Juice @ Juice @midwest.social

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1 yr. ago

Who said "the last capitalist will sell us the rope we will use to hang him"? Was it Marx? Lenin?

Or was it an American right wing nut case politician giving a speech meant to slander and demonize the left?

Your theoretical knowledge is so non existent that the only left wing "theory" you know well enough to quote, is in fact, right wing political theory

What a crock. I love this thing that has entered the discourse where, "disagreeing with me is advocating doing nothing." As if not shooting up a car dealership is equivalent to just letting fascists take over. Get a grip.

I'm not going to hand-wring about it, I'm not a pacifist. I don't advocate for doing nothing in fact I spend almost all my free time organizing, educating, preparing and mobilizing. I wish I did nothing, instead of watching the smartest, most committed and hardworking leaders in our movement burn out one after another.

What is shooting up a dealership going to accomplish? What's the political message? "Elon bad, break his stuff." Keep pretending that a single shooter will make a silent fart worth of difference. Anarchists tried this bitd, it was called propaganda of the deed. How many revolutions did it win? Zero. How many gains did it win for the working class? Less than zero because it justified the use of violence against leftists, and the huge swaths of well meaning but slightly backwards people who are conscientious and see what is happening to the world, can be turned against the left. The right will call us terrorists no matter what, but we shouldn't give them the ammunition.

The fact that you are so politically underdeveloped that you can't imagine any solution that isn't an individual committing a single gun crime should make you worry.

Who won the Russian revolution? Was it the Narodniks, the political terrorists? Or was it the Bolsheviks who were the political organizers? And before we litigate the atrocities of the soviets after 1921, let's not pretend that the Narodniks wouldn't have just handed political power back to the bourgeois and monarchists, wouldn't have become even worse. But you don't have to read thousands of pages of Trotsky and Lenin to know what happens to a country when political terrorists seize power.

The point is we need to organize, and yes, part of that means organizing workers militias and community defense. But a single half cocked act of terrorism is, at best, misguided reformism -- but usually it portends something much, much worse.

Believing that individualistic political violence is ineffective and arguing that it is counter productive is not doing nothing. disagreeing with you is not doing nothing. Don't pretend to know what you're talking about. There's a lot more to being an effective radical than just advocating for the most radical position. In fact, often the most "radical" sounding arguments come from the people who are the first to capitulate to power. I see no evidence that your position is anything but misguided, underdeveloped, idealist reformism.

Getting politically educated, as the first commenter suggests, is doing a lot more than shooting up a Tesla dealer ffs because it actually improves political consciousness. Political action without political theory is worse than a complete waste of time, it can have negative effects on our movement.

Instead you wanna go off like some right winger kicking down the door to a pizza shop demanding you and your gun are allowed into the pedo torture basement.

I really understand that it is a nuanced issue, people are extremely intricate and surprising creatures. People have a way of taking the worst circumstances and making them wonderful. If a little God makes your life better, fucking go for it. My granddad, one of the sweetest most caring men I ever met, his final words were, "God in heaven..." And then He passed. At which point it doesn't matter if heaven is a "real" place, it is real because it is real to people who believe in it. On the other hand, many atheists are insufferable and just as ignorant and entrenched in their negative belief as the worst religious people can be. I've studied religions and was deeply Catholic until I was about 30, so like 15 years ago. I love to discuss theology. Personally I read the Tao te Ching and it helps me connect with my spirit, and I want others to have that, whether it comes from religion or music or just other people.

But the parts that are a mechanism of control are just too ingrained into it. I believe in freedom and human self-creation. If religion helps you accomplish that, go for it: praise Jesus, God is Great. But if it doesn't, then to the extent that it actively prohibits this then it is to that extent that I oppose it. Sometimes its a little, sometimes its a lot.

Totally agree, but why is your username the noise made by my old 28.8k modem?

Religion takes the best parts of human nature, and convinces people that these things come from some big other, who is always watching and judging us. It turns us inside out, and the world upside down. I don't get mad at god or judge people for being religious but anything that convinces good people that they are fundamentally evil is itself the opposite of goodness.

It is absolutely a method of control, its no coincidence that the emergence of basically all the major religions coincides with the rise of class domination.

"With or without religion, good people would do good and bad people would do evil. But to make good people do evil takes religion."

What if wanting to believe that there is some nice place that good people go when they die, leads people to support the mass murder and immiseration of countless women, children, queer people and BIPOC?

Right, electronic devices talk to each other all the time

"Machines were the weapons deployed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor"

I've said it before, all ceos could be replaced by mascots and it would have no negative effect on the productive capabilities of our society. On the contrary things might actually improve for once in my life

You say that, but what about St. Paul who is definitely in heaven and was a pathological gooner

What do you mean "adapting" he has never done anything but Leach off the govt. Tesla isn't so much a car company as it is a carbon credits company that sells govt carbon credits to other car manufacturers. Other than that, SpaceX is basically fully funded by fed contracts and boring by state and municipal contracts.

