domain:parrhesia.substack.com
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
14m ago
The sheer gall of the authors calling their American building/zoning codes international will never cease to inflame me.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
18m ago
The way he said it is guaranteed to upset both sides (which is why it's so hilarious), but the basic truth behind it is undeniable.
Huh? Why is it guaranteed to upset both sides? It seems obviously directionally correct to me (I'd nitpick that femininity is more prominent than masculinity rather than being hyper-feminine, which implies the near absence of masculinity to me) from the lolicon side and I have pointed to research supporting much the same conclusion in the past:
Recall Kinsella's suggestion that lolicon be understood as men performing the shōjo to come to terms with an unstable gender identity (Kinsella 2006: 81-83). If being a man ceases to promise power, potency and pleasure, it is no longer the privileged subject position. Akagi explains that lolicon is a form of self-expression for those oppressed by the principles of masculine competitive society (Akagi 1993: 232).32 Lolicon is a rejection of the need to establish oneself as masculine and an identification with the "kindness and love" of the shōjo (Akagi 1993: 233). This interpretation reverses the standard understanding of lolicon as an expression of masculinity to one of femininity. This is, of course, not the only way to approach the wide range of lolicon images, but it certainly highlights the complexity of "pornographic content" and its uses.
What's there to be upset over?
lagrangian
21m ago
Numpads are overrated. I won a nickel in a bet with a coworker that I could type numbers faster without. I love my keyboard.io model 100 split ortholinear walnut thumbcluster keyboard
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
24m ago
There apparently existed some group of people who used that term once upon a time, and maybe you can still find one or another stray adherent, but it's not clear why it would even still be popular given that the typical SJW is hustling for a seat at the table of the megacorps and passive-income fatcats.
As I said in my reply to OP, the term “cultural Marxist” refers to a specific umbrella of ideas, originated and promulgated by individuals who explicitly self-identified as Marxists, and who applied Marxist analysis and praxis to issues of cultural/social inequality. These people mostly called, and still do call, themselves critical theorists. Do you agree that this is a discrete and identifiable phenomenon or not? If you do, what is the point of quibbling about the term “Cultural Marxism”? Your concern clearly isn’t that you don’t want to use an exonym for this group, because you yourself call them “SJWs” and “the Social Justice crowd” - terms that these people clearly do not use amongst themselves.
but it's not clear why it would even still be popular given that the typical SJW is hustling for a seat at the table of the megacorps and passive-income fatcats.
Marx himself made it very clear that he believed that capitalism was a necessary step on the way to communism. One of the first major wrinkles in Marxism that caused a lot of consternation and soul-searching in the movement is the fact that the only country where communism had securely taken hold before WWII was Russia - at the time a non-industrialized semi-feudal state that had not yet undergone most of the preliminary steps that would have allowed capitalism to first take root and then expose its own contradictions. Marx himself expected communism to flourish first in countries like the UK and Germany, where the Industrial Revolution was the most pervasive and capitalism strongest.
Modern Marxists have developed corporatist theories of how 21st-century Marxism will necessarily be achieved. They’ve given up on the short-term goal of expropriating industrialists and shifted their focus to working within the existing framework of monopoly capitalism; many of them welcome a paradigm in which megacorps crush smaller companies and centralize the means of production among an ever-smaller group of nearly state-adjacent entities, because it makes it that much easier to infiltrate those organizations and direct them toward ideological ends. Public-private partnerships are the new Marxist paradigm.
Someone who doesn't identify as a Marxist can't be a Cultural Marxist, any more than a folk music fan who is not into metal music or culture can be a folk metal fan. What you are doing amounts to relabelling all folk music fans as folk metallers, because you hate both metal and folk music and during the most recent resurgence of folk music there happened to be a group of metalheads who got into it.
Again, have you actually read any of the works of the figures I and others are identifying as Cultural Marxists? If you were to read their works and see that they do actually identify as Marxists, and offer sophisticated explanations of how their work furthers Marxist ends, would that change your mind?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
29m ago
I use Unicomp, but it's the mother of all clicky keyboards.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
39m ago
[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]
A little over a year after the landmark UAP hearings with David Grusch that took place in the US House of Representatives, both chambers of Congress are gearing up to have additional new UAP hearings within the coming months. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's office confirmed that the Senate Armed Services Committee is planning on having a public hearing after the November elections which will focus on the progress in UAP analysis made by AARO, the official "UFO office" in the Pentagon. Rep. Nancy Mace further confirmed that the House will have its own public hearing on November 13th.
