domain:forecasting.substack.com
orthoxerox
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27m ago
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.
Peter the Great didn't give a flying fuck about the culture of Russia; no, that's incorrect, he hated it with a fiery passion. He and his successors promoted 18th century globohomo so ruthlessly that Russian nobility stopped speaking Russian until they rediscovered their heritage during the war of 1812 a century later.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
41m ago
They can fly so low though! At the treeline, below the treeline, at waist height... At sea you have clear lines of sight and an elevated position to shoot down at surface-skimming missiles.
Countering these things is hard, as we see in Ukraine. The solution may just be to have more drones of your own.
Rosencrantz2
1hr ago
Finely tuned deceitful narratives deliver much more information and can be nitpicked with fruitful results. Importantly there is a shame+update mechanism whenever sophisticated lies become too obvious. Whereas pure Trumpian bullshit must be simply ignored. There is no path to anything better, if we allow it to dominate public discourse.
hooser
1hr ago
Imagine trying to defend yourself against 10 bullet-size drones flying towards your face with a small but lethal explosive charge at the tip.
I would use an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP). And looks like the Pentagon is on it.
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?
My experience does not differ.
If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?
It comes from Orthodox Marxism, which predicts that humanity progresses through different "modes of production", one of which is Capitalism, which will inevitably be replaced by Socialism and then Communism. "Late Stage Capitalism" is basically just hyping up the inevitably end of capitalism that Marxists believe will occur, because they're alleging that we're already past the early and middle and thus are in the "late" part of it.
It's pretty much the commie version of the Millenarian Christian "End Times". One says we're living in Late Capitalism because they're prophesizing the second coming of Communism. The other says we're living in the End Times because they're prophesizing the second coming of Jesus.
I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.
Worth adding that "neoliberal" here is effectively a meaningless snarl word when used by these groups, used to refer not just to something like Milton Friedman's beliefs, but to pretty much anything they dislike including, in one thing I read, String Theory. You can mentally replace it with "nasty" and no information will be lost. Or more precisely, they end up calling random stuff neoliberal because they believe all not-explicitly-Marxisdt scientific theories produced under our current culture is just discourse serving power.
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.
Many of them, yes. But some of the rest ascribe to what Marx would have called "Utopian Socialism" which can be summarised as dood, what if like, we were all equal and shit. With no further theory. In other words they just don't like capitalism but have no ideology which they want to replace it with.
Since you've mentioned feminism so much, a useful distinction is that some Social Justice advocates who are into feminism are not Marxist Feminists, but instead Radical Feminists (which confusingly are two different things). The former is more popular in the US while the latter is more popular in the UK. Marxist feminists believe oppression of women is due to capitalism while Radical feminists believe it is due to gender roles imposed by men. And the former seeks to resolve it by abolishing capitalism while the latter want to abolish gender roles. This is basically the cause of the TERF wars. the Radical Feminist desire to abolish gender roles conflicts with the desire of trans people to uphold them, if not outright making trans people worse than the general population out of some sense that they are traitors, or even more entrenched in gender roles than anyone else. Hence TERF is a bit of a redundant term - it is incoherent to be RF and not also TE, and the self-proclaimed RFs that are pro-trans are only so as a consequence of something between burying their head in the sand and being bullied into silence. The Marxist feminists don't have that same ideological incompatibility, more likely to see Trans people as allies because they can rally them to the overthrow capitalism cause.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
What did they play? The White Stripes and The Hives and Evanescence?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
Yeah, this looks nicer. I would make the parking spaces 7x21ft, but I guess pickups are just that big.
Now you just need to change the floor plans so that you can enter the houses from the front again.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
I threatened to fight mine off with the keyboard itself.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
Imagine trying to defend yourself against 10 bullet-size drones flying towards your face with a small but lethal explosive charge at the tip.
