catalog

Well-known member
geriatrix has the really fit wife doesn't he. spen and biz obvs the shield bearers. and maybe, just maybe, constant escape is getafix?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
This guy is good I think:



Independence for the North with a smile on its face and against the culture war shite.
 

version

Well-known member
"The persistent trick of modern politics – that appears to fool us repeatedly – is to disguise economic and political interests as cultural movements."
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Well I think much of the distinction between cultural/political/economic is in what most people would consider semantics, trivia. That isn't to say that such distinctions ought to be considered trivial, nor that most people are dumb - somewhere in between, perhaps.

Like do most people use the term political to refer to policies? Would pointing this out be received as pedantry?

That quote seems to present itself as revelatory, asserting that flows of power pass undetected as flows underneath power, but again I'm skeptical that the people in power have the cognitive wherewithal to truly strategize and pull this stuff off. Granted, all things considered, its not too difficult to more or less determine the average citizen's belief system. That said, I think much of this talk gives too much credit to those in influential positions. I think much of our hegemonic influences happen to work out - that half-baked plans beat out quarter-baked plans.
 

version

Well-known member
Brexit has been pitched as a cultural thing, but I very much doubt someone likes James Dyson, a billionaire, really gives a shit about culture, immigration etc. It's just much easier to convince regular people to vote for what he wants if he spins it that way rather than because he wants to pay fewer taxes and deregulate his industry.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Monbiot's taking the War in Heaven line.
Decent piece, that, though I'm not sure it will have told any thinking person anything they didn't already know.

A big problem for progressives, when the the defining ideological battle is between two factions of capitalists, is that they can't attack one side without inadvertently supporting the other, or at least being vulnerable to accusations that they are.
 

luka

Well-known member

luka

Well-known member
Barty says it proves business interests don't have the final say but I'm not willing to accept that interpretation
 

luka

Well-known member
Even this is not strictly true it's partially true and a great idea in its own right

Johnson’s government is what warlord money buys. It could be seen as the perfect expression of the Pollution Paradox, a concept that I think is essential to understanding our politics. What this means is that the dirtier or more damaging an enterprise is, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it’s not regulated out of existence. As a result, political funding comes to be dominated by the most harmful companies and oligarchs, which then wield the greatest political influence. They crowd out their more accommodating rivals.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Barty says it proves business interests don't have the final say but I'm not willing to accept that interpretation
A lot of business interests will make a killing from it. They're outnumbered by those that will lose out, probably, but I suppose they're just cleverer and more ruthless.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah that's why I latched onto that war in heaven line it seemed to be an explanation
 

version

Well-known member
You should read that big Harper's piece I posted in The Coming Authoritarianism. It explains the situation pretty well. The gist of it is we're heading back to a similar situation to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the sense that the elite operate in a different economy to the rest of us, one that isn't constrained by borders, much like they did when the East India Company was at its peak. That, coupled with AI and automation, means they can gradually phase out democracy and leave the running of things to machines whilst rendering the rest of us obsolete.
 
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