numberonemusicstranger-blog

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@ranma-official:

The biggest, easiest demonstrable failure of the rationalist movement is not their failure to change the world in any meaningful way outside of creating a couple terms like “virtue signalling” and making a handful of people more atheist than they otherwise would have been, and it’s not their weird obsession with AI, and not attempts at being apolitical that are hilariously political, i.e. mortality’s going to be solved in like five years but discrimination in the workplace is hard so let’s just not even bother. It’s not the fuckton of people within the movement who suddenly started believing in gods. It’s the sheer amount of people who either flat out deny manmade global warming or insist that it’s not a pressing enough manner that one should ever introduce regulations about.

an attitude only justifiable if you believed that AI god is five years away and will solve everything magically so why bother worrying

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What do you think is going on with passport denials, claims that naturalized citizens are facing voter suppression, etc.? Has there been any sort of comprehensive investigation into what's happening?

I have only read mainstream press on it, and my meta take is obviously inflected by my own position, culture/psychology, and politics. Respectively, these are: first generation immigrant and naturalized US citizen of Eastern European Jewish background, descended from the small minority of my family who managed to gtfo from Holocaust Central countries, with an active personal interest in emigration in the medium term; rootless cosmopolitan, introvert, coastal elite [sic as a dog, but]; anti-authoritarian progressive who balances high fundamental value for individual rights and protections against an increasing focus on straight-up material conditions and might go with ‘left-libertarian’ if existing self-identified libertarians weren’t busily poisoning that lexicon by trending fascist with such tedious and increasing reliability. Given all that, it’s surely obvious what my top-line gut reaction to this entire cluster of ethnonationalist-Trumpist policy developments is, viz., profoundly revolted at every level. If there’s anything I loathe more than blood-and-soil idpol idk what it is.

The specific action that this particular story describes seems to me intensely chaotic-evil. That is, it is 1. destructive to the rule of law and corroding the settled premises and assumptions on which human lives and society at large are constructed (chaotic) and 2. driven by ethnosupremacist malice, or desire to harm, erase, and expel members of a designated and scapegoated outgroup (evil).

Probably an argument can be made that it’s actually *reinforcing* the rule of law by correcting existing weaknesses and inconsistencies in the law and its enforcement. I think that that argument is coherent but rather magnificently ignores how the rule of law actually works. [wank] It’s weakened by a sort of rationalistic cognitive bias along the lines of ‘principled refusal to consider the real-world hardness of real-world problems.’ I’m thinking of a recent wave of rationalist discourse around “decoupling” here but from my own angle. It’s like: the ability to abstract, which is very useful, gets hyper-reified to the point where it becomes an inability to contextualize or pressure-test, which is … not an epistemic virtue. [/wank] Furthermore, I think that even if you accept this argument, it only gets you as far as lawful-evil. Which, per paragraph one, is a thing I extremely and specifically cannot abide.

[numberonemusicstranger-blog]

So here’s the biggest gardening hack that I don’t think I’ve seen anyone talk about before.

Terminator technology has not hit the shelves in most places. If you put these boys in the ground, they will grow and multiply. You can get enough soup beans to seed I don’t even know how much ground for like a dollar.

And man, you need to get on some beans. There’s a reason beans are cheap food: They’re one of the best staples in the whole world in terms of effort versus yield; especially the red ones, which grow in neat little bushes. You can have beans for ages with very little work. What’s more, bean plants are basically magic; they have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which promotes soil health and can help revitalize damaged soil.

Anarchist Santa Claus said that the revolution must have bread; whel'p, wheat can be a tricky crop. Let’s have some soup, too.

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[numberonemusicstranger-blog]

I never watched this, it looked bad. But this attack is so good. Check out this part:

“That reluctance to ‘unite’ her audience may be the most radical thing about Gadsby’s act,” Andrew Kahn wrote in a glowing review for Slate.

But, as made obvious by the universal praise she has received, that’s exactly what Gadsby has done. She doesn’t use comedy to do it, instead opting for tragedy, but that doesn’t make her show any more radical. The audience is not challenged in any meaningful way to act.

All of this reminds me of R.L. Stephens’ 2017 critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates. The former Atlantic writer and MacArthur winner’s 2015 book Between the World and Me sketches a convincing narrative of how racism sits at the heart of the American experience, but its universal popularity among the media (and white people) shows that it failed to actually challenge our material world. The book portrays racism as an abstract concept, not one based in centuries of empire and capitalism, and therefore something that cannot be completely understood. It allows white people to think “I understand racism as a deep and complicated process I’ve been complicit in,” without implicating them, pointing blame at our current structures, or identifying a way forward (if the book did, say, call for armed struggle or a working-class overthrow of capitalism, it no doubt would be less-praised).

