domain:alexepstein.substack.com
What kind of single unifying culture you favor promoting here? As an outsider looking in, It makes sense for the USA to promote a unifying culture and also to stop undermining the white American historical nation and part of its unifying culture to be about the continuous American nation. I.E. White Anglo Americanism. While the story of USA will include also black experience but with much less grievances, and sure there is some room for the story of other groups. A multiethnic country which is what the USA is today, can promote a unifying culture, but will also have to promote. And plenty of grey lines on such issues, but your trajectory is not a good idea, and leads to the destruction of American culture, and towards a post-American culture.
Which is not my culture, nor my people, except in a more supra-national way, although it does benefit my people for "genocide the native people and put a lipstipc on a pig" to not be a fashionable ideology. But I object against this cultural revolution from a moralist universalist perspective too. I am not suggesting, anywhere that USA should promote other languages than English.
Saying you favor unified culture is an easy slogan, but black Americans have their own different ethnic community. They speak English. What are you going to do about it? Are you trying to force different ethnic communities in the USA to abandon any of their characteristics. You ought to target especially groups like black Americans or Jews, or Indians who are especially ethnocentric.
- It was the same with unification of various countries in Europe— the French promoted Frenchness, the British promoted Britishness, the Russians promoted Russian culture. Peter the Great was not Marxist by any stretch of the imagination. He was a Russian Czar promoting the culture of Russia.
There is no Frenchness without the French. Look, you had the opportunity to address mass migration, and you didn't. And now it seems you support displacing Americans while painting this as promoting Americanism.
I think as far as people suddenly becoming “strangers in their own land”, again, this isn’t some weird new idea that nobody ever thought about until Marx came along. There have always been subcultures and ethnic groups on the outs in any given society. It’s how a unified culture tends to work, you go along with the culture or you are at least somewhat on the outside. I and my near kin would be on the outs in lots of cultures.
People becoming strangers in their own land is the local culture and people becoming replaced. And when this happens, those doing the replacement cheer for colonizing it, including the left and fake right, who ideologically favor the native people being disminished and support cultural genocide and advocate for a culture that does not carry the heritage of the past, that has its statues replaced, schools renamed, etc.
You trying to support this as nationalism is just a complete failure to address this issue, and subversive. It basically denies what is happening because it supports it.
Also important to note that actual highly hostile cultural marxists have promoted rhetoric trying to spin cultural replacement and mass migration as something else than it is because they genuinely believed that by lying about this, they will get their way to destroy their ethnic outgroup. So they promoted dishonestly the narrative of opposing identity, while the end result was their focus was on what was destructive on their right wing outgroup identities, while enabling the progressive favored groups like Jews, Indians, migrants. Because the current trajectory is of certain people being replaced, hated and discriminated and that isn't a case of regional cultures of a nation, converging, but of the destruction of European people. Your approach is just to compromise with this and spin it as otherwise.
In regards to whether you are a cultural marxist hiding your power level, I am not saying you have that goal, and I am not saying you don't. Cultural marxism works not by only the people who promote directly racism in the left wing direction, but also people who undermine opposition to it, by promoting the acid of destruction of identities. Most cultural marxists do both and pretend they are just opposing racism, because they see as racist for their right wing outgroups to have things for themselves, being exclusive.
As for the rest, in addition to those doing so deliberately, some, because of the pressure of political corectnest which is key element of cultural marxist, address their message towards those who are less ethnocentric, and are getting screwed over because of it.
The end result of mass migration and the culture of Americans being on the out, is the promotion of a different culture, of the outsiders who replace Americans, and those of native stock who are ideologically anti-American. The unifying culture you favor is not going to be an American culture, but a new Soviet man, that is about a shared ideological vision. And even that is not going to happen, because the cultural destruction you favor, and try to spin as nationalism as usual, has as part of its dna the hostility against the ative people.
I have challenged you and others repeatedly. Look, to have equality under the law, you need to crash organizations like ADL, and to change the mentality extremely pervasive among countless fanatics, even more so of those communities, that "Jews are wonderful, and disagreement is antisemitism", Blacks are wonderful and disagreement is racism, women are wonderful and disagreement, is misogyny, etc. One needs to be critical of mgirants and of thse groups and of even people who don't belong in these groups, who have that mentality.
Generalities about equality under the law mean nothing, because you can have a lopsided system that pretends to be doing equality under the law, while pretending that groups like Indians and Jews are oppressed, while their system benefits them at the expense of others. We need substance that names names, and is specific about the coalition and how it would deal with groups like the ADL and similiar.
Because else, people who want to promote a generality that in the substance is not going to be what it claims, are going to just do that.
