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libertariantaoist · 6 months

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News Roundup 11/30/2023 | The Libertarian Institute

Here is your daily roundup of today's news:

News Roundup 11/30/2023

by Kyle Anzalone

US News

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) vowed in a letter to his colleagues to bring a bill to the Senate floor as soon as December 4 to fund military aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. President Biden has requested the funding as part of a massive $105 billion spending package. AWC

US Threatens to Reimpose Sanctions on Venezuela if American Demands Not Met this Week. Miami Herald

Ukraine

Photo Emerges Showing First Abrams Tank in Ukraine. X

A US official has denied that the Biden administration is nudging Ukraine toward negotiations with Russia, saying it’s up to Kyiv when to seek peace talks. AWC

Secretary of State Blinken Says We Must and We Will Continue to Support Ukraine. France 24

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Says We Are Becoming De Facto NATO Army. Politico

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday urged alliance members to continue funding the proxy war in Ukraine amid growing signs that Western support for the conflict is waning. AWC

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov plans to attend a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) from November 30 to December 1. AWC

Internal polling in Ukraine shows that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could lose a presidential election if he faces off with Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, The Economist reported on Tuesday. AWC

Korea

North Korea Begins Remilitarizing Border with South Korea. Miami HeraldThe Institute

Israel

Qatar announced Monday that Israel and Hamas agreed to extend the truce under the Hostage deal for another 48 hours. AWC

Since October 17, US troops based in Iraq and Syria have come under steady rocket and drone fire. At least 73 attacks have been carried out on US bases in the two countries, but they have stopped since the truce between Israel and Hamas to facilitate the hostage deal came into effect on Friday. AWC

The Israeli central bank believes the war in Gaza will cost over $50 billion and cut BDP by 3%.Business Insider

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career is in peril due to his failure to prevent the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, the Israeli leader has been meeting with members of his Likud party to ensure continued support. AWC

Biden Says Israeli War in Gaza Is Giving Hamas What They Want. X

Israel and Hamas exchanged prisoners for the fifth straight day on Tuesday as the extension of the initial four-day truce appears to be successful despite the two sides blaming the other for briefly violating the ceasefire earlier in the day. AWC

Senior White House Official Says US Support for Israel’s War in Gaza Remains Unwavering and Calls for Current Conflict to Be ‘The Last War’ Jewish Insider

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday dismissed growing calls to condition military aid to Israel, calling them “ridiculous,” as Israel has been killing civilians at a historic pace in Gaza. AWC

Secretary of State Blinken Will Travel to Israel on Thursday in Attempt to Extend Truce. Haaretz

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was the lone member of the House to vote against a resolution equating criticism of the modern state of Israel with antisemitism. AWC

Since October 7, Israeli security forces have taken a number of steps that condemned sick Palestinians to a slow death. In Gaza, the lone cancer treatment center has been made inoperable by Israeli military operations. In East Jerusalem, Gazan hospital patients were rounded up and deported to the West Bank. The Institute

Biden Told Netanyahu Israel Operations in South Gaza Should Be More Restrained. Axios

Intense negotiations are underway in Qatar aimed at extending the truce between Israel and Hamas that’s due to expire on Thursday. AWC

US Has Provided Israel with 70,000 Weapons Since 1950. Truthout

US Officials Say White House Has No Plans to Place Conditions on Weapons Sent to Israel. PoliticoAWC

Bezalel Smotrich, the extremist Israeli finance minister who’s been given sweeping powers over the West Bank, has said the occupied territory is home to “2 million Nazis,” referring to part of the Palestinian population. AWC

Syria

Rand Paul to force a vote on Syria troop withdrawal. Responsible StatecraftAWC

Yemen

US Navy Arrests Five Attempting to Pirate Ship in Red Sea. War Is BoringAWC

US Says Warship Downed Yemeni Drone in Red Sea. Politico

#kyle anzalone #libertarian institute #news roundup

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symmetrysys · 11 months

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mls talk about how "see? anarchism failed in Spain. you have to have a state to defend the revolution". this however, ignores the perspective and history apparent to anarchists in the 1930's

take Rudolf Rocker and chapter 4 of his Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice as an example. Rocker explains how the libertarian nature of the trade union organising and rejection of bureaucracy created a militant labour that took up arms against the fascists in the Spanish civil war for 2 years, setting up an egalitarian society while at war

this is where id like to interject this is in stark contrast to the russian revolution, which used the war to suspend civil liberties and abolish the independent unions and organisations set up and ran directly by the workers, refusing to return control to the workers after peace had been achieved

back to Rocker tho, his highlighting of the anti bureaucratic nature of the Spanish anarchists was directly contrasted by the heavily bureaucratic and centralised German marxists where strikes were not permitted unless given the ok by center committee. this stifled rapid responses as the local, on the ground organisation (that actually understood local conditions) was not able to act independently. this came to a head when the fascists took power and of the 12 million SPD/KPD voters, half of them did absolutely nothing. this is bc unlike in Spain, the German workers were not trained for independent action and only to wait for orders from their party, who was more concerned about electability instead of mounting any sort of resistance to the newly ascendent nazis

a text version of the chapter referenced can be found here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rudolf-rocker-anarchosyndicalism

and an audio version can be found here: https://youtu.be/pdP6l7aGHcA

-Mae

youtube

#anarchist #anarchism #anarcho syndicalism #marxism #marxist leninist #anti capitalism #anti facist #labor history #socialism #socialist #queer anarchy

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argyrocratie · 1 year

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“The Cult of Personality in the Spanish Revolution”

(Danny Evans, 2021):

In an article of January 1937[1], Ada Martí, one of the moving spirits behind the anarchist student organisation the FECL, criticised what she called ‘revolutionary fetishism’: the tendency to create icons out of revolutionary martyrs. Regardless of the ideology of the idol in question, such hero worship had no place in a revolution – at least one directed at freedom and equality rather than dictatorship. In the article, she noted in passing that Buenaventura Durruti would have been appalled at the sanctification to which he had been subjected since his death. Worse was to come.

