#western morals and ethics

[lovebird965]

I've committed genocide in games and in my novels! Hurray!!!!!

I've committed genocide in games and in my novels!

In game and my head, my novels, I have committed genocide thousands of times, targeting all humans around the world!

In the game, in my head, and in my novels, I have repeated the action thousands of times, exterminating humanity itself by genocide all humanity around the world!

I have committed genocide many, many times just for my own fun and happiness!

I have the most fun causing indiscriminate genocide in my head, in my novels, and in games!

I ENJOYED COMMITTED GENOCIDE AND EXTERMINATE!

LONG LIVE GENOCIDE!!!

GENOCIDE HURRAY!!!!

If YOU'RE GOING TO PUNISH ME, TRY IT!!! INFERIOR WORMS!!!

[saltyyetbland]

ngl im fucking terrified of how the fandom will act when the asian ccs get added and they are confronted with asian customs such as honorifics, asian cultural norms, and the language itself (ie words that are common in one language that sounds like a slur in another) and i know most of the fandom will be open and welcoming but idk im probably being way too pessimistic as someone who is asian and has seen the bs that people can spew esp regarding things like stereotypes

[gregorsamsairl]

Nietzsche and Nihilism

If there's one thing that really grinds my gears it's when people treat Nietzsche as some sort of face of nihilism. I think anyone who is well-versed in Nietzsche's work would agree that the guy is definitely not a nihilist, as he is very openly against it in almost all his works.

I believe this misunderstanding of Nietzsche's philosophy mostly comes from the averages person's understanding of worth.

When Nietzsche said, "God is dead," he was referring to the objective meaninglessness of the world. A lot of people take this at face value, understanding objective meaninglessness as absolute meaninglessness. However, this is not the point Nietzsche was trying to make at all.

In our age of enlightenment values and reason, the western man values objectivity and shuns subjectivity (If you want to read more about the negative effects of enlightenment principles, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment is great). This sort of "facts over feelings" mindset is exactly what led to the nihilist interpretation of Nietzsche being so common. When people read that this guy thinks that objective meaning does not exist, they can't fathom any other meaning existing, because their whole life has been built around putting objectivity on a pedestal, they cannot begin to think about finding anything of significant value through their own subjectivity.

However, this is exactly what Nietzsche is proposing in his work. Objective meaning may be gone, but that does not mean that meaning is impossible, we should instead chose what has meaning to us, based on our own subjectivity. That is what he means when he speaks of the "will to power." My personal understanding of the will to power is simply the desire to be yourself ("simply" is perhaps the wrong word, it's much more nuanced than just "being yourself" but I think it sums it up nicely).

In fact, Nietzsche's main criticism of the modern Christian church was actually that it was "necessarily nihilistic." Modern Christianity puts all its focus on the afterlife. Even if they claim to be worried about being kind and spreading the truth of God, at the end of the day they are only doing that so they can go to heaven when they die. Taking the emphasis off of this life and placing it on the afterlife is precisely what makes modern Christianity nihilistic to its very core.

A notion Nietzsche touches on briefly after his denouncement of modern christianity is that of eternal recurrence. On this, he claims that we should live our lives in such a way that we would be happy to live it over and over again for all eternity. A lot of people dislike this claim, and point out that a lot of people aren't born in circumstances in which they can be happy over and over again (ex: because of poverty, discrimination, political situations). I don't disagree with this at all, there are an incredible amount of people who have to live in situations out of their control which make them unhappy with their life. However, you have to remember that Nietzsche is much more metaphysically inclined. When he says you should live a life you would want to life over and over again, he is more talking about the person you are. You should make choices about your virtues and your morals which would make you happy about the person you are, so much so that you would want to be you over and over again, no matter your external circumstances.

I actually used to hate Nietzsche, as I had only heard of him through this sort of depressed high school boy view that twisted him into a nihilist. However, once I read him for myself, I found his message extremely inspiring, and helped me mentally a lot. The idea of being yourself no matter your circumstances is a beautiful one, and I think it's really sad that most people just view Nietzsche as the nihilism guy.

Remember to be yourself!!!! Nietzsche said so!!!!!!

