Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Setting aside the whole sustainability of the idea that critiques from some particular viewpoint are somehow invalid because that viewpoint is different from yourself (and it is really a question of perspective - a Communist who attacks Obama for being a neoliberal could claim that the Tea Party types were just demanding Obama to be even more neoliberal than he actually was): no, the example is "There aren't enough Stalins".
Is this a meaningful distinction? It is in this case, since we're specifically talking about cults of personality. If we're talking about parties or ideologies, sure, I could see the point, but we're talking about specific personalities, and in this case a political cult of personality really generally demands complete fealty to the personality, independent of political ideologies. Attacking a personality from the "further same side" is the same as attacking them from the "opposite side" since both are evidence of disloyalty, "further same side" probably even more so. Again, Stalin vis-a-vis Bukharin and Trotsky is a good example.
Another Stalin-related example of how political cults of personality work is a demand that you follow the personality's line even if they make complete u-turns. When Yezhov is Stalin's guy, you agree he's a good Communist; when Stalin gets rid of Yezhov, you agree he was a traitor all along and edit him out of photos. When Stalin declares that Hitler is the greatest threat to Soviet Union there is, you attack Hitler; when Stalin declares that Hitler is OK now and the Western imperialists are the true treat, you change your line instantly and forget your attacks on Hitler even if you're Jewish yourself; when Hitler attacks Soviet Union and Soviet Union allies with the West, you change your line about Western warmongering in the middle of the speech if needed. And so on.
Does this apply to Obama and Trump? I can't think of good examples regarding Obama - Obama changed his line from anti-SSM to pro, but most of his partisans had probably already made the switch already. On the other hand, there just was a case of Trump's actions changing the views of at least a great number of his supporters instantly; the bombing or Iranian nuclear sites, making the GOP support for such strike go from 47% to 77%, meaning that there is at least a large number of Republicans willing to change their stance to Trump's instantaneously.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Manchin is actually quoted as saying he's doing this "not as a Democrat".
So? He's still a Democrat.
Sanders is claiming that Obama isn't left wing enough, which is a 50 Stalins criticism.
That's not what 50 Stalins means. As it was originally used, it was "Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!”"
It's supposed to be a completely facile pseudocriticism, not an actual criticism that is simply coming from a different direction than where you yourself are coming from. If we loop back to actual Stalin, it was just as dangerous to attack him from the left (like Trotsky did) as from the right (like Bukharin did), originally even considerably moreso. The only way to stay say would have been not to attack Stalin at all but "attack the system" while praising Stalin, like the 50 Stalins example guy does.
And it's not actually hard to find conservatives criticizing Trump.
This is someone obscure enough that I have never heard of them before you linked this, and the whole piece starts with him taling about how his criticisms of Trump get him constantly attacked by dozens of readers. Not a particularly worthy example, this.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
The oceans stopped rising?
...one of your examples of a cult of personality around Obama is a misphrased version of his own speech?
Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless.
This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
This was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.
He's exhorting the troops ('if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it'), and he's not even saying that the oceans stopped rising but that the rise begins to slow.
Meanwhile, a considerable share of American Protestants believe(d) that Trump is anointed by God to be the President, and the share is not insignificant even if there's a comparison question regarding whether all Presidents are anointed by God.
The God-Emperor stuff was both funny and a satire by someone not a fan of Trump, it was taken up ironically because hell, yeah it was funny and cool at the same time.
