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U.S. Politics: Moscow Mitch


Martell Spy

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1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

They have millions of people in reeducation camps. The only reason the west cares about Hong Kong repression is that its costing money. If the military rolls in under the pretense of dealing with terrorists (which is what they're doing now) and kills a bunch of people the US won't give a shit.

Jamal khashoggi was murdered and we have tape of it. What did the US do about that?

True, but the Saudis are Trump's buddies, whereas he is in the midst of a trade war with China right now.

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3 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

Trump immigration official offers rewrite for Statue of Liberty poem

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/13/statue-of-liberty-poem-immigration-ken-cuccinelli-1459824

 

“Give me your rich and powerful, and preferably white, masses huddled in first class waiting to be free”

It says something about  Cuccinelli when he argues this policy isn’t prejudiced because it’s been around for 140 years while at the same time  wax poetically that his grandfather was an immigrant.

This policy was exactly for those like Cuccinelli’s grandfather. Back then it was the “ savage”Irish, and ”Dagos” that needed to be stopped from coming here. Now it’s Mexicans and Latin Americans. 

 

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2 Guards Assigned To Watch Jeffrey Epstein Placed On Leave, DOJ Says
The warden at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan has also been temporarily reassigned.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/justice-department-jeffrey-epstein-guards-warden_n_5d530941e4b0c63bcbee8b2d

Quote

 

The Justice Department says two guards assigned to watch Jeffrey Epstein when he killed himself in jail have been placed on administrative leave.

The department says in a statement Tuesday that the warden at the Metropolitan Correctional Center has also been temporarily reassigned to an office post pending the outcome of two investigations. Both the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general are investigating Epstein’s death.

Attorney General William Barr has expressed outrage that Epstein was able to take his own life Saturday while under the care of the federal Bureau of Prisons while the inmate was facing sex trafficking charges.

The Justice Department says the warden of another facility in upstate New York has been named the acting warden at MCC. The Department says it will take additional personnel action as warranted.

Amid revelations about Epstein’s death, authorities have intensified inquiries into what went wrong at the jail and who could still face charges in his case.

A person familiar with the matter says Epstein was supposed to have been checked on by a guard about every 30 minutes. But investigators have learned those checks weren’t done for several hours before Epstein was found Saturday.

That person wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Additionally, Serene Gregg, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3148, told The Washington Post that one of the guards assigned to Epstein’s unit wasn’t a correctional officer, but a fill-in who had been pressed into service.

 

 

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14 hours ago, ants said:

Its not a pure monopoly, but either is that bakery with the cake.  Just because they're the only bakery (or hotel or supermarket, whatever) in town doesn't make them a pure monopoly because anyone can open against them.  But in reality, they're the only service provider.  

If you want to interact with other groups (or see lots of businesses' info) you have to log onto Facebook/Instagram etc.  If you want to know what your celebrities are tweeting, you have to go to twitter.  

Asking someone to build their own web platform sounds a lot harder than telling someone they can bake their own cake.  

Part of me is saying this, because I always assume that these things will be tried to be used against us.  Remember, it often wasn't laws but societal norms that shut minorities out of services and establishments.  That said, I don't want Trump et al being the arbiter of what can and can't be said either!  

Right-wing and left-wing crazies can still follow celebrities and catch up with their friends on twitter, facebook and Instagram. What I'm talking about in terms of setting up one's own websites is organisations that want to encourage people to preach hate and intolerance, or UBI and UHC or maybe all 4 of those things. I imagine the KKK and several other like-minded organisations could come up with the money and expertise to establish a safe place to share ideas and recipes. As it's all legal then any cyber attacks on the websites would be subject to criminal investigation. I would say it's easier to set up your own web service than it start your own bakery. Certainly cheaper. Most PCs sitting in people's homes could do it.

You're arguing using the cake example, but the cake situation was about discrimination against a protected class. And in both the provision of goods and services it's illegal to discriminate against protected classes. But outside of that you have complete discretion in terms of your freedom of association. If you want to argue that people with opinions should be a protected class then we can have that discussion.

Social media has been a great democratiser of the market place of ideas, because before you needed money to get wisespread public attention. But you still need money, just a bit less of it. People without access to the internet are still largely excluded from that marketplace. If you want to make accessing facebook a legal right then you have to guarantee access to everyone, (i.e. everyone gets a phone, and a free basic data plan) otherwise it ain't a right.

