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Ferrinus posted:I mean, there was also the Japanese invasion. The two countries also had extremely similar vital statistics as they moved into their respective periods of independence, although offhand I don't know how exactly much industry or cultivated land or whatever that left each country with at t=0. I think fundamentally this is the right approach from any materialist perspective as it focuses on the economic distinctions between the two countries rather than appealing to differences in their culture, language, or other idealist factors as an explanation for why they had different outcomes. One project I considered for a long time, but which would probably form a PhD thesis and require learning Russian / Chinese, was studying the bureaucratic documents from the USSR or Maoist China to see what governance techniques were employed to achieve the economic results they did. Most analyses of the socialist economies in English are very focused on the top level ideology and political economy, but I’m fascinated by documents such as the CIA papers on the average Russian vs American diet in the 60s (roughly equivalent, but the Russian diet had more potatos and less meat; the average Soviet citizen had slightly more calories than the average American).
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Dec 25, 2020 03:53
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Purple Prince posted:I think fundamentally this is the right approach from any materialist perspective as it focuses on the economic distinctions between the two countries rather than appealing to differences in their culture, language, or other idealist factors as an explanation for why they had different outcomes. Please excuse the naive question, but are things like culture and language really considered to be in the domain of ideas rather than material reality? I would think that language (for sure) and culture (debatably) would fall squarely into a materialist framework rather than idealist.
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Dec 25, 2020 08:34
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Please excuse the naive question, but are things like culture and language really considered to be in the domain of ideas rather than material reality? I would think that language (for sure) and culture (debatably) would fall squarely into a materialist framework rather than idealist. It’s more about which one comes first (or is ontologically prior to use jargon). A historical idealist like Hegel or Fukuyama holds that economic results are the result of language, culture, and so on - hence why both were committed to seeing economically successful nations of their time as having superior cultures and see the engine of history as ideas; while historical materialism (orthodox Marxism) holds that culture (and to some extent language) emerges from material conditions. If you hold that culture and language have no impact on reality then historical materialism becomes an absurdity, but this would be a nakedly radical interpretation similar to the idealist right wing argument that poverty comes from having the wrong set of values and that material factors have no effect on the indomitable Will of the Individual.
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Dec 25, 2020 09:43
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uncop posted:In feudal cities, private enterprise was mostly very small scale: individual craftspeople and small collectives. Guilds acted as the main anti-market force: they rather successfully monopolised specific crafts within a city, and basically set the price of labor. When there were a lot of potential workers, they muscled most out of the market so that pay wouldn't be lowered. When there were few, they muscled out people trying to raise their prices. Nepotist favoritism caused many crafts to become largely hereditary, because masters would give the limited positions to people they knew. Basically, the labor market was suppressed both in terms of pay and in terms of freedom to work. Thank you. Thats a lot of elements that didn't occur to me
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Dec 25, 2020 14:26
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Purple Prince posted:It’s more about which one comes first (or is ontologically prior to use jargon). A historical idealist like Hegel or Fukuyama holds that economic results are the result of language, culture, and so on - hence why both were committed to seeing economically successful nations of their time as having superior cultures and see the engine of history as ideas; while historical materialism (orthodox Marxism) holds that culture (and to some extent language) emerges from material conditions. Cheers, that makes a lot of sense
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Dec 26, 2020 03:31
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Purple Prince posted:It’s more about which one comes first (or is ontologically prior to use jargon). A historical idealist like Hegel or Fukuyama holds that economic results are the result of language, culture, and so on - hence why both were committed to seeing economically successful nations of their time as having superior cultures and see the engine of history as ideas; while historical materialism (orthodox Marxism) holds that culture (and to some extent language) emerges from material conditions. I feel like this is basically the Marxist vs marxist question (well, this and "do I believe in dalectics") . You've split everything into superstructure vs base and you're asserting primacy of the base, but the question is how strong is the dominance of the base. 100% is obviously absurd, but if you can pin it very high then you've got an interesting theory. My experience is that after a few criticisms it gets bargained down to something similar to "the base exerts a strong influence on the superstructure" which is pretty obvious and uninteresting.
