I want you to ask yourself, what is really important.
Over the past, oh, week or so, I've felt fairly disgruntled about what my friends on leftbook have been talking about.
It's not really their fault though, they're being misguided.
if you don't know, the "left", here in the united states has been up in arms over celebrity comments.
Two major ones that have caught my attention
The first is a national headline, for some reason
http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/29/media/roseanne-twitter-chelsea-clinton/index.html
and the second might be more of a local news story but it has been talked about all over the internet by "Radicals"
https://pitchfork.com/news/nofx-lose-beer-sponsorship-after-joking-about-tragic-las-vegas-shooting/
Rosanne, and her racist comments are deplorable, this isn't anything that I am going to try and dispute. Here is the thing, she's a washed up old has been, right? She is a person who once had the lime light, and is now just a remnant of a past which she is a product of.
Why is this a major headline? Is this really all that important?
Fat Mike, in the same way, is well past his hay day. Let us be honest here, NOFX hasn't had a good record in well over a decade. I was a huge fan of their music growing up, but for a long time I've thought that they've really been sub-par in terms of musical interest. Yes, his joke hits a little close to home for me, and I was fairly upset to hear this coming from one of my childhood idols.
I was in Vegas the night of the massacre, I stood in the blood donation lines. I saw the city scurry about in a fearful manner, wondering, if this would be the end to the violence.
I wept as we all did.
So I can understand why my city would be upset about this. I get that one to a point, but should it be a major headline? should it be the forefront of public discourse? Should it really even matter?
Yes it was offensive, but it shouldn't be major news.
What is really important?
Racist comments happen all the time, jokes in bad taste happen all the time. People tend to look the other way,I suppose, which is a problem, so we must ask ourselves why the media is having an aneurysm over these things now?
Well, to put it very bluntly, the media is serving the agenda of the ruling class, this is a distraction, nothing more.
This all has happened, in all honesty, to the benefit of Donald Trump himself, because the(dare I use such a cliche phrase) real news shows how little the trump administration really has cared about the american people(or at least a sub-sect of them)
I'm talking about this study that came out about the Puerto Rico crisis
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1803972
I can not say it better so here is a quote from the study
"Our results indicate that the official death count of 64 is a substantial underestimate of the true burden of mortality after Hurricane Maria. Our estimate of 4645 excess deaths from September 20 through December 31, 2017, is likely to be conservative since subsequent adjustments for survivor bias and household-size distributions increase this estimate to more than 5000."
So, Puerto Rico is experiencing a crisis, much much worse(in terms of deaths) then the September 11th terrorist attacks, and it's mostly been swept under the rug(to use that turn of phrase).
Now, if you are unaware, the propaganda system in the united states is one of the most influential in the world, and probably the most manipulative.
I laugh when some trump supporter says that the media is against him, because it's not, and this is proof of it. The media got him elected because every time you put on the news he was all they talked about. Now the media is serving to distract you from the most important story to happen in the past week. They are the tools of the ruling class, and the ruling class wants to give an illusion of dissidents to the powers that are in control.
Noam Chomsky(who I have very mixed feelings about) put out this book called,"The Manufacturing of Consent"
What it does is scholarly describe the propaganda model in the united states.
To put it briefly there are 5,"media filters" used to control the collective mind of the population.
Media used to create profit
Advertising as the means to that profit
Using,"official" sources instead of investigative journalism
Controlling criticism
An enemy(imaginary or otherwise) to direct anger towards away from the ruling class
So these celebrity scandles are following the propaganda model to the letter.
The enemy is the offensive persons. Right, like entertainers that have foul mouths, that's the real issue we're facing according to the main stream media. Which this is how they are controlling the criticism of the ruling class, by directing you towards things that aren't really that big of deal.
The actual death toll is unknown, and because the media was using the,"official source" we were mislead. How can we question an authoritative source right? It's authoritative, why do an investigation, the elites have all the answers!
I really hope my sarcasm there was apparent.
Now, these sensationalist stories are profitable because they draw an audience. Everyone wants to talk about how once loved media personalities are now horrible racists or just offensive joke tellers. These instances generate interest, although artificial in it's generation. Profit, distraction and control is the true function of the media.
A social minded media, would give you the stories that make you uncomfortable, and show us the true horrors our planet has to offer.
So what is really important?
Now to really understand the scope of the tragic events of the Puerto Rico you have to understand the historical context of Puerto Rico.
Or to paraphrase Hegel, the only thing that is concrete is how history has developed.
Since 1898 Puerto Rico has been a colony of the united states. Yes a colony, not a territory.
