You are a smart guy too, Louis! Concerning the pandemic and being stupid, I can only retort your "compliment".

Leaving aside this, I sincerly hope that you don't get sick!

All the best!

On 10/21/20 8:11 AM, RKOB wrote:

Oh, Louis! First, supporters of the capitalist Lockdown policy claimed that "science" and "all serious scientists" support the claim that COVID-19 is "the worst pandemic in modern history".

What does this have to do with the tight bonds between the Great Barrington crew and Charles Koch, Donald Trump, the Hoover Institution, the evangelical right and the cuckoo-heads at Off-Guardian, Global Research, and UNZ Review?

I removed you from Marxmail for linking to a COVID-19 denialist website and will do it again if I have to. Within in your ideological cocoon, this sort of thing passes muster. But not here. Especially when I have to worry about getting sick now that cases are spiking again in NYC. You're a smart guy, Michael, but this fixation you have on the pandemic is stupid.

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Oh, Louis! First, supporters of the capitalist Lockdown policy claimed that "science" and "all serious scientists" support the claim that COVID-19 is "the worst pandemic in modern history".

What does this have to do with the tight bonds between the Great Barrington crew and Charles Koch, Donald Trump, the Hoover Institution, the evangelical right and the cuckoo-heads at Off-Guardian, Global Research, and UNZ Review?

I removed you from Marxmail for linking to a COVID-19 denialist website and will do it again if I have to. Within in your ideological cocoon, this sort of thing passes muster. But not here. Especially when I have to worry about getting sick now that cases are spiking again in NYC. You're a smart guy, Michael, but this fixation you have on the pandemic is stupid.

Oh, Louis! First, supporters of the capitalist Lockdown policy claimed that "science" and "all serious scientists" support the claim that COVID-19 is "the worst pandemic in modern history".

Now this is no longer possible

a) because it is pretty evident by the numbers that this is not "the worst pandemic in modern history" and

b) because a growing number of scientists criticize the Lockdown policy.

Now, the supporters of the capitalist Lockdown policy try to discredit the critical scientists.

At least, this is certainly easier than to disproof them.

Ah, in case you want to know more about the interests of capital groups you might want to take a look to a research of Naomi Klein in The Intercept. (https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/) This is not the New York Times, but on the other hand she is progressive!

Eight month after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic ... and you have still not learnt anything! This is sad, Louis!

On 10/21/20 7:03 AM, RKOB wrote:

COVID-19: Watch Your Back, Lockdown Gangsters!

A new wave of draconic Lockdowns sweeps Europe but popular resistance and criticism of medical scientists are increasing

By Michael Pröbsting, 21 October 2020

https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/covid-19-watch-your-back-lockdown-gangsters/

"In addition there are also a growing number of medical scientists who withstand the pressure of the governments. In various studies and public statements, they criticize the brainless COVID hysteria and the anti-democratic Lockdown policy (see e.g. the so-called Great Barrington Declaration with which we have dealt in a recently published essay)."

Yes, I referred to them yesterday in an excerpt from a NYT article. In fact, you are echoing the most reactionary voices on these questions that are now being pushed by Scott Atlas, Trump's chief spokesman now. Atlas is a long-time member of the Hoover Institution and a class-a capitalist ideologue:

The declaration grew out of a gathering hosted in Great Barrington, Mass., by the American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank dedicated to free-market principles that partners with the Charles Koch Institute, founded by the billionaire industrialist to provide support to libertarian-leaning causes and organizations.

On Oct. 5, the day after the declaration was made public, the three authors — Dr. Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard — arrived in Washington at the invitation of Dr. Atlas to present their plan to a small but powerful audience: the health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II.

