Re: Digital leftism in a globalised world?

2017-01-27 Thread carlo von lynX 
On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 03:34:05PM +0100, Alexander Bard wrote:

>Excuse me, but what kind of world do you live in?
>A world where all property is owned by nation-state governments as if
>they were all North Korean dictatorships? And the globe is a
>competetion for most evil between these states and nothing else? Have
>you even heard of transnational movement?

This has not been the topic of conversation in this thread,
but you are free to start it.

>Can we please raise the quality of postings on this forum to at least
>slightly above the junior high school level?

My post just got an affermative feedback by a British professor
in Paris who has been evolving the concept of what I would call
"equal trade" agreements as opposed to "free trade" agreements
and bumped into the incapacity of people to even imagine such
a thing. I found it highly enlightening and motivating that
not being a part of the machinery of traditional thought can
lead to the ability to think out of the box and circumvent
cognitive barriers that have been erected by ideology and/or
special interest.

So what exactly is it, that you would like to criticize?
Could you please go into details rather than leave it at
some pointlessly insulting level?

>And while I'm at it, may I suggest a pause from the usage of the sloppy
>demonising term "neo-liberalism"?

Since you are replying to my post, and my post did not make
a single mention of "neo-liberalism" I deny you the right to
throw straw-man argumentation at me.

In this post you express an aggressive tone, miss out on
delivering actual argumentation and even pull a logical fallacy
on the interlocutor. If this is a slightly moderated list, then
this post should have hit the moderation wall for as long as
it takes until its author formulates a thought that brings the
discourse forward rather than getting tied up in the emotional
use of fallacies.

>And censoring the internet is not the slighest bit Marxist. Neither is
>racist localism, so stop defending that too. Don't be Trumpists!

Congratulations. You just pulled two further straw-man
argumentations at me. I neither advocated Internet censorship
nor racist localism.

>Instead look at the real issue at hand: What are we going to do with
>the masses of Trump and Le Pen and Brexit voters when their
>pseudophallic leaders do not give them what they want? How do we
>prevent an Aryan State in Europe or a new U.S. civil war from rising?
>Or do we go even more radical than Zizek and in an accelerationist
>manner accept and encourage such a development?

Certainly not if you try to impede people from using certain
terminology and thinking certain necessary thoughts to recognize
fallacious thinking and transcend it. This mail has not provided
any contribution in that sense, but I suppose it is somewhere
stuck inside your head and needs more time to find a formulation
that anyone outside your head could possibly agree on.

My perception is that by continuing the discourse on "equal trade
agreements" we are a lot closer to a solution that could actually
remove the foundations of the unhappiness that motivates the
"masses of Trump and Le Pen and Brexit voters". So while your
post lists the symptoms without a suggestion for treatment,
we were discussing a medicine against the malady. Did you even
notice?

>Best intentions from Cape Town
>Alexander Bard

In endless patience, the author of the e-mail that got you so
angry and made you reply completely off-topic, for no discernible
reasons.

Dear moderators, please make sure the contributions are actually
constructive.


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Re: 10 Preliminary Theses on Trump

2017-01-27 Thread Ian Alan Paul 
   "Is you 10th thesis calling for a revolution without using the word.

   If so why not? Why avoid the word? Has it become tarnished by
   carrying too much historical baggage ? Or does te word simply
   not cover what it is you are trying to say?"

   Thank you for this question David ~ I certainly think it's an important
   one. Especially now.

   I hesitate to use the word revolution because the relationship between
   what we might call the "history of revolutionary movements" and the
   present remains unclear to me (this is also why I hesitate to use the
   term "fascism" in this text).

   When I drew attention to the absence of the word "revolution" during my
   talk in Amsterdam a few days ago, it was in connection to two other
   points I was trying to make:

   (1) : The tendency of those in attendance to describe them/ourselves as
   "radical leftists," another term which I think I would like to hold
   onto in some regard but am also unsure of how it maps onto the present
   conjuncture. It's possible we're in a moment where a left/right
   distinction is becoming less important in some ways, particularly in
   the political space of the state, and so perhaps it's time to either
   leave the term behind or alternatively to forcefully redefine it by
   laying out the new kinds of stakes that this situation requires of us.

   (2) : As my talk was reflecting on the historical emergence of
   Disciplinary Societies, and in turn Control Societies, I wanted to
   intentionally trouble forms of resistance that imagined that a
   reconsolidation of power could be an effective means of opposing recent
   developments (as you'll recall, some of the talks openly proposed that
   we should invest in Control Societies as a means of pushing back
   against Brexit/Trump/etc., something which I oppose). This of course is
   also part of the history of revolutions (the tendency of resistance to
   call forth new forms of power), and so I wanted to make this dynamic
   explicit in some sense for our thinking.

