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They deliberately tried to get booked at white power events to make fun of them to their face.

That's fucking ballsy. I did not know that

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Okay buddy best of luck

I have literally said zero good things about him, he's not a good guy, his regime is corrupt. Of course he's not the most popular he's Alawite in a Sunni-majority country and the Alawites have gotten preferential treatment from his father and himself. This ignores the reality of the alternative and the environment which gave rise to such a situation. From everything I've heard since the winding down and the funneling of the jihadis into Afrin and Idlib, it seems to me that the popular sentiment is a begrudging embrace (even for those less violently sectarian people whom nonetheless possess very little love for the Assad government) of the potential for stability in a region which had been thrown into utter chaos and violence for near a decade.

Oh fuck off sorry we don't take issue with the military intervention for the prevention of mass killings, enslavement, and sexual assault on the non-Sunni populace by Salafist Jihadi militias. Whatever Assad isn't a swell guy, corrupt regime etc. Same for Putin. This understands nothing of the political and historical realities of either of these people nor their 'regimes'. I'll agree the YPG and PKK really showed some promise, communal progress and solidarity in the face of chaos, slaughter, a history of oppression, and so on. However you obviously possess zero understanding of the political and sectarian history of the area beyond the Kurds being oppressed. What about Turkey's role in all this, our NATO ally? Or the coming to fruition of a history of Wahabbism, emanating from the penninsula (also our allies), in the rise of Islamic State? None of this can be separated from the long opposition to Secular Left Nationalism/Socialism, and especially Communism, by Western powers nor from the reaction of the Islamic world to the Shia revolution in Iran nor Israeli reaction to the rise of Hezbollah - we especially cannot ignore the catalyst found in the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter of which saw the Sunni minority lose its position of power over Shia-majority Iraq with the fall of Saddam and the Ba'athists. The harsh reality was that beyond a certain point there were no moderate militias in Syria, radicalism has been brewing for a long time and this has absolutely been a historical material interest for the US and its allies. It's not like Rojava was going to prevent mass sectarian violence throughout non-Kurdish Syria, it was difficult enough maintaining their own territory - it's a fucked situation for the Kurds, it has been for a long time and will continue to be (If you wish for me to write an ode to the awfulness of Erdogan's government I can do that too). However this should be a matter much simpler and more immanent than the staging of some abstract duality of practical Leninist discipline in opposition to utopian Anarchist mutuality over the topic of Rojava - Russian intervention in Syria saved lives and the Assad government is preferable to Salafist rule, plain and simple. Those are the lessons I want to draw from the situation.

Personally, whatever take your moral purity, I could give a shit. I 'support' Putin and Assad insofar as I support taking tough and decisive action in order to protect life in the face of a brutal reality - this seems to me to be the only socially useful way of approaching the concept 'support' with regards to international politics and conflict, a way that may actually inform my approach to future conflict in this quagmire of a hellworld. Or I suppose you can go back being shocked at cold-blooded Nationalists doing shit that cold-blooded Nationalists have done throughout all of history, the libs sure seem to enjoy shaking their fists these boogeymen - seems like a good time.

:hexcrab-party: :hexcrab-party: :hexcrab-party: :hexcrab-party: :hexcrab-party: :hexcrab-party: :hexcrab-party: :hexcrab-party: based

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Fuck I had the off-brand candy bars too. I think I tried to do it for 1 year, then the other 3 my grandparents just paid for the box or whatever the minimum was.

Then there were also the car washes.

This is what I call a post-post-post

The funniest thing is that there's still an impulse to downvote shit, but the arrow flashes, and then nothing. The impotence of my disagreement with this anonymous online comment confronts me head on - the way I see it there's only 4 courses of action in this conjunctural event: 1) angry reply 2) hour long typing out of an effortpost before deleting it due to the obviously hysteric nature which had structured the whole pedantic, passive aggressive nature of the comment 3) post ppb and/or copypasta 4) if no ppb, there is only to reconcile oneself with one's impotence.

This is why I think the vestigial downvote thing is pretty rad

I just listened to the Larouche RWN! Holy fuck what a nut

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Thanks for the thoughtful response. I was worried about coming in too hot there. I'm very much in the transition between these two worlds at the moment and always feel a bit too passionate. Honestly I'm more interested in philosophy and political economy, where the methodology of psychoanalysis has tons of parallels. I just think people do tend to dismiss a lot of this stuff, especially Zizek, because of an obstinate refusal to leave an analytic frame in engaging with it

however for the replicability crisis (something I am also worried greatly about as well!) is largely due to the misapplication of statistics and methods, as well as the incentive structure favoring rejecting the null instead of just doing good science and reporting “boring” results.

I would definitely see the "why" behind this as ultimately a psychoanalytic question, that is, we can only view it as a symptom of some larger abstract movement which we could never observe empirically but which has real effects. Why is this now something every undergrad gets taught?

Emphasis on stats and methods is great and 100% necessary nowadays! You can tell me to fuck off if you don't want to share info on here, but what are your interests?

