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  • Yeah, I see it as a great foreclosure on the imagination and on the horizon of possibility. Once you look for it in liberalism, you'll start noticing it everywhere.

    I live in a country where it's common for very progressive progressives and radicals to lament that the masses are extremely politically apathetic. Like, the polar opposite of the French who start flipping cars and starting fires in the street because parliament is trying to reduce pensions kinda thing.

    I don't disagree with that take that people are apathetic but I think there's something deeper going on than just some widespread individualistic moral failing. I think that liberalism has been very effective here in creating a cultural belief that it's impossible to make things better and that there's no point fighting for things.

    There's a reason why people identify so strongly with that Churchill quote "Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" and it's because they genuinely believe that liberalism is shit but it's the best that things are gonna get. It's like some sort of mass Stockholm syndrome or a political learned helplessness experiment inflicted on the masses.

    You encounter it when organising. People are deeply pessimistic and genuinely hopeless, if you dig under the surface a little bit. Contemporary liberalism requires the erosion of hope so that masses remain passive and they don't organise and fight, so they don't vote en masse outside of the two party system, so they don't start a revolution etc.

    If you want to go deep on this there's a weird sort of dualism in liberals because this hopelessness makes people react by resorting to investing hope in the status quo as a secondary response. This is why people put so much hope in electing Harris but they try to convince people that a third party vote is a waste:

    "We all have to band together and vote for Kamala to stop things from getting worse!!"

    "Cool but what if we all band together and vote for the PSL or the green party and make things better?"

    "Um, no. That will never work."

    I'm sorry, what??

    I think that's why the DNC were so desperate to clip Bernie's wings (outside of the economic reasons to do so); he represented a massive political threat to the DNC because a movement that has mass support where people start making demands means that they can no longer force their agenda on the compliant masses who believe that the only thing they can do is accept the hidden bipartisan consensus on government policy.

    In order to radicalise, I think people in the west generally have to go through a process of losing hope, even that secondary response to hopelessness by investing hope in the status quo, so when they get spat out of liberalism they mostly end up bereft of hope entirely. I'd say for most people that's necessary to negate the indoctrination from liberal hegemony. The problem is when people fail to genuinely create hope for the struggle and for a better world. It's not all anarchists who have this sort of lack of hope, this "don't seize power because you'll only make things worse if you try" kinda attitude because it's pretty endemic in lots of the left more broadly; there are leftcoms and doomer tendencies like with Mark Fisher or Chris Hedges and the people who buy into the anti-USSR paradigm and so on.

    You can ask this type of person what all the failures and inadequacies of something like the Soviet Union were and if you genuinely listen they'll have a laundry list of complaints, which is fine - that's their prerogative. But when you ask them what movement they do find inspiring, which one was better than the USSR they tend to come up with nothing or they'll give you a half-hearted answer like "Burkina Faso led by Thomas Sankara I guess" and if you get them to talk about why they find Burkina Faso's revolution inspiring they tend to give very shallow answers or they'll regress into talking about what could have been. I think this is representative of a deep kind of hopelessness that is really commonplace.

    I'm gonna do some detestable armchair psychologist cultural critic routine here (like I haven't already been doing that lol), so excuse me while I get self-indulgent, but I genuinely think for a lot of people that psychological trauma of losing all hope in politics when they radicalise goes unresolved and so when they are confronted with the invitation to engage in political optimism, they tend react very negatively and viscerally to it because they aren't ready to hope again as the experience of suffering disappointment and losing all hope has been too much for them to deal with and they haven't really completed the cycle of grief that they needed to go through, so it draws out all sorts of hostility and rejection and apathy. I'm not saying that everyone in the radical left must get hyped for the Soviet Union or otherwise they are psychologically broken but to see very brokenhearted people whose politics lacks any genuine hope, I think there's a psychological response going on beneath the surface that drives this.

    So I think that other responses in this thread are right about liberal anti-communist indoctrination but in my opinion there's also deeper psychological reasons for why people adopt this indoctrination and really cling to it, otherwise it would be a simple process of providing counterfactuals that debunk this indoctrination and people would change their minds almost instantly because their position was purely based on false information. But I think we are all aware that it's a much more involved process than simply correcting some falsehoods and this is because there's psychological factors that motivate this belief at play, which is what I've been outlining here.

  • I'm exhausted but I'll try and take a swing at this, speaking as a long-term ex-anarchist. Note that I can only speak for myself but these are the trends I observed and a lot of this is exactly what I experienced.

    So in transitioning from progressive liberal to the radical left, it's basically a rite of passage to identify all the ills and the egregious excesses of the government and corporations. I think this is not only valid but it's also extremely important.

    The problem that emerges is that anarchists and LibSocs can fall into a trap of universalising this very valid skepticism to expand to all forms of hierarchy that have existed and will ever exist.

