a tweet reads “the US is obviously hurtling into a serious “gender critical” movement” and frankly i have no idea how we’re supposed to combat it given that nobody who isn’t trans seems to notice or care”
it is replied to with this thread
“Aight Imma spit real quick and hope my FBI agent doesn’t turn my phone off /j Let’s talk real quick.
There was a movement in Black History around the Civil Rights when there was a currently-unimaginable amount of coalition building. It is truly amazing to me that a letter from the Panthers talking about queer rights was signed by Mexican, Chinese, Black etc activists.
During that time, and the time that followed, the government dedicated themselves to wedging as much bullshit between our groups as possible. Crack. AIDS. Model Minorities. Super predators. The list goes on and on.
Every time class consciousness gets a little bit closer to being realized, shit like this comes out in full force. We see BLM being branded as ultra violent. We see gender critical movements get a flux in support. We see how disabled people are basically being euthanized.
It’s just straight facts that our government is experienced in disrupting and assaulting leftist movements. All of it is on public record. Our own country is included in the collective that had to be broken down and “readjusted” for the benefit of white supremacy and capitalism.
The good thing is that we know we’re getting closer, cuz they’re scared. The bad thing is that we loose lives and are pushed a few steps back. Trans people are more of a target than we were before, and it was already bad. Disabled people. PoC. The intersections therein.
I kinda miss the slogan “all power to all the people” Because “all the people” means EVERYONE. It’s inclusive. It implies that the work of deconstructing our isms is how we empower ourselves and are able to collect under mutual interest. All power to all the people y’all.
Anyway. Just do what you can. Just surviving is a revolutionary act. If you can do more, do so. We’ll figure this shit out somehow. END ID]
Starving and homeless children in Russia in the 1990s, who often became victims of substance abuse, sexual abuse and were actively involved in crime. These scary photos are reminders that the West considers Russia in the 90s “democratic, free and detached from totalitarian communism.”
The capitalism implementation in Russia during the 90’ was probably the biggest capitalism failure of all times. Yeltsin implemented the economic policies applauded by the neoliberal institutions (FMI, World Bank, etc.) With mass privatisations, welfare destruction, destatalisation, destruction of social rights etc. The results were terrifying from all point of views:
As always happens in capitalism there were cartels, trusts etc. That formed a class of oligarchs that put themselves above the State leading the policies towards their interest against the interest of the people. Mostly represented by the Semibankirschina.
-Dramatically drop of life expectancy arriving at 7 years drop in less then a decade for men.
-Dramatic rise in mortality.
-Dramatic rise in self destructive behaviours like drugs and alcohol abuse.
-Mass depression
-Low birth rates due to financial instability and uncertainty
-crime rates rise with entire pieces of the country controlled by organised crime
-Moral crisis well represented by the dramatic increase of prostitution ( Prostitution that was de facto absent during most of Soviet times especially under Stalin but that started again with Gorbachev)
Fascism is corporatism; public resources are used by private enterprise to advance some objective of that private enterprise. Neoliberalism and Conservatism are both fascist or corporatist economic systems. Neoliberalism is when the government proactively gives power to private enterprise and conservatism is when the government intentionally fails to regulate private enterprise
“Unlike the conservative model of sex as an impulse to be controlled and limited to the context of monogamous, heterosexual marriage, the left-liberal model sees sex as a good impulse to be liberated, and according to the champions of the sexual revolution discussed in Chapter 1, such liberation involves women being accessed, shared and exchanged by men. Historically, this has not been seen as harmful to women, because the liberal human subject is constructed as male –therefore pornography does not impinge on others’ freedoms, since women are not actually seen as individual subjects within this model.”
“Another aspect of liberal thinking – idealism – is also evident within debates on pornography. Idealism posits attitudes as both the source and solution for oppression; thinking as the prime mover of social life; and rational argument/education as the engine of social change (Keith, 2011b: 66). On this view, changing attitudes through education, awareness raising or the production of diverse sexual representations would be con- sidered appropriate and effective solutions to any problematic or undesirable aspects of pornography.”
Long, Julia. Anti-porn : The Resurgence of Anti-pornography Feminism. Chapter: Pornography and the Feminist Divide. 63. Zed Books, 2012.
I think my favorite thing when people argue that I’m not a Liberal, is that they have no idea what Liberalism is, they just argue that I can’t be one because I don’t agree with them and they’ve been told by the American mainstream that they’re Liberals when their politics, beliefs, principles and ideals don’t align with Liberalism.
Liberalism isn’t what the American Right and Left think it is, it isn’t what Rush Limbaugh claimed it to be, that man was using the term Liberal as a pejorative because the Far Left hated Liberalism and to be called one was the same as calling a Conservative a fascist back in the day, now all it does is convince morons that the Far Left are actually Liberals and provide the Far Left with an ideological smokescreen.
Liberalism is a very basic political and moral philosophy, now you might be asking, what is Liberalism? Liberalism is based on four foundational rights, that of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.
Then there are secondary rights which are derived from the foundational rights, such as individual rights, including civil rights and human rights, liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, defense of self and property, private property and a market economy.
