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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

How bastardized does a theoretical development have to be before it can be considered an entirely different thing?

The Frankfurt School had lots of critiques of Western Civilization. But "people having critiques of Western Civilization" isn't a useful class--it'd group together everyone from the Frankfurt School to Evola to wokes to Mottezans to etc.

And, when you look at the actual content of Frankfurt critiques, they don't overlap much, if at all, with woke ones. They seem rather quaint actually, given the points of conflict and focus of today. And when you look at their actual actions during e.g. 68, they were considered enemies by student activists, shiftless intellectuals creating masturbatory theories while ignoring praxis. Habermas condemned "left wing fascism," Adorno famously called the cops on students protestors who occupied a lecture hall. (Marcuse, to be fair, was friendlier.)

The current theory of the American Left doesn't draw much from the Frankfurt School or any thinkers really; to the extent it exists at all, it's just a ramshackle gloss on patronage politics with a couple academic shibboleths to give it an air of legitimacy.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I mean, its an easy heuristic to read Wikipedia and realize that it represents the most far left case that can be plausibly levied under their rules.

No? I am a far leftist and this really isn't the case. Wikipedia is generally pro establishment, and that lines up with the left in some ways and not at all in others.

Even so I was alone during 2nd intifada

My condolences?

terrorist campaign supported by all the relevant Palestinian parties in government, so that necessarily includes him and Arafat.

If you're going to claim that lets you call him a terrorist, you're going to have to admit that the entire Israeli government consists of terrorists as well. If you're willing to make that claim, fair enough, but otherwise it doesn't really mean anything at all - not that "terrorist" is a particularly meaningful political designation these days anyway.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

subject to the abuses that have led to there being basically no jews anywhere else in the islamic world

I feel like pointing out that the major historical abuse that lead to the jews leaving the arab world was actually the creation of Israel. Even wikipedia makes it clear that there were plenty of jews living in the Arab world up until the creation of Israel, and the descendants of those populations are largely referred to as Mizrahim today. Some of the other "abuses", like the 1950s Baghdad bombings, were almost certainly committed by Israelis in order to encourage Iraqi jews to emigrate to Israel to boot.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Which invites the obvious question: what will the next Current Thing™ be?

AI. I won't know what the exact angle will be until I see it, but it seems like a good bet it will be AI-related.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

"Palestinians brutally murdered by occupying military forces!... but it's not the IDF doing it, so does anyone really care?"

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

They want whomever they believe to be low-status in the culture to have more status. They believe everything is a social construct, and so they conclude that status is not earned, but granted by authorities to preferred classes of people, and stigma to disfavoured classes. Cultural marxists want to become the status/stigma-granting authority, and for them this means controlling art and education. In the US they’re primarily concerned with black people. In Canada they’re concerned about indigenous people. In Europe they’re concerned about migrants or something. You can question whether status actually works this way, but you can’t dispute that this attitude toward status is widespread all across the political spectrum.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

So you're saying cultural Marxists think black people need to be in charge of art, universities, etc?

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

And are we arguing that that has yielded no fruit?

No I'm just saying I don't understand the explanation

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Cultural Marxism is a demonstrable thing, unless you believe that culture is some sort of fungus that shows up on economies. What do you think Homo Sovietcus was, anyway?

I mean sure, "the culture of Marxists" obviously exists

But when my uncle goes on about how DEI departments are "cultural Marxism" I think that is nonsense words. That's "progressive liberalism" and has essentially nothing to do with Marx except that I guess both have a general goal of a more equitable society (although I question if progressive liberals even want that).

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

Soft skills aren't my strong suit, but I spent far too much time gargling rage-slop from Facebook until I turned off the spigot, and the upshot of all of that is that I'm confident that there's a very straightforward model on the vague-left, as follows.

Everything is some kind of class conflict, in that there are rich people exploiting working people in some way. In order to solve a problem, you need to figure out who the rich exploiters are, and, depending on how brave and/or edgy you want to be, regulate/tax or eat/behead them.

In this case, possibly due to the influence of the evil developer trope, developers are evil business owners who want to bulldoze virtuous, affordable working-class homes and replace them with empty glass high-rises. Because developers are evil, it's never considered that the existing homes were once newly built by some other developer. Because developers cannot do good, it's never considered that people will live in these new buildings, so there's a persistent idea that developers intentionally construct buildings, intending that they stay empty, and profit from this by "writing it off" or something like that.

