A thread for Democrats Only
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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What’s the meaning of life? (It is a political question even more than a philosophical and religious question)
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/5/18663220/god-religion-sociali
sm-martin-hagglund-this-life
It’s the biggest question anyone has ever asked, and there is no easy answer. It’s even harder to answer if you consider this possibility: That this life — the here and now — is all we have. There is no heaven nor hell, no eternal beyond, no consciousness of any kind after death. We are thrown into existence, we live for a while, and then we pass away into nonexistence.
If all of that’s true, how should we spend our time? What should we care about? And most importantly, what do owe each other?
A new book, called This Life, by Yale philosopher Martin Hägglund somehow tackles all of these questions and much more. For Hägglund, the best religious and philosophical traditions all implicitly recognize that the highest good, the thing we’re really after, is this life that we share together. And that means we have to think about meaning and commitment with this truth in mind.
This is Hägglund’s point of departure, and it leads him through the history of religious and political ideas and finally to a deep critique of capitalism and the values that undergird it. In the end, Hägglund argues that some form of socialism is the only political project that takes the human condition seriously, unlike capitalism, because it allows us to devote ourselves to projects that we actually care about as opposed to selling our labor — and time — for the sake of profit and survival.
Sean Illing: Capitalism values time in the sense that someone has to pay us for it, but it doesn’t value the ability to spend our time in ways that aren’t connected to survival or money. Everything turns on wealth and profit and property, and you’re defined by what you own, what you possess. It’s the most spiritually impoverished way of being I could possibly imagine.
Martin Hägglund: Yes, but the thing about Marx is that, even though he’s very critical of capitalism and thinks it has to be overcome, he also thinks it was a form of progress compared to previous forms of life. And the question of time is at the center of that.
There’s a contradiction here because, on the one hand, capitalism is the first social form of life which recognizes that everyone’s time is valuable in the sense that you have to pay someone to do something rather than just enslave them. What you’re saying to the enslaved person is that you don’t own your time at all; I own you and your time.
So capitalism, at least minimally, recognizes that our time is important. Even if you’re not a capitalist or don’t own any property, you at least own the time of your life. In other words, there’s a negative recognition that your time is valuable because it costs something to buy it, and this is a qualitative shift that capitalism makes possible.
Sean Illing: Can you say a little more about Marx’s critique of capitalism and why it was both a necessary step on the way toward something like socialism and why it had to be discarded in order for us to really own our time in the way you think we should?
Martin Hägglund: Well, Marx asked, how did we come to embrace this idea of everyone’s right to freedom and equality? And the answer is that capitalism helped gives us this language, this way of thinking, because this mode of production, of buying and selling our labor on the market, couldn’t be justified by race or caste or any of these things.
But this is where the contradictions emerged for Marx. While we’re all formally equal under capitalism in terms of our rights to sell our labor, we’re still unequal because we have different amounts of capital. So we’re minimally free in that no one can just enslave us or force us to do something, but we’re only free to sell our labor in order to survive.
This is progress over the old feudal system, and it helps to establish the importance of freedom and equality, but it can’t
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Awesome links.
I'm sure the author won't mind.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, Martin Hägglund is a Commie. Excuse me -- Marxist/Socialist. He wrote the book because that is what professors do. If he was writing for money, he'd be writing movie scripts for Disney. Hollywood sure needs some smarter writers and Hägglund is one. Did you see Star Wars 9? What a stupid movie! But it made money. A billion people will eventually waste some of their life watching it and Martin Hägglund would not approve of such waste, which is why he wrote "This Life, Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom".
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Awesome links.
