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On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

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Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#241

Post by cmrdporcupine »

stcredzero wrote: post #231
throwawayjava wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need a damn broad definition of Marxism for that to make much sense. Economy and class are so central the Marx's philosophy that saying "Just s/ /class" doesn't make any sense. You can't just go into Capital and s/ /class and end up with anything that makes any sense. The entire analysis needs restructuring. At some point, if Marxism is defined that way, you might as well just call any materialist philosophy "b…

You'd need a damn broad definition of Marxism for that to make much sense. You have groups vying for power, with one group systemically oppressing another, and the morality of the situation adjudicated at that granulatiry. How does that not work? Can you reply with a specific? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjNJX64cBOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGRVhsNX5Ao Tangentially, I've seen a lot of "so basically (cultur…

Because frankly Marx was not broadly concerned with discussions of morality and oppression of 'groups' in a general sense as you seem to be implying. He was quite strictly concerned with an economic analysis of capitalist exploitation, and not necessarily exploitation in our contemporary moral sense (as in child explotation) but more in the sense that we talk about exploiting nature, or a tool. Marx's analysis was almost purely an economic one, where he pointed out that the economic model of capitalism and our modern notion of private property created a class division based around the extraction of profits ('surplus value') from labour through the ownership and control of the tools of production. All 3 volumes of Capital are about this, and he spends little time discussing power or domination in a general way and basically almost none on racism, sexism, or colonialism except as they tie into capitalist exploitation.

The phrase 'cultural Marxism' only betrays how little right wing pundits who use this phrase actually understand of Marxian theory and postmodern cultural studies generally, since frankly the vaguely left wing strains of academic cultural theory spent the last 50 years _critiquing_ Marxism from the vantage point that it did not pay enough attention or have a meaningful theory to talk about these issues. Postmodernism and Marxism generally have been somewhat 'at war' within academia, though generally you'll find that the 'founding fathers' of cultural studies and postmodernism (say, Adorno, or Derrida, Foucault) themselves express admiration or sympathy for Marx himself though they rarely considered themselves Marxists per se. "Cultural Marxism" is kind of a misnomer -- they'd be better off saying "left wing postmodernists" or "liberal cultural relativists" or something, but those don't sound as boogeyman, do they?

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#242

Post by germinalphrase »

Veelox wrote: post #80
maxerickson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you make an interesting observation about how communities are structured here, but there is also plenty of overt (though quiet) racism.

What things are happening in the Midwest that you consider overt racism?

A few weeks ago I was in a rural Minnesota bar watching the Packers only to hear some guy start making jokes about black female anatomy and picking cotton. He got some laughs and kept rolling from there. Jokes about menstruation/tampons/cotton picking fall pretty squarely in my "overt racism" bucket.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#243

Post by Balgair »

stcredzero wrote: post #228
Balgair wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Because there are people in the SLPC who are abusing the reputation of the organization as a political weapon. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an ex-muslim who wants to reform the society she came from and Majid Nawaz is a muslim reformer. Labeling what they are doing and saying as "hate speech" is intellectual dishonesty.

No offense, but I'm going to believe the SPLC in general all the same. They have a pretty good track record over the decades. Yeah, if they screwed up 2 things, that's not good and they should fix it. But, a 99.9% 'correct' rate is pretty damn good all the same.

You should email them and tell them though, I'm sure they would want to correct anything they are wrong about. Smearing people incorrectly is something I imagine they would want to make right.

https://www.splcenter.org/contact-us

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#244

Post by stcredzero »

throwawayjava wrote: post #237
stcredzero wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need a damn broad definition of Marxism for that to make much sense. You have groups vying for power, with one group systemically oppressing another, and the morality of the situation adjudicated at that granulatiry. How does that not work? Can you reply with a specific? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjNJX64cBOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGRVhsNX5Ao Tangentially, I've seen a lot of "so basically (cultur…

> You have groups vying for power, with one group systemically oppressing another, and the morality of the situation adjudicated at that granulatiry You've just described thousands of years of history prior to Marx and hundreds of years of history after Marx across every single axis of the political spectrum. This is more a description of "effective political messaging" than a description of "Marxism". Has there ever…

You've just described thousands of years of history prior to Marx and hundreds of years of history after Marx across every single axis of the political spectrum.

