Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk radio pioneer, dead at 70 - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15157713
Agent Steel wrote:I don't know a lot about Rush Limbaugh but I do remember an instance of him mocking waterboarding and acting as though it isn't real torture, and then he went and started slapping himself across the face and claiming it was equally a form of torture.

Honestly he was a despicable human being. I do not have to respect man who makes such ignorant and dangerous statements.


Mancow Muller, a Chicago shock jock who went pretty hard right after 9/11, volunteered to get waterboarded on his own show and gave up after less than ten seconds. He said it was absolutely torture.

He at least had the balls to try it, I'll give him that.
#15157768
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/02/05/r ... g-anybody/

    Rush Limbaugh denied smoking risks in 2015: ‘Smokers aren’t killing anybody’

    The conservative radio host has long extolled the glamour and societal benefits of smoking, while downplaying its dangers.

    Just five years ago, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh went on a pro-tobacco rant on his show, during which he downplayed the risks of smoking, said it’s “a myth” that secondhand smoke causes illness or death and argued that smokers aren’t at any greater risk than people who “eat carrots.”

    “Smokers aren’t killing anybody,” the conservative host declared in an April 2015 segment of the “Rush Limbaugh Show,” then argued that tobacco users should be thanked because their purchases generate tax dollars that fund children’s health care programs.

    “I’m just saying there ought to be a little appreciation shown for them, instead of having them hated and reviled,” Limbaugh said. “I would like a medal for smoking cigars, is what I’m saying.”

    Fast forward to Monday, when Limbaugh, 69, went on his radio show to announce that he had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.

    ......
#15157802
blackjack21 wrote:Really? bin Laden ran a group of people that killed thousands upon thousands of people.

I don't doubt Bin Laden's leadership role in the organisation or organisations and networks that have been labelled as Al Qaeda. However both the Republican and Democratic establishments operate under the pretence of believing the idiotic fantasy that Al Qaeda operated in Afghanistan without the approval of ISI and the Pakistani deep state and at least the acceptance of the Saudi security leadership.

Osama Bin Laden was murdered by Barack Hussein Obama not to provide justice for the three thousand, but precisely to obstruct and deny justice for them. To protect those within the Pakistani and Saudi States who were responsible for enabling and aiding Al Qaeda's war against the United States. This is the same reason that Khalid Sheik Mohammed was enslaved, imprisoned and tortured without even the pretence of due process, not to give justice but to protect the responsible from justice.

Was Rush Limbaugh nice or nasty, is an irrelevant diversion. What's important is how much Rush Limbaugh really sought to attack the Swamp and how much he sought to expose the post 9/11 dual narrative pushed by Bush, Obama and the rest of the establishment. This allowed right wing Christians and right wing atheists in the United States to be sated by the murder (democide), enslavement, imprisonment and torture of Muslim suspects without due process. Mean while Islamophillic Liberals could console themselves with the official narrative that unconvicted suspects targeted by the government were not real Muslims, that they had nothing do with Islam.

You see for the mainstream Liberals (not the Truthers obviously) Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had committed the greatest crime that any human can commit. They had brought Muslims into disrepute.
#15157828
Rich wrote:However both the Republican and Democratic establishments operate under the pretence of believing the idiotic fantasy that Al Qaeda operated in Afghanistan without the approval of ISI and the Pakistani deep state and at least the acceptance of the Saudi security leadership.

Yes, and they still want us to believe that. If you can't win a war in 20 years, there's something wrong with the way you're fighting it--another reason why the establishment has lost credibility with the American people.

Rich wrote:Osama Bin Laden was murdered by Barack Hussein Obama not to provide justice for the three thousand, but precisely to obstruct and deny justice for them. To protect those within the Pakistani and Saudi States who were responsible for enabling and aiding Al Qaeda's war against the United States. This is the same reason that Khalid Sheik Mohammed was enslaved, imprisoned and tortured without even the pretence of due process, not to give justice but to protect the responsible from justice.

You're not going to get an argument from me on that. We have slightly different takes on 9/11, but we're not believers in the retail narrative. People here on this board seriously think that Rush Limbaugh is worse than Al Qaeda and their sponsors/protectors. It's delusional.

Rich wrote:Was Rush Limbaugh nice or nasty, is an irrelevant diversion. What's important is how much Rush Limbaugh really sought to attack the Swamp and how much he sought to expose the post 9/11 dual narrative pushed by Bush, Obama and the rest of the establishment.

Yeah, I don't think Limbaugh was helpful on that score. He was every bit the cheerleader for the establishment. However, he did seem to understand why Trump won.

Rich wrote:This allowed right wing Christians and right wing atheists in the United States to be sated by the murder (democide), enslavement, imprisonment and torture of Muslim suspects without due process. Mean while Islamophillic Liberals could console themselves with the official narrative that unconvicted suspects targeted by the government were not real Muslims, that they had nothing do with Islam.

You see for the mainstream Liberals (not the Truthers obviously) Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had committed the greatest crime that any human can commit. They had brought Muslims into disrepute.