I'm sure the author won't mind.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Chapter 5 begins with:
The greatest resources for developing a secular notion of freedom can be found in the writings of Karl Marx. This may be surprising, since Marxism is notorious for having given rise to totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. Yet, as I will seek to show, there is no support in Marx’s thinking for any form of totalitarian state. On the contrary, the premise for all of his work is “the existence of living human individuals” as ends in themselves. This commitment to individual freedom—what Marx describes as “the free development of individualities”—is the foundation for his critique of capitalism and his critique of religion.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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And you too can have a legal copy of it for just $19.98 at Target:
https://www.target.com/p/this-life-by-martin-h-gglund-hardcover/-/A-54
175371?ref=tgt_adv_XS000000&AFID=google_pla_df&fndsrc=tgtao&CPNG=PLA_Entertainment%2BShopping&adgroup=SC_Entertainment&LID=700000001170770pgs&network=g&device=c&location=9016186&ds_rl=1246978&ds_rl=1248099&ds_rl=1246978&gclid=Cj0KCQiAhojzBRC3ARIsAGtNtHWCklSioDXZ6p0PFFpwuHA_Cc2W24raU2_8eycqkhj3BeivXAbxIsIaAtz5EALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds
Or just $12.99 on Kindle:
https://www.amazon.com/This-Life-Secular-Spiritual-Freedom-ebook/dp/B0
72MXPYQB
So when are you cutting your pay to $70,000 per year and giving the rest away? You never got back to me on that one.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Why do many working-class white Americans support politicians whose policies are literally killing them?
This is the question sociologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl tries to answer in his new book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. The book is a serious look at how cultural attitudes associated with “whiteness” encourage white people to adopt political views — like opposition to gun laws or the Affordable Care Act — that undercut their own health.
The book is not about racism at the individual level, though you can certainly read that into it. For Metzl, the key question is how did a politics of racial resentment become so powerful that it overwhelmed even the basic instinct for self-preservation? To get answers, he spent years talking to voters in Southern and Midwestern states, asking them to explain their political choices. The answers aren’t terribly satisfying, but they are instructive.
I spoke to Metzl about what he learned and what he thinks we can do to solve this problem. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing: Why are so many poor and working-class white Americans endorsing policies that are literally killing them?
Jonathan Metzl: That’s the core question I address in the book. I look at the rejection of the Affordable Care Act in the South. I look at policies that make it far easier for people to get guns and carry guns everywhere. I look at tax cuts that benefit wealthy Americans but cut roads, bridges, and schools in poor and working-class areas. Every one of those policies has been sold as a policy that will make America great again. But they have devastating consequences for working-class populations, particularly working-class white populations, in many instances.
You can’t really understand why people might support those agendas if you just start the conversation today. There are long trajectories of anti-government sentiment that course through the South that Trump has tapped into. There are also concerns about what it means to have the government intervene in ways that equally distribute resources that working-class white populations fear might undermine their own sense of privilege.
I think the GOP has also been remarkably successful at tapping into this narrative — a narrative that makes people anxious that immigrants and minorities are going to take away privileges that are theirs.
Sean Illing: When you say that certain policies or dogmas are “killing people,” what exactly do you mean? How are people dying?
Jonathan Metzl: Well, part of what I do in the book is talk to people in their daily lives and try to examine the everyday effects of particular GOP policies. And the other part of the book looks at the data trends of those policies, which is pretty remarkable.
I found that if you lived in a state that rejected the Medicaid expansion and blocked the full passage of the Affordable Care Act, you lived about a 21- to 28-day shorter life span on the aggregate. So it was costing people about three to four weeks of life in those states.
When I looked at states that made it incredibly easy for people to buy and carry guns pretty much anywhere they wanted, I found that this correlated with hundreds of deaths that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, particularly in white populations, because gun suicide rose dramatically. And I found that if you lived in a state that cut away infrastructure and schools and funding, that correlated with higher high school dropout rates.
All these variables are associated with shorter life expectancies, so this is what I mean when I say these policies are killing people.
Free Download for "Dying of Whiteness"
https://libgen.unblockit.red/search.php?req=Dying+of+Whiteness
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:The free links are for you, but would you exert yourself to click? The $70,000 job is out there for you, but would you exert yourself to move where the job is?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And you too can have a legal copy of it for just $19.98 at Target:
Or just $12.99 on Kindle:
So when are you cutting your pay to $70,000 per year and giving the rest away? You never got back to me on that one.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why do many working-class white Americans support politicians whose policies are literally killing them?