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4 hours ago, Maithanet said:

I'm not arguing that China is irrational.  I'm saying that they are likely to calculate that any pushback from the West on a crackdown will be minor, and easily handled.  Their primary concern in the Hong Kong situation is how their actions will be viewed domestically, and how they can foster the long term integration and assimilation of Hong Kong into China.

The conversation has largely run its course and we'll just have to agree to disagree, but I do want to add one thing. Regardless if the party leadership is more worried about internal or external reactions, they are certainly worried about how Taiwan will react to a crack down. The two systems-one state model is one they're pitching to Taiwan, and a complete breakdown like this will absolutely spook the Taiwanese. 

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9 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

These arguments have been addressed in judgments of both the UK and US Supreme Court.  Both agreed that you cannot compel speech (as in your first example of adding words on a cake).  And your second example is not discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and so would not implicate an equal protection claim. 

People have strong feelings about this, but in my view we should draw the line in preventing discrimination in offering a service, full stop.  So you cannot require an african-american sculptor to create a bespoke swastika for the KKK.  But a sculptor who sells standard crosses in a shop cannot refuse to sell to someone simply because they disagree with their sexual orientation or race.  Bakers who sell standard cakes should be required to sell to all.  But if you are asked to create a bespoke cake with words that you don't agree with, you should be entitled to refuse. 

This is more or less the position the UKSC took in Lee v Ashers Bakery. You can refuse the order for a bespoke cake so long as it isnt the PC of the person ordering the cake that is the reason. I.e. whether the person was male or female, gay, straight, bisexual, transsexual etc. you would have refused the order.

Bull and Bull v Hall and Preddy is quite instructive too. That case WAS discrimination, but from the judgment i dont know it would be discrimination now - at the time, it was not possible for gay people to get married, so the PCP of not giving double rooms to unmarried couples disproportionately affected homosexuals. 

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“Kochland” Examines the Koch Brothers’ Early, Crucial Role in Climate-Change Denial

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought

Leonard, nonetheless, manages to dig up valuable new material, including evidence of the Kochs’ role in perhaps the earliest known organized conference of climate-change deniers, which gathered just as the scientific consensus on the issue was beginning to gel. The meeting, in 1991, was sponsored by the Cato Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank, which the Kochs founded and heavily funded for years. As Leonard describes it, Charles Koch and other fossil-fuel magnates sprang into action that year, after President George H. W. Bush announced that he would support a treaty limiting carbon emissions, a move that posed a potentially devastating threat to the profits of Koch Industries. At the time, Bush was not an outlier in the Republican Party. Like the Democrats, the Republicans largely accepted the scientific consensus on climate change, reflected in the findings of expert groups such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which had formed in 1988, under the auspices of the United Nations.

The Kochs’ key role in stopping congressional action on climate change is well-known, but longtime environmental activists, such as Kert Davies, the director of the Climate Investigation Center, credit Leonard with discovering that the Kochs played an earlier and even more central role in climate-change denial than was previously understood. In 2010, Davies authored a report, for Greenpeace, that labelled the Kochs “The Kingpins of Denial,” but he told me that he hadn’t realized that their role went as far back as 1991. (A copy of a flyer for the Cato conference can be seen at Koch Docs, a new digital collaborative-research project, directed by the liberal corporate watchdog Lisa Graves, which tracks the Kochs’ influence.)

According to “Kochland,” the 1991 conference was called “Global Environmental Crisis: Science or Politics?” It featured many of the same characters who have spread doubt about the reality of climate change and continue to challenge the advisability of acting against it. Among the speakers was Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at M.I.T., who is quoted in the brochure as saying there was “very little evidence at all” that climate change would be “catastrophic.”

“Kochland” is important, Davies said, because it makes it clear that “you’d have a carbon tax, or something better, today, if not for the Kochs. They stopped anything from happening back when there was still time.” The book also documents how, in 2010, the company’s lobbyists spent gobs of cash and swarmed Congress as part of a multi-pronged effort to kill the first, and so far the last, serious effort to place a price on carbon pollution—the proposed “cap and trade” bill. Magnifying the Kochs’ power was their network of allied donors, anonymously funded shell groups, think tanks, academic centers, and nonprofit advocacy groups, which Koch insiders referred to as their “echo chamber.” Leonard also reports that the centrist think tank Third Way quietly worked with the Kochs to push back against efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which could have affected their business importing oil from Canada. Frequently, and by design, the Koch brothers’ involvement was all but invisible.

