FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
I'm saying that it's a mistake to identify the critical theory of wokism with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. The major figures of the Frankfurt School would reject wokism--ideologically and aesthetically, and in particular its focus on consumerist identity.
Would it also be a mistake to identify the socialist theory of Trotsky with the Socialist theory of Stalin? (Or that of Kamenev and Stalin, or Zinoviev and Stalin, or Bukharin and Stalin, or...)
...I submit that Marxism is best understood as a bundle of critiques of society emerging from a particular worldview. Beyond those worldview-clustered critiques, Marxism contains no actual, gears-level insight or plan for fixing society beyond "amass absolute power and use it tear down this society and build a much better one in its place". If you are tracking ideological descent, you should track it through the worldview, the critique cluster, and the prescription of amassing and wielding absolute power. These are the constants of Marxist thought.
The non-gears-level theoretical confections layered atop by Marx and his feuding successors are best understood as superstructure, epiphenomena. Lenin gutted much of Marx's own theoretical constructs to carry out the Russian Revolution, and no one cared because he maintained the constants of perspective, critique, and seizure of power, and he won. The Russian Revolutionaries who followed him themselves contained great diversity of thought and and many beautiful theoretical elaborations, until Stalin culled them all by hueing to the constants of Perspective, Critique, and seizure of power, and no one cared because he also won. Mao likewise diverged greatly from Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and yet he stuck to the basics, and he also won and so was recognized, at least initially, as a Real Marxist.
Consider the idea that Marxism does not actually contain actionable insight into the human condition or the proper ordering of a peaceful, prosperous society. Because of this lack, people attempting even minimally to engage with the human condition or build such a society in the real world quickly find themselves having to make shit up. Then if their improvisations work, they must have Really Understood Marx, and if they fail, clearly they were heterodox and benighted, at least by everyone within reach of the winner.
You may be correct that all the Frankfurt School and modern Social Justice share is a rhetorical commitment to communism, and you may be correct that in both cases, that commitment is fake. When in the history of the ideology has it been otherwise?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8hr ago
Yes, and that is why the people we are calling Cultural Marxists have engaged in a protracted and highly public campaign to, among many other things, put black people in charge of art, universities, and "etc". Surely you are aware of this campaign, the explicit arguments forwarded for its necessity and its many notable and expensive foibles?
What is your actual argument here? You appear to be quoting newspaper headlines as examples of ridiculous things that obviously haven't happened.
The motte is Marxists caring about culture, which obviously they have done throughout history. The Soviet Union is just one famous example.
The bailey is the much less defensible claim that "wokism is the bastard child of communism" - this kind of 'cultural Marxism' is a much larger, more complicated narrative about how intersectionality, modern progressive thought, etc., derive from a complex chain of descent from Marxism.
This claim comes around with some frequency, and has always left me quite confused as to where exactly such a view emerges from.
From your understanding, what is the doctrinaire Marxist view on, say, feminism as an ideological/philosophical system?
My understanding is that doctrinaire Marxism had no room for Feminism as such; class conflict was the problem and the solution, and the future classless society would provide seamless, perfectly egalitarian solutions for existing conflicts between the sexes with no need for further analysis or theoretical constructions. My impression of the attempts to implement Marxism likewise believed this, even as they often implemented, for example, what from a feminist perspective would be considered large-scale rape culture, exploitation and repression of women in their societies.
Likewise, from your understanding, what is the mainline Feminist view of Marxism as an ideological/philosophical system?
My understanding is that mainline Feminists consider Marx enormously influential to their critique of society and its discontents, but believe their ideological/theoretical model is an application and refinement of Marxist social critique, and that as a refinement, their movement's distinctive perspectives and prescriptions should be prioritized over the older, cruder, pure-class-conflict marxist view.
It seems to me that the above two descriptions are accurate for central examples of Doctrinaire Marxist and Feminist thinking respectively, and that both the fundamental relationship and fundamental conflict between them is undeniable. This old comment provides concrete examples of the phenomena both from popular appeals to academia, and from within academia itself; I'd be interested in whether you think I'm engaging with a Motte and Bailey there, and if so how. The dénouement to that post seems evergreen:
It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly. I think the above position can be defended unassailably by looking at the academic output that constitutes the headwaters of the Social Justice movement. I think that those who argue that the obvious, inescapable ties between Social Justice theory and Marxism are some sort of hallucination or sloppy categorization are either woefully uninformed or actively dishonest. To those who have advanced such arguments in the thread on the subject below, I offer an invitation: assuming the above examples are insufficient, what level of evidence would satisfy you? How many papers from how many journals do you need to see? How many quotes from how many prominent figures within the modern social justice movement, and the people who taught them, and the people who taught them, and so on? How far back do we need to go to satisfy you? How deep do we need to dig to bring this question to a conclusion?