I'm not sure what the satire part is in reference to. Probably the first memes I saw about Trump (his campaign didn't instantly take off in the online crowd so it ook a bit of time for them to start accumulating in places where I'd spot them) were God-Emperor memes, presented in a ha-ha-only-serious tone.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
From the right of the party and from the left of the party. (Of course Sanders is technically not a Democrat, but in practice, he was and is.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
Our Orthodox parish has a lot of relatively recent young female converts who come out of the New Age scene and apparently converted to Orthodoxy during the Covid era. Some other women in their circles went Pentecostal. This, combined with the more recent wave of young men into Orthodoxy (like in other Western countries), has recently led to some marriages, and more appear to be on the way.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
Imagine thinking a President was practically the Second Coming
The QAnon stuff goes here.
and deifying him in art
...and the "God-Emperor" memes, among others, go here.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
...aren't Kurosawa and Leone basically currently at the same "they made seminal classic movies but let's face it, appreciating them doesn't really make you a cinephile as such by itself" status?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
A quick search turned out, in Google, at least this Jacobin article that situates Trump as something different from neoliberalism and indeed opposed to it while also situating him on the Right, yet not calling him a fascist. (This was admittedly after a quick skim, there might be some indication of the last in the other words, but I didn't spot it.) This would mean that there's at least one leftist who is able to do that.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
I dunno, the sort of a leftist who would have called, say, Obama a neoliberal would be unlikely to call Trump a neoliberal even though Trump's views on economy were to the right of them (or if they did, it would be specifically as an unexpected term with the intent of highlighting that Trump's economic policies aren't as divergent from the standard post-Cold-War Western economic model as he or his fans might like to claim.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
If Mamdani gets in and starts implementing his platform, his proposals will probably get on the table basically all around the Western world, or at least the large/capital cities.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
There's not that much need for an exhaustive deep dive, as it is a question you asked and answered in the same post.
To put it in other words, the nerd is titillated, but is also still unconsciously ashamed of his titillation, so appreciates the fact that there is a smokescreen justifying his titillation.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
I think that's called "burying the lede". "There being a LGBTQ+" page does not give full picture of what he supports and plans to do.
I was specifically talking about the main thrust of his campaign (in this election), which is different from what he actually supports and plans to do. The campaigns that politicians run don't always correlate on what they will actually do.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
I also said that there is a LGBTQ+ page. The point is that the main trust of the campaign is the lunchbucket stuff, not the woke stuff.
I'm not sure what the point you're striving to make here is? That he's not campaigning on lunchbucket stuff? The last person I'd trust on giving a honest estimation on what the particular place of importance of trans policies is in his current campaign is an one-issue anti-trans campaigner like Billboard Chris.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
I'm not sure even sure if that's miles away from Ignatiev's actual position, if you strip away Protestant Christianity or going to Israel and th elike. I was prompted by this whole discussion to go search for his actual comments on the issue and found easily a series of blog texts called "Memoir of an ex-Jew", where he suggests that one of the big problems with Zionism is precisely that it prevented Jewish assimilation:
What is the relation between Zionism and Jewishness? Within Palestine, Jewishness is the problem—not the Judaic religion or the Hebrew language or the commemoration of Jewish holidays, but Jewishness as an institution, an officially recognized identity carrying privileges enforced by the state. The aim of Zionism was to establish a regime of Jewish privilege. It succeeded, so that within the Zionist entity there is no legal distinction between Zionist and Jew. People seeking to establish residency there based on the Law of Return are subject not to a political but to a “blood” test: are they descended from Jews through the maternal line? No matter that the test merely pushes the issue back a generation or more, thereby failing Simone Weil’s logical objection: it works to maintain internal cohesion, and that is enough.
In Palestine the task is to abolish the “Jew” as a public identity. What about outside of Palestine?
As the apartheid regime in South Africa became isolated worldwide, public opinion in Holland was as unanimous as elsewhere, and it never occurred to most Dutch that they owed anything to their Afrikaaner cousins. (Like European Jews, Afrikaaners have their own tales of past persecution: the first concentration camps were set up during the Boer Wars.) No similar rupture between the “Jewish” settlers in Palestine and world Jewry has occurred; in fact, most Jews worldwide continue to identify with “Israel” in spite of all the United Nations resolutions condemning it.
...
