Goodguy
1d ago
I think that the Marxist platform is very diverse because there are many kinds of Marxists. I think that most of them do not want to abolish the family.
As for Marx himself, as far as I know he did not want to abolish the family, he just wanted to get rid of the "bourgeois" style of family.
I'm no expert on Marxism though, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Some of the ethnic groups of the Caucasus tend to look quite different physically from Europeans or even from Iranians, and many of the languages of the Caucasus are not Indo-European despite the Caucasus being located very near to the likely origin point of the Indo-European languages and despite the Caucasus having spent thousands of years having strong Indo-European-speaking powers on its borders, so I suppose it's possible that they too retain strong pre-Indo-European genetic traits, although I have no idea whether there is any connection to Early European Farmers.
Yeah, I think there is definitely a danger to escapism, but not all fantasy/sci-fi worlds have a negative effect, at least not on all people.
I've spent many hours with J.R.R. Tolkien's stuff, diving into relatively obscure writings by him, reading other people's theories... but it all tends to have a sort of uplifting, elevating, ennobling quality. I disagree with his moral worldview in which goodness is on a deep level more or less synonymous with obedience to the kind of God who is ok with drowning an entire continent because its people were corrupted by an evil being that He himself created in the first place. But that doesn't stop me from absorbing moral lessons and spiritual ennoblement from his work.
H.P. Lovecraft's writings are very different, and not what I would call ennobling, but from them I've received a lot of education in how to write in an interesting and grammatically advanced way, also in things like architecture and history. And there is something that I find very mystically interesting in his concept of "adventurous expectancy" that he touched on in some of his letters.
On a different note, there is Stephen King... I like his Americana, the noble blue collar workers and artists, the landscape of gas stations, diners, and small towns. It is also just good clean entertainment, there are many Stephen King fans but I've never heard of anyone becoming so obsessed with his work that it began to harm their lives.
Even something like Star Wars, which some people do get obsessed by, has a fun playful quality. It's basically an homage to many different kinds of other real and fictional worlds... tales of knightly chivalry, greaser movies, samurai movies, the Roman Empire, Nazi Germany, etc... but in space, and all put together into one fictional universe. I've spent some hours reading through Star Wars lore, but I've never been tempted to buy Star Wars merchandise or devote more than a small fraction of my life to Star Wars.
There is also reading about actual history, which I've done a lot of. It can have an escapist quality, but one can also learn valuable lessons from it. It would be difficult, I think, to have a reasonable notion of modern politics and geopolitics without having read history. There's something to be said for understanding today's reality from first principles and direct perception, and certainly that has a lot of value, but reading history is at the least a valuable aid, at least if one does not let it bias you too much (and of course one can also become biased while attempting to understand today's reality from first principles and direct perception). I've spent many an hour reading about obscure details of this or that World War 2 campaign, but I've never become tempted to devote more than a small fraction of my life to such activity.
I do think there is a real danger. I was maybe too bookish for my own good when I was a teenager. But I am not sure to what extent the distance that I kept from more direct involvement with reality was caused by my bookishness, and to what extent the bookishness was just what I did while I had that distance from more direct involvement with reality. It is possible that even if I had forced myself to put away the books, I would not have engaged more directly with reality any quicker than I actually did. It's hard to say.
What eventually drove me more out of the books was a combination of things... making friends and getting invited to do things, sexual frustration forcing me to learn how to develop social skills, becoming more rebellious in my attitude toward social structures like school, going away to college and living on my own, also just a deep sense of "there is more to life than just reading about life" and a deep dissatisfaction with a life spent merely on reading.
Some people get caught at some point on that journey and never actualize much further. But if it wasn't for the fantasy worlds, it's possible that they would not necessarily actualize much faster, or at all. I don't know. I just know that for me, the worlds of books have been a beneficial and, I think, not really particularly stunting part of my life. On the contrary, I think that they have probably enriched my life more than they have taken away.
Goodguy
2d ago
I think no, right-wing authoritarian governments have a similar level of tendency to suppress dissent.
Suharto killed over 500,000 civilians in the 1960s as part of a supposed anti-communist battle.
As for the Soviet Union, it was great at suppressing dissent back during Stalin's time. After it softened, the tendency to suppress dissent reduced to such an extent that by the time the system fell apart, it barely used its massive security forces and military to try to hold itself together by force.
Goodguy
6d ago
I don't think those urban communities are underserved when it comes to abortion. I know you're just being snarky, but I mean, still. I think it makes strategic sense for pro-choice activists to focus their efforts on parts of the US where there are legal challenges to abortion.
Do modern descendants of Mesoamericans have better alcoholism resistance than modern descendants of North American natives? The Mesoamericans, after all, were not hunter-gatherers, they had advanced civilizations that were perhaps roughly at the scientific/technological level of the Mediterranean civilizations of about 1000 BC.
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