domain:nunosempere.com
JTarrou
7m 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
10m 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
23m 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
24m 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
25m 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
37m ago
· Edited 29m 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.
46m ago
· Edited 39m 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
Well, for my money the Current Thing at the moment is the hot war in Gaza. So assuming that specific war ends and stops being the Current Thing, my question is what will be the next Current Thing other than the hot war in Gaza.
Personally, I am sceptical that "the relationship between the US and Israel" will become the thing that everyone in the Anglosphere is talking about in the way that e.g. the conflict in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, BLM and Covid were. Even if a majority of Americans want something (such as AIPAC being brought to heel), that doesn't mean it'll be the thing that everyone is talking about (indeed, per the toxoplasma criterion, controversial things get discussed more than things about which there is widespread agreement).
none of the normies who supported Palestine because it was the Current Thing are going to forget what they saw Zionists and those funded by them do
I think you greatly overestimate the staying power of Current Things and the degree of emotional investment normies hold in them. I think that, by Christmas, an absolute majority of normies will have completely forgotten about the "genocide" they spent two years performatively condemning. In the US, Google searches for "Black Lives Matter" peaked in June 2020 and had fallen to 6% of the peak by December. Of the people who posted a black square on their Instagrams in the summer of 2020, what proportion of them do you think could name an unarmed black person killed by a police officer since George Floyd? Of the people calling for others to mask up and calling the unvaccinated "plague rats", I suspect that a majority of them believe that literally no one has died of Covid since the lockdowns ended. Out of sight, out of mind.
Think about how much the average American (even the average Democratic-voting American) cared about the Palestinian cause before October 7th, 2023. By January, I think they'll have regressed to the historical mean. Expecting anything else is almost certainly the product of wishful thinking.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
If it was long enough ago that you can't even estimate the year, a $0.00 basis is going to be pretty close to accurate anyway. Charity is a good approach if you don't want to deal with it and do want to make similarly-sized charitable contributions though.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
Yes, enormously so although "default 5" is also just not a high bar to clear (non-thinking 5 is similar quality to 4o, 5t is slightly better than o3 for most use cases other than "I want to run the 300 most obvious searches and combine the results in the obvious way in a table", where o3 still is unbeaten). 5T does seem to additionally be tuned to prioritize sounding smart over accuracy and pedagogy, and I haven't managed to tune the user instructions to fully fix this.
But yeah. Big difference.
Tollund_Man4
1hr ago
The printing press, plow, literacy, the Enlightenment, and the 20th century provides tools to enable the Priestly-type that simply didn't exist at other points.
Can you explain this a bit more? If you're talking about the ability to maintain an unproductive priestly class it seems like the ancient extractive hierarchy (whether through direct taxation or tradition-bound hospitality) is a social technology which is very capable of doing this on its own. With Christian poverty you even get priests, monks and saints in places where they can just about feed themselves, and their number seems more constrained by the strength of their ideals than anything else.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
“Giftedness” (unusual abilities in music, maths, arts or abstract thinking)
5/5 of the “Major Psychiatric diagnosis”: Autism, ADHD, Bipolar, Schizophrenia, and Depression.
Hypermobility/Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (aka double-jointedness)
Hormone disorders
Sensory processing issues
Anxiety, Cutting and Eating disorders
Autoimmune disorders, Asthma, Allergies, Mast cell activation disorder
Gender dysphoria, fluidity, Same-sex attraction
Sleep disorders, Chronic fatigue
Left Handedness
This is such an eclectic collection of traits, I challenge you to find one Mottizen who doesn't qualify.
TwiceHuman
2hr ago
This post is uncomfortably well suited for me. Thanks for sharing it! It ties together a lot of seemingly unrelated things that I've already come across by chance (I noticed years ago doing my depression that the shared reality of a group was more or less the sum of individual interpretations, making social matters collaborative storytelling). The advice is good as well, but it seems difficult for shamans to achieve financial security. Oh well, at least my autism gives me a buff in STEM related tasks
Supah_Schmendrick
2hr ago
I think even some of the people who developed it studied directly under the major figures of the Frabkfurt School.
Correct.
Supah_Schmendrick
2hr ago
...I submit that Marxism is best understood as a bundle of critiques of society emerging from a particular worldview. Beyond those worldview-clustered critiques, Marxism contains no actual, gears-level insight or plan for fixing society beyond "amass absolute power and use it tear down this society and build a much better one in its place".
A friendly amendment - Marxism isn't just the critiques of society; it's also (1) critiques of the critiques, usually trying to explain why their prior predictions didn't pan out [e.g. Frankfurt school], and (2) tactical theorizing about the proper way in which to actualize the vague, high-level, utopian promises of the original critiques [e.g. the Trotskyite "Permanent Revolution", Leninist "Vanguardist", Stalinist "Socialism in One Country", etc.].