I don't think that's because they were Islamophilic per se, but because they were against whites, Christians, the PATRIARCHY!! Slavoj Zizek has a humorous commentary about white liberals always adopting this mea culpa/apologia for things they had nothing to do with. I've queued it up for you so you don't need to waste too many minutes of your life.

#15157830
blackjack21 wrote:Yes, and they still want us to believe that. If you can't win a war in 20 years, there's something wrong with the way you're fighting it--another reason why the establishment has lost credibility with the American people.

No; what it actually means is that you're fighting the wrong war.

I don't think that's because they were Islamophilic per se, but because they were against whites, Christians, the PATRIARCHY!! Slavoj Zizek has a humorous commentary about white liberals always adopting this mea culpa/apologia for things they had nothing to do with. I've queued it up for you so you don't need to waste too many minutes of your life.


Yeah, funny how it's the Marxist-Leninists who can see these things, isn't it? Reading Marx and Lenin is a form of mental hygiene; it vaccinates you against the virus of liberalism. ;)
#15157834
Potemkin wrote:Yeah, funny how it's the Marxist-Leninists who can see these things, isn't it? Reading Marx and Lenin is a form of mental hygiene; it vaccinates you against the virus of liberalism.


Even a child can see it mate. It's not a matter of who sees it, but who has the right to say it.

Marxists that are also minorities themselves(like Zizek) have identity rights within the woke crowd to talk about these things. The woke accept criticism only from specific identities. Zizek is barely intelligible, and rarely goes to any depth beyond the very obvious and scaly surface. We have had posts in PoFo that have articulated this 100 times better than Zizek. The only reason Blackjack uses Zizek is because it is the only way for this message to go across without being accused of 'racism' on the way as it comes from a leftist minority and as such not someone that can be dismissed as 'racist'.

Zizek's 'marxist and Slovenian identity' enables the message and not the merits of his logic and in that regard you are correct, being or pretending to be a marxist gives one immunity from being accused to be an "imperialist".
#15157837
Potemkin wrote:Yeah, funny how it's the Marxist-Leninists who can see these things, isn't it? Reading Marx and Lenin is a form of mental hygiene; it vaccinates you against the virus of liberalism. ;)


Really? I mean, liberals are the ones that are probably pushing the hardest against these people, obviously considering the word in the European sense. American libertarians also reject this position, let alone neoliberals.

These guys are also those who are working to undo much of the liberal project and are squarely against plenty of its achievements such as equality before the law, which they justify under a collectivist concept of privilege, an idea that pretty much all strands of liberalism would reject since they would not say that one should be blamed for what his ancestors did.
#15157840
wat0n wrote:Really? I mean, liberals are the ones that are probably pushing the hardest against these people, obviously considering the word in the European sense. American libertarians also reject this position, let alone neoliberals.

These guys are also those who are working to undo much of the liberal project and are squarely against plenty of its achievements such as equality before the law, which they justify under a collectivist concept of privilege, an idea that pretty much all strands of liberalism would reject since they would not say that one should be blamed for what his ancestors did.

I can agree with this although would also mention that Zizek sees them as an inherent offshoot from liberalism rather than entirely distinct.
https://www.lacan.com/freedom.htm
The obvious reproach that imposes itself here is, of course: is the basic characteristic of today's "postmodern" subject not the exact opposite of the free subject who experienced himself as ultimately responsible for his fate, namely the subject who grounds the authority of his speech on his status as a victim of circumstances beyond his control? Every contact with another human being is experienced as a potential threat - if the other smokes, if he casts a covetous glance at me, he already hurts me; this logic of victimization is today universalized, reaching well beyond the standard cases of sexual or racist harassment - recall the growing financial industry of paying damage claims, from the tobacco industry deal in the USA and the financial claims of the holocaust victims and forced laborers in Nazi Germany, up to the idea that the USA should pay the African-Americans hundreds of billions of dollars for all they were deprived of due to their past slavery... This notion of the subject as an irresponsible victim involves the extreme Narcissistic perspective from which every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject's precarious imaginary balance; as such, it is not the opposite, but, rather, the inherent supplement of the liberal free subject: in today's predominant form of individuality, the self-centered assertion of the psychological subject paradoxically overlaps with the perception of oneself as a victim of circumstances.

Basically this overly sensitive type arises out of a breakdown of the social fabric of traditional society and the rise of the individualism born from markets.
#15157842
Wellsy wrote:Basically this overly sensitive type arises out of a breakdown of the social fabric of traditional society and the rise of the individualism born from markets.


Other causes could be the constant fetishisation of the 'noble victim' and the automatic demonisation of the perceived enemies of 'noble victims'. Identity is taking precedence over logic.

I do not think it has something to do with "individualism born from markets". Identity is an inherently collective thing. The identity mania started during the age of nationalism when former Empires were dismantled by ethno-national identities, some of them real but a large part of them totally invented. This was proliferated to such a degree than any dick & harry could simply find or invent a grievance with someone and pronounce a new language, and a new language would pop up and be accepted as such instantaneously.

