Executor just got buffed, I am ascendant

I thought monolingual meant someone who only licks one other person, as opposed to polylingual where someone licks multiple other people

Rick Roderick was one of the greats. The Self Under Siege and Master of Suspicion are like the greatest philosophy podcasts of all time, 15-20 years before podcasts were invented. Such a wonderful mind and tragic life.

When I daydream and imagine myself in Russia in 1921, I like to think I’d be one of the Bolshevik sailors who was killed at Kronstadt.

Unfortunately, in 1917, Trotsky called the Kronstadt soldiers the heroes of the revolution.

I hope that when I’m put in a concentration camp and die there that if pisses my friends and family off enough to do something.

What would the two sides be? The political class makes noises but is either completely in the bag or still in the bag just complaining about it sometimes. The capitalists with all the wealth and influence is making lots of money and being promised more. The small capitalists are gullible, reactionary strivers and graspers. And the middle and lower classes, who would have to be united in action and word by coherent political party of the people are totally atomized and incoherent, no such party exists, no nascent program could unite them.

Things are changing quickly, something that was impossible last year could become inevitable next year. But there aren’t sides to the civil war, it is a one-sided class war as it always has been.

Who tf is down voting you on a week old thread.

I dont think youre wrong, and your assessment that ideology is created by material human progress is how I think about it too.

But your phrase “monarchies have gone out of existence because of human progress” sort of side steps my point about private property. I would argue the private property question is inherent to liberalism.

As a leftist however, and this isnt a popular opinion for the online left, I think that liberalism appears to people in different ways. For conservatives, who are a type of classical liberal, the private property question is explicitly paramount, and all considerations of human rights, etc., are maybe given lip service and informal recognition. But materially it is deprioritized and in our era getting wiped out, such as “neo-liberalism.”

For modern day liberals however, and this seems to be the category you are in, human rights and freedoms are paramount. As a socialist, I feel affinity with these people and I believe that socialism is the next advancement of human rights over capitalism. I dont think power can be wrested from capitalists without organization of the masses and struggle. But I do think that our projects are the same in that regard. However since this second category of liberal isnt engaging with the private property questions of who owns the means of production, why they own it, how the mop are used to make stuff, and who gets the stuff, then these liberals actually can’t defend human rights and freedoms, because there is no material basis for the defense, its ideological.

I dont think we can change the effect that corporations have over politics, economics, and the lives of basically everyone on the planet without revolution. And by revolution I dont mean a bloody, head-choppy war, I mean fundamental change in social relations, and this process of emancipation will be a fundamental change called socialism.

The corporations are a front for the actual class that is in power. Analysis that leaves out this class component misses a lot. Corporations can not give this to us permanently. We will have to win it, and we will have to defend it with the same zeal that corporations defend the right to own the material basis for human advancement as well as the right to own people’s time in order to sell the produce of that time for more than they paid us.

However I believe that what is in your heart, the desire for freedom and liberation (“liberal” contains the root “liber” as in liberate) is very close to what is in mine. But I also think that when it comes to our theory of change, we are completely different, and I think the liberal theory of change, when it even exists, actually allows corporations free reign to continue their agenda against the masses. We need to build a new fundamental basis for global transformation, and imo part of that is convincing well-meaning and liberation minded liberals like you to come over to a liberatory socialist program and ditch analysis that has no concrete basis in class relations.

I have a lot of philosophical differences with liberalism, but you can see how long-winded I can be. But my primary focus is the advancement human spirit. And i think in that regard we largely agree.

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Sorry i posted an edit with a link. I just can’t stand people using fallacies to invalidate other people’s arguments. A logical fallacy is an example of where to begin to look for logical errors or assumptions in an argument, it doesn’t mean that if you can fit parts of an opponent’s argument into one of the categories in this list that it is insta-invalid. Doing this shows a compulsion to win rather than understand, and we are talking about a situation where maybe 12000 people have already died. Nobody wins, but further losses might yet be avoided.

It was a long comment telling you to get serious. If youre not serious then why should anybody who does know, even bother with you, if youre making no effort to appear as somebody who actually cares about anything that actually matters

Lol. I haven’t asked my comrade about it, I’ll let you know what he says.