    This is going to sound uncharitable but it's really not intended to be this way but I see a deep form of liberal hegemony as being not a positive form of hegemonic ideology but a negative form of it. Let me explain: the USSR established its own cultural hegemony. It was very much a positive cultural hegemony: this is who we are, this is how we act, this is the future we are striving to achieve etc. etc. You absolutely see this in Soviet art and film and propaganda.

    The negative form of cultural hegemony that I understand liberalism to mostly rely upon, especially in a post-Gilded Age era or a neoliberal era or wherever you want to draw that line, is epitomised by Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement about arriving at the end of history; this wasn't a positive proclamation but rather it was a negation of the future, of the need to strive for a better world, of the demand to be better. Instead it was essentially an attack on and an erasure of aspirations.

    This is also seen on a small scale with people demonstrating antipathy towards unionism; "they're all corrupt", "they used to be important in the past but there's no use for unions anymore", "there's no point joining a union because I'll just get fired or management will close this branch down if we all unionise". That sort of thing. It's also seen in the shadow cast by this plethora of pseudo-choice we are offered and, forgive me for invoking Horkheimer & Adorno but, the pseudo-individuality inherent to this developed form of capitalism we exist under. There's no point boycotting because how do you avoid consooming products from one of the two or three oligopolistic companies that have cornered a market? Why bother attempting to divest from BlackRock when they already own everything? Why bother protesting against war when we know the government is going to ignore us and prosecute it anyway? etc.

    So this negative form of ideology or liberal cultural hegemony tends to inculcate the belief in LibSocs and anarchists that the best we can really achieve is abolition of the current state of affairs and not the construction of a positive project to bring about the revolution.

    This is where I take issue with Audre Lorde, or at least the way that people quote her and what this is used in service of. She is absolutely right that you cannot dismantle patriarchy with patriarchy or that white supremacy will not be dismantled by a different form of racial supremacy. I think the distortion of Lorde comes with people thinking that this quote is in service of abstaining from using some of the most valuable tools available to us; you cannot hug the violence out of the bourgeois state no matter how hard you try (just ask the hippies). But at the same time I think we need to be cautious about how far we take this message; people can arrive at pacifism simply because the bourgeois state uses war and violence, if you took this to the the point of absurdity you could imagine people rejecting construction itself or maybe even hammers because infrastructure has been used to enact genocide and land theft and vast exploitation through colonialism and imperialism in so, so many countries. Heck, hammers have been used for DV and assault so you wouldn't want to taint yourself by benefitting directly from that instrument of violence, would you?

    But it's very easy to slip into a reductive or reflexive rejection of things like the state simply because most states have historically been dogshit. If you look exclusively at the west from the advent of feudalism to today, it's basically all of them.

    This is where anarchists tend to develop the basis of a quite bitter ideological distinction from communists, although obviously this varies in degree depending on what sort of anarchist we're talking about here. (I'll try to remember to circle back on this negative urge and how it provides a degree of... I guess ideological comfort or safety for anarchists once I've finished the other parts of this comment.)

    The other factors are a disagreement on the pace of the post-revolution construction period (which likewise comes from the difference between materialists orienting themselves to addressing material conditions and working to resolve contradictions and anarchists who mostly prefer abolition as the means to address these issues) and the other one is that anarchists tend to be exposed to convenient historical narratives that are overly reductive if not downright anaemic.

    So for the pace of the post-revolution construction, most anarchists expect a very swift transitional phase - the abolition of capitalism, often the abolition of markets themselves, prison abolition, and all sorts of other things to establish a more-or-less horizontal or low/zero hierarchy society. Again this depends on the different types of anarchist in question but to put it simply they tend to believe that post-revolution you knock all or most of it down, then establish a government or council of sorts (which again varies) and you call it good.

    So from that perspective, communists get into power and instead of following what anarchists believe to be the correct path, instead communists go completely the wrong way and even start building up more state than existed under the Tsardom, for example. With this in mind I think it's easy enough to understand why they perceive this to be a betrayal of principles and of the revolution.

    The last thing I want to touch on is the historical narratives. Anarchists have a tendency to share a distorted perspective on historical moments; the communists betrayed the anarchists in the Spanish Civil, the Bolsheviks stabbed the Black Army of Makhnovia in the back, occasionally you'll hear discussion of the KPAM likewise being crushed by the Soviets (although not very often tbh).

    All three are actually very complicated topics and there's a lot to cover with them but in broad brushstrokes the narrative is that the communists were the aggressor and that they opted not to leave the anarchists alone to do their thing because they wanted to crush the true revolution. I disagree with this narrative these days, although I didn't always disagree with it.

    There's a really good article by Jones Manoel on this sort of preference for martyrdom-over-statecraft mentality here. While he only discusses western Marxists, it definitely applies to a lot of anarchists and LibSocs. I think that Manoel simply doesn't regard the latter two as worth addressing though.

