I guess you mean Naomi Wolf, as the sub-title makes clear? Quite different people. Klein is an excellent writer and thinker. Wolf is deep in the conspiracy hole.
Someone could argue Klein is a Chomsky-like intellectual: interesting, academically challenging, but largely ineffective at actually affecting the status quo she condemns. In the end, she sells books printed by the evil corporations she supposedly despises, and she's definitely made quite a bit of money from them.
“We should improve society somewhat” vibes here. Speaking of academic challenges that are largely ineffectual: ideological purity games likes this are equally meaningless.
Either the ideas are sound, or they’re not. Which ideas do you think are unsound, and why? No hiding behind “someone could argue,” or “but she claims x but does y.”
Which ideas of Klein’s do you see as intending to affect which status quos, and why is it notable that they in themselves have not impacted them? Charles Babbage never lived to see his machine built. Does that make the endeavor less meaningful?
Note: I have read “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine.” I have not assessed their impact on any particular status quo. I am not claiming that they have. I am challenging the misdirection of your comment in an attempt to understand what you meant by what you wrote.
That's a pre-punk attitude, there. Ideas on their own do nothing, it's actions that produce change. Klein talks a good game but then publishes with the biggest conglomerates, does the promotion tours, etc etc; effectively, she sells out like everyone else. Does this make her work less meaningful? Yes, it weakens it significantly; claiming things like "capitalism is incompatible with controlling climate change" and "brands are bad for society" and then happily partaking in that same capitalism and branding, is incoherent to say the least. And sure enough, it does little except justifying her profile in the system.
Incoherent? You mean you don’t understand the ideas themselves because of the medium by which it was transmitted? Be serious. You yourself are reading these words on a machine that is the result of capitalist and military influence. Does that mean that those aims, those causes, haven’t had a negative impact on, i.e, the environment or society? Certainly not.
By the standards you set, no idea which goes against the status quo can legitimate unless that status quo is so weak it can be totally circumvented: The biological corollary would be saying vaccines don’t work because they didn’t prevent every instance of the disease they were intended to prevent.
How many babies must we throw out with the bath water before we’re permitted to discuss the merits of the ideas themselves?
The misquote Sorkin, this the reason the Left in the United States looses so goddamn always.
The medium is the message. Embedding anti-capitalist discourse into capitalism is how progressives get coopted and neutered, always.
You don't have to be a maximalist to express ideas, but if you express maximalist ideas (and Klein does), then it's only reasonable to expect you to be coherent. Otherwise you're just playing a part, for the benefit of a system that requires token opposition.
To be fair, she occasionally tried to be coherent - supporting Chavez in Venezuela, for example. That didn't work that well either.
We are at least two generations removed from any possible, popularly conceivable alternative to capitalism. Such an alternative is not generated from thin air; it must be cultivated.
Any criticism, to be useful, must be consist of two parts: (1) An assertion of fault and (2) a suggestion of remedy. You haven’t even provided (1), not really, but let’s pretend for a moment you have. What is your remedy for Klein’s faulty expression of anti capitalism? Printing ‘zines from paper made from the pressed dryer lint of guerrilla laundromats? How far does your purity test go before it itself becomes just an excuse to refuse to discuss the ideas themselves?
Or shall we just admit that your position is merely nihilism? If that is the case, let us state it out right; this, at least, dispenses with pretense of ideology.
It's very modern that she's experiencing trouble because of someone who simply shares her first name, not even an unusual one or her whole name, who has become famous for being unhinged on Twitter.
Naomi is fairly unusual, both surnames have the same number of syllables, and both rose to fame around the same period, in the early '90s. It's not true that Wolf "became famous for being unhinged on Twitter"; she used to be considered a leftwing feminist and worked with Bill Clinton, while Klein was a radical anti-corporation leftist active in anti-G8 circles, so they were broadly "on the same side" from a mainstream perspective (although I'm sure Klein, as the most radical of the two, would strongly challenge that). It's very very easy to mistake them; I know I've been knowing their work for 30 years and still occasionally mix them up.
Wolf seems to have drifted right only fairly recently - although I'm sure she would say that it's the Overton window around her that moved instead.
> Wolf seems to have drifted right only fairly recently - although I'm sure she would say that it's the Overton window around her that moved instead.
That's totally true. Conspiracy theories used to be a left-wing thing and are now a right-wing thing. Klein went from writing conspiracy theories to writing about them, while Wolf stayed course.
