What Is Communism?

The following dialogue took place in both sections of my literature course.

Me: This philosopher says that the masses are stupid. In his opinion, the masses are incapable of governing themselves, which is why every society needs a strong governing minority that will direct and guide the stupid masses. How would you characterize the political stance of this philosopher?

Students (in unison): He is a Communist!

Me (baffled): No, actually such views belong on the opposite end of the political spectrum. If we have Communism on the far left, then which political system belongs on the far right?

Students (in unison): Socialism!

Those pesky Communists and Socialists seem to have colonized the entire political spectrum in my students' opinion.

Why Did We Elect Him, Again?

I want to be oblivious, people, I truly do. I want to zombify myself into a nirvana of not knowing, not doubting, not seeming the obvious. I keep telling myself, "No, Obama is good, he will deliver on his campaign promises - eventually. Or at least he'll give a very nice speech explaining why he couldn't. And no, he is not in favor of strengthening governmental restrictions to the point where our every breath is regulated, and by "our" I mean that of the regular folks, not the banks, never that." But you can only be oblivious for that long before you can't disregard evidence any longer. Take this beautiful piece of news, for example:

The Obama administration has drafted new proposals to curb Internet piracy and other forms of intellectual property infringement that it says it will send to the U.S. Congress "in the very near future."

It's also applauding a controversial copyright treaty known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, saying it will "aid right-holders and the U.S. government to combat infringement" once it enters into effect. Those disclosures came from a report released today by Victoria Espinel, whom President Obama selected as the first intellectual property enforcement coordinator and was confirmed by the Senate in December 2009. There's no detail about what the proposed law would include, except that it will be based on a white paper of "legislative proposals to improve intellectual property enforcement," and it's expected to encompass online piracy. The 92-page report (PDF) reads a lot like a report that could have been prepared by lobbyists for the recording or movie industry: it boasts the combined number of FBI and Homeland Security infringement investigations jumped by a remarkable 40 percent from 2009 to 2010.

Nowhere does the right to make fair use of copyrighted material appear to be mentioned, although in an aside on one page Espinel mentions that the administration wants to protect "legitimate uses of the Internet and... principles of free speech and fair process."

It would have been nice, of course, if during his election campaign Obama had told all those bloggers and Facebook/Twitter users who were doing so much to put him in office, "Prepare, folks! In return for all your Internet activism on my behalf, I will slap you with a list of regulations, rules, FBI and Homeland Security investigations so long that the most anti-libertarian amongst you will secretly start collecting Ayn Rand's books. I will make you realize that what movie and recording industry have achieved with their lobbying for copyright restrictions is nothing compared to what will be done to your free and unimpeded use of the Internet. We will now supervise every breath you take online, and isn't that amazing? Yes, we can do this to you, Internet users. Yes, we can, indeed!"

What's so frustrating is that while the economy continues to tank, both major political parties are only interested in finding new and inventive ways of policing us into the ground. The Republicans want to police our bodies with their tightening of anti-abortion regulations, while the Democrats want to police our thinking and free expression.

I know that I have now angered both the Democratic and the Republican readers of my blog but I don't care. Unless we all snap out of our partisan oblivion as soon as possible, nothing is going to get better.

Thanks for the link, Mike!

Being Hated by Conservatives vs Being Hated by Liberals

Due to the "contrarian nature" of many of my blog posts that some of the readers have mentioned as one of the blog's main attractions, I have been excoriated by both liberal and conservative bloggers. My progressive readers are not too happy about my lack of unqualified, starry-eyed admiration of Assange and his WikiLeaks project, they get annoyed with my questioning of "choice feminism" that requires an unwavering acceptance of every stupid, misguided choice if said choice is made by a woman, become sulky when I ridicule their love of scratching the itchy scab of their imaginary "privilege," and start foaming at the mouth when I remind them that there was nothing good about the Soviet Union.

The conservatives, on the other hand, get upset when I mention that the US is a country that has some problems, go into tantrums when I remind that, statistically, hosewives are one group of population that suffers the most from depression, get sulky when I ask them difficult questions such as "What makes you think making a budget will cover a multi-billion dollar deficit?", and become rabid when I make fun of the general stupidity of the Tea Partiers.

There is a difference, though, between getting tons of hits from people who come from liberal sites that post angry rebuttals of my posts and visitors from the conservative blogs that attempt to do the same. Visitors from progressive blogs leave comments, argue, initiate discussions, offer evidence in support of their opinions. I might disagree with them, but I am forced to recognize that their comments are interesting to read. Conservative readers come by, gawp, and, at best, leave a comment of the "I-know-this-is-somehow-wrong-but-I-don't-have-the-brains-to-explain-why" variety. Their writing is stilted and full of spelling and grammar mistakes. They think that calling one "a Jew whore" and "an autie retard" is a powerful intellectual argument.

