So, if you haven't heard rabble.ca is looking for a new editor-in-chief (EIC). Here's the job posting for more information on it: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/rabblecas-staff-blog/2018/03/were-hiring...
I've been thinking about it and wanted to ask people on babble what direction you would like to see the new EIC take rabble.ca?
I'm going to leave the initial question wide-open to hear what you think rabble.ca's new EIC should do, but I'll add my thoughts as the discussion develops.
Stop supporting and running an American, imperialist view on almost every major foreign policy issue that comes along. Libya, Ukraine, Syria, Russia...
Not sure what imperialist position you're claiming Rabble has taken on Libya, Ukraine, Syria, an Russia. From what I've seen, it's view on all of those issues has been that there's no "side" particularly worth supporting. As to Syria an Turkey, from what I can see the only progressive an anti-imperialist entity is Rojava. Nothing either Assad or Putin does is anti-imperialist or has any progressive or humane effects. Anti-imperialism is not just being on the opposite side of a conflict with the U.S. .
Anti-imperialists never need to ally themselves with dictators, for crying out loud.
or White Helmets or NATO.
or White Helmets or NATO.
Rabble has done articles critical of Putin, on issues he deserves critique about-his militarism, his islamophobia and his persecution of gays(as well as the antisemitism he has recently unveiled, are all indefensible. They've run no articles supporting Western aggression against Russia and to my knowledge Rabble has never supported NATO or the White Helmets.
You can't actually want the site to SUPPORT Putin, for God's sakes. It's impossible to do that and still support a radical democratic transformation of life. Putin is a right-wing counterrevolutionary. Nothing he does is for the good of the people and nothing he does can ever have any humane, progressive or anti-imperialist results.
Make it so we can comment on Rabble articles/blogs using our rabble.ca handles.
[quote=Ken Burch]
Putin is a right-wing counterrevolutionary. Nothing he does is for the good of the people and nothing he does can ever have any humane, progressive or anti-imperialist results.
[quote=NDPP]
Thanks for articulating so clearly and succinctly the quintessential Canadian 'progressive' view which Rabble mirrors. Can't help but notice how similar your view is to that so relentlessly disseminated by the Russophobic western media. It is not about 'supporting Putin' but, as seems almost always the case, being led by the nose into supporting things you supposedly oppose. The contention that this is a 'progressive' site becomes less and less tenable. Hopefully a new chief editor can arrest this alarming decline.
PS Syrians saved from the tender mercies of the West's head-chopping jihadi proxies might disagree with you...
Make it so we can comment on Rabble articles/blogs using our rabble.ca handles.
I think that is more of a development than an editorial question, but it seems like something that should be relatively easy to change.
Do you have any opinion on the type of articles that you would like to comment on?
Well, my concern is more about the system than any particular content. I would probably comment on many of the articles and blogs were I able to do so using this handle.
I read the job posting and it sounds like way big responsibility!
Good luck to the candidates.
I like this site as is. I like the articles as is, some I agree with some not, that's the way it rolls and I want to voice my opinion regardless if to agree or disagree. I like contributing here, and doing so within the gide lines has so far not gotten me banned so I will continue.
Thanks for articulating so clearly and succinctly the quintessential Canadian 'progressive' view which Rabble mirrors. Can't help but notice how similar your view is to that so relentlessly disseminated by the Russophobic western media. It is not about 'supporting Putin' but, as seems almost always the case, being led by the nose into supporting things you supposedly oppose. The contention that this is a 'progressive' site becomes less and less tenable. Hopefully a new chief editor can arrest this alarming decline.
PS Syrians saved from the tender mercies of the West's head-chopping jihadi proxies might disagree with you...
I think you have to give the Syrian people some credit for saving themselves, there.
It is NOT a blow against the empire to, if what you're doing isn't "support" for Putin and Assad, than whatever it is. The Left has an obligation to steer just as clear of those two as it does of the Anglo-Euro-American empire-whose leader, Mr. Trump, is an ALLY(and possibly a lackey) of Putin, in case you somehow hadn't noticed that.
We're no longer in a binary world-it's not a choice of lining up with Russia OR lining up with "The West". Some of us are lining up with the global majority who despise and wish to be free of both of them.
Putin is just another dictator-he's not "the enemy of our enemy"-if anything, he's the boss of our enemy. He's a right-wing capitalistic militarist. There would be no difference between a world dominated by the U.S. and a world dominated by him.
And on that, I'm not with the State Department, I'm with Pussy Riot an the independent Russian Left-or do you see THEM as tools of imperialism as well?
Geopolitics is not a game radicals and revolutionaries should ever be playing. And history has proved, once and for all, that we can't be liberated by a "strongman". We have to do it ourselves, from below. Nothing else works.
I too would like rabble's new EIC to support and promote my personal politics, and if possible, to smite mine enemies.
Oh, and make the "Save" button a different colour.
CMOT has this thread "Blessed are the Peacemakers" that he/she uses to list interesting links and articles. Sometimes it is muddied by discussion, but mostly it serves as a resource. It would be nice if we could have threads that had no place for comment but rather can be used to post useful articles.
My activism (not what it used to be) is very local and in that setting we don't just want to shake our fist we want to impliment programs that will work. In that regards I would love to see a collection of links and articles that showed what works and the steps it takes to getting it implimented.
