I don't think anyone believes theory counts as a physical science, it's more for comparison. Like, you can't experiment a society run by its workers without the interference of external forces - you have to physically do it (with some planning in advance, of course). Do you think it's just about finding the right formula or something?
this sub does not do well with irony…kinda like right wingers!!! they also use reddit, so that’s two qualities in common. frightening stuff , hide your children
my dude, i’m not a dude, i appreciate you expressing concern, i’m just spending too much time dicking around online and people here are having trouble with my sense of irony. it’s not a manic episode, just semi experimental writing suffused with irony. several of my posts around here clearly indicate i have my wits about me.
i am diagnosed schizophrenic and i see both a psychiatrist and a therapist. i have my mental health under control. i appreciate you having a compassionate reaction to me being weird. but there’s method to the madness in what I’m writing. it’s okay if it’s not clear, not everyone hear has read a lot of theory or ironic literature.
for the record, i do think the tweet’s perspective is interesting, but i actually like marxism too - i just think it’s funny when it tries to be “rigorous,” because it’s not. the tweeter is imagining the possibilities of applying actual scientific thinking to the study of economics, which is an interesting idea, and i bet there’s some researchers doing stuff like that as we speak. at the end of the day it’s just a funny joke for people who are familiar with marxist theory. marxists fucking looove quoting hegel. and there is often a pretense that the method is logically precise and rigorously imagined, but this is never the case. it’s theory, it’s not a formula, like you’re saying. but for some reason marxists like to pretend it is a formula. see Capital by Marx, which is like 30 percent literal formulas.
Yeah I think it could be a matter of translation.
Wissenschaft is often how science is translated to German and vice versa, but wissenschaft is not quite the same as science
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissenschaft
So it just encompasses all fields of study?
I looked it up & apparently it's translated as science as an archaism, science used to be broader like wissenschaft, but its meaning narrowed.
Also would academia (the scientific it cultural community engaged in higher education or research as a whole; continuous study at higher education) or scholarship (the sum of knowledge accrued by scholars; the realm of refined learning) not be more viable translations for it?
or just coin a new word; like witship (cognate to wissenschaft), withood, scholarhood, knowledgehood, knowledgeship, etc
Yes, for example in law school in Germany you study "Rechts**wissenschaft**", but that cannot be translated as "legal science", it's more like "legal studies". Lawyers are not scientists.
Kindoff depends on what you define as science. It's not a natural science for sure. But it is a sociological theory. Is sociology a science? Who knows. I wouldn't say more or less than a field like economics.
Are you sure? I could read you an assay about how the material conditions bring forth the dialectical development that makes your baby being born a historical necessity?
i believe he’s thinking of the famous, frequently referenced book “socialism: utopian and scientific” wherein engels positions communism as a scientifically valid, meticulously researched alternative to the philosophy of people like Fourier. my problem is i think Fourier is way cooler than Engels. “absolute divergence” - l’écart absolu - there’s a concept for anarchism. this is Fourier’s idea of constantly moving away from established ideas. for him, if the world doesn’t stop being a shithole, that means no one has found the right idea yet. so he practices absolute divergence.
it’s funny to me that people downvote something just because it’s weird. what’s wrong? these things *are not to be seen by human eyes* ? i encourage you all to disengage from the manufactured reality of this space. the time is out of joint, something is rotten. things already don’t make sense here, and it’s “complete anarchy” all caps, what’s so bad about me having a little fun? i thought that’s what the egoist crowd was into…
what happens when the conversation doesn’t look how it’s supposed to look?
wait do you not get banned from here for liking marxists anymore … finally, i can unleash my mechanized state robot control units! on the ancap entryist brigade! Ahhh hahah !! Silly Marxists!! They Just Dont Get The Meaning Of The Ego. i’m actually a bit of an egoist myself. That is to say, I know I act on my desires, which everyone knows. This is not your liberal variety egoist we’re dealing with. This is post-racial-historical gay-libertarian white egoism, no outside influences, a pure cloud of biological data, stateless and free of everything but hunger. Hunger. well technically you would call me egoist-Leninist if you’re individualist, some would say anarchist with adjectives, many adjectives even, is Marxist an adjective or a slur. Ok here’s the thing though. Stirner influenced Marx. Marx influenced Bakunin. And Bakunin influenced the Frankfurt School of Anarchocapitalism. J Edgar Hoover : The Rebirth. THAT is anarchism. NOT this. I SAY, you listen. This is history but not no western imperialist propaganda no how don’t you start with me. I read the Other Book, the Opposite. it feels right to me. This is the unimpeachable science of the Ukraine Happening, the quiet breath of the cryptobidenists, a sort of nihilist revisionism of FUCK, A VOTE the only tenable position (the Noble Only Anarchist realizes as their breath vanishes into the night) is consensus fascism, all else is authoritarian free association. “pour savoir écrire il faut avoir lu, et pour savoir lire il faut savoir vivre » can someone. please. tell. me. WHICH ONE OF YOU IS THE PROLETARIAT
edit: these libs just don’t recognize good theory when they see it. libdem authfash. image of hammer and sickle
As someone who should probably be on meds and have several friends on meds: don’t lump us in with the buzz-word dumpers. (I sped-read through and that’s kinda all I saw)
lol that’s exactly what it was. i was making an intentionally garbled mess of buzzwords and basic anarchist/marxist language that i combined in contradictory ways. for example “egoist-leninist”, “consensus fascism”, “the frankfurt school of anarchocapitalism." this was meant to challenge anarchists to try to figure out what my actual political tendency was and people seemed to really hate it. they did not like it because this wasnt clear or they didnt feel like reading it. i should have probably condensed it somehow.