For anyone who wants to read it, here's a bonus question from an exam that I took this semester where I basically said the same thing as above, but it's worded more concisely I think:

"It is often claimed that Nietzsche is a nihilist and his philosophy is nihilistic in nature. Do you agree with this claim? Indeed what is behind Nietzsche’s denying modern society, traditional values, morality, and Christianity? How would you argue?

I strongly believe that Nietzsche is not a nihilist. In his claim that there are no objective virtues, he is not negating the meaning of human life, he is stating that there are no universal values. I think a lot of the misunderstanding of this claim making Nietzsche a nihilist comes from people's view of subjective vs objective value. Objective values are not inherently more "real" than subjective ones, and I believe this is where the most common mistake is made. Nietzsche advocating for subjective virtues does not make these virtues any less significant than objective ones. Life still has meaning, but it's up to every individual to decides on those virtues for themselves. In Nietzsche's denying of society, traditional values, morality, and Christianity come from his advocation of individuality, and subjective values. He denies society, and Christianity because it values a slave mindset, and thus hatred (ressentiment) of "the other," even denouncing modern Christianity for being "necessarily nihilistic" for focusing on the afterlife rather than our current one. He denies traditional values as well as morality because they are both discussed from a universal, objective standpoint. In all four of these, he does not deny them because they give meaning to life, or because he advocates for people doing whatever they want, he denies them because they take away the existential value of the individual. Thus, I would conclude that Nietzsche is definitely not a nihilist. Life's meaning is not removed when we don't have the guiderails of the objective to tell us how to make choices. If anything, life would have a more personal, passionate meaning when the individual gets to decide for themselves what gives their life meaning."

[nando161mando]

I reject the notion of "Western Christian values" period. It's a gaslight. There are none.

[thottybrucewayne]

"Erm, if you callout this mangaka or anime director for following cp creators on pixiv you might as well not read manga or watch anime at all because a lot of them do that!"

[laabx]

Has the west influenced my values and traditions?

As a person, who was born in the middle east, and raised in Europe, I sometimes ask myself if my values have been influenced by the west….Sometimes I feel ashamed for my religion and my background, because people here look down on you. They always underestimate you and think that you aren't as good as them. So, I kind of feel further away from my values and traditions, because they have been replaced by the western culture. Do you think that you can hold on your traditons while adapting new ones?

[comradekatara]

actually i just realized why interpretations of [atla] characters that are like “aang doesn’t lie” (blatantly textually false) or “katara would be offended by swearing” (sensically false) are so common. aang and katara are the most overtly ethical characters in the show, and people [subconsciously] associate morality with honesty and “clean language.” but none of aang’s principles preclude him from lying (he lies. a lot), just as nothing in katara’s moral code dictates that she must be a square (she is, in fact, the furthest thing from a square, and if you argue otherwise you are simply misremembering her character). i can understand why people think that an ethically principled person would consider honesty a virtue, even if aang clearly doesn’t, but the association between morality and language feels like a very christian (to broadly generalize) conception of “sin” and moral transgression that doesn’t map onto the atla characters whatsoever, and is entirely a projection of the largely american (and otherwise western) viewership. inversely, fanart that depicts “modern au” azula as some kind of goth abg with dyed hair and leather pants also attempts to map our internalized notions of how aesthetics are illustrative of morality onto a character who would clearly never present herself in any way countercultural. if azula were suddenly transported to montclair, new jersey, she would be a conservative and present herself accordingly (most likely scenario she would dress like shiv roy). i’m not saying all this to condemn the activity of projecting onto characters, as i clearly participate and engage in these fandom-cultural practices, but rather that i think it’s important we be mindful of what connotations are carried in certain interpretations and depictions, because even our subconscious associations can stem from a legacy of cultural contexts, often embedded within harmful institutions we may not consciously wish to associate with, or that are simply not useful or relevant associations when thinking through whatever thing we are in the process of fandomitizing.

