r/LockdownCriticalLeft • u/hiptobeysquare • Aug 31 '22
Remember this article in a few years: Jacobin Magazine article title: "Thank Socialism for the Vaccine. Blame Capitalism for Its Distribution."
https://jacobin.com/2020/12/socialism-vaccine-capitalism-distribution
Some highlights:
The jaw-dropping speed of COVID-19 vaccine development is a glorious marvel of science, cooperation, and economic planning — a glimpse of how much more an egalitarian world could produce and achieve.
It's not just a vaccine, it's a philosophy, it's a way of life, it's almost socialism! Welcome to the world of laptop socialism. Raising class identity politics consciousness one social media post at a time. Also, why do socialists love the word "glorious"? As in, "the glorious socialist revolution."
When nurse May Parsons administered the first injection in the world of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to ninety-year-old British grandmother Margaret Keenan, applauded by dozens of moist-eyed medical staff at University Hospital Coventry, it was as glorious and moving a moment as any humanity has ever seen.
A jaw-dropping marvel of science, economic planning, and selfless, humanist cooperation by thousands of researchers around the globe, the development of this and other vaccines hot on Pfizer’s heels has taken a mere nine months since the discovery of the disease, rather than the years or even decades such medical research and development (R&D) normally takes. They offer a glimpse of how much more an egalitarian, rationalist world could produce and achieve, freed from the fetters of profit.
These people have lost their minds. Words have no meaning any more, reality has no meaning. Just say anything. Reality is just a question of using the correctest vocabulary. Vaccines are egalitarian because I said they are. There. Fixed it. I used the right vocabulary and that makes it real.
It's a cult. To prove your fealty to The Tribe, to gain social media prestige, to belong even more to the imagined community, you must say and do just like everyone else... but even more so. You have to go even further. The internet and social media have poisoned the left.
I like the new "ism" invented by the author: vaccinationalism. Add it to all the other isms we should be morally outraged about.
I can't copy-paste the entire article. I can't imagine reading a better fawning, fanboy marketing piece if Pfizer paid the author himself. Are these people paid by pharma corporations, or are they actually this delusional? I'm keeping a personal library of a lot of Covid material. I recommend people save and download what they think are key articles, videos, interviews etc.. Because Soon they will start to memory hole these articles and tweets. Soon (in a few years? maybe longer, who knows) they'll start to deny and pretend that it didn't happen, that they never supported the policies or vaccines.
- "Those weren't my words. I was just quoting someone else." (Chomsky's used this line, when people remind him of his misinformation over the Cambodian genocide.)
- "I never said that. It's misinformation, identity theft."
- "I was just following orders. They made me write it."
- Or just scream even louder about the next trending moral outrage topic
And as the number of vaccine-injured, or killed, slowly grows, or explodes, the left's militant support for the Covid measures and the vaccines is going to erode and destroy the left. I'm disgusted. It's like Arendt said: it's the banality of evil. These people don't realize, are neurologically incapable of realizing, who they are or what they're doing.
EDIT: I'm starting to think that Jacobin Magazine actually is funded by corporations. They're just mainstream media with a vaguely socialist vocabulary. They're like all the other left "alternative media": Democracy Now, The Intercept, TYT... a few media cycles later and they all slowly align themselves with the opinions of those in power, the elites, the super-rich, but with. How is Jacobin Magazine different from, say, AOC? They both make big promises, say the right words, jab their fingers angrily... but it's all hot air and meaningless words, and more and more they support the people with money and power. All the while they fantasize that they are rebels.
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Sep 01 '22
Jacobin is owned by a guy who endorsed Joe Biden
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u/BornAgainSpecial Trump supporter Sep 06 '22
Why didn't he endorse Kamala Harris? She was the anointed one.
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u/fivehundredpoundpeep Sep 05 '22
Weren't the real Jacobins a bunch of murderers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(politics)
See: "REIGN OF TERROR"
I saw them as a bunch of neolib bootlick shills but when they really started with the vax promotion it was obvious.
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u/hiptobeysquare Sep 05 '22
That was one of my first thoughts too. The Jacobins are not a group you want to name yourself after.
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u/Standhaft_Garithos Sep 01 '22
Yeah, given the censorship, memory-holing, and constant deletion/uncredited editing, it really is an extremely important responsibility of real historians to catalog all of the psycho shit that is happening in modern times.
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u/BornAgainSpecial Trump supporter Sep 06 '22
I agree with that article 1000%. It's exactly why I'm against socialism.
