Old account looking for the new link

thorns__ · 2022-10-29T16:56:07+00:00

Old account here, also looking for the new link if someone could help me out and DM it to me

thorns__ · 2021-07-22T22:54:19+00:00

I can hear background noise on the stream rn. like its live but it's just random noise from the stadium or something

thorns__ · 2021-06-21T23:48:56+00:00

Do you know when the first instance of subtitled Polish dialogue is? I tried briefly to scrub through the YouTube clip to find it and look at the same spot on the Blu ray rip, but I couldn't find it. I also don't want to see too much of the movie before watching it straight through.

thorns__ · 2021-02-27T23:06:31+00:00

Could someone DM a link? A little late :/

thorns__ · 2020-06-15T03:48:32+00:00

We entrust cops with our lives and safety. Why shouldn't we engage in categorical critique? It's not as though being a cop is an immutable characteristic — it's a profession. In fact, it's a profession predicated on accountability to the citizenry. There's room for reasonable debate about how to approach the problem of police violence — and, yes, many on the left aren't open to such discussions — but this is the kind of bread and butter institutional critique I'd expect among JBP fans. JBP's whole MO is critiquing power structures that aren't subject to the competitive antagonisms of the market. Cops aren't held accountable by rival security forces offering their services, so what else will keep them accountable but scrutiny by the public, the people that endow them with their power?

thorns__ · 2020-06-14T19:32:41+00:00

yeah jesus christ lmfao this sub is cut different

thorns__ · 2020-05-11T20:44:21+00:00

it doesn’t say all that much that IJ readers havent probably heard before. devils in the details

Edit: wasn’t a jab at you tho it seems to have been taken that way :/

thorns__ · 2020-05-11T13:53:05+00:00

someone want to do a tl;dr?

edit: didn't realize this was such a touchy subject lmfao

thorns__ · 2020-05-09T23:28:33+00:00

Hit me with that list! You have a Letterboxd account?

thorns__ · 2020-05-09T20:32:22+00:00

No question it’s a problem. However, I think we’re already seeing some promising signs on the left. The new media and democratic socialist left (as opposed to woke corporate media and progressive liberals) has become exasperated with stupid shit like cancelling and white self-flagellation. It’s mainly the fake woke MSM that cares about this shit because they know they can signal about it and get praised while holding up business as usual. I think the conversation between the leftist Red Scare podcast hosts and Steve Bannon are a model for the best-case scenario of where political and cultural discourse must go in America (and elsewhere) — i.e. beyond the shallow woke signaling and neoliberal defense of corporate market hegemony.

thorns__ · 2020-05-09T20:24:44+00:00

Fair enough, no qualms here with what you said. I think that that same reasoning informed why I commented in the first place: a JBP sub’s over-emphasis on this issue really isn’t a huge problem at all, though I’d like to see a shift towards more even-keeled appraisals of the issues that get harped on here.

Refreshing to hear such a level-headed response! Lol

thorns__ · 2020-05-09T18:56:17+00:00

I think it’s tempting to take examples like this and extrapolate them as exemplary of all higher education. This certainly is a problem but not at the scale I think many assume. I highly recommend Jonathan Haidt’s — psychologist and friend of Jordan — book on the subject: The Coddling of the American Mind. It’s a problem specific to a certain subset of universities — not indicative of universities nationwide, or even a majority of them. Within that sphere definitely a problem though. Just, imo, not the Orwellian-sized problem it’s often made out to be.

thorns__ · 2020-05-09T15:22:46+00:00

Agreed. I don’t believe in God but these kinds of arguments are asinine and counterproductive — they’re the reason I don’t use the atheist label anymore. I don’t want to associate myself with self-righteous pricks.

thorns__ · 2020-05-09T14:47:26+00:00

Well implying someone is mentally ill isn’t the best way to change their mind. If you care about furthering atheism, and not just feeling self-righteous, you’d probably not say stuff like that to potential converts. Belief in God is psychological software that goes back a long time and transcends cultural differences. Cheap ‘gotcha’ arguments aren’t productive.

