As Alan Moore once said, fascism is basically giving simple answers to complex problems. I can't find that quote at the moment, but this seems to sum it all up pretty nicely:
》I thought that this was worrying because retreats to infantilism are generally precursors to fascism; that desire for a simple solution to really complex problems. The desire to be told that this has all been done by the illuminati, the international banking Jewish banking conspiracy, the underground Democrat paedophile demons drinking children’s adrenochrome underneath the Comet Ping Pong Pizza restaurant in Washington DC. These are all comic book solutions to comic book problems. Donald Trump — The Donald — is a perfect comic book superhero come to save us from the equally ridiculous threat of whatever it was that he was worried about, [...]《
I'm inclined to think that they didn't get their ideas by perverting Hayek. Comic books and junk SF are far more likely.
You don't mention fascism at all, so I suppose the book doesn't either. Just that all that is not very liberal. Ok, it's not. But what is it, then?
The end of republics is nigh, even if they don't all turn out fascist.
There is an international banking conspiracy, headed by the troika of the Federal Reserve, the IMF and the World Bank. East Asians became rich because their central banks used to fund their economies. The IMF reformed the Japanese central bank ushering a lengthy period of economic stagnation. In the US, the banking system has its favorite recipe of expanding credit (creating roaring twenties or housing bubbles) and then tightening it. The rich then get bailed out and the middle class loses their real assets. But the conspirators, just like the alt right, are not well read. Alan Greenspan's favorite author is Ayn Rand.
«borderline racism (“the Christian west is the only creator of morals in the modern civilization”, p. 35)»
I am disappointed that our blogger is not beyond smearing by insinuation of proximity to racism and ethnicism (two completely different concepts too) a cultural ("social capital") argument. Even as I think that the claim of that argument is quite wrong.
How is it not ethnicist? I think most Westerners would view the claim by say Bin Laden or some other Islamists that only Arabs produce a worthwhile moral system in the world to be somewhat racist and insulting. Similarly i think most people would judge the argument that the West is the only source of argument to be quite "racist" or discriminative at the least
«the argument that the West is the only source of argument to be quite "racist" »
Apparently in your unrestrained fantasy "the West" is a race that includes USA latinos, finnish lapps, french jews, english tamils, italian arabs, german syrians, etc. :-)
«or discriminative at the least»
Whether it is western christian or west asian muslim or chinese post-feudal culture etc. that produced in the modern era better cultural artifacts in one specific area is a matter of judgement not of discrimination. Not all cultures are equally fertile in all areas. Unless the title "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" is your proof that Web was a racist :-).
I also think that "that only Arabs produce a worthwhile moral system in the world" has a very different scope and not just type subject from "the Christian west is the only creator of morals in the modern civilization” which is a much narrower claim.
Your comment seems to me to imply that you are an eager recipient of astutely worded smears and insinuations.
Thank you, definitely goes on my reading list. I am too squeamish to delve into that zoo of intellectual mutations myself, very happy someone took the cross for us sinners
Hi, I’ve just looked up this book and found there are two coming out with the same title, different tags. What are the primary differences between the two?
The fraud happened because “Hayek’s bastards” despite all their pretenses to the contrary were not intellectuals nor people interested in ideas. There is no doubt left to the reader of this book that they were (as some of them self-congratulatorily called themselves) “intellectual entrepreneurs”. Their objective was to make money. It was not to have their ideas, which most of them, I believe, knew to be either unrealizable or false, accepted. A cynical reader might even say that they hoped that their ideas be never implemented because once brought into the real world such ideas would show their creators’ intellectual bankruptcy and rob them of permanent sources of money syphoned off from the feeble-minded tycoons and credulous public. The authors reviewed here are written of as a part of the modern Western intellectual history only because that history is in a decline and they are its most clear examples. Their true claim to fame is not to have forewarned unsuspecting public to the dangers of the looming apocalypses; it is to have accelerated intellectual decadence and to have converted intellectualism into pure money grubbing.
PS. One might compare in its otherworldliness alt-Right to various groupuscules of Trotskyists. There is some similarity in the fact that both worked out schemes they knew are not within the realm of the politically possible. But Trotskyists were truly dedicated to the ideas, while the alt-Right, in accord with the spirit of the time, cared only about money. This is a big difference.
‘Much of the media has framed the populist right as a backlash against neoliberalism – but they share common roots in the project to defend social hierarchies against the threat of equality’. https://tinyurl.com/4t5kxyh8
Resist Comrades, resist! The forces of evil have fckd the plebs over once more. Those poor sods just can't understand where their true interests lie.
Maybe we should adjust democracy just a lil' bit until they become reasonable again. Then we'll let them drink from the well once more.