So secular Jews fall back on “Hitler” and “Israel” to renew their Jewishness.[4] (“Hitler” and “Israel” are in quotation marks because in this context they do not represent actual determinations but are sacralized.) The Talmud gives way to a secular religion, making Jews the main base for a lobby that provides unconditional support to a regime which but for them would be universally quarantined, a lobby beating the drums for the most reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialistic policies of the world’s only superpower.[5]
Their reward is membership in a global fraternity, an exclusive club that allows them to hug their alienation to their breasts and paralyze all critics by waving the “Holocaust” in their faces. The founders of the Zionist movement advocated a Jewish homeland as a response to what they viewed as the rejection of Jews by the majority everywhere, which, according to them, made their assimilation impossible. As it turns out, assimilation has proven to be not only possible but a cause of alarm to Zionists, who see it as a grave threat, far greater than the threat posed by Judeophobes, to the survival of “the Jewish people.” Zionism is the remedy, the final solution to the “problem” of Jewish assimilation.[6]
The entire series is likewise an extended attack on Jewish identitarianism in multiple forms.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Yes?
Never mind, I probably interpreted your post wrong.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
No, I just meant why define capitalism in a way that only includes the good things it enables and not the bad.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Wait, Wikipedia says that KF and Konsum were specifically the predecessors of Coop?
The Finnish grocery market is similarly dominated by the co-operative S Group, which has also attracted the attention of American progressives, but co-operatives have also always been specifically an alternative to not only standard private enterprise but also public ownership, and have been pushed by non-socialists, too, as such an alternative.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
I specifically contrasted his current platform with his old tweets.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
I think that Mamdani's middle-class/upper-middle-class appeal may in large part be simply due to the Mr. Smith Goes To Washington idea of a honest, non-corrupt outsider against a corrupt machine creature.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Good rule of thumb is that whenever you look in any complex system in the USA of lately usually you have shitload of rent seeking and not capitalism.
Why should these be opposed to each other?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Two things that strike me about Mamdani:
-
his main proposals really go beyond Bernie-style "Do what they do in Nordic countries!" style stuff. While there are still elements of rent control in Nordic countries, I haven't heard anyone put a total rent freeze, even in public housing, on the table. Free public transport is not really on the table either, apart from some small Danish towns (and Tallinn if you think Estonia can get into Nordic). I don't remember anyone even suggesting publicly owned grocery stores. Even a failed attempt to do these in the "capital of the world" would probably put all these on the table all around the West.
-
Mamdani's platform, as presented, seems like a specific attempt to do what many class-first leftists have proposed doing and run on lunchbucket issues instead of idpol. There's a LGBTQ+ page, sure, but if one drills down to proposals then there are some specific Black and Hispanic appeals but way less and way less prominently than I'd expect most Democratic candidates in a similar position to include. My understanding is that there's more idpol stuff if one drills down to Mamdani's old tweets and like, but if we're talking about a specific campaign strategy, it seems to have worked.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Another trajectory is what happened in Malta, another famous two-party system where one party just consistently wins and another consistently loses but not by large enough a margin as to make the loser party politically irrelevant.
Uhh, which one is which? The timeline here shows both Nationalists and Labour holding power for long stretches. I checked some of the recent elections and Labour seems to win bigger victories when it wins, but still, winning is winning.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
But the obvious corollary to that is that if the "new right-wing counterculture" wins, it will then become The Man and there will be a rebellion against it, too, at some point, no?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
I'm not sure if I see the relevance here, considering that there are, for well-known reasons, not a lot of Jews inside the Muslim states at the moment. At this moment, when we're talking about the conflict between Muslims and Jews referred to in the posts above, it mostly refers to Israel-Palestine and secondarily between various other countries that generally operate by supporting Palestinian factions and, in case of Iran (and previously Iraq), sometimes shooting missiles.
Finland collects fairly granular data on languages spoken in Finland, which are often used as a proxy for "foreignness". Here's a table with the numbers of approximately school age children by language family, showing that a large majority continues to be Finno-Ugric speakers and the next largest groups are Germanic speakers (including Finland-Swedes) and Slavic speakers (including recent Ukrainian refugees).
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