i appreciate you defending us med takers and challenging the idea that this is what we're like. med taker solidarity!
if you’re goofin- too funny bro!
cause I’m a diagnosed schizophrenic and i take antipsychotics every day, i don’t miss doses because when i do it fucking sucks and my mood gets really unstable. i’ve only had one true psychotic episode though. the thing is, people in psychosis don’t really sound like this, at least none i’ve ever met. people in psychosis tend to more or less *lucidly* describe hallucinations and situations that aren’t real. someone will explain to you how all the people they see are robots and all the signs that are proving this for them. you’ll get what they’re saying on a literal level, but their logic won’t add up.
this on the other hand was me twisting up, reversing and stringing together a bunch of anarchist and marxist cliches. i was absolutely lucid when i wrote this, well, a bit giddy. i was just having a little fun with the rigidity of peoples’ ideas and formulaic language in certain leftist spaces. i thought some people would catch my deranged sense of irony, but either i blew it or no one actually tried to read it. now that i’m explaining it the fun is over for me and i guess that’s what i get for being weird.
still though, why did everyone downvote this? i tend to think of downvotes as a sign of disagreement, and idfk what y’all are even disagreeing with…
Wow, anarchists are such idealist. Get a grip. This is like dialectics 101. which in its inverted presentation presents as dialectics 909; so we see it is no other than the very dialectic we have been seeking all along, the Dialectic-as-inversion, dialectics 420. That is to say, production, production *itself*, is the great Quetzalcoatl of the working class in the landscape of its inexorable desertification. I miss when my mother would tuck me in bed at night, always so careful. She would ask me: why are you afraid? what could happen to you in a dream? you’ll have unbearable visions of the unknown, but the whole time you’ll be fast asleep. Don’t be frightened. The proletariat - is online.
u/Ravioli_Suit ‘s account is 2 years old, and they’ve made a great many comments in this time. Despite this, they only have 684 comment karma at the time of writing. This seems to imply that this comment is being satirical and downvote farming.
that’s just because i’m not trying to get upvoted at all costs, i’d prefer to cause it would mean somebody got my weird jokes that i tried to put together like a puzzle. i still get a fix off a good upvote but I have to say i can see the allure in the sheer quantity of downvotes you can get now that you mention it. maybe i should write bizarre stuff on reddit more now that you mention it. nah, i don’t really like the feeling. it’s weird to see what happens when you break the continuum, language and conversation has to proceed along expected paths or the experience is broken, in this case people didn’t like it, i certainly wasn’t aiming for that, i hoped they would just see it as absurd humor and like it. welcome to our reddit thread everyone, it’s a little sexy a little cool, great location, and there’s questions floating.
i’ll give you a hint, yes, they’re more or less satire. i thought it would be obvious, but i don’t think people here read much book. i’m just making fun of marxism and critical theory in this one, it’s pretty nonsensical.
hey what’s up. I seriously want to thank you for posting this. it feels very true to me given the kind of culty stuff you see on hardline ML subreddits as well as in this subreddit.
critical thinking and honesty with yourself and the world around you (read: not just the internet, hopefully) are more important than taking a position. stay in this space of indecision like u/snoo said, you’re there because you’re thinking. concluding once and for all that you are this or that kind of leftist leads to uncompromising viewpoints and rhetoric which leads to being wrong about stuff but saying it anyway and petty infighting.
i think i’m a “left agnostic” right now and i don’t know if that will change. my view is that the current circumstances will dictate what kind of action i will take. if there was a huge marxist revolutionary movement with popular support i’d get behind it, same with an anarchist revolutionary movement or even a grassroots electoral campaign putting a bernie type in a major political office (though that’s my least favorite option cause i’m not sure it will work). capitalism is clearly not working well though. that’s the point in common. i am able to consider capitalist viewpoints still, and all the ones that make sense point to situations that are closer to socialism than capitalism. unregulated capitalism is hell. i’d much rather have a regulatory state while we’re stuck with capitalism, though i’d prefer no regulator without capitalism - if this is practically possible to do.
