Hillary Clinton has a great time in Cartagena
Hillary Clinton is enjoying every minute of the Summit of the Americas this weekend in Cartagena, Colombia.
The AFP snapped some pics of the U.S. secretary of state sipping some beer and dancing at the international summit.
Between this and “Texts from Hillary”, the former first lady has become an overnight internet sensation.
OMG
“Do not assume that gender politics or feminist concerns come in neat packages easily legible to the trained eye. Instead, allow your research to expand your own view of what a “feminist politics” may be. It could be, for example, that protests against neoliberal market restructuring in Egypt are understood within a broad political framework that includes notions of gender justice. As Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu Lughod have taught us, liberal feminism’s assumptions as to what constitute “feminist politics” or “feminist causes” are at best flawed. At worst they are exercises in epistemological hegemony and the violent remaking of the world according to secular and neoliberal rights frameworks. Furthermore, do not assume that what we call the “feminist canon” is exhaustive or particular to western philosophy in that it is not constituted through a series of exclusions, hierarchies, and imperial histories. After all Simone de Beauvoir, who taught us all that a women is not born but made, also wrote in terms we now recognize as “Islamophobic” about women “under” Islam in Algeria at the time when Algeria was a French settler colony. This does not mean we should dismiss de Beauvoir, just as it would be too easy to condemn Hegel or Marx for their “views” on Africa. Rather, it is crucial to critically inhabit and navigate the reality that the western canon was, and is constituted through producing a series of “selves” and “others.””—
Emphasis mine.
This is something to keep in mind whether you’re the type of person Maya Mikdashi is talking about, or the kind of person on the opposite spectrum, i.e. people of color who are so willing to completely dismiss anyone who is part of the western canon.
Santorum’s call for Puerto Rico to adopt English sparks serious backlash
Rick Santorum and Governor Luis Fortuño at La Fortaleza, the governor’s Mansion in San Juan on Wednesday. After the backlash regarding his English-language comments, Santorum tried to explain his stance. (Facebook.com/RickSantorum)
By MATTHEW JAFFE
Channel: PoliticsRick Santorum on Wednesday became the first Republican presidential hopeful this election cycle to visit Puerto Rico ahead of the island commonwealth’s Sunday primary, but his stop thus far, rather than boost his support, has primarily sparked controversy and even spurned a key supporter.
Duh, you dumb fuck.
Santorum: Puerto Rico must adopt English for statehood
Many Republicans share Santorum’s belief, but could it rub Puerto Rican voters the wrong way. (Flickr: Gage Skidmore)
By JORDAN FABIAN
Channel: PoliticsPuerto Rico must adopt English as its main language if it wants to be considered for U.S. statehood, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Wednesday.
BRB, DYING
Slavoj Zizek and Costas Douzinas arguing at a recent Q&A
Zizek: This is for me the crucial problem and when you say, “well, it’s a long process, we will find it”, it’s just rhetorics. Of course it’s a long process … but your position is basically, if I’ve got it correctly, we cannot say anything, we will see what happens. I mean this is for me a little bit too risky … The big problem is: can we imagine another way of what Gramsci called the “new order” of things functioning normally in a different way.Douzinas: But what you’re saying … the “new order” –– this is total eschatology.
Zizek: No, because I’m not saying that this is the end of history.
Douzinas: No no, what you’re telling us is we have to know how paradise is. Before we know what paradise is we’re not going to make any attempt to get there. And what I’m saying is that it is much more important to try to get to paradise and once we get there we’ll work it out. Because your recipe and your advice all over the world to these movements, to people who are standing up and mobilizing and so on, is that before you have a full blueprint of how society is going to be after the change you should not do anything. Do a bit of protest, do a bit of hippydom here and hippydom there, and since you do not have your full constitutional order and party in place, forget it!
Zizek: I never said this. What I said is, on the contrary, that if you just want to go to a paradise without knowing where you are going you can well end in hell.
Douzinas: Indeed, this is the chance you take. As [Walter] Benjamin said, the worst and best are very close to one another, but unless you aim for the best you don’t get anywhere.
Zizek: Let me be concrete. I never spoke about what will be. Who knows what will be? … But my point is this one: I don’t think you can simply say how to get to paradise. Paradise is there. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the sad 20th century experience, it is that the germs of paradise must be already here in how we are organizing … and direct democracy is not enough …
Douzinas: You’re a very imaginative guy so use your imagination and give us some alternative …
Zizek: … our focus should … be … on different forms of representation. There lies the true creative work. In normal times, you cannot have permanent activity [in terms of horizontal or direct democracy], you need representation, but you need a type of representation, maybe even less democratic, I don’t know.
