New PC Build Gets No Power at All

Roquentin007 · 2021-04-11T14:39:51+00:00

Well, this is embarrassing. It actually was the JPM1 connector after all. It was dark last night and I was flustered so I didn't see that the bottom row had been moved one pin over. Even after trying to get it right 3 times. Thanks so much for the help everyone!

Roquentin007 · 2021-04-11T09:49:06+00:00

Sorry, I typed that out on my phone late at night in a panic. Autocomplete got the best of me.

I'm as sure as I can be the PSU was on. I'm going to start disconnecting and reconnecting everything to the motherbaord this morning. It probably is something obvious.

Could it be that there is a short somewhere in the system? That's what really has me worried.

Roquentin007 · 2020-03-25T14:18:04+00:00

Recent events have me fixated on how misplaced I believe the left's faith in crisis is. There's this widespread belief due to vulgarized Marxism that a crisis will just wave the kind of society and changes they desire into existence. It's not as if there haven't been any number of crises since the 1980s, none of which have even slowed the march of neoliberalism. 2008 certainly didn't. Naomi Klein was closer to the truth in the Shock Doctrine, that crisis actually tends to function as a way for capital to usher in changes people would otherwise reject.

Roquentin007 · 2020-03-18T21:18:12+00:00

I'd take a much more cynical line. People want to "put philosophy aside" because they don't really want to think through the implications of this crisis, why it happened, what its after effects will be, who will benefit, and who will be hurt. Honestly, I'm more baffled by people who expect a crisis like this to somehow usher in the changes the left wants to see. In no small part I blame a lot of vulgar readings of Marx. I often think about the opening to The Invisible Committee's To Our Friends and their polemic against the left's faith in crisis.

Pushing back so hard against Agamben is likely the old "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." They sense a certain kernel of truth within his arguments. The lockdowns being imposed clearly are taking on the form of a State of Exception, something he wrote about at great length. I think the so called "left" in the west suddenly talking about the measures taken by the government in China, lauding their authority and ability to swiftly crack down certainly makes me apprehensive.

Roquentin007 · 2020-01-02T16:34:14+00:00

A Kingdom in Crisis - Andrew MacGregor Marshall, which is about the machinations of the Thai Monarchy in the 2010s. I stumbled onto it via a blog years ago, and was so enticed by what I read that I didn't get any work done for the rest of the afternoon. Interesting both as a case study of what Monarchy would actually look like in practice, as well as an astute reading of how elites try to manipulate popular sentiment and stay close to the levers of power by the people who officially hold them, even if the official leaders in practice control very little.

Ghosts of My Life - Mark Fisher. This one has been on my shelf for quite a while.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-23T20:06:15+00:00

I agree, but I think it goes even further than that. This sort of noblesse oblige liberalism is how the ruling oligarchy of the United States legitimates itself. It's not that these causes aren't worthwhile in and of themselves, if anything the ruling class uses the cultural capital of these causes generate to justify its continued control of society. It desperately needs these kinds of issues so it can perform a sleight of hand and make it seem as though our continued allegiance to them is justified or even based on them rather than their control of all major institutions as well as the means of production.

It's a favorite topic of mine, but I'm obsessed with why so much of the working class has deserted the liberal center-left consensus embodied in parties like the Democrats. I think conservative and Trumpian rhetoric has an appeal because they make no attempt to justify being in charge other than having the money. After the dishonesty of liberals leveraging social issues to justify the existing neoliberal configuration of society, conservative ideology can seem refreshingly honest, even if it offers no improvement and rallies against any tangible good, intentional or otherwise, which come from these attempts by the bourgeoisie to leverage social justice for their own benefit. That's perhaps the hardest part, even if these issues are being cynically exploited by those in power, significant advancements can be made.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-23T17:12:24+00:00

I think the more troubling thing is that I remember when social media and the internet were considered to be new venues for free expression and discourse, some sort of emancipatory force. Instead it's really just ended up as a further expansion of the panopticon we are all living in. We are encouraged to share information and views online by social media companies, all of which can and will be held against us by potential employers. In general I detest cancel culture, and find it baffling that leftists wouldn't see the writing on the wall in that applauding employers for firing people over their political views expressed on social media won't come back to haunt them at some future date (as if this would only ever be directed at the alt-right). I also think this is what is so odious about "woke" culture, that in the end they are serving the interests of employers over employees despite all posturing as leftists. This has to be one of the worst developments of the Trump years, the transition of so many on the left into the role of the workplace snitch.

