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“The Young Karl Marx” is a less than exciting but decent period biopic movie about Marx and Engels in their 20s from 1844-1848, featuring star turns from actresses playing the wives of the authors of The Communist Manifesto. The plot, which mostly consists of Marx and Engels arguing with other leftists like Proudhon and Bakunin, isn’t all that compelling but it’s presented with historical accuracy and lucidity. The sets of northern Europe during the hard times of the 1840s are wholly persuasive.
It’s more or less the opposite movie of the anti-Marxist The Death of Stalin.
This trilingual (German, French, and English) movie, directed by a Haitian named Raoul Peck, offers a more traditional economics-oriented interpretation of Marx in contrast to the more culturally-oriented Marx pioneered by the Frankfurt School based on Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. Thus, we see Engels telling Marx he needs to learn English to read Adam Smith and David Ricardo (always confident, Marx replies, “I’m a quick learner”), followed by Marx wrestling with the Labor Theory of Value.
Marx is portrayed realistically as a sardonic man always assuming he’s the smartest guy in the room, while Engels is a rich kid of talent who chooses to play second banana to his buddy. The movie does not explore the question it inevitably raises: Would things have worked out better if Engels had been the more dominant personality?
Karl Marx is a traditional paterfamilias struggling to support his wife, growing number of children, and their servant; in contrast, Engels’ girlfriend is staunchly opposed to marriage and maternity but her sister isn’t. (After his girlfriend’s death, Engels married her sister right before his own death.)
The star turns in the movie come from the actresses playing Marx’s wife, the aristocrat Jenny von Westphalen, and Engel’s Irish working class girlfriend Mary Burns, played by Hannah Steele as the epitome of the Irish spitfire.
The lovely Mrs. Marx is portrayed by Vicky Krieps, the Luxembourg actress who more than held her own as Daniel Day-Lewis’s girlfriend in Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent The Phantom Thread. Krieps plays pretty much the same role: the genius’s muse whose fashion model willowiness makes her initially seem weak, but whose willpower eventually makes her a little scary.
Krieps tells a funny story about how she didn’t closely read the email from her agent asking her to make an audition tape for a film reuniting Anderson and Day-Lewis from There Will Be Blood, which is perhaps the most famous movie acting role of this century:
“When I made the tape I thought it was for a student film,” Krieps said. Anderson quickly snapped back, “The writing was that good.”
… Krieps didn’t even realize she’d be sharing much of the film with the three-time Oscar winner until three weeks after she was cast.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
I assume this film does allow the audience to know that Marx was ethnically pure Jewish. Does it make it clear that both Marx and (especially) Engels grasped that the British Empire was necessary to spreading their ideas globally and that the Empire would serve its role grandly?
They certainly lay it on thick in the trailer! Sounds like a movie for the true believers.
I was trying to find whether Marx’s real name was in fact Moses Mordecai Marx Levy, but couldn’t find anything substantial. But in the process I did find this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jewish_Question
I would argue that the work is not in fact, anti-Semitic, on the grounds that it is too tedious to make it through until the juicy bits might be found, if they were to exist.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
Was Marx a Satanist? I am not sure, but this book makes the argument.
https://horst-koch.de/karl-marx/
You will notice that this is now how they talk about white people. White people are not the origin or singular propagators of racism -- white people are racism, and when they are gone there will not be any tribal competition or village clearing or riots or beauty preferences.
Off Topic: Has Steve reviewed Amy Chua’s new book?
The site seems to be swallowing comments.
Anyway, one notes both Marx and Engels are played by goyim in this film.
OT:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/19/politics/dc-council-member-apology-anti-semitic-comment/index.html
OT:
Sons of rich black families end up poor, unlike in white families.
More Raj Chetty, at the New York Times and Marginal Revolution:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/sons-well-off-black-families-not-well.html
And the original study:
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_summary.pdf
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_paper.pdf
The New York Times piece is incoherent. It somehow gets off onto IQ differences as a possible explanation, but boys and girls turn out different, so it wonders if standardized tests are biased against blacks, which … how does that relate to the Chetty study under consideration? It does give them an excuse to quote an “expert” (a sociologist) who refers to IQ differences as “putative.”
Here's the money shot from the study:Hmm. Looks to me like the answer is to move blacks kids into white (and Asian) neighborhoods to improve their environment. And, shockingly, that's the prescription.As always, the last Five-Year Plan failed because our earlier comrades weren't dedicated enough. Busing wasn't enough. Just having black and white kids in the same school won't close the gap. We must integrate not just the schools but the neighborhoods, block by block, street by street, house by house.
In addtion, we must force white children (and their parents) to become close with their new black neighbors. Naturally, we will need to re-educate white children and show them how terribly racist they are. (South Park's Tolerance Camp was just a bit ahead of its time.)
Naturally, we'll need to re-educate the neighborhood's police and school administrators to help them understand that their racism is responsible for higher arrest rates and school discipline for black boys.
Stalin would have loved Chetty and Hendren. I'm sure that the two of them live in heavily black neighborhoods and send their kids to schools with lots of black kids. I mean, they believe all of this right?Replies: @Flip, @Anonymous
Was Anderson sarcastically mocking the standard cliches used by actors to explain why they took a role when he said, “The writing was that good”?
This sounds like the baseball version which would be: “I’m just happy to be here” when a guy comes up from the minors or is traded to another team.”
I took it as slightly miffed but forgiving self deprecating humor. PTA was the writer. The actress unintentionally compared his writing to that of a film school student.
Romanticizing the communists whose ideas led to mass murder in the 20th century?
What’s next? A movie on “the young Pol Pot”?
It's a strange world...By the way: Young Pol Pot studied in Paris and saw Althusser and the crème of the Paris left there - such a movie could turn out to be somewhat funky, even...).
(Well done, such a movie could be interesting indeed...Althusser later on killed his wife and had to accept a sentence to psychiatry.... it'sall there: Drama, bohemien stars ... and bars...).
uhhh
Whoa, Steve!
Per Wikipedia, Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory!!!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
So end of discussion, right?
There Will Be Blood</ was about oil and California and human nature, as all good movies are.
The population of California in 1910, around the period when the movie takes place, was 2.4 million people rounding up. California had 20 million people in 1970. There are now 40 million people packed into parts of California. The recent increase is mostly due to the mass importation of foreigners from mass immigration.
Housing costs in California, and the rest of the United States are going through the roof. There Will Be Blood won’t be just a movie title when the young people stop smoking pot and figure out that greedy older people are deliberately stifling AFFORDABLE FAMILY FORMATION by profiting off the high housing costs.
The disgusting rats at the Wall Street Journal have an article today about high housing costs and they blamed it on lack of new construction of housing units. I didn’t bother to read most of the slop, but they ignored the demand aspect of skyrocketing housing costs and they didn’t mention immigration as a contributing factor in the increase in housing costs. I’ll keep my blood pressure low by not fully reading the WSJ propaganda article.
The WSJ is just as evil as the NY Times. The Republican Party is just as evil as the Democrat Party.
Amen, and again I say amen.
Don't confuse venality with malice.
So if a Haitian is directing it, who is the (now) obligatory African actor that’s playing Marx’s servant? Is it a black Carribbean actress or a black British actress (e.g. Thandie Newton)?
In this day and age considering with OscarsSoWhite (or whatever it is), that’s a fair question.
It was John Derbyshire who noticed that during the famous subway scene with Churchill a black actor got some choice words to help the story along. If a black can be inserted in mid. 20th century London on a subway they certainly can be inserted in 19th century Europe alongside Marx and Engels.
I am very interested in this film for family reasons. My grandfather never knew how our family ended up in the U.S. from the Grand Duchy of Baden. A bit of genealogical legwork revealed that his grandfather immigrated through New York in 1850 as a 10 year old orphan with a younger brother, two aunts and an uncle, all the males using aliases, from the port of Le Havre. The uncle started a successful brewery in Louisville in which his nephew worked. The significance to this film involves the Baden Revolution of 1848-49. Joseph Engels (and likely Karl Marx) was directly involved in the last phase of the Revolution with the Rastatt Mutiny. The Prussians executed many of the revolutionaries and others died from typhoid fever in the Prussian prison camps. I’m a descendant of a half-sister of the famous professor and politician Karl von Rotteck of Freiburg and evidently his son Karl was involved in the People’s Republic Union associated with the Revolution. Karl Jr. (not the burger guy) was forced to flee to the U.S. and ran a German-language newspaper in St. Louis. This family tie to revolutionary activity is likely why my ancestor was orphaned and why I’m here today.
If you are of German heritage and your family just seemed to magically appear in the U.S. sometime around 1850, you’re probably a 48er. You may be interested in this film.
Why did Wisconsin, Missouri and other states get all the 1848 pot-banger Krauts? These Germans ain't nothing like the colonial era Krauts, or the Krauts who made the Kentucky long rifle or any of the other types of Kraut.
Carol Alt is the most famous Prussian I know. I can't see her or her Prussian people executing their fellow Krauts unless they really deserved it. I prefer supermodel Prussians to anti-White public intellectuals such as Steven Pinker. I say deport Pinker as soon as possible.
Thankfully, Trump got a lot of the other kinds of Germans to vote for him in the Great Lakes states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
- They brought continental leftism to America, shattering the Franco/British Enlightenment as the sole realm of discourse. The "Ohio Hegelians" were an influential circle.
- Their influence on American eduction, "kindergarten" being the most obvious example.
