It’s been 28 years already? Christ I’m old. Kowloon Walled City was razed 31 years ago.

Since people seem interested in the morality angle, allow me to introduce U. of Macao philosophy professor Hans-Georg Moeller.

• 📺 Why Sam Harris is Wrong - A Critique of Sam Harris’ “The Moral Landscape”
• 📺 The Problem with Sam Harris’ “Morality”
• 📺 If Morality Exists Everything Is Permitted. (Q&A)
• 📖 The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality (interview)

2 post, 6 comments. I think a stay-behind operative has been activated :P

I’m glad I was never subjected to whatever mental gymnastics are in Arendt’s horseshoe theory polemic.

Looks like they took it down. You might try here: https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Pedagogy+of+the+Oppressed

I’ve never been to r/tankiejerk, but I assume it’s just libs circle jerkingvirtue signaling their anticommunism. I think they’re the “Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition”: https://redsails.org/false-witnesses/

Every once in a while, I am sorry to say, some sick bastard sets fire to a kitten. This is something that happens. Like all crimes, it shouldn’t happen, but it does. And like most crimes, it makes the paper. The effects of this appalling cruelty are not far-reaching, but the incidents are reported in the papers because the cruelty is so flagrant and acute that it seems newsworthy.

The response to such reports is horror and indignation, which is both natural and appropriate. But the expression of that horror and indignation also produces something strange.

[O]ne also came away from reading that thread with the sense that people seemed to think this ultra-minimal moral stance made them exceptional and exceptionally righteous. Like the earlier editorial writers, they seemed to think they were exhibiting courage by taking a bold position on a matter of great controversy. Whatever comfort might be gleaned from the reaffirmation that most people were right about this non-issue issue was overshadowed by the discomfiting realization that so many people also seemed to want or need most others to be wrong.

The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.

[I]f the kitten-burners didn’t already exist, we would have to invent them.

I don’t think they’re interested in understanding us, nor that any of it is in good faith. I think they’re interested in using us as a straw man that they can pin any cartoonish fear or moral depravity on, and then condemn us for those things, and then pat each other on the back for their righteousness and bravery. Same with c/tankiejerk and c/meanwhileongrad.

I mean, whatever was Stalin thinking, allying with Hitler’s enemies, or Mao allying with he KMT?

This episode was brought to you by NordVPN.

I don’t think I’m yet able to fully believe levels of haute bourgeois calcification & incompetence I think I’m seeing. It really is failsons all the way down, innit.

Whether or not the analogy is sound, it seems to be problematic pedagogically because of the easy conflation among the two distinct senses of power used. It also can cause confusion between constant capital, e.g. the cost of an engine, and variable capital, meaning labor power, measured in e.g. cost per worker-hour.

I can’t really speak to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; it’s slightly above my pay grade. But that Marx quote shows that labor power isn’t power in the physics sense, because the worker using the new invention is spinning more cotton in a given unit of time without burning any more calories in his body. What increased productivity was the invention itself and the capital investment in manufacturing the invention for use by labor.

Edit to add: As to TRPF: It has to do with the increasing capital costs for labor-saving technology like the invention above. It increases capital (“constant”) costs in order to lower labor power (“variable”) costs per unit of product, and it decreases prices for the products. The capitalists, in price competition with each other, are compelled to continue repeating this cycle.

That’s a bad analogy. Horsepower is a unit of power in the physics sense, just as the watt is. Labor power isn’t using “power” in that sense. In fact, the engine is what increased human labor power in the industrial revolution, because humans could use them for physical power instead of their own bodies or horses or windmills or water wheels.

Never heard of it. Is it—or do they intend for it be—a hard fork or soft? I can only find one comment claiming soft.

In other words, for the British workers to liberate themselves, they must fight for the Irish workers and support them in both words and deeds.

Marx’s strategy for the 19^th century British Isles was never tested, so we’ll never know what would have happened. He also believed that socialism would begin in the most industrialized states, but it didn‘t. It started in a weakened, largely feudal, largely pre-industrial empire after the first inter-imperialist world war, through Lenin’s theory of revolutionary defeatism.

Marx advocated replacing the U.K. with a voluntary federation of nations, quite akin to the U.S.S.R.

I don’t know that anybody is arguing against such an outcome. The question is how to actually get there from here. You can’t have a voluntary federation of states until you have sovereign socialist states. For imperialized states, that means that they 1) have been freed from the imperial boot and become properly sovereign and then 2) have overthrown their bourgeoisie. For Imperialist states, they can’t realistically be overthrown until their empires collapse. It’s necessarily so that the intermediary stages between a unipolar, imperial hegemon world and a world federation of socialist nations would be multipolar ones.

I’ve never heard of Jason Unruhe. Apparently he’s a Maoist-Third Worldist, a tendency which almost never comes up on Lemmygrad.

“Premier Matthew” is claiming that the concept of a labor aristocracy dismisses the fundamental class relationship, but it doesn’t at all. The working class isn’t an undifferentiated horde, nor is the bourgeoisie, otherwise we wouldn’t distinguish between petite & haute. In Marx’s Capital volumes, he distinguished British proletariat who’d become “bourgeoisified.” Was Marx making a fundamental error as well? AFAIK, Lenin himself coined the term labor aristocracy, which Stalin quoted.

Maybe Maoist-Third Worldists make such a fundamental error; I wouldn‘t know.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is.

It seems as though you’re taking communism 101 theory and insisting that it be followed universally and by the book, regardless of history and material conditions on the ground, as if no further investigation were needed. Maoists wouldn’t be Maoists if they took Mao’s Oppose Book Worship seriously.

People have suggested to you several works on anti-imperialism from a Marxist perspective. Another important one, especially for those who live in a settler-colonial state within the imperial core, is Settlers.

“My lord, when heaven gave the duke of Wu the grand opportunity for gaining power he did not take advantage of it and so he is a fugitive today.

Who is the duke of Wu? We were only introduced to the duke of Yue & the king of Wu. And what opportunity did he forego? Is there a piece of the story missing or am I stupid?

then all the years of hardships you have bourn will have been endured in vain.”

Okay… but that’s a sunk cost. Does it really factor in?

Trump hates losers, so I doubt Zelensky will be living next to Juan Guaidó in Miami when this is over.

Everyone considered the USSR a superpower.

Anyway, I liked him in NewsRadio.