domain:pedestrianobservations.com
hydroacetylene
17m ago
Israël seems to have a history of backing credible shots at a Christian state(eg the Maronites), but doesn’t treat Christian’s in its territory any better than other Arabs. This means that there is discrimination against Christian’s in Israël- but Arab Christian’s are one of the world’s genuine high-IQ groups, so they still do very well.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20m ago
There are others around who are far more qualified to make the argument than I am, but my understanding is that the circumstance that Critical Theory is derivative of Marxism is beyond dispute. Wikipedia itself devotes a big section to it, and the introductory paragraph on its history already says,
Max Horkheimer first defined critical theory (German: kritische Theorie) in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", as a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only toward understanding or explaining it. Wanting to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy (...)
I suppose that the assertion that is more likely to be disputed is that CT is a driving cultural phenomenon or could be described as the principal philosophical basis of US progressivism, for which it is much harder to show receipts. The only way I can see is to painstakingly show the provenance of defining features and tenets of it - value systems built around class/group interest and oppressor/oppressed dynamics, the fundamental rejection of positivism (lay definition, perhaps: the premise that something like a correct way of reasoning can be discovered and yield a "symbol-pushing" way of generating true statements that should be upheld regardless of human interests) and embracing of textual criticism (dismissal of a "text"'s content in favour of a meta-analysis of who stands to benefit from it being accepted and the motivations of those authoring and conveying it) as a tool to implement this rejection, emphasis on subjective experience, and faith-based anticipation of radical changes to society leading to an improvement of conditions.
One could also point at the high correlation between above-average engagement in the Social Justice movement and explicit self-identification as Marxist with all it entails (being concerned with economic oppressor-oppressed dynamics, anticipating a labor-based radical reorganisation of society resulting in utopia), which would be an unexpected phenomenon that warranted explanation if the two philosophies were not actually closely related.
I am actually with you insofar as I don't think that it is politically sensible or productive to apply the "Cultural Marxism" label as part of public discourse. This seems comparable to me to the erstwhile push to attack Muslims by saying things like "Allah is an Arabic moon god" - it may be true that Islam was shaped by the polytheistic soup of medieval Arabia, and this may even have great explanatory power regarding its culture and tenets, but in a modern context where most everyone is more familiar with Islam than with the medieval Arabic moon god you are trying to link it to, all it will achieve is making you look obsessive and schizophrenic as it suggests that your beef with Islam is just because you are the sort of person who would have a beef with the worship of a moon deity from 1500 years ago.
hydroacetylene
22m ago
And to note, even blacks in South Africa are much better off than in most of the rest of the continent- see the economic migration there(which has been going on for SA’s entire history).
hydroacetylene
24m ago
White South Africans are still there, the boers are probably above replacement, the shrinking of the white population is mostly due to very high black population growth. And nobody really wants the whites to leave, either- they lay the golden egg for the ANC to then steal.
Shrike
25m ago
Why does Israel need an imperial patron?
In the past Israel got along okay without the US (buying military hardware from, notably, France).
Today they are capable of manufacturing most of their own military hardware except for fighter aircraft and helicopters (the bottleneck on the former likely being engine manufacturing). It looks like they are a net food importer but are energy independent. As others have pointed out, they have a growing population and an advanced military.
So why do they need a patron? I'm not trying to be confrontational here, I'm just trying to figure out the argument that they can't survive without a sponsor. It seems like to me that as long as they can prevent sea access from being cut off they should be just fine on their own. Is there a bottleneck that I'm not seeing here?
pigeonburger
26m ago
He probably wouldn't like it because his era was obsessed with industrialization, yeah, but that doesn't mean that the people doing it are not transplanting his ideas from the factory to the movie studio.
ThenElection
27m ago
The issue with a genealogical approach is that theory is more like a lattice than a tree, with extensive lateral gene flow and different branches being reabsorbed into the main.
For instance, we have a Marx -> Marcuse -> New Left -> Social Justice lineage. But what do we make of Carl Schmitt's significant influence on Marcuse (who found his critique of liberalism very strong)? Does that mean woke activism is just a far right extension of Nazi legal theory adapted to modern times?
MathWizard
Good things are good
36m ago
Ah yes, the classic Yankee Doodle strat.
hydroacetylene
36m ago
Pagan polemics against Christianity exist, though. They’re not much about that- some common themes include accusations of magic/sorcery, Christian’s being low class/gullible, and rebelliousness/insufficient patriotism. Not a lot about it being too Jewish.
Contemporary Roman humor made fun of Christian’s as good natured but very strange, often particularly mocking charity and the treatment of slaves as being eccentric.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
44m ago
I completely understand your experience regarding the Russians. In any given domestic situation, the same character is given four different names, and none of these are what his coworkers call him.
Tiber727
57m ago
Here's an 18 minute video that goes into the text and cites how the creators of Critical Race Theory (the actual academic theory) literally say they were inspired by Marx and Critical Theory. It's not that Marx himself would necessarily approve of the goals of CRT, more that CRT adopted Marx's framing of class struggle and class consciousness.
