Very Deep Left
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Monday, October 28, 2024
Boycott the Election?
But there is no such boycotting organization, and without it blasting out the corresponding rhetoric, up to 60% participation personal boycotts can simply be dismissed as "apathy." That is why I have argued in numerous previous posts that the correct response to this election is to vote for one of the 3 or more anti-Genocide Presidential candidates available in your state (Stein, West, De La Cruz, and the SEP which I just learned about). That sends the specific message you may have if like me much of your rage comes from the Genocide of Palestinians being supported by both mainstream candidates with great exhuberance.
Generally speaking, however, I think it's better to vote for Democrats in other races, except for the really bad extra pro-Israel ones like Fetterman.
The failure of CPUSA to adequately critique the Democratic Party is one thing that has been making me rethink my membership in the organization, but I'm sticking with it for now anyway (and NOT joining one of the fake alternatives).
No one has yet explained to me why the CPUSA chose to run Communist Presidential Candidates until 1988, and then started organizing members to support the Democratic Party. Well, I know why, it was the position taken by the majority of representatives at the CPUSA Convention. But it was not guided by Marxist-Leninist theory, which didn't suddenly change around 1988. Either position could be argued to be consistent with Marxist-Leninist theory.
And it probably made a big difference that the CPSU stopped supporting CPUSA around then too. That support made fielding independent Communist candidates at all levels more possible.
Active third parties are the only form of 'party discipline' available to citizens of USA, since we have top down corporatist parties which basically shill for the candidates most attractive to big donors. It may still only be worth voting for major parties for the lesser evil, if the even lesser evil hasn't also gone beyond the pale, as now.
Discipline comes precisely from the fact that third parties, if they gain support among people who usually support majority parties, threaten those parties. That is precisely how FDR was pushed (by competition from Communists, Socialists, and Huey Long) to do the New Deal, otherwise he could have been a fairly conservative President.
Third Parties, or a comparable means of internal party discipline, are an essential part of a Democratic system, especially a winner-take-all system, and especially with corporatist parties who only serve the public as little as they can get away with.
By these "beyond the pale" standards, which Democrats would I have voted for? It looks like all of them for the first term and none for the second. Every Democrat since Kennedy did sufficient 'beyond the pale' things as to be not re-electable in my book, starting with Johnson, who created a false-flag attack to justify sending millions of US troops to fight democracy in Vietnam (and I could go on from there).
Until now, when Harris, who was duly recommended by Biden himself, has put no distance between her policies and his with regards to the ongoing genocide and proxy wars, even when demanded to put forward such differences by critical constituents, such as Michigan Muslims, instead silencing them, and "stopping disinformation" (which all too often means stopping valid criticism, and always means limiting freedom of speech) has become a Democratic Party rallying cry.
Sunday, October 20, 2024
McCarthyism Eternal
After reading this McCarthyist article, blasting Cornel West for association with anti-imperial and communist groups in a recent antiwar rally, I have decided again to vote for West. It appears that Green Party did not attend the rally, but West and PSL did, which I think shows more courage. Meanwhile, Green Party candidate Jill Stein was interviewed on cable TV, and did a respectable job, until she felt compelled to send a note of corrections the next day explicitly condemning Putin and Assad (but also US Presidents). Many in antiwar circles, including me, found that sort of condemnation of US official enemies to be offensive (though others have often failed to mention that she also condemned US Presidents, which makes it somewhat less so).
So it seems that indeed Cornel West and Claudia De La Cruz (PSL) which both attended the ANSWER Coalition conference with Medea Benjamin, are positioning them to the anti-imperial and anti-war side of the spectrum, which is where I am.
Monday, October 14, 2024
Strategic Uncertainty becomes Strategic Certainty
US recognized that Taiwan was part of China 50 years ago.
But then created a policy of 'strategic uncertainty' meaning they might protect Taiwan if violence were used for assimilation.
New proposed law would make turn this into strategic certainty, in effect, making Taiwan a defacto NATO member.
This is very much like what was done with Ukraine, and led to war with Russia. Although, unlike Ukraine, the US recognized (as does the world) that Taiwan is part of China. So it's even worse.
When empires take great interest in the fate of islands and other features near geopolitical rivals, it's not because of their concern for human rights.
Taiwan has been used as a base for foreign invaders of China many times before.
Saturday, October 12, 2024
The almost infinite improbability of casting a decisive vote
Saturday, October 5, 2024
Iran: Empire comes back to bite
Iran is one of the world's oldest countries, older even than China.
Iran pioneered monotheism with Zoroastrianism. When they released Jews from Babylonian captivity was when Judaism also became monotheistic, inspired by Zoroastrianism. The Hebrew religion(s) had not been monotheistic. That was editing that occurred during exile, fundamentally reformulating the essence of Judaism, and bringing it into alignment with the Iranian empire it became part of.
Cyrus I was a visionary multicultural emperor. But he must have also seen releasing the Jews as creating a stronghold of allies in the Levant so that his son, Cyrus II, could conquer Egypt. So his reason for re-establishing the Temple of Jerusalem with the formerly exiled Hebrew elite now called "Jews" was fundamentally geopolitical.
You could say, Cyrus was a pioneer of creating vassal states, though what Cyrus funded was not a vassal state so much as just...a Temple, centering a region in the Iranian empire. So it was an empire based on vassal elites though not "states" as such (which weren't really a thing much until modern times). But it was an approximation to that with the organizations of the time.