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Dec 26, 2020 06:46
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That’s my understanding as well, and the principal reason the New Left and Critical Theory broke with orthodox Marxism (they tend to give the superstructure more credit than orthodox / Leninist Marxism does). It’s slightly problematic that theory developed in this way but I’d posit it’s because bourgeois academia tends to value idealist approaches in humanities over materialist ones. See how organisation theory, to give one example, is relegated to business departments or a niche specialism in psychology. It probably doesn’t help that because of neoliberalism there are now far fewer intellectuals with experience in blue collar, materially grounded professions than there were 50 years ago. Thus developing “the weapon of theory” (from Cabral) becomes challenging because institutional pressures militate against studies in applied leftist theory and promote abstract critical theory detached from praxis. Not that critical theory needs to be this way, as say Raymond Williams demonstrates, but overwhelmingly it remains an academic and impractical topic which tends to just produce really highbrow reviews of popular culture.
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Dec 26, 2020 09:06
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NovemberMike posted:I feel like this is basically the Marxist vs marxist question (well, this and "do I believe in dalectics") . You've split everything into superstructure vs base and you're asserting primacy of the base, but the question is how strong is the dominance of the base. 100% is obviously absurd, but if you can pin it very high then you've got an interesting theory. My experience is that after a few criticisms it gets bargained down to something similar to "the base exerts a strong influence on the superstructure" which is pretty obvious and uninteresting. Trying to understand the relationship between base and superstructure through this sort of "domination" concept falls into the same trap as people who conceived evolution as a process to develop more complex, or "higher" lifeforms from less complex or "lower" lifeforms. What evolution actually does is throw poo poo at the wall and see what sticks. What sticks is a statistical event based on adaptation to the environment. The base is the equivalent of the environment to superstructural developments. And the superstructure feeds back on the base much like the development of life has changed natural environments. The materialist viewpoint asserts that it's 100% impossible for e.g. an ideology that believes people should subsist on sunlight to proliferate, no matter how many people believed that or how charismatic the proponents were, because the believers would cause a society that listened to them to outright fail. And conversely, that any ideology that does successfully proliferate must have been well adapted to the material conditions that it emerged in. Basically, whenever there's something seemingly idiotic that most people have believed for a long time, an idealist would call it to be replaced with beliefs that make more sense in the abstract. A materialist would investigate what sort of positive social/economic adaptation those beliefs represent, and how material conditions would have to change for them to cease to be beneficial. For materialists, to be wrong in the right way is more weighty than to be right in the wrong way.
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Dec 26, 2020 16:09
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uncop posted:Trying to understand the relationship between base and superstructure through this sort of "domination" concept falls into the same trap as people who conceived evolution as a process to develop more complex, or "higher" lifeforms from less complex or "lower" lifeforms. What evolution actually does is throw poo poo at the wall and see what sticks. What sticks is a statistical event based on adaptation to the environment. The base is the equivalent of the environment to superstructural developments. And the superstructure feeds back on the base much like the development of life has changed natural environments. I think you might be thinking of the wrong definition of "dominates". I'm not speaking in a political sense, I'm talking about the mathematics of growth. If you have a graph defined by two functions, one of which shows constant growth and one which shows a sinusoidal pattern (so y = x + sin(x)) then the long term growth of the sinusoidal component is zero so you can model the long term growth using only the dominant component (y=x). If the base is dominant in this sense then you get to say interesting things like "Capitalism will inevitably fall and give way to Communism because of the fundamental contradictions". If it doesn't dominate then you're stuck saying things like "people that don't eat will die" that pretty much everyone already agreed on without historical materialism. I'm also not too interested in the whole materialist vs idealist thing. You'd probably need to be a bit more specific to have an interesting talk on it since I'm not entirely sure if you're trying to talk in the more general philosophical sense with Hobbes or if you're specifically talking about historical materialism. I'm also not sure if you're talking about it in opposition of critical realism, which I'm not an expert on but most of the more modern marxist things I've read seem to be based on that.