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10 hours ago, sologdin said:

curious.  i wonder which ones are considered good or not so good.  some things in his near term were substantially correct, such as the US civil war and the likely effect of socialism in the russian empire--but those are specific ontic instances from history, rather than ontological abstractions about political economy, which, as a hegelian, he would've found more important and more real. the manifesto's decalogue seems to be plausible for the advanced states, though bound by 19th century ideas. i suppose therefore it matters little, the nature and extent of the predictions--one can't hold too tightly to a 19th century writer, but must look at the updates on the doctrine as history unfolds; otherwise, it is a prophetics, rather than scientific prediction. certainly the classical description of capitalist doctrine in the 19th century is worthwhile, as it broke classical political economy and made the bourgeois economists run with an entirely different set of philosophical assumptions.

I was mainly thinking of the prediction that eventually, the proletariat would seize control of the means of production and build an international post-capitalist society. It's true that several of the things he predicted did come to pass, but this was the grandest and most important of his predictions and not only did it not happen, but attempts to force the existence of such a society (i.e. Marxism-Leninism) either failed outright or resorted to a mostly capitalist economy.

11 hours ago, sologdin said:

what objection however to intersectionality doctrine? it's fairly basic stuff, descending from dubois and feminist ideas. is the argument that in developing the thesis, they were deploying class bound false consciousness that enhanced the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie? that certainly applies to the specifically racist and xenophobic ideas of rightwing populists such as trump and other fascists--but does it apply with equal force and effect to the attempts by feminists and critical race theorists to end discrimination within liberal capitalism?

Yes, it applies with equal force. They are not aiming for equality for everyone, they merely want more power and wealth for themselves even if this comes at the expense of people who are already worse off than they are.

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51 minutes ago, Triskele said:

This is still just baffling to me that it's not continued to be talked about ad nauseum.  Even if not on ABC or CNN, the myriad other sites I read not to mention this place.  I'm sure I've just missed it in spots, but I am having a hard time reconciling that it's apparently discussed so little.  

I've been terrified of Trump all along but am certainly more terrified now.  

trisk, you ever listen to the citations needed podcast? (i think you would really dig it) one of the last eps was kinda about this, namely how a lot of media language is extremely uh, conservative (in that sense but also just an over abundance of caution) in how it describes things, like fact checkers calling out trumps “unverified claims” or the like instead of calling them the outright lies that they are

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9 minutes ago, Triskele said:

The thing I originally quoted link to another piece that had this:

 

 

sure, i guess i just find it as equally likely the like one thing he has actually read was something like ‘my new order’ (and lied about reading anything) or that of course he owns it but also never read it. either way, his actions speak for themselves, whether he came to be inspired by the book or simply came to the same positions organically (parallel evolution or whatever) 

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More of this please:

Hickenlooper in talks to drop out of primary to run for Senate in Colorado.

I realize that being a Senator probably isn't as glamorous as being a governor, but if Hickenlooper, Bullock and Beto can be convinced to drop out of the presidential race and run for Senate (prestigious committee assignments, etc.) instead, then that gives Democrats a better shot at picking up the Senate and the White House.

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9 hours ago, Triskele said:

No, thank you for the rec.  I'll check it out.  

I think the thing that worries me most about this realization is how it squares with how unread Trump is.  Like, he could never be interested enough or bothered enough to read much anything but this is the thing that intrigued him. 

It's a really good podcast. I often find myself rethinking how I view things after listening to episodes. They're smart and thoughtful hosts, and the episode being referenced was a bit infuriating the more I thought about how the media narratives are crafted.

There is also a very short book worth reading called On Tyranny that looks at the history of 20th century fascism and argues that we are close to falling under tyrannical rule. I can't remember if the author actually mentions Trump's name, but if he doesn't, there's little doubt who he's writing about.

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16 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Right-wing and left-wing crazies can still follow celebrities and catch up with their friends on twitter, facebook and Instagram. What I'm talking about in terms of setting up one's own websites is organisations that want to encourage people to preach hate and intolerance, or UBI and UHC or maybe all 4 of those things. I imagine the KKK and several other like-minded organisations could come up with the money and expertise to establish a safe place to share ideas and recipes. As it's all legal then any cyber attacks on the websites would be subject to criminal investigation. I would say it's easier to set up your own web service than it start your own bakery. Certainly cheaper. Most PCs sitting in people's homes could do it.

