domain:science.org
Botond173
3m ago
As far as I can tell, 4 different things are/were going on.
Post-2014, many Atlanticists and Nationalists (Banderists etc.) in Ukraine believed that trying to reach a compromise with the Russians on the status of the Donbass is pointless, because they thought ongoing military assistance from NATO would eventually ensure that, when the political opportunity arises, the swift and victorious conquest of the Donbass and the Crimea by a beefed-up Ukrainian army would become a reality, just like how the Croats united their country during Operations ‘Flash’ and ‘Storm’ in 1995.
Pre-2022, the same group of people and their sympathizers believed that NATO countries would send troops and weapons to aid Ukraine should it be attacked, which in turn would deter the Russians from attacking, as in reality they’re a paper bear.
None of this turned out to be true.
After the Russian blunders in the opening months of the war 2022, plus the successful Ukrainian counterattacks in the Kherson and Kharkov regions, this same group of people were convinced that final victory can be achieved in the summer of 2023 because the demoralized orc hordes will cut and run at the sight of the first German tank, and if not, then it’ll be still possible to recapture the entire post-1954 territory of the Ukraine because the Americans and their NATO allies will provide sufficient supplies and weapons for the job whereas the orcs will run out of missiles/tanks/food/washing machines.
Again, none of this happened either, and at this point seems increasingly out of reach, although this is the only turn of events that would realistically constitute something that can be called a Ukrainian final victory.
With respect to your argument that the Ukrainians would keep fighting even without US/NATO weapons (and supplies plus money), I’d say the lessons of history prove the opposite. Look at Afghanistan, South Vietnam or Georgia for that matter (in 2008). US-aligned regimes don’t keep fighting after military aid is cut or is not forthcoming in the first place – this has been the case so far for sure. But even if you’re right after all, the main question is whether the average soldier is then willing to fight even offensively or only defensively. Because if the latter is the case, victory cannot be achieved. My argument is that to the extent Ukrainian troops keep fighting defensively, they are doing so in the belief that NATO will at least supply enough assistance to prevent the Ukrainian army from collapsing. (Whether the Russians actually want to annex the entire state is also far from clear, on a different note.)
zeke5123a
7m ago
Yeah but that’s the whole point of the insult — the one act of cocksucking makes someone a cocksucker (ie a bad thing).
zeke5123a
9m ago
I don’t think it’s the equivalent but it is still highly distasteful. That is, I would be crushed if my daughter did porn. I would still be extremely upset if she did playboy. Yes one is worse than the other but only on the margins.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
29m ago
but it's also self refuting nonsense that should never have been allowed to have social impact.
What's the self refuting part, exactly?
Reading Derrida is a journey into the most high grade sort of masturbatory thinking about thinking that allows learned men to convince themselves that their worst urges are actually fine just because they're so clever.
What "worst urges" do you have in mind here?
Derrida's work in particular is relatively light on ethics and politics (depending on which period of his work you're talking about). He spends most of his time addressing relatively abstract and "classical" philosophical problems related to language, meaning, and knowledge.
Incidentally, that's exactly how it was received in France at the time
Depends on who you're talking about I suppose? Lacan was a pretty big deal, it was front page news when his yearly seminar series finally concluded after more than two decades. He was a bit like the Jordan Peterson of his day, except culturally lauded instead of culturally shunned.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
35m ago
I knew "career" was the wrong word to choose and might lead to a misunderstanding, but I didn't take the time to work on it. "Lifestyle" might have been better. Or "Calling". The material rewards are not the main aspect here.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
35m ago
"Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable."
Fair enough! I have no interest in defending any of the specific points listed of course. Just one more reason why I'm not a Marxist.
I will point out that 1) the Manifesto was a relatively early work and Marx's political thinking developed as he progressed into his mature works, and 2) it was a polemic intended for general consumption and may not represent the most "nuanced" version of his views. But I don't have any further relevant textual references to cite.
Botond173
40m ago
One manifestation of that are online complaints about the "Chopped Man Epidemic". Fascinating stuff from a culture warrior perspective.