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Dec 26, 2020 19:21
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NovemberMike posted:I think you might be thinking of the wrong definition of "dominates". I'm not speaking in a political sense, I'm talking about the mathematics of growth. If you have a graph defined by two functions, one of which shows constant growth and one which shows a sinusoidal pattern (so y = x + sin(x)) then the long term growth of the sinusoidal component is zero so you can model the long term growth using only the dominant component (y=x). If the base is dominant in this sense then you get to say interesting things like "Capitalism will inevitably fall and give way to Communism because of the fundamental contradictions". If it doesn't dominate then you're stuck saying things like "people that don't eat will die" that pretty much everyone already agreed on without historical materialism. Nah, I understood what you meant, and my point was that trying to interpret the base and superstructure as simple numerical variables erases the actual theory. When you said: "...how strong is the dominance of the base. 100% is obviously absurd, but if you can pin it very high then you've got an interesting theory." it just sounded weird to me, because I can't see how you'd quantify this stuff in a manner that would allow you to come up with these percentages. We can pick out specific quantifiable phenomena and see how they interact, but we can't quantify "base" or "superstructure" altogether. The reason I brought up the details is to illustrate why IMO the correct question to ask isn't "how strongly does the base dominate the superstructure" but "how much can superstructural phenomena alter constraints set by the base that would imply them to be unviable" and "how much can basal phenomena alter constraints set by the superstructure that would imply them to be unviable". In other words: if a new social practice emerges that a society is ideologically against, how effectively can it affect ideology to condone the practice instead? If a new ideological practice emerges that is against society's material interests, how effectively can it affect social practice so that the material interests would be in line with it instead?
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Dec 26, 2020 22:03
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uncop posted:Nah, I understood what you meant, and my point was that trying to interpret the base and superstructure as simple numerical variables erases the actual theory. When you said: "...how strong is the dominance of the base. 100% is obviously absurd, but if you can pin it very high then you've got an interesting theory." it just sounded weird to me, because I can't see how you'd quantify this stuff in a manner that would allow you to come up with these percentages. We can pick out specific quantifiable phenomena and see how they interact, but we can't quantify "base" or "superstructure" altogether. That's the point, you can't come up with these percentages. Historical materialism is a lens for viewing the world, and it's only useful when it lets you say interesting things. You can only really say interesting things if the base dominates the superstructure, otherwise the lens doesn't provide any real clarity. Keep in mind that the whole "base vs superstructure" thing is artificial, you have to figure out why it's a useful distinction that's worth using. quote:The reason I brought up the details is to illustrate why IMO the correct question to ask isn't "how strongly does the base dominate the superstructure" but "how much can superstructural phenomena alter constraints set by the base that would imply them to be unviable" and "how much can basal phenomena alter constraints set by the superstructure that would imply them to be unviable". In other words: if a new social practice emerges that a society is ideologically against, how effectively can it affect ideology to condone the practice instead? If a new ideological practice emerges that is against society's material interests, how effectively can it affect social practice so that the material interests would be in line with it instead? You've just thrown away most of dialectical materialism in favor of masturbation then. The whole point is that it's capable of making strong predictions about the future, that's the whole thing about the contradictions in capitalism inevitably leading to its collapse. That's a prediction that you can make because you have identified a contradiction in the base that will be the antithesis to capitalism. If you pull back and just say that the base and superstructure are two things with no special relationship and you've just identified them so you can talk about them then you lose the predictive parts of historical materialism and you start just saying obvious things.
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Dec 26, 2020 22:54
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I guess there is a sense in which you can boil historical materialism down to pithy observations like "people die if they don't eat", but the corollary here is that liberal ideology actually denies that people die if they don't eat and instead posits that they die if they don't engage in enough positive thinking or whatever.
