Philosophy Discussion Forums

Consul wrote: ↑November 19th, 2023, 9:32 pm

Sy Borg wrote: ↑November 19th, 2023, 4:10 pm While I think that complaints about society breaking social contracts are fair, we are seeing this general sense of discontent being projected into other issues. The result is a belief that all dominant entities are bad and all underdogs are good, as though one's actions has no bearing on one's situation in life. While good and bad luck can play a significant role, people, organisations and nations at least at least control their destinies in part.

The Woke Left has a Manichaean worldview: Either you belong to the good forces of light, or you belong to the evil forces of darkness.

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑November 19th, 2023, 11:51 pm Some would ague, quite reasonably in my view, that it is the 'unwoke" rabid right we should be more worried about. It's the right that has the Manichaean worldview. Anything even a smidgeon left of extreme right is anathema for them. Truth can only be what they say it is. Fortunately, the rest are not (yet) forced to fall into line with the rabid right view of the world.

"A right-wing populist program, then, must concentrate on dismantling the crucial existing areas of State and elite rule, and on liberating the average American from the most flagrant and oppressive features of that rule. In short:

1. Slash Taxes. All taxes, sales, business, property, etc., but especially the most oppressive politically and personally: the income tax. We must work toward repeal of the income tax and abolition of the IRS.

2. Slash Welfare. Get rid of underclass rule by abolishing the welfare system, or, short of abolition, severely cutting and restricting it.

3. Abolish Racial or Group Privileges. Abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas, etc., and point out that the root of such quotas is the entire “civil rights” structure, which tramples on the property rights of every American.

4. Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not “white collar criminals” or “inside traders” but violent street criminals—robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.

5. Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums. Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares? Hopefully, they will disappear, that is, move from the ranks of the petted and cosseted bum class to the ranks of the productive members of society.

6. Abolish the Fed; Attack the Banksters. Money and banking are recondite issues. But the realities can be made vivid: the Fed is an organized cartel of banksters, who are creating inflation, ripping off the public, destroying the savings of the average American. The hundreds of billions of taxpayer handouts to S&L banksters will be chicken-feed compared to the coming collapse of the commercial banks.

7. America First. A key point, and not meant to be seventh in priority. The American economy is not only in recession; it is stagnating. The average family is worse off now than it was two decades ago. Come home America. Stop supporting bums abroad. Stop all foreign aid, which is aid to banksters and their bonds and their export industries. Stop gloabaloney, and let’s solve our problems at home.

8. Defend Family Values. Which means, get the State out of the family, and replace State control with parental control. In the long run, this means ending public schools, and replacing them with private schools. But we must realize that voucher and even tax credit schemes are not, despite Milton Friedman, transitional demands on the path to privatized education; instead, they will make matters worse by fastening government control more totally upon the private schools. Within the sound alternative is decentralization, and back to local, community neighborhood control of the schools.

Further: We must reject once and for all the left-libertarian view that all government-operated resources must be cesspools. We must try, short of ultimate privatization, to operate government facilities in a manner most conducive to a business, or to neighborhood control. But that means: that the public schools must allow prayer, and we must abandon the absurd left-atheist interpretation of the First Amendment that “establishment of religion” means not allowing prayer in public schools, or a creche in a schoolyard or a public square at Christmas. We must return to common sense, and original intent, in constitutional interpretation.

So far: every one of these right-wing populist programs is totally consistent with a hard-core libertarian position. But all real-world politics is coalition politics, and there are other areas where libertarians might well compromise with their paleo or traditionalist or other partners in a populist coalition. For example, on family values, take such vexed problems as pornography, prostitution, or abortion. Here, pro-legalization and pro-choice libertarians should be willing to compromise on a decentralist stance; that is, to end the tyranny of the federal courts, and to leave these problems up to states and better yet, localities and neighborhoods, that is, to “com-munity standards.”"

