Climate scientists and IQ researchers are both (largely) correct. Both of the sciences that they represent are hugely important for understanding the future, while both also have tribal ideological detractors on the right and left, respectively. Though this wasn’t always so. For instance, Svante Arrhenius, the man who constructed the world’s first climate model back in the 1890s – the projections it spat out are perfectly tallied with modern models powered by supercomputers – was also a Social Democratic eugenicist who looked forwards to Sweden becoming Tropical Hyperborea. If climate change is a NWO conspiracy, it goes back more than a century.
But the main difference is that only one of those groups have managed to inspire a secular religion (Greenism) that has become politically dominant amongst European yuppies. The other group, at best, has a few political mavericks (mainstream conservatives and even large sections of the Far Right are militantly blank slatist). On worse days, they are pseudoscientists and social outcasts who can barely hold a conference without a pack of SJWs baying for their blood outside.
I have recently been mulling over why things turned out this way.
My answer may surprise you, as my Marxist credentials are hardly stellar. I believe the most parsimonious explanation is class war. Greenism allows middle class to virtue signal, while the economic costs of highly regressive carbon taxes mainly affect rural & blue collar workers. It also appears to demand global solutions. Like it or not, all science and technology comes with “ideological load.” Stirrups promoted feudalism. Climate science promotes globalism.
In contrast, IQ realism promotes meritocracy, and perhaps a generous dose of paternalism towards the genetically less privileged (before you raise that issue: the Nazis were militantly anti-IQ). No surprise, then, that it was the British middle class that drove the campaign against Cyril Burt and (selective) public grammar schools. Even more hilariously, it is the Far Left that is most stringently opposed to IQ research (modern SJWs harass, assault, and deplatform IQists; under Stalin, some were outright executed). In effect, they act as the hirelings of capital. “False consciousness” much? Then again, that would be assuming that Marxists are out to do social good, as opposed to personal status maximization. I am not sure that assumption is justified.
I do think the Right gets this connection, but only on a hazy, subconscious level. They associate climate science with a globalist Green agenda, and many of them react by denying reality as opposed to framing their arguments around it (e.g. immigration will increase global warming; citing the possible benefits of global warming; pointing out that many Green policies, such as their opposition to nuclear power, are going to worsen the climate crisis). This is perhaps not that surprising, since they aren’t that bright. So they rant about Mann’s hockey stick, Al Gore inventing the Internet, and other inanities, marginalizing themselves and allowing the Left to monopolize the agenda. Meanwhile, in the long-term, it is the more intelligent who tend to status maximize most successfully – the son also rises and all that – and the optimal path towards that goal involves promoting neoliberal globalism, which is the system that they can best thrive in. Realism on AGW coupled with blank slatism (or rather, selective blank slatism – we all know what people mean when they ask which area of town has the “best schools”, and can cite many other petty hypocrisies) is the belief space that is best synchronized with status maximization goals.
This is how Bioleninism operates in the 21st century.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Finally, you have moved away from “technology is neutral”, which is so abstract.
Technology is woven into the fabric of life, and has a religious dimension.
When have I ever said technology is “neutral”? Incidentally, I have been using that term – which I got from Michael Anissimov – for years.
The Nazis may not have been interested in IQ per se but they were certainly interested in eugenics, and for most of the early 20th century eugenics went hand-in-glove with intelligence research (not saying that all intelligence researchers supported e.g. mandatory sterilization, but most people who were interested in trying to measure intelligence were also interested to some degree in “better breeding” of humans). When eugenics was largely discredited after WW2 (due to Nazi associations), intelligence research was inevitably going to be a casualty as well. The final blow was probably the ascent of the ’68ers into the academy and other positions of power within society; particularly in America, which had been the hotbed of intelligence research and the eugenics movement, the Marxist takeover of academia meant that certain opinions were not only discredited, but ruled completely out of bounds for any discussion at all.
“I have recently been mulling over why things turned out this way.”
i guess i don’t understand why it’s so hard to explain.
selling a BS lie about planet destroying global warming helps leftists. talking about real genetic differences between humans around the world doesn’t help leftists.
leftists control all dialogue. so which one is blathered about all day, and which one is silenced?
seems pretty simple to me.
i can accept the globe has warmed cos
ice age ——–> long time ———–> now
but i don’t believe it’s man-made cos
1) global crisis!!!! is so obviously being used as a stick to herd people into global government
and
2) if TPTB believed it they wouldn’t have moved all the industry to places with the least environmental protection.
on the other hand you’re probably right that figuring out the best argument to use on kids brainwashed at school is probably better than waiting for global crisis!!! to not happen and then say “told you so.”
Any serious right-wing government should embrace green initiatives by cutting funding from something ridiculous (welfare, overseas aid, etc) and use it to invest in valuable infrastructure such as nuclear. You win the moral fight by producing solutions, you don’t tax people anymore which gives you their support, and at the end of the day have delivered infrastructure that benefits the country overall.
now you mention it that’s another option – have lots of green policies (recycling etc) and just simply ignore all the carbon stuff.
Right-wing support for nuclear has ancillary electoral benefits. Nothing says “Big Science” like nuclear power. And scientists have been a major grantor of moral privilege to the left in the US, witness Bill Nye and I (censored) love science.
With regards to global warming, I’ve got two words for you: nuclear power.
Anyone who is not pro-nuclear is not serious about global warming.
Speaking of which, Thorcon has the best approach. They plan to mass produce MSR plants using shipbuilding techniques where they can build 100 plants per year in each manufacturing facility.
Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.
In Australia some of the public service departments, like Department of Social Services, have received new buildings, and while this is largely an upgrade for modern buildings many of them focus on energy saving featues like automatic lights and electrical zoning features as a byproduct of modernisation but not as an explicit enviromental feature. A large focus can be on cutting electrical waste, do this through building new buildings/infrastructure which bolsters public spending, employs people, and allows you to focus on sustainable modern functions that are enviromentally friendly (whatver they may be). No brainer really, hits a lot of things people care about and govs should be focusing on.
You can also focus on zoning stuff by increasing development/allotment of public parks and green spaces. Have tree planting areas or encourage that through some means or build new lakes and deposit fish into them for people to walk around. There are so many ways in which you can promote a ‘green’ lifestyle while benefitting. Suck the money straight out of the urban elites pockets and put it towards ideas that benefit your country.
As 216 said the scientific approach is also extremely valuable. You can strip money from unis teaching useless humanities and provide R&D funding for nuclear power facilities. Take away from the things that don’t benefit you and put them towards developing solutions that do benefit you in the moral scenarios you’re losing in.
win-win
Doesn’t seem to work in practice, I’m afraid. Sweden does all that, like autistic recycling into 100 categories … but it’s just not enough. Likewise, all the dozens of climate models have failed due to the weather (an embarrassing decade+ which in the field is, of course, called ‘the pause’) … but it’s just not enough, the ideas are not discredited, the global conferences continue. Science, yeah!
So perhaps this too instead of rational argument calls for some Soviet Union era leering cynicism. Surely there are some good jokes about the idealism of the green youth brigades marching across the land, etc. Activate the boomer-level memes!
I am not sure how blank-slatism helps metropolitan globalists maximize their status. Would they not support IQ to brag about their big-brains and justify their privileged position?
I think another factor is at work: the Kindergarten ethic, that we can’t suggest that anyone is inherently less gifted than anyone else. At least not concerning intelligence, which is too obviously a measure of what makes humanity different from and superior to other animals.
Then of course status maximization/amour-propre intervene, once the blank-slatist norms have been set: look at how tolerant I am, look at how I make enough money to live in a nice moderately multikulti neighborhood rather than complain about the ghetto, look at how successful I am, not because of my in-born qualities, but because of my efforts, etc.
The Kindergarten ethic would also explain equal-outcomes feminism.
Re: the Right and ecology, you are sadly quite right. Even high-brow right-wingers like Thierry Baudet and Renaud Camus are crusading against climate and wind mills. Possibly because they have big business backers or simply for esthetic reasons.
