The Official Conservative Political Thread

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

So we are basing how influential a person is just on how many people debate and read his stuff?

I guess Jesus wins over Marx then, right Dumar?

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Jesus was enormously influential, obviously, but he wasn't an academic or scholar; Jesus couldn't even read or write.

Marx is considered the most influential scholar that's ever lived, due to the number of citations mostly.

Re: on Marxism:

Engels_sl said:

Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late [18]70s: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist."

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He is cited the most because you have researchers much like yourself that just endlessly cite his same shit. The link with Chomsky in there go to show why that is so silly. Every other field cites fuckloads of shit from new scientists, because science evolves. No modern physicist is going to endlessly be citing Einstein in his shit. No modern mathematician is going to be endlessly citing Newton.

Iannis_sl said:

Karl Marx, the secular Jesus.

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With regards to a religion, yes, Marxism can be similar, but there are very certain, definite, chasm-like differences that you can't reconcile when you try to bucket Marxism as a religion.

Firstly, and this is a tangent but a useful one, the religion of Christianity has very little to do with Jesus - Jesus of Nazareth, the person who (likely) really lived and fought the Jewish aristocracy and Roman occupation. We know very little of that Jesus.

What peoplebelievewas almost entirely made up by the Apostle Paul, who never knew Jesus and was at odds with his real followers, the ones that did know him. The majority of the NT is made up of Paul's writings, and he made lots of stuff up - lots of things that contradicted what Jesus supposedly said (compare The Epistle of James, which is night and day different than what's in the Bible). He's the one that gave him the Greek "Christ" title.

So Christianity grew from one man, but what most believe has nothing to do with that man. It has to do with other men writing about him, and in most cases, getting what he said, believed, and fought for wrong.

It's the same with Marxism. After Marx, lots of people interpreted what they thought was right, wrote even more literature in his name, and committed widespread atrocity and used his texts as an excuse. In this respect, Jesus and Marx are very similar: their words are taken and contorted to suit the ends of people wanting power, whether it was Constantine or Stalin.

The difference is though, with Marx, we can look to what he actually wrote, what he actually said. That's always been my modus operandi. I'll use a few Marxian authors here and there, such as Fromm and Gramsci, but you have to be very careful and consider their words independently of Marx's.

It would be a religion if I really didn't know what Marx said, attributed words written by people like Fromm and Gramsci to him, in his name, and I would be doing that by some screwed up idea of faith like the modern Christian version. I don't: I use Marx's words directly because he was a damned good scholar.

ZyyzYzzy_sl said:

Let's not forget Marx was mainly an economic scholar, a human derived construct. It is a lot easier to comment and critique on such a thing opposed to experimenting and building upon past research and understanding in science/mathematics.

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Well, it's debatable: he was pretty much everything. His relentless attack of economics, law, and general academia is spread everywhere in his writings, though. He would never be a professor anywhere because he insulted and upset too many powerful people:

Karl Marx_sl said:

Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than to interpret, to systematize and turn into apologetics - in a doctrinaire way - the ideas of the agents who are trapped within bourgeois relations of production. So it should not surprise us that, precisely within the estranged form of appearance of economic relations in which these prima facie absurd and complete contradictions occur - and all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence - that precisely here vulgar economics feels completely at home, and that these relationships appear all the more self-evident to it, the more their inner interconnection remains hidden to it, even though these relationships are comprehensible to the popular mind.

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Karl Marx_sl said:

Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws - i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy throws no light on the cause of the division between labor and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain [...] The economist assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce - namely, the necessary relationship between two things - between, for example, division of labor and exchange. Thus the theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of Man - that is, he assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained.

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Kudos to Dumar for derailing the Conservative Thread into the Communist Manifesto. Well played sir, please continue.

TheBeagle_sl said:

Kudos to Dumar for derailing the Conservative Thread into the Communist Manifesto. Well played sir, please continue.

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I was more thinking the comment that the Bible is basically Paul's little comic book series would trainwreck it much faster. Time will tell!

More importantly, which ancient MMO would Marx try to recreate via kickstarter?

Dumar_sl said:

The difference is though, with Marx, we can look to what he actually wrote, what he actually said. That's always been my modus operandi. I'll use a few Marxian authors here and there, such as Fromm and Gramsci, but you have to be very careful and consider their words independently of Marx's.

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Buddy,

Marxism is a religion. Marxists like yourself think they know what makes people happy, and it's not the stuff that actually makes people happy. So modern Marxist have to come up with bullshit like 'false consciousness' to explain why the people that Marx says shouldn't be happy, are actually happy. It's no different than Scientology really except they use the word 'Thetan' instead of FC. FWIW, Thetan is a cooler word/phrase than False Consciousness. L. Ron Hubbard > Marx.

The reality is that people are actually quite happy with their PlayStations, Fantasy Football and (if they're part of a standard religion) going to Church only on Christmas and/or Easter (Temple only on YK, etc). All these things make them feel good about themselves, it's only people who majored in crap like philosophy or gender studies in college that buy into Marx and think he has anything relevant to now.

