Keith & R.J. talk about PC culture and tribalism in America.
Articles discussed:
Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape by Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, Tim Dixon
Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture by Yascha Mounk
The Threat of Tribalism by Amy Chua
Voluntary Tribalism: Why Not? by Nicky Reid
Rand Paul Warns of ‘Assassination’ Peril‘ by Gregg Re
Topics include:
The bizarre Supermicro motherboard situation, scholars have fake papers published in academic journals, scam artistry in supposed scholarship, exchange of words between Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, risky selfies killed 269 people in 6 years, car crashes killed 37,133 people in the US in 2017, self-driving car accidents, dead pedestrians, guy says he’s “ready to kill” if Kavanaugh is not confirmed, town in Bosnia bans all politicians, US unemployment rate falls to a 49 year low at 3.7 percent, 8 year-old-girl pulls 1,500-year-old sword from a lake in Sweden, Florida man tried to buy 8-year-old girl from mother at Walmart for $200,000, People of Walmart.
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
I haven’t always been an anarchist but I’ve always been a radical. After being raised in the pro-life movement I discovered the Communist Manifesto as a 14 year old lapsed malcontent. I didn’t understand every word of it but the inflammatory anti-clerical rhetoric lit a fire in me that never went out. After spending several years as a teenage anarchist, influenced in equal measure by Subcomandante Marcos and Johnny Rotten, I turned to state socialism, inspired by the bold anti-imperialist antics of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution. It was also around this time that I became enamored by tales of the Bolsheviks, Che Guevara, and those dastardly Castro brothers. Marxist-Leninism and Democratic Centralism made sense to a twenty-something closeted agoraphobic. Like my life it felt preserved in formaldehyde. It felt safe.
But there’s nothing radical about safe and when I came out of the closet to take my life back from mental illness and gender tyranny, I was ready to dream dangerously again. The suspiciously early demise of Hugo Chavez followed shortly by the cataclysmic failure of his signature revolution was the final straw. Chavez did everything right but when he dropped dead the revolution dropped dead with him. For me, that was the last nail in the coffin for state socialism or state anything for that matter. I was drawn back to anarchism by the unexpected triumph of the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria and the prison writings of the man who inspired it, another post-Marxist anti-statist named Abdullah Ocalan. But I’ve remained both conscious and unapologetic of my tangled radical roots and my objectives have always remained the same, the creation of a classless post-capitalist society.
Issue #1 July 2018. Now available. Order here.
By Juleigh Howard-Hobson
With an unaffected sense of balance and variance, Tribes is more than a mere issue of a magazine. It is a thoughtful compendium of many facets of National-Anarchism. None steal center stage. None erase or confute. Even while each article is quite firmly individual, this is a cohesive publication that both explores and presents ideas about and of National-Anarchy.
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
This blog is a lot of things to me. It’s art. It’s therapy. It’s a bullhorn from which I can shout my radical diktats to a small horde of loyal followers whom I lovingly refer to as my dearest motherfuckers. Hopefully it’s a launching pad for a future revolution that will liberate poor people once and for all from the shackles of big government and big business (or do I repeat myself.) But when it all comes down to it, lets face it, I’m here to bitch. That’s why once a year I drop all artistic and political pretenses and simply make a list of all the people who piss me off the most. I call it my shitlist and 2018 has provided me with no shortage of shit. Now if I put everyone that chaps my ass on this list it would be longer than fucking Gravity’s Rainbow, so I’ll just pick a handful in no specific order to roast like pigs on a spit. So here it is, dearest motherfuckers, My Shitlist 2018.
John McCain– After a lifetime as America’s most celebrated war monger, the one thing that John could do for the world, the only act of mercy that that rapacious murder junkie should have been capable of performing is to finally do us all a big goddamn favor and just fucking die already. But no, John McCain even has to die like a fucking dick. Over a week, a goddamn week of funerals and parades and tributes and memorials and animal sacrifices and imperial orgies, all of them carefully planned by that ego-drunken light bulb factory bomber, to celebrate his foul legacy of homicide advocacy like a goddamn pharaoh. By day five of this ordeal, I was screaming at the TV set “Just give me a goddamn shovel! I’ll bury the cunt myself!!” All I have left to say to the first dead man to make this list is bon voyage you putrid butcher of civilians. Tell Satan that Armageddon’s going great.
Do the ideas of thinkers like James Corbett represent the way forward for an anarchist-led/informed revolutionary center that identifies the global power elite as the true enemy?
