sean

✊ Very nice, Black Mountain is gorgeous. I live in Asheville, hit me up if you ever want to get a beer or tea sometime. Sean

New rule: Transphobia is an instant ban. Discussing transgender nuance lovingly, respectfully and intelligently is 👍. Otherwise educate yourself outside this forum beforehand.

This topic is an embarrassing pile of trash. As founder of this space I'd like to personally invite members committed to far-right politics leave this forum. You're not welcome here anymore. The web is awash with other far-right friendly dumpsters you can crawl into. Peace, Sean

Dumb: "The Nazis had the word 'Socialist' in their party name, therefore their agenda was also socialist!" Dumber: "People who oppose and fight Nazis and white nationalists are also the Nazis!! " Fellas, these are far-right talking points and excruciatingly idiotic examples of the bullshit I avoid engaging in anymore. They're such stunningly false, historically and philosophically oblivious statements easily corrected by even a cursory study that it's difficult for me to imagine motives other than willful ignorance or worse. Sorry, but the first statement is like a child seeing the word "Republican" in "Irish Republican Army" and confidently asserting that this means they must be ideologically related to the U.S. Republican Party. The second is like a deranged sociopath saying that victims of rape that fight back are as bad as rapists. As founder of this space I'd like to personally invite members committed to the latter conflation in particular, and far-right politics in general, to just leave this forum. You're not welcome here anymore. Sean

Sweet, we're back. If anyone notices anything weird please let me know. This involved a tablecloth trick.

Think I'm finally finished moving the forum to a new shiny server. Things feel much snappier to me! 🔥 @dawei — Do you notice anything out of sorts? If not I was planning to flip the switch to bring the forum back online shortly. 🙌 Sean

How do you mean? Sean

Well, capitalism and fascism are right-wing and we've all seen how ruthlessly authoritarian and murderous those ideologies can be. Knee-jerk tropes about inherent flaws in Marxism and communism nearly always avoid admitting the horrific failures of capitalism. Its fundamental dependence on mass consumer culture and cheap labor (or slave labor whenever possible), ceaseless, unbridled destruction of the planet for the profit of a few, widespread inequality and poverty proximate grotesque wealth, half a million homeless in the U.S. adjacent millions of empty homes, an institutionally racist police force originating from slave patrols, trillion dollar wars but not a dime for citizens with cancer going bankrupt from for-profit healthcare, etc, etc. China is one of the most capitalist nations in the world by the way. Sean

I only link to the Wikipedia on Anarchism as it's a free, relative decent starting point for further research and validation. The nice thing about Wikipedia is that it includes references and further reading. If you'd like I can also personally suggest a dozen rigorous texts on the history of Anarchism as a positively leftist philosophy. You're also mistakenly equating leftism and authoritarianism when the two in are no way conjoined. I wonder if there's also a negative reaction to a kind of literalist notion of the word "left" itself. As if "left" implies one's political philosophy has a fixed, "narrow" and halfsighted location in space. I'd contest that the directional connotation of the term "left" doesn't map over to anything meaningful about leftism as a political philosophy. For example, I think political centrism is incredibly myopic and perpetuates injustice despite the appeal of the world "center" as used in other contexts, e.g. "let's all take a deep breath and center ourselves." Sean

✊ Anarchism is a deeply leftist political philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism Sean

Somehow I doubt you'll have the restraint to avoid another wall of text in this topic, but I'll leave you with something as well. Isn't it strange that you went from patronizing us with links to logical fallacies and urging a "rational" discussion, to "peacing out" entirely when I asked you to even just consider that no amount of logical facts or evidence will change your mind. Sean

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Respectfully, I'd submit that imagining one doesn't have a political preference is always a blind spot or disingenuous. For what it's worth, it's hardly offensive when misogynist racist grandpas call socialism a mental illness. What logical syllogism can liberate a closed heart with terrible aesthetics? This is also the danger with far-right conspiracy theories, e.g., QAnon and Pizzagate lunacy. It's not that there aren't bits and pieces of horrifying and often unacknowledged truth in conspiracies. That's precisely what helps transform them into a compelling mode of religious belief. Please consider that literally no amount of tit for tat "facts and logic" in response to your ceaseless, colossal posts will ever put a dent in your religious faith. You're a true believer. Sean

No one: ... Chang: Socialists are crazy, I'll tell you what! ... continues rambling ... and women! Don't even get me started on women ... white men something something ... but after my wife left me ... weird throat clearing noises .... and now cultural Marxism, am I right? They've completely taken over ... mumbling, doddering away, yelling at Muslim kids to get off his lawn.

