The spiritual head of the Catholic Church and sovereign head of Vatican City, Pope Francis criticized war manufacturers and called for the end of violence around the world, paying particular attention to Gaza.

Pope Francis’ remarks from St. Peter’s Basilica focused on Bethlehem, the biblical birthplace of Jesus, speaking of the biblical story of Herod the Great who, according to the Bible, ordered the slaughter of all boys under the age of two in hopes of killing baby Jesus.

 

BACK TO THE HABERMAS APOLOGIST: 

Duncan Ivison is a Friend of The Conversation.

HE IS Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Sydney…

IVISON IS F&^KED IN THE HEAD!!!!!!

IVISON WRITES IN “THE CONVERSATION”:

 

Philosopher Raymond Geuss, for example, asks, “is ‘discussion’ really so wonderful?” For him, and other critics, “discourse”, does not, in fact, have an unchanging structure that enables us to discern universal rules we can live by. This is sheer assertion on Habermas’s part, or what Geuss calls the “soft nostalgic breeze of late liberalism”.

The force of the better argument appears perpetually deferred, if not drowned out, in the cacophony of our dysfunctional public sphere. Arguments for justice — from Alexei Navalny in Russia to the campaign for a Voice to Parliament in Australia – seem even less likely to carry the day than ever before.

 

F^%K!........ MENTIONING ALEXEI NAVALNY AND THE VOICE TO PARLIAMENT IN THE SAME SENTENTIAL DISCOURSE IS F&^KING CRAZY!  NAVALNY WAS WORKING FOR THE CIA, WHILE THE VOICE WAS AN ATTEMPT TO RECOGNISE THE PEOPLE WE’VE F^%KED SINCE INVADING THIS LAND IN 1788….

I REPEAT: Duncan Ivison IS F&^KED IN THE HEAD!!!!!!

 

BUT THIS IS THE DIRTY CESSPOOL WHERE HIGH PHILOSOPHY IS AT… HABERMAS HAS NEVER UNDERSTOOD THAT IN A PEOPLE — A DEMOCRACY OR WHATEVER — THERE ARE NASTY PEOPLE WHO WILL TRY TO ENSLAVE YOU OR KILL YOU IF YOU RESIST. HIS LEVEL OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCT IS SET ON “NICE” WITH DISCUSSION.

 

IVISON TELLS US: 

The first is what Habermas calls “discourse ethics”. The underlying idea is that the conditions required for successful communication between people prefigures a form of public reasoning that helps us make sense of the normative grounds of liberal democracy.

“Discourse” is a special form of rule-governed communication. It is oriented towards truth seeking and providing reasons to others that they could, in principle, accept. The “unforced force of the better argument”, as Habermas puts it, should carry the argumentative weight in discourse, not economic or political power.

THIS IS A UTOPIC MONSTROSITY, BECAUSE IT IS PHILOSOPHICALLY CORRECT ON THE MOON — BUT TOTALLY SILLY AND STUPID IN THE AVARICIOUS WESTERN SOCIAL CONSTRUCT, GEARED FOR WARS AND CONQUESTS. WE NEED BRAKES AND RED LINES! AND FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW FOR JUSTICE’S AND TRUTH'S SAKE.

WE ARE NASTY… WE ELECT NASTY PSYCHOS TO DO OUR “DIRTY WORK” WHILE WE, AS WESTERN BOURGEOIS AND PHOLOSHONERIES (PHILOSOPHERS OF BOAT BILGES LIKE IVISON) ENJOY THE SPOILS BY DISCUSSING THE IMPORTANCE OF GRISTLE IN A WHAGU STEAKKI…

YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. ISRAELIS ARE KILLING WOMEN AND CHILDREN WITH INTENT: THIS IS GENOCIDE.

END OF DISCUSSION…..

 

GUS LEONISKY

OLD FOOL, CARTOONIST SINCE 1951....

 

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The Genocide Democrats: Max Blumenthal speaks at WNDC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS3HOEss9rk

 

At the Woman's National Democratic Club in Washington DC on March 7, 2024, The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal discussed the crisis within the Democratic Party as the party grassroots revolts against President Joe Biden's vehement support for Israel's rampage in the besieged Gaza Strip, where at least 30,000 have been killed to date - mostly women and children. Blumenthal points the finger at the Democratic Party establishment for crushing any and all iterations of antiwar politics, and illustrates how its most prominent figures have been bought off by the Israel lobby.