The recently released study indicating the deep unpopularity of political correctness, as well as the marginal nature of both PC partisans and the hard right, carries certain implications for the ATS strategy and program. First, there is no need whatsoever to capitulate or kowtow to PC, and that the strategy that I have been pursing for years now of bashing PC to the max is a winning strategy (in fact, it’s probably brought me a larger audience than anything else I have ever done). However, a second implication is that the far left and far right are only peripheral and unpopular elements that are soundly rejected by most Americans. But the catch is that the rival ruling class factions attempt to build a loyal base for themselves by pandering to far left and far right extremists. Therefore, those of use who are committed to an authentically revolutionary perspective must necessarily position ourselves as a radical center that not only rejects the ruling class in its entirety, but also rejects the marginal right and marginal left with equal fervor. When it comes to the Antifa, “anarcho”-Marxists, neo-Commies, PC progressives, Alt-Right/Lite, WN/NS, neo-fascists, or religious theocrats, our attitude should simply be, “Fuck ’em. We don’t ’em.” Instead, our target audience should be the “exhausted majority” who are tired of both ruling class malfeasance, and the crap on the margins.
Kyle Kulinski offers a good critique of why right-wing critics of the Left typically fail, but regrettably Kyle merely wants to steer the conversation toward his own Berniebro/neo-Rooseveltian perspective.
These Tucker Carlson-types are pretty good at criticizing the Left. But they regrettably use their critique to steer their audience toward the Republican-oriented right-wing. It’s possible to hate Bolsheviks without wanting to preserve the Tsar.
Read the study here. It’s excellent.
The study confirms two things I had previously thought. One is that PCers are a small minority that is largely concentrated among mostly white, affluent, educated professionals (the left-wing of the upper middle class). The reason they’re so loud is because they tend to be concentrated in areas where they have a platform (media, education, entertainment, left-wing of the professional class, the public sector bureaucracy, corporate PR offices, left-wing clergy, etc.) The second is that hardcore partisans in the other direction are a small minority as well (notice that while “progressive activists” are 8%, the “devoted conservatives” are only 6%). The “culture wars” represent a rivalry among the elite (“old money,” Sunbelt industries, and right-wing Zionists vs the techno-oligarch/new clerisy alliance), with each faction reaching out to far right and far left extremists in order to build a constituency for themselves. This is why for 20 years I have been saying that anarchists, libertarians, and other radicals need to abandon “culture war” politics which merely feeds the objectives of different ruling class factions. The Left has been almost completely bought off by the techno-oligarchs/new clerisy (with the exception of some far left anti-imperialists). And the Right has been almost completely bought off by the right-wing of the ruling class (with the exception of some extreme rightists who reject the current system).
By Robby Soave
Reason
Except among a tiny minority of far-left Americans, political correctness (P.C.) is deeply unpopular. Some 80 percent of people said they viewed P.C. excess as a problem.
I bash John Bolton on Iranian television.
By Umair Haque
Eudaimonia
America is ripping itself apart. So much so that I couldn’t help but notice another strange, gruesome, and bizarre turning point in American collapse today. On the heels of Trump mocking Dr Ford, many famous and powerful right-wing extremists were bellowing, for the first time I can remember, in unison, a shared, loud, and explicit support of real, physical violence — “I love fighting!! What kind of man hasn’t been in a fight? Not a real one, I’ll tell you that!” Violence is virtuous, healthy, ennobling, in other words. My friends, this is far, far outside the lines of discourse we should expect from a civilized society. These are the kinds of things the sneering thugs and grandees who become the proud lieutenants and captains in the armies of dictators tend to say just before a democracy collapses. So while all that might strike you as inconsequential, I think it’s indicative of a deeper and truer malaise — because, of course, on the heels of the Kavanaugh debacle, it is a justification for the idea that anything should go. But can anything go in a democracy?
Americans don’t agree on two things anymore. Personhood and violence. They don’t agree that all people are people, or should be, or even can be — and therefore, many Americans appear to believe in many or most of the following things. It’s perfectly acceptable to rape women if you can get away with it, it’s perfectly fine to put children in camps, it’s perfectly desirable to suggest, believe, “know that” some groups are inherently superior to others, it’s quite alright to want to ethnically cleanse a society, it’s perfectly healthy to “debate” ideas like authoritarianism and fascism (as if two world wars hadn’t settled the question). Need I go on?
By J.D. Tuccille
Reason
After last week’s hearings on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, it became pretty obvious that the questions, answers, tears, and grandstanding had changed few, if any, minds. “Today felt very much like an update of the 1850s: 2 very distinct parts of US that no longer care to even fake that they respect or value the other,” tweeted Ronald Brownstein of CNN and The Atlantic.
The 1850s? We know how that ended: badly. Why not head off continued conflict by letting these “very distinct parts” of the U.S. be even more distinct—so much so that there’s less for them to battle over. We could even break with the past and try political solutions that let people live side by side without submitting to the authority of opponents they neither respect not value.
Brownstein wasn’t the only observer to notice the political breach—a breach that appears to be growing.
“It is hard to believe that Democrats and Republicans were watching the same hearings,” the YouGov polling firm marveled while reporting that Democrats disbelieved Kavanaugh and believed Ford, his accuser, in almost exactly the same numbers that Republicans disbelieved Ford and believed Kavanaugh.
Press TV. Listen here.
