Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
22d ago
I dunno, the sort of a leftist who would have called, say, Obama a neoliberal would be unlikely to call Trump a neoliberal even though Trump's views on economy were to the right of them (or if they did, it would be specifically as an unexpected term with the intent of highlighting that Trump's economic policies aren't as divergent from the standard post-Cold-War Western economic model as he or his fans might like to claim.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
23d ago
If Mamdani gets in and starts implementing his platform, his proposals will probably get on the table basically all around the Western world, or at least the large/capital cities.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
There's not that much need for an exhaustive deep dive, as it is a question you asked and answered in the same post.
To put it in other words, the nerd is titillated, but is also still unconsciously ashamed of his titillation, so appreciates the fact that there is a smokescreen justifying his titillation.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
I think that's called "burying the lede". "There being a LGBTQ+" page does not give full picture of what he supports and plans to do.
I was specifically talking about the main thrust of his campaign (in this election), which is different from what he actually supports and plans to do. The campaigns that politicians run don't always correlate on what they will actually do.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
I also said that there is a LGBTQ+ page. The point is that the main trust of the campaign is the lunchbucket stuff, not the woke stuff.
I'm not sure what the point you're striving to make here is? That he's not campaigning on lunchbucket stuff? The last person I'd trust on giving a honest estimation on what the particular place of importance of trans policies is in his current campaign is an one-issue anti-trans campaigner like Billboard Chris.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
I'm not sure even sure if that's miles away from Ignatiev's actual position, if you strip away Protestant Christianity or going to Israel and th elike. I was prompted by this whole discussion to go search for his actual comments on the issue and found easily a series of blog texts called "Memoir of an ex-Jew", where he suggests that one of the big problems with Zionism is precisely that it prevented Jewish assimilation:
What is the relation between Zionism and Jewishness? Within Palestine, Jewishness is the problem—not the Judaic religion or the Hebrew language or the commemoration of Jewish holidays, but Jewishness as an institution, an officially recognized identity carrying privileges enforced by the state. The aim of Zionism was to establish a regime of Jewish privilege. It succeeded, so that within the Zionist entity there is no legal distinction between Zionist and Jew. People seeking to establish residency there based on the Law of Return are subject not to a political but to a “blood” test: are they descended from Jews through the maternal line? No matter that the test merely pushes the issue back a generation or more, thereby failing Simone Weil’s logical objection: it works to maintain internal cohesion, and that is enough.
In Palestine the task is to abolish the “Jew” as a public identity. What about outside of Palestine?
As the apartheid regime in South Africa became isolated worldwide, public opinion in Holland was as unanimous as elsewhere, and it never occurred to most Dutch that they owed anything to their Afrikaaner cousins. (Like European Jews, Afrikaaners have their own tales of past persecution: the first concentration camps were set up during the Boer Wars.) No similar rupture between the “Jewish” settlers in Palestine and world Jewry has occurred; in fact, most Jews worldwide continue to identify with “Israel” in spite of all the United Nations resolutions condemning it.
...
So secular Jews fall back on “Hitler” and “Israel” to renew their Jewishness.[4] (“Hitler” and “Israel” are in quotation marks because in this context they do not represent actual determinations but are sacralized.) The Talmud gives way to a secular religion, making Jews the main base for a lobby that provides unconditional support to a regime which but for them would be universally quarantined, a lobby beating the drums for the most reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialistic policies of the world’s only superpower.[5]
Their reward is membership in a global fraternity, an exclusive club that allows them to hug their alienation to their breasts and paralyze all critics by waving the “Holocaust” in their faces. The founders of the Zionist movement advocated a Jewish homeland as a response to what they viewed as the rejection of Jews by the majority everywhere, which, according to them, made their assimilation impossible. As it turns out, assimilation has proven to be not only possible but a cause of alarm to Zionists, who see it as a grave threat, far greater than the threat posed by Judeophobes, to the survival of “the Jewish people.” Zionism is the remedy, the final solution to the “problem” of Jewish assimilation.[6]
The entire series is likewise an extended attack on Jewish identitarianism in multiple forms.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Yes?
Never mind, I probably interpreted your post wrong.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
No, I just meant why define capitalism in a way that only includes the good things it enables and not the bad.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Wait, Wikipedia says that KF and Konsum were specifically the predecessors of Coop?
The Finnish grocery market is similarly dominated by the co-operative S Group, which has also attracted the attention of American progressives, but co-operatives have also always been specifically an alternative to not only standard private enterprise but also public ownership, and have been pushed by non-socialists, too, as such an alternative.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
I specifically contrasted his current platform with his old tweets.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
I think that Mamdani's middle-class/upper-middle-class appeal may in large part be simply due to the Mr. Smith Goes To Washington idea of a honest, non-corrupt outsider against a corrupt machine creature.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Good rule of thumb is that whenever you look in any complex system in the USA of lately usually you have shitload of rent seeking and not capitalism.
Why should these be opposed to each other?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
24d ago
Two things that strike me about Mamdani:
-
his main proposals really go beyond Bernie-style "Do what they do in Nordic countries!" style stuff. While there are still elements of rent control in Nordic countries, I haven't heard anyone put a total rent freeze, even in public housing, on the table. Free public transport is not really on the table either, apart from some small Danish towns (and Tallinn if you think Estonia can get into Nordic). I don't remember anyone even suggesting publicly owned grocery stores. Even a failed attempt to do these in the "capital of the world" would probably put all these on the table all around the West.
