Random News Stories

[think positive]

I wish my English relos didn’t have to suffer. Thanks for the explanation. The situations there are terrifying. Cheers. More people need to care.

[roar]

The silver lining of brexit is that it may hasten Scotland leaving the UK.

[David]

[pietillidie]

^Yes, Starmer is clearly as unelectable as Corbyn, but offers even less by way of choice and constructive policy.

Either way the Tories only need to put up a shameless clown act and they get free reign.

The collapse of accountability across society obviously favours the amoral right and its billions, and the mass of lies they generate, but it's taking too long for a counter-effort to emerge.

At the moment the cycle is locked in: extremist rage > wreckage > pay for wreckage > anger at paying for wreckage > repeat.

Sane and decent people can't penetrate that cycle because by definition they aren't narcissistic or sociopathic enough, or driven by any base impulse enough, or prone to bad religion enough, to run entirely deceitful hate-based campaigns, funded by violent and corrupt money, simply to 'win'.

It's a doom loop: we need moderation but the moderate will never win.

[pietillidie]

The irony is, you see dead ends like this and then have to muster up your own sense of exaggerated self-importance to motivate yourself to help solve the dilemma.

I mean, you have to have tickets on yourself to some degree to even try to do something like influence society.

The trick is presumably to muster up just enough self-delusion to motivate yourself to take action, all the while knowing what you're doing is itself nonsense at some level. But that weak form of faith struggles to compete with malignant, fist-waving forms of motivation, which deliver fast dopamine rushes to their addicts.

How far can you push a 'productive delusion' before you start actually believing it and thinking your shite don't stink? The best example of this is watching the talented entrepreneur go from a productive creator one minute to a destructive self-server who manipulates markets and politics the next.

The left keeps trying different forms of moral superiority and purity, but this also collapses into fundamentalism. Those who try to avoid malignant forms of motivation end up retreating to the hills, having no influence on society.

Anyhow, the subject of motivation might hold some answers here.

[roar]

[Pi]

Looks like old Billy has been naughty again......

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/15/bill-clinton-to-remain-in-hospital-as-he-recovers-from-urological-infection

was it the maid or the butlers wife?

[David]

[stui magpie]

^

Well said.

[pietillidie]

^I get the desire here. People do retreat to in-group gains when they can't (or perceive they can't) obtain more general gains. So, the thought is to extend an olive branch, find common ground, put differences aside, etc. I think that's the goal, but you can't get there without the right treaty.

I was dealing with a good illustration of general gains today. Putin is trying to make fuel prices an argument against green energy transition, but the EU - confident in its own progress and stability - is taking this as a signal to go even harder with renewables to overcome demand spikes. Thus, confidence in EU identity and direction is trumping Putin's wedge mischief. Brexit Britain, on the other hand, is far more vulnerable to Putin's efforts (thank goodness for COP26 being in the UK, heading off this risk to some extent).

In other words, people who can see general gains are more able to stick to comprehensive plans that benefit the whole. (As an aside, when you drill down into the survey data, people in countries like Poland might complain about the EU but there is no way in hell they would seriously consider leaving it).

This then can easily become another vicious cycle: no perceived general gains > retreat to immediate group gains > less chance of driving general gains > repeat. So, you need an offer on the table that motivates people through its benefits or they will retreat into tribalism.

At the same time, a lot of 'olive branchism' is still just 'identitarianism', but running the other way.

Why would people who have been battered into strong minority identities play Jesus and Gandhi for any other group for the good of a whole that has never benefitted them? They don't see a worse world to rectify; indeed, their motivation is to do anything but go backwards in time.

The deal being offered can sound a lot like this: "Look, we understand you've worn more oppression than anyone else, but you're going to have to take another one for the team so that people who openly despise you and are a risk to your wellbeing can live slightly better off by being floor managers over you in 1970s factories at ten times the cost of going world prices."

This sort of olive branchism assumes that minority identity is stronger than majority identity and therefore more dysfunctional. But white working class identity is every bit as potent and all-encompassing as any identity out there, if not more so. And we all know just how toxic it can be.

When you drill into a lot of the thinking of the old Corbyn industrial left, that's the olive branch being extended: "How about you give up your minority identity that you were beaten into so we can finally get back our lost industrial identity that is by now little more than maudlin imaginings as we seek revenge on Reagan and Thatcher." (This goes hand-in-hand with the term 'neoliberalism', which no one can explain other that it's bad and somehow did away with manufacturing).

Also, the idea that current divisions are just or even mostly about identity - when incentive and motivation are driven by many more things - is misleading. Parliaments are full of identical-looking middle-and-upper class folks staring at each other across an aisle divided not by identity, but by interests. Competition will always separate interests that people then align with and dress up in team colours after the fact for branding purposes. So, there's an awful lot of noise to pierce which looks like 'identitarianism' but is just plain old competition.

To top things off, the terms 'identitarianism' and 'identity politics' are dubious because 'identity' is what humans do for a cognitive living. There is no 'non-identity' politics; it does not and cannot exist. And there was only apparently less 'identitarianism' in the past because society was far more oppressive of other identities and competition, not because it was more enlightened and accepting. So, we have to be sure we understand what those terms really imply.

[pietillidie]

I'm not sure I explained that very well, but when I tease apart suggested overtures to the new popular right, they usually entail a one-way concession to a vocal white working class, replete with fantastical economics, in order to get it to stop wrecking things.

