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Van Jones wrote a positive review of a book that came out years ago whose central premise was developing alternative economic systems to the current one with its attendant gross economic inequality and concentration of wealth in the 1% (https://www.amazon.com/What-Then-Must-We-Revolution/dp/1603585044)

Either he has changed since then or doesn't care to live up to his principles, or this is a reminder of what empty soulless husks elite political news and political commentators are.

There's a great book about this called White Trash: the 400 year History of Class in America.

it's awesome. Slavery started just as a way to make money but quickly poor whites and poor blacks began working together so the rich had to stop that. That's when they instituted laws making all blacks legally inferior to whites.

Before that there was no concept of "white people". English people were considered to be totally seperate from German people who were totally separate from Scandinavian People who were totally different from Irish people.

https://www.amazon.com/White-Trash-400-Year-History-America/dp/0143129678

I own the audiobook.

Fun Fact: The term 'White Trash" being used to describe poor whites has been around for as long or longer than the N-word.

Those who know anything about the indigenous peoples of California and their unique way of life know that ethnic classifications like 'Ohlone' aren't very significant because they had basically no permanent governing structures above the level of the village and nuclear family in immediate pre-Columbian times.

Unless you want open competitions so that only men can play as there are few sports where females can match any male in any manner, then you already accept that people can be banned from competition based on biological differences. Or if you accept that those that don't fit into something like weight divisions can be excluded from competition, you accept that people can be banned based on biological differences.

By extension its been tested by the US Air Force that there is still a noticeable biologically sourced difference between transgender athletes and their cis competitors after several years of transitioning procedures. Moderate the above study by the limited sample size however - although most any study on transgender athletes are going to have limited sample sizes by the nature of the condition.

The reason for these divisions is to keep people safe. Males are stronger than females, there's no way to make up for that outside of singular genetic aberrations. I've trained in MMA for well over a decade, when I was starting out rather young one of the Instructors I had was a woman. Absolutely fantastic fighter. Could have went pro easily if she didn't have other aspirations. By my mid teens I was able to beat her just by using my body size, and I'm not a massive guy. Nowadays its not even a competition.

Its unfair. But that is reality. Sports are predicated on safe competition between individuals or teams. Not on making people feel accepted or happy.

I wonder how many essentially selfish boomers plan to follow the advice of this book and "die broke." I know my girlfriend's dad has announced his intention to do so, to leave no inheritance behind (and he's done quite well for himself over the years), and I've lost a bit of respect for him because of it, as it's quite clear his children will make out much worse than he has thanks to the luck of his birth year.

I've into a similar issue with a "police abolitionist" friend. I was trying to honestly engage and offered to hear him out. Ok, what's your proposal? How should we handle socially deviant/disruptive behavior. He wouldn't elaborate and just reccomended reading The End of Policing by Alex Vitale. So I picked up the book, sincerely wanting to hear an alternative. What I got was the first 3/4 of the book was just a chronicling of various police abuses over the years. Which felt like a lot of preaching to the choir. Anyone that would pick up that book probably already agrees that there is a problem with policing in America and is looking for a solution. Then in the last quarter of the book he proposes a series of police reforms, acknowledges that any kind of mass society is going to need a body that enforces rules, and does this dumb linguistic shufffle where he calls them something different and claims to have "ended policing."

Its such bad marketing. When most people hear "police abolition" they think you are calling for anarchy and chaos, the total lack of any social controls at all. They need to remessage to call for what they do want and identify concrete steps to getting there. Police and prison abolitionism is such a bullshit copout that lets the person posture as a more extreme socialist without having to actually annunciate a real position that could be implemented.

lol jesus fucking christ, everyone understands that aipac is shorthand for a constellation of pro-israel lobbying groups and donors. go read the israel lobby if you're seriously this dense

You think Zuckeberg wants to be be grilled by AOC about how Facebook isn't doing enough to ban "extremists"? I very much doubt it. Did Apple want to give the NSA a backdoor? The record shows that they were't too thrilled with the idea. You think Google and Apple want to censor their platforms for the sake of China and Russia? Who do you think is compelling half of US based hosting providers to block requests from users in Cuba and Crimea (two places at the top of the US sanctions list)?

It's not like big tech cares either way but the main push isn't coming from them.

Aw thanks. You date one girl too many with BPD and it gives you the ability to see beyond the veil.

In all seriousness, A General Theory Of Love poetically and thoughtfully examines the biological, psychological and ineffable aspects of love, and I highly recommend it to anyone.

Actually, recommending that book touches on the central problem I’m grappling with:

How do you get it into the hands of the people who would benefit from reading it most?

there seriously needs to be a cartoon guide. dude the Internet has made me so dumb I can barely type these days, I think for most of us it would be super helpful

edit: o shit https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Lacan-Graphic-Guide-ebook/dp/B00OZHQF8U/

https://www.amazon.com/Fantasyland-America-Haywire-500-Year-History-ebook/dp/B004J4WNJE

Americans have generally always been believing weird-ass shit, simply because unlike most other large-scale pre-industrial societies, there usually wasn't an institution charged with limiting the acceptable body of belief (e.g an official church, or a Confucian mandarin elite, or a priestly caste). In the 19th century you had the Great Awakening and all the bizarre religious sects that came out of that (Mormons being the most prominent), but also things like patent medicine salesmen etc.

But you could argue that rationalism and scientific thinking peaked in the US immediately postwar, during the 1950s and early 1960s. Not coincidentally, this is when the US gained a 'thought control apparatus' for the first time, in the shape of television and other mass media. The prestige of American science and technology in this era, though, was quite heavily bound up with the military-industrial complex.

So when you had the counterculture emerge in the mid-to-late '60s, a lot of it veered into anti-science and rationalism, given the deep associations between the technocratic scientific establishment and the military industrial complex responsible for the carnage in Vietnam. This book is quite good on how a lot of woo came out of California, at first with the hippie movement, but later associated with the sort of postmodern French theory that gave rise to woke idpol.