I explained before why I find any conservative position to be unsustainable on the level of reason and logic. It is not surprising to me that visitors who come here from conservative websites turn out to be very unintelligent and incapable of maintaining a discussion. They don't really have opinions, that's the problem. They have emotional outbursts whose underlying causes they are able neither to identify not to control.

P.S. An interesting response to this post appeared here. Finally, I'm being linked to by somebody intelligent. :-) Things are looking up.

I'm Not a Liberal

I don't identify myself as a liberal because the word makes very little sense to me. It has been used in such a wide variety of contexts that its meaning has been diluted to the point where the term means everything and nothing. I also consider references to "left" and "right" in a discussion of political convictions to make very little sense. You go far enough to the left, you will arrive at the far right and vice versa.

This is why I'm neither a liberal nor a leftist. I define my political views as progressive. I prefer this term because it is the most obvious antonym to the opposing political position, which is conservative. As a progressive, I believe that change, transformation and innovation are inherent to human beings. Even as I'm writing this post, I am not the same person that I was when I started writing it. This is why I believe the conservative position to be untenable. You cannot "conserve" anything because everything changes. It just does. We cannot stop the flow of time just like we cannot hope to preserve any state of affairs indefinitely. Everything moves forward, and a political movement that disregards the nature of things to the extent that it believes in moving backwards or standing still is illogical and unreasonable.

A Third Party Option: Part II

The main paradox of the Libertarian movement in this country is that in their quest for freedom from authority, Libertarians plunge straight into the arms of the Republicans whose desire to control people's bodies and sexualities is their main defining feature. Bringing up these contradictions to the newly-minted Libertarians is a royal waste of time. When I brought the Tea Party's hatred of abortion to a young female Libertarian, her response was, "Yeah, that sucks, but so what? At least they support all other kinds of freedom."
It is quite useless, of course, to try to explain to a Libertarian that without the most basic freedom of all - the freedom to control one's own body - there are no other freedoms. A young woman saddled with a crowd of unwanted children can tug on her bootstraps until the cows come home to absolutely no avail. It is equally impossible to explain to them that the only freedoms their support of their fanatical leaders Sarah Palin and Rand Paul will bring them are the freedom to die needlessly in an unwinnable war, accumulate insane amounts of debt, work themselves into the ground to pay off that debt, and still consider themselves the most fortunate people on Earth.
It has become obvious to all but the most ignorant that there are very few actual differences between the only two political parties we have in this country. Behind the Democratic and the Republican slogans lies the sad reality that they serve the same economic interests. No matter which party comes to power, all we - the regular voters - can expect is more wars, more debt, more unemployment, and more pride in our great good fortune to enjoy these things.
It is not surprising that people are tired to death of choosing the lesser of two evils (and failing every time because evil knows no gradations). The yearning for a third (fourth, fifith, etc.) party option is very easy to understand. It is also very easy to exploit, which the Republicans are doing so well with this Libertarian chimera.
Sarah Palin - the Libertarian commander-in-chief - recently declared that the main focus of attention for the Republicans (who, with the help of Libertarian supporters, will take both the Congress and the Senate) next year should be abortion. These people don't care about unemployment (if you are out of a job, that's your own fault), about the recession that keeps deepening (the markets know what they're doing, so let's just allow them to keep doing it), about the education crisis (the comprehensive public education system is an assault on the individual freedom to be as ignorant as one wants, anyways), about the lack of legitimate life options for the young people (let them make their own options and be more like us, who walked barefoot in the snow to find a grizzly bear we could skin alive), about racism (an individual has a right to be as racist as they want), and so on.
Since all these problems are solved so easily in the Tea Party mentality, they can turn all their energy to the only issue that matters - abortion. Given that they need more and more soldiers to die in unwinnable wars overseas, a surplus of unwanted children will come in very useful. And who cares if the ban on abortion brings the crime rates back to their pre-Roe levels? You can always hire your own army of bodyguards. And if you can't afford it, go do some more bootstrap pulling.
The main thing to remember about the Libertarian movement in this country is that it doesn't exist. It's nothing but a ploy hatched by the Republicans to make some naïve voters believe that there is a legitimate third party alternative.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Apolitical Academics

I recently witnessed the following dialogue between a senior faculty member and a high-ranking university administrator.


