littlegreenpills posted:

actually there was an episode where a commodity trader got a phone call saying "captain something here, where do you want these several thousand tons of coal then" and he looked out his window and due to a dreadful misunderstanding a gigantic container ship had sailed up to his harbourfront office building

just say no to futures kids

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

i like it when they talk about cultural stuff and its like spewing rly weirdly angry shit about a tv show by bbc america on cops in brooklyn in the 19th century or w/e

lol what

Crow posted:

eileen jones is the best shit on the exiled

speakin of best shit, maybe the OP should've dropped in some "According to the principles of Mao Tse-Tung Thought," and mentions of "capitalist roaders" and signed it as if written by a ship captain and then people would've liked it all the way to upvote heaven. Mmm boy! That dialectic yum-yum

let's not fight



walk through this world with me, crow.

walk through this world with me

jools posted:

lol what

the reviews of tv shows etc where they're always really weirdly hostile about the aesthetics of a movie or tv show no one cares about and call galifinakis like human garbage bc he was in teh candidate or w/e

bonclay posted:

Jools, i want you to know that i think you are a wise and caring person, a true to life "Indigo Child". I wish. you. The. best. but ive got some problems with the way you are thinking.

It's solid to say that Taibbi and Ames' love for horror stories and doomsday prophecies tend to lead them and their readers towards nihilism. Instead of offering nihilism, or Oh Dearism, we should reflect seriously on how the contradictions of the system of capitalism can be resolved by moving to another world-historical economic system, I agree. By doing journalistic work about the failures of capitalism but neglecting to promote an alternative besides Taibbi's lame left-libertarianism or Ames' vague Keynesishm, they are limiting their ability to make productive change with their work. Also, unless Mark Ames made all those Whore-R stories up, he's a serial rapist in denial, and if he did make all them up, he's got an awfully funny way of showing commitment to his feminist ideals. So there's that.

i think it's weird to hear the criticism you offer being used here. in the pit of eternal despair. Nihilism, or less ideologically couched forms of giving-up, are pretty darn near universal in LF and all of its offshoots. Festering hopelessness seems like the natural response to our current situation. We're a group of people that are basically hyperaware of history's worst atrocities and the self-defeating cycle of abuse and power accumulation that defines our current economic form. This societal structure seems to be attempting to collapse our planet's life support systems with absolutely no opposition or outcry and only dimmest awareness. And we're gripped by this sense that there's not a thing that all of us together can do to stop it. I think that we're brought together by an idealized desire to overthrow and replace an inherently abusive and globally destructive form of human society, but the awe-inspiring entrenched powers we face make our ambitions look pathetic, engendering self-hatred. It seems we have very little to look forward to. Why not nihilism, then? Why not the idealization of suicide and death, and the angry lamentations, if all we have to look forward to is a long, hellish decline?

You criticized Ames and Taibbi for never moving past that angst stage. You think that there must be something constructive or useful they could be aspiring to beyond that, right? But changing a society requires facing incredible obstacles and risks. Many well-intentioned people with the intention of building a classless society have tried to fight for their cause and ended up crippling it instead, like the bad man If our goal is to make things better, we have to be acutely aware of the possibility that our well-intentioned solutions may end up merely manipulating or altering the contradictions instead of resolving them.

So the imperfect narratives horribly imperfect people like Taibbi and Ames uniquely give us, highlight inherent flaws, cracks in the system, and give us an indication of what a different, better one might look like and what safeguards it may require. We should seek to use the information that is valuable in their work, while disregarding the conclusions and the aspects that we know to be idiocy, bravado, or hyperbole. We should improve upon their work, since I think that each of us is just as capable as Ames or Taibbi of doing research, following money trails, exposing and explaining the flaws and anomalies of the system wherever they are, doing Google searches. We should allow ourselves to be guided by a Marxist teleology, and be willing to acknowledge the truth of all these horrors while still believing that the world does not have to stay this way forever.

Throwing away journalism that brings to light unseen aspects of secretive financial capitalists personally responsible for ruining many lives in many different ways, just because it's too negative or it's stylistically bad, is a waste. It is like throwing away your chicken bones instead of boiling them to make your own great homemade chicken stock.

