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Following the news delivered by traditional media can be surprisingly educative. Don’t believe me?
Read on.
The still above comes straight from a short video Blockade Australia posted yesterday in their Twitter account. Those protests were in the news this week. Sharon, 62 – the lady speaking – shot the video herself. Go to their tweet to watch it.
There are good reasons why I should not write this post.
Frankly, I don’t like writing about myself: I’m a boring, unremarkable old bloke. Moreover, even if for some unfathomable reason readers had any curiosity about me: it makes no sense for anonymous bloggers to give personal details.
As importantly, I’m sure this post will not endear me with some readers or gain me any new friends among modern Leftists. In fact, it’s likely to positively incense many and it will certainly not sit well with the liberal/Leftish.
And yet, here we are.
So, as Yanks say, here goes nothing.
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White, male, old, educated, upwardly mobile, relatively affluent Americans of a progressive, identitarian and Liberal-Leftish persuasion are excited: the racial composition of the American population is changing in a direction they hope will make the Democratic Party politically hegemonic in their country. Propelled by demography, over there the march of progress seems inexorable.
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As a good male identitarian Leftist you are intent on promoting gender equality, breaking stereotypes, combating toxic masculinity. You may – or may not, who knows – read learned journals on that subject, but you certainly read columnists in the left-leaning press promoting third wave feminism; and you certainly watch and agree wholeheartedly and applaud that kind of highly-educated, upper-middle-class feminists’ interventions on TV debate shows and then support them in subsequent Twitter battles to the death.
In other words, as good ally of women, you do your bit for the revolution, but want to do more. And you are searching for other means to contribute.
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No comments.
Update:
22-08-2021. Over the years, the US supplied Afghanistan with lots of military hardware, including “Blackhawk helicopters, scout attack helicopters, and ScanEagle military drones, light attack aircraft, and military transport planes”. Now that the Taliban is in charge the fear -- understandably -- is that the Taliban might turn those weapons against their makers.
That concern may be overblown, explains Tracey Shelton, because “the fact that our equipment breaks down so often is a life-saver here”.
The best sales pitch ever.
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The Australian Government could not be any more inept if they tried:
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That’s the letter a group of Afghan asylum seekers, former security staff at the Australian Embassy in Kabul, received from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The author suggests the letter was sent on behalf of the Minister, Marise Payne, and with her knowledge.
After informing the recipients that they are not eligible for certification under visa policy, the letter explains that the Australian Government has allocated 3,000 places for Afghan nationals, among them those who “have links to Australia”.
It politely suggests the recipient to investigate their options fully or contact a migration agent.
More sensitive readers may not appreciate its darkness, but as a cruel joke, it’s genius. No wonder the Taliban won.
Maybe things are different elsewhere, but in Australia you can hardly read the news or watch TV news reports without hearing about how hard it is for local businesses to recruit staff. And you hear those tales of woe whether unemployment is high or low, in good or in bad times.
After a while, if one pays attention, one realises that kind of story seems to follow a template or a script.
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I must admit that I wrote this post with hesitancy. There are at least two reasons for that.
Firstly, because I was not elected Great Inquisitor and Defender of the Faith by my fellow orthodox Marxists. As readers should know, we members of the All-Powerful Secret Orthodox Marxist Monolith of Fanatical Intransigence are obsessed with repressing a rag tag band of enlightened commentators bravely fighting for the good of humankind against our evil ways. So my self-appointed position is not specially strong: I lack the legitimacy that one such election (particularly a unanimous one, as you would expect from orthodox Marxists) conveys.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848).
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Well, that’s an unusual, even odd, question, isn’t it?
Indulge me.
Prince Harry has copped a pasting in the British media for his new job as “chief impact officer” with Silicon Valley startup BetterUp.
His role, and the company’s business model, has been called the “latest expression of woke capitalism” in venerable conservative magazine The Spectator. Other critics have chimed in, deriding the “Prince of Woke Capital” for “surfing a wave of wokery towards an economic abyss”.
Ridiculing people and corporations for being “woke” is, of course, a relatively easy sport for pundits on the right of the political spectrum. Harry’s critics have a point that woke capitalism involves vapid political correctness, even if they are missing its more serious ramifications for social and economic inequality.
First, let’s recap the meaning of “woke” and “woke capitalism”.
The use of the term “woke” by African Americans has been traced back at least to the 1920s, though Oxford English Dictionary researchers say its meaning as being alert to systemic issues of injustice and discrimination emerged from the American civil rights movement in the 1960s.
It became more widely known with the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 (following the acquittal of Florida man George Zimmerman for shooting dead African-American teen Trayvon Martin).
As academics Elaine Richardson and Alice Ragland explain in a 2018 article, BLM activists used the hashtag #staywoke to urge fellow African Americans “to remain aware of what is going on around you and in society, more specifically, to remain politically aware or conscious”.
It didn’t take long for “woke” to enter mainstream culture. In 2016 the American Dialect Society declared it the slang word of the year. They defined “woke” as being “conscious, aware or enlightened, especially with regards to matters of social justice and racial inequity”.
Read more: Woke washing: what happens when marketing communications don't match corporate practice
In entering the mainstream, though, the meaning of “woke” was soon distorted. Those on the right of politics co-opted it as a term of derision – akin to “social justice warrior” – for people (especially white people) who bragged about their self-righteous positions on political issues.
