Category Archives: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

Why I Stopped Being White (and You Should Too) 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Race and Ethnicity • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Race is a touchy subject in the West. People across the aisle, especially white folk, tend to avoid it like a plague. A big part of the reason behind this reservation has to do with the fact that both the left and the right maintain an equally immature grasp on the subject. While the right seems to be convinced that race is some kind of scientific fact like a species of bird, the left seems to view it as an inescapable historical prison sentence with no hope for escape. Like usual, the left is wrong and the right is way fucking wrong. There is nothing scientific or permanent about race. It is a social construct as fluid in nature as gender or sexuality, and it is constantly evolving. Almost every known race was created by a collision of former races that have ceased to exist. About the only thing that the clueless class in the left-right paradigm gets right is that the white race is a very unique creature, and a dangerous one.

The white race is unique in that it is the first defining race of the imperial era and modern day imperialism defines its very existence. The Western Europeans designed the concept of whiteness to justify their expanse and enslavement of the New World and it’s dark skinned cousins across the Global South. As the insatiable nature of capitalism demanded endless expansion, it’s moneyed mandarins required the creation of a new super-class to rationalize the enslavement of the darker nations. This concept became even more necessary with American independence and the fall of monarchism.

This new white aristocracy replaced the royal bloodline and shaped the very nature of the planet’s economic ecosystem. The First World was created with the excess wealth pillaged from the Third World, and it’s subjects soon became victims of new races invented to further empower the white race. The colored races of black and Latino were constructed to both consolidate white supremacy’s ill-gotten gains and to rob the many tribes that made up these racial monoliths of color of their diverse indigenous cultures. The white race is unique, not simply by the Machiavellian nature of its design, but by the necessity of its supremacy over other similarly constructed mass races to justify its very existence. But like most imperial schemes, white supremacy backfired.

READ MORE

I Was a Red Flag Kid 5

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Middle school sucks for everybody. But its harder for some people than others. After nearly a decade at a small, conservative, K-8 Catholic school, I was beginning to chafe beneath the cross of my mental illness. I had suffered from depression and anxiety since early childhood but as I entered the maelstrom of my teens, these issues became too turbulent to conceal. I didn’t feel like the other kids and my awkward individuality felt far from welcome among the pious adults. Even beyond my ability to cope with the basic everyday stress of being an active human being, I felt strange and detached from what passed as normal in this stifling environment. My body felt like a mistake and I couldn’t shake the fear that these feelings were evil. I had never heard of words like transgender or genderfluid. This was the Nineties and the only people who looked the way I felt were Dennis Rodman and Marilyn Manson, and the generally excepted wisdom at my church was that these freaks were going to hell, and so was I.

I was terrified. Terrified of myself. Terrified that if I ever let people in, that if people ever really truly saw me, they would either burn me at the stake or run screaming for the hills. So I retreated and found ways to cope. I lost most of my friends but I found shards of myself through the awesome power of punk rock music and radical politics. George W. Bush dropped bombs on Baghdad when I was in 8th grade and the very next day I came to school with a peace sign strapped to my arm. In early post-9/11 middle America, this mild gesture of resistance was tantamount to burning a pentagram in your forehead and declaring allegiance to Al-Qaeda.

I spent the proceeding weeks and months engaging in all out verbal combat with nearly every student and teacher I crossed. It was exhausting, but for the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t scared, I was proud. I had declared my independence from “normal” and stood my ground and it felt empowering. So I dressed in all black, stopped standing for the pledge of allegiance and gave up on trying to please the normal people who occupied my life. I decorated my backpack with badges emblazoned with the portraits of my new saints; Kurt Cobain, Che Guevara and Joey Ramone. Then the wolves came in and normal bit back.

