I'm Crap posted:

jacobin started out pretty good but the last couple of months they've had a load of articles about cishet shitlordery offences and loving gamergate

Tom Collins posted:

After this many decades, shouldn't it be pretty clear this isn't going to happen?

Leftism makes implicit assumptions about the world in order to bend it to fit within certain prescribed parameters. The very worst and most obviously wrong assumption is that it would or could ever be possible to get a high enough percentage of people to think consciously and hold informed opinions that they apply to actively improve the world around them. It assumes a degree of faith and hopefulness in individual industry that is just naive on its face; the Tragedy of the Commons is never truly addressed.

In fact, instead of addressing the fact that most people are objectively pretty selfish and useless to the advancement of any particular ideology, Leftists of all stripes usually find some mitigating reason to shift the blame for one subgroup's issues onto another, ad infinitum, as necessary to keep the populist vote. Everything, in the view of a Leftist, is a calculated plan to oppress some underclass; nothing could possibly just be an emergent effect in a complicated, stratified world permanently besot by entropic scarcity.

Now, I don't deny that it would be possible to make a modern and marketable Marxist-compatible doctrine and shop it around. I just don't think it's possible to make one that's actually got the substance underneath it to back up the claims. Any modern manifesto usually consists of such high-level language as to be entirely useless in execution; nobody can describe what their communist state apparatus looks like, or how it pays for itself. They forget that all the millions of things they wish to have people do for each other for free require a massive amount of logistics and planning to actually deliver, and that such requires business processes and project managers and policy analysts and all that poo poo. In the end, it's not going to be particularly different in a Communist system compared to the modern Western government of today, except in the scope of services it aims to provide with all the trappings.

Forgive me for not having an especially positive view of the cost-effectiveness of most existing Western bureaucracy...


Sometimes I wonder whether most social-justice types have ever truly internalized what evolution means and necessarily results in. Stratification of every possibly divergent factor is implicit in a genetic environment; this inevitably gives an advantage to some groups over others, and this will manifest in any environment no matter the strictures placed upon it - unless you were so strict as to remove any possibly way that a person could succeed over others. Classes will necessarily arise in any environment as long as there is any mechanism by which a group of people can excel to the exclusion of their peers.

Now, that's not to say I totally disbelieve in the struggle. The argument that the top 1% have too much money relative to everyone else has some merit. However, that's a very different level of privilege differential compared to what the average Tumblrina is complaining about on a daily basis as being Privilege. As Marxism evolves into Cultural Marxism, the struggle becomes more inwardly focused and so hipster-oppression-olympics obsessed that it is damaging itself.

No amount of rebranded Marxism can fix a problem that started with applying Marxism in the first place.

TEAYCHES posted:

Yes We Can. and despite our disagreements, the enemy is the capitalist rulers who must be overthrown because they are driving this poo poo into the ground

Tom Collins posted:

After this many decades, shouldn't it be pretty clear this isn't going to happen?

Leftism makes implicit assumptions about the world in order to bend it to fit within certain prescribed parameters. The very worst and most obviously wrong assumption is that it would or could ever be possible to get a high enough percentage of people to think consciously and hold informed opinions that they apply to actively improve the world around them. It assumes a degree of faith and hopefulness in individual industry that is just naive on its face; the Tragedy of the Commons is never truly addressed.

In fact, instead of addressing the fact that most people are objectively pretty selfish and useless to the advancement of any particular ideology, Leftists of all stripes usually find some mitigating reason to shift the blame for one subgroup's issues onto another, ad infinitum, as necessary to keep the populist vote. Everything, in the view of a Leftist, is a calculated plan to oppress some underclass; nothing could possibly just be an emergent effect in a complicated, stratified world permanently besot by entropic scarcity.

Now, I don't deny that it would be possible to make a modern and marketable Marxist-compatible doctrine and shop it around. I just don't think it's possible to make one that's actually got the substance underneath it to back up the claims. Any modern manifesto usually consists of such high-level language as to be entirely useless in execution; nobody can describe what their communist state apparatus looks like, or how it pays for itself. They forget that all the millions of things they wish to have people do for each other for free require a massive amount of logistics and planning to actually deliver, and that such requires business processes and project managers and policy analysts and all that poo poo. In the end, it's not going to be particularly different in a Communist system compared to the modern Western government of today, except in the scope of services it aims to provide with all the trappings.

Forgive me for not having an especially positive view of the cost-effectiveness of most existing Western bureaucracy...


Sometimes I wonder whether most social-justice types have ever truly internalized what evolution means and necessarily results in. Stratification of every possibly divergent factor is implicit in a genetic environment; this inevitably gives an advantage to some groups over others, and this will manifest in any environment no matter the strictures placed upon it - unless you were so strict as to remove any possibly way that a person could succeed over others. Classes will necessarily arise in any environment as long as there is any mechanism by which a group of people can excel to the exclusion of their peers.

Now, that's not to say I totally disbelieve in the struggle. The argument that the top 1% have too much money relative to everyone else has some merit. However, that's a very different level of privilege differential compared to what the average Tumblrina is complaining about on a daily basis as being Privilege. As Marxism evolves into Cultural Marxism, the struggle becomes more inwardly focused and so hipster-oppression-olympics obsessed that it is damaging itself.

