Hi there,
I'm sure you've seen me around, as I've been here for quite while. I enjoyed and saw how this site grew, etc, but what I enjoyed was the genuine topics and conversation of discussions about this site. Perhaps it is the reintegration of life and routine, away from Covid, but I've noticed a decline in quality that makes me reminiscent and nostalgic for the past and even for members like LiberalSocialist.
You used to have something to say, regularly.
Chapochat/Hexbear wasn't just recycled memes and images from r/thedeprogram or r/trueanon.
There are still interesting things and conversations that are posted but they've been drowned out by pages of mediocre images that substitute picture and image for discussion and introspection; as another poster once typed, paraphrasing, we're all just trying to create site taglines and phrases and substituting quips for insight and catharsis.
Fair enough that catharsis, solidarity, and revelation can only be achieved through living your life and not through quiet meditation and discussion on reddit or psuedo-reddits. But there was at least more frequency of effort posts, venting, and exegesis of history, current and social events, and understanding of the world or at least an effort to do so.
To my observation, such that I lurk here, Such effort is only spared on video games. On media. On the dunk_tank. On getting upset about wrong opinion.
Despite the federation, this site seems to have only become isolated and divorced of what made it unique: effortposting.
Maybe it's not just Hexbear. Maybe that is why UlyssesT left; the catharsis is exhausted and online space is dominated by a a tendency for performative and justified outrage and yearning for solidarity and emotional validation. But rather than copium, as anyone afflicted with a disease would prefer, some small part of me wanted prognoses rather than diagnoses.
I don't know. I reflect on things like /moretankiechapo or /genzedong and see how things have declined in qualityposts. Perhaps it is for the better, as UlyssesT had discovered, to have the impetus to go outside and not only live life but to evangalize socialism and recapture purpose and community.
I'll see you tomorrow.
It does make me sad how the only time there's a great number of comments about art or philosophy is in the monthly struggle session about whether all Western culture is just a tool of the CIA. I'm still holding out hope that we could get some genuine discussions going, especially because all other Internet venues for discussing literature are extremely fucked in terms of politics, but it doesn't seem likely.
That's how hobby discussion usually works on boards that already have a niche, people find overlaps between their interests??
That's only the tip of the iceberg. Philosophy going back to 1848 is contaminated with Hitler particles.
All you Adorno Guattari Deleuze Morton Bennett Latour Debord Baudrillard Zizek Lacan mfs are seething with them
https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/
This comes off as needlessly insulting. Declaring a bunch of philosophers as Hitlerites (Adorno had to flee from the Nazis, you know, and psychoanalysis didn't have such a good standing with them either) without elaborating and then saying someone is seething with Hitler particles (whatever that means) because they expressed a genuine interest in discussing philosophy is some weak ass shit.
Although that was a joke, it alludes to something I've experienced and surely many of you have as well.
These writers, these irrationalist philosophers, Mark Fisher, and a few other Verso books authors like The People's Republic of Walmart make up the canon of online western leftist theory.
You will legitimately be browbeaten with them by people who declare that your thoughts and actions or beliefs are guided by "the spectacle" and "capitalist realism" as they vaguely remember them from these books.
This is very irritating when you've been banned from reddit and are just trying to figure out what a dang communist is. You run into a wall of Twitch fans! They're downright awful!
I know people who are younger than me, stuck doing doordash, in debt, they come to me after talking to folks on social media and I have to explain to them that a 19 year old just tried to get them into Heidegger because they said Maduro is okay.
No, I don't think people who have a "genuine interest in philosophy" are bad. But I do think that children who use books they hardly remember that other people told them were important as a substitute for real history reading, nay, as CUDGELS against those who do, are setting themselves up for failure.
EDIT: I think when I finish my RetroSpective™️ you will all like it a lot. When you go back and compare people to Caleb Maupin, who used Occupy Wall St. to try to push his Heideggerian idealist online cult where he reposts pre-1940s communist theory just in case Marxists dot org goes down, it's clear these groups aren't as different from each other as they'd like you to think. Naomi Klein and Leigh Phillips bad takes should surprise nobody.
Like, sorry that we don't want to read about how CAPITALISM HAS BEGUILED THE MASSES. UNLIMITED CRITICISM ON WESTERN POP CULTURE 100 times in a row and wanted to read about how capitaism actually formed and what it is. You know, instead of just navel gazing about the late 20th century? Lol??? @G_Bookner@hexbear.net
Yes I literally resent having to wade through people who recommended Chapo and Adam Curtis. Not extremely it's just like man, "why did that property leave their sprinklers blsting all over the sidewalk." resentment. I think you're caterwauling ne'er-do-wells first and book understanders maybe third or fourth. Second is shitposting so thank heavens you are good at that
Idk why but everyone has been relitigating Occupy and 2016 and also 2020 recently so it's been on my mind.
