#neoliberal thought

[whereserpentswalk]

Made this political cartoon. Feel free to share it around just don't remove the watermark.

[nando161mando]

Liberal double standards

[thoughtfullyblogger]

Νέα απάτη για τα Ιδιωτικά Πανεπιστήμια: Ο νόμος λύνει τα χέρια για αχαλίνωτη κερδοσκοπία στα δήθεν «μη κερδοσκοπικά»

Νέα απάτη με τα Ιδιωτικά Πανεπιστήμια   Η απάτη με τα, δήθεν, μη κερδοσκοπικά, το νομοσχέδιο χαρακτηρίζει τα παραρτήματα “μη κερδοσκοπικά”. Τί εννοεί το εξηγεί το άρθρο 132 παρ. 8 του νσχ: “Απαγορεύεται στο Νομικό Πρόσωπο Πανεπιστημιακής Εκπαίδευσης να διανέμει μέρος των εσόδων του σε οποιοδήποτε πρόσωπο”. (Κάθε πρόσωπο αδιακρίτως. Ιδιοκτήτης, ιδρυτής ΝΠΠΕ, μπορεί να είναι και φυσικό…

[eclecticstarlightblogger]

Νέα απάτη για τα Ιδιωτικά Πανεπιστήμια: Ο νόμος λύνει τα χέρια για αχαλίνωτη κερδοσκοπία στα δήθεν «μη κερδοσκοπικά»

Νέα απάτη με τα Ιδιωτικά Πανεπιστήμια   Η απάτη με τα, δήθεν, μη κερδοσκοπικά, το νομοσχέδιο χαρακτηρίζει τα παραρτήματα “μη κερδοσκοπικά”. Τί εννοεί το εξηγεί το άρθρο 132 παρ. 8 του νσχ: “Απαγορεύεται στο Νομικό Πρόσωπο Πανεπιστημιακής Εκπαίδευσης να διανέμει μέρος των εσόδων του σε οποιοδήποτε πρόσωπο”. (Κάθε πρόσωπο αδιακρίτως. Ιδιοκτήτης, ιδρυτής ΝΠΠΕ, μπορεί να είναι και φυσικό…

[greekblogs]

Νέα απάτη για τα Ιδιωτικά Πανεπιστήμια: Ο νόμος λύνει τα χέρια για αχαλίνωτη κερδοσκοπία στα δήθεν «μη κερδοσκοπικά»

Νέα απάτη με τα Ιδιωτικά Πανεπιστήμια   Η απάτη με τα, δήθεν, μη κερδοσκοπικά, το νομοσχέδιο χαρακτηρίζει τα παραρτήματα “μη κερδοσκοπικά”. Τί εννοεί το εξηγεί το άρθρο 132 παρ. 8 του νσχ: “Απαγορεύεται στο Νομικό Πρόσωπο Πανεπιστημιακής Εκπαίδευσης να διανέμει μέρος των εσόδων του σε οποιοδήποτε πρόσωπο”. (Κάθε πρόσωπο αδιακρίτως. Ιδιοκτήτης, ιδρυτής ΝΠΠΕ, μπορεί να είναι και φυσικό…

[skandaladiaplokidiafthora]

Νέα απάτη για τα Ιδιωτικά Πανεπιστήμια: Ο νόμος λύνει τα χέρια για αχαλίνωτη κερδοσκοπία στα δήθεν «μη κερδοσκοπικά»

Νέα απάτη με τα Ιδιωτικά Πανεπιστήμια   Η απάτη με τα, δήθεν, μη κερδοσκοπικά, το νομοσχέδιο χαρακτηρίζει τα παραρτήματα “μη κερδοσκοπικά”. Τί εννοεί το εξηγεί το άρθρο 132 παρ. 8 του νσχ: “Απαγορεύεται στο Νομικό Πρόσωπο Πανεπιστημιακής Εκπαίδευσης να διανέμει μέρος των εσόδων του σε οποιοδήποτε πρόσωπο”. (Κάθε πρόσωπο αδιακρίτως. Ιδιοκτήτης, ιδρυτής ΝΠΠΕ, μπορεί να είναι και φυσικό…

