hexagon_bear [any]

  • 2 Posts
  • 65 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: July 26th, 2020
  • hexagon_bear [any]tothe_dunk_tank•Vaush is bad masterpost
    ·
    3 years ago

    Gender and Sexuality (continued)

    • Thought Slime, who is nonbinary, gave their perspective on how gender abolition alone is insufficient.[3.25] Vaush dismissed it as “obviously dumb”.[3.26] Thought Slime said it was dismissive.[3.27] Vaush said “Are you always this fragile? A person asked me for my opinion on your take and I said it was dumb. It remains dumb. We’re both free to hold our opinions; I’m not pressing you for a debate.”[3.28]
    • “‘A lot of people say that you talk over trans people.’ They just make stuff up.”[3.29]
    • Transphobia, “balancing socialism and minority rights” class reductionism, and thinking that direct action is ever not possible.[3.30]
    • Thinks a transphobic comic by Stonetoss is funny even though the punchline is just “lol trans suicide.”[3.31],[3.32]
    • Said that Mel (a trans woman with voice dysphoria) used the abusive tactic of talking in a soft voice. “It’s the same thing that abusers do, by the way. There are a lot of abusive women who will play up their femininity or soft uwu shit as a way of avoiding responsibility for the behavior that they engage in.”[3.33],[3.34]
    • “Do you luhh tran peepoh [...] qui dogin thuh queschun do you luhh tran peepo”[3.35]
    • “Actually i got a warning earlier today for using the t-word”[3.36]
    • “I posted trans porn and didn’t get banned”[3.37]
    • “Trans people do not have a better understanding of trans-ness.”[3.38] While this is superficially true, it ignores the phenomenological question of “What is it like to be a bat?”
    • This was said jokingly, but it was also targeted towards the trans people he dehumanized: “you know / not suggesting anything / but if trans people didnt exist my notification feed would look a lot better rn / somebody needs to do something about the (((lovely trans advocates))) in my feed”[3.39]
  • hexagon_bear [any]tophilosophy•A Summary of “Supply Chains and the Human Condition” by Anna Tsing
    ·
    4 years ago
    Part 2/2