Ofc it wasn't just the 'left' that was going down this road, the American Right from the late '80s up till now began to embrace the sort of paranoid conspiracism that's really dominated their politics ever since.

So I'm going to use this opportunity to plug what is the only good book on the caste system: Sumit Guha's <em>Beyond Caste</em>. I never truly understood how Medieval Southern Asia worked in material terms until reading this.

Make an actual argument. Repeating "its a buzzword because it is in gender studies" isn't an argument.

>unhinged articles

Why is it unhinged

>At some point reality is going to smack you in the face

Lol okay, it's not my ideology that's led to the current situation

If you're interested in this subject I highly recommend reading Rogers Scrutons Thinkers of the New Left. Even if you're not conservative it's a valuable read for any moderate and one of the best critiques of the radical (mostly French) 1970s new left movement which heralded this obsession with 'power' and attacks on all forms of institutions.

> Scruton demonstrates that the New Left does not have "a system of rationally held beliefs", and is dependent on never questioned assumptions.

https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Frauds-Firebrands-Thinkers-Left/dp/1472935950

Few people have attempted to take on Focualt and Sartre and the like, and most of their political babble is just accepted without scrutiny these days. It'd probably be suicide for most professors.

A lot of people think this identity politics and weird obsessions with inverting power structures (as opposed to just gradually equalizing them), where only the alleged victims and oppressed should have a say in any matter, is a new phenomenon but it's far from it.

This literally was Tim Berners Lee original vision of the world wide web.

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HTML was supposed to be human writable so that anyone with just a few hours of learning who knew how to use a word processor could build their own web-page and upload their own information. People didn't need to know the details about how to run apache since schools/institutions/community-websites would be the places to provide hosting for its own members.

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It was never intended to be a format for performing creating what are essentially real-time multimedia sharing or messaging apps. Definitely wasn't intended to be a source for profiteering. But with javascript becoming a vehicle for web-tracking, and generating profiles of users to try and sell people more crap, companies have eaten up the World Wide Web, and it has turned to shit.

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My hope at this point is if developers can make a less retarded version of GNUNet integrate with IPv6, then something will be ready and in place when the rollover from v4 to v6 happens (which to be fair, may not)

I've actually only read Exiting the Vampire Castle, and I (not surprisingly) find it really powerful, and not just because of the, well, context. I haven't read much Zizek and Adorno, to be honest. Once in awhile I try to dip into Zizek and it just doesn't work for me. He did a thing on trans issues, for example, which wasn't just offensive but that sort of offensive you get when you're trying to write in a clever and look-how-smart-I-am-way about a subject where you REALLY don't have any genuine knowledge. (I'm lobbing one over the plate with that remark, aren't I?)

As for the question about the U.S., it's really interesting, isn't it? We've always been an insanely individualistic people, and I think the absence of a strong left, lately, makes those impulses even stronger. I can't recommend &quot;Age of Fracture&quot; by the Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers enough on this stuff. From early on;

>Across the multiple fronts of ideational battle, from the speeches of presidents to books of social and cultural theory, conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture.

Could anyone sum it up better than that? And while Rodgers believes that 9/11 temporarily slowed down or partially reversed this trend (which doesn't mean he supports, like, the foreign-policy response to it, of course), he thinks it then continued apace.

The Amazon reviews confirm that's the direction the book goes in.

>An utter heresy, of course, but a perfectly factual account of how the KKK came into being and why boys are still raised to respect only females and smite other males who would dare challenge one. It has been this way for hundreds of years at least; the Klan cult was just one modern reaffirmation of an ancient chivalric code for the oncoming industrial age. Modern feminism is merely the latest velvet affectation of the code, nicely masking the state-sanctioned subjugation, disposal and murder of men. If you want to know why there are more boys than girls born, but within 60 years between a quarter and a third of those males are dead, read this.

The guy also wrote masterworks of sociology like "Female Sex Predators: A Crime Epidemic" and "How to Avoid False Accusations of Rape: Self Defense in the Feminist State".

I can’t tell if you’re confused, but <em>Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology</em> and <em>Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism</em> describe the radical, socialist and liberatory theology of the Church, which I suppose you could say is a critical theory that challenges Liberalism and Capitalism.

A good book on the subject is Spooks: The Haunting of America : The Private Use of Secret Agents https://www.amazon.com/dp/0688033555/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_T19X5WKETMBZWQ3YN8FJ

It’s dated but well-sourced.

A book just came out about this, <em>How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate</em> featured on Aufbungabunga

Don’t be surprised if the hearts suddenly bleeding for the muslim populations of Burma and China are part of this policy.

class unity's doing great, though the website has been down for a couple days due to a rogue IT guy. hopefully back up in short order. in the meantime you can join here https://airtable.com/shrBLh2v5Ef24B6DI

I lost 35 pounds in a couple months eating fast food for every weekday lunch. Turns out just getting a jr burger, jr fry and a diet dr pepper is not only cheaper than the mega combo but also just as tasty. Cutting out the full calorie coke alone and that saves you a shitload of calories.

I just took slightly more effort. Gaining weight is laziness. Literally just don't get a large Coke refill and you've cut out 315 calories instantly. Then get a small next time and you've cut out nearly another 90 calories. Switch to coke zero or diet pepsi and WOW 215 calories disappear. It's literally that easy to remove 630 calories a meal from your diet or 1260 calories if you do this for lunch and dinner.

Banning

>men's ponytails

When it's

>A traditional Han Chinese hairstyle- It was inspired by the Confucian belief that cutting your hair was a symbol of dishonour.

https://www.sutori.com/story/men-s-hairstyles-throughout-the-dynasties--HAeVx4vPpi8EfRsgiNctM9Kw

People's Republic of China getting less Chinese...

He sure does.

He wrote Why Marx Was Right, which is what I always recommend over Capital as introductory reading on the sub.

>I expect that MIT is going to have a few full times staffers organizing all of it for decades. >>I fuckin doubt it, Chomsky is left-wing >>> There's literally 0 chance that MIT won't want to archive the hundreds of thousands of pages of one of the greatest thinkers and the most important linguist of the 20th century, who also happened to have spent his entire career there.

