Open mike 24/04/2025

28 comments on “Open mike 24/04/2025 ”

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1. Ad 1

   24 April 2025 at 9:02 am

   Great to see Apple and Meta get done for anti-trust violations in the EU. US$800m in fines.

   Excellent judgment to read for the US judge hearing the Google anti-trust case.

   How's all those Trump campaign donations working out now tech bros?

   Reply
   • Karolyn_IS 1.1

     24 April 2025 at 9:55 am

     I had to look to read about this. It doesn't seem to be particularly front page news.

     This CNN article is about it.

     The EU has imposed conditions to avoid the fine, but Meta's chief global affairs officer is whining about it trying to force them to change their business model.

     Of course they should change their business model. However, they rely on dodgy practices, that invade privacy and use people's personal details to generate profits.

     Zuboff's "Age of Surveillance Capitalism" goes into great detail about how Google pioneered this business model and Facebook was a fast follower.

     Reply
     • weka 1.1.1

       24 April 2025 at 10:26 am

       also lol the whining about it being a tariff.

       Reply
   • AB 1.2

     24 April 2025 at 11:17 am

     Chris Dillow in a typically clever and thoughtful recent post (Governments vs Capitalists) notes that:

     "Capitalism has always demanded two things from the state (though these can sometimes conflict): profitability and legitimacy."

     The conflict here is obviously that too much profitability starts to undermine legitimacy – especially if profitability is obtained in a morally dubious fashion. Therefore, for the US Government to push back on what the EU has done here, would be to paradoxically contribute to delegitimising capitalism, while the actions of the EU operate to legitimise it. Or as Dillow puts it:

     "It's a nice irony that one of the most capitalistic nations on earth should be one of the few which has a government which is acting against the interests of capital."

     If Dillow is right, it appears that the power to end the Trump experiment lies mainly in those sectors of Capital that are disadvantaged by it. That's only a half-comforting thought at best.

     Reply
   • SPC 1.3

     24 April 2025 at 12:08 pm

     Wonder when Edge and Bing get wound out of Microsoft. Then its Office monopoly.

     Reply
2. Obtrectator 2

   24 April 2025 at 10:48 am

   What is America’s pro-natalism movement really about?

   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/23/america-pro-natalism-women

   Keeping women under control, of course.

   Reply
   • weka 2.1

     24 April 2025 at 10:53 am

     yes, and the point of that is to force women to produce the next generations of workers for the autocracy/plutocracy. This is the essential reason why women are exploited, for their labour, and it's why women are an exploited class alongside socioeconomic and ethnicity.

     Reply
     • Incognito 2.1.1

       24 April 2025 at 11:52 am

       This is a source of immense and never-ending confusion; gender-sex, race-ethnicity, and [socio-economic] class are different categories used in the theoretical framework of intersectionality. As such, women are not a class.

       Reply
       • SPC 2.1.1.1

         24 April 2025 at 12:19 pm

         Were slaves a class?

         Are migrant workers (who were being deported if they made a case their employer exploited them).

         Once married women are a second worker, not given access to income support between jobs.

         An exploited group, sustaining support for the man (professional hours or OT/shift) at work with some respite via WFF tax credits, if with children.

         Albeit the period exploited as unpaid carers and in underpaid professions (Fair Pay Awards) may be declining.

         https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/2018675816/marilyn-waring-still-counting-the-value-of-women-s-unpaid-work

         Reply
         • weka 2.1.1.1.1

           24 April 2025 at 1:01 pm

           Once you oppress women on the basis of sex (reproductive labour), it then becomes possible to oppress them as other kinds of workers, pay them shit wages etc.

           Reply
       • weka 2.1.1.2

         24 April 2025 at 12:59 pm

         in classic leftist analysis, there are three classes that are exploited by the capitalist system: workers, women and people of colour. This is different from gender identity, disability and so on.

         The point of that analysis is to understand how and why those groups of people are exploited. Women are exploited because our labour is needed to produce workers. Without women, there would literally be no workers at all. Women are also workers of course.

         Workers are exploited because they do the work of building the capitalist class.

         People of colour are exploited because historically they've been the groups of people who don't have the capital, and are excluded from the capitalist class precisely so that they can continue to be exploted(#notalletc). Key example, slavery.

         Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 to describe the experiences of black women as they impacted upon by the different systems of dominance. She is likewise talking about systems of power, specifically sex and ethnicity, and how sex mattered in analysis of race politics.

