PropagandaOfTheDude
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User ID: 726
PropagandaOfTheDude
2mo ago
Marxism is modern and materialist; cultural Marxism is postmodern and sociological. The idea was to use Marxist insights to determine how to distribute sociological, rather than material, "equality."
Did or does Marxism talk about how? Or was it mostly an analysis of current pressures, with a prediction that socialism and communism would inevitably come to pass?
PropagandaOfTheDude
2mo ago
Frankly, I think it is all fundamentally about resentment of the have nots against the haves, and this is essentially a parallel development.
The Frankfurt school brings a memeplex that the solution is obvious, and those in-the-know just have to keep reiterating why the problem is bad until people come around.
But it's also postmodern and Gnostic. The one unifying agreement is that everything is white cis-hetero patriarchal capitalist—our modern Yaldabaoth. That Everyday Feminism comic is reminding you that even if you think that you have gained knowledge and escaped, you probably haven't. There's always more work to do.
PropagandaOfTheDude
2mo ago
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music discusses various ways that music genres grab ideas from other music genres. Or enthusiasts take a particular element from one genre and put it front-and-center into new tracks, making it distinctive enough to be its own genre. Calling this process "direct and coherent" would overstate things.
Same process here.
(I suppose that "Cultural Marxism" is roughly equivalent to the hearing "Oh, you listen to disco?", back in the day.)
PropagandaOfTheDude
2mo ago
From the old country, worth linking to.
Occasionally, I find myself listing out all the different things that people use the words "capitalism" or "capitalist" to mean. I think I need to add a couple.
That website is using the "state of alienation, strife, and scarcity; considered as a moral and natural evil" meaning.
PropagandaOfTheDude
2mo ago
I'm also reminded of that one woman who committed suicide a few years ago IIRC, who had written a book about her experience dressing up as a man (no transition, just roleplaying for the book), where she seemed to come to some revelations about the difficulties of men's lives that were completely invisible to her before the experience.
PropagandaOfTheDude
3mo ago
Theoden sings....
I am the very model of a mediaeval Anglian
The truth of this suffuses every nerve and every ganglion
While some proclaim my folc to be Germanic (miscellaneous)
I am in in fact bewildered by this theory extra-aneous
I'm neither Lombard, Hun or Goth or any of that eastern crowd
We're Anglo-Saxon to the core although we fight on horses proud
Some seem to think our armour bright could easily be Persian
But it is plain to see that it is mediaeval Mercian
PropagandaOfTheDude
4mo ago
"I grew up in Louisiana..."
"Woo!"
"Yeah, see... Whenever I do that, people... Some people will 'woo', but that's for New Orleans. Which is the best part."
PropagandaOfTheDude
5mo ago
There's a good chunk of library science that has to do with figuring out precise meanings, and precise classifications of "things" based on those meanings. Getting that nailed down helps the data crunching process.
PropagandaOfTheDude
5mo ago
My read at the time was that Mutual Friend was attempting to arrange for Other Girl to "go to the prom", and was trying to find someone to fill a critical slot in the plan. I've had no reason to re-evaluate that.
If it had been Mutual Friend asking for herself, I might have said yes. We had known each other for years at school, and hours upon hours in the same school bus by that point. But any theoretical indulgence for our shared history did not extend to Other Girl.
PropagandaOfTheDude
5mo ago
Not much to elaborate. Clueless, nervous, uncommunicative. Unable to initiate conversation,monosyllabic in response, zero cross gender social skills.
Now I'm getting flashbacks to a Korean classmate in high school, a lonnng time ago.
A mutual female friend (Taiwanese, but raised locally) asked me senior year whether I would be up for taking said classmate to the prom.
I said "Thank you, but I wasn't planning on going." I can only imagine what the ensuing vast, hours-long conversational chasm would have been like. I couldn't even say for certain whether the two of us actually ever talked to each other in school.
PropagandaOfTheDude
6mo ago
Inclusion into strangely discriminatory female spaces
Something like this?
"Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following: 1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group; 2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question 'is this peer group worth impressing?'"
PropagandaOfTheDude
6mo ago
As the old saying goes, "Remove one piece of jewelry". Unfortunately, that's hard to do with makeup.
PropagandaOfTheDude
6mo ago
With the right cybernetic chair and daily sacrifices he'll be fine.
PropagandaOfTheDude
7mo ago
as well as contractual poly families as described in Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land
You're thinking the of the line marriages and so forth in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?
PropagandaOfTheDude
7mo ago
Twitter shut down the "disposable account" mechanism that Nitter instances used. Thirty days afterwards, the last Nitter account stopped working.
PropagandaOfTheDude
7mo ago
That's not how the game works at all!
