domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
dunce tutoring
I assume this is a typo for "dance", but I find it rather amusing.
JTarrou
2hr ago
It's all right in front of you. This is a belief system that posits "scientific" politics as a substitute for what christians would call "godliness". "Science" is the clerisy that interprets the Moral Arc of History (the Popular Will, or Will of God) and informs the initiated what the correct Just Being A Decent Human Being (politically correct, christian) behavior is. Marx was just the first big one to take off during the religious doldrums of the second half of the nineteenth century, and so it is his name most associated with all the related sects that squabble among us to this day. From the enlightenment until now, this has been the pattern. The first attempt in France to replace Christianity failed miserably, the second in Russia worked, sort of, for a while. The third, in the west has been more successful, largely by free-riding on western military power and religious tolerance. But here too, we see cracks forming.
Mantergeistmann
2hr ago
You can hardly ask the Israelis to stop fighting and wait for the Palestinians to catch up in the kill count.
I feel like the definition of the term "proportionality" as a military/conflict term was one of the major casualties of this war, but I also don't think it matters. If Israel were to have shut down the Iron Dome, so more of its own civilians were being killed, those misusing the term proportionality wouldn't have changed to "well, now it's not genocide/war crimes because the Israeli deaths are closer in count to the Palestinian deaths", it would be "good, that's what they deserve for attacking Gaza." At least, among the die-hards, rather than the normie supporters who hear about a bad thing on social media and take their views/marching orders from it. They'd just go along with whatever the newest talking point was instead.
I feel like it might be a tad uncharitable to have said that, but I've never seen anyone change their mind when confronted with the text or context of the various laws and regulations that cover waging ethical and legal warfare.
Mantergeistmann
2hr ago
If a domestic abuse victim moves out because they finally found a safe place to stay instead, it feels weird to say "well, they didn't leave because of the abuse".
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
It is all the abstracted christian heretical sect
As I wrote before:
That's [wokism as Christian heresy] an interesting claim, considering that it came significantly out of atheism. E.g.:
Most movement atheists weren’t in it for the religion. They were in it for the hamartiology [the study of sin, in particular, how sin enters the universe]. Once they got the message that the culture-at-large had settled on a different, better hamartiology, there was no psychological impediment to switching over. We woke up one morning and the atheist bloggers had all quietly became social justice bloggers. Nothing else had changed because nothing else had to; the underlying itch being scratched was the same. They just had to CTRL+F and replace a couple of keywords.
I'm pretty doubtful that if one examines the continental->critical philosophy pipeline that may have undergirded some of the trend, one would find a pool of Christian heretics, either. I guess if you say that all the atheism is just Christian heresy (would be quite a claim) and that Wokism is just atheist heresy, blink and imagine some form of transitive property, you might be able to think that Wokism is just Christian heresy.
The last time, it seemed like most of the response was to actually entertain the idea that atheism is just Christian heresy rather than contest that Wokism was just atheist heresy. There was some discussion on whether or not that was justifiable, but no real discussion on whether any sort of transitive property could be used to make Wokism a Christian heresy through the intermediary of atheism.
2rafa
2hr ago
The bulk of the peasantry and proletariat in the region would gladly throw everything at Israel. The leadership refuse because of a number of reasons; the connection between Hamas and other Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood that wants to overthrow the Egyptian military regime, those who would destabilize the Jordanian monarchy etc; the fact that the US supports Israel; the fact that the IDF could destroy their militaries leaving them vulnerable to domestic upheaval (see the first reason) and so on.
However, if Israel appears weak, these same governments may be unable to resist popular pressure to give in to the people and mount an invasion. This would be especially true if there was a Palestinian uprising. In addition, Egypt may well eventually fall to an Islamist government.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2hr ago
giving it to trump also seems very premature
Not least because it's awarded for deeds done before the year 2025. How exactly did Trump advance peace in 2024 when he wasn't even a president?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2hr ago
We are generally lax about modding when it comes to insulting public figures, but "Lobster Daddy" doesn't really express much but your contempt and seems meant only to provoke people. Don't use whatever cute nickname some person's enemies use for him on Twitter.
Bingbong
2hr ago
Yeah but on the other hand I'd expect the majority of BLM people wouldn't have really changed their minds on the underlying subject, just buried it underneath other issues in terms of primacy.
Bingbong
2hr ago
If you put it to the same standard as Obama getting one for being Brown, charismatic and existing it is a bit of a robbery considering Trump's actually secured Peace in places
Bingbong
2hr ago
Yes but if the boot were on the other foot (assuming somehow the Palestinians were militarily paramount to the same degree, maybe via the act of a warlock) the Palestinians would actually carry out an effective genocide instead of awkwardly trying to ferret out a deeply-buried guerilla insurgency without doing too much damage to civilian populations.
