crushedoranges
No bio...
User ID: 111
crushedoranges
9mo ago
Clumsily. (Like krogans.)
crushedoranges
10mo ago
I really don't want to get into definitional arguments, because they don't get anywhere.
I am using their terminology. You can argue it as much as you want that it is vague and nebulous, but it doesn't matter, because it describes a real subset of people that do exist that push policy and active goals. I don't have to go back to the Kievan Rus to explain it. What am I, Putin?
Don't dive into generalities. I am addressing a very specific movement (the woke, the intersectionalists, the crt) who can be described as cultural marxists. I am intentionally limiting the scope of the discussion here because there is where an argument can actually be had.
But if you want to continue down this path, please, provide your definitions of these things.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
Sovereign is he who defines the exception, or so it is said.
Then what is, exactly, the strength of the person who is allowed to make the definitions?
Let me short-circuit the definitional arguments: imagine that we are gesturing at a horse... and I call it a horse. No, some obnoxious college activist emerges, it is a four-legged ruminant ungulate!
Okay, I concede. It's a four-legged ruminant ungulate (bad). We take a step forward on the euphemistic threadmill.
You horrible, horrible person! The college activist says. It's actually an equine monodactyl animal of herding!
And so on. At no point is the discussion is allowed to proceed beyond what identifying the horse is.
Cultural Marxism is identifiably so because it uses the oppressor/oppressed dynamic but replaces the class structure with a whole assortment of intersectional replacements. No, it is not orthodox Marxism. But it very succinctly describes what it is. You are falling for a psy-op, a plausible smokescreen of academic confusion. Strip out decades of cold warrior rhetoric and it is still an accurate description of what they're trying to get at.
There is no distinction between cultural and economic marxism in the end because it all leads to redistribution of wealth from oppressor to oppressed. If you don't recognize that basic fact, you don't really want to fight the SJWs at all: merely moderate their excesses.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
His name is 4chan.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
Well, of course it is.
But your non-participation only entitles and empowers a potential Caesar, who similarly believes that the systems and institutions are a corrupt sham and shell. And when you go to hide behind said institutions, suddenly made aware of its values, it will collapse upon itself. You will be left naked and trembling before a new, populist God.
Unless, of course, that is your desired end goal.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
You don't need to believe in democracy, only give sacrifice to the civic gods. The Roman analogy is apt. I'm not asking you to sacrifice a fatted calf or a firstborn child: I'm asking you to stand in a line for two hours in some public place. It doesn't matter what you believe or what you think is true, only that the proper forms are observed.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
Let me make an analogy.
One prays to God, not out of a naive desire for divine intervention to manifest one's wishes, but as an affirmative call to one's own virtuous goals. Whether or not it comes to good or ill is divided into two parts: the mortal - which is in our control - and in the divine - which is ineffable.
Which is to say, go vote, because it is good for the soul, and then do the necessary things in your community anyway.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
You should vote because it is a holy ritual that strengthens your household and girds your soul. You are not voting just for yourself, but you are linking the fire of American democracy, from your father to his father unto infinitum. As the Romans would say, it is a matter of religion, not politics. All the votes are rigged anyway, the candidates pre-selected, but that doesn't change the necessity of the act. So as long as you vote, the sacred institutions of the republic are preserved.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
I apologize. I've got a bad habit of making hot takes.
To expand on that pithy statement, I can't see her as anything but a worse version of Hillary Clinton. She, at the very least, had experience in government and political wrangling. What does Kamala have in comparison?
crushedoranges
10mo ago
It doesn't work that way anymore because the very concept of a 'mainstream media' was shattered into a hundred thousand screaming fragments by the bale curse of social media. 'respectable' media like NYC and ABC may capture the lib normies but that audience is growing smaller by the year and more out of touch by the moment.
No one even remotely in our reality would think Kamala is a strong candidate.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
Childbirth being painful is a universally known fact. The fact that women do it anyway is one of the many miracles of our biological condition. Such is the power of hormones and the genetic compulsion to reproduce.
What I suspect is happening here is that she doesn't want children, began that as her conclusion, and intellectualized herself into her preferences. And that's fine. Many people perform the backwards scientific method all the time when it comes to core beliefs. But if her reasons become mainstream - well, our species would soon cease to be.
We are all descended from either careless women, who had babies by accident, or feckless ones, who were brave enough to do it anyway despite the danger. I remind everyone to thank your mothers the next time you see them.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
I'm sorry, which set of partisans coined the term 'stochastic terrorism' and used it on speech they didn't like? Schmittian dynamics aside, splinter in my eye, log in yours. Even now, after excerpts from her diary saying she fantasized about her imaginary penis to fuck a black woman in the ass, you still hear the calls to respect 'his' pronouns.