Douzinas: I don’t think we disagree.
Zizek: Yeah … can’t you see what worries me is that we will have a beautiful protest and then this protest will disappear and then all that will remain is that we will feel very well: what a nice time we had during the protest. Show me what will remain, show me what will remain as new institutional forms! And I agree with you, something probably will emerge. I’m not as pessimistic as I may sound here. Just let’s look at history and how people thought many things [were] not possible. Let’s not forget. Here we should even sincerely praise democracy itself: my God, up until modernity people thought the moment you don’t have a natural pretender to power, the moment you open up the field and admit the empty place of power, it’s catastrophe. The great triumph of democracy is that it turned this moment –– when the thrown is empty –– into the resource for the stability of the system. So things can be done. But I don’t want to terrorize people into this: oh give me a detailed blueprint! –– no! I just think that we should be very careful … . The people with their protests are not asking questions, they are an answer, but an opaque answer. What we intellectuals can do with our knowledge is not to provide answers, but to start to raise the right questions, so that the answer can only come from the people. The answer will be recognised as the answer if we provide the frame for the question to it. This is a much more modest model where nonetheless we intellectuals are crucial … I think, if anything, [given] the 20th Century fiascos, we intellectuals lost this arrogant right to say, “we have the answers, we show you the way” …
"
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeoisie, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling, and buying.
But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeoisie about freedom is general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the nonexistence of any property for the immense majority of society.
From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
…But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
" -Marx and Engel, Communist Manifesto
QED, libertarians
"I don’t believe in an America where the separation between church and state is absolute."
-Rick Santorum, who, it is relevant to point out, is leading the GOP primary polls. (via andrewgraham)
Jürgen Habermas might agree. [source]
(via thenoobyorker)
Ugh, Habermas is the WURST him and Santorum were meant for each other
"Marxism shows that a politics based upon man in general, the citizen in general, justice and truth in general, once it is inserted into the concrete totality of history, works to the advantage of very particular interests…if the proletariat is that ‘universal class’ we have described from Marx, then the interests of this class bring human values into history and the proletariat’s power is the power of humanity."
-Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror"This is why the notion of reform is so stupid and hypocritical. Either reforms are designed by people who claim to be representative, who make a profession of speaking for others, and they lead to a division of power, to a distribution of this new power which is consequently increased by a double repression; or they arise from the complaints and demands of those concerned. This latter instance is no longer a reform but revolutionary action that questions (expressing the full force of its partiality) the totality of power and the hierarchy that maintains it…There is no denying that our social system is totally without tolerance; this accounts for its extreme fragility in all its aspects and also its need for a global form of repression. In my opinion, you were the first-in your books and in the practical sphere-to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others. We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this “theoretical” conversion-to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf."
-Deleuze, in conversation with FoucaultCrass Libertarianism, Liberty, Ideology, & Ron Paul fans
I got sick a couple of weeks ago and forgot that one of my favorite trolls is wishing me mad death and napalmings and such. So, for my new followers, I thought I’d repost some highlights of what got me in trouble with the logical positivists, the Ron Paul fans, and their hysterical apologists. (Any bisexual snark is reserved for Leon.)
I began writing about libertarianism this summer. Somewhere in my archives, you can find me struggling to discuss capitalist libertarianism, trying to come to terms with what to call it. I settled on “crass libertarianism”. About that time, I began being trolled by Ron Paul fans, logical positivists, and anarcho-capitalists. Most of them have given up reblogging my posts because I insisted that if they wanted to talk about capitalism and libertarianism, even positivism, that they’d need to begin referring to the actual theories and theorists, rather than giving me some shit paraphrased from mises.org.
1. US Libertarianism is in hate with itself
Libertarianism, from anarcho-capitalism to objectivism, denies social being yet depends on its formation (namely, society,) for its denial, its rhetoric, its discourse. They are the only social political movement I know of that denies itself as part of its ideological representation of reality.
I wrote this earlier on The Weight of Emptiness:
2. Ron Paul, Ideologist
If freedom is “taking your own risks,” then freedom for Paul has nothing to do with the libertarian sacred cow, Liberty. Freedom is being free from others, and nothing more. Liberty is the rhetorical object embodying this being with(out) others.
Not only is Ron Paul a capitalist ideologist. He’s an aristocrat with a compulsion to cultivate the traditional white power structure.
