Twenty-Four Words

“empty-headed and messianic”

Two things that bother me: most people I’ve known on the left have never read Marx; a small minority have read him, yet still buy into the stupid. Sigh.
OT, in light of recent discussion here on feminism etc, via Guido:
http://conservativewoman.co.uk/2014/03/saturday-more-victimhood-than-sisterhood/

Very interesting reading, by the way. The L.A. Times did a review back when it came out—Noting that the one book has going through a number of slight title changes.
Anyone who has lived in the Soviet Union quickly learns that life can imitate bad art. Where the ways of the system are concerned, nothing is too outrageous or absurd. The chilling opening scene in Viktor Suvorov’s “Inside the Aquarium” demonstrates that. A training film for Soviet spies features a lesson on the penalty for deception: One of their own agents is shoved into a crematorium’s oven alive. The fact that this is ideally suited for a Hollywood production caricaturing the evil empire is, of itself, no reason to dismiss it as too far-fetched to be real.
Suvorov is the pseudonym of a defector from the GRU, the Soviet Union’s military intelligence organization . . . .

Don’t forget required correctness . . . .

“stupid”
= malignantly narcissistic
= spiteful and childish
= flatly delusional
Just got off a Twitter exchange with a moron who actually defended the Obamacare trainwreck. Dude. If you’re gonna defend the O-ministration, don’t stand behind Obamacare.

Witness our own beloved Penny Dreadful, a woman rapidly approaching 30, who dresses like a sullen teenager and acts like one, too. It’s just so silly, and if it weren’t for the fact that unchallenged it tends to rack up death tolls in the seven figure region the correct response to socialists would be hoots of derision.
Yes, laugh while don’t have the power they want. That’s power over you. And Marxoid psychology does seem comically adolescent, which may explain why its adherents are so often students who never grew up and lecturers who surround themselves with teenagers every day for decades on end.
Hence the self-imagined hipsters whose badges of “Che” and Trotsky actually tell the world, “I’m wearing these badges because of credulity and peer pressure, and sadly my peers are all idiots.” Hipsters who are so non-conformist they want a world in which everyone is forced to conform. Some of these towering intellects are so ignorant of history (and much else besides) they don’t even register the connotations of what it is they say they want. This young woman, for instance, is a student. One of our brightest and best. Just let that sink in for a minute.
And then of course there’s the hilarious self-flattery on which it all depends – the belief that one is smart enough to remake the world and to ‘manage’ the yearnings and affairs of the beings within in. And so we get pretentious little idiots like Jesse Myerson, whose grip on facts and reality is somewhat shaky, often inverted, and who gets his arse handed to him when challenged by someone more familiar with Marxism and its consequences.
Or there’s the anti-capitalist “artist and activist” John Jordan, who thinks it’s his job to “show us how to live differently.” Which is to say, in ways that suit his ego. In order to achieve this noble and heroic realignment of our lives, Mr Jordan expects to be subsidised indefinitely, via taxation, by people who actually work for a living and who may not wish to be re-educated by chronic freeloaders with mental health issues. And then of course there are people like the reprehensible Eric Hobsbawm, who simply didn’t care about the cost of his utopia for others, however monstrous it might be.
These, then, are the titans who would save us from ourselves.

Marxism: The belief that if only one could violate the autonomy of enough people, confiscate their earnings and rewire their very nature, the result would somehow be Total Human Contentment™.

David: “Says a woman who, so far as I know, has yet to start a business or employ anyone.”
Don’t you remember? In 2011 she advertised for a research assistant, who she was proposing to pay £500 for 85 hours work – which works out nearly £2 an hour short of the minimum wage.
http://order-order.com/2011/01/18/sexist-penny-exploits-unemployed-offering-below-minimum-wage/

* working = winning. Damn you, predictive swiping nonsense.

Marxism is, in general, cleverness for disordered people; people with some stripe of appearances-centric, neo-moralistic, and typically self-superior regard. Narcissism is a good catch-all and it is clinically recognized.
Marxism is the grease that lubricates progressive ways. It’s a code that, whether consciously or not, allows the lofty superiority of faux benevolence and tyranny to coexist.
It is The Lie. The closing of the mind and the nullification of the soul. Religiously it is the un-reborn or the unenlightened.

