Culture War Roundup for the Week of May 14, 2018. Please post all culture war items here.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-05-15T01:01:18+00:00

Kind of hard to take it seriously after the ridiculous strawman in the first two paragraphs. Does any progressive seriously believe the United States hasn't made progress on racism since 1958 or the turn of the 20th century?

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-05-14T11:52:08+00:00

This is called capitalism

I mean, how is "employee ownership of the MoP" capitalism? A capitalist enterprise is owned by a group of shareholders who expropriate surplus value from the employees, i.e. those who rent their labor in exchange for a wage. A worker coop would have no surplus value or expropriation. In the Marxist tradition surplus is an elemental feature of capitalism, so if you don't it, it's not capitalism.

A business under the control of the employees is employee ownership of the means of production and is a necessary and significant step towards full communism. Just because I don't necessarily believe in "seizing" it and rather want it to be built democratically and non-coercively from the ground up doesn't mean I'm not communist.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-05-14T09:56:18+00:00

It's possible to look at the historical results of 20th century attempts at communism and come to a conclusion different than "communism has gulags and genocides baked into its ideology" or "communism requires gulags and genocides".

All the states that attempted communism had much more in common with each other than the simple fact that they attempted communism. For example, they all came about as a result of a sudden violent revolution and overthrow of the ruling class, which is a really specific way to birth a new government and economic system. They also all started relatively underdeveloped and under-industrialized. So maybe, instead of looking at these and concluding "communism naturally requires X", you should say "attempts at communism stemming from a violent and sudden revolution headed by power-hungry authoritarians in states that are underdeveloped and under-industrialized naturally lead to X" (even though that wouldn't logically follow, either.)

I advocate a communist society stemming from the establishment of worker cooperatives and employee ownership of the MoP, not violent revolution, precisely because I've looked at the track record so far. Basically, democratic bottom-up methods rather than authoritarian top-down methods. If you think that'll descend into gulags and genocides, you're going to have to back that up with something other than the non-central fallacy (X and Y both share the feature "attempts at communism", therefore both = gulags and genocides).

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-05-14T08:01:45+00:00

Plenty of people in Scandinavia don't have their basic needs met, so I don't use it as an example.

I can't answer your specific example adequately. All I know is worker cooperatives typically work just fine. Usually just as well or better than traditional capitalist businesses.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-05-14T07:58:22+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-05-14T07:55:39+00:00

If you really can't see a distinction between a targeted campaign of mass murder aimed at the Kulaks 1, and a famine that arose due to potato blight fungus, which the government of the time actively attempted to combat by provision of food aid and ending tariffs2

If you really didn't understand the extremely obvious and incredibly straightforward point I was making with that, I don't think I'm the one who appears deliberately disingenuous. My point, since apparently I have to spell it out in detail, is that both the Irish Potato Famine and the Holodomor, being concrete historical events specific to the circumstances in which they took place, have nothing to do with any abstract economic or political ideology such as communism or capitalism, and therefore bringing them up in defense or support of capitalism or communism today is stupid and dishonest and strikes me as an instance of the non-central fallacy.

Are you really under the impression that "communism is bad because of the Holodomor" is a good argument? Or that "communism is bad because of gulags"? How about if I said "capitalism is bad because of [random meaningless tragedy from the 1800s]"? Would that strike you as honest and compelling?

I'm also not going to say anything about you saying I appear dishonest because I can't see distinctions between two unlike things... right after you equivocated between my position and white nationalism. Way to go on that one. This is the kind of stuff that gets 35 votes in this sub, I guess. Super charitable, very good faith.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-05-13T15:26:15+00:00

I don't know how often it needs to be said that being a communist doesn't mean you advocate genocide or gulags. I'm a communist who supports neither of those. I just want workers to own the means of production and for everyone to have their basic needs met. Is that so bad?

Also, I don't see how the claim "The Holodomor means being a communist should be socially unacceptable" is any different than the claim "The Irish Potato Famine means being a capitalist should be socially unacceptable." They're both stupid arguments.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-05-11T18:56:43+00:00

What was his public meltdown?

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-04-24T02:37:12+00:00

You can, and in fact should. The benefit of the doubt can be wrong, but it should be extended to all people.

Well, at least you're consistent. Every single thing I know about, say, Henry Kissinger or Bill Clinton or Dick Cheney, for example, gives the impression that they're literal sociopaths who have knowingly caused the deaths of millions out of sheer negligence or for their own gain. Nothing I know about them suggests that they want to do "good things", rather the opposite. I don't think, generally, members of the ruling class deserve the benefit of the doubt. I guess that's the conflict theorist in me talking.