I would note that in France the right cares more about climate change. By no means disparaged in either the discourse of François-Xavier Bellamy (running in bobo Paris to be sure) and the RN. The RN has made a point of arguing that, to be consequential, environmentalism must be nationalism, above by promoting local production. And Marine loves the Atom. An older article on the subject: http://www.leparisien.fr/politique/fn-quand-marine-le-pen-ebauche-son-programme-ecolo-03-12-2016-6408786.php
It’s interesting to read the Wikipedia biography of the teenager promoted for her great global warming activism. (I’m always suspicious when children are pushed forward as fronts for something pushed by the elites. Similar to the pictures of dead children, they are used for emotional manipulation.)
They are using a child with huge emotional and mental health issues:
Her parents are (minor?) celebrities in Sweden, so that explains part of her way to fame (apart from the media being happy of finding a public face for their children’s crusade):
She also is vegan (and turned her family to veganism), the unhealthy diet probably exacerbates her emotional and mental issues:
Also, she’s probably an only child, and as seen above, probably has overindulgent parents (so the 16-year-old is the boss in the family).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg
Maybe it’s only me, or because of my Eastern Bloc background, but I find these children’s school strikes and children’s rallies “against climate change” to be similar to Soviet style rallies where children were ordered to participate by their schools. Here the coercion may be more subtle (I wouldn’t bet my house that they always are..) than in the Eastern Bloc, but to me at least it seems really similar.
(For the record, I think AGW is more or less real, though the specific models might be wrong.)
This and her nuclear power comment shows that she is more consequent than German Greens who fly a lot and hate nuclear power.
If IQ is mostly inherited, it isn’t a personal achievement.
But if there’s a blank slate and everybody has the same potential, elites are elites solely due to their own effort and hard work. Whereas non-elites are simply too lazy to achieve what could be possible for them with a better work ethic…they’re morally deficient.
imo one sees echoes of this premise in the immigrationist topos about lazy native proles who deserve being replaced by hard-working, dynamic immigrants.
As you said, blank slate implies that people who are on top belong there because they studied hard and worked hard, and people on the bottom belong there because they are wilfully lazy and stupid.
You can futher subdivide it to left and right wing versions.
According to left wing, poor POC are held back by white racism, while poor whites are trash, so lazy, dumb and worthless that they ended in the gutter despite their white privilege.
According to right wing, all poor are trash who deserve what they got and much worse.
Hard to find more perfect justification of current class structure, why change it.
Acceptance of HBDIQ science that says the high IQ ruling classes were born that way, logically leads either to “noblesse oblige” paternalism or “master race” domination.
TPTB do not want to admit they have any obligations to lower classes, and do noth have the guts to put on the jackboots, pick up the whips and rule the lower orders by brute force.
Better not to open the HBDIQ question at all.
But people don’t take pride in only those things which are the result of their own actions. People are often quite proud of being, for instance, good-looking.
In any case, left-wingers believe that intelligence is also not the product of their own choices but of their education and parents’ status.
It depends. As anon wrote in #20, there’s a “left-” and “right-wing” version of this, the former being “only your own efforts matter for privileged people (white people), while POC are held back by white racism (basically, the racism of the very same lazy whites who are morally deficient, as shown by their poverty),” while the latter is “all poor are morally deficient and thus deserve to be poor.”
I think it all converges on the left-wing narrative, where even poor-hating “right-wingers” will show a little noblesse oblige towards POC. Probably the fully Social Darwinist model is not very satisfactory for people’s emotional needs, they need to feel that they are not totally heartless to the weakest and the poorest. “Solidarity” with POC (support for affirmative action, hating racists, including poor whites in general, etc.) satisfies this emotional need.
Classism reinforces the new religion, but it didn’t cause it.
Earth Day was established in the United States in 1970–long before AGW was a prominent concern. During the 1970s global cooling was a prominent concern. This is used today by climate skeptics to dismiss the AGW theory, but scientists of the time were responding to serious problems like atmospheric dimming.
The S&P 500 back in the 1970s was also dominated by industrial corporations, so early environmentalism was a threat to your stock portfolio: http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/full/1970/
At the same time that environmentalism was developing, Hans Eysenck was having his university lectures disrupted by radicals and sociobiology was being strangled in the cradle. The ’70s was a more intellectually open time, so Arthur Jensen and William Shockley got mainstream press coverage–but they were still widely dismissed and denounced.
Causation on HBD-denialism is easy enough to explain. The Nazis were the ultimate bad guys, and then the need to compete with the USSR globally resulted in American elites embracing “equality”. Jewish influence wasn’t helpful either, of course.
As for environmentalism, other than the fact that to some extent it was (and is) needed there is the fact that nature worship is the most primitive human religion. The worship of natural phenomena has been observed in most hunter-gatherers, and if you look at what we know about Greco-Roman and Norse paganism before their classical periods it appears they worshiped some kind of sky god.
The demise of Christianity doesn’t eliminate the religious impulse, and one gets a transcendent feeling when experiencing beautiful nature. So why not worship the Earth?
Lots of functional environmentalism revolves around this sort of superstitious, ritualistic signalling rather than actual efforts to improve the environment. Atomophobia is a prominent example of how irrational these people are. Another example is the hysteria over plastic bags, which use trivial amounts of resources and help prevent food-borne poisoning.
Found this while browsing the internuts. Rather old news from 2017, but as LGBTQ issue might be on topic in this thread.
Have you ever wondered what will happen when 11th century feudalism meets cutting edge 21st century LGBTQ thought?
No more, we now know 😉
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42182747
Argh, I’d almost forgotten about Greta Thunberg. Virtue signalling of the highest order, and along with it one should not forget that this is rapidly and smoothly conveyed to the masses, regardless of truth value.
It’s our own fault if we listen to the wisdom of a teenager though.
For the record, my view, based on geology and straightforward observation, is instead that we are currently in an ice age — more specifically in an interglacial. Furthermore, that the ‘climate scientists’ don’t really know what they’re doing but that it’s obviously still a useful spectacle for political purposes. Hence, we are not doomed, for reasons of climate at least, in ten years or a hundred years. In a few tens of thousands of years, honoured Glacier-chan will at last return.
To speculate on the causes of hysterical climate angst in part of the population, it is of course partly due to mass media and political will (ahem) fanning the flames, but could also originate from psychological issues with fear of overpopulation. Whites are not suited to live in ant hills where quality of life steadily degrades.
Well, though technically that’s true, in reality, we are listening to a voice carefully selected and amplified by the media, a totally unnatural phenomenon, which makes it sound like some kind of authority figure or a Jeanne d’Arc character.
That’s likely, actually, it looked to me that the climate already started slowly cooling back a few thousand years ago, but while arresting this phenomenon is beneficial, no doubt there’s a risk that we could suddenly warm the climate too quickly and too much. Especially since now we have huge infrastructure near the sea.
Ask any green that if it is proven that immigration increases pollution, that they would be against immigration. The answers are all the same (absolutely no exceptions), they are not serious about global warming if all the other left wing ideologies are more important for them.
What exactly are German Greens if they hate nuclear power? Just pinko commies (as we say in America)?
Ascetic, flagellant religious fanatics.
They desire to replace sinful Europeans with sacred QPOCs and to reduce everyone’s standard of living to subsistence in order to better commune with the spirits. Their beloved solar panels and wind mills should be thought of as religious temples and relics rather than an energy program.
If elites actually believed in global warming, we would see that belief reflected in the price of oceanfront property. However, we don’t see oceanfront property declining in price, quite the opposite.
It’s all just virtue signaling, they don’t believe their own bullshit. If they did their actions would reflect it.