    New Figures of Labor

    • “Cultural” factors are often seen as an add-on to economic generalizations, but this is wrong
    • Workers are expected to perform aspects of their identity, thus establishing their own superexploitation
      • This especially applies to contract work, such as:
        • Day laborers: perform brawn and availability
        • Prostitutes: perform sexual charm
      • These performances (and thus superexploitation and self-exploitation) bring in work, and it is difficult to get work without them
      • Supply chain capitalism encourages the conflation of superexploitation and self-exploitation
    • Examples:
      • Walmart
        • Not a Christian company, but “came to claim the Christian orientation of many of its workers”
          • Christ is characterized as a “servant leader”
          • Men can take on service jobs without being “clerks”
          • The manager can be the leader of a “family” of employees”
        • Pretends to let people “prioritize” family and church over work to justify irregular hours and starvation wages
        • Walmart sponsored business students to study “the specific business culture of the Christian service sector,” but this Christian-ish work culture did not extent to suppliers at all
        • Walmart “is proud of the regional and religious roots of its specificity. [...] Indeed, because Wal-Mart claims to represent consumer interests, it can cast its pressure on suppliers as a feature of its cultural orientation to consumers, with whom, Wal-Mart claims, it shares priorities. [...] This formulation depends on Wal-Mart’s favored figure of labor power, the servant leader. The servant leader is not a conventional ‘‘economic’’ figure; it brings the contours of gender, race, region, nation, and religion into labor subjectification. [...] Gender discrimination is not just an add-on to universal problems of labor; gender discrimination makes labor possible in the Wal-Mart model.”
      • Clothing
        • By the end of WWII, sweatshops in the US were being phased out due to historical labor struggles. These jobs were outsourced, but this process reversed starting in the 1980s
          • Many sweatshops are run by small entrepreneur immigrants without much capital. They make use of the immigrant status to connect with other immigrants willing to work below minimum wage due to a lack of alternatives
        • Textile companies moved “their assembly plants abroad to match the superior sewing skills of women in the global South. These skills, the managers told her, are learned at home, not on the job. ‘This paradoxical framing of skill makes women’s ‘disadvantages’ in the labor market at least a temporary advantage’”
        • Because of subcontracting, firms are able to claim that they are unable to force contractors to comply with their own high ethical standards
          • E.g. Nike was protested for using child labor. Nike joined an independent monitoring org. The process originally included citizen and labor groups, but Nike just wanted the appearance of change
      • Shoppers
        • Consumers have been wrongfully depicted as the “leading force of oppositional politics”
          • “Vote with your dollar”
          • Advertising commodified dissent
            • E.g. the commodification of African American rebellion
              • This even affects sweatshop workers in Honduras, who want the jeans they make
      • Nonwork Livelihoods
        • “Nonwork” is only nominal
          • “Dreams of entrepreneurship and consumption shape worker subjectivities*/and the meaning of ‘‘work.’’”
        • “Independence” is very important, although it is nominal
        • Garment workers in China dream of opening fashion boutiques
        • U.S. chicken farmers and FedEx drivers
          • U.S. chicken farmers make below minimum wage
          • Work is coded as entrepreneurship
            • They are very beholden to the chicken companies and FedEx, respectively. Independence is nominal
            • Chicken farming here draws in white males, with their conception of independence
        • North American matsutake mushroom pickers
          • The supply chain has several layers of middlemen which connects pickers in North America and importers in Japan.
            • “But it is important to almost everyone along the chain that they be considered independent contractors rather than employees.” Nobody imagines themselves as working for someone else
              • E.g. mushroom pickers do not describe the activity as “work”
          • Pay is low, roughly equivalent to disability and unemployment
          • Interestingly, there was a strike of matsutake mushroom pickers. This did not lead to labor negotiations because there were no possible representatives for labor and management. Instead, the strikers aimed for newspaper reports and exposure.
          • Types of mushroom pickers
            • Middle-aged white men
              • E.g. “traditionalists,” ex-loggers, military veterans
              • They view themselves like gold rush prospectors
              • They reject common conceptions of wage labor
            • Southeast Asian refugees
              • They lack the cultural capital (language, education, employment history, etc.) to find decent wage-labor
              • They make use of their community-building skills
                • They compare the mushroom camps to Laotian villages a and Thai refugee camps
            • “The nonwork status of mushroom picking is a reminder of the specificities of the cultural history that allowed the twentieth-century labor movement to take ‘‘work’’ for granted as the locus of negotiation between labor and capital. Nineteenth- and twentiethcentury labor struggles created the dignity of work as a sacrifice of time and effort in exchange for a wage. In the twenty-first century, an increasing number of laborers do not imagine their activities primarily through this history’s categories. Most commentators on this problem argue that less people are doing hard, physical labor; today, they say, the economy is run almost entirely by service and information. I see no evidence of the withering away of tiring, repetitive, or physical chores, although perhaps some have been moved farther away from privileged commentators. The issue is not that these chores have gone away. Instead, the challenge is that people doing these chores may not see themselves within familiar frameworks of labor.” This leads to…
        • China
          • In a coastal town in Fujian Province, men seek to go abroad, work in low-paying jobs like restaurants and warehouses in places like New York, and send remittances home
            • This is seen as “the fulfillment of a manly destiny and not just a matter of chores”
            • Meanwhile in the coastal town in Fujian, there is viewed to be no work for men. Remittances sent from those abroad are used to hire peasant migrants from poorer villages
              • These peasants are also looking for work to send remittances home and fulfill their “manly destiny”
              • coastal Fujian migrants : New York :: non-coastal Fujian migrants : Fujian coast
          • “Where ‘work’ as imagined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century labor movements is not a framework for people’s descriptions of their activities, it will be really hard to mobilize around familiar labor slogans or the notion of ‘solidarity’ that they inspired. Another set of articulations is needed. These will probably have to stay close to cultural niches and the links between them.”

    Conclusion (End of “New Figures of Labor” + “Into the Labyrinth”)

    • “Supply chain capitalism makes use of diverse socialeconomic niches through which goods and services can be produced more cheaply. Such niches are reproduced in performances of cultural identity through which suppliers show their agility and efficiency. Such performances, in turn, are encouraged by new figures of labor and labor power in which making a living appears as management, consumption, or entrepreneurship. These figurations blur the lines between self-exploitation and superexploitation, not just for owneroperators but also for the workers recruited into supplier enterprises. Through such forms of exploitation, supply chain capitalism creates both great wealth and great poverty.”
      • But this doesn’t mean that supply chain capitalism controls diversity. Supply chains are heterogenous, such as French supply chains favoring difference while British supply chains favor cultural similarity. This is based on the histories of those nations and colonialism, rather than disinterested “economics.”
    • “Because diversity is not entirely created by employers, it offers a wealth of resources, for better or worse, that workers use without considering the best interests of their employers.”
    • “The mushroom pickers I am studying want to be foraging in the mountains. Here they can combine making a living and revitalizing ethnic and gender histories. Supply chains are not always evil.”
    • “even in the most exploitative situations, nonwork identities are not only about labor discipline; they also open alternatives.”
    • Diversity is the source of low wages because it can divide people with shared class interests, but it also a source of radical criticism and, potentially, creative alternatives
  • hexagon_bear [any]toem_poc•*Permanently Deleted*
    ·
    4 years ago

