Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
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User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
First off, I’m surprised that nobody has brought up James Lindsay and his New Discourses project. Lindsay gets a ton of ridicule from many on the right (some of it justified) and is treated as a joke by the left, but I think he has done a wonderful service on this front. He does sprawling podcasts where he actually reads and deconstructs some of the foundational works of 20th-century post-Marxist thought, tracing the explicit genealogy not only of the ideas but also of the authors. It’s trivially true that most of the writers and thinkers people are taking about have common intellectual mentors and influences, and I think Lindsay does an able job of demonstrating this.
Secondly, people are getting hung up on the specific term “cultural Marxism” when in fact most of the proponents of that school of ideas would instead call it “critical theory”. (There are, of course, various subdisciplines - most famously critical race theory, but also critical fat studies, critical pedagogy, gendercritical, etc.) Critical theory also comes with critical praxis - the specific actions and analytical approaches applied by practitioners of critical theory, who for a while were calling themselves crits. (I don’t remember if it was Richard Delgado who coined the term. I’d have to go back and check.)
In discussions about whether or not “critical race theory” is being taught in K-12 schools, educators will usually protest that critical theory is a college- and graduate-level set of ideas which are both inappropriate for, and impossible to teach to, children. And that’s true! What they are teaching children is critical praxis. They’re teaching children how to apply a critical (and this word has a very different meaning in this context than it does in the phrase “critical thinking”) lens to specific real-world examples.
And what is critical theory? Succinctly, it’s the view that social relations can be accurately described as a set of unequal power relations between socially-constructed affinity groups, such that groups can possess and accrue social capital - the power to disseminate and reproduce a hegemonic set of cultural norms - which, barring intentional efforts to redistribute social capital/prestige, will allow those groups to maintain their dominant cultural power indefinitely. In this sense it is applying the analytical tools and framework of Marx (the dialectic, the identification of complex power relations, the belief in accrued capital as an inherently unjust state of affairs) and treating social/cultural hegemony as the unit of capital, rather than money or land ownership. And much as communists seek to intentionally seize and redistribute/democratize the means of economic production, crits seek to seize and redistribute/democratize the means of cultural production.
Just as the end goal of communism is a world in which no person or group can possess and selfishly hoard more economic capital than another, crits want a world in which no group has more prestige than another. No group feels more “at home” in a certain place, no group feels confident as a majority to impose its cultural norms on others, etc. To get there, we must first identify the current power relations and actively subvert them; the formerly-marginalized must be centered, the hegemonic/bourgeois cultural norms must be relentlessly critiqued and negated, and the means of cultural production must be actively turned toward the dissemination of counter-hegemonic narratives.
I fail to see how anyone can miss that this is Marxist analysis applied to culture and status instead of money. I think that a fair reading of the authors in question will make their intellectual foundations very obvious.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Sure if we had that power then there are probably other interventions. Instead of snapping them away, why not just "fix" them, so they become contributing citizens.
One possible argument is: We have too many people in this country as it is. We’re overpopulated. Eliminating that chunk of the population frees up housing and space. It staves off the YIMBY-vs.-NIMBY wars by making existing housing cheaper and more available without needing to build another wave of commie-block apartment complexes. It frees up medical resources, school spending, and all of the other financial outlays that would apply to those people even if you magically turned them into productive citizens.
Now, one counter-argument is to say that if we could turn all these people into productive citizens, those people could then go gentrify and revitalize all the myriad small towns in America - places like Springfield, OH - with a population of productive Americans instead of welfare-dependent Haitians. The danger, of course, is that if you turn all the current thugs and junkies in America into middle-class domesticated Americans, they’re going to do the same thing that most middle-class domesticated Americans are currently doing: go to college and move to a major population center to seek white-collar work. This is just going to introduce another population influx into those cities, further constricting the housing and job supply. By eliminating these people entirely, you ease population pressure instead of just turning one type of problem into another type of problem.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Who is "we" in that context? Not the country at large or its interests? By "we" did you mean the sideline popcorn-eaters? Why would it be the best they could ask for?