I'm not itching for the chance here, but I'd be very surprised if Western R&D isn't cooking up mostly-autonomous, short-range anti-drone weapons (lasers, small caliber guns) that they intend to strap to pretty much everything bigger than a jeep. I imagine that modern electronics manufacturing could build a miniature CIWS for not too much more than the drone it's targeting: the RF and compute electronics to do this are much more ubiquitous than they were when the original technology was deployed on ships.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
2hr ago
"But I have not yet gone to college."
I'll keep an eye out for the first installment.
ControlsFreak
3hr ago
DARPA grants, at least in the area of autonomy, still massively publish. And that's just using the most bland keywords that are mostly getting at summaries of their grand challenges. Those summaries will have gobs of references to the much more specific work that has been published with little reference to DARPA other than a funding acknowledgement. I don't yet know of a tool that allows you to search the literature specifically for funding acknowledgements from DARPA rather than being heavily biased toward papers where "DARPA" actually made it into the title, but there are tons of such papers.
On the one hand, there is a faction of people who are doctrinaire Marxists, who consider themselves to be committed adherents to the cause and who are constantly overhauling their propaganda in pursuit of the same goal they've always hand - the formation of a permanent communist society. Sometimes this means playing the poor against the rich, sometimes the blacks against the whites, etc. I won't argue with that, I think it's true.
But in addition to that group, I think that anyone who thinks even slightly about society realises at some point that you have to start talking about groups and group interests. And it was Marx who formulated the great original theory of group interests. In that way I think Marx is to societal organisation what Nietzsche is to moral philosophy - he dominates the topic such that anyone who approaches that topic finds themselves discussing it in his terms. So feminists want to talk about the different and sometimes conflicting interests of men and women, and they cast around for suitable language to think about the problem in, and Marx's class conflict ideas come readily to hand. Likewise disabled people who want to talk about the deaf vs. the hearing find themselves thinking in terms of class and oppression. Or trans people talking about themselves in the language of gay liberation, despite the obvious conflicts - that language was in the water.
I've noted before that when the modern-day dissident right want to talk about the cultural dominance of the left, they often do so in leftist terms, talking about narratives and simulacra and manufacturing consent. Same thing. Those formulations come easily to mind because the left happened to be talking about them first. When I want to talk about nationalism and belonging, I end up with things like 'blood and soil' because that's the first place the mind goes and it's a good phrase.
I think if you're not careful, or if you're committed to the formalism that academia forces on you, this causes you to tangle up your original thoughts with previous movements. For example if you're an early feminist and you want to make waves, and you're already thinking in somewhat Marxist terms for the reasons given above, you're probably going to publish your articles in Marxist journals. They already exist, and they have a good readership, and your ideas are pretty compatible with the stuff they already want to take about. And this association keeps strengthening, and it becomes very difficult to find feminists who aren't Marxists, or so heavily associated with Marxists that it's hard to tell them apart. If you liked, perhaps you could think of this as 'directed' and 'grassroots' or something.
On a separate note, I heard somewhere that late stage capitalism referred to capitalism that has moved on from building things in factories to an economy that trades primarily in ideas and financial derivates. No idea if that's true or not.
theincompetencetheorist
4hr ago
Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?
I don't know for certain since I don't have the time nor resources to verify, but I do believe the ideas are a continuation from Deleuzes Societies of Control. The general idea late-stage capitalism is that capitalism controls us through various means, and there is some truth to that because of corporations we can't have any discussion we want on Reddit for example. The problem is the parasitic ideas of neomarxism has tagged along with it.
But all that proves is at least one person supports both communism and BLM.
Would you expect American Communists, or indeed communists generally, to not support BLM?
At any rate, I do not draw conclusions about the ideologies of entire movements supported by millions of people from individual graffitos.
If you were persuaded that hammers and sickles were a common addition to BLM-riot graffiti, would this be weak evidence of a connection between the two movements? To be clear, the best I can do after a brief search is two instances, and the vague memories of seeing many more at the time. I'm more curious about your reasoning process.
