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Patriarchy's visions are becoming ever more extreme. Surpassing even Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

"Women “would have their uteruses removed when they turn over 30,” Naoki Hyakuta, leader of the Conservative Party of Japan, said in a stream on his YouTube channel on Friday.

On the channel, he also said that he would make it law for “women who are single after 25 years old not to be allowed to marry.”"

He later apologized by saying: “I cannot deny that the expressions were too harsh".

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/societ y/general-news/20241110-221734/

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Patriarchy's visions are becoming ever more extreme. Surpassing even Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

"Women “would have their uteruses removed when they turn over 30,” Naoki Hyakuta, leader of the Conservative Party of Japan, said in a stream on his YouTube channel on Friday.

On the channel, he also said that he would make it law for “women who are single after 25 years old not to be allowed to marry.”"

He later apologized by saying: “I cannot deny that the expressions were too harsh".

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/societ y/general-news/20241110-221734/

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The level of propaganda necessary to sustain the fiction that genocide in Gaza is a noble fight against anti-Semitism is breathtaking.

If you only read Der Spiegel or the NYT, you get the impression that what happened in Amsterdam was close to a pogrom.

But, of course, it wasn't.

"Maccabi Tel Aviv fans rioting in Amsterdam chanted slogans like “There are no schools in Gaza, as there are no children left.” Far from just extremist provocations, their slogans tell the truth about Israeli war aims."

https://jacobin.com/2024/11/maccabi-ho oligans-amsterdam-media-gaza/

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The level of propaganda necessary to sustain the fiction that genocide in Gaza is a noble fight against anti-Semitism is breathtaking.

If you only read Der Spiegel or the NYT, you get the impression that what happened in Amsterdam was close to a pogrom.

But, of course, it wasn't.

"Maccabi Tel Aviv fans rioting in Amsterdam chanted slogans like “There are no schools in Gaza, as there are no children left.” Far from just extremist provocations, their slogans tell the truth about Israeli war aims."

https://jacobin.com/2024/11/maccabi-ho oligans-amsterdam-media-gaza/

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@tomjennings @dcult welcome! We (mods) try to stay on it. :)

The best way to get a feel for the instance is to keep an eye on the "local timeline".

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@tomjennings @dcult welcome! We (mods) try to stay on it. :)

The best way to get a feel for the instance is to keep an eye on the "local timeline".

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@EubieDrew or boots only the first post in the thread and the rest can be easily accessed through the threading.

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@EubieDrew or boots only the first post in the thread and the rest can be easily accessed through the threading.

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@bengrosser A few less typos here :)

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@bengrosser A few less typos here :)

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@eliasr

The public sphere is problematic bc it was never as free and ideal as Habermas made it to be, and it has always excluded a lot of people / perspectives (historically, women, minorities, colonized people etc). Just look at the range of people in talk shows and the which subjects are discussed.

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@eliasr

The public sphere is problematic bc it was never as free and ideal as Habermas made it to be, and it has always excluded a lot of people / perspectives (historically, women, minorities, colonized people etc). Just look at the range of people in talk shows and the which subjects are discussed.

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@guenterhack Mont Pelerin is apparently available!

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@guenterhack Mont Pelerin is apparently available!

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3/ It’s quite striking that in seven out of ten states, abortion protection measures won with strong popular support. Even in Florida, 57% of voters backed the measure (but it failed to reach the 60% threshold required for adoption). It’s quite telling that, when considered in isolation, the key point of Harris’s campaign was widely supported, but the overall project of the continuation of the liberal order was rejected.

The left has been completely unprepared for this collapse. Fifty years of neoliberalism have undermined ideas and practices of solidarity and replaced them with a cynical, game-theory view of social interaction as endless competition in zero-sum games. On what new basis solidarity could be rebuilt is entirely unclear to me.

We are off the charts now, and many vulnerable people will suffer. There is a tidal wave of ugliness coming. While liberal wars might be pursued less vigorously now that the Cheneys are in the wilderness for good, neocolonial exploitation will not, creating its own incentives for war. Musk made this very clear in relation to the need to have access to cheap lithium.

But there is no reason to be nostalgic. It’s precisely the charts we had that created the mess we are in.

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3/ It’s quite striking that in seven out of ten states, abortion protection measures won with strong popular support. Even in Florida, 57% of voters backed the measure (but it failed to reach the 60% threshold required for adoption). It’s quite telling that, when considered in isolation, the key point of Harris’s campaign was widely supported, but the overall project of the continuation of the liberal order was rejected.

The left has been completely unprepared for this collapse. Fifty years of neoliberalism have undermined ideas and practices of solidarity and replaced them with a cynical, game-theory view of social interaction as endless competition in zero-sum games. On what new basis solidarity could be rebuilt is entirely unclear to me.

We are off the charts now, and many vulnerable people will suffer. There is a tidal wave of ugliness coming. While liberal wars might be pursued less vigorously now that the Cheneys are in the wilderness for good, neocolonial exploitation will not, creating its own incentives for war. Musk made this very clear in relation to the need to have access to cheap lithium.