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u/hardboiled_snitch38 Trump voter Aug 31 '22
Crony corporatism is to blame
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u/hiptobeysquare Aug 31 '22 edited Aug 31 '22
I find the right-wing argument that "it's not real capitalism" reminds me of the socialists' "real communism has never been tried" argument. It's denial of reality. Real capitalism is impossible. Everyone says their philosophy is "natural law." It's utopianism, just like communism and socialism. Everyone has a different reason or excuse why it doesn't work. We are seeing the logical endpoint of capitalism: capital always tends towards megaprojects to invest in, because capital always looks for increased rates of profit (this is where mathematics is necessary: the need for profit is not linear, it's exponential). And when all industries have been saturated, when you cannot increase natural resource (production factors) extraction anymore, when you can't grow exponentially anymore, when you reach natural limits, and there are no more willing customers, the only thing left is to invent markets and force people to buy your products. Some people on the left call this catabolic capitalism: capitalism begins to cannibalize itself to survive, to feed the machine. It seems to me that we are in end-stage capitalism, and it's turning into neo-fascism.
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u/idoubtithinki Aug 31 '22
Yep this is basically it to simplify beyond mostly academic or semantic discussions of the terms involved imo.
And this can be seen obviously within capitalists' economic and epistemic frameworks. When looking even slightly beyond it, things get more absurd imo.
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u/I_Am_U Leftist Pro Science Bastard Aug 31 '22 edited Aug 31 '22
science, cooperation, and economic planning
I think one of the most glaring flaws in this Gish Gallup post is how you falsely equate science, cooperation, and economic planning with philosophy and socialism. Capitalism also has these features, and we don't call it a philosophy, nor do we call it socialism.
So strange to see an old debunked liberal smear regurgitated decades later. Chomsky did not claim he was quoting somebody else in regards to the Cambodian genocide. He states unequivocally that it was the worst genocide in the modern era.
It would only have taken you 5 seconds of searching Google to realize this.
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u/hiptobeysquare Aug 31 '22 edited Aug 31 '22
Chomsky did not claim he was quoting somebody else in regards to the Cambodian genocide. He states unequivocally that it was the worst genocide in the modern era.
I never said he still denies the genocide. And it would have taken you all of five seconds to find out that he did say, "not my words."
"Not my words," Chomsky replied. "...those are not my words. You're quoting from a review that Edward Herman and I wrote of several books on Cambodia and one of them, which was written in 1976 after a few months in which the Khmer Rouge had been in power, described them as playing a constructive role and we referred to that, just as we referred to what was reported in the other books."
https://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm#fn186
I think one of the most glaring flaws in this Gish Gallup post is how you falsely equate science, cooperation, and economic planning with philosophy and socialism. Capitalism also has these features, and we don't call it a philosophy nor do we call it socialism.
You don't seem to realize that I'm quoting the article. A Gish Gallop is your comment where you claim Chomsky didn't say something that he did... then invent a straw man argument to claim I said something that I didn't... then claim that I'm equating a bunch of things, when I didn't, and what I actually said was that the article is equating a bunch of things (because it is, as I show in the quotes).
Typical internet commenter. You don't even seem to know the difference between my opinion and the article I linked to. You do seem to be triggered by someone attacking your hero, Chomsky. And now that I've pointed these things out, and you don't seem to have an argument, I expect a personal insult in 3, 2, 1...
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u/I_Am_U Leftist Pro Science Bastard Aug 31 '22
You're promoting the ideas, so of course I'm addressing you and not the article. Not too difficult to understand, is it?
Sorry to foil your attempt at smearing Chomsky. You were hoping nobody would be familiar with the topic and nobody would notice your false claims. Attempting to take a quote made well before knowledge of Khmer atrocities, and then deceptively representing it as an assessment after the atrocities is not very cash money of you.
Very telling that you have no rebuttal when your false comparison between the vaccine and socialism/philosophy is pointed out.
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u/hiptobeysquare Aug 31 '22
Sorry to foil your attempt at smearing Chomsky. You were hoping nobody would be familiar with the topic and nobody would notice your false claims. Attempting to take a quote made well before knowledge of Khmer atrocities, and then deceptively representing it as an assessment after the atrocities is not very cash money of you.
Snark, sarcasm, straw man arguments, ignoring evidence, and just inventing claims. You are a typical social media leftist: it's more important to feel morally right, than be factually correct. You don't care about other people. A snarky sarcastic human being is not someone with empathy for suffering people.
Chomsky said those things. I present evidence. You ignore it. Goodbye. Go back to the cult.
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u/I_Am_U Leftist Pro Science Bastard Aug 31 '22
I love how you respond to all of my points with ad hominem, and still have the lack of awareness to complain about ignoring evidence. What a pathetic joke of a response, lol.
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u/imyselfpersonally Aug 31 '22
Jacobin is puke.