Sports writer kills himself, leaves behind website describing how and why

Remember, I have read Marx.

What I haven't done is memorize it line and verse to regurgitate in online debates as a replacement for actual thought.

Nothing is specific to capitalism. The fucking Maya didn't have capitalism and they still had oppression, they had the elites subjugating others to usurp their wealth. The Aztecs didn't have capitalism and they had slavery and human sacrifice to the Sun Gods.

You're an ideological extremist who read a book at 15 that they decided answered all life's problems, with an extremely limited world view that ignores history, biology, geology, geography, evolutionary principles, chemistry, physics and every other major field of science for the softest of the soft sciences and rote recitation with little to no actual consideration of opposing or alternate points of view, is what I'm saying.

Let me just add that your repeated insistence that everyone must read every inch of Das Kapital before they can criticize it is, again, bad logic. Let's simply apply it to another book by another ideological extremist to illustrate that viewpoint:

If you haven't read the entirety of The Fountainhead and Atlus Shrugged, you can't criticize libertarians.
If you haven't read the entirety of the Quran, you can't criticize Islam.
If you haven't read the entirety of Dianetics, you can't criticize Scientology.
If you haven't read Mein Kampf you can't criticize the National Socialist race based world views.

I've read the Manifesto, I've read large tracts of Das Kapital.

If no one who wasn't a devotee and avid consumer of Marx could have an opinion on his philosophy, that would of course make people like you very happy, because most people don't give a fuck enough to read it. For lots of reasons. One being its a boring as shit political treatise from a century and a half ago that is quoted religiously like the Bible by dogmaticists like yourself.

But we do have opinions, on him, on people who espouse his treatise as truth without any willingness whatsoever to explore the possibility that he might be incorrect in some form or fasion, and we're going to keep on pointing out the hypocrisy, logical fallacies and flaws in your world view as long as necessary to expose it for what it is: An incredibly thin veneer used to obfuscate what amounts to a very mediocre thinker.

Dumar_sl said:

Excerpts are not reading.

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yeah, they really are. I repeat

If you haven't read the entirety of The Fountainhead and Atlus Shrugged, you can't criticize libertarians.
If you haven't read the entirety of the Quran, you can't criticize Islam.
If you haven't read the entirety of Dianetics, you can't criticize Scientology.
If you haven't read Mein Kampf you can't criticize the National Socialist race based world views.

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It doesn't matter what'sspecific or not specificto capitalism.

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Notice for everyone reading this thread, how often Dumar says "Well, this doesn't matter. That doesn't matter." Notice how he can never justify why. It just doesn't matter because he says so.

That's called an assertion fallacy.

It's a lovely discussion that I'd love to get into (because theyaresimilar), but it's not for our purposes here.

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No, they really aren't and weren't. Their societies were made up of king priests who exercised total authority over the lives of their peoples and no money was necessary or required. In fact, if anything, they were more closely related to communal and communist/collectivist societies than our modern one.

Not sure what you're trying to prove here, that since agriculture and the tendency of large populations to cram into small areas developed that violence has been a recurring theme?

What part of the past 12,000 years comprises about 1/10000000th of the world's history is so hard to comprehend? The statement is fallacious. If you said the history of modern human society is violent revolution, you might have a point.

As it is, we have 120,000 years, at minimum, from the time modern humans diverged from homo erectus where no violent revolutions occurred versus 12,000 years where the occassional violent revolution has occurred. The entire premise of this argument is and has always been fallacious and based on a simplistic and extremely limited view of what human history, and world history, imply.

Its more of that Christian influence, really. To the Christians, and the Dumars of the world, nothing mattered that happened more than 6000 years or so ago, so it didn't really exist.

Its also got a tinge of that Eurocentric racism that says that the only human societies that really matter are the ones who developed writing and thus have a "history".

Why are communists so racist, Dumar? Can you explain that? Why do you want to deny all of Africa its legitimacy as the home for human society? They never developed written history, you know.

