I don’t even agree with your shit how am I better at it than you. How are you gonna jerk off over the rules based societal order and then claim you can ignore whatever highest court you have because you personally disagree. mfer you just reinvented feudalism again
they don’t have political beliefs they never do
unstoppable material interest meets immoveable ideological prism
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I once had to explain the french revolution to a “classical liberal” my man that’s the ideology you say you are how have you not even heard of it
there’s a good quote from Trotsky (yes, bare with me) about how liberals disavow the French revolution and Marxists are the true inheritors of that struggle’s legacy.
The Great French Revolution was indeed a national revolution. And what is more, within the national framework, the world struggle of the bourgeoisie for domination, for power, and for undivided triumph found its classical expression.
Jacobinism is now a term of reproach on the lips of all liberal wiseacres. Bourgeois hatred of revolution, its hatred towards the masses, hatred of the force and grandeur of the history that is made in the streets, is concentrated in one cry of indignation and fear – Jacobinism! We, the world army of Communism, have long ago made our historical reckoning with Jacobinism. The whole of the present international proletarian movement was formed and grew strong in the struggle against the traditions of Jacobinism. We subjected its theories to criticism, we exposed its historical limitations, its social contradictoriness, its utopianism, we exposed its phraseology, and broke with its traditions, which for decades had been regarded as the sacred heritage of the revolution.
But we defend Jacobinism against the attacks, the calumny, and the stupid vituperations of anaemic, phlegmatic liberalism. The bourgeoisie has shamefully betrayed all the traditions of its historical youth, and its present hirelings dishonour the graves of its ancestors and scoff at the ashes of their ideals. The proletariat has taken the honour of the revolutionary past of the bourgeoisie under its protection. The proletariat, however radically it may have, in practice, broken with the revolutionary traditions of the bourgeoisie, nevertheless preserves them, as a sacred heritage of great passions, heroism and initiative, and its heart beats in sympathy with the speeches and acts of the Jacobin Convention.
oh boy, that thing. Safe to say most french people have a very poor understanding of that event, because schools here teach that Robespierre was basically Stalin and that Danton was like Obama. I wish I made this up but thats literally what I was taught back in High School. Also the whole “violence bad” bullshit, skipping the fact the french monarchy was atrocious for anyone who wasnt in the clergy or the nobility.
skipping the fact the french monarchy was atrocious for anyone who wasnt in the clergy or the nobility
The “two reigns of terror” quote is evergreen, and one of the best parts is that it’s from a popular non-leftist author (Twain), so libs can’t even dismiss it out of hand.
Twain was pretty left, although not communist.
well the bourgeoise got so preoccupied with it’ss new class enemy the proletariat that it entirely forgot it’s old enemy landlords
Shared interests in maintaining the system that puts both on top aligned them pretty quickly
well yes and no. The way the landlords charge the proletariat and bourgeoise rent massively harms capitalist profitability and productivity. People cannot afford as many commodities when they pay out all their income in rent and workers having this expense ultimately sets a floor on the minimum capitalists can pay while still having access to labour in an area
The bourgeoise didn’t get to the top with the aid of landlords they took it by force from landlords
Yes, but then they either became small scale landlords or were too preocupied with the proles demanding a fair share to be too upset with the feudal dipshits once they gutted much of their power
not saying the bourgeoise are opposed to landlords I’m saying that if someone had a good understanding of capitalism and wanted to preserve it that person would be
More like it became the landlords. Rent extraction is just another business now.
It is also important however to be clear about what we mean when we say that it was a bourgeois revolution.
It wasn’t a bourgeois revolution in the sense that there was a group of self-conscious bourgeoisie who specially carried out a revolution to create a bourgeois or capitalist society. The key figures and organizers, not to mention the masses who were essential to it, were not normally bourgeois. There were of course a lot of bourgeois who were sympathetic to the pushback of absolutist royal authority (as France by this period was not really feudal either in terms of its mode of production, political power no longer being parcelized but rather concentrated in the monarchy, though this can also been seen as an important and natural development of powerful feudal governments, as also happened to a lesser degree in England under the Tudors as a result of the degeneration of bastard feudalism). Nor did the French bourgeoisie organize itself into a specifically bourgeois political party for their own uniquely specific interests. People like Robespierre, Saint-Juste, etc. were normally lawyers or employed by the state, but were not really bourgeois, unless we really stretch the definition of bourgeois or petit bourgeois, though they were not engaging in rational profit-seeking activity for the functional purpose of capital accumulation. France would not truly succeed at capitalism development until after the 1830s/40s, and even until the late 19th century the French peasantry were not really living in capitalism fully, though of course they were deeply influenced by it and were increasingly dependent and coerced by its development.