From what I’ve seen in life, the most successful people outside of a handful of high-IQ professions that demand enough hardcore higher education to prove IQ via deeds, rather than via a quotient, are not that demonstrably bright or certainly not intellectual. They achieve success by going along to get along, an activity that any 2 year old with average intelligence masters in 2 seconds. They mimic the in-crowd. When they figure out what the current trendy buzzwords are, they just repeat them over and over, delivering the crowd-pleasing content that teachers, employers or friends of friends who might be connected up to jobs in the crony-parent job market want to hear.
It’s not necessarily true that middle classes will be spared, or more spared, than the rural workers, when the CO₂ taxes will come to the Western world.
We pay through the nose for a square meter of housing, be it for a bed or a washing machine, for a bag of potatoes, for an effing Ikea shelf. Everything is cheaper in the countryside. Whenever some tries to sell it more expensive, the hick gets in his car and goes further. For pennies spent on gas, the hick saves a lot more on shopping. I lack time, they lack disposable income.
When the potato bag and the Ikea shelf will become more expensive, it’s going to be a 20% increase, not a 20 cents increase. I am going to pay a higher penalty than the hick. The only difference is that the hick gets to see an itemized increase, because he pays for gasoline separately.
Let me put it differently: I make 3000 a month, but the hick makes 1000. Shit gets more expensive. I get spent 3000, possibly losing the chance of saving something. The hick spends still 1000. He doesn’t have more to spend.
The hick spends on energy, and stuff that is made from energy. The middle classes spend on energy, stuff that is made with energy, and hicks that depend on energy. Netflix is still not a significant part of middle class expenses, and even that costs a lot of energy. Services, such as the famous avocado sandwich, are expensive because we have to pay the hicks that make them. Few business people got rich out of sandwiches. It’s mostly hicks who make the sandwiches, who manage and own those restaurants, who inspect, borrow, upkeep, paint and wire those restaurants.
The people who won’t care, the only ones who buy significant quantities of hick-free services, are the 1%.
Since people are so concerned about climate change, this would be an excellent time to test the hypothesis of nuclear winter.
Woke Dr. Strangelove shall prevent the solar panel gap, even it requires nuking Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang and Tehran!
The illustrious House of Balfour, founded by Arthur Balfour, yes THE BALFOUR of Balfour Declaration we all know and love.
Quelle surprise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Balfour#Later_career
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
Old British aristocratic stock, if you wanted to know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Balfour#Ancestry
As we mark (((you know who))) with triple brackets, there need to be some other symbol, maybe [[[ ]]] for the Norman swine.
To be an annoying complainer, what is the meaning of this term “bioleninism”.
Without wanting to be rude, if I hear this words, I imagine person who says them is illiterate.
Is it like washing power “bio” which has enzymes in it?
I have not read a lot of Lenin, but I don’t believe he writes anything about biology in it, and anything about biological effect on politics would probably be incompatible with his theories. And we know how in the Soviet times, there were quite absurd attempts to make biology amenable to Marxism-Leninism, which has almost no place for its theories.
The term was created by Spandrell: https://spandrell.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/
The tldr is that modern leftism is a political program in which sociopathic status maximizers (SJW or “progressive” activists) capitalize on the resentments of the biologically inferior in order to build durable political coalitions and achieve power.
Meaningless buzzword just like “cultural Marxism”, pure product of capitalism that have nothing in common with historical Marx and Marxist thought.
Just like leftists call everything they do not like “fascism” or “nazism” regardless whether these things have anything in common with historical Mussolini’s and Hitler’s policies, many people on the far right when they hate something, cannot resist to call it “marxist” “leninist” “communist” etc.
If the progressives are so inferior, why are they winning? Sounds like “dog ate my homework” lame excuse.
I agree in relation to “global warming”, which is not directly affecting lives yet, and can be understood as a luxury political issue for now.
It has moralistic and prophetic attraction (it is a Biblical prophecy, and attracts people who want to believe world is punishing man for his sins).. Upper classes can use it as a way to look down on those who cannot afford a Tesla solar roof.
But the more boring, topic of general air pollution and high cancer rates, is damaging people of all classes who live in affected cities.
Moreover, generally, richer people can avoid it by their location and occupation. And poorer (or at least non-rich) people – with more occupational and geographic immobility – are suffering the worst consequences of pollution. Major polluting industries are controlled by oligarchs who do not live in the same cities which are damaged by their pollution.
Although nuclear energy has the best aesthetics, we should probably still prefer wind and solar power. With nuclear, storage of “high-level radioactive waste” is still a problem, if you worry about future civilizations who might find silos in 20,000 years.
And the answer of deep geographic storage is still in provisional development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
Products like e.g. Tesla solar roof, has an analogous attraction now in relation to apocalyptic prophecy of global warming, as commercialized “indulgence” of the late medieval church – especially in the form when both could be publicly displayed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence
I question if they were simply just Norman swine. The stink of jewishness permeates this family, I have no doubts that somewhere in the past some jewish blood crept in.
Who is “Spandrell” – is this a useful scholar of Lenin or Leninism, that the term has some body of research related to it, and is not instead (as it seems to me) just indication of illiteracy of people on the internet?
I said…
It’s not the sociopathic status maximizers (Spandrell’s term, not mine) who are inferior. It’s their “base” of low-quality minorities and mentally ill people.
There’s obviously more to it than this, I was just explaining Spandrell’s concept to Dmitry.
Because far too many whites are still adhering to ideas such as decency, fairness and honour. The other side are fully aware of these stupid cuckservatives and have zero problems taking advantage of it.
I know that “Cultural Marxism” conjunction is an indication that person who writes it has no knowledge of Marx’s historical materialism, in which culture is almost epiphenomenal – usage of it is probably sign of the low educational level of people in the internet.
“Cultural Marxism” is almost as non-sensible as saying “nominalist Platonism” – oxymoron, which indicates that person who uses it does not know at least one of the sides in the conjunction.
Spandrell is a neoreactionary blogger. He’s a European of some kind who lives somewhere in Asia as far as I can tell, probably in mainland China.
He’s certainly not a scholar of Lenin and doesn’t pretend to be.
I assume he picked the term “Bioleninism” simply because it’s catchier than “cultural Marxism” and removes the focus on the long-gone Frankfurt School.
Nuclear waste is not a problem. Its quantity is very small (all of it ever produced takes up a few “football” pitches) and can be stored in geologically safe areas. If someone 20,000 years in the future accesses the site and gets sick–who cares?
These sort of atomophobic views should be illegal to express and result in confinement to a concentration camp until you can be suitably reformed through labor to love atom.
I don’t know why you keep doubling down on this even though it has been explained to you repeatedly. Perhaps because you are from a country which was actually governed by Marxists?
“Cultural Marxism” describes the theories of Antonio Gramsci and the subsequent Frankfurt School, communists who felt that Western culture was preventing the “inevitable” socialist revolution and thus had to be subverted, corrupted, and destroyed.
You can no doubt find people on Breitbart who use the term and have no idea what it means or differs from classical Marxism, but it’s not a concept developed by uneducated people.
Except that the people starting it started out as actual Marxists hoping to create the classless society (while doing away with other bourgeois institutions like marriage or family), but realizing that Marx’s route through revolution of the proletariat has failed (and they partly criticized Marx for his ideas on that).
Instead they conceived of the idea of spreading rot through bourgeois society (like destroying the institutions of marriage, family, organized religion etc.), though the end goal of creating Marx’s utopia outlined in the Communist Manifesto still stood. Later on the ideology morphed further, eventually dropping the original goals.
However, as any literate person knows, the meanings of words are infinitely malleable. For example a weathercock is not a cock, and when applied to a politician, has nothing to do with the weather either. So what?
The progressives must then be the greatest strategists of history, true supermen. They are controlling the world with base of low quality mentally ill people – imagine what could they do with high quality sane people (like alt-righters).
And moves the focus to even longer dead Lenin.
To someone who never heard about Lenin, it sounds boring. Yawn.
To someone who vaguely remembers that Lenin was hero fighting for liberation of oppressed people just like Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, it sounds awqesome.
“The world needs new Green Lenin to save the environment! Where can I sign up?”
