GlacialTurtle

Using being undercover and disguising yourself as a segue into talking about imposter syndrome is a skit done unironically

Michael Roberts provides an overview of various topics discussed at this years AHE conference, bringing together heterodox (non-mainstream, critical of neoclassical econ) economists from a variety of backgrounds (marxist, keynesian, MMT, etc.).

The conference paper sessions were divided into various streams, one of which was entitled Imperialism and Dependency in the 21st century. I made a presentation in one of these session, called Catching up of falling behind? in which I tried to answer the question: were the poor peripheral countries of the Global South catching up and closing the gap in living standards with the rich imperialist countries of the Global North? I tried to answer that question using three different measures: per capita incomes; levels of labour productivity; and indexes of ‘human development’. On all three measures, I show that the Global South is not closing the gap, with the possible exception of China.

[...]

My main conclusion was that the countries of the Global South (6bn people) are not ‘catching up’ with the Global North (2bn people) because wealth (value) is being persistently transferred from the South to the North AND falling profitability in the Global South is reducing labour productivity growth. China may be the exception because its investment growth is less determined by profitability than in any other major Global South economy.

Conrad Herold from Hofstra University, Long Island presented an insightful summary of Marxist approaches to explaining imperialist exploitation over the last 100 years since Lenin, starting with Henryk Grossman in 1929 and then Bettelheim and Emmanuel, going onto so-called dependency theory mainly coming from Ruy Marini in South America. Conrad rejected the structuralist theories of such as Pereira that the Global South did not develop because of ‘premature industrialisation’, thus turning the Global South into commodity producers under a regime of currency exchange rates that benefited the North. In summary, Herold said, there is more work to be done on developing a robust Marxist theory of imperialist exploitation.

In that session, there was some debate about whether the transfer of profit, rent and income through international trade and capital proceeds was mainly the result of higher rates of surplus value (due to lower wages) in the Global South or mainly due to higher rates of technological superiority in the companies of the Global North. Previous Marxist theorists like Emmanuel looked to higher rates of surplus value; while Bettelheim looked to higher levels of capital composition. For me, both are relevant and in work done jointly with Guglielmo Carchedi, we found that differing rates of organic composition of capital and surplus value both contributed to the transfer of value from South to North.

[...]

That brings me to the panel session on the new book, Radical Political Economy: Principles, Perspectives and Postcapitalist Futures edited by Mona Ali and Ann Davis, to which I and many others contributed chapters.

One of the authors in that book was Ramaa Vasudevan in which she makes it clear that “financialization is not simply the expansion of finance but the generalized subordination of economic interactions and inter- relations to the abstract logic of interest- bearing capital that has fundamentally restructured the way economic activities are organized “ quoting Professor Ben Fine from 2013. According to Vasudevan, the dominance of finance is seen to have engineered “a fundamental transformation of the economy – marking an epochal shift”. My reply to that can be summed by the critiques of the financialisation hypothesis, both theoretically (Mavroudeas and Papadatos 2018) and empirically (Turan Subasat and Stavros Mavroudeas 2023).

Also in the book is a chapter by Paolo dos Santos who attended the panel that I missed. In the book, Dos Santos emphasises that political economy can only be effective in explaining the world if it rests on historical materialism. Economic analysis is a lynchpin of social and historical inquiry because it can cast light on how relations of production and distribution shape the social, political, institutional, and cultural realities that condition the nature and historical development of human groups. “Stubborn patterns of underdevelopment and differences in labor productivity, living standards, and political power across national economies, have persisted across the history of capitalist development. For radical political economy, those differences are a feature of global capitalism, not a “bug” due to the idiosyncrasies of developing economies.”

[...]

The struggle against the ideology and theories of the mainstream continues and the AHE makes an important contribution. Let me quote Ann Davis, the co-editor of Radical Political Economy book. “Radical Political Economy will make clear the political choices, while mainstream economics will claim that there are none. Whatever the outcome, proponents of both sides will defend their respective positions and seek to attract adherents to their views.”

Today in Lutris discord which I happen to lurk occasionally, I saw some lovely people were commenting in the offtopic channel about how they support Ethan Kleins lawsuit against Youtubers who criticised him, GamerGate bs, defending streamer sex pests and some other stuff. One person offhandedly mentions how they get their information from Asmongold.

