Juice
@Juice@midwest.social
- Comment on Boiling hot, Ice cold, skin melting, frigid, liquid magma, hailstorm, just right for 5 seconds, dragon fire 2 days ago:
4cm
Perfectly average
- Comment on The best president who ever lived!! 😌🙏😌🙏😌🙏 2 days ago:
That’s just capitalism!
- Comment on That explains a lot 3 days ago:
Sounds kinda tain
- Comment on Why am I getting gore on my racism app? 3 days ago:
My son showed me this last night, its insane. Its like one video from his feed and then two videos of people getting mauled
- Comment on Sun God 3 days ago:
Neat! Thanks!
- Comment on Sun God 3 days ago:
I guess because of perspective, Mercury being millions of miles closer to the camera than it is to the sun, the actual proportions would have the planet being much smaller by comparison
- Comment on Stop touching your stuff! 5 days ago:
You say that, but what about St. Paul who is definitely in heaven and was a pathological gooner
- Comment on Why would America declaring cartels terrorist organizations be a problem for Mexico? 6 days ago:
Hah! Good one
- Comment on Why would America declaring cartels terrorist organizations be a problem for Mexico? 6 days ago:
Same, except i wasnt a lit major, just a guy who was going through the phase of “this is what intelligent people look like” while trying to educate myself. I was convinced DFW was the voice of our generation, heralding in a new era of consciousness.
The book is conceptually pretty cool, like it is really well written and he draws together so many disparate elements to make kind of a coherent narrative.
But the idea of making a book impossible to read on purpose is a funny joke, especially one that so many aspiring intelligentsia gush over. I can appreciate a good shaggy dog as much as the next guy, but IJ is just so far beyond the pale.
A book should be challenging because the concepts are unique and well considered, and it draws from lots of historic and philosophical research; not because the author decided to intentionally break the flow of the narrative to make you flip to the not-optional appendix to read 32 pages of made up synopsis about a character’s avant-garde filmography.
- Comment on Why would America declaring cartels terrorist organizations be a problem for Mexico? 6 days ago:
Quebec
Yeah if our reality could stop resembling Infinite Jest, that would be great. I can’t stand that stupid fucking book and how accurately it predicts our increasingly insane circumstances
- Comment on Sooo, where did the blatant Nazism suddenly come from? 1 week ago:
Fascism shouldn’t be thought of as a static “thing” or an object of ideology. Peoples beliefs come from their environment. We are so individualized as a society that often we as progressives take “personal responsibility” too far, we buy the premise implicitly without realizing there are flaws with thinking in this way. Every logical system has flaws and contradictions, its proven mathematically though I think some systems are more rigorous and based on evidence.
GWF Hegel’s philosophy of Right was written in 1820, and influenced political thought ever since. Liberalism was still in it’s revolutionary phase and theories about it were still fairly new, the Wealth of Nations was written just 50 years before, and Karl Marx was like two when it was released, although it would serve as the basis for much of his work analyzing the hidden relationships of Capital, and ethical political philosophy on the whole.
The book is the closest I think someone can honestly get to an actual “horseshoe theory” because not only did it influence the left but it also influenced the far right. Hegel, using the works of other great liberal philosophers such as Locke and Kant, who Hegel was always working to surpass, applied his dialectical philosophical methods to the writings of liberalism.
What he discovered was a natural tendency toward fascism. Like he prefigured fascism by 100 years. He wasn’t a fascist, there was no such thing. He was just exploring the ideas of this revolutionary philosophy, one that purported to liberate the mind, body and spirit, and discovered the oppressive seeds which might grow into something quite different.
This isn’t to call liberals fascists, I’m a communist and 20th century communism had a lot of problems, to put it mildly. I would say confidently that progressive liberals are not crypto fash, in fact the term “progressive” is a typically left-Hegelian ideal, in that it describes human progress and development as the subject of history. Instead it challenges the idea of the liberatory nature of private property, a key component of liberal thought. Of course this is all depending how you look at it, right-Hegelians see this same formulation as proof of the inevitability of their ideas and justification for their actions.
You’re getting a lot of different opinions about this stuff so I’m trying to make sort of a different point about philosophy, history and action. Other reading for a deep dive on fascism is the essay Ur Fascism by Umberto Eco (great empirical analysis, but the least scientific IMO), Trotsky’s pamphlet Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It, and HA Roy’s Fasism, Its Philosophy, Professions and Practice.
In a way, fascism has always been there below the surface, informally shifting the sands of history until it was formalized in the early 20th century. I don’t think you can have a society based on private property without some elements of fascism somewhere. Mostly “western democracies” will outsource their extreme cruelty to other countries where it doesn’t affect their citizens.
But in summary, Fascism is the realization of the contradictions inherent in liberal ideology, its liberalism turned inside-out, with all its appearances of justice and freedom cut away, leaving only the logic of expansion and domination that most liberal democracies do their best to hide. This is how fascists are able to hide in our society, their individual beliefs are not completely unpalatable to centrists and conservatives who have also started to dispense with justice and freedom in the interest of national greatness. Its what makes their beliefs so malleable, and its also why liberals have such a hard time defining it. But fascism isn’t an individual’s beliefs, if it was it would be just regular bog-standard chauvinism. Fascism is a mass movement which will use charismatic leaders amenable to their politics to rally the masses.