To someone who knows who was Lenin and what he did, it sounds just plain stupid.
Overall, bad recruitment slogan.
Leftist politics are hardly anything new. The Gracchus brothers lived over two millennia ago, and we’ve even observed similar behavior in the lesser primates of lower status apes building coalitions to overthrow a smaller number of high status ones.
The novel development of the past century is the replacement of low class with inferior racial, ethnic, and religious origins (as well as mental illness and sexual perversion).
I don’t think bioleninism is a bad term, it’s better than cultural Marxism, but it shares the same problem of never ending spergfests from people acquainted with classical communism. I’ve used the term “weakness worship” before, but that’s not pithy.
Socialists had a great advantage in being able to oppose “capitalism”. Now there’s a great term.
Sadly, it seems that legislators thought about this issue.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/section/16
All progressive people of the world, unite and fight this transphobic outrage!
For example Dmitry.
If you are educated in American schools, you start swearing allegiance to the flag, from kindergarden until your brain si completely washed out of any opposing idea. The ritual gets spares in high school, but it is boosted, like a vaccine, long after. For example, before every college sports event, where Americans are pressured to attend in a near-compulsory manner, they have to sing the anthem and beat the bush about the flag.
When these indoctrination sessions become longer, such as during civics classes, American teachers tell American children that the Holy Flag is important because it symbolizes the fight against Godless Communists, who are bent on stealing their lunch. Subsequently, similar to the way a dog responds to a clicker or an inaudible whistle, the average US adult finds himself unable to think once his masters have uttered the words “Communists” and its derivatives.
Reagan run a massive deficit while whistling “Soviets”. Kennedy did nothing durable for the US economy, and aggravated the Vietnam problem, while whistling “Soviets”. McCain wrote to Pravda. More recently, for almost 4 years, Hillary Clinton had only Russians on her mind. A majority of unz.com American commentards lose their shit as soon as you mention “Soviets”. Rather than replying to your comments, they will gloat about that time when Rocky beat the shit out of Ivan Draco, in front on Gorbatchev and the whole Committee.
“Leninist” and “Marxist” are insults Americans are throwing at each other, similar to “gay” a few decades ago. Mentions of how some blacks were indeed slaves? Cultural Marxism! Suggestions that Bezos and Trump are not paying their fair share in taxes? Cultural Leninism! Reheated fries? Stalinist fries! (In contrast to Freedom fries, of course.) Today, Americans are mostly gay, making “Marxism” an even more important tool for the Spandrells.
It’s similar to “Fascism” in Russia. I don’t what you have against corporatist states, with a penchant for Christian rituals and for small militant cells disseminated within the larger populace. In case you haven’t noticed, Italians were forced into a half-hearted alliance with the Germans. You had a war with Germans, who were Nazis, not Fascists. Nazi Germans were centralizing, statist, atheist. But I think that, since the beginning of the paragraph, where I typed the trigger word “Fascist”, I lost your attention. That’s how spandrells design their blog posts too.
We can immediately know it is developed by uneducated people – because it sounds to educated man’s hearing like a practical joke, a “square circle”, or “atheist theist”.
Most central and ineliminable feature of Marxist’s theory is that culture is causally supervenient, and relevant to analyse for diagnostic, rather than causal, purposes.
This fact is “the load bearing wall” of Marxism. It’s not just cosmetic to remove it, but whole theory of Marxism will collapse.
To extent culture is causally relevant for historical process, it is because it can act causally like “fetter” that can slow transition to next stage – and as a result make this transition more explosive and destructive. Therefore task of Marxists on culture, is to ease transition process, introduce more rapidly class consciousness, etc.
I searched in the internet, and it says on Wikipedia: “the term Cultural Marxism is a right-wing, antisemitic conspiracy theory”.
So, I was right that this kind of self-contradicting conjunction, will mark a demographic whose knowledge of history of ideas is derived from reading YouTube comments.
Use of self-contradicting conjunction inversely correlated with acquaintance with Marx’s writings and essays.
Frankfurt School reject central theories of Marxism, so they are not Marxist, but perhaps “Marxian”.
However, they accept historical materialism, so they will view culture primarily as diagnostic of their capitalist enslavement, rather than as the causal reason of it.
And Gramsci obviously sounds like his part as easing transition in inevitable historical process – but he is probably more like Marxism–Leninism (which is already leaving a lot of real Marx behind).
https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1926/10/letter-togliatti.htm
Where in Communist Manifesto is “utopia outlined”?
You know the basis of thought: “not [a & not a] ”
Just because it’s possible to say oxymoronic nonsense, does not mean they are not nonsense.
Some oxymorons, however, will only be known to be oxymorons by people of a certain higher level of sophistication or education: “Irrational Cartesianism”, “Nominalist Platonism”, etc.
In this case, the use of the oxymoron would only be useful for marking people of low level, who do not understand one or both sides of the conjunction. But Marx is mainstream and there is no excuse for people who can’t see the oxymoron.
In Marxism, family is only product of current historical stage (Engels wrote an essay on this). However, idea that “destroying marriage, family”, will result in communist society, is quite comical from a Marxist view.
But, moreover, provide which texts you are actually talking about. Who knows, maybe there are texts on this (at the most extreme level, there were idiots who created Kibbutzim in Israel, although I would not give Marxism responsibility for this).
Eeh, not for long can the tricks stand – for their policies will just stack all the foot shots until they collapse
I’m not sure what your point is. As you yourself mention, Marxism-Leninism is already pretty different from the original ideas of Marx, and let’s also not forget that those ideas were themselves pretty incomplete and ambiguous, leaving it open to interpretation. Most people calling themselves Marxists in history behaved as if most of Marx’s theory was untrue, for example Marxists-Leninists or interwar German Social Democrats.
It’s not like Dmitry is the arbiter of what is the “correct” usage of certain words or expressions.
Lol what you said is almost exactly what I was imagining.
Not all Americans are like this of course. But I think the use of “Marxism” has a kind of Pavlovian response from Westerners, and rather feel sorry for the old ideology in this context, even while disagreeing with it completely (if I wrote a history of ideas, I would say the effect of Marxism on the world inherited from the 19th century, was not completely without analogy to a computer virus).
I was going to say there is a reversal – and I wonder how Westerners only view from one perspective. Today, Marxism can be more “conservative” than some of their conservatism.
I hope you are not talking to me. I’m not representative example from any view.
Sigh….. time for another c/p..
In my opinion, Cultural Marxism is a poor label. This is basically New Left from 1968 on steroids. “Cultural Marxism” is, when I think of it, too sophisticated & actually inaccurate. Marcuse & other idiots are responsible for its chief tenets (white working class hopeless; men & patriarchy bad; colored, especially black & brown underclass great; colonialism bad, bad; sexual minorities like gays very, very important & oppressed; weed & other drugs something central to life; national identity bad, bad; nuclear family horror of oppression; non-European cultures & subcultures saintly; feminism & everything menstruating sacred future; critical thinking bad, hurrah for obscurantism; Rousseau-type quack ecology great; science & technology bad; sexual licence desirable; gibsmedat redistribution will solve everything; biological reality non-existent; West colonial/genocidal/racist…).
There is virtually nothing Marxist, let alone cultural in this nonsense. Just like what Voltaire said about Holy Roman Empire: neither Holy, nor Roman, nor Empire.
Most of Frankfurt school luminaries’ chief works (Adorno’s, Horkheimer’s, Benjamin’s, ..) had a very limited, although sometimes beneficial reception- for instance, humanist “Marxism” of Fromm- who was only tangentially associated with the Frankfurt school- is an example of well-intentioned, albeit frequently naive approach to human relations.
