šŸ¤” šŸ“– general politics and philosophy thread šŸ“– šŸ¤”

The Nick Land thing is basically an actual Lovecraft story innit? Messed himself up on a shit load of drugs and the high of rave optimism to the point where he was left with this confused mega-nihilism

Is that whatā€™s happened to him? The CCRU collected writings are dangerously close to utter bullshit for my liking, but there is some kinda cool ideas buried within these stories. Their obsession with the internet seems to be quite prescient though, they had ideas about online currency and all for a bit. This video is kinda cool though

All in all they remind me of myself at like 16/17 when I was pirating books from Philip K Dick, Terrence McKenna and David Icke on my kindle. At this stage I also failed to understand that Tyler off fight club was not something to strive for.

What was the film? I might try and make my dad watch it with me :yum:

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But yeah accelerationism would lead you to support trump to have capitalism collapse, but capitalism will just collapse into facism and racism. It also seriously fails to account for climate change which any political theory needs to properly wrestle with

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It was called Hyperstition. It was quite interesting ā€“ essentially about visions of the future beyond the stasis of late capitalism. And presented in a really bizarre way with loads of wanky, seemingly pointless flourishes.

Have you read this article, which goes into the CCRU (Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in | Philosophy | The Guardian)? Kind of goes into how their fascination with the Internet, rave, (primarily cyberpunk / post-cyberpunk) science-fiction, and Lovecraft kind of splintered off into yer Landian proto alt-right and Fisherā€™s more, I guess, compassionate / melancholic yearning for a future that was stifled

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Thatā€™s a great article about them. Funny how a weird den of people into the internet and rave were probably one of the more important Philosophical movements of recent times. But yeah, itā€™s very slippery territory tbh

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this puts me a bit in mind of nazbol stuff

kind of attempting this:

which imo is ultimately impossible because the left and right are diametrically opposed in terms of objectives. but when you look at richard spencer and other alt-right figureheads, they have an economic understanding that on the surface seems to have a degree of class consciousness, only itā€™s full of nihilism, accelerationism even, ith the aim of establishing white ethnostates. just the most horrifying stuff. identity politics for white males i guess. itā€™s been pretty scary to see these ideas welcomed into the mainstream - when fascists start screwing around with economics and class politics thatā€™s when your society is really on the slippery slope.

Havenā€™t got anything profound to add in here, but I had a nice little lunchtime diversion of a few 90s throwback ambient/techno tracks cos of @anon35600300 mentioning Terrence McKenna and @manches mentioning cyberpunk.
:headphones::peace_symbol::space_invader::globe_with_meridians::fish_cake::milky_way::cloud::alien::brain::sunrise_over_mountains::telescope::atom_symbol:

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My pleasure! :grin:

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Angela Davis sort of coverā€™s this in Are Prisons Obsolete?

Hopefully itā€™s fine for me to post this here :thinking:

Oh also thereā€™s quite a good article on this by Scott of the Insurgency

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i know so little about abolition. idk what an anarchist plan for treating serial killers/rapists etc would look like. how do you deal with true sociopaths in a world where you canā€™t remove them from a community etc.

Yeah I kind of see abolition not necessarily as the idea that all sorts of confinement are ended but more as the broad overarching ideal of dismantling the prison industrialization complex and the various systemic issues within society that lead to mass incarceration. I could even see something like the Nordic prison system being a reasonable endpoint for more serious crimes given their general focus on restorative justice and rehabilitation.

Additionally one thing I think Davis mentions, is that for certain kinds of behavior currently classified as crime, such as drug use and sex work the focus should broadly speaking be focused on decriminalization and the amelioration of material needs.

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Just watched this, incredibly beautiful and moving documentary.

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Further to this:

Hereā€™s that n+1 mag article I was trying to find about 100% a income tax band (seems there was some UBI thrown in, too):

Havenā€™t re-read it yet, but here are the bullets:

Principle: The purpose of government is to share out money so that there are no poor citizensā€”therefore no one for whom we must feel guilty because of the arbitrariness of fate. The purpose of life is to free individuals for individualism. Individualism is the project of making your own life as appealing as you can, as remarkable as you like, without the encumbrances of an unequal society, which renders your successes undeserved. Government is the outside corrective that leaves us free for life.

Legislative Initiative No.1: Add a tax bracket of 100 percent to cut off individual income at a fixed ceiling, allowing any individual to bring home a maximum of $100,000 a year from all sources and no more.

