BANNED USER: antagonistic and personal
>Unban in 4d 13h 19m
remzem
No bio...
User ID: 642
Banned by: @Amadan
remzem
2mo ago
I can get behind the use of cultural marxism in a sort of genealogical sense. It seems clear that early critical theorists saw themselves as marxist and were familiar with marxist theory, but as an actual descriptor of modern ideology it's always felt weak to me.
Basically, so it goes, cultural marxism is marxist oppressor / oppressed framework but applied to identity. Except really what is unique about Marx isn't the oppressor / oppressed framework, people have been writing about hierarchy and exodus from oppressors since ancient times. What made Marx unique was that he took the oppressor oppressed framework and interpreted it through a lens of economic materialism. All conflict no longer has to do with your identity or specific role in society it's all about economic output and who controls the means of production. As a descriptor the term doesn't seem to help much since modern political discourse seems less marx and more just a return to more typical conflicts. Different identity groups fighting and forming alliances to further their interests.
When it comes to how the term seems to actually be used in the real world it seems like early critical theorists happened to identify with marxism as it was the well known revolutionary theory that predated them so they were familiar with his arguments and inevitably drew from them. Paleocons seem to have latched on to the word at some point because it fits with their outdated views on the world being some sort of battle between capitalism and communism. Meanwhile most normal people just don't really care about the term since these days both capitalism and communism have shown their flaws and the distinction doesn't really offer them much utility.
The big divider these days seems less about private and public and more about centralization and decentralization. Both Capitalism and communism have centralizing features, communism explicitly and capitalism through things like natural monopolies, economies of scale and prohibitive start up costs, so people aren't too enthusiastic about the prospects of either and just tune cultural marxist talk out.
remzem
2mo ago
Yea this is a delusion the dems have been trying to sell themselves ever since Trump. They see themselves not as a specific group fighting for it's members interests, like the republicans do, but more like a religion like messianic figures that will bring about utopia if they can just get enough control and "eliminate" the external things dividing us. Reality is that Trump didn't start anything and the divisions had been brewing for a while. The things dividing us are us. Globalism has clear winners and losers, 20k Haitians get dumped on a rural town of 40k, but two bus loads would overwhelm Martha's Vineyard, etc.
Due to this they need a rationalization for why their universalist solutions aren't working or their self conception would break down. Similar to that Muslim meme people always post in regards to Europe where the bureaucrats are desperately asking what the Muslim wants, more healthcare, better housing and the Muslim says they just want Shariah. It's clear what the man in the meme wants, the increasingly desperate questions aren't for his sake. It's funny they made diversity one of the pillars of their ideology when they don't really believe it exists in the first place.
remzem
2mo ago
The lesson for Israel is to be very wary of technological shifts in warfighting, particularly if they represents shifts in power from demographically smaller states to larger populations - but I don't see any coming down the pike in the 21st Century.
Aren't they already here? As we've seen in Ukraine? Drones and intelligence gathering have basically obsoleted maneuver warfare and turned wars into a slugfest number game, you need a strong and wide EW net to advance now without getting picked off which means advancing along a wider front which favors numbers. Though the caveat here is that AI could follow on the heels of this as another technological shift. Feel like this would just make wars about industrial capacity though which is still sort of a numbers game.
AA also now struggles to deal with the saturation attacks possible with cheaply mass produced drones.
remzem
2mo ago
Yeah that'd still be pretty easy. You wouldn't need to sample every one. Just one per 50, a few per shipment, that sort of thing. I imagine they fear pretty much all electronics could be used for tracking since Israel or the US might drone strike them at any time and anywhere anyways.
remzem
2mo ago
I mean... wouldn't they just make sure to dismantle a handful of pagers before distributing them from now on? They'd have to pack the things with high explosives to get a result like this, would be easy to find, not much of a cost.
They'll likely short term want to change up suppliers if that info is compromised, but by blowing up all the pagers Israel has revealed this which means it can't be used in the future and if there are other capabilities downstream from this supplier compromised like wire taps etc. Now Hezbollah knows to toss the electronics.
remzem
2mo ago
They didn't have nuclear weapons, the USSR had weapons that were stored there. It's like if Turkey left NATO and refused to give back the nukes the US keeps there. They wouldn't have the codes to actually use them and would have to reverse engineer new bombs.
remzem
2mo ago
Well tbf the distinction between Ukrainian and Russian ethnicity is also a media fabrication and Syrskyi was born in Russia and his family all lives in Russia.
So far Ukrainian and Ukrainian inspired terrorism has: attempted to assassinate a US presidential nominee, attempted and nearly assassinated a European Prime Minister, blown up a major piece of German infrastructure causing serious damage to their economy.
