[OT] Extraordinary Popular Delusions

I get the feeling that there are many on TUSCL who believe the two extraordinary popular delusions I mentioned in the OP.

Seems to me you can spend your entire life trying to figure out whether monetary or fiscal policy is the most effective way out of a recession. I'm not an economist and have only so much time to read about this shit. However, if you compare the US and Euro GDP growth over the past nine years, you notice that the US did much better after 2011. That coincides with the ECB raising interest rates -- and it sure looks like more than a coincidence.

The left always has a built in excuse: it failed because it isn't communism, socialism, marxism, progressive, liberal etc. Covers up the fact that their belief set has never worked anywhere. Capitalism works best for most, but nothing will ever work for all.

Counter-example: Norway is definitely socialist. Definitely not a country falling apart at the seams. Seems to have worked well there.

@RandomMember: I think that's more because of the main factor I see driving the stock market rally: Technological advances which the US dominates. Also our culture is just more entrepreneurial.

Besides Norway, I would also add the US which is the country in the world where workers own the means of production more than in any other country. So the most Marxist country in history and success story because of it.

USSR, Cuba, and Venezuela are the usual examples held up by the Right, to denounce Socialism. But in fact none of those countries has any history of Democracy. They are left oriented autocracies.

The examples to look to are the Social Democracies of Europe. There you will see both the good and the bad.

Marx was wrong about the workers rising up and taking over. They are too beaten down already. Look to Western Europe and see how it went to the Left, as the US had been before Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy.

You will hear from lots of quarters this idea that Socialism depends upon a great deal of altruism. This is wrong. There is nothing altruistic in wanting everyone to have their basic needs taken care of, and to be able to get an education, and to be able to pursue value producing and suitable employment.

The only way someone could see this as altruism is if they think that some people are somehow defective or undeserving.

But what Socialism does depend upon is having a populace which believes that everyone is worthy, and that we can make our society work for everyone.

SJG

Yanis Varoufakis Explains Greece's Financial Crisis (Pt. 1)
youtube.com

Yanis Varoufakis and Dave Rubin Talk Greece's Financial Crisis (Full Interview) youtube.com

Counts himself as a Libertarian Marxist.

One of the last chapters of this talks about such: amazon.com

en.wikipedia.org

csul.iii.com

en.wikipedia.org

TJ Street farm4.staticflickr.com

adelitasbartijuanamexico.com

adelitasbartijuanamexico.com

farm6.staticflickr.com

^^^ good post!

Ah, Libertarian Socialism. That's what I considered myself in my younger days. :-)

And then you turned EVIL.

SJG

Now I do God's work. :-)

That's going to be the God of the Christian Right, an idol made out of the 20,000 hours of Critical Parent tapes we each carry around inside of ourselves.

SJG

Shailynn's Homeless - Beggars thread tuscl.net

Robert Reich explains Authoritarianism, Trump's threat to Democracy youtube.com

Yanis Varoufakis Explains Greece's Financial Crisis (Pt. 1)
youtube.com

Yanis Varoufakis and Dave Rubin Talk Greece's Financial Crisis (Full Interview) youtube.com

Counts himself as a Libertarian Marxist.

One of the last chapters of this talks about such: amazon.com

en.wikipedia.org

csul.iii.com

en.wikipedia.org

TJ Street farm4.staticflickr.com

adelitasbartijuanamexico.com

adelitasbartijuanamexico.com

farm6.staticflickr.com

Anyway, you're brain is all psycho. I'm not the one who advocates violence. That would be you. So it sounds like you were a good guy when you were younger. Studies lots of physics, designed some chips. But then you whatever lately psychoness you had got aggravated for some reason and now it's stupid revolution this, stupid revolution that. Threaten people. Advocate violence. Hope you can find your way back to good guy some day.

Just forget all this revolution crap and go back to reading physics is my advice.

Dude, you are trying to play it both ways, and it is not going to work. You have said that you preferred Clinton for President and you have denounced Ayn Rander's. But you don't seem to be too bothered by Trump, or by Ayn Rander Paul Ryan.

I understand now why you are so put off by any talk of violence. So many activists make the same mistake that Martin Luther King made, turning non-violence into a way of life.

Doing this reinforces the bogus sciences of Eugenics and Social Darwinim, because it reduces the marginalized into pity seekers and validates those who use them as scapegoats.

Lots of people are completely locked out of the labor market. And this is only going to be increasing.

Welfare money is intended to regulate the poor, not to provide for their needs. But we need to have it. So Citizenship Pay would seem to be the only answer.

And like I've been trying to say, if someone has been treated with dignity and respect and allowed to develop and apply their abilities, then the chances that they will be one of those shut out are much lower. So if you see people who's lives have fallen apart, look to their parents and hold the parents financially accountable. The US is just about the only industrialized country which allows one to disinherit their child. We must change this, because it legitimates child abuse.

Capitalism has always depended upon having scapegoats. We used to get these in the immigrants and racial minorities who did low wage labor and slave labor.

