I bought the Moby CD when it came out but I didn't like it so I took out back to shop to get my money back, but I had recorded it onto Minidisc. I played it in my car for a few days and then realised I loved it. The Minidisc sounded fine, but I went back and bought the CD again as I felt that was fair.
And my girlfriend likes Big Brother, but I think it's decadent so I won't watch it. I find it appalling. Society seems to be going down the pan.
Jonathon Cook is a socialist, like me, and he supports Jeremy Corbyn, so, although he criticizes liberalism here, he's not on the right.
Excessive liberalism has atomized society, says Jonathon Cook, so that the satisfaction of selfish desire has predominance over the community, and this has led to neoliberalism, where the ruling elite - who say they believe in the meritocracy, but they don't, really - feel they have the right to everything they are able to take. There is no community, only the satisfaction of personal desire.
Liberalism, like most ideologies, has an upside. Its respect for the individual and his freedoms, its interest in nurturing human creativity, and its promotion of universal values and human rights over tribal attachment have had some positive consequences.
But liberal ideology has been very effective at hiding its dark side – or more accurately, at persuading us that this dark side is the consequence of liberalism’s abandonment rather than inherent to the liberal’s political project.
The loss of traditional social bonds – tribal, sectarian, geographic – has left people today more lonely, more isolated than was true of any previous human society. We may pay lip service to universal values, but in our atomised communities, we feel adrift, abandoned and angry.
Meanwhile, the absolute prioritising of the individual has sanctioned a pathological self-absorption, a selfishness that has provided fertile ground not only for capitalism, materialism and consumerism but for the fusing of all of them into a turbo-charged neoliberalism. That has entitled a tiny elite to amass and squirrel away most of the planet’s wealth out of reach of the rest of humanity.
Worst of all, our rampant creativity, our self-regard and our competitiveness have blinded us to all things bigger and smaller than ourselves. We lack an emotional and spiritual connection to our planet, to other animals, to future generations, to the chaotic harmony of our universe. What we cannot understand or control, we ignore or mock.
The Unz Review
Jonathan Cook is usually a good writer, but he mucks up his message here. In truth he doesn’t need a message, since that photo of arch psychopath and Jewish supremacist Bernard-Henri Levy says everything.
ReplyDeleteLevy is a tireless champion of wars for Israel. He cheer-led the destruction of Libya, and the assault on Syria, and now he is demanding that the USA militarily invade Venezuela. Levy is so evil that I wish I could meet him in person with no witnesses or security cameras.
Anyway, every time Jonathan Cook says “liberal,” he means “neoliberal” -- i.e. the drive to reduce everything and everyone to commodities owned by oligarchs. Neoliberals are worried about the rise of populism and nationalism. That is, they are worried about peasant solidarity and the call for national sovereignty. Jews are worried about it too, since Jews, like rich oligarchs, rule by keeping the peasants divided and bickering. The Judaic word for non-Jewish group solidarity is “fascism.”
The neoliberal elitists’ evoking of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe, and Comenius is comical. For neoliberals the idea of “Europe” means a continent ruled by vampire bankers, oligarchs, and an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy.
“Though unnamed, their European political heroes appear to be Emmanuel Macron of France, and German chancellor Angela Merkel.”
Yes. Their heroes are Euro-crats. The proper adjective to describe Euro-crats does not exist in any European language.
To me it's pretty simple: We did not fix the banks and the banks have "fixed" us instead.
ReplyDeleteWere their any other possibilities?
"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks." Lord Acton
“In ancient Sumer most of the debts were public -- i.e. owed to the state or the temple. Hence the state or the ruler had periodic debt jubilees so that debtors could all start over. Without debt jubilees there would have been no one to serve as soldiers or to perform corvée labor. Civilization would have eventually collapsed. However by ancient Greece and Rome, most debts were privatized. That’s when our debt problems began.” ~ Michael Hudson
ReplyDelete+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I will now save you the effort…
Banks became private, but not private. Instead, they have public private privileges that are not private. And public. Phasellus ullamcorper ultricies turpis, at semper nulla bibendum vitae.
That’s roughly troll-speak for, “I have no idea WTF I’m talking about.”
I say roughly, because I used Google translate.