The End of Civilization.

luka

Well-known member
Paglia thinks the failures of her generation were caused by taking too much acid. Dropping it. Investing in holy grail quests for personal spiritual actualization and losing their grasp of the real.

On reflection I've realised the issue was not taking nearly enough acid. The golden rule of life is never ever turn back.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
i am reading an interview with varoufakis and my god it is bleak. the original article is in german: https://www.republik.ch/2020/11/14/...-aber-das-neue-weigert-sich-geboren-zu-werden but you can run it trough google translate: https://translate.google.com/transl...-aber-das-neue-weigert-sich-geboren-zu-werden

he's talking about left and right and which ideology will benefit from the american elections and in his view, this marginal biden victory is the worst outcome of them all if you consider the long term effects. for him, either biden should have won with a very big margin, or trump should have won. both would've been better than the current outcome. i copy-pasted it here but the whole thing is worth reading.

After all, Joe Biden has already announced that he will revive the Paris climate agreement.
A symbolic act, nothing more. The best possible result would have been a substantial win by Joe Biden. He could have been committed to his promises and the Republicans would have broken into two camps.

What would have been the second best result?
A victory for Trump.

Stop it.
I am convinced that what has happened now is worse.

You have to explain that. What could have been worse than four more years of Trump psychosis? For example, racists and fascist militias who feel encouraged?
Now is not the time for wishful thinking, which might be possible in the first euphoria under Biden. It's time for realism, so let me be realistic: the United States economy is set to crash over the next two years because of Covid-19. There will be another massive spike in structural unemployment, of deprivation - industrial workers and craftsmen will be even worse off than they were in the last fifteen years. For blacks, for Latinos, for everyone on the fringes, it will be even more difficult to earn enough money to survive at all. With the current election result, Biden will hide behind the Senate, he does not have to create incentive programs, a Green New Deal or public construction projects.The Republicans will kill everything. Who is blamed for the crash? The left. Because with her progressive politics she allegedly prevented clear majorities. It will be four tough years with harsh media attacks.

Couldn't the opposite also happen: Biden realizes that politically he cannot survive without the left?
The opposite has already happened. The transition team of the Biden presidency consists almost exclusively of people from the party establishment. All the people from the left who sparked extreme movement in the party, who massively mobilized for Biden, are being teased. The pressure is already massive, for example on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And she will have to put up with questions from her own camp: “You told us there was a deal. You said we can swallow the bitter pill and choose Biden, who stands for big business. What about the deal now? " The deal is off the table. People feel betrayed and that will weaken the left. In contrast to the right.

Why should the right emerge stronger from this chaos?
71 million voted Donald Trump. 71 million. A large proportion of these people are now convinced - even if it is not true - that their choice was stolen from them. And that will make these people one. They become more toxic, more radical, more fascist. Even more alt-right . Therefore, the radical right will benefit from the coming Great Depression, and the left in the US will almost perish. As a result of Joe Biden's narrow victory. That's why I would have preferred a victory for Donald Trump instead of the current result.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Did we get a good answer on why/when @slackk became an astute political commentator? I'm wondering whether the same explanation might be applicable to our Dutch/German ambassador.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
it feels sometimes as if music disappeared from my life. i guess a big part of it has to do with not being able to go to clubs or dancing.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Yeah I know what you mean. You need somewhere to put that time/energy. Music is not the same for me without the live/going out element. Today I drove round aimlessly for 30 mins just so I could listen to music really loud.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
i am reading an interview with varoufakis and my god it is bleak. the original article is in german: https://www.republik.ch/2020/11/14/...-aber-das-neue-weigert-sich-geboren-zu-werden but you can run it trough google translate: https://translate.google.com/transl...-aber-das-neue-weigert-sich-geboren-zu-werden

he's talking about left and right and which ideology will benefit from the american elections and in his view, this marginal biden victory is the worst outcome of them all if you consider the long term effects. for him, either biden should have won with a very big margin, or trump should have won. both would've been better than the current outcome. i copy-pasted it here but the whole thing is worth reading.