READ MORE

Who’s Afraid of Tulsi Gabbard? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Elections are different for anarchists. We’ve already made our peace with the basic fact that representative democracy is a sham even when it’s not rigged by moneyed oligarchs. So when we do actually take part in the process, it’s usually for purposes of propaganda and/or Machiavellian strategy. One thing Trump was right about is the influence of the deep state, though it’s hardly the shadowy coalition of dope smoking lesbian Bolsheviks the Alex Jones-set imagines them to be (I wish.) Rather, they’re more of a loose coalition of rich old white men who travel back and forth between unelected positions in the federal government and the numerous industrial complexes of the Fortune 500. At the risk of sounding like a member of the tinfoil hat brigade, these are the people who really run this country. Elections, especially at the presidential level, are largely just theater, a glorified reality TV show designed to feed the masses the illusion of living in a democratic society beneath the steel boot of a rapidly decomposing empire.

I personally subscribe to the Murray Rothbard philosophy on elections, which basically goes that since the state is defined by it’s monopoly on the use of force, the best we the people can do when we’re not loading rifles is to support the most antiwar candidate available. To me, this school of thought is made doubly relevant by the fact that theoretically the only thing the president has direct authority over is the armed forces. To say that this philosophy has brought me to some strange places is an understatement. I have personally changed political parties no fewer than three times and counting. And I’ve found myself openly backing everyone from Jurassic goldbugs like Ron Paul to New Age hippie vaxxers like Jill Stein (who’s 2016 campaign sticker continues to haunt Hillaryites from the bumper of my Ford Taurus.)

The DNC’s bottomless clown car of milquetoast morons doesn’t exactly provide a lot of options for the Rothbardian voter. Most of the candidates seem to come from the Oprah School of social democracy, chumming debt besodden millennials with the promise of an endless procession of free shit, payed through taxing super-villains without offering to cut a single missile. The only solidly antiwar candidate was 89 year old former senator Mike Gravel, but since Mike has called it quits after essentially being banned from Cable TV and screwed out of his rightful place in the latest debates, that only leaves contrarian powder-keg, Tulsi Gabbard.

READ MORE

I’m a Little Bit Ilhan, and I’m a Little Bit Tucker Too 2

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags: , ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

As something of a radical contrarian, I often feel like my life is comprised largely of coming out of an endless procession of closets, often without even realizing I’m stepping through the doorway. What? You didn’t know I was a pro-life feminist? You’ve never heard of a libertarian socialist? I genuinely can’t keep up with all the peccadillos you partisan pussies find indigestible. All in all, with this experience of casually shocking boring people, it’s little wonder I took to being queer like a fish in a frying pan.

But some closet doors are heavier than others and at this hybrid moment of Republicrat hysteria, they don’t get much heavier than the simple fact that I have a great deal of respect for both Ilhan Omar and Tucker Carlson, which is a bit like being a unicorn that everyone hates for a different reason. How could this be possible? Well, for one thing, I’ve long held a soft spot in my bleeding heart for both shocking people and, well, shocking-people. As a kid, I couldn’t seem to decide whether I wanted to be Mother Teresa or Marilyn Manson when I grew up. But more than any idiosyncratic character flaw, my respect for these two highly demonized figures stems from the fact that I am and will always be an anti-imperialist above all else. And regardless of their many many flaws both Ilhan and Tucker have been fairly consistent advocates for world peace.

I never expected to like Tucker Carlson and, for the most part, I still don’t. His demonization of immigrants and trans people like myself is nothing short of revolting. But like most paleocons, with Mr. Carlson you take the good with the disgusting. Regardless of how you or I may feel about the bastard’s social cluelessness, you have to be pathologically apoplectic to deny his post-partisan devotion to anti-interventionism. Where Tucker’s beloved pseudo-isolationist Caesar, Donald Trump, has faltered, Carlson has remained courageously resolute.

