this is not a criticism, but your touchpoints have changed in the last 2-3 years and i dont see it as an adjustment to the climate. your vigor & rigor is unsullied, but your trust of what's behind your thought process appears diminished and your alarm hierarchies are almost fully manipulated from when i first started jabbering with you. it's Suckerdome
Hey wikkid, I'm sorry to hear that. Let me answer, because people engaged with me deserve an answer. I'm not sure that my touchpoints have necessarily changed. Maybe what you see in the form of my engagement on the board has led you to believe it so, but I still consider the same things when assessing what to think about. I still think about underlying concepts, of virtue and lassitude, of freedom and duty, but these things have taken a back seat because the culture has seemingly so utterly decided, both left and right, what to do about them in modern applications, that I find it necessary to engage at the sucker level. I still think a certain way about things, that's for sure. That hasn't really left me.
What to write and engage about has become an entirely different matter. The constant criticism received both about abstraction and content have certainly left a mark about how I engage on this board, what I engage about. Lest it seem like principles betrayed, you'll notice the constant confusion when I try to bring up more abstract points. I've realized that political engagement must be done at the Suckerdome™ level, if you'll permit me. Speaking of that, permit me confusion: It took me years to figure out what you meant by "Gods and bugs." "Sucker" politics and "sucker" arguments is something you talk about that I've never fully understood because I've never caught the full explanation. I don't believe myself to have a false consciousness, which seems to be what you're implying. In Marxism, false consciousness is when the petit bourgeoise don't even understand the machinations of their own enslavement. So it seems you would posit about suckerdom in late-stage capitalism. The machinations and things we talk about politically are inessential to the real problems, the real meat of what is going, you seem to be saying. I would argue differently.
The abstract points I once made have been subsumed, debated, and moved on from in their ultimate forms because the suck peddlers have won for the moment. What I mean by that is, I cannot debate the abstract merits of something like, say, majoritarianism vs. individualism by bringing up the movement of courts away from individual autonomous jurisprudence towards a pluralistic, sociological jurisprudence. These foundational, abstract concepts earn me idiotic comments by small-minded people like the guy who always makes niggling points in my thread and his ilk. They do not understand basic abstractions, so they resort to stupid points and trip-ups. They run cover for the intellectual bankruptcy that is the nightly cable news shows, those things that determine so much of our culture now. They've taken over, or we've ceded our lot to the worst of them, even on this board. That certain people still have a right to post here is gobsmacking to me. Even when their own side that they purport to be on hates them, they persist. This is a microcosm of our culture writ large. We have ceded the public debate to the worst among us, and it shows in our vetting and our hysteria. It is manufactured outrage, all of it, driven by a sensationalism and puritanism not found but for the Mayflower descendants. They win the day simply by catering to the worst impulses by the worst means.
There is something else about suckerism, best I understand it, that makes it all the more sinister, and this is why it must be fought: Suckerism sneaks things through the back door that have real effects on people's lives. You and I differ on something, and that is the maxim Christopher Hitchens used to have. He fought at every level, generally among the intellectuals, but also in very real life by saying "you might be through with politics, but politics ain't through with you." And such is my belief. Watching the suckers gravitate towards Black Lives Matter where not only are corporations tripping over themselves to show how down they are to prevent a real race war, the corporations and HR departments have tripped over themselves too, mandating to people who just want to earn wage labor spoils how to think and act. How to behave. Never has a movement been as intrusive in my lifetime. And it's all based on suckerism, this kowtowing.
So I fight its suckers, I fight the woke trans activists and the anti-Semitic rappers that are part of the BLM movement. It puts me in the cultural milieu now and dumbs me down, but that is a given. If I can explain in very simple terms how things that influence people on a very broad level have particular intellectual movements behind them, then that's what I'll do. I see life changing in America for much the worse, from the left with respect to culture, from the right with respect to anti-democratic politics and organizational leanings. The suckers have won for the time being; I'm fixing to fight for it back.
And that's about it. Perhaps I have misunderstood your definition of Suckerism. That is quite possible. But the best I can suss out, it's the petty arguments over late-stage capitalism and media that pervade the landscape that would otherwise have no import on people's lives. But the problem with that is, it has an effect on my life because it affects the populace politically. The polis is now but the twinkling of a pollster's eye, depending, of course, on who is asking the questions and how.
Of course, it may happen that it is because I am sober now, less drunk, and not crying about the death of God or upset over the grander things anymore. Perhaps it is gratitude about the little things that has led me to lose the larger picture, the bigger meaning. I do not think so, but so it is. Anyway, the topics I start prove larger points about culture and if I can generate discussion and walk back the tangible to the abstract, then I'll engage the suckers to the nth.
So it is.
