TreadOnMe [none/use name]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2020

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  • I call him a meta-physical philosopher because much of what he talks about is derivations of ethics and the nature of religion and God in relationship to those ethical categories. It’s arguably more tangential to metaphysics than metaphysics itself, but claims like ‘God is dead’ and the historical-socio-ethical reasoning behind that are incredibly metaphysical statements. However, you are correct that most of his actual metaphysical work is derived from an re-phrasing Schopenhauer, but I didn’t read any Schopenhauer until college, so I didn’t know that and at the time it blew my little freaking mind.

    I will be honest, my preference is for Hume, as Kant is an enormous windbag, though tiny compared to Hegel. That said, you really should give ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ another go-around, it’s one of those seminal texts that will be constantly referenced in everything forever, and really makes up the majority of his and everyone’s groundwork for literally everything afterwards particularly liberalism. Regardless if or not you think he actually solved Hume’s is-ought pincer and problem of causality, it is basically impossible to understand why Kant leans so hard into deontology without reading it. But if you really want to piss people off, just read and retort with Hume, he is basically the philosophical linebacker for Western philosophy.


  • It really depends on how they deal with the inevitable development crises, though they continue to handle themselves well so far. As long as they don’t let the fucking Shanghai clique dictate policy they should be fine, but there is a lot of money rolling around in that area and I never count the bourgeoise out until they are pushing up daisies. Fortunately, people, especially in Beijing, generally seem to hate the Shanghai clique because they fuck up so many government mandates, so they will likely only continue to play a marginal role in government for the foreseeable future. That said, it definitely seems to be one of those cases of ‘friends close, enemies closer.’ which is a difficult thing to juggle, particularly when they keep clumsily trying to stab you in the back.

    Yup, I hope I am around to watch it happen, but I really doubt it at this point. What will really be interesting is to see who ends up taking over after Xi, because he is an very talented politician. Now I can be called a ‘Xi shill’.



  • I, in general, agree with all of this, you should be posting this at CatholicSocialist, not me. My general criticisms of Marx’s social revolutionary model are ones that he recognized himself later in life (and would be incorporated into Lenin’s labor aristocracy critiques as well), which is that it is the periphery proletariat and peasantry that has more revolutionary attitude and need to organize and create a social revolution. He just never actually published them, so I struggle to really call them a part of Marx’s ‘social revolution model’.

    My general description of China as ‘left-liberal capitalist’ stems from the fact that while the party holds the vast majority share of political power in the country, many of those party members are members of bourgeoise, though not even close to a majority, with none of them making up the upper echelon of the party. However, notably, they are almost entirely made up of members of the industrial or petite-bourgeoise, not the FIRE or tech sectors, which is an unspeakably enormous improvement over the Western neoliberal model that fits incredibly neatly into Adam Smith’s idealized version of classical industrial capitalism described in the Wealth of Nations, which Marx saw as a clear and total upgrade to the feudal mode of production.

    That being said, I am perfectly content to call China ‘first-stage socialism’ when not in mixed company, but ultimately these stages are rather arbitrary, and it will be seen what happens when China actually achieves it’s destiny and breaks the shackles put around it by the U.S. I generally am in good faith about it, as I have seen factory conditions all over the place and China’s are, in general, much better than your average place, and the proletariat seem to be mostly in high-spirits and believing in the project and the government and their ability to change what the government is doing if it is doing something they don’t like. It’s a completely different attitude than the U.S. and it is completely alien to my experience in any other Western country. Even our most ‘patriotic’ chuds think that the government is out to screw them, so it is weird to see a patriotic nationalism that actually believes that government can and does do good things. Whatever their central mode of production, they are very clearly trying to achieve communism.