    So we've got the martyrdom and purity fetish for the immaculate revolution covered there. Last of all to circle back around to the ideological comfort of the negative, I've seen plenty of anarchists do this and I have definitely been guilty of doing this myself - by not supporting or critically supporting any but the briefest attempts at revolution (and then only maybe 3 or so of those), you can create a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the real world attempts. You don't have to engage or defend anything, you can just reflexively dismiss things as being statist or hierarchical or authoritarian and thus you don't have to grapple with the reality of their circumstances or to consider what would be a better way of resolving the contradictions or moving forwards with the project. "You committed the sin of statism? Then I can wash my hands of you and that's that."

    This is alluring because it's a simple rubric and you don't need to wrestle with the reality of things. To put this into an analogy that's probably more relatable, imagine a Marxist who refuses to engage in the ol' agitate/educate/organise because "liberals are social fascists and counterrevolutionary - I'm not gonna waste my time befriending my enemies!"

    On the face of it, there's nothing false in that statement. But the application of this line of thinking absolves this Marxist from needing to do any of the hard work because they have created a rhetorical and ideological detachment from the most important task that a revolutionary faces and so by abdicating from this duty they never have to put in any effort and they never have to deal with fuckups and failures and addressing their own inadequacies.

    That's a pretty close match to this urge that exists in a lot of anarchists and it's also why they can invest a lot into their grudge against communists, because ultimately the other option is to engage in the hard work of listening and learning and working with/working on the "authoritarians".

    Obviously all of this is my vain attempt at brevity so I didn't cover the broad terrain of different ideology tendencies within anarchism and I'm talking specifically about the anarchists who really bear a grudge against communists. Plenty of anarchists do not begrduge communists and are very willing to work with them and to engage with them (or to roll up their sleeves and engage in the difficult work of educating, agitating, organising as well as grappling with the historical realities fafed by revolutions) so I haven't given consideration to this cohort of anarchists because it's beyond the scope of the question, although if I gave the impression that what I've said is true for all anarchists then that's on me.

  • If you want to be combative about it, you can always learn up on the history of food and point out all the things that he eats that are "fake".

    That cola? You know that's fake, right? HFCS isn't real sugar.

    That ketchup you just used? That's fake, you know? Unless it's walnut ketchup (at the very least) or fermented fish kê-chiap, that's fake ketchup.

    Bread? Lol. I hope you are aware that bread made with commercial yeast is an imitation of real bread that has been leavened with naturally occurring wild yeast from the atmosphere; it's completely fake.

    Oh you want to eat sushi? Yeah, that stuff is fake. Putting vinegar into fresh rice to mimic the sourness from lacto-fermented fish that has been stored in rice is bogus af.

    Just try it out for a day and see how tiresome that schtick suddenly becomes when he's on the receiving end of it.

  • Only 2 left

  • Coincidentally, so did Gandhi:

    Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves in the sea from cliffs.... It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.

    Fucking idealist nonsense. He would have praised the Jew who committed suicide while in the same breath denouncing the Jew who participated in the Warsaw Uprising.

    Nonviolence protects the status quo.

  • She's definitely interviewed Robbie Barwick who is the defacto head of a Larouchite cutout in Australia so it might have been him but I'd be interested to know if it happened to somebody else.

    I'm definitely in agreement with you on this.

  • With Haiphong, he seems to be pandering to an audience but he doesn't seem to be genuinely Marxist imo. There isn't one thing that I can point to as a very clear sign that shows that he's sketchy but I remember him making a post, I think it was a YouTube community post, asking what people's Top 5 Revolutionaries are and he gave his which included Gaddafi and someone else which was a really odd decision.

    I can't recall who made it to his list but it was enough for me to wash my hands of him. I'm not saying that everyone has to have their Top 5 as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Sankara and Castro or something but a Top 5 is a tough pick when you have people like Ho Chi Minh and Giap, Luxemburg, Che, George Jackson, Huey P Newton, Allende, Maurice Bishop etc. but if Gaddafi is getting a look in on your list then that's really weird imo. And it wasn't like it was some "I'm special and an individual so I'm going to choose people off the beaten path like Simone Weil and Toussaint Louverture" kinda thing either. He has said things that have made me stop and ask if he was really a Marxist but nothing ever egregious, instead it was just a series of little "Hm, that's a bit odd" moments.

    This isn't some purity test either. For figures like David Harvey and Richard Wolff I have a lot of disagreements with them but there's nothing that tells me that they haven't read or that indicates anything sus in the sense that they're on a grift. But Danny Haiphong gives a different vibe imo.

    I noticed you left out Ben Norton who also makes content with many of the people you listed regularly to this day, why isn't he being included in this constellation despite being so actively engaged with it?

    Honestly this isn't meant to be a comprehensive list and I had to rack my brain to even remember Daniel Dumbrill's name. I haven't been looking at Norton since the days of his split with the Grayzone after Blumenthal was courting the Jimmy Dore audience and went hard into anti-vaxx territory so I didn't feel right in making a call Norton today as I genuinely don't have a read on him now, same for people like Katie Halper.

