/316/ From Emergency to Emergency: 2022 Review, ft. Ashley Frawley
Added 2023-01-24 07:00:02 +0000 UTCOn the key events and developments in 2022.
We look back at how the world transitioned from the pandemic to war over the past year, and what the socio-political fallouts have been. Is everything "better than expected"? Has managerial technocracy been rejuvenated?
We discuss whether we're in a Third World War, how the US empire is strengthening its grip on Europe, and how cultural populists are taking over from economic populists.
Comments
I think the Bunga Boys--actually really Ashley--got closer on this episode than ever before in terms of convincing me of that Covid -> Ukraine thesis. Because there needs to be a dispensation--Ashley called it a devaluation. G. Bataille called it expenditure. That, in other words, there must always be an excuse for why the very apparent plenty of society cannot be evenly distributed and that that distribution cannot be questioned. As long as something trumps human freedom as a priority for social solidarity, we never have to change anything.
Richard R
2023-01-26 02:58:02 +0000 UTCI think the biggest problem with the Covid->Ukraine emergency politics thesis is simply that it really doesn’t make sense. Firstly, very few of the covid public health restrictions are still in place in the west (even China, which imposed a draconian response to Covid, relented in its intensely recently). Secondly, there actually has been a decent amount of deliberation surrounding the war in Ukraine and it has achieved fairly significant support even in cases where it faced real tests of legitimacy (Meloni in Italy was elected as a fervent supporter of Ukraine despite running an otherwise insurgent right wing campaign; much of leftist and conservative media in the US made a significant show criticizing the war in Ukraine, as did elements of the GOP, ajd all performed poorly in the face of it, despite months of criticizing it, and despite these attacks, aid packages are routinely reauthorized; Germany’s political establishment has relented repeatedly in the face of caution, and the most hawkish elements of the Green Party have only received support for it). There’s perhaps an analysis to be done of how the Ukraine war has acted as a point of ideological religitimization of neoconservatism/interventionism after it’s discreditization after the War on Terror, but it’s an ideological critique, not necessarily one of emergency politics. Ukraine has been in the news for months, with plenty of points of fear and concern and there’s been little interest in limitation outside of extreme minoritarian peacenik movements. if anything, the emergency politics are those harranguing that we are constantly seconds away from nuclear doomsday and WW3 when the battlefield has seen little territorial progress, energy politics are (slowly) being sorted out and cases which risked direct escalation to conflict between Russia and NATO haven’t resulted in such
jkjkjkj
2023-01-26 02:48:35 +0000 UTCEven more to the point: abolition appears to mean--when all is said and done, when the anarchists and left liberals and communists and fourth worldists have all had their say--that the state comes in and supersedes any other authority. Abolition of the police in the US means empowering the FBI over local sheriffs or police departments; abolition of families means throwing children into the inter-state foster system.
Richard R
2023-01-25 22:32:51 +0000 UTCPerhaps ironically--though perhaps exactly to the point--in the US, the primary opponents of social workers intervening in families are ethnic-identity- or local-community-based organizations. I myself am a social worker, and it is hard to argue with the personal experience of my Black or Latin clients, mainly convicts, that profess that the police, as well as my profession, rob those groups of their autonomy.
Richard R
2023-01-25 19:59:13 +0000 UTC