But today there is far less need for any kind of labor. So today Capitalism gets its scapegoats directly from the middle-class family. And most middle-class child abuse involves doctors of one type or another. So the scapegoating involves the fallacies of mental illness, or things like Autism, Aspergers, ADHD, or Eating Disorders. What this is, is the resurgence of the bogus sciences of Social Darwinism and Eugenics.

We must put these doctors out of action. Crimes Against Humanity prosecution would be best. Other counties have the laws which will facilitate such prosecution. And then we must hold the parents financially accountable, as this is the only language they will ever understand.

And people who are willing to engage in principled and necessary violence, are respected. Whereas pity seekers are not.

And you Dougster, and all the others pushing for increasing financialization, intuitively know this. You know that your plans for a two tier society will never work unless you can portray the scapegoats as pity seekers, supposedly "unfit to live".

Of course, a small number of leftist radicals, perhaps inspired by John Brown, are not going to be able to hold off the US DHS. But look closer at the effect John Brown had. Before his raid on Harpers Ferry, those free blacks who knew of his plans were mortified when they learned. But after, they all wanted to be John Brown. They changed from pity seeking Uncle Toms, into a well respected oppressed people, willing to fight for justice. And 180 thousand trained with rifles and bayonets and served.

You Dougster know that once even a small contingent of the oppressed start standing up for themselves, that the scapegoating will not work any more, and your plans for a two-tier society will be derailed. Just look today at how many continue to be inspired by the Black Panthers and their mostly only symbolic brandishing of fire arms, and by Malcolm X's call for Any Means Necessary.

SJG

Brian Eno youtube.com

youtube.com

TJ School Girls losangelespress.org

I like the looks of them, but I would prefer them in higher heels and overall a more slutty look.

Asperger's has been subsumed into Autism Spectrum Disorder. Which are, of course, a very real thing and not part some political conspiracy. The thing is that really is a spectrum or fuzzy set, so there's a grey area where it gets subjective if someone has it or not.

Yes, I know about that subsumption. But lots of people still use the term Asperger's. What is so compelling about it is that the people who write books saying that they have it, like John Elder Robison and Nick Dubin, do in their very writing show that they could not possibly have any such thing, yet they show how much they are the products of what I call Maternal Hatred Syndrome, MHS. Yet they do not show any signs of understanding this.

All it is, is just a way to exonerate parents and school administrators for abuse. Basically, the child accepts a fiction, placing the blame upon themselves, and this makes peace by exonerating the parents. And then corporate scientists try to find genetic evidence.

broadsheet.ie

The "Refrigerator Mother" concept was overly simplistic, and also it makes it look like it is accidental. But all the early researchers were certain that the parents were doing it.

In his Toxic Psychiatry, 1991, Peter Breggin explains that the Refrigerator Mother concept never has been disproven. Rather, it was just too politically explosive. And all the Autism organizations are simply defensive formations of the parents. They started non-profits to defend themselves against the abuse allegation.

Those who are claimed to have it, even look like the monkeys which Harry Harlow used in his Maternal Deprivation Experiments in the 1960's.

It is highly tied to social class, and the concept tied to the English speaking world, and in the UK to their national health system, and to the Tony Blair neo-liberal government, and it is a kind of psychiatric policing being imposed as there come to be less and less hands on physical jobs.

It is another version of what they used to call Munchausen's By Proxy, that is just using the child and supposed medical conditions to give an identity to the parents, usually the mother. Today they are just calling such abuse, Medical Child Abuse. The Autism/ Aspergers, or ASD concept is just a form of Medical Child Abuse.

This Jayne Lytel is a frightening woman, and her hatred for her second son Leo, is very palpable. She and the husband are dot com yuppie elitists.

amazon.com

And also, this is good, as it shows the link between advancing the bogus concept of Autism and Neo-Liberal Capitalism, and the re-emergence of Eugenics:

amazon.com

Timimi and his coauthors stand together emphatically stating, "There is no such thing as Autism."

Also, as the diagnosis rates keep climbing, it gets more and more gender skewed. Now up to 1 in 40 for boys, whereas originally it was more like 1 in 10000.

Autism, Aspergers, ADHD, and Stuttering are the counter points inflicted upon boys, for the bogus concept of Eating Disorders inflicted upon girls.

And yes, these are conspiracies in that they are about the denial of child abuse, and denial of the fact that the middle-class family exists to abuse children, and that most of this involves active assistance from doctors.

And this in turn props up our completely unworkable and insane Capitalist economic system, because that is based on convincing people that they are born into this world with some outstanding debt or obligation, Original Sin.

Most of these people who go along with the idea that they suffer from ASD, also are strongly attached to the idea of this debt or obligation and the self-reliance ethic, and to the idea that they should not fault their parents.

SJG

Brian Eno - Thursday Afternoon (61 Minute Version) youtube.com

en.wikipedia.org

theguardian.com

People are very scared of Marxist ideas. Or maybe they are just stared of populism. Scared that the lower 51% will gang up on the upper 49% I suppose.

Marx, this far out, is only intellectually relevant. The more current thinkers are Yanis Varoufakis, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Much of this new thinking traces to Georges Bataille, who changed the central focus from production to consumption, and then to Georges Bataille, who shows how it is all about reactionary systems of identity.

SJG

Resist!

Letitia James democracynow.org