(Rothbard, Murray. "Right-Wing Populism." 1992. Reprinted in The Irrepressible Rothbard: The Rothbard-Rockwell Report Essays of Murray N. Rothbard, edited by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., 37-42. Burlingame, CA: Center for Libertarian Studies, 2000. pp. 40-2)

"Now, taking our cues from the Buchanan-, the Paul- and the Trump-movements, on to the specifics of a populist strategy for libertarian change, in no specific order except for the very first one, which has currently assumed the greatest urgency in the public mind.
One: Stop mass immigration.
…
Two: Stop attacking, killing, and bombing people in foreign countries.
…
Three: Defund the ruling elites and their intellectual bodyguards.
…
Four: End the FED and all central banks.
…
Five: Abolish all ‘affirmative action’ and ‘non-discrimination’ laws and regulations.
…
Six: Crush the “Anti-Fascist” mob.
…
Seven: Crush the street criminals and gangs.
…
Eight: Get rid of all welfare parasites and bums.
…
Nine: Get the State out of education.
…
Ten: Don’t put your trust in politics or political parties."

(Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. Getting Libertarianism Right. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2018. pp. 90-7)

Consul wrote: ↑November 20th, 2023, 12:22 amBoth the far right and the far left are unpalatable to me. Yes, there are unwoke folks we should be very worried about, such as the obnoxious right-libertarian and self-declared anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, who's just become the new president of Argentina. He calls man-made climate change a "socialist lie". Such guys give me the creeps!

"Former U.S. President Donald Trump congratulated libertarian Javier Milei, an outsider with radical views to fix the economy, on being elected president in Argentina on Sunday.
"The whole world was watching! I am very proud of you. You will turn your Country around and truly Make Argentina Great Again!" Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ ... 023-11-20/

“The colonized subject discovers reality and transforms it through his praxis, his deployment of violence and his agenda for liberation.”

(Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. [1961.] Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004. p. 21)

“During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the American far left repeatedly denounced Israel as a criminal regime resembling Nazi Germany and enthusiastically endorsed the Arab guerilla movement’s terrorist campaign to eradicate the Jewish state. This was a period, bounded by two wars that threatened Israel with destruction, in which the far left devoted particular attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Leading far left publications joined the Arab guerillas in charging that Israel was aggressively racist and expansionist.

To support these claims, the far left often invoked long-standing antisemitic stereotypes, both economic and theological. It attributed to Jews enormous financial power and an arrogance and sense of superiority that drove them to exploit and dominate other peoples. In a three-part series published in 1969 on what it called the “History of Middle East Liberation Struggle,” New Left Notes, the newspaper of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), declared that the Jews’ chosen people concept gives Israel “the right to expand and expand.” Like Nazi Germany, the Jewish state would “not contain itself within any set borders.” It explained that the “architects of Zionism were mainly bourgeois Jewish intellectuals” and that the movement’s early sponsors were “leaders in…world imperialism” like wealthy Jewish banker Edmond de Rothschild, who wanted to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine to promote “his own financial interests.””

(Norwood, Stephen H. Antisemitism and the American Far Left. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. p. 1)

“The American far left remained fragmented and marginalized in the four decades following the New Left’s collapse in the early 1970s. It never commanded more than a small fraction of the New Left’s following. Nonetheless the far left continued to disseminate virulently anti-Zionist propaganda laced with antisemitism, serving as junior partner to Muslim student organizations and black nationalist groups that became the driving forces in an ever-expanding campaign to denigrate Israel and Jews. In the post-Vietnam era, the far left gave the Palestinian cause greater emphasis than any foreign policy issue. Mainstream liberals, particularly in academia, increasingly embraced much of the far left view of Israel. They often remained indifferent to manifestations of blatant antisemitism and even sometimes excused or shared responsibility for them.”

(Norwood, Stephen H. Antisemitism and the American Far Left. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. p. 208)

“Many far leftists today make overtures to militant Islamists, whose outlook is intensely antisemitic, and excuse Muslim customs that Communists once denounced as reactionary.”

(Norwood, Stephen H. Antisemitism and the American Far Left. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. p. 225)
——————
“This book argues that a ‘politics of position’ is emerging on the left in preference to a politics of reason or persuasion. This tends to solidify an essentialist notion of who belongs in the community of the oppressed and the community of the progressive. The boundaries of these communities are coming more and more to be policed by coercive discursive practices and less by democratic debate and persuasion. Hostility to Israel becomes a key marker of identity in this process. If Jews are reluctant to embrace this hostility to Israel identity, then they risk exile from what I am calling ‘the community of the good’.”