    There's this pattern that plays out, as it did with Blumenthal, with Eddie Liger Smith, with Jimmy Dore and Russell Brand and plenty of other figures. Even Joe Rogan used to have a pseudo-progressive angle before he went hard right. They start saying some things that are critical of the system and they get attention, then they start criticising empire or challenging common western narratives and they develop a following so then they start talking about socialism or revolution in very broad terms. Then the baby leftists and the unseasoned leftists start getting excited because it feels like it's really happening - radical views are finally going to break into mainstream discourse and this is the moment we've been waiting for, Russell Brand is going to be the spark that kicks off the revolution!! And then they drop a patreon and maybe release a book and they go on late night TV talking a big game, if they can manage to score an interview. It's really happening!! Then these figures, who lack a theoretical basis and who adent materialist and haven't done the reading end up getting lost in the sauce and they take a rightwing turn. It plays out over and over again.

    Lots of people are too young for this but Roseanne Barr literally had her own fairly-left, very progressive political arc where she was very critical of the system. Jimmy Dore did it too. Believe it or not Bill Maher was also once part of a sort of vanguard of progressivism that leaned radical in the sense that he used to touch on topics about the prison system and American imperialism. (Even Doug Lain made an attempt at this but failed pretty dismally lol.)

    These days that left demographic has most shifted a lot further left and so you'd scoff at hearing Bill Maher being mentioned as ever representing a left-ish zeitgeist, even if you heard what he used to say back before he went full chud. But that's because of the leftwing overton window having shifted left a staggering amount since those days.

    I've just seen this same pattern play out too many times. You could accuse me of being jaded and maybe you'd be right to but I'm deeply skeptical of "thought leader" type figures who aren't forward about their politics or at least who don't make very obvious and intentional tells to their audience about their political beliefs, if they are aiming to be part of a left pipeline but they don't want to spoök the baby leftists.

    I still get my info from a broad range of sources and I listen to people who I have major differences in politics with but there are people whose politics I genuinely respect and who I look to for my own political development and then there are people who I am very skeptical about because, basically, I'm waiting for them to take a Max Blumenthal or Eddie Liger Smith turn. That doesn't mean they are necessarily going to take one or that I believe they're a PatSoc just waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves but when they demonstrate a lack of theoretical underpinning to what they say then I know they are going to end up being led astray sooner or later.

    I could lay out a playbook for how to grift the left because there's a pattern that exists but I really don't want to hand thd people who want to follow their own SpaghettiKozak grift a guidebook on how to go about it since that would be a kicking a big own-goal.

    Look, ultimately I could be wrong about some of these figures or they could develop in a genuinely radical direction. The problem is that there's no telling with 100% certainty until a figure takes a reactionary turn, although with Eddie Liger Smith (and even Haz to a lesser extent) there have been a lot of tells for a long time and the people whose politics I respect have been sounding the alarm about them for years and years now (yet in the more broad left spaces I still see people shocked and in disbelief about Eddie to this very day even though he's been telegraphing it for, what, two solid years by this point). I'm not saying you aren't allowed to like those figures I've mentioned above or that you cannot appreciate their takes, I'm just airing my serious concerns in a space amongst comrades because I do not trust them. You aren't obligated to agree with me and if there's a figure you appreciate on that list I'm not going to rub it in your face if it turns out they are a grifter or they slide to the right, I'm just saying be careful about which figures you put your trust in.

    If we really want to get controversial about it, I'm concerned that Gabriel Rockhill and his atelier is courting the PatSoc audience. Rockhill has absolutely done the reading so he should know better. He's affiliated with the PSL. And yet he has collaborated with the Midwestern Marx group multiple times, in recent history where Eddie in particular has been pretty overt about what he's doing. I could understand being an academic a couple of years back and just skimming Eddie's stuff and assuming that it would be okay to work with him but in more recent times? Either Rockhill isn't being diligent about vetting people at all or he's also intentionally distorting the left. Which is bitterly disappointing to me either way tbh since I sincerely respect his analysis and his research. It would really suck if his politics turned out to be trash. The reason why I bring this up is because it stings to talk about it. I'm not saying these things to try and inflict suffering on others out of malice or because I'm trying to become a thought leader in my own right, I'm just speaking from experience of a person who has been duped by figures like this before and if I can encourage others to be more aware and more cautious about this then it might spare them from making the same mistakes that I have in the past.

    In the famous words of Helen Hywater: be careful who your friends are.

  • There's a lesson here and it's why I'm very skeptical, if not downright disdainful, of figures that do not openly identify as radical (and then I want to hear terms like communist and anarchist, not "leftist" or "socialist" because otherwise this usually only makes me more skeptical).

    Berletic is part of a constellation of content creators like Richard Medhurst, George Galloway, The Duran, Max Blumenthal, Glenn Greenwald, Carl Zha, Danny Haiphong, Xiangyu, Daniel Dumbrill, Scott Ritter etc. who give the impression that they are anti-imperialist and part of the radical left but often they are deeply reactionary.

