What motivates the neo-Luddite worldview? — Bret Bernhoft

Skepticism of the potential of technology to improve our lives rather than the opposite, based on historical trends and on emerging scientific research into the interaction between technology and power.

Life in general is like that. A mix of general constraints and particularised choices. We can turn food into a moral dilemma. But we still must eat food. Go figure. And I didn’t invent this world. I just comment on how it is. — apokrisis

Having a good understanding of how the world works is a prerequisite for living life in relative comfort and avoiding the worst that it has to throw at you. It is good advice to tell someone that they must learn to set more modest expectations for reality; to correctly perceive nature and by doing so learn to participate in it. Go with the flow.

That being said, the human mind dreams about how the world could be better, even if it contradicts fundamental constraints of reality. It is in the nature of a human being that they will strive for conditions that are impossible to attain.

Perhaps if a square were conscious, it might wish it were a cube - but it is stuck in two-dimensional geometry. If reality is a river, then humans are the little eddies that briefly emerge, opposing the current, before being swallowed up again.

Metaphors aside, humans want more than reality can provide. We always have and we always will.

Is it just coincidence that resolving these modern issues, even to the complete satisfaction of the complainants, would have absolutely no impact on the capitalist class at all? — Isaac

Yeah I think this is a common criticism leftists make of liberals. They want to reform the system, make it "nicer", but don't want to fundamentally change the way it works. It's all surface-level, appearance-based, superficial and totally impotent. There's so much energy wasted on crap that ends up just improving the capitalist system.

This is something that seems to have happened across social justice movements. Like, second-wave feminists were hard-core. People were scared of them. And there was a heavy current of socialist thought involved in it as well, it really was a revolutionary-minded wave.

Nowadays it's mostly lukewarm, apathetic "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" slacktivism that is more of a corporate HR propaganda tool than anything else and ends up produces mind-numbingly stupid shit like this.

We acknowledge that TikTok dances may not have been the greatest tactic to get the SCOTUS draft rejected, but please understand that this was part of a greater awareness campaign.

What the fuck??

By not being a fucking idiot, lol

Is there a broader ideological system that you ascribe to? I have some guesses but I don't want to make any assumptions.

With regards to the poor white male's grievance or the rich black trans lesbian's, I have little sympathy for either. Both are clutching at exculpatory narratives, both are looking to distract attention from the fact that their very lifestyles are an act of oppression against the actual poor - the sweatshop worker, the peasant farmer, the modern slave. — Isaac

It seems to me that in order to help other people, you have to take care of yourself first. Devoting a significant amount of time and energy to aiding the modern slaves of the world requires that certain conditions be met in your own life. But I can't define what the threshold is between justified self-care and gratuitous self-care, it seems fuzzy.

I think that if there is anything to criticize about the social justice movements in developed countries, it's the way they have been commodified and turned into just another avenue for consumption.

Too often 'free speech' is confused with a right to be taken seriously. The right to be taken seriously is earnt, it's not a birthright. — Isaac

:100:

All opinions welcome — SackofPotatoeJam

My opinion is that we are rapidly closing in on the point of no return, and given that peaceful attempts to resolve global warming have all but failed, violence will likely be the only option going forth.

I hope you can understand the importance of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech includes things you don't like to hear. Trust me, as much as it drags me down that people to this day still do not believe in global warming, I feel the best way to reach them is to allow them to share their thoughts, and get to the root of the problem by engaging in personal discussions with them. — SackofPotatoeJam

Denying global warming should be treated with complete and unconditional disdain. Freedom of speech does not preclude the public shaming and ostracizing of those who abuse it.

Interesting perspective. Just speculating, but I think we can see the mistreatment of homosexuals in economic terms as well, as they would not produce heirs to a lineage.

Just because those two minority struggles were parallel to class struggle in their goal of unshackling said minorities from their economic ostracism, doesn't mean we can just subsume any other minority struggle in class struggle. — Isaac

Sure, I agree with that. Not every form of oppression is based on class struggle.

If the straight white man experiences oppression, it is not because he is white, straight and a man, but because he is part of the working class in the capitalist system. That is the only form of oppression that the straight white man can legitimately claim to be suffering from.

The straight white men that complain about reverse racism or reverse sexism need an explanation for why their lives suck, and they incorrectly and stupidly attribute it to the social justice movements of women and minorities, rather than capitalism. The privileges they have (as straight white men) are a crutch (that come at the expense of other people), and they despise anyone who threatens to take that crutch away from them, rather than questioning why they even need a crutch to begin with.