[fernsbyisntreal]

Enjoy this transcription of a speech I completed for an assessment, I really enjoyed delving into this topic and would much like to touch on it again with a deeper investigation

[qqueenofhades]

Hwy dod we even need to send more money to Ukraine tho like we’ve already supported them plenty! But let Europe pull their weight and we can go back to spending that money on American policies

Do you read like, any news outside Tumblr, any Ukrainian perspectives, any basic analyses of the conflict, any rationale from Democrats or Congress, or anything? Because, in brief:

Ukrainians are currently facing a full-scale genocide. It has been going on for over a year and Russian military leadership has every plan to continue until fruition. If they stop resisting, there will be no more Ukraine or Ukrainians. So all the "appeasers" or "realists" insisting that Ukraine should "give up land for peace" (which notably worked so well with Czechoslovakia and Hitler in 1938) are basically deciding that it's fine to let the genocide be carried out, if it's even minorly inconvenient for us. Putin and cronies have repeatedly stated that if they are successful in taking Ukraine, they will go further. This is the exact scenario that leads to the "escalation" and/or WWIII that various people keep wringing their hands over. It is far more just and safe for Ukraine to be supported now and to stop that before it gets even worse.

America is not actually giving over buckets of black cash, regardless of what various bad-faith takes claim. They are handing over weapons valued at various amounts of money, along with some financial and budgetary aid. A lot of these weapons are older and would cost more to decommission than they cost to give to a sovereign democracy fighting for its life against an imperialist autocratic neighbor. This is some tiny amount like 5% (if that) of America's bloated military budget. And again: it's actual weapons valued at a certain dollar amount. These cannot be spent on American domestic policies.

The idea that helping Ukraine is directly coming out of our own pockets or preventing us from spending as needed on our own needs is propaganda. It is not good to repeat it.

I wrote this post the other day about why Putin is trying so hard to break American/Western support for Ukraine, and why the hard-right MAGA has enabled him in it. Putin's Russia is the motivating nexus, coordination, and funding center for Russian/European/American far-right theocratic fascism. This whole "America Only" is the exact rationale that appeals to said far-right domestic fascists and gives Putin and other imperial expansionist kleptocrats the justification to just throw away post-WWII international order and declare that any larger and more powerful state can systematically eradicate any neighboring country, claim its territory, destroy its government, kill its people, and get away with it. Because why would they stop, if there aren't any consequences and they are rewarded for it?

Putin has repeatedly interfered in American elections to help Trump and the Republicans. That should tell you something about who he sees as most favorable to his interests and what he would do again if allowed to emerge victorious.

Europe IS actually pulling its weight! They just brought all 27 defense ministers to Kyiv, they have been working on Ukraine's accession talks, they have committed all types of weapons (including the long-range missiles that the US still won't clearly authorize), they've committed a new tranche of 5 billion euros in long-term assistance, etc. But the whole "we should pull out of NATO and leave Europe to fend for itself" was a key isolationist and xenophobic Trump idea. We can see what that led to.

American aid is vital to Ukraine's continued existence as a sovereign country, period, and it is in American interests to continue to provide it as agreed upon. Not least because such an egregious betrayal of a democratic ally would empower the fascists of the world, both Russian and American, and because as noted, if this conflict was not stopped and got bigger, it would then involve American troops. It is a moral, democratic, political, and ethical imperative. This is not a difficult call or a complicated situation, regardless of what the Online Leftist tankies and the MAGA-world nutcases (because horseshoe theory) want you to think.

Слава Україні.

The end.

[bakasara]

Trying to parse my thoughts on Izzy's death and why I had a different reaction to it than I thought I would. To summarize: I thought I wouldn't like it, but also that they wouldn't do it; the opposite happened– they did it but I'm ok with it.

I'm also feeling like talking through some mourning for an amazing character, so follow along if that's you, too 😌

(I should probably clarify the following thoughts are coming from someone who deeply enjoyed this season.)

I first wondered what would be of Izzy around the end of season 1. I expected him to have a heel-face turn – which I object to calling a redemption arc and I'll get into why, because the distinction ties into his death imo. A lot of antagonistic characters' changes of heart end directly in death, but I thought they'd subvert that trope. And they... did, actually, despite Izzy dying. Not an option I had imagined.

What the show avoided is the logic, the set of tropes attached to the deaths of this kind of character. These deaths usually come as a consequence of the character's changed ethics or "redemption". My being against that scenario came from the diverging natures of traditional redemption arcs and OFMD's rhetoric.

A traditional redemption arc functions by a kind of catholic logic, if you will: the villain can become one of the good guys by balancing out his "sins"/bad deeds with enough good deeds to tip a moral scale. This often involves a purifying suffering, which acts as an agent to expiate one's faults. To the viewer, this suffering can serve to activate our empathy and make the character more sympathetic. It can also legitimize his quest: our trust in the character's good intentions comes from seeing that the character is ready to make sacrifices to become better and he isn't deterred by the hardships of doing the right thing.