Since taking the prime time slot of pandering grope-a-holic Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson has delivered some of the most breathlessly eloquent prose in defense of peace that this country has seen since MSDNC had Phil Donahue fired for speaking out against the war in Iraq, often going against the very president he rebuilt his career on defending in the process, and it’s effect appears to be profound. Donald Trump seems to have only reversed his decision to commit mass murder in Iran after a brief phone call with his favorite Fox News host. With an impetuously impressionable man-child in the Oval Office, this xenophobic, binarist dick may have literally saved lives by sticking to his guns on America’s existential need to drop hers. Hate the fucker for who he is, but game recognizes game, and Tucker is looking pretty damn familiar to this tranny peacenik. Crucify me for being big enough admit it.

Perhaps the only thing more enjoyable than seeing a neocon network hijacked by a modern-day Charles Lindbergh has been watching mighty little Ilhan make those same pigfucking giants sweat. While, as an anarchist, I may find Mrs. Omar’s pseudo-socialist, big-government-solves-everything approach to domestic policy nauseatingly tiresome, she has proven herself to be the Lower House’s most doggedly consistent critic of empire since Ron Paul.

READ MORE

US political hostility has reached the greatest level Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies

Press TV. Listen here.

Hostility between major political parties in the US has now reached is greatest level, according to an American analyst.

Large majorities of Americans believe the tone of political debate in the United States has become more negative in recent years and the inflammatory political rhetoric could encourage acts of violence, and President Donald Trump is a major factor in this growing problem, according to a new poll.

PressTV-Americans say Trump has made US political debate toxic: Poll

PressTV-Americans say Trump has made US political debate toxic: PollLarge majorities of Americans believe the tone of political debate in the United States has become more negative in recent years, a new poll shows.

“It is true that in recent years the rhetoric between political partisans, between Democrats and Republicans, and Liberals and Conservatives, has certainly escalated,” Keith Preston, told Press TV in an interview on Saturday.   

“And, on the margin there has been some conflicts in the streets between the far left and the far right in recent years, as well,” he added.  

“Research by social scientists will show that the level of hostility between members of the two major political parties is now at the greatest that it has been in at any time in US history since the late 19th century,” Preston insisted.

Some 85 percent of US adults say that political debate in the country is getting increasingly negative and less respectful, according to a survey conducted this spring by the Pew Research Center, a fact tank based in Washington, DC.

The poll found that 55 percent of Americans believe Trump has changed the tone and nature of America’s political debate for the worse, while  just 24 percent say he has changed it for the better.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents overwhelmingly say the Republican president has changed political discourse for the worse. Eight-in-ten or more Democrats say Trump’s comments often or sometimes make them feel concerned, confused, embarrassed, exhausted, angry, insulted and frightened.

Preston said that “nowadays you have different networks that can appeal to different political constituencies”.

“And also, social media, and the alternative media, the internet media, since that has come into being, that has also fueled partisanship,” he argued. 

Preston noted that American society had become a lot more diverse in the past few decades.

“Naturally, there is going to be a wider divergence of opinion on a lot of topics, as well,” he noted.  

Despite the heated political rhetoric, the violence is still low-key, according to Preston. 

“But, at the same time it has to be viewed in context since the political environment may involve a lot of heated political rhetoric, but it is still fairly low-key compared to what you find in many countries where there is full-blown civil war, or routine acts of political violence,” he concluded.  

Smash All the Camps (Or Sympathy For Willem Van Spronsen) 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration, Left and Right • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I sympathize with Willem Van Spronsen. Maybe that’s a bad way to start this post but it feels like the most honest way to start this post. A mentally ill anarchist, not unlike myself, Willem wanted to end his life but he wanted to end it for a cause. So he attacked an ICE detention center with pipe bombs and let the cops do the rest. I’ve never made my disdain for Antifa a secret, I’ve befriended too many right-wing anti-imperialists caught in their crossfire, but god help me, this struck me as a move in the right direction for Pacific Northwest anarchists, who have lately been far too busy bombarding alt-right imbeciles to confront our growing police state.