Whether this all is a form of Marxism can easily be dismissed as a theological pseudo-question: is Mormonism a variant of Christianity? But, if we focus on central Marx’s ideas, they can be dismissed as para-Marxist hocus-pocus. There is no Marxism without:
a) the proletariat as the collective Prometheus who will liberate the entire humanity through some kind of apocalyptic Revolution
b) the establishment of a classless society where there will be no private ownership of the means of production
c) the utopian ideal where man’s essence, work, will become one with his existence & insufferable dichotomy between essence & existence will be abolished, along with all other forms of human alienation.
“Marxism” without the chosen class that will emancipate all mankind, without work as human central essence, without final great apocalyptic showdown, without abolition of private ownership of companies- this is not Marxism at all.
For those more interested:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41nbLKCdkXL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Rolf Wiggershaus: The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Ji3VKpJLL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Stuart Jeffries: Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/416jj%2B6YSjL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders – The Golden Age – The Breakdown (pt. 3)
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41Op25xwkML.jpg
Paul Gottfried: The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41pkauazM2L.jpg
Roger Scruton: Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
Spandrell isn’t American.
I am however and did attend American schools.
We pledged allegiance to the flag but the rest did not take place. I vaguely recall environmentalist and “civil rights” indoctrination.
Leninism, with concepts of vanguard party and socialist revolution in backward feudal country like Russia, is complete perversion of Marx’s thought, but is still seen as part of Marxism.
So are Stalinism, with building of socialism in one country, and Maoism with peasantry as revolutionary class.
Why cannot be Gramscianism seen as part of Marxist tradition? (I agree with previous posters, “cultural Marxism” is stupid label, just call it after its founder like other variants of Marxist thought)
I agree, except that, while not very logical, Cultural Marxism is widespread enough and is understood by all (except Dmitry) to make such renaming difficult.
IQ realism promotes meritocracy, and perhaps a generous dose of paternalism towards the genetically less privileged
Point taken, but we could just as easily say that it promotes caste/quotas.
people on the right side of the IQ Bell curve (but not currently part of the elite for whatever reason) tell people on the left side of the IQ Bell curve they’ll make their lives better if they help them get rid of the current elite.
and then they don’t.
suckas!!
Cultural Marxism is the body of ideas developed by people like Gramsci which tried to explain why Marx’s predictions didn’t happen.
Given that Gramsci is taught in hundreds of western universities it’s pretty pointless denying it exists (even if they didn’t call it cultural Marxism themselves).
Marx’s predictions didn’t work cos the Russian revolution was nothing to do with capitalism vs socialism it was the Russian version of the urban elite vs rural elite transition that takes place whenever the towns get strong enough – just much later than NW Europe and North Italy.
they’re sociopaths, sociopaths generally win
it’s the people they lie to who are inferior (in IQ, not necessarily in other ways)
Tesla sun roof = indulgence
great analogy
thing about Normans is for all their faults even the vegan pacifist ones make great officers
the West is ruled by the banking mafia who want total control of ideas and the western media is their pet so there’s no ideas allowed in meatspace.
all the ideas are on the internet.
it was entirely Marxist in the minds of its originators – the point of it was to explain why Marx’s predictions didn’t come true.
and it was entirely cultural because the explanation they came up with was culture created a kind of road block which had to be removed first.
Also, if Marxism-Leninism (which is contradicting Marx’s original teachings) or Maoism (which contradicts it even more) are considered to be part of Marxism (perhaps somewhat divergent ideologically), then why can’t we consider the Frankfort School and its derivative ideologies part of Marxism as well?
And it’d be pretty confusing if we considered Mao absolutely separate from Marxism (and then we’d have to pretend that Maoist China had nothing to do with the USSR), based on some hairsplitting differences of the kind of their opinions of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Marxism is a fantasy ideology which usually resulted in mass murder (though sometimes, as in the case of the pre-1933 German Social Democrats, it had far more benign results), and so it’s easier to lump several these ideologies together, even if, technically, some of them drifted away from Marx’s original ideas.
Clueless. Among philosophers, historians of ideas & political scientists, Leninism is considered to be a slightly “off” variant of Marxism. On the other hand, Maoism, as well as Frankfurt School, are para-Marxist or Marxoid movements or schools of thought that have moved too far from the original concepts so they cannot be considered to remain Marxist lege artis.
They’re cartoons of Marxism, which may sometimes be included in serious discussions on Marxism as examples of what Marxism is not.
We are now facing a serious alien problem. Go ahead and solve it with your relativism if you can.
Reiner I was having a sense your knowledge is more from reading YouTube comments, than from actual acquaintance (although hopefully not friendship) with the texts.
So I asked a couple of questions to see if you would disprove my assumption.
1. Where in Communist Manifesto is “utopia outlined”? It’s rhetorical so you don’t have to answer.
Although I don’t see how anyone could say this comment, and it’s not like Communist Manifesto is regularly confused with the text with his famously only discussion of this (of course briefly in Theses on Feurbach in German Ideology).
I’m sure these commentary books may be interesting, but it’s generally always better to read the authors’ texts as originals, than texts about them.
If an author is intelligent, and the person writing about them less intelligent – it can have an effect of being like trying to judge a musical composer’s symphony from a mobile phone ringing tone.
I have not read anything of “Frankfurt School”, so cannot comment directly yet.
However, it would be much more interesting to see the real texts (originals).
Now I could find for example is a few pages essay of Adorno (“Late Style in Beethoven”).
https://fswg.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/adorno-late-style-in-beethoven.pdf
I’m a work now so cannot read it, but from just skimming a few paragraphs, it looks far more like 20th century German “existentialist” style of writing?
There is evidently no Marxist analysis of Beethoven, but rather some “20th century German existentialist” style of paragraphs, relating to Beethoven’s relationship with death.
Relationship of this Adorno text to Marx, is perhaps only as a collateral effect of both being influenced (at least in writing style) by Hegel.
Lol we need a separate topic for this though – it’s ironic we live on a website with the craziest and weirdest people in the internet, and yet we are not even discussing about UFOs. .
Sorry, but I strongly disagree with you on this point. Adorno & the rest are virtually unreadable & it’s just not worth the trouble & sweat.
Philosophy, in this respect, is close to exact sciences, especially mathematics & physics. It is better to read authoritative interpretations of, say, boring authors like Aristotle, Leibniz or Hegel, than to waste time on those wastrels. Of course, highly readable philosophers like Plato, Epictetus, Engels, Nietszche,… are exception.
Similarly, better to read modern expositions on classical & quantum mechanics, than to slog through Euler, Laplace, Gauss, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schroedinger….
I have read the Communist Manifesto several years ago. So I remembered well that there would be this section right after the ten immediate points (which are already pretty radical and cannot be implemented without a great deal of violence):
It sounds pretty utopian to me. A society without class distinctions (no organized society has existed without those, as is well known, not even so-called communist societies), no political power, and in place of it “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” If that’s not utopian, what is?
What is the point you are trying to make? Marx and Engels considered marriage a bourgeois institution, and so thought it’d get abolished in the perfect society. The Frankfort School realized that such institutions and ideas had staying power, and actually reinforced the underlying economic reality (so the very primitive Marxist model of the underlying economic reality creating its ideological and institutional superstructure was replaced by a more sophisticated, albeit messier, model, where such institutions and ideas were capable of reinforcing the underlying economic reality).
I’m still not sure why I’d need to read thousands of pages of useless books in order to be found worthy by Dmitry to discuss this issue with him. If you have a point, you can write it. If you cannot write it in a way to be understandable to anyone not having read the thousand-page tomes you are referring to, perhaps you don’t even fully understand their content either.
We are none of these, so we are free to use words as we like it. The only constraint is that it needs to be understood. Even Dmitry probably only pretends not to understand what we mean by the term “cultural Marxism,” so this should not be a problem here. Anyway, Dmitry has some strange ideas about asking his interlocutors questions whether they read certain philosophical works, to be worthy of talking to him, so I don’t think he’s all that relevant.
Well, obviously, the vast majority of Marxists-Leninists themselves considered Maoism to be a variety of Marxism (more precisely, a variety of Marxism-Leninism), at least until the 1960s, when there was a break between the USSR and the PRC and Maoism was no longer considered Marxist, so your point is obviously wrong. Maoism can, quite obviously, be considered to remain Marxist lege artis.