Botond173
44m ago
I know that Orban is socially conservative and anti-LGBT, which will likely not make him enthusiastic about titty mags, but likely not to the point where they would outlaw them. The MEP leader of that opposition party was formerly in Orban's party and seems to be more pro-EU, while avoiding any CW issues. I do not think he is campaigning against porn videos.
You'd be right. It's his half-hearted attempt at reverse Uno which I find curious. And while avoiding any CW issues i.e. trying not to antagonize the normies, he made a social media post where he implicitly called the woman's former antics 'sinful' which as you can imagine didn't win the approval of local Blue Tribers.
Given that she likely appeared when she was a bit younger than 50, I do not think that what playboy eventually shifted to is all that relevant.
Do you? Most people aren't pop history nerds, and considering that the local edition of the mag folded in 2019, it's all bygone history anyway, and to the extent that people still remember what it was, they remember it as the slick, high-end mainstream mag. (The photoshoot appeared in 2003.)
It's entertaining for sure, but it's also self refuting nonsense that should never have been allowed to have social impact. Reading Derrida is a journey into the most high grade sort of masturbatory thinking about thinking that allows learned men to convince themselves that their worst urges are actually fine just because they're so clever.
Incidentally, that's exactly how it was received in France at the time, and correctly I think.
Sadly, we live in the world where these ideas are influential, and thus in the ruins of reason. I blame Americans and positivists.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
52m ago
France truly is the 4chan of philosophy. Everybody likes its memes, but few can stomach the environment which was necessary to produce them.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
59m ago
Where in the English-speaking world are you where "dicksucker" is more idiomatic than "cocksucker"?
"Cocksucker" is an idiomatic insult that usually is not a synonym of "sucker of penises". "Dicksucker", in contrast, has no idiomatic meaning, and therefore can be used as a synonym of "sucker of penises".
I'm not a Marxist (although I do think they make some good points that are worth taking into serious consideration), so I'm not here to defend Marxism qua Marxism, and I'm certainly not here to defend the specific economic policies of the USSR or China.
Okay, fair enough. Consider my question revoked then. You bring up some interesting points, I have some thoughts on a couple of them.
Marx never said "you have to immediately and forcibly collectivize all farmland".
An aside - Vietnam's implementation wasn't exactly immediate; it was a gradual rollback of the possibility of private enterprise involving multiple steps. It started with the Land Reform Law which involved redistributions of land from landed Vietnamese to those the VCP considered to be impoverished, then progressed towards forming mutual aid teams of farmers who were encouraged to aid each other with work on their fields (which, at this point, they still privately owned) during periods of peak labour demand. Then they created agricultural production cooperatives obligating them to perform collective labour for the state, rewarding them with workpoints, and it was then that the process of collectivising proper started.
I do realise this isn't the main point so I'll move on though.
What he did say is that there need to be a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which the proletariat would commandeer state power and use it to begin the process of overcoming capitalism. But no one can decide for the proletariat how they should go about this or what exactly this process should look like; they have to decide it for themselves, concretely, as they struggle through the actual process. (I think the DotP is a bad and unworkable idea for many reasons, which in turn is one of the many reasons why I'm not a Marxist.)
I have read this and in specific, Marx does state the following about the dictatorship of the proletariat:
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible."
"Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production."
"These measures will, of course, be different in different countries."
"Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable."
"1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes."
"2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax."
"3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance."
"4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels."
"5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly."
"6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State."
"7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan."
"8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture."
"9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country."
"10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c."
"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character."
It's not exceptionally specific, but it's not entirely non-specific, either; there is a very strong emphasis on collectivisation of production by the state, and that this should be achieved via "despotic inroads on the rights of property". This model outlined here actually parallels what a lot of communist countries in effect chose to do; they were in fact loosely following the instructions contained within Marx (and Engels') famous manifesto. I think this model clearly has not worked in any case in which it has been implemented.
Guilty as charged, yes. I think all the sophisticated ones would admit to this.