Would be nice if they had something concrete planned. Maybe we'll finally see that stunning photo that Matt Gaetz mentioned last year? Or at least some new witnesses coming forward.
Stingray3906
40m ago
Thank you, that makes sense. It seems like the cultural Marxist in your example might be exaggerating the concerns of the parents whereas the traditionalist might be restraining the autonomy of the woman.
celluloid_dream
43m ago
I've never quite got the appeal of deep mechanical gaming keyboards for work. I prefer something my fingers will fly over, not sink into.
As such, I like the thin aluminum Apple ones, or similar in office. I still use a thick one for gaming though. Feels more secure in WSAD-position.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1hr ago
Who are "they"? The vast majority of people you seek to describe as "Cultural Marxists" do not use that terminology for themselves. There apparently existed some group of people who used that term once upon a time, and maybe you can still find one or another stray adherent, but it's not clear why it would even still be popular given that the typical SJW is hustling for a seat at the table of the megacorps and passive-income fatcats.
The definitions are not that hard.
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Marxists are adherents of Marx's theories and visions for society and economics, who believe that the principal division in society is between people who own property that generates value and those who have to sell their labour to provide for themselves, and it is inevitable that the latter will rise up and bring about a new form of society where the former mode of existence is impossible and the latter retain control over the property complement that is needed to convert their labour into value.
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"Cultural Marxists" are not really a thing anymore; to the extent to which people identified with this, this can be compared to the tendency of metal music fans to create new "types of metal" whenever they stumble upon a non-metal music genre that they like, so folk music as enjoyed by the metal community is "folk metal", J-pop enjoyed by Metal fans is "kawaii metal" and so on. "Cultural Marxism" is a label that emerges when people whose identity revolves around being "Marxist" discover their interest in culture warring, and have to lay claim to still being part of their old community.
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The people currently controlling culture in the US and its vassals can be called SJWs, Wokeists or the Awokened or whatever you prefer. I found that in my life calling them "the Social Justice crowd" is specific and inoffensive enough that it gets the point across without eliciting backlash.
Someone who doesn't identify as a Marxist can't be a Cultural Marxist, any more than a folk music fan who is not into metal music or culture can be a folk metal fan. What you are doing amounts to relabelling all folk music fans as folk metallers, because you hate both metal and folk music and during the most recent resurgence of folk music there happened to be a group of metalheads who got into it.
Endorsed -- be aware that everyone in Canada (other than people from Toronto, who will smugly inform you that 'it's a World Class City') has felt the same way since roughly 1965:
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
1hr ago
It's not clear whether it's illegal in the strict formalist sense.
It probably isn't, but as you observed, you can be denied a security clearance for behavior that is not illegal. For example, smoking weed in a state where it's legal (granted, that is still federally illegal), or having too many foreign contacts, or having financial problems or a gambling habit.
It used to be, of course, that homosexuality was grounds for denying a security clearance. The reasoning was that it "made you vulnerable to extortion," but even an out and proud homosexual would be judged unsuitable. Homosexuality is now a protected class, but being a furry hentai aficionado is not (yet).
So yeah, looking at underage hentai, even if they are 1000-year-old vampires, is probably legal but still likely gonna get you flagged as "deviant with lack of impulse control and judgement" by a background investigator. (I too have questions about "intent to continue doing so" - who actually tells the humorless polygrapher who's about to torpedo your career, "Yes, I totally intend to keep doing this"? But then I have watched a lot of police bodycam and predcatcher YouTube, and the things people will admit to on camera is amazing, so...)
jkf
1hr ago
The thing you are missing here is that it's 'CULTURAL Marxism', not 'cultural MARXISM' -- the Marxism is secondary but still important. We could draw an analogy with 'football'. Everyone agrees that 'AMERICAN football' is descended from and related to ROtW 'FOOTBALL' in important ways, but the 'American' modifier indicates that it is a different thing. In almost every way! An alien watching the two sports would be unlikely to notice very many parallels other than the most banal. ('played on grass or grass-like field with inflatable object' is about as far as I can get)
Similarly, Cultural Marxism was invented by Marxists working on a Marxist playing field, but they changed the rules in order to apply some (core) Marxist concepts (eg. class conflict) to the cultural playing field. Marx did not really do this, and is not around to say what he thinks about it -- but it still relies heavily on his ideas and suffers many of the same flaws. Same playing field, new ball, if you will.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
For my personal use, I use the GMMK. Unfortunately Glorious caught the stupid and stopped selling full size keyboards, so you would have to get one secondhand. For work I use a Keychron K10, which is also pretty good. I prefer brown switches myself, but the GMMK is customizable and I believe the K10 is too.
