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Marxism Matters: Anarchal promotion of looting, burning & destruction of society

#1
C C Offline
Cynical Sindee: Another white academic (Vicky Osterweil) co-opting and trying to represent and direct what Blacks and other minorities think/want to serve their own political agendas, childhood grievances, and pathological personality recreations.{*}

Q: Can you talk about rioting as a tactic? What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy?

Osterweil: "It does a number of important things. [...] It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss ... It points to the way in which that's unjust. ... So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free."


Compare how divorced from reality and natural processes Osterweil is to a Creationist's beliefs. The former is promoting a form of craziness that is immediately dangerous, whereas any effects of the latter is indirect/prolonged or consequential primarily if it invades the educational system.

The point is that secular para-religious fanaticism (political ideological cults and their conspiracy theory frameworks used to interpret everything and prescribe action) can potentially be a greater threat than supernatural fanaticism. There is a constitutional obstruction for straight-up religion oozing into administrative departments. Arguably it has been dodged at times in the past, but at least there is a formal separation of Church and state to be reckoned with. Whereas potentially pathological secular belief-systems that hijack social issues and masquerade behind junk "philosophy and science" can receive a free pass through the government/culture barrier.


- - - footnote - - -

{*} Jessica Krug: George Washington University professor says she lied about being black
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54008495

- - - - the article - - -

There is no defense for looting
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...ng/615925/

INTRO: Last week, NPR’s Code Switch published an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. NPR summarizes the book as an argument that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.”

If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders and crippling for a generation its ability to serve its poorest citizens, then I suppose I am forced to agree. Osterweil sees an upside. Looting is good, she says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” She came to this conclusion six years ago, and in her book, which is written “in love and solidarity with looters the world over,” she defends this view as ably as anyone could.

Osterweil’s argument is simple. The “so-called” United States was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” violence. That violence produced our current system, particularly its property relations, and looting is a remedy for that sickness. “Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the ‘justice’ of law and order,” she writes. Ownership of things—not just people—is “innately, structurally white supremacist.”

The rest of the remedy is more violence, which she celebrates as an underrated engine for social justice. The destruction of businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom,” Osterweil writes. It is also a form of “queer birth.” “Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,” according to Osterweil. “They rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world.” She reserves her most pungent criticism for advocates of nonviolence, a “bankrupt concept” primarily valuable for enlisting “northern liberals.”

Liberal is pejorative in this book. Martin Luther King Jr. is grudgingly acknowledged as a positive figure, but not as positive a figure as he would have been if he had kicked some white-capitalist ass and put a few pigs in the ICU. The “I Have a Dream” speech was, Osterweil writes, “the product of a series of sellouts and silencings, of nonviolent leaders dampening the militancy of the grass roots” and “sapping the movement’s energy.” More to her taste is Robert F. Williams, who practiced armed resistance, and Assata Shakur, who murdered a New Jersey police officer and remains a fugitive in Cuba. The violence needn’t be in self-defense—Shakur’s certainly was not. Osterweil quotes the “wisdom” of Stokely Carmichael: “Responsibility for the use of violence by black men, whether in self-defense or initiated by them [emphasis mine], lies with the white community.” (MORE - details)
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#2
Syne Offline
Guess what, "without police and without state oppression, we can have" guns to protect our own property. That means thieving rioters won't go to jail for trying to "have things for free". They will just die, very unceremoniously. That quickly starts "sapping the movement’s energy", and its numbers.
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#3
C C Offline
Cynical Sindee: Asian protest is genuine; whereas Western social-justice fronted militancy makes "cosmetic" noise to boycott "Mulan" for the sake of appearances. Disney, of course, is another virtue-posturing enterprise conflictingly selling-out to Communist Party demands for profit from Chinese consumers/moviegoers.


Calls to boycott "Mulan"
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultur...nd-present

EXCERPT: . . . Oddly, perhaps, “Mulan,” directed by the New Zealander Niki Caro and credited to four screenwriters, gives the voice-over a body in Mulan’s father. Although most Americans associate the folktale with its proto-feminist heroine, this movie is framed as her father’s story -- he is the film’s definitive narrator. It is not the only dissonance in the new “Mulan.” The film is, put crudely, an Americanized celebration of [Marxist] Chinese nationalism, on a two-hundred-million-dollar budget.