Quote from the thread. From what I remember there were a drive to kickstart his archive at MIT. I remember it, because I donated.

Yup, my memory checks out: http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/mit-is-digitizing-a-huge-archive-of-noam-chomskys-lectures.html

I also got me a nice boost at work, I'm a programmer and one day secretary comes in to my office and annouces, "/u/opi, here's a letter to MIT in your name". It was a "thank you" note, but I never let that slip. ;p

Surplus, Sedintism and Domestication are the roots of Power. If we want to critique power why is it taboo to critique its origins?

Origins: A John Zerzan Reader https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005B2EMCE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_fabc_BuKbGbZEEW60J

Operating theory is this article shamed them into doing something. I think that might oversell the importance of TNW as a media outlet, but you never know. Maybe threatening violence against cops for the 100th time was the last straw.

What determines if people are into these sorts of things? Is this like the shame and guilt from overbearing parents or something?

I was thumbing through <em>Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present</em> and was blown away by how early childhood experiences create different psychological profiles that fit into a typology.

Obviously serial murder is the ultimate expression of these impulses, and seems to be correlated to social conditions that no longer exist - traumatized and abusive ww2 veteran fathers (no treatment for PTSD, different attitudes towards domestic violence), unwanted children (no abortions), insanely dysfunctional marriages (no divorces), leaded gasoline, hitchhiking etc. - but it was fascinating to see, for example, how boys that had harsh and domineering mothers would often become rage killers seeking to destroy femininity, boys that were shamed and emasculated would start collecting women’s clothing, crossdress etc. and become lust killers.

Could porn preferences come from those same, very early experiences?

Matt McCusker keeps referring to <em>A Billion Wicked Thoughts : What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships</em> and something called “Porn Sickness”, but I haven’t read it and can’t say. It seems to back up what you’re saying though.

I think the difference is the connotations...

You tip draq queens. You just do, its not like they were doing it special for him. That's what you do at drag shows.

The drag queen can be dressed like a big fat bumble bee with a beard and they still get tipped.

https://www.groupon.com/articles/what-to-wear-to-a-drag-show-and-other-tips

It's just like the next version of this story is gonna be "Tucker Carlson reports the young straight boy was forced to take hormones and dance surrounded by 10000 naked grown men screaming yass queen and it was her turn"

Not even saying this at you really. I just see this shit on the rest of reddit and I thought this sub would be different.

My glib response is that they aren’t called “The Dangerous Class” for nothing.

The more detailed explanation is that the historical record is fairly decisive about which side the Lumpen will align with when push comes to shove - counterrevolution and reaction. Obviously there’s a lot to it, but on the most basic level Lumpen conditions create lumpen culture. Which is to say, if you are submerged in a world of dog-eat-dog, lying cheating and stealing for survival, violence as the most basic and effective form of dispute resolution, and for all those reasons prioritizing your own survival over any social bond, and not being able to trust anyone, political action is not really a possibility.

Riots? Sure. Revolution? No.

And keep in mind without political or class consciousness those riots can be drummed up against almost anything but the social order. It’s easy to set the howling mob on sectarian or ethnic enemies, and for the lumpen it is much easier for them to visualize the working and middle class enemies of their daily life (debt collector, shopkeepers, whatever) than abstractions like the state or the sociopolitical order.

There is an argument that the Precariat may have revolutionary potential. As austerity, covid, neoliberalism, and inflation push people downwards activating them before they fall into the Lumpen may be a possibility.

That was fantastic. I don’t have much to say because I was just typing words words words on Calvinism and Christology in another thread and am tapped out, other than I think you’d either really appreciate After the Avant-Gardes or it would drive you insane like the Kitab al-Azif.

After the Avant-Gardes: Reflections on the Future of the Fine Arts and Towards a New Architecture,

I get that people evolve their positions -- and in all seriousness she's better than a lot of these Democratic candidates -- but she comes across as opportunistic to me and took a hard anti-Iran position at that speech. I haven't looked into this deeply enough but leftists will point to various things that seem bizarre and disconnected on their own (her old homophobia) and it's easy to dismiss these individually, but I think it makes more sense in the context of her being part of this Hawaiian political machine that has mutated its positions a lot of over the years.

This article is a little old, but it presents an interesting angle on the San Antonio Symphony strike. First of all, it looks like the article had an alternate title at one point: &quot;Here's how the symphony strike is impacting Opera San Antonio&quot;. Opera San Antonio tried to contract some of the San Antonio Symphony musicians independently, but Local 23 rejected the offer in solidarity with their fellow players. As a result, the Opera was forced to find another solution. The conductor hired a pianist, and a performance was arranged with piano and harpsichord instead of an orchestral accompaniment.

> I remember it started to get noticeably stupid when r/Athiesm became a default sub... just a big dip in the quality of user, but there was still a large portion of the site that was enjoyable to use. Now I stay away from /all like the plague and stick to the same few subs. Even niche hobby subs have gotten remarkably lamer. Everywhere it’s just the most bottom of the barrel humor, people have a hard time engaging in honest debate, you aren’t allowed to go against the status quo in most subreddits, etc.

It's because there's still some good information in the small subs. But even there the mods are cancer. I was interested in a small subreddit with >10k people ... with a bottom mod that bans anyone who disagrees with him and comments in every thread. There's a few people left from before he became a mod, but fewer with each day.

Aether is a solution to the problem: https://getaether.net/ there's even a stupidpol there.

I've wanted to get this book for a while.