Following his death, Durruti was used by the leadership of the Spanish anarchist movement to symbolise self-sacrifice and the subordination of the revolution to the war effort. An invented quote was attributed to him, ‘We renounce everything except victory’, and repeated endlessly by his former comrades and enemies alike.

The sanctification of Durruti served the leadership in two respects. First, it lodged the country’s most famous anarchist at the forefront of the Republic’s martyrs, thereby demonstrating the commitment of the movement to the war and to anti-fascist collaboration. Second, it worked as a disciplinary mechanism over the anarchist rank-and-file, suspicious of leadership but full of admiration for their fallen compañero.

One event in particular illustrates both of these purposes. At the beginning of July 1937, a major assembly of the Catalan FAI was held in the Casa CNT-FAI, the headquarters of the libertarian movement in Barcelona, to debate the organisation’s collaboration with the Republican state. The opening sessions were dominated by radicals who advocated breaking with the policy of collaboration. During its second session, proceedings were called to a halt so that the delegates could attend the unveiling of a plaque dedicated to Durruti. In order to attend, it was only necessary to head to the balcony and windows of the meeting hall, as the plaque was unveiled in front of the Casa CNT-FAI, as can be seen in the photos of Pérez de Rozas in the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona.

There, the delegates were confronted by an enormous multitude who had heeded the call in that morning’s Solidaridad Obrera to appear ‘as one man’ in memory of Durruti. They were addressed from a raised platform to the side of the building on which stood, alongside notable anarchists such as Juan García Oliver and Ricardo Sanz, the chief of police Ricardo Burillo, then overseeing operations against revolutionary centres, union premises and libraries. After the ceremony, the big names of Spanish anarchism who had shown up to the event entered the meeting hall, where they proceeded to browbeat the FAI delegates into backtracking on their radical agenda.

The crowd that had gathered represented the greatest show of anarchist strength between the May days of 1937 and the end of the war, but also symbolised the shift from ‘mass participation to mass mobilisation’ described in reference to the Russian revolution by Simon Pirani[2]: ‘Mass mobilization, in which the party defines the parameters and aims of a campaign, calls on the mass of people to support it, and judges mass consciousness by levels of participation, stands clearly in the “socialism-from-above” tradition. It fences off the mass from decision-making, and assigns it a limited role, undertaking activity guided by decision-makers in the party.’ When the proceedings came to an end, the crowd were urged to leave in an orderly fashion without making any kind of demonstration, which the following day’s Solidaridad Obrera congratulated them on doing.

In such a context, we can see that it was a mistake for an important radical anarchist grouping to call itself the Friends of Durruti (FOD). On the one hand, the choice of name was intended to expose the CNT-FAI leadership’s falsification of Durruti’s politics and to affirm a revolutionary continuity with the militia column he had led and which many of the FOD had fought in. On the other, it was off-putting to those anarchists repelled by the cult of personality being constructed around the anarchist martyr. Furthermore, to do battle over the legacy of Durruti was tactically dubious when so many resources were being invested in constructing a pliable, national myth out of the obdurate internationalist anarchist. In an article at the end of May 1937 denouncing the FOD, the Madrid-based anarchist newspaper Castilla Libre affirmed that the grouping had been infiltrated by Communist Party provocateurs who falsely claimed to be disciples of the ‘people’s caudillo’. This frightening expression, mirroring the fascist propaganda describing Franco – who had not yet taken on this title formally – as a ‘caudillo’, would become increasingly visible in anarchist media, in a process described by Miquel Amorós in Durruti en el labarinto.

Although a contributor to the FOD’s newspaper, Ada Martí was right in perceiving the inherently anti-revolutionary, anti-libertarian nature of the cult of personality. Her warning is no less true today than it was in 1937: ‘Beware new idols!’

#anarchism #spanish revolution

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dicapiito · 3 months

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Kinda surprised there’s still Black leftists in 2024. The north always remembers what they did during the BLM Protests in 2020 and how they had the audacity to speak over Black People. I have been tired of it but yesterday was just…wow…

Fast forward to 2024 and the same shit has happened with the Palestinian movement. Leftists are speaking over actual Palestinians who have repeatedly said that Trump and the GOP second choice would be a nightmare but leftists don’t give a fuck about that. They just want to be antiblack and act like Black People ‘ don’t do enough’ for a cause they themselves only learned about on October 7th.

Being critical of the Democratic Party is one thing but buying into the leftist Russian propaganda and the hijacking of another movement yet again really should’ve made people realize that Leftist socialism really is just another word for a Libertarians and they only want s few tokens so they won’t appear racist. Nonblack leftists are also using the movement to be able to harass Black People and claim its in the name of Palestine when it’s clearly not.

The goal of leftists is the same as it’s always been. Fuck over the Democrats and fuck over Black and brown people and help out their actual party, which is the GOP. There’s no “ lesser evil”. There is a Democratic Party and an Evangelical white supremacist party. It’s unfortunate there are shitty motherfuckers who are claiming to be Democrats ( Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Omar, Ro Kanna, Katie Porter, AOC, Barbara Lee, Summer Lee and Dean Phillips), but the Republicans are a cult and there’s NO good Republicans.

Leftists don’t care that there will be mass deportation for Project 2025. They don’t care that there will be a national abortion ban. They’re in safe Deep Blue States so they’re comfortable enough to keep spreading misinformation. They love being disruptive especially in areas where they know that there’s many Black People around. Examples:

The same church where a white terrorist took the lives on nine Black People. Ever hear of them doing this shit to any white churches? Or how about these:

And notice what they all have in common. Using a movement to target Black People and it’s not just the yts who are doing this shit.

As well as look at how they use antiblack racist images while playing in our faces about how it’s not offensive to Black People:

And our phrases

And if that’s not enough. They need to call Biden ‘ Old’ because they can’t admit that they don’t want MVP Harris as President. A Black Woman as President ? They are saying it with their chest but want to act like theyre not.

And last but not least. Examples of the chaos agents in our community playing in our faces because they got money and white acceptance. They know they’re full of shit but they’re paid enough to sell out Black People and they’re also why yt and nonblack leftists are comfortable being antiblack:

The entire Breakfast Club, Killer Mike ad Joy Reid. Notice what they all have in common. You can research further to realize that they got theirs so fuck the rest.

I really hope that Black People who call themselves leftists wake up because our lives are always on the line and voting is a way for us to fight back against the yts who want their white evangelical world and the nonblacks who only care about us when we are ‘ useful’ to them. I hope this post helps because there’s way too much misinformation happening and way too much antiblackness happening in the ‘ name of Palestine’.

#us politics #us elections #long post #project 2025 #receipts attached because I’m over the bullshit

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mariacallous · 7 months

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Is liking Ayn Rand a personality defect? Before she was the godmother of American libertarianism, Rand was a writer known for insisting on the virtue and beauty of self-interest. To her admirers, her books, including “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” celebrate exceptional men and women who make their own flourishing a moral imperative. To her detractors, Rand’s novels, as Lisa Duggan writes in her 2019 study “Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed,” glamorize rapacity and violence; they grant happy endings to characters who showcase “contempt for lesser beings and a cool indifference to their suffering”; and they “provide a structure of feeling—optimistic cruelty—that . . . underwrites the form of capitalism on steroids that dominates the present.”

Since Rand’s death, in 1982, she has been embraced by tech billionaires (Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk), free-market politicians (Ronald Reagan, Clarence Thomas, Rand Paul), and their acolytes. Elsewhere, she has become a pop-cultural bogeyman, ridiculous but unkillable. Find her on “The Simpsons” (“Russian weirdo Ayn Rand”), “Parks and Recreation” (“a terrible writer”), “Girls,” “Watchmen,” and “The Mindy Project,” invariably dressed as a menace or a punch line. The presence of “Atlas Shrugged” or “The Fountainhead” on a bedside table or Tinder profile is a waving red flag—reliable shorthand for latent sociopathy. A friend, in order to lend me a copy of “Atlas Shrugged” for this piece, stowed the paperback in a manila folder that she then stapled shut and handed off to my partner at their mutual workplace. He smuggled it down the hall and into his bag. “I didn’t think I’d get fired” if anyone saw the book, he explained, “but it wouldn’t look great.”

In “The Book of Ayn,” a novel by Lexi Freiman, Rand takes on a new role: North Star for the cancelled. Anna, a mid-career writer who comes from money, has just published a “contrarian” novel about the opioid epidemic, a satire of the rural poor full of “bad haircuts,” “misspelled tattoos,” and pants-shitting. “I had honestly believed I was writing a book so good it metabolized its own badness,” Anna explains, somewhat touchingly. Instead of the acclaim she expects, Anna gets dropped by her publisher and ghosted by her friends; even her old prep school rejects a last-ditch job application. On Twitter, she is enjoined to jump off the balcony of her pied-à-terre on Madison Avenue and to use her novel as a parachute.

Worst of all, a review in the New York Times suggests that Anna is that current-day bête noire, a “narcissist.” Devastated, Anna borrows a friend’s book on narcissism and reads that narcissists are “selfish, arrogant, and insecure,” “grandiose and fragile and incapable of handling any threat to their identity,” and that they “saw themselves reflected back everywhere, made grand narratives of their lives, but felt at their core that they were empty.”

To Anna’s horror, the descriptions remind her of herself. She is empty, she realizes. She doesn’t believe in anything; all she can do is make fun of people. Seeking a counternarrative, Anna gloms on to a tour group discussing Ayn Rand in a coffee shop and, soon after, orders a bundle of her works. She’s immediately enthralled. The books argue that “selfishness was a form of care” and that “wealth was a beautiful thing.” They claim that “true freedom lived . . . in the breaking of bonds and severing of ties.” As Anna reads, she feels her weaknesses becoming strengths. Her selfishness, she realizes, is radically ethical. She may not get invited to parties anymore, but she wouldn’t enjoy them anyway—she’s too radiantly liberated.

In “The Culture of Narcissism,” his famous 1979 study, Christopher Lasch writes that the narcissist can only overcome insecurity “by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others.” Freiman slyly casts Rand as Anna’s “grandiose self,” the mask she pulls on over her pain and vulnerability. Anna, you might say, has suffered a narcissistic injury and is turning to Rand to preserve her positive self-image.

An elderly millennial in the shitposting era, Anna shrouds her new obsession in layers of self-protective irony. Rand’s ideas give her solace, and being a “ ‘Randgirl,’ ” in scare quotes, appeals to her contrarianism, her desire to provoke and outrage the commenters who want her to jump off a balcony. When Rand was in her late thirties, she moved from New York to Hollywood to write for the big screen. Anna decides to follow in her footsteps. She decamps for Los Angeles and reinvents herself as a television writer, pitching a sitcom, inspired by “Bojack Horseman” (although she swears it’s not), about a farm animal named Ayn Ram. Even as Anna hopes to rehabilitate her hero for a contemporary audience, she places some distance between herself and her subject by wrapping Rand in the soft wool of humor—a defense mechanism that Freiman suggests originates in a tragedy in her early life. When Anna was three, her infant brother died “for no reason” in his sleep. Provocation “smoothed the edges,” she says, a fleece that muffled the sharpness of loss.

