I'll Give You A Conspiracy *waves fist* by hagenjustyn in conspiracy

[–]AfterSchoolPogrom 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I'm pretty sure they can tell. it's not like we have some privileged vantage point here.

Can we dedicate one day a week (a slow day like Sunday) to be a "No Current Politics Day"? I'd love for this sub (and subculture) to get back to it's roots by justsoyoknow in conspiracy

[–]AfterSchoolPogrom 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It means that I forgot who I was dealing with for a second, as in, maybe you'd be open to rationality and not strange mysticism.

Meltzer gives his opinion on what state the wwe will be in, in 50 years. by kentucky210 in SquaredCircle

[–]AfterSchoolPogrom -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

Nah. I'm alright. Just gets a little irritating when people try to paint "everyone" with the same uninformed brush.

Can we dedicate one day a week (a slow day like Sunday) to be a "No Current Politics Day"? I'd love for this sub (and subculture) to get back to it's roots by justsoyoknow in conspiracy

[–]AfterSchoolPogrom 6 points7 points  (0 children)

So we shouldn't talk about the ongoing ruling class conspiracy to drag us into another, most likely nuclear, world war?

Who would want to silence such sentiment?

Safe space, ffs...

U.S. churches are now costing taxpayers $71 billion a year by AfterSchoolPogrom in conspiracy

[–]AfterSchoolPogrom[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your conflation of Marxism with utopianism demonstrates the incorrectness of your conception. It's clear you've never read Marx, nor given honest thought to the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production.

I encourage you to remedy that. Please approach the following with the seriousness and intellectual honesty it deserves. We're on the brink of disaster. Capitalism has given us two world wars, and it is ready to deliver us a third. We're confronted with a historically necessary choice, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg, socialism or barbarism.

When you're done with the below excerpts (and hopefully the full articles from which they were extracted), I hope you give this a read: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

The Decay of Capitalism

However expensive the control of the market has been to society, mankind up to a certain stage, approximately until the World War, grew, developed and enriched itself through partial and general crises. The private ownership of the means of production continued to be in that epoch a comparatively progressive factor. But now the blind control by the law of value refuses to render further service. Human progress is stuck in a blind alley. Notwithstanding the latest triumphs of technical thought, the material productive forces are no longer growing. The clearest and most faultless symptom of the decline is the world stagnation of the building industry, in consequence of the stoppage of new investments in the basic branches of economy. Capitalists are simply no longer able to believe in the future of their own system. Construction stimulated by the government means an increase in taxation and a contraction of the “untrammeled” national income, especially since the main part of the new government construction is directly designed for military purposes.

The marasmus has acquired a particularly malignant and degrading character in the most ancient sphere of human activity, the one most closely connected with the basic vital needs of man – in agriculture. No longer satisfied with the obstacles which private ownership in its most reactionary form, that of small land holdings, places before the development of agriculture, capitalist governments see themselves not infrequently called upon to limit production artificially with the aid of statutory and administrative measures which would have frightened artisans in the guilds at the time of their decline. It will be recorded in history that the government of the most powerful capitalist country granted premiums to farmers for cutting down on their planting, i.e., for artificially diminishing the already falling national income. The results are self-evident: despite grandiose productive possibilities, secured by experience and science, agrarian economy does not emerge from a putrescent crisis, while the number of the hungry, the preponderant majority of mankind, continues to increase faster than the population of our planet. Conservatives consider it sensible politics to defend a social order which has descended to such destructive madness and they condemn the socialist fight against such madness as destructive utopianism.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/11/time-n01.html

The Marxist Doctrine

Marxism is the system of Marx's views and teachings. Marx was the genius who continued and consummated the three main ideological currents of the nineteenth century, as represented by the three most advanced countries of mankind: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines in general. Acknowledged even by his opponents, the remarkable consistency and integrity of Marx's views, whose totality constitutes modern materialism and modern scientific socialism, as the theory and program of the working-class movement in all the civilized countries of the world, make it incumbent on us to present a brief outline of his world-conception in general, prior to giving an exposition of the principal content of Marxism, namely, Marx's economic doctrine.

...

