Lol this ain’t reddit, you don’t need to couch requests for sources like that. I’m not about to get snarky when someone wants to learn more.

There’s this interview with Dave McGowan on his book Weird Scenes inside the Canyon if you want to read on this topic.

Disclaimer that I am too young to have experienced the hippie era and we never really had a coherent hippie movement like in the US however I have encountered enough hippie adjacent people here to have formed an opinion.

There’s so much about the hippie movement that should make me sympathetic towards it: valuing peace, vegetarianism/veganism, queer-friendliness, being countercultural etc. etc.

Despite this fact, I really really dislike the hippie movement.

It’s idealistic, utopian, individualistic, naive, anti-scientific, orientalist, Walden-esque transcendentalist nonsense, and it tends to encourage really arrogant, sanctimonious attitudes.

The movement had an opportunity to work towards achieving societal change and, at one point, I believe that they could have really made an impact but they were so steeped in individualism that they never really got their shit together and organised because they were too busy pursuing their own individual goals or gratification.

I think that the hippie movement is a really good example of how liberation has to come from a material basis first or otherwise, as with ancapism, if you allow for certain freedoms then you risk increasing the oppressive elements that are pre-existing in society. In the case of hippies, amongst other things it was free love before the liberation of women which I suspect led to many opportunistic men exploiting women and potentially even abusing them.

It’s absolutely no coincidence that a lot of cults, small and large, sprang up within or alongside the hippie movement. Charles Manson’s was probably the most notorious example here but all of the seeds of Manson’s exploitation of vulnerable people were sown by the hippie movement.

Hippies are generally a classic case of what MLK posited as the “white liberal” (in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail) who values a negative peace over a positive presence of justice; they’ll end up opposing righteous anger and violence against the system in favour of maintaining the status quo and the precious negative peace which is characterised by the absence of justice.

They also grossly fetishised eastern and indigenous cultures.

I could go on but I’ll spare you.

Hippie/hippie adjacent music had some really shocking ties to military establishment families and I do wonder if there was more behind the hippie movement than just a grassroots culture that developed organically.

Honestly, I have no time for most hippies. I don’t trust them, I don’t like them, they are insufferably preachy and arrogant. Of course there are some good people who are hippies but I treat them with a ton of well-deserved skepticism. Usually the good hippies are good in spite of being hippies rather than being good because they are hippies, in my experience.

¡Venceremos!

Agreed.

It’s stuff like this that makes me realise how much better a head of state Thomas Sankara was than I’ll ever be though. Homie refused to use airconditioning in his office because it was considered a luxury in Burkina Faso.

I believe Suslov was another revolutionary figure who eschewed the privileges that he had access to on the grounds that if it was good enough for the masses then it’s good enough for him.

NAFO and its consequences have been a disaster for the online discourse.

Imagine having the confidence to make ahistorical claims that are this outrageous. Either you’re duped or you’re an op.

Which probably doesn’t track well with my posts as I tend to ramble a lot but I’m going to try and cut back on that as much as possible. I would hate for anyone to get bored or frustrated reading my posts.

Unless it serves your interests or your own purposes not to, ramble away.

It’s entirely up to the readers of your posts to determine whether or not they choose to read your posts and how they decide to go about that (e.g. reading closely, skimming, skipping to the parts that interest them etc.) Let the reader figure out what they want to get from your post and to seek that out themselves. Don’t concern yourself with their needs because this is an exercise in reinforcing and enriching your own learnings. You aren’t writing a paper or a book, so your concern for the reader shouldn’t really be a high priority imo.

Im sure most of you know who Antonio Gramsci but he was discussed in class

Just be aware that Gramsci is used in the service of many purposes and his materialism is often downplayed or even erased from how his theory is interpreted or applied.

This is in large part a product of the fact that he was never able to really produce a body of work that is coherent and which nailed down his positions due to the circumstances of his imprisonment.

What this means is that I’d urge you to approach people’s takes and applications of Gramsci with a healthy skepticism unless they are Gramsci scholars.

Out of interest, it’s worth noting that the chief prosecutor for Mussolini said of Gramsci during his trial “We must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years.”

My professor answered this in the pluralist perspective there’s production bourgeoisie vs some other type of bourgeoisie that I couldn’t quite catch but that hardly matters.