Muslim Empires are some of the empires I have a big gap in reading/knowledge about in my "Historical Empire" readings.

do yourself a favor and put that bro science bullshit on hold for a bit to read this book

https://www.amazon.com/Starch-Solution-Regain-Health-Weight/dp/1623360277

Asians eat rice and Mediterraneans eat pasta (actually Asians also eat noodles and Italians also eat risotto) and both eat bread and they're the healthiest and happiest and longest lived people in the world

"In 2013 Professor Lance Dehaven-Smith in a peer-reviewed book published by the University of Texas Press showed that the term “conspiracy theory” was developed by the CIA as a means of undercutting critics of the Warren Commission’s report that President Kennedy was killed by Oswald. The use of this term was heavily promoted in the media by the CIA."

https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-Theory-America-Discovering/dp/0292757697/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1471971025&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Conspiracy+Theory+in+America

Feel free to direct your argument to this history professor then. :)

See: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/cnqzu.com/Philosophy/neoreaction/_extra%20authors/Lasch%2C%20Christopher/The%20Minimal%20Self.pdf

Note: despite the name of the link, I do not considerate Lasch to have been a reactionary.

Here's a free pdf - https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;rct=j&amp;url=https://the-eye.eu/public/concen.org/Conspiracy%2520Theory%2520eBooks%2520Collection%2520part%25202%2520%255BPDF%255D-OMNiSCiENT/Baudrillard%252C%2520Jean%2520-%2520The%2520Transpare...

The 2nd 3rd and 4th chapters are titled "transeconomics, transsexuality and transaesthetics" which all come back to "the transpolitical realm of indifference."

Example I could argue that Trump is a trans politician = he's not a politician but he is a politician. Transeconomics - war torn Congo functions perfectly in global capital as warlords procure a steady supply of silicon for our electronics. Transaesthetics is where most would probably shrug at the statement "everything is art" etc.

All these elements amount to uncertainty and instability which is great for opportunistic Capitalists.

I’ve been trying to give you the space to develop your own Authorial Voice.

> u/Enough-Oil-2003 grew with the years. Every other writer claimed descent from him. Inexplicably, the whole of r/stupidpol posting proceeded from his genius. Poetry, novels, short stories, history, theater, criticism—he had opened up the whole gamut of literary endeavor to his fellow posters. He was first in time, and first in quality. He was the source. Neither r/wallstreetbets nor r/Tinder could have existed without him, for he made the posting language; he prepared the ground for the growth of every genre.

>After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob credible "historical figures" [...] archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus has similarly been discarded as a fruitless pursuit.

https://www.amazon.com/What-Biblical-Writers-Know-When-ebook/dp/B001G0O3DI

It's the ancestral home according to the Torah, which is conveniently their holy book. Even if it is their ancestral home, about 4 other culture groups can lay similar claims. But those 4 other groups aren't regularly sold weapons and arms with which to kill each other.

The trajectory of the 21st century will be set by those who control the memes of production!

Edit: damn, somebody beat me to the T-shirt for that meme.

https://www.amazon.com/Mammoth-Book-Ghost-Stories/dp/0881845906

Favorite Horror:

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

In a Glass Darkly - Sheridan Le Fanu

The House on the Borderlands - William Hope Hodgson

Hell House - Richard Matheson

The Dark Chamber - Leonard Cline

If anyone wants in the mood to don a tinfoil hat then look into the west coast rock scene of the 60s/70s. Lots of connections to military intelligence and similar

https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Scenes-Inside-Canyon-Laurel/dp/1909394122

https://youtu.be/OJPfBiZ1mZ8

2 hour sound only interview from 2014

Thanks for the recommendation, Doug. I, as Sunnite Muslim, am very much indebted to Prof. Brad S Gregory 's The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society to understand Christian modern history. That's why I ask about Anabaptist peasant cos that's one of the part of history that intrigues me in that book.

I will say tho if I have an authority, I definitely will include this book in the curriculum. Especially at Madrassa. Although the book didnt explicitly tell it, which I expect, the problem of reformation is on the preservation of the Bible itself and methodology of interpretation. Which Islam have an abundace of utility that prove very usefull so we dont go to hermeneutic ways. It's a shame that hermeneutic is taught by state-sponsored university in Indonesia. And most of them is alumnus of McGill University 😆

Baptists, Presbyterians and Anglicans were sort of at odds - Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario

Religion was at the heart of Ontario life for many years. In Two Worlds, Westfall examines the origin, character, and social significance of the powerful and distinctive Protestant culture that grew and flourished in Southern Ontario in the mid-Victorian

Enjoy if you can stomach Amazon

>The liberal ideological framework is incapable of dealing with crime, because it involves doing things that would run counter to what liberals have focused on since 2020, which is overwhelmingly race and alleged systemic racism.

Reducing the homicide rate of young Black men should be THE MOST IMPORTANT task for fighting racism in the US, but liberals seem resistant to even acknowledging the reality. This book I find to be the most palatable coverage of the issue for liberals, but most of friends/family I recommend it to don't even want to engage the subject. No other topic makes the wealthy Whites in my life more uncomfortable.

Haven't read this book but I've watched his talks and he says two main things that I agree with about the motivation for adopting ESG:

1. Wall Street wanted to draw attention away from class issues after the Occupy movement because a population unified around class awareness is their worst fear.
   
2. Focusing on race / gender and other idpol bullshit allows them to appease most of the Occupy types so it accomplishes #1 and serves as a sort of PR shield against any criticism. "We're not the bad guys, look at all this woke shit we're doing!" It also destroys any hope of people unifying around class issues by pitting the different identity groups against each other.

Book is called Woke, Inc. Like I said, I haven't read it so do your own research before buying: https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Inc-Corporate-Americas-Justice/dp/1546090789

If you want to take your ad-blocking up another degree, you can get a Raspberry Pi to set up a Pi-hole which blocks ads and trackers network wide and in more than just your browser. It can block some of the tracking your smart devices do as well.

I love it when these wokies do their damned best to get low paid workers fired by big ass corporate monsters like target.

Edit-apparently he does this shit for attention a lot But still what a douche

The weird thing is that she has solid papers and and a h-index of 15, so she isn't a pop-sci retard or a fraud. Wtf happened?

I would suggest reading Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person: A pessimist's guide to marriage, offering insight, practical advice, and consolation before making that commitment.

The harder you work at making sure you’re marrying the right person, the less you’ll have to work at making sure it’s a good marriage, which of course you’ll also have to do. Sweat in training so you don’t bleed in battle.