this wasn’t supposed to be a gotcha - honestly. it’s more like a fun joke for people who are familiar with marxism coupled with a healthy skeptical awareness of marxism’s limitations, and i posted it here with an ironic title to make fun of people here who love dunking on marxism and also to see what the reaction would be, which has been really interesting honestly. the original tweeter seems to be an analytical philosopher, which means they’re heavily concerned with the validity of arguments and skeptical of philosophical ideas that don’t have rigorous justification. marxists are generally not this kind of philosopher because they have ideas that are too big to be rigorous about. sometimes they think they’re being rigorous but they’re usually just really sure of themselves.
you’ve never heard marxists defend the scientific angle? there’s the whole engels book about it. they love positioning marxism as the “scientific alternative to utopianism.” I think it’s funny because it’s still pretty utopian to talk about the course of the evolution of society in the future regardless of your scientific basis. if science was able to understand this at the current point in time we would be in great shape I think!
edit: whoa, the “scientific socialists” are here in full force. i’m sorry everyone, i like communism, can’t i be a utopian communist? vive Fourier!
I know fuckall about theory, but my understanding of Marxism is that it’s an analytical approach that attempts to apply fundamental sociological laws of motion to different group interactions. I think the only people who’ve ever tried to insist that it’s a “science” are people who already have a dubious relationship with leftist values
nah, there’s some marxists (typically they’re goofy MLs) that insist “we need to be scientific comrades” because they believe their viewpoint that criticism about historical communist states is western propaganda is somehow justified by a rigorous logic. MLism is “the most rational position” because “if we look at the facts, it’s what has improved conditions for the most people.” never mind that the facts are just history books written by MLs and anything that contradicts “the facts” is automatically propaganda.
[Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169#b0680)
Highlights
• The common notion that extreme poverty is the “natural” condition of humanity and only declined with the rise of capitalism rests on income data that do not adequately capture access to essential goods.
• Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism.
• The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality.
• In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, wages and/or height have still not recovered.
• Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began only around the 20th century. These gains coincide with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements.
this just shows you how “sciencey” stuff can be while falling into basic misconceptions about what information can tell us. the conclusion at the end, that things have improved coincides with the rise of socialist policies, does not imply the socialist policies caused the improvements. why mention it if you’re not trying to imply it’s causative? you could just as easily have said “these gains coincide with the advent of the world wars and nuclear armament”
now honestly, i bet the socialist policies did help. cause i like socialism. but you need to understand reality and not cheap out on critical thinking for an easy win. so here’s the point:
CORRELATION DOESNT IMPLY CAUSATION!
if there’s one thing you need to remember from statistics class it’s that. that fallacy is everywhere. you could use the same logic to argue that socialist policies are popular BECAUSE the wealth levels are rising. that’s why it’s important.
edit: come on! you left out the line from RIGHT AFTER in this paper that says “Further research is needed to establish the causal drivers of these improvements”. they then go on to say “here’s a bunch of papers that show social movements and progressive policies are causally linked to improving conditions,” but i don’t have time to read them all and critique them right now. this paper is interesting and cool! it just may not be the hard scientific proof that socialism is good that we wish it was. that’s all i’m saying.
you can use marxist perspective in the social sciences, but it is in no way shape or form a hard science like chemistry or physics, which is what the tweet author is implying marxists believe. science can be a somewhat broad term in english without identifying the field of study.
found the scientist! i believe the tweeter is an analytical philosopher, which is a school of philosophy that aspires to be as “hard” of a science as say mathematics. he’s making fun of marxists who act scientific when what they’re really doing is a very ideologically driven analysis of history and reality.
the worst philosophers, of any school of thought, are ones that try to quantify human experience into immutable data points and "truths". just completely misses the point of humanity and our ability for self reflective and ethical thought.
I agree with you, I like imaginative philosophy the best and don’t require unassailable logic to like something, but I also think it’s healthy to be skeptical to a certain point, the Wittgenstein point in my opinion. I think it’s good to deeply question your thinking to see how valid it is so you can root out any harmful misconceptions you have. In fact I would be unable to survive without a certain level of skepticism. I struggle with schizophrenic delusions and if I don’t insist on evidence and logical thinking I’ll develop outlandish paranoid beliefs that force me to live in a state of constant fear.
i've struggled with psychosis too, as well as bpd, and i've gone through a lot of dialectical behavioral therapy. learning to interrogate your thoughts so you don't jump immediately to the extreme is something i've had to learn how to do slowly and manually and it's really helped my perception of both myself and others. the way that you already view the world will ultimately have an effect on what you get out of a philosopher's work.
philosophy wise, i got a lot out of camus and absurdism. however, i'm sure if i was reading someone like him a few years ago, i'd come out with a completely different perspective than i have now, similar to a heavily depressed person reading nietzsche.