The death occurring at the end of a traditional redemption arc acts as the ultimate sacrifice and/or purification. A number of ideas might be at play behind it, depending on each story: only in death can the soul become fully pure, or a final sacrifice is "needed" to demonstrate the change once and for all, or change was only possible up to a point after which there is no viable/acceptable future – the character deserves moral points for changing, but not so many that he also deserves a full life, or past crimes make him more expendable, etc.

But these are all ideas that aren't evoked in any of the crew's journey in OFMD. For starters, the show isn't interested in "catholic" redemption; its focus is on reintegration/rehabilitation into the community. Rather than appealing to the more traditional (in Western media) and more christian principle of "purification of the soul through mortification of the body", it plays with notions of restorative justice.

We see it especially this season with Ed and Izzy. Ed's arc is a whole little lab for it. We have the community being made to decide whether he can stay or should leave; catbell!Ed is made to apologize to the people affected – which he initially does abysmally, with what fandom has dubbed his "CEO's/YouTube apology". Later, he's given the opportunity to have a more honest and genuine conversation with Fang where he learns about how he hurt him. He's made to repair some of the material damage his behavior caused. Some members feel repaid by the idea that they did to him the same he did to them (Fang) while others don't (Lucius), and the show touches on what this means for each/legitimizes both feelings. Arguably, Ed using his treasure to throw Calypso's birthday party – a much needed refrain and moment of social (re-)connection within the community – is an additional form of reparation. While Stede's belief in Ed has a clear role in helping Ed change for the better, Izzy's s2 journey focuses even more intensely on the role of social support within an individual's constructive (re-)integration into their community. The show is condensed by choice of format, but the beats are all there.

With that kind of rhetoric set up, I'd never be able to accept Izzy dying in a way that feels like a punishment for his past crimes, nor in a way that should "confirm" his positive change/"purify" him for good. And he doesn't! By the time he dies, we know full well he's deeply changed, it's already established to completion. How it happens has nothing to do with proving himself – he's randomly shot in battle. It's never questioned that the time he got to live surrounded by affection mattered. The speech he gives Ed is only possible because he's changed, accessing a completely different perspective on piracy/life than before, like we see when he talks to Ricky earlier. The reason the whole crew is paying respect and crying is because he became "the new unicorn", a treasured member with a defined role. But his death itself is the show going back to the initial symbolism of Izzy as ultimate pirate. The narrative function of his death is underscoring that the age of piracy has come to an end. It's nothing to do with his change. It's posited as the "natural conclusion" (again, by symbolic function) of a character that represented piracy through-and-through, not the "natural conclusion" of a process of becoming better.

And for me, that difference changes everything. I can see and accept the logic behind it, even as I mourn Izzy as a character. It makes the grief feel like a catharsis I experience within the context of the story I'm watching, rather than a grief I feel from a show "betraying" me.

It's also a difference that completely changes how Izzy's death relates to his queerness. Izzy's change is intertwined with being able to express queer affection openly. Becoming "a unicorn" is this extremely queer imagery already – a magical rainbow creature. His role becomes akin to a mother to the crew (the mother hen!Izzy many headcanoned last season, tapping into his potential), a position that isn't extraneous to older queens, including our honored real-life mean-old-queer men. Last season he threatened another queer man for showing too much delicacy, effeminacy, vulnerability. Now, his change is a process that culminates in him singing a tender love song among the crew in drag. He's given the privilege of playing the soundtrack to our protagonists making love for the first time, which ties him symbolically to the event in a way it does no other crew member. Suffice it to say that insinuating his process of change should end in death would have been disastrous, as far as I'm concerned. Antithetical to the show's supporting ideology.

But that's not how it went. Grief occupies a big role in the queer community, but it's so rare that we get to experience it cathartically. In real life, we often have to contend with the ways queerphobia causes us trauma or even shortens our lives, or the lives of our friends. In fictional narratives, a lot of characters that get to express queerness unabashedly still die for the transgression. They're still usually the only queer character with relevant screen time or at all, at best one of two that formed a tragic couple.