How did Puerto Rico become a colony of the united states? Invasion, just like all imperial powers do. The united states invaded the island, took control of the place, and has been extracting resources from them ever since.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/puerto-rico-invaded
So Puerto Rico, didn't want to join the united states,it was conquered.
It gets even worse.
So Puerto Rico has been in a finance crisis for a long time. Mostly due to weird regulations passed upon the island. For instance the Jones act
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/jonesact.asp
which forces Puerto Rico to use ships only built in the united states.
This is a fairly complicated matter, but to give you a gist of why the economy got so bad, was because the united states gave Puerto Rico a tax exempt status, which many companies migrated there to take advantage of. Just like a good bourgeois would do.
Which, nominally made the economy look fairly good, but then under Bill Clinton the tax exempt status was taken away
Which as anyone would guess, collapsed their economy.
What is really important?
The economic crisis got so bad, that Obama effectively made the local government of Puerto Rico a dictatorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROMESA
Now, that imperial meddling crashed there economy, and instilled a dictatorship there, we find the highest expression of what imperialism actually is, and what our ideology of profit will do to people. Not only has a hurricane destroyed their island, not only has our government lied about how many people died in the event, but now we see that the media is more focused on fucking sensationalist bullshit then actually informing the population. And on top of all of that, the government has turned its back on Puerto Rico. The spectacle which is our reality would be amusing if it wasn't so depressing.
Tragedy is the stage play here on earth.
So I ask you, what is important?
Social need, or profit?
The great irony here is that the left has a splendid chance to enter into the conversation and bring up the horrors of imperialism, to ask the very question I'm asking,"What is really important" So far, this has been wasted. This is why the left in the united states isn't take seriously, because we, as a group of people, aren't addressing the real issues we face. We're too busy circle jerking about how bad things are. We're too busy holding signs and chanting to get political power.
The left is digging its own grave.
Every rise of fascism has a failed left behind it. This is what we are seeing.
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Welp, welcome to the World of Bourgeois Media - where it is one of the many mediums for the Superstructure to achieve the monochromatic (self-reflexive) Dialectical spiral and tells itself what it wants to hear about itself for the Trauma it created itself (the Myth). For the Superstructure is an equal partner and struggles with the Base to keep each it in check and functioning for their own survival, as does the Base with the Superstructure for the same reason.
I have yet to read Hegel, I did pick up a copy of," the phenomenology of spirit" last week. My girlfriend works at a bookstore and they were having a sale for employees so I've got a lot of new reading to do. I'll pick up a copy of history on history next time I have the money for a book run.
The manipulation of the base is so blatant now days that even the ruling class are using it to their advantage. The whole concept of,"fake news" is doing two thing in my perspective.
1)Creating a situation where questioning of the validity and honesty of the media is now considered a right wing "conspiracy" that isn't founded in reality
2)trump is using it as a means of gaining support from those who are inclined to question the authority of the capitalist state and system.
With this they are creating a situation where any criticism of the media is coupled with groans by the common person. The damn Bourgeois really know exactly what they are doing.
I suggest if you're going to get a book on Hegel talking about history, get Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History then. And I say, Capitalist Realism was the project of NeoLiberalism when they saw the dissolution of the USSR and knew they can easily shock the Base to force a change in the Superstructure to drop the Keynesian Social Democratic Project for the Rate of Profit they had to hemorrhage for who knows how long.
Even Stalin predicted this a long time ago that if the USSR will fall:
prophetic Stalin quote.
Keynes was wrong about the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment.We saw this during the stagflation during the 70's here in the united states. Which even so, we did see a resurgence of Keynesian economic thought during the Obama years.
The federal reserve had several rounds of quantitative easing after the crash of 2008, to try and increase aggregate demand to try and deal with the unemployment and underemployment that the crash caused.
Which Keynes was a fool, his goal of having full employment is impossible as long as a market economy is our reality.
The cheap price of labor is dependent upon the reserve army of labor, as Marx so eloquently put it. So unemployment serves a function is a capitalist economy,meaning that full employment would have drastic consequences in the labor sector and productive sector by increasing the price of labor, which would increase the price of good or cause,"cost push inflation".
Keynes tried to solve one of the inherit contradiction of capitalism, but you can't fix capitalism at all. Reform will always have reaction.
Which is what we are seeing with the domination of Milton Friedmans neo-liberalisms. The dominate economic policy is,"oh, the market will figure it out for us". Which the irony of all this is that neo-liberalism essentially caused the crash in 2008 to begin with. The housing market was left alone and what did we get?
The whole capitalist system is absurd in and of itself.