Which is an issue when your movement has a strong urge to tear down and then proceeds to have no idea what to do once the much-hated system has been completely dismantled. My perception upon talking to many Marxists in my time around these people is that there isn't that clear of an idea regarding how one would handle the incentive problems, coordination problems, etc that the envisioned society would face. I find many of them don't really have a proper theory of governance; they pretty much just cross their fingers and hope ideology does the work of sorting all these issues out once capitalism is no longer an obstacle.
When you're working on things as complex and fragile as entire societies, you just can't operate like this.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1hr ago
Sigh. I wish we wouldn't use such crass language here, but I have to chime in and say I don't see them equivalent at all. The latter is far worse.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
You really just have to plainly read critical theory to start hating it.
What! But there are so many lovely works of critical theory! Even Marcuse. "The Aesthetic Dimension" is a wonderful book, I always recommend it to everyone.
What specifically did you read that made you hate critical theory? I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything, I'm just curious what you read that caused you to form your opinion.
Have you ever read any Derrida? He has some beautifully poetic writing, his writings on art are a real pleasure:
everything will flower at the edge of a deconsecrated tomb: the flower with free or vague beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and not adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). It will be, for (arbitrary) example, a colorless and scentless tulip (more surely than color, scent is lost to art and to the beautiful: just try to frame a perfume) which Kant doubtless did not pick in Holland but in the book of a certain Saussure whom he read frequently at the time. "But a flower, zum Beispiel eine Tulpe, is held to be beautiful because in perceiving it one encounters a finality which, judged as we judge it, does not relate to any end"
(This is such a great closing paragraph because earlier in the chapter Derrida quotes Kant as saying "examples are the wheelchair of the mind", and then here in the final paragraph he again quotes Kant as saying "zum Beispiel eine Tulpe", and it's like, huh I thought you said examples were bad, but here you're giving an example, what's up with that eh? It's a really great mic drop moment. Because the whole chapter was Derrida taking Kant to task for his position that the frame/ornament(/example/footnote) has to be excluded from art proper, but Derrida's argument is that the picture can't be distinguished from the frame, so he finds a footnote in the Critique Of Judgement where Kant gives an example, so it's the innocent flower in the innocent footnote that brings the prohibition against the frame/ornament/example/footnote tumbling down and ahhh he was just so delightfully clever with stuff like this.)
FoundViaTwitter
1hr ago
Part of revolutionary terror theory is that it's not just about killing the individuals, but destroying the society they were a part of in a way that it cannot come back from. You secure the revolution by preventing counter-revolution, and you can prevent the counter-revolution by making would-be counter-revolutionaries complicit in the revolution, so that its loss would lose them.
Doesn't sound all that different from Nazism.
FoundViaTwitter
1hr ago
who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?
About half of the people who read this sentence, I'd wager.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
I would like you to illustrate how a state governed by the principles of Marxism would be superior in securing "value" for people (however you define this) as opposed to capitalism.
I'm not a Marxist (although I do think they make some good points that are worth taking into serious consideration), so I'm not here to defend Marxism qua Marxism, and I'm certainly not here to defend the specific economic policies of the USSR or China. I just want to help people understand what classical Marxists actually believe, so that when they reject Marxism, they have a better idea of what they're rejecting.
"A state governed by the principles of Marxism" is a bit of a misnomer (besides the fact that Marx thought that advanced communism would bring about the dissolution of the state). Marx was intentionally very light on specific details about how a "communist society" would work; we can say what communism is abstractly, but not concretely. Because communism will involve a fundamental transformation of human subjectivity (according to Marx), it's impossible to predict exactly how it will work, because we can't extrapolate from human behavior under capitalism to predict human behavior under communism.
Marx never said "you have to immediately and forcibly collectivize all farmland". What he did say is that there needed to be a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which the proletariat would commandeer state power and use it to begin the process of overcoming capitalism. But no one can decide for the proletariat how they should go about this or what exactly this process should look like; they have to decide it for themselves, concretely, as they struggle through the actual process. (I think the DotP is a bad and unworkable idea for many reasons, which in turn is one of the many reasons why I'm not a Marxist.)
