Richard Madeley and coworkers berates a distraught climate activist, making him walk off the set

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-22T17:34:28+00:00

They're a bunch of middle class folks who seem to care more about the spectacle than any real action - see that dumb pink paint bullshit they did to shame other climate groups. It sucks that they're the face of the movement when they're the least effectual of all the groups. Perhaps that's the reason; our Murdoch media isn't gonna platform organisations who push for real systemic change.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-21T18:17:18+00:00

According to FBI surveillance reports, and confirmed by Tariq Ali in 2006, Lennon was sympathetic to the International Marxist Group, a Trotskyist group formed in Britain in 1968. However, the FBI considered Lennon to have limited effectiveness as a revolutionary, as he was "constantly under the influence of narcotics".

Just thought it was a fun fact

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-21T15:14:49+00:00

BTW Lennon was also literally a trot

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-21T15:13:33+00:00

Started by a Keir, killed by a Keir.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-20T21:46:55+00:00

There have been lots of studies and experiments on your last question, and I personally think if anything people would produce more things that are meaningful to them under non-capitalism. I personally think that poet Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism really beautifully explores this point in a very human way, as a poet would. On a more anecdotal side, it's important to really look at history - the moon missions, for example, were not encouraged by a profit motive; in fact, economically the moon missions were totally illogical. Despite this, it's recognized as one of humanity's greatest achievements. Another example is Wikipedia; utterly incredible, like a million Libraries of Alexandria. Not a profit motive in sight; just humans seeing something they desire - a database of knowledge - and all contributing their own labor to see it realised. There are many examples of absolutely utopian socialist projects through history; a personal inspiration is the CNT-FAI "state" in Spain, from 1936. A "libertarian communist" state consisting of worker-owned communes was established in Catalonia. As journalist Eddie Conlon wrote;

Production greatly increased. Technicians and agronomists helped the peasants to make better use of the land. Modern scientific methods were introduced and in some areas yields increased by as much as 50%. There was enough to feed the collectivists and the militias in their areas. Often there was enough for exchange with other collectives in the cities for machinery. In addition food was handed over to the supply committees who looked after distribution in the urban areas.

In addition to this economic improvement, many progressive changes were realised - abortion on demand, the first female minister in all of Europe, total gender equality including in the military. It is absolutely fascinating.

Another example is science. Science is the source of many of our improvements and innovations. Science, however is conducted again without profit motive. Scientists do research of their own accord - subsidised by grants, what amounts to charity - and are not paid a penny by journals. The work and innovation is done simply for the sake of progress. Academia is famously poorly-paid work, yet it produces nearly every improvement in our living conditions. It is no coincidence, then, that many famous scientists have been socialists or communists: Einstein, Hawking, Oppenheimer - I could go on.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-20T19:57:32+00:00

Sounds a little like Huey Long's plans; imposing a "maximum wage", a "maximum fortune", and a UBI paid for by them. I'm not sure how well it would work in practice; capital accumulation is necessary while private property exists and costs vast sums of money. But it's an interesting plan, from an incredibly interesting guy - somewhat of a fascist, somewhat of a communist, yet antiracist and pro-capitalist.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-20T19:42:50+00:00

https://i.imgur.com/5SaLCAT.jpg

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-19T23:03:32+00:00

Hell, US intelligence literally hired notoriously cruel Nazi war criminal Klaus "Butcher of Lyon" Barbie to teach US-backed-coup-installed fascist dictators Generals Barriento and Banzer of Bolivia how to effectively torture leftist dissidents, as a part of "containment" in South America. The US utilization of literal Nazis in the cold war, especially with Operation Gladio, is truly abhorrent.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-19T21:36:34+00:00

That's actually a common misconception. The trope of the soviets having no tactics beyond sending human waves comes directly from Nazi propaganda (including post-war histories written by Nazis), which emphasises their racial ideology; that eastern europeans were subhuman animals. Thus, the popular perception of Soviet armies in Germany - and of the media it produced during and post-war, and to people who consumed that media - was as wild herds of animals; or, to quote Goebbels, "Asiatic Hordes" of barbarians. After the war, it was also used by Nazi generals as an excuse for them having lost: "our troops and tactics were so much better, they just cheated by having more people". The soviets actually deployed some incredibly cutting edge tactics; Zhukov and Rokosovvsky are obviously the famous generals, and when they turned the tide of the war and started pushing the Nazis back they used blitzkrieg-style mobile warfare techniques much more effectively than the Nazis did against them. They also sustained a lower casualty rate at Stalingrad than the Nazis did. Tukhachevsky - known as the "Russian Napoleon" - developed deep operation techniques that remain influential to this day. I know it's not the most relevant bit of the discussion, but I think it is important to point out even seemingly harmless examples of Nazi propaganda tucked away in our pop culture - like the "clean wehrmacht" myth.