-The Civil War. Barring the supposed disaster at Gettysburg (due to command confusion more than anything), the German immigrant divisons played a big role in the war. It was a German division led by a communist (Marx' old rival August Willich) who made it to the top first at Missionary Ridge- the beginning of the end of the war in the Western theater. They brought a lot of ideological reinforcement to what was a minority abolitionist view in the Union army.
-They built up the Midwest, fast.
-Coming in at the same time as the Irish, the Bavarian contingent greatly expeanded the Catholic Church in America.
-Thousands of skilled fabricators and machinists arrived. They were the shot in the arm as the Industrial Revolution really took off.Replies: @Luke Lea, @Hibernian, @Anon
Peck is amazing. I am not your negro was incredible
The movie chronicles Marx and Engels friendship, collaboration, and the tough time they had persuading more idealistic and less proactive workers’ representatives that a coherent doctrine was necessary for any meaningful movement to form and thrive. Marx in particular spars, politely, with French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudon. Marx’s response to the elder statesman’s famed pronouncement “Property is theft” is an inquiry: “Whose property?”
Marx and Engels’ thought was genuinely revolutionary, and it’s clear that Peck would insist that said thought had little if anything to do with the depredations of the supposedly Marx-inspired Soviet Union. Since capital is evolving Marx was not proved wrong. Peck is very persuasive in getting the young to see the evils of capitalism
OT – Very iStevish article in today’s NYTimes:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html
Rich White Boys Stay Rich. Black Boys Don’t.
It goes on to say that black women don’t decline as much as black men relative to white women but if you look at the graphs, black women, black men and white women all perform similarly – it’s white men that are the outliers. Every other group tends to fall (“the best way to make a small fortune is to start out with a big one”) but only white men have the mojo to hang onto their father’s fortunes and maybe even increase them (cough, Donald Trump, cough). The narrative of the article (as usual) is ass backward . Its premise is “what are evil white men doing to cause black men to fail?” instead of “what are white men doing right and why (other than blaming racism) can’t any other group do the same?
Of course as usual Asians don’t exist.
Fortunately, after some de rigueur crying over racism they bring up crime:They briefly covered asians and it makes sense:The words missing from this study are "regression toward the mean", words which explain why the boys of exceptional blacks don't do well, why the children of poor whites often perform better than their parents and why the children of successful asian immigrants are not on par with their parents, but still do pretty well.Replies: @AndrewR
I figure it's probably a twofer - the gap between examples of black successes and the black mean is very broad, and black males are under societal pressure to conform to certain roles which require displays of antisocial and economically disastrous behavior.
A black father of slightly above average intelligence of the general population may be in a position to really benefit from serial bites of the apple via Affirmative Action - cumulative advantages in undergraduate admission, graduate school admission, and then his first few jobs. If his son is average for blacks or even slightly above the black average he's probably still not going to get on the Affirmative Action express elevator in the way his father did. This is especially the case if he insists upon acting out in the typically black manor following the urban rap image. At best he's going to get an assist in admissions at a state school with a chance to muddle through for a few semesters.Replies: @Citizen of a Silly Country
Not for the first time, in this forum and elsewhere, I’ve noticed a resurgence of interest in Marx. The Left has been doing its “cultural Marxism” shtick for quite some time, as Steve notes; but the interesting uptick in referencing Marx seems to be coming from the Right. I suppose this has to do with the reassertion of Class as an area of concern and inquiry among certain elements on the Right, where previously it was suppressed. But I wonder whether that’s the only reason.
His theory of history strikes me as the most attractive part of the Marxian package. I don’t mean to say that it’s correct, but it *is* vivid, clarifying, and a prod to deeper understanding. It’s been a quarter century since I last read Marx, and I haven’t thought about him directly for years. But when my teenage son was recently assigned “The Communist Manifesto” for school, I was amazed at the level of detailed knowledge I was able to summon up in our conversations. Contemporary examples of “class struggle” seemed very apparent, especially with all the iSteve matter filling my head (although I suppose it’s a double-edged sword with historical determinism that you can always find contemporary examples to “verify” its claims).
Another possible source of his strange new appeal is the fact that Marx is a very European figure. As mightily as he (and his epigones) strove to overturn Europe’s political/social/economic order, Marx is now a genuine part of the European inheritance: an example of European ideas that conquered, transformed, or merely opened up rival world cultures. (Whether for good or ill is a separate question–ironically the question at the heart of Western imperialism.) People who take pride in the European inheritance have reason to appreciate his achievement. Certainly the depth of Marx’s learning in the Western tradition was breathtaking–such a contrast with the fourth-rate intellectuals who pretend to wave his flag today.
Again, none of this is an endorsement of Marx. But what I take to be a cautious reappraisal of his thought on the part of the new Right is notable, surprising and, I think, meaningful.
Adding Darwinism to Marxism in an intelligent way is something that has never really been attempted . It would involve both biological Darwinism (HBD stuff) and a Darwinian conception of inter-societal struggle (Peter Turchin stuff) plus the Marxist analysis of modes of production and concomitant class struggles. It would be messy, but so is material reality.Replies: @ChrisZ, @Dube, @Crawfurdmuir
The headline made me hopeful for a sequel to Young Frankenstein.
However I can see that the premise of this movie will command a VAST audience of eager cinema-goers. What’s more, the subsequent merch will be highly collectible, such as a molar from an exhumed Kulak or a DIY show-trial kit with a 1/32nd scale firing squad.
I assume no quotes from these letters of the young Karl Marx make it into the movie:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
Of course, Marx’s “antisemitism” is anything but.
Joe Six Pack: “Bernie Madoff, Marc Rich . . . I’m mad as hell, and I’m starting to notice a pattern”.
Karl Marx: “Yes, my people are hucksters. But so are all capitalists. And do you know who is also a capitalist? Henry Ford. C’mon, everybody, lets go lynch Henry Ford!”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html
Rich White Boys Stay Rich. Black Boys Don’t.
It goes on to say that black women don't decline as much as black men relative to white women but if you look at the graphs, black women, black men and white women all perform similarly - it's white men that are the outliers. Every other group tends to fall ("the best way to make a small fortune is to start out with a big one") but only white men have the mojo to hang onto their father's fortunes and maybe even increase them (cough, Donald Trump, cough). The narrative of the article (as usual) is ass backward . Its premise is "what are evil white men doing to cause black men to fail?" instead of "what are white men doing right and why (other than blaming racism) can't any other group do the same?
Of course as usual Asians don't exist.Replies: @res, @Pseudonymic Handle, @Alec Leamas (hard at work)
Darn, no comments.
That article is even more iStevish than it sounds from your excerpt given that it uses Raj Chetty’s research.
One of their main points:
What is old is new again. Is saying this not “racist” anymore? It is so hard to keep track.
Asians actually weren’t completely invisible in that article, but Occam’s butterknife is very useful for arriving at the “correct” conclusions.
And look at their poster child for Black success:
The article has some interesting graphs. For example, black and white incarceration and marriage rates by income. The graph of 5 races by parent/child income broken down by all Americans and US mothers helps account for the immigration factor (it would have been helpful to show non-US mothers by themselves, but the sample size is probably a bit small). There is a substantial difference across all incomes for Asian immigrants.
Does anyone know how they define their groups (rich/UMC/MC/LMC/poor)? Based on the numbers I am guessing quintiles of income, but if that was stated explicitly I missed it.
Link to Chetty et al. paper the article is based on: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_paper.pdf
Here is how they rank people (worth noting it is income based, not wealth, “equal” is probably not equal):
The paper has many more interesting graphs.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html
Rich White Boys Stay Rich. Black Boys Don’t.
It goes on to say that black women don't decline as much as black men relative to white women but if you look at the graphs, black women, black men and white women all perform similarly - it's white men that are the outliers. Every other group tends to fall ("the best way to make a small fortune is to start out with a big one") but only white men have the mojo to hang onto their father's fortunes and maybe even increase them (cough, Donald Trump, cough). The narrative of the article (as usual) is ass backward . Its premise is "what are evil white men doing to cause black men to fail?" instead of "what are white men doing right and why (other than blaming racism) can't any other group do the same?
Of course as usual Asians don't exist.Replies: @res, @Pseudonymic Handle, @Alec Leamas (hard at work)
At least they mentioned racial differences, even if only to clumsily refute them:
My explanation would be that black women are not handicapped because women generally don’t rely on their cognitive abilities to achieve status.
Fortunately, after some de rigueur crying over racism they bring up crime:
They briefly covered asians and it makes sense:
The words missing from this study are “regression toward the mean”, words which explain why the boys of exceptional blacks don’t do well, why the children of poor whites often perform better than their parents and why the children of successful asian immigrants are not on par with their parents, but still do pretty well.
That trailer almost made me puke. The “Romance of Communism” is really being pushed hard now.
Engels can barely contain his gleeful admiration for the ruthless amoral efficiency of Bauernjorg, the German nobleman who ruthlessness crushed the 1525 German Peasant’s Revolt by any means necessary (deception, treachery, sadistic violence against helpless captives):
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/
It was obvious to any intelligent observer that Marxism, if established as the ruling ideology in Russia, could provide justifications for ruthlessly crushing the class most despised by Marxist theory, yeoman farmers such as the Cossacks and the Ukrainian “kulacks”.
An ethnic group with an ethnic desire to mass murder Cossacks, Ukrainians, and the Russian upper class, embraced Marxism for obvious reasons.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html
Rich White Boys Stay Rich. Black Boys Don’t.