There’s similar things to say when people talk about the English Civil War as a bourgeois revolution, though I’d say that their ‘Glorious Revolution’ (i.e. the one where they invited a Dutchman to rule them, i.e. the most English Revolution of all time), is a more fully bourgeois revolution.
What it did do however it produce the conditions for a bourgeois-dominated capitalist society, through political revolution and then socio-economic transformations which the former made possible. It allowed for development of societies whose values were increasingly favorable to the breakdown of restraints on bourgeois and capitalist development. Liberalism as a ideology became more and more powerful, including many French liberals who admired English society, which was significantly further along the path of capitalist development than France.
That’s also a reason why it was a genuinely politically revolution, as the brilliance of the series of events that make it up can be seen in that they did not live in a capitalist society yet, nor were the French bourgeoisie very developed as a class But that should no more make us think that this was not the key political event allowing for the eventual development of capitalism on the European continent, than should the fact that the Bolshevik revolution was led by people who were mostly not themselves members of the proletariat. Like when you read speeches by Robespierre, Saint-Juste and so on MFs are going off and do not read at all like modern libreals, because they were not, and they were genuinely revolutionary individuals.
Stalin speaks to that when talking with H.G. Wells
Or take France at the end of the eighteenth century. Long before 1789 it was clear to many how rotten the royal power, the feudal system was. But a popular insurrection, a clash of classes was not, could not be avoided. Why? Because the classes which must abandon the stage of history are the last to become convinced that their role is ended. It is impossible to convince them of this. They think that the fissures in the decaying edifice of the old order can be repaired and saved. That is why dying classes take to arms and resort to every means to save their existence as a ruling class.
Wells: > But there were not a few lawyers at the head of the Great French Revolution.
Stalin: > Do you deny the role of the intelligentsia in revolutionary movements? Was the Great French Revolution a lawyers’ revolution and not a popular revolution, which achieved victory by rousing vast masses of the people against feudalism and championed the interests of the Third Estate? And did the lawyers among the leaders of the Great French Revolution act in accordance with the laws of the old order? Did they not introduce new, bourgeois revolutionary laws?
The rich experience of history teaches that up to now not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class. There is no such precedent in world history. The Communists have learned this lesson of history. Communists would welcome the voluntary departure of the bourgeoisie. But such a turn of affairs is improbable; that is what experience teaches. That is why the Communists want to be prepared for the worst and call upon the working class to be vigilant, to be prepared for battle. Who wants a captain who lulls the vigilance of his army, a captain who does not understand that the enemy will not surrender, that he must be crushed? To be such a captain means deceiving, betraying the working class. That is why I think that what seems to you to be old-fashioned is in fact a measure of revolutionary expediency for the working class.
as also happened to a lesser degree in England under the Tudors as a result of the degeneration of bastard feudalism
in the Tudor case as I assume also in the french the centralisation of power in the crown rather than the lesser gentry was the feudal equivalent of Mao killing the warlords and thus no longer having the state precarious to being toppled by private ministates
I’ve seen that described in the sense that for the peasant very little changed. The poor did not gain anything, merely the barons and duchies lost something.
it did effect the peasantry in that it changed the way the state worked and the kind of policies that could then happen. The barons being broken made enclosure easier later for example
True, true. But I think the person’s point was more that it wasn’t something peasants had a part in. In the process of Absolutism they didn’t have skin in the game, it didn’t change their daily lives. The end result was cataclysmic for them as a class, but they didn’t think of themselves that way. They were, as Marx said, a sack of potatoes.
yeah the political machinations of the Tudors didn’t directly involve the peasantry in the decision making process which was typical for feudal politics
To a degree yes but the extent to which the Wars of the Roses leading to the Tudor dynasty were bloody is exaggerated from what I understand. The only battle which was very serious in terms of casualties was Towton (which might have actually been the most bloody battle on English soil we know of), but apart from that is was an on-and-off affair. The causality rate and absolute numbers were high in that battle, but not more so than other vicious battles which were more frequent on the European continent. It’s not even certain that the numbers of the nobility were decimated that much or more than in other European wars of the time.
