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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Posted: Sat Nov 09, 2019 11:32 pm
by chlamor
All of the below from a Sanders fanatic who are now in full bloom- recycled hope/change 2020:

The anti-Sanders cult is an ideology. "Ideologies are patterned clusters of normatively imbued ideas and concepts, including particular representations of power relations. These conceptual maps help people navigate the complexity of their political universe and carry claims to social truth" (James, Paul; Steger, Manfred [2010]. Globalization and Culture, Vol. 4: Ideologies of Globalism).

These anti-Sanders ideologues are certain that their assumptions are based on "reality" and "the truth", when the facts of the matter are -- for all intents and purposes -- politics is at least half (and probably more) based on entirely subjective choices.

That goes for us who are campaigning for Bernie Sanders also. What's "objective" or provable or evidence-based or concrete about confidence, trust, loyalty, empathy, compassion, making a long-term effort to give love rather than just receive it?

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” ― Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Take a good hard look at the actual people behind the anti-Sanders commentary. Are ANY of them guided by great feelings of love for the working class? I get that feeling from Bernie. Do I have "evidence" or "proof" that Sanders has compassion for those without access to health care and those working for 7$ an hr? No. But I feel it. That's enough for me. If it's not enough for the anti-Sanders crowd, let them bark as they eat dust.
“The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.” ~ an old Arabic proverb

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Extinction Rebellion could evolve into a full-scale revolt.

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For the record, I don't believe that you are an acclerationist, a racist, a right libertarian, a xenophobe, an incel, a homophobe, a transphobe, an anti-Semite, an Islamaphobe, a cisphobe, a misogynist and a misandrist.
You're simply a human being with desires and interests and individual character traits which evolve resulting in different outward and cognitive behavior compared to when we were in our 20's and 40's.

Do you have a group identity? I don't know. I cannot recall us ever discussing it.

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I'm not going to condemn the Democratic party as some monolithic entity, but I'm not going to defend the party either.
There are a handful of pols & writers & political commentators I admire who see the Dems as the lesser of two evils and who suggest strategic lesser evil voting.
I'm not going to condemn the members of Congress who are also of the Democratic Socialists of America just because they have a "D" after their name.
Neither will I condemn Sanders for running as a Democrat.
If that attitude earns me condemnation from progressive leftists, I can live with that condemnation.
I look forward to the day when progressive leftists can point to their/our "changing the world or the country for the better" achievements.

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Actually I consider Sanders' support of HRC a political gaffe.
You consider it "treason".
I consider you and HRC two peas in a pod when I compare your "deluded sheeple" comment with her "basketful of deplorables" comment.
Both of you are elitists.
Both of you are bourgeois.
Both of you are reactionary.
"That's what blind tribalism, selective morality, and cognitive dissonance are all about." Yep. Too bad you cannot recognize it in yourself. Bourgeois elitist reactionaries look down on the masses.

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The article is how the corporate media is marginalizing Sanders. This is the same media who gives millions of dollars worth of exposure to the most reactionary segments of the bourgeoisie.
You and your anti-Sanders cultish ilk are also intent on marginalizing Sanders.
Thanks for your transparency.
It's good to know that your advocacy for the working class is merely vacuous rhetoric.

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I otoh don't find it "hilarious" how similar calling one's fellows "a basketful of deplorables" and "deluded sheeple" is. Sanders merely supported HRC's presidential bid, fulfilling a campaign promise. You behave like HRC, i.e. pious guilt mongering.
As per Nietzsche

The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the Vampire Castle has recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way. Now, here it is …

The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups – the more ‘marginal’ the better – into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering – those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.

Mark Fisher, "Exiting the Vampire Castle"

When leftists begin utilizing "all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented", that's when my commitment to ally myself with "the Genuine Left"™ is annihilated. I suspect it's the same with young people who are becoming aware of socialism due to the Sanders movement and who read rhetorical rants by "the Genuine Left"™ against Sanders, i.e. how he's a "traitor" against the working class.

You may utilize the troll's prerogative and have the last word. Internet trolls are everyday sadists.