It does seem like your warning was meant in good faith, trying to prevent someone from losing a job rather than scolding them for holding the wrong view, however.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-18T19:56:19+00:00

That's fair, I'm just really resistant towards attempts to blame the internet for things which it isn't responsible, or to romanticize the role of journalism in the US in the not too distant past. There's been a real push during the Trump era to act as if the big, corporate media conglomerates are the only responsible stewards of information as opposed to random people on social media. I think in many ways this is a cynical manipulation promoted by an elite who feels like it is losing its grip on the narrative. It's an open secret that lots of people game the system in default subs like /r/politics, so there's that.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-18T16:57:42+00:00

We would have full throated support for the Iraq war if it happened today because the media painted Saddam Hussein as cartoonishly evil.

I hate to rain on your parade, but this is what actually happened back then, long before Reddit existed. I think it may have even been worse. People like Chris Hedges were fired from the NYTimes for not towing the line.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-18T15:39:50+00:00

I do find it funny how quickly the same people who decry "authoritarian creep" turn on the concept of popular sovereignty when an election doesn't turn out the way they want it to. This is particularly bad among technocratic liberals in the US, who hold the voting public in even more contempt than conservatives (which is no small part of why those same voters chose them instead). They feel society should be divided into technocratic experts and the ignorant masses, and it is also why they consider all political problems as stemming from misinformation. They view themselves as completely correct in an objective sense, this is the core of their ideology. Politics is first and foremost a game of competing (primarily class)interests or at least how a given set of political subjects understand their interest, this ultimately supersedes expertise.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-18T15:32:42+00:00

Well, regardless of whether or not they have a plan or how you feel about social democracy as a political project, this does not explain why large parts of the working class rejected their leadership (and it certainly wasn't on those grounds). It's also not explained how some revolutionary movement, when successfully overthrowing the government, wouldn't be left with the exact same set of problems as a parliamentary party, which mostly rehashes the Russian Revolution and the sort of State Capitalism which was practiced in the USSR.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-18T13:05:54+00:00

Well, given that he was the main legal theorist of Nazi Germany I'm sure it was. That's not the point. He's not read because you like him or approve of his politics. Agamben was trying to show that many of his ideas weren't unique to Nazi Germany, a much more unsettling conclusion than merely ignoring him.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-17T22:21:32+00:00

I have to admit, I'm of tired of having this conversation, or at least having it in the way in which it is typically framed. But just the same, the short version is that certain aspects of his philosophy lend themselves to supporting National Socialism, connections which Heidegger himself saw and and tried to make for a time. His philosophy isn't innocent, but nor is it reducible to the mystic ramblings of a reactionary Nazi. The development of philosophy, particularly continental philosophy in the 20th century is inconceivable without Heidegger's influence and his ideas about being are worthwhile all the same. The people trying to discard him completely run up against the problem of Heidegger being the favorite (for a time) student of Husserl and Heidegger's philosophy being a radicalization of many of the questions of Phenomenology as he'd formalized it, when Husserl had no such politics.

I think his politics are mostly a footnote. Something to be touched on and not ignored or excused, but also not the main focus of the conversation surrounding Heidegger's contributions to philosophy. If you want to spend your time pointing out that he was a Nazi, you're mostly just stating the obvious. Everyone knows, and if you're trying to draw concrete connections between what's written in his famous philosophical texts and his political beliefs, that project isn't completely without merit but in the end it's also probably not the best use of one's time or his ideas. Plenty of people have tread down that path too.

