From Philosophical Research
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- A medieval kingdom is a one-party state -> Liberal-republican theory often assumes this is true. it's somewhat arguable it is the case, if for instance you use idealized fantasy novels for reference you see kingdoms are often represented as if they are groups of friends that trust each other. but the thing is that this doesn't lead to the flattering conclusions Liberal-republicans and Existentialists hope it leads to. Liberal-republican theorists hope it will show that medieval kingdoms are tyrannical and unethical, and Liberal-republicanism is natural and obvious. instead it makes it easy to highlight that Liberal-republicanism is not a natural or obvious development but an arbitrary choice to divide countries into multiple sloshy countries per country, fully as arbitrary as it believes Bolshevism to be, which potentially engineers multicapitalism and the problem of two separate capitalisms trying to kill and crowd out each other's people for not being part of each other and then complain that eating and occupying space too much and existing too much is really mean and people should have thought more about that.
- childism (Pierce 1975) -> I didn't know this was an actual motif considered by psychiatrists. [1] [2] okay. I guess there's a real set of labels for the movement that happened in Mr Enter's cartoon then. it's a fictional movement against childism. or to put it fully accurately, a utopia that jumps having to think about one.
- Theorists are academics / If you spend all day reading and researching and you do not produce a sellable product, your activities are academic, and if you produce a book which is usable but entirely theoretical you are an academic -> I once saw someone claim after using a bunch of technical jargon that what they were doing wasn't "academic". and this is why I always throw around the word "theorist" copiously. in hopes that people will come to understand that any strong division between the theoretical and the practical creates academics, and that in a few limited cases that can actually be a problem. at the heart of it, the goal of a Marxist is to stop being an academic, and to become better at survival and daily activities due to theory rather than to just become better in some limited domain that theorists live and compete in. I genuinely think that may be true of everything. it's a very corrupt system to have these article piles people make money by selling to at a price that will probably never be enough but where very few people will get to use and apply them, where like, all academic activity kind of just enriches researchers (and not very much, just enough to give them a teeny amount of privilege such they can ignore the existence of the rest of the world). it may be better at this point for people to just apply their research practically and sell books so they can be in regular libraries and used book stores.
- Chester Pierce / Dr. Chester Pierce -> founder of Black Psychiatrists of America, coined the term "microaggression". I had to look him up to figure out what field it came from. now I feel slightly bad about making fun of the subdivisions of the term like "microinvalidation" because, well, it would be a more productive use of this thing for people to know about Pierce existing. yes, 'musical chairs' strategies only go so far, and we need to get over great men, I would argue even and especially in all the social theories or blue anarchisms of the United States and Europe that are pretending not to be movements. but at the same time "Chester Pierce was the first Black therapist at Massachusetts General Hospital" is actual history and not just a bunch of abstract ideals. and even talking about any actual historical event without descending into just an abstract river of ethics is doing really well in the United States.
- If you had total artistic freedom, and you could literally make whatever you wanted, and nobody would ever call you out on any of it, giving you the total freedom to make mistakes and learn what is right and wrong on your own, but to have that you had to live in a country which was an empire and benefited from allying with other large empires to beat up Third World countries and force people off their land or put most of their populations into factories to turn your country into a series of malls and tiny shops, and you could not stop Palestinians from being killed every day, but as long as you shut up you would get to write romances about The Onceler or serial killers or draw
Jack London wolves banging or write about weird fetishes or things people debate as being stereotypes or normalizing toxic relationships or literally whatever you want to express, would you take that trade-off? -> I swear people answer this question wrong every single day.
the question here may be slightly hypothetical and contrived in that the causality on some of these things doesn't connect directly to empire, but you still see people saying the inverse proposition that they think Freedom is more important than literally anything and they would choose Freedom if it did. that's the key. as long as Freedom is more important than not killing people, not only will you never get to build the temporary cages that reconstruct all of society in a form where chunk competition is far less easy, but generally, you'll never get people to be ethical at all.
