#r/stupidpol

[arcticdementor]

What control do they not currently have though? They’ve captured absolutely every American institution in the country, the have the entire media complex as their first and foremost weapon against the populace, they largely have the judicial on their side that they have absolutely no qualms abusing against their enemies for any reason, they have the entire federal government under their control and every branch that comes with it - the FBI, CIA, IRS, you name it, and they have control over it. They have the backing of practically every every single corporation on earth at their helm corporations larger, more powerful, and wealthier than fucking countries. Now combine all the top 10,000 largest global corps and show me one that doesn’t operate essentially at the behest of the DNC and their orders. They largely have the entire military industrial complex under their watch to sicc on the world and fund any and all wars they’d like, at the expense of millions of natives of those countries, they have the pharmaceutical complex under control, educational system, and I can go on and on. They have Canada under their thumb, the EU, Australia, NZ, and whatever other western country you’d like to name. They’ve become deranged, tyrannical, and authoritarian beyond what anyone ever foresaw, all whilst being cheered on by their shitlib army. And let’s not forget, they have a global shitlib army at their disposal, every sickening non-profit you can name, and so on and so forth. No one has any ability to stop them.

–PolarPros

[hexagon-club]

Not sure how r/stupidpol hasn't been nuked by reddit. I guess it's not a feminist sub, but it seems to be the only sub where you can find opinions like this. Other than maybe all those porn subs that are "cis women only".

[sexhaver]

What is r/redscarepod's whole... thing? If you know. At moments it seems alt right/reactionary, other moments populist and/or leftist, other moments hard traditionalist, other moments r/stupidpol, other moments pure shitpost. Is it a sub with a heavy divide or is there a joke/troll I'm not in on.

somehow, literally every single one of your guesses are correct at the same time. it's basically a melting pot of contrarians who used 4chan in their formative years and then grew up to have at least nominally leftist politics, emphasis on "nominally". they have this notion that they're Speaking Truth To Power with such radical ideas as "being fat is a moral failing", "gay people are annoying sometimes", and "misogyny can be funny". this produces equal amounts of tradposting about how gender roles are good and incredible shitposts from people using the subreddit as their diary.

as much as both parties involved would hate this comparison, it kind of is an evil alternate timeline version of tumblr.

[mitchipedia]

Here’s a modernation tip I observe on the GEnie online service more than 30 years ago

If you have people on your service who like to argue and use insulting language, give them a place where that’s OK. Many of these arguers and insulters will prove perfectly civil outside that little playground.

I recently stumbled across a subreddit called /r/stupidpol which describes itself as a “Subreddit focused on critiquing capitalism and identity politics from a Marxist perspective.” A better desription would be “liberals are stupid.” I was called “Blue MAGA” and an “idiot.” I was not angry; I understood the rules of that place and modified my behavior accordingly.

That said, Redditors can be a rough crowd, and if you’re going to post or comment there, you need to be ready to be insulted.

[roaninlynch]

I know I’m a class reductionist but like if you honestly think that cops DON’T have a racial bias and that they haven’t been subconsciously trained to see black people as criminal youre stupid and braindead and need to go outside

[menalez]

all this "white women and women of color need to stand together bc the patriarchy benefits from us being divided!!!" shit reminds me of /r/stupidpol white lefty bros making the same argument abt how black people or gay people or women need to stop caring so much about racism/homophobia/misogyny and just focus on class activism only. like yes our oppressors benefit from us being divided but you know who is to blame for that? white women lmao. we need to fucking do better and we need to actually put in the work so that women of color can stand side by side with us as equals, instead of just ignoring their problems and expecting them to want to work with us. like it's so fucking shitty to just expect women of color to ignore white women's racism because "we all benefit from feminism!!". if it's so important that we stand together, why aren't white women putting in the work to end racism? why are women of color the only ones who have to put in any effort? why do they have to overlook our racism instead of, idk, white women not fucking being racist to begin with?

also id like to point out that white women being racist and excluding woc from feminism didn’t result in All Of Us Benefitting. woc had to then fight alone (maybe a handful of white ppl supported tho) to gain the same rights white women fought for while neglecting us. like this is one of the reasons why considering racism against woc isnt just something we can ignore in feminism. the racism we face is tied to the misogyny we face and when you ignore our lived experiences, you ignore us and leave us to fend for ourselves. which, fine, if that’s what u want then w/e but if u want women to be united then at the very least start by being decent to woc 😐 instead of treating us like shit n then expecting us to suck it up and fight for you anyways.