It goes on to say that black women don't decline as much as black men relative to white women but if you look at the graphs, black women, black men and white women all perform similarly - it's white men that are the outliers. Every other group tends to fall ("the best way to make a small fortune is to start out with a big one") but only white men have the mojo to hang onto their father's fortunes and maybe even increase them (cough, Donald Trump, cough). The narrative of the article (as usual) is ass backward . Its premise is "what are evil white men doing to cause black men to fail?" instead of "what are white men doing right and why (other than blaming racism) can't any other group do the same?
Of course as usual Asians don't exist.Replies: @res, @Pseudonymic Handle, @Alec Leamas (hard at work)
Is there some evidence that blacks males are more likely to regress to the mean than others?
I figure it’s probably a twofer – the gap between examples of black successes and the black mean is very broad, and black males are under societal pressure to conform to certain roles which require displays of antisocial and economically disastrous behavior.
A black father of slightly above average intelligence of the general population may be in a position to really benefit from serial bites of the apple via Affirmative Action – cumulative advantages in undergraduate admission, graduate school admission, and then his first few jobs. If his son is average for blacks or even slightly above the black average he’s probably still not going to get on the Affirmative Action express elevator in the way his father did. This is especially the case if he insists upon acting out in the typically black manor following the urban rap image. At best he’s going to get an assist in admissions at a state school with a chance to muddle through for a few semesters.
For example, let's say that whites in the top 20% of income might have an average IQ of ~122 while blacks in the same category might be ~115 due to AA. (Kind of just making up the numbers, but you get the idea.) So right off the bat, comparing the test scores or achievement of the white kids and the black kids as though their parents have equal IQs (or other traits such as conscientiousness) is wrong. Given the IQ gap of the parents, you'd expect the black kids to perform worse.
Throw in the black kids regressing farther toward their group's mean because of their parents' greater distance from that mean, and you'll push that white-black even more.
The white kids could have an average IQ of 115 (again, I'm just ball parking here) while the black kids could have an average IQ of 105, nearly an SD difference. Throw in black kids not wanting to act white and acting ghetto (which the boys would do more than the girls) and you could have dramatically different outcomes for the white and black kids, especially the boys.
How come no mention of the white supremacist terrorist attack bombings in Austin Texas?
Oh wait that doesn’t fit the narrative
The victims are People of Color and the perpetrators are white boys
You guys cannot accept that white men are the biggest terrorists in the USA
Lendpserg “dats teh way uh huh uh huh Tinys lykes it uh huh un huh.....Lendspurp be feelsin musical today’s” Pit Pit the Great
Pretty f’n based.
I haven’t (and won’t) see this movie, but I’ve read ton of works on Marx, Engels, Marxism etc. Marx, it must be noted, towered over all socialists & communists with his erudition, intellectual acumen & creativity. Engels was the first to acknowledge this; he said that Marx was the genius, and all the rest just talents (by the way, for those interested in the topic, I’d recommend two very good biographies) .
Marx had a stronger “prophetic” strain than Engels, so although both co-authored prophetic “Communist Manifesto”, Engels had become more realistic & anti-apocalyptic over years, especially after Marx’s death, when he was treated as the Grand Old Patriarch of world socialism.
It is futile to speculate whether someone like Lenin would be “ideologically incapacitated” had Engels’ more nuanced down-to- earth ideology had won. Ultimately, every one in this trinity was, basically, apocalyptic enough & driven by quasi-religious ideological zeal.
Fortunately, after some de rigueur crying over racism they bring up crime:They briefly covered asians and it makes sense:The words missing from this study are "regression toward the mean", words which explain why the boys of exceptional blacks don't do well, why the children of poor whites often perform better than their parents and why the children of successful asian immigrants are not on par with their parents, but still do pretty well.Replies: @AndrewR
Black boys raised in the 1% probably tend to be sons of pro athletes. Pro athletes are relatively likely to have been raised in the ghetto. People raised in the ghetto are relatively likely to teach their kids ghetto values. And people who grow up with ghetto values are more likely to turn to crime.
These are working salaried rich people, however. The largest share of wealth in the USA is in the form of appreciated company stock and inheritances.
OT
I haven’t seen “Black Panther” yet but with all the blog commentary do I really need to?
In any case it is clear that Wakanda is a real place and it really exists. There is a city full of high technology, prosperous people and excellent prospects for the future . It is largely free of white people and has emerged from an area where there has always been grinding hopeless poverty.
The only deviation from the Wakanda in the film is that the non-whites who built this paragon of modern nations are not Africans. They are Koreans and the city isn’t called Wakanda – it’s called Seoul.
At the end of the Korean War the GDP of South Korea was something like $68. Korea was poorer than almost all of the sub-Saharan nations. What’s more Korea is relatively barren in terms of natural resources. Africa has oil and minerals. The Korean peninsula has mostly just cold bare dirt.
Today all those black nations are still desperately poor while South Korea has risen to number six among all nations by GDP per capita. Korea manufactures its wealth from its human resources.
That’s why “Black Panther” is cinema mendacité.
Mr. Jawando may “identify as black,” but he should not count as one of the “black boys who rose to the top,” for obvious reasons.
OT, Uber autonomous vehicle kills pedestrian.
https://twitter.com/daiwaka/status/975771533745336320
Oh wait that doesn't fit the narrative
The victims are People of Color and the perpetrators are white boys
You guys cannot accept that white men are the biggest terrorists in the USAReplies: @fish
Ohs Tinys….you’n just stil mad dat teh whyte boys donts liek givin you the Lendspert treetmint dats yous kraves so bad! It bein what lil lendspurt be made to do.
Lendpserg “dats teh way uh huh uh huh Tinys lykes it uh huh un huh…..Lendspurp be feelsin musical today’s” Pit Pit the Great
If you are of German heritage and your family just seemed to magically appear in the U.S. sometime around 1850, you're probably a 48er. You may be interested in this film.Replies: @Just Another 48er, @Charles Pewitt, @eD, @yaqub the mad scientist, @Anonymous
Sorry, that would actually be the more famous Friedrich Engels, not Joseph. One thing that stands out from the period was the degree of overlap between the freedom advocates, like the Rottecks, and the Communists or proto-Communists, whatever they were, like Marx and Engels. That “power to the people” thing can seem to go either way. The revolutionary movements of the time seem to have been comprised of both camps.
Marx grew up classically educated, and by several accounts in adulthood he maintained enough fluency in classical Greek that he could read Aeschylus’ tragedies in the original language for pleasure. Marx also had read deeply in later Western literature, and he could quote readily from Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
Ironically his heirs in the Coalition of the Fringes in the early 21st Century disdain having to study those works in college because white men wrote them.
(Reply to Pat Boyle, #27)
Interestingly, Pat, an extended sequence in the movie actually takes place in South Korea: in Busan. The scene starts in a secret casino, but then opens up into a car chase through the streets of a visibly high-tech city, and concludes with the Panther restraining himself from killing an opponent when he realizes that all the Korean onlookers are recording him on their cell phones.
I finally saw the movie this weekend, and found it pretty enjoyable. The laughably desperate Leftist commentariate made too much of its social/cultural significance–but what else is new? I’m an old-time fan of the comic book character and its creator, Jack Kirby–who was more inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rider Haggard than by ideology when he conceived of the hidden, hi-tech Wakanda back in 1966.
The film’s director, Ryan Coogler, strikes me as interesting for similar, non-ideological reasons. The drama of “Black Panther” and Coogler’s Rocky sequel “Creed” revolves around family dynamics, especially the meaning of fatherhood and the consequences of its absense. The memes about BP’s alt-Right cred (his reliance on a wall, his aversion to immigration, e.g.), though meant to be provocative, do have some merit–at least in my view. These “conservative” themes–if they truly exist–are realized imperfectly, and delivered “under cover” to baffle SJWs; but then again, we’re talking about a super-hero movie.
If you are of German heritage and your family just seemed to magically appear in the U.S. sometime around 1850, you're probably a 48er. You may be interested in this film.Replies: @Just Another 48er, @Charles Pewitt, @eD, @yaqub the mad scientist, @Anonymous
Pot-banging 1848’er Germans were making a big racket to protect their state government worker racket in Wisconsin in 2011. They occupied the state capitol building and might have had ancestral visions of making a fuss in the 1848 era back in Germany.
Why did Wisconsin, Missouri and other states get all the 1848 pot-banger Krauts? These Germans ain’t nothing like the colonial era Krauts, or the Krauts who made the Kentucky long rifle or any of the other types of Kraut.
Carol Alt is the most famous Prussian I know. I can’t see her or her Prussian people executing their fellow Krauts unless they really deserved it. I prefer supermodel Prussians to anti-White public intellectuals such as Steven Pinker. I say deport Pinker as soon as possible.
Thankfully, Trump got a lot of the other kinds of Germans to vote for him in the Great Lakes states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Sons of rich black families end up poor, unlike in white families.
More Raj Chetty, at the New York Times and Marginal Revolution:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/sons-well-off-black-families-not-well.html
And the original study:
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_summary.pdf
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_paper.pdf
The New York Times piece is incoherent. It somehow gets off onto IQ differences as a possible explanation, but boys and girls turn out different, so it wonders if standardized tests are biased against blacks, which ... how does that relate to the Chetty study under consideration? It does give them an excuse to quote an "expert" (a sociologist) who refers to IQ differences as "putative."Replies: @Citizen of a Silly Country
Watch your wallet on this one.