That’s it, that’s Liberalism, however Liberalism has spawned many other political and moral philosophies from its foundation, Conservatism and Libertarianism are two such examples, then there are others in which foreign enlightenment ideological frameworks were shoehorned into Liberalism, using it like a skinsuit, such as NeoLiberalism, Social Liberalism and so on.
The whole reason the Far Left on this platform have been shitting themselves over my use of the term Liberal is because they want to assert that Neo and Social Liberalism are the true forms of Liberalism when Conservatism and Libertarianism are closer to true Liberalism than those other two.
So yes, I am a Liberal, not a Conservative, not a Libertarian, or any other derivative of Liberalism, that’s it, and if you take issue with this, you can just die mad about it, now can’t you?
There should be no shock at the success of White Nationalist revival. A fog of liberal-progressive panic seeps across the closest quarters, oddly individualizing what some inhabit as a normal and collective disposition of familiarity with emergency under conditions of constant bodily and spiritual duress. In the living room, kitchen, office, school, cafe, park, dorm room, gym, and library there is a steady-sad din: How did this happen, Why such hate, There are so many of them, What will happen to our country, Will I be threatened, My uncle and neighbor lied, What does the world think of us, I do not feel safe, What do we do now, Who will protect those peoplefromthem, How could this happen my god my god…
Wrapped up in the noise, it is worth reminding that this alleged descent into new chapters of state-induced racial and sexual terror is not reducible to the serial reprehensible (though completely unsurprising) tweets, assaults, and grandstanding of the new President-Elect. There are some who understand, because their wisdom is inherited, that the terror he embodies is both long-standing and carried in the thrust of a Civilization’s futurity. This guy was always here, he is the persona his predecessors possessed but disguised so well (though you never fooled me, you assholes), and many of those in the throes of liberal-white-people-panic know this deep down because their revulsion to him is driven by a hatred of the intimate, the familial, and maybe the same.
Throughout the current election cycle, it has been striking to note the ways that privilege discourse has been deployed to demand loyalty to particular parties and candidates. “Either vote Clinton,” one widely-circulated tweet demands, “or admit you’re a privileged asshole.” Bernie Sanders refused to concede to Hillary Clinton because of privilege. Third party voters are privileged. “Ultraleftists” are privileged. Privilege has thus become central to a heavily moralizing language of civic responsibility which demands that the US electorate maintain a neoliberal bulwark against the far right for the putative good of the less fortunate. This use of the concept marks an appropriation, one which transforms privilege discourse fundamentally, from an analysis of white supremacy’s capillary and quotidian power into an individuating and deeply ideological mechanism of state discipline.
A Feminism Where ‘Lean In’ Means Leaning On Others by Gary Gutting and Nancy Fraser This interview, the latest in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues concerning feminism. My interviewee is Nancy Fraser, professor of philosophy and politics at The New School. She is the author of “Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis.”
G.G.: Why can’t responding to feminist concerns be seen as just one major step in correcting the social and economic flaws of our capitalist society, not a fundamental transformation of the system?
N.F.: It certainly can be seen that way. But I am questioning whether today’s feminism is really advancing that process. As I see it, the mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized and/or immigrant women. So this is not, and cannot be, a feminism for all women!
But that is not all. Mainstream feminism has adopted a thin, market-centered view of equality, which dovetails neatly with the prevailing neoliberal corporate view. So it tends to fall into line with an especially predatory, winner-take-all form of capitalism that is fattening investors by cannibalizing the living standards of everyone else. Worse still, this feminism is supplying an alibi for these predations. Increasingly, it is liberal feminist thinking that supplies the charisma, the aura of emancipation, on which neoliberalism draws to legitimate its vast upward redistribution of wealth.
G.G.: Another major feminist concern has been what many see as a “rape culture,” particularly on college campuses. What’s your view of this?
N.F.: Well, this is certainly a hot-button issue today, and I must confess that I have mixed feelings about that. This is in part because I always worry when one issue becomes so dominant that it eclipses the rest of the feminist agenda — as abortion has often done in the United States. But it is also because I have a certain feeling of déjà vu — it’s as if we are replaying a previous argument between a “protectionist” strand of feminism, focused on violence against women and seeking remedies through criminal law, and another, liberationist strand, which seeks to validate women’s agency and sexual freedom.
Personally, I have always to wanted to develop a third approach that would assure not only sexual autonomy for women but also civil liberties for everyone. And I would like this approach to deal not only with sexual assault but also with other, more impersonal or systemic forms of coercion that limit women’s autonomy in sex and in other spheres. For example, I’d like to reclaim the insights of the 1970s “battered women’s movement,” which stressed the importance not only of criminal sanctions, but also of “exit options” in the form of decent, affordable housing and jobs that pay enough for a woman to support herself and her children.
Really, really great interview that highlights the shortcomings of liberal feminism. Gary’s question about rape culture seemed to come out of nowhere, but I love Nancy’s systematic approach to the issue by refocusing agency as not only the right to say yes, but also the ability to say no without harmful consequences.
Demonizing the Poor by Sanford Schram and Joe Soss Harsh restrictions on welfare don’t limit fraud and abuse. They advance the interests of the rich and powerful.
