statickinetics posted:what's your point
Lenin would agree with Amin.
swirlsofhistory posted:Lenin would agree with Amin.
don't troll.
swirlsofhistory posted:statickinetics posted:what's your point
Lenin would agree with Amin.
babyhueypnewton posted:statickinetics posted:did yall read that dumb shit samir amin wrote about mali
it was bad. i guess amin voted for Hollande lol
also that mlm guys post about nietzsche made me so sad, now im disillusioned. i dont think i can read his blog or reddit anymore and i have a new appreciation of the aesthetic marxists that make up this forum
lol. i googled the post you refer to. i read it and his responses to comments and was MIFFED at what a dweeb he is. so i wrote him a scathing response that concluded basically, you need to give up writing about marxism because your writing is bad enough that it damages the movement. then i submitted it and now its awaiting approval 
swirlsofhistory posted:statickinetics posted:
what's your point
Lenin would agree with Amin.
the quote says Lenin would not support the reactionary movement. it doesn't mean he would support French imperialism, like Amin.
speaking of which, here's a article by good ole John Pilger:
The Real Invasion of Africa and Other Not-Made-for-Hollywood Holy Wars
(Photo: US Army Africa / Flickr)
The "Islamic terrorism" that is an excuse for the enduring theft of Africa's vast store of minerals was all but invented by US, Pakistani and British intelligence agencies, which created the mujahedin of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
A full-scale invasion of Africa is under way. The United States is deploying troops in 35 African countries, beginning with Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger. Reported by the Associated Press on Christmas Day, this was missing from most Anglo-American media.
The invasion has almost nothing to do with "Islamism," and almost everything to do with the acquisition of resources - notably minerals - and an accelerating rivalry with China. Unlike China, the US and its allies are prepared to use a degree of violence demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Palestine. As in the cold war, a division of labor requires that Western journalism and popular culture provide the cover of a holy war against a "menacing arc" of Islamic extremism, no different from the bogus "red menace" of a worldwide communist conspiracy.
Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Last year, AFRICOM staged Operation Africa Endeavor, with the armed forces of 34 African nations taking part, commanded by the US military.
AFRICOM'S "soldier to soldier" doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command, from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa's proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master's black colonial elite whose "historic mission," warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the promotion of "a capitalism rampant, though camouflaged."
A striking example is the eastern Congo, a treasure trove of strategic minerals, controlled by an atrocious rebel group known as the M23, which in turn is run by Uganda and Rwanda, the proxies of Washington.
Long planned as a "mission" for NATO, not to mention the ever-zealous French, whose colonial lost causes remain on permanent standby, the war on Africa became urgent in 2011 when the Arab world appeared to be liberating itself from the Mubaraks and other clients of Washington and Europe. The hysteria this caused in imperial capitals cannot be exaggerated. NATO bombers were dispatched not to Tunis or Cairo but Libya, where Muammar el-Qaddafi ruled over Africa's largest oil reserves. With the Libyan city of Sirte reduced to rubble, the British Special Air Service (SAS) directed the "rebel" militias in what has since been exposed as a racist bloodbath.
The Tuareg, the indigenous people of the Sahara, whose Berber fighters el-Qaddafi had protected, fled home across Algeria to Mali, where the Tuareg have been claiming a separate state since the 1960s. As the ever-watchful Patrick Cockburn points out, it is this local dispute, not al-Qaeda, that the West fears most in northwest Africa ... "poor though the Tuareg may be, they are often living on top of great reserves of oil, gas, uranium and other valuable minerals."
Almost certainly the consequence of a French/US attack on Mali on January 13, a siege at a gas complex in Algeria ended bloodily, inspiring a 9/11 moment in David Cameron. The former Carlton TV PR man raged about a "global threat" requiring "decades" of western violence. He meant implantation of the west's business plan for Africa, together with the rape of multi-ethnic Syria and the conquest of independent Iran.
Cameron has now ordered British troops to Mali, and sent a Royal Air Force drone, while his verbose military chief, Gen. Sir David Richards, has addressed "a very clear message to jihadists worldwide: Don't dangle and tangle with us. We will deal with it robustly"- exactly what jihadists want to hear. The trail of blood of British army terror victims, all Muslims, and their "systemic" torture cases currently heading to court, add necessary irony to the general's words. I once experienced Sir David's "robust" ways when I asked him if he had read the courageous Afghan feminist Malalai Joya's description of the barbaric behavior of westerners and their clients in her country. "You are an apologist for the Taliban" was his reply. (He later apologized).
