we really don't seem to have advanced much beyond the utopian socialism denounced by marx & engels, in socialism: utopian and scientific.

we still have this mass of people on the ground that insist on operating with their hearts instead of their brains, and have no chance of success, because of it.

and, these people still need to be organized by charismatic planners and tacticians that can convince them that they need to fucking listen if they want to get anything done.

i can write you blueprints, but i'm awful with people. sorry.

"i don't know what you're talking about. profits? concessions? i'm just trying to stand on the side of what i think is right."

well, you're going to lose then.

and, your self-righteousness frightens me.

what are some tactics that can actually work in stopping some of these extraction projects?

yes, i support a diversity of tactics. i've been careful not to denounce anybody, i've just been clear that i think this is tactically stupid - that it's not going anywhere, that it's perhaps even counterproductive, and that it's reflective of a level of desperation, rather than careful planning.

but, if there is a purpose to blocking a rail line in southern ontario, it is to try and spark a broader movement, like a general strike. the way the feds responded seems to have demonstrated little understanding of this, which is something that the indigenous groups should exploit to their advantage. they've been given an opening, here, i'll concede that. so, what they need to do is get as many people out as they possibly can and cause as much havoc as is possible, with the hopes that it spills over. that was always the tactic, and they'll tell you that better than i can, but, as stated, the context is that it's a desperate act.....

i know from experience that these groups want to measure the value of a direct action by it's intent, rather than it's outcome. the mere concept of a "direct action" has this kind of romanticism to it, in contrast to the "peaceful protest" which is seen as pointless and ineffectual. they're not wrong to draw that contrast, and i've drawn it over and over again, myself, but they tend to have difficulty getting beyond the abstraction of romanticizing "direct action", of kind of role-playing revolutionaries by manning barricades, like it's a game in drama class, and actually developing meaningful direct actions that can actually extract meaningful concessions.

so, i've pointed to a sit-down strike, and the factors required to make it effective. maybe i can generalize this. i'm supposed to be the academic, here. what do you need to look at in designing an effective direct action that goes beyond these empty concepts of movement solidarity and moral self-righteousness?

1) the direct action needs to directly harm somebody's actual profit in a substantive way. you have to be able to physically get in between some capitalist enterprise and the expropriation of their surplus value. that is the reason that strikes and blockades are effective - because they cost people money, and that is the only thing that capitalists actually care about.

2) you need to be able to protect the direct action from the police, at least to the point of requiring a blood bath to take it down. if you get to the point where they need to send in snipers to take you down, that's probably good enough (although you might need to be prepared for them to try to psych you out). any direct action that can be dismantled easily by the police is simply a waste of time. the other way around this is to generate huge numbers of people, so that the cops are overwhelmed. but, if you're going to do direct action, it is absolutely imperative that you have a tactic to fight the police off. they will arrest you, if they can, and then you're not hurting anybody's profit any more, and can be safely ignored.

3) you need to have popular support. i'm not making an argument about democracy, here. as before, this is purely tactical - the only weapon that these people really have is the threat that they may get the broader society on their side. essentially, the police and government have to be worried that dismantling the direct action by force will lead to greater losses of profit than leaving them in place. 

once you have these three components in place, you can reasonably start making demands.

but, if your direct action essentially amounts to putting on a balaclava and looking chic in your revolutionary garb, as you yell slogans with ten people in an attempt to try to get laid, and get nailed by the press for doing it, then you're a retard that probably deserves what they get.

the blockades meet the first condition, and we'll see if they can meet the second through mass action or not. it's a passable strategy, at least, if they shift to a large number of ad hoc blockades that can come up and down quickly, rather than try and hold a single spot. if they can get enough people to cause enough mayhem, it becomes impossible to police, leading to greater profit losses and the possibility of the capitalists saying "enough" and making a concession.

i've yet to see any evidence of them actually doing this, but that's the way you do it - you set up small blockades, you move them around chaotically, you try to avoid predictable patterns, and you do it relentlessly. so, you stop trying to confront the cops, and start actively avoiding them, instead - because you realize that your focus is not in defeating the police by a show of force, but in harming the profits of the capitalist class, and you keep your focus on what your enemy is, without being drawn out by distractions or pissing matches. you stay disciplined...

the third condition is more challenging, and they need to spend a lot more time on it. they are losing this debate in the public sphere, and potentially harming the people they're trying to stand with, in the process.

i'd be a lot more likely to argue that direct actions tied directly to the pipeline have a greater chance of meeting these three criteria and actually leading to concessions.

breaking up banks & tech firms to generate more market competition isn't a socialist policy. it's a policy that is capitalist to it's bones. socialists would argue for the exact opposite policy - we would argue that competition hurts workers. 

