The Other

[Yazata]

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
~~ Isaac Asimov, Newsweek: “A Cult of Ignorance” January 21, 1980

I think that Asimov was profoundly misunderstanding things.

It's true that there's a distinctly American strain of popular skepticism, a reluctance to trust arguments from authority, to believe assertions simply because they are coming down from ostensible authorities. People need to be convinced first.  That's probably associated with Americans' historical skepticism about the pretensions of old-style European aristocracies, coupled with the nation's founding principles of popular liberty and freedom. That skepticism is still being applied today to the new would-be academic, governmental, business and media aristocracies.

I think that's healthy. It's certainly healthier and more intelligent than credulously believing whatever we are told by ostensible authority figures and then following like sheep.

It's especially healthy when the self-styled intellectual authorities appear to have their own agendas, in which their own personal ethnic, political, financial or religious interests might have more to do with motivating their conclusions than any dispassionate search for objective truth. Even in universities (especially in universities) people often seem to arrive at their conclusions first, and only then do they seek out evidence and arguments that support whatever they already believe.

So Asimov's complaint would seem to me to be self-contradictory. He appears to be calling it "anti-intellectual" for people to think for themselves, to exercise critical thinking, and appears to be dismissively stereotyping a whole nation for not believing everything that they are told by would-be "intellectual" authority figures that I expect he believed included him.

In my opinion that's to profoundly misunderstand what 'intellectual' means.

There's a huge chasm between actually behaving like an intellectual (which necessarily means thinking for one's self) and blindly following those who style themselves "intellectuals".

[confused2]

Humour intended here. Note the date - 1990.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1990-02-14

I think we can say it is official now.

[confused2]

Issues of personal safety and the safety of others are complex and to an extent philosophical. Somehow I don't expect rednecks to bother too much about complex and philosophical issues. Not surprisingly (as reported in the UK) we see that Democrats tend to support the wearing of masks and Republicans don't.

[Syne]

Issues of personal safety and the safety of others are complex and to an extent philosophical. Somehow I don't expect rednecks to bother too much about complex and philosophical issues. Not surprisingly (as reported in the UK) we see that Democrats tend to support the wearing of masks and Republicans don't.

Ah, another ignorant foreigner equating redneck and Republican.

Politically, Democrats are always in favor of the government forcing people to do things, and Republicans are not. That doesn't mean Republicans don't wear masks. And I've never seen a survey that specifically asked people if they were rednecks (even though rednecks are rather proud to be so).

[confused2]

In the UK the working classes have some qualities in common with the average redneck.
So I took the test..
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973
Result.. Traditional Working Class.
Ouch.

[Secular Sanity]

Result-Established Middle Class

Hmm...maybe I'll move to Britain. 

[Yazata]

In the UK the working classes have some qualities in common with the average redneck.
So I took the test..
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973
Result.. Traditional Working Class.
Ouch.

I'm an American, but I took the test anyway... and it said "traditional working class". Which isn't 100% wrong, I guess. Probably because I'm retired and live on a fixed income. My income is low but I have quite a bit of assets. It seemed a little embarrassed about that and explained that many working class people own their own homes.

It didn't ask about education. I thought that my listening to jazz and frequenting museums would bias the results and expose me as posh, but it didn't seem to care.

[confused2]

Until fairly recently (30 years ago) the majority of the working classes lived in Council Houses - effectively social housing subsidised by the wealthier ratepayers in the area. Originally the plan was to eliminate or at least relocate the inner city slums of the 19th century. Our Mrs Thatcher (a Trump prototype) decided the cost of maintaining homes for a bunch of feckless losers was greater than the loss that would be incurred by selling the homes to the occupants for far less than the market value of the property. Hence people with low incomes who own their own home are marked (by the calculator) as 'Traditional working class'.

[C C]

. . . She [Angela Davis] believes that capitalism and racism is interlinked. "There is no capitalism without racism," she says.

This is a perilous moment – unions are under attack, racist assaults, and anti-Semitic violence are on the rise, ultra-right candidates have won office in the U.S. , Brazil, the Philippines, Israel, and in other countries. At the same time, there is increasing opposition to white supremacy, police violence, misogyny, and capitalist accumulation of wealth in the world. With its century-old history of struggle, the Communist Party is well-positioned to offer expertise, experience and Marxist analyses that will assist the resistance movements to grow and develop. At the very least we must defeat the Trump administration in 2020! I wish you success in the deliberations of the convention.

In Solidarity,
Angela Y. Davis

Why Am I a Communist?

"Because I have a very strong love for oppressed people, for my people. I want to see them free, and I want to see all oppressed people throughout the world free. And I realize that the only way that we can do this is by moving towards a revolutionary society where the needs, and the interests, and the wishes of all people can be respected."Angela Davis

Totalitarianism is a not a mutation. It is a part of the DNA structure of communism and socialism. An economy built around a central plan, by default, eliminates individual freedom. 