Of course this damages the Narrative™️. If the left were more strict about policing autogynophiles and penis-envying school shooters, maybe people on the right would take the self-affirming takes more seriously.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
Personally.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
Communism sucks because it will be run by the people who run the DMV. Every would-be communist imagines that the bureaucrats who run the command economy will be intelligent, capable, and moral. Angels, in other words. The simplest diffuser of Communism is asking if whether or not they want the people who can't get children to be literate or lead out of their drinking water to be responsible for the entire economy.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
The moment the Israelis exchanged one hostage for a thousand Palestinians created a terrible precedent of which Hamas seeks to repeat.
I am not sure why the Israelis, knowing that their enemies were digging tunnels, did not dig tunnels of their own. Surely with modern equipment and a lack of a need for secrecy they could dig beneath to undermine them. Why hasn't this happened?
crushedoranges
10mo ago
When you stop on a bike - a commuter bike, with a high saddle - you have to swing your leg to anchor on the concrete, which has the side effect of crushing your testicles. The desire to avoid this at all costs is like, half the motivation of attempting to keep the bike moving.
crushedoranges
10mo ago
I'm not sure if you've been paying attention or not, but conspiracism and crackpot theories has become mainstream for years, if not decades at this point. Old, genteel conservatism that is happy to be a principled loser voters are tired of. There is nothing more American than winning, because Americans love winners. Even returning to 2000s liberalism is a conservative direction to Western culture's current trajectory.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
I would gesture vaguely at Lee Kuan Yew for the ideal of conservative paternalism, or the Bismarckian creation of the German welfare state. There are certain situations which allowing free markets and individuals to make bad decisions is harmful to the nation, and interventionism can be worth the loss in efficiency.
As such, paternalism's policies are not set in stone and are highly specific to the region the politician comes from.
The caveat is that conservative paternalism's aim is to enact reforms to prevent communists, socialists, and progressives from gaining power, to keep the status quo. The latter's aims with reform is to enact revolutionary change unmoored from economic realities.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
I mean, to be fair, no taxes on tips acknowledges a de facto reality: who reports their tips in their tax returns? Enforcement would be impossible. As a handout to Nevada, it makes sense politically.
Harris's proposed policies make Trump look like the king of austerity. Considering how spendthrift he is, that's an accomplishment.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
I find Shadman's depiction of Hillary Clinton to be one of the classics of all time.
Uh huh. Funny that you should use the Buran as an example, because it was a bad copy of a bad idea.
There's a lot of nuance hidden in the 'proper market reforms' and 'mature and sensible way'. Sensible to who? Who would bring about these sensible reforms, when the temptation to just copy the West - what they have always did - would have been omnipresent? By the time the Soviets could manage a few hundred creaky clones of IBM mainframes, people were playing Wolfenstein. They were twenty years behind in silicon, in the defining technology of century, and they had neither the time or the capital to catch up.
All of their existing industrial base was old. The tooling was bad. The workers were unproductive. It could not make enough to satisfy the domestic market, much less compete with the west. They could not export their way to prosperity because the only thing the West wanted from the Soviets was their raw, material resources. You could say that the average Russian worker removed value from the steel and aluminum they worked. No one drives Ladas anymore, do they?
All of this capital misallocation happened because they were communist. The reforms that hypothetically, pie-in-the-sky would have saved the Soviet economy would have made them not communist. No one could have saved the Soviet Union, because the time for saving it was 10 years before Gorbachev ever came to power. They had no Deng, and they had no American technology transfer. The Soviets knew that they needed to reform but were unable to do so until it was far, far too late.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
With what capital, exactly? With what technologies, from the West?
China bootstrapped their industry with technology transfers and capital investment - from Americans. 'Just reform the industries', like it's easy. Reduce the military budget, as if the military was not its own fiefdom hostile to its own diminishment.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
I would imagine that because EAs are doing private charity (and therefore are looking for the best return on their money) they'd be somewhat favorable under the broad umbrella of 'free association'.
crushedoranges
11mo ago
No, it wouldn't. Even if you had the proverbial 50 Stalins in charge, the Soviet Union was running into the debts it had incurred to reality - no amount of will can overcome the demographic cliff, uncompetitive industries, and the ruling elite's lack of faith in its own ideology. You might as well say that Hitler could have held along for longer if he just 'cracked down harder.
It was over. Gorbachev was merely more deluded than most, in thinking it could be reformed. The hardliners that wanted to keep the Union together had no solution for the country's problems other than continuing the stagnation.
Did yah call ya mothar? She gets so worried sick about you, and you nevaaaah call!
Did ya turn off the stove before you left the house?
More options
Context Copy link