[pissvortex]

if reddit was gonna take down any “dirtbag left” subreddit to make an example out of them you would think they would take down r/stupidpol

[le-fils-de-lhomme]

I do this thing to torture myself sometimes where I'll put the name of some academic into reddit's search bar to find posts from different subreddits about that academic. I did a search on Judith Butler and the people who loved her the most are the people of r/stupidpol and the people who had the most disdain for her was r/redscarepod.

[antoine-roquentin]

I think one of the major problems with the modern left is a focus on cultural analysis instead of economics. When I say culture I EXPLICITLY DON'T MEAN racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and Indigenous rights/decolonization.

Stupidpol and their ilk are reactionaries and should be treated as such. What I'm talking about is the focus on things like analyzing TV shows or picking over the latest issues of the NYT op-ed column, the sort a caricatures you see on Chapo.

Zizek is emblematic of this syndrome. He's a theorist of ideology, a film critic, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and complete reactionary on gender and immigration issues, and he's widely considered to be one of preeminent Marxist scholars alive. And, and this is important, Zizek does fuck all actual economic material analysis. Mark Fisher, who was an excellent Marxist theorist, covers almost exactly the same ground from a different perspective, and you can repeat this across academia.

Inside academia the problem has gotten so bad that the best economic analysis is being carried out by the fucking post-humanists. Take, for example, Anna Tsing's excellent Supply Chains and the Human Condition. Tsing is a brilliant theorist but she spends most of her time writing about multi-species interactions between humans and mushrooms. Carbon Democracy, one of the best theories of the carbon economy ever written, is by a left-Foucaldian.

There are some exceptions to this, Andreas Malm's Carbon Capital is wonderful, Riot Strike Riot is great and I have to mention the group I call The Other Chicago School, Endnotes, whose infrequent analysis is a breath of fresh air. But Endnotes isn't particularly well read even inside the academy, which takes back outside the ivory tower in the dismal mess that is what passes for popular left "economics."

I want to go back to Occupy for a second because what happened there is indicative of the problem. Occupy, at least technically, actually had a theory of economics that went beyond "neoliberalism bad, welfare state good." And it's really not as bad as its critics have since accused it of being. Graeber's "the 1% meme" was supposed to be part of an MMT analysis of the ability of banks to create money out of nothing, see Richard A. Werner. The theory then goes with the ability to create money out of nothing the question becomes who should actually have that power. The 1% are the people who control that power and use that it to gain wealth and their wealth to gain power.

This is essentially what happened after 2008 and it relates to an entire analysis of the politics of debt and war that's captured really well in the last chapter of Debt, The First 5000 Years, drawing from Hudson's excellent Super Imperialism. Again, not bad, and not the disaster it became in Liberal hands. But note two things:

1, His work is intentionally detached from the production process- Graeber uses a value theory of labor about the social reproduction of human beings. That theory is really interesting and I'll leave a link to his It is Value that Brings Universes into Being here. But Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist, and his recent work is mostly composed of a set of theories of bureaucracy.

And, don't get me wrong, I really like Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs, and it's possible to build an economic theory out of them, but almost no one actually does. And this gets us back to my second point about Occupy and economics.

2, Not a single other person I have ever met, including people who were in Occupy, have ever actually heard the theory behind the 1%. Part of this has to do with Graeber’s rather admirable desire to not become an intellectual vanguardist. But, I cannot overemphasize how much of this is a result of the left's retreat into an analysis of consumerism instead of capitalism and its further insistence that the entire fucking global economy can be explained by chapters 1-3 of Capital and this just isn't a "read more theory" rant, it's not like reading the rest of Capital is going to help you here. But even that's better than what's actually happened, which is people reading Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and the Communist Manifesto and trying to derive economic theory from that, or getting lost in a Gramscian or psychoanalytic miasma trying to explain why revolution didn't happen. But we can't keep fucking doing this.

