gyrofry posted:
obviously i wrote the better superman piece but i really feel it should be other people pointing that out instead of me
HenryKrinkle posted:http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/04/fbi-agent-apparently-egged-on-texas-terrorist.html
Hendricks’s arrest means that every major U.S. attack was linked to FBI investigation before it happened, Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told The Daily Beast.
Sinha seems to be under the impression that either we must view Southern nationalism as a counter-revolution or as a variation of liberalism. Personally, I don't see why it can't be both. Even the material she gathers suggests how this can be so. The South Carolina Slavery apologists she cites repeatedly appeal to the sanctity of private property, the advantages of Free Trade, the necessity of human bondage as a condition for "progress", and the necessity of black subordination for the guaranteeing of the liberty of white landowners all of which are themes that are not inherently alien to American republicanism, which has always struggled with the realities of settler colonialism and a strong distrust of egalitarianism. This is not to say however, that the difference between more or less democratic forms of that ideology is insignificant.
Sinha also keeps taking as a given that Founding generation of Southerners as a whole subscribed to the notion that slavery was a necessary evil, as assumption which I think is lacking for reasons I elaborate on here: http://suburbanidiocies.tumblr.com/post/104946846422/the-necessary-evil-myth
Overall though it was a solid read.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
swampman posted:http://theintercept.com/2016/07/09/barrett-brown-the-fact-of-sisyphus/
i keep forgetting about that column. it's usually pretty good reading, notwithstanding the fact that he was a pretty unsympathetic character at the time he was arrested
swampman posted:http://theintercept.com/2016/07/09/barrett-brown-the-fact-of-sisyphus/
It's remarkable to me how completely identical the Sam Kriss types are to each other in writing style and petty bourgeois affect. I guess there's a market for it.
jihad, imminent, nails, unstable, forgery, suicide
Also the Book of Isaiah
Also Settlers
RedMaistre posted:Read the The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson.
I was looking at reading this myself. What did you think of it?
babyhueypnewton posted:swampman posted:http://theintercept.com/2016/07/09/barrett-brown-the-fact-of-sisyphus/
It's remarkable to me how completely identical the Sam Kriss types are to each other in writing style and petty bourgeois affect. I guess there's a market for it.
It's more palatable to me coming from someone who doesn't claim to be a marxist tbh
Big U.S. corporations have systematically set out to minimize their tax bills through exotic international arrangements. Many of them have accumulated huge stockpiles of money outside the U.S., which they do not want to repatriate under current tax conditions. This has caused a lot of controversy within the U.S. However, the U.S. does not want the E.U. to levy a big tax bill against Apple and other large U.S. firms. They would prefer that U.S. tax authorities get any revenue at some undefined time in the future, when Apple and other big companies repatriate their earnings.
Furthermore, depending on the niceties of the ruling, Apple may be eligible for a U.S. tax credit for any foreign taxes it has to pay. This would mean that Apple would retrospectively be able to claw back a lot of money from the U.S. government and taxpayers.
U.S. authorities are furious, and U.S. senators are threatening retaliation against European countries.
tears posted:John smiths Imperialism in the 21st CEntury, its very good,
it is good. he's pro-cuba and anti-china and anti-ussr though which leads to a weird section condemning Stalin and Mao as competing social-imperialists and cuba as anti-imperialist. it's weird to me because it requires ignoring everything cubans themselves had to say about china and the ussr (which wasn't always positive) and instead idealizing their anti-imperialist solidarity without any kind of deeper analysis of their economy or construction of socialism.
but that part is basically irrelevant to the rest of the book which really breaks down bourgeois economic measurements and how they disguise bourgeois economic thinking and are fundamentally fettered by them. I've never encountered another work which deals with this problem holistically so please read Smith even if you already know how fucked up imperialism is.
glomper_stomper posted:finally reading class struggles in the ussr second period
On February 13, 1928, Stalin sent out a circular to all Party organizations summarizing the situation which had led to the emergency measures being adopted and admitting that mistakes had previously been committed by the Party, including the CC. He welcomed the results obtained by the emergency measures, so far as the amount of grain procured was concerned, but denounced "distortions and excesses" that had been committed in the villages and that might "create new difficulties." Stalin gave as examples of such excesses "compulsory subscription to the agricultural loan, organisation of substitutes for the old interception squads, and, lastly, abuse of powers of arrest, unlawful confiscation of grain surpluses, etc." concluding that "a definite stop must be put to all such practices.”
