https://twitter.com/CatholicClod/status/1451917060079034377?s=20

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]
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    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Motherfuckers out here really just be GUESSING at what Marx wrote, not a lick of academic rigor or integrity

    Liberals are literally too superstitious to read Marx lol

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
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      3 years ago

      I've had two people tell me they can't read Marx because they're afraid only a few sentences would leave them brainwashed. One countered my request to read Marx with "Well you wouldn't read Hitler, would you? What if you become a Nazi?" I mentioned it's possible to read something critically without suddenly subscribing to its contents and never got a response.

      • VILenin [he/him]M
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        3 years ago

        If reading Hitler makes you a Nazi, you were already a Nazi.

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
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          edit-2
          3 years ago

          I've had a few family members who previously identified as politically unaffiliated start identifying themselves as fascists after I explained to them what fascism entails

          • FloridaBoi [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            The words allowed them to describe their existing beliefs

            • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Yeah, they've tried a few times to blame me for making them into fascists, but I've realized how nonsense that is.

                • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  They think I'm a liberal and that they can egg me into apologizing for my political stances or making a compromise with their more bigoted beliefs. They just want to feel like they've owned me and I guess liberals they interact with are more easily pushed into a corner.

      • MarxGuns [comrade/them]
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        3 years ago

        This was my stance before reading the manifesto, thinking that I can't be converted to something just by reading a 'scary book'. I soon realized that it wasn't about totalitarianism and genocide.

      • Alex_Jones [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I don't know why, but my mind immediately went to the ending of Starship Troopers with Neil Patrick Harris

    • UncleJoe [comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Libs and especially conservatives have this irrational fear of Marx, as if his books are the Necronomicon and merely glancing at a page leads to you getting mindfucked and possessed by otherworldly forces. Motherfucker it's just a book, you can read things you don't agree with lmao

        • UncleJoe [comrade/them]
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          3 years ago

          Yeah, it's weird. Outside of his outright political writings, Marx's work is just him studying history, philosophy and economics trying to figure out the laws of human history. Communism was just the natural discovery he arrived at during that process. You could legit slip Adam Smith's name on a volume of Capital and libs wouldn't be able to tell the difference lmao

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          But Capital doesn’t advocate for anything, it’s just a study and explanation of how capitalism works.

          It is a view of capitalism antithetical to the Milton Friedman tier content Americans are raised on.

          In that sense, it advocates for an understanding of the function of the economy contrary to what we've been lead to believe.

      • Glass [he/him,they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Gonna put on dark ritual music and use the vibe to trick myself into reading theory

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
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        3 years ago

        Motherfucker it’s just a book, you can read things you don’t agree with lmao

        I mean, I tossed The Road to Serfdom after the first two chapters because it was just so backwards and demonstrably incorrect.

        At a certain point, your priors will get in the way of appreciating content. Some of these works are bad enough to make my skin crawl.

        I imagine that's what it is like for a Neoliberal or Conservative to read Marx.

        • UncleJoe [comrade/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Fair enough, I can see how they'd be opposed to reading Marx. I completely forgot what it's like to put down a shit book after years of pushing through complete garbage like Julius Evola lmfao

    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      It really is some Satanic Panic shit. They think if they crack open the book, demons and banshees will fly out of it like some cursed ancient spellbook.

    • mayo_cider [he/him]
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      edit-2
      3 years ago

      No, didn't you read the interview? It's not superstition, it's just too hard. Are you really expecting economists to actually study economic theory? It's not like uneducated farmers in the early 1900's could study and understand it, it's really high level stuff with big words like "bourgeoisie" and "linen".

  • OldSoulHippie [he/him]
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    3 years ago

    You know those people that just can't admit they haven't seen the movie you're asking about and they have to reply with "ehh bits and pieces"?

    This motherfucker based his entire career off that attitude.

      • OldSoulHippie [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        That one should be easy. "Hey, remember that wink at the audience joke?"

          • Alex_Jones [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            I'm pretty sure fans will fill in the blanks for you. Speaking as a former fan. (Though the Winter Soldier movie is still my guilty pleasure gay drama)

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      With the amount of alcohol I consumed in my youth and the amount of movies I watched during that time, "bits and pieces" is pretty accurate for a lot of movies.

      • OldSoulHippie [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Fair, but my rebuttal to that response is that the person asks you if you've seen a movie with the intent to follow up with a detail of that movie. Basically when someone asks, they assume you have a pretty thorough understanding of the movie, so they can bring up a detail. Instead of being cryptic about it, I've started saying "I think I've seen it, but it was so long ago, I don't remember too much."

    • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      just can’t admit they haven’t seen the movie you’re asking about

      :side-eye-1:

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      You're confusing Pikety with Peterson.

      Pikety tapped the works of Marx and Engels to build up a big chunk of the historical record on wealth aggregation over time. Marx's thesis was predicated on a vast trove of probate records that he'd aggregated and analyzed.