Legislative Initiative No.2: Give every citizen a total of $10,000 a year from the government revenues, paid as a monthly award, in recognition of being an adult in the United States.

Legislative Initiative No.3. It makes most sense to have a president and vice president who will forswear wealth permanently. A man who rules for the demos need not come from the demos. But he ought to enter it; he ought to become one of the people he is responsible most for helpingā€”that means the rest of us.

Is this in tandem with legislating for other reasons why society may be unequal (inequalities in cognitive function, health, attractiveness, physical strength, sporting aptitude etc. etc.) outside of money?

I couldnā€™t speak on behalf of anyone else, or the intention of the article, but my first instinct is that the answer to that question is yes. I donā€™t see any reason why monetary/financial/economic proposals should be seen as the full, final, ot single solution to all our troubles and inequalities. No doubt some people will believe or expect that all inequalities can be accounted for of you get the money thing right. Seems a bit over-hopeful to me. But youā€™d have to hope that of we eradicate a whole host of financial inequality then we would at least see mitigation of some of the effects of the inequalities you mention.

I listened to this one last night.

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Itā€™s been up for a little while but the entire archive of radical philosophy is online if anyone fancies checking it out, contains essays by Foucault, Badiou, Butler and many more.

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This is a good extract - itā€™ll be interesting to read the book to dig into the data and evidence behind it.

This is a long and sprawly post. This is also a philosophy thread. Come at me. (Seriously. I bang on about a bunch of stuff, and at least some of it must require challenge or clarification!) Letā€™s go!



Changed my mind again. Cos, as if by cosmic magic, the latest Trashfuture podcast gets stuck into it.

(NB: This is a sober one-person delivery looking at Benedict Andersonā€™s Imagined Communities book, rather than the ā€˜UK Chapoā€™ style raucous chat.)

The ā€œnationā€ is a concept much beloved of reactionaries and dismissed by Marxists as mere ideology. But it has serious psychological power nevertheless. Andersonā€™s book asks what is a ā€œnation,ā€ where did it come from, and how has the concept been used and misused over time? Riley then applies Andersonā€™s rubric to understanding the increasingly psychotic trajectory of the Conservative movement in the developed world.

For the most part, itā€™s good. Lots of interesting theory. I guess my main gripe is that, toward the end, when he focuses on the UK, he very much concentrates on the Brexit-centric fear of the imagined masses coming for their jobs and their homes. Fine. All that accords with the themes identified. But if you talk about nationalism in the UK, and you donā€™t touch on Scottish independence, itā€™s a debate thatā€™s lacking. Which is frustrating.

The podcast identifies that itā€™s possible for a non-class based, liberal, refutation of racism to exist, which could potentially exist within the setup of a nation. That thereā€™s room for international solidarity, understanding and altruism, etc, that doesnā€™t have to be explicitly Marxist. Then claims it never happens with any degree of depth as part of ā€˜national storiesā€™ when compared to Marxist Theory. Macron is given as an example of a classic contemporary failing on this front. Of a superficial multicultural talk not backed up by reality.

Okaaay. But I say hmmm. I (inevitably) look at Scotland. I see A Manā€™s a Man for Aā€™ That (ā€œfamous for its expression of egalitarian ideas of societyā€).

I see Weā€™re aā€™ Jock Tamsonā€™s Bairns (ā€œequivalent to weā€™re all the same under the skinā€.

[Incidentally, the link to Hansard with Winnie Ewingā€™s use of it in a parliamentary speech is worth a read, with itā€™s inevitable interjection - on this occasion from anti-devolution Labour MP Brian Wilson - suggesting that a concern about Scottish issues inherently means a lack of concern about English issues. Other good stuff, too, about Eurosceptic ignorance etc, in that speech: check it out.). And whaddya know? The good conscientious internationalist Mr Wilson got a sacking in 2015 for doing a cry about the influence of Islam on Europe and the Islamic dominance of Britain. Iā€™d never heard of this guy until an hour ago, but you only have to scratch the surface to uncover the layers of hypocrisy.]

Anyway, these examples of ā€˜national psycheā€™ stories are centuries old and ingrained. I see it in evidence in the way people talk here (i.e. Glasgow) in comparison to, say, Lincolnshire, where I grew up. And more generally in (#notall, but much of) England I see Jerusalemā€™s green and pleasant land. I see An Englishmanā€™s home is his castle. I see the EU referendum result.