My sympathy is not exclusively political however. My sympathy comes from a place of very personal outrage and my outrage comes from a deeply traumatic childhood. I can usually retain a pretty jaded gonzo snark with my writing, stemming from my misanthropic drag queen sense of humor. But when you’ve been fucked with by role-crazy adults as a child, part of you will always be that child. So when I see kids in fucking cages, I see myself brutally misgendered in a confessional waiting for hell. And that’s when I flip my proverbial shit and get downright histrionic. The only reason why I haven’t gone full Kaczynski like Willem, aside from the fact that my meds are working and I generally appose initiatory violence, is because I’m usually too livid in these moments to handle anarcho-home-ec projects like IED’s. I’m also probably too pissed off to write a completely lucid blog post, so this time I decided to wait a week and take a closer look at the issue of the camps.

It’s very tempting to drop the lion share of the blame on a loud-mouth bully like Trump. He’s certainly made the immigration issue more personal by declaring entire classes of people war criminals and encouraging his beloved gorilla juice-heads in ICE to get their Gestapo on. The harsh reality that the media has chosen to ignore however is that there is nothing particularly new about Orange-Man-Bad’s persecution of pint-sized undocumented line-crossers. In fact, the bastard still comes in fourth behind the last three presidents in mass deportations. The modern militarization of the boarder actually started decades before Trump with another sanction-happy rapist named Bill Clinton (I believe the two may have met once or twice at one of Jeffrey Epstein’s Pretty Baby-Eyes Wide Shut Parties) which was just one small part of his fascistic war on children, the hallmark of which was his draconian Biden-approved crime bill which essentially declared black childhood to be a felony. And this is where we meet the concentration camp question.

READ MORE

Epstein a flight risk, should be held without bail, analyst says 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Law/Justice • Tags:

Press TV. Listen here.

Accused child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, is a “flight risk” particularly as he is in possession of a Saudi passport and, therefore should be held without bail, says a political commentator.

Virginia-based Keith Preston made the comments in an interview with Press TV Wednesday after a raid on the house of the American financier and close friend of President Donald Trump, who has been charged with sex trafficking underage girls.

 The investigators found an expired Saudi Arabia passport and a “pile of cash” after the Monday raid.

PressTV-Did pedophile Jeffrey Epstein work for Mossad?

PressTV-Did pedophile Jeffrey Epstein work for Mossad?Jeffrey Epstein’s sex scandal smacks of a sophisticated intelligence service compiling material to blackmail prominent politicians and other public figures.

“Under American law, it’s a fairly standard practice that if a person is charged with serious crimes, they will be held without bail; they will be held in detention before they go to trial,” Preston said, further calling Epstein a “flight risk.”

Being a billionaire, Epstein has “a lot of connections and support all over the world,” argued the commentator, therefore; such a case applies to him.

Preston further suggested that it is natural for such a billionaire to have Saudi ties.

PressTV-Accuser says Epstein raped her when she was 15

PressTV-Accuser says Epstein raped her when she was 15Thirsty-two year old Jennifer Araoz has stepped forward, accusing registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein of having raped her when she was 15.

“Someone of his class, a billionaire class, is typically going to have business that they’re conducting in countries like Saudi Arabia,” he said. “The American business class and the Saudi business class are heavily and intricately connected with one another in a number of different industries, not just petroleum.”

The expired Saudi passport was found in a “locked safe” in Epstein’s Manhattan mansion.

At a bail hearing in Manhattan federal court, Assistant US Attorney Alex Rossmiller revealed that the passport, issued in the 1980s, has a photo of Epstein but a different name.

Tucker: Antifa has the support of the ‘respectable’ left Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration, Left and Right • Tags:

Tucker Carlson has a predictable response to the Willem Van Spronsen incident. I disagree with Carlson that the Antifa is inherently connected to the mainstream Democratic Party-oriented left just as I disagree with the often-made claim that the Trumpians are inherently connected to the neo-fascists.

As a general rule, I do not take sides in the usual conflicts between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and Proudboys/Alt-Right vs. Antifa/Far-Left. I consider all of this to be playing the System’s game, and a “bread and circuses” distraction from the real issues.

