LinkedinLenin [any, comrade/them]

uncompensated driving, commute times, etc

people don’t realize how much their car is costing them. IRS rate is like $0.60 a mile. running errands for work all day? 45-minute commute? yeah you’re effectively making less than minimum wage now

very difficult to get people to understand though

It’s not that every psychological problem is directly due to capitalism (though many are directly or indirectly) it’s that capitalist psychology mostly cares about profitable treatments, whether they’re effective or not. I’m inclined to think some form of talk therapy or psychoanalysis may be more helpful to a lot of people than solely symptom-based treatment. But who can afford to go to therapy for years?

Even from the pharmaceutical side, we’re mostly just tweaking the mechanisms of consciousness without necessarily addressing or understanding the holistic structure, so the best we can hope for is trying various meds until one sort of works. But most of us can’t afford to spend years trying a new med every few months, with all the turbulence and uncertainty that goes along with it.

Cbt, dbt and the like are somewhat useful at treating certain symptoms, but generally fail to address root causes. And the way they’re often applied, they seem more intent on teaching people to accept their treatment under capitalism than anything.

Consciousness is complex in a way that isn’t effectively modeled by insurance-mediated healthcare and science, which overemphasizes quantitative variables in a field that’s profoundly qualitative. Not to mention the obsession with the individual, ignoring the systems that individuals exist within.

Tbh I feel like that’s more a fault of capitalism than a shortcoming unique to psychology.

I get shitbox Toyotas for under a couple grand and run them into the ground. Whatever maintenance I can afford.

I don’t trust cars nor roads nor drivers

:michael-laugh:

Ironically I think 20 hours is about the estimate for reading it if you read 300 wpm, iirc

Of course it’s pretty dense theory so most people aren’t gonna be reading at a fiction pace. Took me a few months to get through it.

Load-bearing cube

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

We’re not claiming pedophilia doesn’t exist, we’re pointing out a dogwhistle that’s been pushed by fash for at least a decade now, which tries to do an equivocation attack on queer people using pedophilia. It started on 4chan and has since spread to high level government.

As you probably know, we use the term “dogwhistle” because these attacks are meant to seem innocuous to average people but convey deeper meaning to those “in the know”. It’s a fascist tactic that’s been used forever, see Sartre’s analysis of antisemites for a concise description.

This type of thing is a manipulation of signifiers (words and symbols) to obfuscate and confuse concepts (the actual ideas words are supposed to represent). Fascists will dance around with signifiers, making it difficult to pin down and explain their meaning to laypeople who aren’t invested or haven’t spent the disproportionate effort it takes to keep up. This allows them to avoid rebuttal (because there’s no coherent essence behind their words) and hide in plain sight.

So the signifier “I want to kill pedophiles” is particularly insidious, because it’s something the average person is already sympathetic towards for obvious reasons. But to a growing demographic of people, it signifies a deeper concept: “I want to kill pedophiles=groomers=queer people”. Which is a wild leap of logic, but it’s what we’re directly observing right now, particularly in red states.

The red flag or smoking gun or hint at this being the case here is the fact that no average person really disagrees with the gist of the sign, so like, who is he speaking to? It’s got a distinctly different vibe than MeToo and anti-Epstien sentiment. “If pedophilia is just a sexuality”-- who’s saying this? It suggests the existence of a archetypal person in this guy’s mind, an Other concept that can be mapped onto whomever.

See also that new Q movie that’s so popular, that portrays a mythical version of human trafficking that’s dialed right into the rightwing consciousness.

