jambeast

[jambeast]

It's not about being an individualist, it's about not restricting yourself to only the opposite of it. There are forests, and there are trees - this is pretty fundamental to being able to understand the world in any holistic way way.

We gotta start describing patriarchy as a system of male supremacy again bc if I have to hear one more person droning on about how men are actually not benefited by patriarchy im honestly gonna lose my shit

[jambeast]

[jambeast]

Any social system as complex as "the ways in which men and women, generally, are treated, generally, by societies in general" is going to be pretty unevenly distributed, with winners and losers in different proportions in either category.

You could argue that men, in total, overall, are net-benefited by The Way Society Treats Gender, and women, in total, overall, are net-harmed by it, and you could be probably correct, but "people with the same gender of you are more often than not benefited rather than harmed by x" isn't a whole lot of comfort when talking to a specific individual who *isn't* being benefitted more than they are harmed, because they're not Men, As A Class, In General, they're a specific man, one of the ones who isn't that!

They're not a hivemind, not all expressions of the same single entity that is Men. As an abstraction it might be useful to talk about, but it can't supercede your other kinds of analysis.

We gotta start describing patriarchy as a system of male supremacy again bc if I have to hear one more person droning on about how men are actually not benefited by patriarchy im honestly gonna lose my shit

[jambeast]

I'd understand it if the Ends Justified the Means. I wouldn't be *happy* about it but I'd get it. But, like, the more important question is whether the Ends *would actually be a result* of the Means.

Something must be done, and slamming your penis in a car door is -something-, therefore you must slam your penis in a car door. There is no other choice.

(Guy whos never been at risk from systemic violence voice) No i think all violence is bad guys. You know. The cycle of violence. I think both sides are bad!

[jambeast]

[jambeast]

(I'm plenty critical of Palestine's leadership, goals, and expected outcomes, to make clear my perspective) It's strange that, among pro-Israel types, the expected outcome of a one-state going bad is the expulsion of Jews and not Arabs. Surely the reverse would be true under most potential circumstances? Given that the IDF (in whatever form it takes in this future) would have mostly Jewish leadership, a one-state breakup would be much worse for Arabs.

I know the exact meaning of One State Solution when proposed kinda wavers between 'everyone Shares the land in peace and harmony' and 'Israel gives the land back to its rightful owners who do with it how they please because it's theirs'. The former is, while unlikely, way less unlikely than the latter, but the latter is also the one that is the main stated goal of the parties relevant to the conflict

Otherwise, I guess the main logic is just that it's a democratic country, and once your population becomes more than 50% people-who-want-to-kick-out-all-the-Israelis then it'll be... put on the table, and whether or not that actually ends up happening that's not something you want on the table.)

It's hard to talk about Most Potential Circumstances when, like, I dunno, it just all feels so infeasible. It's hard to imagine any solution actually happening. All of the signs point towards everything continuously getting more shit for everyone.

[jambeast]

Not really interested in engaging directly with the couple posts about dog whistles currently circulating, as the people involved don't seem inclined to take disagreement gracefully, but my take on the subject is this: "dog whistle" is a useful concept in cases, and only in cases, where the statement in question covertly conveys actual semantic content.

To take a classic (now mostly defunct, due to being widely recognized) example of this, consider the term "thug." It's widely acknowledged that conservative politicians and commentators in recent years have used this term in a way that's meant to specifically connote black (and occasionally Latino) people, and connect them with violent crime, in a deniable way. After all, the strict denotation of the word just means any violent criminal, and well really if your first thought on hearing it is of blacks and Latinos that means you're the racist, not them, etc. It concretely allows people to communicate unpopular ideas to those who agree with said ideas without getting as much flak from those who disagree with them.

This is a standard of which all this "friendpilled visitmaxxer" 4chan-esque language falls notably short. Talking about being a locationpilled scampercel isn't telling anyone coded messages about how you want to crack down on racial minorities in urban areas or that you agree with that one weird McCain ad from 2008 that Barack Obama is the antichrist. At most, it could signal some sort of affiliation with the far-right, but as loving-not-heyting pointed out in that thread, a signal of that sort that creates a bunch of false positives from people who just like meme words is actually the opposite of useful for a movement.