With its undercurrent of childhood trauma, “The Book of Ayn” evokes Mary Gaitskill’s classic treatment of the Randgirl plot, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” from 1991. That book’s narrator, Dorothy, imprints on a Rand-like character named Anna Granite after being abused and molested by her father as a teen-ager. “By the time I was seventeen, I had a very negative view of life, and a horrific view of sex,” Dorothy tells Justine, a journalist writing an article on Granite and her fans. When she discovered Granite’s books, Dorothy says, “suddenly a whole different way of looking at life was presented to me.” Ostracized at school, she draws comfort from Granite’s depictions of “proud outcasts . . . surrounded by the cold glow of their genius and grace.” In bed with her father, she clings to a dream of “strong, contemptuous beauty . . . indifferent to anything but itself and its own growth.” Dorothy comes to believe in a philosophy called Definitism—Gaitskill’s thinly veiled version of Objectivism, the doctrine developed by Rand—and it confers on Dorothy the power and value that she believes herself to lack; Granite herself seems to nurture the girl in loco parentis. As a college student, Dorothy buys an interstate bus ticket to attend one of Granite’s speaking events and imagines her idol, how “she would look at me and know everything I’d endured.” At the lecture, she weeps uncontrollably, convinced at last that she is “damn strong,” that she is “worth something.”

“The Book of Ayn” and “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” plead for sympathy for the Randgirl. Like Freiman’s Anna, Gaitskill’s Dorothy is a case study in vulnerable narcissism and, ultimately, a figure of pity. She retreats from the world and into daydreams about Oz and Never-Never Land, epic tales in which she plays the hero. She hides behind delusions of grandeur, raging when Justine asks her “stupid” questions. These are broken people to be handled with gentleness, the novels seem to argue.

But, in fact, both books have a more subversive intent: to trouble the distinction between Randians and everyone else. In “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” Justine, the freelance journalist who interviews Dorothy, is disgusted by Granite’s ideas. She’s identified as “neurotic” and Dorothy is not; the contrast between them conjures Freud’s dichotomy between pliable patients who obediently adopt the terminology of their analysts and difficult patients who prove too self-absorbed to undergo transference. But Justine, who, unlike Dorothy, is pretty, thin, and popular, incarnates Rand’s notion of the beautiful brute more than Dorothy does. As a girl, she picked on schoolmates who had fewer friends; at one point, transported by “swelling arrogance” and “boiling greed,” she sexually abused a weaker child with a toothbrush. The more Gaitskill reveals about her characters, the more they blur together, as both selfish and selfless at once.

In her penetrating monograph “The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism,” Kristin Dombek describes a narcissistic behavior called “splitting,” wherein the narcissist idealizes that which soothes him and discards that which causes him pain. “Splitting” is also the main structural mechanism of the two novels—and a mental trap that both their protagonists and their readers must resist. Like “Two Girls,” “The Book of Ayn” is built on a seemingly clean division: Part 1 tells the story of Anna’s intoxication with Rand; in Part 2, Anna, breaking violently with Objectivism, goes to a meditation camp on the Greek island of Lesbos to try to murder her ego. Freiman’s Los Angeles is a cesspit of superficiality and selfishness, but the “Beloveds,” as the cultists who run the retreat in Greece call themselves, aren’t much better. The group’s master is known for his collection of three hundred and fifty Harley Davidsons and for releasing “a vicious strain of European bee into the hostile neighboring farmland.” Other seekers at the commune steal Anna’s clothes, cheat on their partners, and neglect their children. Anna, unconsciously emulating Rand, begins a love affair with a much younger man, a refugee from an unspecified war-torn country. Life on the commune can’t heal the effects of his “hard-core trauma,” he tells her. Only Hollywood can; he longs to “try the acting.”

So is everyone a delusional, self-serving, trauma-masking Randian narcissist at heart? You could call that the lesson of the Randgirl novels, although you’d be underselling their sweetness. The books mock their characters, but they also argue that egoism can be nourishing and even generative. Gaitskill’s treatment of Anna Granite, for instance, is unexpectedly sympathetic. When Dorothy first meets her idol, the older woman models kindness and empathy. Dorothy panics, unable to speak; Granite, Dorothy says, “stood and gripped my shoulders with both hands . . . her eyes radiated the gentlest strength I had ever experienced, her tough, hot, callusy hands supported me with the full intensity of her life.” Granite tells Dorothy that she can see her suffering but also her resilience and value. She offers her a job. Because Granite has willed herself to believe in her own worth, Gaitskill hints, she is alive to the worth in others. And, in awakening Dorothy to her own inner resources, Granite awakens the young woman’s sense of her fellow-humans as sovereign selves. In the hours before Granite’s lecture, Dorothy is transfixed by passing faces: “the jowls, the eye wrinkles, the bumpy noses, the flower-petal quality of young female skin.” When Dorothy was in college, individuals had streamed together into a monolithic threat. But “as I walked among the citizens of Philadelphia,” she says, “I felt as though I occupied a compartment of personal space that they instinctively respected as I respected theirs.”

