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Das Sein, das Seiende und das Dasein. how you translate that to English without getting confused?

the moment the left would understand and consider ontology/phenomenology, it couldn't be left anymore.

“ideas that cannot be embodied are basically entertainment” Yes, absolutely. I think about this a lot. You can follow YT streams and Xitter accounts and whatnot but at the end of the day if the stuff communicated via these mediums can’t be realized in the day-to-day life you live, they are more or less entertainment or a palliative to make living in an uncertain world easier to handle. Given that people can’t just conjure up community and local political movements out of thin air it’s an easy trap to get stuck in but also understandable because we don’t currently know how to create interconnected real world movements that can bring people together in a non-superficial way.

Check out the greatest predictor of crime is inequality. Also in USA roe v wade is said to effect the crime decrease since 1990. I work law enforcement adjacent and can definitely say crime would be far less with more social services. Look at how well the left is doing in Mexico because they are fighting crime

Great discussion to hear, going to be sharing this around.

28:30 Anger is a boundary defense mechanism and can easily be exploited as such but let's not forget that you'll need it if you want to learn anything at all pretty much.

~20:00 Maybe Russell Brand is a center left figure in the sense that what he does is to try to bully elected members of parliament into discussing multi trillion dollar issues (edit: And isn't that method what representative democracy boils down to?). He's got a tedious/superlative style and manner of approaching important topics worthy of disucssion and there is something to dislike about people like that getting the digital front page so to speak. I just also dislike it when people call it tailism or whatever to work with what is (a) given.

Acid teaches us that our experience of the world can be altered and is not rigid or set in stone. Buddhism teaches us the illusion of subject object duality and quantum physics demonstrates that the subject effects the object. The conclusion is a new materialism that includes our idealism i.e. the world can be altered through discourse and engagement.🧘‍♀️

This is the most enlightening discourse. You can tell you’ve put in hard work meditating.

My choice current of Nietzsche is shitting on Christians aka the Preachers of Death. Nobody can roast Christianity like that man could. Honestly I read him for the roasts period. Like this one, pretty apropos the topic: "All of you to whome furious work is dear, and whatever is fast, new, and strange - you find it hard to bear yourselves; your industry is escape and the will to forget yourselves...you do not have contents enough in yourselves for waiting - and not even for idleness."

Varn upload, best Christmas gift ever!

i do Agree Accepting mortality is just in general key 2 good heAlth in general

Would not the Campaign for a Socialist Party fit under the base-builders category by this definition?

There is a theory that the rise in violence in the 70's through 90's is related to lead poisoning.

I’m ok with citation of Wikipedia if we’re not in an academic paper. It’s usually good enough on anything that gets edited regularly and is well sourced. The inefficiency of Californias state spending is a great warning of how not to expect neoliberal democrats to solve problems by spending money. There’s just not a lot of accountability in how the money gets spent, and it’s a shame because those resources could do a lot if used the right way.

There’s a huge piece to this crime analysis that hangs on health. The lack of healthcare in the US is a force multiplier for criminalized forms of ‘disorder’ - issues ranging from chaotic substance use, falling out of education, employment & housing to higher degrees of impulsivity which lead some to violence. Worth noting how high the incidence of brain injury is among unhoused- greater than 50% experiencing traumatic brain injury which is larger than the percentage with addiction/chaotic drug use. The left audience in broad terms does not seem to have much attention for or interest in hearing from thinkers on the left who focus on health, social care, crime, family beyond surface engagement (often derisive) which is a contrast to how in-the-weeds folk will get on housing, climate, unions, the economy & electoral politics. Something Covid really surfaced and still hasn’t contended with My suspicion is these conversations code feminine & consequently don’t command respect, even when the consequences accrue

Combine a country that valorizes the abandonment of common inter-subjectivity and the disintegration of even the most basic symbolic order in the pursuit of the self, with a near-total foreclosure of class mobility, and what does one expect to happen? I will arrogantly presuppose that the United States has the largest cognitive dissonance between it’s narratives around possibility versus the reality of class stasis on the entire planet. However, I wonder if the US also has the largest propensity for dehumanizing, self-object vanity, as a byproduct of the aforementioned dissonance between achievement narratives, and the number of seats at the Table of Prosperity. I mean, the US is a country wherein the paranoia that every stranger is Schrödinger's scam artist is nearly ubiquitous. And though it’s a global phenomenon - especially in the Anglosphere - I’d add Schrödinger's cancel-culture klaxon as a near second place paranoia amongst career climbers and blue collar types, alike (I do sincerely view cancel culture as a career/jobs competition culling mechanism, a la the crab bucket metaphor). With that all in mind, is it any wonder that people might increasingly see direct criminality as a more viable - if not more appealing - channel toward gathering resources? The United States is a lumpenization machine. It’s not simply that we’re all on drugs, it’s that most in the US have to participate in gray, and black markets to survive, or to touch a vague illusion of access to the good life - even if one might have a square job. This fact, in and of itself, has hugely negative implications for any potential labor-based socialist project. Scavengers form gangs, they don’t build movements.