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFp300_cSiQ

EU Hypocrisy about Gaza and Haiti EXPOSED | The Monthly Daly | February 2024

 

This months, so many important meetings happened in the EU parliament that two parts are necessary to cover Clare's and Mike's speeches. First, Clare Daly and Mick Wallace called out the EU parliament's agenda stacked with everything... but Gaza. Watch the two calling out the whole EU parliament time and again to remind them of their double standards and the utter disregard of the worst humanitarian disaster of our time. The two also clearly criticised the EU's approach toward the unrests in Haiti and told their colleagues that what Haiti needs is less interference, not more!

 

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The ideas of Peter Dutton and Jürgen Habermas, the government shifts ground on intergenerational politics, a fact check on law’n’order fearmongers, and How the American left is becoming more stupid. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, podcasts, reports and other media on current economic and political issues.

Economics

Even the IMF wants to see the economics textbooks re-written. Expect electricity prices to fall, provided we don’t go nuclear. The government finally realises that it’s wrong to keep asking young Australians to support well-off older Australians.

Politics

A fellow Queenslander exposes Dutton’s plan to Make Australia Afraid Again. When will the law’n’order mob admit that crime rates are falling?

Education

The reading wars. Trends on STEM. Reflections on private and single-sex schools. Sound advice from a former Liberal minister on closing the urban-bush education gap. How the American left is becoming more stupid.

Public ideas

All you need to know about economics in a short article, supported by an 11-minute video. Why are evangelical Christians attracted to political strongmen (Hint: it has nothing to do with the Sermon on the Mount). Introducing, or re-introducing, Jürgen Habermas.

https://johnmenadue.com/how-the-american-left-is-becoming-more-stupid-weekly-roundup/

 

Public ideasAll you need to know about economics

Between them the ABC’s Gareth Hutchens and Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang cover a vast landscape of economic theory, in a post by Hutchens reviewing a recently-published documentaryon Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

It’s far more than a review. Before getting on to MMT, Hutchens reminds us that the discipline of economics is far from settled. To get that message across his post includes a link to an animated video by Ha-Joon Chang explaining the fluidity of economic thinking. It’s a masterpiece of explanatory conciseness – all in 11 minutes. It includes a description of nine streams of economics, captured in a 9 X 6 matrix, based on their different assumptions about society and human behavior, and their classification systems.

This is Hutchens’ way of reminding us that it’s wise “to stay humble and open-minded to different perspectives”, because MMT is one of those different perspectives.

He goes on to describe the basic ideas of MMT, emphasizing that just like monetary authorities around the world, MMT’s advocates are concerned to keep inflation in check, but in a more fine-grained way than as applied by central banks. Much of his article is about the details of how MMT works to create money, and about how, during the Covid-19 pandemic, our government, de-facto, was applying MMT.

He gets to the nub of MMT where he goes into the politics of budgeting. MMT counters the idea that voters, seeking improved public services, should be shrugged off with excuses such as “we’ve run out of money”. Rather:

[MMT] wants politicians to be forced to explain to voters why they don't want to dedicate more resources to helping people get the things they want, rather than being able to hide behind myths about supposed federal budget constraints.

That’s because MMT does not follow the usual fiscal process, where governments start by seeing how much fiscal capacity they have, and then rations out funding to competing programs – as would now be happening in the government’s Expenditure Review Committee.

Rather, its staring point is to consider what voters want, and then to assess if we have the physical and human capital resources to fill those needs. Provided we have those resources, allocating funds to pay for them won’t be inflationary. Hutchens quotes a MMT advocate Tim Hext:

The main idea behind MMT is a central bank like the RBA can create as much of its own currency as it wants. This means the federal government's budget is merely an accounting entry. The government can spend more than it drains via taxes, without needing to borrow from the financial sector.

In this focus on real resources, rather than on money, MMT brings fiscal and monetary policy together and it brings some hard physical reality to governments. If Whitlam’s cabinet had had an MMT mindset, it would have asked how long it takes to train a teacher before over-spending on education, and it would have had the public service assess the capacity of the construction industry before it splashed out on its ambitious urban and regional development program. That wouldn’t have reduced the government’s achievements in these areas, but it would have kept inflation in check.

