#NeoMarxism

[undergroundusa]

"No federal employee has a right to their job. Each is operating under the Executive Branch—as FBI agents do—serving at the pleasure of the President and can be dispatched to any assignment commanded, even if that station is to watch ice melt at the South Pole…"

READ & LISTEN NOW: https://www.undergroundusa.com/p/the-purge-has-begunand-not-too-soon

[leacuri]

[straynoahide]

*stares at the post-reformation anglosaxon world like i'm in the vatican dicastery's office*

to be fair, this isn't even about religion that much. there are two wests - the west of reaction and identity and the west of enlightenment values and democracy - and both are equally true.

the only reason america manifests the far-right more as christian nationalist than europe is because europe has had anticlerical waves, but european neo-identitarianism is the same phenomenon.

tough pill to swallow for left-of-center people who still may have good intentions: you can't fight and redeem universal values from the west by being anti-western, anti-male, anti-white, anti-european, anti-straight, anti-majority, though. you can't fight particularism with particularism.

that isn't about equidistance, it's about reality. that's why the onslaught of a domineering progressivism has produced this huge reactionary wave -in all demographics, in all significantly- that may yet push an already right-leaning europe even further into illiberalism.

[gothicprep]

here's something i see sometimes – someone will make a complaint about a phenomenon that is, admittedly, Really Online, and someone else will reassure them that it's just the internet and to touch grass and stuff. it's so insane to me that anyone believes that in 2024. did you miss the memo that the internet is inhabited by people?

to lay out a stronger version of my point, there's a pretty common complaint now that goes, "when did politics get so weird?" there are a lot of reasons for this, but one of them is that a lot of talking points and argumentative styles from tumblr's heyday mainstreamed. this is what people are complaining about when they rag on "woke stuff". they misidentify this as postmodernism in the academic sense, or the frankfurt school, or foucault, or. ugh. postmodern neomarxism. but if you look at postmodern writing, or anything from the frankfurt school or foucault, or any of the books that karl marx's second cousin, postmodern neo marx, wrote, it doesn't look like any of that. it's informed by postmodernism, yeah, but it's also a crude retelling of it. why did it take so long for tumblr stuff to catch on? probably a combination of tumblr having dogshit SEO, a huge portion of the userbase not fully migrating to more visible social media sites until the nsfw ban, and the fact that most of the tumblr heyday users are roughly in their mid 20s-early 30s now, and have responsibilities and influence outside of their internet bubble.

it's insane how much influence this site has had on mainstream culture, considering how niche it's always been.

anyway. it's not healthy to get too worked up about online happenings, albeit we all do that sometimes. take a break. play with your pets. finally start that book that's been collecting dust on your shelf forever. call your sibling and shoot the shit with them. attempt to skip rocks on a creek for the first time, and get frustrated with how difficult this actually is rather than online stalinists. but that all said, i don't think anyone is in the wrong for paying attention to internet happenings and being a bit nervous about what this all will lead to. it always spills over. every time.

[grandhotelabyss]

Very well put, the only things I’ve ever read systematically are Plato and the Bible, and even then I never did reading finish Laws or all of the minor prophets. As far as culture goes – you’ve observed elsewhere that the cultural middlebrow is always seemingly fighting the last battle – hence the retreat on the right from the critique of liberal bioauthoritarianism (I suspect we disagree on the extent to which that is a threat, but I would be a fool not to acknowledge that it was political gold for them) to a crude and ridiculous restaging of the Satanic panic shorn even of the simple middle American decency behind which the original could hide its derangement, while the liberal left’s obsession with redressing narratives of the wronged media pariahs of its millennial childhood surely speak to this as well. As you I believe once said of a podcast that we’ve both listened to and probably have more similar grievances* with then you might think based on the way I go on sometimes- “to listen to them you would think it was still 1996!”

*I consider myself a liberal in the way that Trilling and most of the silent generation authors we venerate did, but when you hear an hour or so of insightful analysis into the problems we face followed by the same rote graduate student neomarxism offered as a solution, well I get where the idw types got some of their juice even if I find them collectively a bit of a joke.