I would generally give Willem Van Spronsen an A for attitude and an F for execution. Whatever one’s views on the immigration question, a revolutionary upheaval will certainly involve attacks on state facilities and outposts in various circumstances. It’s the way revolution is done. Any kind of revolutionary upheaval needs folks that will go the distance. However, he strikes me as a mentally ill guy who committed suicide by cop via virtue signaling, which is often the case with these “lone wolf” terrorist types. He did nothing to improve conditions in the detention centers, and likely made them worse by motivating the authorities to increase the level of security in such places.

Nor do I think Van Spronsen’s Antifa associates would create a better society than the one we have now. In fact, they would create a much worse society, basically like Bolshevism, possibly more like Maoism or the Khmer Rouge. Not that they would ever be large enough or functional enough to bring that about. Like their Alt-Right tribal enemies, the only value of these groups is as disruptive virus within the system, and counterforce to each other.

But the outrage over “terrorism” coming from “the other side” also rings hollow. The US federal regime/global empire is the number one terrorist organization in the world today. So-called “federal agents” (the entire alphabet soup of them) are by nature members of a terrorist organization. The Tacoma incident was simply a matter of a mini-terrorist taking on a mega-terrorist. Big deal.

The Truth About The Migrant Detention Centers 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration

This is quite good. Totally smashes the conventional narrative that the abuse of migrants is somehow unique to Trump. The same thing is happening with the migrant detention center issue nowadays that happened with the Iraq War during the George W. Bush era. In both cases, liberal and left opinion used the issue to score some partisan and ideological points, and then quickly forgot about the issue (with some exceptions, of course) when there was a change in the political winds. When Obama came along, the antiwar left virtually disappeared. When another Democrat becomes president, the migrant issue will be dropped as well.

Full ‘Squad’ Press Conference In Response To President Donald Trump’s Attacks Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism

I’m of two minds on these people. On one hand, I prefer these supposed “far left” (really just center-left) figures like Alexandria, Omar, Tlaib, etc. to both the mainstream Democrats and the Republicans because they’re usually much better on foreign policy (more anti-Israel, anti-Saudi, less antagonistic to Russia, Iran, the DPRK, etc). They’re also more antagonistic to the corporate class and (all things considered) have a less favorable view of the so-called “criminal justice system” (police state). However, like a lot of leftists who are good on those issues, they mix it with a lot of loopiness (impractical economic policies, eco-hysteria, idpol victimology, “political correctness, contempt for the culture Middle America, etc).

I like them for the same reason that I tend to like Trump (although I think they’re actually much better than Trump on many issues). Trump has given the finger to the Bush-Romney Republican elites, exploited the “far right” taken them for a ride and discarded them, while making populist and isolationist rhetoric acceptable among the rank and file Republicans. I’d like to see the Democrats move in the direction of DSA or the Greens and the Republicans move in the direction of France’s National Front, thereby strangling the “centrists” from both ends.

ICE Is Dangerously Inaccurate: Even American citizens are not immune from immigration raids 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration

My main criticism of the mainstream right is their jingoistic flag-waving, dupiness for imperialism and their corporate-love (“those poor oppressed billionaires paying capital gains taxes”). My main criticism of the “far-right” is that many of them are so anti-immigrant and anti-private crime (particularly black crime) they end up sucking the dicks of feds and cops in the process. If you don’t want immigration, build a wall around your city-state or township. If you want to fight crime, form a posse or militia or expanded neighborhood watch. But Fuck the System and its stooges. Period.

Check this out as well.

By Darlene Cunha

New York Times

Tracy Nuetzi, a Trump voter and resident of Florida, was an American citizen for 60 years, until the country decided she wasn’t.

