Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
19d 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
19d 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
20d ago
Which, based on fairly gruesome videos circulating on social media, it appears to be doing fairly vigorously right now.
Supah_Schmendrick
20d 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
20d 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
20d 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
25d ago
Ah yes, withholding a bonus to an employee is the same negative hedons as whipping him. Clearly.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d 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
25d 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.
Obama was, in the referenced Tuscon speech, speaking soon after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that is now seen as one of the earliest examples of political assassinations now frequently discussed.
Obama wasn't "adopting a frame," he was telling the truth, and liberal/progressive attempts to turn the Tucson shooting into a political event to pin on conservatives are rank propaganda.
Everyone remembers that Congresswoman Giffords was wounded during the shooting, but the [edit: typo, thx @NewCharlesInCharge] one guy who was actually killed - Judge John Roll - was a Republican, appointed by Pres. G.H.W. Bush, who had struck down the Brady "assault weapons" ban.
The shooter himself, Jared Lee Loughner, was himself described by class-mates as "left wing, quite liberal," and (ironically for Lakoff) was obsessed with the idea that the structure of English grammar controlled people's thoughts.
Realistically, Loughner appears to have been genuinely detached from reality, claiming to have mind-control powers. There's never been any evidence linking political rhetoric from either of the parties to Loughner's actions, nor any evidence that Loughner had any support in either his ideas (such as they were) or actions.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Israel's modern weaponry is dependent on a complex international supply chain that could be interrupted at any moment by patrons dropping their support whereas Germany was, by design, autarchic and self sufficient.
Germany literally ran out of fuel, as well as several major metals necessary to build tanks, airplanes, and shells. And as for Israel, they produce quite a lot of their own gear; the Merkava tank, their own small arms, quite a lot of their drones, etc.
The IDF has nearly no tolerance for casualties, unlike the Hutus or Waffen SS. You can drop bombs or snipe people from a distance but to commit Rwanda-tier genocide you have to close in and closing in would expose Israeli fighters to a level of risk they aren't willing to take.
Neither the hutu militias nor the einsatzgruppen (of whom there were only a few thousand at any given time) were zerglings or mindless hordes; this is not a serious analysis.
We executed orders very well, so I assure you if there had been an order to kill all Jews, there would be none left in Europe. Instead, there are millions of survivors.
Extreme apples and oranges. Attempting to exterminate an ethno-religious group across an entire continent is a much different thing than attempting to destroy a single large city and kill the inhabitants - something the Nazis did do several times during WWII, most notably in Warsaw which went from a city of over a million to having only a couple thousand people left when the Soviets entered. Here, actually, the Japanese were significantly worse - they simply demolished dozens - potentially hundreds - of towns and villages, and killed all the inhabitants.
If killing millions of people is as simple as you think then why did Hitler bother with the logistical hassle instead of just killing them on the spot like Genghis Khan?
They did quite a lot of killing-on-the-spot - far more than the Israelis have done, with far fewer soldiers involved. Also, the Nazis extensively used prisoners - including jews in concentration camps - as slave labor in service of that autarkic fantasy you mentioned above.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
An argument can be made that they still are as they were in the 90's, because that's when critical theory was being born; it was also the last major push for censorship in the universities.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Except that you'd expect someone like Zinn to be over-indexed for when you hold a giant "debate-me" event. Yes, you get a lot of people who want to participate in good faith, but you also have put out a honey-trap for wackos with outsize grievances.
It's the same mechanism that draws people like this to city council open comment sessions.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Who's advocating for anything? I responded to your historical counterfactual with my belief that events would not have been nearly as bloody as you described them.
Your comment is not in good faith, and unworthy of the legacy of this place.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide...
...Were largely civilians, waving machetes and operating under no military discipline whatsoever. Those Tutsi militias were veterans of several other brush wars in Tanzania and Uganda, and were led by a quite effective and battle-hardened leader (Kagame)
Just being brutal doesn't always translate to being more militarily effective...
It does if your objective is, as many allege, to simply depopulate an area through violence. The Rwandan genocide took a little over 3 months, during which mobs of civilians armed with blades and a few small arms killed a million people. It defies credulity that the IDF, armed with modern weapons, somehow is so incompetent at genocide as to only kill less than 10% as many over a period of time six times longer, especially when all the would-be victims are penned up in a tiny area like Gaza.
No, if the Israelis were actually the Nazis that so many here portray them as being, they could have just treated Gaza like the Warsaw ghetto and it would have been over inside a month.
Correct.
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