Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6745|Moscow, Russia
O_o
it's satire, right? it's not an actual trump voter lamenting about having been duped... or is it?

Last edited by Shahter (2020-11-21 06:50:17)

if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
oh my god how have you lot spent nearly an hour a day on an internet forum for half of your adult lives and you've never heard of the onion.

i know in soviet russia a sense of humour was officially abolished along with religion and private ownership of property but COME ON.
Larssen
Member
+99|1857
No it's a real Trump voter
Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6745|Moscow, Russia
it is satire then. okay. i thought my bullshit detectors were acting up for a second there.
if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6745|Moscow, Russia

Larssen wrote:

No it's a real Trump voter
if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
i mean, look at the title. do you think even most grad-school students at berkeley or columbia are reading '800 pages of queer feminist theory'?
Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6745|Moscow, Russia
i can't really tell anymore. the whole "woke revolution" has gone off the rails long ago. and since there's not a lot of grad-school students from berkeley or columbia around me i ask people like you, even as i'm sure you'd be a cunt about it.

p.s. still love you, sweetie.
if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
seeing as you're not that exposed to western discourse and tropes, let me just do you a favour and tell you that you sound really fucking stupid when you complain about a 'woke revolution'. i'm not sure what the russian media are doing with these things but there is no 'woke revolution'.

and besides, what the fuck is an avowed marxist doing complaining about 'cultural marxism'?

you sure do like parroting the rhetoric and playback of the right-wing. putin's little poodle.
Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6745|Moscow, Russia

uziq wrote:

and besides, what the fuck is an avowed marxist doing complaining about 'cultural marxism'?
it's easy - there no such thing. marxism is, and always have been, a critique of capitalism from - first and foremost - an economic point of view. "cultural marxism" is a smoke screen raised by the western propaganda machine to obfuscate what actual marxism is about.
if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
except most people accused of 'cultural marxism' are college professors and their students. do you have any idea what they are reading and teaching? the frankfurt school? marx and engels? hegel? lukács? gramsci? to say nothing of the entire nexus of 20th century post-marxist theory that tried to incorporate elements such as psychoanalysis, sociology, and anthropology: from marcuse all the way up to zizek.

'western propaganda machine'. i don't really know what you're on about. the right-wing are complaining about 'cultural marxism' because it is teaching CRITIQUES OF CAPITALISM and the STATUS QUO to young people.

everyone knows the standard marxian line that the 'origin of all class struggle is economic'. but intersectionality is very much a thing. ideology critique is very much a thing. the history and struggle of colonialism, and subsequently of post- or neo-colonial theory, is very much relevant to understanding the international picture. french and german marxists shaped this tradition throughout the early 20th century. althusser? laclau? mouffe? badiou? ranciere? balibar? liberal arts and humanities faculties on college campuses teach this stuff, even if it is engaging with the 'superstructure' that rises from the 'economic base'.

whoosh! over your head. instead you parrot bollocks from the right-wing, yet again. you are a muppet.

you know, marxists such as yourself who rely on marx dogmatically and only want to read and re-read das kapital, are a serious part of the problem. the right-wing has mopped up the left, theoretically and practically, in the 20th century. many of marx's works were, even by his own admission, incomplete, shahter. for instance, the phenomenon of nationalism is massively under-theorized in the marxian corpus; he simply doesn't go there, or doesn't cover it in any systematic way. the left-wing has been defeated by nationalists throughout the 20th century; the socialist states even went to war with one another in nationalist conflicts. do you think nationalism is entirely 'economic'? let me tell you, it isn't. you are revelling in your own ignorance and holding back your own declared cause with your pious attitudes. you resemble an orthodox peasant revering the bible.

Last edited by uziq (2020-11-21 10:00:05)

Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6745|Moscow, Russia

uziq wrote:

whoosh! over your head.
right. as we were discussing this stuff, you were the first to point that large problems have to be broken into smaller parts to make any practical work possible. hence, my emphasis on the defining aspect of this shit - economic. unless we start there, all the stuff that went "woosh over my head" won't mean squat - and, judging by the way it's going, we are not even starting atm.

get back to me with fancy shit when private property on means of production has been abolished - we'll talk then.
if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
once again you seem to think you have some higher knowledge or insight, when all you have is a stupid one-answer-for-everything philosophy that doesn’t even begin to approach real, meaningful questions.

why might it be useful to study dominant systems of power and coercion? why might it make sense to critique class formations and hierarchies as they exist? what use might one get from psychological, or sociological, or strictly cultural analyses of these questions?