(And it's a genetic fallacy anyway, but that's a whole separate issue. Suffice to say that I think wokism is wrong, but it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of this or that historical antecedent.)
I would disagree. New Ranch Marxism goes wrong specifically because it retains many of the distinct errors of its progenitor.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
My point is that "it's okay to assassinate people, but they have to be evil" is a belief that's held by approximately nobody.
I disagree, but am intrigued. Huge amounts of entertainment hinge on this norm. lots of history hinges on this norm. Radicals openly advertise based on this norm.
All the people who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk would never say that.
What would they say, in your view?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
Could you elaborate your point?
I think most people are not actually aware of the sort of person John Brown was, and the sort of things he actually did. I think those who are aware of him generally regard him as a hero, and if informed of his actual actions, would consider them justified, because he was Fighting Evil. I think this prediction would hold increasingly true the more latent social pressure it's tested under.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
...are you on substack?
Not yet.
One could point out that one way to avoid worries of a slave revolt would be to simply not build your economy on the backs of forced labor from an imported underclass that continues to grow...
Are you under the impression that I disagree with John Brown's actions?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Neither. It is the peace where "they" get away with it for another day, for whatever definition of "they" we each prefer.
“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
-G.K. Chesterton
The concept is right up my alley, but the movie's ending really threw me off.
..what threw you off about the ending? It seemed relatively straightforward to me. Spoilers initiating:
|| The lighthouse was ground-zero for the Shimmer, due to it being where the alien landed. The shimmer operated by smearing things into other things, copying and mixing together and generating variants of anything within the zone. It began altering and copying all the team members as soon as they entered. Note that we see them enter the shimmer, and then we hard-cut to them waking at a campsite, with no confirmation of what happened in between; it's not clear we're actually watching the original team or a duplicate throughout.
The ending: the shimmer is playing with the humans, pretty clearly trying to understand them. The husband had been copied, with the original self-immolating while the copy walked back home. In the main character's case, she convinces the copy to self-immolate, and in the process sets off a chain reaction that spreads immolation through at least its core domain. The shimmer is destroyed. "She" walks out, fundamentally altered at the least, with bits of her comrades mixed into her, and reunites with "her" "husband". The open question in the end is whether they're still carrying the shimmer inside them, and whether it will simply spread again. ||
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Cool. Now imprint this feeling in your mind, so that you can recall it in detail when the shoe is on the other foot.
I think it is every red-blooded American's moral duty to do a lot of things you probably would not approve of. moral clarity is a rush but it does not keep the peace.
Yes there is???!
Then by all means, lay it out. When I want to list law enforcement travesties by federal law enforcement, I list people murdered, women and children burned alive en masse, obviously unnecessary use of lethal force, decades-long patterns of abuse of rights and murderous malfeasence, destruction of evidence, perjury and coverups, all without meaningful accountability through any process intended to supply it.
What are the clear misdeeds of the current ICE offensive?
This is happening, and the optics do suck. You can tell they suck because people hate and fear ICE officers in a way they didn't a year ago.
Blue tribe emotions are not a reasonable guide to material reality.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
I do not think that the South seceded because they thought that Lincoln would shoot them up a la John Brown.
My understanding is that southerners were very worried about large-scale slave revolts, having observed long-term the outcome of such a revolt with the Haitian Revolution in 1791. John Brown, a murderous terrorist, made a serious attempt to ignite the same sort of slave revolt in Virginia, and for this was lauded as a hero and martyr by northerners generally, and that contemporary southerners saw this as proof that the northerners held their lives and wellbeing in slight regard.
From the first result for "southerner reactions to john brown":
In John Ellis’ letter to John Floyd and John B. Todd’s letter to Governor Ellis, they both mentioned the need for a militia in the wake of John Brown’s raid and execution. Ellis wrote to Floyd, the United States Secretary of War, about the conditions of North Carolina after the John Brown raid, and why North Carolina needed weapons for its militias. “The Sense of insecurity prevailing among the people of this State, renders it necessary that I should apply to you for arms to place in the hands of the militia…
...It is important to realize that there are exceptions to this demand for a militia. One such exception appears in The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux, where she and her father differed on the issue of being militarily prepared after Brown’s raid. “He does not conceal that he thinks it all folly, childs play, no need of preparation for war…. I do not see how in the present attitude of the North, sample they have given us in the John Brown raid, he can be so indifferent to our preparation for a future one.”[4] Catherine’s entry reflects the attitude of several newspapers suggesting Northern fanaticism, and well as a family division between her father, a man not convinced of the need for preparing for a war, and Catherine, a woman who was convinced that war would be inevitable.
