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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-179
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Europe:
Zionism:
Lebanon:
NGOs:
> These NGOs—nongovernmental organizations—and their supporters see themselves as representing “civil society,” a phrase often conflated with society as a whole that in practice means the consensus of upper-middle-class liberal opinion. Amnesty International is a pillar of civil society. The National Rifle Association isn’t. <
Russiagate:
Zeitgeist:
Statistics:
Epstein:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
On the issue of economic statistics, the link to Noema at least leads to something genuinely relevant to a real-world analysis.
The other links are shallow partisan hack jobs. Firing everybody for lying for the Democrats is likely not true, but it wouldn’t solve the problems anyhow. It would just provide another weaponized servant for Trump. The problem of falsifying statistics has not been a problem in the sense that it has been policy. For example, the quarterly GDP reports are routinely annualized, multiplied by four. The national budget is usually reported for ten year periods. Massive increases or cuts in the next year’s budget can be hidden in fictional revenues and spending in later years of the budget. Both these falsifications are practically mandatory.
That economic statistics can be uncertain to a degree that undermines the empirical foundations of many economic theories has been known for decades. Oskar Morgenstern (known for collaborating with John von Neumann, by the way, ) in 1950 published On the Accuracy of Economic Observations. The second edition is available online. https://archive.org/details/onaccuracyofecon0000morg Those determined to find dastardly Democrats lying to hurt god Trump will no doubt find their ragebait. But the problem of economic statistics and the theory underlying them are genuinely relevant to all economies. And they are relevant to economic planning as well. In my opinion Noema is inadvertently calling, despite themselves, Marxist economic theory.
Personally I wouldn’t pay a sub for Wall Street Journal. If you want to find the central organ of the PMC, it’s most likely the WSJ, not the CIA. At least, that’s the case for people who remember that the M in PMC is supoosed to stand for managers, as in managers of giant corporation, financial funds and so on. You know, the readers of the WSJ. (Financial Times and the Economist may be competitors for the title of journal of record.) Wall Street is the Swamp, so I don’t think its journal of record is a reliable source.
As to NGOs…I’m so old I remember when the term was QUANGO, quasi-nongovernmental organizations. As to this…
These NGOs—nongovernmental organizations—and their supporters see themselves as representing “civil society,” a phrase often conflated with society as a whole that in practice means the consensus of upper-middle-class liberal opinion. Amnesty International is a pillar of civil society. The National Rifle Association isn’t.
Not sure who this quote is from, but the NRA is in fact a pillar of so-called civil society. Whoever said this is merely whining about how somebody dislikes them, doesn’t flatter them. The NRA, and another similar qroup, the Federalist Society, are in fact very powerful. The notion they are oppressed because somebody thinks they are morally backwaord and politically reactionary doesn’t change that. If we want to talk NGOs/QUANGOs, we want to talk funding. All NGos receive private funding (often from foundations, but those are still private. Their tax privileges are precisely that, privileges.) These privileges are functionally granted to the wealthy as a way to shelter estates from taxes. Although the rich have to put some of their money into some public good, they get to choose what counts as good, and get applauded for it too. There was once a time when conservatives advocated abolishing these privilege because the wealthy—correctly by the way—believed that certain socially liberal policies, such as desegregation, were ultimately beneficial for them, if only in suppressing revolutionary agitation by reform. The discovery that votes for Negroes didn’t end the Republic silenced those calls, as I remember.
What makes them QUANGOs is that they also received government funding plus sometimes the tax privileges awarded to the wealthy. It is now customary to omit the Quasi for some reason. The idea that NGOs are objectionable nowadays seems to depend upon some notion that social liberalism is a direct political assault on tin god Trump. It is not. When the Internationa Republican Institute (that’s how I remember the names behind the IRI acronym,) a branch of National Endowment for Democracy, puts some money into financing a seminar where there was some support for transgender rights in Bangla Desh, they are doing that because their fundamental mandate is to find support for the US ultimate goals. They will use whatever bait they can. It does not mean that NED has been subverted by the globalist ideology to attack MAGA. (And yes, I’ve forgotten the source but the event in Bangla Desh was reported.)