Thanks! I'm only reading The Bible (King James Version) systematically now for the first time, though obviously I've read a lot of it before between my early religious schooling and my college courses in Judaism and Christianity—particularly the narrative parts of the Torah, the Gospels and authentic Pauline letters, and the "poetic" books (Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Revelations). Then I want to read the books about the Bible I own, mainly of a literary-critical rather than of a theological nature: Bloom, Frye, Josipovici, Alter. I'm starting to appreciate the way in which it really is a book and not just a library. With Plato I've only read the hits (Apology, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, etc.), often more than once. I'm not sure I'll ever read him systematically, but I do need to get to the one about Atlantis: that's my biggest Platonic omission.

I didn't realize the extent to which acting like it's 1996 would actually recreate 1996. (Is this hyperstition?) Everybody's certainly acting like it's 1996—there's even a war in the Second World left-liberals can love after a spell of pacific sentiment brought on by a recoil from imperial aggression in the Third World (i.e., Ukraine is to Iraq as Yugoslavia was to Vietnam). Only the return of Trump in a more liberal guise can save us from the lethal simplicities of a culture war reorganized around the most brain-dead forms of religious conservatism—simplicities that, among other things, exonerate the left-liberals of their last decade's perfidy.

[oww666]

Home School

[morogwen]

There we have it, the anti-trans conspiracy theory. "The government has a vested interest in gender affirming care because it" Why trans people? If the goal is maintaining patriarchy, why manufacture evidence trans people? This guarantees a solid chunk of voters voting to restrict the rights of trans people, which defeats the purpose of GAC. If it's for monetary reasons, this is also a problem. You aren't going to make money targeting 1% of the population and only specifically in places where being trans is even legal, especially when you're going up against right wing transphobia that has demonstrably attacked trans care. The entire diatribe about postmodernism is taken straight from Jordan Peterson, and other's have discussed at length his "Postmodern Neomarxism" bit was just "Jewish Bolshivism" for the modern nazi. I've provided the studies showing that conversion therapy does include trying to prevent trans people from transitioning or accepting their gender identity (i.e., trying to prevent someone who is AMAB from identifying as a trans woman). If you're going to just ignore the evidence on that, then I'm just going to have to copy and paste this paragraph. The "follow the money" bit that comes up in a few places is very reminiscent of how other conspiracy theorists argue. Creationism doesn't lack evidence, it just doesn't get studied because money. Climate change isn't real, you just can't get money if you want to do a study that would disprove it. Of course, covid-19 is a hoax, they just won't give doctors money to do a real study. I've heard this a billion times and it's always a dumb excuse. It doesn't make sense when creationists say it so it doesn't make sense when you do. Unless you have actual evidence that the data is being forged for monetary reasons, this is just not worth considering.

I should add: you have to contend with the actual evidence. If you're going to go into a conspiracy theory that these dark shadowy elites are trying to trans people for nefarious purposes, you have to explain why these apparently smartest people ever are doing the dumbest thing they possibly could. If all of these medical professionals are just mistaken, why are you going after trans people over the medical communities incompetency?

A high rate of suicide is often tied to being trans, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s actually the other way around. My friend group in high school consisted almost entirely of severely mentally ill and suicidal young teenagers. As the years went on, more and more of them became trans until it was the majority of the group. They were suicidal and trans, yes, but they were suicidal long before discovering a trans identity. What are the odds that 80% of the people in one group all happened to turn out trans? Is it really reasonable to argue it was an undiscovered trans identity that made them all suicidal long before any of them “discovered” they were trans? Isn’t it more likely that when you are a mentally ill, unstable teenager, you may be more likely to adopt a trans identity as a way of reinventing yourself, rebelling, and gaining instant sympathy and community?