Which is precisely what Marx claims to do, with essentially the model which Marx claims does so.

Well, anything popular taps into some truth

It's pretty obvious that Postmodernism is homomorphic to Marxism. It's also well documented that Postmodernism has intellectual roots in Marxism. Marxism is also outwardly and openly claimed by many in the current day political left in the US, in particular, the part which originates and most vigorously promotes Intersectionality.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#245

Post by spaceseaman »

weberc2 wrote: post #214
twblalock wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but that's correct under the explanation of racism given by the parent comment (which is not merely the left-wing view, but the consensus academic view). The example about divesting from a neighborhood due to concerns about property value is spot-on. In a systematically racist society, it is rational to behave in ways that produce racist outcomes even one does not person…

> which is not merely the left-wing view, but the consensus academic view This follows only because academics (in relevant fields) are a strict subset of the left-wing (and generally the extreme left wing), and the relevant fields are in the middle of a reproducibility crisis largely due to their political confirmation bias. These fields are very open about their commitment to activism over objectivity (and many in t…

> the relevant fields are in the middle of a reproducibility crisis largely due to their political confirmation bias.

As someone who works very closely with academics (specifically sociologists), I would love to see some evidence for this baseless mud-slinging. All of science is having a reproducibility crisis

Do you have a knowledge of the field? Or do you just disagree with their conclusions? I would be happy to be proven wrong so I can let my sociologist friends know that they are doing such a thing.

EDIT: There's also this really neat nature article detailing some of the responses to the current reproducibility crisis in all of science. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-016-0021 Based on this article, it looks like the social sciences are actually the ones spearheading the effort for more reproducible science. One of my colleagues is actually investigating how the typical formulation of ideas with the scientific method can implicitly lead to biases and errors in the science actually performed.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#246

Post by stcredzero »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #241
stcredzero wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need a damn broad definition of Marxism for that to make much sense. You have groups vying for power, with one group systemically oppressing another, and the morality of the situation adjudicated at that granulatiry. How does that not work? Can you reply with a specific? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjNJX64cBOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGRVhsNX5Ao Tangentially, I've seen a lot of "so basically (cultur…

Because frankly Marx was not broadly concerned with discussions of morality and oppression of 'groups' in a general sense as you seem to be implying. He was quite strictly concerned with an economic analysis of capitalist exploitation, and not necessarily exploitation in our contemporary moral sense (as in child explotation) but more in the sense that we talk about exploiting nature, or a tool. Marx's analysis was al…

Because frankly Marx was not broadly concerned with discussions of morality and oppression of 'groups' in a general sense as you seem to be implying...Marx's analysis was almost purely an economic one

Your point ascribes to me a sense of morality to me as a sneaky way of putting words in my mouth. "as you seem to be implying." In reality, I need no more than the Marx's subsumed sense of morality/justice in Marx's analysis for my point to stand.

"Cultural Marxism" is kind of a misnomer -- they'd be better off saying "left wing postmodernists" or "liberal cultural relativists" or something

Not a misnomer at all. Many who fall under the banner openly proclaim themselves Marxist, or subscribe to those ideas in their writings. For those who don't, there's still the matter of the homomorphisms between Marxism and Social Construction.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#247

Post by throwawayjava »

stcredzero wrote: post #244
throwawayjava wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have groups vying for power, with one group systemically oppressing another, and the morality of the situation adjudicated at that granulatiry You've just described thousands of years of history prior to Marx and hundreds of years of history after Marx across every single axis of the political spectrum. This is more a description of "effective political messaging" than a description of "Marxism". Has there ever…

You've just described thousands of years of history prior to Marx and hundreds of years of history after Marx across every single axis of the political spectrum. Which is precisely what Marx claims to do, with essentially the model which Marx claims does so. Well, anything popular taps into some truth It's pretty obvious that Postmodernism is homomorphic to Marxism. It's also well documented that Postmodernism has in…

> Which is precisely what Marx claims to do, with essentially the model which Marx claims does so.

