Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech
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The USSR could increase literacy to 100%, but nothing it could do would ever make it so that IQs between ethnic Germans and Russians and Tatars were par with each other. Maybe this is why leftists like mass migration so much? It looks like Germany and the US are currently on par with Russia's IQ, presumably as a result of mass migration. Mass migration is the solution that finally achieves what Communism never could: equality between the First and Third world.
I think the correct position would have been for Russia to modernize into a nationalist state. At the very least, Communism would probably been more successful in its goals had it openly presented itself as what it actually is: an alliance of underachieving ethnic groups in conflict with First World nations. This is more or less what modern Russia is and the idea behind 'Third Worldism' and the 'Global South'. No reason to waste 50-70 years on mass killings of their own population and severe government mismanagement of the economy, Russia and China could have skipped that stage and immediately arrived at what they are now, geopolitical leaders of the Third World with functioning liberal economies. This is probably what would have happened if Lenin hadn't stolen power from the SRs. Ultimately, Russians and Chinese are high IQ peoples who would be better off without shackling themselves to either the 'international proletariat' or the 'Third World' but if that's what they want it would be more effective than rigid economic Marxism.
That communism retards economic growth is pretty well established. Note that I said it retards growth, not that it leads to economic decline. Compare Finland to the USSR, West Germany to East Germany, Taiwan to China, South Korea to North Korea, or Thailand to SE Asian communist states like Vietnam and Laos. I've never seen a convincing argument that any of these places would have been better off under communism.
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The Holodomor claimed several million in Ukraine via famine, intentional starvation, etc.
This is suppressed
The Holodomor is not "suppressed". It is name-dropped in a completely ahistorical way in HBO's Chernobyl TV-series, for example. Cartoons and such depicting Holodomor from that time people are readily available.
You are right that the Holocaust is relatively more propagandized... in part because it is an important part of the mythology of Israel.
The Confederates were holding onto slave labor to finance their meager existence which was being robbed of them due to the Jewish bankers in New York and Jewish bankers in London.
Lincoln wrote to Marx; Marx admired Lincoln.
Indeed, the CPUSA venerated Lincoln in the 1940s. Images of this are readily google-able.
You are aware that the USSR supported and made possible in its current form the anti-Zionist movement, right? And today, it is China that hosts the foremost anti-Zionist factions? Does this consist of "Judaic governance" in your view?
Stalin had killed perhaps the second-most prominent Bolshevik Jew, Trotsky, with an ice axe. The USSR's universities, like American ones, had Jewish Quotas.
Perhaps there are ways you explain away such things in terms of "fall guys" and such. A Hierarchy of Jews. But the story seems inconsistent to me.
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nothing it could do would ever make it so that IQs between ethnic Germans and Russians and Tatars were par with each other.
There is no reason to think this completely immutable. Something you have not addressed in any comments of mine for obvious reasons: your presence here on the diet-improves-brain forum proves that intelligence is not fixed by genes. I have no reason to hope for the fixed nature of IQ: I want as many people as possible to be intelligent. And history does not seem to show a fixed intelligence over time within some ethnic group (usually for the worse these days with the effects of Covid)
Maybe this is why leftists like mass migration so much?
I don't like mass migration, or as I call it, "irrational migration", where it is harder to import intelligent foreigners legally than less intelligent ones illegally. As @Corngold points out it is largely Capitalist interest that requires mass migration for cheap labor: in the Communist countries it is not there. It was East Germany that built the Berlin Wall.
That communism retards economic growth is pretty well established.
China is the world's fastest growing economy. And it's likely underestimated because they still use the Leninist MPS system to compute GDP, instead of Western systems that include things like illegal drug dealing, in the case of Britain.
I will agree with you that in the long run, undeveloped Leninism (killed off in its development by Khruschev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev) wasn't scalable to going beyond providing what we would call basic needs such as electricity (at a historically unprecedented pace). Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, provide the latest synthesis. The current condition of liberalism by contrast is economically disastrous, but you would call this the fault of "leftism", probably, where it is exactly the result of not questioning the right to debts, private property (in the sense of telecommunications as privately owned, not your house), and vulgar individualism buttressed by non-optional socialized scams. In some sense you are right: the tendency of people to be safe and snuggly "leftists", instead of capital-C Communists, helps to perpetuate the problem for a few years more.