This is the question sociologist and psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl tries to answer in his new book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. The book is a serious look at how cultural attitudes associated with “whiteness” encourage white people to adopt political views — like opposition to gun laws or the Affordable Care Act — that undercut their own health.
The book is not about racism at the individual level, though you can certainly read that into it. For Metzl, the key question is how did a politics of racial resentment become so powerful that it overwhelmed even the basic instinct for self-preservation? To get answers, he spent years talking to voters in Southern and Midwestern states, asking them to explain their political choices. The answers aren’t terribly satisfying, but they are instructive.
I spoke to Metzl about what he learned and what he thinks we can do to solve this problem. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing: Why are so many poor and working-class white Americans endorsing policies that are literally killing them?
Jonathan Metzl: That’s the core question I address in the book. I look at the rejection of the Affordable Care Act in the South. I look at policies that make it far easier for people to get guns and carry guns everywhere. I look at tax cuts that benefit wealthy Americans but cut roads, bridges, and schools in poor and working-class areas. Every one of those policies has been sold as a policy that will make America great again. But they have devastating consequences for working-class populations, particularly working-class white populations, in many instances.
You can’t really understand why people might support those agendas if you just start the conversation today. There are long trajectories of anti-government sentiment that course through the South that Trump has tapped into. There are also concerns about what it means to have the government intervene in ways that equally distribute resources that working-class white populations fear might undermine their own sense of privilege.
I think the GOP has also been remarkably successful at tapping into this narrative — a narrative that makes people anxious that immigrants and minorities are going to take away privileges that are theirs.
Sean Illing: When you say that certain policies or dogmas are “killing people,” what exactly do you mean? How are people dying?
Jonathan Metzl: Well, part of what I do in the book is talk to people in their daily lives and try to examine the everyday effects of particular GOP policies. And the other part of the book looks at the data trends of those policies, which is pretty remarkable.
I found that if you lived in a state that rejected the Medicaid expansion and blocked the full passage of the Affordable Care Act, you lived about a 21- to 28-day shorter life span on the aggregate. So it was costing people about three to four weeks of life in those states.
When I looked at states that made it incredibly easy for people to buy and carry guns pretty much anywhere they wanted, I found that this correlated with hundreds of deaths that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, particularly in white populations, because gun suicide rose dramatically. And I found that if you lived in a state that cut away infrastructure and schools and funding, that correlated with higher high school dropout rates.
All these variables are associated with shorter life expectancies, so this is what I mean when I say these policies are killing people.
Free Download for "Dying of Whiteness"
https://libgen.unblockit.red/search.php?req=Dying+of+Whiteness
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Fuck Metzl and fuck his racist book.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:If I had a dollar for every time a Texas Republican told me he wasn't a racist but he did have a problem with lazy, no good niggers and Mexicans expecting the government to give them free stuff, I'd have enough money to fix 6ix's screwed up life, which is all his fault, not Democrats'.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Fuck Metzl and fuck his racist book.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
I forgot to mention how much Texas Republicans, who described themselves as completely non-racist, hated that goddamn stupid Obama because the nigger only got into Harvard since there is a quota for dumb niggers. Then they would remind listeners that they are not racist, they are simply stating the facts.
He is not a Texas Republican, but Donald Trump in 2011 upped the ante against President Barack Obama's legitimacy, raising questions about how the president was admitted to two Ivy League schools.
Trump openly questioned how Obama, who he said had been a "terrible student," got accepted into Columbia University for undergraduate studies and then Harvard Law School.
"I heard he was a terrible student, terrible," Trump told the Associated Press in an interview, a claim he's made in the past but one he doubled down on by suggesting he's probing that area of the president's life.
"How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records," he said, without providing backup for his claim.
