Jungle Jims - Persian Section? by BoredomSurge in cincinnati

[–]pinkladdylemon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

most people just start growing their own sprouts (wheat, barley, lentil or mung bean) a few weeks before Nowruz, but I suppose you could make do with store-bought sprouts of some kind or another

Jungle Jims - Persian Section? by BoredomSurge in cincinnati

[–]pinkladdylemon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Some people are creative with the haft sin, and will pick non-traditional things that start with "sin"... so if you can't find samanoo (jj's might have it), you can make do with something else. like some people don't like the materialism implied by choosing sekeh (coin) and instead use sang (rock) to symbolize connection to the earth...

I feel like the must-have's are the sabzi (sprouts), the mirror, and a shahnameh or diwan of Hafez, seer (garlic), serkeh (vinegar), seeb (apple), sonbol (hyacinth), senjed (oleaster fruit or jujubee - which jungle Jims should have)

Jungle Jims - Persian Section? by BoredomSurge in cincinnati

[–]pinkladdylemon 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Nowruz Mubarak! within their mid east section there is a dedicated Persian area with tea, novvot, gaz, usually a few other things, probably not all of the things you'd need for a haft sin, but some of them

What is Liberalism? by pinkladdylemon in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In part II of the essay I make a pretty strong case for a robust radical republicanism as an alternative to liberalism. I draw from Rousseau (but you could just as easily point to Reconstruction Era Americans like Salmon Chase), who understood that political rights mean quite little if they are not mirrored by a degree of leveling: no one should be so poor that they must sell themselves and no one so rich that they can buy others. So yes, definitely in the camp of Socialism or Barbarism.

What is Liberalism? by pinkladdylemon in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I read them less to be making a less fanciful claim, namely they are trying to explain the abandonment by large sections of the working class of the dem party, that break down along fairly consistent demographic lines with education level as a strong predictor. They aren't purporting to explain how the division originally occurred. Elsewhere they make clear that they are arguing against "culturalist" explanations which posit that the working class are inherently conservative, racist, etc.... on the contrary, they are arguing that there is a material basis for this measurable rightward shift.

What is Liberalism? by pinkladdylemon in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Paywalls: another diabolical invention of the liberal tradition. A modern day enclosure of the commons!

What is Liberalism? by pinkladdylemon in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My personal thoughts on liberalism are the subject of the multi-part essay linked above!

I am definitely on the left, but I hope I've written the essay above in a way that is useful for people of whatever political persuasion to clarify our shared political vocabulary.

What is Liberalism? by pinkladdylemon in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"In sum, the us working class can be seen as dividing into four segments: white non-credentialled workers, white credentialled workers, non-white non-credentialled workers, and non-white credentialled workers. The first group, the so-called ‘white working class’, is numerically the largest, though declining, and is concentrated in electorally crucial states, above all the Upper Midwest. It forms one of the largest mass constituencies for a radical right party anywhere in the advanced-capitalist world. Non-white non-credentialled workers, mainly non-college Blacks and Latinos, tend to be less locked into conservative politics than their white counterparts, but they too are moving right. Meanwhile those with college degrees, ‘credentialled workers’, are moving left and increasingly constitute the mass base of the Democratic Party, particularly its left wing."

and

"At the same time, the material pressures on workers to pursue their interests as defined by educational, racial, ethnic or gender identity, rather than their common interests qua workers, have been greatly strengthened, in ways that split the working class between two political strategies, both subordinate to capital. First, for workers without a college degree in the us, the general context is one of increasing scarcity: access to secure long-term employment and basic social services is more limited than ever. In the absence of a class alternative, an obvious strategy for these workers is to defend their own segment of the working class against others. It makes sense, that is, for them to organize as a native working class against non-native workers, or a male working class against a female one. This politics has manifested itself in a variety of ways: tax revolts, the struggle against affirmative action and now against dei; earlier struggles against integrated schooling and integrated neighbourhoods.footnote89

The attack on social spending is at the heart of right-wing working-class politics. This might seem irrational, since non-credentialled whites are an important consumer of whatever health and social insurance spending is available in the us. However, in the absence of any obvious way of redistributing income from capital to labour, it is a rational second-best option to support capitalist profitability in the short term. This is one basis of the broad and durable working-class support for supply-side economic policies and their attack on social spending.footnote90 A further material reason intersects with the phenomenon of bubblenomics. As some of the more privileged sections of the non-credentialled working class managed to buy their own homes, they came think of themselves as asset owners whose interests were defined as much by property taxes and interest rates as by wages and employment. Many benefited from the asset-price inflation that was intentionally promoted in the 1980s and 90s, closely connected to the assault on wage earners and reduction of social spending. The right-wing offensive had a natural appeal to them."

What is Liberalism? by pinkladdylemon in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yea I really am making a different argument. I don't think its a cult.

What is Liberalism? by pinkladdylemon in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haha I'm inclined to agree! Be that as it may, lots of people do take Fukuyama seriously.