[netakias]

Νέα απάτη για τα Ιδιωτικά Πανεπιστήμια: Ο νόμος λύνει τα χέρια για αχαλίνωτη κερδοσκοπία στα δήθεν «μη κερδοσκοπικά»

Νέα απάτη με τα Ιδιωτικά Πανεπιστήμια   Η απάτη με τα, δήθεν, μη κερδοσκοπικά, το νομοσχέδιο χαρακτηρίζει τα παραρτήματα “μη κερδοσκοπικά”. Τί εννοεί το εξηγεί το άρθρο 132 παρ. 8 του νσχ: “Απαγορεύεται στο Νομικό Πρόσωπο Πανεπιστημιακής Εκπαίδευσης να διανέμει μέρος των εσόδων του σε οποιοδήποτε πρόσωπο”. (Κάθε πρόσωπο αδιακρίτως. Ιδιοκτήτης, ιδρυτής ΝΠΠΕ, μπορεί να είναι και φυσικό…

[wtf109]

Just because you know how to play the diversity game, doesn’t mean you are fooling the people who can actually tell what your politics are, Neil Gaiman

Never told a single genuine story about a female character that didn’t seem to center on some sort of irresolvable trauma. I know. I was there getting near suicidal by the same stories your adoring fans touted as “progressive” and “impactful”. You don’t actually bring hope. Because you never actually address the problem at hand, you neoliberal American bootlicker. You don’t actually believe in a future that can be any different from the status quo of now. Making “good omens”, a literal parody of a Cold War book, end on an empty compromise, justifying a transphobe’s opinion on your own fucking trans character in sandman, killing off all the poc side characters for convenient shock value, defending problematic gender dynamics under extreme patriarchal structures “because that’s the way it’s always been”. If you have read, “actually fucking read”, his books, and not just the inclusively casted tv remakes, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You. You’ve always known what to say. Who to hire. How to play this game, so that the US will adore you for your “progressiveness and inclusivity”. As if you writing a character who literally would rather DIE than change (in the comic’s own fucking words) wasn’t the truest representation of your actual politics and who you are as a person. And for that matter I will be defending Good Omens. Not because it’s separable from you, but because it’s also the story of Sir Terry fucking Prachett, and I won’t let his good be drowned out by whatever the fuck your neoliberal politics watered down in a potentially actually meaningful story and ending.

For all of you, ALL OF YOU OUT THERE, still oblivious to the fact that you can clearly read politics from an author’s work and storytelling, consider that you may not be as “progressive” as you thought. Ask yourself, really truly think, Is the person who wrote ATLA someone who has the same politics as someone who writes Good Omens (the book)? Think, about the endings of the books, the levity, the snark? Where it is directed, who it is directed against, what it actually achieves (which in ATLA is anti-colonial messaging and in good omens is…fucking nothing) actually fucking think; he’s been telling you who he is all along.

[homestuckreplay]

Gee John, How Come Your Dad Lets You Watch Three Movies?!

Alright. I suffered through THREE of John's movies today, and all of them were extremely bad. All three of them had terrible dialogue and boring characterization, Face/Off was mostly gunfights, Armageddon was mostly explosions, and Ghost Dad was mostly an absolute fever dream clearly signed off by a very drugged up executive.

However, I do see why John likes these movies. John is a Nic Cage fan, and I do think both Cage and Travolta gave great performances in Face/Off. The weird, experimental science aspect is fun too, and might have a link to John's chumhandle - I can see him getting curious about how the facial transplant surgery works. Mistaken identity is an interesting theme - John feels like his dad doesn't know him well, thinking he'd like harlequin dolls and cakes, and might think his dad sees him as a different person. People on Discord have theorized that John's arc will be realizing she's transgender, which is REALLY interesting in light of this movie and its focus on physical features vs actual identity.

