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The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2022-140
Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:
— Other issues:
Social Media Manipulation:
China:
War crimes:
Use as open (Not Ukraine) thread …
@Grieved #89
The key takeway I hope people take away from the article is that it clearly and correctly places blame on both Republican and Democrat past Presidents.
It also clearly points the finger toward a complicit media in the fog surrounding us all.
As for whether Europeans or Americans will act, the answer is yes.
But when, less clear and how – is the 64 dollar question.
This article talks about 5 lessons from history
Lesson #1: People suffering from sudden, unexpected hardship are likely to adopt views they previously thought unthinkable.
One of the most fascinating parts of the Great Depressions isn’t just that the economy collapsed, but how quickly and dramatically people’s views changed when it did.
Americans voted Herbert Hoover into office in 1928 with one of the biggest landslides in history (444 electoral college votes). They voted him out in 1932 with a landslide in the other direction (59 electoral college votes).
Then the big changes began.
The gold standard, gone. Gold actually became illegal to own.
Public works, surged.
Attempts to provide taxpayer-funded old-age pension insurance made no progress for decades, with supporters arrested on the Capitol lawn during the most serious push after World War I. The Depression practically flipped a switch: a fringe idea was suddenly embraced. The Social Security Act was passed in 1935 372 to 33 in the House of Representatives, and 77 to 6 in the Senate.
On the other side of this was an alleged coup by wealthy businessmen to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt, with a Marine General named Smedley Butler taking his place as dictator, similar to fascist trends sweeping Europe at the time.
These are not the kind of things that occur when people are sleeping well and have stable jobs. It’s not until your life is upended, your hopes dashed, your dreams uncertain that people begin taking ideas they’d never consider before seriously.
Nowhere was this more powerful than in Germany, where the Great Depression was preceded by a devastating hyperinflation that destroyed all paper wealth.
The book What We Knew interviews German civilians after World War II, seeking to understand how one of the most civilized cultures turned so sharp, so quickly, and committed the worst atrocities in history:
[Interviewer]: At the beginning of this interview, you said that most grown-ups welcomed Hitler’s measures.
[German civilian]: Yes, clearly. One has to remember that in 1923 we had the inflation … nobody had anything, everybody was unhappy. Then Adolf came to power with his new idea. For most that was indeed better. People who hadn’t had a job for years had a job. And then the people were all for the system. When someone helps you get out of an emergency situation and into a better life, then you’re going to give them your support. Do you think people would then say, “This is all such nonsense. I’m against that”? No. That doesn’t happen. How things were done later on is something else. But the people at that time were happy, even full of enthusiasm, and they all joined in.
These are some of the most extreme examples that exist. But the idea that people who are under stress quickly embracing ideas and goals they never would during calm times has left its fingerprints all over history.
The other 5 lessons are much weaker:
Lesson #2: Reversion to the mean occurs because people persuasive enough to make something grow don’t have the kind of personalities that allow them to stop before pushing too far.
Tries to say that determined people are what is needed to build and also what causes problems later. Ignores the real issue of psycho- and socio-pathy, as well as criminogenic enterprises and sectors.
Lesson #3: Unsustainable things can last longer than you anticipate.
Meh. No different than theoretical statistics not working well, in most cases, with real world gambling…
Lesson #4: Progress happens too slowly for people to notice; setbacks happen too fast for people to ignore.
This is actually a great point, but the example used is horrific: the airplane. Warren Buffet has said that the world would be far better off, financially, if someone had gone back and shot the Wrights before their plane took off. The airplane sector has consistently been a black financial hole…but its ongoing existence is well explained by its utility to the rich and powerful.
Lesson #5: Wounds heal, scars last.
Another decent point but followed with a series of really bad examples, with the Silent Generation behavior being the only one that is remotely valid.
Posted by: c1ue | Aug 31 2022 22:49 utc | 90
Some historical / research info on the difficulties of understanding the meaning of, and the role of “Neoliberalism” in the world today – including that it manifests as Russia being distinctly anti/non-Neoliberal and China only partly so, and the West overwhelmingly so.