A defense of simple narratives: How you say a thing helps determine how it's received. People need to learn what's wrong with the system if they want to fight against it. From birth, most people are miseducated, both in the sense that we systemically underprovide literacy, comprehension, and critical thinking skills in our schools, and that people are forced to be able to believe and repeat convenient lies about the system they live in and its history in order to be able to pass on to the next grade and continue their career arc. The fact that people have hardly any point of reference for understanding the complex nature of the system which ruins their lives besides crude villain portraits like Megahitler Von Ronsenburg or The Fed is a huge part of the problem. Even if people sense on some level that something horribly wrong happened to our economy during the financial crisis, their inability to understand it in its Literally Insane complexity makes them easy to manipulate. Even if their conscience bothers them so much that they try and speak out against the system, their meager understandings face an army of devilish rhetoricians and sophists that our society has trained into obedience to Capital. A deafening shrieking of pundits, sound bites, and memetically transmitted peer pressures. In this way, people become afraid to speak out, because they know they'll get embarrassed for sounding like any number of scary epithets: crackpot, idiot, conspiracy theorist, boring, paranoid, ignorant. By offering simple explanations that demonstrate serious and unresolved problems in the nature of the system, you offer people a defense against this. And of course, these simple narratives are the fundamental building blocks of more comprehensive understandings. I honestly didn't know anything about the financial crisis before I read some of Taibbi's work, outside of some obfuscatory lies I'd read by mainstream journalists who were surely confused and dishonest in equal measure. From there, I was able to move on to broader critiques, secure in a basic knowledge of how the system worked.

How can you change people's ideologies if you can't give them understandings that allow them to advocate confidently for the ideology?

sticky

Groulxsmith posted:

The financialization of commodities markets doesn't really demand some kind of necessary increase in price, because firms don't tie up their capital in outright speculation; they profit off demand for derivative profits, and speculate on the volatility of the same

thank god we have you on this forum to explain financial issues in a common, down to earth way, goldsmith. not big pretentious words or antisemitic ramblings reminiscent of the darkest depths of the blogosphere

Groulxsmith posted:

The financialization of commodities markets doesn't really demand some kind of necessary increase in price, because firms don't tie up their capital in outright speculation; they profit off demand for derivative profits, and speculate on the volatility of the same

Want to be socially conscious? There's an app for that.

bonclay posted:

You criticized Ames and Taibbi for never moving past that angst stage. You think that there must be something constructive or useful they could be aspiring to beyond that, right? But changing a society requires facing incredible obstacles and risks. Many well-intentioned people with the intention of building a classless society have tried to fight for their cause and ended up crippling it instead, like the bad man If our goal is to make things better, we have to be acutely aware of the possibility that our well-intentioned solutions may end up merely manipulating or altering the contradictions instead of resolving them.

So the imperfect narratives horribly imperfect people like Taibbi and Ames uniquely give us, highlight inherent flaws, cracks in the system, and give us an indication of what a different, better one might look like and what safeguards it may require. We should seek to use the information that is valuable in their work, while disregarding the conclusions and the aspects that we know to be idiocy, bravado, or hyperbole. We should improve upon their work, since I think that each of us is just as capable as Ames or Taibbi of doing research, following money trails, exposing and explaining the flaws and anomalies of the system wherever they are, doing Google searches. We should allow ourselves to be guided by a Marxist teleology, and be willing to acknowledge the truth of all these horrors while still believing that the world does not have to stay this way forever.

well my question now is whether this DIALECTICAL APPROACH to reading matt taebo is something that happens widely, and further, if there is possibly a way of forcing the reader to take this approach. i guess thats why i also prefer adam curtis, because he tells stories that he seems to purposefully leave huge gaps or overreach in, so you can jump in and blow apart the narrative while still retaining the good elements in creating your own.

there's probably also something to be said about the different experience of reading these people from a european perspective as opposed to america. and i will. but not now. im eating porridge

Of course, many thinkers, including some scientists, persist in trying to wrest some sort of psychologically satisfying narrative from elements of the modern scientific worldview. But this effort is doomed because it is the very category of narrative that has been rendered cognitively redundant by modern science. Science does not need to deny the significance of our evident psychological need for narrative; it just demotes it from its previously foundational metaphysical status to that of an epistemically derivative ‘useful fiction’.

