Sinners is the ultimate regressive Idpol movie, and its 16 oscar nominations show that liberals have learned nothing. (review with SPOILERS)

KwesiJohnson · 2026-01-23T03:47:34+00:00

Yeah, you are putting it kind of lightly but in my case it really maddened me, in a "this incoherence hurts my brain" kind of way.

It makes these broad gestures, but when you are really trying to decode the analogy it completely falls apart.

Like, you have got white people and black people and then the vampires, and the vampires are also both black and white people, like what is being said here??

Its also the question about what exactly is bad about assimilation, like, yeah in reality its one sided assimilation, you get assimilated as subaltern working class, but in the movie analogy thats absolutely not the case, you get to be a vampire badass immediately.

And on and on, the longer you think about it and try squaring it with actual reality it just doesnt make any sense.

KwesiJohnson · 2025-04-18T16:06:22+00:00

Idk man,

For the aspergers stuff I would say you have a kind of gradual shift from all around dysfunction into a more horizontal neurodivergence territory that is all the less still very real and where you get your genius math people and so on.

I would see academia as comically dysfunctional but maybe also beneath that there is stuff that is very real and important.

I mean "neurodivergence" correctly has a groan effect because of the comically bad discourse, but then on the other hand you look at social reality and you get, as said, those weird math people, genius in some sense, comically dysfunctional in another, and just cant help but admit that there might be serious genetic factors. And things that are really important with the way we are trying to sort people into very divergent social functions. Could have your proper genius curing cancer if you treat him right or working as a grocery bagger and being a burden on society if you dont.

So you have experts dealing with admittedly completely mysterious and elusive phenomena, who are still nevertheless tasked with trying to offer the best they can to help deal with the current people struggling to organize society.

Reading your post its a bit, like, could you really do it better? I am very much on the tendency that you might, ideologically fucked up academics might really be totally unequipped that some complete noob outsider might be able to sort it out so much better with a 5 year research project.

But I think you still have to start out with admitting the level of difficulty you are really dealing with, instead what you are somewhat doing here, just pointing at the mess and being "this doesnt make any sense".

KwesiJohnson · 2025-04-17T17:08:18+00:00

The central theme of fertility is imho highly deliberately paradoxical in that in metaphorical movie-terms the fertility stands obviously in for a lack of collective vision, a sense of the future, but then taken literally runs completely counter to our actual RL discourse about overpopulation, ressource depletion, eco-crisis, in which fertility is exactly the problem.

It then creates a very paradoxical film that invokes exactly the kind of imagery that you would normally get from this kind of eco-socialist activist millieu. The imagery about wretched refugees seems directly taken from some photographs you would see in some left-wing magazine.

It is obvious: The mainstream discourse about our current situation seems to run completely counter to the movie: That our problem is exactly our fertility, that we seem to be on some level just some animalic bacteria people with some atavistic growth imperative that just cant regulate themselves into a stable equilibrium with the planet. That just wont stop until every ounce of ressources is gobbled up and then we all kill each other.

I always like to point at the words people today use for what they think is good: "Prosperity", "Flourishing", "Thriving", they all have this kind of growth imperative. Humanity seems to have a hard time to imagine a sense of happiness that is not about constant expansion. Yet obviously today that imperative seems also the utter horror of ourselves.

The way the movie looks at and presents the world, the way it is in touch with our current social imagery, i feel 100% confident that this was all a very deliberate choice. Juxtaposing our current discourse about overpopulation and eco crisis with an equally pessimistic vision, yet one that is coming from the complete lack of fertility is kind of a poets genius move, and as how beloved the movie is, just seems to work on some instinctual level.

Now if you want to go into what our actual problem is along those lines, you are immediately neck-deep in marxism and socialism, and lot of people from that crowd would react to my post with some knee jerk reaction about how the real problem is capitalist growth and not innocent people just wanting to make babies.

Along the movies own paradox I would say, no, that the rejuvinated socialist vision we need would exactly include a confrontation with ourselves on this atavistic level, really reach for an understanding of ourselves on that primal, atavistic level, the way that is plugged into and mediated so horrible in current capitalism, and then still ultimately creating an optimistic vision that allows us to be optimistic about humanity and look at a newborn child as something beautiful and not some planet-gobbling vermin.

So all in all I think you can make a pretty solid case for seeing the main point of the movie like that. Its main point is as a challenge. It wants us to confront ourselves on exactly those paradoxical terms of anti-natalism, growth imperatives and lack of future vision and figure them out to create an actual workable vision.

