(Part 3) Best products from r/ChapoTrapHouse

Well, it is a very large union with many different locals so it isn't fair to dismiss it out of hand. There are certainly some good locals with good politics and a good approach to organizing.

Overall, and especially at the highest levels, the union is very corporate and extremely into doing the bidding of shitty milquetoast Democrats. I think it makes sense for unions to engage politically, but they are very wedded to the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. Hillary's slogan, Stronger Together, was literally directly lifted from SEIU. There was scandal in a number of big locals when the union endorsed Hillary, as she has been no friend to labor (serving on Walmart's board, etc., etc.).

In addition, the union is overall not interested or invested in real worker struggle. Again, there are a few locals that go against this, such as 1199 New England, but in general the union is heavily against striking or industrial action. It greatly favors corporate partnership agreements, where the union creates pro-business preconditions to any collective bargaining agreement which effectively put certain things workers might want off the table so as to induce corporations to go easier on union organizing. It's a strategy that maybe made sense at one point but it severely limits the effectiveness of the union in being a real vehicle for worker power long-term.

I can talk more about this if folks want, just PM me. If you are really interested I would highly recommend two books by Jane McAlevey, a labor organizer and leader who served as director of Nevada's big SEIU local. She has real-life examples of the problems with SEIU but also talks about the good things workers have been able to accomplish within it. They are both good books - Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell) and No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age - but I would recommend the first very highly.

EDIT: I do want to say that if you are looking to organize, it is worth calling them. I think I am probably too cynical from direct involvement in a lot of organizing, and I want to be clear that my views are just that. This current moment for the labor movement is probably the worst it's been in since the Red Scare at least, and a lot of big unions are just turtling up and trying to weather the storm. SEIU, to its credit, has still prioritized organizing and spends a lot of money on organizing efforts even if they won't lead to obvious wins for the union. Also, they do have a lot of resources which can be very helpful to being successful at organizing. The IWW is cool, but it is tiny (less than 3,000 members globally, most of whom are at-large members whose membership has nothing to do with working anywhere, which is fine but very different than most unions) and it has no resources. There are cool things going on with it, but if you are looking for a more traditional union organizing effort where you will get support in building an organizing committee and moving to an election and then negotiating a collective bargaining agreement, I would call SEIU or another large union that has some involvement in your industry.

Soooo I guess I basically just walked back my initial comment. Shit's complex, everyone.

Deleuze and Guattari demand being read as primary source material. To understand, you must be willing to ditch your ontological hangups and try to make the same moves they do. This is exceedingly hard to do at first, and I'm still learning all the time, 2.5 years after I picked up Anti-Oedipus on a lark and struggled to break page five. Without reservation, they are the most important thinkers to how I live my life, having studied philosophy an undergrad and reading on my own four years after. Kant interested me, D&G move me. Or the me assemblages.

I recommend reading A Thousand Plateaus, Nietzsche and Philosophy, and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. ATP is their most famous work, and it will be much easier to understand the philosophical concepts Deleuze picks up by understanding his biggest influences, Nietzsche and Spinoza.

But I learned a lot from secondary material, and I think it's a necessity for almost everyone that isn't a savant, doesn't have a teacher, or isn't a Frenchman that lived through May of '68. Not all of it was useful, not all of them were good readings, but my D&G wouldn't exist without them. Some helpful links

What did Deleuze mean by "becoming-molecular a very brief introduction to their ontological orientation. To understand their politics, you need to understand how their ontology.

Can You Feel It? Deleuze & Guattari, Schizoanalysis, Affect[https://culturepowerpolitics.org/2016/05/19/can-you-feel-it-deleuze-guattari-schizoanalysis-affect/) a 2 hour podcast that uses D&G to analyze capitalism.

A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia Massumi is the reason I can read A Thousand Plateaus in English in the first place, as well as an excellent Deleuze scholar in his own right.

How to begin reading Deleuze some advice from a very good Deleuze scholar, John Protevi.

Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus a very good secondary source I'm using to work through AO. Ian Buchanan is very good.

Daniel Coffeen's Reading the Way of Things: Coffeen provided my introduction to Deleuze and I loved this book as a Deleuzian reading in action. It's short, not expressly political, and a very easy read. It's a very good introduction for those with little to no philosophical experience. Also it's by Zero Books, which should carry some cachet here.