The repressed memories stuff is dumb guy, feel-better industry psychoanalysis for sure though, definitely agree there. I will say I still have tons of reading to do about psychoanalysis' history, I know there's been a plenty of problematic notions and naive idealism in the field (I can also think of rebirthing therapy off the top of my head, which is very cringe). Yet there's something very methodologically promising in the much more critical approaches I've come across and I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

you lost me with the chomsky part, my apologies. Would you mind going explaining it a different way? a bit I am rather curious.

Lemme try. I'm more than a bit stoned and that part was me fucking around and trying to practice the use of concepts which are still freshly learned and developing, but lemme give it a shot. What I was trying to do was relate Chomsky's Universal Grammar to Alfred Sohn-Rethel's notion of Real Abstraction.

Chomsky presents Universal Grammar as an a priori of human language, that is before this abstract capacity for divisibility, combination, organization etc. (grammar) exists, pure linguistic exchange is impossible. In order for language to be truly human (this is where we differentiate from animals in how we exchange concrete verbal enunciation) this abstract capacity must already be present. Thus, and this is where Chomsky opens room for God, this capacity must be the nature of man as such.

In a sense, there is certainly truth here, once this abstract capacity arises it has real and irreversible effects on the nature of how humans interact with the world. Our concrete enunciation (making noises) could indicate nothing more than a relational immanence without the abstract, formal underpinning of grammar. However there is no witnessing grammar empirically, it exists in so far as language appears organized as such (when someone talks to you, the division and organization of the sound you receive simply appears to you as a matter of fact). The immediate exchange via language must appear to us to be the eternal nature of such an exchange, otherwise language would break down. We don't need to understand the history of linguistic development to use language - this is the radicality of grammar. Yet Chomsky takes this radicality and flattens it into a dualism, grammar is the eternal nature of enunciation.

In a sense this very similar to how Proudhon treated money, if you want something to relate to Marx. Money appears as the eternal nature of commodity exchange. Labor time determines the quantity exchanged. Proudhon sees this and concludes that we must harmonize the duality between money and labor, to avoid forceful and unjust exploitation. Marx says, no you can't flatten it like that, these determinants can only have their interconnection because the abstract dominance of the money-commodity is a historical condition tied to the immediate, material reality of the form in which useful labor is alienated for purpose of exchange. We must treat money as a bearer of purely abstract value when we actually buy anything, whether or not we personally admit to this subservience to abstraction is irrelevant. Yet it is precisely this indifference of the money-commodity to individual thought which leads the historical development of it as a force of domination. Money allows for the manifold qualitative differences between subjects on either side of exchange to be negated via the implicit, mutual recognition of its abstract authority. Money is not some eternal fact who signifies the eternal nature of exchange, but a Real Abstraction determined in and by the necessities confronted by commodity-exchange in material immanence.

This is precisely the case with grammar as well: the manifold qualitative, material differences between enunciating subjects is negated due to a mutual, implicit recognition of some abstract authority in shared grammar. That actually is very radical once you start poking at it. Something I certainly wouldn't want to abandon to a naive Deleuzian "becoming animal" so as to desperately flee the tyranny of the grammatical structuring of enunciation. To me it points to the creative capacity of language, that the capacity to move beyond immanence in language requires that this immanence can be negated by grammar. Yet grammar is not some eternal essense, it is a formal force generated through the ensemble relations of active, enunciating subjects. As subjects, us engaging with universal grammar as some a priori or thing-in-itself gives us little recourse to developing our relation with how we use language, socially or instrumentally or however, because in this frame it is just the substance of this eternal thing which we are helplessly subservient to. Engaging with the concept this way masks that it is we, in our many varieties of interdependence, who are ourselves the agents of active, formal structuring of relation to the world. That this structuring is not the product of some eternal fact, but whose form and codification into law is determined in and by the necessities confronted by linguistic exchange in material immanence.

Jesus Christ this turned into an effortpost (effortcomment?), I hope it's somewhat intelligible. I'm reading Alfred-Sohn Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labor at the moment (which I guess isn't psychoanalytic per say, but I found him through Zizek) if you want to check that out. I find it fascinating thus far and, because I did not study philosophy in college, I feel like every time I work through the book a bit I understand Kant (and his relation to Marx, Hegel etc) better and better. I think Sohn-Rethel's notion of Real Abstraction points to exactly the kind of problematic which a methodology like psychoanalysis tries to grapple with and which more positivist streams like modern psychology are incapable of grappling with - not because of moral failings or anything, but because it's beyond the scope of their methodology. This is a domain which can't be abandoned to a sheer liberal nominalism. Thanks for suffering through my rambling.

Tbh bud, this just sounds like you're taking modern psychology's anti-psychoanalytic sentiment at face value. I remember my professors making similarly flippant remarks all the time. It's a sentiment certainly tied to American Positivism and Cognitive Psychologists' desperately hoping to differentiate themselves as 'properly scientific'. Thank god they did that. I guess that's why academic psychology has no problems with replicability nowadays huh?