    I summarized “Supply Chains and the Human Condition” by Anna Tsing. It's the first time I've read something like this, so it's not very good.

    edit: https://hexbear.net/post/97241

  • hexagon_bear [any]tomutual_aid•where can i get involved creating audiobooks of communist works?
    ·
    4 years ago

    Here's a list of sites with leftist audiobooks. Some of the youtube channels have readings done by different people.

    http://audiobookbay.nl/

    https://librivox.org/

    https://www.marxists.org/audiobooks/

    https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/audiobooks.md

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaO1QA8QL99_eb0XhJI2Fyw/playlists

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3ClSqbN5tlXOuFj3eqyAoA/playlists

    https://www.youtube.com/c/DankAudioStash24/playlists

    https://www.youtube.com/user/examinfo/playlists

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEzvnHqlIPv0QbXpdoH0f0Q/playlists

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLuOU7ExpyrupHu35sIqgnQ/playlists

  • hexagon_bear [any]tothe_dunk_tank•Vaush is bad masterpost
    ·
    3 years ago

    Race

    • “In this video, i drop an n-bomb. Biiiig one; hard 'R'. I did this to show my interlocutors that their language doesn't impress me, that their slurs don't frighten or disarm me. You can see from their reactions that it worked - they were clearly taken aback. It was a power over which I am entirely unashamed of, but I understand how that language might have upset some of you. This is an example of what i would call an 'invocation of a slur's power for good', but that's a subjective judgement. I invite you all to discuss this in the comments, critically or otherwise!”[4.1],[4.2]
      • “Damn right, that was a tactical n-bomb and I'd do it again / also i dont care about moral offense, i care about arguments. i offend nazis all the time, i read the /pol/ threads. Gotta make an argument for me to change my mind, not just complain impotently”[4.3]
    • Said Black people trying to preserve their culture that was systematically eradicated is exactly the same as white nationalism.[4.4],[4.5]
    • “The Democratic Party of The United States of America - even those milquetoast weaklings - are also committed to this. Like even people like Pete Buttigieg were talking about the Friedreich Douglass Plan to put forward reparations to Black folk and ease the racial economic divide. What you’re talking about, what you’re trying to sell to me as Black Nationalism is so milquetoast that you could speak about it on the public debate stage in a presidential election.”[4.6]
    • Anti-Indigenous.[4.7] Said “I’ll listen to the scientists,” which excludes the subaltern, naively assumes objectivity,[4.8],[4.9] and ignores the deep effects of racism.[4.10]
    • “‘Until then white people should stop demanding PoC talk to [Vaush].’ Dude the tankie-wokescold, like, horseshoe theory collides right here. By the way, this is unironically racist, just so you guys know. Delegitimizing my opinions because of my skin color and saying that the only reason I hold those opinions is because I’m a chauvinist. This is like, actually unironically racist.”[4.11] This equates whiteness with chauvinism, which is accidentally correct.[4.12]
    • Called Hakim, who is an Iraqi physician, “this kid.”[4.13]
    • “you guys know ive called black and trans people subhuman too”[4.14]
    • “I do fetishize black people”[4.15]
    • “Don’t need The Blacks mad at me again”[4.16]