I don't care for DeLanda, even though he may be the most popular Deleuze lecturer. Spend time on youtube as well. There is an entire channel devoted to D&G called Actual/Virtual Journal.

Also, I will answer any questions anyone has about Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari to the best of my abilities. I love them passionately.

Honestly I'm super suspicious of anything written about Japan that's not in Japanese. Everything tends to get this hyper mystical filter laid over it, because it's easy to sell people books and articles that portray Japanese people as Super Deep and Wise but Incomprehensibly Weird.

Shinto: The Kami Way was written by a Japanese scholar and translated, though, so it looks good. It doesn't seem to delve too deeply into the belief structure, it's more of a sociological look at Shinto. That's probably better, honestly, because there isn't really much in the way of a belief structure there. When I said upthread that Shinto is all about hand washing, I was only like 5% kidding.

If you can read it, then an introductory book written for a Japanese audience like Why Can't Japanese People Explain Shinto to Foreigners? is probably your best bet.

The short blurb is already a deeper education on Shinto than I ever got in my undergrad history classes:

シントウって何だろう…?
What is Shinto?
●「神道」=「アニミズム」ではない
Shinto is not animism
●戦前に「国家神道」は成立しなかった!?
「State Shinto」 didn't exist before the war!?
●「禊ぎ祓へ」は現代でも通用する
「Purification rituals」are still in common use today
●「日本語」が「英語」ともっとも違う点
The biggest difference between the Japanese and English languages
●神社や神様には「地域らしさ」がある
Shrines and Kami have the characteristics of their locations
●神道の「間」と日本建築の「間」
The gate in Shinto and the gate in Japanese architecture
●日本料理の起源
The origins of Japanese food
●日本のアニメや漫画はなぜ世界を席巻するのか
Why Japan's animation and films are sweeping the globe
●神道の「見える化」と「量子論」etc.
Shinto's 「visualization」 and 「quantum physics」etc.

Thanks for making me think a little more on this! I haven't actually read much on Shinto, I just know what I've absorbed in the eight years I've lived in Japan, so I went and ordered both of those books. I'd also encourage you to look into how Buddhism is really practiced in Japan—it's absolutely nothing like the Steve Jobsian California caricature that's fashionable in the west. A lot more fire and brimstone.

Thanks so much!

As for what to read, it really depends on what you're interested in but I always recommend the classics when it comes to anything to do with the left first.

However, if you'd like something more modern and lighter here are some of my recent favorites:

• Why Marx Was Right - Terry Eagleton is a fantastic author and this book has sold more than one friend of mine on the concept of Marxism. A great resource to learn more about the socialist left and hear the other side of the story if you've been sold the mainstream narrative on Marx.
  
  
• A Cure for Capitalism - An elegant roadmap for ethically dismantling capitalism by the most prominant Marxist economist alive today, Richard D. Wolff. Very utility-based and pretty ideologically pure to Marx while still taking into account modern economic circumstances.
  
  
• No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy - this one is a great take-down of how modern NGO organizations (especially the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) are the premium outlet for soft imperialism for the US.
  
  
• Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair - added this because it was a very impactful, recent read for me. A lot of left-of-republican people support some kind of prison reform but we usually view it through the lens of helping "non-violent offenders". This book digs into that distinction and how we, as a society, can't seriously try to broach meaningful prison reform before we confront the notion of helping those who have done violent things in their past.
  
  
• [Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women] (https://www.amazon.com/Backlash-Undeclared-Against-American-Women/dp/0307345424/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1550926471&sr=1-4&keywords=backlash) - probably my favorite book on modern feminism and why it is, in fact, not obsolete and how saying/believing as much is key to the ideology behind the attacks from the patriarchal ruling class. Can't recommend it enough if you're on the fence about feminism.
  
  
• How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic - Written in the 70's by a couple of Marxists during the communist purge in Chile, this book does a fantastic job of unwrapping how ideology baked into pop culture can very effectively influence the masses. Though I can only recommend this one if you're already hard sold on Socialism because you might not even agree with some of the core premises if you're on the fence and will likely get little out of it.
  
  
• Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? - Mark Fisher's seminal work deconstructing how capitalism infects everything in modern life. He killed himself a few years after publishing it. My most recommended book, probably.