nor is universal healthcare something that you need to invoke socialism to get to. it's true that it's the kind of thing that the framers of capitalism would have realized should be kept off of the market, and that the fact that it ended up on the market is a part of the socialist argument against the failure of capitalism, but if you want to invoke these "real capitalist" debates that are underlying sanders' economic positions, you should quickly get to the deduction that the health care industry is a natural monopoly, and that flailing against it is just going to lead to market failure. there is a perfectly coherent capitalist argument against market-based health care on strictly classical grounds, and if you listen to sanders closely, it's actually the argument he's advancing.

and we could go on. i won't. 

no.

stop.

look at the candidates for president at the last debate.

- biden is a conservative southern democrat.

- warren was a republican into middle age, and still sounds like one on fiscal issues, which is what she really cares about

- bloomberg was a republican for most of his life as well, and sounds like one on most issues

- buttigieg is what you would call a small-c conservative, and would probably have been a republican if he wasn't gay. i've called him a log cabin republican, and it's kind of true. there are actually speeches where obama openly admits that he only ended up as a democrat because the republicans wouldn't have him due to the racism. one wonders....
- klobuchar markets herself as being appealing to conservatives

- and, while sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, he's more in the tradition of progressive capitalism, and is probably the closest thing to an adherent of traditional capitalism in the batch. you hear this line from the libertarian right all of the time, about how really existing capitalism isn't really capitalism, it's "corporatism" and we need "real capitalism". if you look at sanders' proposals with a sober eye, you can see that he's essentially operating from this right-libertarian ideological position, even when he leap frogs the austrian economics in favour of a literal reading of adam smith, and trying to design a more pure type of capitalism, rather than overturn it or dismantle it. in that sense, there is a comparison to fdr, even if his policies are actually far less socialist than fdr's were. that's really what krugman was pointing out, and he is right to do it.

so, that's a bunch of fucking conservatives running for president under the democratic party.

and, what is trump? he's not a trostkyist neo-con, granted, even if he's surrounded by them. but he's hardly a conservative. he's an autocrat, an authoritarian, a "strong leader". a demagogue. he's almost better describable as a member of the chinese communist party than as a member of the john birch society, which seems to have resurrected itself in the form of adam schiff.

i know i've beaten this horse badly, but it's true.

and, while you can't fault some people for repeating what they're told, and shouldn't expect more from them than it, there are some people that you expect should know better than to use smear tactics, or abuse the language.

nowadays, the trotskyists are all in the republican party. the authoritarians are all on the right.

and, the democratic party is full of conservatives.

but, whatever a "centrist" is must have sat there and watched that reversal happen.

there was a wonkish debate between krugman and sanders in 2016, and the sanders campaign sees the world through an us vs them filter and remembers enemies and holds grudges. so, this is really an old debate.

this is what i said then, on april 9, 2016.

===============
j reacts to krugman's critique of sanders (he's right, but nobody should care)

krugman is right, but who cares?

what's the differences in health care plans? in foreign policy? on climate change?

if you break the banks up, they get captured. regulation doesn't work. we tried this. it failed. so, personally? you give me a referendum on a bank, i stay home. it's boring. and it has no effect on my life. i do not think this is what is driving the popularity of his campaign. and i think he needs to fight the perception that it is.

let's get less teddy roosevelt, and more franklin roosevelt.

the banks are important because that is where he gets the money to do the things he wants to do.

that is all.

the way to fix the financial system is to educate people about where they're putting their money. it doesn't matter if it's big or small, or private or public or anything else - so long as people remain clueless, they will be taken advantage of. you can't protect the ignorant. what we need is financial literacy.

==============

i rant a little more here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBUxjVr4GLQ

(https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2016/04/j-reacts-to-krugmans-critique-of.html)

==============

but, if you want to put this on a political spectrum? krugman is actually the leftist, here. it's a keynesian liberal left, but it's a left. sanders & warren are pushing chicago school style neo-liberal pro-market reforms.

