[UK] Knee Deep In The Inbred

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [UK] Knee Deep In The Inbred

Mandoric: Mar 15, 2003

Communist Thoughts posted:

we're gonna have 10 years of bojo

Ahh, the... second? Third? Five-Heir Plan.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2020 00:56

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 20:50

Mandoric: Mar 15, 2003

V. Illych L. posted:

the concept of "totalitarianism" is a deeply bourgeois one. it can be useful for some things, mostly in differentiating the bourgeois-democratic core from the revolutionary periphery - it's a theory of government under serious pressure. fast-forward a few decades from arendt's launching the concept and you see the definitions start to blur a lot - is the present US corporate-imperial state in the west totalitarian? it shares a great many of the attributes (mass surveillance, censorship, berufsverbot for dissidents, mobilising mental health to silence opposition etc), but it doesn't get painted with the same brush at all; in practical terms, the concept is mostly used to assert a commonality between fascism and communism which is not present under bourgeois democracy by definition

under such circumstances, the term is useless, however: all it says is "others bad, we good" with about as much sophistication as attributing the excesses of the 20th century to inscrutable hunnish savagery. getting caught up on the commonalities between hitler and stalin is deeply unfruitful for a modern leftist. the failures of the soviet union must be analysed on their own terms, and while it's true that simply being a relatively isolated revolutionary regime is very difficult and carries with it a strong motivation for brutality which must be taken into account, this doesn't really explain the atrocities of stalin or those of hitler (or of churchill, for that matter) in a satisfactory way

I think that there's some small nugget of mostly-useless semi-truth in that the politics of the workers and the politics of the petty bourgeoisie both need to, in times of conflict (including in the fash case deliberate crisis as a path toward rewriting social compacts like who governs which land), be set up on an industrial, statistical, sociological scale, while bourgeois thought ticks along just fine by its own standards only contemplating existing great men.

Arendt's failures are twofold; she casts the two-against-one along the lines of scale of thought, placing the politics of literally an authority as the noble outlier, rather than along the lines of idealism (which could even have included the notion of Stalin speaking the received truth if she wanted to dunk on him!) justifying the unjustifiable will of elites and placing the politics of the workers as the noble outlier; and she fails to recognize the value of industrial organization in conflict inevitably leading to these free great men inevitably accumulating their own domains where their word is law that they can then hold in loose commonwealth against external threats, due to the bourgeois bias against recognizing anyone else involved as historical subjects.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2021 21:14

Mandoric: Mar 15, 2003

but does he demand it dry?

# ¿ Jul 28, 2022 17:51

Mandoric: Mar 15, 2003

kecske posted:

why are there so many MPs at the kebab awards? I refuse to believe that any of them have inhaled a shameful doner at 3am

are you sure they didn't think it said 'donor'

# ¿ Mar 1, 2023 11:17

Mandoric: Mar 15, 2003

Weka posted:

https://twitter.com/galbertyn/status/1636033744686444544

Carter wasn't by any metric decent, he was the guy who gave the Afghan mujahideen their big start.

He was decent solely by the metric metric, at least.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2023 09:53

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 20:50

Mandoric: Mar 15, 2003

Raskolnikov38 posted:

e: hmm no its made up of actual cheeses, whats the retched "cheese" product i'm thinking of that's made out of whats leftover from making real cheese

# ¿ Apr 17, 2024 02:41

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