See the Guardian's coverage here, which has included articles by Amy Goodman and others in support of the protesters. See also the Guardian's criticism of U.S. media, particularly the NY Times, for hardly noting the protests at all. See pictures here. There are, to be sure, plenty of things to quibble about re: the tactics of the protesters, but the general thrust of the phenomenon is right on: tax the rich, end the wars, no cuts to social programs.
Showing posts with label new york times bullshit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new york times bullshit. Show all posts
Monday, September 26, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Why the NY Times is Politically Clueless
I'm sure many saw this in the NYTimes this morning. What you may have missed was this little gem:
Mr. Hall was a rising force in the party, which has capitalized on a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment to attract members — young racist skinheads, aging Ku Klux Klan members, and extremists on the left and the right."Extremists on the left". Yes, you heard it. Yes, evidently the line coming from the NYTimes is that "extremists" on the "left" are every bit as likely to join the US Nazi movement as "young racist skinheads, aging Ku Klux Klan members and right extremists". That is fucking offensive. It's basically slander.
Last time I checked, "workers of the world unite!" doesn't exactly sit easily with wanting to secede to create a "white society".
First of all, the "far left", or the "hard left", or, if you like, the so-called "extreme" left has always been the most determined and uncompromising force against fascism and the hard right. Look at history. We can find plenty of instances in which mainstream conservatives (and even liberals) strike an indifferent, or even slightly sympathetic, posture vis-a-vis hard-right xenophobia, nationalism, and fascism. It's easy for these mainstream political forces to re-write history from where they're sitting now. But at the most crucial moments in U.S. history when xenophobia, nationalism, and quasi-fascist movements were on the rise, it has almost always been the case that the radical left was the most vocal, uncompromising force opposed to such developments.
Without fail, the far Left has consistently been the most determined, uncompromising opponents of fascism and racism.
Think of the role of Communists in the 1930s in fighting for the Scottsboro Boys when liberals and conservatives were happy with the status quo as it was. Democrats in the South, in conjunction with KKK terrorism and violence, were responsible for rolling back the gains of Reconstruction and reimposing the apartheid order that came to be known as Jim Crow. Leftists lost their lives struggling against this re-imposition of de jure racism when liberals and conservatives were quite happy with the white supremacist order over which they presided.
Comtemporary examples abound. When complacent, "tolerant" liberals shrug their shoulders at the re-emergence of White Power and fascist groups in the public square, it has consistently been the socialist Left that has courageously stood up to the bigots. The article mentions counter-protesters in LA hurling bottles and rocks at the fascists. I can guarantee you the counter-protesters weren't from the DNC. They were probably exactly what the NYTimes deems "extreme leftists", namely socialists, communists, anarchists and so forth.
The far Left has been unanimous in absolutely opposing the rise of xenophobia and racism exemplified by SB1070. In fact, it has been the Left which has organized the most fierce resistance to these developments. Recall the Columbia students in the International Socialist Organization who stormed the stage to interrupt an event meant to give the fascist, murderous Minutemen Project a forum to express their racist bile. Liberals jumped to the defense of the Minutemen on grounds of being "moderate" and "tolerant" and so forth. But the Left was uncompromising in saying that we cannot ever tolerate fascism, xenophobic violence or hard-right hatred. A free society is incompatible with tolerating such toxic, violent hatred. To "tolerate" it is to acquiesce. This is exactly what Herbert Marcuse was talking about when he spoke of "repressive tolerance".
"Nazi Punks Fuck Off!" is not a liberal slogan.
I've never been able to accept the bit of liberal ideology which asserts that the point between two "extremes" is therefore credible. I guess I'm just not a "tolerant" moderate when it comes to opposing oppression. I think injustice and oppression never deserve to be tolerated. If that's enough to make me an "extremist", then so be it.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Pseudoscience in NY Times
The NYTimes pseduo-science bureau reports that "Taller people are Happier, Especially if they're Male". The article ends on this note: "I’ll let the sociobiologists among you out there theorize about why."
Two things.
First, the article makes a typical, ideological mistake common among neoclassical economists regarding "happiness" and "well being". Though such charlatans rarely explain what they mean by "happiness" in newspaper pieces like this, economics as a discipline is far more blunt about its assumptions, and they're not pretty. Since money is easily measured and quantified, economists typically let it act as a kind of stand-in for happiness as such. The more sophisticated way of explaining their view is to speak in the bogus language of "revealed preferences". The basic gist of their view is this: whether or not you are flourishing, whether or not your life is going well, is just a matter of whether your present consumer preferences are being satisfied. That is to say, your life is going well if only if you have money to purchase things to satisfy your preferences. But this is just to restate the (typical pro-capitalist) myth that you are what you buy. It makes it sound as though you should be fully satisfied if you have a TV and car and refrigerator (never mind whether you're exploited, alienated, oppressed, etc.) It elides the structural imperative within capitalism to continually generate new markets, manufacture new wants, and make people feel constantly unsatisfied so that they feel pushed to continue working and consuming in such a way that the system can reproduce itself. Now, to be sure, material resources (and, in capitalist societies, money in particular) are necessary in order to flourish. I don't want to make it sound as though an oppressed person living in dire poverty could be flourishing/well-off/happy in the fullest sense. But material resources that give one the capability to exercise her talents and natural powers are not the same as satisfied consumer preferences. There's much more to genuine happiness and human flourishing than that.