Referring to comments on https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/08/ukraine-a-frontline-report-vanishing-foreign-weapons/comments/page/2/#comments including :
Craig Murray: Marx Was Right https://consortiumnews.com/2022/08/31/craig-murray-marx-was-right/ Posted by: bevin | Aug 31 2022 21:21 utc | 150
and Posted by: bevin | Aug 31 2022 21:38 utc | 158
and Posted by: Nobody | Aug 31 2022 21:58 utc | 163
“With respect to Ukraine and the neoliberal project’s inability to do anything without war…”
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Aug 31 2022 22:14 utc | 166
“It’s official. Craig Murray is a total idiot.
Posted by: Scorpion | Aug 31 2022 23:03 utc | 171
“In what way does the word ‘neo-liberalism’ have anything to do with deliberately concentrating wealth amid general poverty? Is it a deliberate con? Or what? What’s ‘liberal’ about that, or ‘neo’ for that matter? ”
Posted by: Scorpion | Aug 31 2022 23:07 utc | 173
“IMO the gibberish comes from who ever is using the language, either intentionally to disinform and confuse or unintentionally due to poor education or having been propagandised for a lifetime. Using language correctly is like everything else in life. I appreciate the posters here who attempt to define the terms we throw around. […]”
Posted by: K | Aug 31 2022 23:17 utc | 175
” It’s perfectly easy for me to understand. I’m not sure what the disconnect is. The neoliberal economic and political order that took off w/ Reagan and Thatcher is designed to concentrate wealth in as few hands as possible through the mechanisms Murray both describes and alludes to. “
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Aug 31 2022 23:18 utc | 176
“Sociopaths are functionally a different species, as alluded to in Peter Watts book “Blindsight”. They must be identified and isolated as such if humanity is to have a future. ”
Posted by: Moaobserver | Aug 31 2022 23:25 utc | 177
” Going to comment on political terminology, but where it belongs on the open thread “
Posted by: watcher | Aug 31 2022 23:30 utc | 179
and Posted by: LightYearsFromHome | Aug 31 2022 23:36 utc | 181
” Well first, I think the word ‘neoliberal’ is wrong, at least the way he defined it (ie neo and liberal do not mean what he says the word means) but which I think is right (in terms of how the word is used). ”
Posted by: Scorpion | Sep 1 2022 1:06 utc | 188
1) Basics Neoliberalism explained 4mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_ruEbn4jU0
2) How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (w/ Philip Mirowski)
@4:40 […] the labels that Americans use are amazingly confused about politics you know what is a liberal what is a libertarian and of course what is the neoliberal so let’s let’s try to make it a little bit more clear is that eventually what happens in neoliberalism was it’s a it’s a political position that does not believe in laissez faire anymore it believes in the market but it believes that you have to have a strong state and that the neoliberal have to take over the strong state to impose the kind of market society that they think would be ideal […] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsiT9P87J4g
3) The Neoliberal Optimism Industry gaslights us into complacency and political impotence. Today, we’ll be speaking with Dr. Jason Hickel, anthropologist, author, and fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
” So we’re all concerned about global poverty and human suffering, etcetera. But what’s really causing these problems? So the aid discourse makes it seem as though what’s needed is like little technocratic fixes here and there, some more malaria bed nets here and there, but it distracts our attention away from the fundamental structure of the international economy and you know, the rules that govern international trade and that’s really what needs to be addressed because effectively if you look into the way that that system operates, it’s effectively designed in such a way that facilitates the siphoning of wealth and cheap labor and resources from the South to the North.”
4) @jasonhickel Professor at ICTA-UAB and Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE • Author of THE DIVIDE and LESS IS MORE • Global inequality, political economy and ecological economics
jasonhickel.org https://twitter.com/jasonhickel
5) Glenn Greenwald: The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West February 22, 2022
Those who most flamboyantly proclaim that they are fighting fascists continue to embrace and wield the defining weapons of despotism
“Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous. The implicit guarantor of this comforting framework is democracy. Western countries, according to this mythology, can never be as repressive as their enemies because Western governments are at least elected democratically.”
https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/22/glenn-greenwald-the-neoliberal-war-on-dissent-in-the-west/
6) The Road from Mont Pélerin: the Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, edited by Philip Mirowski, of the University of Notre Dame, and Dieter Plehwe, of the Social Science Research Center in Berlin.