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Dec 27, 2020 08:08
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NovemberMike posted:That's the point, you can't come up with these percentages. Historical materialism is a lens for viewing the world, and it's only useful when it lets you say interesting things. You can only really say interesting things if the base dominates the superstructure, otherwise the lens doesn't provide any real clarity. Keep in mind that the whole "base vs superstructure" thing is artificial, you have to figure out why it's a useful distinction that's worth using. one of the strengths of marxian doctrine is imo that it's resistant to vulgar formalism like trying to affix percentages to concepts that are not coherently disentangible it is a meaningful - though these days rather obvious - statement to make that cultural phenomena are fundamentally constrained by circumstance. if you look at e.g. the size of families, this seems rather clear - where you have educated women and a relatively high level of social security, family sizes drop dramatically. this makes sense; bearing lots of children is dangerous and often unpleasant, but there is a strong biological urge to reproduce nonetheless it seems obviously bizarre to start trying to apply a variance analysis to something like family size where you have to assume that there's some proportion of it which exists outside of the influence of material circumstance - which doesn't make sense at all!
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Dec 27, 2020 08:35
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NovemberMike posted:You've just thrown away most of dialectical materialism in favor of masturbation then. The whole point is that it's capable of making strong predictions about the future, that's the whole thing about the contradictions in capitalism inevitably leading to its collapse. That's a prediction that you can make because you have identified a contradiction in the base that will be the antithesis to capitalism. If you pull back and just say that the base and superstructure are two things with no special relationship and you've just identified them so you can talk about them then you lose the predictive parts of historical materialism and you start just saying obvious things. It's you who's talking about contradiction seemingly without having done much work trying to wrap your head around what it means. I'm telling you, seemingly-pinpoint predictions like communism coming after capitalism are produced by logical process of elimination based on constraints, as well as sufficiently vague definition of outcomes. First, we claim that capitalism can never change in a way that'd allow it to work long term. Then, we claim that capitalism has produced only one rising class that could take power over society. Finally, we define communism in a vague way that basically boils down to classlessness and planned production, basically designating it as the only way the proletariat could generalize its class power. Dialectical materialism outlines a structure and epistemology for scientific use, it's not some kind of magic that can do things that philosophy in general can't do. Marx made predictions based on science, and the science was based on decades of study of the actual concrete phenomena at hand. The role of dialectics was to give Marx pointers on what to study: which potential approaches to discard, where to look for clues. Accusing me of having thrown it away, because I'm actually explaining what the speficied structure is like in order to illustrate how to scientifically utilize it, looks confused at best. Dialectical materialism does not provide a direct escape from the fate of being restricted to either saying obvious things or spewing mystical bullshit. It actually claims that it's impossible to become able to say novel and interesting things without quitting the philosophizing and engaging in hands-on practice from a novel direction. So, alas, I'm forced to say obvious things about stuff I don't actually know like the back of my hand, because the alternative would be to say things that are wrong and misleading.
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Dec 27, 2020 10:34
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I think that the reversion to capitalism is due to the fact that capitalists currently run the world and are incredibly hostile to non-capitalist countries. I hate to keep bringing them up, but Vietnam made a very real attempt to go full blown space communism and was strangled to death by exclusion from the market. As a result, Vietnam adopted aspects of capitalism out of necessity: If they didn't open their markets, they were going to starve because the capitalists who owned all the poo poo refused to do business with them. At no point did the VCP ever attempt "Space communism" it stuck very closely to the "National-democratic" economics of marxist-leninist planning, one of the arms of the star on the flag represents the nation's business community, along with intellectuals, peasants, workers and military. With all the strengths and weaknesses that came with it. That system broke down quickly because in addition to rebuilding from war and incorporating the south in ways that could be brutal and messy (driving most of the Chinese minority out) it had to keep a strong border force in the north to deter China who even after the failed invasion didn't stop provoking them until 1992, prop up governments in Laos and Cambodia and keep fighting that brutal civil war with the remnants of the royalists and Pol pot fighters, all while facing a blockade from the USA, ASEAN, China and all of the nations friendly to them. Its isolation in the 70s-80s had nothing to do with capitalism versus communism, it was completely over geostrategic concerns the US was trying to save face after losing militarily by isolating Vietnam, Mao was convinced Vietnam would be a Soviet outpost and this was shared by his successors, ASEAN were convinced Vietnam was building its own regional empire with its military mission to Laos and invasion of Cambodia. Before the invasion of Cambodia Vietnam did have trading relationships with most nations apart from the US, the five year plan was planned in part based on their trade and investment predictions. After troops cross the border China breaks off completely and then attacks, while most other nations defer either to the US, China or the ASEAN economies boycotts. Nations started trading with Vietnam again once it withdrew from Cambodia, the Doi Moi reforms largely just stimulated the growth of a domestic market, it wouldn't play a part in international investment until the mid 90s.