[undergroundusa]

"I think that the $50 million spent on condoms for Palestinians in Gaza or free benefits for people who have broken the law to be here in the first place, could be better spent on Americans in need right here in the US. But hey, I’m not an appointed spendthrift, so what do I know…"

READ & LISTEN NOW: https://www.undergroundusa.com/p/taxpayer-dollars-cant-be-considered

[mikhalsarah]

The Emperor’s New Gender

How can you help a 3-year-old to stop misgendering family friends who are transwomen? She isn't trying to insult them deliberately, but just doesn't perceive them as women and won't remember being corrected the next time she sees them. -Quora

First of all, as per further information in the comments, this is not your child and it is NOT your place to be interfering in how this family handles the issue unless they have specifically ASKED for your advice. This is something for the offended friends and the parents to work out, and if you value your friendships you will back out of what isn’t your problem. The entire fact that you feel entitled to force your personal beliefs on other people’s children and intervene in their parenting and other social relationships is extremely disturbing. I suggest you get a good book on Co-dependence recovery.

Secondly, this is an “Emperor’s New Clothes” problem. There is NOTHING “wrong” with this toddler (who at 3 is actually a preschooler), so there is nothing the parents can do about it. You can’t fix what isn’t broken. This reminds me of medieval parents getting the idea in their heads that crawling was too animalistic and ungodly, and strapping their children to little roundabouts to force them to skip crawling and go right to “proper human” walking. Crawling is developmentally necessary for most children and they rarely skip over it, and their lower leg bones and muscles are not yet ready to bear their full weight, leading to possible bow-leggedness. You cannot force children to skip developmental stages because it offends people based on some ideology they have. It has consequences. It is grown-ups here who must accept the natural development of children however inconvenient it is. This is called ACTING LIKE AN ADULT.

This is a normal stage of neurological development. At a certain point in the developing brain it starts to categorize things as a means to understand them. The ability to understand who is biologically male and producing sperm and who is biologically female and producing ova is self-evidently crucial to the survival of every species on the planet that has sexual reproduction. Even for species that can literally morph from one sex to the other, it is still crucial to recognize which members of their species are in which sexual form, and to have that skill locked well down before puberty hits. Therefore that ability is hard-wired into us, just like our ability to acquire language is. This child has reached a stage where they can now identify key markers of biological sex in people’s body shapes (hip to waist ratio, shoulder to hip ratio) and faces (relative size and placement of eyes, nose and philtrum lengths, chin length and width etc) but they have no idea yet what “gender” is as a concept because their brain is not mature enough to entertain a concept that still confuses many adults, apparently.

Children are notorious for mis-gendering everyone, not just trans people. I was mis-gendered by two preschoolers yesterday when I appeared at work in a skirt instead of my typical jeans. There was even a story decades back in Reader’s Digest illustrating how they mix up and conflate sex and gender roles. It was submitted by a parent who allowed their 4 year old to go to JK wearing his sister’s barrettes, only to have the teacher overhear him arguing with another boy about whether he was a boy or a girl. The boy eventually became exasperated and pulled down his pants to show the other boy his penis to prove he was a boy, to which the other boy dismissively said, “Everyone has a penis, only girls wear barrettes.”

Here I will suggest that you also need some good books on child development and evolutionary biology.

This situation would not have been a problem even a few years ago, before “transsexual” was turned into a dirty word and transgender was foisted on us, instead. Once upon a time you could just tell a child that:

A) not everyone who is male or female fits neatly into the typical or average appearance for their sex (or behaviour, for that matter)

B) some people who are born into one sex are unhappy about it for reasons we don’t yet understand. They feel strongly that they are the other sex internally (in their mind/brain) and are much happier if everyone just lets them live as the sex they feel inside as much as possible, and they can have hormones and surgery to help them do so. Since most of those people don’t fully understand themselves until past puberty, they develop outwardly like their biological sex and it can take a lot of time and money to change that.

and

C) It’s impolite and unkind to make personal remarks, or to draw attention to physical features or other differences which people have no control over.

We don’t yet fully understand the biological working of things like gender development, gender identity, or sexual orientations, but there is more than enough evidence that they are “real” events with correlates in the material world. We know that people with conditions that are known to affect the structure and function of their temporal lobes are much more likely to be GLB (including sudden shifts in their sexual orientation after events like head injuries, strokes and seizures) and much more likely to identify as trans or otherwise not conforming to the gender binary (including again, sudden changes to their sense of self-identity in the wake of neurological events). Obviously the majority of people who are LGBT haven’t had a head injury, stroke or seizure, so being LGBT is not “caused by” those things, they’re just some of many things that can “flip the switch”; genetics, pre-natal hormone exposure, birth order, and developmental life experiences have all been tentatively cited as having a role to play.