How does it work?
PropagandaOfTheDude
8mo ago
The upthread discussion about male role models reminded me of a web essay that I can no longer find (damn it). The author was a male English professor for undergrads. His course satisfied a general requirement, so his male student population broadly represented the student body. In the essay, the author observed that when his male students were given an opportunity to select a text or topic to study, the most popular subject was always power.
I don’t recall the author proposing any reason for that preference. We can come up with a couple.
Broke: They know that power is the ultimate aphrodesiac.
Woke: They are already toxically masculine. The professor should focus exclusively on books by queer women of color, who hate power.
Bespoke: They are thinking about the Roman Empire.
I’ll have to expand on that last one.
Ages ago, I came across someone asking why 19th Century Britain seemed to be so obsessed with Rome. One responder said “Britain found itself with an empire unexpectedly. The 19th Century British culture was looking to ancient Rome to give it context. How should they act? What is it like to have an empire? What can they learn?”
That sprang to mind as I was reading the essay. Those teenage boys knew that they were on the cusp of having power, over themselves at least. They should, at least. What does that mean? How should they behave?
My question, then, is: What would you recommend for those boys, to help them understand the power that they will eventually wield?
The Motte automatically converts Twitter/X links into Nitter links, right?
Nitter is dead, and its replicas will die in less than 30 days.
Nitter currently relies on the mass generation of guest accounts, a weird anonymous form of account that was only supported by old versions of the Twitter app. Creation of them was totally disabled today, so every nitter instance will be dead in under 30 days (when they expire). Scrapers apparently also relied on this, as every public nitter instance was being hammered by scrapers earlier. Instances will probably shut down quite soon unless someone finds another way to create tens of thousands of accounts in an automated fashion for free.
(Note: This is a per-account setting, in the "Content" section.)
PropagandaOfTheDude
10mo ago
I haven't seen these, but the first thing that pops to my head by way of analogy is the way that close masculine friendship is now frequently coded as gay. Arab men holding hands? Gay. Two bros hugging it out? Gay. Telling your decades-long friend that you love him? Gay. Slap on the butt or other physical encouragement in sports? Gay. Just hanging out together? Believe it or not, still gay.
John Woo films? Total sausage fests.
The focus on male friendships in Woo's film have been interpreted as homoerotic. Woo has responded to these statements stating "People will bring their own preconceptions to a movie .... If they see something in The Killer that they consider to be homoerotic then that is their privilege. It's certainly not intentional."
That was 1989.
PropagandaOfTheDude
10mo ago
Some hard-core of people exist who, for whatever reason, will always want to transition to living as the opposite sex and will be happier if they do so; but there also exist today people who transition for reasons of social contagion or to take advantage of policies, who would be happier living as their birth-sex.
I found this Tumblr screencap a while back, it stuck in my head, and then it turned up again recently:
i went to go pick up my HORMONES from the chemist today and the guy was quite sweet and very well intentioned but clearly way out of his element... when i was leaving i did the standard "thanks have a nice night" and he responded with "you too enjoy your... (very very quietly obviously realising what he was saying was highly insane) gender..." and tbh i haven't stopped thinking abt being a gender enjoyer since
For me, that's a useful way to view matters. Is a given person a gender enjoyer? Or someone who isn't enjoying anything?
PropagandaOfTheDude
10mo ago
Summoning up the faux anger...
Why didn't you post about Vermis when my wife was pestering me for Christmas present ideas?!?
Bookmarked for when Hollow Press gets back to the office.
PropagandaOfTheDude
10mo ago
PropagandaOfTheDude
10mo ago
We have 2 dogs and 10 cats in my condo right now. This isn't normal right? She also teaches kids math as a data scientist so she is obsessed with helping people. But I feel like there is a certain point where it's insane. Should I crack down and tell her how crazy it is with how many animals live in our condo, or should I just let it go.
You've heard of or read those news stories that pop up, about people who have lots animals, in filthy conditions?
One of the paths that leads to this is that the person or family can foster four pets. Then eight pets. Then twelve, sixteen. It works, for a while.
Eventually some other crisis happens. The household can't take care of them all. But having a dozen or more pets is normalized. Stress accumulates. Quality of care drops, and drops.
Right now I don't think you folks are in a position to cope with a life downturn.
PropagandaOfTheDude
10mo ago
Years ago I had reason to hear a one-hour job overview, from the head of security of a vast consumer goods warehouse. Security...they're worried about stealing stuff, right? Somewhat, but mostly it was the employees creating a giant, ongoing soap opera.
When I started using a split keyboard, I realized that I pressed the "B" key with my right index finger. That took some adjusting. Kinesis Gaming Freestyle Edge.
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