gattsuru
1hr ago
Yeah, and it's not necessarily a completely overlapping set of circles -- there's a lot more security clearance red flags in totally-legal levels of financial mismanagement than in getting in an ill-advised fistfight. A clearance isn't an official designation that you're a good person, or even a completely trustworthy one, so much as trying to hedge off certain security risks. As I said, I'm not sure the clearance determination here is wrong.
But the heuristics are wonky, here. I'm sure mine aren't representative, but it's hard to name ones that are compatible with what we do.
HaroldWilson
1hr ago
A triumph for the substance-free politics of vague cultural signalling, unfortunately. Harris still supports the centrepieces of the Democratic pro-labor agenda such as the PRO Act, but because she doesn't give the right cultural signals a portion of the membership turns on her. Ridiculous.
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
1hr ago
how is furry masculine, how is dubious anime porn feminine?
Look at the faces.
Furry [well, unless it's actively trying to avoid this... and ends up looking like a girl/boy in a onesie] is typically so far divorced from facial neoteny it might as well be bara. Anime characters, by contrast, tend to have round faces and large eyes- emphasis is on soft/round/cute/happy, not hard/angular/ugly/angry.
(Western animation tends to have a mix of both- the largest exception to that was, of course, My Little Pony (specifically Gen 4), and now you know why 4chan liked it so much.)
Mind you, this is just the broad strokes of it- it's a lot more detailed (and honestly, a lot more normal) than I make it out to be- but these are the broad strokes as they relate to the people who are most taken by that stimulus.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
Promoting a single unified culture has been a part of every national movement since the Greeks and Romans. Calling “treat everyone in society as legal equals and insist on a unified culture” is a concept that would be as close to universal as can be. The Romans insisted on the unification of their territory into being Roman. Major business and cultural exchanges were in Greek or Latin. If you wanted to be an elite, you better learn to speak the language. 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.
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. The Chinese are not going to look kindly on a bunch of white Americans suddenly showing up in their country, nor would they tolerate a situation in which such groups demand infinite carve outs for their particular cultural preferences. I don’t think that legally forbidding someone to practice a religion makes sense, but that doesn’t mean that it should be perfectly legal to do things that the rest of society finds abhorrent in public under the guise of “my religion or culture.”
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
1hr ago
Keychron Q6. Full sized, simple, easy to use, and customizable. I never customized it, but it is. One negative is that it's heavy, but I prefer it that way.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2hr ago
Voting patterns are not a useful criteria to determine equivalence among ideologies.
Yes, that's true. That's why I limited the (tangential, and so unelaborated) point to "practical terms..."
As for the rest, I've had this conversation many times over the years, and the answer ultimately depends on your question, which you don't appear to have clearly stated yet. Calling out a "Nicene Creed of Marxism" is akin to the "true Communism has never been tried" trope. In my experience, cultural Marxists tend to regard themselves as Marxists, or Marxists-plus, or also Marxists, while avowed Marxists may or may not accept cultural Marxism, but I have never seen a rigorous attempt at putting empirical numbers to these things. Presumably, that would be difficult or impossible now; "cultural Marxism" has been a somewhat contested term for a long time, and its memory-holing into an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" has only made that worse.
So in general I would say that the term "cultural Marxist" should probably be avoided simply because it's been hopelessly muddied. But at the same time, when people insist that it just is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, or that it has nothing to do with Marxism as an ideology, I just have to point out that this is wrong as a matter of history. It certainly evolved from Marxism; it certainly is intellectually downstream of Marxism; it certainly shares many structural features with Marxism. If a "true Marxist" feels the need to gatekeep and insist that "cultural Marxism" is an ideological heresy, like, fine? I don't have a horse in that race, I'm happy to taboo "cultural Marxism" so long as the conversation is not explicitly about the term "cultural Marxism."
