Fucking liberals think voting will fix the world

Odradek

They should instead do what I, and other practical communists are doing and wait patiently for Godot

Crystal

You forgot constant demeaning and refusing to engage, my other favorite trick.

Klinotaxis

i keep telling you i have a few hundred AKs in the plain of reeds but you never listen

Odradek

ESTRAGON

Let's go

VLADIMIR

We can't

ESTRAGON

Why not?

VLADIMIR

Don't want anyone to quote "Love Me I'm a Liberal" at us

ESTRAGON

Oh

Odradek

VLADIMIR

I can't go on like this!

ESTRAGON

Like what?

VLADIMIR

Without a plan!

ESTRAGON 

We have a plan

VLADIMIR 

Then what is it, damn you?

ESTRAGON

Waiting for Godot

VLADIMIR

Of course...

Imipolex G

let's hang ourselves immediately

Odradek

ESTRAGON

Let's just go!

VLADIMIR

What would they think of us, if we just left?

ESTRAGON

Who would know?

Enter POZZO

POZZO
Love me love me love me! I'M A LIBERAL

Odradek

POZZO

Think! Pig!

LUCKY

Put simply, to understand the totality of any thing we must first begin the process with the precondition of the real, but “chaotic” whole, then break this abstract whole into classes and their elements, their interconnections and their contradictions, “from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until [we] arrive at the simplest determinations.(4)” – a process achieved on my part with regard to imperialism in Iraq while being wholly ignored on Kriss & Co’s.For example, the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole. As a category, And then through making analytical determinations via dialectic (the unity of opposites, determining the principal aspect in each contradiction), we will eventually arrive back at the thing — but never as the “Absolute” totality of the preconceived whole, but as a “rich totality of many determinations and relations” containing their own Absolute truths that contain further relative truths within them. In his Notes on Dialectics Lenin wrote: with Qatar – who are incidentally included in the Gulf Cooperation Council under the NATO/GCC axis – form “inconvenient facts” (static abstract “facts”, by any chance?) as they “bring too much reality into [my] symmetrical abstraction of a concrete analysis”. The Qatar fallacy is immediately removed by the fact it is a subordinate class actor in the totality of the international perspective under the GCC. Regardless of its own contradiction; these internal and external contradictions do not, by any means, negate the external, nor do they negate or supersede the principal aspect within the Iraq contradiction Kriss has arbitrarily applied them to. White liberals today have lurched very far to the right. That historically the liberal, affluent and educated, have always collaborated with the ruling class is fact. But it is today tinged with a deep neurosis and self hatred, and with panic and mania. Looking backward, there is an interesting aspect to the ways in which the family as an idea has deteriorated over the last seventy of eighty years. Of course even further back the shift took place during feudalism transforming under capital. The Father was, as Hill and Juliet Mitchell and Eve Sedgewick and others have written, became an avatar for property in a sense. Or perhaps not property so much as the symbol of dynamic Capitalism. But today, the father is beset by divorce, and lack of purposeful work, and the proletarianization of women as workers in a failing economy. The masculine white ideal is linked indissolubly with family and by extension responsibility. The White male that was the ruler of colonial projects and rejected blackness. That white man is now both economically weakened, and more importantly perhaps, is adrift in a societal landscape that doesn’t need him. Adorno noted that in his phrase *the guilt of life* a kind of fulcrum on which teetered a fragile bourgeois identity and the compensatory virile exaggeration that comes as a response to that fragility. The masculine crisis, in an Oedipal explanation, is that the absent father is both loved and hated. Submission and aggression (Pasolini being the perfect artistic expression of this) are always present, next to one another, in the fascist character. One can only assume these two states have been given as refutation of imperialism due to geographical (or perhaps ethnographical?) determination alone. Dismissing the actual left as "fringe" and baptising the "centre" neoliberals "the Left" - the left denounced as without programme, but also as mirror image, enabler and indeed father of the far neofasho right - Zizek undertakes to defend fasho mobs in a wholly confused context of his concocted fantasy, fashioned of clichés and sensational stereotypes. Like Hedges - who in contrast seeks to explain real right wing populists in our real historical moment accurately depicted - Zizek says there are real grievances motivating them. But whereas Hedges recognises the scapegoats toward which the ruling class deftly and usually at least somewhat successfully directs white male anger (communists, foreigners, women, immigrants, black folks, Muslims, Jews, gays) are not the origins of the real grievances, Zizek insists they are, that these groups - humanity in general, with some small exceptions - are real threats to the privileged minority which presents itself as universal, causing everything from a "race to the bottom" in wages, through state crimes from Abu Ghraib to TARP, to the "failure" and "humiliation" in Iraq, against which the fasho mobs, representing a mythically monoethnic "white working class", justly arise to defend themselves. Zizek seems to a casual listener to echo, but really expropriates and transforms, Hedges' analysis, which he almost simultaneously also denounces as the dirty mendacious rhetoric of sinister liberals who want to disguise the real threats posed to the fasho mobs by those whom these mobs assault (as ZizneyCorp shows, purely in self-defence) - immigrants, ethnic minorities, homosexuals who are indispensible to authoritarian clique/tribe bonding. Thus while one might imagine Hedges or others sharing his analysis conjecturing that the anti-Roma pogroms multiplying in Europe reflect the fury of populations at the pain of the economic depression, Zizek declares the Strojan family, the victims of a pogrom, are the criminal menace itself against which liberals in their egoist ecstasies of hedonist permissiveness are insufficiently vigilant. The Strojan family, Zizek discovers, is the real source of the real grievances of the racist mob that terrorised them, but he cunningly positions the Strojans, and all Roma, also as the instruments of "the liberals in the big cities", that is, they are the violent, destructive forces unleashed by liberal decadence. (This is not a new script). (This is not a new script). (This is not a new script). (This is not a new script). (This is not a new script). (This is not a new script). (This is not a new script). (This is not a new script). (This is not a new script). (This is not a new script). (This is not a new script). 