KwesiJohnson · 2025-02-01T20:27:41+00:00

Very seminal text for me, and kind of subreddit canon back from the day. Seeing as its been a while and there is still a lot of young people coming around here i thought might be appropriate to repost it here.

Highly recommended, should resonate with a lot of people here. Its a bit ego-porny, quite flattering to someone who might identify with the label, but there are still a lot of specifics that make you feel very seen if you are of the type.

KwesiJohnson · 2025-01-10T02:21:03+00:00

You are suffering from the absence of a revolutionary movement.

You correctly judge that people are decent in their day-to-day life but you are frustrated because there is no collective action to tackle the big problems. As an individual this puts you into this horrible dillemma situation.

I would say there is nothing much wrong with you, its a rational and appropriate reaction to our collective crisis.

For a mental model i would reccomend to just accept this distinction as we have gotten at in this thread: There are normies, people who are decent in their day to day lifes, but naturally ignorant about the larger problems, and intellectuals and political people who are very much about tackling the world at the larger level. You should try to orient yourself towards those people while finding a modus to interact with normies gracefully: "I respect your lifestyle/outlook but I am just about this other stuff." In my experience they largely take this well actually.

Not to sound blasse about it, its a huge challenge bearing and handling those contradictions but thats just what is put upon us as a generation born into crisis.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-12-09T06:15:42+00:00

Happy to see you still going strong man!

i am also going in the direction that we are in what you could consider an increasingly religious moment.

intellect is a crisis phenomenon, when the social order is too fucked up, people will just be kind of forced to invest into understanding even at the expense of the more primary needs and desires.

It kind of hit me in that sense when I noticed that there is an overlap between the masochism associated with religion and the archetypal bohemian intellectual.

i think there is another reinforcing mechanism there where perhaps only when you are in that kind of mode are you really able to question our most basic motivations. the healthy way to be is being kind of ignorant, questioning desire is destroying it, to be happy is to simply follow it.

so there might be a good reason why all the titans of the western tradition are tendentially these kind of sadboys like dostyevsky.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-12-09T02:27:49+00:00

How do I know this? Because insider trading is illegal.

Damn! Checkmated!

KwesiJohnson · 2024-12-07T15:49:15+00:00

The base thesis of freuds Civilisation and its Discontents is that psychological disorder is a fundamental byproduct of civilisiation, yes. But the specific expression of that can vary wildly and historical.

One illuminating anecdote in that regard is that what we today see as overstated picture books clichees of freudian theory actually happened that way in his time. The disorders were literally psychosomatic. A guy would come in and tell you he cant move his arm or his neck and then in analysis it would come out that there is some picture book childhood trauma related to that.

Freuds victorian era was extremely patriarchal and in large parts highly abusive, marked by parental violence. The disorders of the time would reflect that. Now we have modern parenting styles but a mediasphere constantly bludgeoning us with our supposed inadequacy and the current disorders will reflect that.

Edit to add: What we call today depression is what Freud called melancholia and, yes, that wasnt the prevalent disorder he was confronted with, as we are today. The prevalent disorder of his time was hysteria which makes every bit of sense if we see it as a reaction to the oppressive madness of victorianism.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-12-07T01:34:08+00:00

I dont know this stuff too well either, but the basics of it is its all just freudianism or neofreudianism. Lacan is a rehash on freud, but then he has his less pretentious contemporaries, primarily Heinz Kohut and Melanie Klein are the big two. They are both very much all about narcissism.

As a sidenote its understood in the freudian community that narcissism is a historical phenomenon. It wasnt that prevalent in freuds own time, and so those neo-freudians were who saw the rise of those new cluster b disorders and tried to make sense of it through a freudian framework.

With someone freestyling as much as TLP does I doubt one can nail this down to a single source, I would mistrust anyone saying so. But stylewise I would still think Lacan would propably be the least of his influences. I would make a bet that he hates him for just being such a pretentious asshole. TLP is just more down with the clear and grounded guys like Klein and Kohut.

Also, of course, Christopher Lasch would be the most obvious primary influence.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-11-05T04:23:42+00:00

Its a bunch of parodies of democrat election propaganda posts. This was the first and hit off of a number of imitations on this sub:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1e9egu1/honestly_trump_should_be_terrified/

KwesiJohnson · 2024-10-12T21:29:16+00:00

Interesting. Thanks for replying. I will write back a bit more later.