If we do we're just going to keep getting stuck in endless fucking inane arguments, one of which is about which countries are Imperialist or not based on trying to read the minds of world leaders, and the other of which is a bunch of racists trying to argue that they're actually "class-first" Marxists and that if we don't say slurs and be mean to disabled people we're going to lose the "real working class," which is somehow composed only of construction workers banging steel bars.

So let's stop letting them do that. One of the reasons Supply Chains and the Human Condition is so great is that it describes how the performance of gender and racial roles creates the self super-exploitation at the heart of global capitalism. Race and gender cannot be ignored in favor of some kind of "class-first" faux-leftist bullshit. THEY ARE LITERALLY THE DRIVER OF CAPITAL ACCUMULATION.

Most of the global supply chain has been transformed into entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs (see the countless accounts of Chinese garment factory workers who dream of getting into the fashion industry and who attempt to supplement their meager income by setting up stalls in local marketplaces to sell watches and clothes).

The fact that global supply chains have reverted to the kind of small family firms that Marx and Engels thought would disappear is a MASSIVE problem for any kind of global workers movement, because it means that the normal wage relation that is supposed to form the basis of the proletariat isn't actually the governing social experience of a large swath of what should be the proletariat, either because they're the owners of small firms contracted by larger firms like Nike who would, in an older period of capitalism, have just been workers or because the people who work for those firms are incapable of actually demanding wage increases from the capitalists because they're separated by a layer from the firms who control real capital, and thus are essentially unable to make the kind of wage demands that would normally constitute class consciousness because the contractors they work for really don't have any money. These contractors are in no way independent.

Multinational corporations set everything from their buying prices to their labor conditions to what their workers say to lie to labor inspectors. The effect of replacing much of the proletariat with micro-entrepreneurs is devastating.

The class-for-itself that's supposed to serve as the basis of social revolution has decomposed entirely. Endnotes has a great analysis of how this happened covering more time, but the unified working class is dead. In its place have come a series of incoherent struggles: The Arab Spring, the Movement of the Squares, the current wave of revolutions and riots stretching from Sudan to Peru to Puerto Rico- all of them share an economic basis translated into demands on the state. We see housing struggles, anti-police riots, occupations, climate strikes, and a thousand other forms of struggle that don't seem to cohere into a traditional social revolution and WE HAVE NO ANSWER.

I don't have one either, but we're not going to get out of this mess by trying to read the tea leaves of the CCP or analyzing how Endgame is the ruling class inculcating us into accepting Malthusian Ecofascism.

I want to emphasize YOU DON'T NEED TO SHARE MY ECONOMIC ANALYSIS to develop one, I'm obviously wrong on a lot of things and so is everyone else. The point is that we need to start somewhere.

There are other benefits to reading economics stuff even if it can be boring sometimes, like being able to dunk on nerd shitlibs and reactionaries who do the "take Econ-101" meme by being able to prove that their entire discipline is bunk. Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is absolutely hilarious for this, he literally proves that perfect competition relies on the same math that you use to "prove" that the earth is flat.

Or learning that the notion that markets distribute goods optimally is based on the assumption that what is basically a form of fucking state socialism exists, and that the supply demand curve is fucking bullshit. Here's a page from Debunking Economics looking at the socialism claim, it fucking rules, and it's the result of the fact that neo-classical economics and central planning were developed together. Kantorovich and Koopmans shared a Nobel Prize.

But wait, there's more! We can PROVE that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST. Do you have any idea how hard you can own libs with facts and logic if you can demonstrate that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST?

But seriously, if you go outside of the Marxist tradition there are all sorts of fun and useful things you can find in post-Keyensian circles and so on and so forth. I'm a huge fan of Karen Ho's Liquidated, an Ethnography of Wall Street/Liquidated_%20An%20Ethnography%20of%20Wall%20Street%20-%20Karen%20Ho.pdf) which looks at how the people at banks and investment firms actually behave and, oh boy, is it bad news (they're literally incapable of making long-term decisions which is wonderful in the face of climate change).

Oh, and also, all of the bankers are essentially indoctrinated into thinking they're the smartest people in the world, so that's fun.