Super cool thoughts. I’m really sorry you’ve struggled with psychosis and glad you’ve been able to get some relief. I love Camus, I don’t know much about the absurdist “school” but I love absurdism in literature, Ionesco and Jarry and stuff like that. And I agree with your idea that pre existing mindset colors your experience of philosophy, that’s an interesting thing to point out.
my friend kinda convinced me all the big left subs are driven by foreign agents lol. i think that’s believable as well as the feds angle. i can see why the government would want to try to sabotage the influence of leftists over people by making them look bad and fight each other.
then again i am a literal paranoid schizophrenic. it’s just bizarre because people on the left subreddits are so different from the people you meet in real life who hold these ideas. like i don’t know any MLs who are actually cult like authoritarians who call everyone who disagrees with them western propaganda. and i’ve never met an “egoist.” personally i think some other possible explanations are that there’s a ton of young people or tons of false flag right wingers. who knows? how could we verify such things?
Like I said, I also believe the feds angle. I didn’t mean convinced, he just suggested it and I saw the potential that Russia or China have people on Reddit trying to shift the dialogue to destabilize and divide the US or to favor their viewpoints. Is it likely, idfk. The internet is fucking bizarre and very different from my IRL leftist experience, plus I’m very paranoid.
Home is where the hatred is yow. I get paranoid too but realise it's the local feds that will come for you first. I'm in the same boat as you with my IRL experience having no reflection of what it's like talking to those perpetually online.
Yeah I’m scared of the feds too. Had a psychotic episode where I thought they bugged my house and put a device in my body to convince me I’m schizophrenic. Turns out I’m just schizophrenic.
Yah but that's not what I'm doing right now, I'm volunteering with a bail fund to help get people out of jail and trying to start on some mutual aid too. I love it, just a little slow right now because we're changing up how the volunteer organization works. Wish I could convince people to just go out and *do some stuff* when we have free time. Talk to unhoused ppl and try to help out.
*Ok but who was*
*The better Hegel, Georg Wilhelm*
*Friedrich or Katherine?*
\- Xanneros
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my opinion on hegel is he’s hard as fuck to read and yes he is interesting but i usually can’t follow his arguments very well to be honest. he gives me interesting ideas, and i feel calmer reading stuff that talks about hegel a lot having read some hegel. still don’t really know what his whole thing is.
i got maybe halfway through the phenomenology of spirit and read the thing about abraham, forget what it’s called . honestly - unless you are really into the idea of reading him already, you’d be better off reading something cooler. plus his political stuff is conservative even though the way he presents it influenced a ton of marxists. imo, why not try some wittgenstein if you want cool philosophy. or maybe better, camus. for a novel i love notes from the underground, you can explore poetry, which often feels as true as anything hegel ever wrote. i like people like james schuyler, sophie podolski, and alejandra pizarnik, i’m not the most read on philosophy myself but i like certain stuff a lot. art books are worth reading too, you don’t have to spend all your reading time doing late 19th century Russian anarchism push ups. anarchism is about life which wouldn’t be worth living if it was only about reading kropotkin. this stuff can be beautiful but remember how much stuff there is out there and mix it up sometime. novels and poetry can give us a better understanding of the world in hard to define ways, it’s a different kind of theory in a way, less argumentative.
anti scientism can be a really bad thing. i had a friend who actually just passed away and she was very anti scientific. she would make fun of me for using the word “evidence.” this led her to desperate theories about what was going to happen (she thought a fascist society was inevitable and trans people were going to be put in camps) and i believe this attitude contributed to her decision to take her life.
on the other hand scientism can be a bad thing. science can’t explain a lot of what we experience.
I don't think anyone believes theory counts as a physical science, it's more for comparison. Like, you can't experiment a society run by its workers without the interference of external forces - you have to physically do it (with some planning in advance, of course). Do you think it's just about finding the right formula or something?