"Some find it hard to reconcile sadism with the concept of 'normal' psychological functioning, but our findings show that sadistic tendencies among otherwise well-adjusted people must be acknowledged," says Buckels. "These people aren't necessarily serial killers or sexual deviants but they gain some emotional benefit in causing or simply observing others' suffering."
https://www.health24.com/Me...
I suspect that you anticipate with relish the suffering & resignation of Sanders supporters.
"'Resignation' is the driving force behind worker's lack of militancy during periods of capitalist dominance." ~ Vivek Chibber, "Consent, Coercion and Resignation: The Sources of Stability in Capitalism"

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You're carrying water for the anti-Sanders corporate media and the most reactionary segments of the bourgeoisie and the owners but -- because you see probably yourself as a member of the elitist leftist intelligentsia -- you're probably totally unaware of who you're carrying water for. That's false consciousness for ya.
As I told Maxwell, I've outgrown you and the anti-Sanders cult.

If I was like another member of your cult, I'd block you. But I'll leave you & your ilk to what you do best: specialize in -- along with the Alex Jones cult -- guilt-tripping, shaming, execrating, finding fault with the "sheeple".
Maybe you're aware/conscious enough to recognize how Nietzschean the term "sheeple" is.
“Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.” ― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

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Can there be both a vertical paradigm and a horizontal paradigm?

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When someone like Maxwell claims to be a hard-core realist, it raises a red flag, i.e. I become aware of my bullshit detector flashing. It's too much like someone claiming that s/he's in possession of the Truth with an emphasis on the capital "T" or when someone is in harmony with "the Real" (i.e. "the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language" [Jacques Lacan]). It's like a hard-core materialist getting mystical.

I don't really know what "idealism" even means to hard-core materialists like Maxwell. Materialists use the word "idealist" like some sort of epithet, some sort of proof that the "idealist" is unworthy and ought to be shamed. Why? What's essentially wrong with ideals, ethical values, the cardinal virtues? Without these, don't we become monsters? "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster" (Friedrich W. Nietzsche). Besides, it sure seems to me that being BOTH reasonable AND pragmatic allows for some sort of conflict resolution between what's realistically practical and what's idealistically non-negotiable. After all "the law of the unity and conflict of opposites" must allow interplay between however materialists interpret "the Real" and whatever non-economic ethical values (as an example of "a [Platonic] Ideal") actually ARE behaviorally.

Is Max acting outside of goodwill and fellowship?
Yes. By covertly disparaging all members of the proletariat who are supporting the Sanders movement -- by insinuating that they're all enamored with and following a sparkle pony -- Maxwell has abandoned goodwill and fellowship. I stand by that judgement. If I'm wrong, I'll gladly suffer the consequences. May all the followers of Maxwell excommunicate me.

Are you thinking that Max is ill-willed? Against 'fellowship"?
One of the more insightful things I've recently read from a psychotherapist is that "everyone has an agenda." Whatever Max's agenda is, I don't trust it. It leaves a bad taste. It's malodorous. I simply get the feeling that there's something off with his agenda -- off the rails, "off" as in butter that's going rancid or milk that's going sour. I cannot put my finger on it, but after reading Mark Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" and reading about Marxist accelerationists, agents of chaos, emotional vampires and everyday sadists -- like how these anti-Sanders cultists seem as if they can hardly wait for Sanders to lose the nomination because of their implacable hatred for all people associated with the Dem party so that they can glory in the grief of yet another setback for the commoners -- I was like "I don't want to be a part of this anymore." I don't want to turn into a Maxwell or an ARIC or a V4Vendeta or a Bassy Kims of Yesteryear or anyone who upvotes (what I see as) despising people who are about as far removed from the agenda of the ruling class as possible. The "despisers" seem to see ordinary people as the enemy. I cannot countenance that.

How is "Realism -- unalloyed with imagination, idealism, goodwill and fellowship -- is depressive" an insightful quote? I guess it's the difference between materialistic/naturalistic realism and the sublime/the mystical. I guess it's about the "fanatical atheist's" (Einstein) rejection of everything outside of sense-experience.