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@Corngold said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
This and Operation Paperclip are basically a macro-view of enslavement during tribal warfare. Generals either will obey a new king or be killed. High-ranking Germans that obeyed were tolerated or promoted. Those that didn't suffered Nuremberg, whether guilty or not.
Yeah that infographic was hella gay. Like they won’t show all the former ww2 Wehrmacht in East German uniforms serving a soviet state post Nazi affiliation.
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@Rah1woot said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
…The "aristocratic superiors" of today ARE the political Saturday Night Live class, Jeffrey Epstein, liberalism, the Ivy League, NGOs, Think Tanks.
…if you were actually right wing, you would support the actual aristocrat Jeffrey Epstein. That's what it means to be right-wing: to support the ruling class. If you think it means something else, you are a victim of CIA psyops.
…You are not actually right-wing, because you do not support the actual ruling class: I don't care about any Jew-oriented blabber you generate to justify the dissonance, I've heard all of it on four chan dot org many years ago.
I’m not trying to make arguments for the guy you were arguing, but found these quotes disagreeable to the bigger picture from the right wing perspective.
Most modern right wingers don’t know what they are of. The counterparts of the American right wing in Europe are more honestly titled “social democrats” or “Christian democrats” or whatever.
The 20th century right wing is populistic propaganda dating back to esoteric groups like jacobins and occults of renaissance Europe.Left wing populism and right wing populism come from the same source. What distinguishes the two is how they answer the question: “how far do we deconstruct social order?”
Left wing: if you don’t support mandatory sex changes for infants and intermarriage with martians who eat humans you’re a Nazi.
Right wing: let’s stop evolving at Edmund Burke.Directly to your point, nobody alive today knows what an aristocrat looks like. Anytime social order begins to reconstitute, you begin to see its vestiges in business fat cats who pay for a lavish lifestyle, but wealth is merely the popular and recognizable part, hardly the substance. Today’s version of an aristocrat would’ve been called a whore by a self-respecting aristocrat anytime in the last 5,000 years.
Today’s aristocrat competes in an equality/fraternity/liberty context, that rewards the most psychopathic. Prostitution, drug dealing, wallstreet, and politics — are all base capitalism. Machiavelli was inspired to write his book precisely because he was in the inner workings of a democracy. His works were verboten amongst the aristocracy of Europe at the time, yet proudly read by all the jacobins, Freemasons, and revolutionaries, including the in the USA.
A real aristocrat is a paternal/maternal figure, because of their organizational skills, who leads their micro community, and is recognized and co-opted by a more powerful neighboring community willingly or unwillingly. This is necessarily regionalistic in nature, yet simultaneously hierarchical in nature. It’s also authoritarian. This is where you’re getting the idea that the right wing sticks with any and all “aristocracy.” But you can see how that needn’t automatically be the case.
In the post-revolutionary new world order, Indeed, many times the middle class develops symbiosis toward the business class to maintain stability, to the detriment of the bottom poor, and this is where the battle lines are often drawn today. Yes, the right picks up many things once considered leftist in these quirky culture wars of personal advocacy — like classical liberalism. Which communists call right wing, but is of the original hierarchical deconstructions for “fraternity, equality, and liberty.”
…MAGA base is left-wing in real terms: their program (so they hope) asserts their Human needs to eat above that of Capital.
I said it above that the broader right picked up capitalistic arguments for economic stability of their primary demographic, but that was not the right wing cause 200 years ago, and thankfully that’s reverting again.
I guess you’re associating capital with power, not just with capitalism? By the metric of power equals wealth, yeah I think aristocrats having wealth is fine, but how they get it and their corresponding priorities for their people they under no uncertain terms own, makes all the difference between good capitalism and bad capitalism, re me speculating your definition… i.e., Walmart doesn’t offer the elderly any form of decent retirement, but the lord of a feud would call that backwards and primitive whilst all peasants who were too old to work, got to live with their families and eat decently until death in old age, participating in all religious and cultural activities.
Likely more aristocratic than yours. The Bolshevik state killed my ancestors, who had unwisely taken up arms against them.
