Global terrorism thread

Wikipedia mostly treats it as a term related to conspiracy theory

The gist of it is "social justice advocates are appropiating Marxist rhetoric to destroy western society".

While pseudo-Marxist nutjobs exist in the social justice movement, they're nowhere near the threat some people would like to make you believe. :/

edited 26th Aug '17 6:33:44 AM by DrunkenNordmann

The term 'cultural Marxism' has an academic usage within cultural studies where it refers to a form of anti-capitalist cultural critique which specifically targets those aspects of culture that are seen as profit driven and mass produced under capitalism.[57][58][59][60][61] As an area of The Frankfurt School's discourse 'Cultural Marxism' has commonly considered the industrialization and mass-production of culture by The Culture Industry as having an overall negative effect on society, an effect which can reify an audience away from perceiving a more authentic sense of human values.[62][58] British theorists such as Richard Hoggart of The Birmingham School developed a working class sense of 'British Cultural Marxism' which objected to the "massification" and "drift" away from local cultures, a process of commercialization Hoggart saw as being enabled by tabloid newspapers, advertising, and the American film industry.[63]

The term remained academic until the late 1990s when it was misappropriated by paleoconservatives as part of an ongoing Culture War in which it is claimed that the very same theorists who were analysing and objecting to the "massification" and mass control via commercialization of culture were in fact working in a conspiracy to control and stage their own attack on Western society, using 1960s counter culture, multiculturalism, progressive politics and political correctness as their methods.[55][64][65]

This conspiracy theory version of the term is associated with American religious paleoconservatives such as William S. Lind, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Weyrich, but also holds currency among alt-right/white nationalist groups and the neo-reactionary movement.[65][56][66]

These people are very silly.

Doesn't help that Wikipedia actually got rid of the normal article for the term then. :/

That was a lengthy conversation here.

Cultural Marxism has been used as term thrown around to discredit and attack anyone who slightly veers from anything outside very specific brands of right wing conservative libertarianism, that you could even be a right wing capitalist and still be called a Cultural Marxist because you support the inclusion of women and minorities in the work market with equal pay or think that companies and employers should give more benefits to their employees and workers.

Hell, you could even be a libertarian that endorses a purely secular state over the grounds that the state should be out of everyone's right to express religious beliefs and still be called a Cultural Marxist because you don't think that your nation is necessarily a Christian nation.

Oh, so it's another of those stupid thought-terminating slurs, like "Imperialist", "Zionist", "Communist", "Papist", "Heretic", etc.

Yep.

It lost its meaning pretty quickly for the same reasons why calling people SJW pretty much tells more about who's throwing the term than the person receiving it.

Stating that you adhere to Frankfurt's school of thought is not only a better description of your intellectual alignment but also prevents all other sides of the political spectrum to look at you with disdain. Both because several branches of the left wing have to deal with the term being used by self described far-left and reactionary left wingers, thus trying to distance itself from the term and by right wingers who like to use it to discredit anything that challenges their position.

edited 26th Aug '17 7:15:47 AM by AngelusNox

OK, different approach. Handle, when you're saying you're a cultural Marxist, what do you mean?

I was raised in a culture of Marxism and my paradigms are strongly influenced by it's legacy. Like the air I breathe, its basic assumptions are invisible to me, held to be self-evident, even when I reach different explicit conclusions or outcomes.

Look up Cultural Muslim for how a similar thing applies to the irreligious heirs of the faith.

edited 26th Aug '17 8:18:56 AM by TheHandle

OK, that makes a lot of sense.

Fascinating as this conversation is, it's off topic. Can we move it to the Philosophy thread?

There is now a 16th fatality from the Barcelona attack, a German national has died of her wounds in hospital.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41066735

Catalan police are accusing Barcelona of holding them back in terms of accessing information from other police forces.

US troops and Turkish backed rebels got into a firefight in northern Syria. No losses on either side but this could get even uglier.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/29/politics/us-troops-exchange-fire-turkish-rebels-syria/index.html

We really need to do something about Turkey. They can't keep trying to kill NATO forces like this.

I'm just waiting for them to "accidentally" do an airstrike on forces assisting the Kurds.

The US needs them too badly, and they know it. Besides, Trump likes authoritarian leaders and lets them get away with whatever, and they know that too.

We need an ally in that geographic area. We don't need Erdogan.

Jordan sounds reliable enough....

Too far south. We need Turkey's borders specifically.

The point is to keep the Russians from having a direct land route into the Middle East and to minimize it's ability to enter the Mediterranean.

But they are already aligning towards Moscow anyway. I'd be very surprised if they haven't allowed Russian intel guys near all their NATO standard hardware.

I know, which means we have a very serious problem.

So, imagine that Turkey did ally with Russia and it had contact with the mediterranian. Why is that so bad? They would never attempt an invasion of any EU country and have no interest in the other balkan countries.

Because it's still a massive shift in power and gives them a very broad range of preemptive strike options all across Western Europe. Minutes of warning concerning a Russian missile launch turn into seconds not to mention it lets them bring all their naval based strategic assets to bear.

And the direct land route into the middle east is also another big issue, that again would be a massive shift in power over the region. It would let them move far far more materiel and bodies into the region far faster than NATO ever could.

And this isn't even getting into the fact that Turkey is a member of NATO and an alliance with the Russians is a violation of it's founding principles. It would destroy any political capital and soft power NATO has and probably kill any hope the Balkans have that NATO would ever support them in case of future Russian aggression.

edited 30th Aug '17 2:04:15 PM by LeGarcon

They might try throwing their weight around in the Mediterranean.

edited 30th Aug '17 2:03:09 PM by DrunkenNordmann