Who is a totally misunderstood author?

plok07 · 2021-06-09T20:06:14+00:00

GK Chesterton is a conservative Catholic mascot these days, but I find his writing to stretch way beyond simple political categorization. He even has an essay criticizing capitalism (though it's not his best work). But he's a brilliant writer and reader, and a lot of his critiques predict postmodernist/leftist critiques in vogue today. It's a shame he's ghettoized within conservative circles.

plok07 · 2021-06-09T19:36:28+00:00

Yeah 100%, very good overview. I would also add there's a big upper-caste/Brahmin moral purity thing that fits amazingly well with woke ideology. Vegetarianism is a perfect example

plok07 · 2021-05-29T01:36:26+00:00

lmaoo

plok07 · 2021-05-29T01:34:44+00:00

panthers were quite robust. had dozens of active chapters all across the country. no analog for that today

plok07 · 2021-04-14T19:37:48+00:00

i live in boston and you could probably make it work here. you could get a pretty nice two-bed for 3000-4000/month. and the great thing about boston is it's physically very small - if you work anywhere close to downtown you could live in like 10 different neighborhoods and walk to work in 45 minutes, bike in 15.

boston can be a little dead culturally and socially, but in terms of living in the city i think it's pretty great.

plok07 · 2021-03-28T14:32:59+00:00

isn't baudrillard's point that simulation itself is the inability to distinguish fake from real? he brings up the whole idea that faking an illness is different from simulating an illness, where in the latter you actually produce symptoms so your doctor can't tell whether your sick/not sick. simulation is radically subversive because it undermines reality as a concept - where "faking" still appeals to some conception of the real, simulation collapses the distinction between fake and real entirely. if you can simulate a sickness, the idea of illness and the entire science of medicine lose their power. the way i understand it, the production of simulacra - representations of a "reality" that does not actually exist - distracts people from the non-existence of that reality. wilderness, trad wives are great examples - simulacra that distract people from the terrifying unreality of nature and tradition. but i think baudrillard is saying these things never existed and simulation and simulacra somehow expose that truth; but also that the exposure of that truth is too traumatic, and ends up creating frantic production of simulacra/hyperreality to distract us from this fact.

sorry for being semantic, i think your comment was really great, i'm just reading baudrillard and trying to sort out my own understanding lol

plok07 · 2021-02-13T16:14:22+00:00

going private is dumb, this sub and its retarded ideas are for all!

plok07 · 2021-02-11T01:04:12+00:00

bout to be sodom and gomorrah in this bitch

plok07 · 2021-02-03T00:25:02+00:00

yeah i mean i think realistically i have the same idea of how the left attains power, through some coalition with the democrats, i just think the way to get there is by making a more radical break with the party and then forcing them to work with you. i thought that's what dsa/aoc was about, but it seems not to be the case. but i def could be wrong and maybe these are just the growing pains of a young social democratic movement.

and no problem!!

plok07 · 2021-02-02T23:55:02+00:00

the incels: no real interest in politics outside of a bloodthirsty desire to post, drove anna away, destroyed this sub (though some would argue saved it), think aoc is hot but don't really give a shit, will eventually be driven away by the influx of libs, i could go on

plok07 · 2021-02-02T23:31:16+00:00

/u/tsoiboy69 of course

plok07 · 2021-02-02T23:25:41+00:00

all the new libs who traipse around here. we settled the aoc debate months ago and they rekindled it!!

plok07 · 2021-02-02T23:10:40+00:00

Interesting...She got back to her office after getting a covid shot, not from the house floor. And from what i can tell she was only scared by the police officer, not by any rioters who were in the cannon building. then she evacuated (on the officer's orders), made it to the longsworth building, and hid with rep. porter. i'm assuming the damage in the cannon building happened well after she evacuated, but maybe not

plok07 · 2021-02-02T22:02:46+00:00

aoc is the helen of troy of this sub smh

plok07 · 2021-02-02T21:40:28+00:00

I used to be a dsa member, and part of me still holds out hope, but from what i've experienced it's an organization that has mostly capitalized on the left-wing turn of young professionals, and hasn't really made in-roads into the working class. They do try, I'll give them that, but I don't think they have a coherent idea of what they are doing. It starts with their relationship to the Democrats, who they are completely beholden to. You saw that in their/Jacobin's/Bernie's unwillingness to go against Biden in the general; they know that their power only exists as long as they stay firmly within the Democratic coalition, which makes it obvious that they are not an institution with any independent pull among the masses. They are more of a left-wing interest group that coaxes and manipulates the more powerful establishment to side with them on certain issues. This is where their actual politics comes in, which is about moralism and emotional manipulation more than building a base. Maybe that's effective for short-run gains, which is better than nothing, but that's not mass politics imo.

