The genocide in Gaza.

What I wanna know is did he make the myum myum myum cookie monster voice when he did it? this could be the October surprise Republicans dream for if he didn’t say “myum myum cookies” while biting the babies

The Book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnneman. Weird self help name, but its a book on biases, research which Kahnneman won the nobel prize. Once I started questioning my preconceptions it completely changed my whole perspective on the world. Its like that list of fallacies that you study in philo 101, but they’re not like dialogical fallacies they appear in our own thinking. And “experts” are more likely to get fooled in their own fields of research than laypeople when asked trick questions

Only if you look at things a certain way. There’s real danger to believing that you lack actual subjectivity, its like reverse solipsism, and is basically the worst version of doomerism.

If you look at things dialectically and Materialistically, subjectivity can’t be avoided

That would sound amazing

Well there’s some things i agree with strongly, although I believe I still disagree with your definition of the word “fascist.” But it’s not an important difference since you’ve taken it up to actually try and learn history and make sense of it all. Very “class conscious worker” of you.

Do you do any organizing outside of your studies? You seem energetic, and class conscious workers have to get together and (imo) do political organizing, like how you discussed. I agree its a lousy time for consciousness but it think its changing. Time will tell. Thanks for the history lesson, appreciate you making time

So What’cha Want by the Beastie Boys

*more than

Idk about that, but there’s def similarities. I think its dangerous to mischaracterize things that aren’t fascist as fascist, as popular movements which have done so seem to actually accelerate the spread of fascism. One a them dialectical historic contradictions.

But I don’t say this to take the wind out of anyone’s militancy against the all but unchecked rise of the anti-democratic authoritarian right. By the time something that is almost fascism becomes fully formed it is too late.

But it is worthwhile to use care when applying the term.

Right I was just joking. I’ve seen a lot of cases of this, not as pronounced as “husband loses his shit over wife’s vote” but def the situation where two young people fall in love, have kids, and then the guy becomes very conservative whereas the woman is like normal-conservative where maybe she doesn’t have all the right “takes” but she has a shred of common sense and maybe even decency to realize that women bleeding out in ERs due to complications from a miscarriage is not just cruel and pointless but unsustainable if certain theories of historical development are to be trusted.

Kind of ironic since Hitler based Germany’s immigration laws on USA’s.

Oh is this a thing that academics predicted? Welcome to the 1840s, Guardian

Also blaming the billionaires for destabilizing the economy is only partially true. The system is unstable, but billionaires profit from “instability”, so sure they cause it as much as the system causes billionaires and millionaires.

The problem isn’t who owns gigantic companies like Walmart and amazon and google and apple, the problem is that they can be privately owned. The instability isn’t a bug so much as a feature. Its not the individuals, it’s the system. Individuals can make adjustments, sometimes very critical ones but the system doesn’t pick winners based on who does the best at adhering to externalized ideals, it picks winners based on who can create the most profit for owners, profit made of the immense amount of collected time and energy siphoned off of workers.

you get into these things when you’re younger.

What, chauvanistic conservativism?

Anarchist socialist antifa liberal democrats have infiltrated MAGA, die mad about it

Increased interest rates make it more expensive for businesses to borrow money. This causes them to tighten up expenses to remain profitable which means cutting hours and laying people off. The more people that are unemployed, the lower wages become.

Inflation is caused by companies raising prices in response to higher revenues. Forcing people into unemployment stops that by taking money out of circulation, it just sits in accounts as capital, rather than being used to pay wages

He’s a fucking Vanderbilt, he’ll be fine

Putin seems to make implicit threats every time he opens his mouth, and I’m sure Musk’s “I’m a very dangerous crazy loose cannon billionaire” that is such a huge part of his public image, even – maybe especially – with heads of state, went over extremely well with an actually very dangerous guy who tames loose cannon billionaires as a part of his actually very dangerous job.

This is garbage why should I care about what some nerd with a sub stack thinks about other academics? Intellectuals suck, Marxist intellectuals are no exception. So in the wake of MacCarthyism, at the dawn of Neoliberalism, intellectuals in universities were being pressured to gravitate away from Marx. No shit. Does this mean they were correct to do so? Well the death of the militant labor movement around the same time would give us some indication.

Why would you care so much to try and ensure that people don’t read very good books that you likely havent read? Seems like someone with an axe to grind. But let me assure anyone who is reading this, Marxist Intellectuals are as big a pain I’m the ass, and kind of necessary, as they are in any other org. The problem isn’t with the intellectuals though, it’s that there’s not enough regular working people who read and understand revolutionary theory to push back against them and their tendencies toward splits and polemics and laziness.

This is the problem with not reading Marxism though, the basis of the argument is “all these smart people stopped studying Marx” and takes it for granted that it is because the source material was somehow incorrect. And maybe some of it was, there’s no shortage of that. But that explanation completely ignores structural and social pressures that would have been a clearer and more direct explanation than, “all at once all these smart nerds left Marxism, so they must have been right to do so.” This is not what causes a mass exodus. What causes someone to leave a field of study for another one is the threat that their livelihood will be taken away.

Its so funny I wonder if this would have worked on someone who was new to Marxism. Homie I’m so far gone, if you think this post might be the reason someone would give up on reading Marx that person would have to be already unfamiliar. Actually engaging with other Marxists will do more to run you out of Marxism than this goofy ass nerd ass substack

I did neither of those things, literally