Unlike the old "Red groupies" referenced in the fourth paragraph below, and as if echoing the fictional 1960's Black Communist Rebellion of The Man in the High Castle, the radical Black movements aren't even shy about holding onto those roots.

There's a difference between pre-motivated ideological crusading and crusading that arises from the practical spontaneity of contingent circumstances. The former indeed has a "bible" and conspiracy framework that it's devoted to, the latter doesn't. Capitalism similarly arose from the non-academic, commercial interactions of society -- it wasn't created by intellectual thought on paper, prescribing fanaticism and reverence. Though long after the fact various scholars have tried to formalize it (to retroactively make it dogmatic and fixed, para-religious). 

Tony Frangie Mawad: "[...American admirers of Marxist regimes...] are beset by what Venezuelan journalist Cristal Palacios Yumar calls 'peace privilege' -- by which people living in peaceful, prosperous countries simply have 'no real clue about what it means to survive' in a dictatorship. Hannah-Jones, in particular, seems ignorant of the institutional racism that has suffused communist Cuba -- a country ruled by a mainly white gerontocracy..."

Most of the applicable Jewish citizenry at least lost its direct love-affair with communism after they finally (very late) started believing information about the Stalinist era of the USSR, Mao, etc.{*} In larger context, though, Red Gospel on the coasts just mutated from class struggle to the [ideological grounded] social justice of the New Left, which still lingers as the ["testament"/conspiracy crusading] spearhead they rely upon to eventually topple the "evil bourgeois".

- - - footnote - - -

{*} Jewish Currents Magazine and a Longtime Adversary Decide to Merge (2006): The magazine, one of the last remnants of an era when many Jews in New York City believed that Communism would redeem America [...] That perspective no longer sticks out among the Jewish Currents audience. Most of the magazine's onetime Communists were disillusioned first by the revelations about Stalin's murderous purges and finally by the collapse of the Soviet empire, and their revised views have converged with the reformist vision of the Workmen's Circle. Many of the diehards have, well, died.

[...] Jewish Currents ... started as Jewish Life in 1946. It was in all but name a Communist Party organ, and its editorial policy zigged and zagged with the Soviet party line. David A. Hacker, a member of the magazine's advisory board, recalled how the magazine labeled Stalin's Jewish detractors as fascists who "must be destroyed."

But in 1956 Khrushchev began to acknowledge the purges and slaughters of the Stalin era. Word also filtered out that a group of Jewish writers and scientists, later numbered at 14, had been executed in 1952 for publicizing Jewish suffering during World War II, even though their effort had been sanctioned by Stalin. Louis Harap, the magazine's editor, was devastated, telling colleagues, according to Carol Jochnowitz, the magazine's production editor, that he felt "as if the world had fallen out from under him." After the magazine printed the revelations, it lost three-fourths of its subscribers.

Morris Schappes tried to keep the flame burning. He had sterling leftist credentials: fired from City College for Communist membership, imprisoned for 13 months for perjuring himself before a state legislative committee. He changed the magazine's name, promised to be more self-critical and raised questions about Soviet anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, the magazine did not fully break with party dogma until the June 1967 Mideast war, when the Soviet Union denounced Israel for aggression against its Arab neighbors while Jewish Currents supported Israel's right to defend itself.

[...The magazine has...] realized that with just 2,200 aged readers remaining, its future looked dim. By becoming an arm of the Workmen's Circle, the century-old mutual aid society and preserver of Yiddish culture, it instantly gained 13,000 additional subscribers -- that organization's dues-paying members. [...] a voice that might help it appeal to younger Jews. ... Not surprisingly, some leaders of Workmen's Circle opposed the merger, saying, "Don't trust those old Commies..."

True, the editor, Lawrence Bush, 54, is a onetime "red-diaper baby" whose grandmother Bessie Sayet, a rabbi's daughter, claimed to have returned to Russia in 1917 on the same boat as Leon Trotsky to help the Revolution. Nevertheless ... "To this day, I'm wary of ideology," Mr. Bush said during an interview ... "Anybody who purports to explain the world through a single ideology, I'm interested but I'm skeptical."

The bot accounts that I mentioned before, you know, the ones that you popped off about, aim to weaken several of the essential tenants of democracy: institutions, capitalism, societal cohesion, and trust in leadership.

Do you really want the outsiders wiggling in? Do you really think that bots have a right to free speech?

Yah, I've got to admit that I do overlook domestic Marxists coordinating their own bot armies. Usually think of communist China, North Korea, etc being involved -- and Russia, Iran, etc in the "other" political department.

[Secular Sanity]

I know, right? I thought the same thing.

I guess I'm going to have to breakdown and watch The Man in the High Castle.  I'll have to watch it when my husband is gone or he'll surely ruin it for me.