What it did do however was undermine the more decentralized power of late bastard feudalism in which there was concentration of power in the hands of certain very powerful houses and barons. This centralization of power had already been going on under Richard III, and was taken up by Henry Tudor. The Tudor did not kill all of their opponents, let alone dissolve the feudal aristocracy, as though Henry Tudor was of the House of Lancaster, he married into the House of York to create the Tudor dynasty in order to unite the houses descended from the Plantagenets, and it remained a society ruled by a land-owning military aristocracy, though with important developments in the English state.
yeah I don’t think that the wars of the roses were very bloody but they did result in the barons having less power. The extent to which Henry the 8th was a very cunning political mind who pulled off a massive centralisation of power with very little actual explicit violence is underestimated given his rightful reputation as a frivolous murderer
Yeah I think we often forget just how brutal and ruthless you had to have been during Feudalism, especially earlier feudalism or the period prior to Feudalism proper i.e. during the early formation of the socio-economic and political structures that we would then call Feudalism, in order to succeed or survive politically. The violent competition between the aristocracy was very real. It’s funny in the case of Henry VII and Richard III because obviously while the view of the latter as a deformed sociopathic tyrant and pervert has been influenced up to the current day by Tudor propaganda (of which the most famous example is the Shakespeare play Richard III), it’s nevertheless hilarious that there has been moves to try and legitimize Richard III by claiming that everything bad claimed about him are Tudor lies, whereas you can literally just read contemporary or fairly accurate accounts of his reign to realize that mans was also a ruthless murdering bastard. So was Henry VII obviously. They all were frankly. If you weren’t then you ended up like Henry VI.
I was reading Southern’s Making of the Middle-Ages recently, and although it’s definitely dated in a bunch of respects, it does emphasize how during the period of feudalism’s formation in Northern France, there was real, extremely brutal and violent struggle, showing great political acumen and tact, by the brutal aristocratic warlords who were rising during the 11th century to form the Knightly class. It leaves little to doubt as to whether these people knew what they were doing. He also emphasizes their fascinating relationship with the university men, who during the High Medieval Renaissance were becoming more and learned, numerous, and essential to the construction and administration of feudalism’s political and bureaucratic structures, and how they also played the role of providing moral justification and psychological care to the many deeply guilt-ridden, violent men of the nobility and warrior class.
I maintain the only real difference between William the conqueror and the Krays is scale
I know I’m late to the party here but I figure, if you didn’t know, it might pique your interest, the shortly after banned KPD said to the constitution of germany
“We will not sign this. However, the day will come that we communist will defend it agains those who did”
I’m starting to realize most people I’ve met have political beliefs no more complex than “I can do whatever I want and also I’m not gay.” No conception of what class they belong to, no idea what organizing is, rather just stuck in the idea their personal opinions are what matters the most. They don’t want anything that could possibly impede consumerism. Also it’s really important to know they’re not gay. They never want to be mistaken for gay and that’s their central political motivation.
Anything that might imply they’re gay could be bad, including wearing sunscreen, shaving, eating soy, driving the speed limit. All of that is gay and is thus the political opposition.
Is that what you’re struggling with? Most Americans seem to think yelling at TV or being in a Facebook group constitutes praxis. I mean we’re posters so we’re not much better but at least I know I’m just a goofus cackling at a pig shit emoji
I’m starting to realize most people I’ve met have political beliefs no more complex than “I can do whatever I want and also I’m not gay.” No conception of what class they belong to, no idea what organizing is, rather just stuck in the idea their personal opinions are what matters the most. They don’t want anything that could possibly impede consumerism. Also it’s really important to know they’re not gay. They never want to be mistaken for gay and that’s their central political motivation.