If you're not very online, Asmongold is a reactionary streamer who at one point declared he thinks Palestinians should be genocided because of their "inferior culture". Ethan Klein is a somewhat well known youtuber/podcaster who has also spent the last year or so having a very public meltdown over Israel and his own fundamentally contradictory set of positions he's tried to triangulate between.

Seeing this, I made a brief comment about Asmongolds stance mentioned above and why anyone would listen to him. I got racist responses claiming "Palestinians have been kicked out of every culture they've been in" and deflecting to "Look at Egypts border".

Called out the racism and genocide apologia, the only person who was warned was me for not being civil. I replied "racism and genocide apologia is not civil", referred to the fact the Lutris logo on discord has an LGBTQ flag, and was called a nutcase and banned.

tl:dr Lutris discord moderation is OK with racism and genocide, but you're a "nutcase" if you call a spade a spade.

UPDATE: I was responded to on Mastodon and was accused of being the one making antisemtic comments. Others explained in the thread below there were some who made antisemitic comments after I was banned. I sincerely hope that's a misunderstanding, but I don't have much faith the moderator in question would be telling the truth about the events.

These people are genuinely conspiracy brained morons.

“Places like City Hall and Albany and even Washington, DC, are more responsive to the groups than to the people on the ground,” New York Rep. Ritchie Torres said at WelcomeFest, held at a downtown Washington hotel and billed as a forum to help the party find more electable candidates and messages.

Seconds after Torres’ shot at “the groups” that have become intra-Democratic shorthand for excessive left-wing influence, protesters from … the group Climate Defiance charged on stage with signs reading “GAYS AGAINST GENOCIDE” and “GENOCIDE RITCHIE,” attacking his support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

As the activists were yanked out of the room, conference organizers played Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain on the loudspeakers in the room.

The mockery was part of the point. Welcome PAC, the main organizer of the conference and one of several outfits that have emerged in recent months to try to reverse the party’s post-Obama losses, was happy to be accused of embracing a pro-growth “Abundance” agenda or attacking progressive urban policies.

“Any time someone is against something like ‘abundance,’ it means that they’re afraid of something. They’re afraid of losing power,” said Welcome PAC’s Lauren Harper Pope, a former Beto O’Rourke adviser. “If the left feels threatened by what we’re doing, then I say: ‘You’re still welcome in our coalition.’”

[...]

“If you can financially afford to go to a protest every day, you are a different person than most people in my community,” said Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, defending her vote for House GOP legislation that would require proof of citizenship from every voter.

Asked about recent polling from the progressive group Demand Progress that found pro-business “abundance” ideas faring worse than anti-corporate “populism,” WelcomeFest speakers scoffed.

“It’s what happens when you test an economic textbook for the Democratic Party against a romance novel,” said Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass. “It’s such a bad poll.”

Shadowy """groups""" who are supposedly coordinating every protest, protestors are all on payroll or rich or unemployed so therefore they don't count, activists and """groups""" are never part of or representative of even a section of the public, and all polling showing their framing and ideas being unpopular are just bad polls. This is conspiratorial thinking, 1:1 with what conservatives and Republicans have been saying for decades.

And they're repeadedly wrong on the polling they claim to love so much.

All because people got mad at the and demanded they do their jobs, demanded they actually stand up for people who are literally being picked up and deported for no reason besides not liking Trump or having an accent when they speak.

WelcomeFest’s less single-issue enemies have highlighted the Republican and pharmaceutical-industry pasts of some of the conference’s donors, arguing that it’s naive to think billionaire donors could save the Democrats.

The Revolving Door Project, which has campaigned to keep Democrats with corporate ties out of powerful positions, called the whole project a “self-serving crusade” against popular politics.

“A billionaire-funded movement to keep billionaires happy with Democrats by wielding only poll-tested language that billionaires are okay with is a sure path toward a President Vance,” said the project’s executive director, Jeff Hauser.

Dan Cohen, the strategist who conducted Demand Progress’ abundance-or-populism poll, said that the party wasn’t facing a binary choice and could incorporate some more pro-growth “abundance” ideas into a successful populist campaign.

“That kind of conflict is unhelpful because it’s just wrong,” Cohen said, calling for a broader focus on “strengthening a Democratic Party that’s trying to get its sh*t together again.”

If you’re an American, it should make you angry that the many people who knew better stayed silent about, even actively conspired to hide, the fact that Biden wasn’t actually capable of executing his responsibilities as president, handing untold amounts of power to a cabal of advisors you never voted for.