Usually so. For Progressivism projects its ersatz superiority like a beacon, not uncommonly crushing light wherever it finds it.
Progressivism is the religious practice of employing unreformed, carefully coddled, self-absorbed rage to carry out its institution’s pet neo-moralities — racialism, classicism, the many inquisitions of political intolerance, the material envy of redistribution, the social covetousness of dull, killing conformity, anti-sociability against tradition and order, bearing eternal false witness against resistance, and the preachy hypocrisy that conveys it all — to stamp out the finer, more aware, and vastly more functional principles of the classic spiritualities and moral codes.
To be free of personal responsibility organized Progressivism only needed to reinvent morality — detach itself from real right and wrong and create these new, lower-order substitutes for it. Codifying the lie of it with institutional tradition and habit are what any number of Progressive luminaries openly preach in various manifestos. It’s not like you can hide it and clearly many have not.
But of course, the dysfunctional’s seven Progressive deadly sins immediately run afoul of the real issues in and with the human soul, but we can’t have that awareness clouding the landscape for just the latest failing Progressive Utopia.
Progressivism is a disorder. Should mankind become sufficiently accountable sufficiently rapidly maybe we’ll regard this truth with enough conviction to react better to its characteristic malignancy. We’ve had the awareness to for thousands of years.

Nik & Rafi,
I can’t work out whether or not she understands… the practical consequences
But she still writes (and protests) as if she were.
I doubt Laurie is overly troubled by the practicalities of whatever it is she’s demanding on any given day. The need to continually display her own radicalism doesn’t leave much time for piffling details. Hence her ability to wave aside basic economics as if it had no bearing on what is possible, or indeed moral.

A few days late with this, but:
“This Lent I will eat no food, to highlight the hunger all around us”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/03/lent-food-hunger-fasting-britain

while mouthing someone else’s idiocy, exactly as expected,
They’re so ignorant and yet so sure they’re right.

There is a lot of truth to this, but the late Norman Geras was a Marxist who was not a stupid nor someone who was clever in a perverse way:
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/

Bob-B,
the late Norman Geras was a Marxist who was not stupid nor someone who was clever in a perverse way
True. But then Norm was something of a rarity and as a blogger spent much of his time, if not most of it, challenging idiocies on the left, including those of other self-defined Marxists. It often puzzled me how someone who was by no means an idiot could still cling to the Marxism of his youth, almost like a dead religion, even as he poked at its inherent indecency. Having invested so much time in it, academically and career-wise, perhaps he was reluctant to let it go. Maybe in part it’s analogous to the sentimental fondness people often retain towards the pop music of their youth. Objectively, the music may be naff, even ludicrous, but it still elicits pleasing memories, and therefore a degree of sympathy.
If you’re retired and have a lot of life to look back on, you probably will look back quite often. And if a lot of your youthful energy and enthusiasm – and sense of possibility – was attached to Marxism as a world-changing panacea, then that emotional connection may endure in later life. It may even endure endless discrediting and survive as a theoretical thing, a vague sense of nostalgia and potential. Provided, of course, you don’t spend too much time lingering on how the catastrophic real-world results of Marxism are inherent to the theory and therefore unavoidable.
[ Edited. ]

It often puzzled me how someone who was by no means an idiot could still cling to the Marxism … even as he poked at its inherent indecency.
I find this to be a really interesting question and one that applies (as Bob-B suggested) to quite a lot of people. For me personally, this includes virtually all of my close friends and, over the years, the majority of my work colleagues and certainly all of the British ones.
When I first started working with colleagues from the US I genuinely thought one of them was joking when I heard her say that she’d voted for George Bush in the 2000 election. I was even more surprised when it turned out that she was completely serious – they do say travel broadens the mind and that’s certainly been true in my life.
Even though from high school on I’ve always been suspicious and/or dismissive of the kind of posturing that goes on with Occupy-style activists / neo-Hippies / aging Soixante-Retards etc. that doesn’t mean that I’ve never had sympathy with the attractions of the Left and some form of Statism, and even now certain aspects of them still appeal to me.
I can’t speak for Norman Geras and I’m sure that the nostalgia of an elderly gentleman must have played a role in his case as you have suggested, but I would also say that many more moderate, reasonable (and dare I say it) intelligent people on the Left are attracted to Statism because they perceive it to be a logical extension of the Rule of Law.
I would hazard a guess that the reasoning goes something like this:

• the Rule of Law is essential for the protection of individual liberties and for the safeguarding of property rights;
• as individual liberties and property rights are fundamental to a free and civilized society, the Rule of Law must therefore be fundamental to civilization;
• that being so, why shouldn’t the Rule of Law be extended beyond civilization’s essential needs until it also encompasses all the additional needs required to cover every aspect of people’s lives that, if left to Fate alone, can deprive them of life or liberty?

