site banner
Hour Week Month Year All
Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Advanced search parameters (with examples): "author:quadnarca", "domain:reddit.com", "over18:true"

Showing 25 of 287 results for

domain:pedestrianobservations.com

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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?

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Ah yes, the classic Yankee Doodle strat.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 2025

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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).

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Yeah, I couldn't imagine them giving a nobel peace prize to a newly-elected president before he'd even done anything. That would be the scandal of the century.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Those are the events that preceded the transfer. The transfer itself was relatively peaceful and successfully ended these hostilities. If there are population transfers in the west bank in 2030 then it would be dishonest to cite the deaths in the Gaza war as being caused by the population transfer.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

When in the history of the ideology has it been otherwise?

The Khmer Rouge. (And, yes, Lenin/Stalin/Trotsky/Mao.)

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.

Neither the Frankfurt School nor Social Justice activists, despite their faults, desire that. Their relationship to power in the existing order is very different, in that they, in different ways, already had/have substantial access to it. That's not capable of creating the apocalyptic communist revolution, because that kind of upending would undermine their power. Instead, they want to expand their existing power and use it to push their different visions (a legally and socially recognized racial and gender hierarchy for the wokes, and some odd psychological liberation for Adorno etc).

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Also the US gives both Egypt and Jordan over $1 billion a year in aid to prevent them from attacking Israel.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

According to an article published in an 1998 issue of a Hungarian periodical of social sciences, reproduced online in .txt format, the young Jewish woman in question was carrying forged papers and hiding in a safehouse which she had to leave because it got compromised, and no replacement could be found. Fearing that her likely capture will compromise them all, the cell members (including her partner/lover) all unanimously voted to force her to commit suicide. In 1950, party organs investigated the matter and concluded that Lakatos formed the underground cell without permission from above and was the main culprit in this suicide, was expelled from the party as a consequence and was sent to a notorious forced labor camp (interned, technically speaking, although in retrospect it’s impossible to confirm what further considerations, if any, were decisive in that). According to his social circle he was pretty much a Dostoevsky character.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

thinking that they're going to get game theory to do their work for them. I've noted before that most of these attempts misunderstand the basics of game theory, and you can see by their actions that the Wokists actually understand some elements of game theory better than their opposing sect.

Can you explain this claim a bit more. It is not self evident to me what specific basics the anti-woke atheists are missing nor what elements the Wokies get better.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 2025

If the U.S. puts a woman on some paper money, who should it be?

The statue of liberty

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

What I find especially funny/galling about this is that Peterson almost never used the phrase "Cultural Marxism" - the one time I saw him use it was in a meta way, referring to the term as something that people used and coined, but not referring to the thing that the term was pointing at.

The phrase he's most quoted as saying in terms of "Marxism" is actually "Postmodern Neo-Marxism," not "Cultural Marxism." Eliding between the two when complaining about the vapidity of the term, I think, is a reflection of the fact that there's a real cluster of ideologies there that is being pointed to that is postmodern, cultural, new, and Marxist.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I mean yeah agree with all of this

My thesis isn't that these people don't exist, they do.

My thesis is just that the phrase "cultural Marxism" has been beaten and twisted to the point it's basically just an out-group signifier that has nothing to do with Marx

I don't think Marx would like DEI departments. I'm actually pretty confident he'd see all the DEI stuff as the bourgeoisie using a wedge issue to keep workers fighting each other.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Maybe I'm slow today but I'm not understanding your parallel.

Mormon rule is a derivative of Christianity and by prioritizing it with rules you do give it a "supremacy" of a sort I guess.

The words are actually connected to the real life effects.

"Cultural Marxism" has very little to do with Marxism, although I'm still reading through all the philosophy everyone linked so maybe there was a more coherent connective thread in the 1960s, but these days the way it's used is borderline meaningless

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide?wprov=sfti1

I'll confess to knowing nothing about the Bulgarian case, and I'm not going to insult you by immediately researching it as pretending to. But the Turkish-Greek split was not without atrocities on either side.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Which is also... incredibly stupid

The median Westen voter is a moron, the older I get the worse it's revealed to be.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I'm not denying it doesn't exist, full agreement there, I'm just saying "cultural Marxism" is a stupid name

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 2025

Lol, I read it more as addressed to an audience that's never done anything than as by an author that's never done anything, but you may well be right. Separately, the accounts I've read of Delta selection (e.g. Haney's Inside Delta Force) make it pretty clear that the challenge comes more from navigation, elevation gain, bushwhacking (using the road is an auto fail), and beating the time cutoffs than from merely covering ground as such.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I was legitimately just trying to clarify what he was saying

Obviously that is happening, I have eyes and I'm not a shitlib

My argument is simply that the phrase "cultural Marxism" is pretty devoid of meaning and when used in common parlance has essentially nothing to do with Marxism at all.

It's basically the right-wing equivalent of the very common leftist trope of "everything I hate is neoliberalism, the more I hate it, the more neoliberal it is"

Just in this case it's "everything I hate is Marxism, the more I hate it, the more Marxist it is"

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Ahahahaha it's fucked up colloquial word usage all the way down

Yeah fully agree that CRT and classical liberalism are at odds.

But much like the term "the left", which used to be a reference to actual Marxists but now means "progressive liberalism" (I genuinely don't know what else to call this).

The word "liberal" has evolved from the classical (borderline "don't tread on me") industrial Revolution liberalism to a phrase that's basically interchangeable with "the left"

AHHHHH

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

"Accepting the risk of death" is probably a more accurate description than "choosing to die for the cause" in this context.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Some groups are so proud they'll even adopt exonyms their enemies created

4chan has wholeheartedly adopted "chud" and even taken the wojak variation originally designed to mock them and made it their own, it's beautiful to see.