Dumar_sl said:

I'm actually quoting Harvey. He says that when you read excerpts of Marx, you often get his entire contextual meaning wrong, which is true. It's better to not read him whatsoever than read passages in a survey course.

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Yeah I really don't care that you are regurgitating yet another person who is smarter than you as proof of something you wish was true.

I mean, really, you know, if you just read Mein Kampf in bits and pieces, you lose the entire contextual meaning. Its better not to read it than to just review it lightly, you know?

I mean, really, you know, if you just read the Bible in bits and pieces, you lose the entire contextual message. Its better not to read it than just to review it lightly, you know?

Dumar_sl said:

Back to bipedal social philosophy & economics, fantastic

Speaking of the mental capacity of a biped, I've got a date a new girl tonight. Til later!

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Why are you so racist? I mean you literally just wrote off all of African society as just "bipeds" because they didn't develop written history.

You can not get into my boy's soul, Nightman.

The Ancient_sl said:

[citation needed]

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Can't have a violent revolution without people to revolt, and people to revolt against. So you can't have a violent revolution until you have society.

First human societies are believed to have developed between what, 12,000 and 9,000 years ago or so.

Catalhoyuk is one of the older known human settlements.

Dated to 9,000 years ago in Turkey.

http://www.catalhoyuk.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization

The emergence of civilization is generally associated with the final stages of the Neolithic Revolution, a slow cumulative process occurring independently over many locations between 10,000 and 3,000 BCE, culminating in the a relatively rapid process of state formation, a political development associated with the appearance of a governing elite. This neolithic technology and lifestyle was established first in the Middle east (for example at G?bekli Tepe, from about 9,130 BCE), and Yangtze and later Yellow river basin in China (for example the Pengtoushan culture from 7,500 BCE), and later spread. But similar "revolutions" also began independently from 9,000 years ago in such places as Mesoamerica at the Balsas River[2] and in Papua New Guinea. This revolution consisted in the development of the domestication of plants and animals and the development of new sedentary lifestyles which allowed economies of scale and productive surpluses.

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I was being fair and giving him an extra 2000 years of class struggle than probably actually existed.

Anyway

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ult.../Primates.html

Approximately 1.8 million years ago, a new form, the ancestor of Homo erectus appeared in Africa. Over the next 300,000 years, the australopithecines and Homo habilis became extinct, perhaps because they could not compete with Homo erectus with its larger (as much as 1000 ml) brain. Although Homo erectus arose in Africa (where it is sometimes called Homo ergaster), it soon spread into Europe and throughout Asia ("Java man" and "Peking [Beijing] man"). By 300,000 years ago, H. erectus was extinct. Not until some 195,000 years ago do clearly modern humans, Homo sapiens, appear in the fossil record.

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120,000 years is the minimum amount of time since homo sapiens diverged from homo erectus when you are comparing genetic distances by examination of base pair alterations between them.
What makes a homo erectus and what makes a homo sapien is a bit debatable, of course. And then there's the debate about whether you can divide early homo sapiens from modern ones.

One more point, the definition of revolution is the forcible overthrow of a governmental or social order.
Tribes have a social order, but no government, and thus tend to have no one to overthrow and definitely don't tend to fundamentally alter their social organization or structures if they were to have a chief that they killed because they didn't like his "rule" (chiefs rarely rule their tribes) so the entire premise that you can have a violent revolution against elites who hold wealth and extract resources from others before you have elites, and people who can have their wealth extracted, is a contradiction in terms.

The vast vast majority of tribes observed globally tended to work on reciprocity and concepts very similar to the Big Man of Polynesia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_man_(anthropology)

Big men do not have political authority in the sense that they can dictate to people to get things accomplished. Rather they are more like the organizer for group democratic decisions. Often they achieve this status by accumulating wealth in the form of pigs, sweet potatoes, wives and children, and then spread that wealth around the community so that people will support their choices when it comes time for political decisions, but all political decisions are still decided upon by the community and the Big Man has no official mantle, no official power in any way shape or form.

He can't order armies to march for him, he can't tax his neighbors, etc.