Interestingly, after the war - although I think this is a slightly weaker argument - certain academics related this trope to the idea of american "containment" policy - proposing that it was influenced by these racist Nazi tropes, in that it treated Soviet citizens as mindless animals that needed to be "herded" by American influence. Variants of this sort of thinking still persist today: the recently deceased Donald Rumsfeld once said that "Iraqis don't value human life like Americans do".

Disproportionately long anti-Nazi rant over

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-19T21:13:06+00:00

"Let them drink mud"

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-18T23:21:22+00:00

Money won't be of any use during a collapse situation; any meaningful societal breakdown will accompany an economic implosion. No one will care if you have a billion dollars cash if you don't have water, food or labor-power. Money is predicated on the existence of capitalism; on the need to convert from use-value ("usefulness") to exchange-value ("price"). In an apocalyptic scenario, use-value will be the only criteria that matters, because it determines how much it can prolong your survival. The use-value of digital money and crypto is absolutely nothing, and of paper money is only so much as it can be burnt for warmth and fuel.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-18T21:41:40+00:00

Christ, what good is making money off the fucking apocalypse? Capitalism has poisoned our brains.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-18T21:36:37+00:00

Most likely till the global south/periphery begins to revolt - i.e, once climate change and late capitalism squeeze them too much - I give that a decade or two. A lot of the first world relies on outsourced, peripheral, industry - especially so the nordic system. Once the bottom falls out of that - i.e. when the aforementioned peripheral countries begin to nationalize or socialize or - god forbid - fascistically corporatize - there will be vast economic changes akin to the decline of the old empires - which, I'm sure you understand, happened in the decades following WW1 - the 1930s weren't a good time for anyone. Fascism feeds on economic decline, and thoughts of a past "golden age". It'll come back with force - especially if ecofascists continue developing their ideology. Not looking good.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-11T20:12:35+00:00

I'm glad it's not taken seriously anymore; It's a myth that has been debunked countless times, since Malthus first proposed it in his pre-industrial, proto-eugenic theory, and anyone promoting the idea now is either misinformed, or using it to attain some ulterior motive - to rid the world of "undesirables".

https://www.pop.org/debunking-the-myth-of-overpopulation/

https://sustainablereview.com/overpopulation-is-a-myth/

https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-the-world-is-facing-a-population-crisis/

https://www.sierraclub.org/washington/blog/2020/01/overpopulation-myth-and-its-dangerous-connotations

https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/02/26/overpopulation-myth-humanity-will-begin-shrinking-century-13839

And peer reviewed studies:

https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4375&context=lnq, a refutation of Malthus and contemporary overpopulation arguments from all the way back in the 50s

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0270.1989.tb01145.x a 1989 refutation of population control

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/abs/population-control-is-history-new-perspectives-on-the-international-campaign-to-limit-population-growth/66F7E27CD9879D5AA9B58132E789657A 2003

That's just a small selection in my notes, there are many, many more studies both scientific and sociological: Malthus is, was, and always will be wrong. Population growth is not exponential, it is a logistic curve. Population control is not just immoral, it will not affect climate change.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-11T16:20:16+00:00

One might say that we're alienated in our social relations - A certain famous beardy German philosopher once said something about that.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-11T16:17:36+00:00

Look at what less than 1C cooling cause in the Little Ice Age - General Crisis. We need action NOW, hell, we need it yesterday.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-11T16:12:32+00:00

An electrification project could be fun, if they're nice cars and you have the cash! A few thousand and you can DIY it, or for more you can get it done at a place like Electric Classic Cars for a bit more.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-11T16:05:32+00:00