That's problematic for all kinds of reasons: behaviourally, it rewards rage and thuggery; economically, it involves a weird redux of old industrial leftism that bears no relation to commerce as it is; and morally, it pushes the old left nationalist idea that working class white folk ought to be the centre of the universe (even as it claims morality is a middle class luxury it can't afford).

That kind of deal isn't going to wash with victims of the white working class, a group encompassing far more of society than is generally understood. Don't forget to add that segment of people in business, science, technology, academics, the arts and public service, to name a few fields, who consider themselves to have been victimised by working class culture.

Then, there's the economics of the olive branch, which speaks volumes by avoiding explanation. It usually entails some sort of vague wish about a return to a post-war manufacturing economy. That idyll, which was handed down by my grandparent's generation, already made no sense by the end of my father's career and is now firmly the realm of mythology.

As I think David alluded to above, there has never been a satisfactory expression of these ideas, which is probably a sign that their assumptions should be revisited.

Anyhow, none of that is written to discourage people. But still more efforts to position the white working class at the centre of a very big universe by invoking its economic myths most certainly won't move things forward. Even that favourite myth of the tax-havened wealthy, the 'trickle-down effect', is more reality-based than thinking you can power a successful economy with high-paying low-skilled jobs.

[David]

I feel like the notion of old-school left politics being fixated with the white working class is a bit of a pejorative stereotype pushed by sections of the media in the wake of 2016 – even so-called class reductionists on the left, such as Adolph Reed, are able to point out that a significant proportion of blue-collar workers in the US and other Western countries are non-white. So I don't think you can have a coherent class-first leftism nowadays without acknowledging that diverse constituency. The notion here is not that racism and misogyny don't matter and that minority groups should just cop it for the sake of class solidarity or whatever, but that material concerns are far more relevant to working-class minorities' political interests than whatever nonsense some upper-middle-class POC undergraduate is writing in a Guardian op-ed about "white fragility", Western cultural appropriation of yoga classes or the intricacies of TV show plotlines. And it's fair to surmise that that's something that a lot of working-class people from minority backgrounds would wholeheartedly agree with.

Now I should reiterate here that the above is not quite the way I see things, and I happen to agree with you that class-first leftism often comes across as merely another kind of identitarianism in which the Venn diagrams have been drawn in a slightly different way. I'd also concede that, even though I hold a much more positive view of Corbyn than you do, your diagnosis of his ideology as being infected with nostalgia for an unattainable past is hard to argue with (although I would still hold that a vision for progressive transformation tainted by fanciful thinking is far preferable to holding no vision for change at all, as is the sad case with Starmer's Labour and most other social democratic parties around the world now).

My way of thinking is not that evinced by concern-trolling centrists (see here for a classic example of the genre: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/11/lessons-donald-trump-marie-le-pen) or "red-brown alliance" types who think that the way forward for working-class power is to abandon certain (or all) progressive social issues. While I do think there are certain excesses of id-pol discourse that deserve scorn (remember when we were being instructed not to address mixed-gender groups as "guys"?), I think it's absolutely essential to not give an inch on issues like racism, gender equality, trans rights and so on, and you're not going to get anywhere by condescending to or dismissing those on the front lines of those particular causes. I don't personally think cultural appropriation is the most pressing political issue of our time, but I do think that, as a white person, it's important to listen respectfully to those from minority cultural backgrounds who think it is and consider their arguments seriously. You meet people where they are, not where you think they should be. So I think it's the personal animosity one needs to put aside, not the politics.

For instance, one thing I've argued for in the past (and would love to see more people on the left speak in favour of) is the idea of maintaining temporary coalitions. For instance, if you're a leftist building an anti-war movement or getting together organised opposition to state surveillance and, say, right-libertarians present as potential allies on those fronts, I think you should absolutely collaborate and march with them. That doesn't mean that you start softening your stance on company taxation or gun regulation to make your own politics more palatable to libertarians; it just means that, for the purposes of this specific issue, you recognise that they may be useful allies and assist in advancing a mutually agreed-upon cause, and their weight of numbers may mean all the difference in achieving vital policy change (while remaining opponents on other fronts).

It should be an absolute no-brainer, right? I'm reminded of a quote from, perhaps, Gerry Adams (I wish I could find it again, but have googled without success) in which an IRA member saw some ideological opponents marching at an anti-occupation rally and remarked in disgust, "Why are they here?", to which he replied something along the lines of "Why isn't everybody here?". That to me sums up a critical difference in how one approaches politics, and I feel like far too many on the left are like the first guy in that story – too busy ostracising fellow leftists (let alone those with even more disparate political opinions) and maintaining cliques to even consider how to go about attracting the necessary critical mass to build a popular movement that would achieve anything.

I'm not sure if any of the above fits what you're describing as olive branchism, but I hope it at least clarifies my position.

[stui magpie]

[pietillidie]

You know what I want to say: The investment of two decades of national capital in three lost wars — Afghanistan, Iraq and global warming denial — is the greatest failure in Australian history by a country mile.

A painful two decades. It's been like watching a conman stealing an elderly person's savings as the crowd denies its happening and some even offer him a helping hand.

[pietillidie]

Is extremist, is 'evangelical', is Republican — Muslim, Hindu, Protestant, Catholic or whatever flavour of fundamentalist.

It was always tacit, which is why the Republicans pick up so many Latin American immigrants. But here's what the data looks like as the extreme join forces to form one great bat-eared anti-Enlightenment block: