Skip to main content

Egypt

Many things come to mind when I think of the Egyptian Revolution. There are a few that stick out and I haven't heard much discussion regarding them, so I thought I'd bring them up.

Many reports have mentioned the neighborhood patrols people have initiated. This doesn't sit well with conventional wisdom. It should. To be quite simple, we don't need a police force. The police are there to protect the privileges of the ruling class. Case closed. Of course there are individual members of the police force who are sympathetic and will join the people, as has happened in Egypt, but as an institution they are not necessary in a truly democratic state. Arm the people. If my neighbor isn't safe, neither am I.

That brings me to my next point. Many believe most of us on the left are anti-gun and soft on crime. Untrue. I would imagine these patrols and checkpoints would be quite worthless without guns. They are needed for defense, both of individuals and of gains made by the masses as a whole. And we should also be clear regarding crime. There is a huge difference between understanding crime, its institutionalization and its relationship to poverty, and justifying it. The difference has been blurred, mostly by right-wing propagandists, but activist academic types on the left ferociously obsessed with identity politics have played their part as well. We protect our personal property. We are concerned with the means of production, the "property" that gives the few their undue privilege and influence over the many. The lumpen scum that serve as the foot soldiers of reaction deserve every inch of fiery wrath someone protecting their home or small shop can give them.

The coverage on IDOM has been excellent.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I’m somewhat familiar with the story, but haven’t seen the tv series “the plot against America.” Is it any good? I’ll admit I have doubts that will be difficult to overcome. My guess is it’s a well stylized but historically simplified attempt to frame international liberalism, particularly the US dominated post war order, as something deeper than what it has become- a value championed almost exclusively by the cosmopolitan elite and global corporations. I also predict that the entire post WW1 context (three months involvement and almost 120,000 Americans dead, split evenly between fighting and the flu pandemic) is lost to Lindbergh and his anti-Semitism. Is this accurate? “The man in the high castle,” another alternative history book made into a tv series that I actually did watch, missed an opportunity to dig into American militarism by not really explaining why so many high level American military members joined the Nazis. (We were supposed to believe it’s just because the Germans wo
4 comments
Read more
  I voted for Joe Biden and hope he wins. I’m also alarmed at the increasingly transparent alliance between the Democratic Party and influential sectors of corporate America, namely media conglomerates and the technology industry. (Their relationship reminds me of the Republican Party and the energy industry.) It’s true there are conservative media outlets that are not friendly to Democrats, but it’s far less certain how objective the “paper of record” and other “serious” media would be to a post-Trump and post-COVID Biden administration that is politically and ascetically their peer. (I would say we are at a point of competing Pravdas, but that would be a slander against the Soviet newspaper’s pre-Stalinist period when it was a battleground of ideas.) Perhaps even more damning is the Democratic Party’s relationship to the technology industry, particularly when companies like Twitter and Facebook have shown they are prepared to unilaterally decide what’s true and what’s false. Not many
2 comments
Read more
State power (that is the ability of the state to use brute force) has increased beyond any somewhat comparable moment in history, yet the state’s ability to everyday govern has decreased to historically poor levels. People (across the political spectrum) typically make sense of this through various conspiracy theories, some more attached to reality than others. (Many are nakedly conspiratorial, others have elements of structural analyses, usually done by trained post-structuralists of course.) America is ground zero, but this is not exclusively an American phenomenon. (China is a possible counter-example, though their competence is both exaggerated and relies heavily on the brute force part of the state.)  This creates a stalemate of sorts. The state lacks legitimacy, but also can’t be replaced. You can add Ross Douthat’s Laschian critique of societal “decadence” (drift may be a better word) to this context. His analysis is largely correct in my view and he’s also right that it’s relat
Post a Comment
Read more