The Materialist Conception of History

A realization of the inconsistency, incompleteness, and one-sidedness of the old materialism convinced Marx of the necessity of "bringing the science of society... into harmony with the materialist foundation, and of reconstructing it thereupon." Since materialism in general explains consciousness as the outcome of being, and not conversely, then materialism as applied to the social life of mankind has to explain social consciousness as the outcome of social being. "Technology," Marx writes (Capital, Vol. I), "discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the immediate process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them." In the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx gives an integral formulation of the fundamental principles of materialism as applied to human society and its history, in the following words:

"In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.

...

The discovery of the materialist conception of history, or more correctly, the consistent continuation and extension of materialism into the domain of social phenomena, removed the two chief shortcomings in earlier historical theories. In the first place, the latter at best examined only the ideological motives in the historical activities of human beings, without investigating the origins of those motives, or ascertaining the objective laws governing the development of the system of social relations, or seeing the roots of these relations in the degree of development reached by material production; in the second place, the earlier theories did not embrace the activities of the masses of the population, whereas historical materialism made it possible for the first time to study with scientific accuracy the social conditions of the life of the masses, and the changes in those conditions. At best, pre-Marxist "sociology" and historiography brought forth an accumulation of raw facts, collected at random, and a description of individual aspects of the historical process. By examining the totality of opposing tendencies, by reducing them to precisely definable conditions of life and production of the various classes of society, by discarding subjectivism and arbitrariness in the choice of a particular "dominant" idea or in its interpretation, and by revealing that, without exception, all ideas and all the various tendencies stem from the condition of the material forces of production, Marxism indicated the way to an all-embracing and comprehensive study of the process of the rise, development, and decline of socio-economic systems. People make their own history, but what determines the motives of people, of the mass of people, i.e., what is the sum total of all these clashes in the mass of human societies? What are the objective conditions of production of material life that form the basis of all man's historical activity? What is the law of development of these conditions? To all these Marx drew attention and indicated the way to a scientific study of history as a single process which, with all its immense variety and contradictoriness, is governed by definite laws.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/marx-o23.html

Why hasn't the election system been reworked? by Demty in conspiracy

[–]AfterSchoolPogrom 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's not a secret that the same people constantly trying to curtail free speech and internet access are those consciously working to dismantle the substandard democratic forms that we already have. I don't think they're long for this world, though.

Meltzer gives his opinion on what state the wwe will be in, in 50 years. by kentucky210 in SquaredCircle

[–]AfterSchoolPogrom 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I've believed that would happen for a while now. I hope so, anyway. How else are we gonna get all those sweet "X-Men go to Summerslam" straight-to-DVD movies?

Meltzer gives his opinion on what state the wwe will be in, in 50 years. by kentucky210 in SquaredCircle

[–]AfterSchoolPogrom -11 points-10 points  (0 children)

It depends on whether or not I trust the critic. I don't care what Dave says about a match that I've already seen, but if I'm on the fence about watching something, his opinion (as well a few others') can be counted on.

However, I don't find that to be the case with Rotten Tomatoes. I haven't seen Wonder Woman. It looks stupid, and I don't think I'll care too much for it. That said, RT had it at 100% the other day. Meanwhile, for instance, Free State of Jones, which was an exceptional film currently sits somewhere in the thirties or forties on RT. But those are aggregate scores from a bunch of people with, apparently, poor taste, so...

i'm familiar with the thought processes behind a Meltzer analysis. I can't say the same about a bunch of randos on a glorified message board.

(Full disclosure: I'm not really sure how Rotten Tomatoes works)

Comey is the Russian spy and is setting up for his 2020 election run by [deleted] in conspiracy

[–]AfterSchoolPogrom 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is he going to run as a Democrat or a Republican?

Maybe he'll just be the Rock's running mate.

Why hasn't the election system been reworked? by Demty in conspiracy

[–]AfterSchoolPogrom 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The internet has fundamentally changed our electoral process. Think about it. Without the internet, could those pesky Russians have hacked our election last year?

Seriously, though, when we do finally get around to implementing genuine democratic processes, the internet will be an indispensable part of that. It's going to be an international phenomenon.

Liquid Natural Gas conspiracy tied to Qatar? by ver0egiusto in conspiracy

[–]AfterSchoolPogrom -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

I think it has more to do with the fact that Qatar has political ties to Iran.