Yes, the popcorn-eaters. I’m sure this has been a headache for the U.S. foreign policy people who have to deal with whatever fallout comes from this. But as someone who finds organizations like Hezbollah pretty repellent, it’s very difficult to be unhappy to see their efforts stymied and their operatives harmed and humiliated.
And as someone who has a lot of fatigue and angst about seeing Arab civilians wantonly killed, both by Israel and by various other actors in the region, it’s nice to see an effort like this for a change that seems to spare civilians while still achieving strategic goals. It gives me a glimmer of hope that maybe future efforts by both Israel and others will look more like this and less like Gaza.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Why is the US foreign policy apparatus intent on avoiding escalation into a regional conflict but you're indifferent to it?
Because I’m not a member of the US foreign policy apparatus. It’s not my job to fret over complex geopolitical consequences of events like this. I have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines with popcorn. I’m not significantly emotionally-invested in this region. I understand why the American foreign policy establishment wants to limit conflict in the region, and I don’t even disagree with them! I get just as distressed by mass civilian casualties as anyone else does. That’s why when the Israeli military does an operation like this which seems extremely targeted and designed to limit civilian casualties relative to pretty much every action the Israelis have taken since 10/7, I think they should be commended for that. I’d like to see more of this and less carpet-bombing of city blocks.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
In the first place because, a single video instance is not enough to prove the statement "these explosives were not a danger to anybody standing near the person holding them".
I didn’t claim that it is. However, it shows that it’s actually quite plausible that these bombs did not do widespread harm to uninvolved bystanders, because the explosion just isn’t that big or destructive. Hell, in this video, even the guy with the pager is still alive afterward, still has both of his legs, etc. It’s nothing like the kinds of suicide bombs we see in Kabul or Baghdad that absolutely shred and annihilate the people nearby. Yes, it’s possible that the guy next to him who ran away sustained some fairly minor shrapnel injuries, but I think it’s very unlikely that he will even require hospitalization. The other guy who starts the video out of frame appears literally completely untouched by the blast.
What I find hard to understand is why don't you just admit that these explosives do create danger for the civilians around them, and then just say it's justified?
Because I don’t have enough information to say that’s true! Assuming that every one of the blasts was as small as the one in this video, I just don’t see a mechanism by which they could have created serious threat of death and dismemberment to a large number of people who were not intended targets. Obviously they created some non-zero level of danger; I would be horrified to learn that some random guys walking around at a concert or bake sale I’m attending are carrying miniature explosives. But in terms of minimizing civilian exposure to danger while still measurably impacting an enemy terrorist organization, I think this is about as great a scenario that we could possibly ask for from Israel.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Assuming that this video depicts what it is purported to depict, I see three guys standing literally right next to the guy with the pager, and none of them are harmed.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
You haven’t demonstrated to me that a war between Israel and Lebanon will have those effects. Provided that the United States does not join the war directly, I don’t see how it will have the same direct effects on the homeland that Iraq and Afghanistan did. And if the countries of Europe continue to get serious about tightening their immigration policies, then the war will not have the same effects as Syria did. Do you have specific reasons to believe that this hypothetical war will be more like Syria, and less like the Iran-Iraq War (two Middle Eastern countries going at it, the West basically unaffected) or the Six-Day War?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Iraq and Afghanistan had terrible effects on the home front in America primarily because American troops themselves were fighting those wars, at great expense to the United States.
Syria doesn’t appear to have had any massive negative effect on the American home front. It has had a very bad effect on Europe, because European countries pursued incredibly stupid immigration/refugee policies. (I know, you likely believe that Israel or Global Jewry strong-armed them into those policies, but I just don’t think the evidence is there.)
I don’t see that previous wars in the Middle East - say, the Iran-Iraq War, or the wars Israel fought against its neighbors in the 60s and 70s - did actually have a significant long-term negative impact on countries outside of the region. Perhaps I’m simply too ignorant about the subject.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
It’s not clear to me that such a war would cause all of that damage to the United States. It seems like it could go all sorts of ways! I simply do not feel as though I have a strong enough grasp of all of the possible outcomes to have a strong opinion on the issue. When faced with this level of uncertainty and complexity, I think it’s pretty reasonable for a person like me - a random civilian whose job and livelihood seem not to stand much of a chance of being seriously impacted either way - to throw up my hands and say, “Not my problem!”