This is nowhere in the world more pronounced than the former Soviet block and the Slavic nations. Communists created new countries on the spot with new languages, new identities, new people. There is more linguistic variety inside tiny Greece or Israel than there is in the entire Slavic domain, currently represented by possibly over 100 "distinct" official languages. When you start putting this into perspective, some things at least start falling into place.

Sacrificing logic for the 'identity of the exploited' has proliferated to such a degree that identity has become the arbiter of dialogue. This is not a process that started yesterday, nor is it a process that is particular to the "individualist west" even if it has found fertile ground within the narcissistic charity of white-guilt trippers. It started within marxism and the elevation of the "exploited" into the most precious religious artefact of modern society. "The exploited" is now the ultimate measure and mirror upon which any collective defines its own identity. That is particularly marxist.
#15157845
I recommend all of you to read the link which I shared in my previous post. There is no need to do a mental masturbation. At least you can' get some information about the issue from that essay, and not talking out of your ass.

White guilt is a term invented by the left to dismiss achievements of European people. Leftists weaponized the term to target successful white countries and people.

When you move outside of conservative and libertarian boundaries, you see that common ideological traits of these ideologies have no appearance in other ideologies. American liberals, leftists, fascists and all other authoritarians have something in common. These guys lack sense of personal responsibility. Blaming on others is the way for authoritarians.
#15157847
blackjack21 wrote:People here on this board seriously think that Rush Limbaugh is worse than Al Qaeda and their sponsors/protectors. It's delusional.

To be clear, I said Limbaugh was more spiteful than bin Laden. I stand by that.

Bin Laden was, by all accounts, erudite, charismatic and charming, and at least had very clear reasons for his jihad against the USA.

Limbaugh was literally none of those things; just an angry, stupid, hypertensive pill popper who hated women and minorities for its own sake. Basically a discount bin Laden, without any of the personal courage.

Of course he didn't personally do more damage than Al Qaeda, because he was too much of a chickenshit loser to get up of his fat arse and do the work. But I hardly see how being too ravaged by vicodin and hamburgers to be capable of actual physical work is a point in his favour. :excited:
#15157850
noemon wrote:Other causes could be the constant fetishisation of the 'noble victim' and the automatic demonisation of the perceived enemies of 'noble victims'. Identity is taking precedence over logic.

I do not think it has something to do with "individualism born from markets". Identity is an inherently collective thing. The identity mania started during the age of nationalism when former Empires were dismantled by ethno-national identities, some of them real but a large part of them totally invented. This was proliferated to such a degree than any dick & harry could simply find or invent a grievance with someone and pronounce a new language, and a new language would pop up and be accepted as such instantaneously.

This is nowhere in the world more pronounced than the former Soviet block and the Slavic nations. Communists created new countries on the spot with new languages, new identities, new people. There is more linguistic variety inside tiny Greece or Israel than there is in the entire Slavic domain, currently represented by possibly over 100 "distinct" official languages. When you start putting this into perspective, some things at least start falling into place.

Sacrificing logic for the 'identity of the exploited' has proliferated to such a degree that identity has become the arbiter of dialogue. This is not a process that started yesterday, nor is it a process that is particular to the "individualist west" even if it has found fertile ground within the narcissistic charity of white-guilt trippers. It started within marxism and the elevation of the "exploited" into the most precious religious artefact of modern society. "The exploited" is now the ultimate measure and mirror upon which any collective defines its own identity. That is particularly marxist.

