☭ Sup Marxists? ☭

wrath
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I’m not really sure such a state is possible, unless by “barbarism” we mean nuclear annihilation. I don’t think we can have a social apocalypse without a physical apocalypse.

People fret about a future where automation means workers are no longer needed because they are so entrenched in the idea that some fat cat has to own the productive capacity that somehow being able to make everything we need with virtually no work seems like a crisis (the rich may one day not need the poor). But imagine a star trek replicator future where a few rich people lord over the technology and everyone else is dirt poor subsistence farmers. The logical end to that is that either one day a “rich” person will just decide to share because they can and they are a human being, or the poor people will kill one or more rich people and take the technology. The poor have never needed the rich, and on multiple occasions have decided to do away with them.

I think protests are more useful than many people seem to, but these days I think of trying to change things for the next generation rather than for the next election cycle. But it’s not like protestors don’t get abused by American police. An average American has free speech according to their constitution, but doesn’t really have free speech in practice because they don’t have enough money to defend themselves all the way to the supreme court, and they don’t have enough clout to be free from police brutality.

I think I made this reference very recently in another thread, but once again I’m reminded of Screwtape telling Wormwood to get his charge to pray for someone’s soul instead of for the person. Many americans seem to cling to Free Speech as the soul of America and leave America - a place where people live and die and work and eat and etc. - completely out of the discussion.

I think people overemphasize this. It’s amazing how, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, I saw people giving France flak having laws against denying the holocaust, because that goes against free speech. Does a contemporary society really need to hear from holocaust deniers? The slippery slope argument only works if we deny any possibility of being reasonable.

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I’ve seen quite a bit of analysis related to how technological progress does or does not change how we should implement the 2nd amendment, but little related to how tech changes the 1st. Anyone know of any?

Certainly, I would think the cycle time to debunk a lie or falsehood is quicker these days, allowing for much earlier intervention in the spread of the bad memes that need to be bred out of our culture.

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Different branch of this topic: It’s notable that all three incarnations of the BBS role-playing game so far have instances where the players organize to take collective action against authority.

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Tyranny!

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I think that current technology makes bad ideas easier to spread and hold on to. A person who used to be the town kook* is now able to find a forum to talk to other people with similar dispositions. And I’m not sure we really understand that antidote. The anti-vax movement was founded on literal fraud-for-monetary-gain and has no basis in science, but every time people try to shine a light on it, the movement either just morphs into something new, or we discover that giving information about the truth only hardens people’s beliefs in falsehoods.

I know the adage that the best remedy for bad memes is good memes, but if countering falsehoods were as easy as pointing out they were false then no one would watch FOX News and America would probably be a lot more socialist than it is. Ultimately, I’m just not sure we can do it.

It was not long ago I read about a new cure for chronic bad breath that used probiotics - and by cure I mean cure, not treatment. Mouthwash worked by killing the bacteria that cause bad breath, but there’s no chance of completely annihilating them all so they just come back. If you destroy 99.9% of bacteria in your mouth, your mouth bacteria will be back in exactly the same state in a matter of hours. The change with the probiotics is that the treatment actually repopulated the mouth with bacteria that don’t smell bad. When you repopulate you don’t leave the vacancy for the old bacteria to refill.

I think that makes a very good analogy to trying to “cure” bad ideas. To counter bad ideas we need good ideas that can take over the function of the bad idea in the person’s head. But memes are a lot more complicated than bacteria and they do very different things for different people. I don’t think there is some idea that can crowd holocaust denial out of the culture, and I don’t think that we can actually engineer one.(as the Frankfurt School engineered ideas to replace capitalism with communism!). The thing is, suppose we could do that. Bacteria can mutate to try to get around our treatments, which is bad enough, but the bad ideas that we’d like rid of are supported by people who can understand the technology we employ to counter them, and can use that technology back at us (like Will Smith flying the alien ship in Independence Day).

That’s basically exactly what happened with progressive intellectual ideas that were around when I was in university. Like I said way back in post 277:

The people who used to complain about “cultural relativism” have lapped it up at this point because a kind of bastardized version of understanding multiple points of view serves their purpose. I think that progressives these days are mostly trying to run to science and actual facts to try to counter of madness of valuing everyone’s opinion (which should be valuing everyone’s experiences - kind of objective relativism).

The thing is, being universally vulnerable to one kind of idea would be like being universally vulnerable to one kind of fungus - you’d die off. Some humans can be talked into nearly anything, others listen to people who they have emotional connections with, others only believe things they can understand themselves, etc. And if it weren’t like that, I think we’d probably be screwed. Ideas like holocaust denial don’t need a general way of spreading through the population to survive, they need a very narrow approach that works on a specific subset of people. The internet make it easy to radicalize people who are especially vulnerable to radicalization, but it doesn’t do much to lessen the task of de-radicalizing those people, because they are just plain prone to being radical.