I think as far as people suddenly becoming “strangers in their own land”, again, this isn’t some weird new idea that nobody ever thought about until Marx came along.
The followers of Marx are the people who want to destroy reactionary people like white Americans and are promoting the idea of destroying nations while also respecting more certain nations than others. You are reversing things here and promoting a false analogy between the creation of a nation from regional cultures, to being replaced and not having a homeland.
This is incredibly radical and destructive agenda of cultural revolution. It does have historical paralels but it is of people who have been conquered by a foreign tribe, and subject to the humiliations related to that.
It actually is a key part of the far left tradition to take something and then double down to the extreme, without considering that doubling down takes something that mgiht work in one case, but be destructive in another one. In this case, nationalism reducing some regional differences which it self has its own costs, to then "destroy nations" agenda.
In the American context, the people promoting this have, as a pattern basically constantly concern trolled white Americans, with extreme intolerance, while playing dumb and tolerating far worse behavior by other ethnic communities and migrants.
Rebranding destroying ethnic communities as nationalism doesn't make it nationalism. Which is about ethnic groups which share blood, language, historical tradition and have a common conciousness.
Note, that this isn't a defense of all ethnic groups who migrated in the USA retaining their own language, tradition. Of course, I am in favor of both limited migration and migrants trying to assimiliate, which is destroyng part of their ethnic identity, at least them deprioritising the rights, but also affirming and replacing it with the native identity in part. The reason, being that a nation has a right to its own existence, and migrants are coming to either be adopted into it, or at least to coexist with it, if in small numbers. It is of course a significant harm to a nation to be replaced by foreigners. A world of people who have homelands, and they don't try to destroy others homes, and even there are some minority ethnic communities doing their own thing, but with the trend where there is migration towards assimilation and of limited numbers of foreigners being allowed to migrate, is a better working model.
This "destroy nations" idea, that is related with hardcore authoritarianism and its adherents have also commited attrocities against those who would oppose it, and ethnic communities for refusing to abandon their identity, and become new soviet men is just a bad idea that leads to inevitable disaster and a key part of the cultural marxist dna. That promoters of this idea don't want to consider the consequences of enforcing this, doesn't make them irrelevant. We know the consequences.
However sincere some adherents of this bad idea might be, they have lost to those who promote it to screw the right wing outgroup. It is used to concern troll white people which explains why its adherents are often not concerned about say banning the ADL or NAACP. Because they are comfortable with a status quo that enforces authoritarianism that doesn't allow pro white identity politics and tolerates and promotes the identity politics of such groups. And spinning this status quo as non woke (especially among cultural marxists who oppose the more mask out cultural marxist elements).
The agenda of destroying ethnic communities and opposing conservative identities and dinstiction is a vehicle for the cultural marxists who promote it to harm "reactionary" nations under their belief and agenda that all groups are equal, but some groups are more equal than others.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22m ago
Oh, I'll happily grant that the term 'cultural Marxism' has referents. When someone like Joy Pullmann says 'the cultural Marxists', I know who she means and what they believe. (...)
By contrast, most of the people identified as cultural Marxists don't claim to be cultural Marxists. In fact, they mostly decry the term and claim that it's a conspiracy theory.
There's two problems here. Like I mentioned earlier, we've had at least a decade, maybe more, of left-wing academics writing rivers of text on "neoliberalism". No one identified themselves as neoliberal at the time, the mish-mash of ideas attached to the label often contradicted the beliefs of people who may have at one point identified as neoliberal, or were even self-contradictory in themselves. None of this stopped a huge amount of papers on the subject being published in peer-reviewed journals, so I don't see why we should be treating "Cultural Marxism" with a higher amount of rigor.
But the bigger problem is that there were people identifying as cultural Marxists. That excerpt I quoted was Emily Hicks writing about how to combine Marxism with feminism, and her answer was: cultural Marxism. Again, at that point what more do you want? You can say the term is outdated, you can say the whole thing was a marginal niche at the time, but what you cannot say is that it's a strawman conspiracy theory.
Now, back to OG Marxists, if the goal is to enforce a distinction between Marxism and the-ideology-that-shall-not-be-named, I'm happy to go along with that, but enforcing a distinction is not the same thing as denying it's existence, or that it at one point used the label "cultural Marxism" as a matter of historical record.
Suppose there is a person who is very concerned with social justice. They believe that racism and sexism are among the most serious problems facing our society, they are deeply committed to battling the kyriarchy hydra. They are interested in cultural critique, in sociopolitical theory, and have educated themselves extensively on these subjects. In my experience, such people are not particularly rare, and probably most people commenting here will have encountered several of them.