This reminds me of the smooth reverse uno move by the French revolutionaries who committed regicide and then a few days later when the peasants around the countryside revolted, they were then the traitors to the government who needed to be put down for their insolence LOL.
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Left wing populism and right wing populism come from the same source. What distinguishes the two is how they answer the question: “how far do we deconstruct social order?”
I agree. I think "leftists" that aren't Communists are basically equal to Ben Shapiro. They're not a serious political position and they both end up supporting WEF Fascism.
if you don’t support mandatory sex changes for infants and intermarriage with martians who eat humans you’re a Nazi.
It is Communist China that banned "effeminate men" on television. Semi-communist Russia which banned "LGBT Propaganda".
Today’s version of an aristocrat would’ve been called a whore by a self-respecting aristocrat anytime in the last 5,000 years.
Aristocracy imho does actually have a history of being degenerate. The French aristocracy of the 1700s is an easy example. As are the Bound Feet of pre-Communist China.
A real aristocrat is a paternal/maternal figure, because of their organizational skills, who leads their micro community, and is recognized and co-opted by a more powerful neighboring community willingly or unwillingly. This is necessarily regionalistic in nature, yet simultaneously hierarchical in nature. It’s also authoritarian.
Sure. Mao Zedong and George Washington are good examples of this.
makes all the difference between good capitalism and bad capitalism, re me speculating your definition… i.e., Walmart doesn’t offer the elderly any form of decent retirement, but the lord of a feud would call that backwards and primitive whilst all peasants who were too old to work, got to live with their families and eat decently until death in old age, participating in all religious and cultural activities.
Sure. I'm not the kind of so-called "leftist" that disparages capitalism from start to finish, without some form of capitalism this forum conversation would be technologically impossible. Capitalism still ended, and it will still end. I want the aristocratic "form", if you will, of having free time, having strength and intelligence, having enough money to pursue work and projects beyond immediate survival, to expand to as many people as possible. The only program that works towards this is capital-C Communism, ending the financial domination made possible by overextended property rights for corporations. Ending PUFA ideology.
Your description of some kind of Epic Retvrn of Good Capitalism is a fantasy though. You are probably aware of that. The epistemology of right-ish people is always Gnostic, reaching outside the real. That is why they keep losing. Only an unconditional leap into the abyss that is reality, and the Future, might offer a way through.
I guess you’re associating capital with power, not just with capitalism?
I don't really care about the SNL aristocracy of today on the face of it: they are just robots for a much larger leviathan. Even if they have a decent amount of money and maybe even three nice houses. Pales in comparison to BlackRock at owning something like 25% of all houses.
My wording of Humanity versus Capital was deliberately chosen. This is how I see the world. There are those things which are pro-human and those which are anti-human. Extortionate lending is anti-human, as is militant gender ideology, and degrowth.
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@Rah1woot said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
You are aware that the USSR supported and made possible in its current form the anti-Zionist movement, right? And today, it is China that hosts the foremost anti-Zionist factions? Does this consist of "Judaic governance" in your view?
In what sense? I've heard Stalin did use anti-Jewish anti-Zionist tactics occasionally. I've not heard that China is anti-Zionist. If anything I understand the opposite, that because of their central importance in the western and global economy, they rely on strong bankers. Soviet Jewish bankers helped establish Mao IIRC.
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@Rah1woot said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
I don't like mass migration, or as I call it, "irrational migration", where it is harder to import intelligent foreigners legally than less intelligent ones illegally.
I will agree to this extent: in a homogenous culture/country governance style can be changed somewhat, following the Aristotelian observation of democracy only working in a homogenous culture. Mass migration is the key element that has distorted unified cultures, in America at least since the 1860s, but much more by the 1890s-1910s, and all the way up to present day.
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@LetTheRedeemed said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
Yeah that infographic was hella gay. Like they won’t show all the former ww2 Wehrmacht in East German uniforms serving a soviet state post Nazi affiliation.
I think we're saying the same thing.
If one believes "Nazis are evil," and should have been punished, one wonders why so many important Nazis were not put on trial or anything. I think Nuremberg has the look of a hoax or show trial, similar to the "Nazi hunters." I imagine the new-found Israel and their intelligence were creating and fueling anti-Communist propaganda and anti-Nazi propaganda.
