Sunday, July 19, 2009
Os rituais do povo nacirema
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Miguel Madeira
em
1:46 PM
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Etiquetas: temas algo peculiares
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Proibir os fascistas?
Eu acho que essa proibição deveria desaparecer; defendo isso sobretudo por razões de principio, mas também há um forte argumento prático contra a proibição do "fascismo": não existe uma definição mais ou menos consensual do que seja "fascismo"; veja-se que os historiadores e politólogos (?) nem conseguem chegar a acordo sobre se carradas de regimes foram "fascistas" (Salazar foi fascista? Franco? Dollfuss? Perón? Nasser?...); e no discurso político "vulgar" o termo é usado a respeito de tudo e de nada. Até o PCP é "(social-)fascista" para os maoístas, p.ex. (tal como nos anos 20 os social-democratas eram também "social-fascistas" para o Komintern).
Assim, uma proibição de organizações de ideologia fascista será quase impossivel de aplicar se tentar congir a uma definição estrita de "fascismo"; e se usar uma definição lata de "fascismo" pode dar origem a proibições completamente arbitrárias, de acordo com o que os juízes de serviço entenderem por "fascismo".
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
11:34 PM
8
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Honduras - a (actual) oposição conseguirá derrubar o governo?
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
11:00 PM
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O que o povo das honduras pensa afinal (cont.)
The nationwide survey — which was done after Zelaya was sent into forced exile in a military coup — shows Zelaya with 46 percent favorable and 44 unfavorable, compared to 30 favorable and 49 unfavorable for Micheletti.
Earlier findings from the same poll were released to The Associated Press by Gallup after La Prensa, a leading Honduran newspaper, published some of the results on Thursday. They showed that 46 percent of Hondurans opposed Zelaya's removal, 41 percent approved of it and 13 percent were unsure or declined to answer.
The face-to-face survey of 1,204 adults in all but two states showed Hondurans evenly divided on Zelaya himself, close to findings of a similar poll four months ago in which positive views outpaced negative by 4 percentage points.
The survey also asked Hondurans whether they felt Zelaya's removal was justified because he had pushed to add a question on a national ballot about whether to have a constitutional assembly, which the nation's highest court had ruled to be unconstitutional. Forty-one percent of respondents said this did justify his removal, while 28 percent said it didn't and 31 percent were unsure or declined to answer.
The survey was done from June 30 to July 4 and had an error margin of 2.8 percentage points, according to CID-Gallup, which is based in Costa Rica.
Entretanto, o recolher obrigatório foi re-imposto.
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
5:26 PM
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Os méritos democrátios do comunismo
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
10:50 AM
1 comentários
A esquerda, a direita e o Estado
The Left, the Pseudoleft, and the State, por Alderson Warm-Fork:
[U]nder normal (i.e. non-revolutionary conditions), people who notice that society is grossly unfair and a lot of people are being made very unhappy, naturally gravitate around the state. They write letters, they present petitions, they announce initiatives. They struggle and then eventually a politician of their camp gets into the position to deliver a rousing speech about how they will mend the world and help all the poor needy X’s, and they feel themselves to have scored a great victory. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the problems never seem to dry up.Now I’m not saying this is all entirely useless: I’d rather live in a class society that’s been adjusted to make it less obviously nasty, than in one that hasn’t. And it’s also not to suggest that this happens all separately from the ‘real action’, of people really fighting for themselves, solving their own problems, resisting their own oppression. Indeed, precisely what makes things confusing is that there isn’t a clear line between the two, because the pseudoleft is endlessly and insistently chasing after this ‘real left’ to line up beside them (until the end of term).
(...)
‘Real leftism’ (which I say tongue-in-cheek) is anti-state (e.g. Marxism). Because of course the state isn’t a great thing: it’s not nice to have people running around who are allowed to hit you but who you’re not allowed to hit back, it’s not nice to have people enforcing laws onto what you and your friends are trying to do privately. It’s certainly not nice being surveilled, bombed, locked up or sent to war.