Makers, Takers, and Welfare Queens
Now as in the past, elites have rolled out tales of a parasitic and undeserving poor to deflect public anger from themselves. Lazy and criminal “takers” who abuse the goodwill of hardworking taxpayers are offered up as a handy scapegoat for the new hard times and a ready explanation for fiscal shortfalls.
Deeply racialized stories of a threatening underclass captivate the public imagination, while on the periphery lobbyists and public officials rewrite policies and administrative procedures to redistribute wealth upward. The welfare queen and the street criminal are brandished to discredit progressive redistribution, pare back social protections, and justify ever-tougher modes of policing and social control.
What must be understood, then, is the critical role that controversial policy proposals play in constructing this political spectacle. For many observers, it’s easier to see how racial stereotypes and stigmatized images of the poor are used to advance policy agendas than to recognize the reverse — the powerful ways that policies and their rationales work to cultivate racial understandings and images of the poor.
While public policies dispense material benefits and burdens, they also perform a symbolic politics. Policies that force the poor to work send a powerful signal that they would not work unless forced to do so. Proposals that target social groups for special efforts to police irresponsible and criminal behavior tell the public how members of these groups behave. Needless restrictions on welfare recipients’ profligate ways demonize their targets (widely perceived as poor and black or Latino) and focus public attention on reforming their alleged pathologies.
The Material Politics of Welfare
Public officials today are under strong pressure to bring budgets into line and, with powerful political forces arrayed against raising tax revenues, predictably look to cut expenditures on the disadvantaged.
Overt program and benefit cuts are the most visible responses, but they are also the most likely to arouse opposition. Policies designed to limit fraud and regulate how benefits are used can often achieve the same goals — and avoid the potential political liabilities of appearing cold-hearted.
“I support helping people in need,” the old standby goes, “I just want to make sure benefits go to the people who truly need them and don’t encourage bad choices that will trap them in poverty.”
The public promotion of stigmatizing new welfare rules can demonize welfare usage to the point where even the most desperate eligible people resist claiming them. And just as allegations of voter fraud can be used as a pretext for new rules that limit voting rights and access, campaigns to combat welfare fraud give rise to new methods for denying applicants, threatening recipients with the specter of criminal punishment, and subjecting clients to all manner of degrading questions and check-ups.
This is one of the reasons I support Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton.
The Promise and Contradictions of Ethical Consumerism by Nicki Lisa Cole Ethical capitalism and consumerism. Do they represent moves toward real egalitarian change for the poor and workers of the world? Do they suggest hope for a long-term livable planet? Or are they merely symbolic concessions to appease critiques of a deeply problematic system of global production and consumption?
Suddenly I saw around me a world of goods framed as the “right” choice for social and environmental reasons. Whether it was sweatshop free-clothing, Fair Trade or organic food products, sustainably sourced wood, “green” cleaning products and cosmetics, or hybrid vehicles, the message was the same: by buying this product, you are changing the world for the better. The pervasiveness of this message struck me as an adaptation of the ideological foundation of capitalism that seemed a direct response to the rising popular awareness of the environmental and social problems associated with global capitalism.
It seems then that at its heart, ethical consumption is premised on the recognition of problems associated with global capitalism (at least implicitly), and for this reason it can be said that as a social phenomenon it expresses a critical orientation and awareness. It is the manifestation of anxiety on the part of consumers over how the system of global capitalism works, and the role that they play within it. Yet participants stop short of realizing this critique for what it is–a condemnation of a system. Instead they focus on select bad actors and fault governments and greedy middlemen in producing nations for creating the conditions that exploit coffee producers and bind them within an impoverished existence.
While it seems that consumers harbor concern over the actions of corporations and the relations they cultivate with producers around the world, they also lack real knowledge of the sourcing models that bring coffee to their mouths. In this light, consumer concern manifests as well-intentioned reactionary purchasing. I see this as evidence of the successful commodification of morality. By embedding a narrative that features happy producers thriving due to the choices of consumers, the specialty coffee industry has successfully created a market for morality. Together the discourse and imagery that surrounds the product functions as a sign (in the Saussurian sense (1916)) of ethical relations of trade, which signals to the consumer that all is well and they have done the right thing. By foregrounding the image and narrative of the laborer the industry has convinced consumers that they do not need to worry about the laborer. This is a more gripping form of Marx’s commodity fetishism (1978), since the relations and real conditions of production remain obscured by ethical coffee. The narrative presented by it masquerades as a removal of the curtain, but in fact it is the same curtain painted over with an enchanting scene.
So where is the hope in this situation? Hope lies in the unease, the anxiety, and the discomfort that pushes consumers to harbor suspicions of the relations and conditions of production. But, if we are to make moves toward real social change and global economic justice, we must embrace our consumer anxieties, not assuage them through the self-gratifying channels of consumption. To the extent that we opt for the simple fix of ethical consumption we fail to actually confront the root of the problem that causes these anxieties–the system of capitalism. Instead, we reproduce the very thing that troubles us. We must confront and marinate in our anxieties, allow them to trouble us, and then use them as motive to engage in what Marcuse (1964) called “negative thinking”–the unthinking of the norms that limit the possibilities for what social and economic relations can look like. Only then can we imagine social justice into being.