More generally, do you think the examples linked in this comment are likewise lacking a "developed political platform"? Are those people Marxists, in your view?
On the statue of Christopher Columbus, they scrawled “George Floyd” and “BLM,” as well as rudimentary Soviet hammer and sickle images (now sometimes representing a union of social classes), and stencilled raised fists, often viewed as an emblem of Black liberation and solidarity.
...Could it be that you were mistaken, and the hammer and sickle in that first example only represented "a union of social classes"? Maybe that guy wasn't a communist at all?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
I think that 'cultural Marxism' is not a helpful label or one that illuminates the political trend that we're criticising
Oh, I don't necessarily disagree with that, for me it's mostly a question of preserving the historical record.
Crowstep
4hr ago
I think you're talking past me. The sole point I was making was that Jews are not part of the progressive stack of oppressed identities among Cultural Marxists. Whether the Jewish-Israeli lobby is particularly powerful in the US is irrelevant.
It's possible for Jews to be considered an oppressor class by these people and also have the US government be very pro-Israel, because most Democratic congressmen are not hardcore wokes, even if they do tolerate it as an ideology.
You clearly think that Jews are too influential in American politics, fine. You're not the only guy on this forum who doesn't like Jews. But your statement that they are considered part of the progressive stack with all the other intersectional identities obviously isn't true.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
I think that someone who paints hammers and sickles and 'CPUSA' on to a block is almost certainly a communist. That imagery is pretty unambiguous.
(You can't see the BLM in that image, but the reverse of the block shows it.)
But all that proves is at least one person supports both communism and BLM. My priors on the kinds of people who go around spray-painting slogans on skate parks make me think it's quite likely that the person is an idiotic, edgy teenager with no developed political platform. At any rate, I do not draw conclusions about the ideologies of entire movements supported by millions of people from individual graffitos.
Lizzardspawn
5hr ago
Right now I am using some blue clicky mechanical chinesium made keyboard. It cost 15 euro. Not the best I have had but get's the job done. Trying to figure out how to obtain unicomp. I love buckle springs.
Lizzardspawn
5hr ago
That is why you make mosh pits. They are eternal.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
I didn't say that it's a strawman conspiracy theory, so, well, good?
I think that 'cultural Marxism' is not a helpful label or one that illuminates the political trend that we're criticising, and I think that the widespread use of the term has more to do with a need to associate the trend in question with a historical villain than anything else (that is, what I termed 'a bugaboo' - 'Marxism' is a spooky word).
I like to use 'social justice politics' or 'progressivism' when I need to be more neutral, and I'm not above just using 'wokeness' when I think that word's not going to alienate my audience, and that seems to work fine for me. 'Cultural Marxism' just introduces too many inaccurate or confusing associations for my liking.
Now that said, yes, there were people who identified as 'cultural Marxists', and I'm happy to call them cultural Marxists. But those people are not who we mean when we talk about cultural Marxism/wokeness/SJ politics, so I don't find them that relevant to the use of the term today.
For what it's worth I am also quite happy to discard the term 'neoliberal'. I absolutely roll my eyes at and downgrade the reliability of any activists who start talking about 'ascendant neoliberalism' and the like. So let's just throw both of them out. The worthlessness of 'neoliberal' as a term doesn't rescue 'cultural Marxism'.
Mm.
So in your opinion, when some guy spraypaints #BLM, multiple hammers and sickles, and the publication date of the Communist Manifesto on a public structure, what do you think is going on in that guy's head? Would you expect the misconception he's suffering from to be common or rare?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
the only part that I find doubtful is how by "resulted" suggests that the lineage of "woke" is entirely, or mostly, within the movement that referred to itself as "Cultural Marxism"
Well, you can follow the people who referred to their thought as "Cultural Marxism", see what they were writing later on, when "woke" became a thing, note the lack of differences between "woke", the current academic memplex "woke" is based on ("Critical Theory" as best as I can gather), and "Cultural Marxism" of the past.
but the volume of evidence is really too small for there to ever have been more than a fairly small number (on the order of a few academic groups and attached activist groupies? Perhaps 100-1000 people?).