And if you’re a Democratic voter, it should make you angry that a party that spent years promising they would, at very least, stop Donald Trump (and maybe not do much more), and that their blocking his reelection justified asking for your money and demanding your votes, ended up putting Trump in the White House again, in large part by installing and then keeping in power a man they knew was unfit for office.

Questions about Biden’s ill health, and who knew what about it and when, have been reignited in recent weeks, thanks to the release of two complementary books that have added new, scandalous details to the already scandalous litany of details about Biden’s condition that erupted after his disturbing June 2024 debate performance. One is Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Fight, the third in a trilogy of Trump-era behind-the-scenes campaign accounts by the pair that dropped last month; the other, which has been dominating political coverage the past couple of weeks, is Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper’s Original Sin, an autopsy of how Biden’s condition was hidden from the public for so long.

The other reason the issue has exploded yet again — just as the former president has stepped back into the public eye, while he gets ready to release his own, self-exculpatory book — is because we’ve just found out Biden has prostate cancer, and a particularly “aggressive” one at that, which has spread to his bones. Despite his spokesperson’s insistence that this was the first anyone knew about it, speculation has swirled that there may have been an effort to hide the diagnosis while he was president, fueled by the fact that Biden is the only president going back to Bill Clinton at least not to be tested for prostate cancer, that an oncologist who served as his own COVID advisor has called this “a little strange,” and this 2022 clip features Biden casually saying he has cancer.

Whether or not you buy into this speculation, at this point it’s a legitimate line of inquiry. It’s legitimate, because as both Fight and Original Sin show, Biden’s four years as president were defined by a vast, concerted effort by both the people closest to him and a constellation of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to, generously, keep what they knew about his deteriorating health from the public.

Time and again in Original Sin, the same story is told and retold: one of Biden’s advisors, allies, old friends, or donors interacts with him face to face; they are either alarmed by his frail and confused physical appearance, by the fact that he doesn’t know who they are, or by the fact that he’s seemingly unable to speak off the cuff without serious assistance; and they proceed to say and do nothing about it, or even double down in their public insistence that he’s never been better.

[...]

It wasn’t always cowardice. The reporting by both pairs of authors establishes that the insular team of the president’s closest advisors — both longtime Biden loyalists and family members, all of whom became unhealthily enamored with the trappings of power — went to great lengths to disguise Biden’s decline. They made sure he was well made-up, had events scheduled only during certain hours, always had clear visual aids to help him walk from point A to B, was furnished with notes, teleprompters, and other assistance to help him speak, or that events where he was meant to interact with others, like cabinet meetings, were scripted in advance — though even that was not always enough.

In hindsight, many of the most cynical theories about what was going on in the Biden White House turned out to be true. Biden’s advisors closed ranks around him (“You can’t talk about this stuff. We’re backing Biden,” one alarmed Democrat was told), and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) abruptly rearranged the 2024 primary schedule, which nonsensically put South Carolina first, for the exact reason everyone said at the time: purely to put Biden in the best position of beating any challenger. And they worked to aggressively shut down any attempt to ask questions about, investigate, or expose his decline.

Thompson and Tapper report that Biden’s team enlisted a coalition of influencers, Democratic operatives, and loyalist media to publicly shame anyone looking into Biden’s condition and create a “disincentive structure” for them to do so, gave out talking points that were then dutifully used by allies, and at one point threatened to deny a Wall Street Journal reporter’s story on the matter to scare her away from going forward with it. Meanwhile, they kept Biden isolated from his colleagues, to the point that cabinet members went months without seeing him.

While Biden’s decline seems to have become markedly worse and more rapid over the course of 2023 and 2024, both books make clear, as other reporting has, that it started much earlier. Each recounts a disastrous late 2021 meeting that was meant to offer Biden a chance to persuade the Democratic caucus to pass his infrastructure bill, but saw the president instead ramble endlessly and leave the room without ever making the ask.

But Original Sin dates the start of it much earlier, with insiders noticing changes around the time his eldest son was dying in 2015. Biden’s brain “seemed to dissolve,” a senior White House official told the authors, while another insider said the death “aged him significantly.” He struggled to remember his longtime aide Mike Donilon’s name in 2019. And he was so bad in 2020 that the conversations with ordinary voters he filmed for that year’s Democratic convention required heavy, “creative” editing, with those who watched the raw footage left alarmed and convinced he couldn’t serve as president.

[...]

