ReadFanon

joined 2 years ago
[–] ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Which probably doesn’t track well with my posts as I tend to ramble a lot but I’m going to try and cut back on that as much as possible. I would hate for anyone to get bored or frustrated reading my posts.

Unless it serves your interests or your own purposes not to, ramble away.

It's entirely up to the readers of your posts to determine whether or not they choose to read your posts and how they decide to go about that (e.g. reading closely, skimming, skipping to the parts that interest them etc.) Let the reader figure out what they want to get from your post and to seek that out themselves. Don't concern yourself with their needs because this is an exercise in reinforcing and enriching your own learnings. You aren't writing a paper or a book, so your concern for the reader shouldn't really be a high priority imo.

Im sure most of you know who Antonio Gramsci but he was discussed in class

Just be aware that Gramsci is used in the service of many purposes and his materialism is often downplayed or even erased from how his theory is interpreted or applied.

This is in large part a product of the fact that he was never able to really produce a body of work that is coherent and which nailed down his positions due to the circumstances of his imprisonment.

What this means is that I'd urge you to approach people's takes and applications of Gramsci with a healthy skepticism unless they are Gramsci scholars.

Out of interest, it's worth noting that the chief prosecutor for Mussolini said of Gramsci during his trial "We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years."

My professor answered this in the pluralist perspective there’s production bourgeoisie vs some other type of bourgeoisie that I couldn’t quite catch but that hardly matters.

Potentially "rent-seeking bourgeoisie", which is more relevant to liberalism but this is the group of bourgeoisie who are extractive rather than productive in the economy; landlords, speculators, financiers and investors etc.

To illustrate the point, imagine what the consequences would be if every member of the bourgeoisie made their money by being a landlord or an investment banker; the economy would collapse in a week.

My professor made sure to mention that in the Soviet Union, contrary to popular beliefs, it had factions and worked more like pluralists and he made this remark in regards to the criticism that pluralists cannot explain authoritarian regimes. He didn’t talk about the USSR with any contempt, and I feel like that’s important to mention.

This is promising!

Next, of course, was postmodernism

I'm an ex-postmodernist/poststructuralist. While there are useful tools in the poststructuralist toolkit, these days I am extremely skeptical of the overall utility of this intellectual movement.

If you want a crucial perspective on poststructuralism from an insider, the articles of Gabriel Rockhill are excellent and many his lectures hosted on his YouTube channel The Critical Theory workshop are also great. I can provide links if you need but I'm being lazy rn.

[–] ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It depends on what your purpose is but, as a party which has not achieved a successful revolution, the party line on AES means very little.

It's hard to imagine a successful socialist revolution being established that won't rely upon China as a major trading partner and I suspect a lot of the pre-revolution positions will shake out in a post-revolution situation due to the material conditions.

Say your country achieves socialism tomorrow and it is faced with internal and external attempts at subversion, an effective blockade from the US and potentially other liberal economic blocs. Where do you think that your country will turn to in order for economic development and general support?

It's going to turn to AES countries, undoubtedly. Either it will be incredibly isolationist and almost certainly doomed to fail or the pragmatic elements of the party will seek out support from AES countries and those ties will develop and sentiment towards AES countries will shift within the party as a matter of necessary.

But I'm rambling.

Maybe you can use the party as a platform to develop political connections. Maybe you can instigate a split. Maybe you can stay within the party and drive a line struggle.

There are many options but it depends on what your goal is and what the conditions are.

[–] ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 2 years ago

[Rules-based order intensifies]

[–] ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 2 years ago

Go on then, tell me which leftist leaders you think should be upheld.

[–] ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

the strange phenomenon of people idealizing the past, specifically the 50s, and how the people who tend to have a fondness for the 50s tend to b white as back in the day only middle class white people had happy lives in the 50s, anyone else was screwed.

I have an effortpost here that goes into this in some detail (note the comments following that one - I completely forgot about the relevance of the Bonus Army to the subject.) I didn't touch on the history of Pruitt and Igoe being the subject of military testing in that comment because it was already too long but:

https://gizmodo.com/pruitt-igoe-army-radiation-experiments-cold-war-1849833275

https://www.businessinsider.com/army-sprayed-st-louis-with-toxic-dust-2012-10

You might also be interested in the work of Alice Malone, which touches on the role of homeownership in relation to the state making concessions to workers and attempting to stifle the groundswell of radicalism:

https://redsails.org/concessions/

https://youtu.be/GqIHF-gurlU (also available in your podcast app, search for: Actually Existing Socialism and the episode How the Soviet "Threat" Benefitted Workers in the West.)

One glaring omission from Malone's article is the quote from none other than William Levitt:

No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.

Although I've tried to find the original source for this quote which is attributed to him in 'On Communism and the Suburban Home' from 1948 but I couldn't turn anything up so maybe that's why it got excluded.

He compared it to when the British and French went to war against an Arab Socialist, I don’t know hat event he was talking about specifically but it was significant enough that we should’ve learned from that experience and not replicate it in Iraq.

I suspect he was referring to Nasser and the Suez Crisis but I could be wrong.

[–] ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'd recommend considering using Balabolka as a TTS generator because if you go to Tools > Use online TTS service you can select IBM Watson as the TTS engine (and it bypass the word limit restrictions.)

I think that Michael is my preferred TTS option for Watson but it's been a while. Whatever the case, Watson is far and away the most listenable TTS that I've come across.

Lmk if you want screenshots because the Balabolka UI is a bit clunky.

[–] ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 2 years ago

The past tense is in reference to the historical event, it doesn't refer to the present state of Finland's economy.

If someone had a post titled: "How Trump caused a rift within liberalism in the US" the past tense would not imply that Trump no longer exists or that he is no longer a politician, it would simply be referring to the political rift as a historical event.

[–] ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Then he used Stalin as another example of a leader rewriting history, Stalin rewrote about the USSR’s role in WWII and how the rest of the allies treated the Soviets.

This one is interesting.

So much of the USSR is clouded with poor historical scholarship, especially in the west.

Michael Jabara Carley has written on this, namely 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II and Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations (both available on LibGen) and Stalin's Gamble: The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930-1936. He details how the rest of the Allies treated the USSR. You might be interested in any or all of them.

I wonder what your professor's take is on this matter.

What are other lies? What happened in:

Spain (the civil war)

I'd be interested in hearing what was discussed in relation to the Spanish Civil War, if he went into any more depth on the subject.

[My textbooks] can all be found on Lilgen very easily so thankfully I didn’t have to spend a dime

Speaking of which, I put an open call out to people here if they need a hand sourcing ebooks of any kind, including textbooks, because I'm pretty handy at tracking them down even when they aren't available on LibGen and Zlibrary. Hit me up if you're ever trying to find an ebook.

[–] ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 2 years ago

It's hilarious that articles are still needing to give a disclaimer after mentioning X that it refers to the site formerly known as Twitter.

If this isn't proof of a failed rebranding strategy, idk what is.

[–] ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 2 years ago

It's like I'd color my face blue and someone calls me a racist, discriminating penguins.

[–] ReadFanon@lemmygrad.ml 26 points 2 years ago

It's strange that this concern for context only ever goes in one direction. Symbolism, like words, develop meaning through their usage.

If I were to say that I ejaculated during intercourse with your wife last night, would you take that to be an insult or would you be dying on that same context hill that the verb to ejaculate used to refer to suddenly making a statement and that intercourse used to refer to having a discussion with someone?

Probably not.

Would you say that the swastika isn't a Nazi symbol because it originated in Indo-European religious and cultural symbology?

Maybe. I can't speak for you.

The origin of something doesn't determine its usage.

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