LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
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User ID: 657
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
5mo ago
Was pre-Communist Russia particularly low trust? It was certainly highy authoritarian and absolutist, but I don't think that's the same thing as low-trust. Even the relative destitution of the Russian people isn't really indicative of low trust and I would say more to do with Russia's lack of industralisation and entrenched serfdom. But previously other European countries had entrenched serfdom and were high trust (e.g. medieval France)
My only cultural touchstone is Crime and Punishment, which does imply a certain level of high trust in Russian society at the time. Indeed, one of Dostoevsky's main points with his writing is that these new modernist (and ultimately proto-Communist) ideas becoming popular at the time destroys morality and society.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
8mo ago
Yeah, they're called Islam and Mormons the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
I'm only half joking. And Mormon theology is really wack. Interestingly when Islam first emerged, the original view of Christendom was it was a heresy, not a distinct religion.
Some Unitarians in eastern Europe (Hungary) might be more conservative, I don't know.
Other major contemporary (socially) conservative non-Trinitarians (if not specifically Unitarians) include Oneness Pentecostals, and Jehovah's Witnesses. There's a whole range of smaller denominations that are anti-Trinitarian in various ways that you may have heard of, generally they're pretty crazy and their theology is a joke.
As a general comment, I understand why people have problems with the Trinity, but at the same time it is the orthodox Christian position for a reason and does have intellectual weight behind it.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
8mo ago
You quite literally went to the worst denomination possible. Unitarians aren't even Christians under most traditional definitions, as they reject the Trinity.
The whole Unitarian movement has always been very liberal. They basically were created to be a liberal denomination of "Christianity".
As a Catholic, if you're interested in engaging intellectually with Christianity, look into a welcoming, conserative Catholic parish. Parishes associated with cathedrals are your best bet. No shade to our Protestant brothers, but Catholics have the longest and most robust intellectual tradition.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
8mo ago
Long-term it’s probably true that this kind of immigration is good for the economy and makes the pie larger for everybody, but it’s just too much too fast.
It doesn't. Countries with mass immigration like the UK, Canada, and Australia (most of Europe is not far behind) have had negative real GDP per capita growth in recent years (despite massive and increasing government spending as a major contributor to GDP I might add). US still has positive real GDP per capita growth, but that's probably due to US having a larger population able to absorb more immigration and the fact the US is still the centre of technology and innovation.
The pie technically does get bigger, but the number of people who eat the pie outpaces it. Liberal politicians love it, because it does technically grow GDP even if it makes their countrymen individually poorer. I'm reminded of the fact that Boris Johnson increased immigration ("Boriswave") because he wanted positive press coverage from the Financial Times. Any GDP growth is probably captured by the rich anyway, due to the wage suppression caused by immigration among other things.
Maybe once upon a time immigration does increase GDP (per capita) when immigrants were of a higher quality, able to integrate well, and came over to work and had no expectation of being supported by the state. Those days are long gone.
Far cry from the millions that people seem to get the impression about. No, a lot of these races are more small-dollar than you'd expect.
If American politics are anything like Australian politics in this regard (which it certainly is), of course this is not how bribes work. No, it takes the form of "not bribes" where while in office, corporations and donors will invite them to galas and events with fine dining, ridiculously high "speaking fees" and so on.
But the important part is when they leave office. You can expect a nice cushy job on a corporate board paying 7 figures, or a lucrative "consulting" role. The revolving door, as they say.
That's only if you're unwilling to abuse your position outright though, unlike a particular former US Democratic Speaker of the House.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
8mo ago
How many "left-wing violence incidents" go unprosecuted or otherwise unrecorded and therefore never end up in any dataset. Quite a lot I'd wager.
The problem with trying to take this "scientific", "quantifiable" approach to measuring and comparing left-wing and right-wing violence is that the right believe that institutions at virtually every level are structure in favour of the left and against the right. At every step right-wing violence is further monitored, scruntised, highlighted, pathologised etc etc while the inverse is true for the left. There is no clean, unbiased dataset. Your own scrubbing of the dataset only proves the bias exists, not that you've managed to produce a useful or accurate dataset after cleaning out all the garbage.
People need to understand that the institutions making these claims have lost all credibility and authority with the right, and that appeals to them are meaningless.