did philosophers like althusser spend their entire lives, as marxists and activists i hasten to add, wasting their time on ‘fancy shit?’ or did they perhaps have an insight that you do not? like, for instance, that ideology and the intellected or imagined life are also very important?

what’s your theory of revolution? what leads to these events? what catalyses them? what leads to their success or failure? (what leads successful revolutionary parties to devolve into reactionary, dynastic, or nationalistic regimes?) i doubt you can actually answer any of these questions in any meaningful way because all you can say is ‘it’s economic and we have to abolish property’.

you’re not clever. sorry.
Shahter
Zee Ruskie
+295|6745|Moscow, Russia

uziq wrote:

why might it be useful to study dominant systems of power and coercion? why might it make sense to critique class formations and hierarchies as they exist? what use might one get from psychological, or sociological, or strictly cultural analyses of these questions?
the most prevalent methods of coercion under capitalism are economic. start there.

did philosophers like althusser spend their entire lives, as marxists and activists i hasten to add, wasting their time on ‘fancy shit?’ or did they perhaps have an insight that you do not? like, for instance, that ideology and the intellected or imagined life are also very important?
anything ideological stands on economic basis. start there.

what’s your theory of revolution? what leads to these events? what catalyses them? what leads to their success or failure? (what leads successful revolutionary parties to devolve into reactionary, dynastic, or nationalistic regimes?) i doubt you can actually answer any of these questions in any meaningful way because all you can say is ‘it’s economic and we have to abolish property’.
uh-huh. start with economics.

you’re not clever. sorry.
i never really claimed to be. but even for me, with whatever limited understanding of all this stuff i happen to have got, the importance of economic aspect of all this over everything else is pretty self evident. you want to be a step ahead and pretend to know how to shape whatever comes after that aspect has been dealt with - be my guest, just don't put the carriage ahead of the horse. and if the stuff you've been posting here - and general idealistic insanity that's been going on on the left in the west - are any indication, your carriage is miles ahead of the horse. no wonder you are not moving anywhere.
if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
the simple matter is that marx's thought has been read, received, developed, thought about, forwarded, etc. by almost 150 years of years of marxist/post-marxist philosophers. that is what is taught in universities and which is decried as 'cultural marxism' (if the term is actually defined at all; it serves the right-wing demagogues to have it be nebulous and vague).

studying culture, sociality, ideology, psychology, etc. are vitally important instruments of critique. not everything in society is economic, i'm sorry. it might be the basis of everything, yes, but you have massively misunderstood the entire point of marx's 'dialectic' if you oppose everything diametrically between 'economic base' and 'fancy superstructural nonsense'. the cultural superstructure has a dialectic relationship with the economic base: it shapes it and is shaped in turn.

you really have understood very little of marxism, and are committed to understand even less in the 21st century. the world has moved on. many theorists have tried to update marx and drag him along with us in the contemporary age. it's simply no good to keep insisting on economic critiques from the mid-19th century when workers lined up at industrial mills and when socialist theorists could look forward to housing them all in phalanxes. it's badly out of date, old boy.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6742|PNW

Took a flame thrower to him. I didn’t used to like Brian Williams because of his smugness, but it’s put to great use here. I was wrong.
Quote Tweet
Karine Jean-Pierre
@K_JeanPierre
· 8h
Watch the Brian Williams salty shade at its best 👇🏿
1:38 PM · Nov 21, 2020 from Columbus, OH·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/j_elliott78/status/ … 9677384704

Ouch.

Of course the defense I've encountered is blanket cynicism. "Biden doesn't care about any of us either! They're all the saaame!" Like wait, I thought Trump was the chosen one. Messianic even! If they're all the same, that means God has big plans for Uncle Joe too.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

i mean, look at the title. do you think even most grad-school students at berkeley or columbia are reading '800 pages of queer feminist theory'?
I'm sure thats what you did.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
i haven't read any queer feminist theory in my entire life and i have read probably more of the 'humanities' reading list than 99.95% of people. it's quite clearly a parody.

i have read a little judith butler but not a lot. and mostly i encountered her work after grad school. you would have to make some very purposeful course choices to end up reading that sort of stuff. nobody is sat down in english #101 with a teacher who says 'right, we've put off dickens for this term and we're doing cyber-trans-feminism'.

judith butler, the thinker who is name dropped in the video, actually wrote one of the most prescient things about trump, using her psychoanalytical and literary training. she perfectly predicted this end-game scenario with donald trump a year ago. she wrote about donald trump's death drive in the LRB.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n20 … or-suicide