Conspiracy theories have always been a right-wing thing as well. What happened is that right-wing conspiracy theories were normalized, while left-wing conspiracy theories remained stigmatized. Also some (like anti-vaxx, traditionally a leftist thing) shifted polarity.
> while left-wing conspiracy theories remained stigmatized
I don't think that's true. CIA involvement in South America or Italy, for example, used to be a leftist conspiracy theory; and now it is documented history.
In fact, I'd argue that the Left effectively ran out of conspiracy theories, as most of them were proven true. Once the Berlin Wall came down, a lot of "pro-capitalists" activity became overt and acceptable, often even initiated by leftist governments, and historical actors came out of the wood to describe what really happened - the Cold War was over and winners didn't have to be ashamed of the extreme measures they took to get there.
The only conspiracy left to the left (eh) was basically Echelon and internet surveillance; Snowden confirmed that too, so now there is nothing.
Maybe these two actually have more in common then a first name? Maybe they're both conspiracy theorists? Maybe that's why they constantly get confused?
I am looking forward to the book and am particularly curious if it will address the origin of "conspiracy cultures" as I personally feel a lot has to do with governments and media plain lying and manipulating. It keeps me puzzled why conspiracies are not simply addressed but somehow need to be silenced instead. Maybe the book will provide insight or answers.
You can't address conspiracy theories because they can be generated much easier and quicker than they can be rebutted. And attempts to do so just mark you as "part of the conspiracy".
(Although I might be inclined to agree with you that there are real, very obvious, unaddressed "conspiracies" that kind of happen while simultaneously everyone is aware of them but can't "see" them. Mostly to do with the operation of political donations, but things like the Sackler opiate scandal had evidence ignored for years. Or the Clarence Thomas bribery allegations.)
The great replacement is a supposed conspiracy yet everyone in here complains how raising children is too expensive, how immigrants are imported to fill in for the missing people and how they accept wages lower than what natives would accept.
But somehow putting three simple facts together makes you a white nationalist. Which is odd since I wasn't white when I immigrated here.
I find the same is true for most other conspiracy theories. Epstein showed that there are a lot of very rich paedophiles. Covid responses around the world showed that vaccine passports were very much on the cards. And on and on.
It's pretty disheartening to see the ideology which was supposed to keep power in check worship it instead.
It's putting the observations together in ways that assign intent and blame in ways that don't make sense that's the problem. You can't add 1+1+1 and make 5.
(Especially in a country like the US that's literally built out of immigrants; is the argument that the US should revert to its 1600 population levels and their descendents?)
> Covid responses around the world showed that vaccine passports were very much on the cards
Well .. yes? They've been a thing for certain diseases for years. The US used to screen for TB at Ellis Island. I had to get a Yellow Fever vaccination with a little card in my passport to be allowed into Peru. And so on. What's the conspiracy?
> Epstein showed that there are a lot of very rich paedophiles
Now you're on to something; the way in which a lot of people will cover for sexual exploitation because it's happening among people they're friends with. #MeToo etc. Ronan Polanski. This one is hard to unravel. But you have to stick to evidence or you end up in a pizza parlor without a basement with a gun.
Conspiracies are part of that turning your brain off, as they supply in a nice simple explanation for what is actually a complex situation caused by many different factors and actors.
For each concrete gripe you've described, we can see that the dynamic exists. We can imagine ways of trying to reform it or at least reign it in (this isn't to say that doing so is easy, due to entrenched interests). And if someone else disagrees with you on some of those issues, perhaps you can still find common ground with them on others.
What do you get from tying it all together, labeling the whole thing "Great Replacement", and imparting some singular motivation ? It would seem that you gain a group identity and a rallying cry, but at the cost of misdirecting your energy onto easy targets instead of the root issues you started with.
That media executives and politicians were paid off by Big Pharma to promote an experimental prophylactic (does not actually prevent infection, unlike every other vaccine in existence) under the guise of a campaign of fear to inject as many people as possible, even though only elderly/obese/very sick people would really receive a marginal benefit. Oh and if you had a bad reaction, you can't sue the manufacturer.
And still even today in the US, little kids are getting the mRNA treatment, when they are more likely to die from drowning than a coronavirus.
> The great replacement is a supposed conspiracy yet everyone in here complains how raising children is too expensive, how immigrants are imported to fill in for the missing people and how they accept wages lower than what natives would accept.
> But somehow putting three simple facts together makes you a white nationalist.