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Dec 27, 2020 15:26
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Ferrinus posted:I guess there is a sense in which you can boil historical materialism down to pithy observations like "people die if they don't eat", but the corollary here is that liberal ideology actually denies that people die if they don't eat and instead posits that they die if they don't engage in enough positive thinking or whatever. Liberalism isn't concerned, as a rule, with people dying. Particularly not of mass deprivation. That's just The Natural Order of Things.
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Dec 27, 2020 19:49
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The Oldest Man posted:Liberalism isn't concerned, as a rule, with people dying. Particularly not of mass deprivation. That's just The Natural Order of Things. (standing up from corpse) Fatal lack of innovation. You hate to see it.
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Dec 27, 2020 20:39
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uncop posted:It's you who's talking about contradiction seemingly without having done much work trying to wrap your head around what it means. I'm telling you, seemingly-pinpoint predictions like communism coming after capitalism are produced by logical process of elimination based on constraints, as well as sufficiently vague definition of outcomes. First, we claim that capitalism can never change in a way that'd allow it to work long term. Then, we claim that capitalism has produced only one rising class that could take power over society. Finally, we define communism in a vague way that basically boils down to classlessness and planned production, basically designating it as the only way the proletariat could generalize its class power. Lol, that's not a logical process of elimination, that's the dialectic. If you don't hold that the result of the crisis will be a synthesis that overcomes the contradictions of the previous system then your conclusion does not logically follow, and there's no real proof that the dialectic is actually a real thing. You say that it's not magic but when it's applied as a system that history must follow it's basically magical. It's like a TODO list, it's not magical and it's a useful tool, but if you start assuming that things that are written down must be accomplished rather than could be accomplished then you've got a magical list. Without this assumption your logical process of elimination doesn't make communism any more likely than Mad Max.
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Dec 28, 2020 23:46
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Didn't realize this thread was unstickied, bumping it with a question... So I saw this tweet thread (I don't know who this journalist is fwiw) and thought it was interesting. I've seen similar arguments here (in D&D, don't recall if they've been made in this thread specifically) regarding whether Trumpists are 'reachable' by leftist policy appealing to improving their material conditions. https://twitter.com/RealAlexRubi/status/1347314574614290435?s=20 I don't think it's a dumb position or anything, but it does seem like it commits a rationalist fallacy of assuming people will act in their own material interests if given the opportunity. (I find the original quoted tweet's argument more compelling -- that the left can only win by fighting the ruling class, not by fighting the right, which seems like a way of framing the concept of class consciousness in the context of modern US politics.) I'm not sure how much it really matters what % of Trump's Rebellion was comprised of working class vs. petite bourgeoisie vs. elites -- clearly all these classes were represented in the mobs marching on the capitol, and in Trump's base at large. I have zero faith that any of their individual material conditions today will make them more or less amenable to policies that aren't blessed by the Trump appartus. That's not to say I think a materialist analysis of why they are unreachable (in my view) is invalid, but to me the takeaway is that decades of surround sound propaganda (that I *think* over the years has dialed down the ideological focus and dialed up the pure conspiracist fantasy focus) can override people's ability to prioritize their own material interests. I guess in a sense that the conspiratorial fantasy is a direct rejection of materialism, even if it's not consciously recognized as such by the conspiracist. At the end of the day I don't really know that this changes anything for what the left should be doing, but just curious to get this thread's thoughts on the argument.
