• KommandoGZD@lemmygrad.ml
    5·
    2 years ago

    Still on the Shock Doctrine audiobook I posted about some time ago. Gotta say it gets better after the initial wave of anti-communism in the first chapters. It’s generally a fairly good book and covers a lot of ground. It’s just - and I can’t say it any other way - Naomi Klein is a dumbass. I’m sorry, but how the hell can you write a book like that and still not only refuse to draw the proper conclusions, but spout the same anti-communist nonsense as the people the book is criticizing?

    She’s correctly identifiying the conditions under which the liberal ‘welfare states’/Keynesianism she keeps harping on about (‘threat’ of the USSR/socialist movements), she’s also correctly identifiying the effect the fall of the USSR had on those welfare states - their ongoing dismantling. Lady, these two things are connected, it isn’t some fucking coincidence social democracies fall into neoliberal hell every god damn time, as this book aptly points out, so how the fuck do you still ramble on and on about muh Keynes. It doesn’t work.

    My god, it’s just infuriating how close and yet how far she is from getting it. Like Chomsky really, just even worse.

    Edit: I also can’t get over her equating Deng and the Dengist reforms with Yeltsin and constantly portraying the Tiananmen protests as result of ‘corporatist’ shock therapy by the CPC. Yeltsin caused 70mio Russians to fall below the poverty line, Deng’s reforms lifted almost a billion Chinese out of poverty. How the fuck are these in any way comparable?

    • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.mlM
      4·
      2 years ago

      I had this same experience reading Vincent Bevins - the jakarta method recently. I can’t get over how these ppl can learn about all the the terrible things capitalist countries have done to the developing world, yet still remain anticommunist, and still believe all the lies their country tells them about AES.

      It kinda throws their whole scholarship into question, and makes you wonder if anything they say has merit, if they can so easily uncritically accept anticommunism. I’m almost done with reading these ppl because of the chance I might be misinformed by them.

    • Makan@lemmygrad.mlOP
      1·
      2 years ago

      “Edit: I also can’t get over her equating Deng and the Dengist reforms with Yeltsin and constantly portraying the Tiananmen protests as result of ‘corporatist’ shock therapy by the CPC. Yeltsin caused 70mio Russians to fall below the poverty line, Deng’s reforms lifted almost a billion Chinese out of poverty. How the fuck are these in any way comparable?”

      Yeah, this annoys me.

  • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
    4·
    2 years ago

    Decided to let my brain relax a little with some “chewing gum” - namely some Warhammer 40k novels. Are they good literature? Not really. Are they entertaining? Yes.

  • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.mlM
    3·
    2 years ago

    Currently reading The Divide by Jason Hickel. Probably the best introduction to the inequality between countries I’ve read. You could easily give this book to liberals for an introduction to unequal exchange, and how the imperialist countries / the world bank and IMF use debt and other tools to feed off the poorer countries.