Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
22d ago
A line, of course, which largely has been historically understood to be the justification for muscular jewish/israeli military capacity and an unapologetically hair-trigger attitude towards percieved slights.
Supah_Schmendrick
22d ago
The only remarkable thing about this post is the political valency; what is this place if not nut-picking to wage the culture war?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I certainly try not to nutpick. I thought the ethos of the place aspired to something a little grander as well.
Broad swathes of 'antisemitism' on the left can differentiate between opposing Jews and opposing Israel.
Yes; most people, if you can get them one-on-one in a relaxed social setting, will be fairly chill and generous on most political issues. However, those same people, in a march or mob, or when agitated against the outgroup (i.e., in a politically-activated state) will take much harder stances out of pure oppositional aesthetics or attitude.
Also, the "soft and reasonable" left position on Jews, whether or not in Israel, appears to be something along the line of "anything other than deracinated individualism and blank slatism rhymes with nazi and is verboten." This, I should hope understandably, comes off to many Jews and particularly Israelis as the equivalent of Ghandi's advice to the Jews of eastern europe.
The largest protests against the Israeli war in Gaza in my region were led by Jewish men in kippahs with megaphones blocking traffic.
Progressive leftism these days is as much a jewish heresy as it is a christian one - not for nothing is reform Judaism called "the Democratic Party at prayer." Truly, the monkey's paw has curled and given the right a true "judeo-christian" civilization in the form of the GAE, with its mainline protestant State Department, jewish DOJ, and mormon security service state. (said firmly with tongue in cheek).
On the other hand none of those (with the exception of the mormons) do a great job of reproducing themselves; mainline protestant churches are famously elderly, and another famous joke teaches that the way you can tell the difference between a reform and orthodox jew is that the orthodox one will have jewish grandchildren. So how "jewish" really, are these barren branches?
Antisemitism on the right rarely bothers to make the Israel/Jew distinction, particularly when it arrives at it's antisemitism via the protocols of the elders of Zion and the Great Replacement Theory and Holocaust denialism.
A much more degenerate route than the traditional "judeo-bolshevism" line, though that still has its supporters out there.
One of these flavors of antisemitism, were it to gain power, would likely cut foreign aid to Israel and boost aid to Palestine. The other would likely pogrom the US government and elites, or worse.
Honestly, I'm unclear which one is which, because a disproportionate amount of the actual anti-jewish violence in the US comes from the black nationalist and muslim side of things, which are broadly (though not exclusively) within the left/antizionist tent.
See, when this is done by people you dislike you break out the Narcissist's prayer:
That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.
Also known as the Trial Lawyer's catechism.
Supah_Schmendrick
22d ago
I'm perfectly happy to believe Myron Gaines and the creator of an explicitly witch-friendly social media space are at least as friendly to Hitler as your average sociology professor and "community organizer" are towards Mao...but come on, using an unedited Michael Jackson track is "antisemitism" now? That's an extremely bad example.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
It's never been entirely clear to me how much of that was actual "feminist interpretive dancer-turned-defense contractor exec" and how much was "well we'll put General So-and-So's son's wife down as the President of the LLC for compliance purposes, but everyone knows the General still calls the shots"
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
Does that mean woke activism is just a far right extension of Nazi legal theory adapted to modern times?
Clearly not an extension in the sense of merely being an appendage of. However, it would be fair to say that there is some degree of cross-pollination (though the influence can certainly be overstated; significantly less than Freud and the psychoanalysts, for example).
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
I think even some of the people who developed it studied directly under the major figures of the Frabkfurt School.
Correct.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
...I submit that Marxism is best understood as a bundle of critiques of society emerging from a particular worldview. Beyond those worldview-clustered critiques, Marxism contains no actual, gears-level insight or plan for fixing society beyond "amass absolute power and use it tear down this society and build a much better one in its place".
A friendly amendment - Marxism isn't just the critiques of society; it's also (1) critiques of the critiques, usually trying to explain why their prior predictions didn't pan out [e.g. Frankfurt school], and (2) tactical theorizing about the proper way in which to actualize the vague, high-level, utopian promises of the original critiques [e.g. the Trotskyite "Permanent Revolution", Leninist "Vanguardist", Stalinist "Socialism in One Country", etc.].
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
How bastardized does a theoretical development have to be before it can be considered an entirely different thing?
Depends on whether you take a genealogical (A taught B, who was read and cited by C, who taught D...) vs. taxonomic approach. Both have their strengths and weaknesses; both capture something useful and real about the world but have blind spots.
The current theory of the American Left doesn't draw much from the Frankfurt School or any thinkers really; to the extent it exists at all, it's just a ramshackle gloss on patronage politics with a couple academic shibboleths to give it an air of legitimacy.
One could certainly say the same of Mormonism vis a vis the early Christian church fathers...or indeed wokism vis a vis the early church fathers. But there are clear historical and sociological lineages there as well.
Supah_Schmendrick
26d ago
Which, based on fairly gruesome videos circulating on social media, it appears to be doing fairly vigorously right now.
Supah_Schmendrick
26d ago
Why do you exclude South Africa-style reintegration?
Because everyone can look at South Africa to see just how well that goes.
Supah_Schmendrick
26d ago
Lacan's cult of personality is bigger than Marx's? What? How are they even in the same order of magnitude?