But this is the same argument against used against every generation of protest. This has come up a few times now along with requests to define left and right. I think this is where some Google-fu will serve you better. Volumes have been written about these subjects far more articulate than I could ever hope. Wikipedia is not a bad starting point. Anarchism Left-wing politics Sean

I'm picturing my poor, black Marxist friends eye-rolling out of their head at the "privileged leftist" meme in 2019. We're attacked from both ends on this. When we figure out how to not die and pay our bills we're "champagne socialists". When we're poor and struggling we're lazy whiners just looking for a handout. It sounds like you and I want the same things. I believe that the terms I use can still be living maps of where we're going and that renouncing them instead of updating them is part of why we never get there. Sean

Yeah it's really dragging. I'm going to move it to a new server in the next week or so.

Biden's a creepy piece of shit. 😆 I'm much further left than Bernie but IMO he's the only viable center-left option. He's been fighting this fight for decades. Though I'm not holding my breath that he won't be thrown under the bus by shitlibs again. Regardless, while I participate in electoral politics, I also think it can be an entangling distraction. Join a local democratic socialist, anarchist or communist group and meet real people. Decide for yourself if their ideas resonate with you and if they feel like good folks. Ask for book recommendations. There's a long, deep history to all of this. Find ways to get involved. Start small. I said, "there's a better and much more magical way forward than hitching to the reactionary Trump dump-truck." I mean that but I'm finding it difficult to unpack entirely in a soundbite. Maybe a first step for anyone still under this absurd Trump spell is to simply recognize how much of a boring, tried, dead-end it is. It's the exact same story Republicans have been hawking for decades except now incoherently rambled by your retired, senile, grandpa. Throw in some slightly raised volume on the same old, lazy, racist dog whistle bits Reagan deployed, thus cleverly hijacking a philosophically rudderless corporate media financially dependent on spectacle. Trump is not a unique Republican. He's merely the churlish face of it Republicans usually hide behind closed doors. When Republicans (or even most Democrats) disagree with him, it's generally on tone only. Trump's demonic policy positions are nearly all entirely conventional, demonic, Republican policy positions. If there's anything unique about Trump, it's not that he pushes much beyond Republican-standard plagues. It's that he breaks with decorum and "says the quiet part loud." It's that he flagrantly galvanizes his supporters around their most crass, cruel, ignorant and delusional instincts. In a way, I actually appreciate this about Trump. While presently it can certainly feel like Trump's "won the day", I also see that the spell of sham respectability cast by decades of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama "polite murder" style politics is fracturing in his wake. People seem to be waking up a bit and finally seeing, starkly, that the emperor has no clothes and indeed never did. This shared experience of so many, now staring into the unmistakable, unmasked face of American evil is, at the very least, an opportunity to reevaluate and revitalize social values and boundaries. There's no "one weird trick" if only we all did that will save us from our present-day dystopian hell-world to "immanentize the eschaton" 😄. In fact, not to sound hyperbolic, but I think our avoidance of annihilation as a species is far from guaranteed. The "hard pill" of a leftist perspective is a kind of bleak, depressive-realism. Things are really bad, we have very little power, we lose constantly, unbearably beautiful people we deeply love are beaten, jailed and murdered. I think it all demands a widening capacity to presence more and more emotional pain. 😬 Behind the vulgar spectacle of smirking politicians, idiotic pundits and inane advertisements for shit we don't need is an incredibly grim, real-life horror movie. It's crushing to see the depth and scope of it. The least fortunate of us are victims in the worst scenes of the horror show. Those outside of it generally try their best to avoid the pain of acknowledging it even exists. "This is fine." Others, whether they like it or not, seem naturally cursed with a deeper capacity for both seeing and "holding" this pain. Many people are driven at least a bit mad when exposed to too much, too suddenly. (Hence why some lefties can come off a bit "unhinged." We've seen some shit.) There might be a decent shamanic or Kundalini analogy one could make of all this. So I think at least one crucial component is, maybe just an apophatic way of restating what Steve already said so beautifully: Stop turning away from the pain in this world. Don't harden your heart to the suffering of those less fortunate and more vulnerable. I think an indication you're doing this "correctly" is that you'll probably cry more often. And experience more rage. Fun, right? I think this may be the price of admission, if you haven't already paid it. But it's through this, if you can bear it, that I believe you'll also eventually find yourself laughing and loving and creating more. This heart-broken-open place is the foundation from which I hope and believe that we might reenchant this floating world. Anyway, fuck, I hope none of this sounds like life advice. Jesus. I'm not qualified for that shit. 😂 Sean