Again, no. Marx's characterization is much more concrete than that, and really cannot be separated from notions of class and capital and commodity-form without rendering the term "Marxist" nearly meaningless. Or at least synonymous with much less politically-charged ideas like "materialism" or even just "politics". Separating Marx from those things is like separating Jesus from Christianity.

The next two criticism are more tangential and obvious, but hopefully more illustrative of the problem with the way you're trying to re-define Marxism

1. A capitalist operating as Marx would predict is not himself a Marxist, so your statement is especially confusing for more than one reason.

2. Plenty of non-Marxist -- even conservative economists -- tap into various Marxist ideas. And even more tap into the same ideas that Marx was himself building on (e.g., the effectiveness of providing moral justifications on the basis of oppression... not a Marxist innovation!). So drawing any tangential connection to Marx and labeling anything connected by that tangent as "Marxist" implicates 100% of economists. Which, again, makes the label "Marxist" kind of silly and pointless.

If you strip Marxism of Marx's actual core ideas, then "Marxism" ceases to mean anything. And class is a central component of those ideas.

At some point referring to something as "Just Marxism s/.../class" begins to occupy the "you are an idiot" box in on the PG argument hierarchy.

> It's pretty obvious that Postmodernism is homomorphic to Marxism

This seems mostly off-topic... you'll have to draw out the connection for me. (edit: Obviously, plenty of postmodernists critique closeparen's post and plenty of non-postmodernists would agree with closeparent's post. Are you sure you mean postmodernism?)

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#248

Post by hx87 »

Oxitendwe wrote: post #189
CodeCube wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does living next to someone else destroy an ethnic identity? Does a chinese family moving into an italian neighborhood all of a sudden mean that no one can open an italian restaurant? If there is a German festival one weekend, does that mean they can't have a Scottish highland festival the next weekend in the same venue? Does a Russian family moving in next door mean that I have to start drinking Vodka instead of…

>Does a chinese family moving into an italian neighborhood all of a sudden mean that no one can open an italian restaurant? No. It does mean a lot of other things though, like a vastly increased chance of chinese/italian intermarriage for their descendants, which means their descendants will not share your ethnic identity - it will be destroyed. Whether you think that's a good or a bad thing is an entirely different…

> which means their descendants will not share your ethnic identity - it will be destroyed

Mixed and combined, not destroyed. Besides, where to draw the line? Should Calabrians and Sicilians not live next to each other? Cantonese and Hakka?

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#249

Post by cmrdporcupine »

stcredzero wrote: post #246
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because frankly Marx was not broadly concerned with discussions of morality and oppression of 'groups' in a general sense as you seem to be implying. He was quite strictly concerned with an economic analysis of capitalist exploitation, and not necessarily exploitation in our contemporary moral sense (as in child explotation) but more in the sense that we talk about exploiting nature, or a tool. Marx's analysis was al…

Because frankly Marx was not broadly concerned with discussions of morality and oppression of 'groups' in a general sense as you seem to be implying...Marx's analysis was almost purely an economic one Your point ascribes to me a sense of morality to me as a sneaky way of putting words in my mouth. "as you seem to be implying." In reality, I need no more than the Marx's subsumed sense of morality/justice in Marx's ana…

Look you're free to use language (and downvotes) however you want, but I and others are merely pointing out that you are applying a very broad brush which basically amounts to "I can see similarities here, so I'll just call them the same thing" -- Marx may have had a 'subsume[d] sense of morality' in his analysis of capitalism but that doesn't mean anybody who has a similar sense of morality about another topic is now a Marxist.

Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, not all mortals are Socrates.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#250

Post by colanderman »

taway_1212 wrote: post #229
colanderman wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I personally don't like multiculturalism" I'm pretty sure it was the offspring of people who "don't like multiculturalism" who beat me up in middle school for being part of geek culture rather than the prevailing rural culture of my hometown. I personally am a big fan of respecting others despite cultural differences.

Don't liking multiculturalism and respecting people different than you are two different things. You can be respectful and still wish to live in a more homogenous community.

You can respect someone while wishing they move out of your town? That's news to me.
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