Monday, December 31, 2018
Can We Fight Climate Change With Energy Efficient Light Bulbs?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHusLy_K5KU
Der Spiegel’s counterfeit journalism and the campaign against “fake news”
By Peter Schwarz
31 December 2018
The exposure of journalistic
fraud at the German news weekly Der Spiegel has lifted the lid on the
manipulation of public opinion by the so-called “authoritative” media. While
Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media systematically censor
unwelcome posts, the supposedly “reliable” and “objective” reporting by the
mainstream media proves to be propaganda produced in cooperation with the state
to promote the interests of the ruling class. In the name of combatting “fake
news,” freedom of the press and freedom of opinion are being gutted.
Last week, the editors
of Der Spiegel, the highest-circulation German news magazine, admitted that
they had published 55 articles by the journalist Claas Relotius that were
“completely or partially invented, falsified, forged.”
Relotius has also written
numerous articles for other German media outlets.
Since the public
acknowledgment by Der Spiegel’s editors, the news weekly’s editorial board
has endeavoured to portray the Relotius scandal as a unique case in which
genius, a desire for prestige, nihilistic energy and psychological instability
came together. According to media reports, Spiegel has provided the
counterfeiter, who voluntarily resigned following his exposure, with
psychological care and a lawyer.
Relotius may be an exception
in the brazenness of his forgeries, but the much more important question is why
his fabrications were published by Spiegel and other media and why he
was awarded numerous journalistic prizes. At the tender age of 33, Relotius has
received almost a dozen prestigious awards by juries that included not only
journalists, but also prominent figures in politics and public life.
His forgeries, as it turns
out, were by no means difficult to see through. The Spiegel editorial
board repeatedly ignored anomalies and warnings. Now it admits with disarming
openness that Relotius’ reports were “too good to be true.”
What is the significance of
this scandal? According to commentators, although Relotius’ reports were fake,
they were still “beautiful,” i.e., they corresponded to the narrative the
editors and journalism award jurors wanted to promulgate. In his writing, “the
present is concentrated into a readable format, the grand outlines of
contemporary history become comprehensible, and suddenly the great whole
becomes completely humanly comprehensible,” Spiegel editor-in-chief
Ullrich Fichtner gushed following the exposure. As long as the forgeries were
not discovered, they were welcome.
Many of Relotius’ articles
deal with topics that are particularly sensitive from the point of view of
bourgeois propaganda, such as the background to Trump’s rise in the US and the
wars in Iraq and Syria.
To justify the Western
military interventions in the Middle East, a fairy tale by Relotius about two
young brothers (“lion boys”) kidnapped, tortured and trained by the Islamic
State (ISIS) to become suicide bombers proved much more effective than a
carefully researched piece into the real background to the wars. Such an
article would have to admit—if it were honest—that ISIS and other Islamist
militias are, above all, a product of the intrigues of the US and its allies in
NATO and in the Middle East.
Relotius’s fabrications fit
seamlessly into a stream of disinformation that has lasted for nearly 16
years—since then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his infamous speech at
the UN on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Although the entire speech was
based on lies and forgeries, it was largely accepted uncritically by the
international media and served as a justification for the bloodiest war of the
21st century, which continues to this day.
Freedom of the press is an
achievement of the bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie upheld it as long as
it was fighting against the supremacy of the aristocracy, and later enshrined
it in its constitutions. While capitalism remained capable of social
compromise, such freedoms retained a spark of life.
But freedom of the press is
not compatible with war, militarism and a society based on intolerable levels
of social inequality.
Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein, who exposed the Watergate scandal, were still being celebrated and
honoured in the 1970s. Today, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who have
uncovered incomparably more serious crimes of US imperialism, are isolated and
living in forced exile, and must fear for their lives. Outrageous
counterfeiters such as Relotius, on the other hand, are awarded prizes.
The incestuous relationship
between the world of politics and the media has taken on a dimension that
defies description. Billion-dollar media conglomerates dominate the press.