In the film, a courageous Chinese imperial army fights and defeats the proto-Mongol invaders -- a triumph of border control. Offscreen, Liu Yifei, the Chinese actress who portrays Mulan, has openly supported the Hong Kong police against protesters; her stance clashes with her portrayal of a feminist underdog and has galvanized boycott campaigns, including one by the #MilkTeaAlliance, a cohort of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. When the twenty-three-year-old activist Agnes Chow was detained in Hong Kong, a meme took flight anointing her as “the real Mulan.”

And, this week, viewers of the film noticed that the credits offer thanks to government agencies in Xinjiang, where parts of “Mulan” were filmed, and where hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims have been held in internment camps. (At one point, a title card presents “Northwest China” -- that is, Xinjiang -- as “an inalienable part of China that Mulan must defend for her father, her family, and her emperor,” as Jeannette Ng writes in Foreign Policy. “That’s not the historical reality -- or even the reality of the original poem the stories are based on.”)

No one could have foreseen that Liu, the film’s star, would create so much P.R. grief. Disney reportedly auditioned more than a thousand actresses before settling on Liu, who was born in Wuhan and lived in Queens for part of her childhood, as exactly what we want our contemporary female superheroes to be: quietly courageous, uninterested in sex, and possessed of perfectly blown-out hair that somehow never gets in her eyes, even when she’s shooting arrows or briskly mounting horses. When she transitions from her male persona into “Hua Mulan,” the film tracks her in slow motion as she undoes her bun, wavy locks cascading, armor falling away: she is Oriental Wonder Woman. If only she weren’t played by a supporter of police brutality... (MORE -details)
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#4
C C Offline
Cynical Sindee: Praise be, shout great social-struggle hosannas to how much Marxism cares about you and the oppressed, especially after the success of the Revolution.

Another Chinese rocket falls near a school, creating toxic orange cloud
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/...nge-cloud/

EXCERPTS: On Monday, a Long March 4B rocket launched from China's Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center carrying a remote-sensing satellite. This 50-year-old spaceport is located in north-central China, about 500km to the southwest of Beijing. As often happens with the first stages of Chinese rockets launching from the inland Taiyuan facility, the spent Long March 4B booster fell downstream of the spaceport. In this case, it landed near a school, creating a predictably large cloud of toxic gas.

[...] Compounding the problem of dropping rocket first stages on the surrounding countryside is that China continues to use toxic hydrazine fuel for its first stages. Hydrazine, which is two nitrogens bound together by hydrogen atoms, is an efficient, storable fuel. But it is also highly corrosive and toxic.

[...] The use of hydrazine as a fuel for launch vehicles has been phased out for most of the world. ... Yet the majority of China's launch fleet is powered by hydrazine fuel and nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer. ... These fuels are cheap and relatively easy to use, and it would have been natural for China to use them in the 1980s and 1990s when these boosters were developed. But their use continues unabated today. (MORE - details)
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#5
C C Offline
Even Al Sharpton thinks ‘defund the police’ is idiotic
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/e...r-BB18Pd8L

EXCERPTS: You know you have lost the plot as a left-wing activist when even Al Sharpton thinks you have gone too far. The MSNBC host and anti-Semitic agitator denounced the “defund the police” movement Tuesday. He characterized it as a childish fantasy of wealthy, out-of-touch coastal elites.

[...] The “defund the police” movement has yet to find a coherent message. Its proponents cannot decide if they want to reform law enforcement or abolish it altogether.

Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, for example, has gone so far as to call for the disbanding of the Minneapolis Police Department. Activist Mariame Kaba authored an article for the New York Times titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” There are others in the press who support literal “defunding” but in a much subtler way. They obscure their goals with mealy-mouthed double-speak, including the claim that “defund” actually means “redirecting funds from police departments to other parts of society that help people like housing, education, and communities.” That is still “defunding,” by the way.

But then, there are people such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. They support a (by comparison) moderate, reform-based approach.

As for Sharpton, he does not want any part of the “defund” silliness. Perhaps he has grown wiser with age. Perhaps he realizes that abolishing local peacekeeping services is a recipe for disaster. Perhaps Sharpton realizes the “defund” movement is electoral poison for the Democratic Party... (MORE - details)
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