"Reality, says Rudolf Christoph Eucken, is an independent spiritual world, unconditioned by the apparent world of sense. To know it and to live in it is man's true destiny. His point of contact with it is personality: the inward fount of his being: his heart, not his head. Man is real, and in the deepest sense alive, in virtue of this free personal life-principle within him; but he is bound and blinded by the ties set up between his surface-intelligence and the sense-world. The struggle for reality must be a struggle on man's part to transcend the sense-world, escape its bondage. He must renounce it, and be 're-born' to a higher level of consciousness; shifting his centre of interest from the natural to the spiritual plane. According to the thoroughness with which he does this, will be the amount of real life he enjoys. The initial break with the 'world,' the refusal to spend one's life communing with one's own cinematograph picture, is essential if the freedom of the infinite is to be attained. We are amphibious creatures: our life moves upon two levels at once—the natural and the spiritual. The key to the puzzle of man lies in the fact that he is "the meeting point of various stages of Reality." All his difficulties and triumphs are grounded in this. The whole question for him is, which world shall be central for him—the Real, vital, all-embracing life we call spirit, or the lower life of sense? Shall 'Existence,' the superficial obvious thing, or 'Substance,' the underlying verity, be his home? Shall he remain the slave of the senses with their habits and customs, or rise to a plane of consciousness, of heroic endeavour, in which—participating in the life of spirit—he knows reality because he is real?" (Evelyn Underhill (1911), Mysticism, p. 40)
I guess I was trying to run away from "spiritual warfare", but now I'm being drawn back in.

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Maxwell has turned into a parody of leftism/Marxism.
He's rather be an obstructionist than organize.
He and his ilk are cynics, not dialectical materialists.

“Scratch the surface of any cynic, and you will find a wounded idealist underneath. Because of previous pain or disappointment, cynics make their conclusions about life before the questions have even been asked. This means that beyond just seeing what is wrong with the world, cynics lack the courage to do something about it. The dynamic beneath cynicism is a fear of accepting responsibility.” ― John Ortberg

Max calls himself a hardcore realist. So what? "Realism, unalloyed with imagination, idealism, goodwill and fellowship, is externalized depression, or as my high school English teacher observed of my poor usage (and of my typical effect on fellow classmates): depressive."

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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Posted: Sun Nov 10, 2019 12:30 pm
by blindpig
All of the below from a Sanders fanatic who are now in full bloom- recycled hope/change 2020:
That's all from the same poster? Like that guy in the biblical story of the Garadene swine this sucker is possessed by a multitude of liberal demons.

Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Posted: Mon Nov 11, 2019 4:36 pm
by chlamor
Oligarchs are blinded by hubris, wealth and power. Their cloying sense of entitlement sees them outraged by even the most tepid reforms or mildest of criticisms. They lack empathy and compassion, along with remorse or guilt, for what is done to those outside of their tiny, elitist circles. Privilege does strange and unpleasant things to human beings. I saw these distortions among my rich classmates as a scholarship student at prep school and at Harvard University, an institution designed, like all elite schools, to perpetuate the plutocracy. Living in privilege spawns callousness, even cruelty, to those less fortunate and feeds a bottomless greed.

The repugnant characteristics of the rich are skillfully masked by armies of lawyers and publicists, a servile and intimidated press, good manners and the fig leaf of philanthropy. Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates, Jimmy Wales, Peter Thiel, John Mackey and the late Steve Jobs and David Koch—whatever their carefully packaged public image—champion or championed economic and social models that are designed to create a new form of serfdom for the working class and further consolidate the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of the oligarchs. When a society falls into the death grip of an oligarchic class, the result is always catastrophic.

Oligarchs, because they live insulated lives surrounded by obsequious courtiers that cater to their bottomless narcissism and hedonism, wield power based on fantasy. They propagate ruling ideologies, such as neoliberalism and the intellectually and morally bankrupt writings of Ayn Rand, which are not economically rational but justify their privilege. Their mantra, first uttered by a notorious serial killer and enthusiastically embraced by Rand, is: “What Is Good for Me Is Right.” All our institutions—the press, the courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch and academia—have been perverted to serve the oligarch’s narrow, selfish interests while an oppressed citizenry, struggling to survive, is seething with mounting rage and frustration. The corporate coup orchestrated by the ruling oligarchs over the past few decades gave us Donald Trump. If this coup is not reversed, far worse will follow.

The oligarchs are the last to understand the consequences of their moral depravity. The political reformers, such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who could save the system from self-destruction are demonized in the same way the Russian oligarchs demonized Alexander Kerensky, the socialist revolutionaries and Mensheviks, paving the way for the tyrannical Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin. When the end comes, and the end will come, most probably in our case with a tyranny imposed by Christian fascists, the oligarchs will be blissfully unaware, gorging themselves at their palatial estates or on their mega yachts like the clueless French or Russian aristocrats on the eve of their revolutions.