The quoted text in your post is basically all true, except of course for the fact that socialism is a terrible system.
I'll try to be short and axiomatic:
1: Systems become worse with size, meaning felt by the individual is inversely correlated to the size of the structure they exist within (a social being can tell when it's not needed by its environment. This terrifies the social being)
2: Because of laws of statistics, the limit of the micro-scale will result in a macro-scale in which the individual properties of the micro-scale entities don't matter (I don't know the name for this, perhaps asymptotic emergence?)
3: In the far past, emotions didn't exist, life competed in a purely material sense. Emotions (or more generally, qualia) came into existence because they out-competed agents without emotion.
4: It seems we may be creating an environment in which emotions are once again sub-optimal. In fact, a lot of human things are starting to be sub-optimal, and the shortest paths to "success in life" requires destruction of the self ("selling out") and of good taste (morality prunes locally optimal choices if the definition of optimal is purely materialistic)
5: We're trapped in a world in which the incentives threaten to destroy humanity, in the sense that, even if humans exist in the future, they will lack depth and personality. I predict that the standard deviation on various tests and quizzes will shrink as the homogeneity of various things increases.
In short, the problem is not "capitalism", it's the traits/structure of the system that we exist within, like it's size and connectivity. The woke are not wrong when they say that diversity is good, they're wrong when they accelerate the destruction of diversity by mixing together different things.
Technology is only making all this worse, though Ted Kaczynski seems to blame technology for all the problems I listed above.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
My understanding, roughly, is that classical Marxism, to the extent that it acknowledges patriarchy as a concept at all, holds that patriarchy and gender-based oppression are downstream of economic class.
If there's a difference between our understandings here, I'm not seeing it. So far, so good.
Today I don't think there is an ideologically coherent 'mainline Feminism'.
I would disagree quite strongly. The terms "Patriarchy", "Sexism", and "Misogyny" seem like stable, highly politicized tokens of a highly coherent ideological structure. Likewise "reproductive rights", "women's rights", "women's safety", etc, etc. There can be lots of disagreement over lots of things, even very important things, without an absence of a unifying foundation. As you say:
If I were to generalise, I would say that what makes a person or position 'feminist' today is 1) it is primarily interested in the position of women in society, and 2) it holds that women, as group or class, are in some way disadvantaged, and some sort of collective action is necessary to ameliorate those disadvantages.
..To which one might add additional precision: women as a class are seriously disadvantaged due to the nature and structure of society, and this sum of disadvantages can only be resolved by fundamentally deconstructing and rebuilding the nature of society. Patriarchy in Feminist ideology is isomorphic to Capitalism in Marxist ideology, in much the same way that the Greeks worshiped Ares and the Romans worshiped Mars.
Within that broad heading, there are both Marxist and non-Marxist feminists, and the line can be blurry. Moreover, because Marx is such a massively influential figure in the history of sociology, philosophy, etc., if you search for traces of Marxism in almost any school of social analysis, you're going to find some.
bell hooks is my go-to central example of modern Feminism as an ideological structure. Googling "bell hooks on Marx", first result:
The Black Marxist Feminism of Bell Hooks
This book explores bell hooks' trajectory of work and cohesiveness of thought about the meaning and meaningfulness of black womanhood in terms of a Black Marxist feminism, which uniquely confronts the dimensions of feminism and womanism; the relations between the secular and the religious; the problems of gender and sexism; and the structural and systemic issues of oppression, domination, white supremacy, and capitalism. In making sense of black womanhood in its philosophical, social, cultural, institutional, and historical complexities, hooks' Black Marxist feminism constructs an intersectional theory about what hooks describes as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In this sense, hooks' Black Marxist feminism conceptualizes the ways and means by which white supremacist capitalist patriarchy imposes intersectional predicaments upon black womanhood, drawing foundationally on Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, working within the purview of a host of Marxisms in Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Karl Kautsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and Georgi Plekhanov, and speaking to the Marxist proclivities of Cedric Robinson, Cornel West, Charles W. Mills, James H. Cone, Stuart Hall, and Angela Y. Davis.
Okay, but this is commentary about bell hooks, not hooks herself. So let's skip several repeat results, and we find:
Challenging Capitalism and Patriarchy: An Interview with bell hooks (apparently republished from "Third World Viewpoint" via the Espresso Stalinist). Pertinent Excerpts:
...I think that what we see globally is that there have been incredible struggles to combat capitalism that haven’t resulted in an end to patriarchy at all. I also think that when we study ancient societies that were not capitalist we see hierarchical systems that privileged maleness in the way that modern patriarchy does. I think we will never destroy patriarchy without questioning, critiquing, and challenging capitalism, and I don’t think challenging capitalism alone will mean a better world for women...