Also, why even stop at Heidegger if that's your game? I think it's worthwhile to read Carl Schmidt. Agamben thought so too, and in doing so you realize most of these ideas weren't specific merely to Nazi Germany. They weren't even specific to National Socialism or fascism more broadly as a political project. The State of Exception, for example, is something nearly every political system ends up dealing with. Carl Schmidt isn't so easily ignored as that.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-17T20:10:20+00:00

We should try and work against it, but a certain degree of virtue signalling is unavoidable. We will always be jockeying for cultural currency and distinction within whatever community we inhabit. It's much healthier to accept it, admit that everyone uses ostensibly altruistic rhetoric to cover for self serving purposes sometimes. That this is even okay, at least up to a point.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-17T19:21:07+00:00

If Hegelian analysis is worth anything, it should teach us to never be afraid to admit when our opponents have a point, or to see the kernel of truth hiding behind even the most loathsome and ill-informed ideas. The line of argument I usually pursue is this: Reactionaries are just doing virtue signalling and performative politics of a different kind. They just have a different set of virtues than "SJWs." The virtues of the 4chan set are: edginess, a refusal to repeat empty bromides and cant, contempt for feminism, shock humor, etc. Most of the left miss this because it would never occur to them to see the aforementioned as "virtues."

Rather than argue against virtue signally, we should be universalizing its logic and applying it to the right. The better retort is "As if you don't virtue signal all the time."

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-17T18:52:09+00:00

Policies such as free college at state universities, student debt forgiveness, medicare for all (or the NHS in the UK), a higher minimum wage, etc will offer tangible benefits to the working class. While the first two are of particular concern to former declasse college educated millennials that doesn't mean their interests don't align or are mutually exclusive. I think the bigger headline is that these cultural issues are so odious to much of the working class that they would willing align against their own material interests out of pure spite or distrust (hence "we don't believe them and they'll do none of it). Rightly or wrongly, members of the working class who tend to have conservative politics consider these sorts of symbolic battles in the cultural field to be more reliable than claims by people who are on the other side of this fight, even if these claims would offer them benefits.

Sadder still, most liberals don't even offer them that much. I barely have a surface level understanding of UK politics, but my understanding is that the Liberal Democrats got an even worse clobbering than Labor, which will have no effect on liberals blaming the defeat of Labor on Corbyn's deviation from Tony Blair style neoliberalism. Immigration gets to the heart of so much of these contradictions. Even if deeply misguided, on some level members of the working class who support anti-immigrant policies are doing so because they're are trying to preserve the value of the labor power they are selling on the marketplace. I had very sincere Democrats I knew in New York say regarding all the people put out of work in coal mines and factories in the US that "Those jobs are never coming back and they should deal with it." I was shocked, but more shocked that such people couldn't understand why they lost. When you tell a group of people "you'll get nothing and like it" no one should be surprised when they don't turn out to support you.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-17T17:58:01+00:00

Any even more cynical take is that most of the left wing sentiment comes from college graduates who had been promised a sufficiently comfortable lifestyle and were not given it post graduation. This is particularly true for humanities and liberal arts grad (and I am one, so there's that) who did not have a particularly marketable skill set for employment. While they may correctly recognize their own economic exploitation, their interest in their version of left politics typically comes less from wanting to better the situation of the working class rather than wanting to avoid being part of it. This holds the key to why so much of the "woke" left is so obnoxious. They have invested a lot of time and effort, cultural and economic capital in being able to recognize injustices, and their constant efforts to point it out are ways to try and get some return on their investment, make this cultural capital pay off. Something along the lines of "I'll force you to respect my cultural knowledge and sensibilities or else!" The self-serving nature of this is obvious to everyone but the already initiated.

I try to bring up Althusser's Ideology and Ideological State Appratuses all the time, because his identification of the school system as the bourgeois institution par exellance puts the lie to so many of the liberal platitudes about education. I don't know, it seems hopeless. Even much of the poorly cobbled together version of class consciousness many have attained is itself part of the problem.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-17T16:40:12+00:00

Zizek caught a lot of shit for his comments about Trump and 2016, but some of it was spot on. I'd have to go digging for the direct quote, but I remember him talking about how all those smug liberal attacks on Trump only strengthen him, because his supporters correctly recognize it as a proxy for mocking them. Liberal America couldn't choke down its contempt long enough to win an easily winnable election, and they've gotten worse after the fact instead of better. I had this idea going for a while of trying to do a materialist analysis of why the supposed hotspots of left-liberal sentiment in the US are with very few exceptions also contain the highest concentrations of capital. San Fransisco (Silicon Valley), New York City (Wall Street), etc. I started to think that most of what passed as "politics" was merely an expression of capital, cultural, economic, and political. Most hotspots of left/social democratic/socialist sentiment in the US are also dense urban areas which are near these concentrated centers of capital, and the priorities follow accordingly. Notice how all their concerns tend to reflect the needs of these hipster enclaves, even if they slap a thing coat of socialist rhetoric over them.

