i almost certainly hate you, and i definitely don't want to be your friend.

deathtokoalas
sort of head-scratching. there will always be morons, but the russians can't honestly be so cynical that they think westerners will take their propaganda in uncritically or otherwise entirely ignore western media. conversely, he's actually been doing a good job of softening the western rhetoric. if i was the kremlin, i'd let him be. he's actually giving them quite a bit of credibility.

there's three caveats to this.

1) an escalation is being planned, and they want him out of the region before it happens.
2) there's some thought that they may be able to convince him to change sides, as well.
3) things aren't quite as they seem.

i couldn't imagine his life is in danger.

specifically, i think it's important for the russians to realize that nobody with critical thinking skills is going to be surprised by any kind of smoking gun regarding russian troops in the region. it is blatantly obvious that there are special forces operating in the region. no amount of propaganda is going to reverse this obvious truth. nor were these images necessary to demonstrate as much. you're not hiding anything. we already know.

nor would confirmation of such an obvious truth change anybody's opinion on the situation, if our opinion is meaningful in the first place. nobody in the west sees russia as an uncorrupted good guy. at best, russia is a lesser evil with a huge array of substantial corruption problems.

westerners that will intellectually argue in favour of russia's position will rarely be taking an actively pro-russian position, and more often taking an actively anti-american position. the propaganda has some value in seeding that resentment. yet, conflating that with legitimately pro-russian opinions is a gigantic error.

there's consequently really nothing to lose by letting the footage out, and much to lose by holding the journalist.

George
Are you calling Vice a pro-Russian propaganda? That's just..funny.

deathtokoalas
no, that's not what i'm suggesting.

i am, however, suggesting that perhaps what vice was looking for was not a proper reflection of what was occurring on the ground, and that the act of merely sending back images of what was actually happening was helping to counteract the narrative from washington. he may have been sent as a pro-american propagandist, but he wasn't able to find evidence to back up that perspective; instead, he often sent back evidence that countered it.

it may not have upheld the russian narrative, either. but that's a non-starter to begin with.

i mean, he was sent to send back images of russian troops invading the region and terrorizing the population. instead, we're getting pictures of ukrainian soldiers being disarmed by civilians. he can try and talk around that, but it's precisely the opposite of what he was sent there to send back.\

that being said, i must once again point out that it is blatantly obvious that russian forces are orchestrating the situation, and evidence demonstrating it (if it does exist, and he has captured some of it) would be akin to evidence demonstrating that water is wet. the idea that a substantial number of ukrainians would spontaneously organize to join russia out of fear of ukrainian nazis is itself rather comical.

i point this out in relation to american propaganda all the time: if you want people to believe it, make it credible. these cartoon narratives don't really sway people, they just foster cynicism.

rr0b0
wow finally there's someone with a weighted opinion here

holyteejful
I agree with your opinion that he is actually really unbiased and has just been digging for the truth. Sad that the Russians see him as interfering, clearly not provoking anything, just asking questions-- being a reporter and all; you're right when you say that he has actually been way more lenient towards Russia than, say, FOX news LOL...  I sincerely hope he is not in any danger, they are probably just trying to intimidate him and throw some false agendas at him to mislead him.

deathtokoalas
i'm not suggesting he showed up without a bias, but his perception does seem to have softened over time as the evidence unraveled in front of him. he may not have been able to confirm his bias. importantly, he doesn't seem to have allowed his bias to prevent him from sending back images that contradicted it. evidence-based reasoning is hard to find in the modern press.

...and that might have actually pissed his boss off.

holyteejful
After watching all the "dispatches" evidence does point to heavy "covert" Russian operations and that the surges of violence is propagated by extremists on both sides of the political spectrum ... That makes it so much easier for undercover "Spetznaz" (call them what you will)to do their job; I almost guarantee they pose as regular people, Ukrainian soldiers AND "regular" Russian troops as well. Nothing he has reported has really contradicted the rhetoric being spewed by Washington, although I am not much of an avid listener to the mainstream media myself.. He is probably one of the few reporters from the USA who speaks Slavic, so Vice sent him over there (or he volunteered). I personally think that he has been doing a good job. I have watched several other Vice reports and his boss, Shane Smith, seems like a fairly overall truly liberal guy with a sense of ethics that wouldn't allow strong bias on the part of being Pro-American everything. I mean, most mainstream media has almost nothing negative to say about Israel, but Vice has a report from the Palestinian perspective that is almost anti-Israel. I always love to hear both sides of every story to get the full context; I feel it is very important for making informed decisions in future conversations and possibly for elections.... also not sure if anyone knows, but Simon, the reporter,was released from detention in Slovyansk today after being held for a couple of days.