We have always been facing an alien problem.
What do you think the fairies and goblins of myth were? Just aliens.
The Greek Gods were almost certainly aliens as well.
I agree the alien problem is getting more acute, though, and must be dealt with.
I don’t support relativism – my comment meant that technology has an impact on culture and other areas of life and isn’t neutral.
AK – Sorry if I misrenembered you Karlin, but I do remember you saying something like game is a neutral tool one could used or not, like all technology.
The rich will never give up the control of the means of production. Even during the East European Socialist experiment, I have the feeling (although, admittedly, not the numbers) that the progeny of old bourgeoisie had monopolized “management” and “consulting” positions in “state-owned” enterprises, continuing their parents tradition of skimming the output of the hard workers. I see no difference between Mitt Romney and the people running the Gosplan, except that the former was “managing” some Olympic Games within an empire that could get its satellites to sign the Plaza Accord. The Soviet colonies were shittier. Martin Sullivan did not see a decrease in his compensation when AIG was taken over by the state. Khodorkhovsky’s life was top notch, even when he was paid by the Komsomol.
Same lack of skin in the game, same impunity, same life without worries, same skimming of hard work.
Therefore, ideas like “abolition of property in land” (1st tenet of the Communist Manifesto), “centralization of credit in the hands of the state” (#5), or “centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State” (#6), will never happen, especially when you go beyond make-belief “state owned” labels.
And that is the definition of utopia.
Surely, if you try to sell its as a progression, the way Ceausescu tried, then there are degrees of Marxism in action: a bit of nationalization, somewhat more nationalization, lots of nationalization. But AFAIK Lenin said that won’t work. It’s as if he foresaw the Komosomolist Khodorkhovskys and the Gosplan bourgeoisie.
Even that wasn’t enough for spandrells of today, who use Lenin’s name as an insult for people spandrells don’t agree with, regardless of the subject.
There is no outline of utopia in Communist Manifesto, as you show with your quote – just half a sentence of Hegelian word jumble (“free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”). This is one of the reasons I imagined your education is from YouTube comments, rather than from real text of authors you write in your comments, when you were talking about the outline of utopia in the text. If you start to reference to the texts, I am pleased.
This is the most famous idea, of most famous text in history of politics and philosophy – Plato’s Republic, which is why I surprised and interested to see you connect Plato’s proposal to Marxism.
Plato’s position seems to be a naive contradiction from a Marxist view, as it reverse order of causation.
However, if you could actually post the parts of text of the allegedly Marxist authors who you are saying are pursuing Marxism through advocating these famous Platonic ideas, it might be interesting to see. We know that Plato’s Republic has some influence on communism we actually saw in the 20th century, and this influence was written about in various popular texts of the 20th century about “totalitarianism”.
It’s not difficult to look at a text for 20 minutes, and you can see quite quickly e.g. his (Adorno) view of Beethoven is not very related to Marxism (except as a collateral effect of both copying some structures from Hegel).
When you look at direct evidence like this, then you have some direct data for your claims (and this will be first personal observation, rather than inferior Chinese whispers, based on interpretations of other people who might be stupider than even oneself).
Whether it would be a waste of time to actually study this author, can also be quickly judged by whether you enjoyed the e.g. 20 minutes with it. (When I see the Hegelian style of writing, I can be sure I will probably not read him).
This is not so different to listening to music for a composer for a few minutes. You can hear the different influences usually, if you had exposure to the other musicians.
In exact science, the best parts of earlier theories compressed and subsumed in later formulations, and in a way so that they (those parts which are preserved and subsumed) don’t contradict those later formulations. So a modern textbook of physics will contain the correct parts of the earlier authors, within the later theories.
Writing of people like philosophers – although they are conversing with earlier philosophers -, is obviously not subsuming the best parts of the earlier ones: you cannot read some essay by Hume, and somehow absorb from him theories of Plato.
You will troll us now about aliens?
As with other types of madness, if you are going to go into a “crazy zone”, then we will enjoy reading from views which are at least crazy in an original way (not just what we have not seen on “Ancient Aliens”):
Since this thread turned to debate what is Marxism and who is true Marxist, if there ever was any, this powerful take might be on topic.
https://twitter.com/times_tribal/status/1132645482650464256
This anarcho-confederate rainbow red rose guy, to his honor, stands his ground, doubles down, continues to dance on Marx’s grave and never apologizes (easier if you are anonymous twitter account, but few people do it anyway).
And all of this without any HBDIQ science.
https://twitter.com/times_tribal/status/1132663464508313600
https://twitter.com/times_tribal/status/1132649907876032514
https://twitter.com/times_tribal/status/1132657003644407809
What you think? Is it just one guy, or beginning of something bigger?
Is the zeitgeist shifting again?
Is Marx going to the dogs and George Fitzhugh is the prophet for the new millenium?
Is LBGTQ environmentalist utopia of Domination of Draka the future?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination
Then we need planetary defense. It requires civilized races to get along and tackle two problems at once, namely Negros & those who act like them such as Australoids, Polynesians, mestizos etc AND aliens. In order to resist aliens we have to cut off all of the groid aid and take over all the crucial resources in groidland ASAP for the sake of humanity. No more groid or other forms of mismanagement can be tolerated.
Why aren’t we doing these?
As far as I know, Car Jung was the first to suggest that the UFO phenomenon was essentially a modern version of fairies, but I suspect others did earlier.
That seems very correct to me. UFOs are probably some sort of emanation from worlds we can’t really understand.
BTW, the New York Times last week ran an article about American Navy pilots seeing a massive uptick in UFOs – and the US Navy is taking it so seriously, that it is drafting new rules for reporting such incidents.
It is obvious that across the world, the materialist-rationalist paradigm is breaking down – even all the conspiracy theories on this site and since Trump came to office attest to that, and the sheer irrational insanity if the Left, Godfree Roberts religious utopian belief in a perfect China that has mastered all of humanity’s problems (his actual words), Roosh turning to religion, and even Anatoly evincing signs of ever greater sympathy for religion, etc, etc.
It is equally obvious that this is a good thing, an inevitable thing, and long overdue – but it is also dangerous, and needs to be guided into healthy channels.
EastKekistani is not so crazy as you might think at first sight – he us obviously tapping into an emerging trend in the world’s collective unconscious.
The US Navy has just drafted new rules for dealing with UFO encounters, based on a large increase in the number of sightings by Navy pilots.
I am not so sure the aliens are hostile though – at least some of them are friendly.
Remember, there were good fairies and bad fairies, good spirits and bad spirits.
Of course, you’re right. Everything is simply about moon fairies, as evident in the old Japanese Tale of Princess Kaguya.
When in doubt, look for the moon fairies. They are always hiding behind things.
I believe the French call this cherchez les fees du lune.
No. What really matters is what Kolakowski (and a few others) writes, and for him Chinese “Marxism” is a cartoon, while Frankfurt School is a para-Marxist endeavor, not anything that could be accommodated within central Marx’s theses on man, history & society.
Jung is superstitious as an old woman, and obviously this damaged his reputation. However, I believe Jung says UFOs are a religious hallucination, and not literally existing, so he was never going into a crazy zone in the topic, and he was in his personality quite far from a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
Conspiracy theory of Vallee is to say UFOs literally exist, but what is illusory and part of historical stage is only their appearance as aliens.
Their appearance as aliens is part of the control system’s methodology, which requires historical disguise to match our Zeitgeist, in order to change it.
Vallee’s “theory”, that there is a metaphysical, or at least non-human control-systems conspiracy theory, pretending from the middle of the 20th century to be an alien conspiracy theory, as the latter is currently only disguise the control system operators can use which is consistent with the scientific belief systems of our historical epoch.