Here’s the money shot from the study:
Hmm. Looks to me like the answer is to move blacks kids into white (and Asian) neighborhoods to improve their environment. And, shockingly, that’s the prescription.
As always, the last Five-Year Plan failed because our earlier comrades weren’t dedicated enough. Busing wasn’t enough. Just having black and white kids in the same school won’t close the gap. We must integrate not just the schools but the neighborhoods, block by block, street by street, house by house.
In addtion, we must force white children (and their parents) to become close with their new black neighbors. Naturally, we will need to re-educate white children and show them how terribly racist they are. (South Park’s Tolerance Camp was just a bit ahead of its time.)
Naturally, we’ll need to re-educate the neighborhood’s police and school administrators to help them understand that their racism is responsible for higher arrest rates and school discipline for black boys.
Stalin would have loved Chetty and Hendren. I’m sure that the two of them live in heavily black neighborhoods and send their kids to schools with lots of black kids. I mean, they believe all of this right?
If you are of German heritage and your family just seemed to magically appear in the U.S. sometime around 1850, you're probably a 48er. You may be interested in this film.Replies: @Just Another 48er, @Charles Pewitt, @eD, @yaqub the mad scientist, @Anonymous
Richard Wagner also took part in the 1848 revolutions, on the revolutionary side. His life would also be a good subject for a biopic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3ul4LA3l5IReplies: @Charles Pewitt
If you are of German heritage and your family just seemed to magically appear in the U.S. sometime around 1850, you're probably a 48er. You may be interested in this film.Replies: @Just Another 48er, @Charles Pewitt, @eD, @yaqub the mad scientist, @Anonymous
No group’s influence on this country is more underestimated than the 48’ers, such as:
– They brought continental leftism to America, shattering the Franco/British Enlightenment as the sole realm of discourse. The “Ohio Hegelians” were an influential circle.
– Their influence on American eduction, “kindergarten” being the most obvious example.
-The Civil War. Barring the supposed disaster at Gettysburg (due to command confusion more than anything), the German immigrant divisons played a big role in the war. It was a German division led by a communist (Marx’ old rival August Willich) who made it to the top first at Missionary Ridge- the beginning of the end of the war in the Western theater. They brought a lot of ideological reinforcement to what was a minority abolitionist view in the Union army.
-They built up the Midwest, fast.
-Coming in at the same time as the Irish, the Bavarian contingent greatly expeanded the Catholic Church in America.
-Thousands of skilled fabricators and machinists arrived. They were the shot in the arm as the Industrial Revolution really took off.
The deceased baby boomer Sam Francis took the ruling class bit — which is crucial to understanding managerialism or globalization — from a guy named James Burnham. Burnham was a high IQ communist boob whose writings greatly influenced Sam Francis.
Sam Francis says there will always be a ruling class. Even when the slobs — such as the communist scum — say there won’t be any ruling class. Human nature and human biology dictates that there will be a ruling class. That is why I use the historical example of William the Conqueror removing the Saxon ruling class from power in England. People can understand that because it was one day and one battle.
The trick now for White Core Americans is to keep the Anglo-Celts in the South and the Germans in the Great Lakes together in a voting bloc. Whoever can get the votes, or the fighting power, of those two groups will gain control of the American Empire. Trump did it, but his subsequent political moves, or lack of movement on issues(immigration), are threatening to fracture that coalition.
You mean Georgians? As in Josef. Stalin?
Something tells me that this movie is going to bomb. The average American didn’t study Marx or Engels in school, doesn’t know much about them, and could care less. Of those that did, at least half of them must know that the philosophy of the previous two men is a lot of garbage, and they’re not about to go to a movie that looks like it might be intended to kiss the butts of the two previous mentioned and disseminate a lot of Marxist propaganda. Secondly, movies that spend all their time talking over an idea instead of having explosions and crashes don’t do very well at the box office.
If you see communism as an attack on European Christendom, as I do, the fact that Karl Marx was a Jew and many of the Bolsheviks were Jews is vitally important.
Your bit about Marx using the British Empire to piggyback communist ideology onto the wider world is good stuff.
Sailer had a bit about the use of the English language as a weapon to push the ideology of globalism. Popular culture and advertising really pushed the open borders mindset after the Cold War.
Globalization is the specific tactics and governmental actions and laws that ruling classes use to push the ideology of globalism.
I was trying to find whether Marx's real name was in fact Moses Mordecai Marx Levy, but couldn't find anything substantial. But in the process I did find this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jewish_Question
I would argue that the work is not in fact, anti-Semitic, on the grounds that it is too tedious to make it through until the juicy bits might be found, if they were to exist.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
Was Marx a Satanist? I am not sure, but this book makes the argument.
https://horst-koch.de/karl-marx/Replies: @syonredux, @J.Ross
It’s interesting to note how Wakanda has become more of an SJW wet dream in recent years. When Kirby-Lee originally created Wakanda, the idea was that all that high tech stuff was quite recent, the product of T’Challa’s reign. Christopher Priest, during his late ’90s-early 2000s run on the title introduced the notion that Wakanda has always been more technologically advanced than everybody else.
I kind of liked the implication in a Hudnel story that the Wakandans were only a stage or two ahead of the rest of the world, so for example in the time of the Roman legions they had already invented the "medieval" crossbow.
Nevertheless, you're right of course Syon: this is all a recent development, with very small-time, insider appeal--until Black Panther became a money-maker. SJWs are always so impressed by lucre.
BTW, someone on an earlier comment thread suggested that Wakanda might have been inspired by the advanced and invisible Gorilla City in the 1950s-60s Flash comics. It's a very "verboten" but actually plausible idea, which I thought you would appreciate.Replies: @syonredux
Of course, Engels wasn’t Jewish:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels
His theory of history strikes me as the most attractive part of the Marxian package. I don't mean to say that it's correct, but it *is* vivid, clarifying, and a prod to deeper understanding. It's been a quarter century since I last read Marx, and I haven't thought about him directly for years. But when my teenage son was recently assigned "The Communist Manifesto" for school, I was amazed at the level of detailed knowledge I was able to summon up in our conversations. Contemporary examples of "class struggle" seemed very apparent, especially with all the iSteve matter filling my head (although I suppose it's a double-edged sword with historical determinism that you can always find contemporary examples to "verify" its claims).
Another possible source of his strange new appeal is the fact that Marx is a very European figure. As mightily as he (and his epigones) strove to overturn Europe's political/social/economic order, Marx is now a genuine part of the European inheritance: an example of European ideas that conquered, transformed, or merely opened up rival world cultures. (Whether for good or ill is a separate question--ironically the question at the heart of Western imperialism.) People who take pride in the European inheritance have reason to appreciate his achievement. Certainly the depth of Marx's learning in the Western tradition was breathtaking--such a contrast with the fourth-rate intellectuals who pretend to wave his flag today.
Again, none of this is an endorsement of Marx. But what I take to be a cautious reappraisal of his thought on the part of the new Right is notable, surprising and, I think, meaningful.Replies: @blank-misgivings, @Ian M., @Yngvar
Indeed – a ‘right wing Marxism’ is not inconceivable. Neo-reactionary Nick Land calls himself such – but he is not necessarily the model for what a right wing Marxism might look like (it is the apocalyptic elements in Marx he seems most attracted to). Broadly, I think the ‘right’ could rediscover and (re)claim historical materialism as a way of seeing politics. Engels may be more useful in that regard than Marx as he was a more consistent materialist than Marx – who was more in the grip of a Hegelian conception of ‘progress’.
Adding Darwinism to Marxism in an intelligent way is something that has never really been attempted . It would involve both biological Darwinism (HBD stuff) and a Darwinian conception of inter-societal struggle (Peter Turchin stuff) plus the Marxist analysis of modes of production and concomitant class struggles. It would be messy, but so is material reality.
Have you heard of the 20th C anthropologist Leslie A. White--books, The Science of Culture, The Evolution of Culture? Explicitly drawing Darwin and Marx together. I'm not certain what you mean by "in an intelligent way," but he did become president of the American Anthropological Association while his cultural evolutionism was the leading approach. You might enjoy looking him up, though he's been out of fashion.
I figure it's probably a twofer - the gap between examples of black successes and the black mean is very broad, and black males are under societal pressure to conform to certain roles which require displays of antisocial and economically disastrous behavior.
A black father of slightly above average intelligence of the general population may be in a position to really benefit from serial bites of the apple via Affirmative Action - cumulative advantages in undergraduate admission, graduate school admission, and then his first few jobs. If his son is average for blacks or even slightly above the black average he's probably still not going to get on the Affirmative Action express elevator in the way his father did. This is especially the case if he insists upon acting out in the typically black manor following the urban rap image. At best he's going to get an assist in admissions at a state school with a chance to muddle through for a few semesters.Replies: @Citizen of a Silly Country
Yep. I’ve wondered about that myself when I see articles/research about high-income blacks and their children. We’re so used to using income as a proxy for IQ with whites, we forget that when it comes to blacks, there may be other major contributing factors.
For example, let’s say that whites in the top 20% of income might have an average IQ of ~122 while blacks in the same category might be ~115 due to AA. (Kind of just making up the numbers, but you get the idea.) So right off the bat, comparing the test scores or achievement of the white kids and the black kids as though their parents have equal IQs (or other traits such as conscientiousness) is wrong. Given the IQ gap of the parents, you’d expect the black kids to perform worse.