This is in addition to basic issues like trying to quantify "level of violence" by counting the mere number of incidents, when it's really a qualitative phenomenon (do 3 mild cases outweight 1 major one?), and in isolation a narrow definition of violence incidences would exclude other forms of political repression or harm.
So the leftist middle class needed a new victim for whom they could claim to fight. Women. Ethnic and sexual minorities (except pedos, because everyone hates pedos). Victims of colonization. Of course, unlike Marx, they have much less of a master plan, a grand strategy, a theory of victory.
Exactly right, but I have to emphasise that was not merely an organic development, but quite literally what the Frankfurt School/Cultural Marxists/Critical Theorists (and later, the woke), advocate for as a deliberate and concious development of Marxism.
Herbet Marcuse's 1969 Essay on Liberation:
No matter how rational this strategy may be, no matter how sensible the desperate effort to preserve strength in the face of the sustained power of corporate capitalism, the strategy testifies to the “passivity” of the industrial working classes, to the degree of their integration it testifies to the facts which the official theory so vehemently denies. Under the conditions of integration, the new political consciousness of the vital need for radical change emerges among social groups which, on objective grounds, are (relatively) free from the integrating, conservative interests and aspirations, free for the radical transvaluation of values. Without losing its historical role as the basic force of transformation, the working class, in the period of stabilization, assumes a stabilizing, conservative function; and the catalysts of transformation operate “from without.”
This tendency is strengthened by the changing composition of the working class. The declining proportion of blue collar labor, the increasing number and importance of white collar employees, technicians, engineers, and specialists, divides the class. This means that precisely those strata of the working class which bore, and still bear, the brunt of brute exploitation will perform a gradually diminishing function in the process of production. The intelligentsia obtains an increasingly decisive role in this process – an instrumentalist intelligentsia, but intelligentsia nevertheless. This “new working class,” by virtue of its position, could disrupt, reorganize, and redirect the mode and relationships of production...
The ghetto population of the United States constitutes such a force. Confined to small areas of living and dying, it can be more easily organized and directed. Moreover, located in the core cities of the country, the ghettos form natural geographical centers from which the struggle can be mounted against targets of vital economic and political importance; in this respect, the ghettos can be compared with the faubourgs of Paris in the eighteenth century, and their location makes for spreading and “contagious” upheavals. Cruel and indifferent privation is now met with increasing resistance, but its still largely unpolitical character facilitates suppression and diversion. The racial conflict still separates the ghettos from the allies outside. While it is true that the white man is guilty, it is equally true that white men are rebels and radicals. However, the fact is that monopolistic imperialism validates the racist thesis: it subjects ever more nonwhite populations to the brutal power of its bombs, poisons, and moneys; thus making even the exploited white population in the metropoles partners and beneficiaries of the global crime. Class conflicts are being superseded or blotted out by race conflicts: color lines become economic and political realities – a development rooted in the dynamic of late imperialism and its struggle for new methods of internal and external colonization.
As for the lack of master plan - that's also true. Horkheimer said the point of Critical Theory was not to construct or develop a blueprint for a new society, but merely to tear down the existing society so whatever 'good' existed in the society would be liberated and form the basis for the new society. Their whole plant is basically deconstruct everything and the perfect communist society will somehow rise from the ashes.
A big problem with discussion Cultural/Neo-Marxism is that even when you describe or paraphrase their ideas accurately, people think you're being uncharitable, or making it up, or being conspiratorial, because they can't believe someone would actually support those ideas.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
10mo ago
You could at least pretend to display some performative scepticism towards a Guardian article on immigration before uncritically accepting the narrative wholesale. Obvious baitpost.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
11mo ago
Israel would have almost exactly the same national security interests and likely strategic patterns of behavior even if it had no element of racial-supremacist Abrahamic cult-myths, though.
Israel would never had existed if they didn't have that though.
You're correct but I think this is overcomplicating it.
Women's fantasy is to have a strong-willed, dominant, somewhat abrasive/disagreeable man who gets what he wants, but softens around her and only her, that she can wrap around her finger, not a pushover but 'I would do anything for her'. She is the exception to the other women.
Men's fantasy is to have a youthful, viriginal, agreeable, respectable women, but so enamoured and devoted (unconditionally) that she is willing to throw herself at him and only him, and become his 'slut'. He is the exception to other men.
Everyone wants to feel special.
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