         Middle class women are oppressed on the basis of sex, working class women on the basis of sex and socioeconomic, and black working class women via sex, class and ethnicity.

         Modern usage of 'intersectionality' often isn't that.

         I'm not sure where the confusion is, but perhaps it's in the again more recent ideas around identity?

         I wrote a post about it once, referencing feminist philosopher Jane Clare Jones' explanations,

         The important point is that a lot of people who are marginalised are not in fact oppressed. There are only three axes of oppression, sex, race and class.

         A lot of the fuckery in supposed progressive thinking is thinking all discriminations are cause by oppression, and forgetting that oppression is material at base, and that there are more powerful interests holding it in place.

         Thus why techno-corporate power is so happy with rainbow washing and identity politics. There is no demand for material structural restitution for exploitation.

         https://thestandard.org.nz/class-oppression-and-discrimination/

         Reply
         • Karolyn_IS 2.1.1.2.1

           24 April 2025 at 1:20 pm

           Women are also exploited (and dominated) for their unpaid labour, essential to the state and economy, as precarious workers (a reserve army of workers, often part time), and sexually, as prostitutes, in pornography, in soft-porn style music videos, and more

           Reply
           • SPC 2.1.1.2.1.1

             24 April 2025 at 1:49 pm

             Workers are exploited in many areas of work. But not all workers.

             Reply
             • Karolyn_IS …

               24 April 2025 at 2:13 pm

               Women are exploited under patriarchal systems because they are women. Contemporary capitalism also interacts and overlaps with contemporary patriarchal systems – it always has from its inception.

               Reply
           • weka 2.1.1.2.1.2

             24 April 2025 at 2:23 pm

             This.

             Whatever gains we might have been allowed, it's increasingly obvious that these are allowances rather than being entrenched as human rights, or god forbid a sign of actual change to the system.

             As an example, despite the gains we've made around rape culture in the past decades, the capitalist system has pivoted thanks to the internet. Pornhub being an example of both exploitation as workers and women, as well as rape. This as much as anything tells us that women's rights are optional extras even on the left. We can't control the internet apparently.

             But we've seen the same dynamic with the rolling back of abortion rights in the US, and the abandoning of women in Afghanistan. Liberals will say these are bad things, but won't actually do anything about them.

             Reply
             • tWig …

               24 April 2025 at 10:33 pm

               And in the proposed extension of blocking US Federal funding US under-25s to undergo sex hormone treatment "Anti-trans organizations have floated raising the age limit for care to 25 for years, and GOP architects of youth care bans have been explicit: the real goal is to eliminate gender-affirming care entirely. Donald Trump himself has vowed in the past to target trans healthcare “at any age.” Now, …the first formal warning shots have been fired… 'According to a recent CMS letter, clinics across the country are being warned against providing gender-affirming care to individuals under the age of 21. “Federal financial participation (FFP) is strictly limited for procedures, treatments, or operations for the purpose of rendering an individual permanently incapable of reproducing and, under 42 C.F.R. 441.253(a), is specifically prohibited for such procedures performed on a person under age 21,”

               Reply
               • weka …

                 25 April 2025 at 9:34 am

                 yes, we know. The fascists are trying to do a take over of society in the US.

                 What you fail to appreciate is that while the conservative right and feminists superficially share some positions, eg that children shouldn't be transitioned, feminists both oppose facism and are fighting for our own rights.

                 If you want to complain about what is happening in the US, go for it. But if you continue to support the side that ran No Debate and locked out a lot of progressive voices, then you can't actually complain, it's an own goal. Try listening to GC women and engaging with what they are saying, especially the detrans ones, the left wing feminists, and the women who felt abandoned by the left and have allied with the right. That's the only way to understand what is happening in the US, including the backlash against trans people (key point: not just from the fascists). Liberals crying about loss of liberal rights have no clue as to what is going down.

                 Reply
         • Nigel Haworth 2.1.1.2.2

           26 April 2025 at 8:21 am

           “in classic leftist analysis, there are three classes that are exploited by the capitalist system: workers, women and people of colour. This is different from gender identity, disability and so on.”

           May I ask which leftist analysis defines these three groups as classes? The classical definition of the working class includes all three.

           Reply
           • weka 2.1.1.2.2.1

             26 April 2025 at 9:29 am

             My understanding mostly comes from feminists, in particular feminist philosopher Jane Clare Jones. I briefly quoted her in the post I linked above, but will have a look later to see if she has written anything more substantial specifically on this.