We have wandered into a psychoanalytic wonderland. Elected politicians are supposed to shy away from the prospect of being shamed or found guilty of breaking the law. Yet Trump owns the things he does, not by demonstrating repentance but through a flamboyant display of shamelessness. Some commentators suggest that Trump is trying to anaesthetise the public to his wrongdoing or to normalise his actions, but that account cannot address the ‘genius or suicide’ dilemma. One reason psychoanalysis as a form of critique has never been more important than it is today is that we are being asked to contemplate actions that could be either suicidal or a means of triumphant survival. But what if they are both, and playing out now in the political arena? How are suicide and survival linked in the psychic field we call ‘Trump’? It isn’t just that he thinks shameless confession normalises his crimes and makes possible his triumph in a world in which law and crime have become fatally confused. It’s that he seems to regard upholding the law and his oath of office as a form of weakness, convinced as he is that only those who circumvent the law (by evading tax disclosure requirements, by ignoring constitutional constraints on executive power) are smart and powerful enough to prevail. He banks as well on the enthusiastic admiration his base has for those who have the guts to flout the law: such romantic criminals are icons to those who thrill to the fantasy of living above and outside the law, without inhibition or shame.

[...]

If he does finally get taken down, escorted by federal guards from the White House or, after he has left office, extracted from Mar-a-Lago or from one Trump property or another, he will doubtless be spewing accusations and insults as he goes. He will try to destroy in the course of being destroyed. But for him it will be the scene of a lifetime, a raging battle to determine who delivers the final judgment against whom.

Was the Trump regime always meant to end this way? Maybe. His base is taken by the drama of the reckless sovereign, the ultimate representative of state power living shamelessly outside the law. It is a manic escapade, a mythological thriller in which the ruler who declares his ‘great and unmatched wisdom’ threatens the destruction of the Turkish economy days before he unleashes the Turks on the Kurds. The rhetoric would be laughable if the consequences were not so murderous.

At best, a lethal joke is being played out here, as the sovereign pumps up his destructive powers on the eve of his exposure and legal capture. By continuing to unleash rhetorical utterances that confirm all that the investigators need in order to impeach him, while refusing to yield to the impeachment proceedings, he manically proves that he is above and outside the law even as he seals the legal judgment against him. The shameful ‘end’ is what he fends off and solicits at the same time: getting shamed is not what he wants, yet he moves compulsively in that direction. Here mania takes the form of an unrelenting fight, an obsessional pursuit of his enemies, a limitless self-aggrandisement, his weaponised messages fired out into the world as a barrage of daily tweets, keeping going at all costs – because what would happen if he stopped? How odd that Trump may well give us back the law as he is forced to submit to the law and go down: will he then become, even if only in his demise, the lawgiver? The price he would pay might well be prison, an infinity of shame waiting for him at the end of the road.

I have offered no more than a dream sequence of my own. It may be that shame and guilt has suffused all he has ever felt. The jury is out. My wager/dream is that he would rather die than pause to feel the shame that passes through him and is externalised as destruction and rage. If he ever registers shame, it may be only in that briefest moment just as it turns outwards, to be expelled into the world around him. It can never properly be lived as his own, because his psychic structure is built to block it – a gigantic task. If in the end shame ever turns back on him, it would – according to the rules of his psychic playbook – be a suicidal submission. Expect then a very long and loud howl, as he launches a climactic accusation against the whole world. Let us hope that by then he has been deprived of his access to military power.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Took a flame thrower to him. I didn’t used to like Brian Williams because of his smugness, but it’s put to great use here. I was wrong.
Quote Tweet
Karine Jean-Pierre
@K_JeanPierre
· 8h
Watch the Brian Williams salty shade at its best 👇🏿
1:38 PM · Nov 21, 2020 from Columbus, OH·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/j_elliott78/status/ … 9677384704

Ouch.

Of course the defense I've encountered is blanket cynicism. "Biden doesn't care about any of us either! They're all the saaame!" Like wait, I thought Trump was the chosen one. Messianic even! If they're all the same, that means God has big plans for Uncle Joe too.
Brian Williams losing his career over lying about a helicopter trip seems pretty petty in the age of MeToo and Donald Trump.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
I appreciate the existence of Brietbart. It is the one place you can go that is going all in on the "Democrats stole the election and Trump has the evidence and will prove it". Trump's lawyers said they were happy with the verdict in Pennsylvania saying they lost because it puts them one step closer to getting their case to the Supreme Court. I see this as all part of a scam but they probably want a Trump vs Biden court case even if they lose it. It gives Trump a better case that the "deep state" defeated him rather than losing a legitimate election.