It's pretty tough to write an entire circular that "denounces" illegal methods of grain procurement in a tone of sustained, malevolent sarcasm, but again Stalin pulls it off
babyhueypnewton posted:tears posted:John smiths Imperialism in the 21st CEntury, its very good,
it is good. he's pro-cuba and anti-china and anti-ussr though which leads to a weird section condemning Stalin and Mao as competing social-imperialists and cuba as anti-imperialist. it's weird to me because it requires ignoring everything cubans themselves had to say about china and the ussr (which wasn't always positive) and instead idealizing their anti-imperialist solidarity without any kind of deeper analysis of their economy or construction of socialism.
but that part is basically irrelevant to the rest of the book which really breaks down bourgeois economic measurements and how they disguise bourgeois economic thinking and are fundamentally fettered by them. I've never encountered another work which deals with this problem holistically so please read Smith even if you already know how fucked up imperialism is.
yeah, i just kinda glazed over the obligatory 
was a bad man section that all marxbooks must have by law. But apart from that the chapter on global labour arbitrage is excellent; and the overtheme of global south low wage prison and free movment of all comodities except labour power coupled with the revealting and refuting of all the tricksy ways that are used to disguse this has helped me feel even worse about my parasitic existence 
Anyway the more interesting part is that the author traces this to underlying differences in models of imperialism, and how those evolved very quickly during the World War. His basic point appears to be that people like Bukharin (and Trotsky) thought that world-imperialism had to be fought on a world stage and that backsliding into local nationalisms would paralyze the movement. Which is familiar but the arc he suggests is that this informed a wide variety of positions of left oppositionists which had no specific links to eachother otherwise and held different positions on various things. But the fact I found surprising is how much this sounds like Maoism in various ways too, like the debate over peaceful coexistence and the need for a people's war by the third world and such. Anyway I'll have more to say about it eventually once I'm done.
https://archive.org/details/the-silicon-ideology
John Smith posted:For an excellent introduction to the Chinese Revolution see Cindy Jaquith, "The origins and defeat of 1925-27 Chinese revolution" The Millitant, Dec 10, 2007 - http://www.themilitant.com/2007/7146/714656.html; and Cindy Jaquith "How Chinese working people overthrew capitalism", The Millitant, Dec 24, 2007, http://www.themilitant.com/2007/7148/714854.html"
Which is a real shame for such an otherwise good book because this "excellent introduction" can be summed up as
Under the Stalin misleadership,
(...)
Leon Trotsky and other members of the Left Opposition fought for a revolutionary policy in China
(...)
the Stalinized Communist International
(...)
the class-collaborationist course Stalin had promised the U.S. and European imperialists after the war
(...)
Due to its Stalinist leadership, the workers state was bureaucratically deformed from the beginning
pogfan1996 posted:Silicon Ideology is a good 20 page read about the alt right, Silicon Valley and neo-reactionism's relationship to fascism
https://archive.org/details/the-silicon-ideology
This is really excellent, I've tried to summarize all the things that make up the composition of the alt right and how they cohere together before and it's a little overwhelming to do off the cuff. Thank youuuu
shriekingviolet posted:pogfan1996 posted:Silicon Ideology is a good 20 page read about the alt right, Silicon Valley and neo-reactionism's relationship to fascism
https://archive.org/details/the-silicon-ideologyThis is really excellent, I've tried to summarize all the things that make up the composition of the alt right and how they cohere together before and it's a little overwhelming to do off the cuff. Thank youuuu
sparksbadung also posted somewhere else mlm-mayhems review of that: http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2016/07/review-silicon-ideology.html
worth a read
c_man posted:sounds like hell
its hell for me because im not a neet anymore and im learning how unacceptable it is to be a communist still
pogfan1996 posted:Silicon Ideology is a good 20 page read about the alt right, Silicon Valley and neo-reactionism's relationship to fascism
https://archive.org/details/the-silicon-ideology
im sure it's old news to a lot of you, but Ishay Landa's "The Apprentice's Sorcerer" is a terrific historical overview on how fascism evolved intellectually out of classical liberal thought. really helped put a lot of things together for me
bit188 posted:i go to a great books college so i have a lot of school reading. right now i'm reading lucretius' stuff on atomism for my natural sciences class (we just got done with the presocratics) and i'm reading latour's laboratory life for my social sciences class. we just got finished with ruth benedict. i have to write a paper on latour and benedict by next week
Marx did his thesis on Epicurus (and Lucretius by extension)!