These bleak comedians are straight out of Evelyn Waugh and allow us to feel the bracing breeze of history and hypocrisy. The "Islamic terrorism" that is their excuse for the enduring theft of Africa's riches was all but invented by them. There is no longer any excuse to swallow the BBC/CNN line and not know the truth. Read Mark Curtis's Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam, or John Cooley's Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, or The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was midwife to the birth of modern fundamentalist terror. In effect, the mujahedin of al-Qaeda and the Taliban were created by the CIA, its Pakistani equivalent, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and Britain's MI6.
Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, describes a secret presidential directive in 1979 that began what became the current "war on terror." For 17 years, the US deliberately cultivated bank-rolled, armed and brainwashed jihadi extremists that "steeped a generation in violence." Code-named Operation Cyclone, this was the "great game" to bring down the Soviet Union, but brought down the Twin Towers.
Since then, the news that intelligent, educated people both dispense and ingest has become a kind of Disney journalism, fortified, as ever, by Hollywood's license to lie, and lie. There is the coming DreamWorks movie about WikiLeaks, a fabrication inspired by a book of perfidious tittle-tattle by two enriched Guardian journalists; and there is Zero Dark Thirty, which promotes torture and murder, directed by the Oscar-winning Kathryn Bigelow, the Leni Riefenstah of our time, promoting her master's voice as did the Fuhrer's pet film-maker. Such is the one-way mirror through which we barely glimpse what power does in our name.
swampman posted:its awaiting approval
Update on this http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2009/07/i-hate-nietzsche.html
Here my response to his response to my reponse
I will not read your other post because your writing is so self-important yet devoid of critical thought. This piece should be able to stand on its own, or you shouldn't have published it.
People defend Nietzsche in different ways because he wrote so much about so many different things and overturned his own ideas. You sound like someone who stopped reading Thus Spake Zarathustra after the first few pages, not realizing that more than once in the book, Zarathustra recants the limited understanding that produced the previous sections. It says much more about you than Nietzsche that you think his core concepts are master and slave morality. To me his intellectual triumph is the eternal return, a concept that illustrates the weakness of nihilism. A friend of mine reads Nietzsche and can do nothing but focus on his incessant reference to dance and movement.
I call you reactionary not for tearing down "spurious readings" of Nietzsche, but for denying the common person's ability to understand him. You are not particularly smart, as your writing demonstrates. "People who do not study philosophy" is most people. If they find value in the poetry and joyfulness of Nietzsche, then there is value there, and you are the irrelevant fringe.
As for your parting shot about revolutionary theory and praxis, you have no idea what my qualifications are, and what sort of work I do. This is the kind of sneering that I'm talking about. Rather than crack open Ecce Homo, you're satisfied to declare yourself the most knowledgable and qualified person on the subject (except for anyone who's been Published! You do include a throwaway Lukacs lament).
Well, I'm getting back to you now: your "angry, humorous overtones" are figments of your imagination. It's clear you closed your mind to Nietzsche as soon as you imagined him threatening the dialectical materialism that you honor in name only.
You call Nietzsche elitist and brag about your doctorate in the same paragraph. You know, Dr. Phil also has a doctorate. The fact that you've been allowed to teach Nietzsche makes me doubt your university's accreditation.
If you were interested in "Nietzsche in context" you wouldn't waste your time, and the time of your vanishingly small readership, discussing the link between Nietzsche and Marx, as weak and meaningless as the relationship between Freud and Einstein. You'd be talking about Spinoza, Hegel, Foucault, and so on, way on down the to that shithead Deleuze.
The most wretched of the earth don't care about Marx, Lenin, or Mao either, by the way. Or Dr. You!
Edited by swampman ()
Crow posted:I wonder what the Naxalites and the Russian Ministry of the Interior think about the rhizzone
i work for the russian ministry of the interior. i thought you did too but whatever. well technically i'm a security contractor for an oil firm monitoring threats to the russian economy in the anglosphere or some shit lol. anyway my nickname is polio (Полиомиелит) because i take people down by their legs. i dunno it sounds better in russian, doesn't it?
Crow posted:
on a side note what's the deal w/ war nerd glorifying M23 and other Tutsi rebel groups?
HenryKrinkle posted:Crow posted:on a side note what's the deal w/ war nerd glorifying M23 and other Tutsi rebel groups?
the tutsi are heroes
HenryKrinkle posted:Crow posted:on a side note what's the deal w/ war nerd glorifying M23 and other Tutsi rebel groups?