When a non-human control system wishes to intercede in shaping human history, it has to disguise itself in different ways in different historical eras. When fairies were still consistent with man’s beliefs, then the control system could appear in their disguise. But in a 20th century, only aliens are consistent to our other scientific commitments.
It is surely the most multi-layers, creative and craziest theory which has been developed in this area (and perhaps one of the most sophisticated in the history of conspiracy theories), and he deserves some kind of reward for this.
But you can read the text for 20 minutes yourself – find something of e.g. Adorno.
Just like you can usually hear which composers, have influenced another composer in a few minutes – it’s not very less difficult for an intelligent reader to see which writers have influenced which writers.
Actually, you can read a single paragraph, and see what kind of influence writer actually has.
Adorno is clearly not writing Marxism, although he uses Hegelian structures, and seems to like some of Marx’s more subtle ideas (false consciousness, commodity fetishism, etc).
I just looked for another essay available from him, and can find this essay – skim into it, and he seems primarily influenced by Schopenhauer:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Adorno_EssayAsForm.pdf
And here is pdf of a whole book which can be rapidly skimmed: these texts (just skimming for a minute) make you think more of Marx – or of Schopenhauer?
http://monkeybear.info/MinimaMoralia_Full.pdf
His dislike of bourgeois society is not even Marxist – but seems much more like Flaubert’s hatred of Monsieur Homais.
Skimming his actual texts, Adorno’s socialism seems from oversensitivity of a bourgeois childhood (this text sounds more like Baudelaire, than Marx):
Half of his philosophy book seems to be memory of his childhood in the golden age of early 1900s
Reading Adorno for 20 minutes – and you can see, Marx is clearly not the most important influence on his writing.
Well, I definitely agree with the basic premise here, that aliens are a modern avatar for an ancient phenomenon.
It’s sort of like Jung’s collective unconscious becomes songbird’s collective genetic environment – I forget what he called it – and Jung’s collective unconscious was obviously an updated version of God.
Towards the end of his life, Jung confessed he did believe in God, but could not clearly work that into his theories because he wanted to remain scientific.
As for this Vallee fellow, he seems to have developed the basic premise of aliens in a more complicated way, incorporating more modern elements such as conspiracy theories.
My own view is that alien sightings are quite real explanations from dimensions of reality we don’t fully understand.
I’ve read his “Minima Moralia” (good, not great). But, he is definitely a deranged para-Marxist in an unreadable & arid magnum opus “Negative Dialectics”.
There are simply books not worth reading. Most of 20th C academic philosophy books belong to that unenviable category, Adorno being just one among many. On the other hand, there are philosophical essays/books which by far surpass any sterile academic faux discourse & remain relatively neglected. For instance:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41O62rs0PtL.jpg
https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1190670707l/1943796.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81wyb2sybeL.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/510-pDGzJiL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51zzIKuLs5L._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51JD-fJ3dJL._SX317_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
& most things by Freeman Dyson, with a grain of sailt
…
Emanations I mean…
He has probably created the most paranoid, sophisticated and “creepy” conspiracy theory, of anyone in 20th century.
However, it is also just a populist modernization of old ideas of Gnosticism.
I think the best terminology is “para-Marxian”, instead of “para-Marxist”. It’s people who take a few of Marx’s ideas, but use it outside his framework, so “Marxist” is not appropriate in any way. .
I’m not an expert, but I think the standard of academic philosophy books is generally not terrible, from the little I have read
An example I am reading, is Quine “Word and Object”.
It is a bit simplistic and behaviourism, and quite “obsolete” in a charming way. But the intellectual level (and even sense of humour) of the author is higher than in most books (and of course, this kind of humanities book by Quine is still feeling like it is produced by a different species – a couple of standard deviations cleverer -, than people who write in newspapers or internet, and refreshing to read for that alone). .
he’s not a commie – he’s pro-slavery larping as a commie.
same guy defends pedophilia.
the descendants of the people who ran the slave trade around the Med. for 3000 years want to reverse some of the changes anglos made when they were strong particularly slavery, age of consent, incest etc.
Cultural marxism as we know it today is a tool for promoting capitalism so I find it difficult to see it as marxist. As a commenter on Unz Review recently pointed out it would be more accurate to call cultural marxism cultural capitalism.
Applying the word marxist to anything one disapproves of is no different from applying the word fascist to anything one disapproves of. It’s not only misleading but all too often deliberately misleading.
Well, I’m from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s community. That is, I identify as a rationalist (TM).
I don’t think the materialist-rationalist paradigm is actually breaking down in the sense that it is factually inaccurate. It is certainly alien to human psychology though because evolution does not even optimize for self-interest maximization, let alone maximization of knowledge or maximizing belief in evolution itself.
Well, I’m not really sure why you think capitalism is problematic.
That much I agree with. But in this case we have a school of thought
Anyway, if I had to name it, I probably wouldn’t call it cultural Marxism, but that’s what people call it now, and it’s pretty annoying to be told by random commenters to use different words instead of the accepted and widely used ones. I think the expression “Bioleninism” is worse in that the Frankfort School probably had nothing to do with Lenin at all, they didn’t like him or his school of thought at all. But I’m open to suggestions. I’d find “cultural capitalism” bad for the above mentioned reasons.
Look, here’s this section:
You think it’s not the outline of a utopian program. I think it is. You think only illiterate idiots think that it is the outline of a utopian program. I think you are deliberately obtuse here, but normally I’d think you have to be an idiot not to agree with me.
So there’s no point to continue this discussion. Have a nice day!
Beethoven’s First Symphony would firmly put him in the company of Haydn and Mozart. His Third, not so much. His Ninth… you get the point. And with modern composers, it could be even more extreme. I made that mistake with Krzysztof Penderecki, whose early compositions are very difficult modernist works, while later on he switched to an almost Brucknerian idiom.
It’s also possible that some less orthodox or outright heterodox Marxists (as Dmitry would call them, Marxians) would have a more heterogeneous approach to different topics, e.g. write about music in a way which doesn’t readily lend itself to interpret it as under Marxist influence. While his very long and unreadable core works might be more Marxist.
Anyway, Marxism is not a very logical or good way to interpret reality, so hairsplitting about who is and who isn’t a real Marxist is really like debating how many angels could dance on the pin of a needle.
I wonder if Putler was a fan of and read of Tintin when he was stationed in East Germany?
http://en.tintin.com/images/tintin/albums/00soviets/SOVET74C_en.jpg
Take a look at the modern West. It’s the world capitalism made. Materialistic, shallow, greedy, short-sighted, degenerate, decadent, alienated atomised individuals too selfish even to reproduce themselves.
I’m not really sure why you think capitalism is not problematic.
Those things are certainly good for Big Business. Affirmative action is crippling for smaller businesses but mega-corporations don’t even notice the cost and it helps to put smaller competitors out of business.
The feminist and LGBT agendas have undermined religion, the family and traditional values. That leaves people with only one thing to believe in – consumption. That’s good for Big Business.
By that logic Muslims are basically Jews. They’ve just strayed a bit from orthodox Judaism.
I like clarity. Cultural marxism as a term is unclear and leads to dangerous misunderstandings.
Perhaps it’s better just to refer to it as the Social Justice Agenda, which at least has the virtue of avoiding those misunderstandings. Of all the possible names for it I think cultural Marxism is the least useful.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51JD-fJ3dJL._SX317_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Gurdjieff’s progeny?
I don’t think capitalism is the cause of what I describe as “blackpilled lifestyle” which you describe with these terms above. Influenced by Oswald Spengler and Zhongjing Liu while basically going in the opposite direction of what they promote I believe what you described is an inevitable consequence of the increase of knowledge in the world.