No amount of rebranded Marxism can fix a problem that started with applying Marxism in the first place.

katlington posted:

As Marxism evolves into Cultural Marxism,

Tom Collins posted:

If you're going to deny that's happening, you could at least try to back up your specious reasoning, or is this the gentleman's "i can't even"

Venom Snake posted:

lol what rich communists do you know

TEAYCHES posted:

i took out loans, loans i will never pay back

TEAYCHES posted:

i took out loans, loans i will never pay back

5-HT posted:

lol, your credit is hosed.

TEAYCHES posted:

i took out loans, loans i will never pay back

Tom Collins posted:

Don't let there be a false dichotomy here. You can have a decent, subsidized education system without being that Marxist.

katlington posted:

As Marxism evolves into Cultural Marxism,

TEAYCHES posted:

4 years with a texas state education, instate and with a scholarship, i ended up with a comical amount of debt that i am never going to pay willingly. i work in IT. i probably could set up some kind of payment scheme but i dont negotiate with terrorists

Bro Dad posted:

goondolences on being a loser

skeletonotherkin posted:

I always take issue with that term, because before two years ago the only people I ever encountered who used the phrase were neo-nazis.

TEAYCHES posted:

tell me about your life~

Tom Collins posted:

You're not wrong, but the concept has very little to do with nazism, unless the reason one hates the Frankfurt School philosophies is because the authors were mostly Jewish - which is a stupid reason to hate something, especially when it has so many legitimate striking points.

In short, it's the idea that all cultural inequalities need to be levelled out somehow, using an intersectional or stack model of privilege comparison. Only when every intersectional struggle has been resolved will the world be pure and rid of all evil. This is the material that lead to the current crop of SJWs, and what ruined any chance Occupy Wall Street had at saying anything instead of devolving into bullshit identity politics.

I'm very far from a Nazi, trust me, they scare the gently caress out of me and I don't know how any reasonable modern person can fall in line with those guys. That doesn't mean every single thing they discuss is automatically poisoned by virtue of association.

Tom Collins posted:

You're not wrong, but the concept has very little to do with nazism, unless the reason one hates the Frankfurt School philosophies is because the authors were mostly Jewish - which is a stupid reason to hate something, especially when it has so many legitimate striking points.

In short, it's the idea that all cultural inequalities need to be levelled out somehow, using an intersectional or stack model of privilege comparison. Only when every intersectional struggle has been resolved will the world be pure and rid of all evil. This is the material that lead to the current crop of SJWs, and what ruined any chance Occupy Wall Street had at saying anything instead of devolving into bullshit identity politics.

I'm very far from a Nazi, trust me, they scare the gently caress out of me and I don't know how any reasonable modern person can fall in line with those guys. That doesn't mean every single thing they discuss is automatically poisoned by virtue of association.

skeletonotherkin posted:

I'm not a fan of SJW's either and please don't take anything I post too seriously.

Gazpacho posted:

problematic

Bro Dad posted:

im not in debt up to my eyeballs trying to get a computer janitor degree, its cool

hemophilia posted:

Lol if you don't take as many transferrable classes as you can at a decent community college on small grants and out of pocket before even seriously thinking about loans or university

Tom Collins posted:

After this many decades, shouldn't it be pretty clear this isn't going to happen?

Leftism makes implicit assumptions about the world in order to bend it to fit within certain prescribed parameters. The very worst and most obviously wrong assumption is that it would or could ever be possible to get a high enough percentage of people to think consciously and hold informed opinions that they apply to actively improve the world around them. It assumes a degree of faith and hopefulness in individual industry that is just naive on its face; the Tragedy of the Commons is never truly addressed.

In fact, instead of addressing the fact that most people are objectively pretty selfish and useless to the advancement of any particular ideology, Leftists of all stripes usually find some mitigating reason to shift the blame for one subgroup's issues onto another, ad infinitum, as necessary to keep the populist vote. Everything, in the view of a Leftist, is a calculated plan to oppress some underclass; nothing could possibly just be an emergent effect in a complicated, stratified world permanently besot by entropic scarcity.

Now, I don't deny that it would be possible to make a modern and marketable Marxist-compatible doctrine and shop it around. I just don't think it's possible to make one that's actually got the substance underneath it to back up the claims. Any modern manifesto usually consists of such high-level language as to be entirely useless in execution; nobody can describe what their communist state apparatus looks like, or how it pays for itself. They forget that all the millions of things they wish to have people do for each other for free require a massive amount of logistics and planning to actually deliver, and that such requires business processes and project managers and policy analysts and all that poo poo. In the end, it's not going to be particularly different in a Communist system compared to the modern Western government of today, except in the scope of services it aims to provide with all the trappings.

Forgive me for not having an especially positive view of the cost-effectiveness of most existing Western bureaucracy...