Armageddon has the same basic premise as Deep Impact - a meteor will destroy the Earth if the American government can't figure out a way to stop it - but on a much shorter timeframe. I personally think Deep Impact is miles better, but Armageddon is very focused on American masculinity and a motley crew of men who live dangerous, somewhat criminal lives (it's more similar to Con Air in this regard). We know John likes a Cool Movie Moment (see p.20) and this one is basically fifty lab-grown Cool Movie Moments stitched together.

Both these movies are very long and very action packed. Armageddon barely takes time away from the action to give us the characters' names, and since John probably watches movies for escapism, this must be appealing to him. Their major characters have very exciting lives, whether that's working for the FBI, as a terrorist, as a deep sea oil driller or as an astronaut - John probably isn't concerned with the politics of these things, they're simply cooler kinds of people who he could grow up to be, and it's fun to imagine himself in their place because it beats his current life.

Ghost Dad is completely irredeemable. [ooc 2024 note: I don't endorse watching movies that feature Bill Cosby, who is a known terrible guy, and I can guarantee he did not receive any money from my watching this.] It's horrifically written and plotted and none of the humor lands. But, it makes perfect sense that John and his dad would watch this, as it's about a family who pranks each other. The son is an aspiring magician just like John (and is similarly bad at it), and John might even have got his interest in magic from watching this.

The dad spraying whipped cream on a top hat is very Dad Egbert-coded, and John might love the idea of having a ghost in his house who can pilot clothes around while invisible and float up to windows to scare mean kids. Meanwhile, Dad clearly likes to show John movies that feature parents eventually choosing their kids over their career. (It seems like he shows this with his actions, too - he's clearly not at work today, and John's feeling suffocated in the house suggests that Dad is there most of the time).

MOVIES WATCHED: 10/11

MOST RECENT MOVIES:

Face/Off (1997) - Rating 4/10

Armageddon (1998) - Rating 3/10

Ghost Dad (1990) - Rating 1/10

[unapologeticmelancholy]

I don't know what word in the English language — I can't find one — applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life so they can put a few more dollars into highly stuffed pockets.

The word 'evil' doesn't even begin to approach it.

Noam Chomsky

[nando161mando]

It's our fault, guys

[quixoticanarchy]

what is the connectography book and why is it so terrible?

Sorry this took a while to collect my thoughts! where do I start.....

tl;dr it's a paean to enlisting every corner of the earth in the global neoliberal economy so that each can maximize their natural role in the supply chain and achieve Development™. All resources feasible to extract should be extracted, "connectivity" is the most important goal and value and metric in the world, supply chains matter more than nations, globalization is an inexorable force for good, we should focus on mass infrastructure projects to speed development (including a bizarre amount of fossil fuel infrastructure projects). yes there are downsides and yes there's a climate crisis going on but don't mind that, it'll actually be quite profitable

long answer under the cut:

Connectography is a book by Parag Khanna - CNN consultant, Brookings Institute guy, former Special Ops embed, National Intelligence Council advisor etc. So off the bat he’s quite embedded (so to speak) and aligned with the US military and national security apparatus, although the focus of the book is economic. The main arguments are that the world can no longer be thought of as a discrete set of countries setting and fighting over national policies, but an interconnected “supply chain world” where systems of production, transportation, and consumption drive policy and development in and of themselves. Consequently he argues for the diminishing importance of the nation-state and an increasing importance of smaller units of power geography like cities as well as broader ones like regions. He then argues that authority will and should devolve from centralized states to smaller units, and that global conflict would diminish or disappear if we could just give every tribal group its own state or at least autonomy within a larger state. Which is..... already quite a take.

His other main contention is that investing in mass infrastructure projects (oil pipelines, trains, highways, ports) is the best way to maximize "connectivity" and speedrun modernity and urbanization and development and industrial exploitation of poor countries. Demands that everyone and everything serve the market's invisible hand have become demands to bow to the needs of supply chains - which despite being quite based in the material world, are often invoked as something of a mystical force with their own whims and desires, uncoupled from human action.