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What is at stake when we talk about the economics of North American slavery? Over the last 75+ years it has been whether capitalism superseded slavery or whether capitalism and slavery were co-constituted, capitalism to some extent relying on slavery. Part of that discussion has been theoretical and part hinges on whether the exploitation of African-descended Americans is an incidental or an essential part of the economies of English and British North America and the United States over the last four centuries.

https://economic-historian.com/2020/10/capitalism-slavery-and-economic-white-supremacy/

In her survey of Right-wing literature in the US since the 1960s, Carol Mason identifies two concurrent threads that occasionally intersect. First, a mainstream that includes political nonfiction by the likes of Buckley and Milton Friedman at one end, and Fox News celebrities at the other; ‘serious’ literature published by the Agrarian ‘Fugitive Poets’ in the Sewanee, Southern and Kenyon reviews; popular fiction from Robert Heinlein to Tim LaHaye; as well as a massive, often evangelical, industry of self-help. The second thread is an underground of self-published and small-circulation texts distributed through mailing lists, organisations such as the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, and other alternative networks catering to contents and readerships too incendiary for the average bookstore. The standard editions of this thread are Ted Kaczynski’s Technological Slavery (2010), James Mason’s Siege (issued serially between 1980 and 1986 by the National Socialist Liberation Front, an offshoot of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party), and William Luther Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries (1978), which has inspired multiple acts of terror (the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing most famous among them).

https://aeon.co/essays/is-there-such-a-thing-as-far-right-literature

Lawyers say they can’t locate the parents of at least 545 migrant children after they were separated under the president’s “zero-tolerance” border policy.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/migrant-parents-separated-trump-policy-aclu_n_5f8f8ba1c5b6b005f5f0b1d4

COVID-19: Watch Your Back, Lockdown Gangsters!

A new wave of draconic Lockdowns sweeps Europe but popular resistance and criticism of medical scientists are increasing

By Michael Pröbsting, 21 October 2020

https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/covid-19-watch-your-back-lockdown-gangsters/

"In addition there are also a growing number of medical scientists who withstand the pressure of the governments. In various studies and public statements, they criticize the brainless COVID hysteria and the anti-democratic Lockdown policy (see e.g. the so-called Great Barrington Declaration with which we have dealt in a recently published essay)."

Yes, I referred to them yesterday in an excerpt from a NYT article. In fact, you are echoing the most reactionary voices on these questions that are now being pushed by Scott Atlas, Trump's chief spokesman now. Atlas is a long-time member of the Hoover Institution and a class-a capitalist ideologue:

The declaration grew out of a gathering hosted in Great Barrington, Mass., by the American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank dedicated to free-market principles that partners with the Charles Koch Institute, founded by the billionaire industrialist to provide support to libertarian-leaning causes and organizations.

On Oct. 5, the day after the declaration was made public, the three authors — Dr. Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard — arrived in Washington at the invitation of Dr. Atlas to present their plan to a small but powerful audience: the health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II.

COVID-19: Watch Your Back, Lockdown Gangsters!

A new wave of draconic Lockdowns sweeps Europe but popular resistance and criticism of medical scientists are increasing

By Michael Pröbsting, 21 October 2020

https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/covid-19-watch-your-back-lockdown-gangsters/

-- 
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(Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net)
www.rkob.net
aktiv@...
Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314

FYI:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-herd-immunity-immune-response-antibodies

On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 11:40 AM, Michael Meeropol wrote:

 

Rich people like the Koch brothers can PAY other people to take risks for them ---- (in fact many of us who are pretty affluent are doing that now --- we buy food processed in unsafe plants, transported by workers who cannot afford to stay home, sold in stores by retail workers in the same situation --- electricity keeps flowing to our house because utility workers cannot stay home --- and only the kids of essential workers themselves have to go to school and risk infection while the more affluent can keep kids at home)

 

The moral bankruptcy of libertarian economics is presented in stark relief by the Koch-financed "Great Barrington Declaration" ---If Trump is re-elected and the pursuit of the will 'o' wisp of "herd immunity" ramps up, there will be over a million and a half deaths and almost certain (at least partial) breakdown in the the economy and even civil society ...If Biden is elected he and his team will have a hard time "convincing" those who drank the Trump kool-aid to take even the most basic precaus ---

 

I have the impression that the actual nature of acquired immunity to Covid 19 is by no means well-enough established to provide a basis for a "herd mentality" policy.  But I haven't read the article--perhaps they deal with this point.  

I tend to think that if Biden reconstitutes the "organs" of governance damaged by Trump--CDC, etc.--which perhaps might not be as difficult to do as some may think--that the basic steps toward control of the pandemic should be well within the reach even of the Democratic Party.  Getting people to go along with this might be the hard part, but perhaps not.

