Someone messed up somewhere and created an alternate timeline/reality/earth or something because ....surely, we can't be this dumb?

submitted by WanderingElephant from (self.whatever)

2022, UK - The News this Week: Universities across the country are banning speakers with controversial or unpopular ideas. Meanwhile, the head honcho of the Church of England calls on the country to stop with the whole cancel culture thing. So.....science is now burning heretics .......and religious leaders are REASONING, against the grain of current social power, that we should actually be more supportive of them ? WHAT THE ACTUAL F ! Is history really just a continous series of inevitable 180s? And why does no-one else think this particular reverse ferret is just ....weirdly obvious? Also on a sidenote: not a Marxist here, but wasn't this 180 process first postulated by him? Further education on all aspects of this phenomenon, and, ideas on future proofing to end this utter madness welcome.

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[–]iamonlyoneman 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Send all the best and brightest men to die in wars, for a century or two. Let the children be reared by women. Let the women vote.

What do you get?

[–]WoodyWoodPeckerHah he he he hah! 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

https://youtu.be/73UMWoXRbjg

[–]Alienhunter 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (14 children)

Read Marx and not a commentary on it. Primary sources are important especially one subjected to so much propaganda as that.

Some of Marx insights are scarily accurate to modern society. Others are utopian nonsense. But just because he's naive to the same corrupting influences within his own movement doesn't mean his criticisms of his contemporary society are wrong.

Marx very much is concerned with how the move from agrarian and tribal and feudal social structures into a new capitalist structure is affecting human society. And that the bourgeoisie are essentially creating a new nobility supplant the old agrarian based nobility.

As such it shouldn't be totally surprising that the corrupt and power hungry who would in the past seek out positions of moral authority via the church, would seek out those same positions via the university which has largely supplanted the church as the source of mainstream "moral" authority.

[–]Canbot 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (13 children)

Obviously not every single thing he says is wrong. But that is not the claim made by his detractors.

The funny thing about criticism is that it is essentially unfalsifiable. You can take any aspect of anything and frame it in a way that makes it bad. So all bullshit proposotions start with some criticism that sounds reasonable, is unfalsifiable and that creates the illusion that the proposed solution to the "problem" is reasonable.

The criticism of Marx is that all his proposed solutions are bullshit. And the proof is the absolute failure of every attempt to implement it. With a very strong correlation of harm to how much and how long his ideas are practiced.

[–]Alienhunter 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (11 children)

Depends, a hard line communist will argue that no attempt to implement Marx's ideas has been attempted without the ideas being co-opted by others to turn away from the "one true path of communism". Of course anyone with half a brain will notice the "betrayal of the revolution" tends to happen with every communist movement and will definitely be apprehensive about anything resembling it, as well they should be, but it's awfully hard to be anti-communist when one doesn't actually understand what it is. Which is why rather than simply letting the cold war propoganda take hold westerners should go to the primary source and actually read the economic theories that dominated the 20th century rather than simply believe what is told to them by the government or by the government schools. Hence why you often get Americans conflating the ideas of authoritarianism with communism and petty arguments will form around that.

A lot of these terms become relatively useless in the political discourse due to the rampant misuse and propoganda. Capitalism, communism, socialism, right wing, left wing, conservative, liberal etc getting tossed around willy nilly as empty insults without anyone bothering to think about what they are actually saying, until the point any productive discussion becomes impossible.

Which is why we get the somewhat humorous disagreements where people can't decide if Hitler was right wing or left wing, or a socialist or not, because the people arguing don't even know what any of these words mean. They just use them in place of "good" or "bad" except each person decides for themselves which it is.

Marx correctly understood the nature of the changing power dynamic in his time. And he correctly understood that ultimately economic pressures decide who wields power and who does not, and that a lot of the time the ruling class is engaged in attempting to convince the lower class that economic pressures actually don't matter so much as some immaterial thing so they can retain their power.

What Marx fails to understand is the nature of power itself as a corrupting influence. And that any such dictatorship of the proletariat is an oxymoron in and of itself as the proletariat turned dictator is simply the new ruling elite.