    Richard Medhurst promotes Schiller Institute shit, The Duran are extremely reactionary, Glenn Greenwald has brainworms, Danny Haiphong poses as being a part of the radical left but there's enough about him that makes me extremely skeptical, Xiangyu calls himself an ML I think but he's very socially conservative to the point of being indistinguishable from a reactionary, Daniel Dumbrill has expressed sincere support for Helga Zepp-LaRouche (yes, that LaRouche) and he regularly interviews Australian Larouchite figure Robbie Barwick so I'm just waiting on Dumbrill to go mask-off and reveal himself as having been a Schiller Institute stooge this whole time.

    There's often quite a bit of overlap between these figures and the PatSoc/Midwestern Marx/American Communist Party circles too.

    I still get some news from Berletic but I don't trust his politics and I would recommend people approach these left-ish figures with a healthy dose of scepticism at the very least, especially with the recent news that came to light that one of the biggest figures in the NAFO circus having been a far-right grifter the whole time ("it’s scary to think how easily I was able to manipulate left-wing people"), and who rubbed shoulders with the likes of Dylan Burns (who had his pfp made by this guy), Va*sh, Animarchy, and Bellingcat's Robert Evans (at least back in their shared Cracked era).

  • I don't think this can be measured in a vacuum.

    Let's explore some different cases as a thought experiment:

    A country achieves communism. I don't think this is possible tbh but let's go with it.

    We can expect to see the "proles" consuming more than they would otherwise as they'd have all the products of their labour.

    Let's presume that people are people and that they aren't going to suddenly develop much more class consciousness and a spirit of internationalism. Obviously I think that a communist society would go a long way towards this but let's ignore that for argument's sake.

    Unequal exchange would mean that the communist society would be taking advantage of this arrangement, perhaps more than they would be able to otherwise.

    But if this is the situation, we also have no bourgeoisie who do rampant exploitation of the third world. We have no more corporations. We have no more bourgeois democracy inflicting imperialism upon the world.

    Perhaps consumption drops a whole lot purely by virtue of the fact that people would rather work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. Perhaps in freeing up the products of labour and what would otherwise be capital and surplus value under the previous system, people are able to manufacture and acquire products designed for repairing with replaceable parts rather than for planned obsolescence. Perhaps people would be able to be more conscious consumers, opting for the things that have a lower environmental and social impact rather than working two jobs as part of a single-parent nuclear(ish) family and only being able to choose the simplest and most readily available options rather than carefully considering what they would genuinely prefer. Perhaps lots of people devote their time to things like gardening and producing food themselves because they only need to work 15 hours a week in their factory job to cover the rest of their needs.

    It's hard to estimate what it would look like exactly, especially in an unbiased way, but even in a conservative estimate I'd say that it would be a net-benefit for the third world as the degree of exploitation and the worst excesses of consumption would be largely curbed, not to mention all of the excesses of capitalism and imperialism being eliminated (from that society anyway).

    So let's look at a genuinely SocDem society next:

    Imperialism is dead in the water. Capitalism is hemmed in. Billionaires are reduced to having no more than, say $10 million in net worth. If corporations still exist they are brought to heel and they are held accountable for their inevitable excesses.

    Honestly in this society I would expect the net benefit to the third world to be worse than the example above but it would still be much better than what we have today.

    Next is to consider things as they are today:

    Increased wages are going to lead to increased consumption. But things like earlier retirement and better healthcare, education, environmental and workplace safety etc. are going to reduce the impacts on the third world - healthcare, especially stuff that is way downstream, has a big footprint. Workplace and public health and safety makes things better for everyone. Carving out chunks of profit to go towards better conditions generally means less money for wars and less money going towards imperialism, not always but more so than not. Workers having unions and solidarity means that there's more chance of things like general strikes, which can achieve good outcomes for the third world.

    I think under this scenario we could expect to see a net benefit that is significantly reduced compared to a SocDem hypothetical scenario. It might even come out as a wash, if you really want to make a conservative estimate.

    Idk this argument seems overly simplistic and very undialectical honestly. It's a bit like the reactionaries who complain about veganism or measures that benefit the environment and they charge vegans with being responsible for the deaths of animals due to industrialised agriculture or they concern-troll over the carbon footprint of a proposed expansion to rail transport.

    I mean, yeah, there's definitely an environmental footprint that gets incurred when you manufacture a car seatbelt and that's fine. But if 100,000 seatbelts prevent one single person from becoming a permanent wheelchair user then the comparative environmental footprint is vastly in favour of making those 100,000 seatbelts because the environmental footprint incurred by the necessary medical and accessibility interventions from one preventable case of someone ending up as a permanent wheelchair user are far greater.

    This is not an argument in favour of eugenics or to lay the blame for the social and environmental impacts of being disabled at the feet of the individual though. I'm just trying to highlight that we should not fall victim to an overly reductionist assessment of things in a very static way or otherwise we end up with well-intentioned measures that can have ramifications that are far worse than what we prevent.