Some might object that there is a latent contradiction between my denial of the metaphysical reality of narrative order in nature and my appeal to a narrative of cognitive progress in intellectual history. But there is no contradiction: it is perfectly possible to track explanatory progress in the conceptual realm without invoking some dubious metaphysical narrative about the ineluctable forward march of Spirit. I think Robert Brandom’s reconstructive reading of Hegel does just this—it frees the normative ideal of explanatory progress from its metaphysical, and ultimately mythological, inflation into the universal history of Spirit.

Like Nietzsche, I think nihilism is a consequence of the ‘will to truth’. But unlike Nietzsche, I do not think nihilism culminates in the claim that there is no truth. Nietzsche conflated truth with meaning, and concluded that since the latter is always a result of human artifice, the former is nothing but a matter of convention. However, once truth is dismissed, all that remains is the difference between empowering and disempowering fictions, where ‘life’ is the fundamental source of empowerment and the ultimate arbiter of the difference between life-enhancing and life-depreciating fictions. Since the abandonment of truth undermines the reason for relinquishing illusion, it ends up licensing the concoction of further fictional narratives, the only requirement for which is that they prove to be ‘life-enhancing’.

I consider myself a nihilist precisely to the extent that I refuse this Nietzschean solution and continue to believe in the difference between truth and falsity, reality and appearance. In other words, I am a nihilist precisely because I still believe in truth, unlike those whose triumph over nihilism is won at the cost of sacrificing truth. I think that it is possible to understand the meaninglessness of existence, and that this capacity to understand meaning as a regional or bounded phenomenon marks a fundamental progress in cognition.

isn't this precisely where we stand as marxists? the hyperawareness of history's worst atrocities and the self-defeating cycle of abuse and power accumulation is exactly the foundation of the heart of dialectical materialism, this categorical rejection of any falsity or illusion in favor of the basic truth of our reality and experience

as such i think you make a mistake in tying this position to the experience of angst, but i disagree with that, this angst you claim is an existential malaise in the face of this unbearable notion that as an individual subject there is no immediate realisation of anything transcendent or good, no way to personally realize the notion of meaning that has been deprived from us by this cold face of truth. but i think that's totally against the nihilist stance, it's a desperate flailing towards meaning in a space where such a thing can't possibly exist. to me, by embodying this angst, there is nothing of nihilism in the positions of ames or taibbi. you might see them taking simply the role of critics but what is more important i think is that they are basically proposing a narrative. we are attributing the constant processes of the world-system particular agents with personal motivations and characteristics as opposed to the complex inhuman web of dialectical relationships. it might be desirable to understand reality in terms of Gold Mansacks dedicatedly derailing the international economy through the individual failures of fraught participants in reckless speculation, driven by the biologically ingrained pursuit of wealth present in the semitic peoples, but i refuse to believe there is truth there rather than in a serious dialectical investigation of the causal multitude that defines the world-system

what this is doing is participating in the practice brassier identifies, this rejection of truth in favor of life affirming or deprecating fictions, eating away at any reason to remove illusion from our world. i understand how problematic and weird accusing a perspective of embodying fascism is but i completely think this is fascism. this was posted recently and like anything else by sakai it is extremely useful

All during the rise of euro-fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, the left dissed & dismissed them as pawns of the capitalist class. Whether in the brilliant German Communist photomontage posters of Heartfield or the pronouncement from Moscow that "fascism is the terroristic dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie", there was a constant message that Italian fascism and German Nazism were only puppets for the big capitalist class.This has important elements of truth, but is fatally off-center and produces an actually disarming picture.

