by Patrick M. Dixon It has become a point of consensus in American historical understanding that the efforts of conservatives to rid the country of communists in the early Cold War were part of an irrational crusade against an imagined enemy. “Reds under the bed” are jovially referred to. The chief protagonist and poster child… [Read more…]
May 9, 2012
by Bruno Fournier The French have elected François Hollande of the Socialist Party as their new president, and now everyone is dancing in the streets, convinced that this election somehow actually means something. In a capitalist society such as France, the primary role of electoral politics is to bedazzle the population into confusion, to make… [Read more…]
May 1, 2012
by Frank W. Strauch and Bruno Fournier For over a year now, Selecting Stones has been your source for ruthless scientific criticism of everything existing. Exactly one year ago, on this fine First of May, Selecting Stones announced to the world what its duties would be. Things have changed a bit since then, but much remains… [Read more…]
April 11, 2012
by Bruno Fournier Another day and another baseball scandal demonstrates once again the sham of so-called “freedom of speech” within capitalist countries such as the United States of America. The Miami Marlins’ 48-year-old Venezuelan-born manager Ozzie Guillen made remarks where he expressed his admiration for Fidel Castro’s longevity and uncanny ability to escape assassination attempts. … [Read more…]
April 10, 2012
by Frank W. Strauch Former Senator Rick Santorum just announced that he was suspending his campaign for the Republican Party nomination in the American presidential race. It is not as if he ever had a chance in the first place against Mitt Romney, but now the way is paved for the embodiment of Capital itself,… [Read more…]
March 30, 2012
by Anthony Burton In seventeenth-century England, a reactionary mouthpiece for the defeated feudal aristocracy – whose decay as a class was only inevitable within the boundaries set by the natural laws of social development – bellowed out desperately in the midst of the ruthless bloodletting that accompanied the basic dialectic of material progress towards capitalism… [Read more…]
March 25, 2012
by Lawrence McMahon My previous article, called “Occupy Tulsa and the Contradiction of Left and Right”, contained a blatant factual error concerning the workings of magnetism. My mistake. Opposite poles attract — rather than repel — one another. The principle of the dialectical unity of opposites still holds, however. The antagonism between two repellant magnets… [Read more…]
March 18, 2012
by Justin Hayden An inherent problem of the free market is the creation of individual, social, and economic dependency on industries that might no longer be needed due to resource constraints or lack of necessity. The best examples are the future of fossil fuel power plants and the automobile industry of the late 2000s. The… [Read more…]
March 10, 2012
by Justin Hayden If I were into conspiracy theories, I’d say the Milton Bradley Company is a propagandistic arm of the capitalist machine that has, for decades, been utilizing games as a means to mold the minds of our youth. Milton Bradley himself had an interest in kindergarten education and, according to the wisdom of… [Read more…]
March 9, 2012
The following image has recently been floating around Facebook, passed to us via a page called “Being Liberal”. Leave it to the liberals to fail to recognize right-wing propaganda when they see it. It appears to be a run-of-the-mill endorsement of the Pro-Choice position on the abortion question. But take a closer look… Here we… [Read more…]
March 8, 2012
The scientific editors of Selecting Stones wish our readers — and, of course, especially our female readers — a happy International Women’s Day. What a great holiday! It’s such a shame that it is so little celebrated in the U.S. The U.S. is odd in other ways, too. For example, everyone knows that Labor Day… [Read more…]
March 5, 2012
by Lawrence McMahon Nobody likes to hear someone jabber on about German philosophy, but bear with me for a moment. After the death of G. W. F. Hegel, the great philosopher of contradictions, his followers split into two antagonistic factions. The dividing line between them was directly political: Left Hegelians and Right Hegelians. To make… [Read more…]
February 19, 2012
by Lawrence McMahon A couple of months ago, I found myself briefly in Texas, and I had the opportunity to visit Occupy Austin. It presented a rather typical scene, with nothing of particular interest to report. However, I made the acquaintance of a young protester, whom we shall call here “Nick”. Nick did not stand… [Read more…]
February 11, 2012
Evolutionary Biology Evolutionary biology, when approached objectively, from the universal standpoint of the proletariat, is among the most valuable of the natural sciences. However, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, evolutionary biology is often deformed into a body of pseudoscientific theories with overtly racist undertones. For example, some psychologists explain today’s human behavior based on… [Read more…]
February 10, 2012
We offer today a quick update to Anthony Burton’s “Fascism Forecast 2012” article from last month. Our information comes courtesy of (who else?) the New York Daily News and the Pentagon itself. We submit the following photo for your consideration: Yes, those are some U.S. Marines in Afghanistan posing in front of the flag of… [Read more…]
February 7, 2012
‘Improvements’ of towns which accompany the increase of wealth, such as the demolition of badly built districts, the erection of palaces to house banks, warehouses, etc., the widening of streets for business traffic, for luxury carriages, for the introduction of tramways, obviously drive the poor away into even worse and more crowded corners. — Karl… [Read more…]
February 6, 2012
Muslim Brotherhood The Muslim Brotherhood is a bourgeois political party in Egypt espousing a right-leaning populist rhetoric, similar in many ways to Christian Democratic parties in Europe. The organization was founded in Egypt in 1928 by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna, and has produced many offshoots, both directly and by imitation, in various countries of… [Read more…]
February 4, 2012
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich G. W. F. Hegel is the most important bourgeois philosopher, and the central figure of German Idealism, who overcame Kant’s subjective idealism and dissolved his antinomies. He lived from 1770 to 1831, a period of bourgeois revolution on a world scale. Hegel developed the fullest form of dialectical method possible within… [Read more…]
January 28, 2012
Bourgeois Debts, Doubts Spell More Darkness on the World-Historical Horizon by Anthony Burton The fat-headed Winston Churchill once famously remarked that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been attempted. The irony of this statement, of course, is that Churchill – whose failures in colonial administration had produced… [Read more…]
January 26, 2012
by Bruno Fournier Two days ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman published another banal op-ed, this time entitled “Average Is Over”. Even for Friedman, the article is below-average, or, alternatively, if our measure is sheer stupidity, then the article is highly above-average. But we wouldn’t expect anything less from the New York Times, would… [Read more…]
May 16, 2012
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