This month’s essay… more on fandom.
4 Likes
Walking dead offering a hopeful vision?
5 Likes
TLDR…
7 Likes
brava. Another great column.
2 Likes
Your mention of David Harvey brings to mind an interview from before the current crisis in which he notes that “structural adjustments” have become the IMF’s go to solution. I think that this sharpens the opposition to neoliberalism outside the united states. In the united states, the dismantling of the social safety net hasn’t been a sudden decree from a US dominated institution, but a more gradual, insidious process.
Who was it that noted that “tying healthcare to employment suddenly looks like a massive failure”? In that respect, now that neoliberalism has revealed itself to be a cruel failure, socialism looks like a far more promising alternative. Viva la revolución!
But…
Straight out of the IMF’s ideological playbook.
6 Likes
7 Likes
5 Likes
This month’s essay:
BTW, from now on, this will be bi-monthly, as they’re trying to make room for more writers.
6 Likes
Oh, this one hit me, especially after watching this last night:
On the “banality of evil”: anyone who has seen someone who seems like a really nice person casually state something horribly racist or homophobic can grasp it. Your friendly, churchgoing neighbour may be polite, kind and helpful to you and still sincerely believe that certain segments of the population should be tortured into conformity or killed. The same with a popular children’s author or the creator of your favourite sitcoms. If there’s one thing social media has brought to light it’s that Arendt was right about that. And you are correct: any real study of history would show you that slave owners were rarely cackling villains, but ordinary white men and women who saw no evil whatsoever in owning and abusing other people. They were unquestionably wrong in that, but through their lense, they weren’t the bad guys.
Funnily enough, the one movie that did kind of grasp that was Blues Brothers and “Illinois Nazis”. Yes, those guys were treated as clowns and losers, but they were also ordinary people.
I would argue that two things allow us to (mistakenly) envision Nazis as special: records and automation. Most genocides don’t have centralized record-keeping and the Nazis were simply the first to be able to pull off en-masse killing the way they did, due to technology. Machine-guns and gas chambers allowed for more efficient and less personal murder. But the records are a big part, simply because we know so much more what actually happened. They also seem exceptional due to a glitch that John Oliver describes above in how we teach history. We teach it like the Final Solution was dropped in place immediately upon Hitler’s ascension to power, when in reality it was arrived at in a series of smaller steps that were able to overcome our (as human) normal psychological resistances until (for far too many) it made sense.
That’s why I bristle when people say “you can’t compare what’s happening in the US today with the Nazis”… um, yes I can. One, comparisons do not mean a one-to-one match and b) the Nazis really, really weren’t that special, despite what history class teaches. They were just another iteration of what happens when you think you are naturally superior to others, just with more records for historians and an industrialized country with greater processing capacity.
And if that last bit sounds banal, it should. Because that’s exactly how these things happen. Evil isn’t going to leap out at us dressed in a red cape and calling itself evil. Ignoring it because it’s couched in boring terms or seems so common isn’t going to stop it. Nor is thinking that we’re special enough to be immune.
If you haven’t seen that John Oliver segment, I really reccomend it. And not just to @mindysan33, either.
7 Likes
One of the central delusions of… I’ll call them Illinois Nazis… is that they do think they are special. When I was a kid, teachers in my podunk schools weren’t exactly shoving me toward a white-supremacist narrative of life, but it was around if I had been so inclined. Mensa, AP, all of these things have these rathole justifications of race baked into the idea of tiered education. In my high school, for example, where the school was so small that it could only support one foreign language class, that foreign language was German. Which we sort of shit on for obvious reasons.
8 Likes
Oh, I agree that they think they’re special, but my point about the ordinariness is that they’re the same people who are at the PTA or arguing at city council meetings over whether the dog park should be on or off-leash or what days garbage pick-up should be. Most are not obviously, clearly eeevil.
And they always were, breathless NYT stories about the “new” aesthetic notwithstanding.
4 Likes
not sure that non subscribers can read this, but
3 Likes
really good essay. I believe you’ve nailed why and how the left has failed and continues to fail. but the other interesting thing, to me, is that the right sees and views the left in the same way: by othering them, it becomes trivial to dismiss them as buffoons. the right are trying to “take back” what they term the “clown world” they see as ruination due to progressive policies, secular humanism, etc.
the question for me is why did it work for the right and not the left? it seems we just hand-waved nazi-ism as outdated, buffonery etc and therefore not serious. the right stereotypes us as clowns and buffoons, but they won the election. there is a dismissal of us as misguided idiots but they seem to also take us as a credible threat, at least moreso? because they’ve been increasing backed into a corner by the left politically? or is it just that they actually are stronger in number? I feel like this ties into their saying “the left can’t meme,” somehow.