“We are in the midst of a major global, political, economic, social and cultural transition—but we don’t know which way we’re headed,” writes Lisa Duggan in “Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed.” “The incoherence of the Trump administration is symptomatic of the confusion as politicians and business elites jockey with the Breitbart alt-right forces while conservative evangelicals pull the strings. The unifying threads are meanness and greed, and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand.”

This spirit of meanness corrupts the far right and the far left. It defines the Christian fascists and the alt-right as it defines many in antifa and the black bloc, although unlike their fascist opponents the far left in the United States is a marginal, poorly organized, ideologically bankrupt and ineffectual political force. As societies polarize, the attempts by reformers and moderates such as Sanders and Warren to halt the disorder, defuse the mounting hatreds and antagonisms that are increasingly expressed through violence and salvage democratic norms prove fruitless. The oligarchs do not respond to their appeals and eventually the disenfranchised lose patience with the impotence of the moderates.

Lenin’s ruthlessness and rule by decree and terror, enforced by death squads run by the Cheka, reflected the ruthlessness and terror employed by the Russian aristocracy and the Okhrana. The Committee for Public Safety, which assumed dictatorial power from September 1793 to July 1794 during the French Revolution, reflected the ruthlessness and terror employed by the French nobility. Extremists, no matter what their political platform, are remarkably similar once in power. And it is almost always extremists who inherit power in failed democracies.

The oligarchs, who spent $1 billion in 2016 to deny Sanders the Democratic Party nomination and try to put Hillary Clinton in the White House, learned nothing from the debacle. If they can’t shove Joe Biden down our throats, how about Pete Buttigieg or Michael Bloomberg? And should Warren or Sanders miraculously become the Democratic candidate, which the oligarchs are working hard to prevent, they will reluctantly back Trump. Trump may be vulgar, corrupt and inept, he may have turned the United States into an international pariah, but he slavishly serves the financial interests of the oligarchs.

No battle to accrue profit is too small for oligarchs. The election for City Council in Seattle saw Bezos, the world’s richest man, spend $1.5 million to flip the council to serve his business interests. Bezos was incensed by a council decision last year to tax Amazon, which in 2018 paid no federal income tax, and other businesses to help provide housing for the city’s 11,000 homeless. Amazon got the city’s tax repealed within a month. Bezos in this election targeted his nemesis, the socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, who thankfully was re-elected, and pushed a slate of pro-business candidates for the council. Bezos failed, this time, to seize control of the council. No doubt, the next round of elections will see him triple or quadruple his investment. The 2016 elections had a price tag of $6.5 billion, but as Hamilton Nolan points out in the Guardian, “for a group that exercises total control over a federal budget of more than $4 trillion, that’s a real bargain.”

Oligarchs, freed from outside oversight and regulation, wantonly pillage the political and economic institutions that sustain them. They run up huge government deficits by slashing taxes on the rich. This forces an underfunded government to borrow from the banks, further enriching the oligarchs, and impose punishing austerity programs on the public. They privatize traditional government services, including utilities, intelligence gathering, large parts of the military, the police, the prison system and schools to make billions in profits. They create complex financial mechanisms that ensure usurious interest rates on mortgages, personal and student loans. They legalize accounting fraud and suppress wages to keep the public trapped in a crippling debt peonage. They loot trillions in taxpayer money when their speculative bubbles burst.

They are no longer capitalists, if we define capitalists as those who make money from the means of production. They are a criminal class of financial speculators that rewrite the laws to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They are parasites that feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They manipulate money. And this gaming of the system and seizure of political power by finance capital is why the wealthiest 1% of America’s families control 40% of the nation’s wealth.

Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase with an estimated worth of $1.4 billion, is the poster child for corporate greed and criminality. He directed JPMorgan Chase to underwrite fraudulent securities in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crash. He overcharged members of the military on mortgages and mortgage refinancing transactions. He overcharged customers for overdraft fees. He manipulated bidding on California and Midwest electricity markets. He overcharged homeowners for flood insurance. He billed customers for nonexistent credit card monitoring services. He charged minorities higher rates and fees on mortgages than those paid by white borrowers. He failed to pay overtime to company workers. Yes, JPMorgan Chase had to pay more fines than any other financial institution in the country, but the profits more than offset its fraudulent and criminal activity.