Senior faculty member: So who should we vote for in the November elections?

High-ranking administrator: Well, I can’t tell you directly who to vote for, that wouldn’t be right. But, you know, we are a public university and the state currently owes us a lot of money, so I think it’s pretty obvious.

Senior faculty member: But who should we vote for?

High-ranking administrator: Well, I mean, when we have a party that promises severe budget cuts, it’s obvious that we are going to suffer. Public education will be the first to suffer from these cuts. The other party realizes that since our state is in deep trouble we need to raise state income tax by at least 1%. If that happens, the state will have funds to cover its debt to us. So I think this makes it pretty clear.

Senior faculty member: But who should we vote for?

High-ranking administrator: Well, I’d say it might be a good idea to vote for the people who will not cut our funding, don’t you think?

Senior faculty member: I still have no idea who to vote for.

Mind you, this is an American faculty member who has a PhD and has lived her entire life in this country. It’s not like there are 20 or 30 political parties in the US, there are just two. Is it so hard to keep track of just 2 political parties?

Why the Libertarians Should Divorce Themselves from the Republicans

Courtesy of Izgad (a true Libertarian), here is an interesting article on why Libertarians should distance themselves from the Republicans as fast as possible:

A clear-eyed look at conservatism as a whole reveals a political movement with no realistic potential for advancing individual freedom. The contemporary right is so deeply under the sway of its most illiberal impulses that they now define what it means to be a conservative.

What are those impulses?
First and foremost, a raving, anti-intellectual populism, as expressed by (among many, many others) Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Next, a brutish nationalism, as expressed in anti-immigrant xenophobia (most recently on display in Arizona) and it’s-always-1938-somewhere jingoism. And, less obvious now but always lurking in the background, a dogmatic religiosity, as expressed in homophobia, creationism, and extremism on beginning- and end-of-life issues. The combined result is a right-wing identity politics that feeds on the red meat of us versus them, “Real America” versus the liberal-dominated coasts, faith and gut instinct versus pointy-headed elitism.
This noxious stew of reaction and ressentiment is the antithesis of libertarianism. The spirit of freedom is cosmopolitan. It is committed to secularism in political discourse, whatever religious views people might hold privately. And it coolly upholds reason against the swirl of interests and passions. History is full of ironies and surprises, but there is no rational basis for expecting an outlook as benighted as the contemporary right’s to produce policy results that libertarians can cheer about.

I couldn't agree more with everything said here. I'm glad to see that there are Libertarians who are clear-headed enough to see that the Tea Party movement does not offer any hope for the advancement of their convictions. This is a bunch of religious fanatics whose talk about their opposition to "Big Government" is code for their hatred of a black president. They are very much in favor of a very strong government when it bans abortion, contraception and gay marriage, invades Iraq, and hands out billions to corporate moochers.

Žižek on the Political Spectrum

Liberal multiculturalist advocates of tolerance as a rule resist economic liberalism and try to protect the vulnerable from unencumbered market forces, while market liberals as a rule advocate conservative family values, and so on. We thus get the double paradox of the traditionalist Rightist supporting the market economy while ferociously rejecting the culture and mores that economy engenders, and his counterpoint, the multiculturalist Leftist, resisting the market. . . while enthusiastically enforcing the ideology it engenders.

                                                                                       - Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times.

This is, of course, very true. As much as we might not want to hear what Žižek is saying here, there is no easy way out of this obvious set of contradictions that the Slovenian philosopher brings to light.

The Conservatives who believe in the free market and simultaneously advocate conservative family values fail to see the contradictions implicit in their position. The free market engenders a market mentality. That mentality is organized around choices. People get used to having a lot of choices in everything. It is unrealistic to expect that they will magically give up their right to choose their sexual partners, their reproduction strategies, the kind of sex life they want to lead at any given moment, etc. Thus Žižek points out that being a social Conservative and believing in the free market at the same time is a position plagued by unsustainable contradictions.

The same contradictions, however, inform the beliefs of the Leftists. The vision of society where all choices are respected, where everybody should be free to live the life they want, to organize their personal and sexual lives the way they choose is a direct result of the free market ideology. Such ideology would simply be inconceivable without the market economy that gives rise to it. Thus a social Progressive who hates the market is as plagued by contradictions as a Conservative.

I'm sure that even if you never read Žižek before you can understand now why he manages to piss off people on all sides of the political spectrum.

Is There A Left?

This is one of the smartest things I have read for a while:

Keep in mind that the political spectrum in much of the world, and certainly in places like Australia, USA and Europe, is very far right. So you're actually choosing between two right wing parties, one of whom is extreme right and another slightly less so.