We almost never have the opportunity to just mourn some motherfucker who died because they meant something else as well that was central to their character. To mourn and know we're mourning someone who wasn't ever punished for being queer-as-in-fuck-you and going all out. To mourn and not feel like it's another message of queer doom, because for once the character is surrounded by an entire crew of other queer characters that go on to live and be happy. To know the story is saying something about life, not about being queer. To know this kind of crafting was deliberate, too, because the creator has talked about working to avoid those tropes. I struggle to remember another time I had the opportunity to grieve for a queer character like they're a human being, without the implication that it's queerness itself that's a death sentence.

And honestly? It feels good. It feels like a form of catharsis I do not dislike. That I'm maybe kinda glad for. OFMD is and stays a magical world. Beyond that, in a show full of queers, one of them dies after getting some extraordinarily meaningful happiness, and it's peaceful, and I get to just be sad for the fucker without the gutting of being reminded that if you're gay, better not shoot too high. It feels like a completely different emotion that no other show, for now, would give me, but OFMD. To me, it's yet another thing it's pulled off.

As it's been known to do.

[girlactionfigure]

Know Thine enemy

I am not a Jew and I’m not a citizen of Israel. I haven’t even visited Israel. I don’t trace my religion back to a holy site in Jerusalem and I don’t have a problem with Arabs or Muslims or Christians. I’ve read about Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon; the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Ottomans; I know about the British, the Balfour declaration, Ben Gurion and Golda Meir. I know a bit about the Six-Day War and the Intifada. I might not have any personal stake in the Holy Land, but humanity certainly does - and I’m a human being.

The women, men, children, elderly people and soldiers who were kidnapped, tortured, raped, humiliated and murdered on Saturday by Hamas in sovereign Israel were human beings too.

Those who did it to them are not.

Imagine what kind of rational and ethical gymnastics you have to do to justify the cold-blooded murder of teenagers at a music festival; or watching a child, perhaps 5 years old, being prodded with a stick and made to cry for his mother in Hebrew while children of a similar age laugh and mock him? We don’t know that child’s fate and for all we know what followed may have been much worse. It’s depraved. To even enter a conversation about these disgraceful facts with a rehearsed retort about territory or Gaza being an “open-air prison” reeks of moral bankruptcy.

If you wail and scream about your land, dignity, rights, oppression and poverty but are willing to murder, rape, kidnap, torture or humiliate children; then I don’t have to listen to your reasons. When the video footage, photographs and stories of Saturday’s carnage come not from "Israeli propaganda” but from the Hamas terrorists themselves, then how am I to read anything else into it but that you want credit for these atrocities? You want me to know you did it. You want me to know you are proud of it. You want me to see you for who you are. Well, I do.

So, if you swarmed the Israeli Embassy in London, waving Palestinian flags and calling for genocide; if you went down to Times Square to celebrate a victory for decolonisation against “apartheid Israel”; if you sang along to “gas the Jews” chants at the Sydney Opera House or hung a “one settler, one bullet” Palestinian flag over Grayston bridge in Johannesburg then you’re telling me who you are. Well, I see you - and you’re my enemy.

I’m one of those people who believe civilisation is a real thing, and I’ve resisted the poison of moral relativists in the humanities departments of universities across the west who think that being nuanced about the idea of civilisation versus barbarism is a signal of intellectual prowess or critical self-reflection. Upon even a cursory investigation of these people or their positions, you will find every sign of pedestrian intelligence and self-absorbed navel-gazing, combined with a fetishisation of victimhood and always concomitant humourlessness. They too, are my enemies.

It is always interesting to note that only western liberal democracies tolerate and give succour to the most heinous arguments and positions in public protests. You couldn’t picket on the side of quite laudable things like education for girls in Taliban Afghanistan, gay rights in Syria, or against the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. The Ayatollahs of Iran wouldn’t allow women to protest the hijab there under threats of violence. But London, New York, Sydney and even Johannesburg will embrace marches where people actively call for genocide. This is not how allies behave.

Perhaps when the dust has settled we can examine the insidious links between Anglo-American leftism and antisemitism, between Europe never reckoning with what happened in the holocaust and their growing Muslim populations, and between ignorant regimes like mine in South Africa and their determination to stand alongside the worst human-rights abusers in the Middle East.

For now, it’s no big mystery that this has nothing to do with the existence of the State of Israel and everything to do with Jew-hatred - that great, festering wound in the side of humanity from which all prejudice flows. It has been there for thousands of years and every time we think it has healed, some monstrous collective claws it open again.

Hamas aren’t hiding the ball. Their leader, Ismail Haniyeh, safely skulking in Qatar, made this clear. He celebrated dead Jews, not territory won, nor Gazan lives saved.

I’m afraid there are only two sides in a war - your allies and your enemies. On September 11th, 2001, I knew whose side I was on. I feel the same today.

Gareth

Gareth Cliff

[drdemonprince]

Just chiming in to agree that that person is not a selfish bitch. I'm also really put off by moralistic performances of emotion, and I know in my case it's because it was part of a pattern of abusive behaviour that my mother did.

Anytime you expressed to her that there was a problem with her behaviour, she seemed to genuinely believe that if she put enough effort into weeping and crying on her children's shoulders, and verbally denigrating herself for being an inherently bad an immoral person, and stressing so much that she developed physical illnesses from it, then she could follow that up by asking for forgiveness - as if it would be cruel for us to continue her suffering by denying her that forgiveness. Except that to her, "forgiveness" meant "it's all swept under the rug, I have Atoned By Suffering Guilt, so now it doesn't matter and I can keep doing it again." (I really wonder how much the religious background of her parents' generation came into the formation of this worldview.) And at the same time, she refuses to read news that's "too upsetting" and never engages with literature or media about dark themes "because there's enough of that in real life."

It might be cynical of me to read this pattern into the way people talk online about genocide. But I keep seeing parallels. My perspective is that a) if you're not regulating your emotions well enough to function, then you have less capacity to offer practical help; and b) people who are actually trying to survive genocide want unnecessary human suffering to END, so you're not aligning yourself with that hope by engaging in rumination etc that compounds suffering with not practical benefit to anyone.

But also, watching my mother's behaviour has led me to add perspective c) that a lot of people (in Christian cultures?) haven't developed enough understanding of the complexity of the world and how to relate to it, and genuinely believe that an overblown emotionally affected reaction, followed by helplessness and thereby inaction, is the only possible way for them to respond when they're confronted with upsetting information that demands action from them. Being raised to think in a black-and-white "good vs evil" dichotomy, and thinking about people as "either morally good or morally bad" rather than thinking about people as neutral and behaviours as either ethically helpful or harmful... it doesn't give them a conceptual framework to integrate upsetting information and then carry on getting things done, it's like their moral anxiety gets them stuck and that keeps the emotions escalating.

I see people discussing this pattern in the context of religious trauma, and in the context of the cultural construct of "whiteness" - the discovery of something morally bad has to be followed by an extreme emotional reaction that basically amounts to protesting your own innocence and helplessness to deny responsibility for your direct behaviours (in my mother's case) or complicity in a corrupt system (in the case of overwhelmed average people learning about genocide).

Maybe I'm rambling more than I'm analysing here, but the comparison stands out a lot to me and it's troubling to watch.

yo anon no this is gold, thank you for sharing. This is remarkably astute.

I will add the quick caveat that hyperempathic people who are debilitated by their sensitivity exist, of course, and have very real struggles and none of this is intended to denigrate them. In practice, their behavior can have the impact of silencing criticism or distracting from the issue at hand but being wired that way certainly does not doom a person to behaving in a counterproductive, manipulative manner.

This critique is more about performative over the top empathy as a tactic (conscious or not) of offloading responsibility, and as a pseudo-religious ideology that makes predominately white western cultures particularly ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of their global plundering. almost certainly by design. Most moral teachings that we encounter in the west promote this tactic and ideology, and it gets very deeply ingrained in most us if we don't devote a ton of attention to uprooting it.

thanks for this great response.