These paragraphs are more telling that 'Hayek The Good, The Bad, The Ugly' of many years ago :
In 1978, Hayek, who had taken British citizenship as an émigré from fascist Austria, wrote a series of editorials supporting Thatcher’s call for an ‘end to immigration’ in advance of her election as prime minister.
To make his case, Hayek harked back to his native Vienna, where he was born in 1899, recalling the difficulties created when ‘large numbers of Galician and Polish Jews’ arrived from the East before the First World War and failed to integrate easily.
It was sad but true, Hayek wrote, that ‘however far modern man accepts in principle the ideal that the same rules should apply to all men, in fact he does concede it only to those whom he regards as similar to himself, and only slowly learns to extend the range of those he does accept as his likes.’
While far from absolute, Hayek’s suggestion by the 1970s that a shared culture or group identity was necessary for a functioning market order was a turn from what had previously been thought of as the blueprint for the neoliberal society — much more founded in a universalist notion of humans everywhere under the rule of law.
This new restrictionist attitude resonated with British neoliberals in particular, who always tended Tory in comparison to the libertarian tendencies of Americans. Recall that no less an opponent of non-white immigration than Enoch Powell was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and spoke at several of its meetings.
One of the novelties of the 1970s was that Hayek’s rhetoric of conservative values was combined with influences from a new philosophy — that of sociobiology, itself commingled with his previous interest in cybernetics, ethology, and system theory. Sociobiology was named in 1975 in the title of a book by Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. It held that individual human behaviour could be understood by the same evolutionary logics as animals and other organisms. We all sought to maximise the reproduction of our own genetic material. The fate of traits in humans could be understood the same way: selection pressures weed out the less useful traits while the more useful ones multiply.
...
I want to purchace the 'Nine Lives of Neoliberalism' but the cost is prohibitive for an Old Retired Leftist.
As Alan Moore once said, fascism is basically giving simple answers to complex problems. I can't find that quote at the moment, but this seems to sum it all up pretty nicely:
》I thought that this was worrying because retreats to infantilism are generally precursors to fascism; that desire for a simple solution to really complex problems. The desire to be told that this has all been done by the illuminati, the international banking Jewish banking conspiracy, the underground Democrat paedophile demons drinking children’s adrenochrome underneath the Comet Ping Pong Pizza restaurant in Washington DC. These are all comic book solutions to comic book problems. Donald Trump — The Donald — is a perfect comic book superhero come to save us from the equally ridiculous threat of whatever it was that he was worried about, [...]《
I'm inclined to think that they didn't get their ideas by perverting Hayek. Comic books and junk SF are far more likely.
You don't mention fascism at all, so I suppose the book doesn't either. Just that all that is not very liberal. Ok, it's not. But what is it, then?
The end of republics is nigh, even if they don't all turn out fascist.
There is an international banking conspiracy, headed by the troika of the Federal Reserve, the IMF and the World Bank. East Asians became rich because their central banks used to fund their economies. The IMF reformed the Japanese central bank ushering a lengthy period of economic stagnation. In the US, the banking system has its favorite recipe of expanding credit (creating roaring twenties or housing bubbles) and then tightening it. The rich then get bailed out and the middle class loses their real assets. But the conspirators, just like the alt right, are not well read. Alan Greenspan's favorite author is Ayn Rand.
«borderline racism (“the Christian west is the only creator of morals in the modern civilization”, p. 35)»
I am disappointed that our blogger is not beyond smearing by insinuation of proximity to racism and ethnicism (two completely different concepts too) a cultural ("social capital") argument. Even as I think that the claim of that argument is quite wrong.
How is it not ethnicist? I think most Westerners would view the claim by say Bin Laden or some other Islamists that only Arabs produce a worthwhile moral system in the world to be somewhat racist and insulting. Similarly i think most people would judge the argument that the West is the only source of argument to be quite "racist" or discriminative at the least
«the argument that the West is the only source of argument to be quite "racist" »
Apparently in your unrestrained fantasy "the West" is a race that includes USA latinos, finnish lapps, french jews, english tamils, italian arabs, german syrians, etc. :-)
«or discriminative at the least»
Whether it is western christian or west asian muslim or chinese post-feudal culture etc. that produced in the modern era better cultural artifacts in one specific area is a matter of judgement not of discrimination. Not all cultures are equally fertile in all areas. Unless the title "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" is your proof that Web was a racist :-).
I also think that "that only Arabs produce a worthwhile moral system in the world" has a very different scope and not just type subject from "the Christian west is the only creator of morals in the modern civilization” which is a much narrower claim.
Your comment seems to me to imply that you are an eager recipient of astutely worded smears and insinuations.