Because John Dolan is a contrarian for contrarian's sake?
NoFreeWill posted:can we condemn the imperialism involved while still being glad that a bunch of Malians won't die?
Condemning imperialism is condemning the economic relations that keep countries like Mali underdeveloped and dependent, along with the national policies that help reinforce or preserve those relations. But imperialism doesn't create underdevelopment, it only takes advantage and perpetuates it where it already exists in the economy.
The Taureg and foreign jihadists are fighting to entrench and extend their economic structure of slavery and criminal trade, a more backward structure than even the underdeveloped semi-feudal, semi-capitalist relations of sedentary southern Mali. When the rebels captured towns, the first victims brought before the newly implemented sharia courts were former slaves for punishment: lopping off hands or returning them to old masters. It's crazy to pretend like there isn't a better side here, that in this context a marxist should remain ambivalent about which side is reactionary and represents an outmoded structure, and which is the progressive relatively speaking.
While Amin's article is confusing (imo most of his recent stuff is like that), that MLM mayhem guy doesn't even bother giving an argument against its position. But then again, Maoism isn't known for its strong focus on historical materialism; instead preferring to fan the flames of whatever nationalist or religious movement is politically convenient - witness China's support for Biafra long before the invention of the 'three worlds theory'.
1) Many people who are enamoured with Nietzsche are pretentious self-proclaimed experts who think they are smarter than everyone else. They are intellectually elitists in the precise definition of the term (you actually seem to fit the bill here) who imagine they are smarter than everyone else;
2) But if you're an intellectual elitist, and see Nietzsche as a sign of intellectual measure (as a certain banal literary tradition does), then you should at least abide by everything that the elitist intellectual tradition demands: serious scholarship, respect for those who have studied it within a scholarly tradition, etc.
3) Hence my complaint about the spurious "Nietzsche is incoherent" or "Nietzsche's philosophy can be whatever I want it to be"… if this is true, then why is it so important?
4) Hence also the reason why I would mention my doctorate. Recall how it was mentioned: a response to your asinine and trollish insult where you claimed that I wasn't particularly smart––the hallmark of pretentious pseudo intellectual argumentation where insults and self-important thinking replaces arguments. (Ironically you attribute this to me when you've been nothing but personally insulting, intentionally misreading, from your first pompous comment.) So if we're going to descend to that level, it is pretty simple to ask what is the measure of being smart and why do you think you have more right than me to call yourself a Nietzsche expert? See where I'm going with this… otherwise, I could give a shit about my doctorate in the context of actually existing class struggle––the people who have taught me a lot in applied theory haven't had their doctorates and they know a hell of a lot more than me about Marx.
As for the most wretched of the earth not caring about Marx, Lenin, or Mao… Now here is where you really reveal yourself as some anti-communist troll who doesn't give a shit about concrete history. Communism never went away as a radical demand for the majority of the world's population and if you bothered to study social movements in the third world you'd realize this. What is the most revolutionary movement in the world today? The Naxal rebellion in India and the dalits and tribals there definitely do care about Marx. Lenin, Mao. What's more, this tradition speaks to their concrete circumstances; Nietzsche does not. Nietzsche only speaks to would-be academics, usually men, at the centres of capitalism: sometimes they might like Marx as well, but it's pretty clear that they are more interested in treating marxism as a game more than anything else.
[cont.[
Returning to your claims about how I've misunderstood Nietzsche, that he doesn't just boil down to slave morality and master morality, and that he has other concepts (such as Eternal Reccurence/Return) that are more important, I would just say read the scholarship on this. The most significant Nietzschean scholars would disagree with you on this. Now it's all well and good to say this an appeal to an elitism, but it is far more elitist to imagine that you and you alone know more about Nietzsche than everyone else, especially those who have made it their life's work to study Nietzsche... This would border on solipsism.
In fact, the concept of eternal recurrence makes no sense without the concept of ressentiment which is the basis for his value distinction between what is sometimes called slave morality and master morality. The theme of this history of value where ressentiment (the prime value of the "slaves") has repressed what is creative and life-giving runs through everything from the Gay Science, to Ecce Homo, to the Anti-Christ, to the Birth of Tragedy, to Twilight of the Idols, to even Zarathustra (and TSZ, we must remember, was intended as a collection of aphorisms and is thus necessarily fragmented––cherry-picking sections you like is not an honest way to read this text, especially when it intentionally ignores those passages that might contradict the ones you like). I have suggested, following scholars of Nietzsche (such as Walter Kaufmann), that the Genealogy of Morals is probably the central text to understanding the underlying philosophical commitments of Nietzsche. Hell, Michel Foucault who really did know his Nietzsche zeroed in on this text as well as the *primary* Nietzschean work: it's where Foucault derived his genealogical method, claiming it was the fundamental philosophy of Nietzsche, though arguably jettisoning those concepts Foucault did not like in Nietzsche.