Throw in the black kids regressing farther toward their group’s mean because of their parents’ greater distance from that mean, and you’ll push that white-black even more.
The white kids could have an average IQ of 115 (again, I’m just ball parking here) while the black kids could have an average IQ of 105, nearly an SD difference. Throw in black kids not wanting to act white and acting ghetto (which the boys would do more than the girls) and you could have dramatically different outcomes for the white and black kids, especially the boys.
Karl Marx’s
“Confession”
Zalt-Bommel, 1 April 1865
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/04/01.htm
Capitalists here, socialists there: the J secret in a nutshell.
Adding Darwinism to Marxism in an intelligent way is something that has never really been attempted . It would involve both biological Darwinism (HBD stuff) and a Darwinian conception of inter-societal struggle (Peter Turchin stuff) plus the Marxist analysis of modes of production and concomitant class struggles. It would be messy, but so is material reality.Replies: @ChrisZ, @Dube, @Crawfurdmuir
Wow, Blank, that last paragraph is a lot to think over–I’d like to see it developed somewhere. Thanks.
Was it “Priest”/Owsley (who’s kind of a weirdo) or Reginald Hudnel? The latter, in my limited experience, seems like my characterization of Ryan Coogler: a creator who’s trying to insinuate “traditionalist” values into the dysfunctional Black popular culture. (But again, in both cases it’s just my reading of limited examples of their work.)
I kind of liked the implication in a Hudnel story that the Wakandans were only a stage or two ahead of the rest of the world, so for example in the time of the Roman legions they had already invented the “medieval” crossbow.
Nevertheless, you’re right of course Syon: this is all a recent development, with very small-time, insider appeal–until Black Panther became a money-maker. SJWs are always so impressed by lucre.
BTW, someone on an earlier comment thread suggested that Wakanda might have been inspired by the advanced and invisible Gorilla City in the 1950s-60s Flash comics. It’s a very “verboten” but actually plausible idea, which I thought you would appreciate.
Here's the money shot from the study:Hmm. Looks to me like the answer is to move blacks kids into white (and Asian) neighborhoods to improve their environment. And, shockingly, that's the prescription.As always, the last Five-Year Plan failed because our earlier comrades weren't dedicated enough. Busing wasn't enough. Just having black and white kids in the same school won't close the gap. We must integrate not just the schools but the neighborhoods, block by block, street by street, house by house.
In addtion, we must force white children (and their parents) to become close with their new black neighbors. Naturally, we will need to re-educate white children and show them how terribly racist they are. (South Park's Tolerance Camp was just a bit ahead of its time.)
Naturally, we'll need to re-educate the neighborhood's police and school administrators to help them understand that their racism is responsible for higher arrest rates and school discipline for black boys.
Stalin would have loved Chetty and Hendren. I'm sure that the two of them live in heavily black neighborhoods and send their kids to schools with lots of black kids. I mean, they believe all of this right?Replies: @Flip, @Anonymous
In March 1814, Francia, the dictator of Paraguay banned Spaniards from marrying each other; they had to wed Indians, blacks, or mulattoes.
https://indietravelpodcast.com/paraguay/jesuit-ruins-paraguay-jess-trinidad/
You cribbed from wikipedia didn’t you. 😉
This sounds like the baseball version which would be: "I'm just happy to be here" when a guy comes up from the minors or is traded to another team."Replies: @Anonym
Was Anderson sarcastically mocking the standard cliches used by actors to explain why they took a role when he said, “The writing was that good”?
I took it as slightly miffed but forgiving self deprecating humor. PTA was the writer. The actress unintentionally compared his writing to that of a film school student.
The movie chronicles Marx and Engels friendship, collaboration, and the tough time they had persuading more idealistic and less proactive workers’ representatives that a coherent doctrine was necessary for any meaningful movement to form and thrive. Marx in particular spars, politely, with French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudon. Marx’s response to the elder statesman’s famed pronouncement “Property is theft” is an inquiry: “Whose property?”
Marx and Engels’ thought was genuinely revolutionary, and it’s clear that Peck would insist that said thought had little if anything to do with the depredations of the supposedly Marx-inspired Soviet Union. Since capital is evolving Marx was not proved wrong. Peck is very persuasive in getting the young to see the evils of capitalismReplies: @Mr. Anon
And yet, you are our negro.
In the opening paragraph it said “presented with historical accuracy “.
Is Communism that sacred that this might be one of the few movies of late that were presented with “historical accuracy”? The movie industry seems to screw up everything else they get their hands on that is of historical significance.
For an anti-Marxist film, "Death of Stalin" is pretty compatible with that old apologetic line of thought, that "If it weren't for that Stalin," the Soviet Union would be something people would want to immigrate to, eg, the beginning of the film identifies the secret police as "Stalin's."
Is Communism that sacred that this might be one of the few movies of late that were presented with "historical accuracy"? The movie industry seems to screw up everything else they get their hands on that is of historical significance.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @J.Ross
This is a pro-Marx movie, but it’s kind of dull in part because they didn’t make the script more interesting because they stuck to most of what Marx did as a young man: read, write, and argue about economics.
Germany Must Have Its Place In the Sun! says Burton as Wagner.
The Welsh were damn smart to start their country on the periphery of an island off the coast of Europe. The Saxons might have nudged them over there, or left them alone, which is a good thing to do when a Welshman is in the right and he's bombed on ale. Too much Teutonic turmoil on the European continent.
The Communist Manifesto is the only thing by Marx that I’ve read all the way through.
It is interesting to ponder on German intellectual dominance, as Bertrand Russell called it, from ca. 1750 to 1950. Apart from ancient Greece, I don’t see an equivalent. Even if we take only big names- however different they must have been-from 1840. to 1880., they include Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Max Stirner, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche,…
Marx, Stirner, Nietzsche have, respectively covered so much in their works that production of their French, British, Italian, Spanish, American, Russian…contemporaries seem almost childish (Bentham, Mill, Proudhon, Comte, …). Max Stirner, one of anarchists’ ideologues, the goal of Marx & Engels’ ruthless critique in “German Ideology”, is both psychologically & socially stratospheric in comparison with most of his non-German contemporaries.
And many, if not in orthodox garb, ideas of Stirner, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche… remain both accessible & pertinent even today.
Whence this explosion of German creativity, I don’t know.
I kind of liked the implication in a Hudnel story that the Wakandans were only a stage or two ahead of the rest of the world, so for example in the time of the Roman legions they had already invented the "medieval" crossbow.
Nevertheless, you're right of course Syon: this is all a recent development, with very small-time, insider appeal--until Black Panther became a money-maker. SJWs are always so impressed by lucre.
BTW, someone on an earlier comment thread suggested that Wakanda might have been inspired by the advanced and invisible Gorilla City in the 1950s-60s Flash comics. It's a very "verboten" but actually plausible idea, which I thought you would appreciate.Replies: @syonredux
It was Priest.
https://www.cbr.com/black-panther-wakanda-before-king-tchalla/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3ul4LA3l5IReplies: @Charles Pewitt
Welshman Richard Burton as Richard Wagner got a big reaction when he said PRUSSIANS! Richard Burton would have loved to have had a few drinks with Carol Alt, my favorite Prussian.
Germany Must Have Its Place In the Sun! says Burton as Wagner.
The Welsh were damn smart to start their country on the periphery of an island off the coast of Europe. The Saxons might have nudged them over there, or left them alone, which is a good thing to do when a Welshman is in the right and he’s bombed on ale. Too much Teutonic turmoil on the European continent.
They could have jazzed up this Marx movie with Woody Harrelson as a rampaging Ramapo Mountain Jackson White keen to make some loot on Industrial Revolution political tumult.
I was trying to find whether Marx's real name was in fact Moses Mordecai Marx Levy, but couldn't find anything substantial. But in the process I did find this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jewish_Question
I would argue that the work is not in fact, anti-Semitic, on the grounds that it is too tedious to make it through until the juicy bits might be found, if they were to exist.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
Was Marx a Satanist? I am not sure, but this book makes the argument.
https://horst-koch.de/karl-marx/Replies: @syonredux, @J.Ross
He also wrote a pamphlet with a less ambiguous title: A World Without Jews. Same idea, those things that are repugnant are a result of our separation from a natural egalitarian state, so restoring the state of communism will erase the hateful traits and everybody sings kumbaya. This pisses everyone off for different reasons (Cartman voice: “But Communism is Jewishness!”), and more modern commies either moved toward a vague (and, in Marxism, inescapably heretical) tolerance of Jewishness as an identity, or learned to shout “Holocaust!”
You will notice that this is now how they talk about white people. White people are not the origin or singular propagators of racism — white people are racism, and when they are gone there will not be any tribal competition or village clearing or riots or beauty preferences.
Marx, Stirner, Nietzsche have, respectively covered so much in their works that production of their French, British, Italian, Spanish, American, Russian...contemporaries seem almost childish (Bentham, Mill, Proudhon, Comte, ...). Max Stirner, one of anarchists' ideologues, the goal of Marx & Engels' ruthless critique in "German Ideology", is both psychologically & socially stratospheric in comparison with most of his non-German contemporaries.
And many, if not in orthodox garb, ideas of Stirner, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche... remain both accessible & pertinent even today.
Whence this explosion of German creativity, I don't know.Replies: @J.Ross, @syonredux, @Luke Lea
The German dives deeper but comes up muddier.