      Pikety's critique of Marx amounts to "you claimed we'd get a revolution but the western states proved more resilient than you anticipated". And in that sense, Pikety has Marx dead to rights.

      Cit21st then asks why the colonial powers never experienced the revolutions that Russia, China, the Global South repeatedly endured. Although that is incidental to the primary conclusion wrt the trend of wealth inequality as driven by the gap between domestic growth and asset appreciation.

  • KiaKaha [he/him]M
    ·
    3 years ago

    Christ.

    Just go for David Harvey instead. By far the superior analyst.

    • Multihedra [he/him]
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      3 years ago

      My man is projecting his knowledge of Marx onto marx’s knowledge of economics, pretty cool when you think about it :galaxy-brain:

    • Tiocfaidhcaisarla [he/him, comrade/them]
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      3 years ago

      Back when I was a :LIB: I had the irrational fear that reading Marx would turn me into some kind of... idk what. I also, for some reason, didn't think he used data, just waxed poetic like so many other philosophers- "... the point, however, is to change it" didn't truly resonate because I guess I assumed to change things is to think really hard, get good ideas, and :vote:

      Well, I found Capital at a bookstore and was daring enough to open it up, see what was in there and... it's like, all data? Spools of linen, economies over time and geography? It's an actual study, not some fancily written treatise? It was somehow more boring than I ever imagined. But it had actual data, and I was surprised, but changed a bit... I was realizing maybe Marx was talking about actual things with actual real world backing.

      TL;DR I'm a better researcher than Piketty

  • RNAi [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Oh gods I remember a local socdem politician announcing he read that dipshit.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      He disappeared off the map for nearly a decade because someone at the WSJ said "I've successfully debunked 600 years of accumulated research with this one neat trick".

      Weird how he's becoming relevant again, all of a sudden.

  • Alex_Jones [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I don't know who's holding these votes for "The left's ____," but we have to stop them.

  • SolidaritySplodarity [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    This is the common combination of arrogance and ignorance among liberals - the ideologically committed ones. Picketty admits to not reading Capital and then immediately tries to claim what it doesn't talk about... despite having read it (spoiler for any who don't know: Marx discusses the history of capital lol). He does this in order to deal with a challenge to his ego, his ideology, his book, etc etc. It's a reactionary position, at its core.

    This happens constantly when arguing with liberals irl. Very strong opinions about a topic they've never investigated and refuse to do so. Taking contradiction very personally as a result, because they've gone above and beyond the usual attachment of self to one's opinions by shackling themselves with ignorant dismissal: they can never learn and correct themselves in real time as a result.

    Only bullying works on these people btw.

  • 01100011101001111100 [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    These blowhards want so badly to be the Marx style guy who creates a whole new field of science (that incidentally supports the capitalist structure) but you can't be. You got socialized in capitalism, it had to be Marx and it had to be in the mid 19th century because then Marx was able to see clearly where shit was going without having capitalist realism propoganda pumped into his head for 40 years.

    Its gonna be like the guy that invented Social Credit, an engineer that looked at society and correctly observed that workers where not making wages equivalent to their value created and so society was in an inevitable contradictory crisis - but had some weird right wing solutions and give a UBI and otherwise dont change the economic system.

  • activated [he/him]
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    3 years ago

    Reminds me of the "Based Deleuze" guy who wrote a whole monograph about how Deleuze was actually a based and redpilled right winger, but then when people asked him if he'd read any of Deleuze's primary books, he said no lmao

    • nohaybanda [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      :gigachad-hd: who reads theory anyway. It all came to me in a dream

    • LoudMuffin [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Does anyone actually read? I'm basically illiterate but even having read all the basics it's honestly incredible to see how little anyone knows about...anything

      even reading Locke will make you realize most Americans are complete political morons

      • bigboopballs [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        even reading Locke will make you realize most Americans are complete political morons

        why? (not that I don't already know that)

        • LoudMuffin [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          because you'll actually understand what liberalism is and like 90% of public discourse just becomes fucking insane given people think biden is "full communism"

  • cybernetsoc [he/him]
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    3 years ago

    Haha, what the hell? He is trying so hard to crib Marxism aesthetics while being a full lib. His "Capital" is really long, just so much more dense and boring, and he even padded everything out with a bunch of superfluous graphs. He even put out a book on "Capitalism and Ideology" that is trying to gesture at materialism while ending up with a bunch of lib takes.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
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      edit-2
      3 years ago

      The central thesis of the book - that the ratio of domestic growth relative to asset appreciation determines long term wealth inequality - is sound. And a government that treats G > R as an imperative akin to our Fed's dual mandate on inflation and unemployment would create the kind of prosperity liberals always say they want.

      But this shit is always about personalities in the media. You'll never know what Pikety thinks about western economic policy. Just that he considers a 170 year old thesis crafted at the dawn of the industrial age a bit behind the times.

  • solaranus
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    deleted by creator