It's not like many people knew about Paperclip. Plus the Holohoax narrative didn't really emerge until the 60s and 70s. In a way, it helps shut down any questioning of Germany or of USSR, and most importantly of US, UK, and Israel.America looted the spoils of intellectual property and technology of Germany. I'm sure USSR did the same but I haven't read much on this half of it.
@Rah1wooot seems to think the UK opposed communism but this is false. Much of Europe became socialist and is still socialist. Democracy is a tool of socialism; it exists on a spectrum.
The "space race" and Nuclear war were other successful hoaxes to shut down any socialist or communist organization in the West, as was Gladio after that. -
@Rah1woot said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
It's very Maoist. "Make blast furnaces in your backyard" maps onto "Consume Fruit to Grow Your Brain' pretty well. All the more so because right-racialists lean toward the brain's trajectory already being fixed. Have you read Peat's "Mind and Tissue"? He himself lays it out pretty well in that book.
Ok, and who's going to build the blast furnaces? Who's going to pay for the materials? Please speak to Mao's Four Pests Campaign. It is reckoned to have caused famine as it disturbed the ecology of plant and animal communities. Is this just anti-Chinese propaganda?
Castro wanted to breed miniature cows so that all families could self-sustain. Why did it never happen? Why do all communist utopias inevitably fail and cause more pain and suffering than they relieve?
All governments are corrupt at some level. Belief in regime change is the same whether it be in Russia or the US; an election gives a false hope of change just as "reform" or other measures or direct promises from the dictator inspire hope in dictatorial countries.
MAGA is basically socialism. The Magi want to "clean house" and rebuild the federal system. Some of that has taken place because of certain judges being appointed, etc. They offer the same false hopes that a communist would offer but most people are seeing it as "far right" or Nat. Soc. To me they are not very different. There's a good book called "Three New Deals" written by a German about Hitler, Mussolini and FDR, who all undertook monumental national civic programs in the 1930s. This book obviously doesn't include Soviet Russia which was a major project in the 1930s.
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I've not heard that China is anti-Zionist.
The USSR gave support to Yasser Arafat and his PLO.
The vast majority of the weapons used, from Katyusha rocket systems to AK-47 type rifles, are of Soviet or Chinese design/manufacture.
If anything I understand the opposite, that because of their central importance in the western and global economy, they rely on strong bankers.
One of the reasons behind China's material success is that their banks (and therefore credit creation etc) today are relatively sovereign, whereas the rest of the world is stuck being financed by the US. i would again recommend "Superimperialism" by Michael Hudson for a discussion of this monetary theory.
Ok, and who's going to build the blast furnaces? Who's going to pay for the materials?
I think you're missing the point. Ideologically the blast furnaces are constructed in the backyard in a way to be extremely cheap. Hence "Great Leap Forward". The same is exactly the Peatarian method for brain improvement, as none of its interventions are ludicrously expensive.
Who's going to pay for the materials? Please speak to Mao's Four Pests Campaign. It is reckoned to have caused famine as it disturbed the ecology of plant and animal communities. Is this just anti-Chinese propaganda?
The Four Pests campaign was a mistake.
Why do all communist utopias inevitably fail and cause more pain and suffering than they relieve?
The actual Marxist movement distinguished itself from other Communist/socialist movements of its time (e.g., Fourier) in that it was exactly not utopian. Read "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" by Friedrich Engels (not a Jew...) to learn more.
All governments are corrupt at some level.
Sure. It is impossible to be "completely pure". And yet it is the Communist countries today which effectively deal with the corruption problem, in the US it is called "lobbying" and completely legal.
Belief in regime change is the same whether it be in Russia or the US; an election gives a false hope of change just as "reform" or other measures or direct promises from the dictator inspire hope in dictatorial countries.
Yes, exactly. This is why a human-centric dual-power approach is necessary. The dual-power aspect is key. People simply need to obsolete the government by doing a better job than it. This process is already happening today.
MAGA is basically socialism.
Sounds about right. I touch on this early in the thread. But they will fail exactly insofar as they are not Communists. They have no appetite for challenging property rights and the banks.
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I think we're saying the same thing.
@Rah1wooot seems to think the UK opposed communism but this is false. Much of Europe became socialist and is still socialist. Democracy is a tool of socialism; it exists on a spectrum.