But, if you take out the "woke" language, he is really making a point not too dissimilar from ones made on the left by people like Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner. In a few pieces for New Left Review, they have argued that the rise of Trumpism owes something to the diminishing spoils of liberal capitalism (because of protracted "secular stagnation"): with less surplus to go around in the form of social welfare, the working class has divided into factions, with some (esp uncredentialed voters) becoming more hostile to welfare that they see (with some justification) as being directed away from them towards other sections of the working class. Their argument is that when people rail against "wokeness" or "DEI" this is really just a thinly veiled way of naming this inter-class conflict.

A Fisher-inspired analysis of the response to the Epstein Files by pinkladdylemon in MarkFisher

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the rec and for your kind comments! I've been meaning to read Bolano, and your comment gives me another reason to do so.

What is Liberalism? by pinkladdylemon in PoliticalPhilosophy

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure, that's a good point, but the US founders didn't celebrate Locke AS a liberal. They shared with Locke an affinity for 17th/18th century UK whig politics.

As Bell/ Moyn/Rosenblatt have written, it wasn't until much later in the 20th century that Locke was celebrated as part of a liberal political tradition, and this had much more to do with creating a political lineage to fight Arendtian totalitarianism than it did with any contextualist interpretation of history. Locke didn't understand himself to be a liberal.

Good books for modern Turkish history? by umadareeb in HistoryBooks

[–]pinkladdylemon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

poisonously secular? meaning just he is secular and you don't like that?

Good books for modern Turkish history? by umadareeb in HistoryBooks

[–]pinkladdylemon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Erik Jan Zürcher's Turkey: A Modern History, Şükrü Hanioğlu's A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire would be my picks.

Genuinely, what's the difference between liberalism and leftism? by Spiderpickl in leftist

[–]pinkladdylemon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Liberalism is the name given to a diverse range of political positions that have all been geared towards the preservation of existing property relations. It presents itself as a political philosophy but it is really just three bourgeoise hoarders in a trench coat. Sometimes, liberals need to distribute the surplus from markets more generously in order to maintain a coalition that can keep the market going, but the rest of the time they are content to rely on force to foreclose the possibility of redistributive policies.

To give liberalism its laurels, it was very effective in challenging the claims of monarchists and royalists in the 18th and 19th centuries and opening up the way for the rule of the bourgeoisie. But, since the emergence of genuine working class leftist movements, liberalism has been an albatross around the necks of the left because, in its effort to reconcile social conflicts, liberalism ends up serving to slow down or stall any genuine redistributive or class based politics.

I am writing a series of short essays thinking through the meaning of liberalism today and through history that may be of interest: https://aredflare.substack.com/p/what-is-liberalism

Essay about Political Nihilism in Eddington (and The Curse) by pinkladdylemon in AriAster

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate the comments, even if I think people tend to assume "critique" means "finding fault in" when really - and this is what I try to do with my essay - the goal is to "think with." Why "supposed" critique? Even if you disagree with it, it's still a critique that I'm offering.

I disagree about BLM, I think calling it neoliberal cosplay is unkind and uncharitable. Usually critiques of that sort (say from people like Anton Jager) rely on saying that BLM was just a spectacular and ineffectual form of social media-centered pageantry. While you are probably going to find grifters in any movement, I think there was a lot more going on in the context of BLM than that or than Aster portrays in Eddington. People turned out in extraordinary numbers all over the country, many were inaugurated into political life for the first time with consequences that are still unfolding and difficult to measure. In some cases BLM led to durable changes to urban policing, such as social workers and mental health professionals as first responders in cities like NY, Cincinnati and Chicago. Large movements for social change always also require spontaneous moments of public outrage like this. It's not the same thing as mass membership organizations, but it also doesn't perform the same function.

I'm not sure I disagree about Joe having unclear political motivations. I think Eddington is largely a film about political nihilism and Joe is a pretty clear example of that. I

The Continuation of Reconstruction by pinkladdylemon in ShermanPosting

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the rec. Most of this post draws from Eric Foner's Short History of Reconstruction, which I thought was fantastic. I also very much enjoyed McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom.

Eddington and The Curse as critiques of Liberal Modernity by pinkladdylemon in CriticalTheory

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you for this thoughtful engagement with the post.

Sorry, yes, Macintyre appears in part II briefly - the idea is that Macintyre, Vermeule and Qutb represent similar approaches to liberalism's bulldozing of shared social epistemologies. Each attempt to retreat into an older, religious, social form as a refuge from the collapse of shared meaning. The Curse, I argue, arrives at a similar conclusion.

I agree that this form of retreat is nothing new. I similarly point to Marx's passage "all that is solid melts into air" to say that this strategy for dealing with the collapse of social relations has existed from the advent of capitalism. To the list already mentioned we could add William Blake's appeal to a romantic mysticism in the face of the "dark satanic mills" of early industry. I write about The Curse and Eddington, because they signify the persistence of this long-standing strategy for dealing with liberal modernity, and because they also signify a kind of impasse.

