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Wonderful read. This is the time to question government and media subversion. They divide through race victimhood and affirmative action.

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Thanks for that James. Tracking the sources of The Great Institutional Heist of our system of social administration by an unrepresentative swill of neo-clericalized postmodernist trained authoritarians & dogmatists is important work.

I would only humbly add that while this movement has a very loosely organised 'personnel department' of driver ideologues that has emerged out of social administrator training institutions ('universiries') since at least the 1970s, none of this explains why they have accumulated such enormous leverage using ideas that are faith based rather than rational & represent a conscious abandonment of The Enlightenment.

The sobering reality is that modern rational thinking has collapsed in favour of iconic word plays & gestalts,

Peter Boghossian recently brutally exposed the genre as little better than a 'poetic' stream of consciousness enriched with suggestive jargon, in the same way as an earlier group of wags exposed 'avant garde' poetry in the Ern Malley Affair in Australia in the ''40s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley_hoax).

Call me a shameless old Marxist if you like, but to get such a bizarre outcome erupting out of our cultural face requires more than plotting the course of a collective intellectual amnesia,.orchestrated by some kind of perverse ideological demonology.

Something really big is happening that is equivalent to the religious disturbances that came out of the Reformation & Counter Reformation, as the Mediaeval world declined, pressaging the rise of capitalism & the modern nation state.

We need some fundamental analytical theory of what has been happening to capitalism, its social relations of production & consumption & the culture it has spawned since the 1960s.

I call it Indulgence Capitalism, whereby an economy & culture of disciplined needs & wants has given way to fantasies of desire & satiating them as quickly as possible without any regard for the longer term ecological or governance consequences, by deregulating & privatizing the economic & social system from top to bottom.

After 3 generations, the carnage is now palpable as our ecological, social, existential & intellectual commons infrastructures disintegrate & pathologize in front of us, as we start our journey into a post modern 'disaggregation' into some version of 'Defensive Capitalism Lite'

Ho hum....

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Oct 10, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022

Christopher Eagleman-Nagle: In view of your artful, intellectually accomplished and yet woefully obscurant attempt to reframe the great subversion as "faith based," deflecting away in the process any culpability for Marxian intellectuals like yourself, and in view of the predictable blaming of aspects of religion and capitalism, allow me to fulfill the request you had made at one point in that screed and call you a "shameless old Marxist."

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Having said that, the Marxist idea that the means of production & consumption condition their arising social/class relations, intellectual climate, the architecture of discourse, & the cultural norms you would expect, is a good one.that keeps all aspects of life in the one suite ...

And when one applies this to the emergence of reified postmodernism as an underpin of the humanities graduate domination of the means of social reproduction and it's administration,, one cannot but notice it's intellectual proximity to iconically marketed perception/consciousness management that is the ubiquitous norm within the commercially driven means of social control....which is the main product of late tertiary capitalism.

Indulgence capitalism produces heavily consonant outcomes across all areas of its operations, which is why Wokeism is not just a shit happens & serendipitously unfortunate ghost in the machine.

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And yes, as an old Marxist.....Mia culpa.....

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And when you think about it, there isn't much difference between the eschatology of historical materialism & the second coming of Christ, or dialectical materialism (thesis,, antithesis & synthesis) & the evolution of the Godhead into a holy trinity....

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My dear James, Marxism was a religion too, as is Wokeism. They both rely/relied on pseodoscientism as a form of ideological dress up to obscure the fact.....

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Oct 10, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022

Christopher Eastman-Nagle: Karl Marx as an economic visionary has so laughably been disproved on the stage of world history that any who bother to carry on about "good" Marxist economic analysis are sure to be zealots and very likely to be (anti-liberal) social revolutionaries. Woke adjacent even if they don't get that they are woke adjacent. I'm not here to discuss and debate anything with a Marxist intellectual, that's a waste of my time and there are forums on the internet where that carries on ceaselessly, I'm here to provide those readers currently unequipped to contend with mass leftist subversion (often, argued on Marxian grounds) some basic suggestions: #1: don't be seduced into mistaking flowery Marxian jargon (Roger Scruton termed it "nonsense wizardry") for a rational argument that says something true about the world and #2: educate yourself as to why it is that socialist moralizing -alongside Marxian economics- do not work for the liberal and free society we are fighting for — nor for a prosperous West in which we get to keep our standards of living we deem important for ourselves and our children. You could start with this straight forward discussion by an actual economics professor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFrrovr7GVs

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That is fair. Was there a part(s) that lost you? Or are there specific terms that were confusing? Maybe we could create a glossary of terms that may help if that's the case.

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