Curious, do you consider the bans of racist and violent speech censorship? Because it sounds like we agree that there should be a line in the sand somewhere, just maybe not on precisely where. Sean

💯 There's a popular notion that the only civilized approach to social disagreement is to always hear out "all sides" in the "free marketplace of ideas", an imaginary immaterial abstraction. That opinions, no matter how brain-dead stupid or toxic, should always be honored and meticulously ironed out via public "intellectual" debate. But this kind of free speech absolutism is often a pretentious stance weaponized to platform memetic bigotry and silence already marginalized views. By extreme analogy, imagine if there were pro-slavery members on this forum. My stance is that it's a complete waste of time to argue with these people. It would pollute our space with the delusion that both sides of this "debate" are legitimate. Speech is not harmless. Speech has real, immediate, direct, material consequences on other human beings. Implicitly allowing socially toxic rhetoric to continue platforming itself unchecked in a space, poisons that space, and disproportionately harms the least powerful. Sean

👋 Howdy. It's been too long. Going to riff a bit from your post but don't feel like this is all directed at you or anything. While I think capitalism was historical progress from feudalism, I find it sad when people settle into capitalism as some kind of naturally occurring zenith of human civilization. Capitalism is structurally incapable of offering solutions to critical problems of exploitation, monopoly/monopsony, inequality, and environmental devastation. Socialism aims to secure the advances of capitalism without these disastrous inconsistencies. A recent U.N. report estimated that 40 million people are living in poverty in the United States, nearly 19 million of them in extreme poverty. The U.S. is one of the wealthiest capitalist countries in the world. If this were a report about the Soviet Union during the cold war, it would be used as clear evidence that communism is an abject failure. Reducing poverty is not a goal of capitalism. It's an incidental byproduct at best, and arguably only correlated not causative (e.g. industrialization seems more directly causal and need not be capitalist). Capitalism also creates and inherently perpetuates poverty. Native Americans were not in poverty before colonization. The trouble with trying to remain categorically middle-of-the-road is when you don't realize the entire road has been shifting beneath you in a single direction for 40 years. Both U.S. political parties have effectively converged on the same right-wing, neoliberal core that Reagan was peddling. It's in the capitalist class interest to keep proletariat focus on inflammatory culture wars and away from this fact. Outside of some softball, corporate-friendly, identity politicking, the Democratic Party has drifted only rightward for several decades. They're in no way inculpable for the rise of Trumpism. Democratic Party ghouls abandoned labor and left-wing politics in the 70s, escalating the decimation of hard-won unions. A once pro-working class party quietly morphed into a party by, and for, elite professionals. The fallout has been a poorer and increasingly disempowered working class more easily captivated by racial resentment narratives (amongst other misdirected conspiracy theories) and now without even financial motivations to vote socially. If the grotesque insincerity of center-right Democrats (e.g. Clinton and Obama) is the reason that anyone reading this has hitched to the neoreactionary Trump dump-truck, please find a local shaman to unbind this rotten hex. There's a better and much more magical way forward. ❤️ Sean

Speaking of Alan Moore, he was on one of my favorite podcasts last month:

100%. In fact, I apologize for often centering my politics on a U.S. perspective. I can be a dumb-dumb American like that. I try to stay knowledgeable of important international issues and trends. But I'm also already completely overwhelmed with how much cruelty and injustice is happening in my own country. 😞 😆 Great story. I love witchcraft as activism. Sean

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