deathtokoalas
i guess you're not aware that the funding for vice's recent delve into news reporting has been coming from no less a source than rupert murdoch, himself.

===

nice to hear he's safe.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/int-hist.htm

it's funny.

i've basically arrived where i have in life by convincing myself of the single axiom that existence is meaningless, and this makes conventionally interacting in society entirely worthless. centring your life around anything related to property, status or wealth is just throwing your life away to utilitarian/capitalist excesses. yet, even this is not rational: if the aim is maximizing pleasure in the short amount of time we have to do it, doing loads of drugs makes more sense than working in an office. rejecting hedonistic capitalism within the context of this futility of breathing leaves only the individual's whimsical fancies as remotely meaningful goals (i skipped some steps there). art for art's sake (or knowledge for knowledge's sake) is consequently the only worthwhile pursuit (any other existence would and should rationally end up with a quick suicide, as it would be the fastest way to lessen the amount of existential torture brought on equally by slavery and boredom), and capitalist society is merely an obstacle to avoid.

if mortality could be abolished (and i'm ok with existing in software), the entire calculus would change. this ought to present the individual with a hobson's choice to pursue immortality at all costs, as the worst thing that could happen would be to die trying to abolish death. unless failure is certain, of course, in which case why waste the time? unfortunately, i'm convinced that this isn't feasible in my lifetime. death remains the only concrete reality worth planning around.

so, faced with the certainty of all of this meaningless, the only thing that can actually motivate me to get out of bed and pursue these goals is the certainty that i have a finite amount of time to complete them in, bringing me back around again to where i began.

"yeah, well, i'm 30% of the way into paying off a high interest loan to get a piece of paper to allow me to pay property taxes, and that requires me to spend 75% of my time living for somebody else (and maybe more if i'm married). so, you lose at life."

it's actually not so bad for me if people actually continue to think that. i mean, there's two ways forward from where we are: full communism or state-driven social darwinism (popularly, if somewhat incorrectly, referred to as 'fascism'). we've been leaning towards the latter for decades. and, if that's the unalterable future, i can't benefit from winning the argument.

i can snicker about it on my facebook page, though.

to put it into a little bit of perspective, this rightward shift of our so-called socialist party has a lot to do with the establishment perception of our centrist liberal party, which (despite being moribund for ten years, despite a recent, and perhaps illusory, resurgence under the son of a former leader who was in fact not as electorally successful as some suggest) is still largely perceived of as our "natural governing party". even with the shift in direction the government has taken, there's still this broad feeling that we're living in an anomaly and the liberals will be in power for 70 or 80 of the remaining years of the century. once they get in (and they may win next year), they tend to stay in power for upwards of twenty years at a time.

this extreme insider perception of the liberal party (which, despite staying closer to the ideological goals of liberalism than american liberal parties have, is largely true) has made them less competitive through much of the working class. this opens up a lot of three way races in working class areas, and often pits the socialists directly against the conservatives. now, a lot of these areas are specifically auto union areas, where wages are high enough that we're not talking lowest tax bracket. we're talking union areas where average wages are more than one jump up. so, the socialist party actually has to float these policies to keep union members from jumping to the conservative party, which may in fact more accurately reflect their class interests. this has left people in the lower end of the wage spectrum without political representation, but it's been a slow process of awakening to this.

the debate has sort of trickled down, too. it has a little bit to do with lingering resentment about an introduced consumption tax called the gst. now, that was a long time ago, but it's still just massively loathed. this works in two ways. first, the conservative party did decrease this by 2%. it may not have actually saved anybody any money in a measurable sense, but it's a symbolic thing; correctly or not, there's a perception in the working class that tax cuts are things they benefit from, because of that association with the gst cut. but it's a half-right sort of thing. consumption taxes are regressive. there was a big debate ten years ago about it; the liberals and ndp wanted to cut income taxes instead. this was in the context of giant surpluses (themselves stolen from ei premiums) that have since disappeared...due largely to cuts in corporate taxes.