    Likewise we should not oppose fighting for better working conditions in the first world out of concern that any improvements here are simply going to make things worse in the third world because it's not nearly as simple an arrangement as one where improvements here necessarily make things worse over there in equal measure.

  • I'm in some other English-speaking shithole halfway around the world from you so I don't have any brands that I'd be able to suggest unfortunately.

  • It's going to depend on your use case.

    Are you just looking to do walking? If so it might be worth considering a walking pad - they're more portable and stowable, you can set it up in front of a TV or a desk with your tablet on it with a stand. Good if you just want to get some steps in or to use at a standing desk and that sort of thing.

    If you're looking for the option to jog or run or you want to have incline settings then a treadmill is the way to go. The most important considerations here are tread length and horsepower (generally speaking the higher the horsepower, the longer your treadmill will last.)

    Also try to stick to regular recommended maintenance, especially if you're using either regularly.

  • I mean, as discipline psychoanalysis is essentially dead in the water and has been since before Anna Freud even died her well-deserved death, may she rot in piss.

    Whereas psychology as a discipline has greatly expanded and is extremely dynamic and it has analytical and descriptive power that outclasses psychoanalysis in all respects.

    I don't think that anyone but the most avid psychoanalist would argue that psychology is on par with or somehow inferior to psychoanalysis. My point was more about how in terms of outcomes for patients, you'd assume that psychology would have completely surpassed psychoanalysis given that it isn't based on crackpot nonsense but rather it draws on, what, like a solid century of genuinely scientific endeavour and application. But that's not the case - for all the advancements that psychology has made, and they are massive, in some ways it still seems to be stuck achieving outcomes on a rough par with the Austrian School of Sex Wizards and Oneiromancy.

    Basically: Wrong ideas -> Wrong conclusions -> Respectable outcomes

    vs

    Good ideas -> Good conclusions -> Respectable outcomes

    Which is just to say that something can be extremely flawed and yet still be useful. I wouldn't encourage anyone to approach Freud without very healthy skepticism but that also applies for plenty of other things too and even if its foundations are false, its analysis is false, and its conclusions are false doesn't mean that it is devoid of anything useful. All it means is that you're going to have to separate out the wheat from the chaff and the ratio of wheat:chaff is going to be much less than desirable.

  • Herbert Marcuse was generally pretty ant-Soviet and started the trend of scholars deriding the proletariat in America, which I always found to be pretty bad.

    Very much so but this goes right to the sorta second wave of then-leaders of Frankfurt School, specifically Horkheimer and Adorno, in the era post Walter Benjamin and Erich Fromm et al. Horkheimer worked very hard to suppress mentions of things like class conflict in what other Frankfurt School theorists would publish in order to efface the materialist underpinning of Marx-inspired analysis and it's no coincidence that the Frankfurt School retreated into really pretty sordid cultural critique imo and there's an argument that Horkheimer could have actually intervened to rescue Walter Benjamin from the fascists but decided to leave him to his fate, although the primary source is an academic work in German so I haven't been able to verify this directly myself.

    Tbh that second wave of the Frankfurt School in exile was extremely disdainful of the proletariat and of Marx while they actively courted the bourgeoisie by adopting a pseudo-Marxist revisionist angle.

    What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!).

    —Lenin, The State and Revolution

    And yes, it seems to be in relation to Goerg Lukacs' humanism, not Raya Dunyayevskaya's.

    Ah, not so bad then.

  • I don't know how to think of Deleuze and Guatarri.

    Relatable lol.

    D&G has gotta be some of the toughest of the Frankfurt School theorists and their magnum opus, Anti-Oedipus (which Capitalism and Schizophrenia is one part of) is a direct response to Lacan so if you want to truly get yourself right across D&G then you really have to start from Lacan.

    I've avoided them because they seem to have coming from the psycho-analysis tradtion and isn't that academic tradition basically bunk?

    Yeah, it is and yeah, it is. But I think it's important to be cautious about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

    Freud gets derided a lot, especially from psychology (it turns out the call was coming from inside the house the whole time 😱😱) but a whole lot of that is due to them wanting to position psychology as a much harder science than arguably it is, or ever could be, and so they use Freud as a whipping boy; "Look at how scientific we are, we even denounce the forefather of psychology for being insufficiently scientific!!"

    Psychology as a discipline is always frantically trying to adorn itself with anything that confers it with the aura of being scientific when tbh it's just desperate to be something more like biology than it manages to be but also less like sociology which it loathes and which it cannot acknowledge how proximal it is to it.