Anything that might imply they’re gay could be bad, including wearing sunscreen, shaving, eating soy, driving the speed limit. All of that is gay and is thus the political opposition.
Is that what you’re struggling with? Most Americans seem to think yelling at TV or being in a Facebook group constitutes praxis. I mean we’re posters so we’re not much better but at least I know I’m just a goofus cackling at a pig shit emoji
You cracked the code for pretty much all of the “nonpolitical” chuds around me, especially the “not gay” virtue signaling.
Seconded, it’s ironic. They show how much of a rebel they are by proudly wearing “conformist” as a badge of honor.
political beliefs no more complex than “I can do whatever I want and also I’m not gay.”
Not true. They also know there are good guys and bad guys.
I’m just a goofus cackling at a pig shit emoji
Despite all my rage I am still posting pigs in a cage
It takes decades in the meme mines to develop a coherent belief system
I can do whatever I want and also I’m not gay.
God damn if this doesn’t describe every single cishet mayo dude I’ve ever known
I don’t even agree with your shit how am I better at it than you
atheists talking about religion be like
And exactly like atheism, it is the intense, structured formation of a formal critique in analysis, a thought experiment to test the default assumption, an attempt to understand why the starting conclusion “feels wrong” than directly leads to a unwinnable confrontation with the magical thinking that underpins both of these enterprises
Like a bishop once told me, not all atheists went to seminary but studying at a seminary “earnestly, in good faith” will inevitably lead to a struggle with atheism for the rest of their life
There’s a bit of the spirit of the political revolutionary in the atheist movement I guess, in this way. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I think it’s something to jot down for the moment
i mean that’s how i got here in a roundabout way. There’s a failure of a large segment of the “skeptical community” to apply their skeptical tools to contemporary social issues, but you also had the less internationally famous people like PZ Myers, Rebecca Watson, Sikivu Hutchinson and other people in their blog networks who were not comrades but usually did better than typical white liberal democrats.
The atheist community of austin had (or has? idk fuck them) a long-running public access tv show but they imploded over trans rights with all the comrades quitting in protest. Prior to that they were a good example of post-New atheism that wasn’t overtly racist and so on.
a lot of shit libs stanning clinton and biden came out of that group though. minnesota liberal radio hosts gonna minensota liberal i guess.
Then we must say that it was completely seized and perverted by opportunists, at least in the anglophone context (and in France, from what I can tell), since it is just another cudgel of chauvinism to be wielded against the imperialized when it is discussed in Popular Discourse ™.
completely seized and perverted by opportunists
except in the places it was most successful and influential as actual policy? literally what did the soviets do besides what could be judged not far enough in retrospect? the actual history of atheism is not richard dawkins, its a straight line from jacobins to the bolsheviks, a legacy the nu-athiests were actually very keen to avoid. this bending over backwards to amend for the time imperialists figured out how to posture atheism against state enemies (for a vanishingly small portion of these respective country’s populations) in effect ignores the almost universally positive effects of state atheism and revolutionary action against organized religion have achieved in the past 300 years.
like i know you specified anglo-french but when they constitute both a minority in their own nations and a speck of the worldwide mass of atheists it feels terribly misleading
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kinda
there but on the other hand i’m not broken up about the canadian arson after they found those first-nations remains.
idk if the jacobins are really the best example, the reactionary backlash to hardline anticlericalism destroyed them. in retrospect napoleon breaking the spine of european feudalism did more to turn europe functionally atheist than anyone who was actually trying
There is a reason why Marx developed his thought in part but in an essential way by transcending the Young Hegelian critique of religion, and moving beyond a purely formal, abstract, intellectual critique on the internal consistency of the ideas, to the conditions which produce these conditions.
Marx emphasizes the concept of fetishism in part because he wants to highlight how the fetishist function of money in a capitalist society has important similarities to the fetishist aspects of religion.
