Traverse Fantasy

From the hip. I’ve noticed for a few months that I’ve distanced myself from the label “socialist” and have even started using it to refer to some political position besides my own. I think for a while I’ve been bothered by the idea that there are true or false socialists, that Nazis and similar sorts appropriated the label to deceive an idiot general audience for whom ‘true’ socialism was actually attractive—but still, for some reason, couldn’t distinguish one from the other. It’s hard to square this narrative with the fact that fascism not only emerges from socialist currents such as syndicalism, but that these currents (and their associated tendencies like antisemitism and national chauvinism) predate Marxist “scientific socialism” and persisted throughout the history of workers’ movements. It’s not difficult to see why: workers’ own immediate interests are as sellers of labor-power, and the most common form of workers’ organizations function as cartels regulating the sale of that p...

Sorry in advance for shooting from the hip. This is a ramble. My friend Ènziramire shared with me a quote by some liberal economist or philosopher—can’t find it, so bear with me—that Marxist critics and politicians alike have all failed to consider the question of freedom, except for Marx himself. I said then that I would take the L on that because, yeah, [Mr. Liberal] got me there. But then we were talking about Reconstruction. There was a certain abolitionist, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, who at first sided with the Radical Republicans in hastening emancipation, but during Reconstruction began siding with the Liberal Republicans because she believed that southerners should not have been deprived of their rights. Then the Compromise of 1877 hit, and Dickinson was so dismayed by the South’s reactionary barbarism that, even when she had gained the right to vote as a female citizen in 1919, she chose never to vote. It’s the basic bitch question of liberalism: how much freedom should be sa...

Jesus Christ. Am I some sort of influencer or thought leader that others both really follow my words and hold me responsible to their idea of them? I got a comment a few days ago while I was out: Why do you care so much about Paul? Religion is wrong and backwards. You are wasting your time. How is it possible to read Settlers and then come crawling back to fucking Christianity? Revolutionary communism is what’s true. Don’t you want to be part of the real movement to abolish the present state of things? Are you going to learn how to overthrow capitalism-imperialism from Paul? Please. First of all, this fucking rules and it genuinely made my day. I agree with Semiurge on one hand that that’s some coelacanth type shit, but it’s so refreshing for someone to call me a proverbial opium addict. I’m grinning ear to ear. Love it! Anyway. I thought since I guess it fucking matters, I would give a general update on where I’m at with things. Didn’t delete the blog. Just had an emotional c...

Alright, my babies. We’ve heard from the ‘orthodox’ Marxists from the DSA . We’ve heard from the crypto Marxist-Leninist party . Now let’s hear from the Maoist-tendency Marxist-Leninist party, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. I have a friend who had visited a meeting in his current city, and the main thing with which he walked out of there was that they on one hand are really into the Kingdom of Hawaii, and on the other hand think that American Indians (whether on a collective or tribal basis) haven’t yet developed a national consciousness with which they can act as a nation to bargain for self-determination. It was just my luck that he had told me about this after I had already bought their program—but having been spoiled, I was all the more excited to learn about how big of a deal this really was for the party and about what other weird hills they had to die on. How did the FRSO come about anyway? Freedom Road has a proud past. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a...

Creationism doesn't get enough credit for being an essentially (post)modern ideology. "Evidence does not speak for itself," Jason Lisle and Ken Ham and others always say. The interpretation of evidence requires one to filter it through their own particular worldview and thus—since we can never comprehend the things themselves but only mental models of them—every interpretation is situated within the symbolic cosmos of its analyst's worldview. Of course, we're over 200 years past Kant's critique of reason, and we should know by now that a worldview has overstayed its welcome if it cannot reconcile evidence with its fundamental premises without (speaking figuratively or literally...) divine intervention. In other words, interpretation is also always an opportunity for immanent critique. Lacan's discursive algorithms illustrate this point well, but I'm not going to dig into that here ( borrowed illustration below from another blog ). Just gesturing. ...

Feminism has a metaphysics problem. This isn't specific to feminism: it's just that feminism is a label applied to a variety of discourses which all claim to have the same political premise or subjective vantage, while differing in both respects—usually this is visible when describing white feminism, bourgeois feminism, liberal feminism, cishet feminism, in contrast to some idealized black feminism, proletarian feminism, radical feminism, trans feminism. It's a hall of mirrors no matter where you look. But I'm interested in the discursive function of "essentialism": a theoretical term which encapsulates a critique of naïve materialism, that one can't reduce social phenomena to a superficially materialist basis, which became a cudgel against any materialist analysis in general. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Simone de Beauvoir in  The Second Sex  first distinguished between sex and gender, not as objective scientific reality versu...

This is a paper I wrote for my first semester of undergrad in 2018. I actually wanted to expand it into a thesis about the economics of online platforms (business people say stupid shit about it) before I shifted my research wholly into Greco-Latin poetry, but I still like the analysis and sometimes wish I could refer to it. So, here it is! Sorry for any eighteen-year-old bullshit. Also I removed the footnotes because they were annoying to reformat, but the works cited section is still there. Shout-out to my professor who was an English literature guy forced to teach engineers how to write. He was very entertained by me, I think. And he was a great professor! Very patient with the STEM freaks.  Introduction Social media is a mode of discourse specific to the information age, an evolution of the personalization of commodities and the commodification of personality where users relate to each other in a manner not unlike celebrities and brand images. As a new means of communication...