As for whether or not the most wretched of the earth care about me, no I'm sure they don't and I hope they don't. Really, I don't have anything to teach them and most of what I understand theoretically has been gleaned of making sense of a history of revolutionary struggles that were produced by the most exploited/oppressed, by learning from them. But if you think my readership is dwindling, you are sadly mistaken: it grows every month. And this readership don't care about this old article on Nietzsche that I wrote without thinking about readers (because it was my first post, and I thought no one would ever read my blog, and it was just letting off some steam about first year philosophy boy at the back of my classroom extolling the virtues of his ubermensch existence), just as they probably don't care about your thoughts on the world.
If you plan to respond, please do me the favour and stop acting like a smarter-than-thou troll (I do have a "no trolls" comment policy, though I tend to let things go on for too long), and also stop putting words in my mouth (your last comment was so off the mark that it was simply empty rhetoric).
swirlsofhistory posted:NoFreeWill posted:can we condemn the imperialism involved while still being glad that a bunch of Malians won't die?
Condemning imperialism is condemning the economic relations that keep countries like Mali underdeveloped and dependent, along with the national policies that help reinforce or preserve those relations. But imperialism doesn't create underdevelopment, it only takes advantage and perpetuates it where it already exists in the economy.
The Taureg and foreign jihadists are fighting to entrench and extend their economic structure of slavery and criminal trade, a more backward structure than even the underdeveloped semi-feudal, semi-capitalist relations of sedentary southern Mali. When the rebels captured towns, the first victims brought before the newly implemented sharia courts were former slaves for punishment: lopping off hands or returning them to old masters. It's crazy to pretend like there isn't a better side here, that in this context a marxist should remain ambivalent about which side is reactionary and represents an outmoded structure, and which is the progressive relatively speaking.
While Amin's article is confusing (imo most of his recent stuff is like that), that MLM mayhem guy doesn't even bother giving an argument against its position. But then again, Maoism isn't known for its strong focus on historical materialism; instead preferring to fan the flames of whatever nationalist or religious movement is politically convenient - witness China's support for Biafra long before the invention of the 'three worlds theory'.
twp things: one, which marxists/maoists/whatever are defending the Tuareg or (especially) foreign jihadists, rather than standing opposed to imperialist intervention? two, how are the Tuareg uprisings equivalent to foreign jihadist interposition, particularly when it seems that many contingents were escaping the defeat of Libyan socialism (additionally, where does slavery fit into the conception of Libyan economic structure?)?
And as far as I can tell, Maoism isn't three worlds theory, 'Mao Zedong Thought' isn't Maoism. Certainly 'MLM mayhem' follows a (MIM) Maoism that is at odds with at least some of these configurations
sometimes they might like Marx as well, but it's pretty clear that they are more interested in treating marxism as a game more than anything else.
lol look at this scrub that doesn't think life is a game. boo hoo i weally weally care about poor people lollll
http://www.nsfwcorp.co/nynqex
As always, up for 2 days.
marimite posted:New War Nerd on Mali:
http://www.nsfwcorp.co/nynqex
As always, up for 2 days.
i wonder who john thinks he's still fooling with the achmed-the-islamo-fascist shtick? i mean, it's 2013; old habits die hard, eh?
marimite posted:New War Nerd on Mali:
http://www.nsfwcorp.co/nynqex
As always, up for 2 days.
Where did you come up with the name "Fist Man"?
MadMedico posted:marimite posted:
New War Nerd on Mali:
http://www.nsfwcorp.co/nynqex
As always, up for 2 days.
Where did you come up with the name "Fist Man"?
drugs and free association
getfiscal posted:sometimes they might like Marx as well, but it's pretty clear that they are more interested in treating marxism as a game more than anything else.
lol look at this scrub that doesn't think life is a game. boo hoo i weally weally care about poor people lollll
gyrofry posted:trotskyism is to communism as mad about you is to seinfeld
it stands the test of time better?