There is nothing in that Marx-Engel reader in your back pocket that has anything to do with modern society. Marx never envisioned the PlayStation, 3D Printing, 90%+ literacy, and 50" LED TVs for under 1,000 on Black Friday. The poor in our society are better off than the gentry of the 18th Century, another reason why the "war on the 1%" is so retarded. It's not setting up a fight between the have-nots v. haves, it's trying to set up a fight between people with a Kia and 1 50" TV v. people with a Maserati and several 50" TVs: the haves vs. the have-more.

Drtyrm_sl said:

More importantly, which ancient MMO would Marx try to recreate via kickstarter?

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Asheron's Call, where using a magic spell affects everyone else using it too. EVERY MAGE IS NOT A MAGICAL ISLAND!

tad10_sl said:

The reality is that people are actually quite happy with their PlayStations

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False consciousness is a real phenomenon, and it's alsonot the only thingyou're describing: all you have to do is flip it to Fox News for an hour for proof.

I or Marx never said people couldn't be happy. Opium makes people plenty happy. There were slaves that were very happy in a needs-met sense, too. But they were still slaves and never free. That situation is actually more honest because those slaves always knew who their masters were. Ours in modern day are much more obfuscated, but they washed ashore during the 07 crisis: we saw a glimpse then when the massive wealth transfer ensued.

Feel free to exude all the happiness in the world from your perpetual debt & commodity-lined cell. I don't want that same prison.

Dumar_sl said:

False consciousness is a real phenomenon.

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Yes, and so are Thetans.

You know that bubble people describe many conservatives as living in? Like for example, when they oppose legislation that would actually help them. What do you think that phenomenon is? :

False consciousness is the way in which material, ideological and institutional processes in capitalist society mislead members of the working class. These processes are said to hide the true relations of forces between classes [...]

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Dumar_sl said:

You know that bubble people describe many conservatives as living in? Like for example, when they oppose legislation that would actually help them. What do you think that phenomenon is? :

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You didn't give a specific example, however its my experience that when we oppose legislation that might benefit us, we are not opposing the help, but the overall cost associated with that help. If something is passed, but it will cost the taxpayers billions of dollars, we would rather see that money being used to pay down the debt etc....

What false consciousness really is, is a way for marxists to dismiss anyone that says they are content or think that their life is good or that life has improved under capitalism. It is yet another way that they can ignore pesky facts in their little bubble.

It is really kind of offensive to call him the most cited scientist or the most influential. His shit isn't science, it is a crapload of opinion pieces. Which is fine, his opinions might be fucking awesome and spot on. However, no one is citing Mareen Dowd columns in research papers. Your opinions mean fuckall in real science.

khalid_sl said:

What false consciousness really is

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They're not opinions. Like I said, he's a founder of sociology as a science. He wrote in detail of how capital and capitalism really work. This isn't editorial pieces, but analyses. We're getting into hodj territory here.

False consciousness is a real, observable phenomenon. It's when a group of people are made to think or believe a certain way that mostly goes against their own interests. That's what the term means. There are other, associative terms like cultural hegemony that explore further.

The modern history of the US is pretty much a treatise on false consciousness, where huge populations of people will vehemently oppose things that would almost directly benefit them: labor unions, socialized medicine, minimum wage increases, etc. These same people will be for things that don't benefit them, but benefit another class of people, like decreasing taxes.

False consciousness is the analysis of why some Southerner who works at Wal-Mart is anti-union, against the min wage, and thinks taxes are just way too high.

khalid_sl said:

It is really kind of offensive to call him the most cited scientist or the most influential.

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Who is the best scientist of them all? Nature, International Weekly Journal of Science

Merlin_sl said:

You didn't give a specific example, however its my experience that when we oppose legislation that might benefit us, we are not opposing the help, but the overall cost associated with that help. If something is passed, but it will cost the taxpayers billions of dollars, we would rather see that money being used to pay down the debt etc....

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Why?

wormie_sl said:

You can say what you will about Marx' solutions (which are clearly pants on head retarded as utopia does not exist, neither the capitalist or the communist type) but his analysis of what the fuck happens when capitalism is given free reign is spot on.

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I'm going to go with not so much. Feel free to show me where Marx mentions 3D printers. Also, with respect to the deleted stuff: way to miss the point. Nobody really has a clue where capitalism is heading. Maybe Vinge's Singularity, maybe the Bpocalypse, maybe something else.

Dumar_sl said:

They're not opinions. Like I said, he's a founder of sociology as a science. He wrote in detail of how capital and capitalism really work. This isn't editorial pieces, but analyses. We're getting into hodj territory here.

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L R Hubbard wrote in detail about the metaphysical connections of the mind and body. He was the founder of scientology. He wrote extensively on it. That doesn't make scientology a science.