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VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I don't think you're being crazy here: there have been a number of announced foiled plots to attack EU arms manufacturers.
But it's not inconceivable that it was a garden-variety industrial accident, which do happen from time to time. PEPCON in 1988 in Nevada has some loose ends, but I haven't seen foreign sabotage seriously suggested even though the company was supplying solid rocket fuel for both the Space Shuttle and ICBMs. The USCSB series of videos on chemical plant accidents is sobering, if nothing else.
On the gripping hand, telling the public even if there were evidence of malfeasance inherently would raise the stakes towards calls for open warfare, and I can see an argument for responding in a subtle, yet clear-to-the-counterparty way under the table.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
I addressed this in another comment - because when the system had been initially created, IRS wasn't supposed to have most of the information - at least not routinely, they could get a court order or such if they have reasonable suspicion you're cheating, but otherwise they wouldn't have the full picture. Since then, a lot changed, and now pretty much everything is reported to the IRS. But the system is still arranged as if IRS doesn't have the full picture, even though it does, and since now there are massive companies built essentially on tracking what IRS has and re-implementing it in a user-friendly way - and the IRS itself does not implement any user-facing interface to it - we have barriers to change. IRS would have to budget some investment (not large on the scale of federal government, but not insignificant in absolute numbers, probably tens of millions of dollars at least, maybe more) to implement a user-facing system that could be efficiently used by taxpayers, and the incumbents would lobby very hard against it, claiming this already exists as a private solution (which is true) and the feds squeezing out private business is unacceptable (which is usually true in general, but in this particular case is not, but they can make it look true).
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
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.
True, but building up a cadre willing and able to implement that plan requires significant preparation, and during that preparation the naïve will claim the ideology is all about peace and love, the brotherhood of man, and gradual, incremental, painless reform.
Neither the Frankfurt School nor Social Justice activists, despite their faults, desire that.
This man saw a political opponent murdered in front of him, and his instinctive reaction was to begin dancing and cheering in exuberant celebration. Why do you think he did that?
We've already seen Social Justice lead directly to the celebration and implementation of large-scale, lawless, organized political violence, including cold-blooded murder. We've already seen Social Justice lead directly to both the attempted removal of policing, and also the draconian and illegitimate use of police powers against dissenters. The (surviving) previous generation of violent Marxist radicals got tenure, and are considered luminaries by their intellectual progeny.
Social Justice academia is overrun with arguments for the necessity and inevitability of Revolution. Social Justice culture, likewise, is typified by a totalizing model wherein the forces of oppression permeate every facet of society and only a complete leveling and reconstruction can deliver a truly just society. We've had a decade to observe how these cultural assumptions interact with our society's formal and informal power structures, and the answer seems clear to me: they aim to amass and wield absolute, unaccountable power without limit or restraint, and more "moderate" forms of Progressive culture are set up to pointedly ignore, cover for and enable the harms they cause.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Not "just", "partially inspired by", the same way it was by Marx.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Someone should have probably said that when cultural Marxists started calling themselves that.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
So...is there any reporting whatsoever on the giant explosion that killed at least sixteen at an explosives factory in Tennessee?
The latest I can find on it seems to be treating it as most likely an industrial accident, but secondarily a "criminal" matter. The company website appears to have been turned into a flat landing page about the accident.
The early-morning Friday explosion at Accurate Energetic Systems, a manufacturing plant for military and demolition explosives, was a “devastating blast,” Davis said, noting responders were able to secure the site by late morning. The detonation – which was so large that it registered as a 1.6 magnitude earthquake, according to data from U.S. Geological Survey – left charred debris and mangled vehicles across the area. The blast set off smaller explosions, local officials said, and shook homes as far as 15 miles away while scattering debris over half a square mile. Accurate Energetic Systems called the incident at its facility a “tragic accident,” in a Friday statement. Davis described the event as one of “the most devastating scenes” he has ever seen. “It’s hell,” Davis told reporters Friday evening. “It’s hell on us. It’s hell on everybody involved.”
The NYT is treating it as an accident, headlining their work "Detonation Underscores Inherent Dangers of Manufacturing Explosives." This appears to be back page news across the country. I saw it reported in the paper, and a passing mention on CNBC.
But what shocks me is that the right wing news organizations aren't looking into it! Quickly glancing at the websites of FoxNews, OANN, and Breitbart at noon today, I didn't see one of them mentioning it on their front page. Instead headlines were devoted to such pressing issues as some kind of drummed up urban conflict storyline, a state department employee who mishandled classified documents, and Charlie Kirk. Breitbart in particular has their top article: Exposed: The CCP’s United Front Network in America’s Heartland, Part III engaging in extensive conspiracy theories about CCP influence in the United States. But WHY AREN'T THEY TALKING ABOUT THE REALLY REALLY LIKELY RUSSIAN SABOTAGE THAT JUST HAPPENED IN TENNESSEE KILLING 16 AMERICAN CITIZENS AND DESTROYING AN INDUSTRIAL DEFENSE CONCERN?