> Also there are subjects that I'd definitely implore you to pick up a book or two about, especially regarding the history of black communities in the U.S, which is a topic I'm interested in but not too well-read on.

This is my area of expertise. My thesis work was on a particular movement in Albany Georgia during the civil right movement.

Clayborne Carson's In Struggle is an excellent text on one of the prominent groups.

https://www.amazon.com/Struggle-SNCC-Black-Awakening-1960s/dp/0674447271/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_sims?ie=UTF8

The Eyes on the Prize book and documentary series is a nice overview of the movement as well but goes into less depth then the SNCC exploration. W.E.B DuBois is also a very good read as is Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave girl if you like narratives. My absolute favorite text on this era however is a Collection of Essay by Baldwin entitled The Fire Next Time. Powerful, passionate prose.

I also did some work on communist infiltration into poor white and black sharecropper groups in the during the great depression. Some of these groups worked there way all the way up into Chicago Union organizations.

Most of my career has been related to outreach in poor black and hispanic communities. I don't come to my libertarian positions out of ignorance or hate. I truly believe free enterprise and abolishment of the welfare state is the way to lead people out of poverty and squalor. I no longer see the utility of the oppressor oppressed narrative, but I certainly appreciate you outlining your perspective more and giving me some great sources to explore.

RD Laing did some great work, but he’s maybe a little out of date at this point. Are you familiar with newer work in this area: movements like Critical Psychiatry and Mad in America, or authors like Joanna Moncrieff, David Healy, and Paul Moloney?

I often meet Leftists (and plenty of normies, too) who are perfectly fine with being somewhere on the anti-psychiatry spectrum, as this generally comes from a principled anti-corporatism that makes it easy to believe we’re taking too many psych meds because Big Pharma wants us to. However, they are less likely to follow anti-psychiatry arguments to their logical conclusion: That the DSM and psychology in general have not provided an adequate justification for the diagnostic creep which has lead to an increasing statistical prevalence of various mental disorders, and that talk therapy’s benefits may be largely overstated. I like to recommend Paul Moloney’s The Therapy Industry: The Irresistible Rise of the Talking Cure, and Why It Doesn't Work on this subject. Here’s what I wrote about it the other day.

Also, healthism totally exists outside of clinical psychology, as I pointed out three days ago. Examples off the top of my head: The newly restrictive criteria to define normal-weightedness in the ’90s (not to mention whether the obesity epidemic is entirely justified by present scientific evidence); the creation of the pointless prediabetes category in the early ’00s; and the sloppy mess that is our current hypertension guidelines (i.e., so many unnecessary categories, so much unnecessary and potentially harmful advice like salt reduction). The increasing classification of many formerly well people as patients can lead to many potentially harmful consequences, and honestly may be bad for a host of other reasons.

If your Leftist friends are anything like the people I know, they’re happy to criticize Western medicine, but they really just want to replace some of its newer, more invasive aspects with lifestylism and woo—they don’t actually want to eliminate the constant, unnecessary health anxiety that permeates our modern neoliberal lives.

Sorry so long. I’m always trying to get comrades to go from a vague question of our present medical institutions to an awareness of the harmfulness of neoliberal healthism whenever I can. Maybe check out the books I’ve mentioned if you’re interested.

You can get a console for $200 - take your pick of PS4, Xbox One S, or Switch Lite, all are either $200 straight up or $200 on sale (and Black Friday is coming up). Console and a newly released game is $260 before tax. Older games are usually a little cheaper, between $10 and $50 depending (Nintendo games never drop in price, Call of Duty games go down to $10 after a year because annualized releases means the community moves every year and the game is dead).

Also your MacBook can probably run emulators for a few older systems if you don't want to spend that much and are fine with playing games from the 90s or earlier. The SNES has literally like 4 dozen fucking amazing games on it (and then dozens more "pretty good" games) and there's a Mac OS version of Snes9x. Get that emulator (emulator is free and legal), then pirate the games on thepiratebay or something (not legal but who gives a fuck, most of them you can't even buy by any means other than second-hand), every SNES game ever released combined is about 1GB so you can easily store it. I suggest getting a controller as well, luckily those are pretty cheap. This wired third party Switch Pro controller is $20 and works fine, I have one. You don't need a controller to play emulated games though, you can play with a keyboard.