This is something that ‘the right’ is quite happy to affirm, and a key part of their ideological strength. But the idea that the right-wing supports freedom or choice is rather undermined by the fact that pretty much every single other organ of repression in society gets their enthusiastic support (family authority, religious authority, educational authority, traditional authority, racial hierarchies, sexual discrimination, prejudice against the deviant, etc. etc.)
(...)
So the mainstream right, reflecting the mainstream left, is ‘anti-state’ in the sense of wanting the state to calm down, back off, and do as little as possible (but still wanting it to perform it’s core functions, of violently maintaining injustice, as vigorously and efficiently as possible). To their perception, everything is fine (because they don’t see or don’t mind the various dimensions of oppression that permeate class society), and so these ‘lefties’ who are introducing endless new government initiatives are doing so gratuitously.
(...)
The marginal right, on the other hand – the ‘far right’ or ‘extreme right’ – goes further: from seeing the state’s measures to counteract oppression as oppressive (in which there’s a grain of truth), they see the very process of counter-acting oppression, in any form, social, cultural, personal, as a threat. And against this they enthusiastically embrace the state. This is quite natural and even, in a way, logical: the state’s raison d’etre is to maintain and defend oppression, and so its natural vocation is to smash any resistance to oppression with massive violence.
(...)
We have an oppressive system, and we have an organ of force that functions to maintain it. We have a basic division between those who have twigged that there’s some oppressin’ goin’ on (‘the left’ in the broadest sense), and would like it to stop now, please, and those who don’t mind too much, actually, it makes things more interesting (‘the right’). Now, it would seem intuitively that the former should dislike and distrust the state, and the latter should be quite keen on it.But no! Instead, there’s a hilarious reversal. Under non-revolutionary conditions (which is the great majority of the time), the great majority of the ‘lefties’ find themselves cosying up to the state, asking it to grant their wishes of freedom and equality, and having to forget or say only quietly that the state is the central organ of class society. And in reaction, the great majority of the ‘rightists’ occupy themselves by clamouring against the state and its octopus-like reach, demanding and defending an ‘individual freedom’ rendered largely meaningless through their support for every other form of hierarchy and control.
Only at the fringes, watching this comic inversion and muttering sullenly about ‘the coming revolution’ or ‘the coming race war’, are there people with the attitudes we predicted: lefties who want to get rid of the state and righties who want it to absorb everything and destroy everything else.
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
12:04 AM
0
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Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Incentivar o casamento?
When divorce is the wiser option, por Johan Hari:
At first glance, the sociological evidence shows that the kids of broken homes or single parents are more likely to drop out of school, slip into crime, and become drug addicts than children whose parents stay together. So the solution is, to Cameron, obvious: keep parents together using the tax code and these problems will slowly be reduced. Stop Jimmy's mum and dad splitting, and Jimmy will be more likely to stay in school, on the right side of the law, and off drugs.
A major study has just shown that this is based on a simple misunderstanding of the evidence. Professor Kelly Musick and Dr Ann Meier of Cornell University have carried out a study[1] of children whose parents stay together for the sake of the kids. We all know some: parents who can't stand each other, but have made a hard-headed decision to stay together nonetheless. They are exactly the kind of people who would be glued back together by Cameron's policies if they succeeded in their goal.
It turns out their children do worse than any other group – including those of divorcees or single mums. If you are raised by arguing parents who stayed together only for you, then you are 33 per cent more likely to become a binge-drinking teen than if you have a single parent, for example. Having parents locked in live-in combat damages children more than having separated parents, or just one single parent – and the damage lasts well into adulthood. The offspring are more likely to have bad marriages themselves, and more likely to have children at a very young age.
It makes sense. Would Jimmy rather have a happy mum and dad who live apart, or depressed, stressed, angry parents sharing a bed?
