Metal Reviews

Whatever. The fact that you can't distinguish prejudices from oppression then I'm not having this argument. Being prejudiced towards people you don't know is rational. Being prejudiced towards someone because they are black is irrational.

These types of prejudices are constructed. Prejudices towards others is natural; we develop them as children until we recognize others outside our family as trustworthy. But that's fine.

Conspiracy theories!? Bitch, all I do is social science. Sociology minor and philosophy major! Social values and moral codes? That's my field. Where the fuck do you think I get this shit? Marx, EP Thompson, Weber, Hill Collins, I'm not messing around. This is science.

Don't equate PC multiculturalism to actual acceptance of difference. GTFO with this notion that attempting to reach a point in society where we respect human beings as human beings is comparable to totalitarianism.

If anything, what you have claimed as showing that you are so free, and this is what you really should respond to because the other points are trivial and you're too ignorant to concede, your freedom founded in your car, decent paying job, total lack of voice in politics insofar as your country wages war across the globe and you have no say in it, that freedom is the same kind of freedom that all of the Oceanians claimed to have in 1984. "I have a home, I have a wife and 2.3 children, all I have to do is upturn my gaze from all the awful things that happen in this world and my country has to be perpetually in the process of conquering the globe so that the wheels stay on the machine and I'm fine with that because we live in Western civilization". Keep your freedom and shove it while I try to undermine it and the civilization that perpetuates it. I want you to feel uncomfortable, I want you to come face to face with the woman who stitches the shirt that rests on your back who won't see her family ever again and hasn't since she was 14 and who will die of some banal sickness which could've been treated but wasn't and was fostered by the awful conditions she lived in cramped with the other workers. You say that's how the world works; I don't want your world. I want to burn it down and give it back to the people who built it in the first place and who you sit atop of each and everyday.

Again historical comparisons are appropriate - gays and women in the Western world now have more rights than they ever did.

Actually prejudice to people who look different is logical. If they look different they must be from somewhere else and hence a threat to your turf.

Very animalistic of course and not really applicable in a modern society.

But so many societies are not modern by any stretch of the imagination - they're insular.

Actually I've got two degrees: Commerce with majors in finance and international business and Arts with major in Political Science and minors in Sociology and History. We did plenty of Marx, Thompson etc.

The one thing I learned is it's not real science. Real science is predictive (e.g. laws of physics or chemistry). Social sciences are fuzzy theories often based on extremely unrealistic assumptions.

Basically social scientists play in fantasy land outside of the real world.

Your definition of acceptance of difference seems to be based on wealth distribution.

Firstly you don't make me uncomfortable. I always find idealists amusing in a sad kind of way.

Secondly when it comes down to it, my fellow "Oceanians" and I don't give a fuck about others too much.

Some of us pretend to, but then buy clothes made in sweatshops or consumer electronics and cars produced by poorly paid exploited workers in 3rd world countries.

We pretend to be environmental and then drive big gas guzzling SUVs etc. We state we're against war but then don't do anything to voice our concerns.

We don't change our habits for ideals.

We're not oppressed. Quite the opposite. We are liberated and self serving individuals focusing on the most important things in the world: ourselves, our families and our own little worlds.

Please explain to me how the poor have more rights than ever. Either in buying power to express their voices economically or Politically.

but the average lower-middle class and worse have absolutely no political voice.

when Obama decided that his predacessors were not war criminals is the day freedom died for me.

This is actually what Orwell predicted.

Orwell didn't predict anything.

This is the way it's always been. Since day dot most humans have merely been self serving. They do things that will have what they perceive as positive impacts on their own lives.

They generally don't care about politics or the environment or the plight of others unless it impacts them personally. They never have done.

Basically Rousseau's noble savage is just a fantasy despite left orientated individuals wishing it was true.

Last time I chgecked, Keynesian economics is still what enables people like you and I to live the good life.

Be grateful for it.

Or move to North Korea where it's still all socialist brotherhood.

People work together, people get something out of socializing which isn't purely self interest but a pleasure in acting in concert. I don't comment on this forum for some future gain but I enjoy the act of recognizing myself in a group of others.

And you really insist on responding to every post, even those not directly addressed to you, don't you?

A last word warrior to the end.

Your definition of "self serving" is too limited. Self serving includes companionship, family, community etc - basically anything that creates self-satisfaction or improves sense of self.

Some people get that from doing things for others e.g. Mother Theresa or Princess Diana.

My point here is that people only care about these things that have an impact on their own life and that they're personally involved with.