I personally prefer Marxist Leninism tendency

There is only.... VARNVLOG

Jk I hope u are doing well, will watch later

Ballz

~34:40 Now that I think about it Thomas Sowell/Asmongold do very much fit the Mutual Aid/Self Care angle. edit: ~37:47 wow it's like there's all this audience out there you could be going for but instead people are doubling down on their captured audience.

"this is why they are sectarian" It's either that from the inside or a gross unwillingness to engage from the outside on a level of evidence as a matter of psychological hangups/propaganda. I mean if there's a willingness to do debates(/popular engagement/etc.) anyhow. (I will say I was quite disappointed in Non-Compete when he joined the Landback bandwagon and had zero interest in discussing how this isn't just noble savages for Bezos as opposed to land reform for us all to enjoy) edit: Thinking out in text.

Since Occupy I have struggled to be multi-tenacdy in order to escape the limits of each, but lead into inaction by having all the limts imposed instead. I spent the last 6 years asrideof all this change doing a radio program to figure this out with media A 3, 'base build' with community media a 4. Being in the same spot, I'm back to Green Party work since that is also an org that does some of 1 while being clean of the dems. but suffer from the problems discussed. I'm trying to thread the needle of being a 1, I'm about to run for city council; many groups around me consider themsleves to be doing 4, just within their orgs, like DSA, pSL, SP etc

What about Leftvoice? The pure trotskist

Hey you linked part 2 twice

Speaking of competing book clubs, jean allen is now the editor of the bulletin of the Marxist Unity Caucus

It's over

There's no longer right and left. Now it's only up and down. That's as much Marxist theory as we need to grok.

Maybe you already do this a lot and I just happened to have not seen it but I agree strongly with the choice to put the actual text you are reading from up on the screen in the vod.

Prices have gone up. Wages haven't.

Long live the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia! My Kingdom!

Great comedy. Thanks

13:00 DSA Praxis = The Communist Caucus

08:10 DSA Momentum = Bread & Roses Caucus

Chris Smalls from the Amazon Labor Union just posted his bid to re-launch an American Labor Party.

I and a few others were building a powerful, effective M4A commitee. DSA local voted us out of existence. Time to elect Democrats. 3 yrs ago. Sickening.

Expressive hobbyists have pretty much been the strongest left tendency since the 1960s unfortunately.

These are great analyses and nice arrows to add to a quiver of analytical tools. I come from the Twin Cities IWW GDC milieu and think that's the most promising direction to go: a combination of all these tendencies except state participation, which (at this point anyway) only results in liquidation, wasted energy, and disappointment.

Another conversation about Democrats and third parties. It’s like deja vu all over again.

I'm sorry im not in the loop, I'm have been sick and have a small baby, everything went okay varn?

wouldn't be a Varn blog without shitting on Graeber.

Have you read Miguel Leon Portilla's stuff on Aztec philosophy? In one work he translated the Tlatelolco account of the conquest, which is itself a bit biased against its sister city of Tenochtitlan but quite interesting. One story he tells involves a mysterious owl warrior that the Spanish were unable to defeat.

Varn is particular "I have an issue with..." leftist that would talk about how we cant do anything about anything but just keep talking about. Socialism in one country did work in Soviet Union. Of course, it was not closed off society as trade with other countries was still happening but it doesnt contradict idea of socialism in one country. For the most part due to rapid industrialization and availability of necessary resources in many soviet republics Soviet Union was able to sustain itself and develop further as society. Law of value existed but was restricted therefore creating different social relations: it was transitional period, early phase of socialism. Soviet society did change during 20s and 30s and 40s. And Soviet Union was able to deal with national question well. There was sense of unity and developed friendship of nations. All soviet republics voted for staying in Soviet Union and against diisbanding USSR officially in 1991. Yeltsin and his cohorts went against people's desire.

43:03 the reasons we had a mass shift left is because in the midst of crisis Bernie offered a political conduit for action. His program was not defeated on the grounds of theory, it was defeated politically. The working class didnt become convinced that "social democracy" was bad. Basic economics-based class-centric, social democracy was destroyed by Democratic Party manuevres and anti-woke backlash. We on the left can address the Dems but wont admit the appeal of Trump. Considering that the appeal of Trump increased over the 12 years since Bernie dominated the political scene, our refusal to learn from the absurdities of the woke era is unforgivable. The left needs to figure out why it sacrificed something like Medicare for All to make things like trans rights or the hyperbolic claims of BLM the non-negotiables at a critical political moment. There was no "trans genocide" and white supremacy doesnt define the USA of this era. The woke analysis was weak, the demogogery powerful, the doxxing and street violence scary. The working class (at least the part of it that is stable and literate enough to vote) doesnt want to sacrifice sanity or freedom for milktoast economic reforms and is right not to trust a left that demands this devil's bargain of them.

Josh?! Wow my dream crossover. Prepare to be attacked, Josh.

Very interesting episode

29:33 Couldn't we see Guillaume Faye's Archeofuturism as an example of exactly this, a call to return to feudalism?

Three snaps! Good stuff. Please have a public discourse with Ben S and Dave McK at TU and Why Left? on this topic as it has the potential to help develop TU’s theory of Post-Class Fractured Mass with more fine grain. Love this

great vid!