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Jan 8, 2021 19:05
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:I don't think it's a dumb position or anything, but it does seem like it commits a rationalist fallacy of assuming people will act in their own material interests if given the opportunity. (I find the original quoted tweet's argument more compelling -- that the left can only win by fighting the ruling class, not by fighting the right, which seems like a way of framing the concept of class consciousness in the context of modern US politics.) The people being identified from photos and livestream caps by antifa researchers right now are ex-military, ex-cops, current cops, lawyers, and so on - even one CEO of a medium sized company. They're not "economically anxious," they're the fascist vanguard which are always comprised of the nationalist bourgeoise and janissary class reactionaries. They're distinct from the mass of people at home pulling the lever to put the vanguard in office because they believe that (white supremacist) fascism will improve their situations, and some of those people maybe can be reached by the left, but the people busting into the capitol building with custom printed shirts, zip cuffs, and firearms who had the time and money to travel to DC for the purpose of storming the capitol building being the left's allies in waiting is pure loving nonsense. Edit: https://twitter.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1347612778199212035 Like, please don't try to tell me that the actual Republican elected officials breaking into the capitol building are the left's allies. The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Jan 8, 2021 |
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Jan 8, 2021 19:43
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I don't see how anybody could look into the eyes of those people who stormed the Capitol, full of frothing rage, craze, hate, and genuine excitement to commit violence, and ever think that we can turn them into good Leftists or even allies. Whatever % of the country those people truly represent, they will need to be worked around, not with. I don't think they'll ever come along for the ride, and we'll have to drag them into a better future kicking and screaming. Hate is too easy. Ignorance is too easy.
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Jan 8, 2021 22:51
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How are u posted:I don't see how anybody could look into the eyes of those people who stormed the Capitol, full of frothing rage, craze, hate, and genuine excitement to commit violence, and ever think that we can turn them into good Leftists or even allies. There are a lot of people who should face consequences for what they did because it's a big loving deal, but these are the people. I know that trying to disrupt our democratic through force is a big deal, but there are a lot of folks who are aligned with these people who didn't take part in a terrorist attack. As hard as it is to imagine, I think that the world a lot of us imagine requires us to at one point find restoration with these people because they exist. Their dignity and autonomy matter even if they may not think that about you and me. Because what else can you do?
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Jan 9, 2021 16:27
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Timeless Appeal posted:The people from the attack are terrorists having a temper tantrum and undermining democracy. A democracy that is both already stacked in their favor and still delivered them a President who I'd argue is sympathetic to a lot of their beliefs and values even if I do believe his anger about what happened. And people saying these are our allies as opposed to Liberals or "Elites" are people confusing anti-Cosmopolitanism with Leftism. Like, put them in a jail system that focuses on re-education, where you teach them basic human empathy, and remove them from society until they are no longer a threat to it?
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Jan 10, 2021 07:47
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Our model for re-integrating crazed right wingers into consensus reality should probably be cult deprogramming. South Korea also has a long running programme for integrating defectors from across the border into a society with a different take on what’s real and what’s normal, but I have no idea what that’s like or where that falls on the spectrum of ”copy” to “avoid”. Of course all of that’s secondary to keeping the crazies far away from power, otherwise it won’t be us reintegrating them into our reality, it will be them integrating what’s left of us into their delusions. And then successive cycles of eliminating the people who didn’t believe hard enough, as actual reality fails to keep pace with what they expect.
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Jan 10, 2021 11:06
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Beefeater1980 posted:Our model for re-integrating crazed right wingers into consensus reality should probably be cult deprogramming. You mean re-education camps?
