trpoopo [none/use name]
I mean the left isn’t really helpless here for once. It would only take a couple of the left’s people in the House to publicly say they are not going to pass any of Biden’s legislation unless he stops supporting this. If they refuse to block Biden in the house the left orgs like the DSA could publicly withdraw their endorsements of the squad. There isn’t really much need to bother with the superficial stuff when the left has a power play on the table if it really cares about any of this beyond a branding level.
I don’t really think there are. The jobs data for most countries says a lot of the poorest are among the millions who fall out of the workforce entirely for long periods of time due to whatever reason. A lot of them are still workers by the marxist definition, fulfilling different functions to subsist in a sort of grey area outside the normal jobs market. The people in this category are usually worse off than the people who’ve had regular employment since they were teens. Think Brace or Christman if the pod never took off.
I never saw it graphed like that before. Did people really not notice Sterling’s graph also happens to rise during the last of us outrage cycle, peak during the cyberpunk outrage cycle and then settle back down to 900k when there aren’t really any controversial games coming out anymore?
This is what it’s referring to when someone says how exploitative and ghoulish the left can be on Palestine. The responsibilities for defending Palestine are largely falling on Hamas with both China and left representatives in the US condemning the actual defense effort while arguing over who has the best PR campaign.
The next step is what makes any of this real for both AOC and left orgs. “Israel is an apartheid state” AND “This is why I am no longer going to vote for the agenda of the people supporting it or continue to fund them”
I guess I just don’t really get why there should be any resistance to do this when the whole point of BDS or organizing is to eventually put us in this exact position. We got lucky with the House margins and if we don’t do this now there are no opportunities in the foreseeable future.
I’m saying there is an actual real option here beyond just shouting at the injustice in the world. You have people who can cause meaningful harm to the president’s agenda. You also have orgs who’s denouncements would cause meaningful harm to the fundraising and reputations of the people with that power. If organizing isn’t to exploit opportunity like this then what is it for?
There’s also the whole thing where Lucas auditioned Glynn Turnman for Han Solo and then didn’t cast him because he wanted to avoid having an interracial relationship in the movie. Or how one of the original designs for Jabba was an orientalist caricature complete with a fu manchu.
I kind of want to ask him to expand more on his ideas about authoritarianism and what he specifically sees it manifesting as if things develop this way. For me it seems like the opposite to what he describes is happening. In China it’s specifically because you have strong controls against neoliberalism that it hasn’t had to resort to the type of authoritarian measures you see in the US where the militarized police handles the fallout from failures in economic policy and then the national guard handles the failures of the police.
It’s also hard not to see the shift from Larry Summers to Janet Yellen as an explicit rejection of the path Zizek is describing. As much as Biden saber rattles against China the US seems to be learning from it and rejecting a lot of neoliberal norms to the extent the huge austerity push people expected is not happening. Instead of social authoritarianism we’re seeing Biden for the most part acquiesce to whatever social project people want to try. I don’t think we converted anyone high up into socialist, but it’s clear there are people with power who consider Obama’s economic policy a failure and will not return to it.