Freiman finds less to salvage in Rand’s life or work, but the novel is rightly skeptical of the wellness industry’s promises to subdue the demands of selfhood. After failing to make a TV show and then failing to kill her ego, Anna takes stock. She comes to realize that she can’t write without self-esteem—and that writing, more than being a contrarian or even a good person, is her vocation. “There was only one thing that ever helped me,” she says. “One thing that had always been there, strung up at the threshold of my mind like tiny golden lights, enchanting me into life, dangling its whimsy and warm lozenges of hope.” This thing is writing—“only writing promised me happiness, or at the very least progress”—and the type of writing Anna wants to do, voicey and spiky and singular, requires an “I.”

Unlike the self-aggrandizer, the artist, Freiman implies, uses her “I” as an alloy, creating a material both durable and porous, blending what she has felt to be true with what she imagines might be true for others. The writing that Anna intuits will save her dangles at the “threshold” of her mind because it directs her both in and out. Throughout the novel, as she flails around trying to fill her perceived emptiness, what she fills it with are the words, ideas, and lives of roommates, romantic partners, Internet commenters, friends, influencers, yoga instructors, cult members, Antifa activists, and embarrassing conservative philosophers. She reads their books, goes to their events, and stays in their homes. By the end, her “I” has been vastly expanded: other people live in her head, whether she wants them to or not, shaping the innermost contours of her self. This vision of identity as plural means that self-assertion does not necessarily come at the expense of the rest of the world. It could even be a declaration of life on another’s behalf.

Both Freiman and Gaitskill play up the Möbius-strip aspect to selfishness and selflessness—when I stand up for me, they suggest, I am also standing up for you, because we are intertwined. At their most persuasive, though, the Randgirl novels don’t applaud the morality of self-interest so much as they paint self-absorption as a useful but transient phase. Freud characterized narcissism as a form of arrested development. The narcissist, instead of sprouting healthy attachments to others, remains stranded in the oceanic self-involvement of infancy. Gaitskill and Freiman rescue this creature from a state of frozen pathology, returning her to her rightful place within a developmental stage. Dorothy and Anna, perhaps, are just passing through necessary bouts of self-infatuation on their way to maturity. Late in “Two Girls,” Justine comes to appreciate the role that Granite played for Dorothy, even as she believes that Dorothy has outgrown Granite:

When you read Granite’s work not only did she awaken your sense of beauty and pleasure in life, not only did she illustrate for you a positive use of strength and power, but she provided a springboard for you to create an internal world richer and stronger than the external world which wasn’t giving you any support at all. But she was only the departure point.

Instead of a bogeyman or a red flag, maybe Rand is just a set of training wheels, or a trellis on which characters can temporarily support their unfurling selves. “Everybody had a moment of loving Ayn Rand,” Anna’s mother tells her—it’s a low point for our Randgirl, but a reassurance to readers, who are happy to welcome this lost sheep back into the herd. ♦

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howieabel · 1 year

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"Kallas’s triumph coincided with Estonia’s first majority ‘e-vote’. Out of a total of 615,009 votes, an impressive 313,514 were cast online (prompting a fierce debate between the government and EKRE over the accuracy and constitutionality of the election). For the liberal parties, this was a step forward for Estonia’s much vaunted ‘digital society’. Since it gained independence in 1991, the country has launched an array of digital public services, including e-tax filing, e-residency, e-signatures, e-prescriptions and digital IDs. The libertarian ethos of ‘e-Estonia’ (the country has a flat income tax rate) has elicited praise from the expected corners; the Cato Institute calls it ‘the country of the future’. It aims to mark a rupture with the nation’s Soviet past, building an entrepreneurial paradise from the ruins of technological obsolescence. By fusing this modernizing project with a hyper-Atlanticist disposition, Kallas has made herself the face of the twenty-first-century Estonian consensus, aligning her country with the enlightened West.

Yet Estonia still shares a 383km border with Russia, and about a quarter of its 1.3 million people are ethnic Russians. In northeastern Ida-Viru County, home to Estonia’s third-largest city of Narva, ethnic Russians comprise about three quarters of the population. This has made the area a site of long-running tension. NATO has warned of a ‘Narva Scenario’ in which Russia may seek to exploit existing ethnic fissures, or even annex Estonian territory, in a bid to project its westward influence. In December, Kallas passed a law outlining a full transition to Estonian-only education, to be implemented in 2024: a move that critics described as ‘forced assimilation’. The government also removed a WWII monument of a Soviet tank from Narva and arrested eight of the city’s residents last summer, supposedly to prevent ‘mass disturbances’." - Lily Lynch

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kragnir · 8 months

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“Russia is supporting the enemies of Israel. Russia is supporting Nazi people who want to commit genocide on us and Russia will pay the price,” Weitmann said. “We’re gonna win this war. Afterwards, we’re not forgetting what you’re doing, we’re not forgetting, we will come, we will make sure Ukraine wins. We will make sure that you pay the price for what you have done, you as Russia.”

A very powerful statement from Mr. Weitmann! I hope that Israel will be able to get past Netanyahu to get this accomplished, because it seems that he’s just like orban; a ruskie asset. Anyhow, my respect for Israel just got a boost. Maybe I will have it again, hopefully soon.

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rhetoricandlogic · 10 months

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Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald

Matt Hilliard

Issue: 11 April 2016

True to its title, Ian McDonald's latest novel, Luna: New Moon, takes place almost entirely in a sprawling Moon colony. Technically, everything on the Moon is operated by a company called the Lunar Development Corporation, but in practice the colony is controlled by five powerful family-run businesses nicknamed the Five Dragons. The narrative focuses on the Corta family, who are both the youngest of the Five Dragons and the most precarious. Their founder, Adriana Corta, worked for another great family, the Mackenzies, before she secretly secured outside investment to start her helium business, thus earning her the lasting enmity of the Mackenzies as well as their ferocious competition. Under Adriana's leadership the Cortas have achieved incredible success, but she's near the end of her life and is transferring power and responsibility to her sons.