Based on you experience, how likely is such a person to be familiar with and use the term "late stage capitalism"? My experience would be that it is very likely; does yours differ?
If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?
Why does the kyriarchy hydra in the linked comic have a "class" head, and why is that head resolved into "economics" in the last panel? What sort of economics do you suppose the author intended?
That comic is from the website everydayfeminism. If I search that website for references to "capitalism", I get many, many hits. How many of those hits do you suppose involve discussion of Capitalism as a positive force in the world, versus a negative force?
I've just searched "Patriarchy and late stage capitalism".
Having previously identified the socialization and naturalization of inequalities, we now look at the influence of capitalism. Although patriarchy pre-existed it - many societies were already characterized by a sexual division of labour, gender-based violence, or gender norms often privileging the male - the specific contribution of capitalism was undoubtedly the institutionalization of the devaluation of women and their work. The devalued or even unpaid domestic work, the concept of the “housewife” that accompanies it, as well as professional segregation, have their origins in the era when capitalism gradually replaced the medieval feudal system. They are thus not, as we often hear, the remnants of a dark and barbaric medieval era, but rather constitutive of the first phase of capitalist accumulation which, as we shall see, led to a phenomenal regression in the status of women.
Judging by this excerpt (or the article as a whole, I'm not your dad), what general branch of political philosophy do you think has formed the author's worldview?
The dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background that models gender difference on class relations. The relation between manager and worker is not just one of “difference.” The manager and worker are situated within a system of social relations that unequally distributes money, power, status, etc. Likewise, men and women aren’t just “different,” but are categories of persons – like manager and worker – that are defined in terms of social relations that position them in a complex class/race/sex hierarchy. Given this background to the dominance approach, it is useful to consider a bit of the history of the relation between Marxism and feminism.
What do you think the author means when she says that "the dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background"? What does it mean to "model gender differences on class relations?" Why do you suppose the author spends so much of their paper discussing Marx? Why does she believe that "Socialist feminism involves a commitment to “the practical unity of the struggle against capitalism and the struggle for women’s liberation." Why is she interested in a struggle against Capitalism, and where does Marx come in to this struggle?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
58m ago
Realistically, I think it's just because to conservatives of a certain generation, 'Marxism' is the scariest and most evil word available, so calling everything they don't like Marxist is just a habit. It's equivalent to the way people on the left call everything 'fascism'.
Would you classify Black Lives Matter as a Marxist movement, or no?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
59m ago
Yeah I saw that exact video. It's crazy to see people literally dodging death in HD on the internet.
Mass production is key, Anduril and co keep producing these shiny anime trailers and marketing gear, China puts out these big drone shows where 6,000 are flying in sync like a next level firework show. That's a real demonstration of ability.
At some point container ships are just going to vomit out tens of thousands of flying bombs and make Pearl Harbour look like a joke.
WestphalianPeace
1hr ago
Ck3's gameplay loop is kinda immersion breaking once figured out. You start seeing the same events over and over.
Two solutions
- Roleplay as your character. Instead of minmaxxing you're stats ask instead how your character would respond. Take joy in long plots to murder every single one of your rivals family before kidnapping him and making him die of old age in the oubliette.
- Set weird or interesting goals for yourself. Form the kingdom of Jerusalem and then eventually Outremer. As Norse go to India. Creating a tall Brittania with the goal not of expansion but instead of crusade to spread your dynasty everywhere. Form New England. Play a hyper tall Wales.
Of cultural note relevant to this forum specifically. CK2's After the End mod actually had a bunch of rat references. Yudkowsky founds the empire of California, founds a religion whose focus is to emphasize different teachers but no singular authoritative source, and you start with the rare artifact "Meditations on Moloch"
The CK3 mod did away with all of this and I believe the cultural uniqueness of AtE is worse for it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
I think a lot of SJ positions are better described not as "culturally Marxist", but as a bizarro-world ideology created by starting with the cultural positions of Marxism (and there are quite a lot of them) and then going in the opposite direction of the traditional Western paradigm.
Tradition: "Men should be in charge of women", Marxism: "Sex divisions are a distraction and should be ignored", SJ: "Women should be in charge of men".
Tradition: "The white man is the best man", Marxism: "Racial divisions are a distraction from class struggle; be colourblind", SJ: "Whites suck".
Tradition: "White culture is scientifically superior to natives' primitive culture and we should raze the latter", Marxism: "All cultures suck and we should make a new, constructed culture designed by science", SJ: "Indigenous ways of knowing are just as valid as science; traditional Western culture should be razed".