At the end of the day, economists work with an utterly anemic, implausible conception of human flourishing/happiness/well-being/etc. Any plausible conception of well-being would have to account for much, much more, e.g. meaningful relationships, non-alienation, fulfilling projects, the exercising of one's talents and natural powers, freedom to move about as one pleases, not being exploited or dominated by others, having free time to oneself, being healthy and working in a safe environment, etc. But it's clear why neoclassical economists can't accept this more robust conception of well-being: they are fundamentally committed to capitalism and capitalism simply cannot deliver if this more plausible conception of happiness is used. It would be too obvious that the working majority is denied the opportunity to flourish in the fullest sense. After all, if your basic goal is to continue to propagate the myth that capitalism is the best of all possible systems... then clearly you want a minimalist, money-based consumerist model of well-being so that you can make it seem as though most people are satisfied with things as they are.
Of course, it may be that the "data" in this "study" is nothing but an answer to a "yes" or "no" (or 1-10 scale) phone questionnaire in which respondents were asked whether they were happy. But what do such data actually show? "Happiness" without further specification is a highly vague concept- and there are deep problems with dominant ideas re: happiness in capitalist societies. Ruling class versions of what happiness is should not be confused with happiness itself. Also, isn't there strong pressure in our society not to admit when one's life isn't going well? Aren't we taught to blame ourselves for economic misery caused from without according to the mantra of "personal responsibility"? If that's so, we should expect the self-reporting of happiness levels to be distorted based on respondent's unwillingness to admit to the interviewer that things aren't going as well for them as they would have liked. Finally, we have to account for adaptive preferences. Clearly any scientific study of well-being must have more concrete, objective criteria than a simple yes/no response that elides people's reasons for saying whatever it is that they say.
Second, suppose that tall men really are happier in contemporary societies. Why on earth should the explanation for this be found in biology, as the article suggests? Why not talk to economists, sociologists, or political theorists? Why assume that differential levels of well being are in the first instance natural rather than social phenomena? This is pseudoscientific bullshit. It's a bit like thinking that physicists or meteorologists are the people we should go to first if we want to understand why women in the U.S. got the vote in 1920. This is bass ackwards.
If tall men are in fact happier, it is far more likely that it has to do with the ways in which our current (sexist) society rewards men in certain ways that reflect unequal relations of power among the sexes. Given the dominant norms that specify how women and men are to behave, interact, divide up domestic labor, and so forth, it is not hard to see how we should arrive at such a conclusion. The idea that our explanation must be based in immutable facts of our biological constitution is both unwarranted here and floating on thin air. This kind of determinism is at odds with all of the available evidence: if true, how on earth could it explain the vast changes in gender relations that have been brought about throughout the 20th century as the result of political struggles? Plus, deterministic move has a long and unsavory history. Everyone from slave-owners, to kings and lords, to colonial elites, to capitalists, to sexist corporate leaders have used this argument to claim that their dominance was justified by unchanging facts about our constitution. Every single one of them have been shown to be dead wrong by history. Once we've actually overturned all of the contingent, human-constructed forms of exploitation and oppression in the world... perhaps then I'll entertain such discussions about how talent and natural abilities might be unequally distributed. But until we reach such a state of affairs- there is no scientific way to know what we're truly capable of. To say otherwise is to manipulate natural science into apologetics for the status quo. That is not science but pure ideological distortion.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The apologetics roll in
See here.
The basic argument is that the ruling against the mandate is part of one "tradition" of views about U.S. economy, whereas the defense of the mandate represents another. The first "tradition" is laissez faire. The second is a reformist and progressive. The author of the article would have us believe that ObamaCare is part of the reformist tradition of ideas that lend support to Medicare and Social Security.
The facts suggest otherwise. ObamaCare is not a reformist push against the entrenched power of elites... it is a further entrenchment of the power of those very elites. Rather than tampering with capitalism, ObamaCare expands and institutionalizes the for-profit insurance industry and, at the same time, mandates that all Americans purchase their products or face a penalty. Medicare, on the other hand, is an ambitious program that actually displaced private interests for the public good by guaranteeing seniors access to health care.
So, it is just false that we must either defend the individual mandate put into law by ObamaCare, on the one hand, or concede defeat to the laissez faire lunatics on the Right. Putting the point that way obscures what's at stake by making Obama appear as a progressive facing down conservative opposition. In reality, he's basically a conservative defending a conservative idea against conservative opportunists that happen to be in a different faction of the single pro-business party which monopolizes the political process.
It hardly needs to be said that this notion of "two traditions of thought" is basically bullshit for at least two different reasons. First of all, from the perspective of pure intellectual history, these two "traditions" are neither perennially competing nor coherent paradigms unto themselves. The notion of "laissez faire" obscures more than it explains in the real world. It is mere ideology (in the pejorative sense). It is but one idea, marshaled in certain circumstances when others weren't so effective, used to legitimate certain unjust social arrangements. Capitalist economies have never really operated on the basis of "laissez faire", nor could they. Defenders of the inequalities of capitalism have been far more creative and dynamic than the facile idea of a "tradition of laissez faire" suggests. And the supposedly competing "progressive" paradigm is no better. Speaking purely in terms of ideas, views as different as the technocratic reformism of Keynesian economics, the agrarian radicalism of the populists, and the socialist egalitarianism of the early labor movement could all potentially be the referent of such a "paradigm". It is no help to subsume them all under one heading and claim that they were all after a "social minimum" or "safety net".