Rafa is the eldest and therefore next in line, but her second son Lucas is thought by many, not least himself, to be the shrewder and more ruthless businessman. The already delicate situation is inflamed when someone tries to assassinate Rafa. Is it the Mackenzies trying to sabotage the succession? Is it Lucas, trying to take the place of his brother? As accusations fly and tensions rise, the rest of Adriana's children are drawn into the growing crisis. Ariel Corta, Adriana's only daughter and an influential lawyer, finds herself being courted by several different factions hoping to gain from the crisis. Carlinhos Corta manages the family’s day-to-day mining operations, so he is on the front lines as dirty tricks escalate into outright violence. The youngest son and family black sheep, Wagner, meanwhile makes it his mission to find out who is attacking the family who mostly shun him.

The powerful, feuding families have led many, not least the author himself, to compare the plot with Game of Thrones. McDonald has also compared it to the television show Dallas. These comparisons are useful for marketing because they promise readers who liked a certain work that the same thing they liked will be in the new book, but they aren't wholly positive, particularly in science fiction. In a genre that prides itself on new ideas, "X but in Space" might be fun—but it's not the most exciting of premises. Luna's plot indeed feels very familiar and, worse, quite predictable as it proceeds through the usual moves and countermoves toward a not-at-all shocking revelation about the forces behind the assassination attempts.

One better reason for transposing a familiar narrative to a science fictional setting is to use it as a framework to explore a new environment. Compared to its overfamiliar plot, Luna does far more to distinguish its moon colony from its many science fictional predecessors. First, as one would expect given the focus of previous McDonald novels on non-Western countries, his Moon is a multicultural place. It's not just that there are some token characters from other cultures; Americans and western Europeans are almost entirely absent, making room for characters from Brazil and the rest of the southern hemisphere along with some Russians and Chinese. And whereas traditional science fiction often forgets poor people exist, Luna's corporate-run colony is a place of massive economic inequality. The wealthy Five Dragons live amid opulent gardens and citadels, throwing lavish parties and hosting sporting events. But many more live day to day doing menial labor, struggling to pay for the very air they're breathing. Unlike the rich who live far underground, the poor live near the radiation-drenched surface, and although there are medicines that can cure the resulting cancers, that treatment must also be paid for.

This setting seems like a springboard for a critique of crony capitalism or libertarianism, but after the opening scenes that introduce the divide between the rich and the poor, there's not very much in this vein. The Five Dragons are companies, yes, but their family ownership, dynastic succession, marriage alliances, private armies, and prioritization of loyalty and honor over profit all conspire to make them feel a lot more like the noble families of a weak monarchy than weakly regulated companies. It's also never made clear how this situation came to be. Adriana mentions investors when describing the founding of her company and there is a board of directors, but in practice she seems answerable to no one. The government of China is said to have been an early investor in another of the Five Dragons but since forced out. Otherwise Earth governments don't seem interested in controlling the Moon (apparently their militaries haven't read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress).

The one perspective we have from outside the rich and powerful comes in the form of Marina Calzaghe, an immigrant woman doing menial jobs and living in dire poverty. Her story provides an intriguing answer to the question: "How does one become a poor, menial laborer on the Moon?" She has a "postgrad degree" in "computational evolutionary biology in process control architecture" but the contract that brought her to the Moon fell through after she arrived, leaving her unemployed and almost immediately impoverished. As a reminder that, in the Moon's heartless and exploitative economy, even someone with an elite education is just one paycheck away from homelessness, she should be the most interesting character. Instead, she's almost immediately swept up into the Cortas' orbit and becomes a starstruck bystander to great events, her perspective compromised by access to money and incipient romantic feelings. Little is made of the glaring fact she is likely far more educationally accomplished than the Cortas she works for.

This decision to focus on the scheming, incredibly rich, and often ruthless Corta family could easily have been a disaster. Other stories of this sort, such as Game of Thrones and Dune, ease the reader into their worlds by letting them follow sympathetic children who are young enough that they are (initially, at least) innocent victims of family infighting rather than perpetrators of it. McDonald has what could have been similar characters at hand in Adriana's three grandchildren, but instead most of the narrative is devoted to Adriana's children and augmented with her own first person reminiscences.

Yet the characters are easily the strongest part of the novel and elevate it from a potboiler with nice scenery into something memorable. Each of the Cortas has a distinct personality and voice, something that is impressive by itself in a novel with a large cast. There is conflict among the family members but, at least within the family, there aren't any actual villains. One could easily imagine a version of this story in which Rafa is the rightful heir and Lucas is a scheming upstart, or one where Rafa is the dissolute incompetent who will waste his inheritance while Lucas is hardworking and unappreciated. Instead, both of these dichotomies are present but neither is definitive. All of the Cortas are flawed, but none of them are evil. Rather than root for one against the others, the reader is encouraged to hope—as Adriana does—that they find a way to put aside their differences and work together to avoid a disastrous conflict with the Mackenzies.

As the situation escalates, all the adult characters get a chance to be active and make choices that feel grounded in their personality and circumstances. There's never a sense that a character is doing something (or worse, behaving stupidly) merely because the plot requires it. The third person narrative provides just enough access to their thoughts and feelings for their decisions to be understandable, but although some characters are beset by anxiety or self-pity, McDonald trusts the reader enough to let this show through their actions instead of wallowing in it.

