Chris Ketcham: Clowns to the Left of Me, Fascists to the Right [View all]
If I had a brother, he would no doubt be incredibly annoying not awesome like Ol’ jfz9580m (a satiric non-homage to Ol’ Orlick from Great Expectations).
But, if I could have had a brother I actually respected it would be Chris Ketcham. Extra points for slamming the sleazy Jacobin, where writers like Ben Wray write brainless opeds referring to women’s rights as “popular” (that is encouraging..it is one of those minor conveniences I like..women’s rights) and quotes mindnumbingly brainless Indian economists still supporting this cancerous model of pointless, nuisance growth that exploits desperation, deregulation, human overpopulation and drives a race-to-the-bottom via global migration, straining the limits to growth everywhere (including on my own damn street here in India).
To no one is it more cruel than the poorest immigrants: the 70,000 immigrants languishing in hells, the blind Rohingya refugee..But no discussion of a root cause separate from the usual ICE versus DEI wars, which leave Mark Cuban, Vinod Khosla, Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk out of the equation survives on social media. In this environment Ammon Bundy is seen as pro-immigrant. Superficial, ahistorical wrt any discourse more than a week old..
A nauseating war-monger called Hagar Chemali whose husband works in private equity is considered on the left in this vile environment.
Preach it brother:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/08/clowns-to-the-left-of-me-fascists-to-the-right/
On the Left, to oppose this threat, there’s a clown car. Behold the rickety wheels, the doors falling off, the tailpipe belching smoke, and the disgorged passengers: the worthless “social justice” Left.
Remember that the “Left,” as it was once understood, no longer exists, there being no actual movement in this country of, by, and for the working and lower classes, no movement staunchly opposed to blood-sucking rentiers, industry oligarchs, and idle rich parasites, broadly the upper classes. There is no Left in this country that would have those folks hung, beheaded, or flown to an airless planet (they can have Mars).
This lipstick on the Dimon pig satisfies the rule on the Left that language also trumps class. The banksters can keep on preying on us so long as they follow the proper speech codes. Dimon laughs all the way to the bank as the puritanical children sit goggle-eyed and distracted by nonsense purity tests.
The world this brain-dead Left hopes to bring about is not one in which fundamental power relations are moved an iota in the direction of tangible justice (which is economic and also ecological). The world they are seeking is one in which a black-hispanic trans lesbian (take your pick of aggrieved identities – it doesn’t matter) will gain enough power within the confines of the vicious system, so that, for example, she/he/they/it can order the delivery of bombs to wedding parties in Yemen. After all, we want an empire that allows everyone, no matter creed, color, or gender, the possibility of committing state-sanctioned mass murder. In fact, the mass murder will be better done if committed by historically disadvantaged groups. DEI in the Pentagon!
[
A military vet William Astore made the same point:
https://www.salon.com/2023/10/15/beyond-the-rights-woke-slurs-what-would-a-progressive-us-military-really-look-like_partner/
]
An enlightened Left would center on two matters: class and the protection of the biosphere. The obvious intersectionality of the two: growthist capitalism, driven by the rich, means the strangling of the biosphere as capital transforms the living world into inert exchange value, leaving always less of nature alive.
Where you stand on class and ecology — on class war from above that amounts to ecocide — should determine your allies. The upper classes who are Republican or Democrat, right or left, they are Upton Sinclair’s wings of the same bird of prey, and they need to be set afire tout de suite.
I’d suggest that we turn our flamethrowers on the socialist technocrat Left, too (as distinct from the woke left). These simpletons — see any issue of Jacobin for their exemplars — envision the permanent growth of the megatechnic human enterprise and care not that it comes at continuing ruinous cost to the natural world. The technocrat Left, divorced from biophysical reality and lacking any respect for limits to growth on a tiny planet, seeks a super-populated, hyper-industrialized, high-tech, Star-Trek-redistributionist utopia. Virulently anti-environment, anti-ecology, anti-green, abased worshippers of the Megamachine — making them little different from their putative enemies, the machine-loving capitalists — these red Lefties are as lost as the woke Lefties.
In the meantime, the Trumpenvolk remain unbowed — malevolent, ambitious, engaged, organized — and, if the polls are an indication, their now openly fascist leader could take the presidency again this November. The woke mob howls at the injustice of it all, full of sound and fury that signifies nothing, builds nothing, accomplishes nothing. The rest of us have no idea where to find allies worth having.
Chris is awesome.
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