...And plenty more where that came from. The AI summary:
Southern reactions to John Brown were overwhelmingly negative, viewing him as a dangerous lunatic who threatened their way of life and sovereignty. His raid on Harpers Ferry intensified fears of slave insurrections and was seen as a direct challenge to the institution of slavery, leading many Southerners to advocate for secession and increased vigilance against abolitionist movements.
...And of course, all of this should be obvious with any understanding of who John Brown was and what he actually did. Of course, we understand now that John Brown was in the right when he attempted to secure his moral values through direct, murderous violence against those who disagreed, and of course we understand that similar murderous violence is acceptable when confronted by evil, implacable tyranny backed by force of law. The only wrinkle is that we cannot agree on what constitutes "evil" or "tyranny".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
My own opinion is that they should openly state their position and attempt to modify the laws to fit it (or at least draft laws they would like).
We did that decades ago. We passed laws, and stopped laws we did not want from being passed. We won the legal argument fair and square. Only, it turns out that the legal argument doesn't matter because the other side, broadly speaking, is willing to ignore or actively subvert the law sufficiently to preclude all enforcement. There is no reason to believe that passing additional laws will force Blues to actually respect them.
So again, why are they attacking Christians first?
Did you miss this part?
Most effort is being directed toward South and Central American illegal immigrants because these are by far the most numerous cohort of illegal immigrants, also generally the poorest, and at least arguably the most criminal.
Considerable effort has been expended against Muslim and Hindu migration as well, but it is the southern border that represents the core of the problem. What part of this is confusing?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Trump brought this on himself. There's a million ways he could've implemented the ICE program, and he chose one with the greatest optics of cruelty.
There's a million ways he could have implemented the ICE program completely ineffectually. This way is delivering at least some level of results, and there is no reason to believe that any other plausible method would deliver better results.
"Cruelty is the point". I didn't believe it during Trump 1. For Trump 2, I believe it.
This has been a bipartisan pattern throughout the last decade, pretty clearly as a result of collapsing federal authority. Gun laws are routinely enforced this way, and have been for decades. COVID mandates were very clearly enforced this way. Trans ideology was enforced this way.
Here are the 'job requirements' for a deportation officer. Literally randos.
What job requirements would seem more appropriate to you? Can you point to some examples of how low recruiting standards have resulted in bad outcomes?
Democrats are justified in believing that this will select for bottom-feeder men with anger problems looking to get the high of having power over someone else.
As you say, "An accusation must be validated by a supposedly neutral arbiter." I disagree that Democrats are justified in such a belief. On the other hand, I can point to recent cases where federal agents promulgated official orders to violate their core mission to better discriminate against Reds.
As with all accusations in the US, until the supreme courts weighs in, it isn't formally treason.
I think you overestimate the sociopolitical "pull" maintained by the courts, including the Supreme Court. We are more than a decade into lesser courts, and local, state and federal officials operating in open defiance of rulings they disagree with.
The fact is that systems of law do not constrain human will, individually or collectively. "Treason" is a word invented by humans, applied by humans, and assessed by humans. If the argument here is that Democrat local and state officials probably won't be charged, convicted and sentenced for Treason for the things they're doing right now, I'll readily agree with you. But the fight that is happening right now is more likely to grow than to gutter out, and there does not appear to be an obvious point where it will stop. Blue Tribe has acted for decades as though it is above the law, and it turns out those actions have consequences.
Trump is consistently the first one to raise the temperature and to lower the bar for acceptable discourse. I don't want to sound like a kid. But, he started it. Only now, the democrats are responding.
It is certainly true that Trump started raising the temperature, if one carefully defines "raising the temperature" to exclude everything Democrats have done to raise the temperature over the last decade or more. Trump is essentially a copy of Bill Clinton. His cabinet and associates are full of former high-tier democrat figures. His policies used to be entirely normal within the democratic party as recently as a decade ago. Red Tribe has slaughtered numerous sacred cows to assemble their current coalition, essentially capitulating to broad swathes of the Democratic policy platform. The democrats have only moved further left in response, and have made both unconscionable government repression and large-scale, organized lawless violence core aspects of their political program.