But see, I have a sympathy for emphasize the conditions of peoples lives as more determinant (although in a reciprocal) relationship to peoples consciousness.
You’re right that identities are collective but what is being explained isn’t identity but the very generalized insecurity and the conditions which bring it about. People in true social communities or groups have a much stronger sense of self than a mass of individuals.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/cult-safety.htm
The question is: what is underlying cause of today’s heightened generalised anxiety? I think it is above all else, the insecurity of employment and career. This insecurity at work originates in the micro-economic reform and global restructuring of capitalism beginning in the late 1980s, involving privatisation, out-sourcing, casual employment, deregulation and in short, the commodification of all human relations, economic, domestic and political, including the conception of government as a kind of business. It is commodification which is the prime source of anxiety and key to understanding the ethos of this period, affecting every aspect of life without exception, even though it is rarely the target of fear, and is frequently the chosen remedy!
These processes have undermined or destroyed the safety nets which protected people in the post-war decades, the fabric which people saw as threatened by the bogeys of that time. Increasingly, the only safety net a person has is their own bank account.
This can be illustrated with the reaction to the introduction of University fees. Students tend to believe that if they have paid their fees, then they ought to be given their degree. The idea that passing their exams is their own responsibility is increasingly unacceptable to students. If they are failed, then they have been swindled.
Commodification of a relation pushes responsibility out to the supplier. When you buy a service, then you absolve yourself of personal responsibility for it. The process of corporatisation, out-sourcing and privatisation acts in exactly this way. Likewise, deregulation makes it “worth your while” to act in a certain way, rather than criminal to act otherwise.
Further, we live in a period when authorities and institutions in general are not trusted. Institutions know they will be the targets of blame by people who are injured or otherwise suffer through their dealings with the institution; but they do not have the option of “closing ranks” as no scandal is more readily believed than a “cover-up.” Consequently, all institutions now devolve responsibility outwards and downwards. Base-level supervisors are responsible for the health and safety of employees, teachers are responsible for the health and safety of students, etc..
Likewise, professionals tend to be blamed for less than satisfactory outcomes of their services: paediatricians are held responsible for birth-defects, and so on. Knowing that you will not be supported by the institution, the only rational response is to take out insurance. The cost of insurance is calculated mathematically and passed on to the customer in the price of the service.
Through these and similar processes, safety has been privatised, accumulated and distributed according to the laws of political economy, and social consciousness aligns itself to this new terrain. However, no bond other than that of mutual manipulation binds the buyer and seller; each is vulnerable to the calculation of the other. The decline in full-time employment and “standard hours” is a typical manifestation of the extension of the commodity relation and increased uncertainty and vulnerability results, even as wealth and convenience are increased.
Frank Furedi’s books (see http://www.spiked-online.co.uk) ridicule the weakness of subjectivity manifested in this culture of fear, the vacuum of personal responsibility or any sense of self-determination. The great emancipation movements of the past have given way to claims for compensation by self-help groups of invalids and drug-dependants. Furedi fails to distinguish, however, subjects struggling as best they can under adverse conditions, from “victim” claims which reinforce existing forms of domination.
...
Commodification can solve social problems, but only by moving them into the domain of capital, with the consequent atrophy of subjectivity, and the adoption of forms of subjectivity which reinforce the domination of capital.
The problem with commodification is that it reduces self-reliance and the sense of responsibility in the subject. Ferudi says: “The process of individuation and the weakening of relations of trust contribute to an intense sense of isolation. The attempts by society to artificially compensate for this isolation by self-help groups, help-lines and professional counselling does little to resolve the problem. Such initiatives seek to reconcile people to their experience of estrangement. They represent an accommodation to powerlessness.” But this is like denouncing trade unions for not abolishing the wages system. What accommodation is achieved is a measure of the success of the emergent subject. Today’s self-help group may be tomorrow’s social movement.


Although in regards to identity politics I have a narrower conception that emphasizing any identity but one that has arisen from the particularization/fragmentation of earlier social movements.
Thus, the social movements of the post-war period which emphasised the common interests of masses of people in opposition to an external enemy, began to pass over to politics which emphasised difference, and by the compounding of multiple difference, identity, and the enemy became more and more indefinable: although everyone seemed to belong to one oppressed minority or another (you might be an educated white American, but if you were gay, female or disabled for example, then you could engage in a struggle against the special oppression you were suffering in that respect). All such struggles against the multiplicity of oppressions were and remain of course progressive, but the overall effect is also de-mobilising.
Having its origin in the individualism inherent in bourgeois social relations, Identity Politics began to develop within these movements, transforming collective struggles against state and institutional forms of oppression into struggles of recognition for Blacks, Women, Gays, young people, and so on. From the standpoint of Identity Politics, Socialism is just another strand of Identity Politics, namely the struggle of the working class, but for Identity Politics, identity is self-identity, so Socialism is reduced to the struggle for recognition of those who define themselves as workers, and commonly as straight, white, male, blue collar workers. From this standpoint Socialism appears simply as the assertion of the privileging of one group over others.
...

Nevertheless, the period of Identity Politics completes the bourgeois revolution, in exposing all those forms of oppression that are not essential to the rule of capital; in particular, Identity Politics shows, in case after case, how social consciousness and the various forms of oppression found in bourgeois society are “social constructs” rather than immutable relations given in human nature, and how new forms of social consciousness and new social relations, which overcome the oppressive relations, can be forged in struggle.

I would distinguish identity politics from national liberation movements and the social movements initially inspired by them. But i emphasize that identity politics is a kind of thinking inherent to such modern capitalist relations.
It emphasizes the identity but doesn’t seek the radical abolishment of such identities as it only sees recognition of each and every difference.
https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/02/07/a-marxist-feminist-critique-of-intersectionality-theory/
For several pages, Fanon argues that black people must embrace blackness, and struggle on the basis of being black, in order to negate white supremacists social relations. But to stop there reproduces our one-sided existence and the forms of appearance of capitalism. Identity politics argues, “I am a black man,” or “I am a woman,” without filling out the other side of the contradiction “…and I am a human.” If the starting and ending point is one-sided, there is no possibility for abolishing racialized and gendered social relations. For supporters of identity politics (despite claiming otherwise), womanhood, a form of appearance within society, is reduced to a natural, static “identity.” Social relations such as “womanhood,” or simply gender, become static objects, or “institutions.” Society is therefore organized into individuals, or sociological groups with natural characteristics. Therefore, the only possibility for struggle under identity politics is based on equal distribution or individualism (I will discuss this further below). This is a bourgeois ideology in that it replicates the alienated individual invented and defended by bourgeois theorists and scientists (and materially enforced) since capitalism’s birth.

