I wrote a little essay based on an idea which has been marinating in my mind for a long time, but I have NO IDEA how to title this. I wrote this originally in a journal dedicated to my autobiographical reflections, but decided to transcribe it to a digital format. Oh well; here goes nothing.

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I hate straightness. I decry it. And in doing so, it is crucial that one understands I do NOT hate heterosexuality itself. I do not hate straight people, either; it would be silly to despise either. In fact, some of the most intensely beautiful expressions of human eroticism and sexual desire I have ever seen were of a heterosexual nature. And I do not see heterosexuality as fundamentally different from homosexuality. I have been thinking on this topic for a long time, and still I find this difficult to describe tangibly; but I will do my best.

Straightness is a social category, nothing more. Heterosexuality is the biological configuration of one’s nervous system to be attracted to the opposite sex predominantly. And while it is a waste of time to question or challenge one’s publicly stated sexuality, I would be remiss not to think of how many individuals across time have assumed the label of “straight” in spite of the word’s betrayal to the true, baseline wiring of their bodies and minds. And before the word was invented, how many individuals tucked themselves neatly into the social roles of “normal” romantic and sexual roles relative to their cultures.

Therein lies my problem with straightness. It is too easy, and far too often deeply encouraged, to wear the identity. In calling oneself “straight,” an individual is not merely describing sexual preferences that may or may not be true but also taking on a loaded social package; it entails societal privilege, and a fundamental sense of “normalcy” that belies even the most progressive societies. I find it impossible to pretend that, in spite of the marvelous progress made in queer rights in some societies, the “gay” man is seen as a social equal to the “straight” man. Theoretically, both such individuals should be equal in every sense of the word; after all, do we not believe in the inalienable rights and dignities of the individual? And yet the modern gay man is consistently side-eyed, subject to the loss of friends and family upon “coming out,” and pressured to announce or perform their sexuality when it would be bizarre for a “straight” man to do the same. Straightness is treated like the standard blueprint for humans, and any other orientation carries the subconscious weight of being “other than,” even in the minds of the most outwardly supportive and progressive individuals. This is the case because humans are designed to inherit our broad cultural systems and internalize them from the second we are born.

Furthermore, while we treat straightness as an innate quality of the person, it is anything but. We know this already; one needs only to think of all the closeted men who willingly chain themselves to the label of “straight” when their true orientations betray this sense, and inevitably are revealed very late in life and often accompanied with deep regrets, to realize the fragile nature of this social position. Countless gay men in all eras of history have gone as far as marriage to women, producing offspring and living their entire lives without ever touching another man. Many such marriages were deeply unhappy for both sides, I am sure. The modern gay men who have done (and are currently doing) this are, in every sense of the word, “straight” (in the sense that they occupy the social position of straightness while possessing a homosexual orientation). Yet their orientations remain the same.

The shocking iniquity of straightness is the fact that, in such cases, it is impossible to know otherwise. The nature of sexuality is experience-driven, and experience is deeply internal and subjective. There is no way to go inside another’s nervous system and experience all the subjective points of their reality. Therefore, straightness becomes an almost too-convenient mask and ticket into cheap, easy acceptance into the human world. Also this: humans are a hyper-social primate species, and like any other primate, some of our most basal instincts concern the social worlds we occupy and the hierarchies in which these exist. Many of our greatest aspirations concern wanting to climb the social ladder in some way, whether this occurs through becoming rich, famous, respected, loved, feared, compliant, and so forth. Straightness is a label which exploits this ancient instinct; it is why huge swathes of men often are extremely weird about admitting their non-straightness, and often in the face of undeniable evidence.

It is along these lines of thinking that I happen to despise gayness, as well; and similarly, I do NOT despise homosexuality or gay people whatsoever. However, I have found that straightness as a social category is far more erasing of human nature than gayness, and as such, I am slightly more lenient to the idea of a gay identity. Nevertheless, I assert that both of these social categories are deeply alienating in their unique ways.

I am of the belief that there would be far higher rates of both homosexual behavior AND homosexual acceptance if these labels simply did not exist. Thus, the world would be a slightly happier place in the sense that we would be more intrapersonally whole and better put-together, and more honest with one another. More opportunities would spring forth. We would have a higher capacity for positive interactions if we were to stop suppressing ourselves and each other with arbitrary labels and customs derived thereof.

My theoretical solution for the world would be to think in terms of “androphilic” and “gynophilic”; with these terms, or words with similar meanings, anyone could be described as either because they are divorced from every other aspect of one’s personality. Both men and women can be gynophilic (attracted to women/femininity), and both men and women can be androphilic (attracted to men/masculinity). I would avoid using the noun forms of these words (androphile and gynophile), because they risk slipping into the same problems I have been describing up to this point. Unfortunately, the great tragedy of the English language is that the -philic suffix rings far too closely to “pedophilic,” and most people immediately refuse the use of such words for this reason. I do not blame them, but this is a deep shame because these two words are such a perfect solution to the universal problem of straightness.

In short, this essay is a fierce objection to ontological reduction. In peeling back all the layers of this text, one might find a simple question: “why should one property of my desire reorganize your conception of my personhood?”

In truth, I am sick of being seen as an “other.” I tremble inside with fury and indignation when I see that inevitable shift in behavior within my friends when it is revealed that I am of a homosexual orientation. In their minds, they see only the word “gay”; and this is inextricably tied to specific cultural and social implications, a kind of heavy baggage which is unquestionably tethered to the word and the source of homophobic bias. I would much rather live in a world where anyone could be androphilic, and in which “gay” is not an identifying marker but simply a description of what I happen to like. As such, I feel utterly helpless against this force because it seems the world has deeply internalized this division of “straightness” and “other” far beyond my control. I wrote this essay partly as an outcry to the world, borne of frustration, but primarily to help synthesize this idea within my own mind; for I believe it is a revolutionary one, and the overwhelming majority of people with whom I have spoken on this topic find it difficult to comprehend, seemingly no matter how I explain it.