Common to both books is a broad, behind-the-scenes consensus within the party that Kamala Harris, the most likely person to replace Biden on the ticket, was, even with her youth and full health, nearly as much of a disaster as her addled boss. Harris’s weaknesses as a politician are well known now after being put in the harsh glare of the 2024 campaign, but the reporting gives us new details: her need to prepare for everything to the point that her staff did a mock simulation of an upcoming off-the-record dinner with socialites, according to Thompson and Tapper; or the fact that, according to Parnes and Allen, Harris wasn’t able to come up with a bold economic vision to campaign on in part because she struggled to grasp economic issues — “Wall Street jargon hit her ears like a foreign language,” they write. The party had such little confidence in her, her candidacy was repeatedly used as a potent threat to ward off efforts to roll Biden.

[...]

But maybe most important was the party’s ironically undemocratic nature, and its willingness to use that to stop a leftward shift. The true original sin of the entire, cascading crisis around Biden — his infirmity, the crisis of confidence in the party it caused, his saddling of the party with a weak successor, his final, fatal extraction from her to promise not to break from him — wasn’t really Biden’s decision to run again. It had been the Democratic establishment’s desperation to stop Bernie Sanders and his movement from taking over the party in 2020, something they could only do by saddling themselves with a man whose political abilities many of them had little faith in.

But it was worth it: Several high-profile Democrats have since come out and openly admitted they had gone with Biden only as a last-minute play to stop Sanders, and as Parnes and Allen had reported four years ago, for many of the party’s establishment centrists, “their fears of losing their party to socialism competed with their fears of Trump winning a second term.”

One of the most insane "But Jermy Bomblins!!!1" I think I've seen.

Antisemitic conspiracy theories suggesting Labour is being held back by Zionist interests can readily be found on social media, but none of this is true.

A visible reminder of this came when former leader Jeremy Corbyn got to his feet to challenge Lammy. Under Corbyn’s leadership, Labour became so immersed in antisemitism and so marginalised the Jewish community that the party has had to continue working hard to restore its reputation.

For this reason, Sir Keir and Mr Lammy have worked hard to support Israel’s right to defend itself in the wake of the horrific 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas.

As attacks on Gaza by Israel have intensified, Labour has softly attempted to pressure Netanyahu’s government into restraint but never been willing to go the extra mile. Arguably, as Mr Malthouse and other MPs from five different political parties claimed in the chamber, they still have not gone far enough.

But the reality is that the urgency and horror of the situation now facing the people in Gaza is the tipping point where the imminent catastrophe outweighs the shame of Labour’s recent political past.

Reminder that the entire notion that Labour meaningfully became more antisemitic under Corbyn has never been proven. Worse, revealed internal emails showed Labour HQ employees deliberately tried to undermine Corbyn, including deliberately not dealing with complaints sent to the party, only for those same employees to then try and pretend they were whistleblowers to the BBC unveiling how Labour wasn't taking complaints seriously.

The paper, due to be voted on tomorrow (20 May), means Labour will ban trans women from:

❌ All-women shortlists ❌ Women's Conference ❌ Being Women's Officers

In the original post are images of the leaked paper in question.

The materialist dialectics pioneered by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels remains a crucial method for understanding modern issues, including environmental problems. As early as the 1970s, Howard Parsons observed, “Marx and Engels laid down the basic outline and method of dialectical knowledge, but by its very definition such knowledge must be continuously informed and brought up to date, so that it can become relevant and useful with regard to the life-and-death issues that men face anew day after day.”1 The foundation of dialectics lies in real human beings and the history they have created—both natural and human history—and, thus, dialectics will acquire new forms as human life evolves.

The natural and physical world we inhabit today has experienced profound transformations. According to a widely recognized concept, we have entered the Anthropocene Epoch.2 In this phase, humanity has become the dominant force driving the development of Earth’s systems, triggering what is referred to as the “anthropogenic rift” in Earth’s history.3 This rift primarily is characterized by the “Great Acceleration” of global environmental changes and the breaching of planetary boundaries. Furthermore, these ecological crises are closely related to issues of social injustice. The book Global Change and the Earth System, written by a number of respected scientists, notes: “In a world in which the disparity between the wealthy and the poor, both within and between countries, is growing, equity issues are important in any consideration of global environmental management.”4 Moreover, it is crucial to note that this systemic crisis has not directly led to a transformation of society toward sustainability. On the contrary, it has been co-opted by neoliberalism, exacerbating the crisis.

