Have you spoken to any Moscovites about living standards recently? Like this is so stupid. I would not trade for Russia's brutal treatment of dissidents but we don't exactly have a great record on that front in Western countries…
I actually agree that it was a planned dressing down for optics sakes but the attempt is to try to get Zelenskyy out of the way for Trump / Putin direct deal to settle Ukraine matter and the success of this strategy will depend on whether the MAGA media hype will drown out the soft power enjoyers in terms of messaging.
Peter was more sober thinker (probably literally and figuratively). Christopher was a better speaker, probably a better author but as I get older I realise how much more correct Peter was and still is.
Do post-tribalists even make enough children for them to survive very long? I'm reminder of the Shakers, a religious group that rejected sexual relations between men and women and were famously celibate. They did adopt children at a rate far higher than non-Shakers, but when the supply of children to adopt dried up, their numbers plummeted. Today, there are only 4 or 5 of them left, and when they die, so too will their ideology/religion. Post-tribalism won't survive either, I think.
That's the neat thing, you don't! The very idea of post-tribalism relies on a false narrative. There is an appeal to a mythical past when the Enlightenment was one wonderful big tent and everybody was pursuing the shared project of advancing the knowledge of the human race together. Then those mean and wily post-modernists came and upended the notion of truth. This is all blatantly false. Nobody has ever agreed on anything. As soon as you find a group of people who do agree with you, and there is another group of people who don't, then baby, you've got a tribalism going.
It's a rhetorical move to claim as your heritage some kind of truth that once went unchallenged and is now questioned by people with nefarious purposes. Nothing more.
Rhetorical moves are the primary vehicle of politics. You say something and people resonate with your message. You believe frivious "claims around heritage" are not deeply meaningful to people. Do you truly believe that should artificially overcome family ties, traditions, cultures, and, customs? (…Why would you even want to?)
Seems like it's all just a ploy for corporations trying to remake the world as suits them, helpful to have interchangable workers with no meaningful culture.
Fair point. But I guess my problem with the post-tribal narrative is that it feels especially hollow. It's not rooted either in some kind of particularist commitment to a religion or language nor some universal notion of human brotherhood or dialectical materialism. It's built on the myth of consensus. "We all used to agree about this! What happened?" That just feels like an insecure basis for an intellectual movement.
I hopped out of being a good Marxist when I realised that there was absolutely no room for dissent. You basically are just a empty vessel for activist praxis. In other words, you do as you are told.
Also, there aren't really compelling alternatives to Capitalism that havent been extremely tested, with horrible results. IF they come up with a NEW system, that doesn't involve literally euthanising its dissenters, I would be into it.
The problem of our time is simply that the fruits of the global economy are distributed extremely poorly (jet set global urban intelligentsia isn't big enough) and there is no room for any nativistic or religious culture (call it spirituality, or whatever, it's important…). The folks left behind will simply replace the primacy of Corporate Memphis-style global capitalism with something cooler, economics and politics will be downstream from that culture.
There isn't a world where an living, breathing Christopher Hitchens wouldn't shed a tear at how internationalist, "steel-and-glass" culture has become in say, Paris, France. He also criticised the thinly-veiled American Imperialism ("democracy" or we shoot you) constantly.