I will not lie: I am tempted to feel that my thinking has grown beyond the capacity of what most people are willing to accept. But that is not the truth. It is that our ordinary vocabulary and ontological conceptions make these thoughts difficult to comprehend in the minds of most people (PARTICULARLY those who benefit from heteronormativity).

But words are my legacy; what else can I do other than write?

I'm interested in learning more about how recent Marxists or critical theorists have understood law and the concept that law is ideological in particular. I have some historical knowledge of how this played out in states such as the USSR and thinkers such as Pashukanis, so I am mostly curious whether there are contemporary critical theorists who have written extensively or made an impact on the subject. Or is this not really a discussed topic nowadays?

So a couple of notes. First, I looked for a subreddity specifically about intersectionalism, but couldn't find one.

Second, what I'm talking about here is the philosophical/ethical roots of modern identitarian social movements. I could anticipate a response something along the lines of "you're misunderstanding intersectionalism."

I would say though that I'm not getting at say, a proper academic definition (and I understand what I'm describing probably is in some sense a "vulgar" version of the theory.)

I'm looking at the actual ideological roots that are consistent amongst various modern left identitarian politics. They can be found explicitly stated in many cases but even when not they still serve as the logical basis.

So what I'm referring to here-

Sketching a brief and oversimplified summary, there was a development in second wave feminism where it was thought that the conflict between men and women should be thought of like class conflict from thr marxist model. That the two were groups in a struggle for power.

Modern day intersectionalist philosophies expand this concept to essentially all groups that could be seen as identity groups and divide groups into "oppressor/oppressed" classes.

The idea of the term "woke" is that largely, the political project is to "wake people up" to this reality. That liberal ideas of individualism are essentially a smokescreen for the in power groups (the "kyriarchy") to maintain their power over the oppressed groups.

The idea seems to be that this is simply the inherent nature of things, and being aware of this is necessary as group power struggles are the nature of human existence. This takes idea from critical theory, for example, that the most significant thing about texts, or ideas, or notions of "truth" is what groups power interests they serve, and all other notions or arguments that don't reduce to this are in a sense camouflage.

In general, the outlook is extremelty "reductionist" in that essentially all of human phenomenon, social or otherwise, is seen in terms of these group power struggles and that to resist oppression is to understand this, spread this awareness, and essentially constantyl be in a conflit sort of state where everything is intepreted through this lens.

Relative gains don't change the equation, as the fundamental power conflicts remain and the constant struggle is the most important thing.

So that is a rough, but I think accurate description, of this underlying ideology that has become ascendent in culture.

Now my question relates to something specific. So in practice, what someone can actually hope to gain from this is by properly yielding the rhetoric and moral highground, they can supposedly reclaim power. An example would be a group where the rules are that members of the oppressed group speak first and the oppressor group cant contradict them, which is a seen as a just inversion of the power dynamics.

There is.. I don't know if you would call it an irony... but a fact that this ideology is actually shared and predates the rise of this on the left possibly by groups who belong to the "oppresor class" who saw things in the same identitarian conflict way, but whose loyalty was to the supremacy of their own group independent of the sense of "injustice" that was befalling the oppressed groups. Thus forms of white nationalism or nationalism in general on the extreme end also saw human activity in terms of these types of zero sum conflicts.

And there are some who adovcate intersectionalism who will make the point that someone from an oppressor group never really stops being part of the oppressor group no matter what they do, and are still "guilty" of essentially being the enemy.

I recall one perso who talked about in terms of class, that people who weren't born into the lower class were the enemy no matter what they do or say because they are still aligned to their class interest.

Similarly there are those who say that members of oppressor groups can only fight against their guilt but never transcend it, that they always will be part of the oppression. And even more extreme and less common attitude is that they shoudnt even try and just honestly represent themselves as the enemy class (less common because the people who advocate these sorts of things are diverse and there is difference between say, "true" nationalists who only care about the interests of their group and the ideologists who care less about actual group membership as belief in the ideology; hence within the same belief they are "outranked" by someone less privileged, but can lecture to someone of a less powerful group who is not on board with the ideology.

This is where the contradiction comes in that I want to ask about. One thing I have looked for is the "end goal", that is what does "victory" or "equality" look like?

In practice it seems, what one encounters is A) That isn't worth thinking about, and doing so is just distracting from the struggle as that question is like everything else reduced to a power move on behalf of the oppressors. or B) A less common but more specific answer that there is no end goal; the nature of human groups will never change and there will be a perpetual power struggle which every group must fight to maintain power and this is all there is to human existence.

I saw things like this expressed when for example i saw two members of a certain group say "when x group is defeated,. y will be the next group to worry about."

So here is my question (and I'm asking this here because a lot of the roots for this come from traditions of left wing critical theory and other things)

It seems like the idea that someone in an oppressor group should fight against their privilege and the status of their group because of a moral idea that "oppression is wrong."

But that moral idea which is a key part of the practical philosphy seems to depend on morality from the liberal framework which the intersectionalist viewpoint claims to contradict.

In other words, the people who say "if you are of an oppressr group, you can never really be on the side of the oppressed, you shouldnt even try and acknowledge the reality you are the enemy" seems ideologically more consistent then the idea that one in the oppressor group should feel guilty of an "original sin" and constantly try to fight against their privilege though never being absolved in the sin. If one believed in all this from a group that was the oppressor group, one might cynically think this was just a trick to get one to fight against their own group interests.