As such I find Marxists are really good at subversive critique of the existing order
That's largely the point, yes. The best way I heard it explained was, "Marxism was not the proletarian socialist movement; it was the self-critique of the proletarian socialist movement". And I think that's correct. Marx certainly did not invent socialism, the workers' movements preceded him, their demands preceded him. Marxism was intended to be a type of self-criticism that would bring the socialist movement to self-consciousness. The incessant Socratic questioning of the Marxists was directed just as much at the socialists themselves as it was at broader capitalist society, if not more so.
their vision for society is extremely ill-defined
Guilty as charged, yes. I think all the sophisticated ones would admit to this.
You've admitted that the need for survival and security is "pretty hard to get around". Guess what having weapons is meant to help with? Arms races that involve the production of resources are a fact of life in any remotely multipolar system
Yes of course. I'm no pacifist. I was mainly asking that question as a way of probing faceh's thoughts on value.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
Why not have literal whores become politicians?
With a little plausible deniability, a whore can already become Vice President of the United States. The list of male politicians who started their career as a catamite would also be interesting if we knew exactly who was on it.
Directional whoring is pretty much the overtly default career of young (and not so young) women in the West.
This seems false to me. PUA's, incels, and feminists with MSM megaphones all agree that young women who are not sex workers are competing harder because they are competing for the attention of a minority of high-quality men (for various values of high-quality), not because they are trying to maximise the financial return on their dating life.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
Billionaires aren’t generally spending billions of dollars on material goods (maybe hundreds of millions); instead, they are making capital allocation decisions. Trying to tax billionaires is (I) distorting capital allocation and (ii) transferring capital from investment to consumption.
pbmonster
1hr ago
I think addictive potential is individual, both in the type of game and the degree.
I never found the hooks World of Warcraft and Diablo try to deploy appealing, but Civilization or Factorio are like crack for me. I also banned myself from ever getting Baldurs Gate 3, after sinking four digits worth of hours into BioWare's discography during my youth.
Botond173
2hr ago
With regards to the spectrum it was pointed out in the original thread that Playboy has become completely normalized as a mainstream product with a multitude of otherwise average wives (mostly suburban middle-class and higher-middle-class ones I imagine, but still) being OK with their husbands buying and reading it. This is an important difference. What obviously happened in this case is that a former porn ‘actress’ wasn’t knowingly selected for a political role i.e. whoever permitted her to be a district coordinator didn’t bother to do any serious background check.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
bridgebuilder, but rather as a dicksucker.
The original version of this meme involved goats. I don't think a guy sucking dick is sufficiently transgressive to trigger the meme, and a girl sucking dick (you don't specify sex, and it doesn't matter for the goat version) definitely isn't, even in cultures where hetero oral is taboo. Among the men who metaphorically "built a thousand bridges" while sucking dick on the side, the only one who is more famous as a dicksucker than a bridgebuilder is Oscar Wilde, and only because he sued the Marquess of Queensbury.
Random question to @georgioz - where in the English-speaking world are you where "dicksucker" is more idiomatic than "cocksucker"?
Botond173
2hr ago
I agree with FiveHourMarathon. To the extent they still exist, they are a gimmick/oddity/collectible/curiosity.
I’ll not call her an actress for three reasons.
She ‘acted’ in something that cannot even reasonably be called a porn movie, to the extent that those even exist anymore. Appearing only in one casting video means you didn’t get cast and thus you aren't an actress.
Actresses in the everyday sense of the word are professionals with the corresponding studies and training. This she ain’t.
If her activity counts as acting, we might as well call all prostitutes and escorts actresses, which clearly belongs to the realm of nonsense.
'Porner' is appropriate.
I figure the assessment is different in countries that fought directly against him. I've seen people in Stalin t-shirts, Stalinface parodies of the Andy Warhol campbell soup photo, and academics having a printed image macro with "you're just mad / cuz I'm Stalin on you" taped to their door, in Germany and various parts of the anglophone sphere.
More options
Context Copy link