Like, just the fact that it took me this long to poorly attempt to explain this, is part of why it’s so effective. I have to very carefully and in depth try to explain the context for why a “good” statement actually means a “bad” thing, making me look at best hypersensitive. Seriously, read the Sartre thing, he’s way better with words than I am. I’ll try to find it and post it below.

also a pet theory i like (that isn’t actually true or provable) is that gifted programs are meant to remove children deemed smarter from their communities and funnel them into middle management and academia, so they don’t become agitators for change in their communities and workplaces

on the topic of iq, i have a lot of problems with the way people seem to interact with the concept. there’s a bunch of assumptions all baked into it:

• iq is a variable that actually exists in nature

• people’s iq is static and follows a standard distribution

• iq tests are capable of objectively measuring or at least approximating this variable

• this variable is a good stand-in or even synonymous with cognitive ability

• cognitive ability is univariate or single-faceted, able to be described with a single number

• cognitive ability equates to or correlates with usefulness, happiness, sociability, success, whatever

• finally, that any of this really matters, like in a materially impactful way, or is something that we should focus on

it’s not that each of these statements is 100% wrong, it’s that each shouldn’t be assumed to be true. but the way i usually see iq invoked kinda just uncritically runs with all of them, contained within a neat little ideological package.

Yeah, to me it sounds like “even a tax collector, the worst type of person you know, is better than the Pharisee in this story”

I’m sure there’s probably a few Hexbear users that think that, but as far as I can tell it’s the minority. Maybe I’m wrong

In any case, there’s a lot of us who prefer to interact in good faith. Personally that’s why I left Reddit years ago, because people there are too at each other’s throats instead of interested in finding common ground and developing ideas.

Personally I just think your distinctions are a bit idealistic. Maybe useful as abstract definitions, but too removed from real world economics to make strong statements about it.

For example, a regulated market economy is kind of the natural state of capitalism, unless perhaps you zoom in on single transactions. As capitalism was struggling to emerge out of feudalism, the newly emerging capitalist class had to contend with governmental entities that arose out of feudal economic relations (and thus were geared towards protecting the power and wealth of the landlord class against the peasant class). In that struggle, as the capitalist class gained dominance, they tended to enact laws that protected their interests against both the old landlord class as well as the new working class.

In regards to central planning, that’s a tendency of complex economies to drift towards for a variety of reasons. Capitalism tends towards monopoly (because monopoly is the most profitable state an enterprise can strive towards), and in later stages of monopolization, the economy is de facto, if not de jure, a centrally planned economy. ln the US, a large amount of our industry and distribution is centrally planned by corporations like Amazon and Walmart, large agriculture corporations, etc. And I imagine companies are going to continue to consolidate.

The big problem is this central planning is done without our or society’s best interests in mind, their primary purpose is to benefit the company’s shareholders. What some of us theorize is that once it reaches a point of consolidation, that infrastructure can then be seized, and systems can be set up such that the efficiency and whatnot is preserved, but the purpose is changed to benefit everyone (as much as possible) instead of a small number of shareholders. That’s very theoretical and general, of course. The specifics and nuances will depend a lot on the specific conditions we live in.

Oh I can empathize with that struggle. If I get time this week maybe I’ll try to write a basic summary of it.

I agree with the sentiment, but please do read the essay I linked. It really changed the way I thought about things.

It’s very much about strategizing and analysis, not moralizing or dividing or anything like that.

Jesus Christ lmao

Eh I just don’t think there’s much utility in being so strict with categories. That’s fine as a shorthand though, and for explaining to coworkers who aren’t familiar with the theories.

But the point of a material analysis is to, well, analyze. What are people’s material interests? How do those interests shape a person’s revolutionary or reactionary potential?

Rather than try to illustrate it myself with made-up examples, I’m gonna delete the paragraph I wrote and just post an actual material analysis from history

Idk I don’t think that’s a very useful or accurate way to look at things. I do a lot of organizing and mutual aid alongside leftists of all types, (as well as liberals).

From a materialist lense, middle class usually refers to the small business owners, landlords, etc. Petty bourgeoisie basically. They historically tend to welcome fascist ideology out of fear of losing their privileged position in society.

So there’s a difference between the working person who might get caught in a false consciousness versus the tenuously well-off person who’s somewhat class conscious. The latter is likely a lost cause more often than not. The former can often be reasoned with if we can speak to their experiences as a worker and cut through the spectacle.

But yeah the Liberal use of the term “middle class” as someone occupying arbitrary income brackets is an immaterial abstraction with very little utility for either prediction or description.