Thanks Syon. I’m fond of the old Kirby and McGregor stuff, but do you know if the Priest series is worthwhile?
Is Communism that sacred that this might be one of the few movies of late that were presented with "historical accuracy"? The movie industry seems to screw up everything else they get their hands on that is of historical significance.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @J.Ross
It’s not sloppiness. Some things are holy and must be handled properly to avoid the fate of Uzzah. Some things are hateful and must be gratuitously mishandled, to not only “nudge” the facts but to glory in superiority over the people whose tragedy you mock or erase. And some things are neutral and can be viciously exploited for short-term political ends, like (((Graham Moore)))’s rape of Alan Turing’s life story.
For an anti-Marxist film, “Death of Stalin” is pretty compatible with that old apologetic line of thought, that “If it weren’t for that Stalin,” the Soviet Union would be something people would want to immigrate to, eg, the beginning of the film identifies the secret police as “Stalin’s.”
However I can see that the premise of this movie will command a VAST audience of eager cinema-goers. What's more, the subsequent merch will be highly collectible, such as a molar from an exhumed Kulak or a DIY show-trial kit with a 1/32nd scale firing squad.Replies: @Byrresheim
You should not draw a direct line from Marx to the depradations of the Bolsheviks.
I recall enjoying it when it came out…..but that was a while ago and I was in my teens….One element that probably dates it is that (as I recall) Priest was really fond of presenting things,à la Pulp Fiction , in anachronic order.
Steve: “Another way to think about this is that female behavior is relatively similar across cultures”–not true: black females, on average, are more violent than whites and Asians, and I suspect that their affirmative action prizes account for their success in workforce
Definitely a must see movie. I always felt Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, using Marx’s ideas. He was that talented a writer, Marx wasn’t.
Whenever we hear some feminist harridan complaining about "patriarchy," she is echoing Marcuse, who is in turn echoing Engels. Engels, following anthropological cranks of his time, asserts that primitive societies were matriarchal, and that matriarchy corresponded with the "primitive communism" of Marx's historical theory. Then patriarchy supplanted it. The institutions of private property and inheritance were consequences, and thus feudalism and then capitalism developed. In turn, with the rise of a future communist society, what Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto called "the claptrap of the bourgeois family" will dissolve, to be replaced by a renewed matriarchy.
It is probable that few of today's feminists know the origins of the positions they espouse, but it is highly likely that some of the founders of their sect (e.g., Betty Friedan) were quite aware of them.Replies: @syonredux
The thing about Marx ultimately is his political naivite, which is a typical characteristic of Western Jewish intellectuals generally. Or maybe intellectuals generally. I chalk it up to their lack of first hand experience. See The Fatal Embrace.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/19/politics/dc-council-member-apology-anti-semitic-comment/index.htmlReplies: @Luke Lea
Sounds to me like he was just talking about The Man.
- They brought continental leftism to America, shattering the Franco/British Enlightenment as the sole realm of discourse. The "Ohio Hegelians" were an influential circle.
- Their influence on American eduction, "kindergarten" being the most obvious example.
-The Civil War. Barring the supposed disaster at Gettysburg (due to command confusion more than anything), the German immigrant divisons played a big role in the war. It was a German division led by a communist (Marx' old rival August Willich) who made it to the top first at Missionary Ridge- the beginning of the end of the war in the Western theater. They brought a lot of ideological reinforcement to what was a minority abolitionist view in the Union army.
-They built up the Midwest, fast.
-Coming in at the same time as the Irish, the Bavarian contingent greatly expeanded the Catholic Church in America.
-Thousands of skilled fabricators and machinists arrived. They were the shot in the arm as the Industrial Revolution really took off.Replies: @Luke Lea, @Hibernian, @Anon
Thanks for the info.
If we have to have an anti-Christ, let it be Marx:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ccu91wcovedefH6WbdWaEz6F_uzvy8tab7GHoZBv1BQ/edit?usp=sharing
Marx, Stirner, Nietzsche have, respectively covered so much in their works that production of their French, British, Italian, Spanish, American, Russian...contemporaries seem almost childish (Bentham, Mill, Proudhon, Comte, ...). Max Stirner, one of anarchists' ideologues, the goal of Marx & Engels' ruthless critique in "German Ideology", is both psychologically & socially stratospheric in comparison with most of his non-German contemporaries.
And many, if not in orthodox garb, ideas of Stirner, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche... remain both accessible & pertinent even today.
Whence this explosion of German creativity, I don't know.Replies: @J.Ross, @syonredux, @Luke Lea
Marx, Stirner, Nietzsche have, respectively covered so much in their works that production of their French, British, Italian, Spanish, American, Russian...contemporaries seem almost childish (Bentham, Mill, Proudhon, Comte, ...). Max Stirner, one of anarchists' ideologues, the goal of Marx & Engels' ruthless critique in "German Ideology", is both psychologically & socially stratospheric in comparison with most of his non-German contemporaries.
And many, if not in orthodox garb, ideas of Stirner, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche... remain both accessible & pertinent even today.
Whence this explosion of German creativity, I don't know.Replies: @J.Ross, @syonredux, @Luke Lea
And the poor Brits could only come up Smith, Hume, and Darwin!
I could have included Gauss, Euler, Mendel, Koch, Helmholtz, Liebig, Virchow, Schwann, ... or J.C.Maxwell, Boole, Davy, Lister, Thomas Young, Kelvin, ...on the British side, but these are different areas.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Luke Lea
Here's the money shot from the study:Hmm. Looks to me like the answer is to move blacks kids into white (and Asian) neighborhoods to improve their environment. And, shockingly, that's the prescription.As always, the last Five-Year Plan failed because our earlier comrades weren't dedicated enough. Busing wasn't enough. Just having black and white kids in the same school won't close the gap. We must integrate not just the schools but the neighborhoods, block by block, street by street, house by house.
In addtion, we must force white children (and their parents) to become close with their new black neighbors. Naturally, we will need to re-educate white children and show them how terribly racist they are. (South Park's Tolerance Camp was just a bit ahead of its time.)
Naturally, we'll need to re-educate the neighborhood's police and school administrators to help them understand that their racism is responsible for higher arrest rates and school discipline for black boys.
Stalin would have loved Chetty and Hendren. I'm sure that the two of them live in heavily black neighborhoods and send their kids to schools with lots of black kids. I mean, they believe all of this right?Replies: @Flip, @Anonymous
Marriage has a disparate impact. Why aren’t white people marrying people of color in numbers proportional to their representation in the population? Something needs to be done about this. Maybe a new Mixed Married Filling Jointly tax category.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex
These studies based on huge, anonymous data sets are so frustrating, because they raise so many questions that you would normally address by drilling down into the details of the data … but there are no details. It’s like a video game where you wander into a forest and things get more and more pixelated, and finally you can’t go any further.
That was great. Thanks!
- They brought continental leftism to America, shattering the Franco/British Enlightenment as the sole realm of discourse. The "Ohio Hegelians" were an influential circle.
- Their influence on American eduction, "kindergarten" being the most obvious example.
-The Civil War. Barring the supposed disaster at Gettysburg (due to command confusion more than anything), the German immigrant divisons played a big role in the war. It was a German division led by a communist (Marx' old rival August Willich) who made it to the top first at Missionary Ridge- the beginning of the end of the war in the Western theater. They brought a lot of ideological reinforcement to what was a minority abolitionist view in the Union army.
-They built up the Midwest, fast.
-Coming in at the same time as the Irish, the Bavarian contingent greatly expeanded the Catholic Church in America.
-Thousands of skilled fabricators and machinists arrived. They were the shot in the arm as the Industrial Revolution really took off.Replies: @Luke Lea, @Hibernian, @Anon
Gettysburg was in the Eastern theater. It is in the first low foothills on the eastern side of the Appalachians. The advancing Confederates had come north from Virginia.
- They brought continental leftism to America, shattering the Franco/British Enlightenment as the sole realm of discourse. The "Ohio Hegelians" were an influential circle.
- Their influence on American eduction, "kindergarten" being the most obvious example.
-The Civil War. Barring the supposed disaster at Gettysburg (due to command confusion more than anything), the German immigrant divisons played a big role in the war. It was a German division led by a communist (Marx' old rival August Willich) who made it to the top first at Missionary Ridge- the beginning of the end of the war in the Western theater. They brought a lot of ideological reinforcement to what was a minority abolitionist view in the Union army.
-They built up the Midwest, fast.
-Coming in at the same time as the Irish, the Bavarian contingent greatly expeanded the Catholic Church in America.
-Thousands of skilled fabricators and machinists arrived. They were the shot in the arm as the Industrial Revolution really took off.Replies: @Luke Lea, @Hibernian, @Anon
I believe it was Carl Schurz who commanded that division at Gettysburg. Willich’s fighting was mostly in the western theater. Schurz has the fattest autobiography I have ever seen on a bookshelf. He was a guy who had a busy life.
I think Smith, Hume, and Darwin did less damage to mankind.
And Hobbes, Locke, Ricardo, Paine, and a few others. The German genius count is not necessarily more than other narions, but it was wierdly concentrated in time around the beginnings of coalescence of German nationalist feeling. Imagine what would have happened if they were citizens of the world indifferent to their nation’s wider reputation.
The Union made Schurz a general for political reasons and because he’d undergone a little Prussian military training. He didn’t work his way up through the ranks. He was already famous and was appointed to high rank.
As it turned out, he wasn’t very good at being a battlefield tactician, although he was brave and tried hard.
