Hi there,

I'm sure you've seen me around, as I've been here for quite while. I enjoyed and saw how this site grew, etc, but what I enjoyed was the genuine topics and conversation of discussions about this site. Perhaps it is the reintegration of life and routine, away from Covid, but I've noticed a decline in quality that makes me reminiscent and nostalgic for the past and even for members like LiberalSocialist.

You used to have something to say, regularly.

Chapochat/Hexbear wasn't just recycled memes and images from r/thedeprogram or r/trueanon.

There are still interesting things and conversations that are posted but they've been drowned out by pages of mediocre images that substitute picture and image for discussion and introspection; as another poster once typed, paraphrasing, we're all just trying to create site taglines and phrases and substituting quips for insight and catharsis.

Fair enough that catharsis, solidarity, and revelation can only be achieved through living your life and not through quiet meditation and discussion on reddit or psuedo-reddits. But there was at least more frequency of effort posts, venting, and exegesis of history, current and social events, and understanding of the world or at least an effort to do so.

To my observation, such that I lurk here, Such effort is only spared on video games. On media. On the dunk_tank. On getting upset about wrong opinion.

Despite the federation, this site seems to have only become isolated and divorced of what made it unique: effortposting.

Maybe it's not just Hexbear. Maybe that is why UlyssesT left; the catharsis is exhausted and online space is dominated by a a tendency for performative and justified outrage and yearning for solidarity and emotional validation. But rather than copium, as anyone afflicted with a disease would prefer, some small part of me wanted prognoses rather than diagnoses.

I don't know. I reflect on things like /moretankiechapo or /genzedong and see how things have declined in qualityposts. Perhaps it is for the better, as UlyssesT had discovered, to have the impetus to go outside and not only live life but to evangalize socialism and recapture purpose and community.

I'll see you tomorrow.

  • Alaskaball [comrade/them]
    ·
    6 months ago

    Theodor Adorno, one of the dominant theorists of the Frankfurt School, attacked Lukács in 1958 when the latter was still under house arrest for supporting the 1956 revolution in Hungary. Writing in Der Monat, a journal created by the occupying U.S. Army and funded by the CIA, Adorno charged Lukács with being “reductive” and “undialectical,” writing like a “Cultural Commissar,”

    I aspire to be called a Cultural Commissar by some ultra dweeb like Lukács

      • Alaskaball [comrade/them]
        ·
        6 months ago

        I stand by my statement. Being called a stalinist or some variant of Bolshevik, or something as silly as "cultural commissar" as an insult by western "leftists" is something I wear with pride.

        Also rereading that entire article still made my eyes glaze over in the exact way trying to read 19th century to modern philosophy does.

        • voight [he/him, any]
          ·
          6 months ago

          It hits different for me since I will scrutinize almost any internet cult & I see people assembling this stuff into reading lists alongside basic marxists texts with zero african or latin american writers. They play their word games and come out swinging against the periphery because they focus on media criticism.

          They'll confidently post some British Hong Kong-based paper writing about how China paid the clouds not to rain on the Mekong river & we need to defend colonial era Filipino / Guyanese claims pushed by the US from Chinese/Venezuelan imperialism

          I used to love doing Citations Needed type stuff but you really see the shortcomings of this practice after a few major events happen and people are left stranded, biting into Ukrainian nationalist and Zionist narratives

          Like people are still comparing the start of Putler's illegal invazzion/the SMO to Palestine rn. Abby Martin and Mark Ames were doing this bizarre "im so sorry i didn't believe you glowies, but people should be talking about Palestine instead" trick and all it seems to have done is cemented the connection in people's minds.

          • Alaskaball [comrade/them]
            ·
            6 months ago

            It hits different for me since I will scrutinize almost any internet cult & I see people assembling this stuff into reading lists alongside basic marxists texts with zero african or latin american writers. They play their word games and come out swinging against the periphery because they focus on media criticism

            Are you talking about including the writers of the Oscar Meyer wieners school, the irrationalist philosophers, or the ethno-nationalist philosophers mentioned in your article?

            I used to love doing Citations Needed type stuff but you really see the shortcomings of this practice after a few major events happen and people are left stranded, biting into Ukrainian nationalist and Zionist narratives

            I feel this one. I've just gotten exhausted over major events happening every other week.

            • voight [he/him, any]
              ·
              6 months ago

              Here's an example reading list:

              The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord

              The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) by Walter Benjamin

              The Culture Industry from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer

              Discipline and Punish (1975) by Michel Foucault

              Simulacra and Simulation (1981) by Jean Baudrillard

              Manufacturing Consent (1988) by Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky

              The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) by Slavoj Zizek

              Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990) by Gilles Deleuze

              Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) by Fredric Jameson

              Spectres of Marx (1993) by Jacques Derrida

              Capitalist Realism (2009) by Mark Fisher