    Miscellaneous

    • ‘Watching my videos and doing nothing else makes you “braver” than the people who listen to Chapo Trap House and do nothing else.’[5.1]
    • “There's nobody on earth braver than fans of mine.”[5.2]
    • “It does exhaust me constantly arguing with the entire left. [...] There aren’t really any good pockets of the left, I feel, outside of my community.”[5.3]
    • In response to an insult: ‘Not an argument, debate me bro.’[5.4]
    • “I’m really fucking needed here. [...] Everything the Chapo boys represented with their podcast really was just a sort of veneer of educated cultural commentary stretched over dumbfuck apathy bros justifying their apparent unwillingness to engage with the political reality sincerely. Yea, they’re like triggered that I’m voting Biden. Well, all the lefties that don’t want to vote Biden are triggered by me because they know I’m right and they know they don’t have any good arguments. That makes them really upset.”[5.5]
    • “Yeah, enjoy your Left, built on weakness and a collective inability to criticize one another. I’ll be over here building my left, which isn’t full of mentally ill crybabies desperately craving out safe spaces and whining about criticism. Debate it if you want, elsewise fuck off.”[5.6]
    • In response to Socialism Done Left’s bigotry: “Haven’t seen anything that looks, like, bad enough that I would stop associating with him. [...] Is the shittiest parts of SDL’s online presence representative of the totality of his content?”[5.7]
    • Vaush's sysadmin, WhiteNervosa, tricked ILiedAboutTheCake. ILiedAboutTheCake helped WhiteNervosa set up a website for free, but that website was actually for Vaush.[5.8]
    • “To everyone saying I said “I apologize BUT” / You know what? Yeah, I think internal problems with leftie cancel culture are a thousand times more damaging to the movement and to the safety, frankly, of trans people and other marginalized groups. / I’ve not seen a single good counterargument to this, only whataboutism and, funnily enough, tone policing. These tendencies within the left are the reasons why I engage in the type of rhetoric I do - to strengthen the left, provide a broader range of opinions and to rope in the countless disaffected edgelords who feel alienated by the left’s really fucking high internal standards for behavior. [...] My apology was only directed at a small subset of people, to people who didn’t take it to mean I’m a bigot but still got offended by the tweet. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have made it, because it seems to have cheapened my words on the broader problem. / Anyway, enjoy cancelling me again / EDIT: I’ll remove this edit bit if I see somebody beneath me make a good argument”[5.9]
    • Irony:
      • “They don’t read it, but they’re very fucking confident that what’s inside the text of those pages agrees with them. So they’ll say any shit and they’ll link it back to whatever out-of-context quotes they can.”[5.10]
      • “I like to operate on the principle of charitability, meaning that if you want to do a good job understanding other people, you shouldn’t be incredibly uncharitable in your interpretation of their values.”[5.11]
        • “It seems like the most ethical way to handle all this is to find the single most oppressed person on earth like a disabled trans woman somewherei n Bangladesh and ask them if they want to nuke the rest of the planet.”[5.12]
      • “There are a lot of lefties that have a factually incorrect view of the world. [...] If you try to correct them, they call you a liberal.”[5.13]
      • “It’s really, really, really easy to be duped by arguments like the ones Hakim used in that video, and if it weren’t for the fact that I’m the one being arguing against, and the position is one that I disagree with, I would fall for it to. [...] There’s no shame, we’re all human.”[5.14]
      • “Tankies like Hakim are literally a fucking cancer on online leftist discourse. They don't convert anyone. The only people they convert are fucking lefties into pseudo-fascism, okay? I don't give a fuck about any of these people, okay? They're worthless. They're a cancer. [...] Because I, with my superior ideas, got fucking five times the [subscribers] Hakim did in half the time, okay?”[5.15]
    • Comments from his fans: ‘He didn't say that. And if he did, it was out of context. And if it wasn't out of context, it was ironic. And if he specifically said that it was unironic, he already apologized. And if he didn't apologize, it was actually good. Besides, he said that a whole 3 months ago, that's long outdated. Why should I care about your opinion when you don't even have 100,000 youtube subscribers? You're reactionary for purity testing, woketard. There are valid criticisms of him, but this isn't it.’
  • hexagon_bear [any]tophilosophy•*Permanently Deleted*
    ·
    4 years ago

    IIRC Nietzsche had a more favorable view towards Buddhism than Christianity, although his exposure to it was largely through Schopenhauer and there were only bad translations available at the time.

    SEP has various articles on Buddhism. Although there isn't much interaction between "western" and "eastern" philosophy for a variety of reasons (such as translation and differences in methodology), there is more than enough English-language stuff available for a lifetime of reading if that's what you're into.

    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buddha/

  • hexagon_bear [any]toMain•Luna Oi: Addressing Vaush and the truth about Vietnam
    ·
    4 years ago

    “I do often say that I’ve read no theory. In reality, I’ve read some, and as of last night, I’ve read quite a bit more.”

    He quote mined for his "Marx, Engels, and Lenin would vote for Biden" video, and that seems to be a large part of the reading he's done. He originally said that he read the books he cited, but changed his story when Hakim called him out.

  • hexagon_bear [any]toMain•*Permanently Deleted*
    ·
    4 years ago

    We saw that certain militants leveraged their social capital to wield influence within BRRN. This soft power accumulated when skills and information were not passed on to newer militants who were subsequently unable to access full organizational participation. Soft power was mostly exerted by men who often worked together to evade challenges to their behavior. This took many forms: not responding to criticisms or call-outs, claiming ignorance while dodging accountability, characterizing challenges as misunderstandings rather than political disagreements, and, in the lead up to our mass departure, spreading rumors and attacking the characters of those who spoke out. [...] The weaponization of bureaucratic processes became a key method in maintaining soft power within BRRN. Meetings were strategically stacked with supporters in order to block or smother a competing political position, opinion, or proposal. Instead of embracing open debate, some militants relied on backchannel chat groups to coordinate talking points and arguments as an organized and undisclosed faction. In the Feminist Document, we expressed concern about the over-reliance on bureaucracy to solve deeper problems, especially those arising from our patriarchal internal culture.