Nikki Haley, the outgoing US ambassador to the United Nations, was a member of the “Never Trumper” movement opposed to Donald Trump’s rise to power, an American analyst in Virginia says.
Haley announced Tuesday she was resigning after nearly two years in the post. The former South Carolina governor – one of the few women in the Trump cabinet – gave no reason for her exit.
Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com, told Press TV on Tuesday that Haley had been a vocal critic of President Trump. “She was originally in what they call the Never Trumper camp,” Preston said.
Never Trumpers were a group of established Republicans opposed to Trump’s presidential campaign. They believed the real estate mogul-turned-politician posed a serious threat to America’s national security.
As I have long suspected, PC is primarily the domain of the left-wing of the upper middle class (roughly the same socioeconomic demographic that Jacobinism and Communism came from).
By Yascha Mounk
The Atlantic
On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.
Reality is nothing like this. As scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” most Americans don’t fit into either of these camps. They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest—including a general aversion to PC culture.
Tim Bryant and I discuss economics.
In episode 11 of Unraveling Political Theory, Tim and Keith will be discussing money. Coming to terms with different political movements and what they represent is at the core of what this podcast is all about. To understand the world of politics and change it for the better, it’s paramount that people begin to study political theory and the ways in which it has manifest throughout history up into the present day. By bringing light to the origins of political and philosophical thought, the present day becomes all the more explainable because one is now able to see the logical progression of such manifestations.
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
I’ve always found it absurd that white nationalists bitch the loudest about identity politics when they’re the winy snowflakes who fucking invented the goddamn concept. White isn’t even a race for Christ sake. There is no Whitestan. There is no traditional white tribe. It’s a class concept designed to justify an oligarchy without a royal bloodline. I’m pretty sure that the first “white” guys were just a bunch of slave owners who settled on the superiority of their lack of melanin after they finished taking inventory on eye color and penis size and came to the conclusion that skin was the one thing they had in common that the field hands couldn’t lay claim to. In today’s divided states of America identity politics are mostly used to keep different genres of poor people at each others throats while the one percent rapes their wives (often literally) and pollutes their land.
By Yascha Mounk
The Atlantic
James A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, the scholars behind the hoax.
Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable: By the time they took their experiment public late on Tuesday, seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected.
We’ve been here before.
Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk has a pretty good critique of Tucker Carlson, and Trumpism generally, that I think is largely accurate, although I disagree with Kulinski’s embrace of Bernie Sanders’ neo-Rooseveltian perspective as the fallback position, and Kulinski clearly does not criticize the Left strongly enough, and is too dismissive of immigration critics, which involves issues that are far more complicated than what he recognizes.
The best take on the Kavanaugh mess I’ve seen to date.
By Avens O’Brien
I haven’t commented much on the whole Kavanaugh issue. I have so many thoughts, and they aren’t perfectly organized or suitable for an article. I wrote this rant out last night while really exhausted, I made minor edits this afternoon and I’m just posting it, because it’s burning a hole in my mind and I’m actually like… angry/sad/disappointed, which isn’t very common for me. And yeah, I’m bothered by his confirmation, but more so about the entire process. About how we got here.
Here goes…
In episode 10 of Unraveling Political Theory, Tim Bryant and Keith Preston will be discussing Progressivism. Coming to terms with different political movements and what they represent is at the core of what this podcast is all about. To understand the world of politics and change it for the better, it’s paramount that people begin to study political theory and the ways in which it has manifest throughout history up into the present day. By bringing light to the origins of political and philosophical thought, the present day becomes all the more explainable because one is now able to see the logical progression of such manifestations.
Keith & R.J. cover the news of the week
Nearly a third of US voters expect civil war within 5 years, ignorance is a problem, red vs blue, the real issue with Kavanaugh, Bill Cosby sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison, black people who criticize African American culture, Ahvaz military parade attack, English guy with a bionic penis, inner city delivery room security, Kanye West is a trip, Taylor Swift IRL, gay penguins kidnap baby penguin from straight penguins, rapist gets joint custody of the child, article about Voltairine de Cleyre appears in the New York Times, Voltairine’s fight, Trump talks about two-state solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Trump is not his usual-asshole-self around Israel, Libyans miss life under Gaddafi, Gaddafi’s Green Book anarchist manifesto and middle eastern Michael Jacksonism, Florida guy gets 20 years for stealing $600 worth of cigarettes, warning shot in public, assault with a deadly weapon, Mexico’s drug cartels going into the gasoline industry, confessions of a fake news writer, drone hobbyists angered by Congress ending “aerial wild west,” double/triple/super illegal, psychogenic death, Nietzsche’s fight.
An interesting discussion of N-A on reddit. Not sure if others here have seen it. It’s interesting in places, along with a lot of the usual stuff. Read it here.
The key issue in these debate is should anarchist be limited to leftists only, or does anarchism transcend the usual left/right/center categorizations? I think everyone knows my position. Some of the comments in that thread remind me of this skit from SNL:
