Well said!

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

– Marx

He’s a total ideologue.

A lot of people can sense it, but can’t describe it. My own ability to describe it is amateurish, clunky and abstract. I work with a lot of people who dedicate huge parts of their lives to helping people, who can’t describe it. The social scientists who worked it out are famous, but that part of their work is deemphasized even though it defines their work. And because it is deemphasized, their proponents and followers have committed any number of mistakes and just downright catastrophes.

I’m glad to hear you were doing a social science experiment and I’m glad I could provide some validation.

Your materialism is a form of idealism, that collapses into solipsistic conclusions.

When you limit the scope of phenomenal objects to be only those objects that have a physical quality, that is positivism. It has a nice way of erasing anything human from your analysis. Thought, emotion, social connection, motivation, the will to act all become purely subjective, hence are excluded from the category of objects that are real.

Your inability to process basic fact is admitted in your own description:

no significant change can be brought to masses by purely thinking about them

This is true, but you have no theory of praxis. There is a kind of contemplation that is purely subjective. Like daydreaming for instance, though this could be influenced by objective factors. There is a type of contemplation that develops the self so we are better able to take action, such as studying. And there is contemplation that leads directly to action, like when someone finally decides to leave their abuser, or develop a new flavor of ice cream, etc. These last two forms of contemplation are both subjective and objective. They become objective because they change something in the phenomenal world, they are verifiable.

Money only exists in the form of bits in a computer, or pieces of paper, some people say “money isn’t real,” but it clearly is as there are consequences if you don’t have any. The same is true with the law. It only exists physically as a piece of paper with some writing on it, but it actually took politicians, lawyers, input from citizens, all this unsubstantial stuff in order to create it, and if it is broken (what object broke?) the police can arrest you and you get punished by a judge. Do laws not exist?

Money and Laws are social relations. They have no substance, but they are real and verifiable, the paper they are printed on is only symbolic of what it is, how it came into being, and what effects it has on society. You can’t account for any of this, which is why you can’t understand the problem. You can imagine an individual body, you can imagine society and government, but you can’t connect them. You can’t see how society is made by people or how people are made by society.

The way to fix this is to center the human in our analysis. Maybe a tree exists with or without human work, but many trees are planted. Oil exists in the ground independent of our labor, but what turns in into gasoline is people working on an oil rig (built by people) extracting it, transporting the crude via truck or pipeline (all built and operated by people), refining it (in a refinery built by people), transporting the fuel to a gas station (operated and built by people), and put into your car’s gas tank by you, and that was done for some reason. You witnessed to something in your environment, you thought about it, which led you to want to drive somewhere, which made you want to fill up your gas tank.

Maybe you wanted to buy a video game, created and marketed to you by people. Why did you want that game? So you could play with friends, or you want to compete on leaderboards, or you played the last game and want to play this one. Out of joy or competitiveness, all these feelings lack substance, but they made you do a thing, and as long as you return home with the game, your contemplation and action became objective.

This is why it matters that we are responsible with other people, and we account for their feelings and thoughts. Hell, influencing peoples thoughts and opinions is a multi-trillion dollar industry. If they didn’t exist before, the do when others try and influence them.

things that can not be measured don’t exist.

Where people are concerned, they do exist. Because it influences peoples ability to act. You can act in a way to free other people or you can oppress them, and the qualities of freedom and oppression are not measurable, but their effects are substantial.

I’m not sure if your attitude is based on a need to harm other people, or if you really don’t understand. In both cases, what brought you to it was not totally your own. You were exposed to chauvinism in a way that led you to adopt a crappy attitude, or you were taught things a certain way (which is tbf how we are all taught to some degree, though it is wrong). You internalized this, thought about it, said something gross, and people reacted negatively. This is all objective, but only some of it is verifiable.

This particular misunderstanding you exhibit is one of my favorite topics, and my answer to it is the product of like 15 years of research and discussions. You say

scientific worldview starting from 1800

It arguably started before, but it was thoroughly disproven in 1844. Yet it persists. That persistence is not substance, “worldview” isn’t substance, the year 1800 isn’t substance. But it is phenomenon. You’re confused, but hopefully that’s all it is. Hopefully you’ll reconsider and be able to do better. Human development is objective, but it is not inevitable. This is the difference between your deterministic and vulgar attitude and reality.

In other words, you are an idealist who uses physical phenomenon to disappear much that is real. If we want to become a better materialist, then we have to center people and everything about humans in our analysis, not objects as something that exists independent of human intervention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_jury_investigation_of_Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_in_Pennsylvania

I had lived away from home for decades when it came out. Tbh I admired this man when I was a teenager

When OpenAI crashes, Microsoft just like gets it. They literally don’t care if there is a bubble, in fact they are at least partially incentivised to create the bubble and then let it burst.

Theres no downside for MS

A friend of mine convinced me to go to a community lunch with the bishop, he and I both had long hair in our high school, but the dioscese wanted boys hair cut short. So we went and made a fuss at this mild lunch with a bunch of grandmas in the basement of some church that was serving chicken noodle soup.

Turns out he was knowingly sheltering pedophile priests in our diocese for years.

Read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Read Wretched of the Earth. Read The Revolution Betrayed. Read Kronstadt 1921.

Enjoy your Blanqism and Bonapartism

“When education is not liberating it is the dream of the oppressed to become the oppressor”

Well history shows, that guillotining your ruling class, such as happened in France, leads to centuries of rational peace and prosperity. The French successfully ended all wars, and liberalism ushered in an instant and uninterrupted 250 year peace. Since they designed their guillotines not to cut the heads of any undeserving peasants who were caught in the political maelstrom, and enlightened the peasants so that every citizen was a productive and conscientious member of society, every French person and all of their descendants has become a productive civic philosopher. No despot ever managed to come to power in France ever again, and certainly not within 10-15 years.

Having successfully merged society with the Hegelian world spirit of human freedom, the rest of Europe gave up all colonies, freed the people, and helped them achieve a level of national and self actualization in line with the French wave of historic human transformation. No despot ever managed to come to power in Europe again.

Now, the world’s children know no fear or hunger, only freedom and reason; and its all thanks to the fact that the French did such a good job chopping the heads off of exactly the right people.

Isn’t that just like regular school? American schools students have to do all sorts of patriotic nationalist hoo ha

1000%

But exploitation is about human freedom. Getting rid of billionaires doesn’t end exploitation. It’s just a beginning.

The struggle for human freedom will never end

Sigourney and Gillian aren’t billionaire capitalists, they’re wealthy because they’re talented actresses. Their talent makes the owners of production companies lots of money, and they’re paid a fraction of it. But they still have to find someone to buy their labor. They had to audition to get jobs before they were big stars.

TS’s dad bought a record label and signed her to it.

Class analysis can be tricky, especially the entertainment industry, but it isnt always about being rich or not. The surest way to tell is “what is the relationship to production?” Tay is a billionaire because she helped ticketmaster and Live Nation create a monopoly, she’s a parasite. Without Gillian and Sigourney, the movies and shows they worked in wouldn’t be as good.

She’s worth 1.6 billion so its actually less

Sending that much money to a two year old doesn’t make sense. They literally have no concept of money or social responsibility. Why send money when the kid clearly needs a Dr.

/s

Charity from billionaires always looks so fake. Just send it anonymously. Otherwise its just a publicity stunt.

If her entire fortune was $100000 she would have given $6.25. A handful of pocket change and a fiver. Yet I don’t get articles by the independent written about me when I give an unhoused veteran a $20

I’m glad that someone in her position did less than the absolute bare minimum to help that child’s family. What a moving gesture.

Nice

A wiggler? Did you learn that on the first day at sophistry class at fallacy school? Is that a technical term or are you completely, totally, irredeemably full of your own farts

Ah a rationalist. That’s what I love about rationalism, any relationship to reality is severely rationed

Irish and Islamic Arab scholars were widely sought during medieval era because their countries contained the last surviving copies of the entire roman classical canon and before, locked up in monasteries with monks and scribes copying them by hand, in all different languages, since the fall of Rome and the spread of the catholic and islamic religion into those areas.

In the dark ages, they were the only people with any access to information about the past, they spoke and could read and write many languages. Advanced mathematics were developed in Iraq in the 9th century, or even earlier in the vedas, and made their way to Europe in the 12th century. Fibonacci made a name for himself in Italy through these discoveries, which had a thriving intellectual culture in various regions for the larger part of the feudal era.

So no I dont think its a recent idea. The ruling class in every era has always needed the educated to interpret the world. The formation of an educated middle class is fairly recent, but as the middle class gets squeezed harder, look how the first thing to go is quality public education.

A sharp, curious and questioning mind is route to whatever passes for freedom in any age. Whether or not that opportunity is available to everyone is a sure indicator of a whether a society is more free, or more repressive.

The 3.5% theory is extremely questionable. The first paragraph of this article is problematic if you know like 3 things about Philippine politics.

I’ve dug deeper into the data and it is very opinionated how it defines “success” and violence/nonviolence.

I’m not a pro-violence guy, i defend liberation struggles, buv work to create educational/political/cultural revolution. Also the 3.5% mobilized population would be rad AF in USAmerica.

I haven’t read the whole book the study is based on, though I was working on it for a while. But IMO it misrepresents historical fact to make a nice-sounding abstraction, and I’m not sure how people will react to its failure, which would be based on a faulty premise.

We need to be more focused on what we will do with the power that will come from mobilizing like 12 million Americans rather than hoping some members of the political class notice and decide to fix things. The actual problem is that power is kept out of the hands of workers. The thought of building that power and giving it away would be a catastrophic blow to our movements.

The political system is empowered to fix problems, but not equipped. As far as I can tell, the only people who have ever created or fixed a goddamn thing in all of history have been workers.