The reason the characters work so well is that the narrative pays attention to their lives and slows down to depict a few illuminating moments that have no direct relationship to the setting or plot. We find out, for example, that Lucas Corta has a secret passion for music that develops into a secret passion for a particular musician. This small subplot does nothing to advance the overall story and sheds no further light on the setting, but it makes Lucas into a real character instead of a simple stereotype. Taken together with a dozen similar moments with other characters, it enables the novel to finally mount an unexpected criticism of the Moon's rampantly capitalist society. There have been many stories about futures that involve a few rich people living among an impoverished many, but Luna's focus on character allows it to ask whether these rich people are happy and, if not, what would make them happy. This is a crucial question in a story where the great families' struggle for money and power is destabilizing both their own positions and the entire society.

So far the novel lets the reader draw their own conclusions about this question, but then conclusions are one thing the novel does not attempt to provide. This is a self-contained novel only in the most literal of senses. In the last few pages, various characters are hung off their respective cliffs in preparation for the second novel and the story simply stops. For readers who are most interested in plot, the story here probably isn't interesting enough on its own to justify its lack of closure. But those interested in spacefaring settings and, in particular, those who enjoy reading about compelling characters in those settings, Luna: New Moon is well worth the price of admission.

#Ian McDonald #Luna: New Moon #mahreviews #long post #tw this book is sexist af

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dertaglichedan · 11 months

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White House Looks To Prevent Oversight Of Ukraine Aid

Via The Libertarian Institute,

The Joe Biden administration has come out in opposition to Congress creating an inspector general’s office to oversee weapons transfers to the Ukrainian government.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes a provision that will create an inspector general for the proxy war in Ukraine modeled after the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

SIGAR John Sopko detailed the rampant American failures during the Afghan War for years. His quarterly reports routinely embarrassed American officials who tried to portray the situation in Afghanistan as improving.

Sopko has warned that an inspector general’s official for the Ukraine war needed to be established to prevent a repeat of the situation American aid created in Afghanistan, which saw massive corruption.

"There is an understandable desire amid a crisis to focus on getting money out the door and to worry about oversight later, but too often that creates more problems than it solves," he wrote in a report submitted to Congress earlier this year. "Given the ongoing conflict and the unprecedented volume of weapons being transferred to Ukraine, the risk that some equipment ends up on the black market or in the wrong hands is likely unavoidable."

Sopko continued, "You’re bound to get corrupt elements of not only the Ukrainian or the host government, but also of US government contractors or other third party contractors to try to steal the money. There’s just so much money going in, and it’s hard to keep track of."

The White House argued that creating an inspector general for Ukraine was unnecessary as the Department of Defense was already monitoring transfers.

"This expansion is both unnecessary and unprecedented, as oversight of US assistance for the benefit of a country’s people is already provided by the Inspectors General for the Department of State and United States Agency for International Development," a White House statement said.

However, a report published in June by the Pentagon inspector general found several issues with US weapons shipments to Ukraine. "DoD personnel did not have the required accountability of the thousands of defense items that they received and transferred at Jasionka, [Poland]," the report explained.

"We observed that DoD personnel did not fully implement their standard operating procedures to account for defense items and could not confirm the quantities of defense items received against the quantity of items shipped for three of five shipments we observed."

The US has shipped tens of billions worth of weapons to Ukraine since the Russian invasion last year. While Washington and Kiev maintain all weapons are being used on the battlefield, governments in Europe, the Middle East and Africa report weapons from Ukraine have been used by criminals and militants.

Additionally, American weapons were used by openly neo-Nazi fighters carrying out cross-border attacks within the Russian mainland. Initially, American officials said they were "skeptical" of reports that the arms these militias used had been provided by the US. However, officials later admitted that, indeed American weapons were used during the raid.

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libertariantaoist · 2 months

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News Roundup 4/4/24

by Kyle Anzalone

US News

Orwellian Tactics? Libertarian Party Fears Targeting By FBI After Letter The Institute

Mitch McConnell Says He’ll Stay in the Senate To Fight the ‘Isolationist Movement’ AWC

Ukraine

Ukraine Aid Vote Not Expected in House for Weeks or Longer AWC

Ukrainian Military Officers Say Frontlines Are at Risk of Collapsing AWC

NATO Chief Floats Establishing $100 Billion Fund for Ukraine AWC

Zelensky Signs Law Lowering Conscription Age to 25 AWC

Speaker Johnson Says He Supports Giving Frozen Russian Assets to Ukraine AWC

Joint Chiefs Chairman Claims Giving Ukraine Long-Range ATACMs Is No Longer as Risky AWC

China

US, Japan, and Philippines to Launch Joint Patrols in South China Sea AWC

Israel

State Dept Says Parts of Gaza Likely Experiencing Famine AWC

Pro-Palestinian Protests Disrupt Major Biden Campaign Event AWC

US Loosens Sanctions on Violent Israeli Settlers AWC

US Approves Billions in More Bombs and Fighter Jets for Israel to Support Gaza Slaughter AWC

Israel Creates ‘Kill Zones’ in Gaza Where Anyone Who Enters Gets Shot AWC

US Congressman Suggests Destroying Gaza Like ‘Hiroshima and Nagasaki’ AWC

Hamas Says It’s Sticking To Demand for Permanent Ceasefire AWC

Biden Not Changing Israel Policy After Meticulous Slaughter of Aid Workers AWC

Active Duty Airman on White House Hunger Strike Against Starvation of Children in Gaza AWC

World Central Kitchen Founder Says Israel Targeted His Aid Workers ‘Systematically, Car by Car’ AWC

Nearly 50,000 People in Wisconsin Cast Protest Vote Against Gaza Slaughter in Democratic Primary AWC

Israeli Siege Causes Sharp Rise in Newborn Baby Deaths in Gaza AWC

Biden Administration Expected to Approve Massive $18 Billion F-15 Deal for Israel AWC