[jambeast]

i think soviet brutalist architecture is good because it houses countless people who would otherwise have starved on the streets and i think that's fundamentally good no matter what the building looks like and every dipshit who thinks they're dystopian because big concrete building scary are implicitly saying their aesthetic values matter more than human life

[jambeast]

"Well, reasonably, body-type 2 people should get a -4 penalty to their strength stat."

guy raised on 2020s video games: does anyone else think body type 1 people are more apollonian and thing-brained and body type 2 people are more dionysian and people-brained

[jambeast]

i cannot express to you how often i think about this stupid post. every time i listen to music and its good i think to myself “thank you music”, and often i say it out loud to myself

[jambeast]

If your standard for antisemitism is "too extreme in yr criticisms of israel", then the fact you find the antizionist movt insufficiently eager to distance itself from antisemites among its ranks should be completely uninteresting. Of course for the average onlooker any sufficiently large protest or rally or whatever will have several members whose hatred of israel goes beyond yr preferred limits: the protest is specially selecting for israel hatred! This is totally unsurprising. And then ofc, if you conclude from this "excess" of anti israel sentiment in the "israel is bad" movt that you should move further to the right on the issue, this inevitably means (since antisemitism = going beyond yr preferred limits for israel criticism) you will be lowering yr standards for what counts as antisemitism again, meaning yet another rightward hop. Let us pray this sequence at least converges

The whole bite behind "antizionism harbours antisemitism" is that antisemitism is smth at least notionally qualitatively distinct from anti israel sentiment, smth for which antizionism serves as perfidious cover. Otherwise its just a banal statement of the obvious and an indefinite excuse for a prozionist trajectory

[jambeast]

[jambeast]

Yeah from the amount of buzz around it I assumed there was something a lot bigger they were protesting against than just, like, them building a police training place. Like a change in policy, like 'cop city' is referring to some police curfew being placed on the city, some significant change in civil liberties.

the whole stop cop city thing is a very useful litmus test for people's politics

#vibes based ideology

[jambeast]

HR Giger Tribute by VentralHound

[jambeast]

maybe this is a fundamental difference in moral views because i think oppression isn't bad because it harms certain groups, it's bad because it harms people. it DOES harm specific groups, and that's a necessary part of understanding it, but the mistreatment is the problem, not the fact that that mistreatment is unfairly distributed

[jambeast]

[jambeast]

Also pretty important that, if you're going to learn political theory, you don't... just read communist political theory. You've gotta shop around, get a variety in. I mean, partly because communist political theory is generally bad and dumb, but assuming it's not bad and dumb, you'll have much less bad-and-dumb communist opinions if you actually understand opposing ideas enough to properly refute them.

You can't treat 'Theory' as a set of new opinions you download to overwrite your old opinions - you can't treat something written in a book as by default True, especially something as incredibly fraught as political theory. They're things you have to chew one. Different perspectives, different ways of seeing things, thoughts laid out in all their component parts so you can see how they click together, or how they *don't* click together.

I'm sorry to the like half of this site's political userbase but sooner rather than later you're going to have to step away from tv shows, fanfics, fiction and flawed instinct as sources for a theoretical basis. You can't properly talk about, say, the Cuban revolution without first understanding the ideological and practical context that informed the decisions of the communist party of Cuba (that means reading Marx, Lenin, a communist work on colonialism such as Eduardo Galeno's Open Veins, historiography and statistics on the events preceding and succeeding the revolution that isn't written with ink and paper paid for by the CIA). The Hunger Games, Les Mis and Hamilton aren't substitutes because 1: they aren't real and anything can happen in fiction 2: they haven't influenced any real life revolutionary movements and 3: they are literary works made for enjoyment, not a political analysis.

I know the "kindness is revolutionary" pseudopunk eat the rich one big union type of person thinks pure political theory is elitist and/or boring because why engage with the source material yourself when Abigail Thorn, Jacob Geller and Vaush are right there to tell you what they thought of the source material (which is still political theory in most cases, unless it isn't, but how would you be able to tell?) so you can absorb it like a baby bird unable to chew their own food. Nobody who has both read the theory and applied it irl is ever going to take you seriously if all you can do is regurgitate what your vaguely progressive history or social studies high school teacher told you about decolonization.