This can easily be extrapolated to why people buy into the humane myth. Companies are commodifying compassion by constraining the moral issue within the framework of consumerism. If you’re a compassionate and moral person, would you want to buy “free-range, humanely killed” animals or factory farmed animals? The concept of not buying animals is removed from the question entirely because consumerism is framed as the only active decision with the possibility of changing the world.
Nicki writes, “Ethical coffee is framed as a response to bad conditions and unmet needs in coffee growing communities, and consumers and coffee companies are positioned as ethical actors who help producers.” Change a few words and we get, “Humane slaughter is framed as a response to bad conditions and unmet needs in animal agriculture and factory farming, and consumers and companies like Whole Foods are positioned as ethical actors who help animals.” The marketing around ethical coffee and “ethical meat” is nearly the same as well. Pictures of happy cows and happy chickens frolicking in green pastures with white clouds and a blue sky in the background – surely these animals are eager and willing to give their lives so that humans can eat their bodies, just as coffee workers are eager and willing to work to provide humans with specialty coffee.
Companies and farms that promote “humane slaughter” thrive in this market of morality. They frame animal wellbeing as a product of consumer choices. By foregrounding the image of “happy animals”, they allow consumers to stop questioning the morality of eating animals. The truth is that labels mean nothing. And even if they did, there is no ethical justification for prematurely ending the life of another being, no matter how “happy” they were, or how “painless” their death is.
[…] liberalism: the egalitarian principle which works to ignore and erase difference rather than to undo oppression. It strives for a post-feminist, post-queer, post-racial or racially colorblind world. Liberalism as an ideology deems equal rights and equal treatment as a higher priority than material justice, or as an effective means towards it. Its presumptions of equality are false, as individualist equality may be written into law and policy while material inequality thrives. It effectively abstracts and obscures power dynamics along lines of race, class, and gender. The difference between material justice and liberalism is the difference between actually making reparations for a long history of racism and countries like Austria, Finland, Hungary, France, and now Sweden removing all mentions of “race” from their legislation.
Liberalism is not the opposite of conservatism on a left-right political spectrum, but a set of values that informs various other political ideologies including conservatism and libertarianism. Even the most popular manifestations of feminism and radical political thought (anarchism, communism, and socialism) are their most liberal forms. You can recognize the influence of liberalism in any political philosophy or practice that , consciously or not , focuses on individual equality before social power. What is it that says that ending racism means setting aside our differences and finding commonality? Liberalism. What is it that says that we need love to bring us together and to end the hate which drives us apart? Liberalism. What is it that says to choose unity over disunion? Liberalism. What is it that says racism/sexism/sizeism hurts everyone? Liberalism.
The toxic effects of liberalism are clear in diversity advocacy and its language. […] diversity emphasizes the pragmatic benefits to morale, productivity, and profits. Diversity is the practice of mixing together different bodies within a common organization, and is a prime resource to be capitalized upon by businesses and organizations that are white owned and/or operated. Diversity still benefits those in power by taking advantage of the various experiences and vantage points of different racial/gender/sexual backgrounds. Rather than respecting difference and redistributing power based on it, diversity only “celebrates” difference in order to exploit multiculturalism for its economic value.
When we talk about diversity and inclusion, we necessarily position marginalized groups as naturally needing to assimilate into dominant ones, rather than to undermine said structures of domination. Yes, we need jobs; we need education; we need to access various resources. What we don’t need is to relegate ourselves to the position of depending on someone else to offer us inclusion and access to those resources. Inclusion is something they must give, but our liberation is something we will take.
There’s also Eli Erlick’s recent article, Why Equality Is Toxic to the Transgender Movement, which has a great illustration on why advocating for equality instead of equity is harmful. She writes, “Hate crime laws are framed as initiatives that will end attacks on transgender people, making them ‘equally’ protected under the law. In reality, this legislation is another cisgender issue pushed by neoliberal politicians to further expand prisons and prevent real change. Hate crime legislation does nothing to protect trans people. Instead, it only increases sentencing for offenders. Is doubling a 7-year sentence going to deter crime? Statistically, the answer is no. Hate crime laws do not look at the roots of the problem, including systemic racism and transphobia. Individualizing the problem by sending one person to prison does very little for our community as a whole and does not work within a restorative justice framework. People who have committed these acts can be educated along with the public on transgender issues, which will actually stop the violence. This is not to mention many people incorrectly think anti-transgender victimization has ended when hate crime legislation has passed — and then proceed to ignore the perpetual violence we still face.”
Large, cisgender-run LGBT organizations attempt to operate under a “we’re just like you” model to incorporate us into these industries, which is not only inaccurate, but also diminutive to trans culture. We are not “equal” or “the same” as cisgender people. Like every marginalized community, we have unique needs and identities that equality measures do not take into consideration.
Looping back to A Guide to Gender, this is an example of where the Golden Rule fails. When we focus on “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, we lose sight of other people’s unique needs and identities that we do not have. Instead, we need the Platinum Rule: “do unto others as they would have done unto them”.
I was just a little bit too old to really get into it by the US release of the first Harry Potter book, so I never read those books until quite recently (2016) and I was really surprised when I finally read them. I thought Harry Potter was supposed to be like, this model for nerds and outcasts, but instead he’s a dumb jock who’s famous for being famous. And he wants to be a cop (which is at least consistent).