It is Dimon, along with fellow oligarchs Gates and the billionaire investor Leon Cooperman, who has recently led the attack on Warren. Dimon chastised her for her “wealth tax” plan and for allegedly vilifying “successful people.” Cooperman accused Warren of seeking to wreck the American dream. Gates also denounced her wealth tax plan, although if he did have to pay the tax, he would still be worth $6 billion. When questioned, Gates refused to say whether, if Warren becomes the Democratic nominee, he would support Trump.

Greed is bottomless. It is the disease of the rich. The more the oligarchs accumulate the more they want. This is the dark side of human nature. It has always been with us. All societies are plagued by social inequality, but when those on the bottom and in the middle of the social pyramid lose their voice and agency, when the society exists only to serve the greed of the rich, when income inequality reaches the levels it has reached in the United States, the social fabric is torn apart and the society destroys itself. Aristotle warned about the danger of oligarchies nearly 2,500 years ago. We stand on the cusp of social and political disintegration, bequeathed to us by oligarchs who have seized total power. The ruling oligarchs will stymie all attempts at reform. This makes a crisis inevitable. Once we enter this crisis, the oligarchs will become the most potent enablers of despotism.


https://www.truthdig.com/articles/death-by-oligarchy/

An entire article of it by the "esteemed" liberal religious/political pundit Chris Hedges.

Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Posted: Tue Nov 12, 2019 11:56 am
by blindpig
Got everything, ginned up Horseshoe Theory, human nature, authoritarianism, bad actors, 'billionaires', everything but class

Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Posted: Sat Nov 23, 2019 5:12 pm
by blindpig
Western Progressives and Imperialist Inquisition
By: Tortilla Con Sal

Image
Anti-imperialist graffiti in Caracas. | Photo: Reuters

Published 4 November 2019

They foolishly trust demonstrably false reports from undeservedly prestigious Western NGOs and incessant phony coverage in liberal and progressive news media.

Most people who think of themselves as progressive in the imperialist countries of North America and Western Europe, continue to believe the right-wing opposition version of events in Nicaragua in 2018. A great many also accept some version of the right-wing opposition account of the crisis in Venezuela.

One obvious reason they do so is that they foolishly trust demonstrably false reports from undeservedly prestigious Western NGOs and incessant phony coverage in liberal and progressive news media.

A more disturbing reason is their deep, unacknowledged class-based affinity to racist imperialist sadism informing the way they assign roles to those they think deserve a defense and those who do not. The paradox of this perverse rationality is the way most Western progressives justify their bogus claims to moral authority with self-deceiving avowals of support for human rights, freedom and justice. It bears repeating that, in fact, they persistently make grossly unfair, often self-evidently false accusations and then deny their victims the right to any defense.

Their self-righteous injustice then validates mass human rights violations by their imperialist governments, inflicting suffering on whole peoples via often illegal sanctions. From Iraq to Venezuela via Libya and Syria, Western progressives have ratified their governments’ economic warfare against practically defenseless people. They have validated anti-humanitarian administrative, commercial and financial sanctions all backed up by the threat of illegal military aggression.

At an individual level, a similar process has been inflicted on individuals who resist imperialist crimes both in their own countries and overseas, the most scandalous recent high-profile example being Julian Assange. In the case of political prisoners like Julian Assange, Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier and many, many others, very few prominent individuals speak out. The general liberal or social democrat consensus has been either that they got the defense they deserve or they deserve no defense worth the name.

The French writer Elsa Dorlin has written cogently about this motif of defense and self-defense, linking it to racism and colonialism in the context of horrific punitive sadism. That motif is clearly at work in relation to aggressive Western efforts to destabilize countries like Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela refusing to obey the dictates of the NATO powers, Canada, the US, the European Union and its leading member states. The motif also operates at an institutional level via the dishonest reports of essentially corrupt officials like Michelle Bachelet in the UN and Luis Almagro in the Organization of American States.