One of the central tenets of right wing philosophies is that rich people get richer. They dress it up a little differently, but that's the fundamental. The political debates we get these days are about how quickly and to how great an extent this can happen, and how much at the expense of poor people can it be (eg. how much can you get away with before they revolt, strike, or engage in other stubbornness).

All other discussion is off the table. If you try to represent an argument balancing the range of possible political systems, perhaps taking advantage of the good points of several, you get labelled an extremist. It's very difficult to get a discussion going, or throw ideas around. If you represent a genuine left of centre perspective, you are labelled as a loony or downright dangerous.

Thus, the terms "left" and "right" no longer have any useful meaning, as people might historically think of them. A more honest framing would be "degree of right wing extremism".

I wish I had said it first. But the quote is from here, and I first found a reference to it here. It happens very rarely that I want to shut up and let somebody else be heard but this is just that kind of case.

Emotions and the Supreme Court

I really hate all of the discussions about whether emotions have a place in the Supreme Court that originated with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. It's supposed to be liberal to defend the right of emotions and empathy to form a part of the process of justice. The discussions started, of course, when conservatives began berating Judge Sotomayor for being too emotional and even too temperamental to be on the Supreme Court.

What is really annoying here is the blindness that liberals demonstrate yet again in the way they read this conservative discourse. "Emotional" is the conservatives' way to refer to Sotomayor's gender, while "temperamental" is a way to refer to her Hispanic origin. By taking this language seriously (and refusing to see its chauvinistic and racist undertones) we participate in it.

This is not about emotion versus reason and temperament versus its lack. This is about gender and ethnic discrimination. If we continue engaging in this kind of discussions, we will soon find ourselves arguing about whether it's ok to hire women since they are "more likely to cry" in the workplace.

I'm a Conservative

According to Nicholas D. Kristof, whatever I might have thought about my political convictions has been profoundly wrong. New studies (I just love how there are "studies" to prove any kind of stupidity nowadays) demonstrate that being a conservative is inscribed in my "neural responses."

So what are the indicators that finally revealed my well-hidden (even from myself) conservative nature? According to Kristof, it's the fact that I wouldn't beat up my Dad and my tendency to feel disgusted by public washroom faucets. Another tell-tale factor is that I would never drink from an acquaintance's glass and would hate if anybody drank from mine.

So this is it, my friends. We can stop asking people about their stance on important issues such as abortion, gay marriage, torture, the economy, etc. in order to find out their political convictions. Just ask them how often they hit their fathers (I guess, beating up their mothers or siblings does not have an equally strong political dimension) and try to force them to touch bathroom taps. Every father-beating bathroom-faucet-licking individual is necessarily a liberal. See how easy this is?

Left and Right

We are used to thinking about political convictions in terms of left and right. In our minds, we see a straight line that accommodates political and ideological stances from the most progressive to the most conservative. However, I often feel that the range of political beliefs is best represented not by a straight line but by a circle. The further you go to the right, the likelier you are to arrive at the extreme left. Sounds paradoxical, doesn't it?

I was reading Scheibeler's The Merchants of Deception when I noticed a striking similarity between the ideological position of the extremely conservative, fiercely Republican group of people that he describes (Amway employees) and Marxist ideology. Just consider the following quotes from the book:

"There were several examples that were frequently used to reinforce the group’s
paradigm that employers were oppressive" (42).

In their opinion, people who worked "were relegated to a lifetime of servitude to an employer who would forever control both their time and their income" (68).

"Many distributors actually began to detest their employers for taking advantage of
them and reaping the harvest of their employees’ labor. People often spoke of how hard
they worked for years with little or no respect only to have the owner and his wife go to
Hawaii, while they stayed back to watch his business" (79).

As we can see, these hardcore Republicans arrive at Marx's questioning of why the employer should be entitled to the fruits of the employees' labor. Move a little further in this direction and you will undoubtedly arrive at the necessity for a social revolution.

Now let's take an example of a radical feminist and a die-hard male chauvinist. As different as their political agendas undoubtedly are, it is entirely possible for both of them to proceed from the same ideological assumption: women are different. See how we have come a full circle by going in opposing directions?

Another example: an atheist (not to be confused with an agnostic) and a profoundly religious person. You'd think they have nothing in common. Not so. They actually share an extremely important conviction: they both KNOW for sure. A full circle yet again.

Fascism is supposed to be located at the right end of the spectrum and communism on the left. However, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had a lot in common. Stalin admired Hitler, while Hitler learned a lot from Stalin. A circle, not a straight line.