*People on both the Right and Woke Left will be determined to misunderstand me here as saying that being GLB or T is evidence of a “sickness” of some sort…either agreeing and using this information as “proof” that it’s so or becoming angry at me for equating the two. So let’s just head off that nonsense at Go. ALL MANNER of changes can happen in the wake of neurological events in the temporal lobe or elsewhere. One man who had a head injury suddenly became a mathematical genius…do you think that’s evidence that being good at math is a “sickness”? One person finds they become more emotional, another less so (neither is a pathology unless taken to extremes that prevent the person functioning). Some people who develop Temporal Lobe Epilepsy suddenly take up writing or (less often) the visual arts. Is being a writer or artist a biological flaw? Obviously not. The linkage of any trait with an area of the brain is not evidence that the trait is pathological (it might be, it might not), it is merely evidence that one or more neurological substrates that control that trait resides in that particular part of the brain. As regards gender identity, it tells us that there is some part of our brains where sexual self-identity arises and therefore the person’s experience may be subjective (only they experience it, others cannot perceive it unless told of it) but is not imaginary.

In the past children gradually acquired the ability for more complex categorization and learned to differentiate between someone’s biological sex, their gender presentation (how closely they match others of their sex), and societal gender roles. Children are remarkably accepting of diversity and exceptions to rules when they are presented matter-of-factly. More so than adults who apparently can’t accept facts which don’t fit with their ideologies on the Left, any more than Evangelical Young-Earth Creationists on the Right can, and feel the need to tie themselves into mindless, slogan-droning intellectual pretzels as a result.

The fact that we now view even toddlers with suspicion of “transphobia” and seek to indoctrinate their natural neurological development out of them should be a GIANT F*ING RED FLAG that we are NOT becoming more aware of diversity and more accepting, we are becoming LESS able to see the full extent of how diverse humans really are and are being forced to pigeonhole them into categories that the average five year old is supposed to be outgrowing. What we are seeing is an extremely judgmental, rigid and abusive cult that denies an obvious reality that even a child can see, that biological sex is real and important, and cannot be replaced by or conflated with gender identity or roles, even if we also agree that gender presentation and gender identity are also important biological realities. It used to be only children who foolishly did so, but now we have adults telling children that everyone can have a penis and only girls wear barrettes.

In the original story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the child’s lack of indoctrination into social hierarchies left them nonconformist, and free to state what they saw with their own eyes with impunity. The child was not punished because children are not expected to be politically correct. In fact, it led the adults to realize that they had let fear and desire to conform and be thought clever blind them to obvious reality. It is the adults in the end who feel foolish and ashamed, and change their ways. We’re not yet at the end of the story of The Emperor’s New Gender, but based on the current trajectory the “adults” are going to double-down and I will soon be looking for a new career, as I will be expected to throw away everything I know about child development so that daycares can be run like Orwellian indoctrination camps. I will not participate in the ideological and developmental abuse of children so that a tiny minority of adults can live in a fantasy world in which they deny an aspect of reality when it has the temerity not to give a shit about their ideology.

[grossineptitude]

random thoughts 19

So, social justice

has unfairly earned such a crude connotation. 

you know those half-thought arguments about how there’s ‘toleration propoganda’ and all these ridiculous half-sane theories about ‘neomarxists’ and conspiracy theories. And theories (it would be more appropriate to call them speculations) that are used to opress someone or harnest hate and distrust towards someone are the absolute evil. Think about ‘the j@wish question’ (i think no commentary is necessary here, except for the remark of not needing a commentary), think about antisemitism, think about ‘wiping out the “white race”’ (color of skin does not indicate, nor can be called a race, look it up, race has much more specific criteria), think about xenophobia, think about eugenics (that’s when academia goes wrong), think about ‘gender critics’ (that’s when people get too deep into theory and forget that we are human and we all suffer and it turns into transphobia and i think it’s time to create another brand -- genderphobia), think about ‘identitarians’ (that’s when f@shism is rebranded), think about sexism, think about androcentrism, think about ultranationalism (that’s when nationalism (position that most countries already inhibit -- aim to increase welfare of your country) becomes agressive and unnecessarily exclusive. So when someone declares themselves a nationalist, you can rightly call them at least “an ultranationalist”, or just “a chauvinist”. Learned about ultranationalism from Mia Mulder), think about academical exclusion (that’s when elitism goes too far and academia becomes stiff, inflexible, and stuck), think about “tough-love” parental politics, think about repression of your own emotions, think about repression within.