-
Mamdani's platform, as presented, seems like a specific attempt to do what many class-first leftists have proposed doing and run on lunchbucket issues instead of idpol. There's a LGBTQ+ page, sure, but if one drills down to proposals then there are some specific Black and Hispanic appeals but way less and way less prominently than I'd expect most Democratic candidates in a similar position to include. My understanding is that there's more idpol stuff if one drills down to Mamdani's old tweets and like, but if we're talking about a specific campaign strategy, it seems to have worked.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
Another trajectory is what happened in Malta, another famous two-party system where one party just consistently wins and another consistently loses but not by large enough a margin as to make the loser party politically irrelevant.
Uhh, which one is which? The timeline here shows both Nationalists and Labour holding power for long stretches. I checked some of the recent elections and Labour seems to win bigger victories when it wins, but still, winning is winning.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
But the obvious corollary to that is that if the "new right-wing counterculture" wins, it will then become The Man and there will be a rebellion against it, too, at some point, no?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
25d ago
I'm not sure if I see the relevance here, considering that there are, for well-known reasons, not a lot of Jews inside the Muslim states at the moment. At this moment, when we're talking about the conflict between Muslims and Jews referred to in the posts above, it mostly refers to Israel-Palestine and secondarily between various other countries that generally operate by supporting Palestinian factions and, in case of Iran (and previously Iraq), sometimes shooting missiles.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
If you're an (American - also applies to some degree to other Western countries) progressive Millennial, assuredly one of your chief political formational points was the Iraq War, where, in addition to various other forms of propaganda, you'd be suggested to a huge assay of talking heads, "warbloggers" and the like piously intoning that this is all a part of a battle against Radical Islamic Terrorist and unless you want to support exactly the wars the Bush admin wanted you to support or a course even more radical, it meant that you loved and cherished not only cruel dictators like Saddam but also Radical Islamic Terrorism (and even neglecting to use this specific phrase might mean you're symphatizing with Islamists!) and all of this proved that you were a part of an eternal alliance of Islamists and Leftists and also that you were naive and America-hating and what have you. I'm not talking about the official Bush admin point of view, which tried to avoid direct implication of this being a war against Islam after a few false starts, but the general connected propaganda machine around the WoT.
Then it all went belly-up and Middle East turned into a fire pit and the people who made it happen never admitted anything. I suspect that offered quite an inoculation against similar rhetoric for many Millennials, lasting until now and giving flashbacks right now of similar rhetoric being used by people who were supposed to be a reaction precisely to Bush-era warmongering.
The conflict between various Muslim states and Israel (which, really, is what we're talking about when talking about "Muslims and Jews" here, since there's only one Jewish state) is rather more complex and goes back way more than the 00s War on Terror, but one of the reasons why they get jumbled up is precisely because Israelis themselves worked to jumble them up in the public view when they considered it advantageous to do so.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
Ethnic cleansing, as a distinct concept from genocide, has traditionally involved there being a territory where the population being cleansed is cleansed to. Thus far, Israel has not succeeded in finding such a territory.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
26d ago
The argument wasn't whether the West has "any role". Of course there are risks involved, though there would have been (and are) considerably greater risks related to letting Ukraine fall. The argument was whether what the West is doing in Ukraine is the same as if US had decided to send American B2s with American pilots under American flag to drop bombs on Russian targets. It isn't, even in the ballpark.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
27d ago
There's an obvious difference between tapdancing on a blurry line and flagrantly, obviously and unambiguously running hundreds of meters on the other side of the line, which is what sending the bombers would be doing.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
28d ago
If the context was unimportant, why not include it yourself? Even if we assume that you didn't mean to imply what people think that you were implying, at least you surely understand that your post could easily be read in such a way without that context?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
28d ago
I've long been interested in how people, when talking about Ukraine, use generic terms with little meaning like "increasing escalation" to make comparisons of things that obviously aren't comparable - in this case, the direct use of the American bomber fleet, which obviously hasn't been happening in Ukraine and does not seem like something that is happening.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
28d ago
It would probably be prudent to offer the full context here:
Not at issue is whether there will be kosher food in the Dunster dining hall, since I have said from the beginning that I welcome anything that meets the food wishes of students.
Nor at issue is whether there will be a toaster oven for kosher use only, since House Master Liem offered to pay for one out of his private funds.
The only issue is whether Harvard money will be spent for something whose use is restricted on sectarian grounds. I oppose such an expenditure because it violates secular principles, which in my opinion are part of the foundation of a democratic society.
Cooking utensils, according to kosher law, must be used only for kosher food. Harvard funds all sorts of religious facilities, but none of the others is restricted in use on sectarian grounds. Thus Memorial Church hosts a variety of religious and non-religious activities, which do not render it unfit for Christian (or other) worship, and no one is compelled to engage in any form of religious observance in order to use it.
...
Finally, at least one Crimson headline writer and one cartoonist have suggested that I am anti-Semitic. I regard anti-Semitism, like all forms of religious, ethnic and racial bigotry, as a crime against humanity and whoever calls me an anti-Semite will face a libel suit. Noel Ignatiev Non-resident Tutor, Dunster House
So, he's objecting to what he sees as specific Jewish privilege and is specifically answers the claim that this action would make him an anti-Semite. Seems like context that one would want to include and not just drop this one individual sentence here, whatever one things about Ignatiev's other statements.
A quick search turned out, in Google, at least this Jacobin article that situates Trump as something different from neoliberalism and indeed opposed to it while also situating him on the Right, yet not calling him a fascist. (This was admittedly after a quick skim, there might be some indication of the last in the other words, but I didn't spot it.) This would mean that there's at least one leftist who is able to do that.
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