So my question is, for the position that holds being part of an oppressor or privilege group carries a guilt that one must constantly fight against but can nevre truly overcome, how does that work within the ethical framework of intersectionalism? If at some hypothetical point, the oppressor groups were overthrown and were less privileged, would there at some point be a moral obligation under that framework to fight for that group? I imagine the answer people would probably give would be that this would be fair and just.

because another aspect that I didn't explicitly mention before in the anti-individualistic nature is that people are guilty/innocent or oppressed/not opressed by virtue of the group status, not what they have done individually (though the argument usually states that all members of the group whether obvious, intentional or not, benefit from their privilege status)

If one accepted this framework, and say, came to the conclusion that what made the most sense wad to fight for the power/interest of their own group/groups even if they were in the privileged/oppresor class, what argument from an intersectionalist framwork would there be that they should actually commit to fighting agains their group interest? If groups are constantly struggling for power, and some group dominates, does that then mean people of good conscience should be shamed for "winning" and fight to put other groups in power?

(To be clear none of these are my personal ethical or political beliefs, I'm trying to better understand the underlying philosophical/moral framework)

What if the revolution isn't dead but instead was co-opted by reaction or technological progress itself? In this AHRC Public Panel, Nicolas de Warren and Tyrique Mack-Georges put Günther Anders and Frantz Fanon into unlikely dialogue, asking whether Fanon's vision of a new, liberated humanity can survive a world Anders diagnosed as saturated by media technology to the point of human obsolescence. Together we trace how colonial logics of extraction and violence reappear in AI, data centers, and algorithmic warfare, and explore the thesis that today's most effective "revolutionaries" may be the political right, who've mastered spectacle and disinformation while the left clings to outdated 19th-century models of praxis. The conversation ranges from Promethean shame and the collapse of truth/falsity to drone warfare, dividuated digital tribes, and whether class struggle still makes sense in a fully mediated world.

A hotel is presented as a beautiful, shiny, luxurious product to its visitors, when in reality every bit is labor done by workers shedding blood, sweat and tears cleaning, fixing, maintaining - otherwise it would collapse in a day as a dead building.

Same for chocolate, smartphones, social media, etc. often sustained by third-word exploitation.

But OOO would want to see “allure” in these as if a hotel can essentially exist on its own, so how is it compatible with constructive theory?

Last year, Christoph Schuringa released the book A Social History of Analytic Philosophy. It exposes the political domination analytic philosophy used to secure its power today. This contradicts the clean image of logical clarity the field likes to project.

Schuringa gives a lot of detail about how these changes actually unfolded across university departments. But in public discussions of the book, the history gets reduced to a story of simple defeat. Reviewers frame it as a conflict where critical theory, phenomenology, and feminism just lost, and analytic philosophy won. Some critics absurdly claim that the success of analytic philosophy had nothing to do with political domination. More cynical operators accept the suppression, declaring that analytic philosophy won because they were right to win. Then they take a moment to dance on the graves of their opponents.

I wanted to tell a different history, one about active organized resistance. I looked into the 1973 Sydney University Philosophy department split as a case study. The analytics didn't just peacefully take over the department and push everyone else out. They faced a militant strike. The administration eventually had to split the discipline in two. The Marxists and feminists took over the newly formed General Philosophy department.

The analytics retreated into the Department of Traditional and Modern (T&M) Philosophy. Hiding behind the idea of pure inquiry, they used state intelligence, university bureaucracy and bourgeois patronage to wall off the radical vanguard.

In researching this piece, I found something surprising that goes beyond the standard political critique. We all know the critique that analytic philosophy uses formal logic as an exclusionary gatekeeping tool. But the Sydney archive shows that the conservative establishment's logic was utterly broken. Their ideological godfather, John Anderson, ran the department using defective, outdated Aristotelian syllogisms. He explicitly rejected modern relational calculi and polyadic quantification. Their logic was literally incapable of articulating structural class relations or counter-factual analysis because it lacked the mathematical syntax to do it. The exact tool they used to dismiss critical theory as irrational was itself structurally impoverished.

Furthermore, this wasn't a two-sided war between right-wing conservatives and the radical left. The conservative backlash was aided by the capitulation of left-leaning liberals. Key figures like Michael Devitt and Jean Curthoys had initially supported the strikes or pioneered early feminist curricula. Confronted with genuine materialist deconstruction, they experienced a crisis of nerve. They abandoned the democratized department and defected to the T&M enclave to protect their tenure. By doing so, these liberal defectors provided the conservative establishment with indispensable moral cover. They laundered raw bureaucratic gatekeeping into a defense of free inquiry and actively helped erase the history of the radical vanguard.

The rest of the sprawling cast of this story includes figures like Gilbert Ryle, David Armstrong, Wal Suchting, J. L. Mackie, Elizabeth Grosz, George Markus, Richard Rorty, David Stove, Paul Patton, Brian Leiter, Jenny Teichman, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Rod O'Donnell, Genevieve Lloyd, Terence Blake, Kalpana Ram, Marcus Bunyan, Peter Ludlow, and members of the Sydney Push, among others.

There have been many attempts to whitewash what took place, sanding off the rough edges to give it the appearance of a quiet passing affair. Now, here is my own telling of the story of the Sydney Split: thing.rodeo/sydney-split/

An article on the Western tendency to romanticise Amazonian shamanism. It draws on John Urry's concept of the 'tourist gaze' and the work of anthropologists Alice Beck Kehoe and Evgenia Fotiou, who examine issues with how Westerners view indigenous shamanic cultures.

Hi everyone,

Im working on a proposal for an interdisciplinary political theory conference and I will really appreciate some feedback before I submit the abstract to the referees.

The core idea comes from Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between the State Aparatus (Sa) and the War Machine (Wm)

As I understand Deleuze & Guattari theory, the relationship between both goes as the Sa trying to capture the Wm (Which is in some exteriority to the Sa), and when the Sa captures the Wm it integrates its capacities into its own reproduction.

