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Your second paragraph makes an important point: when reading texts from the 70s it's important to remember that they're using "Communists" and "Leftists" to des
by shuckles 6y ago
Your second paragraph makes an important point: when reading texts from the 70s it's important to remember that they're using "Communists" and "Leftists" to describe groups who, in the public imagination at the time, were extremely destructive and pervasive. Big cities had hundreds of bombings, weird leftist cult leaders would commit unequivocal crimes and get sympathetic, top-tier legal representation. These were not the relatively subdued Tumblr leftists or Scandinavian socialists of today, even after accounting for COINTELPRO distortions of the historical record.
A particularly striking example is the case of Lincoln Hospital in NYC which was taken over by a leftist group named the Young Lords that received a million bucks a year from the famously bankrupt city government to run a putative methadone clinic and Marxist education intensive. The details are a bit of an aside, but long story short the clinic had poor outcomes for patients, doctors dying of heroin overdoses, staff absentee rates in the 70%s, and about 4x more in spending per patient than city run hospitals. Yet it still kept getting funding renewed until 1978 through a variety of lobbying schemes. Some contemporary publications write of this medical failure fondly: https://filtermag.org/how-the-young-lords-took-lincoln-hospital-and-left-a-health-activism-legacy/ https://filtermag.org/how-the-young-lords-took-lincoln-hospi....
- throwanem 6y agoYou should source your claims, especially when they're heterodox. Calling the People's Program clinic a failure is pretty heterodox, and you've already admitted you have an axe to grind.
- shuckles 6y agoI have no axe to grind. Where did I admit that? Is it simply by saying that I've lived through regimes where worker power was itself a (if not _the_) problem? For what it's worth, I am generally on the left end of the spectrum; certainly economically if not socially. You’re right - I should have offered a source. You can reference the extensive reporting here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307365/days-of-rage-by-bryan-burrough/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307365/days-of-rage...
- throwanem 6y agoCalling Days of Rage "reporting" is hardly without controversy [1]. [1] https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/fictionalizing-radical-activism-of-the-1960s-a-review-by-dan-berger-of-brian-burroughs-days-of-rage/ https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/fictionalizing-radical-...
- shuckles 6y agoYour source generally disputes the framing of the book but not the facts. Do you have evidence that the facts I cited about Lincoln Hospital’s expenses, lack of accounting controls, and death and drug abuse rates among providers are incorrect?
- throwanem 6y agoOh, it disputes a lot of the facts, too. So do at least some of the people who gave interviews to Burroughs, interviews whose content the interviewees later described his having misquoted or in places outright fabricated. Do you have any reasonably sturdy evidence that the claims you made are correct? Until you can prove them, you have cited no facts, but only made claims. Those claims are yours to support. Asking me to prove a negative doesn't really accomplish anything in that regard.
- shuckles 6y agoPlease point me to where in the article Dan Berger claims the book’s facts about Lincoln Hospital are wrong. Until then, I am inclined to trust the fact checking apparatus of Penguin Books over your vague suspicions. I’m not asking you to prove a negative; my claims about the hospital were specific, falsifiable, and straight from a book printed by a reputable publisher.
- throwanem 6y agoNonfiction publishers have fact-checkers? That's new. (That is pretty new, and still quite rare: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/business/publishing-books-errors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/business/publishing-books...) I'm still not sure why I should be regarding Burrough's account as more likely to be true to historical fact than all of the other accounts I've been able to find. If nothing else, he, and you, have got an uphill battle in convincing anyone that his account is right, and everyone else's is wrong. You don't seem to recognize that. Perhaps he does. You seem to be quite familiar with the book; maybe he's more willing to support the claim than you so far have been, and has something better to offer than simple assertion. If you don't want to go to the trouble of trying to find references of your own, why not at least copy out whatever on the subject can be found in his bibliography?
- gorgoiler 6y agoWhat do you mean by heterodox? I haven’t seen this word before — is it the same meaning as unorthodox?
- throwanem 6y agoEssentially, yes. The two words' connotations vary slightly.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoReally compared to the PIRA the "leftist" organisations that did direct action in the USA are a bit of a joke. And you know everyone is entitled to representation
- arethuza 6y agoAs an aside - the IRA was itself a very left wing organisation - something that they didn't emphasise when collecting money in the US!