[lbo-talk] IMF = Slums. Slums = Viral Hothouse. Viral Hothouse=Mass Death

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

Ulhas
> The reality is that the so-called Third world is usually treated by
large sections of the Left as
> undifferentiated mass of nation-states, subjected to the power of
Imperialism. Neither the
> Third World nor the Imperialism are monolithic entities. My impression
is that a large
> segment of North American Left loves to blame the US, IMF/World Bank
etc etc for every
> problem in the world without any serious attempt to understand the
local/regional contexts
> and histories.

Exactly.  You took these words from my mouth, Ulhas.

This btw is my observation of the US scene as a partial outsider -
albeit I lived in the US longer than in any other country.  People tend
to form their opinions about facts of which they have no first hand
knowledge based on how these facts square with their own political
ideologies.  Thus, the same piece of land (e.g. Cuba) can be a hell or a
heaven, depending solely on the ideology of the beholder.

The cognitive geography of the world involves the process of lumping
together lands and political entities deemed similar and splitting apart
those deemed dissimilar from a particular ideological point of view.
Hence India and Africa can end up in the same bin, while Japan and
Russia are separated to two diametrically opposed camps (shameless
self-promotion: see my chapter "Beneath the Veil of Market Rationality:
Cognitive Lumping and Splitting in Narratives of Economic Development"
in Kinloch and Mohan (eds), _Ideology and the Social Sciences_ , 2000,
Greenwood Press).  

Wojtek