This is pretty easy to understand - the important part of the conspiracy theory, and the one your three simple facts are missing, is: there is no conspiracy to do these things. Yes, people in developed countries have below-replacement birth rates, but is that because there is a cabal of evil people trying to genocide them? Or is it due to numerous individual decisions by individual actors creating economic and social circumstances which lead to lower birth rates?
Same goes for your other points. There are simple, logical and realistic explanations that don't need some grand conspiracy to make sense. If you still choose to look for the evil cabal who want to destroy white people, what are you, if not a conspiracy theorist?
False dichotomy! There can be structural explanations for sociological phenomena that don't put things down to aggregates of individual preferences and also don't resort to blaming an imagined cabal of lizard-men.
"structural explanations for sociological phenomena that don't put things down to aggregates of individual preferences" aren't necessarily conspiracies. The mere confluence of interests and incentives does not form a conspiracy.
The premise of replacement theory is that "the elites" are willfully and actively conspiring to replace white people, culturally and politically, with non-whites and eventually render the white race extinct. That they're doing it on purpose. Meeting in dark, smoke-filled rooms and planning it out.
Regardless, even in the absence of an active and willfull conspiracy, interpreting socioeconomic trends through the lens of race is still racist. Being concerned that globalism and immigration suppresses "native" wages isn't racist - but people need to learn in that case that what they hate isn't immigrants, but capitalism, because that's just efficient markets doing exactly what they're supposed to do. Being concerned that globalism and immigration suppressing "native" wages is an effort to commit white genocide and destroy white culture is what makes it racist.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. Could you please stop creating accounts to do this with? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and will eventually get your main account banned as well.
> False dichotomy! There can be structural explanations for sociological phenomena that don't put things down to aggregates of individual preferences and also don't resort to blaming an imagined cabal of lizard-men.
What dichotomy am I proposing? I simply said that there is not one evil group conspiring against white people. It's possible that there are multiple groups with nefarious intent (e.g. to suppress wages, or to extract more money from the population), but surely we can all agree that the idea of "The great replacement" is ludicrous? Did this site drift so far to the right that even this statement is now controversial?!
>But somehow putting three simple facts together makes you a white nationalist.
Well not quite. It does make people expect that you're about to blame me somehow wanting to "breed out" white people, which puts them on guard and makes them hostile. Personally I observe the same phenomena as you but I'm not allowed to point them out either, because I can hardly blame myself.
It's a very strange experience, being the conspiracy world's favorite supposed conspirator but still seeing what people are trying to explain by turning to conspiracy theories.
If you believe that a powerful group of people are deliberately trying to decrease the number of white people and replace them with imported non-white people and that they must be stopped then yes, that makes you a white nationalist.
The great replacement conspiracy theory is that a shadowy group (probably the Jews) is deliberately encouraging immigration, encouraging non-white people to have lots of children, and preventing white people from having children, all as a form of genocide. This is completely dead wrong. We don't really see "native" populations being replaced, and to the extent that we do it happens despite the efforts of people in power. The fact that a conspiracy theory contains a kernel of truth, or at least plausibility, does not justify the flights of fancy that follow.
Epstein was running a massive sex trafficking ring. Hillary Clinton was not running one out of a pizza parlor.
The CIA experimented with mind control. It did not use radio telescopes and chemtrails to do it.
The government has videos of weird things in the air. It does not have captured alien spacecraft.
Certain people actually did try to steal the 2020 election. Joe Biden was not one of them.
>Covid responses around the world showed that vaccine passports were very much on the cards.
This is strange to me. Of course they were on the cards! We've handled pandemics before. All these supposedly sinister tools have been used in the past. There's no need for cloak-and-dagger scheming when governments have well-tested legal authority to simply mandate vaccination.
Chinese, Italian, Irish, Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, the list just goes on..
There is always external (or externalized in the case of African-Americans) forces trying to dilute the purported “purity” of the hegemony, despite the fact that the country has always been defined by continuous immigration.
It’s just reactionary people desperately yearning for an imaginary past. One of the classic tropes of fascist movements like white nationalism, christian nationalism or the generally sclerotic and reality divorced movement that worships Trump.
Every conspiracy contains a simple (but wrong) solution to a complex emotional issue. They’re like a “doctors hate this one trick” for politics and science.
> Award-winning author and Guardian columnist Naomi Klein is to publish a book about conspiracy theories, which she has described as a departure and “more personal, more experimental” than her previous books.