So Cameron's first glance at the figures turns out, then, to be wrong. He was comparing divorcees and single parents to happy two-parent families who want to stick together. But happy two-parent families who want to stick together are not what his policy would create. If he had an effect at all, he would be tying together miserable couples who would otherwise have split. To assume you would get the same sociological outcomes from them is an Enron-style accounting error.
In fact, this new study shows that Cameron's policy would actually unwittingly harm children. It's not his intention, but we would have more children in the worst-performing category of all, and so in the long term increase the very social dysfunctions – like drug addiction and crime – that the policy was designed to erode.
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
3:57 PM
1 comentários
Soldados israelitas dizem ter usados civis como "escudo humano"
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
1:09 PM
0
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Palma Inácio
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
12:06 AM
0
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Tuesday, July 14, 2009
A Revolução Francesa
Também sobre isto:
Sobre a Revolução Francesa e o Terror
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
2:00 PM
5
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Monday, July 13, 2009
O que o povo das Honduras pensa afinal
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
12:01 PM
0
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Uma revolução social no Neolítico? (II)
The site from which I've excerpted the above quotes (stripping out the numerous references to the archaeological literature) interprets this stone age classless and stateless society as communism. (Thanks to the latest issue of International Socialism for the pointer.) This may be controversial, but the archaeology is entirely mainstream, and there is no disagreement that the neolithic societies of ancient Anatolia, whose best-preserved site is Çatalhöyük, were very remarkable indeed.
I'm not sure I would apply the category of "communism." It could just as well be interpreted as a conflict between two different versions of private property: In English terms, the monopoly-grants version and the version favored by the Levellers.It sounds as if the key to the rich people's power was that they held stocks of vital raw materials, and denied the poor people access to them except on ruinous terms; and eventually the poor people got sick of this and overthrew the rich people. But how did the rich people maintain that monopoly in the first place? All right, it was over imported goods. Was it impossible for a poor person to accumulate some resources, and travel to where the goods are cheap, and bring some back, and undersell the rich people, in the classic cartel-breaking move? Well, it may have been if the rich people prohibited such expeditions. But such a prohibition would have to be maintained by force . . . and so you're talking about a state-controlled economy. And the antithesis of a state-controlled economy is not so much a communist one as a decentralized one. So maybe the nonoligarchic society that followed was communist, or maybe it was based on competitive markets, or maybe it even mixed the two. I'm not sure if we could tell at this great a remove. Though maybe some archaeologist is subtler than I am!
Isto é capaz de ser um problema geral de qualquer tentativa de deduzir estruturas sociais a partir apenas de escavações arqueológicas - é possivel, mais ou menos, ver como a riqueza estava distribuida, mas já não será assim tão fácil (só atravéz da arqueologia) perceber os mecanismos pelo qual a riqueza era distribuida.
Neste caso, é possível observar a transição de uma sociedade fortemente hierarquizada para uma sociedade sem diferenças significativas de riqueza e status; mas será que a primeira era uma economia assente na propriedade privada e a segunda uma economia comunista? Ou será que a primeira era uma economia "estatista" controlada por uma aristocracia e a segunda uma economia "liberal"? Provavelmente será impossível saber.
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
10:20 AM
0
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Sunday, July 12, 2009
Direitos das crianças
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
3:17 PM
2
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O marxismo estará caduco?
(...)
Of course, both Marxists and mainstream economists will reject all this, and come up with endless guff about “methodology” to explain why they really really hate each other, and would prefer to languish in their little intellectual ghettos.
But the fact is that they do converge upon many important points. And you know why? Because both see the truth.
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
1:35 AM
0
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Economia neo-clássica
Ver também estes meus posts de há uns tempos atrás: A economia neo-clássica e a esquerda e Re: A classe e o indivíduo representativo
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
1:02 AM
1 comentários
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Afinal, o que é que o povo hondurenho pensa?
Publicada por
Miguel Madeira
em
7:14 PM
0
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