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Jan 10, 2021 22:11
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Yes.
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Jan 10, 2021 22:53
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Boba Pearl posted:Like, put them in a jail system that focuses on re-education, where you teach them basic human empathy, and remove them from society until they are no longer a threat to it? I think the people who actually went into the Capitol are terrorists and while I believe in restorative justice, they should face consequences for what they did and be treated seriously. But there are tons of people politically aligned with them who have not tried to disenfranchise their fellow Americans by force. And you can ignore them to some degree. Like Joe Biden can and should ignore them to get an infrastructure plan going, but that's not really what this thread is about. Like if you actually want a society where Democracy is a value and not just system of electing officials, you do have to deal with those people at some point..
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Jan 11, 2021 02:30
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Timeless Appeal posted:Who? Typically in a communist vanguard revolution, the reactionary vanguard would be executed and suspected and actual sympathizers would be re-educated by force.
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Jan 11, 2021 02:31
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The Oldest Man posted:Typically in a communist vanguard revolution, the reactionary vanguard would be executed and suspected and actual sympathizers would be re-educated by force. Is that an option that you think is on the table here in the United States? Do you think it should be on the table?
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Jan 11, 2021 02:33
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How are u posted:Is that an option that you think is on the table here in the United States? Do you think it should be on the table? Let's play fantasy land and say a group of fascists try and take over the United States. And they fail. What do you suppose should be done with them? Do you believe they should be sent to to prison?
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Jan 11, 2021 02:38
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Please excuse the naive question, but are things like culture and language really considered to be in the domain of ideas rather than material reality? I would think that language (for sure) and culture (debatably) would fall squarely into a materialist framework rather than idealist. "Culture" in a neo-Kantian/Weberian sense is quintessential idealism, language is semiotics/post-structuralism and is not quite idealism but certainly not materialism
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Jan 11, 2021 23:52
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Let's play fantasy land and say a group of fascists try and take over the United States. And they fail. What do you suppose should be done with them? Do you believe they should be sent to to prison? Yeah the basic problem is that liberals need to have the right onside in order for their politics to function. If there's any meaningful consequences for the Trumpists they'll permanently alienate most of the right. Of course they're already permanently alienated but at that point even the remote possibility of anyone who's not already a Never Trumper ever being reconciled to the liberal center will be dead. Liberals are rapidly approaching the point where they'll have to confront the fact their politics has 0 popular base, and in order to govern under such conditions they're going to have to be a lot more decisive, assertive and realistic than they've basically ever been, certainly for the last 40 years icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 11, 2021 23:57
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Timeless Appeal posted:But there are tons of people politically aligned with them who have not tried to disenfranchise their fellow Americans by force. And you can ignore them to some degree. Like Joe Biden can and should ignore them to get an infrastructure plan going, but that's not really what this thread is about. Like if you actually want a society where Democracy is a value and not just system of electing officials, you do have to deal with those people at some point.. I think the most important part of this, is that one, it doesn't matter if they are disenfranchising their fellow Americans by force, or by legislation, or by pissing in the wind and trying to catch it with their mouth. They have decided that there personal morals are more important than the safety and freedom of their fellow citizens. If you're supporting republicans politically in the current day and age, you are supporting some of the most harmful, disgusting, and morally reprehensible ideologies that exist. I can not think of a single republican platform that doesn't directly go against someones rights, pillages our nations resources, or exports American misery to other countries. If we're doing hypothetical total future communism, then people who are like this, who are racist without cause, who try to harm others, who want to take and take and take and give nothing back, they would be taught basic skills like humanism and empathy. That is what prison should be as well, not a punishment, or Slavery-Light but a way to reform people into something that isn't hellworld bullshit. You ask me who should go to the reeducation camps, prison, whatever. I think you already know the answer I will give. Everyone. The entire education, and justice systems should be reformed so that people prove they understand and are capable of having empathy, and understanding how the system should work for them, those that don't get iut are taught again, and again until they get it, or they're so removed from society that it doesn't matter.