Comrade Meeropol's doubts on this point, however, are unnerving--he could so easily be right.  The Trump solution to anything is to talk crap and launder more money.  But Obama certainly talked a mountain of crap--implementing Obamacare was hardly the strategic and tactical challenge that mobilizing an effective strategy against the pandemic would be.  Much of his governance consisted of non-actions, such as echoing the whimsical expression of a little girl reacting to the antics of a pet.  This kind of thing continues to elicit waves of abject gratitude from the hopelessly infantilized legions of the Democratic Party.  They are circulating some new, abject petition to "thank" Obama for God knows what every fifteen minutes.

Indeed, the antirealistic cult of Trump in many ways resembles the much-derided "cult of Obama," now largely forgotten, which substituted  anybody's pet "idea of Obama" for any reality.

What has Biden ever actually organized?  Good question.  Maybe they really couldn't do it.

 

This is full of good thinking, though the path to the mass working class party remains unclear, which is hardly a fault of the article:

An observation:

The question of who by right should be considered a worker remains much vexed.  A commenter on Louis Proyect's blog recently echoed the widespread vulgar Graeberite idea that "white collar" workers and "white collar jobs" are all "bullshit" and should be done away with.  This (IMO) debased anarchist tendency is very powerful in the non-BLM protests that have been "shadowing" BLM for months now, and may well be playing a major role in preventing the formation of the mass party Oakland Socialist advocates. 

In addition to the "anarchist" refusal to vote, make demands, or even to publish intelligible analysis of the political situations, on the Marxist side, similar questions arise about who is and isn't a worker. since the indispensable workforce involved on the distribution and circulation end can be defined as "unproductive."  Some argue that delivery drivers, supermarket workers, etc. etc. are not really workers because their work does not directly yield surplus value for the owners of manufacturing concerns and the factory-like farming operations of industrialized agriculture.  Are computer programmers workers?  Are college professors? Students?  

It's been suggested that rather than try to inject workers from outside with a Marxist conception of a mass party, the better approach is to support individual worker demands and struggles, allowing the mass party to emerge as it were organically from worker actions and not from the sort of discussion that happens eg on marxmail.

I don't regularly read Oakland Socialist, so no doubt am unaware of much that would directly address such questions, but would be interested in your "take" on the identity of the working class under today's conditions, and also on the organizational question.  Am not suggesting BTW that Oakland Socialist is "trying to inject," etc.--merely trying to characterize an attitude that I do not necessarily share.

I'm not impressed by these Bert-Lahr-like roars of superannuated machismo.  If either of you had anything substantial to say, you would have said it by now.  Likewise, if you had any punch left, you would have thrown it by now, instead of taking refuge incongruously, in between growls and grimaces, in the suburban housewife's pose of being above it all. 

However, Stewart has a point, since very little he has written in this thread--when it comes to Federalist 10 or American political traditions--matters much, makes any great difference, or is worth dwelling on for long once one has analyzed and gone past it it. Foundation documents are rule sets that are there to be hacked in the process of reproduction of ideology. The points I've made are quite clear and substantial--as far as they go--and neither of you has had anything coherent to say about them.  This is why you resort to false indignation and the pose of superiority.

Well, that ship has sailed. But Andrew--why are you unable to distinguish between the New Deal and Clintonism/Blairism/New Labor?  I'm not offended by that, but I do find it richly comical--a lapse of Trumpian proportions. Do you know which century this is?   

And who are you to fling epithets like "childish" and "inbred" in response to a perfectly civil question?  Why do you care? How are you so hyper-sensitive and so easily offended?

In discussing "Cancel Culture," Glenn Greenwald said that the signatories to the preposterous Harper's letter, as people of established reputation, were offended by the notion that anyone would seriously challenge their, as if were, divine right by actually questioning  them in any serious way.  To this they react with astonishment and outrage--or (I'd add) with the lofty superiority of Mrs. Betty Bowers, America's Best Christian.

This is what we are seeing here.  It's most amusing.  

I think it's the same old has-been donkey.

If any of you catch me making a fool of myself in the next 10 years or so, contact Les Schaffer. Also contact my wife who has been instructed to get me started on jigsaw puzzles.