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GarbageShootAlt2

@ GarbageShootAlt2 @lemmy.ml

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3 yr. ago

  • Australia is Dismantling Academic Freedom in Defense of Zionism

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  • And good Marxists should know - he wasn’t a huge fan of ideology or respecting it as causal or desirable.

    He was very practical, hence concrete historical materialism.

    This is what happens when you don't read Marx and just sort of assume what Marx said based on a literal interpretation of his ideological labels.

    Marx was not, like liberals, laboring under the delusion that ideology is something that can simply be escaped. Paraphrasing Zizek (who I hate, but he has some good points), it is when you believe that you are free of ideology that you are most firmly under ideological control, because in such circumstances ideology is necessarily acting on you without your awareness of it. To be aware of your ideology allows you to engage with it and modify it and so on.

    He also recognized, like anyone who spends a few seconds thinking about what would become sociology (it wasn't really around in his time) that ideology does cause things. His distinction is that ideology is superstructural, it was an abstract product of the concrete base that is material conditions, but the two of them exist in a dialectical relationship with each other. Any base will produce a superstructure so long as that base has people who relate to each other, and this superstructure, in essence, is ideology.

    What Marx hated with respect to ideology, and this is the closest you are to being even superficially right, is the idea that was and is popular among liberals (and others, such as utopian socialists) that ideology alone is enough to transform the world, that it acts independently of material circumstances and people will just freely be moved by what is "right" in a completely absolute sense irrespective of their historical or current conditions. Again, these things have a dialectical relationship, and the superstructure cannot fly freely, unbounded by the base, any more than the base can fly freely (by human hands) when the superstructure stays in place. They will only make progress in the context of each other.

    Edit: For the sake of being more complete, I will say more explicitly that the base has primacy, which is why the superstructure comes from it -- there can be no culture in out in space where no one is. It has primacy and its change -- e.g. by scientific inventions -- tends to drag the superstructure along with it, but those inventions are only created thanks to the superstructural elements of preserved and transmitted knowledge and the desire to, for example, develop production.

    It's very difficult to talk about dialectics because I often want to address both sides simultaneously even though it can't really be done.

  • Australia is Dismantling Academic Freedom in Defense of Zionism

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  • Whether the podcast is relevant or not has nothing to do with what I said. Whether it is credible or not has nothing to do with what I said. Whether you are justified in feeling offended over it? Nothing to do with what I said.

    For my own mental health I'm going to just not take the bait which is that parenthetical. Instead, I would like to focus on how "I refuse to listen to even two minutes of this podcast because I don't like its pedigree" is not actually a go-ahead to blindly presume things about it like the conspiracy theory I initially pointed out. You can refuse to listen to it, that's fine, but that puts you in a position of lacking a lot of information for making assertions about it. What that means is that what you can do is ignore it, or say you don't want to engage with it for such and such a reason that you actually have good reason to believe and then leave it there. That's how epistemology works.

  • Analysis: The West wants Putin isolated. A major summit he’s hosting shows he’s far from alone | CNN

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  • It's true, Russia lost its entire citizenry other than Putin to the war, now he's just operating by means of North Korean hand servants. They lost about 200% of their population because, after the Russian conscript dies, the Ghost of Kiev hunted down their ghost and killed that too.

  • Australia is Dismantling Academic Freedom in Defense of Zionism

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  • … you’re posting a podcast titled “CitationS Needed” that’s clearly trying to pass its self off as famous YouTuber Tom Scott’s “Citation Needed” (no plural

    This amounts to a conspiracy theory. It's a completely different kind of format and the hosts introduce themselves up front. If it's a knock-off, it's not a very effortful one. You'd probably have an easier time saying they stole the name, because it's a very good name.

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    Is it a reasonable expectation to check peoples profiles when commenting on their comments to ensure I am pronouning them correctly?

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  • That is simply incorrect English, words have more referents than gender. Traditionally "it" is reserved for non-human things of all types, but definitely does not ever apply to a human, and calling someone an "it" without it first being requested by them is near-universally recognized as a dehumanizing insult.