==============

may 28, 2016

some of my video comments over the next few days may seem confusing if you're following the Official Alternative Media Narrative, so i think i should be explicitly clear about this.

regarding the issues of financial regulation and the narratives around the bank bailouts, i may actually be closer to clinton than sanders. i wouldn't really agree with either, entirely.

see, i would take what is called an academic left perspective, which neither of the candidates are taking. clinton is taking more of an academic right position. what that means is that there are certain broad academic points that clinton has been making that i agree with (and are not really contested), but that i'm not ideologically aligned with her so i disagree with her on a lot of details. sanders is taking a populist position that is broadly (and correctly) seen as just flatly wrong by most academics. the people that are parroting him either don't know what they're talking about (cenk uygur) or are acting from questionable ideological positions (elizabeth warren).

i would prioritize careful, academic analysis (clinton/obama/krugman) over populist and misleading agitprop (sanders/pseudo-warren/wolff). pseudo-warren because i think she's misunderstood - she's a market fundamentalist, not a leftist. she's good at the agit-prop, but leftists will be sorely disappointed if she gets any kind of position of power. so, i haven't been shy about this: clinton is, indeed, broadly less wrong about the banks.

so, why am i supporting sanders? because i don't care about the bank bailouts. at all. i see the politicking for what it is: populism, agit-prop, maybe a little demagoguery. frankly, i'm pragmatic enough to see the value in it. what i actually care about is foreign policy, health care, social issues and more data-driven analyses of growing inequality.

and, this is not just why i'm supporting sanders over clinton. it's also why i couldn't possibly support clinton at all.

so, i hope that clarifies the point.

what the upcoming video comments are going to focus on is the question of whether some of this agitprop and politicking, as pragmatic as it may be, may have some unintended consequences - blowback - in it's use.

it's one thing to get people angry at the banks in order to get a tobin tax in. that's politics. it's good politics. it's another thing to wake up in eight years and realize we not only don't have a tobin tax, but now have also lost the lender of last resort because the masses got confused about what they were supposed to be angry about. that would be a tremendous fuck-up.

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2016/05/some-of-my-video-comments-over-next-few.html

=========

august 8, 2016

j tries to react to trump's tax/spend ideas but gets stuck in the ultraparadoxical phase

see, what i'd like is for the democratic candidate to spin this around on him and claim she's going to increase taxes on the wealthy - and also on corporations. i know better. i wouldn't believe it, anyways. but the last thing the country needs right now is lower taxes at the top rate. it needs to be taking in higher income tax levels to spend on crumbling infrastructure and convert the economy away from fossil fuels. the problem with the stimulus plan was that it was too small. they need more of this, on a deeper level - and they need to generate the revenue to do it.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/08/restrained-trump-goes-at-clinton-for-tax-plan.html

a strong candidate would annihilate him on his tax policy, which is clearly disastrous and flat out stupid. it's 2016, and dipshit donald still thinks tax cuts create jobs? of course he doesn't. he just wants a tax cut for himself. if i was the nominee, i wouldn't talk about anything else.

i don't always agree with krugman, but he's kind of an expert on keynesian policies. and, if we're going to implement keynesian policies, he's not just a good explainer but arguably the best currently alive. we're lucky that he spends as much time writing in newspapers as he does.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/how-did-we-know-the-stimulus-was-too-small/?_r=0

ok. fine. so, do it right, this time. i mean, the other option is recession. look at europe. you have to find a way to win this debate on the facts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/opinion/krugman-the-stimulus-tragedy.html

see, this is just like the tpp. they both want infrastructure spending. they're both technically right. but, i don't believe either of them - i rather think that they'll both push tax cuts and austerity.

i don't know how i'm going to get through this mess with my sanity. i need to just disengage. i keep saying that...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/us/politics/trump-clinton-infrastructure.html

what a fucking disaster. wow. really.

i ought to be pointing out that it's good that they're both taking the right approach to stimulus. instead, i'm convinced they're both lying, and they'll both do the wrong thing.

and, the evidence is really, truly on my side.

i'm in the fucking ultraparadoxical phase, again. great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmarginal_inhibition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG_iD8epJag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOLC9gELguQ

he's basically right.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/time-to-borrow.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpowqpwNOnE

==================

nov 20, 2016

j reacts to krugman's take on the supposed infrastructure plan

i think krugman is actually giving him too much credit.

my bet is that the infrastructure plan reduces to a tweet to ask investors to invest more in infrastructure, maybe followed by another tweet calling paul ryan some mean names for supposedly blocking it.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/infrastructure-build-or-privatization-scam/

there's actually precedence for this: whenever obama was faced with doing anything complicated, he wrote a speech explaining that congress should do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH7hvdqPP9U

from the start of this process, i never referred to bernie as anything more than a legit lesser evil, and it was refreshing to at least get that for a while, until the reality started to sink itself in.

in 2016, the military-industrial complex rigged the election in favour of trump and then blamed it on the russians to distract you. if you start seeing them blame bernie's successes on the russians, you should take it as an admission of guilt.

as for dr. wolff...