Now the general case is that NGOs (still QUANGOS in my judgment) are funded by private interests and by a government, that is fundamentally yet another example of the rich getting benefits for their goals. If USAID operates a giant dumping operation for US farm surpluses, and tries to get credit for philanthropy, this is not a rip off of the rich. People who operate under the delusion that they are oppressed by high taxes, rather than low wages, can rage against the concept of foreing aid to the filthy foreigners, but that doesn’t mean they are fighting the Deep State. It just means they are both mean and stupid.
As to NGOs, my suggestion is that we the people use the RICO acts against the Federalist Society.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Aug 10 2025 19:10 utc | 36
Part 3/6
Tom_Q_Collins, like Arch Bungle, had good takes on many issues. He recently shared a video on how Britain engineered the Irish famine, so I thought he still got his head on straight.
I was initially surprised when Tom_Q_Collins was receptive towards hearing out the white supremacist Nick Fuentes’s opinions just because Fuentes recently broke rank with Trump, but on reflection, I should have known it was an inevitability.
Nick Fuentes has mocked America’s witch hunt over the alleged Chinese spy balloon and celebrated China’s hypersonic missile flight tests. So what? Nick Fuentes has some positive things to say about China, but so do William Gruff and c1ue, and I certainly don’t consider those barflies to be friends of China.
Nick Fuentes, like William Gruff and c1ue, are opportunistically latching onto China so that they can serve up China as a shining example of what a fascist society can achieve when in reality China is communist and therefore inherently anti-fascist. Neither William Gruff and c1ue would admit that they’re fascist, not yet anyway, so they’re either pretending to be a Marxist or a moderate nationalist (like the “moderate rebels” in Syria) to muddy the waters, just like Nick Fuentes is not yet ready to call himself a fascist yet. This is why I do my utmost to gatekeep support for China. Some months back, I’ve already noticed a troubling development where some people on MoA and X/Twitter calling China fascist not as a condemnation, but as commendation so as to claim China’s achievements for fascism.
Nick Fuentes is a Holocaust denier. This is a well-documented and indefensible position of his.
What truly, absolutely infuriates me about Nick Fuentes is that he suggested that China should take over New York City and have Chinese soldiers start murdering black people en masse for acting uppity (video evidence). This is an insult to the PLA. His exact words: “What if we had Chinese soldiers on every corner and if Black person started spazzing out, they took a sword out and cut his hands off and then they cut his head off. What if that happened? That would be awesome!” His hatred of black people reminds me of William Gruff.
The People’s Liberation Army is called the People’s Liberation Army because they’re not made up of a bunch of imperial stormtroopers. The PLA won the support of the Chinese people, which the KMT failed to do, because Mao was famously strict on discipline, specifically in exercising great restraint when dealing with civilians and meting out harsh punishments for violators. The KMT, in contrast, ran around robbing, raping and murdering, which ultimately made them lose the civil war. The spirit of serving the people is still alive today, and the PLA are always the first in line for disaster relief efforts. The PLA always had to turn away the generous gifts (like crops and livestock) of the people they rescue because the PLA are not supposed to accept gifts for simply fulfilling their duty to the people. People join the PLA not for the thrill of shooting swarthy foreigners, but because they’ve personally experienced the PLA serving the people’s need and want to continue that tradition.
So, no, Fuentes, the PLA won’t be running around and serving as fascist stormtroopers in New York City or any other place for that matter.
Are the Americans trying to set the Chinese up as the patsy after they’ve gaslit Jews and Ukrainians into being expendable blood bags to help America control the Middle East and Eastern Europe? Already Americans like S Brennan are blaming China for the Russia-Ukraine war, even though it’s clearly the encroachment of the America-led NATO, the American color revolution in Ukraine and the supply of American weapons to Ukraine that sparked and prolonged the war. So, it’s not far-fetched for me to claim that Americans wish for a black genocide in America while keeping their own hands clean and blaming the Chinese for the genocide.
fuck off with ….. feral blacks being elevated to sainthood
Posted by: NemesisCalling | Aug 10 2025 5:06 utc | 151
“You’ve got to give it to Nick Fuentes”, a man who openly fantasizes about recreating a Gaza-style open-air prison where an occupation army has the liberty to toy with human lives, is advocating for fascism. Very telling too that NemesisCalling uttering “feral blacks” did not even make Tom_Q_Collins raise an eyebrow.
