Jedard you are boring me silly with your constant references to the Open Veins of Latin America, Friedmanites, and the latest Klein book - if you spent less time doing this and more time reading some other books the lens through which you view the world be of a somewhat broader aperture than the pinprick in the black double blindfold you currently peer through. It's not that these authors or the specific books you reference are inherently wrong or bad it's just that you are entirely lacking the capacity in your vacuous mind to interpret any of it with the slightest shred of insight. Your constant claims to rational ascendancy purely because what you babble is 'the truth' puts you more in league with Ayatollahs and Popes than Schopenhauer or Russell. People fond of classification would probably give you and I the same código postal on the political spectrum (shudder) but I would rather read an intelligent, well researched commentary from somebody I entirely disagree with than the inane pap you all too readily subject us to. If you have read ‘too much’ how come your writing sometimes verges on the indecipherable? Your grasp of English is as limp as a dead squid.
I'm no great fan of Klein but you do her a disservice with your irrelevant, fetid morass of an interpretation of her book. From another post perhaps you didn't see (cut and pasted, others can do this too you see, but this is mine at least):
Quote:
Naomi Klein's books and films are well worth acquainting yourself with as an introduction to alternate perspectives on corporate globalisation, but there is nothing new in what she says and there are better commentators on the subject. Her attempt to stretch the 'shock' metaphor to all corners of the globe seems to be a little contrived, besides shock therapy (in an economic sense) as far as I know is a term coined by Jeffrey Sachs to describe the post communist transition model he applied to Russia and others with predictable consequences.
Naomi is known in activist/NGO circles as being something of a prima donna and she has a tendency to err on the parochial and emotional side of arguments (especially with regard to Argentina where she lived for some time) but I'm sure even she would be horrified to read the narrow minded message taken from her book which appeared in these forums. Milton Friedman is not the architect of all the ills of the world - the reviewer who posted here is certainly correct when he says 'It seems at once absurd to actually believe that one man, an American was able to convince the Presidents of the USA to buy into his dream of a free global market place totally privatized' - of course it does, because it is absurd. Yes he was influential (but I've never heard him referred to as the father of economics), yes he advised governments on policy but the imperative for dismantling the post war Bretton Woods system came from global capital - Milton like any good man of the market merely packaged an attractive philosophy around his theories to advocate what was essentially a return to pre-war uncertainty and deregulation - others have certainly expanded on the theme since his time. He wasn't the instigator nor was he the only operator in the process.
Constructing a scapegoat for all that ails the modern world is attractive in some Hollywood sense and negates any necessity to read further into a complex subject, but I would urge that you look into this complex subject a little more.
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What were you doing in those salad days when you were Eduardo Galeano's protégé and he bounced you on his knee and read you tales of Bolivar and Artigas young Anakin?
There are two or three people on these forums who have similar delusions of grandeur that they are crusading polemicists privy to information unavailable to common peasantry. They all seem equally fond of making comical predictions of a political/economic nature based on whatever paranoid conspiracy pulp is clogging the colonic recesses of the internet at the time in the vain hope that if they are correct they will be proved the geniuses they keep telling us they are (if they're not it will already be forgotten or they can just claim to agree with bigbadwolf in an admirable last ditch attempt at credibility). It is my fantasy, no, my fervid hope and desire that these users are actually a set of barely distinguishable fragments of the same personality inhabiting the same body of one rather confused individual because if there really are several separate entities of this calibre walking the face of the earth I honestly fear (even more) for our future.
11-21-2008, 10:33 AM
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