In other words, this logic says that if Law is essential to a civilized society then having more of it must result in an even more perfect form of civilisation. And by the same token, as there must be a state to enforce that Law, Statism must naturally be the best hope for achieving that most just form of society. The dream and promise of Statism is that the vicissitudes of Fate – illness, unemployment, divorce, bankruptcy, etc. – can be legislated out of existence and beyond all care and concern. (Certainly, the Book of Job would have turned out very differently if there had been a sizeable Welfare state in the Land of Uz!).
Laws are also attractive because Lawmaking seems to be a quicker and more efficient way of improving society than simply hanging around and hoping things will get better eventually if left to Chance alone. And as Lawmaking requires Lawmakers, they become attractive to those who would like to some day lay claim to having defied Fate and created Justice on Earth by the sweat of their own brow. Changing the Law basically means changing reality so it is not surprisingly an appealing (if albeit narcissistic) idea.
It’s also unfortunate that for many on the Left (and not just on the extreme Left), a Free Market is equated with a Game of Chance and all that metaphor implies: i.e. that as in other games of chance, there must be winners and losers; that sometimes losing is a result of bad luck (e.g. an unexpected illness, an accident); that sometimes winning must be a result of graft, deliberate deception, corruption or brute force, etc., etc.
From this perspective, anyone saying that they are against Statism is perceived as if they were claiming to be against the Rule of Law, which immediately puts them under suspicion. At best they are likely to be seen as a lackwit or an ingrate who doesn’t appreciate just how much they have been privileged by the Rule of Law (and by implication, privileged by the fruits of Statism); or as someone who is either actively trying to circumvent the law; or at worst, as a brazen criminal.
News reports of organisations using legal loopholes to pay the bare minimum in tax or even no tax at all only serve to reinforce the message that Free Market = Game of Chance (= the opposite of the Rule of Law) = a Criminal Conspiracy of Crooks and Thieves (= Capitalism)
Also unfortunate is the idea that because Statism is seen as the opposite of the Free Market, services provided by a State to an individual are not really perceived as incurring a cost at the point of access which in turn gives the appearance that they do not incur any costs whatsoever (or that the individual cost is so insignificant in comparison to the vast scale a state’s resources that its consequences are abstracted).
Much of this probably seems astoundingly obvious but I did want to try and at least suggest why, despite considerable evidence showing that all forms of Statism lead to the opposite of what they promise to deliver, Tyranny instead of Liberty for example, various forms of it are nevertheless still hugely popular – even a long way outside Islington dinner parties or Occupy camps in Oakland, CA.

the owners of that small restaurant don’t deserve whatever benefits have resulted from their labours, risk and investment.
And then there was that Twitter exchange I had a few months ago with someone who was trying to be very clever and Socratic in asking why I could assert that it was “my labor” to begin with.
Because “my labor” is performed in exchange for stuff, which thereby becomes “mine.”
I don’t recall getting a straight answer to “if not mine, whose” or “what happens if we eliminate the concept of ownership from the whole shebang? What’s the result?”
Dude kept going infinite regress with the assumptions in each answer to his questions, which is fine as far as it goes, but he never settled enough to demonstrate the utility of questioning the assumptions behind “my labor.”
Apparently in his world, discovering that you can identify and question an assumption is sufficient grounds to discard the assertion out of hand.
Which is that “first-level thinking” that David Mamet identifies. They get to the point in their intellectual maturity wherein they can describe problems in the world (college age, naturally) but they can’t get beyond that. They can’t see that the Marxists’ ability to identify (often correctly) the injustices does not equal the ability to correct them.
Or that maturity involves accepting limitations.
Because they didn’t land a man on the moon by changing the gravitational constant or the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: they got there by hewing to the laws of physics with excruciating exactness.

But you see, if they are on the side of the inevitable progress of history then they feel they don’t really need to put much effort into making an argument due to knowing they inevitably have the right answer.
Step one : find something you don’t like
Step two : blah blah blah the details aren’t that important and coherency is optional
Step three : declare capitalism is to blame and must be overthrown (One can’t help but notice how often step 3 isn’t the conclusion of reasoning in step 2 but the predetermined answer. It’s easier that way.)

Oh come on, there’s more to it than that! You also get to bolt forms of the word “dialectic” onto other words, and make all kinds of brain-throbbing hyphenated neologisms.