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    Is it a reasonable expectation to check peoples profiles when commenting on their comments to ensure I am pronouning them correctly?

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  • No, gay marriage is what the US culture war pivoted on for a long time because it doesn't involve disruption to normal cishet social currents and doesn't require anything of the state actually be provided to people, plus it represents a benefit to the gay members of the bourgeoisie just as much as to the common person.

    Furthermore, like in Taiwan, gay marriage in the US was not approved by referendum, it was basically a fluke from the Supreme court independent of other efforts. There are still nearly as many states as before where it is a large popular sentiment that if your kid is gay, they are sick, and state legislatures that are, as we speak, preparing to bring gay marriage back to the SC to get its protection removed.

    Edit: As an aside, despite your chauvinistic, idealist view of cultures being "there yet" or not, using China as the example, lateral cultural differences also exist, and ignorance of these makes it very difficult to actively evaluate what a cultural attitude is. In China's case, there is in most places a passive homophobia (which is still homophobia), but they generally don't have the same homophobic culture war front that we saw in America. They are more like a broad, cultural "don't ask, don't tell", which is in keeping with even Imperial Chinese traditions. There is obviously resistance to the existing movements to do things like legalizing gay marriage, but it's a losing battle for the conservatives, who are mostly passive on this issue, and several of the practical benefits of gay marriage have already been won by other concessions, allowing gay couples rights concerning medical and financial decisions and so on through their guardianship system.

    All this to say "Is gay marriage legal?" should not be treated as a binary for queer people having any recognition.

    P.P.S. China also has multiple dedicated clinics for transgender people in various cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

  • Locked

    Is it a reasonable expectation to check peoples profiles when commenting on their comments to ensure I am pronouning them correctly?

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  • Most folks on the planet are Indian, Chinese, or in an Islamic country of some sort. Now do tell, dear blakeus12. How do all of those cultures treat LGBTQ+ people :|

    China has cities bigger than New York that are pretty trans-positive. These entities aren't monolithic in their values, and in fact I would say they are more diverse in their values for better and for worse, compared to the US. What you are referring to is a cartoon perspective on these ~dozen countries spoon fed to you by western chauvinists.

  • Assault against 'feminist' for short hair recognized as first misogyny-based crime

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  • CRINK: It’s the new ‘Axis of Evil’

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  • I kind of understand your way of reasoning in this affair, you seem to apply the principle of the lesser of two evils and i don’t deny that NATO is by far worse than their enemies, but then wouldn’t liberals also be in the right when they support the “lesser of two evils”?.

    Without touching the rest of it, the idea is not to support the lesser evil, but to support what is historically progressive despite its negative elements. If two things are both a net bad but there is a lesser evil, it is generally a better answer to support neither.

    All of the "CRINK" countries have negative elements -- particularly Russian chauvinism and Iranian theocracy -- but the Axis of Resistance's overall operations tend towards multilateral internationalism rather than domination by a single superpower like NATO favors.

    P.S. as davel said, your English is great

  • Am I wrong for thinking article titles like this are demeaning?

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  • The whole article is almost certainly demeaning, as you would expect of a celebrity gossip rag.

  • China is winning in every imaginable way

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  • Taking the quote completely at face value:

    So it's now censorship of freedom of expression if the state is not actively sponsoring, advertising, and distributing criticism of itself? I should try writing to NPR about how we need a proletarian party controlling the government so I can say that they've "censored" me when they obviously don't invite me on to talk about it.

  • China is winning in every imaginable way

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  • but the police allowed the protests to rage for weeks and did not violently repress them.

    The HK cops absolutely were violent, it was just unfathomably better controlled than American cops, because they didn't kill a single person despite the huge scale of the protests and reasonably long time period. Literally the only living being who I have heard about their actions killing was a cat that got caught in teargas (whose owner brought it to the protests like a moron). Meanwhile the HK protestors, in a deliberate and targeted manner, immolated a civilian for aiding the police (I think he opened a gate for them or something), along with abuses that were less serious, like beating up the odd pro-mainland HK civilian or less-targeted, like when they negligently bricked that old man and he died.

    Edit: I hope that's not just an incomprehensible pile of anecdotes.