I'm finished!

Salix Babylonika

I'm gonna start responding to these threads by claiming to be a staunch monarchist

Obā-san

cat fascism now

Salix Babylonika

the only useful form of government is an enlightened despotism

Sredni Vashtar

I'll be an egoist for good measure.

Obā-san

Jane said:

the only useful form of government is an enlightened despotism

yes but with cats

Salix Babylonika

the despot can be a cat

Obā-san

huzzah!

Obā-san

real talk the thing that confuses me about monarchism is like

yes, one individual who always makes the best decisions will always make the best decisions

the problem, a problem we have ample historical evidence confirming, is that one individual, no matter how rigorously tested and trained from birth, will not make the best decisions

Odradek

Today is Tomorrow said:

real talk the thing that confuses me about monarchism is like

yes, one individual who always makes the best decisions will always make the best decisions

the problem, a problem we have ample historical evidence confirming, is that one individual, no matter how rigorously tested from birth, will not make the best decisions

Remember when the Rome's good run of five decent emperors ended with the son of the fifth emperor being a dude who cosplayed as Hercules and demanded people watch him stab ostriches to death in the arena

Obā-san

though, I would be curious to see how a government with an elected almost-absolute monarch would look?

not that I personally would want to live under such a thing

Obā-san

Odradek said:

Today is Tomorrow said:

real talk the thing that confuses me about monarchism is like

yes, one individual who always makes the best decisions will always make the best decisions

the problem, a problem we have ample historical evidence confirming, is that one individual, no matter how rigorously tested from birth, will not make the best decisions

Remember when the Rome's good run of five decent emperors ended with the son of the fifth emperor being a dude who cosplayed as Hercules and demanded people watch him stab ostriches to death in the arena

I don't actually remember this because as a child I hated the Roman empire with a firey passion and went out of my way to learn as little about it as possible

Salix Babylonika

Today is Tomorrow said:

though, I would be curious to see how a government with an elected almost-absolute monarch would look?

not that I personally would want to live under such a thing

Vatican City is that but also it's tiny af.

this was also not quite how The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth worked but sorta close IIRC?