The only real explanation I can see for this pattern is that SJ is the result of escalatory virtue-signalling oriented along the axis of "Tradition bad, Marxism good" and thus has positions that are "beyond" Marxism in some sense. I'm aware that this is a bulverism and basically calling the ideology meme cancer, and I don't like being this uncharitable, but it's honestly about all I can come up with.
jeroboam
1hr ago
I am mearly pointing out that the difference is one of degree not of kind.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
Killing 1 billion people is fundamentally different than killing 1 person, even if the method employed is the same.
jeroboam
1hr ago
I love how this war is just the US and China testing their new drone tech against proxy meat puppets.
jeroboam
1hr ago
I saw a video on Twitter where a Ukrainian or Russian guy emptied his clip at some tiny drone and then finally eliminated it by hitting it with his rifle.
In the not-so-distant future, the drones will be much smaller, much more intelligent, and much cheaper. Imagine trying to defend yourself against 10 bullet-size drones flying towards your face with a small but lethal explosive charge at the tip.
In any future war, China wins because they will be able to make 10x as many drones as the U.S. coalition. The western coalition might counter by setting up self-replicating drone factories, which would be a fun development.
Obviously assassination becomes trivial in this environment as well.
In other news, Microsoft is starting Three Mile Island nuclear plant to obtain energy for its AI systems...
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
2hr ago
What do you think of Masters of Orion 3?
What do you think of FreeOrion, that has been version 0.4.x or 0.5 for the last two decades?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
2hr ago
Right, I’m in favor of developing and utilizing remote-controlled arrest robots in the short term to see how well that goes; I agree that it would significantly reduce a number of risks and make the arrest process far more efficient and effective. If that goes well enough, we might not even need to progress to autonomous robocops! My general point is that policing right now is severely hampered by the fallibility and vulnerability of flesh-and-blood beat cops, and that a move toward more automation and robotics in policing strikes me as a highly promising development.
ulyssessword
2hr ago
I thought you were going somewhere else until the last paragraph. The tools of violence that the police have access to aren't actually very good at their jobs: Guns cause deadly wounds and may unintentionally hit bystanders, Tasers are much less reliable, and hand-to-hand fights (possibly with batons) inherently involve risk to the officers.
A remote-controlled (not autonomous) bot has the potential to be safer and more targeted than a gun, more incapacitating than a taser, and less risky than getting personally involved. If the police had an effective bot (that doesn't exist in 2024) in the subway, they could've simply arrested him after he started brandishing the knife. No muss, no fuss, and only the only risk is some equipment damage if he gets a good stab in.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
Why do they need to walk?
The air is the natural domain of the robot, as we see in Ukraine. The Russians and Ukrainians have been toying with ground combat robots but they're throwing industrial quantities of aerial drones at eachother. Some explode, some drop bombs, some are wire-guided to bypass electronic warfare, some have jet-engines for long endurance and long range. They have amazing camera zoom, they can pick out targets day and night.
Flying kamikaze drones are very hard to deal with. You can dodge one dropped grenade or club one away with your rifle. But three? Five? You're going to die. These things are cheap. Onboard AI guidance and swarming will make them even more dangerous.
It's only a matter of time before machines take over high-end airpower too. Humans are expensive to train, need all kinds of life support and suffer under g-forces. We were not made to careen around in the upper atmosphere at 9G or above, that's not where our skills lie. We're ground creatures, I bet that walking around and close quarters will be the last domains that fall to AI.
WhiningCoil
3hr ago
So I've been playing a lot of Master of Orion. I simply adored Master of Orion 2, and the pages of Computer Gaming World considered it the apex of 4X games until Galactic Civilizations 2 came out in 2004, where they begrudgingly admitted GalCiv2 was at least as good as Master of Orion 2, maybe.
Going back to the first one, I'm struck by it's simplicity. No more building individual improvements on planets, it's all more abstract with sliders for different production. Tech makes these cheaper, more efficient, etc. Combat is just the one two punch of fleet battle, and then sending in the shock troops. And that's just as easy as hitting the "TRANS" button to send population, the same way you'd shuffle it between your own colonies. No need to build specialized troop transports or anything. I kind of love it. It has a simple, but good enough, system of setting rally points for ships you build. And if you ever get tired of slowly conquering planets and then getting them up to speed and productive, you can just glass them from orbit instead. Easy peasy, no special tech required. You get nuclear bombs from the start, and it seems like all sorts of different weapon tech can bombard planets.
I find the end game to be a breeze, unlike almost any other 4X game I've played that devolve into micro management hell. I remember encountering people who always sword Master of Orion 1 was better than 2, and I think I can see why. In a world where 4X has grown into grand strategy, MoO1 is downright casual, and it's fucking fantastic for it.
lagrangian
3hr ago
Yeah, that's rough, and it's not like there's a store you can try it out at . I've had I want to say eight keyboards at about that price point purchased by employers...
remzem
3hr 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.