From a strategic point of view they've been more successful than any recent anti western terrorist group other than al-qaeda via 9/11. Since ISIS never really got close to people in power or major infrastructure. They've also managed to get more free military gear from the west than al-qaeda.
The perverse incentives globalism and empire creates makes for some bizarre politics.
edit: oh they also keep a 180k person list of enemies of the state with personal info of Ukrainian enemies which includes westerners like Elon Musk, Viktor Orban, Roger Waters, Roy Jones Jr, and Berlusconi.
remzem
2mo ago
If state media can memory hole that photo of Trump bleeding from his ear while fist pumping with an American flag in the background in only a week than this will be deleted from mainstream memory within 24 hours. Assuming it even makes it beyond local news coverage.
remzem
2mo ago
One that really cracked me up that I saw in a few articles today was how they reminded everyone that the this is the first time a "far-right" party has won an election since ww2 and also it's on the 85th anniversary of Nazi Germany invading Poland.
They then go on to inform us of the unspeakable far right policies of this party which warrant being compared to a group that waged war across Europe.
brace yourselves, might want to sit down for how evil this one is.
They're anti-war!
We really don't hate journalists near as much as we should, we need to invent people that don't spend 8 hours sleeping so they can hate journalists 24 hours a day or something.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-skeptic-parties-win-big-162619480.html?guccounter=1
The continued rise of Alternative for Germany (AfD) entered a new chapter on Sept. 1, when the controversial far-right party came first in Thuringia's state election.
AfD won around 33% of the vote in Thuringia, a state of 2 million people in Germany's east. The results mark the first time a far-right party won a state election in Germany since the Second World War - 85 years to the day that Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
and their policy
"Anti-war, anti-Ukraine"
"In line with the rest of the AfD, Hocke has repeatedly urged for dialogue with Moscow and is against sending military aid to Ukraine"
"In May 2023, Chrupalla and party founder Alexander Gauland attended a reception at the Russian embassy, celebrating Russia's 'Victory Day.' Chrupalla claimed he attended the event because 'dialogue should not be allowed to break down in times of crisis.'"
"AfD's campaign in Thuringia included the slogan 'diplomacy instead of weapons,' referring to Germany's position as the world's second-largest supplier of military aid to Ukraine after the U.S."
"'Friends, we as Germans, we as Thuringians, we as voters say – no more war,' he said."
I was comparing it to campys post, campys post has no mod flair and is just a standard citizen so... try again?
I generally see the explanations about globalism go into the history of nato expansion and western expansion, aggression and regime change in pretty depth. I see the other sides explanations seem to have no knowledge of history that predates the Russian invasion and they are full of incongruity, Russia being both a paper tiger that can be stopped with surplus western military gear while also being a threat that will soon be sailing across the Atlantic with western Europe in ashes behind it. Or the nonsense about wanting Ukraine in NATO, even though we are not willing to send western people to go die for them now, apparently their strategic importance will change somehow if the war ends.
It's nonsense which is why people tend to resort to reddit post level dismissiveness. If I were to speculate about their motives as they do about mine I'd say they are either brainwashed leftwing people that got caught up in the bad orangeman loves Russia propaganda that the MIC pushed to keep their wars going, or maybe some kind of boomercon with early stage dementia that can't see the difference between today and 1980 and somehow thinks this is a western chauvinism thing when the people pushing for this war would like nothing more than to toss western values into the trash bin.
remzem
2mo ago
Campy is at least trying to be humorous which I appreciate. The mods post was just sneering. They literally can't think of a single reason beyond contrarianism that people aren't supportive of Ukraine?
remzem
2mo ago
It helps them avoid talking policy which seems to be one of their main strategies other than keeping Kamala away from any unscripted events. I mean obviously during the debate itself they will finally have to justify their policy assuming Trump can call them out on how stupid things like price caps on food, taxing unrealized gains, and giving virtually everyone 25k free towards their house is, but if there is a lot of back and forth bickering and banter between those bits than the media coverage over the next week can ignore the policy weaknesses and just report on the Jerry Springer esque drama. Drown out any policy weaknesses.
remzem
2mo ago
remzem
2mo ago
nah, empires need to continually expand to keep the spoils coming for the interior. Globalists exhausting themselves in the ME and eastern Europe, especially with China on the rise could easily end them. At the very least it'd ruin their hopes for some eventual whole world centralized control.