I did not mean to imply that straight white males should be the vanguard of a new class consciousness for the working class. The class consciousness already exists and has been developed by people of all backgrounds. Straight white men merely need to wake up and join.

The people who complain about reverse racism or reverse sexism are usually white, straight, cisgender men, and one of the kernels of their complaints tends to be what they perceive to be a double standard in the way society treats them.

They feel as if everyone but themselves is allowed a social narrative that they can identify with and can be proud about. Why can't white people have White Lives Matter? Why can't men have a men's rights movement? Why can't heterosexual people have straight pride events?

All of this is actually just a jealousy of class solidarity and a fear of losing privileges. Straight white men feel "left out" and isolated, as if nobody cares about them. The thinking goes: "if I really am so privileged as everyone else is saying I am, then why am I not happy? And if the gay snowflakes get what they want, I'll lose what little I have!"

In reality, the vast majority of them belong to the same class as everyone else: the working class. If straight white men developed class consciousness, this jealousy of other people different from them would dissolve, because they would have a support group and a meaningful social narrative in which they could place themselves. The fear of other people different from them would also dissolve, as they would identity with these folk as fellows of the working class. There would be an understanding that other people different from them, while belonging to the working class, also experience further forms of oppression that straight white men do not.

Just gonna leave this here:



I fucking love Shaun & Jen

Good points, as usual :clap:

:strong: :100:

Sounds like regular ol' racism/sexism to me. — Tzeentch

No, it's personal prejudice, which is a psychological defense mechanism that is sometimes warranted, given the context of a situation.

But we don't want to give a licence to any form of racism or sexism. None of it is acceptable. — Baden

People who are oppressed have the right to be prejudiced against their oppressors.

Historically, we simply don't value the lives of men as much as we do women. — 64bithuman

Historically, we have valued the reproductive capabilities of women, which is not the same thing as valuing their lives.

and yet we don't really seem to care very much about and of these issues, certainly not as much as we care about women's issues. — 64bithuman

These issues hardly ever get mentioned except as ammunition against those who bring up the issues of minorities and women. wHaT AbOuT tHe MeN??!?

There aren't very many movements or organizations that address men's issues for the sake of these issues (and not to just spite feminists), and those that do exist only do so by piggy-backing on the success of the feminist waves.

Finished:

• The Color Purple, Alice Walker: great read.
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin: it was okay.
• Ubik, Philip K. Dick: friggin amazing!

I think that conscription works if there is among the majority of citizens a collective understanding that universal military service is needed and that basically the threat comes from outside the state/society. — ssu

What threat?

You might as well say "without Nazism there might not be any human rights, since that's the way history played out". — Isaac

Off-topic, but nauseatingly enough, this is exactly what Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens: apparently, racism and eugenics were discredited because the Nazis lost the war. Shit book :vomit:

I recall reading about a Russian tactic in WW2 where orders were given to shoot soldiers retreating from battle. — Agent Smith

This is an exaggeration. The main purpose of the blocking troops were to prevent uncontrolled and panicked retreats. Most of the retreating troops were sent off to the front again and only a small minority were actually executed.

To justify forcing people to fight a war (by claiming it's for their own good), it must be clear that things would be more bad than war. And that's a pretty tall order since war is really, really bad. — Isaac

Right, exactly.

On the other hand, there is some evidence to support the claim that retaliatory action is an effective way to deal with bullies (tit-for-tat, Axelrod). If nobody resisted the invasion of Ukraine, this would likely only encourage more bad Russian behavior - if nobody resists, then they're gonna take everything they can for themselves. But the problem then is that the Ukrainian power structure took it upon itself to decide how the resistance would happen.

Maybe there's a more effective way to resist Russian dominion, but if this would entail the destruction of the Ukrainian power structure, it's not considered. First and foremost the military of a country serves to protect the interests of the existing power structure; human life is not the number-one priority. And the media can be used to trick people into thinking that the interests of the people are the same as the interests of the power structure.

At the end of WWII, Hitler & Co. ordered children and the elderly to defend Berlin, tooth and nail. That's obviously just a total waste of human life - the corrupt and evil leadership were just throwing away their own citizens so they could cling to power for a few more days. If the same thing were to happen in Ukraine though, there would be worldwide sympathy, the media would portray the child soldiers as martyrs, etc - yet it would largely be the same thing, just the leadership of a country trying to hold on to their positions of power for as long as possible, regardless of the costs.