I still find it unlikely that Trump will just say "I am not leaving" but I also can't see how we could do a usual transfer of government with Trump refusing to admit he lost. We can't really even do that whole inauguration in D.C. thing without federal cooperation. What if Trump also fires the entire White House facility staff and just lives someplace else while still in power?
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
by far the worst implications of all this are to national security and your covid response. your entire nation is actively being put under threat and increased risk for the sake of one sad individual's pathetic ego.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
I think people making a big deal regarding national security are being overly dramatic. China isn't going to launch World War 3 on us because Trump is having the art stolen from the White House in December. The transition is going to make COVID issues worse but I think that ship has sailed anyway. A lot of Americans are going about this whole thing as if it doesn't matter at all. Like half of the country thinks it is a hoax to get Trump out of office. The other half thinks it is serious maybe but they can't stop going about their lives and no one is perfect 100% of the time about it.

Biden isn't going to get republicans to take a vaccine. He probably won't even be able to get congressional republicans to fund distribution of one. If you are an American and have a loved one who is high risk you probably should just make peace with the fact that they might get sick and die
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
it's not about world war 3, but about the balance of power and international order generally. any country knows that now it has a window to make some moves, even if only in the realms of cyber or information warfare. biden isn't being briefed and the DoD is in disarray.
Larssen
Member
+99|1857
Nah that's media/Biden camp BS mostly. Departments will merrily keep functioning regardless of who the political leadership is or even if there is any political leadership. The NSA doesn't suddenly stop its surveillance, the intelligence agencies don't stop sharing info, the military doesn't start twiddling thumbs etc. 'Business as usual' continues, no matter what, independent from politics.

The issues are more in the realm of moments that require political decisionmaking. In immediate circumstances that could be about striking targets (be it physically, digitally), which needs to be signed off, or crisis management and response, which can require quick decision making in political circles as to signing off allocation of resources and importantly public communication. In the long term it's about strategic planning cycles, which are usually driven by political decision making and accountability processes in various formats.

Neither are in real immediate danger as an (albeit dysfunctional) administration still exists and is still going through the motions. What could be problematic is the fact that as Trump refuses to share info this will delay Biden's organisation of a transitionary team in terms of people and priorities. If you don't know what the biggest concerns/topics of the moment are it's hard to figure out who you want to fill certain appointed positions and if you want to create new ones or refocus certain stuff.

I suppose the logical workaround would be to just arrange meetings with the top of the bureaucracy rather than wait until Trump decides he wants to help in the transition (he won't).
uziq
Member
+492|3422
well, that's exactly what i was alluding to. trump just reshuffled a bunch of DoD officials and the top-level decision making is what has been derailed.

trump also proposed striking iran's nuclear sites, for e.g., in the last few days. just one of several stories circulating about the instability at the very top.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6742|PNW

Larssen wrote:

Nah that's media/Biden camp BS mostly. Departments will merrily keep functioning regardless of who the political leadership is or even if there is any political leadership. The NSA doesn't suddenly stop its surveillance, the intelligence agencies don't stop sharing info, the military doesn't start twiddling thumbs etc. 'Business as usual' continues, no matter what, independent from politics.
It's been pointed out by a number of people in or who have been intelligence how much of a risk factor is currently at play, and it probably does them a disservice to downplay that. The president leaking classified information through the non-filters of twitter out of spite wouldn't be an (irrecoverable) blow but could have long lasting implications as well as put members of our intelligence community at risk. It's even been suggested that Trump be declared incapable, with Pence assuming the mantle of acting-president for the duration.

The people that Trump just installed in the Pentagon occupy positions that can be reshuffled again at the whim of Biden. Of greater concern to me are the other bootlick appointments made throughout his presidency that have had time to do their damage. Also his assault on voter confidence this year should not be dismissed, and neither should this bumpy transition. Not to mention over a quarter of a million dead Americans in part thanks to the politicization of COVID-19 in a politically divided atmosphere.

e:

In a short period of time, we surpassed the American dead of Vietnam and in less than a year we've broken the halfway point to the American dead of WW2. This will be felt by families for generations and will be in living memory beyond the year 2100. For instance, the child who recently lost both parents to it will be in his mid-80s (barring early death).

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