45 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadEither the ideas are sound, or they’re not. Which ideas do you think are unsound, and why? No hiding behind “someone could argue,” or “but she claims x but does y.”
Which ideas of Klein’s do you see as intending to affect which status quos, and why is it notable that they in themselves have not impacted them? Charles Babbage never lived to see his machine built. Does that make the endeavor less meaningful?
Note: I have read “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine.” I have not assessed their impact on any particular status quo. I am not claiming that they have. I am challenging the misdirection of your comment in an attempt to understand what you meant by what you wrote.
That's a pre-punk attitude, there. Ideas on their own do nothing, it's actions that produce change. Klein talks a good game but then publishes with the biggest conglomerates, does the promotion tours, etc etc; effectively, she sells out like everyone else. Does this make her work less meaningful? Yes, it weakens it significantly; claiming things like "capitalism is incompatible with controlling climate change" and "brands are bad for society" and then happily partaking in that same capitalism and branding, is incoherent to say the least. And sure enough, it does little except justifying her profile in the system.
By the standards you set, no idea which goes against the status quo can legitimate unless that status quo is so weak it can be totally circumvented: The biological corollary would be saying vaccines don’t work because they didn’t prevent every instance of the disease they were intended to prevent.
How many babies must we throw out with the bath water before we’re permitted to discuss the merits of the ideas themselves?
The misquote Sorkin, this the reason the Left in the United States looses so goddamn always.
You don't have to be a maximalist to express ideas, but if you express maximalist ideas (and Klein does), then it's only reasonable to expect you to be coherent. Otherwise you're just playing a part, for the benefit of a system that requires token opposition.
To be fair, she occasionally tried to be coherent - supporting Chavez in Venezuela, for example. That didn't work that well either.
Any criticism, to be useful, must be consist of two parts: (1) An assertion of fault and (2) a suggestion of remedy. You haven’t even provided (1), not really, but let’s pretend for a moment you have. What is your remedy for Klein’s faulty expression of anti capitalism? Printing ‘zines from paper made from the pressed dryer lint of guerrilla laundromats? How far does your purity test go before it itself becomes just an excuse to refuse to discuss the ideas themselves?
Or shall we just admit that your position is merely nihilism? If that is the case, let us state it out right; this, at least, dispenses with pretense of ideology.
If it's Klein, you're fine.
If it's Wolf, woof.
Wolf seems to have drifted right only fairly recently - although I'm sure she would say that it's the Overton window around her that moved instead.
That's totally true. Conspiracy theories used to be a left-wing thing and are now a right-wing thing. Klein went from writing conspiracy theories to writing about them, while Wolf stayed course.
I don't think that's true. CIA involvement in South America or Italy, for example, used to be a leftist conspiracy theory; and now it is documented history.
In fact, I'd argue that the Left effectively ran out of conspiracy theories, as most of them were proven true. Once the Berlin Wall came down, a lot of "pro-capitalists" activity became overt and acceptable, often even initiated by leftist governments, and historical actors came out of the wood to describe what really happened - the Cold War was over and winners didn't have to be ashamed of the extreme measures they took to get there.
The only conspiracy left to the left (eh) was basically Echelon and internet surveillance; Snowden confirmed that too, so now there is nothing.
"The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964), prev on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964931
(Although I might be inclined to agree with you that there are real, very obvious, unaddressed "conspiracies" that kind of happen while simultaneously everyone is aware of them but can't "see" them. Mostly to do with the operation of political donations, but things like the Sackler opiate scandal had evidence ignored for years. Or the Clarence Thomas bribery allegations.)
But somehow putting three simple facts together makes you a white nationalist. Which is odd since I wasn't white when I immigrated here.
I find the same is true for most other conspiracy theories. Epstein showed that there are a lot of very rich paedophiles. Covid responses around the world showed that vaccine passports were very much on the cards. And on and on.
It's pretty disheartening to see the ideology which was supposed to keep power in check worship it instead.
It's putting the observations together in ways that assign intent and blame in ways that don't make sense that's the problem. You can't add 1+1+1 and make 5.
(Especially in a country like the US that's literally built out of immigrants; is the argument that the US should revert to its 1600 population levels and their descendents?)
> Covid responses around the world showed that vaccine passports were very much on the cards
Well .. yes? They've been a thing for certain diseases for years. The US used to screen for TB at Ellis Island. I had to get a Yellow Fever vaccination with a little card in my passport to be allowed into Peru. And so on. What's the conspiracy?