(Hirsh, David. Contemporary Left Antisemitism. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2018. p. 3)

"Transformations: The Rise of a ‘We Are All Hezbollah Now!’ Left

The left-wing anti-Stalinist tradition in which both Alan and I were formed politically took as its target those unjust social structures of power that excluded the majority of people from the full benefits of the Enlightenment. We thought that our project was to complete the Enlightenment for all of humanity, rather than to allow it to remain something that worked best for the privileged. So we were aghast as our students were increasingly taught that far from being the solution, the Enlightenment was the problem. A left and intellectual tradition, which was quite different to our own, taught that the injustices of ancient societies were simply reconstituted by the Enlightenment, but on a more totalising and oppressive basis. This tradition taught that ostensibly liberating ideas and practices, like reason, science, equality, democracy, autonomy and rights, all placed in sneer quotes, in fact constituted the heart of a modernity of unimaginably efficient, rationalised and powerful enslavement, which replaced the piecemeal, personalised and explicit oppression of old. In this view, the Enlightenment was the fall into darkness, not the path towards the light; and it was a fall which, more and more, is now being treated in practice as irreversible. The aspiration to create a new and better world was giving way to an incoherent, furious and negative politics of ‘resistance’.

Hannah Arendt thought that at the heart of 20th-century totalitarianism was an especially toxic ingredient: the breaking free of utopian thinking from immediate, practical and material concerns. That is not to say there is anything wrong with thinking about how to make the world better, only that such thought must not lose its connection with reality. The politics of common interest, and its consequent structures in the modern state and civil society, she argued, binds people into communities that share limited and obtainable goals but totalitarian politics gains a hold where those communal bonds are already cut. And to the extent that those bonds persist, totalitarianism cuts them anyway (Arendt 1951/1985). It preys on ‘masses’ of furious, atomised individuals, who have already been spat out of society, who it teaches to obsess only about a far-off and dreamed future of sweet revenge and utopian comfort. The ‘masses’ that totalitarian politics prey on are people who have no immediate next step forward and no comrades, or even friends or family, to take it with. Totalitarian movements seduce their followers into relating to the world only through the single figure of the strongman leader and the fantasies he sows of revenge and utopia.

In 2001, ‘Stop the War’ originated as a campaign against a particular proposed war, the one against the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. But the campaign persisted, retaining the same name, when it opposed subsequent wars, in the list place, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It did not oppose all wars, however; it focused on the wars of the ‘imperialist states’. And in the case of Iraq, it even refused support to the free trade unions that emerged there after the invasion. When one of the leaders of these unions, Hadi Saleh, a man arrested and put on death row under Saddam, returned to Iraq to build new free trade unions, he was tortured and murdered by Saddamist hold-outs in 2005. One leading British 'anti-war' left-winger, Alex Callinicos of the Socialist Workers Party, sneered at those of us who raised Hadi’s case for creating a ‘hullabaloo’ about a ‘collaborator’ (see Muhsin and Johnson 2006).

This left current gave the name ‘imperialism’ to the democratic states of the West and the name ‘anti-imperialism‘ to anyone shooting at those states or their allies. Anybody fighting against the imperialist aggressors, or their allies, should be supported. The Trotskyist and Stalinist heritage of many of the Stop the War leaders is relevant here. The old division of the world into two warring camps, one reactionary and one progressive, had meant that even if Stalin was ‘betraying the revolution’ and instigating a rule of terror, one should still ‘defend the Soviet Union’ against ‘the imperialists’. The two camps world view has been updated for today: even if the ‘resistance’ to ‘Empire’ includes antisemitic Islamists, and even if its targets include the 21 Jews, including 16 teenagers, who were murdered by a suicide bomber in 2001 while dancing at the Dolphinarium discotheque, one should never support, but always oppose, any Western attack (or act of self-defence) against that resistance. Stop the War’s one-time Vice President Kamal Majid founded The Stalin Society and argued in 2012 that Syria’s Assads were rulers ‘with a long history of resisting imperialism’ who must be supported ‘because their defeat will pave the way for a pro-Western and pro-US regime’ (Bloodworth 2013).‘