In my opinion all current societies are founded on pro-social myths. Knowledge weakens faith in pro-social myths and makes individuals better (as in more competent) sociopaths. This is why the barbarian/primitive – high civilization – fellah distinction exists. All peoples capable of civilizing tend to evolve from highly united, fearless, poor and ignorant primitives to high civilizations and eventually to knowledgeable, rich, divided and selfish fellahs who can’t fight in a war. Mongols and Kazakhs are still in Stage 1, West Europeans a hundred years ago were in Stage 2 while Italians, Greeks, Chinese and Jews are all perfect examples of Stage 3 peoples. Yes, there was a time when my ancestors were Mongol-like fierce warriors too..that is, more than 2,000 years ago..
So maybe whites should eventually adopt Jewish tactics.
What you described above is clearly a sign of fellahism. Social unity is created by blind beliefs in pro-social myths and is destroyed by knowledge. A society with enough sufficiently knowledgeable people is inherently unstable as pro-sociality becomes dangerously low to stop either foreign invasions or extreme levels of domestic conflicts such as the total civil wars in China.
For example MGTOW, PUA and feminism are just different aspects of the same phenomenon. The increase in knowledge caused by scientific research and the internet makes ordinary men and women a lot better at manipulating and defecting against each other than before. Hence the divorce-rapes by women and PUA by men. Hell at least we don’t see “rape guides” and “how to capture a sex slave” for now. That’s because laws banning rape are still enforced. If crime gets worse we will eventually get these things.
The same blackpilling process in ethnic relations led to both groid anti-white nonsense and Ethnoglobe fantasies in multiple tribes which includes both white people and us. As global ethnic and racial relations are poorly regulated the increase in knowledge aka blackpilling will lead to attempts to commit stealthy and efficient genocides such as usage of ethnobioweapons to wipe out a tribe over night.
No, they are quite different. In my opinion (and knowledge)- Corbin was a scholar of genius, a man of immense learning & insight whose central themes were universal Gnosis & eternal Iran (he wrote tons of incredible books); Gurdjieff, on the other hand, was a strange combination of authentic charismatic & charlatan whose novelty was a clumsy synthesis of Tantric practices he got from the Vajrayana & elements of Sufism. Gurdjieff never developed an articulate psychology, cosmology & soteriology, although there are interesting traces in all his works (and Work). Apart from immediate disciples (Ouspensky, Hartmann, de Ropp, Nicholl, Bennet,..), GIG seems to have influenced Castaneda, Idries Shah & Arica’s Oscar Ichazo.
But, I think that GIG is, unlike Corbin, a spent force. His Work doesn’t work, so to speak, and post-WW 2 period has seen the explosion of genuine schools of thought, practices etc.
No, it’s not you. Those children rallies are extremelly disturbing (like Mao or Stasi children denuncing their parents, I think Nazi and red Khmer had it too – a really common patern of the worst regimes). and I really hope it will fade to nothing this summer. It seems indeed to get out of steam, so
From what little I’ve read about Gurdjeff (I once spent a few days reading up about him and his school of thought), I would tend to agree with you that there was a bit of the huckster and charlatan within the man. Although, he did seem to develop his own school of philosophy combining different schools into his amalgamation, including Christian, Buddhist and Moslem ideas, called the ‘Fourth Way’. As far as I can see, he was influential with many leaders of the modern New Age movement in the west, including such luminaries as Ouspensky, Alan Watts, Frank Lloyd Wright and many others. I must confess, that I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for these types of ‘gurus’ who have traversed a great part of the metaphysical and geographic landscape, as certainly Gurdjieff did. You’ve definitely perked up my interest in finding out more about Corbin.
Marxists came up with the phrase “State Capitalism”, and that’s easily as contradictory as “Cultural Marxism”.
For Marx, the Capitalist system was characterised by PRIVATE (i.e. not state) ownership of the means of production. Hence one of his most famous quotes:
“The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
But then governments like the USSR and the PRC came along and delivered on Marx’s demand. They effectively ended private ownership of the means of production. And thoughtful Marxists realised the result of their program wasn’t anything like the future society envisaged by Marx.
The most reasonable thing would have been to admit that there can be forms of un-capitalism which are also un-socialism. But admitting that would destroy Marx’s theory of history. So they had to re-define the Stalin and Mao systems as mutant forms of capitalism, even though both lacked the most crucial feature which was supposed to make them capitalist.
We now know Marx himself knew his theories didn’t work, BTW. From Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism, p. 290:
“It is clear, however, that Marx was determined to find in capitalism a relentless tendency to degrade the worker, and that he resisted facts which indicated than the worker was getting better off. Bertram Wolfe has pointed out that in the first edition of Capital various statistics are brought down to 1865 or 1866, but those for the movement of wages stop at 1850; in the second edition (1873) the statistics are brought up to date, again with the exception of those on wages, which had failed to bear out the impoverishment theory. This is a rare but important case of disingenuousness in Marx’s treatment of factual data.”
The ‘Leninism’ concept is very apt & relevant, a short explanation from a web page here:
https://spandrell.com/about/
https://spandrell.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/
Re the ‘BS lie about planet-destroying global warming’ –
Boomers like Trump, can recall the 1960s and 1970s giant media campaign backed by ‘scientists’, claiming that the earth was coming into a new ‘global cooling ice age’ shortly, with possible deaths of hundreds of millions
Here is a 1 minute 1979 scare video from that particular wave, with famous Russian-Jewish Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy ‘Mr Spock’, warning about how ‘scientists’ had been recording the sinking temperatures, and a new Ice Age was likely coming shortly to freeze much of the earth
And by the way, ‘global cooling’ is back as a theme for the 2020s … Sunspot cycles, apparently
We know that Cultural Marxism is an effective term by observing how effective it is in triggering fits of sperg rage from commies…
http://i65.tinypic.com/2vcucm0.jpg
Perhaps you might benefit from tracing the origins of biolenism/ Cultural Marxism cladistically, rather than mindless emoting about this “But dem not believe in da public ownership of da means of production — so dem not REAL Marxists!!!” crap.
So do you identify as a “fundamentalist Marxist?’
A Trot?
A “Marxist-Leninist?”
A Cultural Marxist?
Clearly not a Stalinist.
Perhaps a Maoist?
A follower of the One True Faith of Juche?
Or are you merely the purportedly-“objective” arbiter of all Commie doctrine and terminology?
Especially when Dmitry openly admits that he knows nothing about Cultural Marxism/ bioleninism and its roots:
Yet he feels free to emote at great length upon the subject…
Or you could look at the (pre-Stalin) USSR, and their attitude toward this (and similar) “bourgeois institutions.” Sure, Dmitry will bleat “but dat ain’t real fundamentalist Marxism — dat’s Marxism-Leninism! Totally different!” or something like that — but it’s useful to occasionally introduce objective reality/ empiricism into this world of pure pilpul and semitic abstraction at times.
What was the Bolshevik attitude toward marriage, the family, homos, etc. in the real world of the Soviet Union in the early years after the Bolshevik coup?
Let’s see what the commies themselves have to say:
http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no7/no07wmru.html
….
Bronstein continues, explaining how the Bolsheviks could have successfully destroyed the family, and turned the USSR into a sort of end-stage Weimar Germany — but with with collective farms and state-run factories — on;y the Russian goyim weren’t “cultured” enough:
More on early Soviet attempts to destroy marriage/ family, promote homosexuality, etc.:
http://mailstar.net/sex-soviet.html
There’s some truth to what you say, but perhaps you’ve got a little too much faith in “progress” and the advance of knowledge, and are a little too quick to view founding myths as a thing of the past.
Have current-year Western societies entirely given up on founding myths?
Or have they largely replaced their original “pro-social” myth with a different one?
If so, what might be the origins of that current myth?
Is it pro-social for those societies as a whole — or perhaps for a particular group within those societies?
Most people get a lot of their “knowledge” from mass media. Are there any consistent aspects of the narrative promoted by mass entertainment and “news” media that could be characterized as supporting a particular founding myth?
Prime noticer: I think you may be missing a subtlety in what Karlin is saying: It’s not just that this all benefits the left — it’s that it benefits CAPITAL as well. So these status-signaling lefties are also useful idiots for capital at the same time. Capital is nothing if not resourceful.