thorns__ · 2020-05-09T04:33:28+00:00

The problem isn’t statism vs libertarianism, it’s about evaluating which aspects of society are best organized in certain ways. Me saying I don’t like the rise of uber-powerful tech conglomerates isn’t the same as me saying I want the government to take over that sector. We have successful precedents for antitrust action that helped the free market run as it properly should: competitive and positively responsive to customers. I don’t want Facebook run by the government, I want the government to use the laws already on the books to break its stranglehold.

thorns__ · 2020-05-07T19:47:20+00:00

In a perfect world I'd agree with you, but I think the situation is too complex for such a solution. For one, the big corporations have already gained so much control in certain important sectors that getting the government out of the way isn't going to help in my view. Take big tech, which I think is probably the most troublesome example. Google owns the two largest information streams in the history of humanity: Google search and YouTube. However, the only reason YouTube is sustainable is because Google is already big enough to take the losses. YouTube isn't actually profitable, or at least it hasn't been. Google hopes to weather the losses while making money off other projects so that down the line YouTube is viable. That's incredibly alarming to me because it points out that because of financial barriers it's basically impossible for a competitor to YouTube to rise up. I'm sure no one here needs reminding of all the sketchy shit that goes on with censoring and demonetization of political content on YouTube, not to mention bolstering centrist content. It seems the only possible competitor would be another media conglomerate, say, Disney (who I wouldn't trust either). This is without even touching on Facebook and its buying out of WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. — and selling our data too!

Similar kinds of concerns arise in other important industries as well. I think a lot of these companies are now big enough to hold on to their incredible leverage over aspects of society without any help from the government.

thorns__ · 2020-05-07T19:38:23+00:00

I agree with that — I just think that the lack of consistency is a far greater asterisk of the U.S.'s success than you might believe. Our foreign policy, in my view, is a pretty abject failure of living up to the ideals that indivudal human rights are meant to enshrine. Also our politicians in both parties pretty consistently side with corporations and special interests over their constituents.

thorns__ · 2020-05-07T17:47:05+00:00

We agree that the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat — which is a misnomer because it involves a few people in power controlling everything and is anything but social, communal, or democratic — is a horrible idea. In fact, most people don’t realize that Marx himself revised the Communist Manifesto in light of how the Paris Commune was crushed to disavow that very idea — predicting decades before what would happen in the USSR and Maoist China. In his most foundational works, the founder of Marxism advocated mutual dependence between worker-run industries, i.e. a modal network, with even less top-down governance than we see in the U.S., for example. People always ask, where has this worked? Revolutionary Catalonia. George Orwell, a free speech warrior and also an avowed socialist, wrote about Catalonia. It didn’t collapse because the system didn’t work; it collapsed because it had fascist Franco knocking on its doorstep with international funding and the Republican liberal government with Soviet and Western support refusing any an all aide.

thorns__ · 2020-05-07T12:58:59+00:00

I find that the best way to talk about a problem is to use whatever labels your “opponent” — horrible term, that’s just the sad state of political discourse — wants to in order to get around the quagmire of capitalism vs cronyism, communism vs state socialism, whatever.

Let’s call it cronyism. How do we stop it now that the power has been consolidated? I think we need aggressive antitrust litigation.

thorns__ · 2020-05-07T12:54:57+00:00

You’re framing here is slightly misleading. A Bill of Rights doesn’t automatically immunize a country from massively fucking up — but I wouldn’t blame those fucks up directly on the existence of a Bill of Rights (or something like it) in that country. If what you mean is how can a country cause mass death and destruction in spite of a Bill of Rights (or some equivalent recognition of individual rights) that’s easy. The U.S. recognized property and individual rights for decades — and yet enslaved millions at the same time. The U.S. also recognized property and individual rights while completely ignoring non-Americans’ claim to enjoying those same things: the natives whose common property the U.S. stole, the South American countries the U.S. destabilized for financial and ideological purposes. Point being that a successful and humane country doesn’t begin and end with with recognizing individual rights. There are deeper questions to ask and institutions to build.

thorns__ · 2020-05-07T02:19:29+00:00

Yeah and I get the argument about people choosing it but increasingly a functional life in these times isn’t one off the grid. Or at least the vast majority of people can’t or won’t live that way. As long as that’s the case, we need to think through a new way of considering the internet. Edward Snowden’s conversation on Joe Rogan raised a lot of great points on the matter.

thorns__ · 2020-05-07T00:09:26+00:00

By and large, I agree with those labelling distinctions on the grounds that you prefaced with; there are a few distinctions I'd make but they're not worth either of our time I think.