Obviously it was a far bigger deal being an atheist in, say, 19th century Prussia or Russia, than the West today, but it still aggravates me that critique of organized religion has declined among Communists. Especially as a major obstacle to communist politics in non-western societies is the influence, authority and power of organized religion. I understand why, however, in that this critique has superficially been taken up by reactionary liberals, neoliberals and neoconservatives, and as many of us do not want to risk appearing, let alone being, say, Islamophobic. However I do think this a something of a passive relationship, rather than an actively or constructively critical and evaluative one to organized religion. This has less to do with if someone, say, is interested in the metaphysics of Taoism or Buddhism, or whatever (though not all religions are metaphysically equal frankly), but more with critiques of organized religion and religious ideology in its variety of forms.
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I think it’s a really big problem how the position of permanent and principled critique of religion as mystification has been surrendered by people who described themselves as on the left, including, communists, and taken up by reactionary Neoliberals and Neoconservatives, whose critiques are obviously deeply ignorant and reactionary, and motivated to a huge degree by a desire to feel intellectually superior to others, but in a way analogous to junk food, as these people do not actually have any interesting things to say, let alone critiques, of religion other than obvious and trivial ones which are expressed in a reactionary way.
The most hardcore atheists I know are all Iranian communists, for obvious reasons.
I don’t even agree with your shit how am I better at it than you
feel this in mah bones
Back in my internet arguing days I would usually help my opponent with their argument but still point out why they were wrong.
It never gets any less tiresome telling “nonpolitical” smuglords that they are supporting the status quo, probably outright benefit from it, and are just dodging labels because conservatism (and liberalism for that matter) seem uncool. They just have theirs and want to feel superior to you.
But have you considered that the really enlightened mindset is precisely Super Sigma-Male 3 in which one is too busy holding their hand over a flame, flexing their bicep in a mirror, dreaming of murdering minorities, and transcending the need for compassion to have time for politics?
G. Gordon Liddy was ahead of his time.
G. Gordon Liddy was an absolute unit. A unit of pure derangement but a unit nonetheless
I have a Christian relative that is “ok with capital punishment because there are reasons” and I nearly died of irony. Would you believe they are anti-abortion too?
Why yes, yes i would believe that. The classic Christian USian pro-death penalty/anti-abortion combo.
If ideology were a drive thru it would be the #2. The #1 would be fiscally conservative/socially liberal with super sized fries and a 64 oz soda
#1 would be fiscally conservative/socially liberal with super sized fries and a 64 oz soda
The 90s were pretty accursed
Decade or two ago that’s how i described myself. Yes I was a cool cool highschooler
Common USian L. So many people did that. Its always cringe to remember things we thought before deprogramming
I don’t know how to tell this person this but they executed Jesus
Of course they know, the whole point is that killing a radical agitator with a god complex cleanses their sins or something like that.
Sorry if I’m getting too redditor
Christianity I think has a lot more of value to say if you work from the basis that everything King James or anyone else who has ever played golf thinks about any subject wrong
Who’s King James?
I went to Sunday school, which was actually on Saturdays, but I never learn the name of the twelve apostles
king James was the English/Scottish king who’s translation of the Bible went on to very firmly establish a lot of ideas by removing reference to tyranny being bad, translating a lot of things to mean eternal hell, his grandson would go on to establish the slave trade.
He was a paranoid murderer who’s belief that the poor were more at risk of corruption by the devil led him to have roaming torurers extracting witchcraft confessions all across rural England and Scotland. He’s also largely responsible for the popularisation of golf and birth of the British empire
My belief he and golfers are responsible for all bad things is largely unreasonable but on the other hand he was the king we had to learn about divine right of in school because of Shakespeare’s cynical propaganda and I never stopped resenting the man for it. More reasonably the emperors Justinian and Constantine were largely responsible for Christianity becoming more of a tool of oppression. Although there is some evidence golf has roman origins so that’s another mark for my “all golfers are always wrong” theory which I will admit is irrational and purely based on prejudice
No, I’m now fully embarked in a jihad against Golf
They WHAT?!
That makes sense, though? Like, the Bible prescribes death for a multiple crimes.
You are correct. Here’s why I find it ironic:
- Jesus was innocent of any crime, neither Roman nor Hebrew, but was executed anyway.
- 4% of death row inmates are innocent.