I dunno but we better figure that shit out.
4 Likes
IMO, part of it comes from the right’s simple “solutions” to complex problems vs. the real solutions the left wants that are complex, and difficult to describe and understand. It’s easier to dismiss a complex solution as being ridiculous and unworkable. I remember John McCain dismissing Hilary Clinton’s health insurance ideas back early into Bill’s first term. He showed an organizational chart that looked like a circuit diagram, to prove that “it wouldn’t work, especially since gummint.” I wish I’d been in the Senate and quickly put up a chart of the workings of a TV set, and claim that it was too complicated to work so we should defund the useless FCC. But it wouldn’t have worked anyway.
Not to mention the right has all the money to better put forth their “left is crazy” ideas.
5 Likes
Part of it is called “standards”. As long as you truly believe that all human beings deserve a basic level of… humane treatment, you can’t go deeper than those who don’t. As long as you believe that there is truth, you can’t sink lower than those who don’t give a fuck. As long as you have lines that you will not cross, this imbalance remains.
The problem is that if you cross those lines, you become them. I am not talking horseshoe theory here. I am in no way saying “the far left is as bad as the far right, they’re basically the same”. I am saying that if you abandon the principles that put you on the left, you aren’t on the left anymore.
That’s their advantage – they believe only in the mantra by any means necessary. Literally put words in a man’s mouth or pretend one man is another? We’ve seen both in the last couple of days. Kidnap? Torture? Murder? So long as it keeps them in power, it’s all good.
That’s their secret. It’s not that the left “can’t meme”, it’s that we don’t believe that the ends justify such means.
9 Likes
Thanks!
At least some of their success has been due to our continuing legacy of racism/classism, especially where we are. The GOP also focused on local elections to a much larger degree and managed to get control of plenty of local governments and state legislatures. In doing so, they got into league with hard right groups who had been on the outs since the 70s but still managed to operate on a local level. And their local success translated into more chances to gerrymander districts in their favor, giving them a strategic advantage.
And I agree with @kxkvi on the right promoting “simple” solutions to problems that aren’t so easy to solve. It’s not difficult to blame problems your constituents face on immigrants or people of color or feminists or marxists or transfolks or whoever and promise that you’ll disenfranchise those people and that will fix the problem… it’s hard to talk about the complex roots of problems and to offer solutions that actually deal with those roots, which is what people on the left are more inclined to do.
Also, I think I was trying to get at a more systemic problem than just left v. right politics. I think even people on the right who don’t see themselves in line with the hard right don’t think of nazis as a problem, but as a historical oddity in Western civilization? They (except the people purposefully aligning with the hard right, of course) probably take the nazi/fascist/authoritarian problem even less seriously than the left does? So I mean the centrist liberals more than anyone else here, on both the center right and left. I think the farther left you are, the more likely you are to take this shit seriously (even if you love nazis as evil type entertainment).
Roger that! Circumstances are going to force us all to do so, I think.
8 Likes
Because that’s what school teaches us they are. So much of this cycles back to the way it was taught.
Like I have said: there are two courses that had an outside influence in shifting me from the centre-right I was raised to be and the person I am now. A media and communications course that focused on oral history and helped me see the patterns similar to other cultures “myths” and our “gospels”. The other was a college local history course that taught me that everything (ie not much) I was taught in standard history, the things my parents believed, weren’t true.
Most people never find that out. They learn what’s taught at the basic level in school and many deliberately don’t look harder. Others don’t think to. After all, why would school lie to you? It’s hatd to grasp the idea that you were lied to all your life by people who were lied to.
And it’s not just us. Germany gets sold the same line, in a different way. “The Nazis were a special evil that ee have purged. It couldn’t happen again. There are laws against it. Stop comparing what is have with you with what happened with us.”
Except if you know anything about stories, it’s that ideas never really go away. That’s just a myth we made up because the truth is too scary.
7 Likes
My latest!
6 Likes
My latest…
Sort of a year end round up…
4 Likes
Hard to believe it was just this year that we assassinated Solemani, Iran accidentally shot down a passenger jet thinking it was a US missile, and WW3 almost started.
Great read as always.
neolibrealism
Typo or intentional? Either way I love it.
4 Likes