God forbid we understand the lives of women and minorities… not like they ever did anything in history worth talking about… /s
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God forbid we describe structures that have historically oppressed people…
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I just finished reading that essay. It was quite interesting, and I can certainly see why the right would hate it: it makes a strong case against tolerating the political expressions of reactionaries. I wish I’d read it before; it might have helped inform arguments I’ve made in the past, and it’s certainly relevant to the current issue.
Recall that Andrew Auernheimer, recently revealed as a Nazi, began his campaign of terrorizing Kathy Sierra when she proposed comment moderation in an Internet forum.
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What I have gotten from looking over this thread is that any attempt to look critically at society is being considered as the influence of the Frankfurt school and creeping Marxism. If you’re not going to accept a narrow conservative viewpoint in total, they’re the only game in town, essentially by definition.
In which case, thanks! I for one welcome our old Marxist overlords; I hadn’t actually realized they were the ones responsible for just about every positive social development in the last century.
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Strawberries and cream for everyone!
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Evenly distributed, of course. To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities and all that stuff.
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The problem is when people confuse the “taint” of something they don’t like or disapprove of with something that’s really real. Most people have “ugh” reactions to particular political movements or particular examples of particular populations of people, especially when those are new things. But everyone has the choice to either accept that the story’s much bigger than their initial sniff test of the outlander homeless or differently gendered or those with an incompatible perspective. Too many just try to justify, not just the bad reaction they had to something, but they want to rewrite the whole story so that it is only about the ever-shrinking cluster of their personal neuroses. That’s also known as “The John Birch Society”.
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Lol love that song!
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Often, things are not what they appear to be.
The sign along the road reading “Womens Emancipation, this exit” does not necessarily have womens best interests at heart.
Thanks.
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True. It’s wise to be cautious. But this could be used to explain away anything,
While this is certainly possible, each woman needs to evaluate this for herself. Feeling that one knows what someone else’s best interests are is dubious at best.
That Bernays and tobacco companies exploited women’s desire for freedom by pushing an unhealthy product says more about advertising and the tobacco industry than it does anybody else. They were “equal opportunity offenders”. Ad companies still make it their strategy to sell “lifestyles” instead of products and services, and are not beyond any sort of bait-and-switch which substitutes any commodified desire with whatever they have to sell, to any demographic.
Great analogy! Because we all know that men typically love to simultaneously light their penis on fire while stuffing it in their mouth! XD
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Indeed. That’s of course the point; the way they’re used here terms like “critical theory” and “Marxism” cover a huge range of things - all the way from totalitarian regimes that kill millions, to historians who dare write about minorities - so it’s no surprise they include all sorts of things both positive and negative.
And of course you are going to find examples of them everywhere from miserable dictatorships to happy democracies. But it doesn’t show any pernicious spread, or even tell you much of anything about what they have in common except that they aren’t all extremely conservative - because that seems to be the only thing that doesn’t qualify.
Myself, I would consider that a good sign the words are ridiculously broad to the point of being completely useless. Studying the treatment of minorities in society is not really anything like the Khmer Rouge at all, and treating them as related because both are “critical” only serves to obscure that.
But then I also think it would be absurd nonsense to, say, claim that because society used to be more sexist, trying to treat women as closer to equal is an attempt to undermine western civilization. So obviously our perspectives differ.
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ah, you’re beginning to understand what Repressive Desublimation is.
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But its clear from my example that, in this case, at least, that women were coerced into a making a marketing-oriented decision via a coopted social cause?
In the interest of clarity, I grant that the health effects of tobacco were not well understood at the time. Nevertheless, the manipulation was enacted. Torches of Freedom was NOT a social issue. It was a fabricated marketing campaign disguised as a social movement.
To ‘bring it home’ I contend that the fruits of Critical Theory are similarly employed to further a political agenda that is not in the interest of the general population.
I find nothing to debate in the rest of your paragraph
Bernays was familiar with Freudian theory. As a matter of fact I seem to recall that Bernays was Freud’s cousin, or nephew, or something.
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Wait, slow down, I’m still processing sublimation.
And you people act like you dont know what I’m talking about. 
BB BBS still the smartest forum on the Internet.
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I would say that some women were surely persuaded - people weren’t coerced into smoking even at its most fashionable, except via second-hand smoke. Also, there is, I think, a difference between a publicity campaign and a social cause. What these women were being offered was merely the image of independence. Not unlike how even today people are offered products marketed towards being identified with rebellion, conscience, refinement, progress, advantage, status, intelligence, etc., etc. - whatever kind of experience they imagine people want to buy to be associated with. To somebody thinking critically, it is obvious that buying a certain carbonated beverage is not any kind of real “rebellion”! But if it didn’t work on some people, they wouldn’t still do it. The path of least resistance suggests that any image will be more easily achieved than reality.
Well done.
But it was capital that subverted those women’s desire for freedom into being addicted to cigarettes. This was not an ideological ruse, just a way to peddle a then-popular addictive product for profit. The profits were “the agenda”. And this becomes obvious by thinking… critically! You are using critical theory yourself to make this point, because it is not a movement, it is a process. Just like “scientific method” is a process. This way of thinking allows one to avoid buying into an ideology which doesn’t check out. Whether you are afraid it might be a “right” or “left” ideology is besides the point. Marxists might disagree with Maoists, just like Objectivists might disagree with Christian Fundamentalists. Needing to accept or deny any position for token reasons such as voting a ticket, respect of others, convenience, or other shallow motivation requires one to accept it without thinking. This is exactly what critique is used to avoid.
He was Sigmund Freud’s nephew. He didn’t seem to be very concerned that his uncle suffered greatly for years with the cancer he ultimately died from, which was a direct result of his addiction to tobacco use. Sometimes a cigar is just a death sentence.
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Ok, I want to digest your response a bit longer before I respond.
But, for now, I noticed that you used the term ‘capital’ to describe the source of deception. Can you elaborate? Do you mean that is was capitalists that subverted desire?
I will get back with you shortly.
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Sure - capital, capitalists, profiteering, unbridled commerce - money as a force which uses people to make more money. With no further ideal, dogma, goal, lesson, agenda, etc.
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Thus, many of those folks among the common ranks of GG are being co-opted by the vultures and profiteers who harbor regressive views of race and gender.
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As someone who is familiar with Bernays and his work and this event specifically, that doesn’t mean that the entire feminist movement is bunk. After all, at that point there had been nearly a century of worked aimed at women’s issues, on a variety of fronts (voting, most notably, but also temperance and birth control). Of course movements can be co-opted by corporations, we all know that and there is a very long history in consumer capitalism of corporations doing that. But by conflating the women’s rights movement from the 1830s or so to the present with the rise of marketing is at best disingenuous. You’re basically accusing all women since this event of having a false conciousness becaues capitalism co-opted the women’s rights movement to sell cigarettes.
So, please, tell me how best to understand this complex world, because, clearly as a woman, I am not able to figure it out myself…
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