Archives for posts with tag: political
Lost in the eye-glazing babble about maturity extensions, haircuts, and which acronymic organization is going to funnel the money into place is the real magnitude of the stakes here. It’s not just the Greeks’ opera-bouffé parody of the modern redistributionist state that is circling the structural-insolvency drain; what really terrifies our political class is the prospect that, very soon, the investors simply won’t buy government bonds anymore – and massive borrowing through bond issues is the only thing keeping the redistributionist state afloat.
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Everywhere, the gap between political spending commitments and revenue has been covered by borrowing. The entire system of redistributionism, in which the political class buys the consent of the governed with ever-increasing handouts, has come to depend on the assumption that the bond markets will always be there to be tapped for cash to fund next week’s bread and circuses.
Read more at esr.ibiblio.org |
The Political Compass, a popular online quiz, was supposedly designed to remedy the simple-mindedness of the left-right spectrum by replacing it with two axes: political and social libertarianism vs. authoritarianism, and economic Left vs. Right. Basically, everything nice you say about big business puts you further to the economic Right — which the quiz equates to a preference for free markets — and everything negative you say about corporate power puts you further to the Left (i.e. collectivism).
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Some of the questions have a “have you stopped beating your wife?” quality to them. For example: “Because corporations cannot be trusted to voluntarily protect the environment, they require regulation.” Or “A genuine free market requires restrictions on the ability of predator multinationals to create monopolies.”
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This wretched quiz takes for granted all the worst assumptions of our dumbed-down political culture. In so doing, like Newspeak, it reinforces all the ways in which our corporatized political culture obscures critical thought.
Read more at c4ss.org |
Yes, Virginia, there are differences between the official “left” and “right”. But those differences are “split” in such a way that one segment of the ruling class benefits no matter who you support. I tend to prefer indirect economic tyranny to direct pseudo-religious pleasure-control tyranny myself, and I suspect most of you would as well, being the shiftless deviants I know and love. It’s still not something to cheer about. The other advantage to our would-be masters of creating two inconsistent, self-contradictory “wings” is that in a democracy they will tend to take turns running things, so each faction of the ruling class gets their chance to be more favored. There’s a war in the heavens, but you’re not invited to the victory dinner. You might even *be* the victory dinner, one way or the other.
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You can’t just up and change the system. But what you can do is subvert it. If enough people subvert things long enough, the system changes de facto. In order to do this, you have to stop buying into the idea that the system as such is legitimate, that it has a claim on your behavior. Subversion, sedition and sabotage. Direct action in pursuit of your goals. Not only does it get results, but it allows you to live like a human being again. You will be, if not entirely free, liberated from the wasteful trap of throwing your life away trying to convince the ruling class to go against their own interests.
Read more at c4ss.org |
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