Yeah the intelligentsia of all of the west was entirely pro-communist — up to the top of the Roosevelt administration. All the cool people — from Hollywood to journalists to universities, were pro-communists. Lucile Ball was an example of communism sympathies, exhibited in the popular/cool crowds of the west. Not to mention the US govt funding them thru the Red Cross in Russia proper. The only people opposing them at the time was pre-war US state dept, the US navy, and the old untrendy WASPs of the aristocracy.
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@Rah1woot said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
The USSR gave support to Yasser Arafat and his PLO.
The vast majority of the weapons used, from Katyusha rocket systems to AK-47 type rifles, are of Soviet or Chinese design/manufacture.
Fair enough. Palestine aka "Philistia" was invaded and renamed Israel. And now Israel funds Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan and others. The US machine has given the most support to Israel over the decades and that machine depends on cheap / exploitative labor and outsourced economy. Furthermore I've read that Israel likely created PLO, Hamas, and ISIS as controlled oppositions in order to justify to the public the destruction of Palestine and the rest of the Middle East.
If anything China or Russia benefits from the Israel/US destruction, as they offer Belt & Road and BRICS to failed third world countries. It's a sort of mutualism and I don't think there is any true antagonism at the level of oligarchs and rulers.
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@Rah1woot said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
I think you're missing the point. Ideologically the blast furnaces are constructed in the backyard in a way to be extremely cheap. Hence "Great Leap Forward". The same is exactly the Peatarian method for brain improvement, as none of its interventions are ludicrously expensive.
Ok that's fine, but seriously, to think the Peatarian diet is not benefitting from the same exploitative third world labor it supposedly wants to replace is short-sighted.
Orange juice, coffee, fruit, coconut oil, chocolate, etc., is almost all coming from equatorial and poor countries.
A true Peatarian diet could not exist without the western neoliberal capitalist economy, and arguably can only exist in wealthier or western countries. It is to me pretty humorously displaying the ironies of communist or socialist idealism, as well as the paradoxes of right wing or ethno-nationalist "rigidity."
What is truly Peatarian would end up being ancestral local diet which is either high carb or high fat but not the so-called swamp of western SAD diet.
Anyways, I don't think Peat's philosophies and science should be reduced to politics. I don't even think it's relevant, unless one is trying to live in accordance with permaculture / communitarian ideals which is great for those willing to do it.
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@LetTheRedeemed said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
Yeah the intelligentsia of all of the west was entirely pro-communist — up to the top of the Roosevelt administration. All the cool people — from Hollywood to journalists to universities, were pro-communists. Lucile Ball was an example of communism sympathies, exhibited in the popular/cool crowds of the west. Not to mention the US govt funding them thru the Red Cross in Russia proper. The only people opposing them at the time was pre-war US state dept, the US navy, and the old untrendy WASPs of the aristocracy.
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Very well put.
I meant to elaborate on how communism or Fabian socialism etc. were A-OK for the ruling elite, oligarchs, pop culture icons, but not necessarily pushed onto the masses. The Congress for Cultural Freedom and things like Tavistock with the Beatles and 60s "beatniks" to me demonstrate a really layered approach to sowing chaos within the host cultures in western countries.
My thought is "Communism" and "Fascism" and "Liberal Democracy" can't really describe the sorts of power structures and governance the west or anywhere else is operating within. I guess "Populism" is a pretty good term which basically shows a "big tent" political movement that is defying previous party boundaries of Rep. or Dem. at least in the US but probably South America, while the Nationalist/Right parties in Europe are obviously using similar tactics.
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Yeah the intelligentsia of all of the west was entirely pro-communist — up to the top of the Roosevelt administration.
True, FDR was definitely sympathetic to Communism. His postwar counterparts much less so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot . Eventually those factions you mention did take back control in the US.
My thought is "Communism" and "Fascism" and "Liberal Democracy" can't really describe the sorts of power structures and governance the west or anywhere else is operating within.
You are in some sense correct. The battle now, as far as I see it, is waged between the descendants of these strains of thought.
Perhaps the most important geopolitical division is that between the Gnosticism of the West and, let's call it the, "Nomianism" of the East. One side (West Europe, America) upholds abstract personal freedom. Islam, Russia, China, all uphold a constant universally applicable truth, in their own ways.