Second, it's unclear that we should think of the political struggles over reforms in purely ideational terms. We must also talk about material conditions, unexpected historical or economic shifts, organization and struggle, changes in configurations of power, etc. etc. In short, it won't do us any good to talk about the historical change a series of passages from one idea to the next. We forget at our own peril that the dominant ideas in a capitalist society are not the outcome of a free rational discussion open to all; they are often the congealed effects of a certain configuration of power. Marx's sociological way of putting the point is that the ideas of the ruling class are often the ruling ideas. That means that if you control the means of production and distribution of information, you're likely to have a strong impact on the currency of ideas.
Thus, the entire framework of analysis posited in this article is obfuscatory and ideological. Even worse, it misapplies it's own ideological framework and attempts to incorporate ObamaCare into a contrived paradigm to which ObamaCare does not belong.
Monday, November 8, 2010
"Fiery Leftist Opinion"
Bad News for Liberals May Be Good News for a Liberal Magazine
"Other than perhaps the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, there were few places as despondent on election night as the Manhattan offices of The Nation, the 146-year-old journal of fiery leftist opinion."
See the NYTimes article here.
Yes, "fiery leftist opinion". They said it. I bet Louis Proyect fell out of his seat when he read that. I nearly did.
Friday, November 5, 2010
More Inept Garbage from the NYTimes
This is so confused it's hard to know where to begin. Here's how this heap of bullshit begins:
Keith Olbermann, the pre-eminent liberal voice on American television, was suspended Friday after his employer, MSNBC, discovered that he made campaign contributions to three Democrats last month.The indefinite suspension was a stark display of the clash between objective journalism and opinion journalism on television.
Hold it right there. How is it that someone can be the "pre-eminent liberal voice on American television" and then be rebuked for making campaign contributions to Democrats? If Olbermann's TV persona is, quite literally, one of "pre-eminent liberal voice" then why should we expect that he wouldn't make contributions to campaigns that are, ostensibly at least, left-liberal? Why are we surprised?
Then there is this obscure crap about a "stark display of the clash between objective journalism and opinion journalism on television". First of all, what the fuck is this distinction anyway? Second, how is it supposed to be relevant here?
Are we really to believe that journalists don't have political views of their own? How could journalists not have political views? Everyone already knew what Olbermann's politics were, in fact this is part of who he is and why people watch him. So what has changed? Why is this predictable fact supposed to impinge on his journalistic work? People don't flip on Bill O'Reilly because they think it's possible they might get a Maoist analysis of U.S. politics; they watch precisely because he's got political things to say that resonate with them.
The distinction between "objective journalism and opinion journalism" is a red herring. It only muddies the waters, since the distinction doesn't pick out anything real at all. As I argued in a recent post, it is impossible to report on politics neutrally. It simply cannot be done. Reporting on politics requires that you have an idea of what it is you're reporting on, i.e. you must first have an idea of what politics is and what it isn't, what is political and what's not. Unfortunately, the determination of what's political and what's not is itself a political battleground. Concrete struggles determine what's "normal" and what's "controversial", what's legitimately "political" and what's not up for contestation. For example, the feminist slogan "the personal is political" was subversive precisely because it declared that an entire sphere of modern life (e.g. housework, marriage, the 'private' realm, etc. etc.) was political, whereas it had hitherto been deemed apolitical.
The idea of what politics is in much contemporary mainstream journalism is preposterous. It is a narrow conception that takes our eyes off the real targets and focuses our attention on trivial bullshit. It is a conception of politics that helps to preserve and stabilize the status quo.
So, the idea that there is "objective" journalism and "opinion" journalism is not a well-founded one. All journalism, even mere reporting of fact, requires that the journalist decide what's of significance and what's not. The set of possible facts that one could report on at any one given moment is massive, nearly infinite. The only neutral course of action would be to report on everything all at once (e.g. the roaming habits of zebra, the price of tomato paste, the chemical composition of toothpaste, etc. etc.). But reporting on everything all at once is impossible, and even it were possible it would be practically useless to us. The unavoidable fact of journalism is that some judgments about what's worth reporting on and what's not must be made. Some decision about what's of significance and what's not are a necessary precursor to any journalism whatsoever. And like it or not, judgments about what's important, what's significant, what's relevant, etc. are political. Such judgments are evaluative, i.e. they invoke ideas about value, political ideals, what ought to come to pass, etc. etc.
Our task must not be to pretend we're doing "objective" journalism. Our task must be to understand and criticize the judgments about significance and value that guide journalistic practices. If an article presupposes a narrow, implausible conception of politics, we should criticize and reject this conception. But we can't even have a public discussion about what's important if we aren't aware that such judgments are being made. You cannot criticize what you don't see as a possible object of criticism. We can't argue about something that is hidden, implicit and never brought to the fore.
This is often how it goes: the evaluative/political infrastructure of culture and media is never made explicit. The article under examination here makes impressive headway in concealing the evaluative judgments that structure it. It muddies things up so thoroughly, that it's difficult to know what's at stake in the politics of media at all. The article itself has such fallacious presuppositions about what politics is, that we cannot hope to find anything but garbage there.
