"conservatives have developed the presentation of bullshit as Just Facts And Logic into a fine art.
Perhaps this wouldn’t be so worrisome if we had a media that could be relied upon to expose this for what it is. But as the “New Beck” episode showed us, the supposed “liberal” media will often utterly fail to display the most basic skepticism, and they will help Beck pose as an “independent” who is “not partisan” even as he pushes a hard-right agenda. Within this book, there are arguments that having a basic social safety net will produce totalitarian misery, that climate change, while real, should not concern us enough to do anything about it, and that Basic Economics means we should leave corporate power almost completely unchecked. It’s all wrapped up in fun cartoons and creative graphic design, and the “I’m just giving you the facts” and “please, think for yourself” tricks are good at implying Beck is not an ideologue, just Someone Who Cares. Books like this should frighten us, because if their conclusion were widely accepted, we would live in a crueler and more dysfunctional society, but they have the power to convince. We need to argue back and we need to argue better."
currentaffairs.org/2020/11/arguing-with-glenn-beck
Perhaps this wouldn’t be so worrisome if we had a media that could be relied upon to expose this for what it is. But as the “New Beck” episode showed us, the supposed “liberal” media will often utterly fail to display the most basic skepticism, and they will help Beck pose as an “independent” who is “not partisan” even as he pushes a hard-right agenda. Within this book, there are arguments that having a basic social safety net will produce totalitarian misery, that climate change, while real, should not concern us enough to do anything about it, and that Basic Economics means we should leave corporate power almost completely unchecked. It’s all wrapped up in fun cartoons and creative graphic design, and the “I’m just giving you the facts” and “please, think for yourself” tricks are good at implying Beck is not an ideologue, just Someone Who Cares. Books like this should frighten us, because if their conclusion were widely accepted, we would live in a crueler and more dysfunctional society, but they have the power to convince. We need to argue back and we need to argue better."
currentaffairs.org/2020/11/arguing-with-glenn-beck
www.currentaffairs.org
Arguing with Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck’s minions have produced a visually impressive but intellectually barren guide to socialism.
"Socialists must be under no illusions that liberal sections of these center-left political parties would like to destroy them. On a post-election conference call in the United States, former CIA agent and current congresswoman Abigail Spanberger even demanded that the Democrats never say the word “socialism” ever again."
"Arguing with the political center will never be enough — and as long as the role of socialists in British and American politics is limited to fighting with centrist blue-ticks on Twitter, we’ll be consigned to permanent irrelevance. They don’t care about facts, they don’t care about accountability, and they don’t care about democracy. They only care about one thing: beating the Left into oblivion.
Socialists could learn a thing or two from this attitude. We need to build real institutional power if we’re going to withstand the onslaught of the coming years and reverse it in the years after that. Healthy reflection on the Left’s recent focus on electoralism is one thing, but leaving the battlefield of party politics altogether is quite another. We need to be in the game, if only to ensure that anti-socialists on both sides of the Atlantic don’t succeed in permanently destroying those fighting against austerity, corporate power, and racism.
Trade unions, combined with the Democratic Socialists of America in the United States and Momentum in the UK, provide a base for socialists in both countries. But much of the time the leaders of left-wing movements seem more focused on fighting each other than they do with building left power."
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/extreme-center-war-on-the-left-socialism-organize-us-uk/
"Arguing with the political center will never be enough — and as long as the role of socialists in British and American politics is limited to fighting with centrist blue-ticks on Twitter, we’ll be consigned to permanent irrelevance. They don’t care about facts, they don’t care about accountability, and they don’t care about democracy. They only care about one thing: beating the Left into oblivion.
Socialists could learn a thing or two from this attitude. We need to build real institutional power if we’re going to withstand the onslaught of the coming years and reverse it in the years after that. Healthy reflection on the Left’s recent focus on electoralism is one thing, but leaving the battlefield of party politics altogether is quite another. We need to be in the game, if only to ensure that anti-socialists on both sides of the Atlantic don’t succeed in permanently destroying those fighting against austerity, corporate power, and racism.
Trade unions, combined with the Democratic Socialists of America in the United States and Momentum in the UK, provide a base for socialists in both countries. But much of the time the leaders of left-wing movements seem more focused on fighting each other than they do with building left power."
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/extreme-center-war-on-the-left-socialism-organize-us-uk/
Jacobinmag
The Extreme Center Is Waging War on the Left
In both Britain and the United States, a resurgent political center has declared war on the Left. But establishment politics and pro-corporate measures will only deepen the present crisis.
Forwarded from /r/latestagecapitalism
Entrepreneurs don't have a special gene for risk—they're rich kids with safety nets
https://qz.com/455109/entrepreneurs-dont-have-a-special-gene-for-risk-they-come-from-families-with-money/
https://redd.it/jvm55m
@r_latestagecapitalism
https://qz.com/455109/entrepreneurs-dont-have-a-special-gene-for-risk-they-come-from-families-with-money/
https://redd.it/jvm55m
@r_latestagecapitalism
Quartz
Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money
We’re in an era of the cult of the entrepreneur. We analyze the Tory Burches and Evan Spiegels of the world looking for a magic formula or set of personality traits that lead to success. Entrepreneurship is on the rise, and more students coming out of business…
"Marx wrote a long letter, which he ultimately never sent, setting out his belief that ‘events of striking similarity, taking place in different historical contexts, [lead] to totally different results,’ and outlining his opposition to the idea that a ‘supra-historical’ theory might act as a ‘master-key’ with which to unlock all historical and political uncertainties. When he wrote a famous letter to the activist Vera Zasulich, at her request, on these matters in which he argued that it was possible to incorporate the obshchina as part of a transition to socialism–he described it as being ‘the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia’–the letter was kept unpublished because of the importance it may have had to factional disputes within the Russian socialist movement of the time. Misreadings of Marx that insist he proposed a single linear framework for the development towards socialism find one of their origin-points in this moment"
"Musto gives us a portrait of a thinker in his last years that challenges the representations others have imposed upon him. Instead of the strict determinist for whom economic circumstances dictated all else, what emerges is an attentive and responsive student of the world who ‘spurned any rigid linking of social changes to economic transformations alone.’ Instead of a believer in the natural and inevitable progress from one mode of production to another, Musto’s Marx is a thinker who attends to ‘the specificity of historical conditions, the multiple possibilities that the passing of time offered, and the centrality of human intervention in the shaping of reality and the achievement of change.'"
#books
https://mronline.org/2020/11/17/a-restless-thinker/
"Musto gives us a portrait of a thinker in his last years that challenges the representations others have imposed upon him. Instead of the strict determinist for whom economic circumstances dictated all else, what emerges is an attentive and responsive student of the world who ‘spurned any rigid linking of social changes to economic transformations alone.’ Instead of a believer in the natural and inevitable progress from one mode of production to another, Musto’s Marx is a thinker who attends to ‘the specificity of historical conditions, the multiple possibilities that the passing of time offered, and the centrality of human intervention in the shaping of reality and the achievement of change.'"
#books
https://mronline.org/2020/11/17/a-restless-thinker/
MR Online
MR Online | A restless thinker
In the millions of pages written about Karl Marx, his final years have been somewhat neglected.