The Digger

To quote someone a lot smarter than me, “I know that I know nothing.” This is the Socratic paradox which states that  the only thing I’m certain of is my own uncertainty . For many, the hubris of blind ideological conviction is hard to shake. I have family members rooted firmly to conservative values who  know  Trump is good for the country. And I have friends devoted to the progressive cause who  know  he’s a walking, tweeting hate crime. They’re all so damned  sure . Too many people seem to be certain of their political opinions. Casual conversations with friends can escalate into overblown arguments. Family dinners must be sanitized of current affairs (unless everyone at the table is in complete agreement). Social media is an incendiary hellscape. Left and right are locked in endless battle, fueled by hate, fear and self-appointed virtue. Books like Amy Chua’s  Political Tribes  and  The Coddling of the American Mind  by Greg L...

The Real Big Brother August 29, 2019   It’s a billionaire’s world and the biggest of them all is in the thick of it, as Eric Zuesse explains. By Eric Zuesse J eff Bezos is the owner of  The Washington Post , which leads America’s news-media in their almost 100 percent support and promotion of  neoconservatism,  American imperialism and wars. This includes sanctions, coups, and military invasions against countries that America’s billionaires want to control but don’t  yet  control — such as Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, Libya, and China. These are aggressive wars against countries which have never aggressed against the United States. They are not, at all, defensive, but the exact opposite. It’s not necessarily endless war (even Hitler hadn’t planned that), but war until the entire planet has come under the control of the U.S. Government, a government that is  itself   controlled by America’s billionaires ,  the funders of n...

OF RACISM PAST AND PRESENT August 27, 2019  · by  regensordo A Washington Post opinion bearing the title  Dear fellow white people: Here’s what to do when you’re called racist  made its appearance recently. It makes a great companion piece to the grotesquely condescending 2015 New York Times opinion piece by George Yancy,  Dear White America . The same lessons of subservience being taught in the five step program outlined in  Dear fellow white people  is one that could have applied to black people at the  dawning of American slavery  but in different ways. This is not to say we are comparing the “lifestyles” of the modern white Americans and the plight of enslaved black Americans several centuries ago. Our focus here is the process of establishment conditioning and divide and conquer — or mass management if you prefer. It is also important to note today’s substandard intellectual climate values personal opinion as fact and ...

Death comes a-creeping at my door Oh my Lord, oh my Lord what shall I do ? The old plantation spiritual comes to mind as the first in a series of DOJ Inspector General’s reports is issued — this one outlining the turpitudes of former FBI Director Jim Comey — while even more fateful inquiries by Barr and Durham grind away in silence and mystery, and one senses that sometime soon the whole hot mess of RussiaGate will land on the doormat of Barack Obama. Many other (by now) well-known names have been implicated in this fiasco but Mr. Obama has stood aloft from them on a fluffy cloud of his own, enjoying his multimillion book deal, plenty of international travel, and shopping for real estate on Martha’s Vineyard, the elephants’ graveyard of the One Percenters. And yet, something wicked is creeping his way as investigators work up the food chain to discover why and how so many high government officials cooked up a scheme to get rid of the despised winner of the 2016 election. Preside...

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) held its biannual convention from August 2 to August 4 in Atlanta, Georgia. The convention, organized by an ostensibly “socialist” organization, was in fact nothing more than a marketing gimmick for the Democratic Party and its right-wing politics. The DSA is riven by factional conflicts over the distribution of money, the relative prioritization of national election campaigns versus local political operations and other tactical issues. The DSA-affiliated Jacobin magazine commented that the level of tension was so high prior to the convention that “many DSA members felt anxious about whether the organization would still exist once the weekend was over.” The internal conflicts are bound up with the fact that the DSA has become a catch-all group for a broad range of organizations that orbit in and around the Democratic Party, including most recently the International Socialist Organization, which dissolved itself earlier this year. Ther...

Karl Marx and Michel Foucault are two of the most cited critical theorists in the world today, simultaneously revered or reviled, depending on who you talk to. Their work has been subjected to countless appraisals and debunkings and has met with everything from overzealous acceptance through well-reasoned critique to parodic and bad faith  misinterpretations . One of the more interesting recent developments has been the tendency to conflate their thinking, and to present Foucault as essentially carrying on the Marxist tradition by other means. The most well known exponent of this position is Jordan  Peterson . Drawing on books like Stephen Hicks’  Explaining Post-Modernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault  (critiqued  here ), in Peterson’s lecture series and  12 Rules for Life,  he makes the claim that Marxism was morally bankrupt by the 1960s, once the horrors of the Soviet Union had become widely known and accepted. Rather th...