Also is there some way that rabble could connect the social action community and post secondary education. Whenever I am at a meeting or a forum questions come up that are left as thinkers. It would be cool if we could connect with students choosing research topics with these issues.
CMOT has this thread "Blessed are the Peacemakers" that he/she uses to list interesting links and articles. Sometimes it is muddied by discussion, but mostly it serves as a resource. It would be nice if we could have threads that had no place for comment but rather can be used to post useful articles.
Are you referring to "All hail the peacemakers 20"?
I didn't go back and check the first 19 incarnations, but of the 280 posts on the current thread, I count 275 of them as being by CMOT Dibbler and only five of them by anyone else. Not only is that thread not typically "muddied by discussion", it's essentially a blog. And rabble already hosts blogs.
Yea I got the title wrong. His posts are in a very narrow topic range and he himself writes nothing. Not saying it has to be part of babble. Maybe it should be hosted somewhere else.
I'd like for Rabble to stop running articles criticizing Jagmeet Singh on the Sikh extremism/seperatism issue. Regardless of whether or not Jagmeet Singh has adequately explained himself on this issue to prevent it from hurting the NDP in the next election, the continuing doubts about it in the media -- including in the headline article right now on rabble -- feel somewhat racist to me.
Overall I'd like to see more priority given to labour, environmental, economic and social justice issues on the front page, and less priority to articles about the NDP. In particular, the fight against the Kinder-Morgan pipeline is heating up in BC, and I'd like for articles in support of this fight to get priority on the front page.
Other issues I'd like rabble to prioritize include:
I quite like this site as it is as well. I agree with the priorities Left Turn lists above. Also like to see the Activist Toolkits more prominently placed. Final suggestion would be a place for a "notice board" of sorts for people to post notices of protests or community actions.
"The ominous assault on the final redoubts of a free press, through an attempt to brand dissidents, independent journalists and critics of corporate power and imperialism as agents of a foreign power, has begun.
The handfull of independent websites and news outlets, including this one, and a few foreign-run networks such as Al Jazeera and RT America, on which I host a show, 'On Contact', are the few platforms left that examine corporate power and empire, the curtailment of our civil liberties, lethal police violence and ecocide carried out by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries, as well as cover the war crimes committed by Israel and the US military in the Middle East. Shutting down these venues would ensure that the critics who speak through them and oppressed peoples such as the Palestinians have no voice left..."
Chris Hedges: Building the Iron Wall
Stop supporting and running an American, imperialist view on almost every major foreign policy issue that comes along. Libya, Ukraine, Syria, Russia...
So Rabble should ban itself for violating it's own rules?
The problem is, Rabble DOESN'T support "an American, imperialist view on almost every foreign policy issue that comes along". It doesn't support any views that come anywhere close to that.
From what I've seen, Rabble's viewpoint is that both the U.S. AND Russia are horrible actors in the world today and the Left shouldn't take the "side" of either of them. It condemns Putin(as it does Trump and as it has every American president in its existence) for imperial, reactionary actions, for aggressive foreign policy choices. Rabble doesn't back the "pro-Western" forces in Ukraine, it opposes Wester military interventions, it opposes it more or less took a "plague on all your houses" attitude on Syria-which is the reasonable position there, since there is no side there-other than Rojava-that any progressive could make any "case" for supporting. Not sure what position that poster wanted it to take on Libya.
As to Russia, the magazine has never called for any Western efforts to topple Putin-though people of the Left WOULD, I think, have to support a grassroots socialist uprising against the man if one were to emerge-it just hasn't argued for the benevolence or harmlessness of his actions.
In the 1930s, much(but far from all) of the Left bought into the argument that it had to at least partly ally itself with an authoritarian regime out of Moscow. Given the misery that stance led to-and btw, the Red Army would have defeated Hitler just as decisively had the USSR NOT been a police state, the credit on that goes solely to the valor of the soldiers themselves-why would anyone on the Left argue for repeating that nightmarish mistake?
Where the hell is the support for imperialism? Nothing Rabble has published would give aid and comfort to the Euro/Anglo/American war machine.
From what I've seen, Rabble's viewpoint is that both the U.S. AND Russia are horrible actors in the world today and the Left shouldn't take the "side" of either of them.
Surely made even easier by not living in either of those two countries.
From what I've seen, Rabble's viewpoint is that both the U.S. AND Russia are horrible actors in the world today and the Left shouldn't take the "side" of either of them.Surely made even easier by not living in either of those two countries.
In some senses, yes. I live in one of them and have never supported any actions on its part that could be taken as imperial. Most of the Left here rejects alliance with either empire.
There's nothing any of us can do from outside to help the anti-Putin movement within Russia. We can cheer them on, but there's nothing else it's legitimate for us as outsiders to do. No U.S. military action or economic pressure could ever bring Putin down.
""Most of the Left here rejects alliance with either empire. "
Yes but surely the fact that we are in an alliance with one empire, and not the other, is relevant to our priorities, tactics or considerations. Also relevant is the fact that one empire is vastly more powerful and more aggressive.
"No U.S. military action or economic pressure could ever bring Putin down."
I like your optimism here, but this is by no means certain. And they might kill us all trying.
I'd like the EiC to facilitate a new thumbs up thumbs down function to peer-review posts.