In a way, there are principles that I also hold which show up in a strange twisted mirror version here. He isn't interested in preserving the nation-state as a form - but it's bc he prioritizes transnational supply chains and rule by corporatocracy. He would like to see a more borderless world - but he's also in favor of more borders (give every ethnic group a state, but also states don't matter anymore?), which counterintuitively he says would lead to a more interconnected and frictionless world. He's pro-immigration and freedom of mobility - but elsewhere it's made clear that he's also invested in blocking undesirable "flows" across borders, and is pro-mobility of people just as long as they enhance economic productivity. He makes some cogent critiques of maps and what is obscured by treating political maps of country borders as true and absolute, for instance - but the ways in which he would re-map the world are all to reflect and further the hyperconnected hypercapitalism he applauds. He would rather see structural adjustment programs prescribe infrastructure investments than austerity - but he still supports "developing" countries being forcibly drafted into the global economy and structured according to the (politely vague and innocuous-sounding) demands of supply chains.

The cheerleading for infrastructure projects, which might be mistaken for a benevolent interest in public spending, is much less "repair bridges so they won't collapse and kill people" and much more "repair and build more and bigger bridges so that more and bigger trucks can carry more cargo across them faster". His rather unoriginal instruction to "developing" countries is to accept globalization is inevitable so it's best to get yours where you can: start by selling off your resources and turning them over to private industry, open SEZs (Special Economic Zones, aka Free Trade Zones) and let the corporations use your cheap labor until you ‘develop’ enough to move up the value chain and those industries depart for cheaper and more lawless shores. He's really into SEZs. It's the classic race to the bottom, except he does not dwell whatsoever on that bottom and its conditions, nor its necessity - someone somewhere will always have to be the cheapest, the most exploitable, the most business-friendly. Instead we get, predictably, the argument that the race to the bottom actually lifts all boats bc corporate investment through SEZs teaches backwards countries how to develop faster and better.

Nothing makes me see red like considering how the version of the future which to me is a nightmare - a fully urbanized integrated modernized hypercapitalist corporate-run world of endless growth and consumption and extraction and waste mediated by advanced technology and surveillance, all consequences be damned - is seen as good and desirable and inevitable by various political and military leaders, economists, think tanks, corporations, etc.

It's also kind of sickening how incredibly out of touch all these visions are. There is no discussion of resource scarcity or limits. There is no discussion of waste. My guy Khanna's acknowledgments of climate change are so blasé and opportunistic I would rather he were a rabid climate denier. How do you acknowledge the destabilizing and deadly effects of climate crisis and yet promote and lionize policies that ensure more of those effects? How are mass scale infrastructure projects supposed to knit people together though lasting physical and supply chain interdependence when so fucking many of them are fossil fuel infrastructure projects?? I cannot emphasize enough how much he gushes over countries and companies building ever more oil pipelines, opening up new deposits for drilling (including in the arctic), and putting aside border disputes to transport oil faster and faster to the biggest consumers.

Well, don’t worry - he’s got the climate-meltdown world all figured out. No mention of cutting emissions or keeping temperature rise down or even many mentions of "green" energy; it's still drill baby drill til we die. Most coastal cities will drown and most latitudes will become uninhabitable but it’s ok, Canada and Russia can become the breadbaskets of the world and we’ll tap all those good good arctic basin resources as the ice melts. Probably throw in some geoengineering too. Climate migrants can move north in their millions, and Canada and Russia will welcome them; really, it's convenient, bc they’re too sparsely populated up there anyway and could use some fresh blood.

