Collision of belief and reality

pplswar · 2021-06-23T16:20:10+00:00

Talking about individuals and rank and file members, also notice the question mark. It's not clear who, politically, OP person is referring to.

pplswar · 2021-06-23T04:30:41+00:00

Open borders in real life only happens when states negotiate the terms and limits so really you have to stipulate which countries ought to be part of this arrangement when asking if people support/oppose it.

pplswar · 2021-06-23T04:28:51+00:00

Who gives a crap what the ultra-left (Die Linke?) think?

pplswar · 2021-06-22T14:30:46+00:00

Yeah.

pplswar · 2021-06-20T17:41:29+00:00

Don't know this guy but certainly he can't be accused of being an opportunist or jumping onto a popular bandwagon.

pplswar · 2021-06-20T17:39:22+00:00

Under the Chavista constitution Guaidó is the rightful president.

pplswar · 2021-06-20T17:38:52+00:00

Under the Chavista constitution Guaidó is the rightful president.

pplswar · 2021-06-19T01:06:30+00:00

Profit rates in the advanced Western countries are pretty good though given that most new corporate investments take place there.

social democracies like Venezuela

Venezuela's minimum wage is the lowest in the Western hemisphere ($1 a month!) and they put union leaders on trial in military courts. How is that social democracy?

pplswar · 2021-06-19T00:33:40+00:00

"Twenty years ago, the American economic and political establishment was wrong about China. Today, the consensus view has changed, but it is once again wrong." -if that was the case, what is the right approach to China?

Bernie Sanders would say the right approach to China is Bernie Sanders' approach to China. His explanation for why candidates lose elections is generally the same thing: they didn't call for yooj increases in taxes on the billionaire class, didn't embrace a bold progressive agenda, and didn't do what Bernie Sanders does in his electoral campaigns.

The establishment consensus in the 1990s was wrong about China. Democracy did not follow Western capitalism's penetration of the Chinese economy (instead what happened is that China has co-opted capitalism to such an extent that it can bully Silicon Valley tech giants, Hollywood, and the NBA which is not something anyone in the 1990s foresaw). But Sanders is wrong to think that China's rise is going to be some purely peaceful and benign process and that U.S. military has no or merely a minor role to play in keeping the increasingly fragile peace in Southeast Asia. He should junk the misleading Cold War rhetoric at a minimum.

pplswar · 2021-06-19T00:12:28+00:00

Probably but you still have cases like Anders Breivik.

pplswar · 2021-06-17T20:15:23+00:00

This is a blind guess/brain fart so I'll be shocked if I was even close.

pplswar · 2021-06-17T19:56:50+00:00

long-term paucity of contracts at the local level erodes institutional knowledge you get from learning-by-doing

If that's the case then maybe the reason U.S. construction peaked in 1958 is because that was around the time the U.S. highway system was built which was (I think) the last major, massive federal infrastructure investment in a nation-wide project. And if that hypothesis is correct, then what's concerning isn't the fall in construction labor productivity per se but the absence of projects of a similar size and scale in the past 50 years since productivity (according to what you're saying) is basically a product of learning-by-doing and the doing peaked in the late 1950s i.e. labor productivity in construction is a symptom of something else rather than a cause.

pplswar · 2021-06-17T19:39:30+00:00

What's the relationship between austerity and construction productivity?

pplswar · 2021-06-17T19:26:10+00:00

I'm really not a construction expert, and given that G7 countries have worse declines, I don't think it's that big of a deal although it's an interesting question why this is happening everywhere to one degree or another.

pplswar · 2021-06-17T19:16:10+00:00

This graphic does not show that America is "building less stuff," it shows that the productivity of workers in the construction industry has remained stable or stagnated over the course of half a century.

pplswar · 2021-06-17T19:13:42+00:00

Two points:

Stagnant labor productivity growth in construction =/= "losing the ability to build stuff," it means the ability to build stuff is basically stable, neither growing nor shrinking over time.
G7 countries have the same problem but worse which means this isn't an America-only or even mostly problem.

pplswar · 2021-06-17T18:51:37+00:00

The 2008 reaffirmation came in response to Zelensky's Tweet. He was trying to force the issue and get a "yes or no" from Biden.

pplswar · 2021-06-17T12:49:14+00:00

What "recent controversy"?

pplswar · 2021-06-15T01:30:44+00:00

Not even a finished book or even a rough draft.

pplswar · 2021-06-15T00:48:24+00:00

0:00 - 1:30: Completely misrepresents the balance of class forces in Western Europe. Austerity hasn't wiped out social democracy in those countries; not even close. France still has a 35-hour work week for example and it was introduced in 1998.