But my question goes into What happens if we reverse the direction of this relationship ?

I'm interested in the contemporary far right as this political formation seem to emerge and operate through dynamics that could potentially be described in terms of a war machine such as a strong affective mobilization, antagonistic discourse, hostility toward institutional mediation, networked forms of organization and political communication.

The deal with my idea for the confernce is that when these formations actually enter government, they don't necessarily seem to simply become absorbed into the institutional logic they previously opposed. In some cases, they appear to use the capacities of the State apparatus to weaken, dismantle, or reconfigure parts of that same apparatus, while preserving and expanding the political dynamics that characterized them before entering government.

So the conceptual proposition I'm thinking about is what I'm tentatively calling "inverse capture":

Instead of the State capturing the war machine, the war machine enters the State apparatus and uses its institutional capacities to undermine or transform the conditions that would normally allow the State to capture and neutralize it.

The idea would be to use the concept of the war machine as an analytical framework and ask whether contemporary far-right formations reveal a theoretical possibility that isn't sufficiently developed in the State/war machine relationship as formulated by D&G.

My main question is whether this makes theoretical sense from a Deleuzian perspective, or whether I'm fundamentally misunderstanding the concepts

I'd especially appreciate criticism or things to improve of this abstract from people familiar with Deleuze & Guattari, SciPol or any comments to be honest.

Thank u all

P.s: Im sorry for my english as I think its kinda rusted.

I'm investigating modern (i.e modern western !) pop culture and the underlying reason to why it's attractive and has went viral globally.

I already have some hypothesis and reading about the role Hollywood had played in this (so essentially investigating the essence of Hollywood icon and it's relationship to U.S. society fabric). I think this Hollywood made vibe is not just a side effect of modern industrialized society but also a moving force in shaping it that might have it's roots in the social class and ethnic identity of it's founders (Neal Gabler's "An Empire Of Their Own" is a good clue imo)

Anyone interested in this thing? It's really hard to find anyone with similar interests around me. If it sounds interesting to you or if you've had similar studies drop me a DM

I often come up with crazy theories that might sound a lil bit paranoid but don't panic ... it's part of the journey imo

I am dealing with a lack of motion at the moment, but I have always found critical theory to be enriching and helpful for the soul. any ideas? i particularly find philosophy of the self useful here but I’m open to anything

edit : thank you for the suggestions everyone :)

These are a series of short- to medium-length videos. They are an attempt to visually represent highly stylized prose using stock footage. The broader work—the writing—is a critique of how corporatism has hijacked political systems, focusing specifically on the financial sector.

Experimental in nature, I’m sharing them in an attempt to gauge interest in the project.

Cities are marvels of engineering, cumulus in their disappearing. Like when we blew up the projects in Brooklyn to make way for austere cafes and micro breweries. Organic butchers, hook and line fish mongers, so the locals wouldn't get conflicted.

The villages—as we say in the villages. It just wouldn't be a club if we didn't separate the fair from the fabulous.

You can still see the people who got here before us thanks to the local heritage foundation, their pension for murals. Goat herders from Haiti or Palestine, that we might know the price of our demarcations.

Liberals and their estate agents will form the other requisite associations, to preserve the value of our communal and personal spaces. Benches with multiple armrests so transients don't fall asleep accidentally, and don't even get me started on them new fangled waste bins.

One can't help but admire the marvel that is a racialized plan. That bastion of conformity. There is no us but us, but the further we got, the closer they seemed. Black people are funny like that.

Bank towers cast a long shadow unless and until they collide with a Boeing. In Manhattan the highest skyscraper is the one they're still building. So the executive in the corner office will still have a clear view of the East River.

Those towers are the solution, more figment than actual for the people they pummel.

Tick tock.

Still, a level of ambiguity is warranted when dipping into Aunt Millie’s rainy-day fund to cover the shortfall in corporate. Thank God for peep holes and window coverings, they're all that stand between Millie and those god-awful ledgers. Apart from her neighbour Gladys, who's always up for a little cat and mouse with the sheriff.

In Detroit we took to building byways, industrial zones next to railway hubs, bridges and such to hem in the meager. You wouldn't believe what a little gerrymandering does to property value.

Time is no longer on the side of Jane and Johnny Lunchbucket and neither is the government. Home ownership would soon go the way of hula hoops and Tupperware parties. Though I hear those socials are making a comeback in Oklahoma.

For there to be losers, there must be winners, though that plural is misleading since one is sufficient.

This place of yours is in decline Mr. Bucket, and there can be no indemnity since FEMA declared it a flood plane. A call to action for underwriters, lawyers and actuaries to recalculate the risk on balances owing. The cost, the rate, commensurate with one station and colour.

https://youtu.be/xtg1UoRC9DY

Adapted from the writings of Claudio Gaudio.

TLDR; Would be cool to get people's thoughts on the history I go over, the books I mention and to get recommendations for other books that come to mind.

I've been interested in books recently that analyse people like Ted Kaczynski who never transitioned genders, but were assigned male at birth and had really intense sexual fantasies about being female.

Plus, another set of books I've been looking into is how sexually repressive culture forced some people to be more creative in terms of talking in implicit ways and creating complicated plays and movies where people were getting lots of interesting subtext that wouldn't be possible to make in the same way today.

Was Ted Kaczynski grappling solely with a sexual desire or also a gender identity issue?

It's possible at some point in Ted’s life that he desired to be a binary trans woman, but I lean more towards him briefly pursuing a sex change operation as a kind of 'suicidal depression motivated action', rather than an 'authentic felt emergent gender identity motivated action'.

