“If we just remove the context of the largest human trafficking disaster Europe has seen in 30 years, it makes sense to want to be a prostitute in Ukraine!” Ukraine is literally the worst place on the continent to be doing that right now, not that it’s really the best place to do anything other than die.
You generally have a point but
and all three of those things being assumed as the only roles a woman would play in a war is just gross
??? Cooking and first aid are normal things for volunteers to do, male or female, it’s not that she’s a woman, but women seem to mostly have the good sense to not fly halfway around the world to get blown up as soldiers like some functionally-suicidal men did, even though there are certainly women on both sides of the war in combat roles.
There are some other normal volunteer roles, e.g. sanitation is very important, but you’d surely say the same thing if people were commenting on her not pursuing that (“oh! so women should be cleaners?”). Anything beyond that, like being a mechanic or nurse or something, requires a serious level of training
Your reading comprehension isn’t great. The problem isn’t that this woman is a prostitute, it’s that it’s normalizing the framing of “these men at war need access to sex,” which if you think about it for even a few seconds should raise red flags. If it is a “need,” then it is “necessary” to a war effort that it is accounted for, and suddenly you see the implication of a military prostitution industry, the existence of which would be a threat rather than a boon to impoverished women because, for this industry to be supplied, the powers that be will be sure there’s a minimum number of people who are desperate enough to sign up or else a good enough PR covering for what is actually slavery (such as corner cases of, to pick a totally random example, some woman flying halfway around the world to prostitute herself for free).
Could a self-identified Makhnovist be anything but a cultist?
It might be interesting to start a conversation on the appropriate comm there about whichever rule is being enforced (check the modlog) and challenge the rule.
Yeah, there are cranks who say stupid things, but it’s common knowledge at this point that the Corbyn campaign was undone by various levels of sabotage by fellow Labour members and even people within the campaign who went to extensive lengths to misappropriate campaign funds to undermine Corbyn while using baroque levels of targeted advertising against Corbyn and his advisers and even the journalists they follow to cover the tracks of those misappropriations. There were surely Jewish individuals and Jewish organizations involved, and Israel itself was probably involved since Britain is an important ally to it, but Corbyn was mainly undone by white British Zionist opposition.
Part of the issue is that western governments – the US famously has this issue with AIPAC – seem to wish to bait antisemitism by allowing Israel to use publicly-visible levers of power usually reserved for domestic corporations and “special interest groups” to control politicians. People see the success of AIPAC and they say “Look! Israel controls so much of US politics that concerns it!” They do not stop for a moment and wonder which other foreign countries are allowed to have a PAC in the US that can so freely buy off politicians. Israel has a lot of money thanks to the endless money funneled to it, but they certainly aren’t the richest country in the world. In absolute terms, the richest country is the PRC (due to size, population, etc), and yet we see no American-Chinese Public Affairs Committee PAC, this of course being due to the fact that it is not permitted to have one. Israel is allowed to have one because it is chiefly a western puppet, and so it is quite safe to allow it to use these levers of power to ultimately give money back to its masters to secure their own common interests!
Aristotle had the benefit of not having millennia of literature to be working in relation with, and himself is quite responsible for the promotion of metaphysics as a philosophical field, which is perhaps the most obscure branch of philosophy.
A Zionist is someone who supports the existing ethnostate of Israel, right? The majority of people in Britain who hold that stance are white (though many of the like .5% who are Jewish in the UK are also Zionists). Further more, while Zionism is obviously connected to the institutions of Israel, which are populated by Jewish people, British Zionism mainly does not derive from Israel itself but from the British FCDO and military and its corporate mouthpieces – all of which are principally white and more-primarily executors of white supremacy than of Zionism (and promote Zionism for the purpose of its white-supremacist, imperialist project).
The accusation of it mainly being Zionists doing the sabotage may or may not be true – I don’t know – but the saboteurs in that scenario are going to be overwhelmingly white people because Zionism in the UK is overwhelmingly a white institution populated by white promoters and adherents, so calling the accusation antisemitic is absurd.
Philosophy has a tendency to need to use very specialized language to avoid problems of ambiguity and to precisely identify concepts that have no reason to come up in the vast, vast majority of conversation among laypeople.
Yeah, there was some point to it back in Aristotle’s day, but you can tell how much someone doesn’t know about logic from the degree to which they lean on pat lists of informal fallacies. Formal fallacies, as in those produced by incorrect inference in classical logic (or an argument that can be accurately reduced to classical logic), are infinite in a similar way to how “wrong answers to math equations” is an infinite category. “Informal fallacies” are a catalogue of rhetorical tricks and cognitive biases that it is good to be aware of but which don’t have very much to do with logic as a field.
jfc, Corbyn’s support for Palestine clearly ruffled some pro-Israel feathers but the idea that Israel or the ‘Board of Deputies’ were the sole force behind the attacks on Corbyn is, well, anti-Semitic. Even if the people saying it are saying ‘Israel/Zionists’.
