wahoopride posted:Is the idea that Sam Kriss sucks because he is one of those "heat vampire leftists" or whatever?
sam kriss "sucks" in the sense of current youth slang use of the term, meaning he's actually very cool and "hyphy".
1. Mostly writes articles about what he's paid to write articles about, as well as things likely to get him future work, instead of correct Marxist topics like reviewing 500 year old books about grain.
2. Now that people are paying him to go places he's doing a lot of stuff that's like if hunter s was on talking like a dick instead of drugs
3. Is more popular than people who he was once less popular than, the ultimate unforgivable sin.
But I don't know of many places you can wax marxist and still get paid.
And that is the ultimate goal of this whole ponzi scheme, right? Make as much money pushing marxism as possible.
also way too in love with horseshit bourgeois continental philosophy to be a proper marxist
but his writing isn't nearly as bad as mccaine's
peepaw posted:but his writing isn't nearly as bad as mccaine's
damned with faint praise
Edited by Backus ()
This is an amazing piece https://t.co/pT1LtR4G5V
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) February 2, 2017
"....These aren’t the advanced techniques of hyper-chess masters; they’re familiar to every schoolyard bully and gaslighting domestic abuser. They’re also techniques which Trump is famous for in his business dealings; he’s particularly got a reputation for refusing to pay vendors and contractors and seeing if they manage to sue him.
All of which is to say: You don’t need to be brilliant to be a danger to democracy; quite literally, an idiot could do it."
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/when-villains-arent-super-f5646d81db6#.jqc55b402
Edited by RedMaistre ()
cars posted:yonatan zunger is a dumb shit liberal who thinks russia bribed donald trump to become(?) president with oil company stock
Don't disagree with you about the russophobia, but Kriss doesn't attack Zunger on the level of facts, he does so by questioning whether political analysis itself is possible and desirable.
"In the end, Kremlinology said a lot more about the people practicing it than it ever did about the Soviet Union. Like all fantasies, it expressed a desire. A universe that could make sense, if only you were smart enough to understand it.."
The problem, evidently, is not that Kremlinologists didn't have all the facts or looked at he world through ideological myopias, but that they thought the world has patterns that are accessible to human reason.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
However, I also believe in the profound importance of systems, because they are the main thing which maintain human welfare on a day-to-day basis. The fact that we can go to the store, buy food, and eat it is not only the product of infrastructural systems (farming, transport logistics, finance, banking) but of social and legal systems: for example, the system of inspection and monitoring which largely prevents people from selling tainted food. There are plenty of countries which lack this kind of inspection system, and what they get is a lot of people dying from food-borne illnesses.
The rule of law is what lets us buy food and expect it not to be rotten, or buy a bed and expect it not to fall apart and kill us, or order from a distant vendor and expect to actually receive something: the laws, the social norms that people follow them, the social (and legal, and physical) cost imposed on those who violate them, allow society to actually function on a day-to-day basis. Without these systems, both formal and informal, our lives really would be a continuous battle of all against all.
This is the entirety of his actual objection to Sam's take.
groundservices posted:If you think about it can you really know or think about anything?
yes
littlegreenpills posted:However, I also believe in the profound importance of systems, because they are the main thing which maintain human welfare on a day-to-day basis. The fact that we can go to the store, buy food, and eat it is not only the product of infrastructural systems (farming, transport logistics, finance, banking) but of social and legal systems: for example, the system of inspection and monitoring which largely prevents people from selling tainted food. There are plenty of countries which lack this kind of inspection system, and what they get is a lot of people dying from food-borne illnesses.
The rule of law is what lets us buy food and expect it not to be rotten, or buy a bed and expect it not to fall apart and kill us, or order from a distant vendor and expect to actually receive something: the laws, the social norms that people follow them, the social (and legal, and physical) cost imposed on those who violate them, allow society to actually function on a day-to-day basis. Without these systems, both formal and informal, our lives really would be a continuous battle of all against all.This is the entirety of his actual objection to Sam's take.
i think about this at least once a week
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:The most d&d post
Also, if people are losing faith in the system, not because the system has a problem, but because they aren't getting the results they want, that isn't a problem with the system.
thirdplace posted:https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/planet-earth-ii-and-the-fantastic-urban-fox/515958/i liked this
Like every other one of his pieces this starts out with an interesting idea and then goes off the rails. This almost reads like he wrote the first half the the article and then inputted random notes he discarded earlier for being off topic to fill the word count. The first half before the fake biology is quite good though, I think there would be something really important in taking the marxist critique of urban space and de-anthropomorphizing it and possibly even finding room for non-human consciousness in the embedded ideology of the city. I do think for example cat videos are so popular because cats are unconcerned with capitalism and so their simultaneous alien consciousness and mimicry of human emotions is the only way we can approach ideology as a whole: through irony. When you see a cat dressed up in a suit but not understanding what a suit is, capitalist ideology becomes visible for a moment in our clothes, even if it can only be approached from the unknowable and projected innocence of cat concerns. One can easily apply this to cockroaches (who are metaphorically used as nature's indifference to nuclear war and man's concern with his own place in evolution) or zoo animals who are incorporated into liberal politics and resist them.
babyhueypnewton posted:I do think for example cat videos are so popular because cats are unconcerned with capitalism and so their simultaneous alien consciousness and mimicry of human emotions is the only way we can approach ideology as a whole: through irony. When you see a cat dressed up in a suit but not understanding what a suit is, capitalist ideology becomes visible for a moment in our clothes, even if it can only be approached from the unknowable and projected innocence of cat concerns.
cars posted:i would let a cockroach in a little hat date my daughter. i'm not a proud man.
i would, but my wife wouldn't (she hates the chinese lol)