Nanette does the same thing for queerness. It locates the problem not in exploitative structures that might implicate Gadsby’s audience, but within ourselves. If only we could respect each other, then things would change. If only we could be more civil in our public debates.

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I believe we’re at this place where I agree with your theory/beliefs but that leads me to a different conclusion. How can you say that the black panther party was rejecting categorically race but today’s discourse is not? It was a black only party that was created to address specifically black community concerns. Huey told white people to form their own party. I think black panthers and newton were great but that’s why I also support things like blm.

Perhaps this is all a misunderstanding, because what I’m after is what you said in the original post about

Anger is given an outlet, but rendered impotent, perpetuating the process that originally gave rise to it. In short, this reflexive anger is nothing short of reactionary, regardless of whom it is directed against. You can see this clearly in the many ways in which the ‘Left’ on tumblr so perfectly reflects the ‘Right.’ They think and act in the same Hitlerite racial logic[...]They see fascists calling for the extermination of shitskins and mudslimes, and retaliate by calling for the genocide of cumskins and crackers. 

But the angry people saying these things are not the same people that are demanding “more black cops”, “more women marines”. Because as you say, those milquetoast reforms are the compromise with the kyriarchy. I haven’t seen someone saying “kill all white people” and “more black ceos” at the same time. I can imagine some radical feminists who are also anticom doing this, but I haven’t seen it. There is the problem that we may not be interacting with the same people, seeing the same discourse. I don’t spend much time interacting with those uncritical of capitalism because they dont have anything interesting to say and don’t consider them to be part of the Left.

I would dispute a jump from “these two groups(right and left) are thinking/behaving the same” to “these are the same” or “these two things will lead to the same outcome”. I don’t know if you’re making that jump.

The media projection and popular interpretation is that it is a ‘Black problem.’

When you bring the media into it this gets more complex. First is that the media is looking out for the capitalist’s interest, so they also heavily painted the black panthers as anti-white and spread that perception as much if not moreso than they do today.(Do you remember the 2008 fox news segment about black panthers scaring away white voters at the polls?). And yet, I believe what you’re saying is that the media shouldn’t cover shootings of black men by police as a racial issue, but an issue of police brutality in general. But what do you say about the black men(and one woman sniper iirc) who were inspired, maybe only because it was racialized, to go out and shoot cops? On two separate occasions. They didn’t go out and shoot white people, or only shoot white cops, they killed an asian, white, and yes even black cops. This was absolutely an act of reflexive anger. But I cannot see it as reactionary.

Now of course this wasn’t an effective strategy. I’m not advocating violence, but it makes me uncertain that politics which puts emphasis on race/sex/etc before/along with class will always lead to non-revolutionary outcomes.

About the demands for representation. Here I agree, it’s liberal distraction that cannot change the conditions. But I don’t think making James Bond black is dividing the proletariat. I can’t imagine someone that is class conscious saying “I thought workers deserved the full value of their labor, but finding out that Vegeta is black now, I can no longer participate in the workers movement”.

Marriage today is appreciably less harmful and humiliating than it was in the past. And for sure, it is still inherently harmful and humiliating, and should be abolished. Which I think we agree, the underlying power imbalances cannot be done away with until capitalism is abolished. What I don’t agree with is the idea that making something less onerous prolongs it. No guarantee if marriage today had kept the same level of suffering as marriage 500 years ago we would be closer to communism right now.

Strange example to pick US slavery because particularly their suffering had absolutely nothing to do with their “liberation”. It was a purely political economic calculation. After they were no longer formally slaves, many went right back into exactly the same kind of suffering because of racism. So yes, if a law had been passed at some point it could have prevented suffering without prolonging their ordeal at all. I wouldn’t leave out the possibility that a reform could have actually shortened it. Not directly but you mentioned in the first post historical contingencies, how something seemingly bad can lead to a good outcome. Runaway slaves and those helping them north were not prolonging slavery.

The french 92 revolution didn’t happen because conditions reached such a low point they became unbearable. It happened after promised reforms and improvements in conditions for everyone. They just weren’t enough so that people revolted out of disappointment not desperation. Quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes.

The only non-reactionary political course is abolishing these systems by any means necessary.