[transmutationisms]

can you talk a bit more about weber (im refering to a post you made earlier today i think)? i know a bit about the protestant ethic theory but not really the historical context in which it was written nor how it's used today. thanks!

so, weber's argument is essentially that protestant (specifically calvinist and puritan) theology played a major causal role in the development of capitalism in northern europe following the reformation. his position was that protestant ethics, in contrast to catholicism, placed a high moral value on secular, everyday labour, but also discouraged the spending of one's wages on luxury goods, tithing to the church, or giving overmuch to charity. thus, protestants invested their money in business and commercial ventures instead, turning the generation of capital into a moral endeavour and venerating hard work and economic productivity as ways to ensure one's soul was saved (as the buying of indulgences was not an option for protestants).

this is a bad argument. at core it is idealist, subordinating an economic development to religious ideology. weber never explains how the actual, material economic changes he wants to talk about were effected by a set of ideas; he doesn't consider the possibility that the ideas themselves reflected in some way the material and economic context in which they were developed; he doesn't differentiate between protestantism as a causal factor in the development of capitalism, versus the possibility that capitalism and protestant conversion both resulted from some other factor or set of factors. <- these types of problems are endemic to 'history of ideas' aka 'intellectual history' because merely writing a history of the (learned, published) ideas circulating at a given time doesn't tell you jack about how and whether those ideas were actually implemented, how common people reacted to them or resisted them, what sorts of material circumstances the ideas themselves were formulated amidst, and so forth.

in the case of weber, it's very easy to poke holes in this supposed relationship between protestantism and capitalism. even in western europe alone, we could look at a country like france, which was quite catholic, never became predominantly or even significantly protestant, and yet also industrialised not long after, eg, the netherlands and england. we could also look at what historian michael kwass calls "court capitalism" in 18th-century france, which was a largely non-industrial form of capitalism that depended on the catholic king's central authority in order to ensure a return on investment. france at this time had a burgeoning luxury culture and a centralised, absolutist government that was closely entwined with the powerful catholic church—yet it also had economic development that is recognised as early capitalist, along with growing social and economic tensions between the nascent bourgeois and petit-bourgeois classes and the aristocracy. this is not even close to being the earliest example of capitalist or proto-capitalist economic development (some predates the reformation!), and again, this is within western europe alone—we could and should also point out that capitalism is not solely a european phenomenon and can and does coexist with other, radically different, religious ideology (i have problems with jack goody's work but this is something i think it can help elucidate).

weber argued that the 'spirit of capitalism' was no longer dependent on the protestant theology that had initially spawned it—but again, here we see issues with idealist methodologies in history. at what point, and how, does this 'spirit' become autonomous? what is it that has taken hold, if weber is not talking about the 'protestant ethic' itself and is also not interested in analysing the material changes that comprise capitalism except as effects of some underlying ideology? well, it's what he sees as a general shift toward 'rationalisation' and 'disenchantment' of the world, leading to an understanding of late 19th- and early 20th-century capitalism as a kind of spiritually unmoored servitude to mechanism and industry. this in turn relates back to weber's overall understanding of the legacy of the 'scientific revolution', which is another can of (bad) worms. there is a lot to say about these elements of weber's thought, but for starters the idea that europe was the progenitor of all 'scientific advancement', that it then simply disseminated such knowledge to the rest of the world (the apotheosis of the centre-periphery model, lmao), and that europe has become 'disenchanted', ie irreligious, as a result of such scientific advancement... is just patently bad analysis. it's eurocentric, chauvinistic, and simply demonstrably untrue in like twelve different ways.

anyway, when i see conservatives and reactionaries cite weber, i'm not surprised. his arguments are conservative (his entire intellectual paradigm in this text was part of his critique of marx and the premises of materialist / contextualist history). but when i see ostensible leftists doing it, often as some kind of dunk on protestantism (or christianity more generally, which is not even a good reading of weber's own understanding of catholicism), it's more irritating to me. i am not interested in 'leftisms' that are not materialist. weber's analysis is a bad explanation of how and why capitalism took hold; it doesn't even work for the limited northern european case studies he starts with because, again, idealist history fundamentally fails to explain how ideology itself creates material change. like, "some guy writes something down -> ??? -> everyone just agrees with him -> ??? -> stuff happens somehow" is not a good explanation of any phenomenon, lmao. if we are stuck on the idea that capitalism, a set of economic phenomena and real relations of production, is the result of ideology, then we will also be stuck trying to 'combat' capitalism on the ideological level. it's unserious and counterproductive. weber's analysis has retained an outsize position in the sociological historiography because it's an attractively simplistic, top-down, idealist explanation of both capitalism and protestantism that makes centuries worth of material changes to production forms into a kind of ideological coup ushering in an age of 'rationalism'. this is just not a text that tells us, leftists, anything politically useful. at best it is an explication of the internal psychological logics of (some) forms of protestantism in (some) places and contexts.

