talos:

If the Communists weren't so damn chiliastic and negative towards every possible colaboration (they see all options as "strengthening capitalism"), this coalition thing would be workable already.

i think that's what the collective hivemind of ET is trying to hammer out, between all the different angles.

the gradations are fluid and blurry, is socialism merely a refined, or muzzled communism? if communism makes use of currency and world markets, how is it not capitalistic, two apparently polarised PsOV that as we see in cuba and china are trying to coexist?

these damn ideological labels are so distracting, they sow divisions that are illusory, for the most part, yet they effectively castrate the left, leaving separate strands instead of twine.

politicians use extreme slogans, L or R, to gain power from their bases, then run to the centre to try and hoover up the swing voters, to consolidate power positioning. this renders labels even more meaningless and relativised.

at the end of the day, despair and hunger move societies out of stagnation, because only what we see in the arab spring, and now in the squares of europe, is too raw to be politicised in any cardinal way. ideologies seem remote, abstracted, bloodlessly conceptual, commentary before or after the narrative, but never during...

No. Bread. No Job. No. House. No. Water. No. Hopes.

they set fire to themselves, they stand in front of tanks and bulldozers, they expose themselves to brutality, they suffer censorship, they have had enough, and gathering together with precious little to lose, they do what terrorists fail to do with their near-random cruelties.

they sweep away cobwebs and make space for the new ideas that can take over as the old institutions crumble.

perhaps a progressive dispensationalism instead of the chialism... ;)

hammering out these intellectual distinctions has its valence, just as any thoughtful doctrine or theory, but it is these flesh and blood confrontations that are where the rubber meets the road; it is immensely tragic how many times history has to repeat itself because the forces of evil can bundle in fasces, while the forces for good annul their own potency by their own otherwise commendable political biodiversity.

catharsis...

this practically ensures that pragmatic change cannot be enacted from the left, leaving the only other alternative of what we see now, the right uranically destroying its own progeny to reveal its psychosis, its -literally terminal- lack of affect, transferred as it is to its soulless icons of short term profit for the few at the expense of long term suffering for the many. these protesters may not have memorised tomes of political history or mastered the canons of political science, they may not have prepared platforms for future enaction, but they do know when enough is enough, and that is enough for them to risk pain, death and imprisonment rather than continue to cower in denial.

i think within the next year or so the energy/climate dramas will eclipse much of what passes for politics today. the energy issue alone will continue to marvellously concentrate our minds beyond the useless factionalising.

in between the floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, plagues, hurricanes, typhoons, wildfires, volcanic eruptions and 26 extinctions a day that is! what else will stop them fracking us all into species oblivion?

debates about '-isms' are an interesting luxury, and attachments to ideological tribalities assume their appropriate contextual proportions in the face of global weather systems going medieval on our collective asses.

i can't believe after all these centuries of democracy, baton-mashing the innocent remains the SOP.

as early men banded together and took down huge woolly mammoths with nets, we can smarten up and do the same with the zero-sum predatory capitalism goliath using the internets, we need to be nimble, multitudinous, and focused as lasers and perhaps we can effect change some more emotionally intelligent way than being thugbait.

till then, regrettably, it's the barricades where push comes to shove.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty