ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
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User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9hr ago
If I thought it would matter, I could say things like "I have met Evangelicals, they are different from us bu not like the media portrays" or "if there was a conspiracy to turn Handmaid's Tale into reality, I would have heard about it" (and be not believed).
That doesn't work. If we map that back to the debate on Cultural Marxism, it would end up looking like "I've met Cultural Marxists, they're not saying what you're accusing them of". No one here is saying that.
yeah, we do get arguments lke "patriarchy is a myth" and "I am a man and if there was such a thing as patriarchy that supports me with my career, I think I would have heard about it".
Ok, but that's just a direct denial of Cultural Marxism having existed, and I'm quite prepared to argue the other side of the position (see here), and that just means the "core facts" from MadMozer's post are actually under dispute.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9hr ago
The problem with this transference is not just that it is manipulative
Ok, but what if I told you I don't want the transference? Like I mentioned, I like MadMozer's analogy to Mormonism, because I can understand the Christians' impulse to say "hey, don't put me in the same bag as those weirdos", but that's not what the Marxists here are saying. What they're doing is more akin to "the Church of Mormon is a conspiracy theory", it's maddening.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10hr ago
I'm afraid I'll have to slow you down here, because I skimmed through some of these examples and they look like a point in my / OP's favor, not yours.
Not in the way it is used in the top-level comment here, though - and in my judgement, not in the way that it is casually used in right-wing discourse.
What do you mean? This is how OP described Cultural Marxism:
Cultural Marxism, on the other hand, seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly right-wing hierarchical social environments.
And here is an excerpt from Cultural Marxism: Nonsynchrony and Feminist Practice
Hartmann's proposed progressive union will not solve these problems. There can be no shotgun wedding of marxism and feminism as Hartmann defines them. Not even a living together.
Instead, the task for socialist feminists is to develop a cultural marxism that can adequately explain the intricate interactions of the oppressions of race, class, and sex; a cultural marxism that helps give a clearer articulation of our various voices: feminist, black, chicano, Native American, Asian, male, female, gay, lesbian, heterosexual; a cultural marxism which understands human needs-family, ritual, religion, sex, fun, insanity, pain, fear and so on.
Emily Hicks is a big fan of Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy, which as far as I can tell are just a rebranded version of what she was writing about back in the 80's. If I look at, say, the training the Wisconsin daycare kids had to go through, do you think I'll find any connection to Critical Theory or Critical Pedagogy through people that designed them?
I think what frustrates me about this kind of piece is a kind of strawmanning or oversimplification of even just classical Marxism
If that's your concern, I'm more than happy to make a clear separation between classical Marxism and Cultural Marxism. I already called it The Last Jedi of Marxism, I can come up with other catchy names that will indicate how it's nothing but twisted perversion designed to mock and torture Marxists with it's very existence. But it exists! In the other chain MadMozer compared it to fighting over whether Mormons are real Christians or not. I like that analogy. You can say "Mormons are not real Christians" because their ideas are so out there that they do actually look like nothing more than a strawman and oversimplification of Christianity. But don't tell me "Mormons don't exist" after a missionary just knocked on my door, and don't tell they weren't even inspired by Christianity, when they lifted half the story from Christians.
The argument about whether or not "Cultural Marxism" is really Marxism is analogous to the argument about whether Mormons are really Christians, and is equally unproductive.
So, first of all thank you for outlining the "core facts", because I pretty much agree on every point, and I don't know if I'd manage to list them in such a detached way, but I do kind of disagree that this is the crux of the issue, and what people here end up fighting over. I explicitly stated that I'm perfectly happy to say The Thing is not Real Marxism, that it is in fact a perversion of the real thing, The Last Jedi of Marxism, a CIA op to co-opt it, and make it serve capitalism instead. I'm entirely fine with all of that.
But if we map the arguments we've heard here, and in the other thread, to your analogy, we'd be getting things like "the Church of Mormon is a myth!" or "I'm a Christian, and if there was such a thing as Mormonism, I think I would have heard about it". It sounds like blanket denial, even as the other side is pointing at church buildings and the missionaries standing on the street corner.
I would argue that, in order to be useful, 'Marxism' should mean the broad school or schools of thought historically derived from Marx's ideas.
Ok, and I'm saying "Cultural Marxism" meets that criterion. If you pick a random thinker from an "intersectional" school of thought, and follow their citations, you will land on someone who is indisputably Marxist and, quite possibly, will go through someone who at one point called themselves a "Cultural Marxist".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
I believe that I am at least somewhat acquainted with leftist thought, not only through reams of videos and text produced by contemporary leftists online, but also through the works of the Frankfurt school (primarily Adorno and Marcuse), the works of Freudian psychoanalysts from Freud himself up through the 20th century and into the current day, and 20th century European philosophy in general. I have never once heard a leftist refer to themselves unironically as a "cultural Marxist".
Do the books, papers, Google ngrams graphs, etc. that people keep linking in these conversations, where the term is used self-descriptively, move the needle for you in any way?
But "cultural Marxism" is not a particularly good term for it, because the phenomenon isn't particularly Marxist, and the "culture" part is just obvious.
It's very Marxist. Like, anyone you'll drop the term in front of will instantly know this refers to a particular type of feminist / anti-racist / gay/trans/wathaever-rights advocate, that sees everything through the lens of patriarchy / white supremacy / cis-straight-heteronormativity, or if you want to take all these together - intersectionality, the same way Marx was looking at the world through the lens of relations to the means of production.
If we understand 'Marxism' instead as involving, well, Marx's thought specifically, and then the thought of followers or disciples of Marx influenced him - the wider Marxist tradition, as it were - then I think that forces us to be more precise in our analysis. Thus, say, Jacobs' criticism of 'cultural Marxism' - that the word 'Marxism' functions as a mere bugaboo, associating any roughly egalitarian movement with the spectre of communism.
This criticism doesn't work at all. If you understand "Marxism" to involve the thought of the followers or disciples of Marx, than Cultural Marxism is Marxism, and the word "Marxism" is not any sort of bugaboo, it denotes the use of oppressor-oppressed analysis that Marx first applied to one's relation to the means of production, and the "Cultural" prefix indicates that it's applied to other aspects of the culture. This criticism is extremely dishonest, because people calling themselves Cultural Marxists have explained this in their own words:
We are, in Marx's terms, "an ensemble of social relations" and we live our lives at the core of the intersection of a number of unequal social relations based on hierarchically interrelated structures which, together, define the historical specificity of the capitalist modes of production and reproduction and underlay their observable manifestations. ”
— Martha E. Gimenez, Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy
What more do you want at this point?
I am not asserting that there is no way to draw a genealogy that would get you to a 'cultural Marxism'.
We are not talking about "a genealogy that would get you to a 'cultural Marxism'", we're talking about "the ideas labelled Culturally Marxist do, in fact, have a genealogy going back to OG Marxists, if not Marx himself, and the label itself was originally self-applied by Marxists".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13hr ago
They went so such lengths to redact the wikipedia article that it no longer even exists in the history of the page, but it was there.
The archive page from the screenshot, for the curious:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14hr ago
@Jesweez, @quiet_NaN , Just so no one misses the correction, I'm adding this as a comment. The broader point is unaffected, but I originally overestimated the numbers by a lot.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15hr ago
Like I said, this is ancient history, but I was hanging out at some Dawkins-era Internet Atheist forum at the time, and remember there being some buzz around what Liz Cheney said about her sister. What that buzz was exactly, I can't tell you anymore.
Even if the rumours Trump based the claim on had been true, they were about cats, not dogs.
Oh, come on!
- Did you hear about the Haitians eating people's dogs in Ohio?
- Don't say that! This is a completely false statement, spread by bigots!
- Oh shit! Sorry, I didn't know.
- Yeah... everybody knows they're eating cats, not dogs.
In this case it's "'they're eating the dogs' is a statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners" that is a false statement intended to induce the false belief in listeners, and this is precisely why people have had it with "lying like a lawyer" types.
Cultural Marxism, on the other hand, seeks supporters by appealing to the cultural grievances of marginalized groups in predominantly right-wing hierarchical social environments.
One of the random factoids I heard somewhere, and have no idea what it relates to or if it's true, is that some ancient people had this idea of hell, where it's just like our world, but it's full of terrifying demons, but if you point them out everyone will think you're insane. This is sort of how this whole conversation felt like to me (though thankfully the spell seems to be breaking in recent years), there's a movement-that-shall-not-be-named:
- "Woke? I have no idea what you're talking about"
- "SJW? Never heard of it. Some right-wing slur against liberals, I guess"
- "Political Correctness? What even is that?"
- "Cultural Marxism? Must be some Nazi conspiracy theory"
The last one was chronologically first, and it getting memory-holed is particularly annoying, because it's a damn good label. First of all it was originally self-applied, and secondly if you take any mildly intelligent person who has even the faintest clue about Marxism, they'll be able to deduce what Cultural Marxism is supposed to be about, and list a few recent examples of Cultural Marxist ideas floating around in the public sphere. Contrast that with something like "neoliberalism" that is actually a poorly defined slur, that for some mysterious reason was taken seriously by academia for a decade or two, and in my opinion Cultural-Marxism-as-conspiracy-theory has no leg to stand on.
Now, I can understand OG economic Marxists being aghast at what came out of the cultural- variant. As someone watching several institutions, subcultures, and media being hollowed out and worn for a skin-suit, I have some sympathy for someone with a take like "Cultural Marxism is to Marxism, what The Last Jedi / The Acolyte is to Star Wars". There's even an argument to be made that the whole thing is a CIA op to castrate Marxism, but sympathy is not a "get out of jail for free" card. I think they should at least admit it's their skin that is being worn for a suit.
I am a bit amazed by Italians and French, there, with crime rates 4.75 and 5.91 times the German citizens ones.
From a US perspective, we are all close neighbors, it would be like if people from Utah committed crimes in California at five times the rate of the natives.
If you tracked interstate migration the same way each country in the EU tracks their migration, patterns like these might very well show up, though personally I'd be more suspicious of Californians rather than the Utahns.
As for the French, they have their own high-crime minorities, fully equipped with French passports, thanks to their colonial past. I can't tell you what is the deal with Italians, though.
Heck, they are more over-represented than Russians.
Russians have a long way to travel, and are not part of the Schengen Zone, so that's hardly surprising.
A general caveat with police statistics is that they generally tell you about the activities of the police, not the criminals.
I'd be more than happy to limit the data to crimes with incentive to report, like murder, assault, rape, etc. I even remember some internet autist going over the German crime by nationality stats. I don't know if that's something they used to publish but stopped, or he had to FOIA them to get it, but if you click on the pdf from my other comment you can see they present the numbers on each type of crime, as well as on suspects by nationality, so they very clearly do have the data on the activities of criminals, they just choose not to aggregate them in a way that would be useful to this conversation. This has nothing to do with them being "IT-shy", European governments can hardly be described this way to begin with, and you can rest assured all this data is already stored in a digital database, and it's only a question of writing the right GROUP BY statement. Most likely this information is not published deliberately, for the exact same reason Germany hasn't published the full crime report since 2020.
Another caveat is that while offenses against the foreigners' law (which Germans can mostly not commit) are excluded, that law might still be the initial reason for investigation of non-EU nationals.
- And this is why I came out against "uh, source?" and "data would be what we use to see if that intuition is correct or not" in my other conversation with Jesweez, and why I think Rationalist movement is either a complete failure, or a deliberate effort to sabotage sense-making. You can play these sorts of games forever, and no one who insisted that the data showing immigrants are less criminal than American citizens should be taken as-is, will ever show up here to criticize you for looking for an out in the unpublished parts of the data.