My foremost goal is the abolition of capitalism. That’s what I know can, out of anything, do the most good for the most amount of people. I agree by any means necessary, and the way you present reactionary vs revolutionary politics would leave me no choice but to say that I support specific reactionary politics(like a hypothetical medicare-for-all bill) because I believe they’ll lead to revolutionary outcomes(like a political and economic crisis). I’m okay with this if you are, they’re just labels but I do think it makes the label ‘reactionary’ less useful if you have to begin to distinguish between reactionary actions done for their own sake and ones done for nonreactionary goals. Or tolerable and intolerable reactionaries.

I hope I’ve cleared up my position enough that i make sense, even if you don’t agree. I think we might be thinking of different specifics and then speaking in broad terms but that’s language. I doubt we have any actual material disagreements. You’re saying you consider the black panthers a good example of rejecting race and I see them as a good example of the opposite. At the end of the day we’re both agreeing they were good and capitalism is bad so what do the reasons matter really.

Mirror Mirror

American political education is absolutely abysmal. There really is no understating how woefully misserved young people are when it comes to the breadth, depth, or quality of politics, regarding both those in the United States and even more so abroad. Practically as soon as their education begins, they are taught to think in terms of us and them; you have the settlers and the natives, the colonists and the British, the Americans and everyone else, the Whigs and Tories, Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Republicans and Democrats, Right and Left. At its most fundamental level, it’s a division between ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ a judgement dispassionately dispensed by the history of Winners and Losers. It’s a cornerstone of the American mythos, so much grease that keeps the gears of the illusory bourgeois democracy turning. ‘Democracy’ is right because it beat monarchy. The Allies were right because they defeated the Nazis. Capitalism is right because it beat Socialism. ‘American’s love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.’

Keep reading

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this is gay privilege 

[numberonemusicstranger-blog]

Of course marriage has evolved since its conception, so has capitalism. The reason divorce isn’t scandalous today is because people fought to reform those attitudes within society. Not only legally but culturally. If gay marriage is reactionary because it perpetuates a fundamentally broken society, those people who made it not only a crime, but looked down upon, for a husband to hit their wife have to also be guilty of reactionary politics.

To come at this from a different angle. I don’t support at all bernie sanders politics. He’s a socdem, I don’t believe in electoral politics, you can’t vote in socialism. Yet the correct thing to do is to absolutely support bernie sanders. The energy behind that movement was disruptive to the ruling class. Many became aware of and interested in left politics only because of that campaign. The effects of the thing matter more to me than the thing itself. Capitalism has only one way to attack it, but the state has many.

How many socialist revolutions in the last century happened the way marx prescribed? None. In russia, asia, africa, latin america, all these places socialism piggybacked onto another antagonism these places had. The anti-war movement is what ended the tsar, and that opened up the space for the bolsheviks to come to power. Most of the others just wanted to be free from some foreign occupation and socialism is what got you support from the only other big player in world politics. This shouldn’t be seen as a bug but a feature.

So with the idea that communists should support any leftist movement that has potential to destabilize society, the only question left is whether identity politics does. Of course I share those suspicions about how easily big name corporations came along to support LGBTQ and how both the identities and movement have been turned into commodities. But that also happened with socialism. I could go out and buy those stupid hats with

stars on them or a che shirt. One of zizeks most famous lines of thought is about how starbucks sells us back our criticism of capitalism with their campaign of sending a portion of every purchase to where they harvest coffee.

Racism can only vanish when the conditions that created and sustain it have been altered to such an extent as to make their continued sustenance impossible.[...] Without the elimination of the racial system and the bourgeois state’s apportioning of resources, protection, and privilege, the only effect will be the selective enfranchisement of discrete portions of racial groups as they’re integrated into bourgeois society.

I absolutely agree, it’s impossible to rid ourselves of racism(or sexism etc) while capitalism exists.

In part that means actively rejecting it as a social category and refuting the division of society along racial lines.

Strongly disagree. The division of society along racial lines is the material reality of our current situation. While we would like it to not be true, we cannot rid ourselves of it by ignoring it. Calling attention to it by saying “all white people are racist” or “all men are sexist” while crude has shown itself to be effective in bringing attention to the issue and dismantling the neoliberal “end of history” ideology of the past.

There’s some post I saw floating around some reactionary’s blog about how it would be impossible in today’s climate to make a movie like Lethal Weapon. Where the black guy and the white guy are portrayed as equal and working together. If this is true(doubt it) it would be a good thing. A movie with a message like that is only obfuscating the truth that society doesn’t treat people of different races equally. It’s neoliberalism to say we can interact as equals under capitalism.