This is exactly what we'd expect from a movement that was dismissed, on this very forum, as "just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses", until a few years ago.
is justified as a term, when the "woke" themselves see their lineage as a procession of mass movements (civil rights, LGBT etc.),
I have to stop you there, "woke" is not a term to describe mass movements. Civil rights, and LGBT are not "woke" / "Culturally Marxist" by virtue of being being civil rights / LGBT.
Then the moniker "conspiracy theory" would be appropriate on the surface. Whether one should abstain from using it because of the pejorative connotations, or push back against the pejorative connotations on account of those being obvious enemy action by conspiracies, is a separate question.
It's not a separate question. The term "conspiracy theory" is deliberately used to slander anyone believing it, the implication being that the theory is false, and the person is a paranoid schizophrenic for thinking it might be true. In colloquial usage a "conspiracy theory" has to be false or else it's not a "conspiracy theory". We could it watch in real time when 2rafa posted about how believing in WEF conspiracy theories are an "embarrassment", and how they magically stopped being "conspiracy theories", according to several users here, when I wrote my longpost about the WEF, even though I explicitly endorsed the term.
If you want to apply the label "conspiracy theory" to "Cultural Marxist" I can endorse it on the condition it is done in a way like "Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory that turned out to be 100% true", or otherwise made it absolutely clear that the theory is not false.
If you want to insist that the pejorative connotations are a separate question, then we have to come back why you insist on not calling wokism "Cultural Marxism", here too the pejorative connotations should be a separate question.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
I would not, no.
I'm aware of that time a couple of its founders identified as Marxists, but I don't think that makes the movement Marxist.
BLM is amorphous enough that it's difficult to nail down any specific principles, but some are outlined here, and I don't think they're Marxist. Based on that page alone I think there's a clear anarchist influence on BLM, with a heavy emphasis on the abolition of punishment, end of coercion, and mutual aid, but I think that to be Marxist specifically, there would need to be something about the ownership and distribution of capital.
So, anarchist or at least anarchist-adjacent, yes, but Marxist, no.
I really doubt this. Well, I doubt the explicitly part.
The median SJW(let’s use a simple descriptor instead of a politically correct neologism) does not know about his(ok, her, but I’m going to start making a point of using the generic masculine) ideology’s descent from Marxism. And usually doesn’t care to. SJW complaints have little upfront economic class valence; race gender and sexuality are prima facia, and any characterization of their opponents as wealthy is a) not that different from republicans calling their opponents elite and b) usually wrapped up in some alternative descriptor, like ‘white’ or ‘male’. And while lots of SJW ideologies are realistically better modeled as class interest movements- mainstream feminism in particular resolves a lot of its internal contradictions out once you realize that it’s specifically a movement in favor of educated, urban girl bosses, and has little to offer(and doesn’t want more)for poor women, rural woman, housewives, etc- the main contribution of Marxism to SJW thought is the ability to rationalize opposition.
See, Marx was a theorist of economics. His economic ideas are wrong, obviously- see holodomor, the, great leap forwards, the, cultural Revolution, the, people’s republic of Cambodia, the, etc, etc- but his critical insight was that economic interests influence historical processes more than individual great men, and so it follows that if you understand economic interest well enough you can derive psychohistory from it, Hari Seldon style.
Obviously this is stupid but it’s like crack to ivory tower academics. Fortunately Marx provides epicycles upon epicycles for when this psychohistory is fake. And SJW thought is, in a lot of cases, derived from pounding a square peg of something that actually exists(yes, there is such a thing as patriarchy, and yes, there’s plenty of people who view blacks poorly) into the round hole necessary for it to be a Marxist epicycle. But the median SJW doesn’t know or care about the kyriarchy being a Marxian concept of the opiate of the masses- I mean the kyriarchy is also fake, but that’s besides the point.
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