ThenElection
1hr ago
It's fair to say that the CRA is central in the history of social justice activism, right? And, I agree, the Frankfurt School didn't condemn it. But that's because they by and large ignored it--a quick search through Google books isn't digging up anything by Adorno, Fromm, Habermas, Horkheimer where they even mention it. They would probably have thought it was a fine thing, in the sense that people generally think "oh, that sounds good!" But race, in general, isn't something they concerned themselves with much: anti-Semitism gets at least 100x the attention (which is a point of critique against them by the social justice crew).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
Seems like one of those pervasive labeling problems: the Mormons in question label themselves as "Christian", which I think makes the use of it in this context within the realm of reasonable takes, even if the Pope, or maybe even the majority of self-identified Christendom don't accept that label.
Analogously, I don't think "Islamic fundamentalism" as defined from the outside in the West needs to take into detailed account which groups think of each other as infidels. "Actually Hamas aren't Islamic Fundamentalists because Ali was the rightful heir to the throne" is, uh, a take.
themig
1hr ago
Yeah, I couldn't imagine them giving a nobel peace prize to a newly-elected president before he'd even done anything. That would be the scandal of the century.
aqouta
1hr ago
Those are the events that preceded the transfer. The transfer itself was relatively peaceful and successfully ended these hostilities. If there are population transfers in the west bank in 2030 then it would be dishonest to cite the deaths in the Gaza war as being caused by the population transfer.
ThenElection
1hr ago
When in the history of the ideology has it been otherwise?
The Khmer Rouge. (And, yes, Lenin/Stalin/Trotsky/Mao.)
The distinguishing characteristic of communism is not that it critiques society. It's that it seizes state power and uses it to commit mass murder in order to radically reorder society, with the murderers being at the top of the new order.
Neither the Frankfurt School nor Social Justice activists, despite their faults, desire that. Their relationship to power in the existing order is very different, in that they, in different ways, already had/have substantial access to it. That's not capable of creating the apocalyptic communist revolution, because that kind of upending would undermine their power. Instead, they want to expand their existing power and use it to push their different visions (a legally and socially recognized racial and gender hierarchy for the wokes, and some odd psychological liberation for Adorno etc).
ZeroPipeline
1hr ago
Also the US gives both Egypt and Jordan over $1 billion a year in aid to prevent them from attacking Israel.
Botond173
1hr ago
According to an article published in an 1998 issue of a Hungarian periodical of social sciences, reproduced online in .txt format, the young Jewish woman in question was carrying forged papers and hiding in a safehouse which she had to leave because it got compromised, and no replacement could be found. Fearing that her likely capture will compromise them all, the cell members (including her partner/lover) all unanimously voted to force her to commit suicide. In 1950, party organs investigated the matter and concluded that Lakatos formed the underground cell without permission from above and was the main culprit in this suicide, was expelled from the party as a consequence and was sent to a notorious forced labor camp (interned, technically speaking, although in retrospect it’s impossible to confirm what further considerations, if any, were decisive in that). According to his social circle he was pretty much a Dostoevsky character.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
If the U.S. puts a woman on some paper money, who should it be?
The statue of liberty
07mk
1hr ago
What I find especially funny/galling about this is that Peterson almost never used the phrase "Cultural Marxism" - the one time I saw him use it was in a meta way, referring to the term as something that people used and coined, but not referring to the thing that the term was pointing at.
The phrase he's most quoted as saying in terms of "Marxism" is actually "Postmodern Neo-Marxism," not "Cultural Marxism." Eliding between the two when complaining about the vapidity of the term, I think, is a reflection of the fact that there's a real cluster of ideologies there that is being pointed to that is postmodern, cultural, new, and Marxist.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
I mean yeah agree with all of this
My thesis isn't that these people don't exist, they do.
My thesis is just that the phrase "cultural Marxism" has been beaten and twisted to the point it's basically just an out-group signifier that has nothing to do with Marx
I don't think Marx would like DEI departments. I'm actually pretty confident he'd see all the DEI stuff as the bourgeoisie using a wedge issue to keep workers fighting each other.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
Maybe I'm slow today but I'm not understanding your parallel.
Mormon rule is a derivative of Christianity and by prioritizing it with rules you do give it a "supremacy" of a sort I guess.
The words are actually connected to the real life effects.
"Cultural Marxism" has very little to do with Marxism, although I'm still reading through all the philosophy everyone linked so maybe there was a more coherent connective thread in the 1960s, but these days the way it's used is borderline meaningless
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide?wprov=sfti1
I'll confess to knowing nothing about the Bulgarian case, and I'm not going to insult you by immediately researching it as pretending to. But the Turkish-Greek split was not without atrocities on either side.
The Jews were seen as troublesome, stubborn bastards too. It was just that they were clearly an ancient people and so got somewhat of a pass. Christians didn't.
After the rebellion this association would have been even stronger. Which explains the Christian efforts to distinguish themselves in their Gospels.
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