it's funny to see dr. wolff present himself as a protector of the new deal, because his academic work was actually written largely as a criticism of it. mr. wolff is known nowadays as an advocate of workplace democracy, but his claim to fame was actually a scathing critique of the new deal as a co-option of socialism; his central academic thesis, the thing that got people to notice him, was a series of papers arguing that the purpose of the new deal was to stop socialism, and that it worked. while it comes off as a conspiracy theory on first glance, it is actually mainstream scholarship to acknowledge that fdr intended to save capitalism from itself, not destroy it.

fdr was a capitalist to his bones, and richard wolff made a career out of taking him to task for it.

i've also noticed in several posts during the past that he has a tendency to view facts pragmatically. he's a marxist; they're all like that.

but, the point i want to make is that it seems as though dr. wolff likes to imagine that sanders is far more like he is than he actually is, that he may be suffering from the fallacy of projection and that he would likely be disappointed by what he actually gets.

so, be careful with the way that certain people are going to frame certain things.

and, i'll be here to keep them honest, as best i can.

i think it's a valid question, actually.

is krugman, himself, more of a socialist than bernie sanders is?

you'd have to take some kind of weighted average, as this is a spectrum with more than two axes in it. 

but, sanders has kind of a conservative streak on very specific issues, and krugman is about as big of a government liberal as you'll find.

i would certainly compare krugman to roosevelt before i compared sanders to him.

in fact....

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2015/11/15/democratic-debate-bernie-sanders-eisenhower-tax-rates-vstan-orig-cws.cbs-news

paul krugman is right - bernie sanders is not a socialist at all. 

it was chomsky that pointed out that, while he likes to compare himself to roosevelt, he's actually largely to the right of eisenhower, who is a better comparison, overall.

you centrists and progressives/conservatives can argue with each other all you want.

i'll go vote for the socialists.

i'm just curious if somebody could define this term "centrism" for me?

i've seen it applied to everything from a rooseveltian keynesian like krugman to a neo-liberal like obama to a neo-con like clinton, and i suspect it's most haphazard proponents would even use it to describe people like myself that, unlike bernie sanders, actually openly describe themselves as an anarchist, a socialist and a communist, and are actually several rungs to his left.

so, what exactly is a centrist?

i suppose that if you want to be literal, the best way to make sense of a term like centrism is to start by defining what the right is. then, once you've picked a left and a right, you can understand the centre through a dialectical process. is it centrist of me to resort to hegel like this?

but, then, where exactly is the right in american politics? it's a kind of nihilism, a sort of open fascism, that upholds strong leader politics and increasingly toys with adopting state capitalist economic models. i think you see where i'm going with this.

but, the odd thing about this topsy-turvy reality that exists in the american political discourse is that you can pivot around the centre without altering it - if we're going to have these definitional debates about left and right, the centre shouldn't actually be touched by it.

but what exactly is it, though, this shifting target of "centrism"?

maybe it's just whatever you call the people that you don't like much, this week.

personally, i'll stand over here on the far left and keep slamming people for being statists, thanks.

i made it home alive tonight, thankfully.

the rain kind of sucked, but i worked it out.

i wanted to stop at villain's to talk, but i forgot that they're closed on mondays...

i'm tentatively planning for wednesday as well, weather dependent. i think it's probably going to be too cold on friday.

i'm going to hop in the shower and probably zonk out, and i'm going to leave the show review until after i can talk to somebody and clarify what happened.

to be clear: i'm not worried about anything, really. i was told they called the police to escort me home for my own safety, because they thought my clothing put me at a risk to get assaulted (which is victim blame-y and weird). the bartender ended up driving me home. i'm not getting any bad vibes, i don't think. i'm pretty sure i was just completely unable to move, and that's really the sum total of the concern. 

but, i don't know if i was out for thirty minutes or three hours, and i need to figure that out before i can order time for the night. and, whether i got drugged or something else, i need to apologize, nonetheless - even if i end up with a negative review for calling the cops during bar hours, if that happened.

yeah, we didn't get quite the distortion that i was hinting at. i mean, i correctly picked out a trend, but it's not as strong as i projected.

biden did come down almost 5 points, in the end, rather than the closer to eight i suggested, and this is due to the reporting issues i pointed out, but it just simply looks like buttigieg did particularly badly in the suburbs around vegas (which are majority white.), and that hampered the effect i was hinting at. if he had done better with white suburban voters, he would have climbed up that extra few percent.

i'll repeat: it looks like buttigieg actually badly underperformed with suburban white voters in las vegas, and that's really what the difference in the results is. all other things considering, if he'd have matched those numbers with how he did in the first two states.....but he didn't. and, you would generally have expected him to win that demographic, that's not a stretch. why did he do so poorly with them in las vegas?