I don’t know how into this you want to go, but Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage makes it clear that capitalism atomizing all human relationships is what did it.

A marriage being just about two people is something that’s only existed for about 60 years. Before that family, in-laws, friends and people in the community were there to provide support and advice, help navigate and even negotiate conflicts, and all sorts of things that took the pressure off the marriage. When people had stronger relationships outside their marriage their spouse was also not the only person they had to talk to, spend time with, complain about work etc. Even raising kids was much easier because people were around to help, money was less stressful when the community could be turned to, and on and on.

gotta have the pumps to make it work

The Catholic to Socialist pipeline is real, it’s what brought me to the sub. I also see lots and lots of similar posters here, online, and increasingly in my real life.

It’s something I think is worth looking into. There are some academics at the University of Toronto working on the social history of Catholics in Canada, and I’ve been persuaded by their work, but of course the social context of Catholics in the US is entirely different which makes the convergence more interesting.

More broadly, while academics have known for a long time that theology, history and doctrine would create a certain social outlook in Catholics in theory, none of us have had a perfect catechesis in practice. Many, I’ll say most, did not even have a religious upbringing at home, in the US I understand they don’t have taxpayer funded Catholic schools. So, how is it that even the background radiation of Catholicism creates an outlook in conflict with society?

It would be one thing if say reading Leonardo Boff came first, but I think it’s often the opposite - people discover that Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World confirms their underlying feelings, but didn’t get there though being overly familiar with Paul, let alone Pauline scholars at UofT. It’s really something.

Yeah, it would probably behoove y'all to read Scott Horton's book "Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan". Dude cites his sources every which way, and it's absolutely an enraging read when you realize how dysfunctional, unnecessary, and inhumane this war was. That the people who pushed for it the most appear not to have been acting in good faith.

https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Errand-Time-End-Afghanistan/dp/1548650218?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&amp;dplnkId=4677d9f9-4fda-49ab-ac3c-f66e8f31fb96

An excerpt from the book is below

"And around the same time the U.S. was also announcing it was stepping up cooperation with India and requesting the Indians help the US. work around its own sanctions against Russia by purchasing even more MI-25 attack helicopters from them for the ANA India's continued willingness to train and equip Afghan National Army forces in their fight against the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network amounted to nothing less than a "proxy war" between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan, in the words of reporter Charles Tiefer, a proxy war in which the U.S. remains on both sides. All this virtually guarantees the Pakistani state will increase aid to their favored insurgent forces in response. The Americans could not be employing a more self-defeating strategy at this point if sabotage was their actual goal,58

A Trojan Horse?

In the autumn of 2016, the "Butcher of Kabul," Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the infamous, formerly CIA-backed Pashtun warlord, former Afghan Prime Minister and insurgent leader, signed a peace deal with the new government in Kabul without the precondition of full foreign withdrawal. Betting the occupation was as good as over at that point Hekmatyar apparently decided that he and his Hizb-e-Islami group would be better off consolidating their position in the capital before his sometimes-allies, the Taliban, beat him to it."

Didi! I remember her. She's the first brush I had with pathological intersectionalism, the initial step of realizing the failure of idpol.

He's an economic historian. He writes about a lot of things, but his main focus is debt. For this subject specifically he did a whole series for Harvard, but those are expensive academic books. He summarized the ideas in this book. Or you can just listen to him be interviewed, like here.

The primary book is Brian Sykes' "Blood of the Isles".

Apparently it has the far more prosaic title of "Vikings, Saxons and Celts" in the US market.

> The USSR recognized that Ukrainians had linguistically and culturally diverged enough from other descendants of the Rus people to be their own nation

Yes, modern-day Belarusians also exist, as a nation, mostly thanks to the cultural policies of the Soviets from back in the 1920s. That's what Putin is also basically saying, among other things (even though he "pushes" the creation of "Ukraine-ness" as a concept back to Imperial Tsarist times, and, as I said, he's most probably correct on that).

The thing is that's not what today's Ukrainians say, or, at least, the nationalistic ones. As far as I know they're saying that they used to be Ukrainians 300-400 years ago and further back, even though they were called something else (as you mention). I think that is, in many respects, quite false, I think that lots of their present national consciousness (including their name as a nation) was "constructed" (why? by who? under what circumstances? that's a long story) starting with the 19th century In fact the same thing happened with the nation that I am a part of (Romania), and to many other nations around this part of the continent, even going further West (Germany and Italy, partially Spain, at the limit even France).

Again, in this Putin is correct, Ukraine as a nation is a concept that was imagined starting with the 19th century, when those lands used to be part of Imperial Russia.

Yeah, to partially quote:

> the right-wing/sucking of Russia package

(meaning this sub, I can't understand the oral fixation, but whatever)

I had also did not give too many shits about all the crazy accents and verb conjugations that the French language has, so that must have rustled some additional jimmies, but seeing as I was commenting inside a thread that was all gung-ho about bringing even more deadly weapons (50 Leclerc tanks) into a war I really didn't want to put the effort as a not-native French speaker.

On a more general tone, it's crazy how the feeling has changed in France (I say that as a francophile). Only now I've started reading some Jean-François Revel, I hadn't read him until now (even though he's idolised by many of the "intellectuals" here in Romania, that should tell you something) because I knew he was crazy, and sure enough he is crazy, but reading his L'obsession anti-américaine is interesting to see how viewpoints that were very outside the French mainstream back then, in the very early 2000s, have now become almost official foreign office policy fort the French State.

I mean, at some point he complains about the foreign minister of that era, Vedrine I think, and about how Vedrine is wrong when talking about the US hegemonic power and about the unipolarity associated to that hegemony. Focusing on that viewpoint (US as a hegemonic power, the focus on the unipolar world) now directly throws one into "he's with Putin camp!", no way a Western foreign minister would dare say something like this again.

Funny thing about the Congo is that the war is largely systematized there. Even for the locals outside the warzones, it's a great way to get money and power. Can't recommend the book <em>The War that Doesn't Say its Name</em> enough, I have a feeling a lot of people on here would appreciate it.