But there is no reason to be nostalgic. It’s precisely the charts we had that created the mess we are in.

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2/ One is digitization, where market forces created extreme concentrations of wealth and power while threatening everyone else with redundancy (most recently even artists, long presented as neoliberal role models). It destroyed the public sphere (a problematic construct to begin with), replacing it with a system of chaotic volatility.

The other is climate change, where the weakened state has been unable to overcome the resistance of fossil fuel interests. Instead of strong policies, “market incentives” were used, which made life under stagnating wages even harder, while having no impact on the structural dependencies. Hence, the clean energy build-out did not reduce the amount of carbon emissions. That might change in the medium term, simply for economic efficiency reasons, but likely too little, too late. All of this made a mockery of expertise and rationality, which acknowledged the problem while coming up with a long list of reasons why not to act on it. Against this background, the argument that climate change is not a big deal because we can fix it later once AI has delivered a miracle solution is at least internally consistent.

While Trump and the far right are, well, fascists in a political science sense, their support is not because people became fascists (though some have always been, and it has become OK to say so openly). As Brian Holmes has argued for a long time now, the popularity of the far right is better seen as a Polanyian double movement, people turning to fascism as a way of seeking protection against the ravages of unconstrained capitalism (Trump’s two main points: lower prices and closed borders).

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2/ One is digitization, where market forces created extreme concentrations of wealth and power while threatening everyone else with redundancy (most recently even artists, long presented as neoliberal role models). It destroyed the public sphere (a problematic construct to begin with), replacing it with a system of chaotic volatility.

The other is climate change, where the weakened state has been unable to overcome the resistance of fossil fuel interests. Instead of strong policies, “market incentives” were used, which made life under stagnating wages even harder, while having no impact on the structural dependencies. Hence, the clean energy build-out did not reduce the amount of carbon emissions. That might change in the medium term, simply for economic efficiency reasons, but likely too little, too late. All of this made a mockery of expertise and rationality, which acknowledged the problem while coming up with a long list of reasons why not to act on it. Against this background, the argument that climate change is not a big deal because we can fix it later once AI has delivered a miracle solution is at least internally consistent.

While Trump and the far right are, well, fascists in a political science sense, their support is not because people became fascists (though some have always been, and it has become OK to say so openly). As Brian Holmes has argued for a long time now, the popularity of the far right is better seen as a Polanyian double movement, people turning to fascism as a way of seeking protection against the ravages of unconstrained capitalism (Trump’s two main points: lower prices and closed borders).

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1/ What a time to be alive!

In the US, Trump is re-elected, and in Europe, governments are collapsing (Germany), teetering on the edge of collapse (France), heading toward a last-ditch centrist coalition that nobody believes in (Austria), or have already flipped to the far-right (Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, Netherlands).

It’s clear the liberal world order has collapsed and will not recover—not only at the periphery, where it was always fragile and embroiled in wars (hence the easy alignment of Harris and Cheney), but also at the center. At the periphery, which no longer accepts the status of periphery and has become present in many forms in the center, few will shed tears—except the Ukrainians and, possibly, the Taiwanese. The pious bromides about human rights and a rules-based order can no longer provide justification and soft power, with the genocide in Gaza the final nail in the coffin.

At the center, the order collapsed because of its own contradictions. Though there are many, they manifest themselves in different ways, but I think they boil down to the neoliberal state being unable to manage two really deep transformations.

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1/ What a time to be alive!

In the US, Trump is re-elected, and in Europe, governments are collapsing (Germany), teetering on the edge of collapse (France), heading toward a last-ditch centrist coalition that nobody believes in (Austria), or have already flipped to the far-right (Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, Netherlands).

It’s clear the liberal world order has collapsed and will not recover—not only at the periphery, where it was always fragile and embroiled in wars (hence the easy alignment of Harris and Cheney), but also at the center. At the periphery, which no longer accepts the status of periphery and has become present in many forms in the center, few will shed tears—except the Ukrainians and, possibly, the Taiwanese. The pious bromides about human rights and a rules-based order can no longer provide justification and soft power, with the genocide in Gaza the final nail in the coffin.

At the center, the order collapsed because of its own contradictions. Though there are many, they manifest themselves in different ways, but I think they boil down to the neoliberal state being unable to manage two really deep transformations.

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@random_musings that and Trump cannot be good for Ukraine. Which ca not be good for Europe.

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@random_musings that and Trump cannot be good for Ukraine. Which ca not be good for Europe.

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@bengrosser I agree. But the center, also here in Europe, offers nothing but a "let's do the same but hope for a better result". That cannot be a winning strategy. So people choose different, even if it's worse (with lots of help from the oligarchs for whom it will be better).

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@bengrosser I agree. But the center, also here in Europe, offers nothing but a "let's do the same but hope for a better result". That cannot be a winning strategy. So people choose different, even if it's worse (with lots of help from the oligarchs for whom it will be better).

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@bengrosser In part, yeah. But there are also many self-inflicted wounds by the democrats.

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@bengrosser In part, yeah. But there are also many self-inflicted wounds by the democrats.