So I differ in the emphasis of it emerging from the USSRs treatment if minorities for internal cohesion.
And Marxism made an analysis of exploitation of the working class as structural. And much oppression is stoll essentially based in that relation although not reducible solely to it. For example womens oppression is most definitely based in the gendered division of labor that renders certain types of work women's work and is dependent on them to sacrifice everything for their children but not the whole of society. To which attempts to commodify womens work has helped somewhat in it outs value on their labor which previously had no market value but it still results in lower paying jobs due to the status of women and the value of their labor as less.
As such the goal is clearly the breakdown of such divisions of labor and ultimately class as the basis of oppression and lack of recognition of equal value of a people while identity politics was for liberal students to argue about media representation and whether there was enough black lesbians in cinema or something. Soon there were markets in which to target demographics on that basis and did nothing to undermine capitalism but offered it a new way to sell things. The sort of stupidity that thinks because a company has a “woke ad” that it is somehow a better company rather than associating certain views and values with their brand or product for sales.

And considering your point of false ethnic grievances, Zizek in fact uses such an example as analogous to consumers in a market choosing what to buy.
https://www.lacan.com/freedom.htm
The case of Muslims as an ethnic, not merely religious, group in Bosnia is exemplary here: during the entire history of Yugoslavia, Bosnia was the place of potential tension and dispute, the locale in which the struggle between Serbs and Croats for the dominant role was fought. The problem was that the largest group in Bosnia were neither the Orthodox Serbs nor the Catholic Croats, but Muslims whose ethnic origins were always disputed - are they Serbs or Croats. (This role of Bosnia even left a trace in idiom: in all ex-Yugoslav nations, the expression "So Bosnia is quiet!" was used in order to signal that any threat of a conflict was successfully defused.) In order to forestall this focus of potential (and actual) conflicts, the ruling Communist imposed in the 60s a miraculously simple invention: they proclaimed Muslims an autochthonous ETHNIC community, not just a religious group, so that Muslims were able to avoid the pressure to identify themselves either as Serbs or as Croats. What was so in the beginning a pragmatic political artifice gradually caught on; Muslims effectively started to perceive themselves as a nation, systematically manufacturing their tradition, etc. However, even today, there remains an element of a reflected choice in their identity: during the post-Yugoslav war in Bosnia, one was ultimately forced to CHOOSE his/her ethnic identity - when a militia stopped a person, asking him/her threateningly "Are you a Serb or a Muslim?", the question did not refer to the inherited ethnic belonging, i.e. there was always in it an echo of "Which side did you choose?" (say, the movie director Emir Kusturica, coming from an ethnically mixed Muslim-Serb family, has chosen the Serb identity). Perhaps, the properly FRUSTRATING dimension of this choice is best rendered by the situation of having to choose a product in on-line shopping, where one has to make the almost endless series of choices: if you want it with X, press A, if not, press B... The paradox is that what is thoroughly excluded in these post-traditional "reflexive societies," in which we are all the time bombarded with the urge to choose, in which even such "natural" features as sexual orientation and ethnic identification are experienced as a matter of choice, is the basic, authentic, choice itself.


What is emphasizes is that identity is indeed social and based on historical as well as real world relations. All sorts of identities don’t have exist currently or without the same meaning they once did because the world changed. But its not individual choice but of course based in the real relations one has to navigate which includes misrecognition and hence struggles for recognition. But with the routine breakdown of traditional relations and replacing them with market ones, it seems part of the plasticity of ones sense of self as unstable and a reflection of consumption even. Like being a gamer, or something where a sense of self is largely defined in a subculture built around a particular product where as earlier during capitalism we were one sidedly defined by our work or the nature of our divisions of labor between groups. So you weren’t only a woman as defined by your sex but the density of biological women in work and hence the feminine association of certain activities and how men historically defined themselves against.
#15157856
Istanbuller wrote:When you move outside of conservative and libertarian boundaries, you see that common ideological traits of these ideologies have no appearance in other ideologies. American liberals, leftists, fascists and all other authoritarians have something in common. These guys lack sense of personal responsibility. Blaming on others is the way for authoritarians.

:) You may see no evil, hear no evil in Libertarianism, but I certainly do. When I read "Lord of the Rings", I see a propaganda so blatant that it would make Joseph Goebbels blanch. I have no problem believing in Elves, Dragons and walking trees, but really Tolkien expects me to think that when Marco and Blanco crossed the Brandywine in 1601 TA, the Shire was empty. " A land without people, for a people without a land!". :roll: Not that old chestnut. And then 1400 years of peaceful anarchism only protected by 2nd Amendment archery. Please pull the other one. Since the beginning of the copper age, the only way to defend a land, the only way to defend property is with a standing army or with quickly mobilisable feudal force at whose heart lies a core of military specialists who spend their lives cultivating the art of violence.