US Increased Intelligence Sharing With Israel to ‘Unprecedented’ Levels After October 7 AWC

Israeli Knesset Passes Law Allowing Government to Ban Al Jazeera AWC

Middle East

US Scraps Planned Visit to Mid East to Normalize Saudi-Israeli Ties The Institute

Israel, US Brace for Potential Iranian Retaliation for Syria Consulate Bombing AWC

Israel DM: War on Hezbollah Would Be Catastrophe for Lebanon AWC

As Attacks Escalate, Israel DM Looks To Prepare Public for Lebanon War AWC

Israeli Drone Strike Kills One in South Lebanon Town of Kunin AWC

UN Investigates as Four Peacekeepers Are Wounded in South Lebanon AWC

Death Toll in Israeli Airstrikes on Syria’s Aleppo Rises to 52 AWC

Eight Killed, 30 Wounded in Overnight Market Blast in Northern Syria AWC

Report: US Told Iran It Had No Involvement in Bombing Syria Consulate AWC

Khamenei Vows Israel Will Be ‘Punished’ for Bombing Iran’s Syria Consulate AWC

#kyle anzalone #libertarian institute #news roundup

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lowkeynando · 1 year

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her party was "too neurotically geared toward environmentalism". [21[31

James Hughes identifies the "neoliberal"

Extropy Institute, founded by philosopher Max More and developed in the 1990s, as the first organized advocates for transhumanism. And he identifies the late-1990s formation of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), a

European organization which later was renamed to Humanity+ (H+), as partly a reaction to the free market perspective of the "Extropians". Per Hughes, "[t]he WTA included both social democrats and neoliberals around a liberal democratic definition of transhumanism, codified in the Transhumanist Declaration." [4]

[5] Hughes has also detailed the political currents in transhumanism, particularly the shift around 2009 from socialist transhumanism to libertarian and anarcho-capitalist

transhumanism. 5] He claims that the left was pushed out of the World Transhumanist Association Board of Directors, and that libertarians and Singularitarians have secured a hegemony in the transhumanism community with help from Peter Thiel, but Hughes remains optimistic about a techno-progressive future. [5]

In 2012, the Longevity Party, a movement described as "100% transhumanist" by cofounder Maria Konovalenko, [6] began to organize in Russia for building a balloted political party. [7] Another Russian programmes, CLONES

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argyrocratie · 2 years

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“Then the anarchists spoke, and in particular M. Nikiforova, who told the Cossacks that the anarchists were not promising anything to anyone, they only hoped that people would learn to know themselves, to understand their own social situation, and to want to gain their own liberty.”

-Nestor Makhno, “The Russian revolution in Ukraine”

_ _ _

“Anarchy is quite simply a problem of assuming individual responsibility. It is the idea that each person conceive of himself as a thinking being, capable of making his life decisions without delegating his decision making capacities to someone else, whether it be a god, a king, a state, a party, an ingenious artist, a master of thought, a leader, a mother or a father. Now, to be more specific, for me, John, anarchy really does have the future that people are talking about, and for a reason much more concrete than the one, fundamental for me, which I spoke about before, that is, creative conduct, as opposed to subordinate conduct, and positive individualism:

In these times, which flow in a behavioral "grisaille"[2], it is no doubt attractive to follow a way of thinking that does not demand anything, that simply proposes the possibility that you have the courage to assume the decision and the consequences of your own acts, without protecting yourself in the imperatives of an ideology, a religion, or an authority, which convert you into an irresponsible person, first in regard to yourself, and then in regard to society.

In view of the unworkability of all the doctrines that claim to liberate humanity, such as capitalism, Marxism, or authoritative socialism[3], the big loser of all the revolutions (Soviet, without forgetting Kronstadt, Spanish, etc.), that is, anarchism, seems for many to be once again a possibility. (As the Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza, used to say to me: "From failure to failure right up to the final victory"). Of course, that this possibility could become another fashion, another fad, is a new risk that anarchists must assume. Why is anarchy a possibility? Because we begin to understand that we have delegated too much, believed too much in the daddy state, which protects us, and gives us such security (or the delusion of it) and puts us to sleep (in the best cases) or which exploits us (in the worst, and unfortunately more frequent cases). The daddy state also puts to sleep our capacity to think, to revolt, to manage our lives, because it promises everything and gives us practically nothing. Maybe it is easier, and even more comfortable, to delegate than to think.”

- Esther Ferrer’s Letter to John Cage (1991)

_ _ _

“Rugged individualism also goes hand in hand with a strong faith in paternalism -- albeit a tolerant and somewhat distant paternalism -- and many otherwise sharp-witted libertarians seem to see nothing in the morality of a John Wayne Western to conflict with their views. Heinlein's paternalism is at heart the same as Wayne's. In the final analysis it is a kind of easy-going militarism favoured by the veteran professional soldier -- the chain of command is complex -- many adult responsibilities can be left to that chain as long as broad, but firmly enforced, rules from 'high up' are adhered to. Heinlein is Eisenhower Man and his views seem to me to be more pernicious than ordinary infantile back-to-the-land Christian communism, with its mysticism and its hatred of technology. To be an anarchist, surely, is to reject authority but to accept self-discipline and community responsibility. To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some benign, omniscient father: Rooster Coburn shuffling his feet in front of a judge he respects for his office (but not necessarily himself) in True Grit.

An anarchist is not a wild child, but a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of the world.”

-Micheal Moorcock, “Starship Stormtroopers”(1977)

_ _ _

“The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.” -Ursula K. Le Guin, ”The Dispossessed“ (1974)

#anarchism

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