Sometimes I wonder whether most social-justice types have ever truly internalized what evolution means and necessarily results in. Stratification of every possibly divergent factor is implicit in a genetic environment; this inevitably gives an advantage to some groups over others, and this will manifest in any environment no matter the strictures placed upon it - unless you were so strict as to remove any possibly way that a person could succeed over others. Classes will necessarily arise in any environment as long as there is any mechanism by which a group of people can excel to the exclusion of their peers.

Now, that's not to say I totally disbelieve in the struggle. The argument that the top 1% have too much money relative to everyone else has some merit. However, that's a very different level of privilege differential compared to what the average Tumblrina is complaining about on a daily basis as being Privilege. As Marxism evolves into Cultural Marxism, the struggle becomes more inwardly focused and so hipster-oppression-olympics obsessed that it is damaging itself.

No amount of rebranded Marxism can fix a problem that started with applying Marxism in the first place.

hemophilia posted:

Lol if you don't take as many transferrable classes as you can at a decent community college on small grants and out of pocket before even seriously thinking about loans or university

Venom Snake posted:

Source your quotes

Tom Collins posted:

Cake Smashing Boob posted:

I'm a cultural marxist AMA

Cake Smashing Boob posted:

I'm a cultural marxist AMA

Tom Collins posted:

After this many decades, shouldn't it be pretty clear this isn't going to happen?

Leftism makes implicit assumptions about the world in order to bend it to fit within certain prescribed parameters. The very worst and most obviously wrong assumption is that it would or could ever be possible to get a high enough percentage of people to think consciously and hold informed opinions that they apply to actively improve the world around them. It assumes a degree of faith and hopefulness in individual industry that is just naive on its face; the Tragedy of the Commons is never truly addressed.

In fact, instead of addressing the fact that most people are objectively pretty selfish and useless to the advancement of any particular ideology, Leftists of all stripes usually find some mitigating reason to shift the blame for one subgroup's issues onto another, ad infinitum, as necessary to keep the populist vote. Everything, in the view of a Leftist, is a calculated plan to oppress some underclass; nothing could possibly just be an emergent effect in a complicated, stratified world permanently besot by entropic scarcity.

Now, I don't deny that it would be possible to make a modern and marketable Marxist-compatible doctrine and shop it around. I just don't think it's possible to make one that's actually got the substance underneath it to back up the claims. Any modern manifesto usually consists of such high-level language as to be entirely useless in execution; nobody can describe what their communist state apparatus looks like, or how it pays for itself. They forget that all the millions of things they wish to have people do for each other for free require a massive amount of logistics and planning to actually deliver, and that such requires business processes and project managers and policy analysts and all that poo poo. In the end, it's not going to be particularly different in a Communist system compared to the modern Western government of today, except in the scope of services it aims to provide with all the trappings.

Forgive me for not having an especially positive view of the cost-effectiveness of most existing Western bureaucracy...


Sometimes I wonder whether most social-justice types have ever truly internalized what evolution means and necessarily results in. Stratification of every possibly divergent factor is implicit in a genetic environment; this inevitably gives an advantage to some groups over others, and this will manifest in any environment no matter the strictures placed upon it - unless you were so strict as to remove any possibly way that a person could succeed over others. Classes will necessarily arise in any environment as long as there is any mechanism by which a group of people can excel to the exclusion of their peers.

Now, that's not to say I totally disbelieve in the struggle. The argument that the top 1% have too much money relative to everyone else has some merit. However, that's a very different level of privilege differential compared to what the average Tumblrina is complaining about on a daily basis as being Privilege. As Marxism evolves into Cultural Marxism, the struggle becomes more inwardly focused and so hipster-oppression-olympics obsessed that it is damaging itself.

No amount of rebranded Marxism can fix a problem that started with applying Marxism in the first place.

Bro Dad posted:

Exclamation Marx posted:

I am the man who loves his life.

Exclamation Marx posted:

After this many decades, shouldn't it be pretty clear: Who is John Galt?

This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing-you who dread knowledge-I am the man who will now tell you.

The chief engineer was the only one able to move; he ran to a television set and struggled frantically with its dials. But the screen remained empty; the speaker had not chosen to be seen. Only his voice filled the airways of the country-of the world, thought the chief engineer-sounding as if he were speaking here, in this room, not to a group, but to one man; it was not the tone of addressing a meeting, but the tone of addressing a mind.

You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I-I am the man who has granted you your wish.

Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man’s mind.

Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn’t. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren’t.

While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem-I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality-mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.

All the men who have vanished, the men you hated, yet dreaded to lose, it is I who have taken them away from you. Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t. Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

There is a difference between our strike and all those you’ve practiced for centuries: our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting them. We are evil, according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics. We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles any longer. We are only an illusion, according to your philosophy. We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality-the reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind.

We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it. We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.

Are you now crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you’ve always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because now we know it, too.

Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom-while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?-by what standard?

You wanted to know John Galt’s identity. I am the man who has asked that question.

Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality-you who have never known any-but to discover it.

You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door-but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.

For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors-between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason-that in reason there’s no reason to be moral.

Whatever else they fought about, it was against man’s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man’s mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.

Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch-or build a cyclotron-without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.