#14041
Post rating: +
the past few years he has been promoting a clear anti-imperialist line and the intercept has run a lot of critiques of economic libertarianism iirc which is far different from when he ran his shitty blog back in 2005

sure, he remains a civil libertarian but he's bought enough goodwill from me with the other stuff that i sorta roll my eyes when the exiled dudes drudge up the fact that he used to work for CATO every time they mention him. people change.
#14042
Post rating: +
also considering the bedfellows the exiled dudes made after the exiled when under im not sure theyre ones to throw stones lol
#14043
Post rating: ~

Petrol posted:

aerdil posted:

Petrol posted:

yeah uh internet teens are allowed to get taken in by libertarianism but greenwald was already a grown ass man and a lawyer lol

true but theres no denying his political perspective has undergone a drastic change within the past five years

in what way? he's still a libertarian. afaik he was always anti-interventionist to an extent but that's the basic libertarian position. his position on government surveillance and political oppression is also libertarian. so..?



Yeah, have you read his coverage of the Brazilian coup for example? This person you're trying to criticize doesn't really exist anymore and hasn't for a long time. People are allowed to change.

Greenwald did a lot to get me back into caring about politics because there was a time when he was the only mainstream US voice who was covering the drone war and the security state, and I can't ever pretend that that doesn't matter, because it really did for me.

The intense fixation some people have about tearing him down seems all out of proportion to me. He's not a flawless writer but the way his every wrong statement or connection gets elevated to this level of treachery is just bizarre. He's spoken at socialist conferences too but nobody calls him a socialist ideologue, for instance.

Edited by KilledInADuel ()

#14044
Post rating: +
Crikey. Anyone would think I called him satan.

KilledInADuel posted:

The intense fixation some people have about tearing him down seems all out of proportion to me.


The intense identification some people have with writers they like seems out of proportion to me.

For the record, I DON'T think he's satan. I've actually linked to his material on these forums before, most recently about the brazil coup. I am aware of the value of his work. But isn't it worth remembering that, in spite of the fact that he's spoken via videolink at trot conferences, he's not actually a socialist? The only reason he's not posting stuff in favour of economic libertarianism anymore is there's no pageviews in it for him, it would be a little off-brand these days. His stance towards socialism as far as I'm aware hasn't changed one bit. I posted the old anti-commie rant because I stumbled across it and found it amusing, but seriously, it's worth keeping in mind the fact that ideologically he hasn't moved very far from that stance, if at all.

aerdil posted:

also considering the bedfellows the exiled dudes made after the exiled when under im not sure theyre ones to throw stones lol


not that i mentioned them at all, but my appreciation for them has always been tempered by the same concerns lol

#14045
[account deactivated]
#14046
mt.real
Post rating: ~

Petrol posted:

yeah uh internet teens are allowed to get taken in by libertarianism but greenwald was already a grown ass man and a lawyer lol

we only have the normal amount of indoctrination, imagine how mindstrong you must be to smash the shackles of being someone who basically agreed with whatever the fuck they told you in law school

(edit: i am beginning to realize that i may be being too sarcastic or ironic or whatever for this forum's threads sometimes. the above is a comedic exaggeration. thank you)

he seems to be doing relatively good things at least.

Edited by drwhat ()

#14047
mt.real
Post rating: +

swampman posted:

i think when a lot of bourgeois guys hit a certain level of material wealth they tend to think "Sure I could live off the land and barter my way to modest comfort in a cashless society" not remembering that they dont even know how seeds work



#14048
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glomper_stomper posted:

i'm seeing this getting tossed around on twitter and it reminds me that the SPK and anti-psychiatry was never really developed nor integrated into leftist politics. psychiatry is bourgeois and mental institutions are pretty much unquestioned as organs of rehabilitation on the left.

what's generally left out of their rosy image of mass institutionalization is that asylums for the criminally insane and mental hospitals in the 60's were as inhumane as prisons. sure, there was less risk of being formally murdered by the state, getting shanked or abused by other prisoners, and maybe less risk of being exploited by something like the prison-industrial complex. but being drugged, isolated, abused, and tortured was common practice and fully encouraged as forms of rehabilitation. they still are but it's a "cleaner", more bureaucratic process than it once was.

people seem to think they transfer prisoners and potential victims of killer pigs into "good" mental hospitals and tap into a reservoir of "good" social workers and psychiatrists to provide the care they need, as if they aren't already swirling around in the open sewer of social services that currently facilitates the growth of the prisons, as if they aren't already integrated into the brutality of the prison system. there's also the fact that no psychiatrist currently in the business hasn't had their patience and compassion whittled away by years of study and the profit motive.

anyway, the SPK was fully fucking idealist but they had the right idea. are there any more contemporary anti-psychiatry books that aren't just new age bullshit?