Bingbong
2hr ago
Israel's already got a fairly sizeable Arabic population. Of course, adding the Palestinians on top of that and retaining democracy and what makes Israel a successful state is difficult, but even a literal apartheid in terms of voting rights would still likely produce better economic and lifestyle outcomes for the average Palestinian Arab Israeli than the current status quo.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
People with Autism and people with "Autism" are very different. There is a large community of people in the US who have a number of the conditions on this list by their own understanding but are really just someone with BPD.
"Yes I have depression, anxiety, PTSD, EDS, mast cell blah blah and 5 allergies as well as a non-typical gender presentation." That person is a borderline who refuses diagnosis or is not diagnosed.
This is so wildly off base.
Additionally most of these people are women. Women aren't really priests in the abrahamic tradition and the emotional instability associated with these people is not a good fit for priestliness.
Most of the listed disorders are incompatible with leadership and gravitas.
Bingbong
3hr ago
I think you're overestimating how much the broader Muslim world cares about the Palestinian cause, or atleast the adults in charge of other nations.
Obviously the calculus could change if Israel were already weak/vulnerable, but there's a reason most of the other countries in the region try their best to ignore what's going on.
JTarrou
3hr ago
We call by many names the "successor ideology", "wokeness", "PC", "Cultural Marxism" etc. It is all the abstracted christian heretical sect which has no true ideology except opposition to western society and its economic and military success. These are deracinated christian cultists who believe the US is the devil. It really isn't much deeper than that. Any number of political, social or entirely imaginary theories will be propagated to hold up this structure, but it really is just oikophobia at the root.
That this ideology is the ruling ideology of the western empire, which legitimates their expansion of empire, is merely the crowning irony.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
I think you're assuming a more stable ideology behind some key feminist terms than actually exist. I don't think, for instance, that using the terms 'patriarchy', 'sexism', or 'misogyny' necessarily implies that the user subscribes to a particular "highly coherent ideological structure". The latter two, in fact, are regularly used by non-feminists. 'Sexism' and 'misogyny' have clearly understood general meanings (discrimination based on sex and hatred of women) and are obviously compatible with a wide range of feminist beliefs, including those more or less influenced by Marxist thought. 'Patriarchy' is a bit more specific but I think that among feminists it does admit of different interpretations - 'patriarchy' is a word for a general social bias in favour of men, and anything past that is the subject of debate internal to feminism. This is why the word 'patriarchy' itself is contested and opposed by some feminists; 'kyriarchy' is an alternative that some prefer.
I don't see here a coherent ideology 'isomorphic to Capitalism in Marxist ideology'. To Marxists, capitalism means a form of political and social economy organised around the interests of owners of capital. To feminists, patriarchy means the idea that society favours men over women. These seem meaningfully different, and if the Marxist understanding of capitalism is more more specific than the feminist understanding of patriarchy, that's because Marxism is a much more narrow tradition with a single ideological forefather and body of canonical work, whereas feminism has neither. There is no feminist Marx; there is no feminist equivalent to Capital.
Thus you take Bell Hooks as one representative example. I'm a bit surprised because my first thoughts as to some of the most influential authors and texts shaping modern feminism were Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. I submit that de Beauvoir and Greer are more important and influential feminist thinkers than Hooks, at least. Are these particularly Marxist texts, in your view? Do they describe a Marxist or quasi-Marxist philosophy? There's obviously some Marxist intellectual influence there (de Beauvoir was quite familiar with Marx), but there is as much by way of resistance as there is by way of agreement - de Beauvoir disagrees with some of Marx's central claims!
At any rate, yes, there are certainly Marxist feminists, and there are feminist Marxists. But I don't think that shows that feminism is descended from Marxism, a form of Marxism, isomorphic to Marxism, or anything like that. It is equally true, for instance, that there are both Christian Marxists and Marxist Christians (I find this baffling, but it nonetheless appears to be the case), and yet nobody tries to tell me that Marxism and Christianity must be closely related in this way.
(Well, I suppose maybe Nietzscheans. Slave morality and equality and so on. Or Randians/Objectivists, for whom both Marxism and Christianity are forms of altruism. Nobody who I think is worth taking remotely seriously tries to group together Christianity and Marxism.)
see the story about the IDF soldier who killed himself because he couldn't live with being the driver
"Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
They deployed more explosive power relative to the size of their target than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
... which they deployed over the course of two entire years, as opposed to all of that explosive power being released in one go. And the death toll in that period was between a quarter* and three-fifths** of the death toll of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, making it abundantly clear that the primary function of all this explosive ordnance was not the taking of human life for its own sake, but the destruction of Hamas's tunnel network.
I'm baffled as to how you expect me to be horrified by this metric.
*Assuming a death toll of 246k in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a death toll of 63k in Gaza.
**Assuming a death toll of 150k in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a death toll of 90k in Gaza
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3hr ago
For a parallel that captures a lot of the nuance (and echoes another discussion that happened here a while back), do you think a committed atheist from out of state bristling under Mormon rule in Utah would be justified in lumping it in as "Christian supremacism"?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
3hr ago
See if you can find the right kind of downer? Sure, it might sound like a bad idea, but so does being on stimulants your whole life. I think the ship has sailed on that particular kind if worry.