I suppose that's a possibility, but it's still just one person's opinion. I think that if Trump had won this year then there wouldn't be a 2024 election - there would be an "election", like the ones they have in Russia. The establishment of a permanent Trump dynasty.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
We’ll get to see the US state’s commitment to the democratic process if Trump persists with interfering with the transition.

He’s already rowing back though as far as I can tell.

There is clearly an appetite for fascism in America but that isn’t sufficient. Let’s not get over excited.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
i am reading an interview with varoufakis and my god it is bleak
I read the full interview. my take - he talks a lot of sense, I agree wholeheartedly with his global vision and main structural point - that austerity is the global engine of right-wing nationalism/fascism (all the cultural stuff just supercharges that engine) - and unlike most Europeans pontificating on American politics he at least has an idea of what he's talking about. and the case he makes for preferring a Trump victory > narrow Biden victory is reasonable - but I still don't agree with it, or at least the certainty with which it's expressed, for several reasons.

I think he's underrating some things, like the immediate need to get Trump out, which outweighs the real concerns about backlash, and the resiliency of the electoral left. there's undoubtedly immense pressure on AOC etc rn, but they've been under intense pressure and relentless assault for 5 years now. the left has been forged in fire, and I think it'll hang tough through an awful lot. and otoh I think he's overrating the capacity of the right to unite - the far right will harden and grow, but it will still be a heterogeneous grouping whose members often enough hate and suspect each other as much as anyone.

don't get me wrong, we're in for grim times ahead and what he's suggesting is easily more realistic than that Franco Berardi civil war nonsense you linked awhile back (miserabilist Eurotakes on the U.S. are really becoming yr specialty), I just think he's taking a rather pessimistic view of the U.S. and describing it as inevitable. America is terrible in many ways but leftists - foreign and domestic - tend to underestimate the great potential that for good that is also contained within Americans.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
he's dead right about some things tho. Biden's transition team and what it means for his Presidency is an absolute disaster, though not exactly an unexpected one. tho idk if ppl will be so quick to blame AOC + co when Biden turns out to be the same gutless corporate shill he's always been. people swallowed that bitter pill with eyes wide open, in the knowledge that it was still preferable to swallowing a cyanide pill.

that's also why it's so important to keep pushing back hard against that blame the left bullshit like I've been doing in Election 2020 (and irl) and other ppl are doing in a million other places - why it isn't just quibbling. it's - potentially literally - dead serious business. things that will directly effect tens of millions of "real people with real issues" as I saw someone put it recently.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
the fascist coup - wasnt that supposed to happen this time around?
people have been telling me me there would be a right-wing coup if the GOP candidate lost every election cycle going back to 2004

this is the first time I took it remotely seriously, and I didn't take it all that seriously. he doesn't have the guts or the guns.

(in b4 someone says - yes we should, again, all remain hypervigilant till he's safely out of office)

what I did take very seriously was the potential for another Trump term to warp American democracy beyond repair
 

luka

Well-known member
good stuff padraig I'm cheering you on with all this politics stuff youre the only politics writer I read
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
There is clearly an appetite for fascism in America but that isn’t sufficient
not yet, anyway - and there's also a taste for anti-fascism

not that I want to at all perpetuate the Qanon LARPing fantasies of tacticool bros fighting Antifa in Civil War II: This Time It's Cultural

but it seems quite clear that there's a huge solid mass of ppl that would actively resist fascism, push comes to shove

since we're in a thread entitled "The End of Civilization"
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
and you could really say there's just a taste for fascism in people (isn't that what Deleuze - among others - was ultimately on about?)

but the American version has been well-known for a very long time - Lewis published It Can't Happen Here in '35 - and we haven't succumbed yet
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
good stuff padraig I'm cheering you on with all this politics stuff youre the only politics writer I read
thanks luke, I appreciate the support and I'm glad you like it. I'll try to continue living up to that standard.

I spent a long time trying not to let it consume my life cos it almost all makes me so angry and sad but it's become basically impossible not to.

what will @craner say tho? perhaps we can keep him on as emeritus editor and features writer. he does long-form much better than I do.
 
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