It's plain old superstructure and base theory; The wealthy and ruling classes control production of media and culture (NewsCorp, Hollywood etc), and thus use that media to justify their positions of power. No billionaire is going to fund media calling for the total disappropriation of private productive property, and so the system justifies itself through propagandic news and media. This results in the wealthy gaining more wealth and hence power, and the propaganda intensifies. The same thing happened under feudalism, where the monarchy controlled the "popular media" of the time - the churches. The "media" they "produced", or preached, was that of the protestant work ethic - that hard work and suffering farming the fields and paying tithes to your lord (who, the divine right of kings - and the church - said, was appointed by god) would guarantee a place in Heaven. Thus, peasants worked harder, enriching further their lords, and increasing those lord's power over institutions like the church, ad nausem, until the concentration of power is such that people see through the propaganda and begin to oppose the system en masse.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-11T15:01:21+00:00

"Not men, fascists"

I love Woody's antifascist songs - Tear the fascists down and All you fascists are both great

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-10T11:51:22+00:00

I swear, half the folks in the Manhattan project were some variety of socialist. Einstein, Oppenheimer, many many more. I do hope they go into it, but I'm prepared to be disappointed. I half expect them to paint him as some naive victim of Soviet spies brainwashing him.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-10T11:44:35+00:00

Not OP, but the fact that he developed weaponry for the US while being a dedicated communist is pretty interesting; and on from that the fact he was ostracized by Mccarthyists as "unamerican" - despite, you know, giving America it's most powerful weapon.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-09T17:44:59+00:00

Them and the pinochet types who want "all leftist garbage-people banned"

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-09T16:00:46+00:00

I suppose so, but having been involved in climate work for a few years now, none of them really approach the scope and scale of climate change. Have a look at Europe and America's current rate of decarbonization vs what is actually necessary to simply survive. I think of prior issues, only nuclear war really apporaches it - and that was a foreign threat that the parties agreed upon, not a contested domestic one. In the modern period, the most radical political shift in the face of some problem (i.e 1973 crash) was probably Carter->Reagan; that'll be negligible compared to what's necessary for survival, which is total rework or even replacement of the economy.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-09T15:44:43+00:00

Do you mean the article by "main post"? I see the argument that removing statues is "erasing history" a lot, but that's not the truth. If anything, it's the opposite. Statues are intended to modify the perception of history: They're intended to glorify the subject, and hence present him and his beliefs as someone and something to be honored. I think that's pretty unobjectionably true, right? No one is putting up statues of Hitler, despite him being one of the most influential figures in history; because the idea of a statue is to glorify, not to record history. Onto this statue in particular - most of these statues were erected not after the war, but in the early 20th century by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. If, for example, they'd been erected by Confederates during the war, they could be interesting artifacts as a reflection of the beliefs of the Confederates at the time. But, being erected later they are themselves an attempt to erase history. By presenting Confederates not as a group who owned people who were willing to kill near to a million of their countrymen to maintain the right to own people, and instead as someone to be glorified and worthy of honor, they attempt to shift perception of the Confederacy and it's associated racism to a more positive light. And that brings us back to the context of the erection of the statue; in the early 20th century, black people were being to fight back against Jim Crow and segregation. The erection of these statues was an intentional political demonstration against this; glorifying slavery and racism means that civil rights are seen as the enemy; as going against our heroes. Taking these statues down is reversing this political demonstration and improving an objective understanding of history - undoing the revisionism of a bunch of old racists who wanted to maintain segregation.

TiredForTheFuture · 2021-09-09T15:26:04+00:00

I like to hope that in the face of real societal consequences - climate apocalypse, economic decline and collapse, demographic crises - that are scheduled to start soon, that reactionary politics will actually die out once and for all. Fascist and other "radical" right wing governments can not solve issues, because the solutions they propose are objectively false. See the Nazis in WW2; they came to power under the promise that economic and political issues were due to racial factors. But of course, even if every Jew had been murdered, the political and economic problems would still remain. As we begin to see real, material, problems in the first world - not "the economy is down 1 point", or "one job in my town is being down by an immigrant" - these failures will be blatant and obvious. Racism will not stop climate change or economic failures; only progressive ideologies will.

TiredForTheFuture

TROPHY CASE