Bachelet and Almagro are corrupt because they blatantly repay political favors to the US authorities in return for having been US-sponsored shoo-ins for their respective posts. They have their counterparts in the managers of leading Western NGOs who generally collaborate intimately with corporate interests so as to hijack the global human rights and environmental agenda against the interests of the majority world, as expressed for example in UN forums by the Group of 77. Those corrupt institutional instances meld into a coherent structure of repressive domestic control and menacing overseas aggression via endless repetition of self-serving falsehoods in Western propaganda media and news outlets, both corporate and alternative.

In the case of Nicaragua and Venezuela, their governments and presidents are deemed indefensible and thus receive no defense. Daniel Ortega and Nicolas Maduro are falsely accused of every kind of crime while salient, basic facts in their defense are either falsified or completely omitted. Self-evident contradictions in the accusations against them are muted. The obvious example is the phony charge of violent repression of peaceful protests, despite armed protesters undeniably wounding and killing numerous police officers in Nicaragua and Venezuela with no corresponding invocation of emergency powers like curfews or a state of siege.

By contrast, little or no condemnation is made of genuine lethal military and police repression of peaceful protests in Ecuador and Chile while Bachelet and Almagro both condemned what there was of protesters’ violence, which neither of them did in the case of wholesale opposition violence in Nicaragua or Venezuela. Bachelet and Almagro’s imperialist patrons ensure a defense for right-wing governments sympathetic to the US and European Union, but exclude any defense for socialist-inspired governments who fail to do what the imperialists want. In Latin America, this applies in more than just the sense that Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela get denied a defense against false accusations.

Cuba and Venezuela are also denied any defense against sadistic aggression seeking to starve their peoples, deny them health care and steal their wealth. Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have won tremendous moral victories at the UN and in other international forums. But, given Western control of the global economy, they are practically defenseless against sadistic economic aggression imposed on their peoples by the US and its allies. It is no accident that simultaneously right now in Latin America practically every right-wing government is in crisis as their peoples confirm longstanding rejection of the US allied elites’ regional agenda.

Military curfews or states of siege have been imposed recently in Guatemala, Ecuador, and Chile, with the army deployed to control protests. Western powers give these countries’ right-wing governments the benefit of the doubt despite them being guilty as charged. However, as in Cuba and Venezuela, the peoples of Latin America get no defense against predatory imperialist country demands and impositions. The US and its European allies intervene in Latin American countries’ internal affairs so as to defend the privileges of allied right-wing elites and deny those countries’ impoverished majorities a defense against deliberate systematic economic injustice.

Ever since World War Two the peoples of North America and Western Europe have accepted domestic prosperity as the trade-off for their countries’ continued looting of the majority world. The most notorious expression of this tacit deal was perhaps the French Communist Party’s support in 1956 for so-called “special powers” facilitating massacres and tortures by the French army in Algeria. As that imperialist domestic pact now breaks up, most Western progressives, while unable to defend their own majority populations, seem more willing than ever to attack governments defending their peoples, like those in Venezuela and Nicaragua.

The motif of defense and self-defense is especially apparent in relation to policy on climate change. Progressives in North America and Europe generally accept the corporate treatment of the developing climate crisis that camouflages the Western elites’ class war against their own peoples and the majority world. To defend their class interests, Western progressives generally collaborate with their corporate elites, advocating intervention in impoverished majority world countries, effectively denying those countries’ peoples a legitimate sovereign defense against poverty and inequality. The inherent self-justifying sadism of these behaviors is beyond dispute.

Equally disturbing is the sinister comedy of most Western progressives’ disabling pseudo-curiosity, negating the revolutionary success of countries like Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela in defending their peoples against Western corporate capitalism. Western progressives could learn a great deal for public policy in their own countries by paying attention to the socially inclusive economic policies of, for example, Nicaragua and Bolivia, or the health and education policies of Cuba and Venezuela. One reason they do not is that they side instinctively with the profane Inquisition consciousness of the West’s sadistic imperialist elites, rather than engaging as equals in the defense strategies of majority world peoples seeking emancipation from the dead grip of that same imperialist Inquisition.​​​​​​​

https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/ ... -0003.html

unhumorously funny coming outta the unreliable Telesur Eng but the author Tortilla Con Sal hasn't let me down yet.

Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Posted: Tue Nov 26, 2019 1:14 pm
by chlamor
FundedByMe Acquires Financial Communications Firm Laika Consulting
April 18, 2018 @ 7:32 am By JD Alois

Investment crowdfunding platform FundedByMe has acquired Laika Consulting AB, a communications agency that focuses on the financial industry including investor relations. Specific terms of the deal were not released but company representatives indicated the purchase was completed via a combination of cash and the issuance of new shares by FundedByMe AB. FundedByMe did state the combined operation expects revenue of about 40 million in the first joint fiscal year.

FundedByMe added that the combined entity will consolidate investor relation services and “major initial public offering business” that will be a “lucrative strategy for the company onwards.” The investment network of FundedByMe will gain in the acquisition with the combined entity claiming around 250,000 potential investors – the largest in the Nordic region. The strategic move is part of FundedByMe’s vision to provide a wide range of financial services as all forms of finance migrate online.

COO Tobias Berglund, who has been in the Laika management team since launch in 2004 will become the CEO of Laika and the COO of FundedByMe. Peter Sundberg is appointed COO of Laika Consulting.

Daniel Daboczy, CEO and co-founder at FundedByMe, said that Laika is particularly well positioned in the financial communcations space. FundedByMe has worked with Laika since 2012.

“…we have seen over the years that we have similar ambitions, visions and attitudes; namely to improve and change parts of the old inefficient financial world. In our company’s growth, we look at this acquisition as a very interesting step, and we estimate that the consolidation will be beneficial and feasible and lead to synergies that can be measured through cash flow, efficiency and growth.”

The consolidation of the corporate services is expected to generate major synergies. Investor Relations is an area where Laika has a well established business. In addition, the company has an extensive knowledge in the public listing process – a focus of FundedByMe.

“Laika Consulting was one of the first companies in Sweden to work with crowdfunding when we established the brand in 2004. I look forward to follow the company’s growth closely. A combination of Laika’s expertise in listed companies, together with FundedByMe with its international and digital presence, can create new opportunities for growth,” stated Laika’s current CEO, Ingmar Rentzhog, who will continue to work on strategic client projects for FundedByMe and Laika Consulting in part-time.

The majority of his time will focus on climate change through the newly established company, “We Don’t Have Time”, as a CEO and founder.

FundedByMe has recently presented statistics from 2017 showing that 45% of all investments made through the platform are made by women. The company has an ambition to educate and invite a greater proportion of female investors. Therefore, Feminvest, one of Laika’s investment networks, is an additional strategic complement to an expanding FundedbyMe.

In a note to platform users, Daboczy explained;

“For you as a client this means that we have more muscle to help you. For you as an investor this means that we have more services to offer like investor-relations and for you as a shareholder in FundedByMe this means that we just took a major step forwards as a company.”

In 2017, FundedByMe had a loss of SEK 5.8 million, compared to SEK 10.5 million the previous year, a decrease of about 55 percent. The company’s goal is to generate profit in 2018. The company also has a strong growth in the number of successfully closed campaigns for 2018. This year, the company has closed 14 campaigns compared with a total of 33 for 2017.

FundedByMe has listed approximately 470 companies from 25 different countries with successfully funded topping €51 million. FundedByMe is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with a local presence in Dubai, Finland, Malaysia, Poland and Singapore.

https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2018/0 ... onsulting/

Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Posted: Tue Nov 26, 2019 2:26 pm
by blindpig
FundedByMe Acquires Financial Communications Firm Laika Consulting
April 18, 2018 @ 7:32 am By JD Alois
"Investment crowdfunding platform" - What in the fuck is that? What are they selling? Gotta be selling something. Or mebbe they're just chumps.
Gimme a time machine that goes back 100 years. The Influenza Pandemic was better than this.

Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2019 1:55 pm
by blindpig
Some folks on Twitter started a socialist chat room. So far we got NWO jive, a Catalan separatist boosting Putin, a Turk throwing blame of genocide on the Armenians. One or 2 straight thinkers but it ain't looking good. No surprises.

Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2020 1:46 am
by chlamor
The illiberal leftists -- certainly not all leftists -- which frequent this Truthdig's comments section are mired in feckless purity identitarianism/identity-politics.
They'll channel Alex Jones by calling the millions of small donors to the Sanders campaign and movement "sheeple" and calling Sanders a "sheepdog".
They push a brand of "socialism" which is actually anti-social, in that it specializes in propagating guilt, conducting a witch hunt, condemning, and excommunicating.
These illiberal leftists are toxic.
I urge Sanders supporters to treat this illiberal group like individual trolls ought to be treated, viz Don't. Feed. 'Em!!

