GenZedong

I commented on the thread on hexbear but I'll say it here for the sake of perhaps starting a conversation, I think linking cognitive capacity to people becoming reactionaries, is itself a reactionary and ableist idea. Has lead/covid/microplastics affected the cognitive capacity of the population? Yes, most likely, but this alone does not turn a population towards reaction. Being "smart" doesnt turn you into a communist, being disabled doesnt turn you into a reactionary.

USA is cringe for sure but I cannot imagine looking at what Americans do and thinking that the country is uniquely worse at critical thinking than the rest of world. Sure, their education system and the people coming out of it are abysmal considering its the wealthiest country in the world. But there are tangible reasons for it, like the underfunded public education system. I look at the people around where I live and most of them are not good at critical thinking either. It is not something that is taught in general.

The other sad thing is what made him surface this thought is the rambling of a weird nazi on X, the everything app. That platform is a cesspool of all varieties of fascists who inhale oxygen just so they are able to make atrocious bad faith posts on it. Now Musk even pays them for it. Content creators cannot fathom leaving that website because a big chunk of their self worth and income is tied to their follower count. Don't use that website that all. Otherwise don't use it to survey national mentual acuity. Just be normal.

I think this is a logical conclusion if one believes "brainwashing" on mass is a thing for an explanation of the bourgoisie proleteriat; it will lead to a biolgical determinist rationale for resistance to being "unbrainwashed" and then it's a short hop from that to eugenicism echoing essentially fascist sentiments.

Instead consider a more dialectical materialist take:

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

Ie narratives as a social license for bigotry along imperialist and settler colonial lines because at some level that individual benefits from those material conditions. The material always come before the idea.

(There's all sorts of other problems with yugopnik's take - like folks with learning difficulties who don't lean right wing, removing the agency of the fascist, using ablism to explain fascism, where these Nietzschean takes of the untermenschen comes from, mechanical vs dialectical materialism etc etc)

Very disappointing. The ReProgram.

Why is he treating it as a mystery? America literally did allow a thought-terminating virus to run rampant. There's also our deliberately poor education. We have answers to this, Yugo. It's not some incomprehensible phenomenon.

It almost feels like Yogo should go in SRS at this point

I once saw a tiktok leftist saying similar shit (though he had a degree in psychology). I did warn him though in the comments that even if the scientific facts are what they claim to be, we still cant fall or use the same rhetoric as the nazis did. luckily he understood.

Man people need to go out more often or you'll eventually talk some dumb shit like this

Don’t drink and tweet, Yugo.

I think he was almost doing alright until the last bit.

I do think that people who engage in the mental gymnastics required to maintain a right wing or even liberal ideology are doing damage to their brains.

If you don't use muscles they atrophy, if you over work them they can become deformed, same goes for different parts of the brain. Its called neuroplasticity. If you don't practice empathy you become incapable of it, the parts of your brain involved in empathy will atrophy and the space will be taken up by parts of the brain that do other things.

The "sub strata" as he calls them are nothing special just a more extreme example of individuals who have ideologically programed short circuits in their reasoning. We all have brain worms some people just have a way larger infestation.

Kinda like how Yugopnic is showing he has an eugenicist brain worm that is confusing cause and effect.

Extremely disappointing take. Comrade Yugo needs to self-crit over this.

We've all been wrong and said cringe things. It's important to acknowledge and correct such behavior whenever it's pointed out.

Unfortunate take. There are plenty of rich and powerful people who benefit. There is a really shit education system, failing millions. There is an absurd amount of propaganda.

The expulsion of a group, any group, from the category of human beings is extremely dangerous. Below are some passages from Losurdo's book, War and Revolution. Although I did gather the passages and quickly made this comment, I think it might resonate with some of you.

"At times of acute conflict, we witness a kind of mutual excommunication from civilization (this is the essence of the process of de-specification). The friend/enemy dichotomy tends to coincide with the civilization/ barbarism dichotomy. However, the two forms of de-specification are not equivalent. One of them establishes a politico-moral distance between the self and the enemy, while the other establishes a distance more charged with naturalistic elements, because it identifies the enemy as foreigner and barbarian or, with reference predominantly to revolutionary leaders, as a lunatic, who is likewise alien to a community within which conflict arises not because of internal contradictions, but because of an external pathogenic or ethnic cause. The first type of de-specification refers to a form of conduct which, by definition, is particular and mutable. Going beyond conduct, the second ends up referring to characteristics that tend to assume a naturalistic fixity."

"The ideology developed to legitimize and celebrate ventures against the barbarians also ends up materializing in the capitalist metropolis. [...] In other words, during serious conflicts between members of the civilized community, forms of war traditionally employed against barbarians tend to emerge within it as well."

But the definition of race/barbarians can be vague. For example,

"Between 1907 and 1915, thirteen US states enacted laws for compulsory sterilization, covering, according to Indiana’s legislation (the first state to move in this direction), ‘habitual delinquents, idiots, imbeciles and rapists’. There were those who proposed extending such legislation to ‘vagabonds’ (for the most part members of an ‘inferior race’)."

However, we on the left usually react to such racialization with moral condemnation.

"We register a paradox. At the very moment when de-specification on a naturalistic basis is indignantly rejected, moral sentiment can result in a different type of de-specification, with the expulsion from the moral (and human) community of a social stratum (in this instance, slave-owners)."

And,

"The most radical representatives of American abolitionism seem to argue in similar fashion. [Condemning] the institution of slavery as a ‘combination of death and hell’, and having branded the US Constitution as a ‘covenant with death and an agreement with hell’. [...] Reconstructed via the rejection of racial prejudice, the unity of the human race is once again undermined by moral or politico-moral sentiment or fanaticism."

Yet,

"In the USA, the ancien régime presented itself in a highly peculiar form. The residues of censitary discrimination were not of much significance. More important was the fact that the aristocracy of class was configured here as an aristocracy of race."

Finally, there's the last part of this passage, which I think serves as a prescient warning:

"Tocqueville identified the French and, in particular, the Jacobins as the carriers of ‘a virus of a new and unknown kind’, which allegedly underlay the incessant French revolutionary cycle. Having condemned ressentiment as the motive behind rebellion against the power exercised by the masters and the successful, Nietzsche pointed to the Jews as ‘the people of ressentiment par excellence’. Finally, Hitler prided himself on having finally discovered the source of the disease and the revolutionary infection. It was Jews and Bolsheviks, who were regularly equated, in part on account of the Jewish origin of a significant number of leaders of the Russian revolutionary movement. The process of ethnicization of the revolutionary virus can assume very different forms. But what remains constant is the danger of slippage from the psychopathological paradigm, which refers to mental illness, to the naturalistic paradigm, which refers to the inferior or degenerate ethnicity and race."

Perhaps the moral condemnation of the West, and since white people have presented themselves as naturally superior for such a long period of time, can at the same time be a rejection of the Western population as part of the "real" human race by those they have oppressed. It sounds like a reversal of white supremacists' own self-perceived superiority. This strand of thought admits that a certain kind of white people were born without a way out of said group, but judges them negatively and attributes to the group only bad, eternal qualities.

What he said here is shit and I think it's worthy of criticism, but I still think that his work is great and what he's doing is great. Also, I get it. I get breaking down and just having A Moment about America, especially when your country is on the receiving end of imperialism. He certainly should have vented in private but I do get what prompted him to act this way.