- Yes, it could be that the police is finding other crime while investigating illegal immigration, but what you've left out is that it could also be the opposite - the police doing their best to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration, but inevitably running into it in the process of investigating violent crime. Which leads me to:
- I'm not saying things are quite as bad as the opposite side of the spectrum I outline above, but if you think Germany, or any other country in the EU, is in crack-down mode against illegal immigration qua illegal immigration, you're posting from a parallel universe.
Oh, and the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person.
Nah. I'll take "convicts" over "suspects", but the length of conviction is a silly metric, if you know what they've been convicted of. Especially given certain European judges proclivity to let gang-rapists off with a slap on the wrist.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I think those are way more long-range than walkie-talkies.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Can you imagine being a Haitian in Springfield right now?
It must be horrible. They should be given a new residence in Martha's Vineyard, where they will not have to suffer such vile bigotry.
Didn't have time to do this earlier. Here's a spreadsheet (I tested it from a few browsers - it should be persistent) with the data from table 7.2-T03 (page 91) of the report ("Non-German suspects by nationalities – total offences excluding offences against foreigners’ law"), and table 12521-0005 from the German statistics office (for total population sizes for 2020).
Might do the same with the data from your study, if it has this level of detail.
UPDATE: Oh shit, I fucked up!
I didn't notice that the % share of suspects the report provided is the % share of non-German suspects, skewing the overrepresentation numbers pretty massively. Though not changing the conclusion that certain minorities are still waaay more criminal than the Germans / other minorities. The spreadsheet is updated, and here's the screenshot with the updated correct numbers:
https://www.themotte.org//images/17268257393208947.webp
Here's the old screenshot for historical purposes:
But merely wrapping something in aluminum foil would leave small gaps
I wouldn't worry about small gaps.
I mean, a "hate fact" has to be a fact. Like various favored minorities being disproportionately responsible for various crimes, puberty blockers not being reversible, or there not being (m)any guardrails on the transition process of kids. If this turns out to be "some Haitian, somewhere, ate a cat once", it's lame, Trump / Vance shouldn't have said it, and people responding with "it doesn't matter if it's true, if it 'started a conversation'" is cope, it's the same tactics progressive activists are using.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I guess time will tell. But we've seen a few too many of this "only a bigot would say that" cases turning into a "hate fact", that I think the reaction of your side is unwarranted, even if you don't believe the claim.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
You'd expect a media campaign to make something "heard of".
I was thinking more from the perspective of an average Ohioan, prior to the media campaign.
And sure enough, the next time someone sees their Haitian neighbour grilling meat, are they going to put it into the "business as usual" bin or into "could be someone's cat" bin?
So you are again saying this doesn't actually happen to any greater extent than it happens with any other person, right?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
It's not about it being a daily ubiquitous occurence. It's that something extremely rare and shocking goes from "never seen it before in my entire life" to "not unheard of in my part of town", even when it's practiced by an overwhelming minority of people. It was the same problem Europe had with Syrian refugees, and the following wave of terrorist attacks and sexual assaults. It was a very small minority doing them, but it was still a social problem.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
The first one. And my issue here is that instead of saying that, we started off from "it doesn't happen". Likewise, if progressives wanted to say any of the latter two, they should literally say that, instead of pivoting to them, after their initial claim becomes less defensible.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
I think it's more that I tend to care about the things they lie about.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
This makes zero sense.
Same to you, bro. If you lie about something that doesn't matter to me, it's not going to matter to me. I can't wrap my head around getting worked up about it.
You'll note that I don't actually go around calling the woke stuff "Cultural Marxism" in day-to-day conversations. It's only when someone denies that such a movement ever existed, and applied that label to itself, and that they were inspired by Marxist ideas, and that they resulted in what we now call "woke", that I pipe up, and point out that they are wrong.
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