    If you contrast how contemporary psychology relates to Freud vs how it relates to BF Skinner, it says a lot. Skinner made some major contributions to psychology at the time but a lot of his contributions are have been superceded, if not completely disproven by none other than the man, the myth, the self-mummyfying Noam Chomsky just about as soon as Skinner dropped his theory on linguistic development. Sure, Skinner was much more scientific than Freud was but that was as much a product of his time as anything else, and what really gets overlooked is that Freud too made major contributions to psychology in his own time. (There's also a massive discussion about the sociology of scientific knowledge which I'm just going to completely sidestep or otherwise I'm going to write forever and nobody wants that. Also it's bizarre because I wrote a comment somewhere completely different on Hexbear on a subject entirely unrelated and I was channeling the spirit of Harry Collins, a big figure in SSK, just before. How odd.)

    Anyway, what I'm driving at is that while Freud was wrong about plenty that doesn't mean that he was wrong about everything or that his conclusions were not valuable. For example, he revolutionised psychology by asserting that the pathology a patient was experiencing could be resolved internally by the patient. Prior to Freud, mental illness was basically considered to be a product of things like "poor moral character" and shit like that, with the solution being that you just beat or torture the patient until they straighten up and fly right, or you just consign them to the asylum forever.

    (I'm going to try and rein myself in a bit but there's another tangent I'm about to spiral off on about the earliest reform attempts of the asylum and the role of Richard Paternoster, who was a colourful character by all reports, and how his incarceration in a mental asylum is a perfect example of the stuff Foucault discussed.)

    But perhaps surprisingly, you'd think that psychology would have surpassed psychoanalysis and yet comparative analysis between CBT, the gold standard for psychosocial treatment, and psychoanalysis shows roughly equivalent outcomes. So basically you have a pseudoscientific approach to, like, dream analysis and psychosexual development and whatever but there's indications that it's about as effective as the most highly regarded and widely celebrated treatment method in psychology today.

    All of this is to say that very faulty reasoning can still arrive at something useful.

    And I think that's what the Frankfurt School does - it isn't just an effort to extend or defend psychoanalysis, it's something that gets drawn upon conceptually as an influence. Think like the way that Hegel is to Marx - there are things in Hegel that no materialist would agree with but Marx drew a lot of inspiration from Hegel despite that fact. And although Marx was a Young Hegelian, Marx didn't just go on to try and extend Hegel's philosophy in his writings but instead he took what was useful, applied what he thought was most relevant, and discarded the rest.

    Once upon a time, when I was younger, I picked up Leviathan by Hobbes. I'm sure you know the only bit that people ever quote from him - that life, in the state of nature, is solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short. I was naïve about reading Hobbes at the time and I disregarded what he had to say because the foundation that he developed his political philosophy from was so false that I found it to be objectionable. The thing is though, he wasn't writing as a historian or an anthropologist, he was writing to elaborate on a (then) modern political philosophy. Another more common reason why Hobbes gets dismissed out of hand is because what he argues for, what his Leviathan represents, is essentially totalitarian in nature.

    But although I strongly disagree with his conclusions and his muthologising or speculation about humans prior to the advent of "civilisation", there are still important ideas in Leviathan - there are valuable observations and arguments and, equally so, there are observations and arguments he makes that are important to understand in order to refute the foundations of liberalism.

    Learn from my mistake. You don't have to agree with an author to read them, and you don't have to agree with the basis of their argument nor even its conclusion to find useful things within it. That was what I was gently encouraging you to take away from my criticisms of McLuhan - his conclusions are crackpot-tier and I'd argue a product of his political and religious convictions but he still made important observations and arguments despite starting from a bad place (imo) and ending up with bizarre fanciful conclusions (imo).

  • This has been rattling around in my brain since I first commented so apologies for the double-tap.

    I think that there's an angle that you could take in particular with regards to AI and the production of culture/media. This might seem a bit like the ramblings of a sleep-deprived crackpot and it might be more suitable for the inspiration for a thesis so strap yourself in:

    I think there's a lot that could be plumbed from synthesizing Marx's bit in Grundrisse that sometimes gets referred to as "The Fragment on Machines" with the overall thesis of Deleuze & Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia to conceptualise a framework for understanding the direction that AI is taking by applying it to the production of culture.

    This doesn't necessarily agree with my current position on AI because as yet I'm agnostic about whether an LLM could actually genuinely achieve true AI or near-AI status but whatever. I don't know enough about it and I'm hedging my bets by adopting a cowardly stance on the matter. But to argue this point would require a fairly optimistic assessment of the trajectory that LLMs are on and how far you think they'll develop.

    Anyway, if we take Marx's FoM and narrow the scope to being purely within the confines of the machines containing the sum total of cultural knowledge, where humans are relegated to being mere nodes in the network, or links in the chain, but where the network itself is dominated by the machines themselves and thus they become both the primary producer of culture and inherently also the primary consumer of the culture produced as the machines feed back on themselves (assuming that there are not limitations imposed as a measure to prevent AI poisoning or ultimately a terminal AI feedback loop of poisoned AI self-cannibalising).