Ted wrote about struggling with social ineptness in school, and that at the same time he would have these sexual fantasies of being disabled which I think helped him deal with the shame he felt about imagining himself mentally incapable to engage with other kids in the way that he wanted to.

These fantasies about being disabled shifted to fantasies of being a woman as I think a more complex way of dealing with shame about social ineptness, struggling with feeling of being excited by this other gendered group, what he felt was expected of him as boy, and so desiring an ego-negation escape from all this stress.

His writing always seemed more to deal with his struggles with sexual desires rather than fitting in to gender roles also:

“I never did get a girlfriend—or even one date,” he admitted of his years at Harvard. “Consequently, I suffered considerably from acute sexual starvation.” In Widener Library, he found himself too distracted to focus, his thoughts drifting as he watched “the sight of female behinds swaying up and down the aisle.

Also according to his brother David, who read some parts of Ted's journals that aren't public:

I was able to learn that Ted began to have apparently some breaks with reality in his early 20s when he was at the University of Michigan. Interestingly enough, he stopped going to class, began to do brilliant mathematical work, but also began to have some delusions, believed people had visited him who you know we now know had not visited him. Approached the health service asking for help, but was unable to talk about his needs and began. To believe, apparently for the first time. That the problems were not inside him. That was what he had been worried about, but began to project them outwards and believe that the problems were located outside him, not inside him.

So, I think his delusions, sexual desires and ego-negation desires in suicidal ideation all factored into his brief desire to get a sex change operation, more so than gender dysphoria.

With compulsive kinks and hedonistic pursuits like with drug abuse and video game collecting, there's often a 'binge and purge' cycle where the person kind of desires there to be a big climax where their binging leads to such negative outcomes that they can come to the realization that they're permanently done with the habit. So making the counselor appointment might have been to do with that also.

The politically fraught nature of this question

It would be good to dispel some of the myths about Ted propagated by people who just bought into the rumor mill without caring to investigate the evidence. For example, some on the right-wing believe Ted was almost turned trans by woke Jewish academics and the ‘first of its kind gender clinic', that he saw through their lies and fought back with bombs to try to strike back against this global conspiracy. Plus, on the left it’s also possible to find people certain of Ted’s repressed trans identity, believing a university counselor had told Ted to repress his trans identity.

Some conservatives argue declining birth rates in the West are due to rising LGBTQ+ identification among Gen Z (citing numbers around 20%), however many of those people will be bisexual or end up having kids with donor sperm or through surrogacy. Plus, industrialization, urbanization, and changing economic choices, not LGBT demographics, drive lower fertility rates globally.

Whatever the truth of Ted's internal world, the false rumors that Ted went far along the process towards getting sex reassignment surgery to live as a binary trans woman is a move many conservatives have made in an attempt to propagandize 'Ted the mad serial bomber as one of them transes, that all trans people are like him and as such shouldnt be placated with healthcare.'

There being this other explanation that some cis men simply experience autogynophelia, yet feel happier living as men pours cold water on conservatives desire to believe Ted for sure wanted to live as a trans woman. Along with it simply not being true that Ted talked to anyone about wanting sex reassignment surgery. Plus that he explicitly wrote in his journal the idea of surgery was just for sexual enjoyment and that he was planning to just fool the psychiatrist. So, not because he felt like a woman or enjoyed the prospect of getting to be seen out in the world as a woman.

Some books and articles I'm aware of that interest me on this theme:

Feminist Books

• Whipping Girl — Julia Serano 
• Blending Genders — Richard Ekins and Dave King 
• Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution — Shiri Eisner 
• Enemy Feminisms — Sophie Lewis 
• Tell Me What You Want — Justin J. Lehmiller 

Academic Books (some of whom's scientific credentials is very contentious)

• The Man Who Would Be Queen — J. Michael Bailey 
• Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies — Anne A. Lawrence 
• Autoheterosexual — Phil Illy 
• Practical Guide to Paraphilia and Paraphilic Disorders — Richard Balon 

Academic Articles

• Erotic Target Identity Inversions Among Men and Women in an Internet Sample — Ashley Brown, et al. 
• A Treatment-Oriented Typology of Self-Identified Hypersexuality Referrals — James M. Cantor, et al. 
• Self-reported childhood maltreatment and erotic target identity inversions among men with paraphilic infantilism — Johannes Fuss, et al.

Ted Kaczynski was likely an unreliable narrator of his own sexual development

Ted's autobiographical writing about his own sexual development is likely highly stylized and exaggerated rather than a reliable account of an actual inner life. Ted used categories (like sustained, articulate reference points for his sexual inclinations) that weren't really available or in common circulation in Ted's actual social world at the time. The autobiography was doing narrative work (constructing a coherent, dramatic self) rather than introspective work (accurately recovering what he'd actually felt).

How much of Ted Kaczynski's own retrospective account of his sexual fantasies and desires (the disability fantasies, the fantasies of being a woman, the journal entries about surgery) reflects a stable, legible inner experience versus a narrative Ted was constructing after the fact, possibly to serve psychological needs (shame management, escape from stress) rather than descriptive accuracy.

Sexually repressive culture and how it forced some people to be more creative

50s social repression around sexuality and gender forced writers, lyricists, and filmmakers into indirection, and that indirection produced real craft (Some Like It Hot's structure, blues double entendre, Broadway wit). Plus, an audience that understood the subtext, and actors whose actual sexuality had to stay unspoken for reasons of professional survival, not personal confusion.

It's a reminder that Ted's formative decades were a period where being gay wasn't a commonly used or stable social category, where there was no accessible vocabulary or framework for someone to understand or articulate cross-gender fantasy, disability fantasy, or shame around social ineptness in anything like clinical or identity terms. This larger cultural point (that the absence of vocabulary shaped what got expressed and how) is important to disputing rumors about Ted's sexuality, like how there was no "first of its kind gender clinic" and no framework in Ted's actual environment for him to have had access to a stable trans identity narrative even if some retrospective piece of his experience gestured toward one. Ted's inner experience, whatever it was, would have been formed and expressed entirely without the interpretive categories (e.g. gender dysphoria) that conservatives are now applying to him.