The obvious danger here is that we stray into exceptionalism. Gotta keep ourselves in check. And, with that in mind, on a slightly more light-hearted note, letā€™s move on.

I was looking through this old hand-me-down football card/stamp book the other night.

DSC_3873

And I see:

DSC_3872

Nice English flag! :uk: And this passage: ā€œRumania (sic) is another country that owes itā€™s start in football to England. British Engineers in the Rumanian oilfields ā€¦ā€ English and British being used synonymously, etc. And I never know ā€œRumaniaā€ had oil fields that ā€˜weā€™ were involved with in the early 20th century. From the El Salvador bit: ā€œā€¦in the First World War we had English troops kicking a ball in the trenchesā€. USSR (which = ā€œRussiaā€): ā€œYet another country where soccer was started by Englishmen.ā€ (Spoiler: it wasnā€™t.) If nothing else, historical accuracy aside, seeing these sorts of thing in a modern Panini book! :grinning:

I realise this footy aside is a bit jokey and small potatoes. But itā€™s an insight into how ingrained and low-level the non-parity of England and Scotland goes in terms of itā€™s place within the UK. A billion words have been written about that. Iā€™ll not add to them right now.

But back to class. As @Attheborderguy said:

And thereā€™s a bit more to be said about that, but Iā€™ll leave it hanging for now.

Back to the TF podcast. He finishes by acknowledging a coyote of key things. Firstly, the power of capital. And how even well-intentioned national socialist efforts to come together for the greater good are at risk of being undermined by organisations, companies and persons that operate on an international level. And international just about always wins out over national. Secondly, the difficulty of even bringing about Socialism within a country in the first place, especially within a single governmental term, such that it (or the beginnings of it) canā€™t simply be rolled back with zero effort by a subsequent government with different priorities.

On that last point, I thought the latest Breunig podcast was good. (Another one-guy presentation rather than the usual other episodes with both him and his partner chatting. If Trashfuture is a UK Chapo, The Breunigs is a kinda US version of We Donā€™t Talk About The Weather.)

It looks at the

philosophical tension that runs through much socialist thinking and posting: how can socialism be both individually liberating while also relying on collective control and ownership?

This winding (donā€™t call it rambling) episode covers many topics including Distributism, Jeffersonians, Rawlsā€™s property-owning democracy, and various socialist tendencies. And most importantly, it offers a real solution to the conundrum.

The answer, in short, seems to be to worry less about what Socialism is (because of the aforementioned problems with realistically implementing it) and to focus more about how to practically work towards collective ownership. Spoiler: we should create a (Norway-esque) gov controlled ā€˜social wealth fundā€™. And also work less. And have a much improved welfare setup that would effectively pay for itself.

Thatā€™s pretty much my mind-dump for now. In the words of @anon18868718 - have a nibble! :grinning:



If nothing else, hereā€™s a question. Do you consider ā€˜social ownership of capitalā€™ to be legit? Or is it too Social Democrat and not Democratic Socialist enough for your liking - more Warren than Sanders?

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I think further than that - there needs to be reflection on all regional nationalism - from the obvious (Scotland, Wales) to the complex (NI/British/Irish identity, and the horrific forms of English nationalism) to the tiny minority forms (Yorkshire, Cornwall etc). Not that I want to suggest that UK is in anyway unique in having all these different groups, nor put Scottish Independence on a par with Cornish regionalism as an issue, but I think itā€™s a subject where a lot of things are glossed over if you ignore them.

Our nation (UK of GB & NI for these purposes), as a whole is a huge bundle of competing contradictions in terms of identity with a core problem thatā€™s been discussed over and over again - that England makes up a majority of the economy, population and holds an immense amount of power over the other nations within the UK even under devolution - the irony being that the ā€œEnglishā€ identity is arguably the weakest of the lot, perhaps football aside.

RE: The sticker album - Obviously, Iā€™m coming at this completely from the perspective of the ā€œprivilegedā€ side of this, but I see it as a sign of improvement over the last 50 years - The Sun would never get away with publishing that sort of colonial nonsense, nor conflating England and Britain in the same way even if they tried (and I suspect it might be a bit much for them to give a go). Again, not to say thereā€™s anything like parity between the nations - see the way NHS England stuff is reported in the press today.

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