If you want to get really fancy, you can make an emulation machine with a Raspberry Pi and play basically anything before the 2000s all on one device and hook it up to a TV.

If you want game recommendations, either for new games or old, hit me up.

WTF this is real? lol.

And from the author's bio:

​



Around that time, on December 25, 1987, Nito was peacefully sitting on the verandah of his bungalow, minding his own business, when that immaterial bolt of lightning hit him square where it kills, carbonizing the little box where Nito used to take shelter when he was not in the mood for Light and Consciousness, left him out in the open with nowhere to hide! At that moment, everything he ever knew disappeared, and that was it! Nobody there to hide, nobody to experience, nobody to be born-and-die! Nobody that was here yesterday and will be here tomorrow . . . That was the Ultimate and irreversible Freedom: the end of the illusion that Nito was a real entity, that Nito was somebody. Somebody searching for Ultimate and Irreversible Freedom! By then, the group scene was pretty intense at Leela, and Nito was working his butt off, while co-parenting first one, then two little girls with his Thai Lady. That s when the Rave joint opened its doors just next to Leela, and 36 hours Rave Marathons with Super Mega Techno Pop basses became the constant fare... The place was unsuitable for its previous purpose. That was loudly obvious.

Nito and family decided to close down Leela and move to the North of Thailand, near the Golden Triangle, where his wife's family was from and owned land. They lived there happily until Nito and his wife's youngest sister fell madly in love with each other (!) The situation took two stormy years to settle down, and presently Nito, his newfound soulmate and partner (the Love of his life!) and their respective young daughters are living in bliss in the bush somewhere in the Northwest of Australia, and his ex-wife comes often from Thailand to visit her daughters, her ex-husband and her sister... Nito is currently in the process of transplanting in Australia Leela meditation Centre to continue his work.

As others have pointed out, the hosts generally steer clear of ideological labels because it is not helpful in building a mass movement. That being said, Matt used to regularly get drunk and talk about his politics on Periscope. Here are a few points I recall off the top of my head.

• Matt is a Marxist, but not a ML/Stalinist. He can quote lengthy passages from memory while seemingly very drunk, and contends that the USSR and PRC were able to develop as rapidly as they did because of their initial adherence to Marx's theories.
  
• In one of the videos he describes his understanding as to why the Bolshevik revolution did not succeed as intended, which, in brief, is that the revolution did not spread to Germany and western Europe and as such was unable to marshal the advanced industrial capabilities of these nations and was instead forced to industrialize independently. He later describes the Soviet Union under Stalin as a "fortress nightmare".
  
• He argues that the mass casualties resulting from famine in the USSR and PRC was largely the result of industrialization, rather than the attributable to the economic system. His contention that the reason similar death tolls were not experienced in Europe during industrialization is because they essentially exported their casualties to their colonies. To support this, he cited Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis, which is well worth a read.
  
• He is generally not a fan of markets as a mechanism of exchange, and argued that central planning, aided by myriad advances in computing power, will be necessary going forward.
  
• While talking about Rojava, he advocated for a communism informed by the local responsiveness of anarchism but did not ascribe a label to this ideology (which is akin to council communism, I guess). That being said, I don't get the impression that he would identify as a left-com.
  
• This was well over a year ago, so it's possible his perspective has shifted, but he said he is far less hopeful that the Democrats can be successfully pushed left than Virgil or Felix (I don't get the impression Felix has as much faith as Virgil, but this is what Matt said).
  
• He said anyone on the left should join the DSA because it's the largest socialist org, regardless of individual ideological distinctions, which suggests he believes the left needs a big tent strategy during the early phases of rebuilding the movement.
  
• As is fairly obvious, Matt is not particularly hopeful that left will be able to overcome the entrenched power of capital. Corbyn's near victory brought a bit of a tonal shift, but otherwise his perspective is pretty much pure hellworld.
  
  I think it's pretty clear that Matt is the most radical of the hosts, and even he's not on the Stalin did nothing wrong/Assad is Dad train. If he identifies as a communist, it would be of the more pragmatic variety who aren't interested in repeating the errors of previous attempts and see little benefit in sacrificing future progress on the altar of defending Stalin.
  