I write “ideologist” in combination with the tag “libertarianism is stupid” for many reasons, but each reason rests with(in) the most stupid thing libertarians like Ron Paul discuss: regulation. (I believe this is why he is nothing more than a common Republican.)
If what I’ve illustrated in many posts about Paul, anarcho-capitalism, and American libertarianism is true, that Liberty for libertarians is the ability to be more or less free from others, then this social and political movement, from capitalist anarchists to fascist objectivists, is about nothing less than insuring regulations only exist to compose citizens as free individuals who must be free from others. We could make this ethical and bring in “ought to be”: the libertarian ethos is focused on regulating society to compose citizens as free individuals who should be free from others. And people are more or less free from others dependent upon their status. This is a must because libertarians believe individuals should be status-seeking.
In nature, an individual is never being free-from-others. (This is being as a noun; “free from others” modifies it.) In markets, a consumer is never consuming free from others. In society, a citizen is never living free from others. This free from others is an ideological construction. In other words, it is imaginary. As such, it is a highly regulated representation of reality that relies on ancient and aristocratic notions of the city and citizens. Libertarianism is not to be confused with a new movement that is looking forward in its progressivism, say that’s represented in the current, growing Occupy Movement. It’s the old order of wealthy and privileged elites who wish to define the best we can be via a highly idealized vision of past orders.
I do believe that libertarianism is stupid. Stupid enough to not understand that the core of its own complex ideological structure calls out for a very narrow construction of what is intended to be seen as a free and public discourse community regulated to reflect an ideal version of nature, market and society that has never existed. It’s not that they believe their own representations of reality as the only reality that’s problematic. That’s just common fundamentalism we cope with in free societies and marginalize as anti-intellectual. It’s that they wish to force everyone else to live according to their rules. So much for liberty and freedom.
Anyone who denies social and shared good(s) exist separate from economic good(s), as crass libertarians do, is a very dangerous kind of fundamentalist. Libertarians are tricky because they use the anti-intellectual knee-jerk response to the words “liberty” and “freedom” to offer cover for their elitism. We live in a capitalist market economy that’s ideally free. But what free means in the capitalist free market is free to exchange goods and services. Unfortunately, we also have a money economy. As we all know, the money economy rather unjustly limits freedom in all communities within society to those individuals who have more money than others. Even Adam Smith had to handle this ethical problem of unjust social standing he referred to as unearned ambition.
Libertarians have no ability to cope with the unjust money economy. It’s why they hold equality in contempt. In addition, they conflate the money economy with nature via a constructed term Hayek called the spontaneous social order, and I often call the liberal social order. This is where aristocracy enters via another construction from Greek, the catallaxy. Supposedly, you can’t make enemies into friends without exchanging money for goods and services—in other words, without trade across borders.
A libertarian can’t talk to you about these things. Go ahead and try.
3. Why I hate Ludwig Von Mises
It’s simple. To take Mises’s work on human action seriously, I’d have to first admit that capitalism is natural and that democracy depends on its unregulated function. Second, I’d have to admit that I’m much better described as a consumer than a citizen. Mises’s theory was constructed to justify a society’s use of death and the threat of death for billions who are not US citizens. It’s theory developed to make socialism appear to lead to communism as democracy leads to capitalism. It’s opposed to the concept of a general shared good. It’s constructed to reward unearned ambition and inheritance as a natural right. In other words, it’s constructed to eradicate discussions about equality in human society. In this manner, it’s highly aristocratic.
To contrast capitalism and communism the way Mises and his followers do—that the latter is natural and the former is artificial—is troubling. First and most important, it’s rhetoric. It really doesn’t mean anything to those who don’t believe it. In this manner, it’s a fiction. In my opinion, it illustrates a major flaw with much of the cold war era’s theory about liberty and capitalism. It’s a critical attitude towards humanity that illustrates human being (human action) as the natural recipient of something we created, namely capitalism. Mises struggles, as do other capitalist theorists like Hayek, to find the source of capitalism in human society and as a result of nature. That’s where catallaxy and catallactic come from: the idea that the unregulated exchanging of goods and services peacefully and justly organizes society as the result of a spontaneous social order that results from the unregulated exchange. That’s a fucking fiction. It’s white fiction about the earliest days of organized human society when we are taught we became civilized. (You know, son, that business is the cornerstone of civilization. Trade. Free trade. Without it, civilization would end. Get the fuck out of here with that nonsense.)