Like the idea that he is even a decent businessman is a wild exaggeration. He's been gaming the system and leaching off the taxpayers from the jump

Hah! Good one

Same, except i wasnt a lit major, just a guy who was going through the phase of "this is what intelligent people look like" while trying to educate myself. I was convinced DFW was the voice of our generation, heralding in a new era of consciousness.

The book is conceptually pretty cool, like it is really well written and he draws together so many disparate elements to make kind of a coherent narrative.

But the idea of making a book impossible to read on purpose is a funny joke, especially one that so many aspiring intelligentsia gush over. I can appreciate a good shaggy dog as much as the next guy, but IJ is just so far beyond the pale.

A book should be challenging because the concepts are unique and well considered, and it draws from lots of historic and philosophical research; not because the author decided to intentionally break the flow of the narrative to make you flip to the not-optional appendix to read 32 pages of made up synopsis about a character's avant-garde filmography.

A condom is just a dick thimble

The leg shakes, or beat the devils tattoo

Quebec

Yeah if our reality could stop resembling Infinite Jest, that would be great. I can't stand that stupid fucking book and how accurately it predicts our increasingly insane circumstances

If he dedicated the rest of his wealth to fighting antisemitism, if he lent his incredible fame to reversing the horrible legacy of racist, chauvinist violence, if he really gave a shit and fixed himself and worked his ass off for years, then maybe, some people might begin to forgive him.

But dong a bunch of Nazi shit and then saying you're not a Nazi, is Nazi shit. This is meaningless and pathetic, cowardly behavior.

Ukrainian children yearn for the mines

Republican understanding of elections

Fascism shouldn't be thought of as a static "thing" or an object of ideology. Peoples beliefs come from their environment. We are so individualized as a society that often we as progressives take "personal responsibility" too far, we buy the premise implicitly without realizing there are flaws with thinking in this way. Every logical system has flaws and contradictions, its proven mathematically though I think some systems are more rigorous and based on evidence.

GWF Hegel's philosophy of Right was written in 1820, and influenced political thought ever since. Liberalism was still in it's revolutionary phase and theories about it were still fairly new, the Wealth of Nations was written just 50 years before, and Karl Marx was like two when it was released, although it would serve as the basis for much of his work analyzing the hidden relationships of Capital, and ethical political philosophy on the whole.

The book is the closest I think someone can honestly get to an actual "horseshoe theory" because not only did it influence the left but it also influenced the far right. Hegel, using the works of other great liberal philosophers such as Locke and Kant, who Hegel was always working to surpass, applied his dialectical philosophical methods to the writings of liberalism.

What he discovered was a natural tendency toward what we would calll fascism. Like he prefigured fascism by 100 years. He wasn't a fascist, there was no such thing. He was just exploring the ideas of this revolutionary philosophy, one that purported to liberate the mind, body and spirit, and discovered the oppressive seeds which might grow into something quite different.

This isn't to call liberals fascists, I'm a communist and 20th century communism had a lot of problems, to put it mildly. I would say confidently that progressive liberals are not crypto fash, in fact the term "progressive" is a typically left-Hegelian ideal, in that it describes human progress and development as the subject of history. Instead it challenges the idea of the liberatory nature of private property, a key component of liberal thought. Of course this is all depending how you look at it, right-Hegelians see this same formulation as proof of the inevitability of their ideas and justification for their actions.

You're getting a lot of different opinions about this stuff so I'm trying to make sort of a different point about philosophy, history and action. Other reading for a deep dive on fascism is the essay Ur Fascism by Umberto Eco (great empirical analysis, but the least scientific IMO), Trotsky's pamphlet Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It, and HA Roy's Fasism, Its Philosophy, Professions and Practice.

In a way, fascism has always been there below the surface, informally shifting the sands of history until it was formalized in the early 20th century. I don't think you can have a society based on private property without some elements of fascism somewhere. Mostly "western democracies" will outsource their extreme cruelty to other countries where it doesn't affect their citizens.

But in summary, Fascism is the realization of the contradictions inherent in liberal ideology, its liberalism turned inside-out, with all its appearances of justice and freedom cut away, leaving only the logic of expansion and domination that most liberal democracies do their best to hide. This is how fascists are able to hide in our society, their individual beliefs are not completely unpalatable to centrists and conservatives who have also started to dispense with justice and freedom in the interest of national greatness. Its what makes their beliefs so malleable, and its also why liberals have such a hard time defining it. But fascism isn't an individual's beliefs, if it was it would be just regular bog-standard chauvinism. Fascism is a mass movement which will use charismatic leaders amenable to their politics to rally the masses.

In our society, the middle classes are the "battery" for fascism. Middle classes are constantly under attack under capitalism and the individuals often feel this and become paranoid (doomsday prepping, etc.,) and this paranoia and real social pressure to produce or be wiped out, the fear from the constant threat of precarity and uncertainty fits hand in glove with the aims and means of fascists.