In our society, the middle classes are the “battery” for fascism. Middle classes are constantly under attack under capitalism and the individuals often feel this and become paranoid (doomsday prepping, etc.,) and this paranoia and real social pressure to produce or be wiped out, the fear from the constant threat of precarity and uncertainty fits hand in glove with the aims and means of fascists.
- Comment on Amazon boss Jeff Bezos could face prison over knife sales to children 1 week ago:
Sometimes the solution to all our problems is a 10" 440A steel knife modeled after the one used by the sadistic villain in the 1986 action thriller “Cobra” starring Sylvester Stallone at his Stalloniest
- Comment on Amazon boss Jeff Bezos could face prison over knife sales to children 1 week ago:
And the avatar for Amazon just carelessly hands a child a long jagged grooved blade that serves no apparent purpose but gleeful murder
- Comment on Amazon boss Jeff Bezos could face prison over knife sales to children 1 week ago:
As an American: lol. Lmao even. The European mind cannot comprehend American laws
- Comment on .world c/conservative is unmodded now too! Post all the things they hate! 1 week ago:
Convicted, pardoned, appointed
- Comment on Funny this never made it into a James Taylor song 2 weeks ago:
I see lots of references to John Denver, Country Roads, but I present:
“Bye, bye Miss Bologna Pie”
- Comment on Anonymous: Trump is making America weaker and we’ll exploit it - News Cafe 2 weeks ago:
Is such a utopia possible?
- Comment on Anonymous: Trump is making America weaker and we’ll exploit it - News Cafe 2 weeks ago:
Sure. Yeah its very hypothetical and silly. As if the Banks that manage national and international money supplies, since most of their managed assets are debt, haven’t thought of it? So no such button exists, whereas there might be a delete twitter button somewhere or one could be rigged up 👀
- Comment on Anonymous: Trump is making America weaker and we’ll exploit it - News Cafe 2 weeks ago:
Attacking twitter would be more useful than deleting all debt? I mean go wild, take that shit ass site down but if you had a “delete twitter” button and a “delete all debt” button, mashing the second one would make you the greatest hero who ever lived.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
I admire your commitment, but it won’t be one apocalyptic battle, it’ll be a long protracted war. So like hydrate and stretch and shit. Make time in your life for meaningful organizing.
- Comment on imagine 3 weeks ago:
GMO skepticism or not, Monsanto is one of the most evil companies in the world and a perfect example of what makes the profit motive such an inefficient organizer of production and distribution
- Comment on Belgium's sex workers get maternity leave and pensions under world-first law 2 months ago:
I love this thread you created where you’re like “hooking is bad for you unlike software developing” and all these devs hop in like, “so is there a certificate program for sex work?”
- Comment on AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably - Scientific Reports 3 months ago:
I don’t always think, but when I do, I prefer not to
- Comment on What are your favorite 1000+ hour games? 3 months ago:
I have around 1700 hs in Destiny 2, and close to the same in Bloodborne. Over 1000 hours in the last 2 monster hunter titles. I’ve replayed resident evil 4 and castlevania sotn dozens of times.
So those are my most played games
- Comment on Feral Science 3 months ago:
Crucial supporting NPCs in Monster Hunter
- Comment on pump up the jamz 3 months ago:
That would sound amazing
- Comment on pump up the jamz 3 months ago:
So What’cha Want by the Beastie Boys
- Comment on She-Ra Lives! 3 months ago:
*more than
- Comment on Nostalgia and remake culture 3 months ago:
- Comment on ... 4 months ago:
This is garbage why the fuck should I care about what some nerd with a sub stack thinks about other academics? Intellectuals suck, Marxist intellectuals are no exception. So in the wake of MacCarthyism, at the dawn of Neoliberalism, intellectuals in universities were being pressured to gravitate away from Marx. No shit. Does this mean they were correct to do so? Well the death of the militant labor movement around the same time would give us some indication.
Why would you care so much to try and ensure that people don’t read very good books that you likely havent read? Seems like someone with an axe to grind. But let me assure anyone who is reading this, Marxist Intellectuals are as big a pain I’m the ass, and kind of necessary, as they are in any other org. The problem isn’t with the intellectuals though, it’s that there’s not enough regular working people who read and understand revolutionary theory to push back against them and their tendencies toward splits and polemics and laziness.
This is the problem with not reading Marxism though, the basis of the argument is “all these smart people stopped studying Marx” and takes it for granted that it is because the source material was somehow incorrect. And maybe some of it was, there’s no shortage of that. But that explanation completely ignores structural and social pressures that would have been a clearer and more direct explanation than, “all at once all these smart nerds left Marxism, so they must have been right to do so.” This is not what causes a mass exodus. What causes someone to leave a field of study for another one is the threat that their livelihood will be taken away.
Its so funny I wonder if this would have worked on someone who was new to Marxism. Homie I’m so far gone, if you think this post might be the reason someone would give up on reading Marx that person would have to be already unfamiliar. Actually engaging with other Marxists will do more to run you out of Marxism than this goofy ass nerd ass substack