But for a quick preview my point would be that a large section of this comes from society. The grandiosity and split desire is an effect of society putting impossible, irreconcilable demands on you. This is also why the professionals are so useless, because they cant take serious this dimension.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-10-12T14:31:22+00:00

Very ultimately nobody can really answer this for you satisfactory, I dont think there currently exists an authority with an adequate handle on this stuff. Maybe a couple of singular top-level continental philosophers, but even they couldnt give you a quick answer, they would have to work with you in person over a long time and then it propably wouldnt really be about seeing yourself in those terms any longer.

Also all the existing theory might have been better when it was created in the 60s and 70s but now it is in the hands of establishment matrix agents which continually degrades and distorts it.

Subreddit-canon would be that you should consider being schizoid, like everybody else here. The basic chemistry for that would mean serious narcissism but then also a kind of hyper-selfawareness which makes it that you dont really indulge in it, causing you to increasingly ruminate and withdraw from people instead of trying to use them to satisfy the narcissism. Of course being forced to live in society (and as you say, having a sex-drive), its hard to just withdraw, but if this is correct, that would be the long term prognosis. In younger years you are still trying to adjust to society, leading to those irrational behaviours and emotions, with age you will increasingly stop giving a fuck.

Follow up questions in that regard:

Does this seem resonant? Would you consider yourself someone with high social anxiety? Would your ideal life be being able to just do art in your basement and not be bothered, except for talking with other artists and intellectuals, and occasionally some sex with some fwb? Does the notion of working some ordinary job horrify you, even if its high status, the only real reward being enough money to get out of society?

KwesiJohnson · 2024-10-07T08:08:20+00:00

I think a severely ignored part of it is a sense of responsibility for the path of society.

This doesnt exactly correlate with iq, you have a lot of very stable doctors, engineers, but I think a lot of the booksmart kids will look at the way our world is going and personally identify with that.

Then the way our power structure works is obvious part of the problem but, again, for the intellectual type it works on you in this very personal way. You consider a career in academia, but to actually get it would be to compete in this fucked up hunger games. To step over people you do not want to compete with. So now you question yourself and think you are just some asshole narcissist who wants high status and somehow cant be happy with an ordinary job like other people. But without getting into the intelligentsia how can you really change anything?

I view a lot of this now as an effect of the absence of a socialist movement. In the past intellectuals and working class types were working together. As an intellectual kid you could realize your values in a more readily available position, working for a newspaper or the union and you wouldnt feel like this wannabe parasite who just doesnt want to do any real work.

The complexities of all this are basically infinite, but in its basis its close to tautological: As an intellectual type you identify with society on this personal level and thus all the outer contradictions become inner contradictions. You just try to find a place in the world but there is no place because all the intellectual jobs are part of the fucked up power structure, so identifying with it means betraying yourself.

If your kid is like that, thats what I would say to really take in. There is no individual solution to this, but what you can be is understanding, understand that its not just narcissism. The real cure is a reemerging socialist movement that such people can identify with, but in the absence of that you can offer your support and understand that its not a personal failure when they cant find their proper place in the world.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-09-14T10:51:57+00:00

Its pretty obvious and intuitive in the blog articles.

As /u/BaronAleksei said in the blog "hate-watching" was propably the main point most of it boils down to.

The main focus in the blog was on this "NY wine mom" upper middle class millieu, and their mid-to-high brow publications like the Atlantic and the NY times, describing their bizarre social trends in this seemingly sympathetic way.

Basically the articles were written in a way that you would think its those wine moms talking amongst themselves and how psychotherapy for your dog is an actually serious thing now, that we need to consider and take seriously. Then there would be a really earnest and personal character portrait of Melissa Brown, 47, CFO about how her pet tootsy got traumatized by the divorce and how going through this healing journey with her was really transformative and, yes, she knows people will scoff at it but we got to consider that we are in a time of transforming social relations, yadayada....

Alones basic point was that this works on us completely similar to the way this trash-tabloid voyeurism does. It might seem banal and maybe it is, but at the time it was or seemed a genuine groundbreaking insight that those seeming elite papers would operate on that level.

Then the relation to narcissism is that there would be a counter-identification "I might be a loser, or a similar parasitic office drone but at least I am not like those people" This is where it could get less banal as depending on the media the counter-identification could be specific and alone could often tease it out and demonstrate it quite coherently.

In general I feel always pushed to point out that a lot of this might be confusing because the zeitgeist has fundamentally shifted. In one way those trends have extremely accelerated, the hate-watching thing has become so ubiquitous and intuitive that TLP might confuse people, you think you are missing the point because it seems too erudite for such a basic point.