   One thing that remains perfectly clear to me is that we lack models for
   what successfully resistance looks like in the present, and so now is
   the time for what I would call speculative or experimental resistance.
   I think we should be striking out in different directions both as a
   kind of cartographic activity (as a means of understanding the current
   configurations/limits/concentrations/flows of power) and as a means of
   perhaps finding ourselves finally able to, as I say in my text, "make
   possible that which cannot be under capitalism."

   Best,

   ~i

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 11:22 AM, David Garcia 
 wrote:

 Thank you Ian for these cogent thoughts..
 I have one question for you:
 <...>

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Re: January 23, Trump Question

2017-01-27 Thread Molly Hankwitz 
This is fascinating to me having just attended the March here in SF all day 
Saturday and having watched, rapt -- the anarchist black bloc on the streets of 
D.C. remotely and been a regular, choosy news hound for months.

A couple of points - while I'm not convinced that the Republicans have 
installed him to impeach him Im inclined to agree with the strong connection 
Chris makes about Pence and the backdrop Republicans surrounding the 
unequivocally absurd Trump - he is surely their fall guy when it comes to 
interfacing with media, signing his name, etc --
A growing right wing agenda has been in develooing throughout the last 8 years 
- and long before, not because Obama was also a bad guy --- but because the Tea 
Party tried to shut down the govt and they engineered the 2011 destruction of 
voting rights which screwed this election for many especially in key states. 
(The turn out in Austin on Saturday was the largest Texas has ever seen so 
despite efforts to silence and create wired laws about fetal material, many are 
outraged) 

While the cabinet selections have bewildered and angered us in the last month, 
numerous bills have been drawn up --not about Obamacare which steals media 
attention - but about "human life" and when it starts,de funding planned 
parenthood through NGOs using the word "abortion", making all of our public 
land equal to 0$ so it can be given away, and other sneaker bills setting the 
stage for the bigger picture of...destroying reproductive freedom, drilling in 
national parks, and worse. The dreams of the Heritage Foundation, the American 
Legislative Exchange Council and other right wing think tanks are now well 
within sight, including the negation of dissent with felony penalties. 

Pence is a crazy freak and Impeachment might be just the far, far right's 
ticket so for progression not sure it is the best ride. 

As for the end of capitalism, the description of it being gentler --and that of 
the rise of greater free market dystopia ---bring me to our march's very tame 
signage...(2 signs using patriarchy) and the uncomfortable feeling upon me that 
the majority of protesting Americans dislike Trump and the decline of human 
rights and public sector concerns such a private individual will bring, but 
that there isn't little political alternative in mind - that we haven't already 
experienced ---except to keep protesting...

then, on top of that, I suspect that we don't know the half of it...Oil is 
running out, as Sebastian pointed to, maybe the oligarchs don't care as long as 
it flows from the Arctic and Indian lands for another decade or so. The 
questioning of science as a hippy-dippy lie? The profits will be Huge and 
Trumps grandchildren will have to deal with having had him as a Water 
Protector. Are they building big ships for themselves to off-shore to Mars? 

While we are trying to get them to lighten up and cut less - they are already 
signing in measures which will support the most horrific right wing agenda we 
have yet to see---and it's not Trump's!  He just signs. His universe has about 
30 people in it - his wife, kids; the gang. The Party is diseased, apocalyptic. 
And now that all are secured, the Party simply smiles and takes away the 
paperwork and puts into effect all the rules they have longed to impose since 
the spectrum opened up in the 70s. Trump is the blithering monstrosity of 
promises that keep us in confusion and suspense while the Party slips right 
wing law under his pen. 


Peace
Molly 

> On Jan 23, 2017, at 12:08 PM, Laura Chimera  wrote:
> 
>   You know what Sascha? I agree with you completely. Some people make it
>   seem like the end of capitalism is going to soon be upon us, whether we
>   like it or not, and I think that's completely ridiculous.
> 
>> "I don't see any evidence at all that our society, or any other,
>   is looking to put an end to the system of independent
>   market-based decision-making that capitalism offers".
> 
>   Neither do I. What I do see, however, is that the limits of what you
>   call "market capitalism" are wearing themselves a little too thin. And
>   I believe that's by design: (I apologise for the extreme
>   simplification, but bear with me...) corporations are optimized for
>   profit, without a government regulating them, they'll drive up the
>   prices as much as they can possibly get away with.
 <...>

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Digital leftism in a globalised world?