In this radical transformation of the very meaning of ‘left’, many left and democratic values were sidelined: equality for women, sexual liberation, the fight against antizionist forms of antisemitism, the rule of law, democracy, human rights, freedom of speech, working-class self-liberation, science and reason, respect for minorities and national self-determination. The political significance of this cannot be overstated. Once a transformed left decided to raise the value of a particular understanding of 'anti-imperialism'—which can seemingly accommodate even the murder of Jews as Jews — to an absolute, assigning it more value than any and all of these other left-wing values, the road was opened to the left chanting 'We are all Hezbollah now!'; to giving de facto support to the Serbia of Milosevic, the Iraq of Saddam, the Iran of the ayatollahs and the Russia of Putin; and to the left-wing academic Judith Butler insisting that 'understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important' (Butler 2006).

'Imperialism', for this transformed left, does not refer to strong states colonising or controlling weaker states and peoples. It refers to a global system of domination that is said to have arisen in Europe, via the Enlightenment, Colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, which now enslaves the world, is the root cause of bad things that happen to human beings, and at the centre of which, for some left-wingers, sits the only Jewish State in the world. The story of how ‘Zionism’, or ‘Global Zionism’, was added into this all-encompassing concept, so that it became either central to, or symbolic of, this single, global machine of domination, is the story of contemporary left antisemitism and this collection."

(Hirsh, David. "Preface: The Critique of the Critique." In Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays, edited by Alan Johnson, xix-xxvii. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2023. pp. xxi-xxiii)

Consul wrote: ↑November 20th, 2023, 12:22 am

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑November 19th, 2023, 11:51 pm Some would ague, quite reasonably in my view, that it is the 'unwoke" rabid right we should be more worried about. It's the right that has the Manichaean worldview. Anything even a smidgeon left of extreme right is anathema for them. Truth can only be what they say it is. Fortunately, the rest are not (yet) forced to fall into line with the rabid right view of the world.

Both the far right and the far left are unpalatable to me. Yes, there are unwoke folks we should be very worried about, such as the obnoxious right-libertarian and self-declared anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, who's just become the new president of Argentina. He calls man-made climate change a "socialist lie". Such guys give me the creeps!

Sy Borg wrote: ↑November 20th, 2023, 12:11 am Both sides see the world as black and white. To the Woke, The Right are pure evil. To the Right, the Woke are Satan incarnate. Extremists are always pretty well the same in that regard, by definition.

The extreme left and the extreme right are the ones screwing thing up for everyone else. A pox on both their houses. How about they focus on how to get corporations and billionaires to pay more tax so societies can build adequate infrastructure and to help people lead better lives? But no, because it doesn't satisfy their intellectual fetishes.

Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑November 20th, 2023, 8:03 am

Sy Borg wrote: ↑November 20th, 2023, 12:11 am Both sides see the world as black and white. To the Woke, The Right are pure evil. To the Right, the Woke are Satan incarnate. Extremists are always pretty well the same in that regard, by definition.

The extreme left and the extreme right are the ones screwing thing up for everyone else. A pox on both their houses. How about they focus on how to get corporations and billionaires to pay more tax so societies can build adequate infrastructure and to help people lead better lives? But no, because it doesn't satisfy their intellectual fetishes.

Aren't billionaires *part of* the "Extreme Right"? In terms of power, and influence over policy, billionaires *are* the Extreme Right. They certainly aren't 'woke', or any other description that would endow them with sympathy/empathy, with consideration for others. They didn't amass billions by caring for others...

Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑November 20th, 2023, 8:03 am Aren't billionaires *part of* the "Extreme Right"? In terms of power, and influence over policy, billionaires *are* the Extreme Right. They certainly aren't 'woke', or any other description that would endow them with sympathy/empathy, with consideration for others. They didn't amass billions by caring for others...