Potentially “rent-seeking bourgeoisie”, which is more relevant to liberalism but this is the group of bourgeoisie who are extractive rather than productive in the economy; landlords, speculators, financiers and investors etc.

To illustrate the point, imagine what the consequences would be if every member of the bourgeoisie made their money by being a landlord or an investment banker; the economy would collapse in a week.

My professor made sure to mention that in the Soviet Union, contrary to popular beliefs, it had factions and worked more like pluralists and he made this remark in regards to the criticism that pluralists cannot explain authoritarian regimes. He didn’t talk about the USSR with any contempt, and I feel like that’s important to mention.

This is promising!

Next, of course, was postmodernism

I’m an ex-postmodernist/poststructuralist. While there are useful tools in the poststructuralist toolkit, these days I am extremely skeptical of the overall utility of this intellectual movement.

If you want a crucial perspective on poststructuralism from an insider, the articles of Gabriel Rockhill are excellent and many his lectures hosted on his YouTube channel The Critical Theory workshop are also great. I can provide links if you need but I’m being lazy rn.

It depends on what your purpose is but, as a party which has not achieved a successful revolution, the party line on AES means very little.

It’s hard to imagine a successful socialist revolution being established that won’t rely upon China as a major trading partner and I suspect a lot of the pre-revolution positions will shake out in a post-revolution situation due to the material conditions.

Say your country achieves socialism tomorrow and it is faced with internal and external attempts at subversion, an effective blockade from the US and potentially other liberal economic blocs. Where do you think that your country will turn to in order for economic development and general support?

It’s going to turn to AES countries, undoubtedly. Either it will be incredibly isolationist and almost certainly doomed to fail or the pragmatic elements of the party will seek out support from AES countries and those ties will develop and sentiment towards AES countries will shift within the party as a matter of necessary.

But I’m rambling.

Maybe you can use the party as a platform to develop political connections. Maybe you can instigate a split. Maybe you can stay within the party and drive a line struggle.

There are many options but it depends on what your goal is and what the conditions are.

“Fellas, is it possible that [disastrous historical event] was actually a conspiracy caused by [this week’s villainous country]?”

There’s always Xiaomi, right?

Errr why should we? Because jungle and imaginary yankee toughs? I’m not sold on this analogy.

I mean, your interpretation is as valid as mine. But I think you haven’t done my words justice in your summary of the points that I made to support my interpretation. You’ve either responded before reading my whole comment or you’ve spent too much time on Reddit.

Predator reads more like Wells’ “War of the worlds” - turning the situation upside down on the colonizers. Suddenly they’re the ones being hunted for sport by uncaring invader with absurd levels of technological superiority (while still acting as if it’s fair and square).

An analogy is such because it’s not a 1:1 representation and it never will be. If it were meant to be a perfect representation of the Vietnam war then it would be a biopic or a documentary. There’s no inviolable rule that you can’t invert parts of your allegory and clearly this was done to make a Hollywood blockbuster action-scifi film.

The predator wasn’t a coloniser imo. There’s less in the movie to support the idea that the predator was colonising the jungle than there is for the Vietnam war allegory. A foreigner in a different land doesn’t amount to colonisation.

I was trying to find the quote from someone who was involved in production who said that if it were a few years earlier then Predator would have been set in Vietnam when I came across this opinion piece which makes a better case for the film being a Vietnam War allegory (while explaining the predator’s high tech) than I did.

Didn’t nafo already use the “I’m doing my part” bit from the movie, completely serious and missing the satire?

Maybe I’m blessed because I haven’t been exposed to nearly anything from the NAFO chuds but I’d absolutely believe this from a group of people who are rapidly circling the ideological drain hole that is fascism.

If we consider the Predator movie, at least the first one, to be an allegory for the Vietnam war because it featured jungle warfare and commando bros facing off against an enemy that is virtually invisible, implacable, utterly alien and incomprehensible, and entirely determined to hunt down and kill the invaders (often in torturous ways) while the commando bros are pretty much helpless against the predator as they get picked off one by one…

Then they’ve kinda missed the entire message underlying the movie.

If they think “better equipment = we’re like the predator” then they’re failing to grasp the fact that the true terror in the film doesn’t come from better technology but from an enemy which can blend seamlessly into the environment, which could be anywhere at any time, and is completely unstoppable. The technology is just window-dressing because if it were about a regiment of small Vietnamese people armed with AK-47s it wouldn’t be much of a spectacle and it wouldn’t play into macho power fantasies.