2017-01-27 Thread Alexander Bard 
   Excuse me, but what kind of world do you live in?
   A world where all property is owned by nation-state governments as if
   they were all North Korean dictatorships? And the globe is a
   competetion for most evil between these states and nothing else? Have
   you even heard of transnational movement?
   Can we please raise the quality of postings on this forum to at least
   slightly above the junior high school level?
   And while I'm at it, may I suggest a pause from the usage of the sloppy
   demonising term "neo-liberalism"?
   I can not in all honesty accept that we put a word on some kind of
   garbage waste bin into which we are all allowed to throw in anything we
   do not spontaneously like and then refer to it as "neo-liberalism". It
   is not just sloppy, it is outright idiotic, and it explains why The
   Left is losing everything as we speak. It has gone lazily bonkers.
   Unless you clearly do not define what you mean with "neo-liberalism",
   do not use the word. It has become absolutely meaningless.
   Instead, if this wants to be a forum for serious discussions on digital
   leftism, let's all go back to Marx and start by defining class and
   class struggle.
   It all begins and ends there anyway.
   And censoring the internet is not the slighest bit Marxist. Neither is
   racist localism, so stop defending that too. Don't be Trumpists!
   Instead look at the real issue at hand: What are we going to do with
   the masses of Trump and Le Pen and Brexit voters when their
   pseudophallic leaders do not give them what they want? How do we
   prevent an Aryan State in Europe or a new U.S. civil war from rising?
   Or do we go even more radical than Zizek and in an accelerationist
   manner accept and encourage such a development?
   Best intentions from Cape Town
   Alexander Bard

   2017-01-26 15:00 GMT+01:00 carlo von lynX :

 On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 07:58:46AM +0100, Alex Foti wrote:

 > [Trump's] politics is neither neocon nor realist (certainly
 > not international kehoane-style) but isolationist.

 We have been sold the notion that Protectionism is very
 very bad and leads to "economic warfare".
 <...>

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Russia? China? It's bored kids you should fear, and Minecraft!

2017-01-27 Thread sebastian 
TL;DR: If this is already too long, forget it. But here's the bottom line: If 
you want to continue debating "foreign cyber-warfare targeting Western 
democracies" without looking like an utter clown, you should read the articles 
linked below. Specifically (3), which is the most illuminating piece of 
investigative journalism I have read online all month, and (4), because instead 
of perpetuating myths about technology, it documents how stuff actually works.


Most likely, you don't remember it, but some may recall that in September 2016, 
the Internet went down for an entire afternoon, leaving many of the most 
popular websites and social media platforms unreachable for hours. This was 
widely reported as an unprecedented cyber attack on the infrastructure of the 
United States. Bruce Schneier, usually regarded as one of the most respectable 
security researchers in the world, wrote in the wake of the incident:

"We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China 
or Russia would be my first guesses. [...] "It feels like a nation's military 
cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar." (1)

Schneier made big waves again in November, when he testified in front of U.S. 
Congress. His declaration was widely quoted:

"It might be that the internet era of fun and games is over, because the 
internet is now dangerous." (2)

Meanwhile, Brian Krebs, another well-known security researcher, decided to do 
some proper research about the incident. Last week, he published his findings 
(3). Not only did he find out who was behind the attack, his account also 
dispels some of the most persistent myths about cyber-war on the Internet:

- Basically, the entire thing happened because he blocked someone on Skype.

- The target wasn't the United States, Silicon Valley or Western Democracy, but 
  Minecraft.

- The clandestine actors that command the largest denial-of-service attacks 
  that the Internet has ever seen are not foreign intelligence agencies, but
  a cottage industry of DDoS protection providers, a racket of small-time 
  extortionists: the Minecraft mafia. These are bored kids in college dorms in 
  the United States.

- A suprisingly effective measure to mitigate such a denial-of-service attack 
  (launched through hundreds of thousands of insecure "Internet of Things" 
  devices, like security cameras or toasters), is to call up an ISP upstream
  of the botnet's command-and-control center, and tell them to turn it off.

- The era of fun and games on the Internet is still very much on.