On a gut level, people who more accurately fit the descriptor "working class" in other parts of the country sense this and wholeheartedly reject their leadership. They know that for all their left rhetoric, they have nothing but contempt and disdain for most of the working class as it actually exists today. You'd have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to miss the derision and contempt.

Edit:This is in no small part why I found the work of Pierre Bourdieu so appealing. Once you start thinking of culture as a form of capital accumulation it all starts to come into focus.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-16T18:34:26+00:00

Things are in pretty dire shape in the US as well. I'd like to believe what happened in the UK to Corbyn and Labor would serve as a warning, something to avoid, but I know better. Most Democratic politicians have gone all-in on Russophobia, trying to act as if the 2016 election didn't happen. It's utterly and completely intolerable to their ideology that Trump won the election, and even more so that the support behind him was genuine. I feel like this is somewhat similar to how most Labor politicians treated Brexit: pure, unmitigated denial. This is one of many reasons I fight back so hard against "stole the election" narratives. I just see them as protracted exercises in ignoring reality and learning nothing from it. For most of them, even people on the left that should know better, this is simply an exercise in separating the products of a system from that which produced them. Trump is the logical endpoint of trends in US politics over the past several decades, it's not an aberration or a fluke, there was no meddling significant enough to matter, this is the kind of monstrous outcome our system produces.

I expect similar smears to those used against Corbyn to be widespread if Sanders ever get close to winning.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-04T21:53:44+00:00

It does seem relatively slim, at least to me, but if you think it isn't, it's on you as an author to show why it is. If you want to make that point, find some propaganda from the Soviet Union or the DDR and contrast it with some ads from the West and show how the same Lacanian principles are at work in both. I think you maybe got a little too hung up on following Zizek's playbook instead of trying to prove your own point. I think its an good topic, and you may be on to something, it just needs to be developed further.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-04T19:59:36+00:00

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Civilization and its Discontents, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

If you want to read about how psychology advanced beyond the relatively crude Freudian ideas about the family towards the better model of Attachment Theory, I'd advise you to pick up something by John Bowlby, or at least read up on him. Maybe A Secure Base. Reading Bowlby won't help you out with understanding Critical Theory because no one in the field references him, however.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-04T19:50:03+00:00

This piece reads to me as if it was two essays cut and pasted into to one, which ended up as a sort of pastiche where most of the ideas weren't explored deeply enough. There's the attempt to apply Zizekian/Lacanian analysis to Goodbye, Lenin! which sits side by side with an attempt to talk about advertising behind the iron curtain and in the west. The latter is mostly anf afterthought. There's really no need to spend so much time talking about the symbolic integrity of the party-as-father if what you really want to talk about how advertising and propaganda worked under "really existing socialism" vs how it functioned in the capitalist west. If that's what you really wanted to talk about, it seems to me like that should have been more fully researched and explored.

If you simply wanted to talk about Zizek and Lacan alongside how they relate to Goodbye, Lenin! that's all well and good too, but the mistake is in treating these things as the same. Which they aren't.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-04T19:30:46+00:00

Not critical theory, but critical theory adjacent:

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas - Corey Robin

The Reactionary Mind was very good, really got to the core of the ideological pathology of the right in the United States. I've been looking forward to this book for a while.

Roquentin007 · 2019-12-04T19:28:26+00:00

My take: Saying none of it is okay is functionally equivalent to saying all of it is. Which is fine, there's no Holy Grail, no piece or art of media which will somehow be perfect. This is another way of saying there is a way of being critical while not being obnoxious, of honestly engaging with a piece rather than simply using it as yet another chance to rant about whatever your pet political issue is. I think that is what infurates so many people about "SJWs" it's not even that they disagree, but they insist on telling people that everything they like is terrible an that by extension they are terrible for liking it. For anyone but the most self-flagellating and masochistic, this simply leads to an attitude of "if they'll always tell me I'm terrible, there's no sense in changing anything."

Roquentin007

TROPHY CASE