- Password (2024) / Password (furry visual novel) [3]
- Password and racism / Password and xenophobia (Orientalism; etc) -> there is nearly nothing worth discussing about this visual novel except the fact it's a really interesting case study on writers who don't know anything attempting Media Representation in racist ways.
- It is impossible to explain the existence of ethics without Materialist philosophy -> so here's the thing about Idealism. minds can model anything. minds can model the most unrealistic thing you can imagine; minds can write a book which portrays real-world race relations and historical interactions between countries so badly the book becomes racist. the ability of minds to contain just anything makes it questionable how a mind could ever know that any ethical proposition is true. what if somebody makes an ethical proposition which says "The existence of Russians is immoral and it is ethical for the United States to torment Russians until they have been exterminated"? (in all these thought experiments I pick groups of people like "Russians" so the statement won't be as inherently charged and icky to even read as saying things like "Black people" or "United States Jews", even though certainly there will be some people that exist that are that level of racist. when I instead say "Russians", the statement inherently feels more made-up and hypothetical, and becomes easier to just laugh about as a weird bit of dark humor given it "isn't really happening".) if somebody says that's what's ethical, how would you know whether they're right or wrong? you can't just say "because X ethical statement is obvious" or "because X ethical statement feels good emotionally" as your justification for why a statement is suitable for checking other statements. to the other person, it might be "obvious" and "feel good" that they need to exterminate Russians, and they can always say that treading on their claim attacks their Lived Experience. so it's only really interactions that happen in the material world that can verify a statement as top-quality. even "a marginalized person recounted an experience" isn't itself a fact. Trotsky can show up and say "I'm a marginalized Soviet person" and then "I think the Soviet Union needs to be destroyed", and his Lived Experience won't be reliable or factual.
- Because normal people prefer to think in terms of Liberal-republicanism, we must teach them everything in terms of Liberal-republicanism and give up on teaching them Communism -> very flawed when Liberal-republicanism absolutely can't address the question of empire and the global-empire prejudices termed "colonialism" at all. the point of Liberal-republicanism is to control people and keep regular people from exerting agency except in line with what a limited array of experts says. that's the point. whether you think of that process as a positive or negative thing, that's the point. so when Liberal-republicanism decides it has to take over issues like Israel-Palestine and
shit, and legislate and amend people into being "postcolonial"... it just plain can't. a republic can beat everyone into position but the people who are the most elite and most existiest will out-exist everyone else and if they just happen to be in support of Israel they get the people-controlling device and there's no winning. even stacks and stacks of Gramscian theory can't fix it. you've written yourself into a corner where survival itself is a virtue and non-survival and weakness and sickness are vices, those rules are not negotiable by anybody, and where literally only a theory of building the most physically-robust, best-surviving population of Communist or anarchist allies that believes in no Idealism and makes absolutely no mistakes of believing that anyone will choose to be kind or reasonable or hope itself will ever work can possibly save you.
- Loyalty to anarchism is equally as "colonial" as loyalty to nation-states / If loyalty to a Liberal-republican or Bolshevik nation-state causes people to kill and dominate, then so does loyalty to a countable anarchist "civilization" or materially-realized anarchist population-society / If loyalty to a Liberal-republican or Bolshevik nation-state causes people to kill and dominate, then it is being part of a population at all which causes it; this implies people actively moving between populations and deserting, betraying, or abandoning them periodically is the only thing which would not cause individuals to contribute to killing or domination, despite the contradiction that some of these things are acts of war and amount to killing or domination, for example in the time of the Trotskyite conspiracy ->
field: existential materialism.
- blocking Donald Trump from taking office using section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment [4] [5]
- States can't disqualify a presidential candidate under the Fourteenth Amendment [6] -> United States case law. this is discouraging, but does make some amount of historical sense, when the Civil War and Reconstruction were a nationwide effort and such.
- It's impossible for you to deserve anything without allies who agree that you deserve it -> descriptive claim of what is possible. not a prescriptive claim of ethics, etc.