Capitalism is a highly regulated economic system. To insist it’s part of nature (the liberal social order) is interesting, but suspect. Moreover, it explicitly demonizes a significant aspect of human being, shared good and the impulse to seek it out—in other words, the impulse to address inequality, to organize our lives, our communities, our society. It’s hard to to take seriously a moral system for economic being that constructs a complex and artificial framework for human being that insists we pretend it’s natural while at the same time denigrating the one thing it accepts we naturally seek to do.
It’s hard not to see Mises as a cold warrior. In this manner, he’s a hero to some, I suppose. But to what end? His works hold no answers for growing poverty and corruption. For him, we are all consumers of products produced by entrepreneurs who listen to our wishes. That’s really it, that’s his theory of demand. We want what we buy because what we buy is produced to satisfy what we want by really smart rich guys. That’s fucking insane stuff.
We have the ideal theorist for an idealized capitalist society fueled by white power and white fiction about the wealthy white man and his just inheritance of everything he stole.
4. Crass Libertarian-isms: Liberty
Liberty, for crass libertarians, is a rhetorical tool.
An object.
Liberty reflects what the individual observing it sees as any thing, process, and/or state of being that makes one feel free of obligation, duty and responsibility—these three often being most responsible for citizens’ anxiety and dread in public.
Liberty is a rhetorical tool designed to make one think about freedom while being educated about how to behave in a capitalist market.
Liberty looks like it has roots in a historical tradition of republicanism and democracy and sounds in tune with capitalism. They appear to go hand in hand.
Liberty is, however, a shape-shifting placeholder for one’s desire to be free from others while laboring with them. It justifies one’s own slavery while excusing others’. Liberty, therefore can be seen as a Capitalist’s ideal form of Cooperation.
Liberty reminds people of an idea they think they share. But the idea was constructed to look old, treasured, lost and recoverable. Liberty has been designed by capitalist economists and libertarian theorists to appear just out of reach. If you have not the liberty you want, it’s because you haven’t worked hard enough, or because the government is keeping you down.
Liberty is part of the white power tradition in the United States.
———
When listening to a political leader, public official, and/or community organizer using Liberty to organize any effort, think twice before trusting him. (Him is appropriate here. Liberty is part of white masculinity. It’s almost always heterosexist.) They’re working in a tradition of white power, imperialism and capitalist economic theory—theory that justifies unearned poverty, war and slavery of others—that justifies the unearned ambition of the wealthiest members of society. Capitalist Libertarians are always anti-socialist, anti-anarchist. They are statists.
5. On Crass Libertarianism Wealth Redistribution:
When you talk to a capitalist about taxes and government spending, inevitably the capitalist will want to begin speaking about wealth. A common conversation is that we, as in our government acting on behalf of citizens, should be promoting (spending on and investing in) wealth creation not wealth redistribution. Never mind that the claim is unreasonable. Specifically, business owners, entrepreneurs and employers in general do not create wealth. Wealth is a capitalist word that is supposed to be a synonym with value. Wealthy people do not create value. We know how value works, but wealth, you know, is the root in wealthy. So, wealth and the wealthy go together. It’s just common sense. Right? Don’t get pulled into a discussion with such shitty use of common sense and language.
When you hear wealth, you should always insist the conversation returns to labor and value. That’s the most important thing. Capitalists do not want to talk about value. Capitalists want to argue that wealthy people create demand. We know that spending creates demand, but again, capitalists will not want to talk about spending. Capitalists will not want to talk about the fact that money in the hands of the poor is much more stimulative than money in the hands of the rich. Why? Well, for example, capitalist libertarians like to believe that 1$ wealthy people spend is worth more than 1$ poor people spend. It’s that simple. It’s an absurd debate to get into. Always insist the conversation turn to labor and value. Bring the conversation from spending, debt, and wealth back to the basic relationship between the employer and employee.
You’ll discover that the capitalists aren’t capable of discussing value and labor because they typically don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t done their homework. They’re simply repeating propaganda.
See also my post from last week. I wrote:
5%, in the US, consume 80% of the capital gains income. That income is taxed at 50% of what it would taxed at if it were normal income. 1% control 40% of that capital gains income. In other words, most US citizens don’t have any access to the wealth their labor produces and a few take advantage of all that labor for their own benefit without having earned it.
When you hear a conservative or libertarian talk about personal responsibility, you’re listening to somebody fighting for the cause of the wealthiest and whitest citizens and against the well-being of the majority of citizens who have no access to it now, nor historically ever have. Personal responsibility really means work that others should do so I can continue to benefit from it and it only applies to privileged individuals who can afford to profit from others’ labor.
If you don’t see the class warfare against the poor, you’re an asshole and an idiot.
Useful primer in why libertarianism is a simmering crock of shit.