I’m not attacking your character, I’m telling you my personal observation. This is not a debate, or a logic 101 exercise. If you want to engage with the subject, you have to engage directly, through the perspectives of actual people, without immediately referring to a list of logical fallacies made up by a society based on slavery. Demonstrate you are capable of stringing two arguments together in a rational manner, instead of one dimensionally not picking the better arguments of internet strangers. Logic isnt made real by its reference to some abstract ancient category of language, it is made real in the lives of actual people. Watching you cut perspectives out of your reasoning says a lot about how serious you are.

As for acting smart I didn’t pull out some ancient logical fallacies. Maybe lecture me on logos some more haha. Or maybe somebody actually knows more than you in this one little area! Is that so wrong and hard to believe? My horse ain’t high buddy, my whole point is for you to get down in the muck and difficulty of real conditions, so that maybe you learn something real instead of repeating vague abstractions that, by your own admission, you dont even remotely understand. Your tone doesn’t come off as someone who is looking for information.

But I’ll get back to you with something, to hold up my end of the deal. I honestly dont try to make assumptions about a situation, fog of war is real and dangerous.

Edit: Here is a start. Honestly with internet shut down, we can’t know what is happening. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601137152

You make an extremely abstract and general statement. Then you give very specific cases as to why your abstraction is correct, with absolutely nothing connecting the abstraction to the specific. You take a huge system of oppression like the prison industrial complex, all of the horror and injustice that it creates, and then justify its existence because of two specific cases. Interesting how both those cases were white men when BIPOC people are much more likely to be victimized by police and carcerial punishment.

Those cases to point to a very thin segment of the population, so it too is an abstraction. No discussion about if society somehow produces killers, like for instance school shooters in the USA.

Even though there are problems with your argument, I admit there are problems with the demand “abolish police and prisons”. Because often there isnt discussion as to how exactly we can practically do it. Like what if we could abolish 50% of police and prisons, then more, then more? The word “abolish” does have many of the problems that maximal and radical demands often have. But then, you need to consider why people are totally uncompromising on their commitment to abolition.

The abolitionists before and during the civil war were a very slim minority of people, and they could not conceive of how slavery would actually end. Lincoln and the North did not want to end slavery, they wanted to preserve the union. It wasnt until the slaves freed themselves and went over to the northern armies to heroically fight for their freedom, that the process of abolishing slavery was inevitable and irreversible.

But then prison labor was used to subsidize parts of the economy where paying free workers was still unprofitable. As such, the tradition continues to this day.

So if you would like to argue that institutionalized state-slavery is justified because of the presence of a few serial killers, then it shows how little will you have to even think about it, and that you would rather just not think about the suffering of all the people victimized by the police and prison.

And that is your right, to stay ignorant on this issue. I’m sure there are many domains in which you are exceedingly knowledgeable. But many people are and have been directly and severely harmed by the prison industrial complex and the police, and when you mak such substanceless, abstract arguments, then it appears to those people you are on the side of the system that victimizes and exploits.

You might ask yourself which group you have more in common with. You dont have to want to free serial killers, you just have to want to free people who deserve to be free. Instead of ignorance, ask yourself, could this system that affects millions of people, more than anyone else in the world, often by orders of magnitude, could this system be made more just? Could the number of people incarcerated be decreased? And then either get to work making that happen, or get out of the damn way

What, you don’t have any Iranian comrades? I just had a meeting with an Iranian organizer last night. We didn’t discuss the events in Iran, we are working on a local campaign, but ill def hit him up and get his opinions.

What are you doing?

And just because something is “a fact,” doesn’t mean that deeper considerations can’t to be made in order to fully understand a situation, so that we can figure out the best course of action. If you’re not really involved in real life political organizing, and you’re used to dealing with TV news opinions, or if you are trying to mislead people, then gross abstraction and polemics might be all you need.

The point is some people do quite a bit more than that. Maybe you’re making political calculations within your cadre somewhere but it sure doesn’t seem like it. Your comment is a very surface-level statement and the idea that it negates, “talk to Iranian people” demonstrates your approach to politics

I was having a goddamn heart attack reading this lol got me

Malatesta is GOATed

No but I tell other people that all the time

No, you are the person who is being unreasonable by your own admission. You re asserting it is a way to make scientific predictions, it is not a way to do that. That is exactly my point. You are the one saying the toaster is for making predictions, when it clearly isnt for people who actually use toasters. Do you get it? You are asserting astrology is a way to make scientific predictions. It isnt that, it doesnt serve that function. So it is ridiculous to assert it does something that it doesnt.