Today is Tomorrow said:

real talk the thing that confuses me about monarchism is like

yes, one individual who always makes the best decisions will always make the best decisions

the problem, a problem we have ample historical evidence confirming, is that one individual, no matter how rigorously tested and trained from birth, will not make the best decisions

you see this is why there are not actually many monarchists anymore.

Unless you extend monarchism to things like supporting Britain's Royal Family but that's not really the same since the Queen mostly just sits there and is ceremonial af.

Odradek

Today is Tomorrow said:

Odradek said:

Today is Tomorrow said:

real talk the thing that confuses me about monarchism is like

yes, one individual who always makes the best decisions will always make the best decisions

the problem, a problem we have ample historical evidence confirming, is that one individual, no matter how rigorously tested from birth, will not make the best decisions

Remember when the Rome's good run of five decent emperors ended with the son of the fifth emperor being a dude who cosplayed as Hercules and demanded people watch him stab ostriches to death in the arena

I don't actually remember this because as a child I hated the Roman empire with a firey passion and went out of my way to learn as little about it as possible

That is somehow adorable

Obā-san

you see, the romans conquered egypt, and I was obsessed w/ ancient egypt, so they were my blood enemy

Salix Babylonika

fucking Romans :falls off my elephant: long live Carthage

Klinotaxis

i learned who the five good emperors were because of girl genius. i am... what i am

Odradek

This is Emperor Commodus's statue, who the fuck gets themselves a statue like this

Salix Babylonika

a cool dude with good priorities

Klinotaxis

Today is Tomorrow said:

though, I would be curious to see how a government with an elected almost-absolute monarch would look?

brief

Today is Tomorrow said:

real talk the thing that confuses me about monarchism is like

yes, one individual who always makes the best decisions will always make the best decisions

the problem, a problem we have ample historical evidence confirming, is that one individual, no matter how rigorously tested and trained from birth, will not make the best decisions

it's like you've never even read the leviathan

Obā-san

related to the romans: it baffles me, given how long money has been around, how long it took to invent economics

Tatterhood

Today is Tomorrow said:

real talk the thing that confuses me about monarchism is like

yes, one individual who always makes the best decisions will always make the best decisions

the problem, a problem we have ample historical evidence confirming, is that one individual, no matter how rigorously tested and trained from birth, will not make the best decisions

I'm pretty sure monarchist logic is basically

the past is Good
there were monarchs in the past
therefore monarchy is Good

Salix Babylonika

well, if i am not mistaken, one of the Chinese Empires (you must understand there were like 8 and none of them were really Chinese as we'd understand it since our conceptualization of Chinese culture is almost exclusively related to the Han who nevermind I am getting off-topic) invented it in like the year 200 I think but they were not European so we don't give them credit.

Obā-san

history tip: it's almost always safe to assume that the chinese invented literally anything 1300 years before someone else who wasn't chinese did it, but then they just opted not to let anyone else know because isolationist neo-confuscianist ideology or w/e

Klinotaxis

Today is Tomorrow said:

related to the romans: it baffles me, given how long money has been around, how long it took to invent economics

oh this is fascinating i was sort of talking about it with jane re video game

there was money but "merchant" wasn't really an awesome thing to be unlike now when they run everything

and the vast majority of humanity was serfs/slaves/whatever, and as far as i know, practically speaking day-to-day they wouldn't have any money proper, and instead they'd barter with food, livestock, stuff. as far as i've seen all the old taxes are in these terms, not coin. like, the heriot death tax was the serf's best clothing or animal.

so having money doesn't actually particularly matter unless you're already in a well-off social position, in which case the market for anything is just a few rich dudes, some of which can decree your prices.

so you kind of need at least wage labor for serious economics. maybe. i think.