I think you are approaching the issue from the wrong angle. True believers view affirmative action as a method of addressing historical racial discrimination, an there is an infinite well of historical discrimination to draw from.

For example, in undergrad I asked my feminist professor during office hours when she thought feminism would be unnecessary. After overcoming the initial shock, she responded: "When there is no more violence against women because they are women." Which I interpreted as pretty much never.

The truth is that supporters of affirmative action are not thinking about the endgame at all. For them the project is still in the beginning stages, as underrepresentation relation to population for many groups is significant. For example, I saw you went to law school, and the percentage black law students (all law students as well due to high cost and low value of a JD) has declined in the last decade (double the rate for black men compared women). Thus, the recruitment efforts to admit underrepresented minorities for universities will not be decreased anytime soon.

There are many good arguments against affirmative action based on race. The fact that it should be unconstitutional to discriminate based on race is the best one, but SCOTUS has tapped danced around it. Probably the next best argument is Mismatch, or that students admitted to schools with median GPA and test scores above their ability through affirmative action do poorly academically, drop out more, and pass professional exams (like the bar exam) at a lower rate. The idpol fights hard against this argument even though the data seems to support it.

So, if schools don't give a shit about race based affirmative action, even if it hurts those it intends to help, I don't there it's going away anytime soon.

> Can't wait to see the Russophile and /r/stupidpol cope after this offensive ..

To quote a book I'm now currently reading:

> summer of 1941 -> the Nazis invade Russia on a 1,200 km front

> summer of 1942 -> the Nazis make a push through Southern Russian towards the Caucasus using two of their Armies

> summer of 1943 -> the Nazis attack a Soviet salient (Kursk) located at the "intersection" of two of their Armies; they brand that as a "counter-offensive", as calling it an "offensive" after the two previous much bigger involvements would have been too difficult to propagandistically swallow by the German population at home

We now have Ukraine, which went from:

> we will liberate all of the occupied territories, including Crimea, of course

to

> launching a 5-point counter-offensive in Kherson in order to liberate a city of 200k people

to

> launching an offensive in order to liberate a city of ~20k people, while painting the previous act as a "feint"

all of this in a matter of just a few weeks, not over three summers, like the Nazis had done in WW2.

A little OT and unrelated to those people from r/worldnews, but related to that book I mentioned, I found out about this 1993 book which gets quoted in there quite al ot: Die Illusion der Wunderwaffen, which, of course, was writing about the Nazis' Wunderwaffen. But I have a feeling that if it were to be translated into English (let's say) it could help with us learning more about today's war in Ukraine.

It's an extremely stupid and myopic (or malicious) argument. Corey Robin has written a bit on this, referencing the book Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson.

Speaking of the Mafia and speaking of the devil, just a few minutes ago I stumbled upon a translation of this book in an antique bookstore I frequent much too often, for about 50 euro-cents I said “what the heck! I’ll buy it!”.

I don’t exactly know how come Giulio Andreotti’s book on his relationship with the US was seen as so interesting as to be translated into Romanian a mere two years after its original publishing date, but the early ‘90s, just after Ceausescu’s regime had fallen, were very interesting years from an intellectual pov.

The Unincorporated Man was not a suggestion.

>a 3d printer

Ender 3: $189, can be had closer to $100 if you wait for sales.

>Correct Materials

PLA+: $22.99 for one role, will make approximately 7 or so handgun frames, and 3-5 rifle lowers. Can be had closer to $13 a roll if you buy in bulk.

>the knowledge and blueprints required

Can't link due to reddit rules, but cost is $0, search CTRL+Pew for knowledge, gatalog for blueprints.

Someone can have the materials required delivered to their door today, can have their printer calibrated in a day or two, and could have a rifle and pistol manufactured before monday, for less than $250. These things are actually being used in relatively large numbers in Burma as we speak. You have your head in the sand.

I mean, this will give you as good a shot as anything at a good mental state (for psychedelics). https://smile.amazon.com/Be-Here-Now-Ram-Dass/dp/0517543052/

I highly recommend libreoffice instead of microsoft office. Libre office is free and open source, and does everything microsoft office does. It can open/save as word formats if needed.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

If you’re interested in the 70’s, read ““The Seventies” by Bruce Schuleman. It’s one of my favorite history books

Walt Disney was obsessed with Main Street USA. It was modelled closely on iirc his childhood hometown in the 1890’s. He was incredibly nostalgic for the period and that idealized America. As you said, in no way did it represent the real 1890’s, which was a decade of poverty and inequality, but for Walt’s generation “Gay Nineties” nostalgia was at least as strong as 50’s nostalgia was for the Boomers. One of his favourite shorts was The Nifty Nineties, and you can see all of the elements of Main street USA present.

This was so influential that a book <em>The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible</em> was written to refute the pervasive Disney-led 1890’s nostalgia.

I understand entirely. Sensitivity to guilt and shame is a vulnerability that people can exploit, even without realizing it.

There’s a book you might find helpful, Shame &amp; Guilt: Masters of Disguise

> A few common characteristics of adults shamed in childhood:

> You may suffer extreme shyness, embarrassment and feelings of being inferior to others. You don’t believe you make mistakes, you believe you are a mistake. You feel controlled from the outside and from within. You feel that normal spontaneous expression is blocked.You may suffer from debilitating guilt; you apologize constantly. You have little sense of emotional boundaries; you feel constantly violated by others; you frequently build false boundaries.

> If you see yourself in any of these characteristics, you can learn how shame keeps you from being the person you were born to be and how to change that. Shame And Guilt describes how debilitating shame is created and fostered in childhood and how it manifests itself in adulthood and in intimate relationships. Through the use of myths and fairytales to portray different shaming environments, Dr. Middelton-Moz allows you to reach the shamed child within you and to add clarity to what could be difficult concepts.