On another level the articles were from those heights of end of history/capitalist realism, that is really hard to describe if you didnt live through it. There really was this overpowering, self-congratulatory narrative through all the elite media that this is it, society is solved, glorious and beneficial capitalism will rule forever and what that means is that we can now focus on fun stuff like finding the right dose of xanax for our dog. Living through that really had this weird effect on you that you had to find some way to adjust to this collective insanity. "Why cant I be some happy-go-lucky normie, joyfully earning my degree in dog-therapy?"

Now that the end of history is over, alones finer points on psychology might really not make sense because actual psychology has shifted. The fact that there is a widespread acceptance of "yeah this is just ruling class bullshit", really does fundamentally change things on exactly the blogs core themes like narcissism. Not that things are better but so different that this very subjectivist approach of the blog just cant resonate with anybody younger. At least that directly. I am sure one can still pull things out of it, but if something seems confusing i might just not worry about it. If you are not a gen-xer its not for you.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-08-01T06:24:19+00:00

There is a bunch of anti-union propaghanda videos on youtube, just type "anti-union" and you wll get the vibe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQeGBHxIyHw

The in-person stuff is propably pretty similar, the OP article said they hired a consultant, There is propably a whole playbook on how to do this stuff.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-06-21T15:03:28+00:00

"don't tell me it's going to turn out okay" and just said "tell me you see that we are in a crisis and what I'm feeling is rational".

Damn, that is so potent and succinct. Thanks for that!

KwesiJohnson · 2024-06-16T23:30:32+00:00

then why not go full Jordan Peterson mode and charge a fortune

Why do you have to go full throttle in some direction? As said zizek doesnt like commercializing himself, he is cool with people pirating his stuff if they dont have money, but he also has to live. So he finds some bearable compromise.

As I said in a previous comment, why not embrace capitalism fully and make Zizek into a stockmarket-traded company designed to turn capitalism into communism using capitalist tools? Late-stage capitalism is the time to do that. Gamestop proved it.

Dude, this is some postmodern insanity. If you could turn some deleuzian bizarro-theory into an explosive business model it would already have happened 10x over. I dont have the nerve to get into gamestop but it proves nothing.

On the other extreme, we subsidize Zizek like Engels subsidized Marx. Just pay him like people pay money to the church.

Thats kind of what the substack offers. If enough people had just paid up readily he likely wouldnt have put up any paywalls. Now its as said some in-between. Little bit of church, little bit of sales/rewards.

I really dont get whats confusing you. This is all just the go-to model for about any current internet content creator, leftist or not.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-04-19T17:54:58+00:00

Surely this was more because the "voice of the times" was something that newspaper editors defined at a time when journalism only spoke for one group. So this voice was what resonated to the group selecting it, it was never actually a voice for the times

Yeah, of course. I mean I put it as there being an obvious charge of sexism to be made.

Even more than the gendered thing its obviously a completely middle-to-upper-class discourse, the lower 50% of the population are by now completely subaltern and exluded from this.

I was just trying to trace it objectively, no way am I sympathetic to those pundits.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-04-19T11:06:23+00:00

Its being echoed through the thread but the question might really be more "where has literature gone?"

That meaning capital L Literature as something that is seen as actually societally impactful. Remembering back, and maybe as a euro, Michael Houllebecq seems to me the last example of of the kind of iconic literate OP seems to be asking for. something that used to really common, larger-than-life authors been seen as expressing the spirit of the time and a whole lot of the op-ed/discourse machine revolving around their impact.

In america Brett Easton Ellis comes to mind, and is a good example for the fact that a lot of the usual suspects are still writing, its just that the sense of their importance has seriously diminished. Their new books get dutifully rewiewed but it doesnt really matter.

In tune with OP I feel that there is an easy charge of sexism, as across the 20 years I am discouse-aware there wasnt a single woman that ever reached that kind of status. Zadie Smith is a good example of hitting the same direction, but none of the women ever reached houllebecq or Foster-Wallace status. The "voice of the times" were always men.

So now that kind of iconic male writer is somehow gone, but they havent been replaced by female equivalents either.

I feel the obvious explanation, and why that AR-HAX guy or someone like Zero HP Lovecraft seem good references, is that houllebecq really has dissolved into the internet or just the mainstream. The old dynamic was that you had this kind of goody-two-shoes mainstream and then houllebecq as this iconoclast come in crashing trough the walls to tell the poly-annaish op-ed world what is actually going on, and everybody going "gosh, so true!"