It is my opinion that only a very severe international conflict can give success to new radical domestic perspectives.
Ok that's fine, but seriously, to think the Peatarian diet is not benefitting from the same exploitative third world labor it supposedly wants to replace is short-sighted.
Orange juice, coffee, fruit, coconut oil, chocolate, etc., is almost all coming from equatorial and poor countries.
This is true. Hence the application of Lysenkoism in the USSR, especially its preoccupation with frost-hardening of plants: https://archive.is/IC4Je
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@Rah1woot, wow you made me longpost. apologies.
I agree. I think "leftists" that aren't Communists are basically equal to Ben Shapiro. They're not a serious political position and they both end up supporting WEF Fascism.
I think it would help you to understand that fascism is populism.
It should also be clear that every populist movement is propaganda by the subversive forces who want to conquer the current regime. There is no true believer ruler of a populist coup. WEF fascism is where the original communist power brokers went. They never cared about Marx, they needed populism to advance their subversive motives. It's a parasitic class and no I'm not talking about Jews or bankers. This is where I think it would help to read about the French revolution. People who actuate regime change are a political class at odds with the current government.
These quotes describe it well:
“The French revolution therefore was the essentially chaotic and often violent process by which political power passed into the hands of those who already possessed economic power.”- Frederic V. Grunfeld
“The revolution was the culmination of a long social and economic development which… made the bourgeoisie the masters of the world.” - Georges Lefebvre
This is basically how every color revolution works.
The bourgeoisie are one of the first major classes that have wealth completely independent of the hierarchical context of the prevailing social order. These are often the people who are the actual "degenerate aristocracy."
Communists are just leftist populists. It’s two sides of the same populist coin. The revolutionaries (insert color revolution here and yes include the USA) tell the unrepresented masses they need representation, they then conquer the current regime, rinse and repeat. The “revolutionaries” then establish their own aristocracy because you can’t run anything without middle management, and kill off all the useful ideologues who helped them get there but are too radical to run a country.
It is Communist China that banned "effeminate men" on television. Semi-communist Russia which banned "LGBT Propaganda".
Ah, sorry, you missed my intention by that comparison (comments in a forum are terrible for writing treatises). My example above merely points out the nature of the two broad political categories in a deconstructionist world view. Deconstructing the old order never ends when you want to. This is why disaffected leftists keep getting pushed over to the right. eternal cultural deconstruction blew past their dream society in 1920, 1945, 1995, 2010, 2020, etc... Deconstruction of order (revolution) blew past communists who just wanted a loaf of bread and representación.
Today’s version of an aristocrat would’ve been called a whore by a self-respecting aristocrat anytime in the last 5,000 years.
@Rah1woot said:
Aristocracy imho does actually have a history of being degenerate. The French aristocracy of the 1700s is an easy example.(I'd like to see what percentage of the Noble estate were devout Catholic, and were not)
I readily concede There is a greater ability to degenerate with intelligence. It's almost a single line on a corollary line graph throughout history, haha. But this is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the path to becoming the aristocracy. If you read about any of the revolutions, after the bloodbath of destroying the people who maintained stability in society, the winners packed positions with friends or people who were willing to backstab and murder anyone to get there. These people were less qualified in capability, dogs in comparison, and they were definitely willing to commit any act or sin that the old Regime's aristocracy, and all the peasants, would balk at. The brains behind the revolutions, have always been the upper middle class (bourgeoise), and the boots on the ground have always been the criminal underclass (of course any impressionable populations are recruited when the propaganda works).
Sure. Mao Zedong and George Washington are good examples of this [aristocratic character].
Mao and Washington were effective populist organizers, political opportunists and leftists of their time. The second they succeeded in destabilizing the old order, they established their new order/hierarchy.
They fit perfectly in the early deconstructionist spectrum. Washington is only like geographically removed from a proper hierarchical social order in mainland Europe, but deconstruction of social order in England had been ongoing for several hundred years at that point, due to proximity he looks like a proper aristocrat to us in 2024 (sans trousers and all). Also the monarch of England at the time had about as much power as it does today. Other than washington’s ownership of an actual plantation (which I have no knowledge of), I don’t actually understand what you mean by comparing them to my description of a communal patriarch/aristocrat, other than the fact that they replaced the prior aristocracy with themselves (via anti-aristocracy propaganda in their effective populist campaigns - savage civil wars).