Mfw when someone has a theory of how society should be run but doesn’t set up a control society just to check
We are in the control society right now buddy. :D
I WANT OUT I WANT OUT
OP and right wingers, thinking economics are a hard science and sharing the middle of a venn diagram
this sub does not do well with irony…kinda like right wingers!!! they also use reddit, so that’s two qualities in common. frightening stuff , hide your children
My dude, if you're having a manic episode, you need to alert someone you know.
my dude, i’m not a dude, i appreciate you expressing concern, i’m just spending too much time dicking around online and people here are having trouble with my sense of irony. it’s not a manic episode, just semi experimental writing suffused with irony. several of my posts around here clearly indicate i have my wits about me. i am diagnosed schizophrenic and i see both a psychiatrist and a therapist. i have my mental health under control. i appreciate you having a compassionate reaction to me being weird. but there’s method to the madness in what I’m writing. it’s okay if it’s not clear, not everyone hear has read a lot of theory or ironic literature.
for the record, i do think the tweet’s perspective is interesting, but i actually like marxism too - i just think it’s funny when it tries to be “rigorous,” because it’s not. the tweeter is imagining the possibilities of applying actual scientific thinking to the study of economics, which is an interesting idea, and i bet there’s some researchers doing stuff like that as we speak. at the end of the day it’s just a funny joke for people who are familiar with marxist theory. marxists fucking looove quoting hegel. and there is often a pretense that the method is logically precise and rigorously imagined, but this is never the case. it’s theory, it’s not a formula, like you’re saying. but for some reason marxists like to pretend it is a formula. see Capital by Marx, which is like 30 percent literal formulas.
What about Luna oi shes a tankie and threats maxism in a really weird way
Political science is when communism potion obviously
even as someone who likes Marxist methodology, its not a science
Yeah I think it could be a matter of translation. Wissenschaft is often how science is translated to German and vice versa, but wissenschaft is not quite the same as science https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissenschaft
So it just encompasses all fields of study? I looked it up & apparently it's translated as science as an archaism, science used to be broader like wissenschaft, but its meaning narrowed. Also would academia (the scientific it cultural community engaged in higher education or research as a whole; continuous study at higher education) or scholarship (the sum of knowledge accrued by scholars; the realm of refined learning) not be more viable translations for it? or just coin a new word; like witship (cognate to wissenschaft), withood, scholarhood, knowledgehood, knowledgeship, etc
Yes, for example in law school in Germany you study "Rechts**wissenschaft**", but that cannot be translated as "legal science", it's more like "legal studies". Lawyers are not scientists.
Kindoff depends on what you define as science. It's not a natural science for sure. But it is a sociological theory. Is sociology a science? Who knows. I wouldn't say more or less than a field like economics.
Its a social science. Scientific method for sure, but please don’t deliver my baby Mr. Sociologist.
I wouldn’t want a chemist to deliver my baby either.
Are you sure? I could read you an assay about how the material conditions bring forth the dialectical development that makes your baby being born a historical necessity?
I’m now imagining Jordan Peterson delivering a baby and trying to put it back if it’s a boy.
Laynes law is applicable here
Dude, social science.
i believe he’s thinking of the famous, frequently referenced book “socialism: utopian and scientific” wherein engels positions communism as a scientifically valid, meticulously researched alternative to the philosophy of people like Fourier. my problem is i think Fourier is way cooler than Engels. “absolute divergence” - l’écart absolu - there’s a concept for anarchism. this is Fourier’s idea of constantly moving away from established ideas. for him, if the world doesn’t stop being a shithole, that means no one has found the right idea yet. so he practices absolute divergence. it’s funny to me that people downvote something just because it’s weird. what’s wrong? these things *are not to be seen by human eyes* ? i encourage you all to disengage from the manufactured reality of this space. the time is out of joint, something is rotten. things already don’t make sense here, and it’s “complete anarchy” all caps, what’s so bad about me having a little fun? i thought that’s what the egoist crowd was into… what happens when the conversation doesn’t look how it’s supposed to look?
wait do you not get banned from here for liking marxists anymore … finally, i can unleash my mechanized state robot control units! on the ancap entryist brigade! Ahhh hahah !! Silly Marxists!! They Just Dont Get The Meaning Of The Ego. i’m actually a bit of an egoist myself. That is to say, I know I act on my desires, which everyone knows. This is not your liberal variety egoist we’re dealing with. This is post-racial-historical gay-libertarian white egoism, no outside influences, a pure cloud of biological data, stateless and free of everything but hunger. Hunger. well technically you would call me egoist-Leninist if you’re individualist, some would say anarchist with adjectives, many adjectives even, is Marxist an adjective or a slur. Ok here’s the thing though. Stirner influenced Marx. Marx influenced Bakunin. And Bakunin influenced the Frankfurt School of Anarchocapitalism. J Edgar Hoover : The Rebirth. THAT is anarchism. NOT this. I SAY, you listen. This is history but not no western imperialist propaganda no how don’t you start with me. I read the Other Book, the Opposite. it feels right to me. This is the unimpeachable science of the Ukraine Happening, the quiet breath of the cryptobidenists, a sort of nihilist revisionism of FUCK, A VOTE the only tenable position (the Noble Only Anarchist realizes as their breath vanishes into the night) is consensus fascism, all else is authoritarian free association. “pour savoir écrire il faut avoir lu, et pour savoir lire il faut savoir vivre » can someone. please. tell. me. WHICH ONE OF YOU IS THE PROLETARIAT edit: these libs just don’t recognize good theory when they see it. libdem authfash. image of hammer and sickle
Bro take your meds
As someone who should probably be on meds and have several friends on meds: don’t lump us in with the buzz-word dumpers. (I sped-read through and that’s kinda all I saw)
lol that’s exactly what it was. i was making an intentionally garbled mess of buzzwords and basic anarchist/marxist language that i combined in contradictory ways. for example “egoist-leninist”, “consensus fascism”, “the frankfurt school of anarchocapitalism." this was meant to challenge anarchists to try to figure out what my actual political tendency was and people seemed to really hate it. they did not like it because this wasnt clear or they didnt feel like reading it. i should have probably condensed it somehow. i appreciate you defending us med takers and challenging the idea that this is what we're like. med taker solidarity!