Finally one point about the supposed contrary of "neutral" journalism: so-called "opinion journalism". "Opinion" is another bullshit term. I think we should expunge our vocabulary of it entirely. It is an individualist term that makes it appear as though our political convictions are like our preference for chocolate or vanilla ice cream. Our political views aren't like mere "tastes". If there are any beliefs for which we should be expected to give justifying reasons, political beliefs are the leading candidates.
Politics necessarily involves other people. It is the least personal thing there is. So how could beliefs about something that involves everyone possibly be the same as individual tastes or preferences for one flavor or other? Political beliefs must be thought of as claims that we endorse on the basis of reasons that we could give to others in order to justify ourselves. They aren't mere "opinions" or individual "tastes" we can hide behind when someone challenges them.
When someone prefaces statements with "well, this is only my opinion" I cringe. If it is merely your "personal preference", why bother disclosing it to others at all? If it could not in principle have a claim on someone else, why even utter it in a public situation?
The moral of the story is this: all journalism is political. The only questions are what are the politics involved? and are the politics justifiable, i.e. can they be backed up by convincing reasons?
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
NYTimes to Mexico: Give US corporations back your oil
Read the NYTimes screed against nationalization here. Man, the Times is terrible when it comes to Latin America. The "argument" in this article is pathetic. It's the same old shopworn right-wing rhetoric about nationalizing resources: "those dumb Mexicans are happy that they booted out the foreign oil companies... but they are too inept to know how to properly extract it... better invite the US corporate experts back in to take the oild back".
As readers of their foreign coverage have come to expect, the Times conflates an important issue of political/economic power with one about efficiency and instrumental virtues. But we can separate these matters. The issue of efficiency of extraction is separate from the issue of whether or not the Mexican people should collectively own their natural resources. If the problem is merely with the former, why not suggest ways in which the extraction could be more efficiently undertaken? Of course, the whole point of the article is not to solve this problem, but to offer us the facile conclusion that the only problem is nationalization. The obvious solution, the article seems to leads us to believe, is that privatization and control of the oil by a small group of wealthy foreign investors is the only way to go.
Of course, nationalization as such is not necessarily a good thing. It matters who "owns" the national state and it matters how the revenues are spent. But even with all of the problems with the Mexican state apparatus, I'll gladly take public ownership of that sort (and the loads of money it provides for education spending) over private ownership by a small clique of foreign capitalists.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
IS article further demolishes mainstream interpretation of German politics
Months ago, I commented on the (predictable) distortion of the results of the German elections in outlets like the NYTimes. Despite the concrete details of the election (e.g. the fact that the right-wing CDU didn't increase their vote tally), the NYTimes spun it as a big win for Merkel and the Right in Germany.
This excellent article in the most recent edition of the British journal International Socialism, further exposes the NYTimes-style narrative as bogus. As the article aptly points out in its opening paragraphs, the CDU actually had a mediocre showing in the recent elections, and its victory owed only to the complete collapse of the "centre-left" Social Democratic party (SPD).
But you wouldn't know this if you read only the NYTimes. They would have led you to think that the election represented a sweeping victory for the Right, a general nod to neoliberalism, and a repudiation of socialism. Indeed, something closer to the opposite is true. The Left Party (Die Linke) had its strongest showing to date, and the majority of the population oppose many of the current government's policies. For instance:The election of 27 September brought to power a conservative-liberal government—the most right wing combination possible in German politics. But this does not represent a rightward shift in German society. The conservatives of the CDU and Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU) had their worst showing since the Second World War. The conservative-liberal camp actually lost a total of 300,000 votes.
The coalition came to power on the back of a collapsed social democracy. The losses of the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) are dramatic. The support for the SPD has halved since 1998. This is a legacy of the so-called Agenda 2010 reforms—a general attack on the welfare state started by SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder and furthered by his successors.
The coalition of the CDU and the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) won despite the majority of the population’s rejection of their core projects. For example, 77 percent of people are for a legally enshrined minimum wage, which the new government rejects. 61 percent want a shift away from nuclear energy, while the government wants to give nuclear bosses a longer running time for their plants. 55 percent are for an immediate military withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the government wants to send more troops.To be sure, the Left faces many challenges in Germany, but it's important to poke holes in bullshit narratives about the "meteoric rise" of the Right in Germany.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Well, I hate that I was right about this...
Yes, aren't you glad that we have such deft political analysis from the "Paper of Record"?
The mainstreaming of the "Teabaggers"? Yeah, that must be it. Obviously, that must be the explanation. This way all of the liberals can be corralled back into thinking that a super-majority of Democrats in the Senate actually means something will change.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
A Steaming Pile in the NyTimes, part zwei
Take a ganders at this monstrosity.
There's so much loaded into this inept assemblage of bullshit that it's difficult to know where to begin.
The article begins:
A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse."Don't you love the nuanced treatment of political conditions in Europe? Or the detailed treatment of "socialism"? Who knew... apparently socialism is just the vote tally of social-democratic (or, as the case may be, soft neoliberal 'third-way') parties.