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I mean this is just one more permutation of the classic problem in the Middle East, which is that in many of these countries terrorists (or people who are employed by terrorist organizations) are walking around intermingled with the civilian population, and therefore fighting those terrorists inherently risks significant harm to civilians. I’m sympathetic to the position that in such a scenario, it should be considered unacceptable to expose those civilians to risk even if it means forgoing a clear tactical victory, but I’m also equally sympathetic to the opposite view. I don’t particularly care if there is a “regional war” or not, provided that nobody I personally care about gets conscripted to fight in it, but I’ve made my weakly pro-Israel position clear, and this certainly didn’t move the needle away from that position for me.
Would you say the same thing about 9/11 with respect to people who were not already committed to the pro-America position?
Support for the 9/11 hijackers outside of the Arab world seems pretty nonexistent, largely because the primary target (or at least the target that ended up getting all the news coverage) was a pair of buildings occupied by thousands of civilians. If they’d just stuck to ramming planes into the Pentagon and the halls of government in DC, I frankly think that there would have been a much larger sense of “Holy shit, I don’t agree with these guys’ worldview, but that was extremely impressive.” Instead people can’t really separate the means from the ends because of the very visually-evocative optics of a bunch of middle-class office workers leaping to their deaths or crushed under rubble. Similarly, while even people who broadly support Zionism still mostly squirm over the carnage in Gaza, I doubt many people feel all that bad for guys who work for Hezbollah.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I can't imagine this having a positive effect on the levels of sympathy towards Israel, which was already fairly low, among the all-important Western public, no matter how much supportive media coverage they get.
Really? I don’t know, this just seems too badass and super-competent to not inspire some level of positive reaction among people who are not already committed to the pro-Hezbollah position. Having seen a video of one of these pager bombs going off, the explosions don’t seem large enough or destructive enough to cause significant collateral damage to anyone who wasn’t carrying such a pager on his body. How much evidence do we have that a large number of individuals who aren’t Hezbollah employees/members/contractors were harmed?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
The advice of Siduri is placed in the epic so that it can be rebuked by the writers of the epic. As your first example was way off I have to assume your others are as well.
I never claimed that the author(s)/compiler(s) of the Epic agree with Siduri. I am saying that her existence in the text very clearly demonstrates that there were in fact people at that time who did espouse hedonism. Your claim was that hedonism is “a recent phenomenon”. Yet I have provided you with what I consider very strong evidence that it is not, in fact, recent. (And how convenient for you that you received to even give a cursory look at the other examples I provided.)
People 50,000 years ago are irrelevant.
Again, they are very much not irrelevant if your claim is that fun and hedonism are a recent phenomenon. If in fact people who are the exact opposite of “recent” can be shown to have fun, your argument falls apart.
When I read Tacitus’ account of the Germanic peoples, I see a great deal of spontaneity and unstructured play/fun. You don’t have to think this is a good or admirable way to live - I think there are a lot of very unsavory things about the lifestyle he imputes to them - but to flatly state that it didn’t exist strikes me as a highly tendentious claim.
People experience joy from deeply satisfying experiences which don’t leave a residue of guilt but which are actually beneficial for them in every dimension (physical, spiritual, etc). There is joy around a campfire after a hike with friends, but there’s no joy in “spontaneous” unreasonable pleasure.
Yeah no, this is a textbook example of joyless thinking, and it makes me wonder if you’ve ever actually experienced what normal people would think of as joyful.
Look, I agree with you that people should be temperate in their indulgences! I agree that the life of a heroin addict merits scorn! To be entirely ruled by one’s passions and incapable of distinguishing between the appropriate decorum in different scenarios is indeed beastly and unbecoming. However, everybody needs to be capable of letting loose sometimes. Everybody needs moments that are unstructured, unplanned, and not directed toward rationally-legible ends. I would not wish to live in a purely “Apollonian” civilization shorn of any appreciation for simple pleasures.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
This is a normal line of inquiry in the Socratic and Christian West, by the way.