* I looked this up, it is probably a reference to cuckoo birds and is amazingly not derived from a pejorative term for a minority group!

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Running to science - or better, doing science - is a perfectly sound option when confronted with the frequent irrationality of people. But the problem of needing to value everybody’s opinion is still based upon the old coercive model of needing to devise a monoculture which compromises them. Monoculture does not really allow for an ecosystem where stronger ideas survive. People do not need to value a person’s opinion in order to accept that it is their opinion. This way, people are not so threatened that they need to seek people with similar dispositions - but can learn from people who see things differently than they do.

This is why I distinguish “true multiculturalism” - people being free to associate and create parallel social structures, from “false multiculturalism” - the appearance of diversity, where people are still coerced into living in ways that are essentially the same.

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Except science needs rationally and human beings really are anything but.

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I submit: The SCUM-T Manifesto.

(Yes, I realize it fails your other specifics, but I had rather a good time reading it and trying to decide if it was serious or not, and whether I wanted it to be serious or satire.)

I was thinking about a collective action for good I’d like to see - someone was passing around an #ILLGOWITHYOU image on FB earlier today, and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to have an app that trans people could use to find nearby friendly “bathroom buddies”? If social networking apps can be used to find people nearby who want to swap bodily fluids, surely, at least in dense areas like college campuses and big cities, perhaps one could get a critical mass of people to let their phone broadcast “I’ll use my cis privilege to help you be safe while you take care of a basic bodily function.”

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This is my very first post here…hello, all! I am not a dogmatic Marxist but it’s nice to know that I am amongst my kind! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Over on another forum, which I will not name, I constantly encounter a guy with what seems to me an irrational hatred of the West, of the British Empire, of Decadence. of the enslaving ideology of liberalism-- so he constantly defends ISIS, Putin, things like [Perimeter](Dead Hand - Wikipedia], while accusing people of being fascists and the like. And so every so often I probe him to learn what conspiracy theory he’s bought into. This week, I started thinking he might have mainlined Lyndon Larouche. And while poking around the net I came across this article (which sounds more than vaguely Larouchite, though I’m not sure.)

Putin stands up to Western Decadence

Yet liberal intolerance is not really new. It has a history reaching back to the 1970s and Herbert Marcuse’s offensive term of “repressive tolerance”, the repression being back then the imposition on the liberal mind of tolerance towards opposing views. Well the trick has worked, with PC being established across the board today, which brings us straight to the Frankfurt School…

As I wrote on that forum:

Oh. My. Fucking. God
Reality never made so much sense.

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I don’t know what we’d do without these characters “interpreting” the past hundred years for us!

Which leads us to the late 20th century, when the Frankfurt school’s notorious Horkheimer was crowned “Star Hustler” by the US intelligentsia, and was used to sow the seeds of Cosmological Marxism amidst an unsuspecting public. Throughout the 1990s, children were unwittingly indoctrinated in their classrooms with lessons amounting to thinly-veiled strategies for domination. See the linked video for hints at their repugnant agenda, using euphemistic phrases such as “finding your planet” or “watching your planet” - and consider their ominous allusions when viewed through the distorted lens of Cosmological Marxism…

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genius,

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GROSS: So the story is, as you tell it, about this alliance between business leaders and Christian leaders, dates back to the 1930s when business leaders were struggling on two fronts - the Depression and the New Deal. What were their problems with the New Deal?

KRUSE: Their problems with the New Deal were that they suddenly found themselves on the defensive. The New Deal had passed a large number of measures that were regulating business, in some ways, for the first time. It had empowered labor unions and given them a voice in the affairs of business. Corporate leaders resented both of these moves, and so they launched a massive campaign of public relations designed to sell the values of free enterprise. The problem was, was that their naked appeals to the merits of capitalism were largely dismissed by the public.

The most famous of these organizations was a group called the American Liberty League, and it was heavily financed by leaders at DuPont, General Motors and other corporations. The problem was, was that it seemed, like, very obvious corporate propaganda. As Jim Farley, the head of the Democratic Party at the time, said, they ought to call it the American Cellophane League because number one, it’s a DuPont product and number two, you can see right through it.

So when they realized that making this direct case for free enterprise wasn’t effective, they decided to find another way to do it. They decided to outsource the job. And they noted in their private correspondence, ministers were the most trusted men in America at the time, and so who better to make the case to the American people than ministers?

Are there any Pagan Statists in the house?

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You know it!

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I wasat one time the operator of a pocket calculator.

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I dressed as Dieter for Halloween back in… '91? Good times.

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For no reason…

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Oddly, Sayle already took over James May’s motoring column in the Torygraph a few years back.

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