[sugaroto]

Round three

Sportacus is one of the main characters from Lazy Town, he's athletic and he often teaches the young kids how to be healthy and have fun outside while they touch some grass instead of playing video games. He's not greek but rather dubbed, though he plays an important role to our childhood

Socrates is a philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought

OG POST

[hussyknee]

You were right about tankies. They do not talk about tiananmen square. They do not talk about Tibet. They do not talk about uyghur. Wtf. No how is this possible? What?

The thing is that most white and western leftists are exactly as racist, imperialist, ethnocentric and tinhatted as right-wingers. For Global South people there's literally no difference in interacting with them sometimes, even if they talk more sense by virtue of their leftist politics. In that, they have a lot in common with liberals; they say all the right things until they're challenged in any meaningful way, which is when the mask slips.

Self-serving, egoistic people aren't saved by reading a bunch of political posts and books. True dedication to social justice requires humility first and foremost, a solid set of ethical and moral hard lines in engagement, and constant self-interrogation. It has to be moved by compassion for your fellow human and sense of accountability, not ideological fanaticism as result of personal disenfranchisement and sense of victimization at being excluded from privilege. Marxists (not even just Tankies) love to accuse conservatives and liberals of unquestioning ideological servitude and selfishness without ever looking in the mirror. They have absolutely no racial or decolonial praxis because that primarily involves listening and centering colonized and Global South people, instead of amplifying themselves to virtue-signal and chase clout.

In essence they're just bad human beings, exactly like every other self-victimizing, self-aggrandizing Zionist, TERF and MAGA-hat (both red and blue) that treat accountability like a personal threat and place ideology over human beings. That's why I say it's important to separate politics from your morals and ethics. Your politics are supposed to change but your moral and ethical foundation cannot.

Personally I take great comfort in being proven wrong about my beliefs almost daily. At least 95% of everything I have ever assumed to be true has been proven wrong, which is what gives me more confidence in the remaining 5%. I love being wrong because knowing that means I'm doing something right. I see so many people on here be the same way, it's honestly lovely and gives me faith and hope for humanity. That's real leftism.

[heavenlyyshecomes]

The Arab people are frequently accused by their opponents and sometimes by their friends of being too emotional. I, as a Palestine Arab woman, have something to be legitimately emotional about: the loss of my home and community and the denial of my present and future. But I am not going to succumb to emotionalism and allow my feelings to blind my reason and undermine my confidence in the capacity of my people to liberate their land. In spite of the power of the enemy, I intend to rely on revolutionary ideology and strategy and mass mobilisation to achieve our objectives. In my work I have chosen to be the ally of reason, not passion, and my party, the Popular Front, also analyses and reasons before acting. We do not embark haphazardly on adventurous and romantic individualistic projects to fulfill "individual needs" or "act out of frustrations and hostilities" as Western "scientific" psychologists hypothesise. We act collectively in a planned manner either to neutralise a prospective friend of the enemy or to expose a vital nerve of the enemy and, above all, to dramatise our own plight and to express our resolute determination to alter "the new realities" that Mr. Moshe Dayan's armies have created. Generally, we act not with a view to crippling the enemy because we lack the power to do so-but with a view to disseminating revolutionary propaganda, sowing terror in the heart of the enemy, mobilising our masses, making our cause international, rallying the forces of progress on our side, and underscoring our grievances, before an unresponsive Zionist inspired and Zionistinformed Western public opinion. As a comrade has said: We act heroically in a cowardly world to prove that the enemy is not invincible. We act "violently" in order to blow the wax out of the ears of the deaf Western liberals and to remove the straws that block their vision. We act as revolutionaries to inspire the masses and to trigger off the revolutionary upheaval in an era of counter-revolution. Dr. Habash, the Secretary General of the PFLP, has stated our human dilemma and our ethical view thus: After 22 years of injustice and inhuman living in camps with nobody caring for us, we feel that we have the very full right to protect our revolution, we have all the right to protect our revolution. Our Code of Morals is Our Revolution. What serves our revolution, what helps our revolution, what protects our revolution is right, is very right and honourable and very noble and very beautiful, because our revolution means justice, means having our homes back, having back our country, which is a very just and noble aim.

—Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary ed. George Hajjar