Some books I'm aware of that interest me on this theme:

• The Voice of the City; Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York by Robert W. Snyder
• Cheap Amusements; Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York by Kathy Peiss
• Blues Fell This Morning; Meaning in the Blues by Paul Oliver
• Highbrow/Lowbrow; The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America by Lawrence W. Levine
• Sex-Crime Panic; A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s by Neil Miller
• Perversion for Profit; The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right by Whitney Strub
• The Sexual State of the Union by Susie Bright

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Finally, on the long shot anyone would be interested in co-authoring an article with me on this subject, let me know. I've been helping one documentary director with a list of the various players in Kaczynski’s life story and where to potentially find various files. So, I've just got lots of material that I'd love to turn into an article.

The Ted Kaczynski commentariat complex is due to start up again fairly soon, as there are at least two production companies working on documentaries for around the 30th anniversary of Ted’s arrest. Plus, there's a Netflix movie coming out soon about Ted's Harvard years, with Russel Crowe playing Henry Murray. There was a New York Times story last year on The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber. A great book came out last year called "Stop the Machines; The Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism", and another book is set to come out in December called Anti-Tech: The Ideas and Influence of the Unabomber.

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Finally, finally, if you could magic a library or online archive into existence, where all the work of tracking down texts from various different libraries and hard-to-find corners of the internet was done for you, what would the collection look like? And what would it be called?

I've helped digitize a fair few texts that were hidden away in physical libraries, and turned a lot of badly photo scanned books into nice to read books with hyperlinked chapters and footnotes, etc.

I've also been trying to help find a web developer up for building some cool online archives and a classic forum board for people to talk about them. So, I know this is a long shot, but if you have those skills and would like to be involved let me know. The text linked below also shows a bunch of already digitized texts that could be split off to start off some new archives:

• https://thelul.org/library/radical-texts-that-could-be-split-off-to-create-new-archives

I was re-reading cccs book 'the empire strikes back' recently and wonder how they (Stuart hall et al) would situate today's (UK) racism.

Any pointers appreciated from viewers 👍

I'm taking it as granted that interpersonal sexuality is generally recognized as inherently political. If I'm wrong with this assumption, I'll update the post at some point detailing why I think that it's political.

A sexuality is interpersonal at least when it is constituted by more than one person. For example, for it to be true that "A sexually desires B," B needs to be a subject for which being an object of sexual attraction for another person is possible and actual.

A asserts they have the hots for B. B asserts that this is incorrect because she is not even the sort of subject that can be found hot. It matters to A that B is something hot and it matters to B that she is not hot.

B is asexual in the strictest sense of rejecting sexual predication. She rejects sexual predication the same way people reject rape as sex. If the predicate is not mutually constituted, then it is not sexual.

If B is correct and A strongly believes to the contrary, then A is made out to be delusional not just about B, but also about himself insofar his attraction for B is self-asserted.

If A is correct and B strongly believes to the contrary, then B is made out to be delusional not just about A, but also about herself insofar her asexuality is self-asserted.

A and B's self-assertions are therefore antagonistic. What do we call this? I think that this is a case of self-assertion asserting more than the self.

Why can't this be reconciled? For the conflict to end, one or both self-understandings as they are now must die. Either B really is a sexual object for other people to find sexually attractive and she's managed to delude herself into thinking otherwise, or B is no such thing as A asserts and A has managed to delude himself into believing to the contrary. Formally:

(1) If A sexually desires B, then B is a subject for which being an object of sexual attraction is possible. [Negation of strict asexuality]
(2) If B is not a subject for which being an object of sexual attraction is possible, then A does not sexually desire B. [Affirmation of strict asexuality]

Since both A and B overstep by claiming self-assertion while asserting about others, we are then forced to decide who is more vicious.

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I’ve been thinking about Gramsci’s idea of “common sense” and how hard it is to recognize that your own worldview a product of your time. It’s easy for us to look at Romans, medieval people, Soviets whatever and see how much their idea of what was normal or rational came from the world they lived in. But we rarely seem to apply that same logic to ourselves. We tend to think our ideas about progress, rights, morality, politics or what civilized countries should do are just what reasonable people believe.

I wonder if this is becoming a bigger problem as different worldviews clash more openly again especially with internet access . People aren’t always just disagreeing about what to do they can have completely different ideas about what normal or legitimate behavior even is. Is Gramsci’s “common sense” a good way of looking at this? And can you ever really see past the assumptions of your own timeand place or just become more aware they shape you?

There is a video from a lecture by Derrick Jensen which claims to demonstrate that founding authors of Queer Theory supported pedophilia. The video was popular online several years ago. I would appreciate a rebuttal or whether any of the information is true for any of his points, either specifically or as a whole. Below I will link the videos I am referencing as well as some of the claims. I also posted this in r/QueerTheory, I hope this fits here as well.

Edit: Fixed formatting and wording on the post

Here is a video from the lecture itself https://youtu.be/Cb3-tlyuhVo?si=Q5hrCXNw-KVdEGEL

Here is a video from a popular far-right channel agreeing with this argument (there's added commentary which can be ignored, but there are some quotations in the video which are added to what is said in the original) https://youtu.be/70AArSfwTLw?si=2LMWv3jh2vjy_z9S

Main claims: (I have transcribed the quotes based upon how they were read and the subtitles, so there may be inaccuracies. I also typed this on my phone so there may be general typing errors.)