- If life isn't fair, why are there constitutional amendments? -> to uninformed center-Liberals this would seem like a non sequitur, but it really is a relevant question. if life isn't inherently fair then there is no grounding to have an amendment saying everyone is entitled to something. this is a serious crisis for Liberal-republicanism in cases the majority of the population can't be made to come to an agreement on a particular thing and the amendment process isn't producing anything including amendments.
- Neutrality aids the non-oppressor -> people like Deleuze want to talk about "fidelity to an Event". but if I understand that concept at all correctly, those are like, movements and things. and movements are a sticky subject. misinformation or wrong actions can sink a movement. so you* don't necessarily want people even participating in them if they're going to do it wrong. sometimes doing absolutely nothing would make everyone happier. especially if we're talking about dark forest situations where acting as if you have no knowledge of a movement and not getting any reactionaries thinking about or talking about the subject of the movement would make them less likely to think they need to take action on the other side. (* by "you", I mean anarchists and Gramscians, not anyone else.)
I don't like that things are this way but it's kind of the way things are now.
Neutrality aids the oppressor + hegemony politics = Neutrality aids the non-oppressor.
- Tent of freedom poles is the shovel dream of wealth / The concept of "equal freedoms for all at the limit of equal freedom for others" is an object-having-consciousness-of-self prompted by the physical arrangement of a cloud of people accumulating stacks of wealth by any means necessary in order to obtain as many options or capacities-to-do-otherwise as possible when faced with any given conflict or undesirable situation — making it appear as if ethical and philosophical choices are caused by rational thought while rational thought does not actually provide the initial basis for them to be thought versus not thought -> in a sense, Liberal-republicanism could not construct itself without the right "technology". separate stacks of wealth does this strange thing of making "the limit of equal freedom of others" possible precisely when and if you're willing to run to the ends of the earth and perhaps over the top of other populations to materially obtain "equal freedom for all".
- Thomas Sankara -> Burkina Faso. heard him mentioned enough I'm researching if he should have an ideology code.
looks like some stuff has been going on in Burkina Faso over the past few decades. despite some failures the first time they're trying again.
is the Alliance of Sahel States one of the major differences this time? were the countries doing this individually before or together?
- The right to vote isn't synonymous with the capacity to do otherwise / The right to vote isn't synonymous with having lines of flight from a situation of un-freedom (having Escape routes; schizoanalyst phrasing)
- A million tiny "revolutions" are rendered moot if every progressive ally is dead
- Retailers lessen chunk competition / Within capitalism stacks of commodities, only within public spaces, act to partially mitigate chunk competition occurring inside the national or local population — however, not all kinds of chunk competition are mitigated, only some -> I think Bordiga may have gotten this really wrong.
A) on a basic level humans are Animals. B) given sufficient resources Animals will not fight. C) a particular slice of the population which is not the whole population has access to stacks of commodities which are in public spaces. D) on creating capitalism, a particular slice of the population is partially removed from chunk competition, whereas it might have been in chunk competition in other periods: US-Mexico war, frontier wars, Dust Bowl (not really any fighting, but migration), wars to secure South Korea and Vietnam. imperialism is a big elephant here, outright conquering other populations has been one of the easiest ways to stop fighting your own people E) people are not removed from chunk competition in cases where one person must be assigned to one unique object, notably in housing, or there are no more open worker slots and they need to run business territories F) 'profit' can never be a stackable commodity, because it comes from change in business territory borders. available space fills up, and as said, when borders stop changing is when stacks of commodities come to be G) worrying consequence: population growth is not stackable. population added requires profit added, which requires an act of chunk competition, which may require an act of imperialism. H) neutral consequence: when population growth hits replacement plus or minus a bit, the era of profit and the warring states period of businesses should end, and the era of workers should begin. I) strictly speaking, the "workers" are Careerists, not classically-defined proletarians. an important difference separates them here: the end of warring-businesses and the creation of state businesses potentially puts a squeeze on which people can have which slots in society, although not a tight one because there should basically be a slot for everyone, just not necessarily where they are currently. if there's a central party that can supply trains etc and move them that won't be a big deal. J) if you try to create a Trotskyism, the broader it is, the more "inescapable" it is as an entity, and the more people will be locked into a specific nationality and culture. the connection of countable populations to countable cultures is probably inevitable. this is to say, the bigger your Trotskyism is the more likely somebody calls it "Whiteness" in a derogatory tone and tries to tear minority ethnicities out of it into new union- or independent republics. Bolshevism seems to require the division of humanity into relatively small units closer to the size of Germany than the size of Russia. although it should be the population number that matters more than the spatial extent. maybe "spatial area adjusted for population number at specific standard density" would be a good measure?