  If you're sympathetic to social democracy, let alone socialism, there's no reason you'd feel out of place here. This is the only good active left sub, so it attracts a pretty broad ideological user base.

I'm not really well-versed on their specific beliefs to comment. I was surprised to learn he was not a Catholic though, as that was my assumption as well.

For folks who are interested in a very comprehensive and interesting look at Brown's life, I would highly recommend this book. It is long but very well-written with a lot of primary sources. I was honestly awed by someone I had already thought was pretty cool - it was just incredible learning how out-of-step with the time he was (in a good way). A lot of his basic values and beliefs wouldn't have even been really acceptable 20 years ago.

Thanks. I'm about 75% of the way through the article and I have faaaaaar too many tabs open so I'm commenting now. I bookmarked Peter Kropotkin's Wikipedia page to read later.

I disagree with some of the axioms of the author but I'm certain I'll be thinking about the text. I read a biography of Richard Feynman once: Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick.

He often went back to first principles. He'd do things that no average genius would - like review freshman physics. I don't know if that helped keep him a wizard amongst geniuses but I think he did it for a kind of "play".

My takeaway of that section was that reviewing what you know might help you to more intuitively grok things you aren't familiar with. Right now I find it hard to accept that insects or lobster can play. But if I consider a random creature like a bird - I think it's clear that ravens and crows play. They are very intelligent.

Maybe humble birds like sparrows do too. We just haven't been clever enough to notice.

I'll add my two cents since this is something I've put some thought into, and will point to some other works you can check out.

I'll go a step beyond McCarthy here by saying I'm a fan of Zapffe's idea that self-awareness might be a mistake, a evolutionary trap:

>Such a ‘feeling of cosmic panic’ is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual’s attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.

>The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.

>In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.

I am very interested in the historical cases of feral children, and the reports of the attempts to re-integrate them after years away from other people. It seems there is a age past which the mind loses a certain plasticity of infancy and learning speech is no longer possible. Though of course the cases are rare and the reports often hobbled by the perceptions of their time, it is also of great interest to me that these children appear to stay at about the same general level of intelligence as the animals that raised them for the rest of their lives (if they were rescued after a certain developmental period). I wonder about the relationship between language and self-awareness and to what degree they depend upon each other. You could learn so much with just a handful of EXTREMELY UNETHICAL experiments.

Other fun notes:

Peter Watt's Blindsight is a recent sci-fi novel with aliens who work entirely "subconsciously" (without self-awareness) and are able to be much more efficient as a result.

People who speak languages with more colors are able to distingush more colors

There is a ton of interesting work out there that has been done about the ways that limited language can lead to limited thought, if you're interested.

I also recommend The Spell Of The Sensuous if this is interesting to you. One of my favorite books. Hopefully we can get to it in the book club some day.

> Dawkins did a great interview with Steven Rose where Rose calls him out on this and he really has no coherent answer.

Ha, I was reading your previous post in this chain and thought of that exact debate, and was going to link to it for your enjoyment (figured your knowledge base of evolutionary theory is probably beyond the level of that discussion, but it's a fun way to spend an hour) and that of others reading the thread. I'm pleased to see you thought of it first! It's been a very long time since I watched it, but what I seem to remember most saliently is Dawkins utterly failing to understand the dialectical nature between phenotype and environment and the role of that dialectic in producing evolutionary outcomes. Watching Dawkins compared to Rose in that discussion made me feel like Dawkins had a college freshman's understanding of evolutionary biology and the various mechanisms that make up the process of evolution when compared with Rose's grasp of the subject.

Have you read Lifelines or Not in Our Genes? Again, it's been a while since I've read them but I remember especially enjoying the latter. They were clearly written for the layperson, but I was a poli sci & philosophy student who took a whopping two courses in biology, so they were reasonably interesting for me, and it was nice to get an alternative take on evolutionary biology versus all the gene-centric stuff like that of Dawkins et. al., which so often seems to morph into right-wing evo psych pseudoscientific "just-so" nonsense.

For anyone looking to read about this, Jane Mayer's The Unmaking of The President is an excellent read on it. It came out shortly after Reagan was out of office and confirmed what many were saying about his second term. It gets into the details about how all of his cabinet carried little cards telling them who to call and how to invoke the 25th because they kept assuming it'd happen any day. It's pretty wild.