There’s something really off-putting and mean about it. It’s “ethically mean spirited” as Ursula Le Guin remarked when asked her impressions of the series, and a better writer might have been able to take that and Say Something about the hierarchy of life as teenage, but JKR is just not able to think through the implications of anything she writes whether that’s the antisemitic implications of goblin bankers, why Dumbledore sent Harry back to his horrible family instead of placing an anonymous tip to muggle child protective services, or why Harry Potter’s shit for brains attitude is always, always rewarded and what that tells her more impressionable audience.
Five years ago, I couldn’t figure it, but with what we’ve learned about JKR’s politics in the mean time, it makes perfect sense.
It’s not just that Harry isn’t particularly bright that’s troubling, but the fact that he treats his friend who isn’t a dullard as a pain in the ass, except for when he needs to exploit her book smarts for something because he didn’t fucking study.
He’s the kid who doesn’t do the reading, acts disengaged through most of the class, but then when the big test comes around he’s cribbing off whatever sap is willing to put up with his shit, whether due to insecurity or pity or some combination of the two.
For all the faults in her writing on a structural level, JKR has a very specific world view that comes across very clearly without making it superliminal a la Ayn Rand.
Fundamentally, her world view is shaped by being a lower middle class Briton who resented the class system while also idolizing it. It’s the Chris Hitchens disease (not the one that killed him, the other one). She hates power and is fascinated by power. A very fraught relationship.
So instead of making Harry this special boy who upsets the order of the Wizarding World with his otherness, his arrival is actually celebrated and makes him an instant sensation because it represents a return of normality and order. She wants to make him a rebel, but she can’t actually have him challenge power in any way because power is constantly valorized in these books. His biggest ally is the headmaster of his exclusive private school (or would it be a public school in British vernacular?). So instead she makes him a cut-up and a delinquent who’s misbehavior is constantly hand-waved by everyone, except the one hard-ass professor who absolutely has Harry pegged except that professor happens to be a former Nazi so we can’t really sympathize with him, no can we?
The whole thing is a fantasy for suffering lower middle class British kids who dream of secretly having a peerage even as they resent the class system for all the opportunities it’s denied them and doors its slammed in their face. It’s an extremely British point of view and it’s not really surprising most American readers are oblivious to it, but at the same time it’s weird that more critics haven’t pointed it out.
This point of view perfectly unites the three main political causes Rowling has taken up: empire fetishism, austerity politics, and TERFism, all hallmarks of middle class British social climbers. Rowling has of course made it long ago, made it far further up the ladder than Hitchens ever did, and is fantastically wealthy beyond the dreams of many of the peers she once might have envied (and maybe still does). Still, the basic grubby insecurity of the class position she lived in for years before her big break remains, which explains a lot about how she sees higher taxes as some kind of personal affront, above and beyond what even many rich people born into money would see them as.
quick question, have I gone insane? are people actually taking this seriously? the effort it took to twist the message of the books into one of pro-status quo conservatism when all the text is about fighting classism and racism and intolerance…
but to be fair this post does have genuinely funny moments, like how op seems to base some of their argument for JK Rowling being pro-status quo on how she writes Harry getting help from his smart friend for homework, disengaged in class sometimes, interested in sports…. basically just for being an average student LMFAO WHAT
(I apologize for the length of this post. I tried to put it under the cut but wasn’t given the option).
Harry Potter as a text is more complex than OP gives it credit for (to be fair, they stopped halfway through Goblet of Fire so they didn’t get exposed to some of the really weird stuff). Specifically, there are serious tensions among different themes in the series. So yes, Harry Potter has a strong theme that racism and intolerance are bad. That is absolutely an element in the text. But the text also has a strong theme that the society it depicts is basically good .
Something that happens frequently in literature is that the author will incorporate a strong theme or element into their work without realizing it. That’s one of the reasons Tolkien rejected allegory in favor of applicability. And an extremely strong theme in Harry Potter is that the system is broken, but given how the series ends (more on that below), I don’t think JKR realized she created a broken society.
(I need to stress that the following analysis relies on the assumption that one of the purposes of Harry Potter is to depict a society–the British wizarding world–in order to critique an actual one–modern Britain. There are legitimate reasons to reject such a reading, and while I think my assumption is correct, I’m not interested in defending it here.)
As I noted in my earlier addition to this post “Again and again throughout the middle books of the series, the society of British wizards is shown to have clear, gaping, structural flaws.” But while the text repeatedly points to those flaws, it consistently addresses them superficially. As a fundamentally liberal text, Harry Potter tends to depict racism in the wizarding world as a matter of individual people subscribing to incorrect beliefs, rather than the “reality” of a society in which bigotry actively serves the interests of the ruling class.
For example, there is never any sense that pure-bloods significantly benefit from the marginalization of muggle-borns; this is in part because there is never any sense that muggle-borns are significantly marginalized. Pure-blood supremacy is limited to Slytherins and everyone else thinks it’s stupid. That’s not how racism works on a societal level.