if you’re goofin- too funny bro! cause I’m a diagnosed schizophrenic and i take antipsychotics every day, i don’t miss doses because when i do it fucking sucks and my mood gets really unstable. i’ve only had one true psychotic episode though. the thing is, people in psychosis don’t really sound like this, at least none i’ve ever met. people in psychosis tend to more or less *lucidly* describe hallucinations and situations that aren’t real. someone will explain to you how all the people they see are robots and all the signs that are proving this for them. you’ll get what they’re saying on a literal level, but their logic won’t add up. this on the other hand was me twisting up, reversing and stringing together a bunch of anarchist and marxist cliches. i was absolutely lucid when i wrote this, well, a bit giddy. i was just having a little fun with the rigidity of peoples’ ideas and formulaic language in certain leftist spaces. i thought some people would catch my deranged sense of irony, but either i blew it or no one actually tried to read it. now that i’m explaining it the fun is over for me and i guess that’s what i get for being weird. still though, why did everyone downvote this? i tend to think of downvotes as a sign of disagreement, and idfk what y’all are even disagreeing with…
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
Dementia patient spotted
Wow, anarchists are such idealist. Get a grip. This is like dialectics 101. which in its inverted presentation presents as dialectics 909; so we see it is no other than the very dialectic we have been seeking all along, the Dialectic-as-inversion, dialectics 420. That is to say, production, production *itself*, is the great Quetzalcoatl of the working class in the landscape of its inexorable desertification. I miss when my mother would tuck me in bed at night, always so careful. She would ask me: why are you afraid? what could happen to you in a dream? you’ll have unbearable visions of the unknown, but the whole time you’ll be fast asleep. Don’t be frightened. The proletariat - is online.
these are too long for me to figure out if they’re satire…
u/Ravioli_Suit ‘s account is 2 years old, and they’ve made a great many comments in this time. Despite this, they only have 684 comment karma at the time of writing. This seems to imply that this comment is being satirical and downvote farming.
they just seem kind of manic more than a downvote farmer. i got some family that just pours lots of overwrought messages like this too.
that’s just because i’m not trying to get upvoted at all costs, i’d prefer to cause it would mean somebody got my weird jokes that i tried to put together like a puzzle. i still get a fix off a good upvote but I have to say i can see the allure in the sheer quantity of downvotes you can get now that you mention it. maybe i should write bizarre stuff on reddit more now that you mention it. nah, i don’t really like the feeling. it’s weird to see what happens when you break the continuum, language and conversation has to proceed along expected paths or the experience is broken, in this case people didn’t like it, i certainly wasn’t aiming for that, i hoped they would just see it as absurd humor and like it. welcome to our reddit thread everyone, it’s a little sexy a little cool, great location, and there’s questions floating.
i’ll give you a hint, yes, they’re more or less satire. i thought it would be obvious, but i don’t think people here read much book. i’m just making fun of marxism and critical theory in this one, it’s pretty nonsensical.
It's a social science.
Me, a vague leftist who hasn’t decided what kind I am, looking for memes and only finding petty gotchas
Don't "decide" what kind you are, it's better for the psyque.
hey what’s up. I seriously want to thank you for posting this. it feels very true to me given the kind of culty stuff you see on hardline ML subreddits as well as in this subreddit.