Left-NIMBYism is, from what I can tell, frequently the result of getting negatively polarized against YIMBYs, who are, unfortunately, kinda smug nerds sometimes. For example, YIMBY poster Sam Deutsch made fun of comedian Kate Willett for being a gentrifier complaining about gentrification, and she is still, four years later, writing red-string-on-a-board articles like this and constantly tweeting about how YIMBYs are funded by "billionaires".

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Thank you, that was highly interesting.

This same concept has been independently rediscovered in multiple communities (including the link to the historical practice of shamanism) which increases my confidence that there's something to it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I suppose that was ambiguous.

In terms of the sheer number of people around the world who (claim to) adhere to his ideas, no one can really touch Marx. But within academic circles, self-professed "followers of Marx" I think are more willing to be critical of Marx when compared to followers of certain other philosophers.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I believe it is a significant outlier yes, in terms of providing a comprehensive metaphysical worldview, an ethics, an eschatology, etc. I think it's more of a religion than any historical form of fascism is for example.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

The joke is that the US is already a mess from the perspective of outsiders. Economically and technologically advanced, socially backwards.

I have a copy of 'Don't Make the Black Kids Angry', the entire book is examples of the non-stop American race-hysteria and tragicomedic, farcical levels of injustice and dysfunction that your country tries (with great success) to reframe as correct and enlightened diversity, while the actual Americans make workarounds and scuttle around anxiously referring to the issue via euphemisms or trying (for the fiftieth time) wimpy methods that failed the last 49 times.

What is this if not a backwards society? I view it as such, that's my opinion, based on my first-hand observations of dysfunction (drug addicts shooting up in public), observations via video, observation of American political rhetoric and observation of statistics.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

So? Maybe Turkey gets excited. Maybe the US gets taken over by lefties and imposes a blockade.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 2025

I bought some ethereum and bitcoin on Coinbase back when I was a teen (before either they or I kept good records), and still have it on the exchange now. I believe there is absolutely no shot of nailing down an estimate to even the year's granularity of the purchase date, so I can't just retroactively fudge the basis, either.

Is just donating it as-is to charity the cleanest way to wash my hands of this ambiguously-basis'd balance, or is that likely to somehow be even worse than just biting the bullet of a "$0.00 basis" plea?

Considering the possibility that no custodial exchange will keep my crypto unbreached all the way up through my death, just leaving it in there and banking on the free death basis step-up is a bad option, I'd think.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Idk, I could see you as sort of a nihilistic shaman. I think most prolific online posters have the potential.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Seems very likely to be bullshit, especially since the patients we see who fit into these buckets are um very un priestly.

Perhaps they would've lead happier lives as priests!

And why would Cluster-B not fall into this? Also you're saying hypermobility and chronic stomach pain are cluster B as well?

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Assuming the UK and the rest of Europe don't deal with their Muslim problem and population replacement continues apace it will not be too much longer before there are a few muslim societies with nukes and modern militaries which are willing to declare war on Israel. I think that is the biggest risk factor for number 2.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

They might if America itself turns against Israel

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

The historical antecedent does not cause it to be wrong, but the explanation for why it is wrong may be analogous to the explanation for why its historical antecedent is wrong.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

I mean, its an easy heuristic to read Wikipedia and realize that it represents the most far left case that can be plausibly levied under their rules.

Even so I was alone during 2nd intifada, it was a terrorist campaign supported by all the relevant Palestinian parties in government, so that necessarily includes him and Arafat. If you have a lexis media account you can probably make a better assessment using only transcripts from the trial and contemporaneous media accounts, although even then they were generally Palestinian -leaning, as we see with Arafat winning man of the year

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Israel has four neighbors, two of which are borderline failed states and the other two are strong American allies. None of these countries are staging an invasion.

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

Isn't this a motte and bailey?

The motte is Marxists caring about culture, which obviously they have done throughout history. The Soviet Union is just one famous example.

The bailey is the much less defensible claim that "wokism is the bastard child of communism" - this kind of 'cultural Marxism' is a much larger, more complicated narrative about how intersectionality, modern progressive thought, etc., derive from a complex chain of descent from Marxism.

The bailey may be true - you'd have to defend it - but you don't get it free with the motte.

(And it's a genetic fallacy anyway, but that's a whole separate issue. Suffice to say that I think wokism is wrong, but it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of this or that historical antecedent.)

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

A brief googling indicates that he is clearly a terrorist

Damn that's funny, I did the same and it told me the exact opposite - a brief google, where you are given a curated selection of results designed to cater to your biases, is less than useless in the modern day when it comes to truth-finding. Why don't you do an actual investigation into the circumstances around his arrest and base your opinion on something substantial? Look, even if you do the research and still think he's a terrorist, discussions on these topics are better when you actually do the research and can make an informed contribution.