It's easier than that even.  Serverless websites can be hosted for free on GitHub, Heroku, or even on Amazon.  

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18 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

And today the market opens down nearly 500. What a strange few weeks.

That was predictable given the 10 yr bond yield dropped below the 2 yr bond yield for the first time since 2007.  If you're investing... hold onto your butts.

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mainly thinking of the prediction that eventually, the proletariat would seize control of the means of production and build an international post-capitalist society. It's true that several of the things he predicted did come to pass, but this was the grandest and most important of his predictions and not only did it not happen, but attempts to force the existence of such a society (i.e. Marxism-Leninism) either failed outright or resorted to a mostly capitalist economy.

that main prediction, such as it is, is likely still pending.  certainly there have been seizures of this sort.  it was attempted through electoral means many times in the 20th century, and normally the left was defeated by the capitalists. chile in 1973 comes to mind easily--but also the post-WWII subversion of western european elections by the united states.  this is why naked anarchist ideas may be insufficient--a strong state is likely necessary to protect the revolution from the reactionaries. 

we've had labor parties take control of various states without violent response, and those states have gone in a social democratic direction--not an abolition of capitalism, but certainly carrying class struggle in the leftward direction. the cosmopolitan world society is otherwise a political dream, doubtful that we can have expected it form up overnight--we have a long way to go.  the processes described in the manifesto regarding globalization are only recently firming up, say.

one thing though is classical marxism did not allow for or otherwise predict its own effect on the processes it sought to describe and influence except to suggest blithely that the bourgeoisie would fight--like, duh? i like the recitation in new left review regarding this sort of 'counterperformativity' in financial markets, figuratively a sort of heisenberg principle for history:

Quote

Mathematical models are, after all, bricolage constructions inscribed with curdled utopias, with arms and with rights—so many scraps of social history. Misfires are all-pervasive in the application of mathematics to finance: markets seldom if ever behave exactly as posited by even the most sophisticated model. ‘Counterperformativity’, however, is more than a routine misfire. It is more than just what Michel Callon—as noted above, the pioneer of the application of ‘performativity’ to economic life—calls, in translating ‘counterperformativity’ into his terminology, the failure of agencements (loosely, arrangements of human beings and non-human entities that generate specific forms of agency) ‘to discipline and frame the entities that they assemble.’ Counterperformativity is a very particular form of misfire, of unsuccessful framing, when the use of a mathematical model does not simply fail to produce a reality (e.g. market results) that is consistent with the model, but actively undermines the postulates of the model. The use of a model, in other words, can itself create phenomena at odds with the model.

(mackenzie, d. & bamford, a. 'counterperformativity.' NLR 113 (sep-oct 2018) at 99. (footnotes omitted).) am thinking that marxist descriptions of capitalism in the 19th century not only necessitated, as a counter-measure, a shift in the paradigm for economic descriptions of capitalism (from classical political economy to neoclassical marginalism) but also laid the groundwork for the ruling classes' position in the conflict against leftwing ideas--but not fascism, which is otherwise found grossly in manifesto language about "common ruin of the contending classes" and "enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces," and is not really, stalinist positions aside, a viable ruling class strategy in the class struggle, considering how it is too populist for wealth to tolerate and too motherfucking crazy for rational market calculation to assimilate. if the ruling class supports fascism, it only means that they feel very vulnerable and want to risk the common ruin of the contending classes that invariably results, hoping to survive the consequent apocalypse long enough to hit a reset button.

Yes, it applies with equal force. They are not aiming for equality for everyone, they merely want more power and wealth for themselves even if this comes at the expense of people who are already worse off than they are.

interesting.  isn't however 'positive discrimination' on the basis of purported race or sex about universalizing market participation, i.e., to perfect liberalism's political dream of egalitarianism? to the  extent that liberalism is ideologically individualistic, it may be considered a feature rather than a bug that each person seeks maximal market participation. i think  the liberal theorist would reply that this is not a zero-sum situation wherein one person's increased access means a balanced diminishment elsewhere. that said, even if there is a diminishment, what liberal doctrine forestalls it, when liberal economics assumes competition, which metaphor plainly envisions 'losers'? i am assuming that the criticism here is not illiberal, i.e., that attempts by purported non-male persons or persons not white, say, to increase their market participation are illegitimate ab initio.

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