That’s false, not least of all because most British Zionists are white.
It’s good practice to link the pamphlet or at least name it
Yeah I mean, in that regard, just look at the entire weight of history. There are vanishingly few instances where people merely communicating was able to bring about what could reasonably be described as revolutionary change, with the Velvet Revolution being something of an ironic counterexample.
Huh, looks like I linked it incorrectly. Here is the link plainly:
http://www.abstraktdergi.net/this-ruthless-criticism-of-all-that-exists-marxism-as-science/
It’s an essay by J Moufawad-Paul on how Marxism’s status as an attempt at a scientific understanding of political-economy is its very foundation and must be defended, both from self-professed “Marxists” who disparage this element as well as liberal academics who do just as you describe, treating it as merely another “lens” and functionally as a sort of rhetorical flavor and roleplay rather than a method to understand the world:
My position, however, which is the position of multiple revolutionary movements and the great world historical revolutions, is that we cannot be ecumenical. Whereas today’s chic critical theorists uphold a variety of post-Marxist European theoretical tendencies so as to dismiss and castigate Marx, I uphold Marxism to castigate these theoretical tendencies. I am not claiming, to be clear, that we cannot borrow from some of the insights of these tendencies but only that, as tendencies, they are theoretically inferior to Marxism regardless of the latter’s purported flaws. Weheliye [a “post-Marxist” academic] reduces every European theoretical tendency to the same state of “white European thinkers [who] are granted a carte blanche” but, in this reduction, misses a key point: it is only the Marxist tendency that can account for and surmount this carte blanche, thus necessarily generating theoretical offspring critical of its erroneous aspects, because of what it is: a science.
That is, the reason why those of us who are committed to Marxism can and should uphold this commitment in the face of other theoretical tendencies is because the theoretical trajectory initiated by Marx and Engels, which goes by the name of historical materialism, was one that was scientific. Unlike the so-called “radical” theories generated by or drawn upon its discontents, historical materialism is not a mere quirk of the humanities based on some academic’s thoughts about reality translated into an intriguing terminological set. Rather it is a natural explanation of natural phenomena that has generated a truth procedure and thus falls within the gamut of science. And it is precisely this claim that has made Marxism the scapegoat of those theories that, from their very inception, have also sought to destabilize and usurp the very conception of a historical/social science.
I do think Weber and Foucault are quite interesting and can be useful, but they do not hold the same ground that Marx and his successors do.
Sometimes it’s better to just wait and observe for a bit. In most subjects, if Marx is even brought up, it is in a pluralistic but not necessarily negative light. This also works as a means of undermining it, but that’s as a biproduct of liberal ideology rather than an agenda as such.
Red bashing is a thing in philosophy, history, and poli-sci. Econ just ignores him and literary and sociological courses tend to have a positive view.
Yeah, though just like physical fitness it’s wildly easier to be high-performing if you start that process of training while you are a child rather than later in life.
I wouldn’t go that far. Intelligence is still a physical phenomenon produced by highly complex and somewhat varied systems. There’s going to be different levels of intelligence, like there are different levels of empathy, of strength, of immunity, and so on. Strong evidence would be needed to counter this. That doesn’t mean people don’t exaggerate these differences, look at them too uncritically, or misunderstand both what they are and their origins (which are mostly in child-rearing).
What is more likely bullshit is the concept of “general intelligence” or “G”, which is basically an illusion of statistical question-begging that has been very useful to phrenologists and basically no one else.
I think too many people get caught up on a consumer-identity mode of relating to these things. It’s way more useful to have good fundamental understanding. For very early socialism, Engels provides an excellent summary in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, since the bulk of pre-Marxist philosophers were put by Marx and Engels in the “utopian” category. Text. Audiobook.
While I think Conquest of Bread is probably worth looking at for an economic skeptic of the idea of a classless, moneyless society, generally it seems to me to be the best strategy to prioritize looking at works that were associated with actual projects of socialist states, and the first person to lead such an endeavor that made it to the “actual nation-building” stage was Lenin.
That was one case where I was really baffled by how stupid the anarcho-bidenists were, seeing literal “communism doesn’t work in practice” people on the same side and not thinking “huh, maybe there’s a problem with my position?”
They are vastly, vastly less common and this is just a poor attempt at a counterpoint because conservatives also dislike male prostitutes, but the answer is that to the socialist male prostitution also represents a problem. It is a smaller problem in absolute terms, but on a “per capita” basis it is of similar severity.