Though he is perfectly correct in saying that the people involved in economic production would hold far more political power to improve their lot should they realize that putting aside petty racial and religious differences and working together is in their best interest. Naturally the ruling class doesn't want this to happen so they purposely try to foment discontent between disparate groups. Hence why you see the current focus on race, sexuality, religious differences, hate bigotry etc in the media, to keep people from voting in mass along their economic interests and ousting the current ruling class which benefits from their atomization.

Another issue that Marx fails to understand is that the proletariat is really stupid as a whole. Not because of the ruling class, though they certainly work to keep this situation in tact, but simply natural differences in intelligence between people will result in the kind of hierarchical structures that basically all human and many animal societies are based on. They can't simply be removed. A smart people who understands how to wield power will simply take the power from a weak person who does not. It's Darwanism in a sense, the strong will dominate the weak. There's abuses of that in human society and we benefit from creating an environment that isn't outright hostile towards weakness but instead fosters a spirit of growth from weakness into strength. But we cannot fully deny the cruel realities of the universe. Life is suffering. Suffering is necessary for growth. Those who don't grow, wither and die. We cannot remove suffering from this world, any more than we can decide to ignore gravity and fly into the heavens. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't work towards making our current society just a bit better than it was before. We don't look at the sky see a bird and ignore the possibility of flight. We build a machine through toil and hardship that allows us to achieve something we could not achieve before. We don't hate the bird for being different. One other key failing of Marxism is here, the stupid proletariat will inevitably look upon the upper ruling classes with disdain, the smart proletariat sees them and copies their habits. Just like the Wright Brothers copied the bird when they wanted to fly. And so inevitably, the revolution will fail, as the idiot masses who don't appreciate the harsh realities of life and prefer destruction to creation go at the ruling class, the smart minority moves into the power vacuum and adopts the tools of the ruling elite to serve their purposes. The Grand Plaza of the Tzar becomes the "people's grand plaza". Yet it still serves the same purpose as before, to show off the power of the state.

[–]Canbot 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

lot of the time the ruling class is engaged in attempting to convince the lower class that economic pressures actually don't matter so much as some immaterial thing so they can retain their power.

I find that it is the modern ruling class which is pushing marxism because it will afford them far more power than capitalism. Every new government program concentrates more power in thier hands. Every welfare recipient is another economic slave beholden to them for survuval.

The real distraction is not entertainment but social and political division. Intersectionality. Wedge issues. Race issues. These all go hand in hand with the political messaging of socialists. It is classic divide and conquer.

[–]Alienhunter 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

So again I think this comes into the same problem of we don't really have clear common definitions of what we mean when we say Marxism or Capitalism. I'd argue that the ruling class is socialist in name only, also capitalist in name only. In reality they are just the ruling class. They take whatever labels suit their interests for the time being. And leave the rest of us to argue amongst ourselves.

I would personally describe our current system as a kind of oligarichal capitalism. Not free market capitalism, again as an ideal I don't think it's an achievable utopian goal but it's a fair point to make that free markets and profit are in no way bad for society in and of themselves. The issue that we have is power is increasingly centralized not simply into the government but a number of extremely powerful corporate entities. It's a form of capitalism, many call it crony capitalism but that betrays a moralistic utopian viewpoint of some kind of pure capitalism the same way communists never admit that communist regimes were real communists.

If course putting semantic arguments aside, we agree in the conclusion. Our semantic arguments of capitalism vs communism and what not are simply another wedge issue tossed into the mix to obfuscate the political situation and stifle effective dissent.

[–]Canbot 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

If course putting semantic arguments aside, we agree in the conclusion. Our semantic arguments of capitalism vs communism and what not are simply another wedge issue tossed into the mix to obfuscate the political situation and stifle effective dissent.

I agree that capitalism is corruptible, but I think it is less corruptible than any other system. And any attempt to fix percieved problems needs to foremost preserve the ability for people to control their own destiny by engaging in buisness independent of government. Regardless of how many people are incapable of improving their situation through those means.