Journalists and leading politicians know each other, mingle at the same bars,
and frolic together alongside film stars and other celebrities at annual press
galas.
As with the establishment
political parties, the terms “left” and “right” have lost all meaning in
relation to the media. Stefan Aust, previously the long-standing
editor-in-chief of Spiegel, who began his career in 1966 at the left-wing
publication konkret, is now editor of Die Welt, the flagship paper of
the right-wing Springer publishing house.
Nikolaus Blome, deputy
editor-in-chief of Springer's rag Bild, worked for a time for the Spiegel editor-in-chief.
Other leading journalists also regularly switch from one publication to the
other, with the pro-Green Party taz proving to be particularly
fertile ground for up-and-coming bourgeois journalists.
Relotius has also published
his articles across the entire spectrum of the German media—from taz to Die
Zeit, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and
Springer’s Welt. In second place behind Spiegel in terms of
articles published by Relotius is the Swiss Weltwoche, mouthpiece of the
ultra-right Swiss People’s Party, with 28 pieces.
Social reality, the sentiments
and needs of the masses hardly exist in the closed circle of the political
parties, the media and the super-rich. The media have become instruments of
state propaganda. This is the reason Claas Relotius—a contemporary version of
Thomas Mann’s impostor Felix Krull—could become a star journalist.
Workers and young people have
long been suspicious of the official media and are searching the internet for
alternative, more objective sources of information. This is the reason for the
hysterical campaign against “fake news,” which serves as a pretext for
censoring the internet and is directed in particular against left-wing,
anti-capitalist publications. Both the European Union and the German government
have enacted internet censorship laws under the false flag of combatting “fake
news.” Facebook alone employs 30,000 people to censor unwelcome posts. Terms
such as “comrade” and “brother” suffice for an entry to be deleted.
This censorship, which is
particularly directed against the World Socialist Web Site, shows how
important it is to build and disseminate wsws.org.
As the central organ of the International Committee of the Fourth
International, the WSWS is completely independent of bourgeois donors and
government influence. It calls things by their name, analyses the facts with
ruthless objectivity and fights to arm the working class with an understanding
of the capitalist crisis and a socialist perspective.
External reality itself is always already transcendentally constituted
Excerpts from:
‘Ugly, Creepy, Disgusting, and
Other Modes of Abjection’
by Jela Krečič and Slavoj
Žižek
[…]
In James Cameron’s Titanic
(1997) there is a short shot from above of an unidentified old couple lying
embraced in their bed while the ship is already sinking, so their cabin is
half-flooded and a stream of water is running all around the bed. This shot,
although meant as a realistic shot, creates the impression of a dream scene—a
bed with the tightly embraced couple in the midst of strong flow of water,
touchingly rendering the stability of love in the midst of a disaster. This
detail in an otherwise average commercial movie bears witness to an authentic
cinematic touch, that of making reality appear as a dream scene. A variation of
the same motif are those magic moments in some films when it seems as if an
entity that belongs to fantasy space intervenes in ordinary reality so that the
frontier that separates the fantasy space from ordinary reality is momentarily
suspended.
[…]
One should emphasize the
hyperrealism of such moments; the spectralization of material reality overlaps
with full focus on material objects. How is this paradox possible? There is
only one solution: external reality itself is not simply out there, it is already
transcendentally constituted so that it is experienced as such—as “normal”
reality out there—only if it fits these transcendental coordinates.
[…]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RcVzevWX4U
[CFP] CONFERENCE 2019: SOCIAL CAPITAL WORKING GROUP
http://iippe.org/cfp-conference-2019-social-capital-working-group/
THEME: ENVISIONING THE FUTURE. ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIES, COLLECTIVES AND COMMUNITIES
Asimina Christoforou, Athens University of Economics and Business
Luca Andriani, Birkbeck, University of London
Collective and community economies represent alternative ways of dealing with important issues such as deprivations, inequalities and conflicts. These alternative economic approaches rely on the strength of social norms and networks of cooperation and solidarity challenging conventional universals of homo economicus. They can be found in a variety of collective efforts and initiatives, which include, but are not restricted to, cooperative production in worker-recuperated enterprises; social kitchens and second-hand stores for the satisfaction of basic needs; community and environmental movements against reckless urban and industrial expansion; alternative currencies and microfinance institutions for local exchange and credit.
