[toyg]

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.

[35997279]

“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.

[toyg]

> Either the ideas are sound, or they’re not.

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.

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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.

[toyg]

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.

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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.