Sure. I'm not the kind of so-called "leftist" that disparages capitalism from start to finish... it will still end. I want the aristocratic "form", if you will, of having free time, having strength and intelligence, having enough money to pursue work and projects beyond immediate survival, to expand to as many people as possible. The only program that works towards this is capital-C Communism, ending the financial domination made possible by overextended property rights for corporations. Ending PUFA ideology.
Ah, of course. I'm a fan of Marxist description, but not prescription. I gotta be honest, he's one man in history, fallible like us all... I encourage considering the philosophy being a product of his time, and that a lot of cool philosophies have existed that he probably didn't read about.
What I believe in, is basically what a peasant anywhere in the world prior to 1780s believed (you could append to that any rural laborer), is maintaining order, recognizing human difference as a real component in human order. If I can acknowledge there are people specialized by knowledge or capability that divides their labor/status (i.e. parents vs children), I can reasonably acknowledge others: surgeon vs auto-mechanic, and management vs worker.* management/worker context is a post-hierarchical social language. The worker is treated like trash compared to a peasant, and the manager got their via his own steal/kill/destroy mindset (yes many times merit), that someone with the divine right of God didn't need to do to accomplish. Sonship vs orphanhood economy.
No one is equal in any capacity, but all are equally deserving of human decency. So, traditionally, survival pressures placed on humanity required cooperation (ignore libertarian retardation that says it required rugged individuality, it required the opposite). Cooperation increased efficiency of human labor. Increased efficiency demands principles like discipline, sacrifice, submission to a smarter person, and the smarter person fighting on behalf of weaker people. Wars were once not necessarily populist, but explicitly royal, and the peasants, including military aged males, were considered labor assets of a realm, not meat grinder pawns (always exceptions of course).
I believe this is a law of nature, we see it down to the cell. We define cell intelligence/health, with it's ability to conformity and segregation. To be transient in skill, compromising in nature, is a rare skill of humans, but is most often a case of weakened people/things' incapability to handle complex/challenging situations.
(*** relevant to below) There is an esoteric argument to be had that the capacity to be a liberal//ideologue, correlates with intelligence/aristocracy, and that those people are best able to explore/pioneer a better world -- this is where religion of a society is paramount -- unfortunately the western aristocracy didn't follow this path with excellence.Insofar as the universe is expanding and the state of entropy consumes all things, Marx is correct. But insofar as entropy reaches a sweatspot utopia, Marx doesn't understand human behavior, or the war of entropy and order. As the lords of social stability are killed off, smaller microcosms of surviving lords will exist (Amish, Mormons, Hungary, etc), the broader population will continue to degenerate into increased self-survival mode, and lower intelligence.
With no good rationale, in my opinion, Marx says there must be ever degenerating society and war, until it gets better again. I just don't see any such thing as a source for spontaneous rebound from entropy, unless he's cynically predicting innocent desperate people beg for stability (hierarchical order) after their entire family gets killed by some later iteration of "for freedom, fraternity, and equality," and that's the only chance by which Marx could be right. Otherwise, he's ideologically excusing the needless murder of millions of people.
Ironically, he does pine for the time of the feudal era, as a genuinely good era for the good of the proletariat; he just thinks we can't return to it. I think he's thinking too small. No, many won't return to submission to hierarchical order, but fighting for order vs entropy in worlds we can affect (church/school), is something he missed that I think may have been a valid pushback. I wonder if he had contemporary critics who spoke such. Entropy is broader reaching today than he expected.
Your description of some kind of Epic Retvrn of Good Capitalism is a fantasy though. You are probably aware of that. The epistemology of right-ish people is always Gnostic, reaching outside the real. That is why they keep losing. Only an unconditional leap into the abyss that is reality, and the Future, might offer a way through.
I'm sure we'd need to define terms more, because I'm not a fan of capitalism or modern concepts of free markets.
Right wingers keep losing because they aren't as smart as left wingers. Game theory: when one wants to win a power or wealth not his own, he has everything to win by playing a long game. An attack where the castle doesn't know it's under siege is the deadliest attack of all.