Vibes based politics and it’s consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Don’t fucking quote Ted Kaczynski, he’s a pos.
No thoughts, head empty, only vibes
Most ‘liberal’s’ political beliefs are basically: whatever the status quo is.
[Sartre Quote] slightly updated:
“Never believe that anti-Semites/centrists/liberals/non-politicals are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites/centrists/liberals/non-politicals have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
True for antisemites but the problem is the centrists / liberals are actually completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies is my point. To stick with the example, the checks and balances is what you’re supposed to defend against the savage lawless hordes elsewhere, how you gonna throw that shit overboard at the slightest ideological disagreement with the institutions you jerk off over. Not even leftists are that infighty
Yeah most people don’t actually have political beliefs. They’re centrists, they just adopt whatever the hegemon is saying.
KINGDOM OF CONSCIENCE – Moralists don’t really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change – not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.
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:yea:
the centrists / liberals are actually completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies is my point.
I don’t think that’s true. Honestly I think most people who spout bullshit, from all corners of the spectrum, subconsciously, or even sometimes consciously, know it’s bullshit, but it’s bullshit they have some kind of incentive to believe so they talk themselves into it. Leftists aren’t immune to this either, we just do a better job of calling it out.
It feels like liberals are discussing the lore of a book or TV show or video game when they talk about politics sometimes; they can get into very angry debates over it but there’s always this sense of detachment from it actually affecting them in any significant way. It’s taking abstract positions in real life problems that affect them directly. “How do we best protect democracy and fight authoritarianism?” Dude, who gives a shit, how does this affect you at all?! You’re dying from the fucking pesticides the agribusiness companies pump into farmland, and PFAS, and polluted water, and pandemics! “See, I think that autocrats like Putin really get off on having a sense of power over other people - there was this really great body language expert that–” My brother in christ, a police officer just shot a child outside your house and all your kids are depressed.
- Freedom of speech - on one day you’ll have people saying that godsforsaken phrase “I disagree with what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it”, and on the next day you’ll have those same people calling for people who disagree with them on Ukraine or Palestine or China to lose their jobs, even their lives.
- Funding programs like healthcare and welfare - talked about generally in such detached language about “efficiency in the sector must be improved” and such, that they ignore that cutting the funding that hospitals receive - or, a step further abstracted, the funding that medical students receive such that they don’t have to enter crushing debt or poverty - will end up killing more people and increasing the net suffering of humanity, including people they may know; and when they see the lengthening waiting lines and increased mortality, they talk about how we need to solve this problem through common sense solutions etc etc.
- Interfering in other countries - atrocities in Yemen and Palestine get ignored or justified, while lesser atrocities in Ukraine get amplified. Complete dissonance based on racism, but even then, it’s all in terms of idealist “We must stand up to dictators and terrorists!” word salad bullshit, not “Hm, I need to do a deep dive into the history of the region and see what the political developments have been over the last few decades and try and find a systematic, materialist understanding rather than relying on platitudes and truisms and quotes from random celebrities that I imagine to be authoritative for whatever reason.” It’s a fucking ferris wheel of pure drivel, bleating sayings at you as if they’re meaningful. Why can’t we have communism? “Because communism works on paper but not in practice.” Why doesn’t it work in practice? “Because human nature is to be greedy and selfish and take resources for yourself and away from others.” Why is human nature like this if we’re social animals, and if it is, why can’t we change it? “A leopard cannot change its spots, and besides, social arrangements like communism only work in small groups like primitive tribes.” Why do they work in small groups and not larger ones? “Because economics is too complicated for planning to work; the free market provides all our needs for cheap.” Isn’t competition inefficient compared to co-operation? Aren’t you wasting resources by developing a similar thing a dozen times compared to if those people all collaborated to produce one very good thing? “Competition is efficient and needed in society or everybody would be lazy and useless.” Why? “Because it’s human nature.” and on and on it goes, and at no point is there any actual fucking evidence or investigation into the claims beyond utter oversimplifications, it’s all informed by youtube and TikTok videos and Reddit comments and movies and TV shows and books and the entire superstructure of society, entirely abstracted from the base.
