Saturday, August 19, 2017

Inherent Vice

Was it possible, that at every gathering--concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back east, wherever--those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear? 
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

Sous les pavés, la plage!

Call It Capitalism by Thomas Jones

review of Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon


Moon the Klan

Molly Ivins:
Our Texas freedom-fighters have been prone to misbehavior ever since. A recent Ku Klux Klan rally in Austin produced an eccentric counter- demonstration. When the fifty Klansmen appeared (they were bused in from Waco) in front of the state capitol, they were greeted by five thousand locals who had turned out for a “Moon the Klan” rally. Citizens dropped trou both singly and in groups, occasionally producing a splendid wave effect. It was a swell do.
I was there and participated!

Alt Left by Molly Roberts

The alt-right didn’t invent ‘alt-left.’ Liberals did. by Molly Roberts


Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Baffler on "Goodbye, Pepe"

Goodbye, Pepe by Angela Nagle
Similarly, leftists who opposed Hillary Clinton or have stressed the role of “economic anxieties” of downwardly mobile whites in the rise of the Trumpian right may start catching flak for excusing and thus enabling Nazis. Indeed, if any of the great historians of the Nazi period wrote their books today, they’d be denounced for larding their accounts with such interpretive context, as they all did, because context has now been reclassified as blame-shifting.

Dylan Matthews Foppish Vox Hipster

Trump's idea that jobs will solve racism is just wrong by Dylan Matthews
It’s not a totally implausible theory, that the country becomes more tolerant during economic booms and that white Americans become more racially prejudiced during recessions or stagnation. 
But the evidence for the theory is mixed at best. In many cases, it’s hard to see much correlation between objective economic conditions and the status of race relations.

Who Were the Counterprotesters in Charlottesville?

Who Were the Counterprotesters in Charlottesville?

In Charlottesville, about 20 members of a group called the Redneck Revolt, which describes itself as an anti-racist, anti-capitalist group dedicated to uniting working-class whites and oppressed minorities, carried rifles and formed a security perimeter around the counterprotesters in Justice Park, according to its website and social media.

The group, which admires John Brown, a white abolitionist who led an armed insurrection in 1859, issued a “call to arms” on its website: “To the fascists and all who stand with them, we’ll be seeing you in Virginia.”

The scholar and activist Cornel West told the newscast “Democracy Now!” that anti-fascists saved his life and the lives of other nonviolent clergy members in Charlottesville. “We would have been crushed like cockroaches were it not for the anarchists and the anti-fascists,” he said on the show. “You had police holding back and just allowing fellow citizens to go at each other.”

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

common owndership argument and fully automated luxury gay space communism

Common Ownership And The New Antitrust Movement by Matt Bruenig

The Simple Clean Route on Corporate Tax Reform by Dean Baker

Add a social wage to be distributed from the corporate tax fund.

NGDP monetary policy rule.

Larry Summers.