FtttG
3hr ago
You're just never going to drop the "Israel is committing genocide" thing, are you?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3hr ago
· Edited 3hr ago
Doesn't the Christianity-Judaism parallel work for that too?
"What on earth does some theory about God sacrificing his own son to himself to absolve all of humanity's sins have to do with the Jews being God's chosen people? How do you do that with 'culture' at all?"
Yet, "Judeo-Christian culture" is a term that is being used, predominantly by Christians. If the Imperial Romans had our version of the discourse and pagans actually spent time tweeting at Christians rather than trying to feed them to the lions as their control slipped, I can absolutely imagine that they would have called the Christians an offshoot of Jewish culture with the intention of associating them with pre-existing negative sentiment towards the rebellious colonial subjects, and the Christians in response to this would have done a public 180 on this (despite continued internal efforts to market themselves as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy) and claimed it to be an insane conspiracy theory.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3hr ago
· Edited 3hr ago
If there still hasn't been a female President 10 years after Nancy Pelosi dies, then this question will have an easy answer. She is by far the most significant female political leader in the US to date.
Right now, I don't see any advance on Susan B Anthony, who was on the 1979 dollar coin for a good reason. She was also a leading candidate when the Obama administration wanted to replace Hamilton and/or Jackson with women.
It's a good thing we put at very few politicians on British banknotes - the row when feminists decide we need a woman and the only serious candidate is Margaret Thatcher would destroy confidence in the currency.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
4hr ago
I have zero real interface to farming and consumer-facing business, but I think if your income comes from selling stuff to people and not payroll, you are then taxed like a small business, and most entrepreneurs pay for accountant services handle that shit. I know that "farmers markets" type of businesses have lessened reporting requirements as long as their business is small-scale.
tip income: no idea how it would be handled when it does not go through cash register.
Any other variable income (say, bonuses of salaried employee) is easier but inexact. Every year the tax authority sets a preliminary withholding rate based on your previous reported income and rate (which they obviously know of), and you have a chance to correct their estimate. If you have same employer, employer is informed directly and you have to do nothing if you agree with the estimate. Your employer withholds accordingly, reports the amount withheld to government and you, at end of tax year authority calculates true total reported income and sends you the pre-filled form. Standard deductions are automatically applied, you tick a box and report a number if you think they missed something. If your income income is super variable, withholding rate was probably not correct, and you usually get a refund or back taxes. (People usually set their rate same so that they get refunds.) If you are doing odd jobs as hourly paid wage labor or you as a salaried employee switch jobs, you provide your taxation information to every new employer.
TwiceHuman
4hr ago
Powerful manias happen when that type of person builds up momentum, and the paralysis happens when they cannot build momentum. The "gifted kid burnout" is what happens when somebody takes up more of a challenge than they can handle. The more resistance you overcome, the greater the rush you experience when it is overcome, if you overcome it. Perfectionism is similar, people either make amazing things, or they're destroyed by their own high standards. I think what happens is that such people accidentally condition themselves into inaction. If you deem your own imperfect product to be a failure, then you punish yourself for your own hard work. The higher your standards, the less reward you get from your accomplishments.
Suffering leads to greatness because suffering is the gap between your current state and your goals. But if this gap is too wide, you realize that the current you is insufficient in reaching the goal, so you realize that you "aren't good enough". Most positive emotion felt in life comes from movement towards ones goals, and despair generally comes from the prediction that one will not reach their goal. Often, despair drives one to re-evaluate things, and if one questions reality for too long, it falls apart, and one falls into nihilism. From nihilism, one can build their own, better philosophy out of the rubble, but it's generally a really difficult thing to do.
If Diogenes was a Nietzsche-type, then he was broken early, only to never fully recover. A common trait in nihilistic people is that they find enjoyment in pointing out other peoples illusions, e.g. "love is just chemicals". If he had actually recovered, he'd be more positive and monk-like, or like Jesus or the Buddha. A well-made philosophy is for something good, while poor philosophies rely on something else to be against, they exist only as a negation of something else
I disagree. I suspect most of the people loudly chanting "defund the police" in the summer of 2020 would be very embarrassed if you pointed that out to them five years later. And as for the people actually calling to abolish the police, forget it.
Data points: in June 2020, 34% of Americans supported defunding the police. Nine months later, that figure had fallen to 18%. By October 2021, only 15% of Americans wanted police departments defunded at all, of which 9% only wanted them defunded "a little" (Ctrl-F "a little").
In other words, at most one-sixth (probably more like one-twentieth) of the US are progressive diehards, and a further sixth (or perhaps a quarter) will pretend to be progressive diehards so long as they think it's socially advantageous to do so.
If by "change their minds on the underlying subject" you mean "most BLM people think it's bad when the police kill unarmed black people who are not resisting arrest" — that was never the part of the movement that was under dispute. Even MAGA types agreed that this was bad. Even Bill O'Reilly was horrified by the Eric Garner case.
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