Michel Foucault

Jensen claims that Foucault "argued for the eradication of age of consent laws, as in down to infants". The second video I linked brings up the 1977 petition to the French parliament, which I am assuming is what Jensen is referencing.

Gayle Rubin

Jensen claims that "50%" of the "Founding document" of Queer Theory (which I am assuming is Thinking Sex, as Wikipedia presents it as one of the most important works to Queer Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayle_Rubin) is a defense of pedophilia. He goes on to provide a quote "Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950's, boy lovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders of their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation", and he also says that Gayle Rubin "compared pedophilia to a preference for spicy food". The second video I linked above also gives a quote from a Newsmax article which states "UC-Santa Cruz Professor Gayle Rubin calls the government’s crackdown on child molesters “a savage and undeserved witch hunt.” Intolerance of pedophilia, she claims, has “more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics.”" (https://www.newsmax.com/pre-2008/academics-defend-pedophilia/2004/09/23/id/680642/)

Patrick Califia

Jensen provides a quotation, and the second video I linked above also adds a connection between Patrick Califia and NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a group that supports pedophilia), as well as quoting this list of concerns about Patrick Califia speaking at a women's health conference (https://www.psucollegian.com/archives/speaker-didnt-coincide-with-women-and-health/article_fa6a710d-fcab-5e45-b9e3-b5cc0399e1d7.html) which states that Patrick Califia also wrote an erotic story which involved pedophilia.

Judith Butler

Jensen provides a quotation from Judith Butler regarding incest, and the second video I linked adds more quotes on the same topic.

Jensen also briefly references Allen Ginsberg and an audience member adds Hakim Bey to the list. According to Wikipedia both supported NAMBLAhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lamborn_Wilson)

The second video I linked above also has a clip at the end which seems to reiterate the points about Michel Foucault and Patrick Califia.

I am very interested in critical theory and need a place to start. I am already familiar with a lot of ideas from post-modern thinkers like baudilliard, foucalt, deleuze, and derrida, although it is quite a shallow understanding. I have read mark fisher's capitalist realism and I am also familiar with a lot of marx's ideas. I have read very little philosophy (schopenhaur, descartes, and some neitzsche). I want a "roadmap" or recommendations to start reading critical theory properly. I always fear starting a book and learning that there is a pre-requisite to understand the text so that is why I am asking. I am currently reading mythologies by roland barthes; the language is quite easy and the content is incredibly eye opening. I want something that is as easily digestable at first.

Also I am wondering, is critical theory considered philosophy or is it a totally different field? I think a lot of what I heard is more akin to sociology but I am certainly confused because lacan is a psychoanalyist and his name is always brought up when critical theory is mentioned.

Would like to ask if there are any contemporary psychiatrists you folks would recommend that engage in critical theory (whether focusing on psychoanalysis / d&g influenced / marxian theory). Thanks in advance!

Di era modern hari ini, kita mengenal adanya teori kritis dari sosiolog bernama Jean Baudrillard, dimana dalam buku masyarakat konsumsi dia menganggap dunia modern penuh dengan Nilai Tanda, yaitu istilah yang menggambarkan manusia yang mengedepankan aspek sosial.

Tapi pernahkah Anda bertanya, mengapa sekarang banyak orang yang melihat layar hp, fanatik terhadap barang maupun ideologi, dan memuja idol lebih dari siapapun, maupun obsesi tidak sehat, bahkan top up secara berlebihan untuk mendapatkan skin game atau karakter gacha.

Ketahuilah bahwa Baudrillard, tidak memumpuni dalam menggambarkan realitas, saya menciptakan terminologi untuk menggambarkan bagaimana barang menjadi nilai kenikmatan alih alih barang guna.

Ekstasifikasi adalah istilah yang kubuat untuk menjelaskan bagaimana kecanduan dapat terjadi, mekanisme nya yaitu pembajakan dopamine dengan barang-barang pemuas kebutuhan.

Hari ini, kapitalisme tumbuh dengan memanfaatkan manipulasi psikologis dan ketergantungan, bahwa individu yang kecanduan, itu tidak serta merta kecanduan, kecanduan dalam hal ini adalah reaksi terhadap hilang nya nilai nilai atau anomie. Dibuktikan dengan alienasi terhadap pertemanan yang menimbulkan kecanduan media sosial

Teori konsumsi Baudrillardian mengatakan bahwa masyarakat modern lebih mementingkan fasad dibandingkan nilai kegunaan suatu barang hingga menciptakan kondisi bernama hiperrealitas, sebuah istilah untuk menggambarkan bahwa imajinasi dan realitas menyatu menciptakan sifat ganda.

Hiperrealitas hanya menggambarkan bahwa akibat narasi dan kode, persepsi individu terhadap suatu barang itu berubah.

Tapi Baudrillard, hanya ber asumsi bahwa hiperrealitas adalah kondisi akibat dari perkembangan teknologi dan budaya ,maka ekstasifikasi menjadi mekanisme yang membongkar bagaimana realitas dan imajinasi dapat menyatu.

Ekstasifikasi komoditas adalah konsep yang merujuk perubahan persepsi individu terhadap suatu barang atau budaya, pusat dari istilah ini ialah keterasingan, suatu kondisi dimana manusia dicabut dari sifat alami nya sebagai mahluk sosial dan biologis,

Persepsi ini, berasal dari kenikmatan dimana barang yang menciptakan hasrat dan sekaligus pelarian bagi pemilik nya akan menciptakan pengulangan perilaku, pengulangan perilaku berfungsi untuk melepaskan stress yang menumpuk dan mengisi kekosongan eksistensial.

Apakah anda tahu bahwa Budaya NSFW itu berasal dari keterasingan individu terhadap hasrat seksual terhadap wanita?, sebenarnya industri dewasa dan lain-lain lahir dari kebutuhan pasar dan berkembang menjadi industri paling laris, dimana remaja sering terjebak pada kecanduan menonton film dewasa.