Have you tried reading the article appended to the post? I hope this helps.
Yes. I don't really know where to start criticizing it and I'm also not really interested in doing so. But for one, having read some works of most of the philosophers the author names, I don't see the big difference between the historical view he solely assigns to Lukács and that of other philosophers like Adorno or Derrida, who repeatedly argued for recognizing the continuity of fascism in human societies. Also, the connection between the so called post-structuralists tradition and Nietzsche or Heidegger is a critical one. When Derrida draws on Heidegger or Nietzsche, this is to be understood as an engagement with the negative at work in the tradition of Western philosophy. What seems kind of strange here is that the author dismisses any dialectic at work in the philosophy he's out to criticize, especially when he is drawing so heavily on Lukács and Hegel.
Well feel free to come back with better criticism
Didn't adorno or some of his cohort basically leave one of their coworkers to die at the border of Spain and occupied France because he was friends with Berthold brecht after they themselves fled from germany and had the funds secured to help more flee or something along those lines?
This is not accurate. It is possible to say that Adorno and Horkheimer could have done more to get Benjamin into the US (Horkheimer did get Benjamin a visa at some point), but they didn't leave him to die because he was friends witch Brecht (?). I also don't really know how easy it was to get someone out of Europe during that time. Also Benjamin stayed far too long in France due to his depression and his suicide in Spain was a result of a very unfortunate miscommunication.
Oh his name was Benjamin
I aspire to be called a Cultural Commissar by some ultra dweeb like Lukács
You may want to read that again no offense
I stand by my statement. Being called a stalinist or some variant of Bolshevik, or something as silly as "cultural commissar" as an insult by western "leftists" is something I wear with pride.
Also rereading that entire article still made my eyes glaze over in the exact way trying to read 19th century to modern philosophy does.
It hits different for me since I will scrutinize almost any internet cult & I see people assembling this stuff into reading lists alongside basic marxists texts with zero african or latin american writers. They play their word games and come out swinging against the periphery because they focus on media criticism.
They'll confidently post some British Hong Kong-based paper writing about how China paid the clouds not to rain on the Mekong river & we need to defend colonial era Filipino / Guyanese claims pushed by the US from Chinese/Venezuelan imperialism
I used to love doing Citations Needed type stuff but you really see the shortcomings of this practice after a few major events happen and people are left stranded, biting into Ukrainian nationalist and Zionist narratives
Like people are still comparing the start of Putler's illegal invazzion/the SMO to Palestine rn. Abby Martin and Mark Ames were doing this bizarre "im so sorry i didn't believe you glowies, but people should be talking about Palestine instead" trick and all it seems to have done is cemented the connection in people's minds.
Are you talking about including the writers of the Oscar Meyer wieners school, the irrationalist philosophers, or the ethno-nationalist philosophers mentioned in your article?
I feel this one. I've just gotten exhausted over major events happening every other week.
Here's an example reading list:
The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) by Walter Benjamin
The Culture Industry from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer
Discipline and Punish (1975) by Michel Foucault
Simulacra and Simulation (1981) by Jean Baudrillard
Manufacturing Consent (1988) by Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) by Slavoj Zizek
Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990) by Gilles Deleuze
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) by Fredric Jameson
Spectres of Marx (1993) by Jacques Derrida
Capitalist Realism (2009) by Mark Fisher
Just reading those titles made my eyes glaze over
@Juice@hexbear.net That's right, I already located the postmodernist cloning facility! TREMBLE, LEFTOIDS!
rent free
I hereby lift my disengagement debuff from you, have at me! I read your post an RSS, I could have listed 20 more different philosophers I fucking hate I listed them not by order of relevance, but my order in which they occurred to me based on other people telling me to read them for no fucking reason
Read Barthes
Thanks I forgot to mention Foucault in my fuckin screed
I just read Foucault to get with ethereal bisexuals
I would say that it's generally true, which is why you should seek out art and philosophy that doesn't come from the Western tradition. The West has been ideologically cooked for a long time. This shouldn't be unexpected since capitalism and liberalism was birthed in the West and thus, had much more time to completely seep into the social and cultural life of the West. This is really obvious in the Global South where there's an almost one-to-one correlation between how liberal someone is and how Westernphilic someone is.