Thank you, definitely goes on my reading list. I am too squeamish to delve into that zoo of intellectual mutations myself, very happy someone took the cross for us sinners
Hi, I’ve just looked up this book and found there are two coming out with the same title, different tags. What are the primary differences between the two?
Case study of the absolute intellectual charlatanism that academics who talk about “neoliberalism” produce.
Could you give examples of these newsletters? I think you might want to give them a read.
Yes!
https://open.substack.com/pub/econdusk/p/what-it-means-to-be-a-libertarian
Critical Review: Hayek the Good, the Bad, the Ugly (Volume 25, Nos. 3-4, 2013) Paperback – January 1, 2013
by https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&field-author=Jeffery+Friedman&text=Jeffery+Friedman&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books (Editor)
Like the namedrop. I did a few interviews for CR years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20111007182942/cr-alumni.com/videos.html
The fraud happened because “Hayek’s bastards” despite all their pretenses to the contrary were not intellectuals nor people interested in ideas. There is no doubt left to the reader of this book that they were (as some of them self-congratulatorily called themselves) “intellectual entrepreneurs”. Their objective was to make money. It was not to have their ideas, which most of them, I believe, knew to be either unrealizable or false, accepted. A cynical reader might even say that they hoped that their ideas be never implemented because once brought into the real world such ideas would show their creators’ intellectual bankruptcy and rob them of permanent sources of money syphoned off from the feeble-minded tycoons and credulous public. The authors reviewed here are written of as a part of the modern Western intellectual history only because that history is in a decline and they are its most clear examples. Their true claim to fame is not to have forewarned unsuspecting public to the dangers of the looming apocalypses; it is to have accelerated intellectual decadence and to have converted intellectualism into pure money grubbing.
PS. One might compare in its otherworldliness alt-Right to various groupuscules of Trotskyists. There is some similarity in the fact that both worked out schemes they knew are not within the realm of the politically possible. But Trotskyists were truly dedicated to the ideas, while the alt-Right, in accord with the spirit of the time, cared only about money. This is a big difference.
So good thinking comes from removing any monetary incentive? Once that's been completely removed, epistemology and cognition can be trusted?
Right out of a commie’s asshole.
Some how I missed your revelatory comment!
Yours,
StephenKMackSD
How simple-minded commentary on Hayek. How “group thinking”. Don’t feel relaxed.
I’ll be back!
Quinn Slobodian:
‘Much of the media has framed the populist right as a backlash against neoliberalism – but they share common roots in the project to defend social hierarchies against the threat of equality’. https://tinyurl.com/4t5kxyh8
Resist Comrades, resist! The forces of evil have fckd the plebs over once more. Those poor sods just can't understand where their true interests lie.
Maybe we should adjust democracy just a lil' bit until they become reasonable again. Then we'll let them drink from the well once more.
One has to deserve The Truth after all.
And we don't want to lose ours.
These paragraphs are more telling that 'Hayek The Good, The Bad, The Ugly' of many years ago :
In 1978, Hayek, who had taken British citizenship as an émigré from fascist Austria, wrote a series of editorials supporting Thatcher’s call for an ‘end to immigration’ in advance of her election as prime minister.
To make his case, Hayek harked back to his native Vienna, where he was born in 1899, recalling the difficulties created when ‘large numbers of Galician and Polish Jews’ arrived from the East before the First World War and failed to integrate easily.
It was sad but true, Hayek wrote, that ‘however far modern man accepts in principle the ideal that the same rules should apply to all men, in fact he does concede it only to those whom he regards as similar to himself, and only slowly learns to extend the range of those he does accept as his likes.’
While far from absolute, Hayek’s suggestion by the 1970s that a shared culture or group identity was necessary for a functioning market order was a turn from what had previously been thought of as the blueprint for the neoliberal society — much more founded in a universalist notion of humans everywhere under the rule of law.
This new restrictionist attitude resonated with British neoliberals in particular, who always tended Tory in comparison to the libertarian tendencies of Americans. Recall that no less an opponent of non-white immigration than Enoch Powell was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and spoke at several of its meetings.
One of the novelties of the 1970s was that Hayek’s rhetoric of conservative values was combined with influences from a new philosophy — that of sociobiology, itself commingled with his previous interest in cybernetics, ethology, and system theory. Sociobiology was named in 1975 in the title of a book by Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. It held that individual human behaviour could be understood by the same evolutionary logics as animals and other organisms. We all sought to maximise the reproduction of our own genetic material. The fate of traits in humans could be understood the same way: selection pressures weed out the less useful traits while the more useful ones multiply.
...
I want to purchace the 'Nine Lives of Neoliberalism' but the cost is prohibitive for an Old Retired Leftist.
Best regards,
StephenKMackSD