The removal of confederate statues was an issue that wasn’t immediately related to capitalism. Yet it caused a great deal of agitation, heightened contradictions. The stupid president’s military parade. Something of absolutely no significance, will have no effect on anyone, a pure symbolic gesture. I will be there, a non-event can turn into an event. Things spin out of anyone’s control.

Medicare-for-all, a terrible compromise of socdems in the US. Absolutely should be supported. Has nothing to do with socialism, it’s capitalism. But there’s an entire industry, 1/5 of the country’s economy built upon the shitty privatized system we have now.

I guess I haven’t illustrated my point very well because that isn’t at all what I have said or am saying.

Apologies if i’m misrepresenting you, but that’s what this back and forth is for yeah?

Mirror Mirror

American political education is absolutely abysmal. There really is no understating how woefully misserved young people are when it comes to the breadth, depth, or quality of politics, regarding both those in the United States and even more so abroad. Practically as soon as their education begins, they are taught to think in terms of us and them; you have the settlers and the natives, the colonists and the British, the Americans and everyone else, the Whigs and Tories, Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Republicans and Democrats, Right and Left. At its most fundamental level, it’s a division between ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ a judgement dispassionately dispensed by the history of Winners and Losers. It’s a cornerstone of the American mythos, so much grease that keeps the gears of the illusory bourgeois democracy turning. ‘Democracy’ is right because it beat monarchy. The Allies were right because they defeated the Nazis. Capitalism is right because it beat Socialism. ‘American’s love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.’

Keep reading

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Since I don’t wanna reformat this for tumblr: here’s some thoughts.

[numberonemusicstranger-blog]

When a liberal accuses communists of “wanting to abolish the police and let criminals run wild”, a Marxist should not say “Those are anarchists, I’m not like those communists”, a Marxist should say “What communists want is an end to the bourgeois police state and armed oppression of the working class.” When a liberal accuses communists of “wanting to establish an authoritarian dictatorship”, anarchists should not say “Those are Marxists, I’m not like those communists”, an anarchist should say “What communists want is for the masses to govern themselves, without being told what to do by private property-owners, who are far more dictatorial than any communist could ever be.”

If you need to have your anarchy vs. Marxism fights, do it, but not when you’re under attack from outside, non-left forces. The purpose of left unity is not to pretend we all agree; the purpose of left unity is to prevent capitalist powers from wiping us all out before we even get to figure out which approach is correct.

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I’m a little confused about your mention of the Polish soldiers in Haiti; did they become de jure ‘Black’ citizens?

Yes.

The perceived differences arise only from the logic of currently existing bourgeois society, absent which these distinctions become meaningless.

And here is the main point of disagreement. There is not enough to support the idea that because capitalism invented racism, racism would vanish with capitalism. The modern western idea of marriage was invented by the feudal mode of production. A wife takes a vow to always be loyal and obey her husband, then does more work than it would take to support herself and gives the surplus to the husband, keeping the home and raising children. In exchange she’s allowed to live on his land. And yet despite this obviously being the case, we still have defenders of traditional marriage today hundreds of years after the end of feudalism. Is it then reactionary to support gay marriage?

Anyway let’s talk about the soviet union, setting aside the definition debate about whether they were doing socialism. They absolutely got rid of the bourgeois. To the point where homosexuality was outlawed for most of it, under the justification that the only people observed engaging in open homosexuality up until that point were the bourgeois(there was more like that being homosexual meant not having kids and killing the birth rate, or that men in the army couldn’t be anything but straight or else they’d just fuck all day). 

With regard to race I absolutely agree the idea needs to be done away with. That’s why the revolution in haiti is so miraculous in that it was the only time it was done. Although in appearance it seems to be perpetuating a racist concept, in actuality it was doing away with race altogether. Perhaps something similar could happen on other axis like gender or sexuality.

I’m afraid I can’t help you out with gender theory. I haven’t studied it and I think you should take what you see as an idea finding its legs. From what I see it’s all very much still in flux.  As an anti-essentialist i’m obviously against TERFS, but your questions point towards a larger philosophical one of self-identity.

All I’m really trying to say is that communism is not *necessarily* an answer to all antagonisms. And that not only from a theoretical view, but a realpolitik one, it is not beneficial to insist that it is.

