domain:archive.ph
Throwaway05
1d ago
It's my favorite book but it can be Work.
I am shocked at how it only seems to become more prescient as I age.*
*and disturbed.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Ya'll don't have review books over there?
Dang.
Also medical classification systems are great. Fight me bro.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1d ago
Interesting. After discovering that One Battle After Another was based on Vineland, I've wanted to read it to get a feel for the source material, all the more so since I made my way through Gravity's Rainbow and well remember the sense of,"what in the actual fuck did I just read," stupefied awe that I felt afterwards. I kinda want to read it both less and more at the same time after that description!
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Crime really is down compared to the crack era, and New York City is reasonably safe, even after COVID-era backsliding. It's not the only city in the country, though. Chicago in particular has a much higher murder rate, with Philadelphia not far behind. And not to leave red state cities out -- both Dallas and Houston are pretty bad. And Atlanta's will knock your socks off (well, strip them from your corpse, most likely)
Repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 probably is neither necessary nor sufficient. But you do need to refuse to allow racial considerations to interfere with stopping serious crime, which might involve some of the law around that act.
There's Left Behind in Rosedale and Philly War Zone; I've heard stories similar to the latter about Baltimore also. "White flight" was in large part ethnic cleansing, and we're still dealing with the results of that.
aqouta
1d ago
If the Palestinians can give up on the pipe dream of driving the jews into the sea then a two or three state solution where both peoples prosper is totally possible. It's essentially the direction Trump's plan pushes things. What you're asking for is a near equivalent to demands all non-native americans leave turtle island and go back to the countries of their ethnic origin, justice by some tortured ethic but simply not going to happen and the sooner the fantasy is dispensed with the sooner real solutions can be tried.
I'm sorry, the Israelis are not going to lay down and let themselves all be killed or expelled from what they believe to be their homeland. If your plan is for them to do that then you need to come up with another plan.
DiscourseMagnus
1d ago
Maybe add Sally Hemings to the $2 alongside Thomas Jefferson?
JarJarJedi
1d ago
I don't know how it is in Sweden, but in the US I am not a big entrepreneur but I have to take into account, beyond my salary:
- Freelancing income - plus expenses, plus SEP IRA linked to that income
- Income from bank deposits
- Income from stock (is taxed differently from above and has a myriad rules like short/long term, wash sales, etc.)
- HSA
- IRA
- Local tax deductions
- Mortgage deductions
- Charity deductions
It became a bit simpler recently when standard deduction had been raised so most of these deductions aren't worth itemizing anymore, but before that I had to deal with it all. Obviously my workplace has no idea about any of it and can't deal with it. Some of them (like taxing income from bank deposits) can be done by the banks, but other stuff can only be properly calculated by somebody having the full picture, i.e. the IRS. Oh yes, and for many of those the actual tax level depends on my income. And not just plain income, but modified adjusted income (real term) - to calculate which you need to check a couple of dozens of rules on which parts are "modified" and which are "adjusted", and all of it depends on all of everything else, pretty much.
And it's not pocket change either - if it's not done right, the difference can easily be hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars even for mid-tier income like mine. IRS could calculate it all (well, except state taxes which is different rules in every single one of them) - but nobody else, realistically, could do it without me giving them all the data and them recreating what IRS has from scratch. Which is what H&R, Intuit and such are charging the money for.
And to be clear here - my taxes are very simple, comparatively. People have massively more complicated tax situations that I do. I'm still in the DIY zone, people with more complex taxes just hire somebody to do it for them, because there's no way a layman can figure it out.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d 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.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
A standalone top level post needs a blurb or explainer for why it's relevant to this forum. If you went ahead and did that, we'll let this through the queue.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1d ago
That was a fantastic read, cheers. I liked his list of jobs for modern shamans in particular.
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.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
Yes, Marwhan Bargouti has been referred to as the Palestinian Mandela for quite some time. The Israelis refuse to release him from prison and repeatedly torture him in order to make sure there's no peaceful resolution to the conflict beyond the extermination of the Palestinians (to the best of my understanding - maybe there's an alternative and more charitable explanation, but if there is I haven't found it).
Supah_Schmendrick
1d 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.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
1d ago
So they do have a Nelson Mandela?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
I don't think that the Israel issue is over - even though the focus might change away from Palestine, my money on the next major issue in US politics is the US-Israel relationship. The current arrangement isn't sustainable, and the polling I've seen suggests that a majority of Americans want AIPAC and Israel brought to heel. There's no way this particular milk gets unspilled, and none of the normies who supported Palestine because it was the Current Thing are going to forget what they saw Zionists and those funded by them do. The activists are already hard at work on projects like the Hind Rajab foundation and other efforts to make sure the world does not forget what Israel did. The outsize influence of Israel over western governments is being pulled into the spotlight all over the world, and the consequences of that conflict have in no way finished playing themselves out. Given that Israel is potentially going to be restarting the conflict with Iran and drawing the US in to that fight as well, I don't think this particular issue is going to leave "current thing" status barring some other major event (AGI getting achieved, climate disaster, another pandemic, another war, etc).