David Graeber writes:

I have never understood why this mass slaughter of Iraqi men isn’t considered a war crime. It’s clear that, at the time, the U.S. command feared it might be. [...] It makes sense that the elites were worried. These were, after all, mostly young men who’d been drafted and who, when thrown into combat, made precisely the decision one would wish all young men in such a situation would make: saying to hell with this, packing up their things, and going home. For this, they should be burned alive?

On some level, let’s face it: these men were cowards. They got what they deserved.

[...]

There seems, indeed, a decided lack of sympathy for noncombatant men in war zones. Even reports by international human rights organizations speak of massacres as being directed almost exclusively against women, children, and, perhaps, the elderly. The implication, almost never stated outright, is that adult males are either combatants or have something wrong with them. (“You mean to say there were people out there slaughtering women and children and you weren’t out there defending them? What are you? Chicken?”)

[...]

About the only real exception I know of is Germany, which has erected a series of monuments labeled “To the Unknown Deserter.” The first and most famous, in Potsdam, is inscribed: “TO A MAN WHO REFUSED TO KILL HIS FELLOW MAN.” Yet even here, when I tell friends about this monument, I often encounter a sort of instinctive wince. “I guess what people will ask is: Did they really desert because they didn’t want to kill others, or because they didn’t want to die themselves?” As if there’s something wrong with that.

[...]

Nevertheless, as anyone familiar with the history of, say, Oceania, Amazonia, or Africa would be aware, a great many societies simply refused to organize themselves on military lines. Again and again, we encounter descriptions of relatively peaceful communities who just accepted that every few years, they’d have to take to the hills as some raiding party of local bad boys arrived to torch their villages, rape, pillage, and carry off trophy parts from hapless stragglers.

It seems the OP has lost interest anyway, — Isaac

Sorry, just been busy with stuff. I have been monitoring this thread and reflecting on things though.

The oddity the OP is picking up on is that in the case of war, the decision (of literally life and death magnitude) is not only removed from any democratic process, but removed from personal choice too. — Isaac

:up:

... maybe pick another bookseller? — Isaac

:100:

I'm wondering if anyone else on this forum has similar opinions and/or feels that there is some kind of "class warfare" going on where some of the rich and powerful are trying to undermine the poor and disenfranchise who should be getting help but are not. — dclements

Jane Mayer documents this in her book Dark Money. TLDR: in the last few decades, enormously wealthy billionaire dynasties (the Kochs, for instance) in America have financed countless political action committees, think tanks, lobbying campaigns etc in an effort to abolish government intervention in a ludicrous right-wing libertarian "free-market" capitalism that could easily be described as fascist.

Just finished Dark Money by Jane Mayer

One reason such polling hasn't been done on that issue is because there's no such thing as artificial wombs. It's just a science fiction hypothetical you've created. — Hanover

Consider environmental technology, which itself started out as a science fiction hypothetical, and was attacked by conservatards for this and other reasons. Just because it's hypothetical doesn't mean we can't have an opinion on whether or not it would be worth pursuing.

I also don't know what evidence you have that women consider pregnancy oppressive. I think many find the whole process hugely rewarding. — Hanover

Pregnancy is like the #1 thing that pregnant women complain about. It fucks up your body both during the pregnancy and for the rest of your life. If there was some alternative to going through this whole ordeal, I'd be willing to bet most women would prefer to do that instead. Lots of women find the prospect of becoming pregnant to be scary, too. I mean take a step back and really think about what pregnancy entails, it's a massively traumatic experience.

I won't deny that pregnant women may find parts of pregnancy rewarding - particularly all of the social benefits that come along with being pregnant. Conservative society LOVES pregnant women, it perpetually pumps out propaganda that exalts them as ideal women.

That is to say, no one is interfering with the discovery of new neo-natal treatment options and everyone is hoping for the day when neo-natal care is good enough that it can save babies in all stages of development. — Hanover

Right sure everyone is hoping things will work out - but so far none of the technology has really improved women's condition wrt pregnancy. There's pain killers and sanitation and whatnot, but fundamentally the core experience remains the same - the body is used as a factory for creating new people, and this wreaks havoc on it.

Conservatives aren't actively promoting R&D into artificial wombs, and they are the ones that seem to care the most about the survival of all the millions of proto-babies. They aren't doing that and there's a reason why - because they don't want science interfering with the female condition (or they never even thought about it, but that itself means they don't really care that much). This isn't the first instance conservatives object to science meddling in their sacred safe spaces.