Mirror Mirror

American political education is absolutely abysmal. There really is no understating how woefully misserved young people are when it comes to the breadth, depth, or quality of politics, regarding both those in the United States and even more so abroad. Practically as soon as their education begins, they are taught to think in terms of us and them; you have the settlers and the natives, the colonists and the British, the Americans and everyone else, the Whigs and Tories, Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Republicans and Democrats, Right and Left. At its most fundamental level, it’s a division between ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ a judgement dispassionately dispensed by the history of Winners and Losers. It’s a cornerstone of the American mythos, so much grease that keeps the gears of the illusory bourgeois democracy turning. ‘Democracy’ is right because it beat monarchy. The Allies were right because they defeated the Nazis. Capitalism is right because it beat Socialism. ‘American’s love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.’

Keep reading

[numberonemusicstranger-blog]

While I agree with the overall sentiment, I have to push back some. Okay so no false dichotomies but there is one you’ve left out. Reform or revolution. Of course not reform in the socdem sense, but there are types of reform that lead to revolutionary change. First that comes to mind is Jehu’s proposal to organize workers to reform only one thing, the days in the work week, each time adding another weekend until there’s no more wage labor and you end up in communism. So sometimes revolution can appear as its opposite is what i’m getting at.

Consequently, the emancipation of any ‘identity’ or ‘class’ becomes a possibility when and only when it seeks to obviate the conditions which necessitate its existence.

Yes but I don’t see enough to say that things aren’t leading to a change these conditions. As I wouldn’t judge the merits of my ideology on what I see online, I don’t want to judge [insert whatever here] based on tumblr or twitter discourse. We’ve seen people say /leftypol/ is no different from /pol/ because they share some cultural signifiers. We all know that if you were to kill the entire class of bougie tomorrow, nothing would change if you didn’t change the mode of production. But we all still shout and share memes about “kill porky”. It’s in that same spirit that I read things like “kill all cis” or whatever, it’s not a policy prescription or a theoretical position, its simply a cultural tic.

I do have a problem with these kind of phrases. But it’s not that they possibly divide the working class(something i’ve seen absolutely no evidence for). But that it maintains the universal position for the typical. White people get to remain at the center of the discourse, just as self-flagellating. Any positive program stays at the edges. However, this is also a problem for people whose focus is more on economics

Elon musk can call himself a socialist on twitter because of how meaningless it is. The default position today is an anti-capitalist one. And so it is with liberals and being so easily able to call themselves anti-colonialists or whatever. A real idea does divide, and socialism isn’t real enough to keep elon musk from calling himself one. The focus should be on defining it as a positive so that something like that can’t happen.

This was the big trauma from occupy wall street. More than enough people gathered in one place to make a difference and nothing happened. All of them anti-capitalists but no singular demand agreed upon that could be worked on. A lot of statements about people being deserving of the full value of their labor but that’s not enough. You need something material that everyone, even if their list of demands vary widly, can agree on.

Now to challenge this idea that white supremacy and black supremacy lead to the same outcome(substitute cis supremacy and trans supremacy or whatever you like here). Let’s take the Haitian revolution. They wanted to have a nation only for blacks in the same way european countries were only for whites. But there was a problem, helping them in there fight for freedom from slavery were polish soldiers that had defected from napolean’s army and they couldn’t return to europe. So in the most brilliant move in the history of enlightenment thinking the constitution of haiti says: Haiti is a black only nation, and because of that, everyone who lives here is now black. That is universality.

Miracles are possible and of course I agree fully with that video you posted. We have to focus on what unites all our different struggles. This is difficult without a concrete program. Part of the problem is that we are too united, too in proximity simply because we don’t like what there is now. The right wing can unite because at the end of the day they all want the same thing: nothing to change. We on the left have differences and we have to find a way, not to reconcile them and become united, but to come up with one action we can all agree to take.

Mirror Mirror

American political education is absolutely abysmal. There really is no understating how woefully misserved young people are when it comes to the breadth, depth, or quality of politics, regarding both those in the United States and even more so abroad. Practically as soon as their education begins, they are taught to think in terms of us and them; you have the settlers and the natives, the colonists and the British, the Americans and everyone else, the Whigs and Tories, Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Republicans and Democrats, Right and Left. At its most fundamental level, it’s a division between ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ a judgement dispassionately dispensed by the history of Winners and Losers. It’s a cornerstone of the American mythos, so much grease that keeps the gears of the illusory bourgeois democracy turning. ‘Democracy’ is right because it beat monarchy. The Allies were right because they defeated the Nazis. Capitalism is right because it beat Socialism. ‘American’s love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.’

Keep reading

[numberonemusicstranger-blog]