In light of these developments, we invite proposals for papers to be presented in the Social Capital Working Group’s panels at IIPPE’s Annual Conference. Proposals could examine the development of alternative collective and community economies in different parts of the world and investigate their potential to combat the individualisation and marketisation of human action and to create transformational relations toward a cooperative and solidaristic economy and society. Many studies have pointed to the critical role of social capital as norms and networks of trust, reciprocity and collaboration in creating values and institutions of cooperation, democracy and welfare. Yet some point to the possibility of degeneration as a result of inherent tensions between economic and social objectives and the pressures of a global environment where the pursuit of economic profit and cost-competitiveness prevail. These are hypotheses that need to be further theorised and empirically tested in order to uncover the role of social norms and networks in developing alternative perceptions and practices of working and living on the basis of cooperative values and institutions.
We also encourage contributions that generally address the topic of social capital. We welcome works that derive from various social science disciplines and use different units of analysis (individual, regional, country or cross-country level), methodologies and techniques (theoretical, empirical, qualitative and quantitative).
SUBMISSION INFO:
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Please submit your proposal by January 15, 2019.
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:
To submit a proposal, please go to the IIPPE home page http://iippe.org/and check “Submit proposal”. You will be transferred to the Electronic Proposal Form (EPF) located at https://afep-iippe2019.sciencesconf.org/. There you first need to register on the platform and create an account. (For English, select the small English flag near the upper left corner of the page.)
To register, click on the down arrow next to the “Login” button in the upper right corner of the page, and then select “Create account”. Fill in the simple information and submit, and you will get a response for confirmation sent to the email address given. Once you have done that, you can submit a proposal.
To submit, select “Submission” from the left column. “Step 1: Instructions” gives you all the instructions that are necessary beyond the obvious ones provided during the submission process by the site. “Step 2: Submit” takes you to the submission process itself. When you submit, be sure to select “IIPPE Paper” under the category “Type”. Only after that will a category “Topic” with the list of Working Groups appear. Please choose “Social Capital Working Group” to submit to our panel.
GENERAL INFO:
For queries and suggestions, you may contact Asimina Christoforou, Coordinator of the Social Capital Working Group: asimina.christoforou@gmail.com.
For general information about IIPPE, Working Groups, and the Conference: http://iippe.org.
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Monday, December 24, 2018
Aaron Mate Provides Much-Needed FACTS & SENSE on RussiaGate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HBA3Zm3dGM
Claire McCaskill Slams Ocasio-Cortez, Tells Dems How to Win (She Just Lost)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7B4jlHY5iY
Stock Market Plunges Xmas Eve 2018
Someone watched Inside Job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHNOYTi3h4A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHNOYTi3h4A
Sunday, December 23, 2018
How Mao would have evaluated the Yellow Vests
The French Yellow Vest movement exposes a problem at the heart of today’s politics. Too much adherence to popular “opinion” and not enough innovation and fresh ideas.
Already a quick glance at the imbroglio makes it clear that we are caught in multiple social struggles. The tension between the liberal establishment and the new populism, the ecological struggle, efforts in support of feminism and sexual liberation, plus ethnic and religious battles and the desire for universal human rights. Not to mention, trying to resist digital control of our lives.
So, how to bring all these struggles together without simply privileging one of them as the “true” priority? Because this balance provides the key to all other struggles.
Old ideas
Half a century ago, when the Maoist wave was at its strongest, Mao Zedong’s distinction between “principal” and “secondary” contradictions (from his treatise “On Contradiction,” written in 1937) was a common currency in political debates. Perhaps, this distinction deserves to be brought back to life.