There are many other ridiculous or appalling things here I could go into if this post weren't already too long - the statement that colonialism is over, inequality is inevitable and a worthy price to pay, antiglobalization activists are naïve and basically a dying breed anyway, the world has gotten so good at controlling desirable flows and preventing undesirable ones--in particular, we're soo good at controlling infectious disease these days (lol. lmao even), the discussion of Dubai and Doha as prime examples of interconnected hyperglobal cities without going into like. human trafficking, the mocking of countries that tried to choose a third way decades ago and were brutally punished, the disparaging of swana/african countries as weak and crisis-ridden (seemingly idiopathic idk. funny), the shameless extolling of the lovely resources found in war zones which sadly preclude their needful exploitation.. etc. Etc.

I hated this book and would only recommend as a know-thine-enemy exercise; I did get a fair bit out of it from that perspective, and it's worthwhile to consider the implications of the worldview that people like this espouse. But it's incredibly depressing and infuriating that the admitted endgame of all this really is to consume everything there is on this planet to squeeze out every drop of profit, and then flee to the poles when it all comes crashing down.

[thoughtfullyblogger]

Η συνέντευξη του Ρότζερ Γουότερς που πρέπει να δουν όλοι οι Έλληνες - Τι είπε για Ουκρανία, Ασάνζ, Γάζα, Νεοφιλελευθερισμό και την παγκόσμια ελίτ

Ο Roger Waters μιλάει για τον Νεοφιλελευθερισμό, την άνοδο ακροδεξιάς στην Ευρώπη, την γνωριμία του με τον Τζούλιαν Ασάνζ, τον πόλεμο στην Ουκρανία Ουκρανία και την γενοκτονία στη Λωρίδα της Γάζας Ρότζερ Γουότερς: Η αποκλειστική συνέντευξη στον Πάνο Χαρίτο για το δελτίο Kontra News 21:30 Continue reading Untitled

[eclecticstarlightblogger]

Η συνέντευξη του Ρότζερ Γουότερς που πρέπει να δουν όλοι οι Έλληνες - Τι είπε για Ουκρανία, Ασάνζ, Γάζα, Νεοφιλελευθερισμό και την παγκόσμια ελίτ

Ο Roger Waters μιλάει για τον Νεοφιλελευθερισμό, την άνοδο ακροδεξιάς στην Ευρώπη, την γνωριμία του με τον Τζούλιαν Ασάνζ, τον πόλεμο στην Ουκρανία Ουκρανία και την γενοκτονία στη Λωρίδα της Γάζας Ρότζερ Γουότερς: Η αποκλειστική συνέντευξη στον Πάνο Χαρίτο για το δελτίο Kontra News 21:30 Continue reading Untitled

[greekblogs]

Η συνέντευξη του Ρότζερ Γουότερς που πρέπει να δουν όλοι οι Έλληνες - Τι είπε για Ουκρανία, Ασάνζ, Γάζα, Νεοφιλελευθερισμό και την παγκόσμια ελίτ

Ο Roger Waters μιλάει για τον Νεοφιλελευθερισμό, την άνοδο ακροδεξιάς στην Ευρώπη, την γνωριμία του με τον Τζούλιαν Ασάνζ, τον πόλεμο στην Ουκρανία Ουκρανία και την γενοκτονία στη Λωρίδα της Γάζας Ρότζερ Γουότερς: Η αποκλειστική συνέντευξη στον Πάνο Χαρίτο για το δελτίο Kontra News 21:30 Continue reading Untitled

[skandaladiaplokidiafthora]

Η συνέντευξη του Ρότζερ Γουότερς που πρέπει να δουν όλοι οι Έλληνες - Τι είπε για Ουκρανία, Ασάνζ, Γάζα, Νεοφιλελευθερισμό και την παγκόσμια ελίτ

Ο Roger Waters μιλάει για τον Νεοφιλελευθερισμό, την άνοδο ακροδεξιάς στην Ευρώπη, την γνωριμία του με τον Τζούλιαν Ασάνζ, τον πόλεμο στην Ουκρανία Ουκρανία και την γενοκτονία στη Λωρίδα της Γάζας Ρότζερ Γουότερς: Η αποκλειστική συνέντευξη στον Πάνο Χαρίτο για το δελτίο Kontra News 21:30 Continue reading Untitled