- proletarian internationalism / プロレタリア国際主義
- male rivalries and gay subtext (fiction) / two male rival characters fixating on each other has gay subtext -> one of those things that's often not intended to be true but then based on evidence that piles up becomes confusing and hard to ignore. it's one of those cases of accidental representation, where the author doesn't think something is possible and then accidentally depicts it.
- Simon Nkoli -> South Africa; founded GLOW in order to have a gay/lesbian rights organization within the context of the struggle against apartheid, instead of from the context of bettering Europe(?). I've never heard of him before today but sounds good so far
- The Long Transition Toward Socialism and the End of Capitalism (Torkil Lauesen) [7]
- Unequal Exchange: Past, Present and Future (Torkil Lauesen) [8]
- Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Gabriel Rockhill) [9]
- Western Marxism: How it was born, how it died, how it can be reborn (Domenico Losurdo) [10]
- How the World Works: The story of human labor from prehistory to the modern day (Paul Cockshott) [11]
- The Global Perspective: Reflections on imperialism and resistance (Torkil Lauesen) [12]
- Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: A guide for foreigners (Roland Boer) [13]
- Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance (Roland Boer) [14]
- Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (Domenico Losurdo) [15]
- Proudhon did not care about feminism (Losurdo) -> Proudhon and Bakunin both have these nasty accusations tied to them and like, the general landscape of (blue) anarchism is you have to throw away people who did the slightest thing but nevertheless the charcoal anarchists keep bringing them up again and again. I guess that's a difference between blue and charcoal anarchists, really.
- Proudhon was a passive imperialist who condoned stationary empire (Losurdo) -> yeah, once you lay out those observations, they sounds about right. haven't read much about Proudhon compared to Marxist divisions, but modern anarchists have very little regard for the notion of how populations are divided, so... yeah.
- Maliciously expelling any significantly large subpopulation from a country either through scattering that population or massacring that population, as opposed to packing that population tightly into the least-desirable corners of a country, is settler-colonialism / Settler-colonialism is, regardless of which causal order of events is intended, the process of exterminating a population and then of this event fueling a national population or State gaining official control over the land area -> an attempt to define the concept of settler-colonialism on a Materialist basis without any Idealism. it's key to realize that the alternatives to settler-colonialism which happen when it doesn't happen are also horrifying — manor lords, racially-charged slavery, large homeless camps, there are a bunch of ways people have historically been packed into the corners of a country, various differing degrees of horrifying. there has seemingly been a shift over the past few centuries from populations merely competing to create a government that is a structure that unifies them, and populations actively expanding into and over each other in ways where it is difficult to simply unify them in that way, and these difficult questions come up of whether "Socialism" and trying to integrate everyone into a population is even the right choice or whether people of all ethnicities can only actually have independence and self-determination and the ability to create a dignified life for their population unimpeded if human beings are properly distributed into the right countries and you don't have pools of surplus people that people start fighting with. do we have to start redistributing White people? are non-suffering majority people the new form of populational wealth now? is it becoming pointless to try to tax money numbers, and would it be better to tax people and put whole people somewhere else, telling them, you're not part of this other big international imperial population any more, you can't own a free-floating business, you belong to this country now as a worker. so many of our theories focus on historical periods centuries ago that are nothing like today, and it's confusing what we're even supposed to do now.