Only thing I've read is "Deconstructing Psychopathology" edited by Ian Parker. It's full of academic jargon (and not the good Marxist kind) but I thought it still had some very powerful chapters. I'm sure someone who knows more can recommend something more recent than 1995.

#14049
Post rating: +

drwhat posted:



please dont dox me

#14050
Post rating: ~

But isn't it worth remembering that, in spite of the fact that he's spoken via videolink at trot conferences, he's not actually a socialist?



I know he's not a socialist, point being that to claim he is makes about as much sense as shitlisting him forever for past associations with libertarian institutions. He did come around on Chavez at least.

#14051
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Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich
#14052
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Goliath by Max Blumenthal....you know these Israelis....theyre a bunch of jerks!
#14053
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

postposting posted:

vonnegut actually lifts that scene from john reed's ten days that shook the world. it stuck with me when i was reading a lot of vonnegut as a teen and then it was good to finally learn the source years later.

also if anyone hasn't read ten days that shook the world, do it



yeah thats the one.

#14054
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
*mr burns candy lips
#14055
Post rating: +
I am currently reading the Elementary Principles of Philosophy (thanks to you fine folk) and realized that it has summarized the trajectory of modern philosophy in a much more succinct way than pretty much anything I've ever come across.

Take that, overpriced college textbooks
#14056
[account deactivated]
#14057
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
I think George Ciccariello's short new book on communes in Venezuela is cool. The first half would probably be familiar to people here (trajectory of recent Venezuelan history) but the second half is great reporting on how communes operate and it takes a radical pro-commune perspective. One of the most interesting parts to me is the "Commune Law", which is a way for local democratic control to be imposed on things like underutilized land or capital. Like if a factory is closing down, people can try to seize the factory and transfer it to communal control.
#14058
Post rating: +
i recently finished wallerstein's world system vol 1 and its pretty dang good if you're into explicitly european history
#14059
[account deactivated]
#14060
[account deactivated]
#14061
Post rating: ~
everyone has their own demons, glomper
#14062
Post rating: +
I talk back to podcasts in my car, write things like good! In the margins of books I own, yell like "oooohhh nooo!" When people are about to die in movies, and I'm also the Dominican grandma who sat next to me at pippin who kept turning to me and adding additional good things about life when characters would try and give Pippen things to live for.
#14063
[account deactivated]
#14064
Post rating: ~
Well tpaine, assuming you aren't "trolling". Pippin is a bob fosse play from the 70s that is currently in revival on broad way. It's a "meta narritive" .
#14065
Poronto
Post rating: ~

tpaine posted:

whats piipen



its your fucking asshole shithead

#14066
[account deactivated]
#14067
Post rating: +

glomper_stomper posted:

my copy of the wretched of the earth has been scribbled all over by some liberal hack professor who seemingly hasn't read a book from a single black author in his life. like on every other page fanon says something incisive with regard to colonial violence, in essence things that wouldn't be out of place in a james baldwin essay or a malcolm x speech, the paragraph is just littered with underlines and branches leading up to comments like "Wow!" or "Good!"

then there are these paroxysms of underlining and excessive marginalia in the sections dealing with the social relations of the settlers and the colonized, like the motherfucker's piecing together fragments of a distant, arcane codex. just fucking insufferable.

i like the book, though.


i found my copy in a box of books at a yard sale that also included "the fountainhead", it had highlighting through like the first quarter of the book and then nothing

#14068
Post rating: +
a special fuck you to the trot who annotated my copy of class struggles in the ussr first period.
#14069
[account deactivated]
#14070
[account deactivated]
#14071
Post rating: +

cata posted:

Take that, overpriced college textbooks



#14072
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
I started highlighting in a book about budget processes this weekend and it has helped me learn almost absurdly more than I otherwise would have learned.... Gonna start highlighting in all my books... except the ones I send swampman.
#14073
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i prefer to underline, personally
#14074
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i use an x-acto blade to cut out pertinent words and passages which i then paste into anonymous letters i send to my local congressman, celebrities, the police, or ex-girlfriends
#14075
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
i downloaded a tv series once where the only version i could find had half a season with scenes removed from every episode and weird jumps in conversations to cut lines and words. because the people who discussed the show on the Internet felt it made the show better because of "continuity errors" related to another tv series.
#14076
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
now i post on an irony stalin web forum & this is unrelated.
#14077
[account deactivated]
#14078
Post rating: ~
i had to stop reading that book after he opened a chapter with a needless Watchmen reference
#14079
[account deactivated]
#14080
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
obviously he meant heedless watchman reference i.e. one that paid no attention to the deep universal character of the story.. happens too often for my tastes!!