Socialdem. 21st Century

For those of you who want a good list of critical analyses and critiques of Postmodernism, now updated.General Critiques Bawer, Bruce. 2012. The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind. Broadside Books, New York.Dennett, Daniel. 1998. “Postmodernism and Truth,” Butterflies and Wheels http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2003/postmodernism-and-truth/Detmer, David. 2003. Challenging Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Politics of Truth. Humanity Books,...

At least in terms of public rhetoric as described here and here. It is difficult to see how he could do both this and cut taxes (a promise of his) without driving the US into deep, deep deficits.We can also turn to Chapter 12 of Trump’s Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (New York, 2015). I am not sure how much weight one should attach to this supposedly ghostwritten book, which Trump signed off on. But for what it is worth we find the book praising infrastructure projects as a...

Bravo, regressive left.[embedded content]It doesn’t matter of course that many people who are not white like good English grammar, or indeed that in many non-Western languages spoken all over the world good grammar and good standards of expression are supported by non-White people.Of course, it would be but a short step from this dubious illogic to say that scientific truths – such as, say, the germ theory of disease? – are viciously racist and just a big conspiracy to oppressive the Third...

No, I regret to inform you it is not because of his criticisms of Israel, or the recent anti-Semitism hysteria in the Labour party.It is because: (1) he is in favour of Britain remaining in the EU and has become pro-EU (see here);(2) he is in favour of unending, catastrophic mass immigration into Britain (see here and here).(3) he is in favour of Turkey joining the EU, a measure which would be a catastrophe for Europe (see here). These things are becoming politically toxic all over Europe,...

From Eleanor Marx Aveling’s essay “The Woman Question” (1886): “They forget that by capitalist employers this very sex-helplessness of woman is only taken into account with the view of lowering the general rate of wages. Again, there is no more a natural calling of woman than there is a natural law of capitalistic production, or a natural limit to the amount of the labourer’s product that goes to him for means of subsistence. That in the first case, woman’s calling is supposed to be only the...

More brilliant quotations from Postmodernist scam artists by Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioural scientist and YouTube personality.[embedded content]It is well known that Foucault admitted he had to have 10% incomprehensible gibberish in his writing to be “taken seriously” in French Poststructuralist circles and in French intellectual life. Even worse, Bourdieu put it at 20%.[embedded content]

An anecdote here told to Hitchens by Huw Wheldon as related by an old man who (supposedly) had worked in the reading room of the British Museum in late 19th century and who, when pressed, remembered details of Karl Marx’s time there.It sounds rather apocryphal, but, still, funny stuff.

I’ve now had the time to look at this recent brouhaha in more detail.Ken Livingstone’s original BBC radio interview is here.Listen to it carefully.First, let us examine the suspended Labour MP Naz Shah’s original comment, which can be seen here. Obviously that is absurd, unrealistic, and anti-Israel, but as anti-Israel remarks go, there are far, far worse things amongst the viciously anti-Semitic elements of the minority community from which Naz Shah comes, who no doubt increasingly form part...

And they don’t make UK Labour party politicians like him anymore.These videos are from 2013:[embedded content][embedded content]And while we are on this subject, this was also one of the few issues on which Thatcher was right:[embedded content][embedded content]

That might as well be the name of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the “free” trade agreement currently being negotiated between the unelected EU and the United States, given the new details here, with the agreement set to allow corporations the right to sue governments for social, economic or environment regulation that causes them “loss of profits” in secret anti-democratic tribunals.Just another reason why the people of Europe should abolish the rotten EU, and why...