             Reply
             • Nigel Haworth …

               26 April 2025 at 1:10 pm

               Appreciated. I ask because there is a great deal of confusion about the meaning of class, a term now used in multiple different ways and contexts. It was bad enough when the foundational Marxist understanding had to compete with later sociological interpretations; today, it is even more complex.

               Reply
           • SPC 2.1.1.2.2.2

             26 April 2025 at 1:49 pm

             Waring called it a measurement issue.

             Which is why budgets later moved/should move towards a well being measure. That includes those outside of the workforce, the environment, the public good/commons/services, funding infrastructure etc.

             How one generates funding for government (via finance or taxation), as capital seeks profit without use of workers (use of machines/robots/AI and or international market supply) is becoming more important relative to the share of wealth to labour from profit.

             Class is now increasingly associated with education and access to health care and sufficient capital and finance for home ownership.

             Reply
       • Psycho Milt 2.1.1.3

         24 April 2025 at 2:17 pm

         As such, women are not a class.

         Oh, I think women have a pretty good case to make that as a group they are oppressed/exploited on the basis of their relationship to [a] means of production.

         Reply
         • Incognito 2.1.1.3.1

           24 April 2025 at 2:32 pm

           Sure. Is that meant to counter or challenge the quoted words or merely make a stand-alone observation?

           Reply
           • Psycho Milt 2.1.1.3.1.1

             24 April 2025 at 3:32 pm

             It's disagreement with the quote – I think men and women are social classes, whether we're talking ordinary old classification based on definable categories or full-on Marxist relationship to the means of production.

             Reply
             • Karolyn_IS …

               24 April 2025 at 3:59 pm

               Women and men are sex classes based in the material & biological reality of sex. Women are oppressed under patriarchal systems because of our biology ie in aiming to control and exploit women's reproduction, labour (paid or unpaid) and sexuality. This is done through social and economic systems (capitalist and non-capitalist ones), restrictive stereotyping and expectations, and acceptable behaviour placed on women.

               Reply
             • Incognito …

               24 April 2025 at 9:45 pm

               I’ve already given the context on which that quote is based.

               Class is routinely mentioned across intersectional scholarship, yet it remains underutilized as an analytical category to explain complex social inequalities. Writing in 1999, Acker (1999, p. 44) suggested that, with the development of postmodern/poststructuralist feminism, several leading feminist theorists turned to issues of culture, representation, and identity, in effect abandoning class as a central theoretical construct. By overemphasizing class as a descriptive category of economic stratification and underemphasizing class as an analytical category of economic relations, empirical scholarship that relies on descriptive analyses of class inadvertently elevates race and gender as explanatory categories while appearing to treat class in a similar fashion.

               The European context reads race, class, and gender quite differently. In the European context of engagement with Marxist social thought, class analyses have long explained social inequality, leaving race and gender as descriptive interlopers.

               Intersectionality's Definitional Dilemmas

               Reply
3. Karolyn_IS 3

   24 April 2025 at 2:27 pm

   It is, as I have long thought, that Brian Tamaki's Destiny Church is very patriarchal.

   John Campbell has been investigating how some women in Brian Tamaki's Destiny Church are afraid. He spoke to 22 women who are currently in Destiny Church or who are former members. Some were still in the church because they didn't have the finances or personal agency to leave. A small number of the women Campbell talked to are afraid of physical violence.

   The ManUp programme deals with the rage of some males from abusive families, state care etc. There rage is often channelled into new targets, the latest being LGBT+ people, while gay people have long been in Tamaki's sights. They are also targeting immigrants, and Te Pati Maori.

   One former insider, the only man I spoke to, said “rage is Tamaki’s marketing tool”. I’ve watched hours of Brian Tamaki sermons – the incendiary tone, the homophobia, the transphobia, the xenophobia, it’s staggering and it’s not healthy, it’s not good for your heart to be assailed with that.

   That former Destiny member talked about attacking drag queens being Tamaki’s “ticket”, because Destiny’s toxic response to drag events gets media attention. And then I found footage of Tamaki himself actually using that word – “ticket". He’s explicit in this. It’s a deliberate marketing strategy.

   But it requires rage to fuel it.

   Reply
   • Obtrectator 3.1

     24 April 2025 at 4:10 pm

     OFGS, Karolyn, all these so-called "churches" are patriarchal.That's the point of them.

     Reply

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