The democratic party announced their intention to use mass immigration to secure a permanent majority Twenty years ago. It turns out that this was not quite the silver bullet they expected, but Reds are assessing future cooperation in terms of intentions, not results, and Blues have made it abundantly clear that further cooperation with them leads to no livable future for Reds.
Reds are not going to back down because there is no retreat available to us. We decline to be reduced to second-class citizens in our native country. We decline to be victimized by the full power of the Federal Government. We decline to uphold rules that are enforced only to our detriment and never to our benefit. We decline to maintain systems that exist only to oppress us.
No justice, no peace.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Is your claim that Reds generally are unconcerned about Muslim or Hindu illegal immigration? That would be a surprising take, given a number of past incidents.
Most effort is being directed toward South and Central American illegal immigrants because these are by far the most numerous cohort of illegal immigrants, also generally the poorest, and at least arguably the most criminal.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Why's Trump sending red state national guard units into blue cities?
Because that is a response on the table when state and local governments violate federal law and conspire to deny citizens their civil rights.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Come on. This is not true. First because treason is pretty well defined. But by this logic Texas was treasonous when they decided to enforce border control on their own.
IIRC, Texas explicitly defied federal control of a core federal concern. The federal government letting it go and refusing to push the issue was an admission of weakness, but... you can taboo the term "treason" if you want, but this was very clearly an inflection point in the collapse of our old system of government, a case where the rules very clearly went out the window. I supported it then and support it now because I think the rules are, at this point, a complete joke, but we should be clear-eyed about what is actually happening here: The federal government as an institution is dying.
But again, why are they not changing the laws to deal with this more thoroughly and why is all effort directed towards more pious coreligionists instead of Muslims or Hindus etc.?
Because it has been established that blues ignore laws they dislike or find inconvenient, and that this is one such law. There is no reason to believe that making illegal immigration double-illegal will result in Blues actually enforcing laws they don't want to enforce and perceive great advantage in not enforcing. This is an invitation to waste political capital on "process" that has already been subverted.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
In particular, I would argue that outside your odd lizardman, none of the smarter MAGA people believe the narrative. I think it highly unlikely that Charlie Kirk thought, in his heart of hearts, that Biden was committing treason for which his countrymen would sent him to the gallows if they knew about it. But the narrative played really well with the idiots, so he spread it.
...How closely have you been following the revelations about Russiagate/Crossfire Hurricane/Hillary's email server/Biden's Corruption/Hunter's Laptop over the last year? My working understanding of that mess (and it seems to me there's a fair amount of evidence that it is a coherent, single mess) is that we now have solid evidence that Obama, Hillary and Biden worked together to suborn the national security apparatus and turn it into both a partisan weapon against their political enemies, as well as a shield to their own serious malfeasance. As with, say, Watergate, but amusingly never ever with any Democrat scandal, the initial crimes seem vastly overshadowed by the institutional corruption used to cover them, which at this point appear to have run so deep and for so long that they put the viability of our political system itself into question.
More generally, there's this amusing pattern I see, where people are very willing to discuss things under a frame where Trump and MAGA are fascistic white supremacists who must be stopped by any means necessary, as we did here for years, and are also willing to discuss things under a frame where actually there's no difference between the parties, everyone's corrupt so none of the details really matter, but certainly are not willing to discuss under the frame where, no, actually it's the democrats who are uniquely, intolerably bad. Maybe it's just bias speaking, but it seems to me that this excluded third option is going to get harder and harder to exclude the more evidence accumulates. And while within the context of debate and one's own mind denial might be an invincible shield, it's less effective in the real world if sufficient numbers of the public simply stop being willing to cooperate with your tribe in any way ever again.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
No, we cannot officially throw out the principle of charity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Nobody is expressing that idea. You are making an unwarranted assumption.
Most of human communication operates through these sorts of assumptions. Why would they be unwarranted? Are books not inanimate objects? Are letters and the written words we assemble out of them not inanimate objects? When someone waves a rainbow flag or a hammer and sickle flag, Are they not specifically inviting everyone watching to infer their message? If not, why wave the flag? And sure, this can be abused by assuming a message that was not the signaler's actual intent... and yet, flags exist as a tool of communication because such malicious interpretation is orders of magnitude less effective than the primary signal.