"German voters clobbered the Social Democratic Party on Sunday, giving it only 23 percent of the vote, its worst performance since World War II."My my. It's as though the SPD has no history, no recent political past, no identity at all. It's a lot easier to just call them "socialist" and say that because they got clobbered, people in germany must hate socialism. In reality, the SPD got clobbered precisely because they are so pathetically right-wing; they lost support precisely because their strategy of trying to be CDU-lite has alienated their constituents. Yes, Conservatives have shed their SPD coalition partners, but its crucial to note that CDU (the "union") did not radically increase their vote tally since 2005. What's changed is that the SPD got hammered, while the Left Party (Die Linke) and the right-wing FDP made impressive gains. Because the right-wing FDP made sizable gains, the CDU is able to form a wholly right-wing coalition without the SPD.
Before the article bothers to finish up with the German situation, we get a nuanced, detailed analysis of Spain:
In Spain, the Socialists still get credit for opposing both Franco and the Iraq war.Ugh. Is this all the NYTimes has to offer in the way of political analysis of spain's current conditions? And they say this like opposing the Iraq War and trashing fascism are bad things... If there actually was a party in the United States who opposed the Iraq War I'd give them credit too. Wow, those poor anti-war dupes in Spain. Don't they read the New York Times? Don't they know that socialism is passe?
All we hear about Die Linke is:
In Germany, the broad left, including the Greens, has a structural majority in Parliament, but the Social Democrats, in postelection crisis,must contemplate allying with the hard left, Die Linke, which has roots in the old East German Communist Party.Right... the "hard" left, who, evidently, are all really just a bunch of Stalinists. Whew. Glad we don't have to think seriously about what they have to say. Who knew that "hard" left had to do with:
-- A safety net for everyoneThat was Die Linke's "Six Point Program" that they ran on in the election. Scary shit, isn't it? Sounds like a bunch of silly Stalinist garbage if you asked me... I'm just glad we have real "change' coming to America from the sensibly centrist Obama Administration.
-- Put people's social interests and needs first
-- For a just and future-oriented society
-- Protect democracy and civil rights
-- Peace and social justice
-- Consistently social for democracy and peace
The best part of this article, however, has got to be this line:
Asked this summer if the party was dying, Bernard-Henri Lévy, an emblematic Socialist, answered: “No — it is already dead. No one, or nearly no one, dares to say it. But everyone, or nearly everyone, knows it.”....no, no. You read that correctly. No joke. Benny Levy is an "emblematic socialist", according to the folks over at the NYTimes. Doesn't anyone bother to edit this shit?
Hey, wait there's more:
The Socialist Party, with a long revolutionary tradition and weakening ties to a diminishing working class, is riven by personal rivalries.Yes, the Parti Socialiste in France... paragon of revolutionary passion. What?!
The current PS in France was never a revolutionary force in French politics. Aside from a brief stint in power under Mitterand in the 70s/80s (which was formed as a coalition government with the participation of the French Communist Party), the PS has also never been a dominant party in France.
The PCF, on the other hand, was the main party of the Left in France for the entire post-war period up until its decline in the late 80s. Is it news to anyone that the Parti Socialiste can't seem to accomplish much of anything? The PS has been a consistent loser for the last 20 years straight (particularly embarrassing for this 'center left' party was the recent election when Lionel Jospin failed to make it to the second round of the presidential election, losing to fascist Jean-Marie LePen).
This hardly says anything about socialism as such, let alone the political situation in France. The NPA is an interesting development, but I suppose that doesn't fit the facile american "two party" frame of reference that the author of this article seems to prefer. Or maybe the NPA is just too 'hard' left to be worth commenting on.
So as though the BHL bs wasn't enough, the NYTimes felt it had to go in for another 'expert' with a semi-radical past who has since gone right-wing. According to the virulently anti-communist Tony Judt:
The French Socialist Party “is trapped in a hopeless contradiction,” said Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. It espouses a radical platform it cannot deliverRight, right... the problem with the PS in France is that it is "too radical". In reality, they've been veering further and further right to the 'center' for the last 20 years. They find themselves in the position today of being nearly indistinguishable from Sarkozy. Where Sarkozy opts for deep cuts, they stand for slightly less intense, more 'pragmatic' and 'centrist' cuts. But of course, none of these facts stops the 'third wayist' hacks from complaining every single election cycle that the problem with the neoliberal PS is just that they aren't sufficiently 'centrist'.
Next on the agenda of complex political situations to ineptly misunderstand and blather about: Italy. Now it's no surprise to anyone who follows these things that Italy's electoral left is in complete disarray. But there's a story to be told here. And it's got little to do with socialism, and a lot more to do with the increasing neoliberal turn on Italy's 'center-left'.
But who does the NYTimes talk to about this issue? Someone who any learned person could actually recognize as "left"? Nope, sorry... here's another third-wayist hack:
“We have to understand that Socialism is an answer of the last century,” Mr. Letta said. “We need to build a center-left that is pragmatic, that provides an attractive alternative, and not just an opposition.”Noticing a trend? We hear a lot of the following buzzwords and phrases: pragmatism, socialism=dead, future-oriented, modernized, "new", "third way", centrist, etc....... I mean this isn't new language. This is a redux of the 1990s. All of these recommendations were already tried by the 'center left' Prodi government in the 90s, and look how well it turned out for Italy's electoral left.
But yeah.. right, it's clear that all the left in Italy needs to do is accept a little dose of 'reality' and try to 'modernize' and imitate Berlusconi, so that they can claim the mantle of "pragmatic" and "centrist". That's the future. That's where the new century is heading.