  • Where'd everybody go?

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  • Contrary to certain self-victimizing sentiments, I think that the problem is that the platform is more and more overtaken by the topic of the election (and Israel in reference thereto) and it just results in interminable arguing in circles that accomplishes nothing but wasting time. Regardless of the outcome of the election, I think less-annoying activity will increase afterwards.

  • US says B-2 bombers launched ‘precision strikes’ against Houthis in Yemen

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  • I'd hesitate to be too smol bean Japan about it considering they were brutalizing East Asia systematically at the time.

  • Why more Singaporeans prefer their country to partner with China than the US

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  • You are right in general that SCMP is going to cheer on China, but MBFC is a stupid, question-begging, centrist website run by someone with no qualifications and spread around so centrists can use it as a "gotcha" in the style of an informal fallacy. I'm sure that others will have takedowns saved to share with you.

    I think the article is good since it's just dryly reporting on a survey from what I can tell, I just sympathize with being wary.

  • ‘They will vote against Harris’: Arab Americans in Michigan desert Democrats over Gaza

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  • When I said:

    and that there is only this one, totalizing crossroad of literal, immediate survival.

    This was me saying "It frames things as though losing the election means that all is lost and there won't be future elections."

    As I'm pretty sure I explained to you an hour ago in another thread, I think it's an acceptable loss for the Democrats to lose an election to put pressure on them to change or else to establish that they are more loyal to the US project of Israel than they are to trying to win elections or do what voters want or anything like that.

    I don't proactively want Trump to win, but I find it totally acceptable since what sets him apart from other Republicans is not that he is especially fascist in the substance of what he is likely to do. It might actually be possible to browbeat me if we had a Tom "throne of Chinese skulls" Cotton or someone as the nominee, he actually represents something that could be totalizing to me, but Trump is just kind of a deranged grifter and Vance is a more even-keel grifter.

    So to save us both time, no, I don't think we agree on any points. I wasn't commenting toward that end, I merely wanted to say that the comic is unhelpful.

  • ‘They will vote against Harris’: Arab Americans in Michigan desert Democrats over Gaza

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  • This is question-begging a number of critical elements, e.g. that the "rafts" cannot be influenced by "passenger" input, and that there is only this one, totalizing crossroad of literal, immediate survival.

    We can do it too:

    You're in a runaway train accelerating toward a cliff and the break only really stops acceleration, it doesn't decelerate. You can sit in the engine room and hold down the break, and you'll live longer, but you aren't changing the fundamental dynamic of the situation, which ends in your eventual death. Conversely, you can jump off the train, surely injuring yourself, possibly crippling yourself, maybe even killing yourself, but it's the only potential way to change the dynamic of being doomed to fall off the cliff.

    Does this prove anything? No, it's just a model of how some people think of the problem, not an argument. It would be really obnoxious and disingenuous to present it as an argument.

  • In the Netherlands, we’re closing our emptying prisons. What can other countries learn from how we did it? | Renate van der Zee

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  • The term neoliberal encompasses conservatives unless it's from the standpoint of a feudal society

  • Mexico’s President Condemns Aggression on Gaza, Calls for Recognition of Palestine

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  • I find it unfathomable how someone can come to that of all conclusions. Obviously she doesn't have a commitment to it religiously or out of ethnic supremacy, but it's just as obvious that she's interested in being the slay kween on top of the bloodiest empire in history, and so she knows it behooves her to take care of all of its apparati for maintaining power.

    When you're a top-level politician like Kamala is failing-up into being, Israel's appeal to you in not the chump change from AIPAC (not that you don't take that too), it's Israel's actual use, the reason that AIPAC is allowed to exist when virtually no other foreign lobby is, that being that it spreads chaos and destruction among America's enemies in the Middle East.

    The idea that AIPAC effectively authored and single-handedly perpetuates zionism in the US political establishment is both antisemitic and just plain stupid. Where do you think they got the money from?! It didn't just spring from Palestinian blood or from being Jewish or whatever, that money comes from the US initially! Or by proxy from US resources. The money AIPAC has is circling back to the US like in a money-laundering scheme.