Posted by: All Under Heaven | Aug 10 2025 20:34 utc | 41
Part 6/6
Finally, to clear up the terminology because there are many who seek to obfuscate the true source of the problem afflicting the world, capitalism, which has evolved to its highest stage, imperialism, and is headquartered in America.
Fascism is capitalism’s attempt at temporarily handling the crises that inevitably arises from capitalism due to capitalism’s internal contradictions. To quote Samir Amin’s article The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism:
Fascism is not synonymous with an authoritarian police regime that rejects the uncertainties of parliamentary electoral democracy. Fascism is a particular political response to the challenges with which the management of capitalist society may be confronted in specific circumstances.
The diversity of societies that were the victims of fascism—both major developed capitalist societies and minor dominated capitalist societies, some connected with a victorious war, others the product of defeat—should prevent us from lumping them all together. Yet, beyond this diversity, all these fascist regimes had two characteristics in common:
(1) In the circumstances, they were all willing to manage the government and society in such a way as not to call the fundamental principles of capitalism into question, specifically private capitalist property, including that of modern monopoly capitalism. That is why I call these different forms of fascism particular ways of managing capitalism and not political forms that challenge the latter’s legitimacy, even if “capitalism” or “plutocracies” were subject to long diatribes in the rhetoric of fascist speeches. The lie that hides the true nature of these speeches appears as soon as one examines the “alternative” proposed by these various forms of fascism, which are always silent concerning the main point—private capitalist property. It remains the case that the fascist choice is not the only response to the challenges confronting the political management of a capitalist society. It is only in certain conjunctures of violent and deep crisis that the fascist solution appears to be the best one for dominant capital, or sometimes even the only possible one. The analysis must, then, focus on these crises.
(2) The fascist choice for managing a capitalist society in crisis is always based—by definition even—on the categorical rejection of “democracy.” Fascism always replaces the general principles on which the theories and practices of modern democracies are based—recognition of a diversity of opinions, recourse to electoral procedures to determine a majority, guarantee of the rights of the minority, etc.—with the opposed values of submission to the requirements of collective discipline and the authority of the supreme leader and his main agents. This reversal of values is then always accompanied by a return of backward-looking ideas, which are able to provide an apparent legitimacy to the procedures of submission that are implemented. The proclamation of the supposed necessity of returning to the (“medieval”) past, of submitting to the state religion or to some supposed characteristic of the “race” or the (ethnic) “nation” make up the panoply of ideological discourses deployed by the fascist powers.
Others try to obfuscate that capitalism is the source of the problem by claiming that a new mode of production has arisen that is completely separated from capitalism. These people lie.
Yanis Varoufakis is one such offender. Varoufakis claims that capitalism is dead and has been supplanted by “technofeudalism” because large tech corporations have such a dominance over the market that competition no longer exists and the corporations are able to extract monopoly rent. Lenin, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, has actually described the monopolistic control found in Varoufakis’s “technofeudalism” as imperialism, but Lenin never severed its link to capitalism. Lenin was absolutely clear that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.
Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.
If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.
The same goes for people claiming that “corporatism” is not capitalism. They define corporatism as corporations exerting overwhelming influence over the government. Corporatism is simply describing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, where the bourgeoisie (the capital owners) calls the shots instead of the proletariat (the workers). In normal parlance, these countries as simply known as capitalist countries. Politics are inseparable from the economy, hence Marxism being a study of political economy.
Politics being inseparable the economy is not an invention by Marx. Even Adam Smith assumes that they’re intertwined, or he wouldn’t have written the Wealth of Nations. Here’s an excerpt from the Wealth of Nations:
To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers. Such statesmen, and such statesmen only, are capable of fancying that they will find some advantage in employing the blood and treasure of their fellow-citizens to found and maintain such an empire. Say to a shopkeeper, Buy me a good estate, and I shall always buy my clothes at your shop, even though I should pay somewhat dearer than what I can have them for at other shops; and you will not find him very forward to embrace your proposal. But should any other person buy you such an estate, the shopkeeper would be much obliged to your benefactor if he would enjoin you to buy all your clothes at his shop.
Posted by: All Under Heaven | Aug 10 2025 20:41 utc | 44
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