    With a culture industry that becomes divorced from humanity by increasing degrees, this imo bears an uncanny resemblance to what D&G put forward as the inherently liberatory capacity of schizophrenia under capitalism, except confined within the bounds of just cultural production; whether you want to transpose the site that D&G predicted this horizon to emerge upon or whether you want to limit it to narrower confines would be a debate you'd need to have with yourself after reading their stuff and maybe hashing it out with a PhD supervisor or D&G enthusiast.

    The inversion in this example is that rather than the individual becoming increasingly fused with the ephemeral identification of a rotating cast of what is essentially branding or marketing desires in the ultimate latter stages of capitalism as it accelerates this process to its absolute limit, instead we have a potentially infinite degree of acceleration that the machines would be able to achieve within the domain of cultural production as machines do not have the inherent limitations that humans have. (Sidebar to note that the inherent limitations of human capacity is one of my major reservations about the conclusion that D&G never quite concretely make but only ever explain as having the possibility of existing.)

    Without trying to dazzle you with words or trying to teach you all of D&G in a single comment, to put it into a metaphorical sense:

    If AI cultural production gains enough momentum as it cycles and accelerates endlessly, as humans are caught in this every increasing churn, at some point one or more people will be ejected from that cycle at such a terrific speed that they will achieve escape velocity from capitalism and/or this AI culture production cycle, at which point they will be able to begin anew at creating works of cultural production that are meaningful to themselves and others while being entirely divorced from the prior mode of cultural production (and/or capitalism), which is essentially what D&G argue as being the liberatory capacity that will emerge.

    I think I'm gonna have to go talk to my own D&G guy about this...

    Anyway hope you liked the little guided tour of my brain just now, and if you were wondering what soundtrack best describes what it's like up there this is it. I hope that what I have written in this comment makes some sense or at least that it will later on.

  • Whatever makes sense to you is all that matters, dude. It's your bookshelf and it's there for your own reading, not to impress others with how accurately it is organised per the Dewey Decimal System.

    Anyway, if someone gives you the side-eye over it you can always invoke the death of the author in your defense.

    (You know, I got into it with some lib on social media a while back, I can't remember over what exactly, but I provided info or a definition that was on a concrete subject and, I kid you not, the other person erm, ackshually-ed me and played that very card. I was like bruh, are you kidding me?? You can't just say that the speed of light is 100km an hour and when you get called out for being completely wrong to turn around and claim that authorial intent is unimportant and that your personal interpretation takes precedence because of the death of the author - that's not how it works outside of fiction and it's not some get-out-of-jail free card where you can just make up anything you want.

    I swear to Marx, so many of these people online just seem to memorise a random assortment of the names of concepts and fallacies, then they haphazardly deploy them to dazzle others in order to "win" a discussion.)

  • Personally I'd be putting it with the philosophy books, hands down. But you're right to ask where it best fits between those two categories.

  • McLuhan was actually really conservative while envisioning a weird sorta low-key accelerationist post-literacy utopian tech future.

    That's not to say that his contributions should be disregarded for that fact but I wouldn't go to him for my politics lol (and I'd be skeptical about his conclusions too.)

    Poststructuralism and adjacent stuff like the Frankfurt School has a fair bit about the topics mentioned and they can be useful as tools in the toolkit but ultimately I'm pretty skeptical about it tbh. Often this stuff is really impenetrable. Debord is pretty grounded, especially given that he's a French philosopher, but the same cannot be said of others who wrote directly about media like Baudrillard ("directly" in a relative sense lol) or ones whose analysis can be applied to media studies such as Deleuze and Guattari or Derrida and to try and wrap your head around them and then to apply this to your major in a coherent way is probably too much to ask.

    That's not me shitting on you by any means but rather it's an indictment on those authors who wrote in such an obtuse way that it requires deep study and developing a good basis of pre-knowledge to understand the discussions they were a part of.

    Walter Benjamin gets overlooked and his stuff applies to modern media, especially The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction which with a little bit of interpretation can definitely be bent towards a critique of AI and it's role in communication and especially media.

    There's Marcuse, particularly One-Dimensional Man but... I'm a bit take it or leave it when it comes to that work.

    Of course there's also Horkheimer & Adorno, in particular Dialectic of Enlightenment and the chapter The Culture Industry - Enlightenment As Mass Deception.

    Then you've got your semioticians that are associated with this bunch like Kristeva, whose concept of intertextuality may be of relevance to you, and Barthes for example.

    I guess since Benjamin and Kristeva got mentioned I should also mention Bataille too.

    I think Fuchs is a Marxist-Humanist

    We talking Gyorgy Lukacs Marxist-Humanism here or we talking Raya Dunyayevskaya Marxist-Humanism tho?(Btw you could probably add Lukacs to the list above.)

  • Fascists often refer to Discord disdainfully as Doxcord because they believe that it leaks their details to the feds.

    I'm not one to take the fash at their word but in this case I'd be inclined to agree. There's nothing about Discord that indicates to me that it's anything but a typical leaky platform which collaborates closely with government like WhatsApp or any other typical service like that.