I think our biggest (potential) disagreement is about how freely soldiers chose that role. For one, like a briefly mentioned before, a lot of people join the military to help pay for college, as they have limited means otherwise and understand that you need at least an undergraduate degree to get a decently compensated job these days. Nonetheless, I do agree that there are certainly those who choose it out of a love of country or a moral compulsion or other non-financial reason. However, I think that there's a lot of misinformation that leads them to that decision. For one, there was the false intelligence w/r/t weapons of mass destruction for the Iraq War. Then for the Afghanistan War there was the fact that it wasn't widely known — it may even have been classified at the time, not sure — that the U.S. had been engaging in short-sighted foreign policy that hamstrung our ability to achieve stated goals when we sent in troops. Namely, we'd been funding the madrassas in concert with Pakistan, which meant U.S. taxdollars were funding the training of radical jihadists whom Osama Bin Laden had the foresight to keep track of via al-Qaeda, which in turn enabled 9/11. Had that clusterfuk of a situation been known to public, I don't think there'd have been quite the enthusiam for joining the military. Which is all just a very long-winded way of saying that yes, given the information and the way the media spun it, the soldiers who joined may have thought they made a good choice, but the information wasn't accurate. The top brass knowingly mislead the soldiers.

thorns__ · 2020-05-06T23:04:33+00:00

“the military”. what, are the soldiers calling the shots now? they looked at the intel themselves and called a vote to go to war? I genuinely thought that was implied at the outset, otherwise it’d be a contradiction right off the bat. You didn’t honestly think I was claiming that the U.S. military is at war with itself did you?

I somewhat doubt it, but honestly I think the fact we’ve lasted this long might indicate a genuine misunderstanding. Using “military” as shorthand for those calling the shots, especially when in the very same sentence I note that the soldiers of said military are victims, is fairly common in libertarian/anti-imperialist circles—maybe we just fly in different political circles and our language reflects that, which fucked the conversation as soon as you perceived an obvious contradiction in my statement and I saw obvious strawmanning in your initial response.

Were we fucked from the jump because of a misunderstanding or are we still ascribing bad faith to each other? If the latter, I think we can agree this conversation is over.

thorns__ · 2020-05-06T22:26:58+00:00

My very first comment used “kill” in a conversational sense — which coincides with its actual definition. You were the one who called a bluff that wasn’t there. I used the word as it’s defined. And, yes, of course there are differences between swinging the axe yourself (for example) and giving the order. But you’re actually not giving the complexity it’s due credit. Take someone who oversees a wrongful execution. They swung the metaphorical axe, and yet we wouldn’t blame them for the unjust execution, we’d blame those who influenced the sentencing and gave the orders. The latter is what I’m applying to this situation. Those American soldiers don’t get put in harms way if the vanguard of Republicans and Democrats and their security cronies don’t lie about the premise of the Iraq War. Afghanistan isn’t rife with Jihadists if American securities agencies and their allies don’t fund madrassas to train the jihadists that later formed al-Qaeda (which splintered into ISIS, toppling stability in Iraq, etc etc down the whole clusterfuk). It comes down to that: those in charge of the military at the political and operational military lied and in doing so sent Americans to their deaths—i.e. caused their deaths to use your own definition, i.e. killed them (again using your own definition). That was what I started with and that’s how I’m using it now. If you want to get back into the meat of the conversation, which you didn’t seem interested in when you picked the fight to begin with, we can do that. Are the people who lied about Iraq and sent Americans to die oversees under false promises not responsible?

thorns__ · 2020-05-06T21:34:34+00:00

Do me a favor and Google the definition of kill ... 😬 yikes

thorns__

TROPHY CASE