Yes, I know, I’ve read Plato as well. I remember rolling my eyes and audibly groaning at the passage where he implores the state to regulate the musical modes people are allowed to listen to, such that music can only be used for “pro-social” ends.
It’s only today that we have the idea that human proclivities and interests shouldn’t be instrumental to a greater good.
Absolutely untrue. We have examples of hedonistic philosophy as far back as the Epic Of Gilgamesh; the alewife Siduri offers the advice: “Fill your belly. Day and night make merry. Let days be full of joy. Dance and make music day and night… These alone are the concern of men.” In Ancient Greece, Socrates’ student Aristippus of Cyrene founded a whole philosophical school of explicit hedonism. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were arguing about the particulars of egoist hedonism 200 years ago.
Dances were organized to increase communal bonding and enhance mate selection, while conveying the physical movements of peacefulness and mirth rather than aggression.
Do you genuinely believe that this is the primary reason people have danced throughout history? Not to experience spontaneous joy? I think you have a very blinkered understanding of human psychology. People fifty thousand years ago were quite capable of having fun, and of doing things spontaneously without needing to have all social action coordinated by authorities optimizing toward the “greater good”.
Sunsets were enjoyed in a spiritual way which deterred one from pantheistic thinking. Etc.
Again: When and by whom?
It’s so ironic, because what’s one of the most common conservative critiques of rationalist materialism? “You just want to reduce all human affairs into a systematizable spreadsheet. Your worldview leaves no room for organic human experience. You want every human action and utterance to have a quantifiable rationalistically-legible purpose, such that humans become mere cogs in a machine.” Yet to me, this is precisely what you are doing, and claiming that all the great Christian and/or Western civilizations of old were exactly like this! Where is the room for joy and spontaneity in any of this?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is the most obvious example of this experience for me.
While I can somewhat appreciate where this post is coming from, it is bordering on a parody of autistic rationalist overthinking. You might as well ask for a steelmanned case for listening to music, or dancing, or looking at a beautiful sunset. Laughter is an inherently positive human experience. It doesn’t require a justification. That’s not to say that humor can’t be employed toward malicious ends, just as music can be used to deliver damaging philosophical/thematic content. It’s just to say that humor and music and love and joy are, in and of themselves, indispensable parts of what makes life worth living.
The distinction you draw between laughter as a social lubricant and laughter as a commodified social media engagement-farming product has the shape of a compelling argument, but fundamentally I think that laughter is basically equally valuable whether it’s my friend making me laugh, or a comedian on the internet making me laugh. In fact the latter is often more valuable, because professional comedians are more skilled at reliably inspiring laughter than most of my friends and loved ones are.
Now, the point about how humor is often used as a crutch or a dodge in order to avoid having to be serious is a fair point. While humor is good, serious discussion and introspection are also good (just like sometimes negative emotions are valuable as a counterbalance to positive ones) and I agree with you that humor can be used as a sort of manipulative “cheat” or “exploit” in discourse. Unsophisticated observers (and often even sophisticated ones) risk coming away from a debate with the erroneous impression that the funnier and more wry/sardonic guy won, even if his arguments are worse.
There’s a case for humor being inappropriate for certain scenarios; I love dancing maybe more than almost anyone else here, but I would consider it wildly inappropriate to dance at a funeral.
@faceh makes the case below that humor is maybe the most important element of charisma. This would be very flattering for me to agree with, since I am personally quite funny. I have performed stand-up comedy, I was a member of an improv comedy team, I’ve performed in dozens of comedic staged productions and made hundreds of people laugh. Outside of my day job, I moonlight as a bar trivia host (I’ve been cagey about giving specifics about this before because of fears of doxxing, but at this point I’ve given so many other details about my life that this additional piece isn’t going to move the needle) and I’m very comfortable working a room.