Klinotaxis

Jane said:

well, if i am not mistaken, one of the Chinese Empires (you must understand there were like 8 and none of them were really Chinese as we'd understand it since our conceptualization of Chinese culture is almost exclusively related to the Han who nevermind I am getting off-topic) invented it in like the year 200 I think but they were not European so we don't give them credit.

hmmmmm let's see

this is not really economics

this is, but the guy got imprisoned for moral corruption

nice

Obā-san

that makes sense but still you think people (in Europe here I'm talking specifically) would have wanted to look into how to run your fiefdom and levy taxes appropriately or w/e

Klinotaxis

tax your serfs as much as you can without causing revolts. adjust with conditions so that you don't kill everybody or cause revolts during a famine. have a granary.

i mean there's more than that but i don't think any of it is terribly intellectually sophisticated.

Obā-san

fair point

Klinotaxis

i mean. there's a lot of writings like that, with advice for how high to tax people and stuff. but it's more like administration than economics, and it's even more heavily tied to politics than economics is. nobody's going to invent inflation based on that.

that's probably why all the proto-economics, at least in europe, is the incredibly stupid "hoard as much gold as possible and never do anything with it". just... nobody was thinking about it.

e: horde/hoard is not a mistake i expected to make in my lifetime

Salix Babylonika

how much gold did the mongol hordes hoard

lee4hmz

how much gold could a mongol hoard if a mongol could hoard gold

Odradek

Klinotaxis said:

i mean. there's a lot of writings like that, with advice for how high to tax people and stuff. but it's more like administration than economics, and it's even more heavily tied to politics than economics is. nobody's going to invent inflation based on that.

that's probably why all the proto-economics, at least in europe, is the incredibly stupid "hoard as much gold as possible and never do anything with it". just... nobody was thinking about it.

e: horde/hoard is not a mistake i expected to make in my lifetime

This is why the middle ages were so good for dragons.

They had to invent Cash4Gold just to make do in the modern era.

Klinotaxis said:

Today is Tomorrow said:

there was money but "merchant" wasn't really an awesome thing to be unlike now when they run everything

In a lot of civilizations that saw fit to divide people into different strata, merchants were viewed as the lowest, because they didn't make or create anything, they just moved it around. Including China

Odradek

I remember somewhere in Plato, Socrates views being a merchant as a shitty job and says that in an ideal state, nobody would do it unless they were crippled and couldn't do any other job, because of how lame it is.

Tatterhood

lee4hmz said:

how much gold could a mongol hoard if a mongol could hoard gold

you gotta go the full way

how many hordes could the mongol horde hoard if the mongol horde could hoard hordes

lee4hmz

XD

Klinotaxis

Odradek said:

I remember somewhere in Plato, Socrates views being a merchant as a shitty job and says that in an ideal state, nobody would do it unless they were crippled and couldn't do any other job, because of how lame it is.

typical state socialist

Salix Babylonika

Tatterhood said:

lee4hmz said:

how much gold could a mongol hoard if a mongol could hoard gold

you gotta go the full way

how many hordes could the mongol horde hoard if the mongol horde could hoard hordes

the actual (traditional anyway) tonguetwister about mongols is:

"how many boards would the mongol hordes hoard if the mongol hordes got bored of hoarding boards?"

to which one responds:

"the mongol hordes would hoard all the boards the mongol hordes could hoard if the mongol hordes got bored of hoarding boards"

Tatterhood

I did not know there was a traditional version of that for mongols

Klinotaxis

it was invented by ogedei khan himself.

Salix Babylonika

Traditional tongue-twisters go back about fifty years or so which is what I meant but yes very funny.

I know more of them than I should. That one (or part of it anyway) was in a Calvin & Hobbes strip also.

glennmagusharvey

how much mulch might mah mum mish-mash must mah mum mish-mash mah mulch

Odradek

Today is Tomorrow said:

you see, the romans conquered egypt, and I was obsessed w/ ancient egypt, so they were my blood enemy

Wait

This was because of cats, wasn't it

Salix Babylonika

I also was pretty pissed about Rome conquering Egypt when I was little.

Fucking ending the Pharoahs and shit