Psychoanalysis and psychology should not be treated as a choice of one or the other. Psychology's unwillingness to engage with its theoretical counterpart should be an indictment of psychology (which is why I've abandoned it as an academic path). Modern Psychology, to my mind, has been largely a failure outside of marketing and algorithms. Of course there's a need to engage with empirical evidence and the scientific method, of course! But that doesn't mean a goddamn thing if there's no understanding of its ontological or epistemological implications for us as subjects, no understanding of how to realize new relations and habits as a result.

For instance, nobody has learned about Chomsky's Universal Grammar and done anything radically new with language as a result. It always remains an antinomy of Being, a fetishized structure of language as such, not in its active, immanent dynamism, but as an eternally stale opposition to enunciation. Universal Grammar is a synthetic a priori which has spurned much development in cognitive psychology, this is fantastic. However through it, the ontological and epistemological implications it carries, we can also see it as a symptom of the Kantian Dualism which both drives and stains all of modern psychology. Yet it is also an abstraction we must work through to grasp its real dynamism, to develop something paradigmatically new and potentially liberatory in how we approach language as subjects

pantheon of our democracy

lol fuckin nerd

In my opinion, as someone who studied Behavioral Economics quite a bit in undergrad (and this is precisely the kind of shit we went over), it is really just an desperate attempt by economists to rationalize marginal utility theory and justify consumer manipulation. You have to basically take the concept Utility as normative, thus the purely atomistic individual, and then use descriptive means to try and explicate deviations from the norm.

In short, in order to talk about altruism you have to contrast it with an a priori assumption about nonaltruism as the default mode of decision making. That ain't so simple, humans are dynamic, social, and qualitatively diverse decision makers, we also have a conscious and unconscious which are not some purely harmonious unity. I think the most disconcerting thing for most people, what the libs are incapable of grappling with, is that our perceived self-interest rarely actually ever is simply that

Its a way to make an otherwise vanilla male-female porn video somewhat risque and interesting

This actually is Freud's point more or less, but about sexual shit in general. Like without fantasy and taboo, sex (especially masturbation) is mindless and repetitive behavior. Of course it's a fundamental aspect of subjectivity, a radically indeterminate excess of experience which is largely unconscious and unknowable. It's something you can't just dismiss as dumb, but it kinda is dumb and you have to reconcile with it.

Maybe some would reject my notion of fantasy and make a claim about love driving sex, but love doesn't function without fantasy. Maybe simply proximity to someone bleeds into unconscious desire and this is where taboo arises. In any case I think Freud is just right as fuck, and everyone who is uncomfortable with that is just uncomfortable with their incestual desires, because literally everyone - though not of their reason or purpose or conscious thought necessarily - does have some version of these desires. I'd even argue here that the people who mute "step-" porn are actually more affected by this, it's obviously more taboo in this case imo. If this was truly like some Kantian categorical imperative, why even ever click on "step-" porn just to mute it? Unconscious desire is a sonofabitch a lot of the time. We can either reconcile ourselves with it consciously or make it a taboo that we must repress and consequently unconsciously desire to transgress. Of course I'm not endorsing incest irl, I more endorse the recognition of our unconsciousness desires being at odds with ourselves. That if we're actually serious about the moral issues that surround incestuous relationships, we have to have a different approach to it than the pure repression of our current patriarchal order, because that very repression is what allows for brutal cycles of abuse to continue in patriarchal, nuclear families.

Whatever amount of passion and declamation might be employed by the party of Order against the minority from the tribune of the National Assembly, its speech remained as monosyllabic as that of the Christians, whose words were to be: Yea, yea; nay, nay! As monosyllabic on the platform as in the press. Flat as a riddle whose answer is known in advance. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: “Socialism!” Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

The eighteenth brumaire is so dank

I mean quite frankly there's no making peace with Death, that's what makes it so fundamental - its radical indeterminacy. I tend to agree with Lacanian psychoanalysis in that the neurotic belief that there is something out there that can eliminate the radical Otherness of Death is a fundamentally fascistic one. It causes one to cling onto some mirage of internal wholeness, which is fundamentally impossible in the face of the contradictory shaping of our own subjectivity by our conscious and unconscious, their many desires and drives - all of which ultimately return to death, not of intent, but of necessity.

Here's a quote from Alenka Zupancic's What is Sex where she discusses Freud and Lacan's death drive which I think shows the radicality in recognizing the fundamentally radical indeterminacy of death and why it's not something to be at peace with. Because it's always already there! And none of us are at peace are we?

It is the death drive that opens up the space (the scene) of achievements that stretch beyond the ordinary, and beyond business as usual... We can now say that the death drive, in our meaning of the term, could be described precisely as establishing (and driving) the ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. The organism dies, but it is more than an ideological or reli-gious phrase to say that there are things (creations) that outlive it. And it is precisely at this point that one has to situate the concept of the death drive, and insist on abandoning the idea of the duality of drives: there is only the death drive. Yet it cannot be described in terms of destructive tendencies that want (us) to return to the inanimate, but precisely as constituting alternative paths to death (from those immanent in the organism itself). We could say: the death drive is what makes it possible for us to die differently. And perhaps in the end this is what matters, and what breaks out from the fatigue of life: not the capacity to live forever, but the capacity to die differently. We could even paraphrase the famous Beckettian line and formulate the motto of the death drive as follows: Die again, die better!