Two Leftover Snarks Against a Very Good Blogger

Subjects; non violent revolution and greenie-ness.

I do not normally concern myself much with the comments section of blogs. I don’t even concern myself with other bloggers much. I do not usually add to their comments section.

One blogger I do pay a lot of attention to is Caitlin Johnston. Find her at https://caitlinjohnstone.com/ I sometimes comment quite critically about what she writes. This is not because I am an info warrior for the left or right wings of the oligarchy. She is one of the few bloggers out there worth the rouble of criticizing. She is so good in so many areas that her failings are worth commenting on, in some hopes of correcting.

So I have a couple of criticisms of Johnston that I left on her comments section recently. They have been collecting dust in my ”completed/responses” folder. Rather than flush them, since I am ramping up my own blogging activities again, and clearing up a lot of old work, I think I will bundle these up and put them on my platforms.

One of these is about the absence of a real left in the USA and most of the western world. I say that what is needed is some revolutionaries who are capable of doing some real revolutioning. I reject Cait’s idea that the present evil empire can be overcome by nonviolent means. I doubt if Cait really believes it herself.

The other is about Cait’s apparent adoption of the ridiculous “global warming” trope. I suspect Cait does not really believe that, either. I think most people now at a deep level that there is something wrong with that trope. The propaganda for it is so intense that even people highly critical in other topics just take it as a given.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/02/01/revolution-isnt-microsurgery-its-a-long-road-trip/

Oh, dear. Caitlin is blogging about revolution again. Like most lefties, she bemoans the incoherence of the left and its proclivity for breaking up into silos of apparently small differences. There is so much I could say about this.

I think the first point I could make is that these apparent small difference are not really so small. If you listen closely to the rhetoric, these people have really very different aims and ideas, really different “theres” that they want to get to. I think most of them really do not, theirselves, understand where they want to go; they have no real self understanding. Some of them are a bit dangerous.

Yes, the disinformation and propaganda from the security state are a factor, as is the infiltration and disruption. Yet mostly, these people are just neurotic and often have outright brain disorders. There is no way any kind of coherent movement is coming from them.

But they are not where the real left is. A serious left activist, who actually wants to create a society and economy that raises the quality of life, and offers a life really worth living to the people living in it, stays far away from these flakes. A serious leftist will also have little time for most of the theoreticians who write their little papers and hold their little debates about how the revolutionary moment is not here yet.

I have met a few real leftist revolutionaries. They have learned to keep their groups small, to carefully vet new members, and to maintain their own communications systems. They do not attract attention to themselves. They mostly have day jobs which involve building and running organizations.

One of them said to me, referring to an assembly of ultra leftie chatterers; “when the revolution happens, these clowns will be the last ones to notice.” And, when the revolution is ready to happen, the real lefties will know what do do about it. They will keep their heads down until then.

Meanwhile, people like Caitlin will fantasize about a non violent, anarchistic revolution. The concern is that when real trouble starts, this is going to get people killed needlessly and create an obstacle to the actual removal of capitalism.

It is as in the famous advice of serious black community leaders to the “freedom riders” of the American south of the 1960s; “this non violence stuff is going to get you killed.” Their nonviolence stuff got a lot of them killed. Contrary to most Left and Pacifist hagiography, it was the willingness of black communities to finally organize their own defence forces which ended the “Jim Crow” era in the south.

So, Caitlin, I do believe we will know the time is right to heal the sickness when a revolutionary group emerges actually capable of defending itself against the forces of the state. Kindergarten revolutions will go nowhere. If there is a cancer within the corpus politic we need surgeons, not a swarm of faith healers.

You have one thing right here, Caitlin; we are still some distance from the end of capitalism in the US of A. However, I think there are people who have the compass and are moving in the right direction. They are not coming up the interstates in big noisy caravans. They are moving quietly up the backroads.

Another thing you get is that we do not need people spinning utopias for which there are no real world examples. We have the models for the kind of political economy we need. They are not ideal but they can be adapted and improved. That is why the corporate media is so hysterical about discrediting them.

These are what we need to hear more about in online discussions. We need that clearer picture of where we need to go. Less squawking about why everyone is squawking about how to go there. How about that, Cait?

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I can no longer find the URL for the article this responds to. It was a little while ago.

Cait disappoints again. It really does disappoint me that even the best commentators, the ones who usually get things right, especially about capitalism versus socialism, accept without question the most vicious propaganda trope of the globalists.

That is, the “Climate Change” nonsense. This comes from the people who subscribe to the idea of the human species as a plague on the planet, who put up monuments to their idea that they would like the earth’s population reduced to 500 million, who want to halt all progress because it might give rise to an alternative to them.

The language of “climate change” is for such bullshitters and those duped by them. Legitimate discussion on this topic is in the language of “environment.” Pesticides, single use plastics, genetically modified organisms, misuse of antibiotics, unregulated industrial chemicals, and plain old overuse of natural resources, are the threats to survival of life on the planet. That and plain old nuclear war and nuclear power.

There is plenty here to fight against. Instead people’s attention is diverted into a hysteria about a harmless gas, necessary to plant growth on earth. Every geophysicist on planet earth tells us that climate change on earth is controlled by solar cycles. Carbon Dioxide has nothing to do with it. The earth is presently cooling down as predicted by real scientists studying solar cycles.

To make it even sicker, there is growing evidence that the rise in atmospheric Carbon Dioxide is causing an increase in plant growth. Earth is not being deforested; forests are growing. Further on this, if atmospheric levels of Carbon Dioxide fell below a certain level, plant growth would cease. The planet seems to have been close to that during the last ice age.

Thus I conclude, that the ‘climate’ idiots are the biggest danger to life on the planet, in that they divert attention away from the real dangers to the environment, and promote solutions to a non problem which create and increase real ones. The worst thing they do is promote nuclear power as an option.

In general, they are promoting these ‘green new deal’ and ‘reset’ measures which would be disastrous for working people in industrial societies, and for subsistence farmers in pre industrial ones. This makes normal people rightly suspicious of anyone posing as an opponent of capitalism and oligarchy, while also mouthing the vicious ‘climate’ disinformation. Are they leading a liberation movement, or just diverting us into an even worse system of suppression?

Do not trust people who talk about liberation from capitalism while also promoting ‘climate’ over ‘environment’.