  • Usually there are a couple of churches in a diocese that do it once a week with the express permission of the diocese. There have been instances of diocese forbidding priests from doing it, or from performing the Eucharist during it (with the general ideological split being if the diocese sees these masses as an outlet for wacky conservative Catholic frustration, or as a gathering place for wacky conservative Catholics to create a different, heretical sect), but in general most of the large population centers in the U.S. will have at least one church that does one mass in Latin a week, usually on a weekday. Monasteries also generally follow their own dictata and are often done solely in Latin, with them only holding common mass in vernacular.

    Orthodox Churches are even weirder about this, with them only holding mass in the vernacular that the Church came from (so a Serbian Orthodox mass in Los Angeles will be done in Serbian).






  • They will feel like it’s unfair if we don’t bow and scrape to their shitty, poorly thought out, opinions. That is not an ‘us’ problem. If they feel it’s unfair, they should dogpile us. It should be easy, they have way more users than us. Except they can’t, because our moderation team is actually good at what they do (arguably too good as in the beginning they were deleting stuff from very confused libs wandering through here rather than letting us shit on then).

    Us posting doesn’t cause them stress, their own community constantly complaining about us posting is what is causing them stress, which again, they will do regardless of what we post or how we post it. I’m not suggesting we go in and ppb and ‘hog out’ on every bad opinion, but we are allowed to express ourselves according to their rules. As I’ve said multiple times federation or de-federation doesn’t matter to me, as in general I will not be leaving this instance, as there is very little point, but moral patronizing forum etiquette is incredibly reddit behavior. If you want to post there forever, make another account.


  • Look, they are what I, when I was a Catholic, would describe as a ‘bad Catholic’. Many liberal Catholics operate the same way, with a perverse attachment to the Church as it could be instead of seeing the Church as it has been and continues to be, that isn’t to say that good things don’t come out of the Church (hospitals, nursing homes, monasteries, etc), just that they are better the further they are away from the central worship and money-making operation. When I was a rigorous Catholic (10-15) I was a very conservative Catholic because I read the doctrine, listened to the scripture, and understood the scripture and how it ought to be interpreted.

    If was during my confirmation when I was continuing my theological study, when I stumbled upon Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche and other metaphysical philosophers and it struck me that not only was my understanding of Catholicism incredibly shallow, but it confirmed my increasing suspicion that everyone else’s understanding of Catholicism was also, if not more, shallow. Upon reading, especially people like Hume and Kant, it became clear that not only did I not actually have very rigorous grounds for what I believed, but that in order to be a ‘good Catholic’ you had to be a ‘bad person’ and that ‘bad Catholics’ were constantly having to deal with this juxtaposition, fighting against the structure of a Church that wants their money, but doesn’t actually want them or their ideas.

    It wasn’t that they were ‘bad Catholics’ it’s that they were ‘good people’ attempting to be ‘Catholics’. That’s when I rejected the entire thing and tried to start from scratch to the best of my abilities. It’s been a long road and I still don’t know where I will end up ideologically, but I do know that I will not make the mistake of seeing ‘what could be’ for ‘what is’.





  • I hate to be the one to say it, but this is the way these things ‘naturally grow’. Hell, we only pinged other users in r/cth and if they showed up we’d dunk on them and that was still called brigading.

    Attempting to differentiate between when someone stumbles upon something and posts it to the_dunk_tank or if they stumble upon it ‘organically’ is a fool’s game. They are both organic forum posting processes. It is just that one is ‘approved’ and one is ‘forbidden’ for arbitrary reasons (in general it is caused by lax moderation standards, which if you are on top of make it easy to deal with actual posting brigades).

    Also, complaining about upvotes is the most lame-ass thing I can imagine. Oh noes, my opinion isn’t popular?!? Better become a psycho about it.

    Edit: also if you posted at all in r/cth, no matter the ratio of posts there (I migrated over there after years of reddit posting) you would be called a cth bot or shill or whatever the insult of the day was if you posted outside of it, eventually leaving you posting to r/cth and it’s derivatives because it was the only place you could have any kind of productive conversation, as unproductive as it mostly was.