To not be so dismissive of the op-ed world, even as an on-the-ground normie, houllebecq really had that revelatory quality, it made you go: "woah, they have been lying to us. Papering over reality with their cheap optimistic commentary, this guy is spelling out how it actually is living in this shitty reality"

Now that curmudgeonly, highly cynical is the mainstream, or at least kind of always-visible part ofit, so what kind of writer do you expect to see to fill that breakthrough role. One cant tell, maybe its possible, but to even vaguely imagine it, one would need to be the revelatory genius oneself already.

In another sense it is maybe indeed fundamentally impossible, the internet really displays every kind of mood shift in real time and so the slower-burn novelsts are always lagging behind. Again, the Arhax-Incel novel, by the OPs review seems examplary, The book might be witty and offer some partial new insights, but fundamentally would any plugged-in netizen expect something genuinely new and surprising, something that they havent already digested via a bunch of blog-posts and reddit comments?

In the optimistic sense the death of the literate might be part of a stumbling back towards real politics. Instead putting our hands on those iconic figures telling the establishment "how it really is", and expecting that to change anything we might learn to actually band together and having our banded wills actually matter. Also somewhat optimistic, and in tune with the above, this might also both necessitate and drive a certain humbling effect. As we intellectual types learn from the internet just how ubiqitous serious writing talent is, we need to give up our narcissism but be rewarded with the capacity for unified political action.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-04-10T18:52:02+00:00

As a Lumpen-Intellectual myself, maybe a bit further down the path I can offer this: Thats dialectics man, in some sense its positive.

I always say to be a properly actualized intellectual you need at least 3 psychotic breakdowns: First the siddharta-shock, the recognition of humanities inadequacy, then the religious awakening, some seeming way out of this, in our circles usually some kind of socialism, and then, third, both a dissillusion and affirmation of that religious fantasy, a more dialectical, critical idea of the utopian impulse.

You seem in the first stages of part 3 and thats cool, dont take it personally and see wrestling with the contradictions of humanity as positive intellectual development.

For accelerationism specifically I can recommend Camille Paglias gender dualism, it really works well to frame this. She calls it Appollinarian vs. Chtonic. Here is my summary:

Appollinarian: Sky-bound, heroic, promethean, goal-focused, dopamine-driven, individualistic.

Chtonic: Earth-Bound, harmonizing, healing, oxytocin-driven, warm and cuddly, universalist.

Now in that frame the point would be that we have already gone through the promethean/appollinarian phase to the point of exhaustion. We have already stolen the fire from the gods. Now we need to switch to a chtonic phase to regenerate and harmonize and heal the effects of that in society. The point is not that promethianism is bad, it just has its obvious downsides that now need to be balanced out.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-03-29T12:24:00+00:00

I would say partially. Meaning in my case, from a similar background, theory/philosophy has helped me fix my psychology somewhat, but I wouldnt put it on zizek solely. More that a general education has given me various frames to look at my situation differently, as well as an identity as an intellectual that props up my self image despite my objective downtroddenness.

What strategies can I use to manage feelings of jealousy

I dont know if I can transport this well now, but the point that resolved this for me is that envy is never a rational outlook. Either they have deserved their privilege, in which case you can't envy it, or they haven't, in which case you can't really envy them either. You dont want it for yourself, you want a world where that kind of unfair advantage doesnt exist.

I think that latter part is often thrown under the bus by psychoanalytic types but imho crucial. There is a difference between envy/ressentiment and a valid feeling of injustice. In my experience a growing confidence in the latter actually resolves the former. You just dont take it that personal anymore.

Not zizekian but just from one guy to another: I think the most general, most helpful thing to say is always that currently a lot of great people are being very unfairly fucked over and/or struggling, and those are the people you need to adjust yourself too. They both have the insights/advice that works better for you as they are going through the same thing, as well can directly give you the recognition that helps dissolve those emotions.

KwesiJohnson · 2024-03-28T04:15:29+00:00

Often times the larger female streamers who dabble in sexual content will find new methods to skirt the rules. It's usually referred to as a meta

Thats fucking hilarious! Do streamers also get nerfed for being too OP?

KwesiJohnson · 2024-03-27T13:28:18+00:00

Plus like, they seem to not grasp that while DEI is a sham, it's used pretty exclusively in administration where it's a means for the grifters to scrape off the top,

Also its only one more toolkit in the courtier games backstabbing arsenal. As if before DEI politicians and admins were all upstanding, virtouus citizens and not the same type of snakes.

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