This may sound like I'm shitting on Marxism, and I sort of am, but there's Marxist stuff coming out that I absolutely love! @chuangcn is a good example of what I think the benchmark for leftist economics and historical analysis should be.

Chuang responded to the call put out by Endnotes to cut "The Red Thread of History," or essentially to stop fucking arguing about 1917, 1936, 1968 and so forth and look at material conditions instead of trying to find our favorite faction and accuse literally everyone else of betraying the revolution, and then imagining what we would have done in their shoes. The present is different from the past and we need to organize for this economic and social reality, not 1917's.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBvBIVhXYAYlVfj.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBvBM3CXoAA7Qmx.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBvBP0SWkAEl6OX.jpg

Chuang produced an incredibly statically and sociologically detailed account of the Chinese socialist period in issue 1 and the transition to capitalism in the soon to be put online issue 2 that focuses on shifts in production and investment and shifts in China's class-structure and how urban workers, peasants, factory mangers, technicians, and cadre members reacted to those movements and shaped each others decisions and mobilizations. They largely avoid discussions of factional battles of the upper level of the CCP, which dominate liberal and communist accounts of the period and produce, in supposed communists from David Harvey to Ajit Singh, a Great Man theory of history.

Instead, they trace how strikes and peasant protests shaped the CCP's decision making and how the choices of people like Mao and Deng Xiaoping were limited by material conditions, in this case by their production bottleneck.

What's great about Chuang is that their work is so rich in sociological detail that you don't need to agree with them at all about what communism is and so on for their account to be useful, and they force us to think about the world from the perspective of competing classes bound by economic reality, instead of the black-and-white "good state/bad state," "good ruler/bad ruler," discourse that dominates our understanding of both imperialism and the global economy.

I'm just going to end this with a TL;DR: Cut the read thread of history and stop fucking arguing about 1917, use economic theory to dunk on Stupidpol and shitlibs. When you talk about "material conditions" talk about the production process, supply chains, capital movements and so on, not which states are good and bad (the bourgeoisie is a global class friends), recognize that strategies need to be built around current economic and social conditions, WHICH ARE INSEPARABLE FROM RACE AND GENDER, climate change is more complicated than the 100 companies meme (I only touched on this but please read Fossil Capital and Carbon Democracy), and in general try to learn more about different schools of economics and social theory, I swear reading something that wasn't written in 1848 isn't going to kill you.

[rf-times]

Leftist men on r/StupIDPol and similar subreddits are like , "I am able to recognise exactly one (1) axis of oppression and thus I can use slurs and be racist, ableist and misogynistic as fuck 😎"

[hook-line-and-anarchy]

i decided to waste some precious time scrolling through r/stupidpol. It literally is just racist conservative socdems spitting out the same kind of cultural takes you’d expect from like jordan peterson or some shit

[arcticdementor]

Nick Carr recently wrote a series of small articles about Mark Zuckerberg's newest pet project/monster. If you're curious, you can read the other two here and here, but this is the one that seems most relevant to this sub's interests.

If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, just scroll down and skim the passages I've bolded. The long and short of it is that venture capitalist and early Facebook investor Marc Andreessen thinks the world of Ready Player One is the one we ought to be building, and is pretty much openly declaring "you will live in the pod, you will eat the bugs, you will wear the headset, and you will be grateful."

Bonus appearance by gamification exponent/moron Jane McGonical.

…

In describing the metaverse, Zuckerberg has stressed the anodyne. There will be virtual surfing, virtual fencing, virtual poker nights. We’ll be able to see and smile at our colleagues even while working alone in our homes. We’ll be able to fly over cities and through buildings. David Attenborough will stop by for the odd chat. Andreessen’s vision is far darker and far more radical, eschatological even. He believes the metaverse is where the vast majority of humanity will end up, and should end up. If the metaverse Zuckerberg presents for public consumption seems like a tricked-out open-world videogame, Andreessen’s metaverse comes off as a cross between an amusement park and a concentration camp.