If your standards of rigor are that communication should be happening with no assumptions being made either way, I'll note that no actual human communication works or has ever worked this way.
Not just to be able to state an idea, but be able to defend it in open debate.
Can a book defend its ideas in open debate? I mean, sort of. It seems to me that a flag can as well. Who's invoking the message and its associations, and how?
Moreover, I can put a flag in my store for trolling purposes, or just as a freedom of speech prop. Why are you assuming intent from inanimate objects?
I'm not assuming, I'm inferring. Inference is a necessary and irreducible part of human communication, which is necessarily lossy, compressed, and unreliable in the best of times.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Snow flakes are not susceptible to social contagion.
An avalanche seems very similar to to a social contagion that snowflakes are susceptible to, if we're accepting metaphors in the first place.
An Aryan Bakery has nothing to do with Open Ideas, because there's no idea being expressed or defended.
"Swastikas are cool" isn't an idea? "I stand with the people who use the Swastika as a symbol" isn't an idea? Where would you get the idea that abstract symbols aren't routinely freighted with meaning by humans, and thus used to communicate ideas?
The fact that you believe an Aryan Bakery has anything to do with actual freedom of speech shows the need for Open Ideas.
How so? what's the argument?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
I don’t like this, and we should not trust every word the mainstream media says, or even trust ANY of it blindly, but it’s a damn right more preferable than loads of far left and far right crackpots producing their own propaganda and all of it being given equal billing with FT, BBC, NYT, Economist etc.
Why is it preferable? Because such propaganda might lead to people believing absurdities and following them off a cliff?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
For one, they seem very interested in ruling you.
"Interested in ruling me" would imply they take actions likely to make this happen. They mostly are interested in doing their own thing on the other side of the world.
It is true that you have little to gain from ruling them. However, you have plenty to gain from the $72.25 trillion in oil they possess (total value of Middle Eastern oil reserves, per ChatGPT), or any of the other resources they control, or simply the land they inhabit.
We are not as rich as we once were, but we are not so poor as to require banditry, and we certainly are not in need of additional desert.
A lot of black men would not be in prison right now had they simply realized that crime is a bad idea and they should stop doing it.
Sure, and there will likely be serious consequences for Europe for the mistakes they're making. I, however, am not a European.
To the extent that your enemies' values are a proxy for the values of non-Europeans/East Asians, the threat they pose is a paper tiger.
...My enemies are a threat because of their values, not because their values are a proxy for those of non-europeans/east asians. I am not worried about Africa or the middle east. I am worried about people who live in my country and don't want me to keep living in it.
None of these arguments are persuasive on why attempting to rule the world is a good idea. Leaving other people to do as they wish elsewhere is simpler and both morally and physically safer.
If there's a difference between our understandings here, I'm not seeing it. So far, so good.
I would disagree quite strongly. The terms "Patriarchy", "Sexism", and "Misogyny" seem like stable, highly politicized tokens of a highly coherent ideological structure. Likewise "reproductive rights", "women's rights", "women's safety", etc, etc. There can be lots of disagreement over lots of things, even very important things, without an absence of a unifying foundation. As you say:
..To which one might add additional precision: women as a class are seriously disadvantaged due to the nature and structure of society, and this sum of disadvantages can only be resolved by fundamentally deconstructing and rebuilding the nature of society. Patriarchy in Feminist ideology is isomorphic to Capitalism in Marxist ideology, in much the same way that the Greeks worshiped Ares and the Romans worshiped Mars.
bell hooks is my go-to central example of modern Feminism as an ideological structure. Googling "bell hooks on Marx", first result:
The Black Marxist Feminism of Bell Hooks
Okay, but this is commentary about bell hooks, not hooks herself. So let's skip several repeat results, and we find:
Challenging Capitalism and Patriarchy: An Interview with bell hooks (apparently republished from "Third World Viewpoint" via the Espresso Stalinist). Pertinent Excerpts:
Would you say bell hooks considers her critique to be a refinement of Marxism? For the many, many feminists who draw on bell hooks as an inspiration, and who likewise employ formulations about Capitalist White Supremacist Patriarchy and Late-stage capitalism, would you say that they also appear to consider their critiques to be a refinement of Marxism?
...In any case, we apparently agree that there are Marxist feminists, and I hope I've demonstrated that these are often central examples of most workable definitions of "feminist". Can you provide some clear-cut, central examples of prominent Feminist theorists or intellectuals who are not Marxists?
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