Most people don't really care about the plight of Libyans or Haitians, or that the shirt they're wearing was made by sweatshop labour in Cambodia or that the politician they helped elect is a corrupt moron.

They only care when it impacts on their lives (hence great opposition to taxes or cutting services).

Your definition of self serving is too limited. The fact that you don't see how what happens in sweatshops affects you is what the left has always pointed to as false consciousness. Interventions come back to bite us in the ass, i.e., Afghanistan and Iraq. You know this. This leads you to advocate non-intervention. However, the economic practices which you support through your promotion of how great it makes our lives is a form of intervention which has been equally if not more destructive than our military excursions which occur in Libya. The world is divided into discrete regions where one can go on without attention to the other. We have shaped them as much as they will shape us and vice versa. But as long as it lasts until your 86 years last then I guess you don't mind because you're self interested.

The young gunmen at the roadblock took no chances. They put a knife to the throat of the driver before hauling the three men and one woman from the car, dragging them through the street into a nearby mosque for a rough round of interrogation.


"They were beaten on their feet and the woman was slapped around the face until she admitted planning an attack on the mosque," said Basim Mohamed, muezzin at Quiche mosque.


Inside the car, they say, they found an AK-47 and 10 cartridges of ammunition.


A frenzied mob formed outside the mosque as word spread that Gaddafi assassins had been cornered. It dispersed only when rebel gunmen arrived to take away the suspects to an uncertain fate.


It wasn't supposed to be like this in free Benghazi. After throwing off the shackles of Gaddafi's rule, Libya's young opposition movement is rounding up suspected opponents and delivering its own brutal form of justice in a city living in fear that it has been penetrated by a fifth column of government loyalists.


Rebel leaders admit that dozens of Gaddafi supporters have been arrested or killed.


Every night, gangs of vigilantes assemble at makeshift roadblocks - made from piles of rubble, oil drums or piping - to control entry and exit from their neighbourhoods.


On Sunday, gunfights echoed around the city as gangs sought to mop up pro-Gaddafi elements after government troops had been beaten back a day previously.


Foreign workers fled the city long ago in fear of being mistaken for a government-hired mercenary.


Many residents are now too frightened to drive through the dark streets at night, fearing a shakedown or worse at the proliferating checkpoints.


"If they don't know who you are, and are in their part of town, and you have a nice car, then they are going to think you are a car thief or they say you are with Gaddafi," said one driver who now stayed close to home after dark.


"Maybe you hesitate or seem nervous and they will think you have something to hide. Not all of them are good people."


The rebel's interim government is made up of professionals, academics, businessmen and lawyers often educated in the U.K. or U.S. who make all the right noises about democracy, human rights and the rule of law. But they are far removed from the excitable volunteers who man roadblocks through the night, stopping cars they believe may have been stolen or dragging suspected Gaddafi loyalists into the street.


Mustafa Gerhiani, the urbane spokesman for the rebels' provisional government in the east, said there were several hundred government supporters in the city who had formed sleeper cells.


"We know where they live and many have been rounded up. There are people looking for them. A lot have been caught and killed," he said.


He added that some had been detained for their own protection and that the revolutionary council did not condone mob justice. "But if they start shooting what can you do?"

So explain in real life practical terms how a dude making shirts in a sweatshop has any impact on my life, except that of making clothes more affordable?


False conciousness is bullshit. It's basically stating that what people think is wrong and needs to be replaced by the "correct consciousness" whatever that is.

People like Stalin, Hitler and Mao were big on rectifying what they perceived as "false consciousness."

False consciousness is people acting against their own interests. Pretty simple if you ask me.

The minuscule wages that he makes undermined the job of someone who undermined the job down the line of the person who lives near the local industry which shut down in your city leaving that person jobless, pushing them onto federal aid or into crime or simply leaving them destitute which could come to impinge on your tax money, your safety, and your property value. If we paid global south workers proper wages they could invest their own economies creating jobs in their own country undermining fundamentalism and creating middle classes to resist dictators and create political empowerment rather than governments ruled by morons and enforced by thugs. As you mention in that article. There simply is no benefit in paying someone dirt poor wages so that we can simply have "stuff" I only really need half the shirts I own. I could've paid the same amount for half those shirts and the workers who made the shirts could've taken home twice their wage, making a vast difference through one's income being doubled.

So Trapt, do you go shopping for your clothes outside Thai loom workshops? Because if you don't, you're being a tad hypocritical again.

Well Trapt, I see you've been talking about 'creating middle classes' as well. Class struggle ftw.