but the take-away is that the process that goes through the heads of the lower wage people is taxes=gst=bad. tax cuts = no gst = good. breaking through that might actually be impossible. it might be an irreversible shift in canadian politics.

what i wanted to point out though is what i thought leo was going to talk about, which is that the ndp are actually in favour of pipelines so long as the oil is refined in canada, so as to create refinery jobs in canada. that is, so as to increase union membership. this is something else that is confusing canadians, but the policy has been very clearly stated: the ndp considers jobs more important than the environment. which is again just like the conservatives....

d scoleri
This is pure bullshit..I had a couple of classes with Leo at York..He is a Marxist and views everything through that lens! Cannot believe anything he says!!

(deleted)

d scoleri
You actually need me to define it for you? Easy, Marxism is a failed  system of governmental control over the entire economy... with no private property rights. Essentially, it's a world run by bureaucrats. The only ones to prosper in this type of  economy are bureaucrats and the so called intellectuals (such as Leo Panitch)  they use  to try and justify their existence. How about some examples?  Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam,  China can be viewed as somewhat Marxist but luckily for them, they realized the fallacies of the system and have turned more and more to capitalism.

CryptedSky
No. Marxism is not a system of governance, it's a swooping ideology through which you can analyse and comprehend the events driving history and the economy forward. An analysis of a certain situation is Marxist when it defines a class structure and describes conflicts happening in a society as part of a far-reaching struggle between these classes. Classical marxism explains the conflicts found in a society as reflections of the meta-struggle between the poor disowned working class (proletariat) and the rich proprietor class (the bourgeoisie). Further marxist analysis reveals that the middle class is the buffer class emerging out of the inevitable victories of the working class and that if this middle class erodes, violent social conflict is sure to reemerge. TBH, it's a very matter-of-fact uncontroversial notion that even heterodox capitalists have embraced.

Some scholars and political thinkers have pushed this type of reflection even further during the last decades of the cold war as it was becoming clear that the cold war was turning out, in practice, to be a tacit contract between the USA and the USSR to allow them to colonise the third world without even a slap on the wrist (see Noam Chomsky). The most notable is probably Immanuel Wallerstein's description of what he calls the World-System Theory which describes globalisation's end game through a marxist viewpoint in which the proverbial «west» is the metropolis for the benefit of which the periphery is robbed of it's ressources and labor and given hope by the implementation of a «semi-periphery» which is semi-rich and acts as an economic buffer zone between the extreme wealth of the «core» and the extreme poverty of the «periphery». It's an amazing analysis.

Tl;dr, Marxism is not a system of governance, it's an intellectual instrument of social-political and economic analysis.

Wether marx himself was a communist or not is irrelevant to his work as a philosopher.

deathtokoalas
it's been my experience that academic marxists are generally more interested in his philosophical arguments, which have little application to reality, and are even generally hostile to the basic socialist premise of workers owning their own means of production because they view them as too incompetent to manage it. i don't want to paint a wide brush on either of these commentators, but the reality is that most "academic marxists" are really just liberals, and often not even particularly radical ones.

(deleted)

deathtokoalas
they'll often use marx to analyze capitalism, but in the end present some kind of keynesianism or heavily watered down lassallianism as an alternative. marx would rip most of them apart as bourgeois fakers.

(deleted)

deathtokoalas
well, yeah, that's just it. it's the hegelianism that these academics are really on about, not anything about social revolution. it's a little annoying that they call it "scientific socialism" when hegelianism is inherently anti-scientific, but that's just where the problems start. it's a lot of teleological nonsense, really. in the worst cases, they'll take the ideas to these scary extremes that suggest that freedom is really just an illusion, so the key to a happy working class is tricking them into thinking they're happy. that may in some sense come from marxist thinking, but it kills the spirit of marxism - which is meant to be a way to salvage self-ownership in an era of socialized economics. that's not a desire for a system of collectivization, it's a reaction to the technological innovations that have asserted it as an unpreventable necessity. even today, socialized production is the norm from the auto plants of detroit to the clothing factories of bangladesh. so, how do we reassert the free, liberal individual in such an economy?