“What Hayek had in mind was an association of scholars involved in “an international academy of political philosophy.” What he produced was something more. From a tiny band of dissidents, apparently without influence in a sphere of public policy world then dominated by economists John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Gunnar Myrdal and political scientist Harold Laski, members of the society grew in stature and influence until they, not the planners whom they criticized, had become the source of the dominant political orthodoxy in much of the world.”
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2011.09.25/1294.html
7) The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective
Identifying Self-Conscious Neoliberals in Time and Space: Studying the Mont Pèlerin Society
Neoliberalism must be approached primarily as a historical “thought collective” of increasingly global proportions.
http://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/mt-pelerin.pdf
8) Prof. Philip Mirowski – Life and Debt: Living through the Financialisation of the Biosphere
“Let me put it this way. For neoliberals, income is always going to be unequal and the more unequal, the better because that just gives people more incentive to struggle and try to climb the greasy pole and all the rest of it. Inequality is a necessary side-effect of capitalism for these people. If it’s true for income, it’s true for knowledge too. Chew on that.
Most people will be stupid. A number of them say this and write it. Most people will be stupid.
It’s just the way it is.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7ewn29w-9I&t=2373s
9) This article examines the theories and practices of neoliberalism across thirteen aspects of
(‘things you need to know about’) neoliberalism. They include the argument that
neoliberalism is not reducible to a cogent ideology or a change in economic or social policies,
nor is it primarily about a shift in the relationship between the state and the market or
between workers and capital in general, or finance in particular. Instead, neoliberalism is a
stage in the development of capitalism underpinned by financialisation. Neoliberalism by its
nature is highly diversified in its features, impact and outcomes, reflecting specific
combinations of scholarship, ideology, policy and practice. In turn, these are attached to
distinctive material cultures giving rise to the (variegated) neoliberalisation of everyday life
and, at a further remove, to specific modalities of economic growth, volatility and crisis.
https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/22614/1/Fine_Saad-Filho_22614.pdf
Misc-
1. Neoliberalism masquerades as populist philosophy about knowledge and society: elevating a cosmos over any taxis.
2. But in reality neoliberals are elitists. When they really want to organize something, the
command hierarchy appears.
http://www.protevi.com/john/Mirowski.pdf
https://www.ces.uc.pt/myces/UserFiles/livros/1097_2013_The%20Political%20and%20Moral%20Economies%20of%20Neoliberalism.pdf
Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: from the free market to knowledge capitalism
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680930500108718
2007 Philip Mirowski “The Global Restructuring of Science as a Marketplace of Ideas”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J13SDqmaNw
Naomi Klein on Global Neoliberalism | Big Think 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKTmwu3ynOY
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311780468_Neoliberal_TINA_an_ideological_and_political_subversion_of_liberalism
Philip Mirowski –
” Neoliberalism is the idea that the market knows more than any of us, it’s smarter than any of us. The real neoliberal prescription is to let the market do its thing over time.- Political understandings I would argue of nature and society come first. Science doesn’t naturally support anything. There’s neoliberal science and then there are other kinds of science.”
“I think we or the left or whoever have to have an alternative to this idea of the market as an invariant natural information processor more powerful than any human cognition. If you can’t crack that – see this is weird – that’s not the thing that people most often think of when they think of this. If you can’t crack that, I don’t see how you can have a plausible, alternative, well-developed
political program which has short-term things, medium-term things and long-term things.
“I know you want the answer, right? I’m just trying to get you there first to see how strong they are. How’s that for an answer? “
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7ewn29w-9I&t=3331s
1997 Noam Chomsky – Neoliberalism & the Global Order (Full Talk – Original Upload)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnc1Ay6X1bg
2014 “Noam Chomsky”: Why you can not have a Capitalist Democracy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxp_wgFWQo
While Trump attacks the overt (Democrat/Clinton/Obama) Neoliberals doesn’t change the fact that Trump Ideology is itself Neoliberal to the core! Neoliberals love contradiction, and confusion, and the “marketplace of ideas” fighting against each other. You can’t get more “elitist” than Trump the Billionaire (can you?) sewing discord amongst the “unwashed masses”.
https://elenemigocomun.net/2016/11/trump-neoliberal-fascism/
2017 Donald E. Pease: The Cultural Fantasy-Work of Neoliberalism
“Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zfax6sH0gM0&t=225s
Posted by: SeanAU | Sep 1 2022 11:25 utc | 100
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