the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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They certainly aren't rational here...
If you start from a culturalist critique and not a materialistic one, this is what happens.
I don't understand shit of the quote. What is "americanization" according to the author?
Essentially the extreme form of liberal ideology that the USA has exported across the world post WW2. The key defining factors are the reduction of social organisation to only two factors, liberty viewed as freedom of private enterprise, and private property. The second key factor that defines this Americanization being the ideological seperation (as the two concepts are in reality inseparable) of economic and political life, in which the free market regulates economic life, and the political life is seperated from it and reduced to voting for a candidate who defines the rules for political life. A low intensity democracy if you will.
Samir Amin later went on to write "The Liberal Virus - Permanent War and the Americanization of the World" to expand on this concept.
so the 'culturalist' opponents defy something modern and evolutionary, like lgbt rights, on the grounds it is 'americanization/westernization'. and the culturalists in the OP are defending anti-modern things in the guise of opposing westernization.
the problem i identify (and maybe he deals with this beyond the quote), is how we should know what is actually modern. because to return to lgbt rights, the suppression of them in the middle-east dates back to the nascent modernization programmes of states trying desperately to resist european colonialism. the very thing culturalists defend as invioable tradition was itself once the 'evolutionary' force.
It's actually dealt with in the preface/introduction of the book. Firstly culturalism is defined:
Then modernity is critiqued.
The universalist values (such as LGBT rights) got undermined and invalidated during colonialism, the only way to move forward is a redefinition of universal values from a non eurocentric point of view, not rainbow capitalism/imperialism.
and now i have made you reproduce & collate the theory for me! MUHAHAHAHAH I WILL NEVER READ A BOOK
i haven't read it put this way as a negative prescription, but yeah any theory of culture as immutable and not definitionally malleable is riding some mad essentialist/racialist horseshit.
By the end of next year an AI language model will probably be able to reconstruct the entire book because I will have quoted it so much lol.