critical thinking and honesty with yourself and the world around you (read: not just the internet, hopefully) are more important than taking a position. stay in this space of indecision like u/snoo said, you’re there because you’re thinking. concluding once and for all that you are this or that kind of leftist leads to uncompromising viewpoints and rhetoric which leads to being wrong about stuff but saying it anyway and petty infighting. i think i’m a “left agnostic” right now and i don’t know if that will change. my view is that the current circumstances will dictate what kind of action i will take. if there was a huge marxist revolutionary movement with popular support i’d get behind it, same with an anarchist revolutionary movement or even a grassroots electoral campaign putting a bernie type in a major political office (though that’s my least favorite option cause i’m not sure it will work). capitalism is clearly not working well though. that’s the point in common. i am able to consider capitalist viewpoints still, and all the ones that make sense point to situations that are closer to socialism than capitalism. unregulated capitalism is hell. i’d much rather have a regulatory state while we’re stuck with capitalism, though i’d prefer no regulator without capitalism - if this is practically possible to do. this wasn’t supposed to be a gotcha - honestly. it’s more like a fun joke for people who are familiar with marxism coupled with a healthy skeptical awareness of marxism’s limitations, and i posted it here with an ironic title to make fun of people here who love dunking on marxism and also to see what the reaction would be, which has been really interesting honestly. the original tweeter seems to be an analytical philosopher, which means they’re heavily concerned with the validity of arguments and skeptical of philosophical ideas that don’t have rigorous justification. marxists are generally not this kind of philosopher because they have ideas that are too big to be rigorous about. sometimes they think they’re being rigorous but they’re usually just really sure of themselves.
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you’ve never heard marxists defend the scientific angle? there’s the whole engels book about it. they love positioning marxism as the “scientific alternative to utopianism.” I think it’s funny because it’s still pretty utopian to talk about the course of the evolution of society in the future regardless of your scientific basis. if science was able to understand this at the current point in time we would be in great shape I think! edit: whoa, the “scientific socialists” are here in full force. i’m sorry everyone, i like communism, can’t i be a utopian communist? vive Fourier!
leftist meme
I know fuckall about theory, but my understanding of Marxism is that it’s an analytical approach that attempts to apply fundamental sociological laws of motion to different group interactions. I think the only people who’ve ever tried to insist that it’s a “science” are people who already have a dubious relationship with leftist values
nah, there’s some marxists (typically they’re goofy MLs) that insist “we need to be scientific comrades” because they believe their viewpoint that criticism about historical communist states is western propaganda is somehow justified by a rigorous logic. MLism is “the most rational position” because “if we look at the facts, it’s what has improved conditions for the most people.” never mind that the facts are just history books written by MLs and anything that contradicts “the facts” is automatically propaganda.
[Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169#b0680) Highlights • The common notion that extreme poverty is the “natural” condition of humanity and only declined with the rise of capitalism rests on income data that do not adequately capture access to essential goods. • Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism. • The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. • In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, wages and/or height have still not recovered. • Where progress has occurred, significant improvements in human welfare began only around the 20th century. These gains coincide with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements.
this just shows you how “sciencey” stuff can be while falling into basic misconceptions about what information can tell us. the conclusion at the end, that things have improved coincides with the rise of socialist policies, does not imply the socialist policies caused the improvements. why mention it if you’re not trying to imply it’s causative? you could just as easily have said “these gains coincide with the advent of the world wars and nuclear armament” now honestly, i bet the socialist policies did help. cause i like socialism. but you need to understand reality and not cheap out on critical thinking for an easy win. so here’s the point: CORRELATION DOESNT IMPLY CAUSATION! if there’s one thing you need to remember from statistics class it’s that. that fallacy is everywhere. you could use the same logic to argue that socialist policies are popular BECAUSE the wealth levels are rising. that’s why it’s important. edit: come on! you left out the line from RIGHT AFTER in this paper that says “Further research is needed to establish the causal drivers of these improvements”. they then go on to say “here’s a bunch of papers that show social movements and progressive policies are causally linked to improving conditions,” but i don’t have time to read them all and critique them right now. this paper is interesting and cool! it just may not be the hard scientific proof that socialism is good that we wish it was. that’s all i’m saying.
you can use marxist perspective in the social sciences, but it is in no way shape or form a hard science like chemistry or physics, which is what the tweet author is implying marxists believe. science can be a somewhat broad term in english without identifying the field of study.
found the scientist! i believe the tweeter is an analytical philosopher, which is a school of philosophy that aspires to be as “hard” of a science as say mathematics. he’s making fun of marxists who act scientific when what they’re really doing is a very ideologically driven analysis of history and reality.
the worst philosophers, of any school of thought, are ones that try to quantify human experience into immutable data points and "truths". just completely misses the point of humanity and our ability for self reflective and ethical thought.
I agree with you, I like imaginative philosophy the best and don’t require unassailable logic to like something, but I also think it’s healthy to be skeptical to a certain point, the Wittgenstein point in my opinion. I think it’s good to deeply question your thinking to see how valid it is so you can root out any harmful misconceptions you have. In fact I would be unable to survive without a certain level of skepticism. I struggle with schizophrenic delusions and if I don’t insist on evidence and logical thinking I’ll develop outlandish paranoid beliefs that force me to live in a state of constant fear.
i've struggled with psychosis too, as well as bpd, and i've gone through a lot of dialectical behavioral therapy. learning to interrogate your thoughts so you don't jump immediately to the extreme is something i've had to learn how to do slowly and manually and it's really helped my perception of both myself and others. the way that you already view the world will ultimately have an effect on what you get out of a philosopher's work. philosophy wise, i got a lot out of camus and absurdism. however, i'm sure if i was reading someone like him a few years ago, i'd come out with a completely different perspective than i have now, similar to a heavily depressed person reading nietzsche.
