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

hodj_sl said:

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.

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[citation needed]
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hodj_sl said:

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.

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Do you see why I think your arguments are sort of circular?

Yeah, it's much easier to revolt when your revolution involves hitting Jerry with a rock while he's passed out.

I assume the revolution in hunter-gatherer terms would be going to where the fucking food is and the lions aren't.

I'm not educated in it, but I assume there wasn't enough basic resource stability in those societies to engender what we think of as revolution. There is one way of thinking and only one way of thinking. "Eat. Don't get eaten." The revolution is picking which guy you think is most likely to find the food. Unless you're going to call every primate dominance challenge a revolution.

Which I guess you could do that fairly. It's changing the simple heirarchy. Not really what I think of as revolution though. The revolution comes with resource control.

hodj_sl said:

Dumar is so tone deaf and blind he can't even see how his insistence that the only history that matters is modern written history is the exact sort of white supremacist racist bullshit that the Frankfurt Schoolers supposedly fight against [...] Marx was attempting to write about fundamental issues of the human condition. [...] If your world view is that the history of all human history is class struggle [...] These are real tragedies of ideological Marxism that have occurred and continue to occur in this world today. Real true crimes against humanity justified by the types of absolute dogmatic thinking that shares more than a passing resemblence to Dumar's obsession with this one body of work as the solution to all the problems he perceives with human existence [...]

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I want to put this nonsense to rest explicitly and concretely, as it's beginning to be the only content of your discourse, and I will be using sources. You are further and habitually misrepresenting my position by labeling me a ideologue, and now, a racist. I thought you were originally being facetious, but it unfortunately now seems you want to intentionally transform my argument of commodity overproduction as mentally unhealthy into some nebulous perspective on the historical human condition and even, for some remarkable reason, intoracism, which it is not. It would be quite contemptible if it wasn't so laughably and obviously intentionally deceiving.

Firstly,my analyses are not Marxist. I am not a Marxist. I use certain Marxist concepts for beginning the analyses and critique of society: I use him where he's useful.Marx or even Marxist thinkers alone do not provide the foundation upon where I stand: Kant, Weber, Schn?delbach, Habermas, even Hoppe are others. You probably don't know those names, but that's the point: you don't know them, and you're trying to justify and further misrepresent by continuing to play zealot or racist cards.

Just so I can make it perfectly clear, so your mental hamster wheel can stop spinning in the wrong direction:

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy_sl said:

Traditional theory, whether deductive or analytical, has always focused on coherency and on the strict distinction between theory and praxis. Along Cartesian lines, knowledge was treated as being grounded upon self-evident propositions, or at least upon propositions derivable from self-evident truths. Traditional theory proceeded to explain facts through the application of universal laws, so that by the subsumption of a particular into the universal, law was either confirmed or disconfirmed. A verificationist procedure of this kind was what positivism has considered to be the best explicatory account for the notion of praxis in scientific investigation. If one were to defend the view according to which scientific truths, in order to be considered so, should pass the test of empirical confirmation, then he would commit himself to the idea of an objective world. Knowledge would be simply a mirror of reality.This point is firmly refused by Critical Theory.

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Critical theory, where we started our discourse on mental health in contemporary society, reinterprets concepts from Marx and others to first call into question theway in which knowledge becomes knowledge, as it posits the positivistic, scientistic model to be flawed with regards to the social sciences. That's the foundation, ourmodus operandi, which leads us to:

Critical theorists, in their turn, rejected both the metaphysical apparatus of Hegel and the eschatological aspects connected to Marx's theory.On the contrary, Critical Theory analyses, oriented to the understanding of society, pointed rather to the necessity of establishing open systems of analysis based on an immanent form of social criticism.Their starting point was the Marxian view on the relation between a system of production paralleled by a system of beliefs. Ideology, which according to Marx, was totally explicable through the underlying system of production, had, for critical theorists, to be analyzed in its own respect and as a non-economically reducible form of expression of human rationality. Such a revision of Marxian categories became extremely crucial, then, in the reinterpretation of the notion of dialectic for the analysis of capitalism.In the light of this, dialectic, as a method of social criticism, was interpreted as following from the contradictory nature of capitalism as a system of exploitation. Indeed, it was on the basis of such inherent contradictions that capitalism was seen to open up to a collective form of ownership of the means of production, that is, socialism.

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And with regards to Marxian dialectic:

Differently from Hegelism or Marxism though, dialectics for Horkheimer amounted to neither a metaphysical principle nor a historical praxis;it was not intended as a methodological instrument. On the contrary, Horkheimer's dialectics functioned as the battleground for overcoming categorical fixities and oppositions. From this descended Horkheimer's criticism of orthodox Marxism which dichotomized the opposition between productive structures and ideological superstructure, or positivism's na?ve separation of social facts from their social interpretation.

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Your accusations of Marxist zealotry and some notion of racist white supremacy are total and complete nonsense, and the speaking of generalities with regards to Marx, his philosophy or his work, is not only equally nonsense and intellectually lazy, but is wielded as a weapon against things you know nothing about. I am laying this crap to rest here.

You should also learn thespecific meaningsof words. Marxism, communism, Mao's China and Stalin's Russia are all different: the latter two were a state-sponsored capitalist mode of production with thestate itselfas the abstract capitalist. This is not Marxist or communist, and equating or replacing one with any of the above of is alsowholly and factually incorrect.

hodj_sl said:

Marx is a great tool for the critical thinker. He's also a terrible opiate for the non critical thinker.

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Yes, he is a good opiate, as evidenced when you used him. Tell me more about critical thinking.

And with that buried, on to Barcelona.

Tanoomba_sl said:

Well, we're not talking aboutHOWwe got here, which has been made repeatedly and explicitly clear. We're talking about the here and now. Specifically, we're talking about how people who live in the here and now may or may not be capable of making a rational decision to take their own lives. Marxism is being used to explain the context that could lead to such a decision being made. History is irrelevant (to this topic). Interesting, but completely and utterly irrelevant.

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But you're not talking about here and now. You're talking about 100-150 years ago.

Marx is a historical entity making what amount to historical observations and analyses. And history isn't important.

It's like Christians claiming that the social and political frictions of Rome weren't really that important -- it's not relevant. It's entirely relevant. Completely and utterly relevant.