Yet @Ponder makes what I think is the correct observation that charisma is very dependent on confidence, and on the ability to confidently and smoothly adapt to shifting social/interpersonal scenarios. While I have a strong sense of humor, I can really only consistently deploy that humor if I feel like I’m “in my element”. If I’m nervous or concerned that my attempt at humor will be seen as inappropriate or unwelcome, I usually clam up.
A truly charismatic person, in contrast, makes every scenario his element. He creates the paradigm wherein his humor will be appreciated. (That or he simply has such a keen ability to intuitively assess every interpersonal scenario that he just knows exactly which canned joke or humorous observation will fit any given opening.)
It’s well-known that many very funny people are also profoundly insecure and self-hating. I think part of this is that absurdity is often a major source of comedy; recognizing the contrast between expectation and reality - exploiting cognitive dissonance - is a reliable way to get laughs. However, individuals who are good at spotting absurd, fake, hypocritical, bizarre quirks in the things normal people take for granted - good at de-encrypting the comforting illusions that help normal people function and maintain emotional stability - are usually not very well-adjusted, well-socialized people. In that sense, humor could in some way be self-destructive. Making others laugh while making oneself miserable. Pro-social but personally maladaptive.
Self-deprecating comedy is an especially powerful and dangerous double-edged sword in that sense. I know I’ve resorted to self-deprecation in the past as a way of trying to seize control of the things about me that people make fun of. I can draw attention to the stuff about me that’s superficially funny and keep the conversation focused on that, so that nobody notices the much more hurtful things that they could take shots at if they were brought to light. Chris Farley made a lot of hay out of fat jokes, whereas the things about himself that he actually hated, and which he did not want people to notice or joke about, were ultimately much more destructive to him (physically and emotionally) than his weight ever was. Robin Williams (who, to be honest, was not actually consistently funny, if you ask me) was constantly bombarding his audiences with a chaotic stream of disparate humor-adjacent quips and silly voices, such that the real man at the center of it all became inscrutable.
Personally, I like to stay away from satirical/topical commentary and focus on stuff that’s far more anodyne and ideologically-empty. Either stuff that’s just harmless and uncontroversial (wordplay, physical/visual comedy, whimsical surrealist stuff), confessional storytelling (guys like Mike Birbiglia and some of Louis C.K.’s material) or stuff that’s so over-the-top self-awarely “shocking” that it can’t possibly be mistaken for sincerity (guys like Anthony Jeselnik, Jimmy Carr, etc.). Leave the actual serious shit for people to talk about seriously.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
What’d I tell you about those Saints, @FiveHourMarathon? You better pray that Derek Carr just blew several games’ worth of talent this week.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I know you said you're struggling with physical health, and I haven't used testosterone myself, but is there a reason you're not trying to simply become literally high-T?
I’ve considered this, but I’m really wary of the potential side effects, and of just being unprepared to deal with the likely changes to my personality. My vague sense is that testosterone supplements are only useful if you are totally committed to being very serious about working out, and the reality is that my lifestyle (I have a side gig several nights a week, hobbies that sometimes prevent me from going to the gym, etc) does not permit me to be as single-minded about exercise as I was for about a year and a half prior to COVID. I’d also be worried that my body would become dependent on the supplements and become unable to reliably regulate its own hormonal levels. (And I’m worried about losing my hair.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
This overtime proposal is interesting since it only rewards people who are already working more than 40 hours a week. And it will, of course, hit mostly blue collar workers.
Do you have any evidence that blue-collar workers work OT more often than white-collar workers? My white-collar job offers a ton of opportunities for OT, which a number of employees eagerly jump on. We have some employees working nearly 50 hours a week, voluntarily, because they like making more money.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
To defend @2D3D’s approach from the perspective of someone who does strongly value interpersonal compatibility and love, the point he’s making is that you need to consider: Will I still love this person in 25 years? If we’re going to get married, I should at least consider whether, down the line, she is going to look so radically different from how she looks now that the things about her that attracted me in an erotic/sexual sense - the things that made me want to make her my romantic partner instead of just a female friend/acquaintance - will have disappeared. Is it fair to her to put her in a position where your marriage could fall apart because you start having to fake attraction, and she begins to hate herself? I don’t know if these questions should be disqualifying, but it’s tough to say that they’re not worth considering.