It seems really bleedingly obvious to me. We have the facts: that Trump announced publicly that he would offer targeting help to Ukraine and is thinking about adding Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine's quiver. Then, not a few days later, a defense plant in Tennessee blows up. Is it not clear that the latter is likely to be a consequence of the former? Russia covertly blows up a defense plant, to tell the USA "we can touch you, don't think we can't."
I might be tinfoil-hatting here. But what's making me tinfoil hat is that nobody else is tinfoil hatting! Even the people who are normally tinfoil hatting! The New York Times and the TurboLib MSNBC contingent has been seeing Russia's wicked hand everywhere since 2016, and more than ever since the war in the Ukraine began. Why are they ignoring the likelihood that Russia killed 16 American citizens? OANN sees wicked foreigners behind every corner seeking to undermine America, why aren't they at least floating the possibility that a foreign saboteur just undermined America's industrial strength? Breitbart doesn't have high standards for proof when reporting on possible foreign conspiracies, and they aren't saying anything!
What's going on here? Am I crazy?
The only explanations I can come to are that it was the Russians, and that's why it isn't being speculated in the news that it was the Russians. Either that the government is shutting everyone up quietly to avoid panic. Or that it was the Russians and they have enough pull with Breitbart to keep them quiet. Because I genuinely can't believe I'm not seeing speculation about this. Talk me off the ledge here guys.
I don't think it's quite so bad as you say. I wasn't referring to 19th century industrialists when I said "liberal", I was referring to the American center-left of the 1960's, the architects of the Civil Rights Act.
Critical Race Theorists were explicitly opposed to them, claiming that the liberal / center-left approach doesn't go far enough. A lot of their ideas gained prominence recently in the forms of BLM, DEI, "racism = prejudice + power", "colorblind racism", etc. These people's scholarly lineage draws a straight line through generations of Marxist thinkers, and straight back to Marx himself.
You can call it a bastardization of his thought, if you want, I think Marx himself told one of his descendants "bro, if this is Marxism, than I'm not a Marxist", so it wouldn't even be the first time it happened. But your uncle is straightforwardly right about DEI, and your denials are just inadvertant gaslighting. Like, some of these people literally and explicitly called themselves "cultural Marxists".
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
Ah, my bad, I didn't mean qualify for all of them simultaneously. Rather, qualify by having some undefined number larger than one of those traits. Vague, yes, I know.
Can you explain this a bit more?
Not with much clarity. OP has a point, many societies have priestly class, social role, and some part of it is filled by the Priestly-type, individual psychology. The psychological need is constant, but the available options are historically contingent.
I listed some of the things that help guide the psychology of Priestly-type to meaning and zeal. The printing press and the October Revolution happened. The former helped democratize literacy, thus enabling the spread ideas to more Priestly-types, and the latter was added to the catalog of ideas that the Priestly-type now access and maintain. The catalog grows, and Priestly-types continue to splinter, branch, and find novel doctrinal positions.
I didn't mean to imply that we can't find zeal in the past, only that we won't find Marxist Priests there. That sounds boring and obvious to write, but it doesn't feel boring in my head. The catalog of ideas has exploded in size, and it continues to grow at an incredible rate. So if we were to say the population is 15% Priestly-type psychologies, accept they have "an outsized effect on society," then it seems relevant just how many varied positions of meaning Priestly-types defend now. But, I need to think about thinking about it some more.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
It's fair to say that the CRA is central in the history of social justice activism, right?
Sort of. There was a whole conflict between the liberals that actually made the CRA happen, and Critical Race Theorists, who had a much more radical vision, and were salty about the liberal one winning out.
The latter aren't likely to say nowadays (they did in the past though) that they the CRA was bad, because that would make them even less popular than they are now, but they will put out memes that go directly against the philosophy of the Civil Rights movement (for example seeing "there is only one race, the human race", or "I don't see color" as expressions of racism).
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!"
No, not really. Like I said, Critical Race Theory thinkers studied directly under them. It would be bizarre if they never heard of their theories, and took no inrerest in them. I think the most reasonable interpretation of their silence is complete approval of the crazy woke theries you claim they would have opposed.
and rebelliousness/insufficient patriotism. Not a lot about it being too Jewish.
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 not so much.
After the rebellion this association would have been even stronger. Which explains the Christian efforts to distinguish themselves in their Gospels.
hydroacetylene
1d 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
1d ago
· Edited 1d 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.
Lastly, my personal experience as someone fairly deeply embedded in academia and acquainted with many Social Justice activists is that questioning any particular tenet of the movement on a philosophical level (like, "why is it actually desirable that black people get the same average salaries?" or "wasn't colonialism a net good?") will inevitably be answered with arguments from/concrete references to publications that explicitly situate themselves in the CT tradition. If the typical follower believes that SJ is fundamentally moral because its morality is asserted by a selection of activists and intellectuals they trust, those trusted assertions of morality are grounded in Critical Theory, and Critical Theory is grounded in Marxism, is it fair to assert that SJ is Marxist? My sense is yes, but there is obviously some nuance there.
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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d ago
Ah yes, the classic Yankee Doodle strat.
hydroacetylene
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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.
What really used to get me were the diminutives, which are not intuitive to an English speaker. Ilya doesn't naturally turn Ilushka in my mind.
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