So, if the story is a metaphor about an enemy which is comparatively poorly armed using their skills and the terrain to their advantage, defeating what is assumed to be the best of the best, then why are they using it to brag about having better equipment again?

Next they’re going to use Starship Troopers in completely the wrong way as a metaphor for the war in the Ukraine, aren’t they?

Go on then, tell me which leftist leaders you think should be upheld.

the strange phenomenon of people idealizing the past, specifically the 50s, and how the people who tend to have a fondness for the 50s tend to b white as back in the day only middle class white people had happy lives in the 50s, anyone else was screwed.

I have an effortpost here that goes into this in some detail (note the comments following that one - I completely forgot about the relevance of the Bonus Army to the subject.) I didn’t touch on the history of Pruitt and Igoe being the subject of military testing in that comment because it was already too long but:

https://gizmodo.com/pruitt-igoe-army-radiation-experiments-cold-war-1849833275

https://www.businessinsider.com/army-sprayed-st-louis-with-toxic-dust-2012-10

You might also be interested in the work of Alice Malone, which touches on the role of homeownership in relation to the state making concessions to workers and attempting to stifle the groundswell of radicalism:

https://redsails.org/concessions/

https://youtu.be/GqIHF-gurlU (also available in your podcast app, search for: Actually Existing Socialism and the episode How the Soviet “Threat” Benefitted Workers in the West.)

One glaring omission from Malone’s article is the quote from none other than William Levitt:

No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.

Although I’ve tried to find the original source for this quote which is attributed to him in ‘On Communism and the Suburban Home’ from 1948 but I couldn’t turn anything up so maybe that’s why it got excluded.

He compared it to when the British and French went to war against an Arab Socialist, I don’t know hat event he was talking about specifically but it was significant enough that we should’ve learned from that experience and not replicate it in Iraq.

I suspect he was referring to Nasser and the Suez Crisis but I could be wrong.

I’d recommend considering using Balabolka as a TTS generator because if you go to Tools > Use online TTS service you can select IBM Watson as the TTS engine (and it bypass the word limit restrictions.)

I think that Michael is my preferred TTS option for Watson but it’s been a while. Whatever the case, Watson is far and away the most listenable TTS that I’ve come across.

Lmk if you want screenshots because the Balabolka UI is a bit clunky.

The past tense is in reference to the historical event, it doesn’t refer to the present state of Finland’s economy.

If someone had a post titled: “How Trump caused a rift within liberalism in the US” the past tense would not imply that Trump no longer exists or that he is no longer a politician, it would simply be referring to the political rift as a historical event.

Wait until you learn about the ties between the defense establishment and the advent of the counterculture music scene…

Which podcasts are you referring to btw?

Then he used Stalin as another example of a leader rewriting history, Stalin rewrote about the USSR’s role in WWII and how the rest of the allies treated the Soviets.

This one is interesting.

So much of the USSR is clouded with poor historical scholarship, especially in the west.

Michael Jabara Carley has written on this, namely 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II and Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations (both available on LibGen) and Stalin’s Gamble: The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930-1936. He details how the rest of the Allies treated the USSR. You might be interested in any or all of them.

I wonder what your professor’s take is on this matter.

What are other lies? What happened in:

Spain (the civil war)

I’d be interested in hearing what was discussed in relation to the Spanish Civil War, if he went into any more depth on the subject.

[My textbooks] can all be found on Lilgen very easily so thankfully I didn’t have to spend a dime

Speaking of which, I put an open call out to people here if they need a hand sourcing ebooks of any kind, including textbooks, because I’m pretty handy at tracking them down even when they aren’t available on LibGen and Zlibrary. Hit me up if you’re ever trying to find an ebook.

It’s like I’d color my face blue and someone calls me a racist, discriminating penguins.

It’s strange that this concern for context only ever goes in one direction. Symbolism, like words, develop meaning through their usage.

If I were to say that I ejaculated during intercourse with your wife last night, would you take that to be an insult or would you be dying on that same context hill that the verb to ejaculate used to refer to suddenly making a statement and that intercourse used to refer to having a discussion with someone?

Probably not.

Would you say that the swastika isn’t a Nazi symbol because it originated in Indo-European religious and cultural symbology?

Maybe. I can’t speak for you.

The origin of something doesn’t determine its usage.