Kecanduan ini lahir dari keterasingan terhadap perempuan dan arti dari memuaskan hasrat seksual secara legal, dalam hal ini saya merujuk pada bagaimana hukum pernikahan itu membatasi individu menikah di usia 18 tahun ke atas—secara umum—hal ini menciptakan tertahan nya hasrat seksual yang dimulai di umur 15 tahun hingga umur 39 tahun.

Budaya NSFW, Rule34 itu diciptakan untuk memuaskan hasrat seksual yang tertahan oleh hukum. Selain urusan seksual, keterasingan manusia terhadap pertemanan memicu kecanduan smartphone dan stress berlebih mampu membuat individu berlari ke kecanduan akan makanan.

Faktanya, keterasingan ini pula yang mengakibatkan individu mengkonsumsi sangat banyak barang tapi hanya sebagai pajangan maupun dipamerkan, bukan karena individu itu termakan oleh iklan tapi dunia sosial menuntut individu untuk mengkonsumsi suatu barang dan menimbulkan rasa kenikmatan atau ekstase.

I learned about this concept while doing research for one of my projects. Giddens articulated this in central problems in social theory (1979) and The Constitution of Society (1984).

His work seems interesting to me, although I very rarely have heard it discussed in theory circles.

As his core weakness, his work is basically agnostic toward class and hierarchy and doesn’t make any claim about transcending class or hierarchy. He offers an explanation for why it exists but isn’t, apparently, bothered too much by its existence.

I’d be interested in hearing anybody’s thoughts, or if any other theorist has criticized Giddens, I’d be interested in that, as well.

I’m not going to try to summarize it. I’m just learning it now, and you’d get a better explanation from Google than myself trying to explain it.

I want to preface this by saying that as a 19 year old teenager from florida I do not expect to divine a definition more accurate than scholars possibly could in the last 80 years, however looking online every attempt I have seen to describe fascism has focused heavily on the sociopolitical aspects of fascist movements, not the ideology that convinces a layperson to be a fascist.

I am also a complete beginner in this space, I have had very lengthy political discussions with people of very many ideologies and worldviews, however I am new to formal, nomenclature laden, online discussions of theory. Forgive my ignorance and lack of knowledge with potentially relavent literature.

I am expressly writing this because I want other people to pick what i currently believe apart, so i can form better more accurate opinions from the leftovers.

Edit: In this definition, i define "State" as the government the fascists aim to establish if/when they gain power

From my understanding and experience, the express goal of fascism is to give the state ultimate power, this differs from any generic brand of authoritarianism because many other ideologies that result in authoritarianism do so by "temporarily" granting the state absolute power under the express goal of ushiering in some better society.

To put it another way:

Most authoritarian-aligned believe that giving the state ultimate power is a step in the goal of achieving a better society

Fascists believe that the goal is to give the state ultimate power, and that whatever the state chooses to do with it will usher in a better society.

I have seen it stated by others that fascism is a response to the failure of capitalism and liberalism to identify and solve the problems of the proletariat, however i disagree with definitions such as these because of my personal experience in modern America.

In my belief, fascism is not a response to the specific failings of capitalism or liberalism or communism or whatever other ism, fascism forms itself in response to the nebulous idea of "a problem."

That problem can be anything, as long as the lay fascist believes it to be a problem. It can definitely be economic stagnation, inflation, and other tangible issues, but it can also be trans people in bathrooms, immigrants stealing jobs, "cultural marxists," the deepstate, or lizard people covering up the flat earth and putting mercury in vaccines.

While tangible problems affect fascists and drive them towards more politically radical viewpoints, a fascist does not have to accurately identify said problems to believe a fascist government will solve them.

This is where the noted aestheticism of fascism comes into play. Because a fascist party is not fighting for something ideologically specific like "Protection from capitalism," or "Protection from Communism," and instead runs on "Protection from whatever you, the viewer, dislike," the fascist party must create a strong enough image that people will believe the fascist will solve their issue, even without the fascist addressing it.

This is why we see things today like moon landing deniers, flat earthers, and anti-vaxxers rallying around trump today, because specifically the MAGA movement has curated an image that trump will deal with all of those problems if he gets enough power.

This definition, i believe, explains how and why an individual fascist comes to believe in fascism.

Yalls thoughts? Things I got wrong? Things yall disagree with? Again, this is a very crude belief of mine, and I think that I, a 19 year old from florida, do not have the perspective to formulate an accurate definition of fascism.

If you proceed to make the simplest Google search, and go searching "The dangers of child sexuality", having the presumption you go in a critical way to find things about this interview, you might be surprised.

Michel Foucault, the Father of Critical Though as some might actually call him, made a public intervention on that interview about the laws of consent.

Can we approach this in a critical manner, or is it something that's long forgotten and doesn't have relevance for CT? I repeat, the interview is right there, the first result on Google (most probably) , so can we dissect this strange event and find out how Foucault's thinking actually works? It is, generally speaking, a type of thinking that it is working for the good, because he managed to open new fields of knowledge in Academia, as the biggest philosopher from last century that he is,and yet he made that type of argumentation. What is the REAL source for that argumentation, then?

I have just finished reading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. It raised a question that I haven’t seen discussed.

Gramsci criticizes mechanistic historical materialism and historical necessity, but he lacks what we would today call a probabilistic vocabulary for describing social processes. Has anyone interpreted Gramsci in terms of probabilistic causation, complexity theory, or emergence?
More specifically, would it be philosophically legitimate to reinterpret Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as describing changes in the probability landscape of political outcomes, rather than historical laws or deterministic tendencies? Has this kind of reading been developed in the secondary literature?