M-L-M Mayhem!

After the release of that ludicrous Harper's letter that claimed the biggest threat to civilization ( civilization  defined as the liberal marketplace of ideas) was "cancel culture", numerous philosophers have gone out of their way to defend this hot take with even worse hot takes. The most asinine and yet pretentiously self-assured of these was Agnes Callard's Should We Cancel Aristotle   that was not only a massive red herring but paradigmatic of the kind of assessments of reality that come out of mainstream [bourgeois] philosophy. That is, as I have noted so many times, there are a lot of philosophers who talk about problematics they haven't studied in great detail, accepting certain flawed parameters as a priori correct and then, upon this faulty conception of the world, build an entire argument they think is meaningful. It's a bit like an astronomer of the bygone era accepting the Ptolemaic conception of the world as fundamentally correct, never botherin...

As many of my readers will be aware, Comrade Zia of the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan [CmPA] recently passed away . Zia was not only the chairperson of the CmPA's Central Committee, but he was instrumental in building the contemporary Maoist movement in Afghanistan and played a key role in the construction of the international Maoist movement. He was not only involved in building the now defunct Revolutionary Internationalist Movement [RIM] but, with the CmPA and other former member groups of the RIM, played a leading role in the line struggle against the rightist line that cohered around the RCP-USA and that led to the RIM's dissolution. Indeed, one of the two major responses to the RCP-USA's "new synthesis" was likely written by Zia (the other being Ajith's Against Avakianism ). Since then, the CmPA's attempts to help rebuild a new Maoist international was recognized as significant and exemplary by Maoists everywhere, as the obituaries from mu...