If people want to believe something and you dont care for it or understand it, then why make it your business? You are just closing yourself off from a whole bunch of people for no reason. You’re not above it, I guarantee you have a ton of beliefs that can be disproven scientifically. If people want to take that and use it to tell themselves a narrative, we all do that in different ways. We believe stuff all the time that isn’t based on science!

Most of the time i see virulent anti astrology its not coming from very good people. A lot of white dudes with very objective views. Low key authoritarians, using a kind og hegemony of academia to puff themselves up, maybe tell some ladies they are stupid. So that’s what I see when I read your comments

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Is there anything in your life that has a use, that is not useful for making predictions?

I really think your “broader picture” is context specific. In the US, right wingers go to church and mostly hate astrology. Ive never met a vaguely right wing practitioner of mysticism. Most people I meet who are into astrology are women, lgbtq+, and minorities, people who are more likely to have their opinions silenced by white men questioning their logic and reason. One of the most popular astrologers right now is Chani Nicholas, who is left wing, and discusses social justice and organizing in her content. Our mystics often call themselves “witches” and can be persecuted for their beliefs by our most prominent persecutors, the christian right. We have periodic “satanic panics” that lead to the arrest of queer people and minorities, who are imprisoned for decades in some cases, while the actual satanists never get caught.

There is objectively a fascism problem everywhere. To criticize astrology as if academic science doesnt have such a problem, is just a different flavor of gullibility. But I admit, the first time I ever met a like a hardcore white supremacist neo-nazi, although i didn’t know it at the time, we got high and he told me all about gnostic mysticism. It took me years to untangle the horrible logic that underpinned the spirituality he was peddling. But that Nazi was so nice and cool. Not once did he take one of my ideas and try to invalidate them. When in mentioned I liked jazz he put on (all white but very good) Mahavishnu Orchestra. We discussed philosophy and metaphysics, and he tried to plant little seeds that, if believed, could absolutely lead to belief in far right extremist ideas, similar to some of the descriptions in the article you shared, like the creation of a new authority, etc.,

But I think if people with liberal or left sensibilities took the effort to really try to connect with people, rather than hegemonically eradicate competing ontologies, then maybe the fash wouldnt be able to gain purchase in these communities. The principal error of idealism is that ideas create society, and to some extent it is true, however ideas are created by society. If educated people are going to shun and humiliate someone who sees a mystic or looks up star charts, then the politics, my friend, will be determined by the social forces that are active in those communities.

I am a materialist, but I also dont believe that spirituality and materialism are totally at odds. The history of why they are at odds is very interesting, and socioeconomic, rather than purely philosophical. Isaac Newton was a mystic, Hegel studied mysticism to formulate his dialectics. I know scientists who are deeply religious and I know people who grew up studying Wicca and then became rational, methodical scientists.

So on the one hand there may be some cultural difference, but also judging the way the German government has treated pro-palestine protesters, There seems to be more political willingness to force people to adhere to certain beliefs. I’m not sure how much the history of Nazi esotericism is in effect in your country, I bet it cuts a lot of different ways.

The fash are winning the culture war, by engaging with culture. Meanwhile liberals, who dont really know why they believe what they believe, continue to ridicule others for their beliefs, because once upon a time rich landlords and the emergent capitalist class wanted to take land away from the church, and they did it by supporting kinds of scientific inquiry that would discredit the church. Granted the history of the church vs scientific inquiry up to that point was pretty terrifying, but these things have a way coming back around. You know, first as tragedy, again as farce.

The emergent right isnt the fault of mysticism and superstition, it is a protracted campaign carried out by our ruling classes and kept alive by extractive social relations. The more divided we are against ourselves, the more ground they gain. Instead of thinking of beliefs as personal failings, think of them as social movements made up of people.

I’m not a mystic but I will fight for witches, especially against smug objectivists. Not saying that you come off as smug, but there is no shortage of smugness among the scientific rational atheist contingent

Science isn’t an ontology, it’s a method.

God, what no humanities does to a mf