Social justice equals humaneness, compassion, understanding, inclusiveness, and human decency. Toleration ends on intoleration. Understanding ends on agression.  

[rametarin]

the fucked thing is that being open and brazen about the neomarxism of the “critical lenses” and critical legal theory is an absolutely MASSIVE tone shift. Like, to the degree of historical revisionists waiting until historians and WW2 buffs were mostly dying off before starting to tell lies about the contributions of the Soviets in WW2 more frequently.

 The point of those views isn’t to appeal to peoples compassion, it’s to play into their tribalism, xenophobia and bigotry, just give it a moralistic and righteous coat of paint.

Being so open and honest is a declaration of two things. 1.) That they can’t gaslight people anymore and hide their views behind “fringe liberalism” or “mistaken liberal” and not part of a vast conspiracy and culture in the heart of left-wing operations. We had people appearing out from behind the rainbow liberal mask in the late 80s/early 90s trying to introduce the idea you can’t be racist to white people because whites have all the power and aren’t a race. This was, in fact, how the original, “reverse-racism” concept got started. An attempted concession by non-Marxists to get them to see bigotry is bigotry whether you seize control of a word and demand control of its definition or not. They pivoted and then vanished back behind the liberal mask and called for help, and like the boy that cried wolf, the person talking about reverse-racism was looked at pitiously and told, “there’s no such thing as reverser racism- just racism. :^) No one actually REALLY thinks liberals believe you can’t be racist to white people. Don’t be absurd.” They can’t hide their beliefs anymore. Too much pattern, too much proof accessible not just from seeing the mask slip in their personal lives, but seeing instances of it on youtube, too. 2.) That they don’t CARE if they’re seen and called out, because they’re entrenched and powerful enough like the Game Journo people to do what they want from the PTAs and curriculum designers at public schools, the human resources departments of corporations and the government, and tenured professorial positions at colleges.

Being so open about hating whites/men and declaring capitalism is the body of this multiheaded scapegoat for everything, is them declaring they finally have enough power and people entrenched in the conspiracy that it doesn’t matter if the enemy knows they exist anymore. They aren’t interested in appealing to a people they believe they’ve already defeated.

The problem though is they really want to lump white Hispanics in that pile, Central and South America learn English as a second language more frequently every day, and overall the Asians are seeing what the Wokes have waiting for them in their majority countries and the rhetoric being used so openly against anglos and hispanos in the west. Not to mention the cultural divide between Africans, African immigrants, and western black people. They may have miscalculated.

I'm far from the first one to say this, but if instead of talking about "white privilege" people talked about "POC disadvantages" nobody would be so up in arms against it.

Same thing with straight, cis, neurotypical, what have you.

When you paint real, ordinary, struggling people as evil just for existing, they're not gonna be on your side.

"Well, we don't care about the feelings of wypipo!"

You should. If not for ideological, for simple practical reasons. You live in a Western country, guess what, there's gonna be more white, cis, straight and neurotypical people than otherwise. If you alienate the majority, you lose. This is activism 101.

Appeal to their humanity and compassion. Humans actually have a lot of that, believe it or not.

[goldencoast-dreams]

[platonicpolycule]

The Frankfurt School is the post-nut clarity from Stalinism.

[infinitysisters]

Unfortunately, the zero-sum idea of an economy as a cake, and every part of it as a slice, to be shared by the dictates of social justice (that is, equally), is still popular among the disgruntled, among intellectuals, and among those who would like to be in charge of measuring and doling out the pieces. It appeals to the most reliable and long lasting of all human emotions—resentment.

Theodore Dalrymple