But he did a lot of other stuff over a long career.
The German 1848ers like Schurz were among the small numbers of elite immigrants in American history: the Puritans were kind of similar, the post 1933 anti-Nazis like Einstein and Fermi.
It just occurred to me that, in one of the early chapters of the long saga of the GOP never catching a break, they finally clamped down on immigration (in the early 1920's) just in time to block the wave of wealthy, ultra-reactionary White Russian emigrants. Ironic on a whole bunch of levels.Replies: @syonredux
The population of California in 1910, around the period when the movie takes place, was 2.4 million people rounding up. California had 20 million people in 1970. There are now 40 million people packed into parts of California. The recent increase is mostly due to the mass importation of foreigners from mass immigration.
Housing costs in California, and the rest of the United States are going through the roof. There Will Be Blood won't be just a movie title when the young people stop smoking pot and figure out that greedy older people are deliberately stifling AFFORDABLE FAMILY FORMATION by profiting off the high housing costs.
The disgusting rats at the Wall Street Journal have an article today about high housing costs and they blamed it on lack of new construction of housing units. I didn't bother to read most of the slop, but they ignored the demand aspect of skyrocketing housing costs and they didn't mention immigration as a contributing factor in the increase in housing costs. I'll keep my blood pressure low by not fully reading the WSJ propaganda article.
The WSJ is just as evil as the NY Times. The Republican Party is just as evil as the Democrat Party.Replies: @Jake, @Charles Erwin Wilson
“The WSJ is just as evil as the NY Times. The Republican Party is just as evil as the Democrat Party.”
Amen, and again I say amen.
Everyone should know the levels of proto-communist thought and action in the Reformation, especially among the ‘radical’ new sects. Engels was a perfect fruit of his specific cultural heritage.
The population of California in 1910, around the period when the movie takes place, was 2.4 million people rounding up. California had 20 million people in 1970. There are now 40 million people packed into parts of California. The recent increase is mostly due to the mass importation of foreigners from mass immigration.
Housing costs in California, and the rest of the United States are going through the roof. There Will Be Blood won't be just a movie title when the young people stop smoking pot and figure out that greedy older people are deliberately stifling AFFORDABLE FAMILY FORMATION by profiting off the high housing costs.
The disgusting rats at the Wall Street Journal have an article today about high housing costs and they blamed it on lack of new construction of housing units. I didn't bother to read most of the slop, but they ignored the demand aspect of skyrocketing housing costs and they didn't mention immigration as a contributing factor in the increase in housing costs. I'll keep my blood pressure low by not fully reading the WSJ propaganda article.
The WSJ is just as evil as the NY Times. The Republican Party is just as evil as the Democrat Party.Replies: @Jake, @Charles Erwin Wilson
The WSJ and the Republican Party are mistaken. The NY Times and the Democrat Party are lacing up their boots in anticipation of stomping on your face, forever.
Don’t confuse venality with malice.
Carl Schurz rather reminds me of the modern neocons. An account of Schurz’s post-bellum travels through the defeated South records that on one occasion he lectured an ex-officer of the Confederate Army on “true Americanism.” The man the German Jacobin so haughtily addressed was the son of an officer of the Continental Line who had been on Washington’s staff. Bret Stephens or William Kristol could hardly display greater gall.
I saw the stats a long time ago so no citation, but are right, a very high share of blacks with top 0.1% income are professional athletes, with another large group being actors. For whites it is as you’d expect, bankers, non-financial executives, doctors, and lawyers.
These are working salaried rich people, however. The largest share of wealth in the USA is in the form of appreciated company stock and inheritances.
Other elite groups (possibly falling under the category of “Puritans”) included the Huguenots (Revere, Thoreau, du Pont) and Dutch (Schuyler, Vanderbilt, Roosevelt).
It just occurred to me that, in one of the early chapters of the long saga of the GOP never catching a break, they finally clamped down on immigration (in the early 1920’s) just in time to block the wave of wealthy, ultra-reactionary White Russian emigrants. Ironic on a whole bunch of levels.
It just occurred to me that, in one of the early chapters of the long saga of the GOP never catching a break, they finally clamped down on immigration (in the early 1920's) just in time to block the wave of wealthy, ultra-reactionary White Russian emigrants. Ironic on a whole bunch of levels.Replies: @syonredux
The du Ponts were not Huguenots; they were fleeing the French Revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89leuth%C3%A8re_Ir%C3%A9n%C3%A9e_du_Pont
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Samuel_du_Pont_de_Nemours
On the other hand, it still bears noting that, unlike many other French Protestants, the du Ponts did not flee France for religious reasons.
The groundwork is being laid:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex
Adding Darwinism to Marxism in an intelligent way is something that has never really been attempted . It would involve both biological Darwinism (HBD stuff) and a Darwinian conception of inter-societal struggle (Peter Turchin stuff) plus the Marxist analysis of modes of production and concomitant class struggles. It would be messy, but so is material reality.Replies: @ChrisZ, @Dube, @Crawfurdmuir
“Adding Darwinism to Marxism in an intelligent way is something that has never really been attempted .”
Have you heard of the 20th C anthropologist Leslie A. White–books, The Science of Culture, The Evolution of Culture? Explicitly drawing Darwin and Marx together. I’m not certain what you mean by “in an intelligent way,” but he did become president of the American Anthropological Association while his cultural evolutionism was the leading approach. You might enjoy looking him up, though he’s been out of fashion.
Funny. I had always assumed that the du Ponts were nominally Catholic:
Surprised to find out that Protestants could be ennobled in 1784 France.
On the other hand, it still bears noting that, unlike many other French Protestants, the du Ponts did not flee France for religious reasons.
If you are of German heritage and your family just seemed to magically appear in the U.S. sometime around 1850, you're probably a 48er. You may be interested in this film.Replies: @Just Another 48er, @Charles Pewitt, @eD, @yaqub the mad scientist, @Anonymous
Lot of highly educated German immigrants after 1848 were what you might loosely term the conservative wing of the budding Marxist/socialist movement in Europe-basically, the forerunners to Social Democracy-fleeing repression. Apart from their often impressive educational background and valuable economic skills, Old Prussia being what it was (mandatory conscription into what was probably the most intimidating training regimen of any army in Europe-and unless you had a very good medical excuse, like Marx did, the Hohenzollerns didn’t give a crap about your nationalist, democratic, and socialist beliefs), most of the northerners also had military experience and any ended up serving in the Union’s Army with distinction over a decade later.
Their impact on the US, as @yaqub stated, is highly underestimated. Most of the Irish-the other big immigrant group at the time-came from peasant backgrounds, which was why they ended up in the big cities, because they didn’t have the resources to go anywhere else. The Germans, by contrast, were much more heavily bourgeois and brought the trade or manufacturing skills that built the Midwest and Texas.
Hume is a philosopher, a very important one, but Darwin was a scientist, while Smith is not quite an important philosopher (economy is a different field).
I could have included Gauss, Euler, Mendel, Koch, Helmholtz, Liebig, Virchow, Schwann, … or J.C.Maxwell, Boole, Davy, Lister, Thomas Young, Kelvin, …on the British side, but these are different areas.
Thanks, Syon.
I could have included Gauss, Euler, Mendel, Koch, Helmholtz, Liebig, Virchow, Schwann, ... or J.C.Maxwell, Boole, Davy, Lister, Thomas Young, Kelvin, ...on the British side, but these are different areas.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Luke Lea
Seems like the best British thinkers like Adam Smith and Charles Darwin threaded the needle between being overly theoretical and overly pedantic, whiles German intellectuals tended toward one or the other extreme.
https://books.google.com/books?id=z0KtOtNYMEQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Frege+The+Foundations+of+Arithmetic&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjSk6jkpPzZAhWrneAKHZu8DSMQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=Frege%20The%20Foundations%20of%20Arithmetic&f=false
What's next? A movie on "the young Pol Pot"?Replies: @Dieter Kief
– Don’t even mention it- the next goodwill effort from some lunatic artist might be already on it’s way.
It’s a strange world…By the way: Young Pol Pot studied in Paris and saw Althusser and the crème of the Paris left there – such a movie could turn out to be somewhat funky, even…).
(Well done, such a movie could be interesting indeed…Althusser later on killed his wife and had to accept a sentence to psychiatry…. it’sall there: Drama, bohemien stars … and bars…).
uhhh
No.
The whole suject would be uninteresting, if it’d be really that simple. (cf. Peter Watson: German Genius).
For a starter: Kant is neither overly pedantic nor overly theoretical (try his essay On Eternal Peace). Then think of Goethe: A counter-example to your idea, if ever there was one. Or – nowadays: The poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger (wo does not fit perfectly here on this blog, because he wrote a rather lousy essay on IQ – but then: Nobody is perfect – which is true for Germans too, istn’t it?!)
Yes & no. Kant is pedantic & insufferable in virtually all his philosophical works (although not as indigestible as Hegel, Schelling or Heidegger). On the other hand, different though they may be, Stirner, Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, ..and later Cassirer & Spengler remain highly readable.
Goethe was not a philosopher & his major works (poetry, Faust, maxims,..) are very clear & enjoyable.