As for Sarauman's pathetic occupation of the Shire, neither he nor his henchmen seemed to have grasped even the basics of counter insurgency. :lol: I can assure you the American rebels didn't deny the British control of territory by allowing free speech or respecting property rights. Its like the IRA run areas during "The troubles", people feared the IRA (a lot) more than they feared the British State security apparatus. If Saruman had put me in charge, Frodo and his friends (unaided by a serious big state organised military force) wouldn't have been seeing their homes and property anytime soon.

As President Snow might sight say: "A little Libertarianism is a good thing, but needs to be leavened by a good does of dialectical, historical-materialist reality.
Last edited by Rich on 22 Feb 2021 14:24, edited 1 time in total.
#15157857
@noemon said: The woke accept criticism only from specific identities. Zizek is barely intelligible, and rarely goes to any depth beyond the very obvious and scaly surface. We have had posts in PoFo that have articulated this 100 times better than Zizek. The only reason Blackjack uses Zizek is because it is the only way for this message to go across without being accused of 'racism' on the way as it comes from a leftist minority and as such not someone that can be dismissed as 'racist'.

Zizek's 'marxist and Slovenian identity' enables the message and not the merits of his logic and in that regard you are correct, being or pretending to be a marxist gives one immunity from being accused to be an "imperialist".


Very true. We all know we need a "man on a horse" but we are stuck arguing about what color the horse has to be.

The "left", particularly in the US, has lost its sense of perspective as well. It counts all problems as equal in gravity. It cannot, for example, attack the problem of unequal law enforcement techniques without somehow injecting gender neutral restrooms into the debate. There cannot be a rally without one of each flavor 'liberal' presenting her own raw spot for all to see; and carefully translated into American Sign for the two deaf people who happen to show up.

Conservatives on the other hand are very good at keeping their three or four issue-groups laser focused on their own particular peccadilloes. Even during one of Trump's rambling rally speeches he carefully brings his audience back to these four issues so that they leave with the conviction that his efforts will be centered on their individual beefs. Guns, God, gays and Get out of my country. That is the whole of Trump's message. All of the rest of his blather is exactly that. Before we dismiss this as shallow we have to remember that this tight focus got him 70 million votes.


(I left his racist sub-text off of these issues because, IMO, he did not actually need it. If he had dropped that particular line he would have gotten more votes. Mes'cans were enough of a dog whistle to carry him along.)
#15157858
Wellsy wrote:The case of Muslims as an ethnic, not merely religious, group in Bosnia is exemplary here: during the entire history of Yugoslavia, Bosnia was the place of potential tension and dispute, the locale in which the struggle between Serbs and Croats for the dominant role was fought. The problem was that the largest group in Bosnia were neither the Orthodox Serbs nor the Catholic Croats, but Muslims whose ethnic origins were always disputed - are they Serbs or Croats.


Zizek is giving us only half the information, only the part that does not undermine his own Slovenian or Communist narrative.

First of all, the problem is that this is also identity politics, Zizek is merely setting up the Bosnian Muslims as proverbial victims("the majority that was ignored"). He does not qualify his argument, he assumes that the mere placing of the Muslim community in this context is enough for you to make up your mind. This is of course intentional, and beyond that his argument is untrue and that is where the devil lies, Zizek totally ignores that Bosnia as a whole is the creation of Yugoslav communist policies that established Bosnia and engineered those ethnic-conditions pro-actively.

The Muslim community of Bosnia was neither the silent majority, nor the place where Serbs and Croats vied for supremacy under Yugoslavia. Instead, the Muslim minority of Bosnia was elevated by Yugoslavia to levels that no other country has ever in the history of the world we live in today, elevated a former minority, from a minority of a province to a majority of a nation, equal to other constituent Yugoslav nations and all that from the top and not from an organic national movement. Bosnia was drawn and formed in a communist committee meeting in 1943. The Bosnian SFR was created out of a provincial rearrangement with the purpose of having more federal entities. This was done in order to create a tinderbox republic whose tenuous balance would ensure the integrity of Yugoslavia both on the micro level inside Bosnia but also on the macro level inside Yugoslavia.

When this experiment blew up in the face of its own communist creators, they, like Zizek assumed the position of the noble victims by elevating the 'Serbs' to the 'ultimate problem, answer and solution'. Blaming the Serbs is not just convenient to western people bombing Yugoslavia it is also the basin where the Yugoslavian communists wash their own hands in order to evade their responsibility for their experiments. It is convenient to a lot of people to just blame Serbia for everything that happened and ignore the realities that cultivated these divisions in the first place.

Whoever asks, just say "Serbs", that way the enormous identity experiments proactively undertaken by communist Yugoslavia and imposed from the top will not be afforded the appropriate attention.

Yugoslavia was not unique in this, Soviet Russia started this identity experimentation, redrawing maps several times according to whatever whim or policy the communist committees could cook up at the time.