[–]Alienhunter 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I think, and considering your other comment concerning collective bargaining, the issue has more to do with a centralized consolidation of power leading to increasing corruption more than any specific economic system.

The basic ideals of either philosophy make some sense and so resonate with the common man, but take any to the extreme conclusion and it requires centralized control and power to carry out which will inevitably result in corruption.

One idea is who owns the means of production. If that is the government or a few large corporations it is not really in the hands of the people. Yet it is safe to say a farmer who owns his own property and land and farming equipment does control his own means of production. And doesn't need collelctive ownership to do so.

So we need to have both a strong idea of what things should be managed collectively by society. And at what level. And what things should be managed by the individual as they see fit. Large intranational projects such as a highway system require some kind of collective system to build be that a corporate entity or a government agency. Whereas there's no necessity for the government to dictate the operation of of individual farms as market pressures will better govern how distribution is done than overarching central control. I do believe the government has a responsibility to prevent the formation of cartels however to ensure that centralized control doesn't emerge through other avenues besides the government.

I also think the government needs to allow itself to be open to competition as well. If the government builds a highway and it sucks, and some Private individual or corporation thinks they can do better, they should be allowed to build and operate their own infrastructure as well, as after all that can only benefit society more through the proliferation of multiple options. The issue that comes into play again is of course that self same issue of corruption.

One can own their own land in the United States yet must lease land from the government in China. However for the average schmuck, living in China is easier due to the cheaper prevalence of housing. Naturally there are big problems with both systems. But if the US doesn't take action to protect the free market from players like large corporate entities buying up and monopolizing housing and farmland to collude amongst themselves for more profit, they are essentially creating a similar system to China. Albeit one where the authoritarian entity that you must submit to the whims of is some corporate conglomeration rather than the government.

Choice is certainly better but all capitalist systems will degrade into monopolies or perpetual monopoly like oligarchies if the government doesn't fulfil it's roll. And the government will increasingly become beholden to corporate interests as the real source of power again boils down to economic sources, namely money, rather than idealistic ideas of democracy or human rights.

[–]Canbot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

the issue has more to do with a centralized consolidation of power leading to increasing corruption more than any specific economic system.

Yes, this is entirely the problem. And capitalism gives everyone the right to economic freedom, thus dissipating one of the greatest sources of power amung the people.

The only solution us to give people as much freedom as possible, while limiting the ability of those who have power from exploiting others.

[–]Canbot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

In reality they are just the ruling class. They take whatever labels suit their interests for the time being. And leave the rest of us to argue amongst ourselves.

I agree.

The problem is that we need labels in order to talk about things, and labels will always be inaccurate in some way. There is no way I see around using labels. We simply have to do our best with the language we have.

There is a huge problem with bad faith actors using "definition attacks" to try to discredit legitimate arguments. We need to learn to identify those who's arguments are based on the definition of words and labels as bad actors.

Anyone capable of having a political discussion is capable of understanding the intended meaning of words, and is capable of having a discussion using whatever definition is relevant.

Control of language is propaganda, and naturally the ruling class will use propaganda. However, that does not mean that all arguments that use labels are wrong simply because labels are imprecise.

[–]Alienhunter 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think as long as we can talk calmly and come to agree on what our labels mean in context we can have a productive discussion. The problem is that many people simply cannot do this and it makes political discussion difficult.

[–]Canbot 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

hard line communist will argue that no attempt to implement Marx's ideas has been attempted

Naturally when there is so much incontrovertible evidence against your ideology you have to make such denials. But there is no substance to them. Literally every economic system can be written down on paper as a utopia, and after being proven a catastopy in practice be claimed that the problem was simply that no one followed the utopian script. It is an absolutely absurd argument.

[–]Alienhunter 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Correct the issue is with utopian thinking in the first place. Existence is a constant struggle on a knifes edge between survival and death in a universe that is constantly changing. A utopia is a perfect form of government that is an idealism and therefore is unequipped to handle the changing circumstances of a chaotic universe and any attempt to create one is doomed to fail. It is like a child trying to build a ladder to the moon. One can see it, one can imagine it, but if one tries to build it it will always be just out of reach and the ladder will become increasingly unstable and dangerous. Because the idea itself is simple yet ludicrous and incompatible with reality.

