domain:moultano.wordpress.com
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
1d 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
1d 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 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 non-specific, either; many broad goals are laid out, including abolition of land and collectivisation of production by the state, and it notes 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
1d 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.
1d 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.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
· Edited 1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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.
quiet_NaN
1d 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?
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.
If you want to play purer-than-thou, I think appearing in a magazine which is famously providing jerk-off material is not very pure even if you don't have your tits out. If you are posing for underwear, you can always say "the main motivation is to sell a product by appearing sexy to customers (mostly women), and if the odd pervert uses the ads as visual aid for masturbation, that it entirely incidental". Appear in playboy, and it becomes much harder to argue that guys becoming aroused by your picture was just an unintended side effect.
Personally, I do not believe that sex work should matter for politics. If a male politician paid a hooker for a blowjob I do not care. If he paid a domina for getting his hole fisted, as you might phrase it, I don't care. If some politician of either gender appeared as the centerpiece of a gangbang video, I do not care.
Of course, the other aspect is hypocrisy. If you have a party which is very much into sexual purity, then at some point the opposition is might point out the difference in what you preach and what you practice. If you or your mistress had an abortion, that is fair to point out when you are running an anti-abortion campaign. If your party is very anti-gay, then you visiting gay nightclubs might suddenly become newsworthy.
I am not knowledgeable enough about Hungarian politics to say how much either party is into sexual purity. 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.
In some respect all circumstances are unique. But gaining access to seaports on the Baltic and Black Sea were foundational to Russia’s concept of itself as a modern state. Losing its Black Sea territory would be a humiliation for them that would be setting them back to before the 1700s.
I understand that is probably the goal of US foreign policy - dismantling Russia into a pre-modern medieval rump state around Moscow. But Russia also understands that is the goal and they have 100 million people and the world’s largest nuke supply to prevent it. Personally, I think we should just trade with each other and get along. I doubt ending the modern Russian state as such will make the world a better place
Ukraine had been Russian for a very long time. Longer than the USA has existed. Much longer than Florida has been a state. These things matter. We are blessed with the world’s largest moat so we have little sympathy for other countries who are faced with the prospect of losing territory.
For us, I imagine our first realistic national humiliation will be when Hawaii is taken by China. I imagine we will fight very hard against that
I don't want to dwell too much on this topic, but could it be that these more horrific types of tortures were limited to just a handful of people and the rest were summarily executed?
Nah. Not just the cruelty, but the complicity, was the point. Clinical and targeted actions by a minority would be counter-revolutionary.
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.
Part of that, in turn, was encouraging/pressuring/coercing other members of society into complicity. In more 'civilized' / stable communist societies, this entailed the use of domestic surveillance states where people spied on friends/family/other breaks of social trust that- if revealed- would ruin their ability to operate outside of the state. In revolutionary terror periods, more direct violence, often mob violence, is the way to build complicity on the perpetrators. People who partake in public violence/torture/etc. with the sanction of the state against public enemies are not only unlikely to turn against the state, but are also more likely to rationalize that what the state does is morally justified and not worth bringing to just account, for what the state did was what they did and people tend to rather rationalize their actions than want to confess and condemn themselves.
Both extremes- 'mere' surveillance state participation or revolutionary terror- work on the same principle of breaking down social trust in favor of the state. The crime / moral violation forever separates people from their victims, who are the other part of society. Who can re-trust a spouse or friend they knew betrayed their most secret trusts? Who will trust a promise to agree to disagree from someone who split another's head open for ideological failure? Once you do an indisputably unjust thing in service of the unjust state, that makes you both an accomplice of the state and having an interest in maintaining it against the people who would bring it to account, for justice against it could also mean justice against you.
This tendency works better the more of the population you turn against the rest, and the more extreme the injustice. If it were 'just a handful of people,' then the crimes of the revolution could be projected/shifted to that tiny minority, and by proxy 'absolve' the rest. This is counter-revolutionary, because the goal of the revolution is to claim and change the people, not give them an easy target and rationalization for rejecting the revolution.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
“In conclusion” was already bad writing long before AI.
RenOS
something is wrong
1d ago
Lots of people do different things at different times for different reasons. Generally though they do leave positions they hate, but I still agree with you that their behaviour is a bit more self-serving than they really want to admit. Usually, nobody really forced them into that in the first place, and it wasn't even necessary. It just made things easier for them. They often stay just long enough in those questionable but very well paying positions to get fuck-you money, and then pseudo-retire to more socially-conscious positions that earn enough to get by, and they donate just enough for it to be noteworthy, but not enough to really feel the hit all that much.
But tbh I think this is to some degree hardwired human male behaviour, and to some other degree simply game-theoretically optimal. If you're young and unestablished, meaning you need to carve out your place, you want to be aggressive and competitive, which includes morally dubious behaviour; When you're older and already established, you want to be cautious and close off as many avenues of attack as possible. You can be cautious from the start and probably will do fine, but not reach quite as high; You can stay aggressive and keep the top a little bit longer, but you risk losing at the young man's game catastrophically.
The_Golem101
1d ago
His point as I understand was, 1) Ukrainians are bitter, because 2) they only fought because (stressed in all caps above) the USA assured them they would get US support and therefore defeat Russia and 3) this has proved a disaster and Ukrainians regret trusting the US and the war deaths could have been largely avoided had they known the all the above - furthermore these war deaths are half a million as Russia claims.
My point is no Ukrainian I know would express those 3, and they're extremely Russian coded. If No_one wishes to correct this misunderstanding I am all ears. Heaven knows it's hard to be clear on this forum, and I'm feeling a bit confused myself.
I worry there's a motte and bailey here - the motte being "Ukrainians would like more support from the USA, and feel that they're hot and cold which isn't helpful to the war effort" and the bailey being "Ukrainians fought the war because the USA promised them the moon and couldn't deliver, and are very bitter, and the deaths could have been avoided without the US meddling".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d 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?
They’re equivalent because they’re both equally fine, and both equally unworthy of further attention.
The same site also lists Animal Farm and Nineteen eighty-four as staples of English courses. I agree that Orwell intended Nineteen eighty-four to be a general warning against totalitarianism but both when it was published in 1948 and now it is seen as primarily anti-Communist. Animal Farm is straightforwardly anti-Communist.
FWIW, the anti-Nazi lit I was exposed to in school was mostly of the refugee memoir variety (The Silver Sword and I am David) which doesn't represent the USSR very positively either. We also read Animal Farm and we looked at excerpts from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when we were studying "Why translating serious literary fiction is hard."
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I went to an establishment in North Carolina called Biscuits N Porn, that sold breakfast sandwiches and porn magazines. They seemed to have a large number of them on sale, though it was more of a theme/gimmick than a real sales item.
Sadly, this wasn't to last - [Red Wing Irish Setter Moc Toes] finally gave up the ghost, and will require submission to a cobbler and a resole(if possible) to continue their use for years to come.
I wear a pair of Iron Rangers about 100 days per year, and have been for the last... 17 years (damn, time flies). They need a new heel about every second year, and a complete resole every 4 years.
For the resole, I just send them to Red Wing directly. It's around $130, I think. They're gone for a few weeks over the summer, then they return completely rebuilt with new, original soles. On one of the first resoles, I asked the cobbler if he could use the vibram sole from the Red Wing Beckman instead of the original leather sole from the Iron Ranger (since the leather soles are extremely slippery in mud and snow) - no problem, looks perfect.
Love those shoes.
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.
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.)
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