===========

It seems like the left would rather blame & shame outside forces than take responsibility for our collective failures at (1) organizing (2) electing decent representatives. Then some leftists get even more defeatist by whinging "Elections don't matter. Elections aren't real."
As nauseating as right-wingers can be, in many ways they understand some social phenomena a helluva lot better than these leftists obsessed with "analysis."

==========

They sound like the illiberal puritanical identitarian left and the illiberal purity leftist identity politics I keep railing against.
Don't they realize that if we don't come together seeking the lowest common denominator causes that the most reactionary forces on the planet will have us for lunch?

========

I'm un-convinced that it takes much effort at all to label Sanders a "sheepdog" and label Sanders' supporters "sheeple", Russ. I think that I'm criticizing closed-minded and illiberal (and worse) leftists -- certainly not all leftists. I still consider myself a helluva lot more left than center or right. In fact, I (closed-mindedly?) consider that only cognitive dissonance (or worse) can prevent a leftist from opposing the reforms which empower labor and which allow labor to make even more revolutionary & radical demands.

The only evidence I can provide for my optimism aka confidence aka trust in future reforms are the historical success of past reforms and how major reform movement (such as the abolition of chattel slavery) start out small with very poor initial chances of success.

Frankly, severely restricting and reforming and regulating the rights of capital -- to say nothing of the actual abolition of bourgeois private property -- is a bigger challenge/problem than the (mostly successful) abolition of black chattel slavery.

As corrupt as the duopoly is, I think it's sheer lunacy to describe liberal Democrats as worse than the duopoly and reformers & progressives & social democrats & the DSA as the worst elements within the duopoly. Opposing liberal reforms is resignation, fatalism, defeatism, nihilism. Worse, such an attitude plays into the agendas of the very worst reactionary & illiberal forces on the planet. Is the attitude that the reactionaries have to achieve complete control before a revolution can begin?

As bad as representative government is, it's the least worst form of government we humans have discovered imo. I'd prefer a govt of worker's councils and worker's cooperatives -- but that's putting the cart before the horse. I completely agree with you that surrendering to the will and whims of our representatives is corrupt to the core. That's why pressuring our representatives is only one strategy. I think that four other strategies are (1) work on getting emotionally and psychologically healthy instead of dismissing healthiness as New Age psychobabble (2) direct political actions of civil disobedience (3) organizing in our communities in ways which don't involve the government whatsoever (4) prepare for a full-scale revolution by the precariat either prior to social breakdown/financial collapse or as a consequence of collapse. RE #4: I have four ways to prepare, but I'm sure that there are many more.

=========

I consider purity identitarianism, anti-social socialism or anti-social anarcho-syndicalism or puritanical identity-politics a helluva lot more than "disagreement."

=========

I think that these illiberal leftists are genuine in their contempt for Sanders and the Sanders movement.
I think that these illiberal leftists already prefer the acceleration of worsening conditions under Trump than these illiberal leftists would prefer the fight for reform under Sanders.
Marxist accelerationists exist as an all-too-real social phenomenon.

The illiberal left must be covert and sly in their support for the most reactionary sections of the bourgeoisie.
If anyone can spot a covert operation on social media -- evidenced by the faulty logic of these illiberal leftist claims that "the more gains the working-class makes, then the less revolutionary it becomes as a class" -- it's probably those like you who have come to spot real conspiracies from fake ones.

=========

For some time now I've been "pessimistic" about these Sanders movement bashers calling Sanders a sheepdog, comparing Sanders to Obama, insinuating that Sanders supporters are "sheeple", obsessively compulsively engaging in illiberal purity identity politics, refusing to accept accountability for the historical & collective failures of the left.

=========

I'm sort of stunned. There's a ton of right-wing Trumpists on this website pretending to be Marxists, and are just trying to suppress the Sanders vote. By the way, this is the same propaganda garbage that occurred in Britain against Corbyn. It's going to get much worse when Sanders begins to win primaries.

It's a form of voter suppression.

Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2020 12:29 pm
by blindpig
wow, radical liberalism. By dissing "illiberal leftists" the author reveals their politics, liberal. And what more ya need to know?

here's a Bernie avatar
Image