Trump added, "I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can't get into Harvard."
"We don't know a thing about this guy," Trump said. "There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president."
More at www.politico.com/story/2011/04/trump-howd-obama-get-into-ivies-053694
Trump claims he is ‘least racist person in the world’ despite repeated racist attacks
More at www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-racist-twe
ets-aoc-ilhan-omar-baltimore-al-sharpton-jamestown-a9027306.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I blame the damn russians'. Hell, it's always the russians'.
T 
Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.
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We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America
by Jennifer M. Silva
Oxford University Press, 206 pp., $24.95
During the run-up to the 2016 election, the sociologist Jennifer Silva interviewed people in the Pennsylvania coal region, which delivered Trump a two-thirds majority, to find out how they made political decisions. Pennsylvania’s coal mines, which once employed 175,000 people, now employ just 837. With those jobs went an entire way of life. The work was dangerous and dirty; thousands died in accidents or succumbed to black lung disease; miners depended on company stores and homes, and those who lost their jobs faced destitution; but they nevertheless had a profound sense of solidarity. Most marriages lasted a lifetime, and communities were held together by social clubs, churches, unions, and friendships.
Today, Coal Brook, the (pseudonymous) town that Silva describes in We’re Still Here, is a depressed wasteland of bars, chain stores, fast food restaurants, and drug rehab centers. Most of the white, black, and Hispanic men and women Silva interviewed struggled with drug or alcohol problems, had spent time in jail, and/or were unemployed. Virtually all said that voting was pointless because the system was rigged in favor of the rich. When Silva turned up for an interview on Election Day wearing an “I Voted” sticker, she was mocked as a gullible fool.
“All politicians are bought off,” declared Joshua, a twenty-eight-year-old white ex-con in drug recovery. “Once they get thrown into the machine they become puppets like all the rest…. I’m not a fan of either [Trump or Clinton]. It’s like choose shit or a shit sandwich.”
Bree, a white waitress suffering from chronic pain whose black boyfriend was recently released from prison, felt similarly:
I love women, and I think they can do anything a man can do, but that woman should not be the President of this United States, so help me God, but neither should that jackass. So it’s like, who the frick do you pick? I’m like, you’re not giving us much of a choice here. Either way we’re going to be destroyed.
Very few of the people of color interviewed by Silva bothered to vote at all, but some whites held their noses and voted for Trump. “Oh, he got us rednecks!” said Steven, a sixty-two-year-old janitor. Danielle, a twenty-eight-year-old child abuse survivor with debilitating anxiety, put it this way: Trump is “so in your face, like eff you, I don’t give a crap what you think of me. I think he belongs in this area because that’s what we are.” Bree agreed: “At the end of the day, I would rather have President Dickhead than President Sellout.”
Silva’s white informants tended to see themselves as lonely warriors facing strange, undefined threats to their community. Weird conspiracy theories were common. Graham Hendry, a white nursing-home aide who’d been chain-smoking since age nine and had recently lost three friends to heroin, believed that September 11 and the Sandy Hook school massacre were hoaxes, that FEMA was building a network of concentration camps for minorities, and that the government put fluoride in toothpaste and aluminum chloride in deodorant in order to calcify people’s pineal glands, allowing the authorities to control their minds.
“Everybody is getting cancer,” Mary Ann Wilson, a fifty-one-year-old white smoker, told Silva. “There’s something in the air,” said her adult daughter Vivian, also a smoker. Could it be landfill from those trucks from New York, they wondered? Or the dust kicked up by the mines?
Many of the white men carried guns everywhere—to high school football games, the supermarket, the sub shop. Their anger focused on a faceless government that neglected people like them and on supposedly shiftless immigrants and minorities who feasted at the public trough. Some embraced white nationalist ideas, which unconvincingly concealed deep feelings of loneliness, shame, worry about the future, and a yearning for solidarity.
America’s white working class seems to have fashioned a new culture of pain and trauma
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