Not really pro Russia, but anyone that fights the globalists I can't be too mad at. They are the biggest threat to the world and have the most immediately negative impact on my life so the more they bleed the happier I am. If its some place that I have no real connection to doing the work and taking the blows in response all the better for me. They lost a lot of prestige in the middle east but unfortunately plenty of lied to Americans had to die for it, when Ukraine collapses and they lose even more face no Americans will have died (the mercs and spooks that go there are only American on paper, and in reality are globalists or opportunists chasing globalist cash that know what they're getting themselves into)
I also don't buy that Russia is an aggressor or much of a threat to America at this point (they are an impediment to global empire though). This ignores a lot of history and hand waves away all of the globalist / NATOs foreign intervention and expansion. NATO acts a lot like mafia protection racket on behalf of DC / Brussels, destabilize and regime change parts of the world, then offer protection from the chaos they create, with the implied threat that this could happen to you as well if you don't submit.
Also just pro common sense, there has never been any chance that Ukraine could win, regardless of how much of our money the globalists pour into the country (while skimming lots for them and their friends in the MIC). Trying to hunt for Russia's nuclear red lines is just profound idiocy, continually escalating and using each non response as a reason to be more confident that there will never be one is just... It's rare to see something that stupid even with how corrupt and full of yes men willing to human centipede there way up the ladder globalist institutions have become. Almost hope they find the red line at this point.
This wasn't originally a reason, but over time after having followed the war closely I've just come to be absolutely disgusted by the Kiev regime. From day one the propaganda coming out of that place was just insulting. On par with urban legends of North Korean propaganda. If Zelensky played golf at all he'd shoot nothing but hole in ones. You expect a certain amount of propaganda during a war, but it's been absurd. Seeing how their border with Europe has become a drone monitored barbed wire spectacle that the Republicans here could only dream of, and watching people get beaten and ripped off the streets for conscription, watching them and the globalists concoct ways to force or deport Ukrainians back into the country after they support asylum for muslims that have passed through a half dozen safe countries... The way troops are sacrificed and sent on suicide missions to Crimea, or across the Dnieper to Krynky for months... all just for Zelensky's publicity. It'd be abhorrent even for a war that had some achievable end goals, but for one that has no purpose beyond robbing western countries, psyoping their increasingly delusional populations into misplaced jingoism and enriching some treacherous Ukrainian elites it's just disgusting.
They could've taken defensive positions with all the western kit gifted to them, ceded some more territory and taken a big L yes, but really dug in and shortened the lines enough that even with their limited population they could've had plenty of reserves more concentrated AA etc. Basically the ability to keep the front stable for years and convince Russia to negotiate, instead they blow it all on some publicity stunt to impress their western masters complete with Hollywood movie trailer (shhh). This operation's goal was to "liberate" the part of "occupied" aka separatist Ukraine that has the least desire to be part of Ukraine and the most Russians... now they randomly invade Russia, again lengthening a front they already can't man, for an op that even western propagandists are struggling to invent a purpose beyond PR for. Weeks later we have a stalled out offensive with the biggest Ukrainian losses since their summer offensive and their Donetsk front is collapsing...
So yeah, best of luck to Russia, to AFD and FN, to Trump, to the Ukrainian men trying to escape, to Elon Musk, and really at this point anyone that isn't just parroting what they read in globalist media.
remzem
2mo ago
It delayed funding (money laundering) for globalist wars for a few months. After that it changed nothing, but this isn't because the republicans in congress are captured by Trump. It's because they rebelled against Trump and enough of them were talking about voting with the democrats to push the funding through. The reality is that Johnson isn't a Trump populist. He does what the other snakes in congress do and pays lip service to Trump, Trump is shallow and doesn't learn from his betrayals so this works, and then ultimately does what the neolib/neocon police state wishes.
They don't care who Trump appoints to get elected because the elections are already rigged in a, heads I win, tails you lose way. If Oz is a charlatan and loses then their guy that is willing to go to bat for the imperialist occupiers still gets in via the dem candidate. McConnell will even play with republican campaign funding to help that happen.
The anti-vax thing is just another weak man. Republicans were no more anti-vaccine than dems, if anything the vaccines cause autism thing was more of a California hippy, "nature is good, not nature is not good" thing prior to covid totalitarianism. The friction came when the state decided to force it on people and use a bizarre and illegal interpretation of OSHA rules to pressure employers until that was struck down. Before that there was a lot less pushback and maybe if the globalists hadn't held back news that the vaccine had passed trials til after the election to help their team republicans would've been more for it.
remzem
2mo ago
So we can't post links to well thought out articles without wasting time regurgitating parts of it in our own words or adding pointless takes, but we can just randomly showerthought now?
remzem
2mo ago
Are you kidding? there is still a huge difference between the average republican party member and the average republican party voter. Are you forgetting they booted their speaker for the first time in history? Does the propaganda just work differently on you guys? You can't remember basic political happenings from a year ago? Is the dissonance between what you're told to believe and what actually is just so great that your mind starts to paint over things?
remzem
2mo ago
Yea I could see it just being bad writing did mention that in my original post that this is probably the worst story we've gotten since ARR. Spending so little time on each culture would also force them to appear shallow rather than it being woke consulting.