I think the narrative of Roman *cultural* decline is overstated, but I would argue that your perspective understates the severe economic/geopolitical decline that was associated with the Fall of Rome. Overall, there was a massive decrease in urbanization, literacy, trade, infrastructure, and all kinds of other metrics that we would commonly associate with an advanced civilization. There was also a great deal of violence associated with the barbarian invasions, regardless of how "Christianized" the barbarians were, or how well integrated some of their leaders were into the Roman political elite. Some of it has shades of modern-day ethnic conflict, which we know can occur on the ground level, even if political/religious elites are relatively intertwined.

One cannot hand-wave away such decline (as some modern historians have tried to do) as being the product of mere "evolution," "transformation" or " social change". In some places, (such as Britain,) living standards didn't return to Roman levels until the late middle ages. Some technologies were lost for centuries. I think Bryan Perkins makes a pretty convincing case in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization that it was, all in all, pretty bad.

I would argue that attempts by modern historians to deny or downplay what was traditionally called "The Dark Ages" in European history are a product of fashionable revisionist histography that ignores objective social/economic metrics, and lacks basic common sense about what the fall of a millennia old imperial hegemon would entail.

This is a problematic article, suggesting Nina can't handle the trolls. She literally wrote the book on how to be a woman online and fight back against harassment.

I see a lot of hopeful trends: elections of people running on explicitly anti-woke platforms, the rise of writers on substack, the simple popularity of voices that combat this stuff in the public square like John McWhorter and his book Woke Racism, and even people like Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle.

The stranglehold doesn't feel as tight today as it did a few years ago, at least to me. There is a public and popular resistance to its excesses, even if it still has momentum.

On the USSR I'd recommend Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, found this English translation of one of her books, a book which was written in 1979 and which did get quite a few things right (I read it about 3 months ago, in a Romanian translation).

Yes but Mullvad on my phone is clumsy. When I am only doing stuff where I am logged in anyways, there isn’t really much of a need of it. Also, I always have to turn it off for most video streaming services (they block the VPN's datacenter IPs)

I'm not sure what you're reading or what taxes it supposedly saves them. It already pays property taxes. It might be exempt from sales tax but that's a local issue and it would be on the consumer anyway. This is the best book I've read on the history of Disney World, although it's mostly on the construction and operation of the parks: https://www.amazon.com/Realityland-True-Life-Adventures-Disney-World-ebook/dp/B00KNBCZBI/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=1650570345&amp;sr=1-13 . The impetus for the formation of the district was so that they wouldn't have to put up with the bureaucracy that they did in Anaheim (for example Anaheim blocked Disneyland entirely at one point from building an additional park on their land).

> > What is the rest of the book about?

Its prototype name so far is called "Love, politics, social norms and sex". It's a piece of social philosophy and philosophical psychoanalysis similar to what is in the OP. I mostly talk about romantic relationships and politics viewed through the lens of psychoanalysis. I hypothesize that the workplace culture, dating culture and political culture of a country/tribe/etc. are strictly interrelated and I'm trying to look for various examples of each. I talk about power and power imbalances in various types of relationships (politician-voter, man-woman, marketing agent-potential customer, employer-potential employee, etc.). I put a very big emphasis on language and the way in which language constrains us by putting expectations. I talk about expectations and how they are perpetuated through media like television and social media and how they affect our lives. I explain that language is not only a form of describing reality but also a form of changing reality through the mechanism of expectations. I partially criticize the idea thrown around that "communication" is the most important thing in any relationship, although recognizing that there is a seed of truth to this, it is too often exaggerated, since language constrains us. Lacan spoke about how we don't speak words but words speak us ("language speaks the subject").

I'm only about 130 pages in and I'm still working on it. I recommend you take a look at the previous book I put out, on somewhat similar themes (philosophical psychoanalysis, politics and semiotics): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Y4V8GYF

Hitler killed himself because he was a methhead and the factory that produced his fix got bombed according to this book. Does this fit the mark? Lol

Everyone should start with Plato's republic, because it outlines the suprarational(it doesn't use that word but you'll figure it out)

I wouldn't blame you for not reading Plato's republic directly and instead opted for a book that explains it to you, I tend to dislike direct translations too. I learned platonism in college so I never read Plato's republic directly myself but I've read other books that are old and translated and it's always miserable.

Although if you're broke, the direct translation is in the public domain so anyone can Google search it and get a free copy.

If you find a good book on platonism I would recommend getting into neoplatonism too, but again, I can't recommend a book on it, the books I have are tougher reads and I wouldn't blame anyone for not having the patience.

My general advice for you is that most of the internet is preoccupied with postmodernism and philosophies that can be reduced to: "not all x verb y!!!" In addition, these philosophies tend to be pseudoscientific too. Not much better than what the conservatives are doing, you need to balance it out with reasonable opposition otherwise you'll become a caricature. Nobody wants that.

So the remedy here is to read classical philosophy. The ancient Greeks as a whole are going to be rich and filled with substance that will be very useful. Just read the famous ones.

Descartes and Kant are good.

Then, I would recommend getting into enlightenment era thinking (John Locke, Hobbes, Hume etc) not because I agree with these guys explicitly but because they offer a lot and learning their perspectives will be useful even if you don't end up agreeing with them.

I wish I had decent books to recommend to you but I don't have my college books anymore and I can't remember the name of any of them. I thought they were pretty good

Maybe this will work?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1934389080/

I think it was Mossad who did it, perhaps in cahoots with LBJ. Kennedy wanted to shut down their illegal weapons program and make AIPAC register as a foreign lobbying group.

&#x200B;

https://www.amazon.com/Final-Judgment-Missing-Assassination-Conspiracy-ebook/dp/B0722R7K46

Very good comment, really thank you for that, it made me think, and it also made me want to read even some more Ellul, you might like his The New Demons (in regard to the secular clergyman thing) and most of his other works in regard to technocracy (even though I don't know of him making the connection "new religion" <-> technocracy, or maybe if he did I can't remember).

You can get a home distiller for $200 like this one, makes a gallon in 5 hours

There other ones that do a liter at a time that are a fraction of the cost.