[–]Canbot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Though he is perfectly correct in saying that the people involved in economic production would hold far more political power to improve their lot should they realize that putting aside petty racial and religious differences and working together is in their best interest.

This idea is only holds true to the point of collective bargaining. But no marxist stops there. They all make the incorrect claim that all people are equally capable, dilligent, motivated, and honest. That we are all just victims of circumstances and given the same starting conditions we would all have the same outcome. It is an absurd belief that leads to disasterous policies.

Furthermore, collective control never works. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" is the best way I can describe it, though it falls short of leaving the proper impression about the inescapable nature of that effect. Even the most intelligent and well intentioned people will have competing ideas that will be in conflict and that conflict will inevitably destroy their efforts.

[–]Alienhunter 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Most communists become woefully naive about human nature but this is true of virtually any zealot.

I remember having some argument with someone who decried the idea of human nature and thirst for power as a consequence of capitalism and that such things would disappear in a communist utopia. A laughable ideal. I stole his wallet and "won" the argument. (I gave it back).

Thing is, I don't want to steal your stuff or act like a bad player. But I can. There's nobody to stop me unless I do it in front of a cop. Most people follow the social norms, but some are sociopaths. Some people will do something simply because they can get away with it and no other reason. And those people if they can get ahold of power will use it to enrich themselves at the expense of others regardless of consequences.

And in the chaos following a revolution, sociopaths are well positioned to prosper.

[–]Dragonerne 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

In 2012, we went from the era of Pisces to the era of Aquarius.

All deceptions will now be revealed. This is what you are experiencing. The veil is lifting from your eyes. You should be thankful because this is how it always was but now you see, what previously you did not.

[–]Rah 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Humanity is just finding out that putting men on the center of the universe maybe is not a great idea.

[–]antares 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Whoever has power becomes an insufferable authoritarian.

[–]Site_rly_sux 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Harold Shipman would be an incredible university lecturer on geriatric palliative care but the universities won't allow him to speak. Literally the #1 most experienced doctor in the country in his field and yet BANNED from lecturing at universities across the UK.

Whatever happened to rational scientific pursuits? Did someone break the timeline and that's why Harold Shipman can't give lectures on geriatric palliative? Just because he's unpopular and controversial!! The heretic must be burnt.

And what about Jimmy Saville. Literally the most experienced and well connected public fundraiser in UK history. If you had a vision for a new orphanage or hospital morgue then he was best placed to help raise money for it. And yet no universities wanted him to lecure. Just for having unpopular and controversial views! Blindly cancelling our culture is just like burning heretics!

[–]Canbot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Leave it to sox to play the reverse psychology card.

It is such a bad argument to say that "bad people like Saville exist and that justifies censorship". Probably why you constructed the argument the way that you did.

[–]Site_rly_sux 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

So why should Shipman not be able to give lectures on geriatric palliative medicine, then. You explain it please.

  1. He's highly professionally qualified and medical council -recognised as a doctor

  2. He delivered end-of-life care to 250+ elderly people

  3. Universities should follow rational scientific pursuits and not just cancel people for being unpopular

Okay sure he's the UK's most prolific serial killer but that just means he'd be a controversial lecturer.

Likewise, dipshit OP has a feeling that people with similarly controversial pasts are being turned away from student unions up and down that nation.

I would like for him to reflect on - why is it bad for "unpopular and controversial" speakers to be unwelcome in the SU while it's okay for Shipman and Saville to be unwelcome?

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Well, all you've really done is change your cult leaders from men in white robes to men in white coats and you had a few toys invented to make you think that you are more enlightened than ancient men.

Meanwhile real science is built on being skeptical of authoritative claims, which is why you collect and analyze data to verify hypotheses

[–]WoodyWoodPeckerHah he he he hah! 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It won't be long until cancel culture cancels the Christian churches. SJW is a religion that is secular and worships nature. So of course they will attack other faiths.