“I thought, ‘This is a mistake, this must be a mistake,’” she said. Ms. Nuetzi spent nearly a year, from December 2017 to November 2018, trying to prove she was an American, and not liable to be arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

READ MORE

Trump’s immigration policies very divisive, escalating tensions in US Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration

Islam Times.

US President Donald Trump’s immigration policies have been extremely divisive and has led to rising social tensions across the country, says an American political analyst in Virginia.

“Within the United States right now, immigration is one of these very divisive issues,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.
 
“In American politics, there will always be occasionally some very divisive issue that emerges in which people have very emotionally-held beliefs,” Preston told Press TV on Sunday.
 
“It appears that this issue is now escalating and becoming more intense,” he added.
 
A 69-year-old man armed with a rifle threw incendiary devices at an immigration jail in Washington state early on Saturday morning, then was found dead after four police officers arrived and opened fire, authorities said.
 
A friend of the dead man said she thought he wanted to provoke a fatal conflict, the Seattle Times reported, and described him as an anarchist and anti-fascist.
 
The Tacoma police department said the officers responded about 4am to the privately run Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, a Department of Homeland Security detention facility that holds migrants pending deportation proceedings.
 
Immigration has been the subject of a divisive political battle in the US, which has struggled for more than a year with a migration crisis on its southern border with Mexico.
 
Many Americans oppose immigration and believe that immigrants bring crime and steal good jobs, while others are sympathetic to immigrants and recognize that the US is an aging nation of low birthrate and needs immigration to make its economy and population grow.
 
Thousands of protesters staged rallies across the United States on Friday to protest Trump’s immigration policies.
 
Trump has made his hard-line stance on immigration an integral part of his presidency and has promised to build a wall along the US-Mexican border to curb the flow of migrants from Mexico and Central America.
 
The Trump administration has sought to curb the flow of undocumented migrants and limiting legal immigration, and replace it with a merit-based system.
 
Many undocumented migrants crossing illegally into the US are asylum seekers fleeing violence and poverty in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
 
The treatment of migrants in the detention centers, particularly child migrants, has come under fire in recent months, with reports emerging of filthy conditions and cruelty from staff.
 
Last week, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, said she is “deeply shocked” at the conditions in which the US government is keeping detained migrants and refugees, including children.
 

The Revolt Against Adulthood Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Why don’t you grow up, Nicky? That’s the tried old refrain that never seems to get older than I do. It seems like I hear it from pretty much all the token adult figures in my life; my parents, my therapist, my government. And maybe they’ve got a point. I am over thirty, unemployed, painfully single and I still live at home. To be fair, I’m also certifiably mentally ill. As a slowly recovering shut-in, my lingering agoraphobia makes it damn near impossible to hold down even a part time job. But If I’m to be 100% honest to a gut-shiving fault, which is pretty much my whole shtick, my aversion to adulthood is far more complex than my inability to properly regulate good and bad stress.

 I was raised in the wrong fucking gender by an establishment of adults who I was led to believe held the mandate of god himself, the ultimate adult figure. By in large, growing up, the adults in my life were cruel, petty, two-faced zealots who had their way with my trust until it quite simply ceased to exist. There is a very firmly moralist part of me that yells at the top of her deeply closeted preteen lungs, WHY THE FUCK WOULD I EVER WANT TO BE LIKE YOU!

 I’ve talked about this disembodied voice before. The invisible girl who’s tired of suffocating beneath the biological trappings of manhood. She wants to come out and play with matches but she’s not particularly intrigued by the late capitalist banality of modern adulthood. And, in 2019, she’s not alone.

It seems like I come from an entire generation of kids who are downright allergic to adulthood. We are a lost generation that has chosen in overwhelming numbers to stay single, unemployed and live at home. We also seem to be a culture that is defined by our collective nostalgia. We’ve somehow managed to make washed-up boy bands and thirty year old cartoons a downright viable industry. we’ve gathered on the Internet into rabid cults devoted to everything from anime to My Little Pony. In the process, we have also become the butt of an endless barrage of jokes from older generations for refusing to conform to what their interpretation of what adulthood is. But isn’t that precisely what adulthood is? An interpretation, not unlike other equally subjective concepts like normality and sanity, of what constitutes a successful existence in a collapsing society running on fumes?