The moral of the story is that identity grows out of something, not by dictat, and there is a difference between organic and artificial identity. Elevating artificial identities to the same status as real ones has always been an enormous slippery slope that communists simply dismiss as seeing all identities as social constructs. Marxism proliferated this idea and marxism is the main vehicle that this idea propagates itself.

The blurring of the line between the real and the artificial is the primary mover here. Social construct for sure but an organic social construct grown out of struggle, blood, war and reality is not the same as an artificial social construct cooked up in a communist meeting.
#15157867
noemon wrote:
Spoiler: show
Zizek is giving us only half the information, only the part that does not undermine his own Slovenian or Communist narrative.

First of all, the problem is that this is also identity politics, Zizek is merely setting up the Bosnian Muslims as proverbial victims("the majority that was ignored"). He does not qualify his argument, he assumes that the mere placing of the Muslim community in this context is enough for you to make up your mind. This is of course intentional, and beyond that his argument is untrue and that is where the devil lies, Zizek totally ignores that Bosnia as a whole is the creation of Yugoslav communist policies that established Bosnia and engineered those ethnic-conditions pro-actively.

The Muslim community of Bosnia was neither the silent majority, nor the place where Serbs and Croats vied for supremacy under Yugoslavia. Instead, the Muslim minority of Bosnia was elevated by Yugoslavia to levels that no other country has ever in the history of the world we live in today, elevated a former minority, from a minority of a province to a majority of a nation, equal to other constituent Yugoslav nations and all that from the top and not from an organic national movement. Bosnia was drawn and formed in a communist committee meeting in 1943. The Bosnian SFR was created out of a province with the purpose of having more federal entities. This was done in order to create a tinderbox republic whose tenuous balance would ensure the integrity of Yugoslavia both on the micro level inside Bosnia but also on the macro level inside Yugoslavia.

When this experiment blew up in the face of its own communist creators, they, like Zizek assumed the position of the noble victims by elevating the 'Serbs' to the 'ultimate problem, answer and solution'. Blaming the Serbs is not just convenient to western people bombing Yugoslavia it is also the basin where the Yugoslavian communists wash their own hands in order to evade their responsibility for their experiments. It is convenient to a lot of people to just blame Serbia for everything that happened and ignore the realities that cultivated these divisions in the first place.

Whoever asks, just say "Serbs", that way the enormous identity experiments proactively undertaken by communist Yugoslavia and imposed from the top will not be afforded the appropriate attention.

Yugoslavia was not unique in this, Soviet Russia started this identity experimentation, redrawing maps several times according to whatever whim or policy the communist committees could cook up at the time.

The moral of the story is that identity grows out of something, not by dictat, and there is a difference between organic and artificial identity. Elevating artificial identities to the same status as real ones has always been an enormous slippery slope that communists simply dismiss as seeing all identities as social constructs. Marxism proliferated this idea and marxism is the main vehicle that this idea propagates itself.

The blurring of the line between the real and the artificial is the primary mover here. Social construct for sure but an organic social construct grown out of struggle, blood, war and reality is not the same as an artificial social construct cooked up in a communist meeting.

I admit ignorance here in the case of Yugoslavia's dissolution, it's not ground on which I am comfortable on and I wouldn't put it past Zizek to do as much as you say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency,_Hegemony,_Universality#Points_of_dispute_between_Butler_and_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek
Thus, Butler thinks that Žižek is uninterested in the specificity of the examples he uses to illustrate his points and that he really only chooses examples which will illustrate and serve his own argument.

|To which the example is merely a crux to illustrate a point of choosing identity being analogous to choosing form many options but it denies any attention to the very conditions of such a choice, thus echoing his earlier summary of Lenin as criticizing formal choice against a free choice.
the truly free choice is a choice in which I do not merely choose between two or more options WITHIN a pre-given set of coordinates, but I choose to change this set of coordinates itself. The catch of the "transition" from the Really Existing Socialism to capitalism was that people never had the chance to choose the ad quem of this transition - all of a sudden, they were (almost literally) "thrown" into a new situation in which they were presented with a new set of given choices (pure liberalism, nationalist conservatism...). What this means is that the "actual freedom" as the act of consciously changing this set occurs only when, in the situation of a forced choice, one ACTS AS IF THE CHOICE IS NOT FORCED and "chooses the impossible."

To which the point of identity could just as well be illustrated with other examples in which we are seeing people take on the appearance/role of another cultural identity in order to market themselves.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/30/hilaria-baldwin-spanish-heritage-new-york-times
Hilaria Baldwin has accused critics of “misrepresenting” her amid allegations she spent years faking being Spanish.