If neo-natal care pushed viability back to the earliest moments of gestation (as you're suggesting with the artificial womb), then under the Roe logic, the woman's right to terminate the pregnancy would be reduced more and more, with the right existing only for a very limited time. Such is the problem with the trimester framework, which might offer another reason not to be so in favor of Roe. — Hanover

Fair enough. Roe v Wade accomplished the right thing the wrong way, IMO. It got the job done but it wasn't rock solid, given how it's been overturned.

Anyway, a question to throw back at you: If there were artificial wombs, if a pregnancy were terminated in the first week, would either parent have the right to refuse having the embryo placed in the artificial womb on the basis they didn't want to give birth to a child? — Hanover

Fundamentally the point I was making is that the pro-life position, if it is to be coherent, should support the development of artificial wombs. In a pro-life society without artificial wombs, there are two options for a pregnant woman: go through the pregnancy, or have an abortion. Artificial wombs provide a third option, which makes it less likely that a woman will choose to have an abortion (she doesn't have to go through the pregnancy, and the fetus gets to live and presumably get adopted or something later).

In a more enlightened society that doesn't believe in magic, a woman would not be shamed for having an abortion when there are artificial wombs available. She can choose to go through the pregnancy naturally, put the fetus in an artificial womb, or have an abortion, and there's nothing wrong with either choice (ignoring antinatalism, which I would prefer if this didn't devolve into a discussion of that).

Materialism has always had difficulty defining what it means to be material. If you mean what I think you mean by it - no "spooky stuff" - then that's just naturalism.

Besides this, probably the most significant challenge to materialism is the Kantian transcendental aesthetic, which holds that space and time are not things in themselves but are pure forms of sensibility. Pairing this with Kant's epistemology leads to the result that not only is the "external" and "material" world beyond space and time, it's completely inaccessible to knowledge, which makes metaphysical claims about its nature (like materialism) empty of any meaning.

Right-wing women are the class traitors par excellence - willing to masochistically sacrifice their sisters at the altar of phallocracy, just to get the meager privileges and honors bestowed upon them by the patriarchs. Collaborationists and cowards to the core, right-wing women fiercely cling to their masters, and jealously despise any women who has the courage to live for herself.

So, if abortions are available, why would one build artificial wombs? — Bartricks

That's the point though, safe abortions aren't available in conservative shitholes, pro-life cretins have made sure of that.

Simply banning abortions is not going to prevent all abortions. If you actually care about fetuses, then you should support the development of technology that will make it less likely that a women will choose to have one. But nobody in the pro-life movement supports this, because they don't actually care about fetuses - they care about keeping women controlled. They don't want women to be relieved of this crucial weakness. They want women to be vulnerable to becoming pregnant and make up a bunch of bullshit about the rights of fetuses to obscure it.

but then why be in favour of artificial wombs? — Bartricks

So that women don't have to get dangerous backstreet abortions in conservative shitholes like Texas.

Artificial wombs are just an extension of the process of de-mystifying procreation which has been in progress since science first started to uncover the actual reality of reproduction. The magical aura of motherhood is a cultural artifact that belongs to an age of ignorance and superstition.

But if she freely got pregnant, why doesn't she owe it to the person she summoned into existence the continued use of her womb? — Bartricks

If she wanted to, she could go drop off the creature at the local artificial womb clinic. Or get an abortion, it's not a person so it doesn't matter if it gets terminated.

And she didn't "summon" it into existence - a man was involved in some way as well.

Re-read my original post.

Possessing the only means of reproduction is an insanely heavy burden and crucial weakness in women, which is easily exploitable by men. The only future in which men and women are truly equal is one in which the means of reproduction are completely separated from the bodies of women. — _db

But of course the pro-life chuds won't ever support artificial wombs, it would release women from their bondage as reproductive factories.

Oh, I see you edited your post. I didn't see the second question.

Why do you think it would be wrong for a woman to abort if there was an artificial womb available then? — Bartricks

Uhhh, I don't...? Are you trolling

Presumably you think it would be immoral to abort if there was an artificial womb available because abortion kills an innocent person who does not deserve to die? — Bartricks

Nope, dunno where you got that from.

What, by having an abortion? No.

Yes to the first question, no to the second.

Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, Bertram Gross

If a red state with a majority of people who are against abortion, isn't that democratic? — Judaka

Fundamental human rights should not be up for debate, full stop.

Right-Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin

From father’s house to husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a woman acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence.

Why was my post title edited?

RIP SX