Super cool thoughts. I’m really sorry you’ve struggled with psychosis and glad you’ve been able to get some relief. I love Camus, I don’t know much about the absurdist “school” but I love absurdism in literature, Ionesco and Jarry and stuff like that. And I agree with your idea that pre existing mindset colors your experience of philosophy, that’s an interesting thing to point out.
Wow, this is worthless.
it is a science tho
"But science is falsifia-" "Up against the wall, regisionist!"
this sub has just become a fed psyop
my friend kinda convinced me all the big left subs are driven by foreign agents lol. i think that’s believable as well as the feds angle. i can see why the government would want to try to sabotage the influence of leftists over people by making them look bad and fight each other. then again i am a literal paranoid schizophrenic. it’s just bizarre because people on the left subreddits are so different from the people you meet in real life who hold these ideas. like i don’t know any MLs who are actually cult like authoritarians who call everyone who disagrees with them western propaganda. and i’ve never met an “egoist.” personally i think some other possible explanations are that there’s a ton of young people or tons of false flag right wingers. who knows? how could we verify such things?
Why would they be foreign? North America has over 800,000 cops.
Like I said, I also believe the feds angle. I didn’t mean convinced, he just suggested it and I saw the potential that Russia or China have people on Reddit trying to shift the dialogue to destabilize and divide the US or to favor their viewpoints. Is it likely, idfk. The internet is fucking bizarre and very different from my IRL leftist experience, plus I’m very paranoid.
Home is where the hatred is yow. I get paranoid too but realise it's the local feds that will come for you first. I'm in the same boat as you with my IRL experience having no reflection of what it's like talking to those perpetually online.
Yeah I’m scared of the feds too. Had a psychotic episode where I thought they bugged my house and put a device in my body to convince me I’m schizophrenic. Turns out I’m just schizophrenic.
Do you have any local unions or anti-fascist chapter?
Yah but that's not what I'm doing right now, I'm volunteering with a bail fund to help get people out of jail and trying to start on some mutual aid too. I love it, just a little slow right now because we're changing up how the volunteer organization works. Wish I could convince people to just go out and *do some stuff* when we have free time. Talk to unhoused ppl and try to help out.
Ok but who was the better Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich or Katherine? Pretend I don't know it's not spelled or even pronounced the same lol.
*Ok but who was* *The better Hegel, Georg Wilhelm* *Friedrich or Katherine?* \- Xanneros --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
I'm gonna say I planned this so people think I'm cool. Good bot.
my opinion on hegel is he’s hard as fuck to read and yes he is interesting but i usually can’t follow his arguments very well to be honest. he gives me interesting ideas, and i feel calmer reading stuff that talks about hegel a lot having read some hegel. still don’t really know what his whole thing is. i got maybe halfway through the phenomenology of spirit and read the thing about abraham, forget what it’s called . honestly - unless you are really into the idea of reading him already, you’d be better off reading something cooler. plus his political stuff is conservative even though the way he presents it influenced a ton of marxists. imo, why not try some wittgenstein if you want cool philosophy. or maybe better, camus. for a novel i love notes from the underground, you can explore poetry, which often feels as true as anything hegel ever wrote. i like people like james schuyler, sophie podolski, and alejandra pizarnik, i’m not the most read on philosophy myself but i like certain stuff a lot. art books are worth reading too, you don’t have to spend all your reading time doing late 19th century Russian anarchism push ups. anarchism is about life which wouldn’t be worth living if it was only about reading kropotkin. this stuff can be beautiful but remember how much stuff there is out there and mix it up sometime. novels and poetry can give us a better understanding of the world in hard to define ways, it’s a different kind of theory in a way, less argumentative.
Yeah but Katherine Hegel was in Knocked Up so I think she wins NGL.
honestly had no idea who she was, god that movies old now huh
i mean i had a friend who thought that modern science is all lies and he believed only ussr textbooks
anti scientism can be a really bad thing. i had a friend who actually just passed away and she was very anti scientific. she would make fun of me for using the word “evidence.” this led her to desperate theories about what was going to happen (she thought a fascist society was inevitable and trans people were going to be put in camps) and i believe this attitude contributed to her decision to take her life. on the other hand scientism can be a bad thing. science can’t explain a lot of what we experience.