So what is an “Adult” in 2019. What earns one that cherished class distinction in the waning hours of the American Century? According to postmodern western society, an adult is someone who pays their taxes and votes for sensible centrist warmongers.

READ MORE

A History of Decentralization 5

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Environment, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Men and Women, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy, Science and Technology, Secession, Strategy

aragon.black
Jun 11, 2019
14 minute read (full)

First let’s decentralize history…

This month’s thematic has been a real challenge for us and raised many questions in our minds. Why? The history of decentralization is complex and non-linear. But most of all, it is difficult to be considered from an objective point of view, stripped of the predominance of the state.

Talking about decentralization leads obviously to discuss about centralization; to find the ghosts of history, to cross-reference the victories and failures of social-political movements; to discover some contemporary alternatives to the generalized centralization of our lives. Unless we consider that a technology is neutral, in the end, we cannot talk about decentralization without talking about governance, suffrage, politics or apoliticism, autonomy, organization… and the dominant model of centralization: the nation-state. Still, if a very vast literature and documentation concerns rise of states, it must be stated that the one granted to the opposite, i. e. the absence of a state, is almost non-existent. More…

What Would Civil War Two Look Like? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right

This is one of the best analyses I’ve seen to date on what an actual Civil War 2 would look like. It’s political, geographical, and cultural analysis is spot on, although its main weakness is that it largely leaves out social class (which is fragmenting both the Red and Blue Tribe) as well as cultural/social cleavages among the Blue Tribe which are growing exponentially.

An actual Civil War 2 would not be the Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe per se (although that may be an impetus that gets the ball rolling). It would be more like the Lebanese civil war of the late
1970s/early 1980s with dozens of different factions. For example, in some geographical areas showdowns between rival gangs would be just as important as political rivalries. Also, the fragmentation of the state itself would be an issue (or multiple issues).

Tourist buses ‘no longer welcome’ in Paris city centre Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized

france24.com

AFP / Lionel Bonaventure (file photo) | A tourist double decker bus in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Paris aims to ban tourist buses from the city centre to spur visitors to walk, cycle or take public transport, tackling complaints about nuisances caused by mass tourism, the French capital’s deputy mayor said.

Emmanuel Gregoire told Le Parisien newspaper that the situation in Paris was not as bad as in tourist-swamped Venice or Barcelona but Parisians were concerned about the influx of tourist buses. More…

Why we disagree about human nature Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy

Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (Eds) Why we disagree about human nature.Oxford University Press, 2018. 206 pp. £30 hbk.

JULY 1, 2019

By Simon Jarrett

If one day a disturbingly precocious child were to ask what part you had played in the nature/ nurture war, what would you reply? Were you with the massed intellectual ranks who, since the philosopher David Hull’s ground-breaking 1986 classic ‘On Human Nature,’ have denied that there is any such thing as a common nature for all humans? Or did you join Stephen Pinker’s 2003 counter-revolution, when The Blank Slate sought to reclaim the ground for the Enlightenment, and the idea that there is something essentially the same about all humans across time, space and culture?

If you are not quite sure where you stand, or perhaps too sure where you stand, then this pleasingly eclectic collection of ten essays on human nature, and whether we can meaningfully talk about such a thing, will be of great help. Its contributors, who come from psychology, philosophy of science, social and biological anthropology, evolutionary theory, and the study of animal cognition, include human nature advocates, deniers, and sceptics. We could perhaps call the sceptics ‘so-whaters’ – they agree there may be something we can attach the label ‘human nature’ to, but query whether it really matters, or carries any explanatory weight. These people would take our (hopefully apocryphal) infant prodigy aside and say, ‘well there are some conceptual complexities here that make it quite difficult to give you a straightforward answer.’ More…