Adding Darwinism to Marxism in an intelligent way is something that has never really been attempted . It would involve both biological Darwinism (HBD stuff) and a Darwinian conception of inter-societal struggle (Peter Turchin stuff) plus the Marxist analysis of modes of production and concomitant class struggles. It would be messy, but so is material reality.Replies: @ChrisZ, @Dube, @Crawfurdmuir
It isn’t as if people haven’t tried. Gould, Lewontin, and Kamin were all Marxists of some sort; wherever Darwin and Marx were in conflict, their Marxism prevailed over their Darwinism.
The irresoluble conflict lies in the Marxist dictum, derived from the psychology of Condillac, that “conditions create consciousness.” Accordingly, neither man nor any other animal can have any innate behavioral characteristics that cannot be changed by changing its conditions. There is, as with many wrong ideas, a grain of truth in this; it is no coincidence that Pavlov’s experiments with dogs are the best-known achievements of Soviet-era experimental psychology.
However, the Soviets overshot the mark with the theories of Lysenko, and with their aversion to psychometrics, which took the form of an actual ban from the mid-‘thirties until sometime in the ‘seventies. These were positions taken not because there was any empirical evidence to support them, but rather because they were doctrinal implications of Marxism. Scientific challenge to them could not be tolerated, for it was heretical. If conditions did not create consciousness, and if changed conditions did not necessarily yield a permanent and heritable change in consciousness, how could New Soviet Man ever come into existence?
And, as Andrei Navrozov observed, though the Bolsheviks strove for seventy years to create New Soviet Man, all they managed to do was to create a race of proficient thieves.
His theory of history strikes me as the most attractive part of the Marxian package. I don't mean to say that it's correct, but it *is* vivid, clarifying, and a prod to deeper understanding. It's been a quarter century since I last read Marx, and I haven't thought about him directly for years. But when my teenage son was recently assigned "The Communist Manifesto" for school, I was amazed at the level of detailed knowledge I was able to summon up in our conversations. Contemporary examples of "class struggle" seemed very apparent, especially with all the iSteve matter filling my head (although I suppose it's a double-edged sword with historical determinism that you can always find contemporary examples to "verify" its claims).
Another possible source of his strange new appeal is the fact that Marx is a very European figure. As mightily as he (and his epigones) strove to overturn Europe's political/social/economic order, Marx is now a genuine part of the European inheritance: an example of European ideas that conquered, transformed, or merely opened up rival world cultures. (Whether for good or ill is a separate question--ironically the question at the heart of Western imperialism.) People who take pride in the European inheritance have reason to appreciate his achievement. Certainly the depth of Marx's learning in the Western tradition was breathtaking--such a contrast with the fourth-rate intellectuals who pretend to wave his flag today.
Again, none of this is an endorsement of Marx. But what I take to be a cautious reappraisal of his thought on the part of the new Right is notable, surprising and, I think, meaningful.Replies: @blank-misgivings, @Ian M., @Yngvar
Part of it too could be that some on the right reject capitalism and agree with Marx that capitalism results in alienation.
The ideas of Engels may in the long run have proven more influential than those of Marx. Marx’s economics, as developed in Das Kapital, are not taken seriously by many economists today apart from hard-core Marxists. On the other hand, modern feminism, “gay liberation,” and other themes central to the modern social-justice-warrior movement are derived through Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization from a late work of Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State.
Whenever we hear some feminist harridan complaining about “patriarchy,” she is echoing Marcuse, who is in turn echoing Engels. Engels, following anthropological cranks of his time, asserts that primitive societies were matriarchal, and that matriarchy corresponded with the “primitive communism” of Marx’s historical theory. Then patriarchy supplanted it. The institutions of private property and inheritance were consequences, and thus feudalism and then capitalism developed. In turn, with the rise of a future communist society, what Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto called “the claptrap of the bourgeois family” will dissolve, to be replaced by a renewed matriarchy.
It is probable that few of today’s feminists know the origins of the positions they espouse, but it is highly likely that some of the founders of their sect (e.g., Betty Friedan) were quite aware of them.
Both Marx and Engels were heavily influenced by the work of Lewis Henry Morgan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_H._Morgan#Influence_on_Marxism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family,_Private_Property_and_the_State
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Society
Whenever we hear some feminist harridan complaining about "patriarchy," she is echoing Marcuse, who is in turn echoing Engels. Engels, following anthropological cranks of his time, asserts that primitive societies were matriarchal, and that matriarchy corresponded with the "primitive communism" of Marx's historical theory. Then patriarchy supplanted it. The institutions of private property and inheritance were consequences, and thus feudalism and then capitalism developed. In turn, with the rise of a future communist society, what Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto called "the claptrap of the bourgeois family" will dissolve, to be replaced by a renewed matriarchy.
It is probable that few of today's feminists know the origins of the positions they espouse, but it is highly likely that some of the founders of their sect (e.g., Betty Friedan) were quite aware of them.Replies: @syonredux
RE: Engels and anthropology,
Both Marx and Engels were heavily influenced by the work of Lewis Henry Morgan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_H._Morgan#Influence_on_Marxism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family,_Private_Property_and_the_State
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Society
The 1840’s was a period of a huge protestant “revival” movement, presumably related in some way to living conditions in that decade. If you look at English grandfather clocks of that decade, the faces are nearly always decorated with religious themes.
Interesting that the same conditions probably led Marx in a rather different direction and explained his aphorism that “religion is the opium of the masses.”
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843 (when he was 31), offering a rather different solution to income inequality than that proposed by Marx. (Basically Dickens was offering the religious solution that the wealthy need to come to their senses and have a change of heart.)
He’s chuaing it over…
First they came for the Jesuits, but I was not a Jesuit…
https://indietravelpodcast.com/paraguay/jesuit-ruins-paraguay-jess-trinidad/
If not for the rise of the Soviet Union, no one would have heard of Marx.
But western decline would be the same, due to Freud’s impact on women and the fetish of individual freedom (which Marx neatly saw through).
Meanwhile the Soviets were not so stupid as to Freudianise their society. The Frankfurt School is 90% Freud:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudo-Marxism
Self-proclaimed Marxist Eugene Debs won 6% of the vote in the 1912 US Presidential election.
“Confession”
Zalt-Bommel, 1 April 1865https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/04/01.htmReplies: @Old Palo Altan
These Zaltbommel Philips are the family which, in the next generation, founded the still flourishing Philips Electronics Company.
Capitalists here, socialists there: the J secret in a nutshell.
But, to be fair, it was equally true of Engels: his sister married into the Blank family who founded (and controlled for decades) DEMAG, a world-wide construction firm. Through them he was also related to August, Freiherr von der Heydt, a banker who, as Prussian Minister of Commerce and then Finance, was principally responsible for the economic might which helped push Prussia to decisive supremacy over first Austria and then France. He was even related to a series of Prussian generals who bloodily brought about this supremacy in the lightning wars of 1859 and 1870, and which culminated in the figure of Alexander von Falkenhausen, Military Governor of Northern France and Belgium in World War II. But, since in Germany high culture is never long out of the picture, through these same generals he was connected to Clara Wieck, the celebrated pianist wife of Robert Schumann and intimate friend of Johannes Brahms.
I could have included Gauss, Euler, Mendel, Koch, Helmholtz, Liebig, Virchow, Schwann, ... or J.C.Maxwell, Boole, Davy, Lister, Thomas Young, Kelvin, ...on the British side, but these are different areas.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Luke Lea
I was thinking of figures with biggest impact on our general worldview today.
I think Frege is wonderfully subtle, or did back when I was into that kind of stuff.
https://books.google.com/books?id=z0KtOtNYMEQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Frege+The+Foundations+of+Arithmetic&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjSk6jkpPzZAhWrneAKHZu8DSMQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=Frege%20The%20Foundations%20of%20Arithmetic&f=false
Marx had been a household name at least since the Paris Commune.
Self-proclaimed Marxist Eugene Debs won 6% of the vote in the 1912 US Presidential election.
The sequel, if there is one, will not be such a bundle of laughs. By 1850 Marx had impregnated the servant. The child was fostered by another family, and Marx never accepted responsibility or acknowledged the boy as his son.
His theory of history strikes me as the most attractive part of the Marxian package. I don't mean to say that it's correct, but it *is* vivid, clarifying, and a prod to deeper understanding. It's been a quarter century since I last read Marx, and I haven't thought about him directly for years. But when my teenage son was recently assigned "The Communist Manifesto" for school, I was amazed at the level of detailed knowledge I was able to summon up in our conversations. Contemporary examples of "class struggle" seemed very apparent, especially with all the iSteve matter filling my head (although I suppose it's a double-edged sword with historical determinism that you can always find contemporary examples to "verify" its claims).
Another possible source of his strange new appeal is the fact that Marx is a very European figure. As mightily as he (and his epigones) strove to overturn Europe's political/social/economic order, Marx is now a genuine part of the European inheritance: an example of European ideas that conquered, transformed, or merely opened up rival world cultures. (Whether for good or ill is a separate question--ironically the question at the heart of Western imperialism.) People who take pride in the European inheritance have reason to appreciate his achievement. Certainly the depth of Marx's learning in the Western tradition was breathtaking--such a contrast with the fourth-rate intellectuals who pretend to wave his flag today.
Again, none of this is an endorsement of Marx. But what I take to be a cautious reappraisal of his thought on the part of the new Right is notable, surprising and, I think, meaningful.Replies: @blank-misgivings, @Ian M., @Yngvar
Are You out of Your mind? Marx great “achievement” was to unleash a ideology of hatred and resentment on Europe and the world. Vile epithets, vile branding was an invention by Marx, one that marxists have used ever since.