Although such adopted identities which a person chooses is often in tension with our sense of what underpins such an identity and hence a lot of conflict over the manner in which words then lose their original meaning.
http://criticaltheorylibrary.blogspot.com/2011/02/slavoj-zizek-key-ideas.html
Symbolic efficiency refers to the way in which for a fact to become true it is not enough for us just to know it, we need to know that the fact is also known by the big Other too. For Zizek, it is the big Other which confers an identity upon the many decentered personalities of the contemporary subject. The different aspects of my personality do not claim an equal status in the Symbolic - it is only the Self or Selves registered by the big Other which display Symbolic efficiency, which are fully recognized by everyone else and determine my socio-economic position.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/flourishing.pdf
The
interpellation of a person to an inappropriate social position is called misrecognition. For example, being able to get only a menial manual job is no injustice in itself, but if this restriction is to do with race or gender then this is an injustice, as is the low pay and social status which goes along with performing that menial, poorly paid job.

Not all identities are recognized as valid because identities aren't a individual fiction but always in relation to social relations which give meaning to such an identity.

And indeed an identity isn't given symbolic efficiency simply because it's recognized by those in power, but in creating such tension it can then emerge as a recognized identity because it becomes a real basis for some people to be grouped as such. There is a material basis for blackness based in the colonial division of labor with slavery and shifts from thereon. But is it not also the case that such an identity is bureaucratically organized and resolved in court cases with things like the one-drop rule, which is a different racial structure than it is in South America. So it isn't simply material conditions but such conditions do underpin the parameters in which it can be made sense of in a country that historically and largely still has black Americans as the poor workers in its division of labor.

So I agree in the sentiment such that no matter political correctness about representation, depicting some black doctors instead of white ones s insufficient to raise the social status of black Americans as whole, or even getting a few more actual black Americans to end up being doctors and judges doesn't negate the many in ghettos and are economically segregated.
But while it doesn't negate the material conditions, such forms are the basis of future struggles and hence my dislike for the one-sided valorization of an identity which is defined in it's exploitation but not a pursuit of conditions that seek to destroy the basis of such an idea with symbolic efficiency.
I guess what Im trying to get at is the emphasis of such representations of groups is based in real world activities of people. Hence the idea of what a woman is is heavily based on the density of women in particular kinds of activity/work. Marx speaks that a black man is simply a black man but he is only a slave in particular relations of production, the essence is based in social relations which are greater than any one individual belief but at the same time are social rather than natural.
https://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613281/index.pdf
Even in the German Ideology, Marx explicitly points out that “circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstance” (GI. 165), and this sentence obviously shows that the real concrete’s relation to law, morality, religion, consciousness etc. is not one-sidedly determined. Of course, intellectual wealth directly depends on material conditions (GI. 154, 163, 166, and 172), but human beings affect and even change the material conditions and the circumstances in so far as it is possible for them to do so within the boundaries of the restrictions set by these conditions. Material conditions and intellectual wealth affect each other: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness; is at firstly directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men” (GI. 154 italics mine)

That an identities origins isn't the basis of a real or authentic identity, because the idea of top down or bottom up isn't the sole determinant but in a reciprocal relationship which is inseparable.
Although the symbolic efficiency of an identity might have it at a stage where it isn't internalized and recognized. See this particularly with the drawing up of borders of former colonies, where borders cut through long term ethnic communities with no regard for them. And can see the tension between the top down in say with settler colonialism as we discussed with the Chinese trying to assert a Chinese identity over that of the Uighurs. But one can see how ethnic identity can exist while subsumed under a greater identification to a nation state as with the USA, in which many are patriots in a way that doesn't negate their more particular identity but they are strongly aligned with their state. Even with myself I consider myself Australian but do not have any strong affiliation with the same identities that prevailed in my ancestors as Irish, Scottish, or Catholic, Protestant. These connections no longer have meaning for my generation although my ancestors originated from such places and practices. Here I only wish to emphasize the change of identity, that there are many strange paths to a recognized identity, many politics are a politics of recognition in the same way a nation-state wants recognition as a nation among all others.
#15157875
Wellsy wrote:See this particularly with the drawing up of borders of former colonies, where borders cut through long term ethnic communities with no regard for them.


Good example, notice how everyone agrees on the artificiality of the borders drawn by former colonial empires while the very same people who snicker about these artificial borders defend to the extremes of absurdity the artificial borders drawn by the Soviet union. Notice how Zizek relies on the strict application of these artificial boundaries that were imposed to create particular demographics in order to practice the experiment of consociationalism.

wiki on Bosnia SFR wrote:It was administered under strict terms of sanctioned consociationalism, known locally as "ethnic key" (Serbo-Croatian: nacionalni ključ / национални кључ), based on the balance of political representation of 3 largest ethnic groups (Bosnian Muslims,[a] Croats and Serbs).


For Zizek any comparison of SSR boundaries with African colonial boundaries is total heresy. In the case of colonial borders everyone agrees on them being artificial, as it is from the top down imposed while in the case of communist republics the story is trying to pass as a "recognition of something pre-existing simply given an impetus", which is merely narrativistic lipstick to sweep under the rug the fact that in communism all these changes came from the top down to serve the top down just the same.

Wellsy wrote:And indeed an identity isn't given symbolic efficiency simply because it's recognized by those in power, but in creating such tension it can then emerge as a recognized identity because it becomes a real basis for some people to be grouped as such.

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