Let’s begin with a simple example: Macedonia – what’s in a name? A couple of months ago, the governments of Macedonia and Greece concluded an agreement on how to resolve the problem of the name “Macedonia.” It should change its name into “Northern Macedonia.”
This solution was instantly attacked by the radicals in both countries. Greek opponents insisted “Macedonia” is an old Greek name, and Macedonian opponents felt humiliated by being reduced to a “Northern” province since they are the only people who call themselves “Macedonians.”
Imperfect as it was, the solution offered a glimpse of hope to end a long and meaningless struggle with a reasonable compromise.
But it was caught in another “contradiction” – the struggle between big powers (the US and EU on the one side, Russia on the other side). The West put pressure on both sides to accept the compromise so that Macedonia could quickly join the EU and NATO, while, for exactly the same reason (seeing in it the danger of its loss of influence in the Balkans), Russia opposed it, supporting conservative nationalist forces in both countries, to varying degrees.
So, which side should we take here? I think we should decidedly take the side of compromise, for the simple reason that it is the only realist solution to the problem. Russia opposed it simply because of its geopolitical interests, without offering another solution, so supporting Russia here would have meant sacrificing the reasonable solution of the singular problem of Macedonian and Greek relations to international geopolitical interests.
Power games
Now let’s take the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei's chief financial officer and daughter of the firm’s founder, in Vancouver. She is accused of breaking US sanctions on Iran, and faces extradition to the US, where she could be jailed for up to 30 years if found guilty.
What is true here? In all probability, one way or another, all big corporations discreetly break the laws. But it’s more than evident that this is just a “secondary contradiction” and that another battle is being fought here. It’s not about trade with Iran, it’s about the big struggle for domination in the production of digital hardware and software.
What Huawei symbolizes is a China which is no longer the Foxconn China, the place of half-slave labor assembling machines developed elsewhere, but a place where software and hardware is also conceived. China has the potential to become a much stronger agent in the digital market than Japan with Sony or South Korea with Samsung, through economic heft and numbers.
But enough of particular examples. Things get more complex with the struggle for universal human rights. We get here the “contradiction” between proponents of these rights and those who warn that, in their standard version, universal human rights are not truly universal but implicitly privilege Western values (individuals have primacy over collectives, etc.) and are thereby a form of ideological neocolonialism. No wonder that the reference to human rights served as a justification of many military interventions, from Iraq to Libya.
Partisans of universal human rights counter that their rejection often serves to justify local forms of authoritarian rule and repression as elements of a particular way of life. But how to decide here?
A middle-of-the-road compromise is not enough, so one should give preference to universal human rights for a very precise reason. The dimension of universality has to serve as a medium in which multiple ways of life can coexist, and the Western notion of universality of human rights contains the self-critical dimension which makes visible its own limitations.
When the standard Western ideas are criticized for a particular bias, this critique itself has to refer to some notion of more authentic universality which makes us see the distortion of a false universality.
But some form of universality is always here, even a modest vision of the coexistence of different and ultimately incompatible ways of life has to rely on it. In short, what this means is that the “principal contradiction” is not that of the tension(s) between different ways of life but the “contradiction” within each way of life (“culture,” organization of its jouissance) between its particularity and its universal claim.
To use a technical term, each particular way of life is by definition caught in “pragmatic contradiction,” its claim to validity is undermined not by the presence of other ways of life but by its own inconsistency.
Social divides
Things get even more complex with the “contradiction” between the alt-right descent into racist/sexist vulgarity and the politically correct stiff regulatory moralism.
Thus, it is crucial, from the standpoint of the progressive struggle for emancipation, not to accept this “contradiction” as primary but to unravel in it the displaced and distorted echoes of class struggle.
In a fascist way, the rightist populist figure of the enemy (the combination of financial elites and invading immigrants) combines both extremes of the social hierarchy, thereby blurring the class struggle.
