john eden

male pale and stale
It's like an old Dissensus thread that starts off on a topic I'm interested in, but by page 18 someone has mentioned Spinoza and by page 26 there are just three people left talking about fascism.

Clearly Josef is still upset by people taking his tatty cardboard sign from outside LD50 but he should know that most of the anti-fascists who were there that I saw were from Hackney rather than Goldsmiths. ("LOL! Students!", say the students)

It's good that Nina is doing a book about men, but weird that she slates liberal feminism for being increasingly about the victimisation of women before jumping right into the victimhood of men - their high suicide rate and that they get sent to war.

Philosophy types should avoid talking about magick in arid theoretical terms, as indeed should everyone. That said, the stereotype of feminists who are into magick as doing this at a purely "low magick" level of Buffy or Harry Potter is quite blatantly missing out the more sophisticated exponents. Also to critique this as "low magick" but not take the host to task for his "fake it until you make it" approach to simulating cleverness is pretty weird, as "fake it til you make it" is exactly the approach of chaos magickians who were seen as the antithesis of high magick in my day.

The discussion of Catholicism was so general as to be useless really. Contrasting the different approaches, strands etc from South America, West Africa and Northern Ireland in relation to paganism would have been better.

There is some absolute guff at the end about "plausible deniability" which ignores the entire history of post-war European fascist movements (with the exception of its most overt Nazi forms such as the British Movement or National Action). The idea that we should take everyone at face value is pretty stupid and you would think not the sort of thing self-styled philosophers would advocate for as this would put them out of a job.
 

Leo

Well-known member
how does anyone have enough time or energy in their life to spend it reading nonsense like that on twitter, what an enormous fucking waste. who really gives a shit what a couple of up-their-own-ass eggheads think of one another?
 

Leo

Well-known member
sorry Luka, wasn't directing that at you, just expressing some disgust with at what twitter and social media in general have become.
 

luka

Well-known member
It probably is important for careers. Luckily we don't have careers, we're not fighting for position at the feeding trough so we can ignore it. I think Eden was talking about this in relation to Bastani, Sakar etc
 

Leo

Well-known member
The majority of people aren't even on Twitter anyway. I remember the penny dropping after the Tories won again in '15, a bunch of people were surprised because everyone on Twitter and various other platforms seemed to hate them then some of them gradually realised that there were millions of people they hadn't been exposed to who didn't care about or use those platforms.

this was also part of the problem with the Clinton campaign. liberals (and media) obsessed with social media just assumed she'd win because they all talked to themselves about how terrible Trump was, the self-perpetuating myth snowballed...until election day, when it became clear that they were entirely out of touch with large segments of the population who hated Hilary and wanted change.

of course there are positives about social media, twitter included. but it's balancing act, and to me the time-wasting bullshit outweighs the benefits.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
Twitter - regarding politics at least - is great insofar as it shows how a lot of folks really are/what they really think. They post crap that they'd never say in let's say a debate due to all that "media-coaching" and such. It has great revealing-potential.
 

vimothy

yurp
It's like an old Dissensus thread that starts off on a topic I'm interested in, but by page 18 someone has mentioned Spinoza and by page 26 there are just three people left talking about fascism.

ok but to pick one obvious example, discussion of the alignment between feminism and capitalism seems useful and to the point
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
OK, for those who don't know what's the story that everyone seems to know and refer to but which I have no idea about?
 

luka

Well-known member
Ld 50 mainly but more broadly winding up liberals so that when they get pissed off you can go, ha! Look, intolerant liberals
 
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