Most Convenient Water Distiller is Lightweight with Easy-Fill Reservoir https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005QDEAMK/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_i_QYN3H3WWF4MGPEWKDANQ?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1

In his book Bad Samaritians, South Korean economist Ha- Joon Chang demonstrated that western neoliberal thinkers want developing countries to change their policies to open markets in order to facilitate economic growth but there is not much evidence of open markets generating the economic trade.

TBH Ha-Joon's book is very important to people who intend to understand developmental economics.

kinda suspect that's been somewhat common throughout history. The main difference here is they're naively signing up to fight for some other country rather than their own, which afaik is not typical but someone can correct me if I'm wrong. Otherwise, volunteering for war and not having any idea what it's gonna be like has been a theme in a bunch of military nonfiction 've read. the most notable ones being With The Old Breed and quite a few of the stories from We Were Soldiers Once, And Young maybe there's less of excuse now with so much information about war being so much more accessible than in the past, but the basic attributes of youth haven't changed and they're always gonna be rash and "invincible" til they aren't.

Men be getting fucked over, women be getting fucked over. Everyone gets fucked over by ideals imposed on them in some way, I don't think it's a competition. Warped hyper-masculinity has negative effects on men and women, calling everything you see toxic masculinity is just as counterproductive. I'm going off topic but perceptions and views of what masculinity is in the West and other countries have gotten really weird lately and lead to a lot of negative side effects for both genders, this is a good book that tries to make sense of the "ideal" masculine: https://www.amazon.com/King-Warrior-Magician-Lover-Rediscovering/dp/0062506064

And it helped me a lot with getting the brainrot out of my head and putting masculine gender issues and ideas of masculinity and how they relate to the world into perspective. Important to explore new ideas of what the ideal masculine might mean and helps understand what masculinity is to everyone else in the world. Interesting tings

I don’t know of any pink/gay washing books. I think you would lose your job if you tried to publish one in 2022.

A good book on greenwashing (Amazon link because it is linked to other books):

https://www.amazon.com/Greenwash-Reality-Behind-Corporate-Environmentalism/dp/0945257775

Short version: Gorby was a r*tard

Long version: The development of a large illegal private economy which capitalist elements within the USSR such as Khrushchev and Gorbachev tried to legitimize. Basically from the very beginning it was a struggle between actual communists like Lenin and Stalin and succdems/liberals like Bukharin and Khrushchev. In the 1980s specifically the USSR was suffering stagnation from the Brezhnev years. Had Yuri Andropov been about 10 years younger, there's a solid chance the USSR would still exist. As it was however, he and his less capable successor were both terminally ill at the time of them taking office, neither were there long enough to enact long-term reforms. Gorbachev was initially a very inspiring leader who seemed committed to Marxism-Leninism, in reality however he was a vain moron who cared more about having glowing articles written about him in the West than actually solving the problems of his own country. He was easily manipulated by capitalists from about 1987 basically intentionally started dismantling the country and allowing the Iron Curtain to fall and nationalists to rise to power in every Soviet republic. All the while he thought he would become the leader of a new succdem USSR basically, in reality he was cucked by Yeltsin. Gorbachev himself was too stupid to actually engineer the collapse, his propaganda minister Yakovlev was the real driving force behind it.

Anyway this is just a very cursory summary of the immediate cause of the collapse, there were a lot of moving parts in it that go back way before Gorby. I highly recommend this book about it which was written by Marxist historians.

seriously? half of what Tucker Carlson does is call the left racist, and "left fascism" is like Dinesh D'Souza's whole deal

https://www.amazon.com/Big-Lie-Exposing-Roots-American/dp/1621573486

It's just a giant game of ping pong.

What's funny is they also sell the book that suggests it as a viable method, as well as a bunch of others

Peaceful Pill Handbook 2020: Amazon Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08DC5VWH8/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_i_AF4GWR8HD6YPG0J96ACJ

Lol

Beyond the environmental tipping points, which seem conceptually preventable because their full effects are said to be generations away ("in the year 300" just to quote this article), there are infrastructural tipping points which no one ever talks about. For example, the Old River Control System preventing the Mississippi River from changing course could violently and suddenly fail due to increased rainfall in the midwest. If it does, it will not only cause catastrophic flooding, but it would also mean the majority of US grain has no outlet for export.

EDIT: https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/If-Old-River-Control-Structure-Fails-Catastrophe-Global-Impact

http://www.openculture.com/2017/06/the-cia-assesses-the-power-of-french-post-modern-philosophers-read-a-newly-declassified-cia-report-from-1985.html

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CIA however did care greatly about pomo shit. I'm a compliance professional, and while pomo seems complex it really is not. People function based on relatively simple rules.

One rule is that you project yourself on others. If you ask people how much they would give to charity, they inflate the number. If you ask them how much other people would give to charity, they give the number they actually give.

How other people are perceived to act is also the main determinant for an individual's actions. If you tell a person his neighbours are recycling, he will start to recycle.

Pomo works these two angles. Everything is about power. Which means the students who study pomo are in effect taught the value system that they should simply pursue power, with no regard for any other values. How successful that is in each individual case varies, but in general the left wing leadership class has become mercenaries that are easily bought.

Critical theory and whatnot are perfectly good lenses for analyzing text, but once taken out of context of limited textual analysis it becomes a powerful ideological weapon.

Just googled her, she’s got some solid arms I’ll give her that

Revolutionary Strategy is another of the few ground work reads I have completed so far, and I found it exceptionally clear. Your putting it forward validates much of the rest of the list for me. Although I must admit I was already partial to cockshott in terms of videos.

Also, for the lazy, Alpha to Omega podcast did a bunch of episodes on the Revolutionary Strategy as a read along.

First one is below:

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/fromalpha2omega/episodes/2019-02-26T03_47_00-08_00

I find it amusing to read the bad takes and then see users' responses. After all, Vox has readers:

>23.2M total visits

The point isn't to get pissed off. Sometimes it's nice to check in and see what garbage my fellow citizens are consuming so I can prepare responses when I run into such people in real life.

It's good to remind myself that this place is highly unusual, and most of the country is actually consuming stuff like Vox or Fox.