Psychoanalysis is a weeeeeeird discipline, man.
who is the "they" in "they need to seize the means of cultural production"
Realistlcally, a small vanguard party of dedicated ideologues.
Who are the cultural Marxists?
Initially there was Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, Benjamin, Pollock, and Lowenthal. Of those, Columbia, Brandeis, and a few west coast public universities (Marcuse wound up at UC San Diego) saw the most influence in political science and theory. Fromm had a large impact on feminist theory.
Second generation figures include Habermas, Frederic Jameson, Stuart Hall, and generally the New School for Social Research and the UC system more broadly (which also played a big part in bringing in and fusing French post-structuralist analysis into it).
Then you have the full efflorescence through Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Duncan Kennedy, Kimberle Crenshaw, Nancy Fraser, Donna Haraway, Wendy Brown, Cedric Robinson, Walter Mignolo, Andreas Malm, Shoshanna Zuboff, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
26d ago
The Jordan Peterson-esqe "cultural Marxism" shibboleth is genuinely gibberish. ... It's literally just "I 'ate communism, I 'ate wokism, refer to 'em interchangeably, simple as"
It really isn't. It's a popularization (thus, inevitably, a bit of a bastardization) of a real theoretical development. I strongly recommend Martin Jay's "The Dialectical Imagination" for an academic but decently accessible intellectual history of the movement.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Ah yes, withholding a bonus to an employee is the same negative hedons as whipping him. Clearly.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
View the dog as a working animal, its job is essentially to perform as an actor contributing to his streams. In exchange it receives food, shelter and so forth. It seems like a fair deal for the dog, I see nothing wrong with this.
A person's character is revealed in how they treat those below them - particularly those who are obligated to serve them. It's wrong to whip a UPS delivery driver for stopping his route for a coffee; it's wrong to abuse a draft or pack animal, and it's similarly a mark of low character to electroshock a dog for the "infraction" of taking a few steps inside your home.
You don't need to be deranged or toxic to look down on that. There's a world of difference between "don't cause your animal unnecessary pain for your convenience" and "deliver your animal 'lavish accommodations' in exchange for nothing."
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
You deeply underestimate the prevalence of destructive behavior in the past.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
But "maximum lethality" is part of a list describing (I think), Hegseth's preferred RoE, also including "common sense" and "authority for warfighters" (whoever they are). Incidentally, this confusion is why we need the Oxford comma, dammit - the oxford comma makes clear that "maximum lethality" is distinct from "authority for warfighters," while without a comma there is confusion about whether it's one list item or two.
But assuming that this is a three item list, I agree that "maximum" is a trade-off against something, but presumably it's restricted by "common sense" (whatever that is), and "authority for warfighters" (which I presume means deferring to what the individuals on the ground are seeing and reporting, but am not sure).
I still think you're likely over-selling this.
On the other hand, I continue to be a fat-ass civilian, so YMMV.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Er, I'm not a soldier, but at least to me that reads as a criticism of RoE which are badly designed, not of the concept of RoE generally. Otherwise, why specify that it's stupid RoE that you're jettisoning? Presumably there are "non-politically-correct" and "smart" RoE.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
There's "am I being detained? If so, I would like to know what for" which is not the same at all as "AM I BEING DETAINED!?!?!?!? AM I BEING DETAINED!?!?!? AM I BEING DETAINED?!?!?!" and I would wager at least $100 that the former gets a lot better results than the latter, even in otherwise sketchy circumstances.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
But this has been the case for at least ten years, and the so-called "fascists" remained remarkably unshot until about a week ago.
Ehhhhhhhh...
"Opposing Obamacare is Killing People!" -> Congresional Baseball shooting where, but for the grace of God and Hodgkinson's bad aim, a nontrivial part of the GOP congressional caucus could have been killed.
"Opposing BLM/supporting Trump is fascist!" -> Killing of Aaron Danielson, the kidnapping and torture of a white mentally-disabled person (incidentally, I just found out when digging this back up that the animals who did this all got less than 10 years in prison and one only got 4 years' probation and 200 hours of community service, and I'm horrified all over again), and having a philosophy professor bash your head with a bike lock.
"Right-wingers should be killed!" -> Killing of Cayler Ellison
And that's just the obvious cases that actually made the media - there's plenty more attempts and foiled plots, including the two attempt on Trump during the 2020 campaign, the wacko who flew out from California to try and kill Justice Kavanaugh, the "Ruth Sent Us" firebombings, BLM riots, etc.
It's not like it's all been sunshine and roses out there.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Roseanne Barr?
Ironically, she actually did have a show canceled after personal presidential intervention over an off-camera tweet of hers - at least as bad as the Kimmel incident.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Revealed preferences; they all clearly much prefer to be bush-league TV pundits than actual participants in the day-to-day business of governing.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
You say, after claiming all Israel needs to do to win in Gaza is to "go full Genghis Khan".
I did not say that. What I actually said was that "Depopulating and securing an area is quick and easy if you're willing to adopt the ROE of Ghengis Khan," and thus the fact that Israel has not depopulated Gaza during two years of war isn't evidence of their incompetence, as suggested by @functor.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Whoops, accidentally left a stray "the" in. Thank you for the correction.
He seems like a thoughtful guy. I hope he's stayed that way and hasn't succumbed to one of the various flavors of brainrot circulating these days. We need sane artists.
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