And just like the triumphant capitalist tone of the opening, the article ends with another hooray-for-capitalism bang:
Not an easy syllabus. But without that kind of reform, Mr. Judt said, “I don’t think Socialism in Europe has a future; and given that it is a core constitutive part of the European democratic consensus, that’s bad news.”Yes, thanks for that Tony. Socialism in Europe has no future. Well, that's good enough for me...
Geez, NyTimes. Could you have found a more cynical old jerk to discuss the future of socialism with? Complete bullshit. Ahistorical, lazy, fatalist, tendentious garbage. American newspapers are a joke.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Dear NYTimes, I'm Confused
When certain ideas are prefaced in mainstream media as being 'conventional wisdom' or 'common sense', its a sure bet that whatever follows will be perplexing.
Here's an example, from this morning's NYTimes, listed as "News Analysis":
WASHINGTON — The conventional wisdom, here and around the country, is that the centerpiece of President Obama’s domestic agenda — remaking the health care system to cut costs and cover the uninsured — is on life support and that only a political miracle could revive it. Here’s why the conventional wisdom might be wrong: While the month of August clearly knocked the White House back on its heels, as Congressional town hall-style meetings exposed Americans’ unease with an overhaul, the uproar does not seem to have greatly altered public opinion or substantially weakened Democrats’ resolve.So the first question I ask when reading this is "what is conventional wisdom supposed to be here?". Evidently it's not equivalent to "public opinion", since the author claims a couple sentences later that 'public opinion' hasn't shifted against health care reform, despite the fact that "conventional wisdom" has.
I happen to agree that they're absolutely not the same. But what, then, is "conventional wisdom" in this specific case? The content here that fills out the invocation of the concept of "conventional wisdom", is a narrative about health care being on its deathbed. But why? Where does this come from?
Thankfully, this "News Analysis" article suggests an answer. When the author imagines why the "conventional wisdom" might be wrong she says: "While the month of August clearly knocked the White House back on its heels, as Congressional town hall-style meetings exposed Americans’ unease with an overhaul..." So here's more information about what current 'conventional wisdom' consists of in this article: health care reform is on its deathbed because it faced a series of setbacks in August, when "Congressional town hall-style meetings exposed Americans' unease with an overhaul...".
Now hold it right there. Things are getting really complicated here. Now we read that a spectacle involving a very small percentage of the population "exposed Americans' unease with an overhaul". Yet we read a sentence later that "public opinion hasn't changed", meaning "public opinion" has been steadily in favor of reform. So now we have "conventional wisdom", "public opinion" and a general "unease" among "Americans" writ large. And they are all marching to the beat of a completely different drummer, even though they ostensibly refer to the same exact thing, namely, what most people (say a majority of people) in America think about health care reform.
My hypothesis is that the "conventional wisdom" here and its corollary about "unease" are really just free floating bullshit bouncing off the walls of the echo chamber of mainstream media. In contrast, maybe 'public opinion' here refers to some Rasmussen poll that reflects some sliver of reality.
To call this news article "New Analysis" is a bit like calling a pile of unassembled bike parts "ready to ride".
I'm particularly troubled, here, about the way that the NYTimes and others have handled the "Town Hall" incidents. This article baldly claims that the antics and veinpopping tirades at the events "exposed Americans' unease with health reform". This false on many levels. To make the NYTimes claim about "exposing Americans' unease" true, we'd need to be able to say that the people who showed up at the "Town Hall" meetings were representative of American public convictions in general. But we can't. It's rather obvious that the meetings were an opportunity for the most vocal, deranged, and crazy Right-wing people (who feel like their voices about birth cirtificates aren't being heard, etc.) to come out of the woodwork and make as much noise as possible. It's a smart political tactic, and they succeeded marvelously in causing an 'uproar' by chanting that "Obama is a Nazi", etc.
So why, then, does an article in the NYTimes titlted "News Analysis" claim that this exposed a general unease among Americans?
Analysis here is badly needed. First of all, its now banal that the event damaged the health care reform efforts lead by Obama. But why? Analysis, i.e. critical reflection, suggests not that the events themselves exposed anything about public sentiments, but that the way that the events were appropriated and disseminated in the media involved the positing of certain narratives deployed to make sense out of those events. A dominant narrative that has emerged in the media is that those "Town Hall" freakshows spoke to larger reservations "Americans" have with health care reform. The NYtimes author here is correct to note that this perverse narrative does NOT accord with 'public opinion' (which probably still states, as always, that people want universal health care!). But she only really 'notes' it insofar as she says two apparently contradictory things, of which any thinking person would want to say more. Unbelievable. And we read this in what is, I fear, Americas best newspaper.
Before I wrap this up, I'd like to share the next sentence in the article with you:
"Critical players in the health care industry remain at the negotiating table, meaning they are not out whipping up public or legislative opposition."Ah. Very nice. In logic we call this an invalid inference. It's a little bit like making the following bad argument:
- If I have the flu, then I have a sore throat.
- I have a sore throat.
- Therefore, I have the flu.
The author claims that "critical players in the health care industry remain at the negotiating table". Let's grant that this is true, although we should reasonably ask why they are 'critical' to the success of reform, and what the political dynamics of the 'negotiating table' are.
But because this is true, we are told that something else follows, namely, "they are not out whipping up public or legislative opposition". According to the author of the article, this is just what the first part of the sentence 'means'.
