What happens when you leave the case against mass immigration or even against plain illegal immigration to libertarians?:
As you can see, they will push their absurd libertarian narrative, with small government, toxic free market capitalism, and anti-welfare state positions, and in the process giving an unjustified credibility to these views, just because they correctly speak for many people’s strong feelings against mass immigration.
As usual, the stupid cultural left is clueless and useless, and could never make the principled left-wing case against mass immigration and, if anything, is more likely to just continue discrediting the left.
And for that matter why leave the anti-immigration position to populist conservatives and the Alt Right, when they, too, will win big when they have many other unjustified views?
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I can kind of see LK that you don't like the direction this conversation is going. Same here but there seems to be nothing we can do about It. That's why you don't have to be supportive of UKIP, Le Pen, Trump etc on all fronts. But you don't have to fight them either. They really help on a lot of issues. If It wasn't for UKIP, Brexit vote would have never happened. If It wasn't for all these racist and xenophobic forces in Europe, austerity and neoliberalism would even be harsher. I certainly don't agree with everything Farage says but I would have been supportive of him bdecause he was eurosceptic. Cultural left doesn't argue against budget deficits but they are silent on demands of austerity. At least they don't show the same enthusiasm as they do by finding racists and bigots. That's their business card. In fact, one could say that this is being supportive of austerity. Anything else is more important to Syriza and Varoufakis than eliminating unemployment and poverty in Greece. Let's face it, evil is what evil does. The only way to get rid of these people is to take a shit in their faces, and we know which political forces are going to do that.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you LK, the Left cannot leave the critique of open borders immigration to the Right. I am already seeing more left-wing populists arguing against open borders these days. True, they are outnumbered by SJWs, at least in academia and the mainstream media and political parties, but many regular people are getting sick of the Cultural Left acting as the handmaiden for neoliberalism.
ReplyDeletei agree with you guys we should try to create a coherent left wing movement which will be closer to the Old left
ReplyDeleteIf I remember correctly Milton Friedman wanted open borders either after the elimination of the welfare state, or as a tool to overburden and destroy it.
ReplyDeleteLauren is an Atheist, so of course she would tell scare stories of how "We're going to lose our country!" She has no faith in the fact that if she does the right thing, her past actions will catch up to her and reward her.
ReplyDeleteWell good thing I've always clearly stated I'm not for Open Borders, eh? Gee I seem to remember saying I agreed with Bernie Sanders on that and also pointed to Cesar Chavez on more than one occasion.
But either way, the US does not have an immigration problem, and most proposed initiatives such as Trump's wall and mass deportation are a farce and are cost prohibitive. LK, are you ever going to address that, as well as the choice of Free-Trader Mike Pence for Veep?
Oh, and about this whole "Return to the Old Left thing" - I've given it considerable thought and here's my preliminary conclusions:
I don't want a return to the "Old Left" and I'm glad that there's a bulwark of empathy that's keeping it from doing so. Why do I say that?
As LK demonstrated for me, the Chinese Exclusion Act was a Racist endeavor by Unions. Of course other Unions and Whites joined with the Chinese in protest, but that still begs the question of "Which old left do we pick up on." Clearly the strain not allied with Racist initiatives targeting an ethnic group is the best route to take.
The Progressivism of the past has a racist history - mainly because racism pervaded society forever: You have examples such as LBJ saying "I'll have every ni**er voting Democrat as a reason for his reforms, needed though they may have been. It's well known that Lincoln supported the Slaves returning o Africa instead of integration - much to the chagrin of Fredric Douglas. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR - all progressives - were known to say things we would wince at today:
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/who-was-most-racist-modern-president-5-surprising-candidates-who-fit-bill
Considering that Trump's brand of Keynesianism is forged with the hot irons of racism, Xenophobia and Unconstitutional endeavors such as exclusion based on Religion, I'd say we need to watch like hawks that racist garbage might be getting in under a Trojan Horse.
THIS... is the way the Left should go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empathic_Civilization
The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis is a 2010 non-fiction book written by Jeremy Rifkin. It connects the evolution of communication and energy development in civilizations with psychological and economic development in humans. Rifkin considers the latest phase of communication and energy regimes—that of electronic telecommunications and fossil fuel extraction—as bringing people together on the nation-state level based on democratic capitalism, but at the same time creating global problems, like climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation. Rifkin extrapolates the observed trend into the future, predicting that Internet and mobile technology along with small-scale renewable energy commercialization will create an era of distributed capitalism necessary to manage the new energy regime and a heightened global empathy that can help solve global problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
http://www.gp.org/platform
Yeah, but what about this?
ReplyDelete"A three-decade analysis of prior research reveals that American college students are not quite as empathetic as they used to be.
'We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,' co-author Sara Konrath, a researcher at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, said in a news release. 'College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.'
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/brain-and-behavior/articles/2010/05/28/todays-college-students-more-likely-to-lack-empathy
Three decades?
DeleteIt probably has to do with the time frame that University of Chicago employed Milton Friedman? ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman#University_of_Chicago
I agree with you that dominant ideas as those of Milton Friedmann can capter humans more than material necessity to act in a certain way.
ReplyDeleteRifkin, however is quoting Schopenhauer in an intellectually dishonest way by not telling us that Schopenhauer was a deep anthropological pessimist. Man can choose to be empathic, but mostly he’s an evil brute. I thought political arguments founded on a dogmatic conception of human nature to be out oft the trend since Gödels incompleteness theorems and quantum physical indeterminacy. Also, the mirror neurons are just a recent discovery in neurobiology, not yet integrated with the general evolutionary doctrine dominated by the „Selfish“-Gene view by Richard Dawkins.
Jeremy Rifkin also seems to revive some sort of marxist historical materialism, with the „technological energy complex“ as base and „communication system“ as superstructure that allow him to construct historical determinacy towards more empathy that contradicts the base tendency towards entropy.
Architectonically I prefer the Hegelian System with its emphasis on the devellopment of superior ideas through history. Hegel thought progressive history came to an end during his lifetime, so in that view it is possible to interprete 20th century with ist wars, genocides and environmental destruction as a stage of moral decadence. A well-informed mathematician recently told me that he’s under the impression of living in a society similarly corrupt and decadent as ancient Rome before its downfall.
You can see this in pop culture for example with the switch from innocent "love songs" to highly sexualised or otherwise nihilistic productions. People like Lana del Rey - which I very much admire - are a Mirror of american and globalist society, like it or not.
This statement is an obscenity. Welfare provisions in the United States have almost always had higher rates of use by White Americans, who have also constituted the majority of social welfare recipients. Its also bizarre to talk about African-Americans and some Latinos as if they were third world immigrants considering a most of them have roots in this country that predate the European Americans your talking about by almost over a century, and have already been exploited for labour for the benefit of society in many cases at virtually no cost. So before you embark on a new age rivers of blood spiel, at least make sure you target the right people.
ReplyDelete