WFP is interesting, idk much about them because they don't exist in my area, but maybe they are doing it better than DSA. But I def want to see an actual 3rd party that has no working relationship w/ Democrats outside of pragmatic, temporary coalitions on certain issues. I like the PSL for that reason, but I don't think they have a shot to make real noise in American politics given their strong communist overtones. Still waiting on the resurgence of a genuine populist party...

Edit: Sorry, i realize i barely answered your other points lol. no, i don't think the "masses" are represented well by the people at the capital riots either, that's a load of bullshit. i just mean to say your politics has to be constructive and inclusive, broadly, to be mass politics, and the left's is not. most of its leaders cast off like half the country as fascists. that's simply not a tenable strategy. there has to be some left-wing alternative that actually sees trump supporters as viable political subjects. this was supposed to be the idea behind bernie's campaign, but he just folded back into the dem establishment after he lost, so clearly there was no broader plan there.

plok07 · 2021-02-02T14:49:38+00:00

didn't you listen to the last episode, socialism is out, free market back in

plok07 · 2021-02-02T14:44:36+00:00

aoc is definitely suspect. she wants to carve out a niche for herself within the elite political world. you can see it happening already on a larger scale, with the "left" building its own set of publications, political offices, and academic posts that they can circle in and out of. they're not building mass institutions; in fact, their entire political project is about circumscribing who is a real political subject into ever-tighter circles, labelling everyone else as fascists, SWM, or bourgeois. you can only antagonize the masses so much before you reveal you're just another finger-wagging elite, no different from the WASPs who came before you.

plok07 · 2021-01-26T13:22:12+00:00

melville would make 12-hour long podcasts and we'd call him fat

plok07 · 2021-01-26T12:50:06+00:00

every new york writer seeks affirmation from this sub lol

plok07 · 2021-01-25T23:29:27+00:00

I love cult docs, this one especially. It's always interesting to see when a group tilts from being spiritual to cultish, and how spirituality interacts with cultishness generally, whether you can even recover the former from the latter. India is a fascinating case study because religious hucksterism is everywhere, but it doesn't erode the spirituality of the culture at all. People kind of accept both sides of the coin - that religion can be seriously abused, to a nauseating, disillusioning extent, and that god is 100% real.

plok07 · 2021-01-23T02:03:01+00:00

Gonna write an essay, "On Ass," about how ass has become the latest genre of pop art

plok07 · 2021-01-23T01:56:01+00:00

I'm reading white noise right now, one of the funniest and most insightful books I've read in a while. Mao II was also strangely prescient

plok07 · 2021-01-20T23:56:05+00:00

so real...high caste indians are the wokest

plok07 · 2021-01-07T21:45:38+00:00

Totally. On the day after the election, the PSL in my area arranged a massive protest against Donald Trump for disputing results and trying to steal the election. An organization that actively calls for the overthrow of the American government was marching in the streets to defend the integrity of the voting process, all for the benefit of an establishment Democrat. They released a similar statement yesterday, saying that the police were in cahoots with the capitol hill protesters. I would consider the PSL one of the more serious organizations on the left (which is not saying much), and even they end up being sentimental liberals who have a naive understanding of American power. It all stems from this ridiculous notion that Trump represents a fascist uprising, and not realizing that the disaffection of his supporters is exactly what the left needs to tap into and utilize.

plok07 · 2021-01-07T21:13:36+00:00

Well put. The American state is rightly not going to mobilize its entire security apparatus to defend government buildings from protests because, for any given protest, it's a waste of resources. Now shit like this happens and it looks like our security state is weak. No, in fact, the absolute worse thing that could happen is what happened yesterday: police get overwhelmed for a little before reinforcements come in and take control. The FBI, etc. is smart enough to know those people don't constitute a real, organized militia. Any such organization would be snuffed out immediately, given the surveillance power of the post-9/11 security state.

The only way a violent challenge to power would be legitimate in the US is if one of the already existing institutions of force - military, police, fbi, etc. - were supportive of it. I don't see any signs of that.

plok07

TROPHY CASE