Think also about the closing words of the series, “All was well.” But what did we see in the epilogue? Harry, Ron, and Hermione as fully-integrated members of a system that the text clearly says needs huge structural reforms. A bunch of people crowded on Platform 9 ¾ sending their kids to an elite private school that has literal slaves to take care of them. A society that continues to treat muggles as toys to play with (I’m thinking here of Ron charming his way through his driver’s test). The basic system has not been changed. And yet, “All was well.”
Because for Harry, Ron, and Hermione, it is. They’ve created a place for themselves within the wizarding world where they can benefit from the “clear, gaping, structural flaws” that the series so carefully points to but never significantly challenges.
The best definition I’ve come across for liberalism is “the belief that problem with the ruling class is that it is insufficiently diverse.” Liberalism is pro-status quo while also being against racism, homophobia, sexism, etc because it sees those as incidental to the status quo rather than essential building blocks of it.
Isn’t it interesting that Rowling chooses to let Harry, her star protagonist, commit two out of the three Unforgivable Curses during the course of the story, while still a teenager, and face no punishment?
Wasn’t one of the huge red flags about Voldemort that he tortured others with no remorse, just to satisfy his own curiosity or emotional desires?
Harry Potter, our hero, clearly has a whole lesson about Crucio, Imperio and Avada Kedavra in Goblet of Fire, in which he learns, aged 14, that each curse carries a life sentence. In the same class, he witnesses the cruel impact of each curse used on an animal.
Nonetheless, the very next year is the first time Harry tries to cast Crucio, the torture curse, on another human. At the age of 15.
We know from the great detail that the lesson goes into that the sole purpose of Crucio is to cause pain. Harry does not use Crucio to try and obtain information. He uses it to hurt a woman who he dislikes (albeit for valid reasons).
The very next year, Harry again uses Crucio against an adult he dislikes, deliberately in order to inflict pain. Yes, it’s during combat. But he is knowingly breaking the law of his land. Is he banking on his celebrity status to be above the law?
Finally, in his seventh year, Harry uses Crucio against an adult for the third time. This time, he hurts the adult so much that they become unconscious from the pain. Amycus Carrow had insulted a woman Harry liked in front of him.
In case anyone has forgotten, immediately after finishing school, Harry Potter takes a career in law enforcement. There’s no suggestion he faces any punishment whatsoever for what are essentially war crimes. Is this what JK Rowling intended?
I wonder what Neville thinks about his friend’s actions, given his personal history with Crucio? Isn’t a central theme of Harry Potter “do the ends justify the means?” What does the rule of law mean if members of law enforcement are given carte blanche to commit war crimes with no punishment?
Doesn’t that retroactively excuse Dolores Umbridge’s actions when she herself, representing the law, attempts to bait Harry into committing a crime and threatens him with torture?
Shall we even get into the issues of Hermione committing kidnap and blackmail, Ron stealing, the Weasley twins underage gambling? Maybe Harry Potter isn’t the Good series it makes itself out to be when such morally grey characters are the central protagonists and the legal system rewards them.
Hi, I just found an amazing tiktok series of a guy explaining the basics of capitalism, socialism, and communism and I just thought I’d share it because I thought it was a great simple summary.
One of the things that I was confused about once I started being interested in politics were the terms “liberal” and “leftist”.
There was obviously a right and left wing. What I knew was that a liberal was a tolerant individual that constantly promoted human rights, and since they were considered to belong to the left, I logically concluded that these two word were synonymous.
It turns out there is a difference, and I thought I’d try to explain it in a relatively simple way for whoever needs it. Let’s start with defining each term:
Liberalism:
A political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise. -Oxford Languages
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. […] Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, when it became popular among Western philosophers and economists. - Wikipedia
Liberalism is a belief in gradual social progress by changing laws, rather than by revolution. -Collin
Leftism:
The political views or policies of the left. -Oxford Languages
Leftism refers to the beliefs and behaviour of people who support socialist ideas. - Collin
An economic posisistion favouring more collectivity/cooperation in making resource using decisions. This can either be done by state planning or using communes. -Urban Dictionnary
The major difference between these two ideologies is the preffered economic system of each. Basically, liberals have nothing against capitalism but believe in law changing and reforming in order to achieve equality. While leftists believe that the only way to atteign true equity would be overthrowing capitalism and adapting an entirely new economic system such as communism or socialism, generally accompanied by a revolution.
“Liberals are not leftists, and there are a few keypoints in understanding the differences betwen the two. Liberalism is an ideology that has a wide array of views but in general it’s in support of universal human rights, democratic governance and market based capitalist economics.
While there is some overlap, this last part is largely what seperates the two. Well meaning liberals do generally want to protect human rights and promote social equality but believe the problems stemmed from our capitalist system can be tweaked and reformed.
Leftists, on the other hand, are fundamentally opposed to capitalism, [they believe] that the problems created by the system are actually not problems at all, rather, they are a sign that the system is working as intended. Crony capitalism* doesn’t exist, ideologically pure free market capitalism* doesn’t exist either, there is only capitalism, and it must be abolished. Liberalism as an ideology believes that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with capitalism, that the problems that exist within a society are the result of bad actors and policies within the system that must be rooted out so the system can function properly. Leftist ideologies understand that the system itself is the cause of the suffering. No amount of reforming can fix the problems in our society. It’s not a matter of bad actors and policies but one of the relations we keep to keep society running.
