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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28699 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I think it is also true that quite a lot of people on that level, and a LOT of people lower down in the PMC are communists. I knew a lot of communists at university, half the politics PhDs were doing their thesis on Marx or Marxist thinkers.

Well, I guess we are probably going to disagree about what 'being communist' is here.

A lot of people study heterodox things in college and maybe even post about them on social media later in life, but if they produce like a capitalist, consume like a capitalist, vote for neoliberal politicians and invest their retirement fund in capitalist organizations, what do we actually call them?

And yeah, certain liberal arts colleges have a lot more of those people than the general population, and then they go on to teach at other liberal arts schools, and that's a thing. Not many of them write their dissertations praising Marx and then go on to hole serious political or economic power, though, and the vast majority of the populace still disagrees with them strongly (or rather, has blind contempt for them without understanding their ideas in teh first place).

I would say that people's hostility to communism comes from the increasing awareness of what went on in the USSR, and in particular from its very public collapse. (Other communist countries like NK or Cuba don't exactly offer appealing prospects either). It has very little to do with McCarthyism

Sure, but I would say that growing trans acceptance comes from increasing awareness and understanding of trans people and the trans experience, and has very little to do with social contagion and SJWs getting people banned fro social media.

I think it's pretty normal when a movement succeeds for the parts of it that look inconvenient in hindsight to get disavowed or forgotten. That doesn't mean that they're not all part of the same movement at the time.

(If they were, I could just 'no true scotsman' any SJW that does something annoying and insist that the movement itself is never wrong)

If McCarthyism had won, communist philosophy would not be taught, it would be difficult to buy or publish related books, and any trace of communism in someone's past would get them fired.

That's a pretty stiff standard for victory. I'm not sure we've beaten anyone except literal Nazis and slaveowners that badly in US history.

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