...I think that strategically, we have to start on all fronts. For example, I’m very concerned that there are not more Black women deeply committed to anti-capitalist politics. But one would have to understand the role that gender oppression plays in encouraging young Black females to think that they don’t need to study about capitalism. That they don’t need to read men who were my teachers like Walter Rodney, and Nkrumah, and Amilcar Cabral.
I think that as a girl who grew up in a patriarchal, working-class, Black, southern household there was a convergence of those issues of class and gender. I was acutely aware of my class, and I was acutely aware of the limitations imposed on me by gender. I wouldn’t be the committed worker for freedom that I am today had I not begun to oppose that gendered notion of learning that suggests that politics is the realm of males and that political thinking about anti-racist struggle and colonialism is for men.
I’m very much in favor of the kind of education for critical consciousness that says: Let’s not look at these thing separately. Let’s look at how they converge so that when we begin to take a stand against them, we can take that kind of strategic stance that allows us to be self-determining as a people struggling in a revolutionary way on all fronts...
Absolutely. I think Marxist thought–the work of people like Gramsci–is very crucial to educating ourselves for political consciousness. That doesn’t mean we have to take the sexism or the racism that comes out of those thinkers and disregard it. It means that we extract the resources from their thought that can be useful to us in struggle. A class rooted analysis is where I begin in all my work. The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women’s studies classes and said, “Black women have always worked.” It was a class-biased challenge to the structure of feminism...
Absolutely. In my newest book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, one of the big issues I deal with is the degree to which capitalism is being presented as the answer. When people focus on the white mass media’s obsession with Louis Farrakhan, they think the media hate Farrakhan so much. But they don’t hate Farrakhan. They love him. One of the reasons why they love him is that he’s totally pro-capitalist. There is a tremendous overlap in the values of a Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam and the values of the white, Christian right. Part of it is their pro-capitalism, their patriarchy, and their whole-hearted support of homophobia.
Farrakhan’s pro-capitalism encourages a kind of false consciousness in Black life. For example, you have a Rapper like Ice T in his new book, The Ice Opinions, making an astute class analysis when he says that “People live in the ghetto not because they’re Black, but because they’re poor.” But then he goes on to offer capitalism as a solution. This means that he has a total gap in his understanding if he imagines that becoming rich within this society–individual wealth–is somehow a way to redeem Black life. The only hope for us to redeem the material lives of Black people is a call for the redistribution of wealth and resources which is not only a critique of capitalism, but an incredible challenge to capitalism.
I would not generalize that modern, mainline feminists consider their critique to be a refinement of Marxism.
Would you say bell hooks considers her critique to be a refinement of Marxism? For the many, many feminists who draw on bell hooks as an inspiration, and who likewise employ formulations about Capitalist White Supremacist Patriarchy and Late-stage capitalism, would you say that they also appear to consider their critiques to be a refinement of Marxism?
...In any case, we apparently agree that there are Marxist feminists, and I hope I've demonstrated that these are often central examples of most workable definitions of "feminist". Can you provide some clear-cut, central examples of prominent Feminist theorists or intellectuals who are not Marxists?
Bingbong
3hr ago
Or the line right now on Left sides seems to be that Israel armed/supported the parties inside Palestine that are currently being purged so that makes them a sixth column of the evil Zionists and therefore free game, or something.
Bingbong
3hr ago
Plus full democratic voting rights and there's a big enough bloc to enforce shit over a decent tenure.
Even Hamas would be able to likely keep operating as a guerilla movement and any attempts to oppress the Palestinian Arab population as a result of Hamas agitation would be looked at even more disfavorably than the status quo.
TwiceHuman
3hr ago
AI-generated media is, I think, necessarily generic. Generating proper art is antithetical to how AIs function. People seek novelty, and LLMs learn through repetition, so novelty is precisely what they fail to learn. AIs are also downstream of human experience, and they cannot ever be otherwise, so attempting to solve this problem is like trying to turn hyper-processed foods back into healthy ingredients. An experience is more real than the memory of said experience, and for the same reason, AI generated content is necessarily lacking to anyone with taste (those who can taste the difference between home-made food and microwaved supermarket food)
Eetan
3hr ago
The motte is Marxists caring about culture, which obviously they have done throughout history. The Soviet Union is just one famous example.
Yes, Soviet Union cared about culture a lot, by promoting classical literature, art, music, opera and ballet to the masses (even when the masses were not interested and would prefer pop music, comic books and cowboy and gangster movies). Marxist-Leninist line always was that feudal and capitalist culture is great and belongs to working class, what was wrong with it was that the oppressors kept it only for themselves.
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.
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