But you seem to be attributing fallacious reasoning to the people talking about cultural Marxism, whereas I and others responding to you are focused instead on the mischief of the people who muddied the term in the first place. If there was a group who called themselves cultural Marxists (there was) and this group believed the things they are accused of believing (they did) and later on the term was abandoned by its users because it had become a useful tool in the enemy's toolbox (it had), then getting conspicuously annoyed with the aforementioned enemies who go on using the term anyway seems like misdirected ire from anyone who is not, well, part of the group-formerly-known-as-cultural-Marxists.
all-my-enemies-get-their-talking-points-from-the-same-source fallacy
All my enemies get their talking points from Plato. What pisses me off is that they don't seem to realize it.
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
2hr ago
Really, I'm not entirely sure why this is an issue. Security clearance depends on a low blackmail attack surface, so as Puritanism [about what books one reads, in this case] in the population increases or becomes more powerful as a social force, things that wouldn't be an issue in more liberal times start to become viable blackmail avenues.
And yes, that means society is leaving talent on the ground; on the other hand, defending people who hate you is stupid and if their fake moral standards get them killed because of it, then so be it. Maybe the survivors will smarten up.
PokerPirate
2hr ago
I'm teaching a class on LLMs right now, and the students are working on a project to use LLMs to answer questions about the current election. (They're using a RAG based system to pull in news articles to answer the questions, and they're next assignment is going to be to get the system to respond in the style of Harris/Trump.)
Anyways, to evaluate the students' work, I needed to create a dataset of US election facts. I call it the Hairy Trumpet dataset (github link), and I'm surprised I haven't heard this pun on the candidates' names anywhere else yet. I especially like the pun because hairy trumpet is also the name of a weird fungus, which seems fitting for a dataset on politics.
But my question is, is that really still Marxism, necessarily?
If you find yourself surveying the attitudes of actual existing self-identified Marxists, and the vast majority believe one thing while only a relatively small and disempowered rump minority believe another, isn’t Marxism just “whatever most Marxists believe?” Christianity has undergone multiple profound changes - theological, structural, and otherwise - in the two thousand years of its existence. If you described modern Protestant Christianity to one of Jesus’s contemporary followers, that person would find many aspects of it unrecognizable. (In fact, that person might be shocked to learn that the world still exists two thousand years hence, since it’s quite clear that a substantial portion of early Christians expected the Rapture to happen within their lifetimes.) The fact of various schisms, sectarian conflicts, doctrinal disputes, and pragmatic political compromises does not invalidate our ability to discuss “Christianity” as a distinct phenomenon identifiable across time, does it? (If you want to argue that it does, that’d a more interesting conversation, but it doesn’t appear that you do.)
Similarly, Marxism, though a far younger movement than Christianity, has already undergone multiple schisms and evolutions as it has had to interface with the real world. I’m not sure why you believe that Marxists are required to be fully faithful to the dead hand of Marx’s and Engels’ original writings, with no room for adaptation or innovation, in order to still be considered Marxists. Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School - all of these guys were grappling with which parts of Marx’s predictions came true and which didn’t, and have tried to salvage the core theses while figuring out how to make them work in reality. They believe in his fundamental goals and vision, and are trying to discover - through experimental praxis - the means by which to effectively actualize that vision.
Marx was never entirely focused on mere economics; see his famous letter to Arnold Ruge in which he states, “It is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists…” Keep in mind also that Marx was building on the ideas of Hegel and was only one member of a larger philosophical movement derived from Hegel’s thought; in that sense, Marxism has merely been building on previous ideas from the beginning, so it should be unsurprising that its modern inheritors should continue that process of philosophical evolution.
SomethingMusic
2hr ago
I'm starting another office job which requires a reasonable amount of typing, so instead of using the work supplied keyboard which makes me want to throw it out the window, I'm interested in what input devices everyone uses. I find my YouTube and internet searches aren't definitive, and I really don't want to spend a grotesque amount of time and money on finding the right keyboard. My current criteria are:
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I prefer linear over tactile or clicky. I hate clicky the most.
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Full size is preferred. I use the num pad for work
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Hall effect is a plus
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Minimal out of box tinkering, even if it comes at some premium.
What keyboards are you using?
Too much wasted space while the houses are tiny. The road between the houses is bigger than the houses themselves, and double-wide driveways are hideous.
I would do the following:
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