> Epstein showed that there are a lot of very rich paedophiles
Now you're on to something; the way in which a lot of people will cover for sexual exploitation because it's happening among people they're friends with. #MeToo etc. Ronan Polanski. This one is hard to unravel. But you have to stick to evidence or you end up in a pizza parlor without a basement with a gun.
For each concrete gripe you've described, we can see that the dynamic exists. We can imagine ways of trying to reform it or at least reign it in (this isn't to say that doing so is easy, due to entrenched interests). And if someone else disagrees with you on some of those issues, perhaps you can still find common ground with them on others.
What do you get from tying it all together, labeling the whole thing "Great Replacement", and imparting some singular motivation ? It would seem that you gain a group identity and a rallying cry, but at the cost of misdirecting your energy onto easy targets instead of the root issues you started with.
That media executives and politicians were paid off by Big Pharma to promote an experimental prophylactic (does not actually prevent infection, unlike every other vaccine in existence) under the guise of a campaign of fear to inject as many people as possible, even though only elderly/obese/very sick people would really receive a marginal benefit. Oh and if you had a bad reaction, you can't sue the manufacturer.
And still even today in the US, little kids are getting the mRNA treatment, when they are more likely to die from drowning than a coronavirus.
> But somehow putting three simple facts together makes you a white nationalist.
This is pretty easy to understand - the important part of the conspiracy theory, and the one your three simple facts are missing, is: there is no conspiracy to do these things. Yes, people in developed countries have below-replacement birth rates, but is that because there is a cabal of evil people trying to genocide them? Or is it due to numerous individual decisions by individual actors creating economic and social circumstances which lead to lower birth rates?
Same goes for your other points. There are simple, logical and realistic explanations that don't need some grand conspiracy to make sense. If you still choose to look for the evil cabal who want to destroy white people, what are you, if not a conspiracy theorist?
How did you get that from what I wrote? I legitimately have no idea. Do you think that "The great replacement" is about wage suppression?
The premise of replacement theory is that "the elites" are willfully and actively conspiring to replace white people, culturally and politically, with non-whites and eventually render the white race extinct. That they're doing it on purpose. Meeting in dark, smoke-filled rooms and planning it out.
Regardless, even in the absence of an active and willfull conspiracy, interpreting socioeconomic trends through the lens of race is still racist. Being concerned that globalism and immigration suppresses "native" wages isn't racist - but people need to learn in that case that what they hate isn't immigrants, but capitalism, because that's just efficient markets doing exactly what they're supposed to do. Being concerned that globalism and immigration suppressing "native" wages is an effort to commit white genocide and destroy white culture is what makes it racist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(This is not a response to this post in particular but to a whole bunch of the posts you've made with this account.)
What dichotomy am I proposing? I simply said that there is not one evil group conspiring against white people. It's possible that there are multiple groups with nefarious intent (e.g. to suppress wages, or to extract more money from the population), but surely we can all agree that the idea of "The great replacement" is ludicrous? Did this site drift so far to the right that even this statement is now controversial?!
Well not quite. It does make people expect that you're about to blame me somehow wanting to "breed out" white people, which puts them on guard and makes them hostile. Personally I observe the same phenomena as you but I'm not allowed to point them out either, because I can hardly blame myself.
It's a very strange experience, being the conspiracy world's favorite supposed conspirator but still seeing what people are trying to explain by turning to conspiracy theories.
Epstein was running a massive sex trafficking ring. Hillary Clinton was not running one out of a pizza parlor.
The CIA experimented with mind control. It did not use radio telescopes and chemtrails to do it.
The government has videos of weird things in the air. It does not have captured alien spacecraft.
Certain people actually did try to steal the 2020 election. Joe Biden was not one of them.
>Covid responses around the world showed that vaccine passports were very much on the cards.
This is strange to me. Of course they were on the cards! We've handled pandemics before. All these supposedly sinister tools have been used in the past. There's no need for cloak-and-dagger scheming when governments have well-tested legal authority to simply mandate vaccination.
Benjamin Franklin objected to “swarthy” german immigrants: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/02/swarthy...
Chinese, Italian, Irish, Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, the list just goes on..
There is always external (or externalized in the case of African-Americans) forces trying to dilute the purported “purity” of the hegemony, despite the fact that the country has always been defined by continuous immigration.
It’s just reactionary people desperately yearning for an imaginary past. One of the classic tropes of fascist movements like white nationalism, christian nationalism or the generally sclerotic and reality divorced movement that worships Trump.
Is it an autobiography?