PS, inspirational populist, Hitler, considered the Jewish cultural contributors in Germany like Felix Mendelssohn, feminizing to the German Volk. The nazis gained grassroots support in part due to the university book burnings by nazi students, instigated by the first sex change doctor in Berlin publishing a ton of material advocating it, and the prolific works of pro-homosexual and gender deconstructionism that took off in Germany in the last 20 years. The French revolutionaries considered the royal order and church as effeminate, and themselves as bringing vitality. The jacobin school of thought that gave them (and every subsequent revolution) its basic deconstructionist ideology, was the neoclassical glorifying Sparta and early Rome — “all men are equal warrior-kings" This is why the fasces and neoclassical construction is all over post-revolutionary France and USA. Deconstructionism starts with hating being told what to do by someone born into a position of authority, and ends with a rap music video in an American ghetto -- both are the same thing if you look hard enough.
(*** relevant to above) there is an esoteric argument to be made that the revolutionary soul is a disgruntled bourgeoisie -- him being insecure in his identity/insecure, because he stands outside hierarchy of a patriarch (the greatest source of masculine security for a male), and so projects masculinity exteriorly to compensate a lack of masculinity in the heart. This is the other side of the coin for the esoteric liberal arts. A contentedly masculine Noble man, discovers the Muse of femininity, and this produced the greatest art humanity has ever known, the baroque era.
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I will make an exercise of replying to your longpost in the most succint way I think appropriate.
As accused: your epistemology is Gnostic. You reference classical thermodynamics, and describe the historical process we both recognize, in order to make an argument that reality is inherently evil, and your ideas about it are better. The straightforward declaration you make is that the past was better than the present, and simultaneously any possible future. This is not what I think. Moreover, even if I thought otherwise, I would have no say in the matter of the vast differential equations, of what we might call the "Treason Cycle", that govern the process. All sentimentality is ultimately to be completely and utterly discarded in the face of Carl Schmitt's theory of the political. And this is exactly why rightoids always lose. They have sentimentality and not reality at their core, and this straightforwardly jeopardizes their war plans. The failed Austrian Painter, with his whiney, mopey, Mein Kampf. Luddites crushed beneath the heel of mass production.
But this is all the esoteric, even "cosmic" side of Communist thought. In the here-and-now, I straightforwardly advocate for the long-overdue obsolescence of the bourgeoisie in kind of their then-progressive revolution. Only what is Real has a right to exist. If your prized social hierarchy and differentiation of a sort is a necessary part of it all, as the Marxist-Leninists differentiate themselves from the Anarchists by, it will be shown out as well. Am I a deconstructionist? Sure. I want to be as radical as reality itself is, but not more, in the particular historical moment I'm in.
Now, some quotations and references.
https://info.publicintelligence.net/MCIA-ChinaPLA.pdf
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” Karl Marx
The basic question about the state is where its
legitimacy comes from. The monarch used to
speak for god, and his clergy backed him up.
Republics kept the basic idea of the state, and
invented a new story about its legitimacy. But the
new government is always founded by traitors to
the old government. Treason is the essence of the
state. Treason is legitimacy. Ray Peat, PhD -
@Rah1woot said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
This is true. Hence the application of Lysenkoism in the USSR, especially its preoccupation with frost-hardening of plants: https://archive.is/IC4Je
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This is a fascinating idea. I'm aware that much of the advanced science, biology, physics, etc was taking place in Soviet Russia and other Soviet countries. I think this is "in spite of" and not "because of" the governance system, though. For example, there is plenty of art or music from the Soviet era, but much of it conforms to certain aesthetic ideals. Schnittke came about in a more liberal time; Shostakovich supposedly lived in fear during Stalin's regime, for example. Physics, chemistry, and natural sciences were being developed in Germany throughout the 19th century. But I think Germany's importance was due to it's geographic centrality in Europe after the peak of colonialism and new industrialization, not because governance.
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@LetTheRedeemed said in Ray Peat name drop during American Communist Party convention speech:
and this produced the greatest art humanity has ever known, the baroque era.
Neat post. But, I think the Romantic or "Late Romantic" era produced better art ;). Bruckner, Wagner, Mahler. The sciences and astronomy were also unhinged in the late 1800s and early 1900s.