It’s fake, it’s fiction, it’s bullshit, but the suspension of disbelief allows them to discuss it as if it was real - except the things that they are discussing are actually real! Their framing is completely off-kilter. “Here’s my favorite and least favorite faction in Game of Thrones, and here’s what that says about why China’s authoritarianism doesn’t work and why the United States is, despite its flaws, still a good force in the world.” What the fuck are you talking about? You’re going to die in the post-WW3 rationing period when all goods from China are cut off! Every acre of natural land within 10 miles of you is being converted to cement! You need to start figuring out how to do first aid, not giving explanations on reddit as to why Israel, on the other side of the planet, has some abstract metaphysical right to exist! You might as well be writing a paragraph on Dumbledore’s Army and their training regimen. You don’t actually give a shit about Israel, you just picked up a series of beliefs from the zeitgeist that are totally incompatible with that other set of beliefs you have, but it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, you don’t care about forming a coherent worldview informed by history and science, but instead creating justifications for your own position in the golden billion and feeling variously good or bad about the events that pop up on the nightmare rectangle while you’re on the shitter, while your life and everybody else’s crumbles in slow (or fast) motion around you. It’s entertainment, it’s a football game, you root for one side - Democrats and Republicans, Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Palestine, China and Taiwan, Trump vs the Deep State, whatever. And if they win, that’s great! If they lose, that sucks! But your life, your own life, the stuff you do when you aren’t engaged in the theater, is getting worse either way.
Not only that, but there’s a sense in which everybody has to ditch their own self-interest in the belief that it makes them selfish children, and the only way to be taken seriously isn’t to say “Well, I want to increase hospital funding because I have X disorder and I would like myself and similar people to survive,” but instead “Here’s some economic analysis showing that doing this funding would lead to increased profits from people with X disorder working harder and more efficiently in the future.”
will end up killing more people and increasing the net suffering of humanity, including people they may know; and when they see the lengthening waiting lines and increased mortality, they talk about how we need to solve this problem through common sense solutions etc etc.
Me telling my friends how fucked life is on SSI, watching them agree with how awful it is, and then realizing they think it’s some kind of accident
I need to relisten to like six Chapo episodes to find where one of them mentioned the quote (paraphrasing) “The ideology of neoliberalism is one where there are many victims and no perpetrators” in the sense that people suffering is treated in all cases like a natural disaster, with total blindness to the idea that systems might be built for the outcome that they consistently produce, decade after decade, for the majority of people the impact.
That’s perfect. If you can find the original please give me a ping.
A friend of mine (this one a Marxist) had their teaching hours unexpectedly and catastrophically cut right before the beginning of the semester. When they ranted to their graduate advisor, the one who was supposed to advocate for them at faculty meetings or whathaveyou, he replied, entirely unironically, and as if it excused his failure, by saying “Well, Hannah Arendt said that in a bureaucracy, no individual is to blame . . .” For some reason that didn’t help with rent.
God I want that on a tee shirt or something
Seems a little clunky to me. What makes you say it would work?
Maybe not literally, its just such a good quote
tag yourself im “feeling variously good or bad about the events that pop up on the nightmare rectangle while you’re on the shitter”
GOOD post
Leftists aren’t free from this too, sadly. Most of the usual debates like Trotsky vs Stalin, anarchists vs communists and so on are too completely abstract and disconnected from reality.
That’s because they don’t have beliefs. It’s all just vibes to them
Moralists don’t really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change – not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.
To steal a chapo bit: the average american thinks Bush did 9/11 but that he was justified in doing so. A land of incoherencies
This is, both regrettably and fortunately, the role of the revolutionary.
Regrettably: Gotta explain stuff to these ignorant libs and it’s annoying.
Fortunately: Theit ideas are such mush that you get to radicalize them rather than treat them like brownshirts.
Once you realise most people don’t give a shit about anything that doesn’t directly affect or implicate them, you realise why things remain how they are.
“A political movement based on an appeal to people’s sense of justice will be a short-lived movement at best. You have to appeal to people’s sense of necessity.”
Try to tell people to stop eating meat and reduce their consumption of dietary animal products because of the moral/environmental disaster that it is, and suddenly it’s too hard to have empathy.