then, when you read some, like, foucault, where he's talking about the state enforcing hegemonic norms through social ostracism...where's the individualism in that....

it misses the point.

proudhon wasn't really a disciple of marx, he was more of a competitor to him. marx wrote some scathing criticisms of his influence on the paris commune revolts (specifically, he blamed the failure of the revolt on the proudhonists refusal to seize the banks, because they were opposed to centralized banking. this allowed the state to raise the funds necessary to retake the city.). personally, i'd categorize proudhon as a liberal (and what you're calling libertarianism to be indistinguishable from classical liberalism) rather than a socialist, although his idea was to combine the two things. if this is your position, you probably don't have any significant disagreements with the bulk of these so-called marxist profs. it's probably all minor disagreements about which order things should occur in. it's just a matter of getting underneath the rhetoric and getting them to admit that they basically just want better laws to redistribute wealth more fairly and stop bankers from being so corrupt.

i sit more on the bakunin-kropotkin-malatesta strain of anarchist communism, which is both a legitimately revolutionary perspective and puts me in a lot of opposition to marxism (which i consider to be an authoritarian, statist form of governance). but, i do rely on some marxist analysis, where it's reasonable. and i realize there's a lot of hot air around who claims they're a marxist...

----

jabraun10
Does Canada have the ability to enact a vote of no confidence?

deathtokoalas
canada has a parliamentary democracy, which means that the prime minister is chosen by parliamentary vote rather than by direct plebiscite. it's less like a president and more like a speaker of the house. the parliament could theoretically elect anybody as prime minister, subject to very mild requirements of things like citizenship.

no confidence votes are generally considered to occur around money issues. the opposition could vote down the budget, for example. that would trigger an election.

currently, the conservative party has a majority of the seats in parliament. that is why they were able to elect the prime minister. it is also makes a vote of non-confidence virtually impossible.

so....sort of. it is a possibility that enough members of the sitting party could vote with the opposition to force an election. however, it is exceedingly implausible.

it should also be noted that canadian voters tend to cynically interpret such votes as opportunistic and politically driven. harper was recently declared in contempt of parliament, and yet managed to win a majority (up from a minority) shortly afterwards. conversely, the man that engineered the vote that declared him in contempt of parliament lost his seat.

canada suffers from tremendous vote splitting. until that is addressed, these sorts of tactics are more likely to backfire than succeed in removing harper from office.

it should also be pointed out that harper is actually a more moderate face fronting a group of radicals that would instantly do things like ban abortion and move back to "free market" health care if he wasn't stopping them (because he knows such reckless action would collapse a conservative movement that has recently been through collapse and reconstruction). replacing him with somebody else, like jason kinney for example, may actually lead to more radical policy. the less freaky possible replacements (such as john baird) have identity issues that are likely to explode on them should they take a serious run.

nor are the opposition parties much better at this point. the reality is that the chinese may actually prefer to see baby trudeau in office, because he could get away with burning down the entire rainforest - whereas harper needs to be more careful about what he does. kind of like how obama can get away with open drone strikes, where bush had to be more crafty about how he lied in public.

from western governments, criticisms about "freedom of the press" are almost always veiled attempts to restrict press freedom for sources they do not like, which is often community or government based media.

this idea of calling private media "free" is itself very much a type of newspeak. private media is not freer than community media in any way. it's often the other way around! what private media is is corporate media, and hence driven by profit. that doesn't make it less controlled; again, that can and often does imply greater control and more censorship.

who has a bigger reach in america: pbs or fox news? yet, in canada and britain it's more subtle. it's clearly more complex than whether it's owned by government or by cartels.

in the end, if you're a journalist on the front lines it doesn't matter if the ceo is threatening to fire you or if the government is threatening to silence you. it doesn't matter if you're reading a script by the ministry or the oil/weapons cartel.

so, freedom of the press is and always has meant freedom for corporations to suppress the press.

and it's always been up to people to organize around the press.

one gets the impression that it was meant to dock in sevastopol.