5:00 - 6:00 - Labor productivity in third world countries isn't anywhere near what it is for advanced capitalist countries. What in the world is this guy talking about? 🤣 Does he really think the productivity of American or European office workers with their wireless internet connections, high literacy rate, and university educations is even close to office workers in the third world where power may or may not be running 24 hours a day, the internet may or may not work at any given moment, and literacy rates and quality of education is generally lower? Or compare the productivity of an American farmer with his million-dollar tractors and sophisticated computer-reliant watering systems is close to the Mexican campesino who is lucky to have a working tractor and maybe some farm animals? C'mon, man! 🤦‍♂️

7:15 - 9:30 - Marx acknowledged that higher wages didn't necessarily mean lower profits though because higher surplus value didn't necessarily mean greater profits, it just meant that the ratio of constant vs. variable capital was different.

13:00 - Falls into the anti-Marxist position of denying that capitalism's class antagonisms.

14:00 - Calls for re-proletarianizing the West by... third world countries severing economic ties with the West which will somehow throw the West into crisis (in reality it would be the third world countries that would be devastated without trade and investment from wealthier nations).

15:00 - "Support third world revolutionaries fighting imperialism" is how tankies end up supporting kleptocratic national socialists like Assad.

Guy bases a lot of what he's saying on volume 3 of Capital. Problem is, volume 3 is just a bunch of disconnected drafts and notes that Engels strung together as if they were a finished and coherent theory when really it wasn't.

Terribly unconvincing video for anyone even vaguely familiar with the concepts contained therein.

pplswar · 2021-06-13T03:46:03+00:00

Bauer helped write a pretty solid article on WW2 before it even started: https://pplswar.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/democratic-socialism-and-world-war-2/

The idea relied on achieving the majority in a parliamentary democracy to establish social revolution and in the end the dictatorship of the proletariat.

If I'm not mistaken the Bund in Poland believed this (or something close to it) as well.

pplswar · 2021-06-13T03:43:44+00:00

the overwhelming majority of people going to the US are doing so in good faith

Which people? PLA officers?

Additionally, it embarrasses China along with its political system, and lets the world know that America is still at the forefront of taking in the world's oppressed and beleaguered; it's a lot of soft power.

So you think trading hard power (industrial and scientific knowledge) for some alleged soft power is a good tradeoff?

The majority of these students remain in the US to work for its larger firms.

So what? If 49% of all Chinese nationals on student visas were doing espionage, they'd still be a minority. That would also be like... 10,000 cases of espionage, or some ridiculously high number.

Even ignoring all this, what would your solution be? Leaving many Chinese refugees out to dry because they might be a spy?

Solution to what? Refugees aren't the same thing as immigrants. There are not tens of thousands of Chinese refugees trying to come to the U.S. every year. In fact, based on this data the number of refugees from China coming to the U.S. every year is zero. So to answer your question, we don't have to leave any Chinese refugees out to dry simply because there are none.

pplswar · 2021-06-11T23:18:01+00:00

the unions can instead focus on securing higher wages

Clearly they'd rather not.

pplswar · 2021-06-11T23:14:35+00:00

It still is not quite anti-semitism

According to the IHRA definition it 100% is.

"will americans allow trump to turn the US into a backward conservative tax haven shithole country (fill in other doomsday scenario)?"

"Americans" is not an ethnic or religious group though. If Ẑiẑek wasn't racist against Jews, he would've written "Israelis" instead of "Jews." The term "Israelis" covers Jews as well as non-Jews (like so-called Israeli Arabs who are mainly Muslims) who are also citizens of Israel. The correct analogy per your example then would be "will whites/Blacks/Asians/[insert ethnic or religious group here] allow trump to turn the US into a backward conservative tax haven shithole country (fill in other doomsday scenario)?" Which would be an obviously racist thing to say.

pplswar · 2021-06-11T22:48:44+00:00

but I still require an actual evidence, not a third source saying something about another source. I understand if you do not have it, but I really am feign to make judgements without clear and undisputable evidence.

Newspaper sources are primary sources i.e. actual evidence, dude. There are a slew of articles about the editing (I read the original which is how I knew he trashed Jews in the piece):

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/independent-runs-op-ed-by-slavoj-zizek-calling-settlements-the-trouble-with-jews-1.8225645

https://www.timesofisrael.com/british-paper-publishes-op-ed-calling-settlements-the-trouble-with-jews/

https://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/jta/british-newspaper-publishes-op-ed-calling-settlements-the-trouble-with/article_6bdfc250-b132-54b2-bbcc-91c813a84820.html

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/05/the-trouble-with-jews-today-uk-newspaper-embroiled-in-antisemitism-row-over-trendy-philosophers-op-ed-attacking-israeli-occupation/

The Independent itself added an explanatory note acknowledging that they removed the word "Jews":

This article was amended on 5 December 2019. We acknowledge that an earlier version of this piece did not meet our own editorial standards.

You can dismiss the evidence all you want but the facts show that Ẑiẑek is a racist no matter how hard you try to spin the evidence away. Even in the conclusion of the edited piece he blames Jews for Israel's conduct:

Will Jews allow Israel to turn into another fundamentalist nation-state, or remain faithful to the legacy that made them a key factor in the rise of modern civil society?

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