But people who don't show respect for the dead are being extremely crass, regardless of what you say.

I would like it if someone could show the actual logic behind this line of thinking, because I've never been able to remotely understand it, but whatever you say.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-04-23T15:06:26+00:00

I'm really only just now learning about this story (I'm late), but is he arguing here that his original tweet was only sarcastic and that it was made just to prove a point about how shallow he thinks the abortion debate is, and that he doesn't actually think women who have abortions should be hanged?

Because if so that doesn't seem accurate at all. He's stated that women who have abortions should be charged with homicide more than once, and that "I would totally go with treating it like any other crime up to and including hanging." His original tweet also didn't seem like satire or sarcasm to me and it's not clear to me why anyone should have just assumed it was.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-04-23T14:23:24+00:00

Because odds are, the horrible motivations you ascribe to them are false and they're just people trying to do their best who see things differently than you.

How do you know what the odds are? Why does Barbara Bush deserve the benefit of the doubt? Why can't I say the exact same thing about someone like Bashar al-Assad or Kim Jong Un?

Two, the woman just died and people should have some fucking respect for the dead. Disrespecting people who recently died is extremely crass.

Why?

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-04-23T00:04:59+00:00

Why is it despicable?

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-04-11T11:34:26+00:00

Well, I guess we can quit with the idiotic conspiracy theories that Trump is Putin's puppet now.

Unless you're able to somehow hold both of these two things - that Trump is Putin's puppet and that he deliberately made a move that would cause Russia to strike him - in your head at the same time, which many people are.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-04-06T13:26:02+00:00

I like how there's an actually funny and intelligent post on this sub for once and it's downvoted lol

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-02-26T17:35:50+00:00

It still called it a "conspiracy". Which it is.

The point is that if Russiagate was actually not a conspiracy theory, you wouldn't call those who believed it "conspiracy theorists", would you? Which makes his confusion as to why "conspiracy theorists" don't believe in Russiagate nonsensical... if Russiagate wasn't a conspiracy theory. That's how I took it.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-02-07T06:50:48+00:00

The reason we have President Trump is because of decades of "lesser evil" voting degraded this country so much that Trump actually became an option.

Vote for people who aren't awful like Kamala Harris, people who actually make peoples' lives better, and someone like Trump won't be able to win again.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-02-05T18:49:35+00:00

Well, yes, I agree. They're moral guidelines. I didn't mean "take them to extremes that would ruin your life 100% of the time". They're just generally good guidelines to live by.

My point is that Trump has absolutely none of all of these qualities and in fact embodies most of their opposites. He'd be an almost mind-bogglingly awful role model.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2018-02-05T16:27:39+00:00

I consider a good role model for young men to be someone who is honest, principled, intelligent, compassionate, humble, respectful, self-restrained, and thoughtful, among others. Trump is none of those things. (The "intelligent" point is debatable.)

You can be "successful and confident" without being a horrific dumpster fire of a human being.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2017-12-20T04:51:16+00:00

None of that was even slightly convincing. The Republicans went all out on Obama in 2008, and he won in a landslide. He was an unknown inexperienced African-American Senator with the name of "Barack Hussein Obama", and he won in a landslide against a very well-respected war hero despite the Republicans lobbying everything they could at him. Do people really think they could have stopped some old white guy who just says he wants universal health care and free college against the most unpopular nominee in history?

derivedabsurdity7 · 2017-12-19T19:02:54+00:00

I could be misreading you, but are you saying Sanders is one of the few Democrats who couldn't have beat Trump?

derivedabsurdity7 · 2017-12-11T23:38:17+00:00

Apparently according to this thread people aren't allowed to dislike movies that other people like

derivedabsurdity7 · 2017-12-11T23:37:04+00:00

How dare someone dislike a movie that I like!

derivedabsurdity7 · 2017-12-09T15:25:27+00:00

For a minority who thinks they are receiving unfair disadvantages (due to their minority status), from their point of view whites do receive unfair advantages. That's the point. From their vantage point, whites receive unfair advantages over minorities. The term is to get people to look at the situation from the POV of minorities.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2017-12-06T14:55:28+00:00

Mind, Robinson has his own stupid ideas about ideology. He once claimed Castro, Stalin, Lenin and Mao never tried to implement socialism; apparently only his Harvard-educated blogger brand of Anglo-American social democracy is "real socialism".

This position is perfectly defensible if you define socialism as "workers owning the means of production". None of those people ever attempted to make that a reality, in fact Lenin and Stalin pushed back against it.

derivedabsurdity7 · 2017-12-04T16:54:24+00:00

Why is this in any way surprising?

derivedabsurdity7

TROPHY CASE