It was weird that they seemed to feel so rushed to tour all the local cultures and not leave them open to exploration later considering this is supposed to be the 1st book in their new arc. ARR introduced a bunch of different people that we had smaller interactions with or whose story didn't really come to the forefront until later. You interact with Ishgard early on, but don't go there and really get a deeper understanding until Heavensward. A lot of the Thanallan / ala mhigo and lala plots don't get wrapped up til Stormblood even. This gave the player some mystery or stuff to think about and look forward to in later patches. For w/e reason we didn't get that with Tural. Every culture needs to be tied up with a neat bow by the time we leave.
With the lay of reeds quest this still felt woke to me. It wasn't written like, "tradition works," the point of it was that our lib arts degree majors know better than unfeeling STEM. Wuk isn't a traditionalist, bizarrely she seems to know nothing about her home country despite having lived there her whole life, she is more a "listen to people's lived experiences" type.
For me it was hard not to pattern match it to woke though with the shallow feel good cultures, girl boss mc, beloved characters being sidelined for the sake of propping up new mc etc. Even had a disney esque themesong. There has been a lot more western pressure on Japanese brands and the ff14 community is probably one of the more degenerate and weird ones out of all the mmo's. They've pressured yoshi p to make perv changes like allowing female gear on male chars and stuff.
Are you trying to convince us with this information that is irrelevant to anyone but you, or convince yourself? If yourself why bother us with it?
If it's not the orwellian stranglehold on all information in the west that is fueling the vibe change will your team finally relinquish control of it? Free Durov? Stop lawfaring Elon Musk. Maybe I can finally browse reddit for news w/o it being freeze framed photos of Kennedy stopped at just the right moment to make him look as stupid as possible "organically" voted to the front page.
I doubt it though. This post basically reads like, "It's not totalitarianism! it's Kamala's youthfulness!"
If you were trying to convince us and not yourself than I have to say no, I still think you lot are totalitarians.
remzem
3mo ago
Seems like Iran could have nukes pretty quickly if they wanted. Probably don't want them since it'd just be an excuse for even more sanctions from the west. Better to have the potential to make a nuke quick and the launch platforms but not actually claim to physically have one or test any since as soon as you do you become a pariah state. Unless you have foreign governments in your pocket like Israel I suppose.
Ok, but, seriously what's the point? I mean yes this is an obscure internet forum on which people advance their technical theories about political topics for no reason beyond being right on the internet and if that's the case then you can stop reading here...
On a bigger scale though when I see this argument employed on the internet in general it seems like proponents of the theory seem to think of it as some kind of "gotcha". I just don't really see it. If the woke or critical theorists all threw up their hands and said, "you got us, we are cultural marxists and will go by this term form now on," what do you expect to change? Socialism polls higher among 18-30 year olds than Capitalism. They're the main group that the woke try to persuade and recruit from. The red scare is a distant memory at this point. The woke didn't rise to power in the USSR or China, if anything these places seem resilient to their influence. They came to power in turbo USA, the most capitalist country ever finally ridden of it's cold war rival. You could make an argument that capitalism is just using cultural marxism and regardless of their roots they are just useful idiots (and many old left types do).
At best you're achieving some weak guilt by association, mostly that will work on people over the age of 65, at worst you're actually making woke sound cooler to younger generations. Just attacking how irrational woke ideology is seems far more effective than all the ink spilled over the cultural marxist label. Pointing out that the woke has its roots in marxism, and then just assuming that people associate marxism with bad and capitalism with good seems intellectually lazy. If conservatives want to win people over they need to be better about pointing out both the flaws in communism and admitting and fixing the flaws in capitalism otherwise at the current rate it seems like both communists and capitalists will be relegated to some stupidpol type forum where they complain about how both the actually relevant political parties aren't "true" left or right.
If anything the failures of both systems seem eerily similar. Focus on material gains neglecting cultural or spiritual growth and interests, using stats on increases in material wealth to hand wave away deep dissatisfaction and malaise. Focus on equality as a selling point (meritocracy in which all people can advance is implicitly part of the western social contract) motivating both groups into ridiculous beliefs, lamarckism for the USSR, blank slatism and "magic soil" in the west. Increasingly centralized power to increase efficiency and productivity, resulting in swaths of people losing agency and corrupt out of touch power centers. I guess i'm not a paleocon at all and more of a post liberal or something so i'm not typical right wing, but the boomer right wing type people need to fix these issues if they want people to just reflexively like capitalism and dislike marxism again.
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