What started as a serious call to political consciousness was manipulated to become a way of dismissing anyone who professed vaguely progressive views.
This wasn’t limited to individuals. Corporations too could be chastised for being woke.
In 2018, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote about the trend of corporations and chief executives aligning themselves to progressive social concerns, such as immigration and gay and transgender rights, while they continued to push their own economic “self-interest on tax policy and corporate stinginess in paychecks”.
The term “woke capitalism” soon came to express the approach of companies who claim a “social licence to operate” through their public advocacy on social issues, without affecting the economic status quo.
Read more: Swollen executive pay packets reveal the limits of corporate activism
What has all of this got to do with Prince Harry and BetterUp?
Let’s clarify what BetterUp is.
Media reports have described the San Francisco-based company as a startup “that provides employee coaching and mental health assistance”.
The company itself describes its business as being about “changing the world by bringing the power of transformation to each and every person”. Announcing the prince’s appointment, chief executive Alexi Robichaux declared:
“Prince Harry will expand on the work he’s been doing for years, as he educates and inspires our community and champions the importance of focusing on preventative mental fitness and human potential worldwide.”
The title of chief impact officer – or “chimpo” – comes from the not-profit sector. There’s no one accepted job decription, but such roles generally involve working to ensure an organisation is actually achieving its stated vision and mission.
How does this apply to BetterUp? That’s unclear.
Remove all the marketing babble and this is a company that exists to make a profit. Its core business appears to be an app selling professional coaching services. Its promise is to make people more “positive, engaged, and connected to every part of their lives”, both personal and professional.
In reality, the chief impact the prince is likely to have is attracting publicity for the app – helping BetterUp’s bottom line, and Harry’s bank balance.
The way in which BetterUp has wrapped its reality in the language of social concern and human progress bears all the worst hallmarks of “woke capitalism”.
Its business model is all about individual empowerment. This shows no apparent awareness of the need to address systemic social and economic inequities. It would also have us believe we can all “make it” in that world, if we just get the right mental attitude.
Yet the connection between entrenched economic inequalities and myriad social problems including mental illness are well-documented. As the World Health Organization concludes, mental disorders are shaped by social and economic factors, with inequality being chief among them.
Over the past 30 years, according to the United Nations World Social Report for 2020, income inequality has become worse in most developed countries.
The irony is that Harry epitomises this inequality, and the limitations of meritocracy. He is the very embodiment of unearned wealth and privilege. Would he have gotten this job except for the family he was born into? Unlikely. How much is he being paid to push the idea that anyone can achieve success? BetterUp isn’t saying. Nor is he.
So while it easy to agree with criticisms of Prince Harry’s new “job” as an expression of woke capitalism, this cannot simply be dismissed as misplaced political correctness.
Inequality is the problem. Woke capitalism is not the solution.
Carl Rhodes, Professor of Organization Studies, University of Technology Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Last month Matt Taibbi (author, journalist, and podcaster) sent the hornets into a fit of fury with “Marcuse-Anon: Cult of The Pseudo-Intellectual” an angry piece on Herbert Marcuse, a (or the) sacred cow of the identitarian Left.
And no one was more evidently furious than Jonathan Feldman (docent at the Department of Economic History, Stockholm University), who replied with “Matt Taibbi, Herbert Marcuse and the Journalistic Appropriation of Philosophy”.
Although I sympathise with Taibbi (yes, I ain’t no fan of Marcuse and I’m even less favorably disposed to educated, relatively affluent, upwardly mobile identitarian Leftists – which Feldman seems to champion) I am sorry to say neither side covered itself in glory in this brouhaha.
By coincidence, however, current Australian affairs offer a good opportunity to illustrate where Marcuse has valuable things to say and to start my comment on that controversy.
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Last week ABC reported on federal Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton’s intention to officially declare the neo-Nazi Sonnenkrieg Division a terrorist organisation. Currently, the official list of terrorist organisations contains 27 groups, all of them apparently fundamentalist Islamic in ideological orientation.
After some fifty years of relentless “neoliberal” onslaught, unions still make a difference for Australian workers.
You don’t need to take my word for that. According to the latest ABS release on trade union membership, “median weekly earnings for employees who were trade union members in their main job were $1,450 per week”: $350 (or 32%) more than their non-union counterparts.
With only one exception (salespeople), that holds for staff ranging from managerial and white collar down to blue collar workers. Indeed, for community and personal service workers the difference is a whopping 60%.
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Before talking about something, it’s always a good idea to understand what is it one is talking about. That applies to everything, the much-talked about UBI included.
It’s not clear, however, that people talking about the UBI really understand what it is.
So, let’s try that.
UBI stands for Universal Basic Income. “Basic income” refers to “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement”.
“Universal” highlights something present in that definition: all members of a community are entitled to the UBI. In Australia that would mean that the Government regularly pays every citizen/resident an amount of money – presumably equal – no strings attached.
Last but not least, implicit is the idea that the UBI is permanent.
By itself this definition raises some evident questions (for example: How much money those individuals would be paid? Where is that money coming from?). They are important but the answers to them depend on many things, including what money is. So, we’ll bypass them.