Perhaps the most succint quote that hilights the differences comes from brazilian Archbishop Hélder Câmara: ” When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.“ -"Why liberals are not leftists” by Leaflets via Youtube
“An economic system in which individuals and businesses with political connections and influence are favored (as through tax breaks, grants, and other forms of government assistance) in ways seen as suppressing open competition in a free market.” -Merriam Webster
“In its worst form, crony capitalism can devolve into simple corruption where any pretense of a free market is dispensed with. Bribes to government officials are considered de rigueur and tax evasion is common. […] Corrupt governments may favor one set of business owners who have close ties to the government over others.” -Wikipedia
*What is ideologically pure free market society?
“In a capitalistic society, the production and pricing of goods and services are determined by the free market, or supply and demand, however, some government regulation may occur. […] A free market system is an economic system based solely on demand and supply, and there is little or no government regulation.” -Investopedia
Is Free Market the Same as Capitalism?
“A capitalist system and a free market system are both economic environments that are based on the law of supply and demand.
They both are involved in determining the price and production of goods and services. On one hand, capitalism is focused on the creation of wealth and ownership of capital and factors of production, whereas a free market system is focused on the exchange of wealth, or goods and services.” - By Steven Nickolas for Investopedia
“Voters need to understand the fundamental differences between liberalism and leftism. It’s the difference between a candidate who believes capitalism, with just a little refereeing, will eventually provide what working people need, versus a candidate who believes serious intervention in the capitalist economy is necessary.” -The Conversation
That’s about it, I hope I was able to properly explain everything. This is obviously an overview of leftism and liberalism and in no way an in depth analysis of each ideology, though I later probably will dive in deeper.
As I have previously specified, I am a leftist, and I do not think that we can achieve any true change as long as we are under a capitalist system since every “problem” we’ve had is each deeply rooted in capitalism. I would also love to make a post listing some arguments that justify my beliefs, but that’ll be for another time.
Thank you for reading, also, I’ve never really asked you if you had any suggestions but I’d like to see if you guys had any questions about politics, and if I happen to have an understanding in the subject, I’ll try to answer it with a similar kind of post. Okay thanks, bye.
There it is. We discussed this on “Shock Jocks.” One of the Tweet replies says, “I prefer the term ‘Tory Anarchism’”—a label self-applied, strangely, by George Orwell, a writer claimed by democrats, liberals, and conservatives everywhere. I’ve always liked it myself. Edward Said used it on Swift; I once transferred it to Yeats:
It is easy enough to say with Orwell that Yeats was a reactionary and a fascist. Edward Said, who did so much to redeem Yeats for the PC era by praising him in Culture and Imperialism as an anti-colonial poet meditating on Fanonian themes (in another mood, I might enter this into evidence for the fascist tendencies of identity politics), once wrote of “Swift’s Tory Anarchy.” The label might be applied to Yeats, who admired Swift: to his Tory elegy for a shattered culture of wholeness and authority, to his anarchic drive toward the shaping of a soul out of the chaos of experience.
Orwell, Said, Swift, Yeats. What connects the politics of these disparate men of disparate eras who between them cover almost the whole political compass? Consider the etymology of “Tory”:
mid 17th century: probably from Irish toraidhe ‘outlaw, highwayman’, from tóir ‘pursue’. The word was used of Irish peasants dispossessed by English settlers and living as robbers, and extended to other marauders especially in the Scottish Highlands. It was then adopted c.1679 as an abusive nickname for supporters of the Catholic James II.
The Tory is a reactionary because he is an outlaw of the progressive regime, the regime expropriating his country and trampling his culture with its forward march of progress. “Tory Anarchism,” then, is redundant. There is no real conflict between serving the exiled or prostrated old regime and wishing to bring down the new one, whether you are Irish or Palestinian or one of the British Empire’s inner critics.
But there is no going back—“retvrn” is the idlest of fantasies—so in theory the Tory’s anarchism should at length become less tactical or circumstantial and more of a substantive commitment to individual freedom in a new world, newer than the new regime which displaced the old one. He might still construe these freedoms as better defended by a unitary sovereign than by an oligarchy or bureaucracy, which is what, for this kind of sensibility, most regimes calling themselves democracies pragmatically are. But if the freedoms are the point—and the writings of Orwell and Said may bear this out in the end—then the distance between anarcho-monarchism and liberalism isn’t as far as their feuding partisans imagine.
Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast. Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveller; he Served human liberty.
Why aren’t there more people like this? And like the opposite number her existence implies? Think about it for two seconds and you’ll see that it makes more sense than the customary way the positions are arrayed. I made this point elaborately here, but I want to make it with concision now.
The pro-choice position: a swaggering and somewhat brutal amoralism (“It’s just a clump of cells!”), this amoralism’s sotto voce corollary that the poor should not reproduce very much, the absolute license the individual demands from the state’s ethical policing, the incredulous rejection of a new protected political class’s very existence—all very aristocratic, libertarian, Nietzschean, right-wing to the core.
