davel

I hope you go over there, get your little brain all scrambled up with PTSD, and then come back here and see how much the United States cares about you, pookie.

Interview with Gabriel Rockhill about his article, Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek.

The interviewer doesn’t have much interesting to say IMO. I would skip over most of his segments.

[The cultural imperialist project] polices the left border of critique, but it does it at an objective vs subjective level. And what I mean by that is that there are coordinates for what the dominant discourse is, and what people need to know if they want to be in these conversations. And it creates a reality, which was very much my reality coming up, where I was interested in radical theory, because I grew up as a farm kid working construction. I knew what exploitation was. I knew what oppression was. I knew a lot of horrible things about the world because I was living them in the capitalist empire. And I gravitated toward what I thought were the most radical things, but I was not aware of the objective conditions that structured that radical discourse in such a way that all of the real discourses—which were anti-imperialist and liberatory—were actually largely excluded from those debates. And so I read a bunch of Negri and Žižek and Badiou and all of these people, and eventually realized, well, I’m looking in the wrong place. I’m looking in the place that the empire tells me I should look for radical theory.

Philosophy professor Hans-Georg Moeller, author of A Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality

For [Harris] the two things are the same: on the one hand objective moral truth (universal morality), and on the other hand scientific facts about what increases wellbeing and what doesn’t. […] I think the two things are very different from one another.

Just as religion is not something that depends on the existence of god, but is a specific social practice, a specific form of communication that relates to a certain unrealistic assumption; likewise morality is a specific discourse, a specific way of acting, that relates to and derives from making unrealistic assumptions about something that doesn’t exist.

Follow-up video: If Morality Exists Everything Is Permitted.

jwz: Perennial "Fuck the Blue Angels" post.

These are handy tools for bypassing soft paywalls, especially when Bypass Paywalls Clean fails you.

• Apple Support: Hide distractions when browsing webpages in Safari on Mac
• uBlock Wiki: Element Zapper

That’s all, just a shitpost.

• https://www.patreon.com/collection/1161
• https://www.patreon.com/violetblue

I’ve known this for a while thanks to the Money & Macro YouTube channel: How Commercial Banks Really Create Money (the Money Multiplier is a MYTH)

This stuff was posted on two sites:

• Ryan Grim & Jeremy Scahill’s new Drop Site
• Matt Taibbi’s Racket News

I haven’t gone through all the content yet, but over the last ~6 years I’ve come to take Jeffrey Sachs at his word, moreso than Naomi Klein. He’s been consistently what he appears at face value.

• Ryan Grim: Jeffrey Sachs: A Front Row Seat to the Cold War That Never Ended
• Matt Taibbi: What I Got Wrong About “Shock Therapy”
• Ryan Grim & Emily Jashinsky interview Matt Taibbi & Jeffery Sachs: A True Shock? Economist Jeffrey Sachs Reveals Secret at Heart of U.S.-Russian Relations (YouTube video)