But we can easily imagine a world (this world, as it turns out) in which 'critical industry players' both 'sat down at the negotiating table' AND 'whipped up public or legislative opposition'. So we need an independent reason, separate from the comment about 'negotiation', to show that the 'industry players' aren't involved in 'public opposition' as well. But we don't get one. We get slight of hand.
This is especially eggregious, because OF COURSE the Industry is "whipping up public and legislative opposition" to real reform. There are many examples. Ironcially, one primarily locus of their opposition is at that "negotiation table" that the author refrers to. But why should the "industry players" have a "critical" say in anything regarding reform? Did we ask the Tobacco "industry players" how best to prevent people from getting lung cancer? I'm sure, though, that there were some 'negotiation tables' somewhere along the line there, so I guess we should conclude that the Tobacco industry was logically prevented from "whipping up opposition" to Tobacco policy reform efforts.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Some good news about the economy
Via the NY Times.
That's some comforting news, for those of us who were panicked about the dipping salaries of Wall Street billionaires.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Around the world for 80 grand!
I'm emerging from a long-running hiatus to do what I do best: sigh about the New York Times' coverage of rich folks. The most recent installment is about a law firm which offered some of its associates a deal: take a year off - don't show up for work - and we'll pay you a third of your base pay. That's $80,000.
So of course, the article is about one woman who chose to take the offer and is going to take a trip around the world. For a year. She's considering Tanzania, Rwanda, India, and other exotic places. How do I know this? Because her dining room table is covered with Lonely Planets. My breakfast table, however, is covered with (proverbial) puke.
Could this paper be any more tone-deaf? This irritating theme -- that the recession is turning out to be a perfect time for upper-class, secure people to do some soul-searching and globetrotting -- offends me. Does this law firm's policy really constitute a 'trend' worth mentioning to millions of Americans? Given the employment and income situation of MOST Americans, isn't this article sort of like putting a big, chocolate-covered strawberry under the nose of a starving man and then eating it in front of him?
That being said, I think I'll email this woman and see if she needs a Swahili translator to come along for the East Africa section of the trip. I'm pretty rusty, but it's worth a shot.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
NYTimes: Fucking unbelievable.
Check this bullshit out.
Most important, Mexico is a young democracy that eliminated an essentially one-party political system, controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, that lasted more than 70 years. And with all its defects, the domination of the party, known as the P.R.I., never even approached the same level of virtually absolute dictatorship as that of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or even of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.Say WHA? Unbelievable. Perhaps I'm naive to be surprised (given the NYTimes's ugly track record of taking a strict anti-democratic, right-wing line on Latin American politics). But "absolute dictator"? Comparing Chavez to Mugabe? What the FUCK!? Chavez has been elected by overwhelming majorities in elections with high turnout that have been certified by countless independent international bodies, including Jimmy Carter's organization. These Right-wing slanderers, we should take note, NEVER actually challenge the popular mandate Chavez has in Venezuela because they would have literally no grounds on which to challenge it. He has the staunch support of more than 60% of the electorate, which should come as little surprise since the majority of the country is quite poor and had been previously disempowered and disenfranchised for decades.
What the Right-wing slanderers DO say is that Chavez is stepping on "private enterprise", he's taking freedoms away from the minority (middle class and wealthy business elites) opposition, etc. "Absolute dictator" is completely ridiculous slander.
And this "young fledling democracy" bullshit that the author offers us about Mexico? Its about as credible as his claim that Chavez is an "absolute dictator". He says literally nothing about the 2006 Mexican presidential elections where Felipe Calderón of the right-wing PAN stole the election in a highly suspect and last-minute attempt to stop populist Left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador from winning. (Obrador had consistently led in all major polls for months leading up to the election and was backed by large social movements). When Calderón "won" the election in a haze of controversy and sabotage, George Bush was the first to step up and "recognize" his "victory" and attempt to give credibility to the contested result. Millions of people took to the streets to protest the result, but ultimately nothing came of it.
Venezuela, on the other hand, has a more robust democracy than most countries in the world. Turnout in Venezuelan elections routinely blows US elections out of the water. Morever, Chavez has diffused some forms of power through local councils ("Bolivarian circles") which involves the participation of hitherto ignored groups of Venezuelans at the local-level. But it should come as no surprise that the Right doesn't like Venezuelan democracy, since the electoral mechanism there has consistently (with the exception of Chavez's referendum loss last year) resulted in majorities of Venezuelan's emphatically opposing the neoliberal march of the Right. This is why the US-backed opposition/business elite attempted a coup to overthrow Chavez by force in 2002; because they knew that they couldn't stop the forward momentum of him or the movement behind him by challenging it at the ballot box.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
NYTimes even worse than we thought?
So, Linda Holmes at NPR thinks that whole Dating a Banker Anonymously support group/blog is a great big satirical hoax that the Times fell for. Now looking back at the Times article and at their blog, I think she's right. In fact, I'd bet my savings on it (don't worry, it's not much).
First of all, let it be true so I don't have to think that support group actually exists or those women actually think what they do.
But next, what the hell NYtimes?! Do they so badly want to believe women are vapid, gold digging narcissists that they didn't even question whether this is real?!
Here's Holmes' probably spot-on guess at what happened:
Isn't it totally obvious that the "support group" reported on in the Times doesn't exist, that these are three women -- two writers and an attorney -- who figured out how to tap our deep societal hatred of the recession and hatred of privileged women who get away with everything, and to combine it into a big giant phenomenon that would produce so much instant vitriol that they would absolutely, definitely get a book deal?