TIRM
3hr ago
Security clearance depends on a low blackmail attack surface
That's the excuse yes. But open proud people are also denied. So there's an unrelated aspect of disapproving schoolmarm-ism that doesn't contribute to their goal even according to their justifications, but they like being this way so they do it.
TequilaMockingbird
3hr ago
I don't know if its my post you're thinking of but i did just post about this very topic
TequilaMockingbird
3hr ago
I'm about 99% certain this robot is just a very expensive and fancy remote-controlled car. I don't think this incident has any bearing at all on AI, since no AI was involved.
You would be correct. As much as we talk up "autonomous systems" the overwhelming majority of systems are not "autonomous" at all, they're "remotely piloted". Anything resembling true autonomy is still deep in the realm of DARPA grants and strictly enforced NDAs.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
Oh, I'll happily grant that the term 'cultural Marxism' has referents. When someone like Joy Pullmann says 'the cultural Marxists', I know who she means and what they believe.
I don't think it's quite the same as the Mormon case, because Mormons do claim to be Christians. I don't think Mormons are Christians, but if I say that where a Mormon can hear me, I know they will disagree. So I and a Mormon will have a debate about whether 'Christianity' is the right word to use for what Mormons believe.
By contrast, most of the people identified as cultural Marxists don't claim to be cultural Marxists. In fact, they mostly decry the term and claim that it's a conspiracy theory. Some claim to be (generic) Marxists, but most do not. We might still have a debate about whether 'cultural Marxist' is an appropriate word for what they believe, but the direction of that debate will be different.
If those debates happened, I'd insist on the Mormon/Christian distinction because as a Christian I feel I have an interest in policing the boundaries of orthodoxy - essentially I want to clarify that Mormons aren't affiliated with me and I lend no support to their beliefs, which I consider wrong. I would not, I think, insist on 'cultural Marxist' as a label because it's not a label that achieves any of my goals re: the discussion of social justice or wokist politics. In fact I think it muddies the waters by confusing wokist beliefs with Marxist beliefs, and another term would be more clear.
They would probably then also disagree with being called 'wokists' or 'SJers' or whatever other term I came up with, but we have to use some label, so, well, that Freddie post. You know how this goes.
campfire
4hr ago
Posted a few weeks ago about trying to figure out Crusader Kings III. Some 50 hours later, I'm pretty entertained. My first "real" campaign was as the de Bessas in Northeast France, became King after a few generations but got too bogged down by factions and decided to give another character a try. Played as a duke (doux) in the Byzantine Empire, conquered a few Kingdoms (Despots), but massively underestimated how big the de jure Byzantine empire was. Then tried out a count in Skane, a duchy in Denmark, in 867. Realized tribal plays very differently, depends a lot on prestige which is hard to come by. Starting as a count, it can take a while to build up an army that can raid effectively depending on how well your leige does setting up alliances for himself. Remains to be seen how this plays out, but might just start as a Duke in Scandinavia instead.
Fun game, but I'm still shocked how many people have 2000+ hours in it. The core gameplay loop seems like it could get repetitive very fast. Make babies, marry them off for alliances (thanks @orthoxerox for the tip), fabricate claim on county, invade, make higher and higher tier titles, rinse, repeat. Is the appeal to the diehard fans just how many various ways there are to larp? Far more than any of the Civilization games at least.
I have dabbled in the total conversion mods. A Game of Thrones is almost too bespoke to believe, has ever a game complimented a novel series so perfectly? With the Tours and Tournaments DLC you can even host your own Red Wedding. Now there's a bookmark that triggers a civil war after Viserys I dies (the Dance of the Dragons). After The End is very original, set in a post-apocalyptic New World in 2666 where people practice religions vaguely associated with their geographic regions. Nevadans worship UFOs, the people of Svalbard pray to their seed vault, rust belt Americans worship the 19th century industrialists. That said, these mostly seem to just give you different ways to larp. The core gameplay loop is the same.
I've heard CK2 is better but I've tried it and just find the graphics and UI hideous and outdated.
I can still see myself getting 100+ hours of enjoyment out of CK3 though so feel free to recommend specific starts, mods encouraged.
SauntSolaire
4hr ago
UHK with a keychron Q0 numpad on the side
Can you point to the US anti-Israel or not pro-Israel party?
I'll conceded the Democrats are pro-Israel, I'm unconvinced they're more pro-Israel than Republicans.
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