But I should let him explain it.  When Soldo asks, “Are we TOO connected these days?,” Andreessen responds:

Your question is a great example of what I call Reality Privilege. … A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also \all* of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.*

The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build — and we are building — online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

…

In Andreessen’s view, society is condemned, by natural law, to radical inequality. In a world where material goods are scarce and human will and talent unequally distributed, society will always be divided into two groups: a small elite who lead rich lives and the masses who live impoverished ones. A few eat cake; the rest get, at best, crumbs. The entire history of civilization — Andreessen’s “5,000 years” — bears this out. Any attempt, political or economic, to overcome society’s natural bias toward extreme inequality is futile. It’s just magical thinking. The only way out, the only solution, is to overturn natural law, to escape the quote-unquote real world. That was never possible — until now. Computers have given us the chance to invent a new world of virtual abundance, where history’s have-nots can experience a simulation of the “glorious substance” that history’s haves have always enjoyed. With the metaverse, civilization is at last liberated from nature and its constraints.

…

McGonical holds out hope that reality can be “fixed” (by making it more gamelike), but Andreessen would dismiss that as just another example of magical thinking. What you really want to do is speed up the out-of-reality migration — and don’t look back.

Andreessen is not actually suggesting that the metaverse will close the economic gap between haves and have-nots, it’s important to note. At a material level, there’s every reason to believe that the gap will widen as the metaverse grows. It’s the Reality Privileged, or at least its Big Tech wing, who are, as Andreessen emphasizes, building the metaverse. They will also be the ones who own it and profit from it. Andreessen may expect the Reality Deprived to see the metaverse as a gift bestowed upon them by the Reality Privileged, a cosmic act of noblesse oblige, but it’s self-interest that motivates him, Zuckerberg, and the other world-builders.

Not only would the metaverse expand their wealth, it would also get the Reality Deprived out of their hair. With the have-nots spending more and more of their time experiencing a simulation of glorious substance through their VR headsets, the haves would have the actual glorious substance all the more to themselves. The beaches would be emptier, the streets cleaner. Best of all, the haves would be able to shed all responsibility, and guilt, for the problems of the real world. When Andreessen argues that we should no longer bother to “prioritize improvements in reality,” he’s letting himself off the hook. Let them eat virtual cake.

…

The paradox of Andreessen’s metaverse is that, despite its immateriality, it’s essentially materialist. Andreessen can’t imagine people aspiring to anything more than having the things and the experiences that money can buy. If the peasants are given a simulation of the worldly pleasures of the rich, their lives will suddenly become “wonderful.” They won’t actually own anything, but their existence will be “immeasurably richer and more fulfilling.”

When we take up residence in the metaverse, we’ll all be living the dream. It won’t be our dream, though. It will be the dream of Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg.

[I find myself wondering how this differs, really, from Moldbug’s “virtual option” to the “dire problem.”]

[supernulperfection]

(Yes, plenty.)

[soulvomit]

Omg, this was on r/stupidpol. “I was in a relationship like this and it crushed me emotionally and drove me down a dark path where I didn’t work and started using heroin. I was genuinely made to believe that I was a horrible person and no matter what i did, her and her gay friends would literally bully me. I stopped doing things I loved that were considered toxicly masculine like marital arts and working on cars.”

I think they meant to type “martial arts,” not “marital.”  But GAH! Holy crap. That is kind of familiar, only for me it was being a computer nerd who played tabletop games with mostly guys. There are reasons I hung out in leather/queer/genderqueer space, it’s because I got along better there.  I kind of actually was a terrible person in some ways, though. I developed a tude similar to some incel/niceguy types, and I’d been a teenager/young adult with a lot of dates and a lot of friends in straight culture who suddenly was a social loser in LGBTQ culture but part of it is the sense of entitlement I walked in with. I just expected everyone to adore me wherever I went. 

[fierceawakening]

@soulvomit Join me at r/stupidpol in case I end up leaving this place... it's a breath of fresh air.

That was real life!

I mean. Zoom, but... yeah

[roaninlynch]

If I had balls I would make a Reddit post to complain about r/seculartalk in the r/stupidpol sub but like shitlibs in the seculartalk sub are vicious and I’ve had 2 warnings already so like I’m sure if I trashed them in stupidpol (even though they deserve it) I would be banned for sure