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Omg, nytimes, omg...
Wha? Is this really the best way the Times could use its resources to cover the economic collapse? They can't cover the way the recession is hurting the relationships of those who aren't among the elite? I don't even know how to take them seriously. There's the "who cares?" response, the "god, the Times is so vapid" response and the "why does the Times like to give spotlights to people just so they'll play up some of the oldest and lamest gender stereotypes?" angle. I'm not sure which path to go down so I'll just tag it with our oft-used NYTimes tag and move on.For Christine Cameron, the recession became real when the financial analyst she had been dating for about a year would get drunk and disappear while they were out together, then accuse her the next day of being the one who had absconded.
Dawn Spinner Davis, 26, a beauty writer, said the downward-trending graphs began to make sense when the man she married on Nov. 1, a 28-year-old private wealth manager, stopped playing golf, once his passion. “One of his best friends told me that my job is now to keep him calm and keep him from dying at the age of 35,” Ms. Davis said. “It’s not what I signed up for.”
They shared their sad stories the other night at an informal gathering of Dating a Banker Anonymous, a support group founded in November to help women cope with the inevitable relationship fallout from, say, the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the Dow’s shedding 777 points in a single day, as it did on Sept. 29.
In addition to meeting once or twice weekly for brunch or drinks at a bar or restaurant, the group has a blog, billed as “free from the scrutiny of feminists,” that invites women to join “if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life.”
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Foucaultians could have a field day with this
A Crisis of Confidence for Masters of the Universe
See: Dana Becker's The Myth of Empowerment: Women and the Therapeutic Culture in America, Chapter 2, "The Empire of Self Esteem":
In America, individual fulfillment has come almost to represent a social responsibility. The discourse of self-esteem has been transformed into a way of governing or managing ourselves through expert knowledge. Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish employed Bentham’s design of the Panopticon, a model prison, as a metaphor for the way in which power is exerted over individuals in modern society. In this prison, inmates, each in his own cell, would be rendered continually visible, via backlighting, from a central tower. The effect of constant scrutiny on the inmates would be to induce in them “ state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” This power, designated in Foucault’s writings as both “bio-power” and “disciplinary power,” is evidenced in the inmate’s ongoing self-observation. To Foucault the Panopticon is a metaphor for societal institutions, and self-scrutiny represents the manner in which institutions exert power over individuals through a sense of continual self-consciousness – what Foucault terms a “technology” of the self.Sidenote re: the Times article--Why are contemporary psychiatrists so useless?
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
I finally decided how I feel about "Her Body, My Baby."
(That's the title of a jaw-dropping, must-read article in the New York Times Magazine.)
The article is written by Alex Kuczynski, an infertile socialite/writer married to a billionaire, who hires a middle-class woman to bear her biological child. Her story, and the way she tells it, is heartbreaking and excruciatingly honest. Her inner monologue ain't pretty. It contains moments of unvarnished classism, elitism, and rich white privilege. The author is, as my mother put it, "not someone I'd like to get to know better."
But the comments page is a sociological bloodbath, and it's what I'd like to focus on.
The sexist, misogynist demands that some commenters make on Ms. Kuczynski's reproductive choices are just as bad as the author's mind-boggling privilege. Some readers are only capable of responding to her story with proscriptive statements: Jeez, she should have just adopted already! Jeez, she should have just accepted that she was meant to be childless! Can't she help us control the population problem and just adopt a kid that's already been born?
It's particularly ridiculous to demand that infertile women help us solve our "population problem" and just adopt a child who already exists. If this is ethically sound, then rich Americans must immediately stop reproducing, and adopt until every third-world baby has been placed in a home. Does any reasonable person propose this "solution" for fertile couples? No.
The claim that Kuczynski "wasted" countless thousands of dollars in her selfish pursuit of a biological child is questionable. Adoptions, whether domestic or international, are no cheaper than hiring a surrogate (around $25,000). In fact, if you want to talk about costs, how about the fact that an acquaintance of mine paid $15,000 in 2003 to give birth to her own, naturally conceived daughter in a hospital? Kuczynski's identity as the wife of a billionaire has certainly raised some hackles, but it is unfair to claim that her use of resources was somehow morally unsound. She spent $100,000 on a baby. Most of her peers have spent that much on a car. Yet her decision to use that money to become a mother outrages us. Why?
Because our culture largely teaches us that we have the right to judge, even to control, women's reproductive decisions. Because women do crazy, world-destroying things like
- have abortions, thus killing babies and making God cry
- go through expensive fertility treatments, thus wasting money they should have given to charity
- hire proletarian wombs, thus exploiting each other
- adopt a brown baby from abroad, thus becoming arrogant colonialist bastards
- remain childless, thus destroying femininity and The Family
- give birth to 12 children, thus destroying the environment, straining the welfare system, and disrupting restaurant dinners across the country.
See? Women just can't get it right.
As Jezebel put it in a different context, we need to GIVE OTHER LADIES A DAMN BREAK.
It took me a long time to decide how I felt about this piece. I can't believe I'm defending a millionaire socialite Times reporter who is personally responsible for a substantial percentage of the fluff in the Style section. I don't care. She's a self-absorbed, spoiled brat. She's also a woman who wants a child, like millions of women before her. So give her a damn break.
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