On the opposite end and in an almost symmetrical way, the politically-correct anti-racism and anti-sexism struggles barely conceal that their ultimate target is white working class racism and sexism, thereby also neutralizing class struggle.
That’s why the designation of political correctness as “cultural Marxism” is false. Political correctness in all its pseudo-radicality is, on the contrary, the last defense of “bourgeois” liberalism against Marxism, obfuscating/displacing class struggle as the “principal contradiction.”
The same goes for the transgender and #MeToo struggle. It is also overdetermined by the “principal contradiction” of the class struggle which introduces an antagonism into its very heart.
Tarana Burke, who created the #MeToo campaign more than a decade ago, observed in a recent critical note that in the years since the movement began, it deployed an unwavering obsession with the perpetrators — a cyclical circus of accusations, culpability, and indiscretions.
“We are working diligently so that the popular narrative about MeToo shifts from what it is,” Burke said.
“We have to shift the narrative that it’s a gender war, that it’s anti-male, that it’s men against women, that it’s only for a certain type of person — that it’s for white, cisgender, heterosexual, famous women.”
In short, one should struggle to refocus #MeToo onto the daily suffering of millions of ordinary working women and housewives. This emphatically can be done. For example, in South Korea, #MeToo exploded with tens of thousands of ordinary women demonstrating against their sexual exploitation.
The ongoing Yellow Vests (gilets jaunes) protests in France condense all we were talking about. Their fatal limitation resides precisely in their much-praised “leaderless” character, their chaotic self-organization.
In a typical populist way, the Yellow Vest movement bombards the state with a series of demands which are inconsistent and impossible to meet within the existing economic system. What it lacks is a leader who would not only listen to the people but translate their protest into a new, coherent vision of society.
The “contradiction” between the demands of the Yellow Vests and the state is “secondary”: their demands are rooted in the existing system. The true “contradiction” is between our entire socio-political system and (the vision of) a new society in which the demands formulated by the protesters no longer arise. How?
The old Henry Ford was right when he remarked that, when he offered the first serially produced car, he didn’t follow what people wanted. As he put it succinctly, if asked what they want, the people would have answer: “A better and stronger horse to pull our carriage!”
This insight finds an echo in Steve Jobs’ infamous motto that “a lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”
In spite of all one has to criticize in the activity of Jobs, he was close to an authentic master in how he understood his motto. When he was asked how much customer feedback Apple uses, he snapped back: “It's not the customers’ job to know what they want… we figure out what we want.”
Note the surprising turn of this argumentation. After denying that customers know what they want, Jobs doesn’t go on with the expected direct reversal “it is our task (the task of creative capitalists) to figure out what customers want and then ‘show it to them’ on the market.”
Instead, he continues “we figure out what we want” – this is how a true master works. He doesn’t try to guess what people want. He simply obeys his own desire so that it is left to the people to decide if they will follow him.
In other words, his power stems from his fidelity to his vision, from not compromising it.
And the same goes for a political leader that is needed today. Protesters in France want a better (stronger and cheaper) horse – in this case, ironically, cheaper fuel for their cars.
They should be given the vision of a society where the price of fuel no longer matters in the same way that, after cars, the price of horse fodder no longer matters.
Monday, December 17, 2018
These 16 House Democrats About to Go Down in History for Helping GOP Kill Internet as We Know It
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/12/17/friday-deadline-these-16-house-democrats-about-go-down-history-helping-gop-kill
Brandon Boyle (Pa.),
Robert Brady (Pa.),
G.K. Butterfield (N.C.),
Matt Cartwright (Pa.),
Jim Costa (Calif.),
Henry Cueller (Texas),
Dwight Evans (Pa.),
Vicente Gonzalez (Texas),
Josh Gottheimer (N.J.),
Gene Green (Texas),
Tom O'Halleran (Ariz.),
Brad Schneider(Ill.),
David Scott (Ga.),
Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.),
Filemon Vela (Texas),
and Pete Visclosky (Ind.).
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