(There are, of course, other perfectly salutary reasons to care about these matters, but I don’t think they’re incompatible with an approach that still centers interpersonal love.)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I see women here (in Japan) who keep their looks and figures well into their forties (though even they are not blindingly hot in the same way as younger women)
This was one of my major takeaways from my trip to Japan, though more of a confirmation than a surprise. East Asian women retain their youthfulness for a length of time unimaginable to most white (and nearly all black and Latina) women. I would look at Japanese women and think, “She could be 22, or she could be 40.” The neoteny is very real, and very appreciated.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Salma Hayek’s ancestry appears to include no indigenous/Amerindian genetics, which is probably the reason why she has defied the Mexican curse.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I'd rather pick one up on the safe side of the divide than marry a girl right out of college without knowing that this nubile cutie has a ticking time bomb hidden away, that all of the sudden she's going to bloat out into something grotesque, like an self-inflating raft from which the pin has been yanked.
You’ve just described 80% of “thicc Latinas”. The natural life cycle of a Mexican woman is to turn into a potato after having her first child and to stay like that for the rest of her life.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I’m not going to touch on anything political; I’ve spoken many times here about my early days as a loudly and annoyingly vocal socialist, the way I damaged so many interpersonal relationships by letting politics supersede everything else, etc.
For me, especially at this particular juncture in my life, I spend a ton of time agonizing about just how badly I bungled my prime years by not managing to seal the deal on a long-term relationship. And it was absolutely not for lack of trying! I spent my entire teens and twenties desperately pining over a series of unrequited crushes. It’s just that I was doing the exact opposite of the things I should have been doing to actually give those overtures any chance of succeeding.
I bought hook-line-and-sinker into the alluring but false promise of certain romantic comedies - The Office being probably the biggest culprit - that the secret to getting a woman to fall in love with you is to become her very close friend first, orbit passively around her but putting yourself into scenarios wherein romance could blossom but which maintain plausible deniability if it doesn’t, and eventually she’ll give you a clear sign that she has fallen for you. This is all, of course, pretty much 180 degrees the opposite of what actually inspires attraction in the vast majority of girls and women. It is, however, very comforting to believe if you’re a gawky, profoundly insecure, sexually unconfident, low-T guy like I was (and in many ways still am) because it doesn’t require you to take bold action and risk catastrophic failure and embarrassment. (Except actually it still does lead eventually to embarrassment, because over time one must face the facts that a particular crush is going absolutely nowhere and she’s clearly drifting away from you, and you realize that the failure was just dragged out over time, losing you precious time and other opportunities.)
I did manage to have one relationship that was, for a relatively short period of time, seemingly very successful, with a very beautiful and intelligent woman, but again, my total lack of understanding of what women want out of a relationship with a man was so lacking that I couldn’t hold the relationship together. However, while I’ve at long last come to the painful realization that women are not seeking an egalitarian and companionate relationship with a man - a friendship that just happens to also involve sex and cohabitation - I also pretty much optimized my whole personality and lifestyle toward that.
I never developed many of the skills (practical or internal) that would be required of a genuine paterfamilias. I’m too redpilled on women and too unable to play along with the female style of unfocused political venting to have much chance of a successful relationship with the kind of progressive woman who might actually be interested in a companionate relationship with a somewhat-effeminate underemployed head-in-the-clouds armchair intellectual; I’m also nowhere near what conservative “trad” women are, understandably, looking for.
@FiveHourMarathon is right about aging. I seem to have hit a real wall physically during the COVID lockdowns, losing a substantial amount of physical fitness that I’m now struggling to get back. (And some of my old crushes are starting to hit their own walls as well, such that even the ones who are still single are not nearly as appealing to me as they once were.)
Young guys, please do not waste your prime. It closes sooner than you think, and the dating scene once you’re out of it is, if not quite a wasteland, at least wasteland-adjacent. Find a good woman early and lock her down for life before she has a chance to experience all the guys she’s missing out on.
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.
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