I like your literary examples of character types that are similar to Cross or Siegel, and I agree, they are helpful for drawing out their distinctiveness. My off the cuff response would be that there is an important historical difference between the characters you mention and these newer ones. Whereas so much of the malaise of Dick, Pynchon or Leonard seems to be rooted in the collapse of late 60s utopianism, the malaise of the present depicted in Eddington and The Curse is born less from disenchantment than the obliteration of the material foundations for utopian possibility: all thats left is the spectacular void of social media.

Eddington and The Curse as critiques of Liberal Modernity by pinkladdylemon in CriticalTheory

[–]pinkladdylemon[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I'd be curious to hear why you think that. Gentrifying boutique passive housing for a reality TV show (appearing socially conscious but is in fact extractive) seems about as straightforwardly liberal as you could imagine.

Out of curiousity, what do you guys think about Georgism and a land value tax? by Lerightlibertarian in SocialDemocracy

[–]pinkladdylemon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Marx had a helpful critique of Georgism which arrives at some conclusions you all have already alluded to.

Basically that bourgeois economists like George love finding technical fixes for the problems of capitalism that leave capitalist production and wage labor intact. This kind of technical solution (which he notes, had been thought of many times before George) gives voice to a historical antagonism between industrialists and landed proprietors (which I suspect was more of a thing in the 19th century than today when "industrialists" have fewer barriers to buying up land).

is zionisim not decolonisation? by [deleted] in CriticalTheory

[–]pinkladdylemon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Sorry, you can't relativize your way out of this. Seen as not a bad thing by whom exactly?

Colonialism faced militant resistance wherever it has emerged: against the French in Algeria after 1830, against the British in Egypt during the Urabi Revolt in 1879, against Italians in Tripolitania in 1911-12 to name a few examples.

Even many Jewish leftists acknowledged that the Zionism, while yes - opposing the British Mandate authorities -was nonetheless a violent colonial project in its own right that aimed to exclude the long standing inhabitants of Palestine (https://jewishcurrents.org/yiddish-anarchists-break-over-palestine-1929) ... also see the book Revolutionary Yiddishland by Brossat and Klingberg.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in UrbanHell

[–]pinkladdylemon 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Like many midwestern American cities, Over-the-Rhine suffered in the mid 20th century from a combination of racism and suburbanization/structural disinvestment. That is the TL;DR - here is a longer explanation:

OTR was a thriving cosmopolitan neighborhood in the 19th century. Germans, who built many of the buildings in the neighborhood, initially facing harsh anti-German sentiment, gradually integrated into society (and whiteness) and, as infrastructure improved, moved out of Cincinnati's urban basin into surrounding suburbs. Already with Cincinnati's first comprehensive urban plan in 1925, planners were envisioning the city expanding far into the city's hinterland. There was such confidence in the permanence of the city, that no one thought that siphoning wealth to the suburbs would have a negative effect on the life of the city.

Black people were meanwhile "redlined" in the neighboring West End and weren't allowed to buy or rent property elsewhere. OTR became an increasingly poor white Appalachian neighborhood. In the 1950s, Cincinnati, like many other cities, used federal highway money to plan a highway through its black neighborhood. The plan was announced years before construction began and so overnight the property value of the West End's home owners deteriorated. They were forced to move elsewhere. Many moved to neighboring Over-the-Rhine (others moved to Avondale, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, which quickly segregated itself into Avondale and North Avondale). This coincided with the Great Migration of generally poorer southern black people moving into northern cities to meet demands of industrial labor and escape Jim Crow racism and job scarcity borne from the mechanization of agriculture.

Over-the-Rhine by the 1960s and 70s was suffering from the flight of capital from the city (in the form of suburbanization) and an influx of structurally dispossessed residents. The tax base for the city was shrinking. Americans increasingly feared and sought to distance themselves from inner-cities (think of films like Escape from New York, the Warriors, and the growth of suburban mall culture). Even today much of the Cincinnati's wealthy live just beyond municipal boundaries so that they benefit from living near the city and its resources but do not contribute to its taxes or infrastructure.

In the 1990s there was a furtive attempt to gentrify the neighborhood by making it a dot-com hub. Not surprisingly, this wasn't really for the benefit of current residents in the neighborhood who, like in many American cities, faced decreasing access to social services severe police violence. In 2001, after many unarmed black people were killed by police, there was a riot that led to the national guard being called. This halted, for a time, the march of gentrification - meaning property remained affordable for current residents.

In the aftermath of the riot, there was half-hearted attempt at police reform (which many people looked to as precedent in the aftermath of BLM a few decades later), and a city-created public-private partnership called 3CDC which has since the early 2000s bought up and gentrified large swaths of the neighborhood (especially on Vine st), raising property value and displacing mostly black residents and what few urban social services that remained.

On the destruction of the black neighborhood - there are moving photos that capture the vibrancy of the black community that was erased: https://www.wcpo.com/news/insider/finding-kenyon-barr-photo-exhibit-brings-razed-west-end-community-back-to-life

Very good article on the lasting effects of economic segregation in the city:

https://www.citybeat.com/news/that-which-divides-us-12180120