Today we think of fascism so much in terms of its repression, that we forget how much Nazism built its movement by campaigning against big capitalism.One famous National Socialist election poster shows a social-democratic winged "angel" walking hand in hand with a stereotyped banker, with the big slogan: "Marxism is the Guardian Angel of Capitalism". Hitler promised to preserve the "good" productive capitalism of ordinary hard-working Germans, while wiping out the "bad" parasitic big capitalism of the hidden finance capitalist Jewish bosses. In fact, tens of millions of Americans (and not just white folks) would support such a program right here & now. Fascism blended together a radical sentiment against the big bourgeoisie and their State, together with racist-nationalist ideology, into a political uprising of the middle classes .

how does bringing to light our secret jewish masters that perverted our political economy offer us anything in the way of a systematic critique of capital flows? i am reminded here really strongly of the trajectory of thought in the english philosopher nick land, who is probably most notable for his unflinching embrace of an ideology based around accelerationism. i think there's this basic misconception floated around here of accelerationism as this simplistic idea that things must get worse before they get better but in lands work and elsewhere its defined by this idea that capitalism proposes conditions that it is incapable of fulfilling - that is, this fantasy of this total vitality and invention present in marketplace competition that will bring about never imagined futures thanks to machinic development, this fantasy is nowhere present in the forms of capital we see today, because the contemporary free market is held sway by the hegemonic position of an elite cabal of monopoly capitalist enterprises. for land, the revolutionary impulse lies in the acceleration of these sites, pushing the market forward against Actually Existing Capitalism itself - so for the accelerationist proper, the herald of the future is not the zionist tentacles of the amerikan free market but the state based approaches of sinocapitalism. ames' vague keynesiam, any sort of social democratic reform of the capitalist system, the state centric conceptions of the sinocapitalist market, plays into this narrative completely, salvaging a "good" productive marketplace from the bad capitalists who pervert it, living in fictions and illusions rather than to any fidelity towards a notion of truth. as i understand it, this is exactly what fascism is, and this sort of market-against-monopoly position enabled by capitalist reform brought land to directly advocating the works of a thinker who seriously proposes military coups for the purpose of enforcing a market based economy

it's a fiction, a total illusion, that offers us the choice between Our Jewish Masters and a site of goodness and meaning that can be reached by rejecting them and their vampirism. if you don't believe that the real situation is as simple as that, then why continue to advocate that narrative? because it's useful? i see no nobility in spreading an idea you only hesitantly support for the purpose of wider political acceptance, i don't understand how that is anything but populism. this is probably the biggest problem i have with your thinking:

How can you change people's ideologies if you can't give them understandings that allow them to advocate confidently for the ideology?

i don't believe in this at all. why is it our role to change peoples ideologies? this is so tied to perverted colonialist white suprematist notions of dead marxism, that we the elite intelligentsia know better than the accumulated knowledge of the proletariat, their losses, and their victories. the process of revolution is the violent overcoming of the hegemon by the subaltern, the realisation of the subject who, by virtue of their basis in exclusion, cannot reproduce that exclusion themselves - i see no change in ideology necessary here, it is a realisation of the revolutionary moment and the radicalisation required to fulfill the potentials opened by this moment, the emergence of and fidelity to the Event. this sequence is realized by the identification of the processes of exclusion, the role of the part-of-no-part, an identification that is established solely by the proletariat - the long history of anticolonial struggles, many of the radical sites of our present conditions (the MST, the MEND, the hizbullah, the riots in the many favelas and banlieues of this world, etc.) show no immediate adherence to our ideology, this simple idea of changing minds is irrelevant to the processes of revolution. when they need it, and i fundamentally believe that the communist hypothesis will be needed by any emancipatory movement, lest they fall short of liberation, the proletariat will find it themselves. it's easy to forget, what with the trainspotting of first world leftist movements we all like to engage with, that the places where m-l-m as an ideology originated and continue to hold material influence have been solely in the peripheral areas of the developing world. even in what is figuratively our own backyard, the panthers adopted the advances of mao tse-tung thought without any provocation from the white petit-bourgeois. i see no reason why this could not happen again, because unlike any illusory fiction there is no end or insufficiency in truth

so i ask you back, why not nihilism? why participate in a narrative when we could surrender ourselves to truth? what this position offers us is the liberatory potential of violence, the ability to reject everything, the affirmation that in the face of acceleration we are completely capable of applying the breaks