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Jan 12, 2021 01:26
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icantfindaname posted:"Culture" in a neo-Kantian/Weberian sense is quintessential idealism, language is semiotics/post-structuralism and is not quite idealism but certainly not materialism Mind expanding further? Sounds interesting, albeit not very intuitive for me personally*. I’d research myself but I have a feeling I’d have a whole lot of dialectics to unpack before i started scratching the surface... *this may be a silly reductionist argument, but isn’t language materialist insofar as you could literally break it down into sound waves? Or is it that “noise” is material but certain groupings of noises having specific meanings is semiotic/post-structural? I have a hard time separating the meaning from the matter, I would think that all meaning is imbued into matter with context and observer biases, but anyway I’ll stop there because I have no idea if this makes sense or if I’m just showing my rear end! 
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Jan 12, 2021 01:33
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I think the distinction is that "material" things are things that exist independently of human thought. Rocks, buildings, technological processes, geography, weather. They are there and their existence (and the specific nature of their existence) creates pressure on us whether we think about them or not. Gravity holds you to the earth, buildings keep the rain off, technology works and what technology exists and is built governs our lives in many ways. Wheras language and culture is literally just ideas in our heads. Those ideas have their own inertia, of course, but conceivably they can be modified very quickly by changes in material conditions.
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Jan 12, 2021 01:39
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Mind expanding further? Sounds interesting, albeit not very intuitive for me personally*. I’d research myself but I have a feeling I’d have a whole lot of dialectics to unpack before i started scratching the surface... There is a material aspect to language of course but as I understand it philosophers like Saussure and a bunch of other dead white French guys talked about language as a kind of abstract symbolic system with internal rules of grammar and such, but that exists outside of the subjective mind of individuals. That has little to do with materialism, it wasn’t about like physical speech or voice
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Jan 12, 2021 05:34
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icantfindaname posted:There is a material aspect to language of course but as I understand it philosophers like Saussure and a bunch of other dead white French guys talked about language as a kind of abstract symbolic system with internal rules of grammar and such, but that exists outside of the subjective mind of individuals. That has little to do with materialism, it wasn’t about like physical speech or voice One could certainly qualify language as a type of encoded information. If technology counts as material, the knowledge required to crate it should be material adjacent at least.
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Jan 12, 2021 06:16
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How are u posted:I don't see how anybody could look into the eyes of those people who stormed the Capitol, full of frothing rage, craze, hate, and genuine excitement to commit violence, and ever think that we can turn them into good Leftists or even allies. I would look at Nelson Mandela for inspiration here. 74 million people just voted for Trump (about 12 million more than in 2016) I don't think we should (or even can) write them off.
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Jan 12, 2021 23:45
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spacetoaster posted:I would look at Nelson Mandela for inspiration here. 74 million people just voted for Trump (about 12 million more than in 2016) I don't think we should (or even can) write them off. Oh I am not writing off 74 million people. I just mean the ones who are too far gone, like the folks who stormed the Captiol. I was thinking about and writing about those type of people. I think there is some percentage of that 74 million that are completely, utterly gone. I'm not guessing exactly what that percentage is, but I suspect it is way higher than you or I would like to see.
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Jan 12, 2021 23:48
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How are u posted:Oh I am not writing off 74 million people. I just mean the ones who are too far gone, like the folks who stormed the Captiol. I was thinking about and writing about those type of people. I think there is some percentage of that 74 million that are completely, utterly gone. I'm not guessing exactly what that percentage is, but I suspect it is way higher than you or I would like to see. I see them as people who've been manipulated and lied to, not as too far gone. I mentioned Mandela intentionally because of the issues he had to deal with after the fall of apartheid. I'm not saying freedom and forgiveness for everyone, but I think a method of redemption is necessary to be successful in bringing people over to the left.
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Jan 12, 2021 23:57
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