The pro-life position: a sentimental defense of the weak, an assertion of the state’s right to protect the minority, an attempt to enfranchise a new political subject, persnickety language policing and ugly neologisms (“pro-life” itself is a kind of PC coinage, and now they call the fetus “preborn,” even though the vernacular word “baby” would be more to their point), the activists’ widely-held conviction that they descend from the abolitionist movement—what could be more left-wing than this?
Even the institutional history up until the 1980s supports the way I’ve laid it out above, with the postwar Republican Party—the party of the WASP establishment—supporting “family planning” and the Democratic Party—with its New Deal workers’ alliance of northern urban Catholics and rural white southerners—being much more skeptical.
A memory, a parable. The year is 1990; I am eight years old; my mother is driving me to or from Catholic school, where I am learning that abortion is wrong. We pass a billboard, a political ad for the Pennsylvania governor’s race. The candidates are a female pro-choice Republican and a male pro-life Democrat (not just any pro-life Democrat either, but Bob Casey himself, of Planned Parenthood v. Casey fame). I ask my mother who she’s voting for. The Republican woman, she tells me. Abortion being among the most salient issues in the race, and my education having emphasized to me already that abortion was wrong, I gently propose that this may not quite be the moral choice. My mother counters that, while abortion may be wrong, or it may not, it is also inevitable, so better it remain safe and legal.
Now this, however it may have lacked the moral sublimity of my religious education, seemed sensible, sober, realistic, conservative, all those things that “Republican” once connoted—and the very opposite of the radical moral sublime suggested in our own time, if you see what I mean, by “vegan activist she/her ACAB.”
Sure, you could pay to read the New York Times, or take an extra minute out of your day to blow through their paywall, but for free[*] you could be getting the good information about John Stuart Mill that was just dropped at johnpistelli.com. There’s plenty of nuance in his almost legalistic prose, I promise you, as he heroically tried to synthesize the Enlightenment with Romanticism. An excerpt from my new essay:
How is the infrastructure of free speech to be erected and sustained? Through a proper education, one in which students are allowed to hear a diversity of views from those who hold them. Citing precedents in intellectual history from the Platonic dialogues (in which philosophy is conducted as an argument between multiple personae) to the legal practice of Cicero (who learned the opposing counsel’s case better than his own) to the process of Catholic canonization (which invites the “devil’s advocate” to speak against the candidate for sainthood), Mill argues that students must be prepared to defend their own positions against counterarguments they themselves are able to reconstruct from the inside: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” Otherwise, people will hold even their own opinions lazily, unfeelingly, and without really knowing why—a state of intellectual torpor that bodes ill for the polity.
Precisely the situation in which once-august and now-bathetic institutions like the Times sadly find themselves.
I don’t even know why I started reading or rereading On Liberty the other day, nor do I remember if I’d ever read the whole thing before or just excerpts in college. I do remember reading all of The Subjection of Women in a Western Civ class, and then answering a final essay exam question in the same class where I was invited to imagine and write out a debate between Mill and Hitler. I recall having some fun with the stage directions: “Mill lifts both eyebrows in startled alarm” and the like. The professor would no doubt be fired today.
Anyway, I think I went back to Mill because George Bernard Shaw had me wanting to revisit the Victorian sages (and indeed to expand my knowledge of some of them beyond the Norton Anthology)—nothing to do with the news. But current hegemonic left-liberalism has of course abandoned Mill’s liberal ideal of free speech without even seeming to understand its rationale—they appear as well to be in the process of abandoning any theory of mind whatever, ironically returning to a fully infantile state—so On Liberty remains pertinent.
Two things I didn’t get to discuss in my essay since I try to keep these things short enough for Goodreads:
1. Mill was a Malthusian who thought the state should seize control of breeding. He disfavored “a woman’s right to choose,” to use an obsolete phrase from my youth, to opposite effect as does the religious right today: he might not outlaw but mandate abortion, for generally eugenic reasons. This seems to me inconsistent with the broad principles of On Liberty and premised on a flawed and zero-sum idea of humanity’s relationship to nature and economics.
2. I quoted but did not elaborate on Mill’s beguiling sentence, “It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either.” I first encountered it before I ever read any Mill at all as the epigraph to James Wood’s paralyzingly eloquent essay against Thomas More, “A Man for One Season.” Wood’s idea is that More was no better than Knox, a religious sectarian, and therefore not a fit Periclean hero for a liberal, secular society. But is it really better to be John Knox than Alcibiades? It’s a case of two extremes, an unenviable choice. I confess I haven’t read any Thucydides since my first year of college, but I do recollect that Athens’s golden boy (and Socrates’s boy-toy) was an unreliable man, to say the least. Still, would I want to found Scottish Presbyterianism or hang out with Socrates? I swing sexually the other direction, but Al seems to have enjoyed primarily female company anyway, among all his wild and dangerous political intrigues. Wherever you come down, it’s certainly a thought-provoking sentence.
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[*] While I have been “playing real good for free,” like the “one-man band by the quick-lunch stand” in the Joni-Mitchell-via-Lana-del-Rey ballad, if you like it and if you’re able, you might please send moneyorbuy a book to keep the operations ongoing. Thank you!