Now the tables are turned. Iran itself is threatened because of what we might call post-Imperial expansion. Empire, which was a concept Iran once pioneered, is now biting back through descendants from the very movement Iran once enabled for its empire.
In a way, sadly, this seems like the saying no good deed goes unpunished. Iranians funded the Second Temple, and created the imperial Pax Irani that it peacefully operated under for quite awhile, and now they face terror and worse from the descendants of those they freed and protected.
Jerusalem and The Second Temple were simply operated by the chief priests, it was a theocracy because the priests knew Jewish history well enough to abhor the idea of kings and all that, not to mention the Iranians didn't want it either, and under their watch the scriptural requirements for a Jewish State were the earthly appearance of Almighty God in "the Messiah."
Things were not so nice under the next empire that replaced the Iranians, and after that was defeated a Jewish State did appear for 80 years under the Maccabees, without the appearance of the Messiah. It was a terror, when the Maccabees conquered the areas that current Israelis seem to be seeking, they force converted adult males to Judaism with circumcision. It was so bad that ultimately the priests begged the Romans for something different, and as a result Judea got King Herod under Pax Romana. As if to make up for the fact that he wasn't actually an ethnic Jew, King Herod built the final incredibly massive version of the Second Temple, but he also bred a lot of dissent in the extended area that was now allocated to Judea. The Apostle Paul we know was a suitor to the Herodian court.
Finally the Herodian dynasty led to years of revolts. They started as Jew vs Jew, and not long after the assassination of James, the brother of Jesus who may have been christian (though probably not by modern definitions) but was also a Jew as was Jesus. Finally the Romans came in, and with large loss of troops, they sacked Jerusalem, and tens of thousands of Jews fled, accompanied by more over time as the Romans introduced new laws. An attempt to restore the Kingdom of Judea by force again was tried by Bar Kochba in 135. This time, he claimed to be the Messiah. It failed, and the rabbis then universally claimed he was NOT the Messiah. The ultimate expression of first millennia Judaism by the rabbis, the Talmud, contains the Three Oaths against creating a Jewish State without the Messiah.
Religious Zionism first appeared when the full text of the Bible was printed by Luther. It was Christian Zionism. "Jewish" political Zionism was created by an atheist of Russian Jewish descent, Hertzl, and the first conference was held in 1895. Most Jews did not become Zionist until the 1960's, when there were popular movies such as Exodus promoting the Zionist cause. The Holocaust was certainly an inflection point, but German Jews died in death camps after years of turning down opportunities to move to Palestine, because they were committed to living in Germany. Most Jews in the world wanted to stay where they were and saw Zionism as the work of anti-semites to get them to go somewhere else. The one and only Jew in the British Cabinet voted against the Balfour Declaration.
As if to repeat the Iranian experience, the US "recognized" the entity that was created in a mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians known as the Nakba. 800,000 Palestinians were driven out of Palestine completely, paving the way for a Jewish majority state with "democracy" (which is oxymoronic under such circumstances).
It had been part of the British plan to both control the middle east through a western proxy, AND to enlist US help in WW1 with Jewish support (Brandeis was a friend of Wilson). To this day the Zionist Entity continues to operate as a western proxy. Ever since its creation, it has helped destroy pan-Arabism (and, even worse from US perspective, pan-Arab-Communism). It creates the instability and anti-democratic forces which help keep corrupt pro-American Arab dictatorships (often hated by most in the country except for their own massive ruling families), who have been continuously kept within the US geopolitical sphere.
But few knowledgeable observers don't see that the era of US global hegemony is ending if not already over. This super-empire (neo-colonial) was clearly doomed to fail from its beginnings in the aftermath of World War II, when imperialists gained the upper hand in the relatively unscathed USA. But now it is in its dying phase, lashing out with it's last gasp against competitor Russia in Ukraine, and unleashing the full demonic power of Zionism in the middle east. The Zionism which was once enabled, as Judaism, by Iran's monotheism, but now simplified (need not wait for messiah, establish no state, not bear false witness, not steal, not murder, not have other gods, love neighbors, heal the world, etc) into pure national supremacism.
Cats have it right. They've had a behaviorally sustainable system for tens of millions of years. The human civilization we know has barely persisted for 11,000 years so far.
Cats refuse any help from others in their fights. It's purely one on one or it doesn't count. That's sustainable.
Empires, allies, client states, and everything of that kind are doomed to failure. And when they fail, there may be flailing that results in world war, which looks like what we are seeing now.
Monday, September 30, 2024
Time, Space, Ergodicity, Reducibility, and God
Mind bending memes and analysis (if you're willing).
The 'Library of Babel' is an interesting meme similar to many I've thought of but more accessible than most.
I'll have to think about it some more, but it occurs to me that the infinity of possible symbolic constructions (eg present and future books) is not something "of this world." If it exists enough to make this meaningful, the Library of Babel is immortal, and therefore every book in it as well. And then if every book, then every author, every reader, etc, as well, I pondered in a previous essay.
However we do have present books, and they are something of this world. As long as there are writers, more will be created, and some will be lost.
There's a huge gap between what we understand as 'material world' and structuring principles, numbers, memes, books, and so on, which appear as though they could be immortal.
Following the above essay, that immortality seems to arise precisely from their reducibility, which things in the material world (including us) don't seem to have.