GarbageShootAlt2

joined 2 years ago
[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 7 points 10 months ago (8 children)

Dude, setting aside what we think of Hamas, I wasn't talking about Hamas, I was talking about people in America protesting against genocide being branded as terrorist sympathizers.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 9 points 10 months ago (10 children)

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/07/25/statement-by-vice-president-kamala-harris-3/

She "knows what's up," and has self-consciously chosen to side with genocide, branding all of its opponents terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Have they been supported by AIPAC? Surely, but them personally getting a check from a foreign lobby that is mysteriously allowed to exist in US politics is not a good explanation for what is going on. Israel serves a purpose extending America's power in the Middle East and terrorizing its rivals. If Israel was against America's interests in the region, AIPAC wouldn't exist and America's lavish cooperation with Israel would not be happening.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 11 points 10 months ago

It's silly to act like individual values are some sacred, unassailable thing gifted to everyone's soul by the heavens, rather than something that came from a combination of inborn human traits and memories*, i.e. they are something that is contingent, changing, and in no way above being questioned.

It's also silly to act like it makes sense to just have a blanket acceptance of something if it's an "individual value" even though, when we look at the world, individual values can sometimes be extremely fucked up and we shouldn't allow people who would enact those values to abuse with impunity.

*"memories" is simplistic, but I don't think it is catastrophically so.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Ah, I see! Please, instruct me further: For how long will it be permissible to blame the Kamala regime for their crimes? For surely there will be a new Most Important Election of Our Lifetime next election, as there has been for at least the last three (and arguably the last dozen or more), and by this logic it would be terrible to imperil the that election as well. Shall it be whenever the new Republican we're calling Uniquely Fascist announces their candidacy, and/or when the media instructs us that an already-announced candidate turns out to be Uniquely Fascist? The election cycles seem to be starting earlier and earlier each year, so I don't expect you could produce a date for when it becomes unacceptable to state obvious facts, but surely something must tell us the window of time it is Ideal!

You must understand, this is all so very complicated, so it's good to have an Adult in the Room to help out us children.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 6 points 10 months ago (3 children)

right now is the exact wrong time to be raising alarm bells and turning blame toward the Biden Administration. It’s not that they haven’t made mistakes;

They haven't made mistakes. What they are doing is deliberate. They are not some oafish giant who tripped and fell and flattened a section of Gaza. They are continuously supplying bombs of all kinds to a military committing the one of the most well-documented genocides in history.

What's the correct schedule for blaming the material facilitator of a genocide for their actions, if you wouldn't mind instructing us plebeians according to your enlightened timetables? Is it the two years following an election but not the two years beforehand?

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 0 points 10 months ago

There's nothing about men in Korea being sexist that makes it worth supporting people who maliciously spread racial stereotypes or TERFism.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 0 points 10 months ago

I couldn't possibly know your motivations, nor the author's, I just find your choice to whitewash racism disreputable. Maybe you just have such a burning hatred for EA that you think that it's expedient to run cover for racists -- I think you wouldn't be alone in that mindset, though not in good company either -- but I think it's silly to waste time on such speculation into the internal state of some random account. All I am concerned with is the result.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago

The formatting is admittedly not the most readable, but this is the best article I have seen on the topic.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I find this reply very strange because it's the core point of Marxism that it's dialectical but materialist. It has a lot of forebears, but Hegel is the most direct and obvious of them.

This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.

That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age. To these limits, a third must be added; Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the "Idea", existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also the last of its kind.

It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning.

-- Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

i don’t think social change boils down to just one theory.

If we believe that the universe fundamentally makes sense, then it must stem from that that it can all be explained on the same terms. Furthermore, within a domain, the extent to which a theory is unable to explain some part of that domain is the extent to which it either fails or is in-utero just a component of a larger theory whose other parts can cover those other areas. Not only can social change boil down to one theory, if you believe we live in an interconnected, logical world, it must boil down to one theory. Obviously there are many competitors for that title, and none of them are yet developed enough to properly claim it, but it is a legitimate and even a necessary title.

Edit: Sorry for piling on about the dialectics part, I see Cowbee did go over it later. fwiw I think he didn't represent materialism fairly, but part of why I included the Engels quote is because I think he does represent Hegelian idealism and its fundamental problem (How can this dialectic of humans -- material beings -- take place in the world of ideas?) fairly.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 11 points 10 months ago

Most people will take "freedom" as an axiom, but how "freedom" is defined varies a lot. In a society where the commons are pretty much fully enclosed and you are homeless, the petite-bourgeois may very well be free, but you really aren't.

[–] GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

4B can be described as some kind of feminist, but it's also extremely reactionary.

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