Below is an excerpt from a longer conversation between the perpetrator of last 
September's attacks and one of his targets (4):

[10:49:11 AM] katie.onis: i love the conspiracy guys thinking this is china or 
another country haha
[10:49:18 AM] live:anna-senpai: yea
[10:49:22 AM] live:anna-senpai: lol
[10:49:29 AM] katie.onis: can't deal with the fact the internet is so insecure
[10:49:31 AM] katie.onis: gotta make it sound hard
[10:49:34 AM] live:anna-senpai: the scheiner on security blog post
[10:49:40 AM] live:anna-senpai: "someone is learning how to take down the  
internet"
[10:49:47 AM] live:anna-senpai: lol

Last night, a friend reminded me that if you look at the pricing for such 
attacks -- and there is no reason to doubt the numbers quoted in Brian Krebs' 
research -- then renting a botnet and shutting down the Internet for an hour or 
two is astonishingly cheap. His idea was that this could become a fashionable 
way for nerds to propose to their fiancées: Hey darling, I wanted your full 
attention, so I turned off the Internet for a moment... 


(1) https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/09/someone_is_lear.html

(2) http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/bruce-schneier-internet-of-things/

(3) 
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/who-is-anna-senpai-the-mirai-worm-author/

(4) https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/annasenpaichat.txt

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Re: A Third Way Between Protectionism & Globalization

2017-01-27 Thread Keith Hart 
Sir James Steuart was a Jacobite exile who brought the term 'political
economy' from Continental Europe to Britain. Almost a decade before
'The Wealth of Nations' he published 'Principles of political economy'
in 1767. For advocating a free Scottish  home market with initial
protection from international predators, he was soon labelled a
'mercantilist'. But his strategy has some relevance now, especially for
regions like Africa that are politically fragmented, economically
backward and subject to financial and other kinds of imperialism.

He rejected the idea that Edinburgh and Glasgow should be cleansed of
'riffraff' (a term for the informal economy popular among the elite
then) by sending them back to the countryside. What the world needs
least, said Sir James, is more farmers. By leaving home, migrants
reduce the number of farmers. As long as people who seem to have no
jobs survive in the city, they generate demand for food supplied by the
remaining farmers. With the money from commercial agriculture, farmers
buy more manufactures and services, thereby letting the city economy
grow, making migration from the countryside more attractive and
accelerating the rural-urban division of labour depends.

As demand rises, so does labour productivity, but it starts from a very
low level.The main threat to this benevolent spiral that we call
'development' is cheap foreign imports undercutting infant industries
and commercial agriculture. The home market must be protected at first
by high tariffs. But as local enterprises become more competitive, with
some firms driving out weaker (as they would have been if exposed to
the cold winds of the world market too early), the government can begin
selectively reducing tariffs protection in strong home sectors while
promoting exports. In this way the national economy will gradually join
the world economy as an equal.

The system of national economy was developed by Alexander Hamilton and
further by Friedrich List who famously told Germans, splintered as they
were between scores of states, that they were condemned to be 'hewers
of wood and drawers of water' for the British forever, unless they got
their act together soon. Like the European Common Market/Union later,
this took the form of building up the home market piecemeal for 50
years through a customs union and then forming a federal state based on
an alliance between the Prussian army and Rhineland capitalists. The
spur to all this was keeping the Austrians out, as well as the British
global free traders (the first neo-liberals?).

Last year I contributed to a multilingual set of publications organized
around the question, 'Is there an emancipatory politics for the 21st
century?' I wrote a chapter on Africa's prospects called 'Waiting for
emancipation' - 
https://www.opendemocracy.net/keith-hart/waiting-for-emancipation-prospects-for-liberal-revolution-in-africa
 - I argued for regional trade
federations as a step towards a politically stronger Africa. This is
not to be achieved by heads of government signing a piece of paper at
Addis Ababa, but through decades of conflict over political forms and
freedom of movement between classes and leagues of nation-states,
Africans and foreign powers, including wars with insiders and
outsiders, against a shifting patchwork of alliances.

The editors told me they liked the piece a lot, but could I explain how
you can have free trade and protection at the dame time. Today's left
has been brainwashed by the neo-liberals, so that they reproduce the
dominant paradigm when opposing them. Sir James could have put them
right.

Keith

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 3:00 PM, carlo von lynX  
wrote:

 We have been sold the notion that Protectionism is very
 very bad and leads to "economic warfare".
 We have been sold the notion that Globalization (aka
 Darwinism), both physical and digital, is inevitable like
 a rule of nature and there is no way on Earth to regulate it.
 I challenge both assumptions and ask why a middle ground
 is such a difficult thing to imagine:
 <...>

   --
   Prof. Keith Hart
   www.thememorybank.co.uk
   135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere
   75009 Paris, France
   Cell: +33684797365

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