echognomics

Hmm I wonder what's that loud beeping sound that I'm hearing...

AOC is just endorsing whoever the unions wanted her to endorse, man. You some sort of anti-union scab?

If anyone's interested in a literary/artistic depiction of the "The Singapore Story" historical narrative, I recommend Sonny Liew’s 2015 comic book The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (copy on a website that rhymes with "giblen" but I'm not sure if I'm allowed link it here directly). I recently got to reading it for a class that I was auditing, and it was a really fun and accessible introductory look at the hegemonic official narratives about Singapore's independence and postcolonial national identity, told from the metafictional perspective of an author insert character that's pretty much hinted to be a communist sympathiser/fellow-traveller. It's a pretty interesting critique of the historical narrative-crafting perpetuated by the PAP throughout Singapore's nationhood.

Fun fact about the book's publication: It was originally funded by the Singapore government through a National Arts Council grant, but funding was withdrawn at the last minute - like, the first publication run was already printed and had to have blank stickers on the publishing details page to cover up the NAC logo printed there. (If you look at the publication timeline, it's interesting to note that the book was published around around the time when Lee Kuan Yew died.) But then after the book became a commercial & critical hit and started winning international awards, suddenly the NAC was more than OK with having its name printed on subsequent editions.

"In North Korea, young schoolchildren are taught ridiculous fairy tales that uncritically glorify their authoritarian leadership class, so as to propagandise them into becoming blind supporters of the oppressive regime when they grow up."

Original source article. Cockburn's article's actually about Rahm Emanuel, and his digression about Miliband is about how in the end of the day the blame for the criminality of such depraved ghouls like Emanuel lies with the goody-goody "progressive liberal" types like Obama.

I don't quite understand what you're getting at in your comment? Cockburn's rhetoric is definitely aggressively combative, but I definitely don't think that he's being smug or insincere or manipulative ar all. In fact, I honestly think that he's actually extremely close to being purely sincere and moralistic. The key idea is that he sees the actually existing suffering and injustice around the world and feels justifiably angry at that, and he's pointing that fury at the right people and institutions, i.e., those most responsible for creating and perpetuating unjust socioeconomic systems of capitalist/imperialist exploitation. He's not at all saying that you should act like a jerk towards everyone around yourself without rhyme or reason; he's talking about there being a class war going on, and the need for principled leftists to recognise their enemies and adopt the right attitude towards them in such a situation.

I'm no big-city art/literary critic, but I choose to interpret the smug expression on both RBGs as signifying her adult self's failure to mature beyond her intellectual and emotional outlook as a teenager.

Spotlight with extra spots :kelly:

But there was still lament over the coup and the end of the Soviet Union. Many Russians still hold him responsible for its collapse.

Although a pragmatic and rational politician, Mikhail Gorbachev failed to realise that it was impossible to bring in his reforms without destroying a centralised communist system that millions in the USSR and beyond no longer wanted.

The sheer cognitive dissonance in that final paragraph; reads like some ghoul at the BBC realised halfway through that they were on the verge voicing a mild criticism of the dissolution of the USSR but that just could not be done because of muh "liberal democracy", and had to assure the reader that "everyone hated the USSR, actually; please ignore the previous paragraph and the first 3/4s of this paragraph"

Also notice the awkward use of "many Russians" instead of "many citizens of former Soviet states", because thay wanted to push the Orwellian narrative that the Soviet communism was actually just Russian imperialism.