According to the neoliberal perspective, the finite and contingent nature of the earth gives rise to the problem of how to allocate and conserve natural resources effectively. In this context, the privatization and marketization of natural resources are seen as the most efficient means of managing the planet. Consequently, the Anthropocene crisis has not been recognized by capitalism as a fundamental challenge; instead, it has become a new opportunity for capitalism to green itself and expand.5 Therefore, we urgently need to revive Marxist dialectics and develop the dialectics of ecology that is relevant to contemporary issues in order to analyze the Anthropocene crisis through the lens of dialectical materialism. This means that it is essential to engage in an ecological critique of capitalism, advance a socio-ecological revolution, and ultimately move toward a new ecological civilization based on the harmonious coexistence of humanity and nature.

As the Israeli military kills two more Palestinian journalists in Gaza, a new documentary by Zeteo has uncovered critical details about Israel’s killing three years ago of the acclaimed Palestinian American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. The film, Who Killed Shireen?, identifies for the first time the Israeli soldier who allegedly shot Abu Akleh. We get response from two members of Abu Akleh’s family — her brother Anton and her niece Lina — as well as the documentary’s executive producer, Dion Nissenbaum, and Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan.

“We’ve always known that it was an Israeli soldier who killed Shireen,” says Lina Abu Akleh, who says the “entire chain of command” must be held accountable, including elected officials.

“The Biden administration and the Israeli government essentially were doing everything they could to cover up what happened that day to Shireen Abu Akleh,”

https://zeteo.com/p/who-killed-shireen-abu-akleh

In this investigative documentary, Zeteo, for the first time, identifies the Israeli soldier who killed the famous reporter – a closely guarded secret up until now, as Israel had refused to divulge his name even to top American officials, according to our sources.

The documentary also reveals a shocking Biden administration cover-up, with former US officials divulging exclusive new information and telling us that the Biden administration “failed” Shireen in order to maintain its relationship with the Israeli government.

The film features exclusive interviews not just with former US officials but also former top Israeli officials and soldiers, as well as journalists who knew Shireen personally.

https://zeteo.com/p/who-killed-shireen-abu-akleh

Democrats keep reacting normally to being told to do their fucking jobs. This guy is looking to be on the House Oversight Committee btw (the same one AOC got kicked off from, to pick a 70 year old throat cancer patient who had to resign a few months later).

Lynch, who's represented a safely blue seat in Congress since 2001, was exhorted by rallygoers at a Friday protest to stand up more forcefully to Trump. But he demurred when one attendee asked him to "commit to not voting for any Republican legislation," saying he had to consider the views of his entire district.

"I got 800,000 people that I represent, and I gotta figure out what's in their best interest, not the best interest of, you know, Sally Blue from across the street," said Lynch in a video published by MassLive. One attendee, however, interjected to say, "This is in the best interests of our country and our democracy," which set Lynch off.

"I get to decide that. I get to decide that," he responded with evident irritation. "I get to decide that. I'm elected. I get to decide that. You wanna decide that? You need to run for Congress, okay? I get to decide that."

Lynch may soon get reminded that voters, in fact, decide that. Attorney Patrick Roath, described by Politico as a "voting rights advocate and Deval Patrick alum," is weighing a bid against the congressman in next year's Democratic primary, according to an unnamed source.

Roath hasn't commented publicly, but the day after Lynch's eruption, he tweeted, "Arrogance is bad. So is entitlement."

[...]

Lynch, a former ironworker with close ties to organized labor, also brings with him a record of past social conservatism: Earlier in his career, he opposed abortion rights, though he later shifted his views (but he still called himself "pro-life" as recently as 2019.) Infamously in progressive circles, he also voted against the Affordable Care Act, though he claimed to do so from the left.

Roath, who is in his late 30s, would offer a stark generational contrast with Lynch, who turns 70 next month and has held public office since 1995. But even if Lynch avoids a primary, he's by no means the only longtime Democrat whose posture toward Trump has drawn progressive ire—anger that is reminiscent of the tea party furor that reshaped the GOP in 2010 and could fuel a wave of primary challenges next year.

Deflecting by saying you represent all constituents is pretty classic Democrat.

"You may have voted for me for specific reasons, with specific policies, identified with a specific politcal party I knowingly campaign and identify with, but now that you've elected me I represent all constituents so please stop asking me what I'm going to do about any of them."

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KArSrW4P-jw