We could imagine MMT’s application in relation to housing policy. The government is clearly concerned to see more houses, including public housing, being built, but is constrained by fiscal and monetary settings. If it goes into deficit the RBA will respond with higher interest rates, making housing less affordable. An MMT approach would see it assessing the extent of unemployed or under-employed resources relating to housing (how many skilled joiners are driving Ubers or stacking supermarket shelves, do our forest industries have the capacity to provide wood? and so on), and allocate funds accordingly.

Sounds simple, and it is, but it would require significantly different institutional mindsets and a different political environment. Monetary authorities would have to abandon the notion that labour is some fungible commodity that is linked to inflation by some simple equation. That is not to suggest that the RBA is so crude in its economic understanding, but its public statements and the media’s interpretation of those statements have ingrained in policymakers’ minds that there is a simple tradeoff between the unemployment rate and inflation. And politically, governments, opposition parties and media would have to overcome their obsession with deficits and debt, and take the attitude “it’s only money”.

Why are evangelical Christians attracted to political strongmen?

In the 2020 US elections 84 percent of people described by the Pew Research Center as “white evangelicals” voted for Trump, while voters of different Christian faiths were much more balanced, and voters of non-Christian faith and of no faith strongly supported Biden.

Similarly Americans describing themselves as evangelical Christians have tended to valorize Putin, in spite of his murderous brutality, while distancing themselves from social democrat political candidates and office holders, whose values and policies align much more closely with Christian social teaching.

On the ABC Religion and Ethics Report Rev Mike Bird of Ridley Theological College describes this phenomenon and explains the reasoning that leads some Christian believers to throw their support behind political thugs: Putin’s appeal among US evangelicals.

It’s because Putin doesn’t allow Russians to hold gay pride parades.

OK, it’s a little more complex, but the west’s tolerance of individuals’ sexual preferences has a lot to do with it. That tolerance is symptomatic of societies that have drifted into secularism and godlessness, away from “Christian” traditions.

In a short essay on the ABC site – Is the enemy of their enemy really their friend? Why American evangelicals’ veneration of Vladimir Putin is so dangerous – Bird explains how to evangelicals Putin is the defender of Russian Orthodoxy and its values, in opposition to secularist Europe and a progressive president like Biden. While Putin holds the line in Russia, Trump is expected to do so in the USA.

 As Bird writes “’Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality’ — a motto of Tsarist Russia — is easily translatable into the American vernacular as ‘God, Trump, and MAGA’.”

Bird is co-editor, with Tom Wright (also of Ridley College) of Jesus and the powers: Christian political witness in an age of totalitarian terror and dysfunctional democracies.

Who is Jürgen Habermas?

Jürgen Habermas is known among scholars as a prolific moral philosopher who has influenced our ideas on politics, the law, economics, and sociology. He has been closely associated with the discipline known as Critical Theory, associated with the Frankfurt School of philosophy. Some have drawn on the ideas of the Frankfurt school to go down the bleak and nihilistic path of postmodernism, for example to develop the idea of critical race theory. Habermas, by contrast, has held on to Enlightenment values and is a passionate believer in the power of rational communication to create a just and fair society.

One of Habermas’s most noteworthy contributions has been to analyse the relationship between everyday colloquial language and the language of philosophers. The relationship is fluid, characterized by interdependence, and the use of language and the nature of public discourse influence our social and political arrangements.

Writing in The Conversation – Jürgen Habermas is a major public intellectual. What are his key ideas? – Duncan Ivison helps us understand two of his two main contributions.

The first is what Ivison summarizes as “The unforced force of the better argument”. It’s an apt reminder that the rules we apply to public discourse, and our willingness to engage in public discourse, shape public policy – an important consideration in a time when the world is awash with fake news, lies, bullshit and scare campaigns, and when social media is largely free of guiding norms.

The second and related contribution is about deliberative democracy – a way of reconciling the possibly conflicting values of equality and liberty, which lie at the core of long-standing left-right conflicts. This reconciliation should take place in the public sphere, where the powerful can be called to account.

https://www.ianmcauley.com/saturdays/sat240323/week24032304.html

 

THE ARTICLE IN "THE CONVERSATION" IS ASTONISHINGLY BAD...

 

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