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Genuinely asking, who is the "they" in "they need to seize the means of cultural production"
Who are the cultural Marxists? Because the people Lobster Daddy hates have been in control of art, universities, etc for the back half of the 20th century and all of the 21st
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
If the money never leaves that other company, never returns to the US and then never gets paid to those executives then I don't think there's any issues with letting those other countries tax it. I don't think there are any issues with saying that money your company never actually lays hands on (a foreign subsidiary does instead) isn't subject to taxation. Of course, if you can't actually bring any money back from a foreign subsidiary there's not much point to having them....
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
Israel will no longer be fighting with one arm tied behind their back.
Israel was lining Palestinians up and then crushing them with bulldozers (see the story about the IDF soldier who killed himself because he couldn't live with being the driver), on top of torturing people with downs syndrome (Mohammad Bhar) and murdering small children (Hind Rajab). They deployed more explosive power relative to the size of their target than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you think this is them being restrained, you're making the case that Israel needs to be removed from the Earth before they can do this to anyone else.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I mostly lurk because I don't feel like I have much to contribute and everyone around here seems to know what they're talking about, or at least is good enough at rhetoric to fool me.
Hey, having nothing useful to contribute doesn't stop some people! Don't let it dissuade you, you're probably wrong on that front.
But yes, having thick skin is a major benefit when it comes to regular participation on the Motte. I would encourage you to dip your toes in the water in the less contentious threads, like you're doing right now.
And my study habits were probably unhealthy. I had a few friends in med school and was generally very well liked by people who knew me, but I had more than a few people say to me at some point in our 4th year "damn wsgy why weren't we better friends? You're a great hang!". I had kind of partied way too much in university and overcorrected.
Such a shame. My parents would have loved to have you instead of me. Well, not because I partied too much (I didn't, at least in med school), but because they wished I'd studied.
I'm not actually too worried about the kids in the grand scheme of things. But it's like having one of your vital organs removed from your body and giving it a mind of its own. You can't help but get at least a bit neurotic about it getting damaged.
A fair point. It's easy for me to talk about adopting a laissez-faire attitude towards children I don't have. The changes parenthood provoke are scary, but also strangely comforting. One's own struggle and strife seem so inconsequential when there are little people who need you. Yours will turn out great!
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
Actually that person, Marwhan Bargouti, is currently in an Israeli prison being repeatedly tortured. The Palestinians keep trying to get him released and think that he'd be the best possible leader (he convincingly clears every poll for preferred leader), which is presumably why the Israelis are trying to make sure he will never get out.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
How do you rate scenario 2 as more likely than scenario 1???
The IDF is one of the most formidable militaries on planet earth, who's primary opponents (Arabs) have one of the worst track records of modern warfighting and who's societies/institutions make them absolutely AWFUL at it.
How on earth do you imagine Israel (who also has nukes) losing?
gog
1d ago
OG Marxism says that the key to true freedom is for the proletariat to seize the means of industrial production because they are materially oppressed. Cultural Marxism says they need to seize the means of cultural production (art, universities, etc) because they are socially oppressed. Replace "economic status" with "cultural status." Hence "cultural Marxism."
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1d ago
So, this is exactly the sort of thing that can get brushed off as being simple bigotry; you just seem to prefer a level of segregation which cities don't provide. But I think it's worth thinking about.
When I wrote out my theory of The Four Failures of blue governance, the first thing I listed was Safety and Order, and I think there's a real tendency for people to talk past each other here; urbanists are particularly fond of saucy memes on that front, but you're literally half as likely to meet an untimely end in New York City as you are in rural America; the murder rate is comparably low, but car crashes make the big difference.
But that's unsatisfying in the same way that someone pointing out complete apathy in the face of brazen and repeated theft being given a lecture about wage theft; it's just whataboutism.
I came across this thread recapping Left Behind in Rosedale, which details how white people violently resisted the integration of their neighborhoods because they feared they would be the victims of violent crime, and then their neighborhoods were integrated, and the people who couldn't leave were violently victimized by the black people who moved in, and below that, the social capital, the ability to know your neighbors and go outside at night and feel safe, all of that just vanished. And it's left some kind of scar that the official narrative here is that white people resisted integration for absolutely no reason, and then we had integration, and the good guys won. Because that's not what people experienced. Just like the official narrative is that there was no reason for purity taboos either.
There are plenty of ideas about how to make things better well outside the right (The Atlantic ran this; Jennifer Doleac writes extensively on the topic; Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias do as well), and as far as we can tell, crime really is way down from the 90s. But how can there be any credibility without reckoning with the past?
FtttG
1d ago
Firing tank shells into Churches
From what I can gather it was a fragment of a single tank shell which struck a single church by mistake. Your hyperbolic condemnation of every single thing Israel does is counterproductive.
Imagination works fundamentally unconstrained from physical reality, for a start. We can 'imagine' and see things like numbers, that have basically no real physical basis, and change the world from them. The list goes on and on.
If you're genuinely curious about this, I recommend the book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.
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