Tag Archives: capitalism

On Gender Acceleration and Its Critics

Halloween 2018 has been especially interesting for those of us embedded, either willingly or unwillingly, in the weird-theory milieu of Twitter. Land officially began the release of his book Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy,1)For those interested in the project, I suggest reading Part 2 of “Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land” on Vast Abrupt. and n1x finally dropped the long awaited Gender Accelerationism (G/Acc) Blackpaper on Vast Abrupt. Following the release of “Gender Acceleration,” some so-called “spicy” shots have been fired claiming n1x’s essay is less-than savory. Thus, in this post, I want to lay out my take on G/Acc and an interpretation of n1x’s argument and, in doing so, hopefully answer some of the criticisms leveled against it.

The first thing any reader should obviously do is go and read “Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper.” After that, hit the jump and dive into the aphotic abyss!

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References

References
↑1 For those interested in the project, I suggest reading Part 2 of “Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land” on Vast Abrupt.

Why Climate Change Really Is Our Most Urgent, Number One Priority Right Now

A little over a week ago Bill Nye (the Science Guy) was on CNN’s “Crossfire” segment where he “debated”, and I hesitate to use this word when describing the following people, pundit S. E. Cupp and the Heritage Foundation‘s Nicolas Loris on the impact that climate change has on our lives. Amidst Bill’s clearly superior understanding of climate science and Loris’ “>muh federalism” cries, Cupp stepped up and did make one interesting point when she said

[Y]ou can look at entitlement reform which will bankrupt this country long before climate change destroys us, heart disease kills 7 million a year worldwide, 870 million suffer from hunger; I want you to look me in the eye and tell me in good conscience that climate change is our most urgent, number one priority right now.

While I loved Bill’s response and her reaction, I feel like he could have run with it more. Specifically, climate change directly affects the root cause of each of those issues and solving climate change is a prerequisite to solving any of the issues Cupp brought up. You see, climate change really is our most urgent, number one priority because it will not only be a huge blow to the economies of the world due to flooding and relocation issues, but it will disrupt global food supplies due to crop failures and ocean acidification, and the increased temperatures will create higher outbreak rates for diseases. All these, which will be fleshed out below, are reasons why climate change is a prior question and answers the impacts of Cupp’s claims.

My aim in writing this is not to provide a comprehensive list of the impacts of climate change, rather to point out that climate change comes before every issues that Cupp claims is more important.

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Attempting the Impossible – Calculating Capitalism’s Death Toll

Update 8/10/18

Given the popularity of this post (and its recent resurgence), I figured I ought to write an update. The following post was written back when I was a senior in high school and still rather idealistic and polemical. Given that, this post clearly has rhetorical oomph that is not found in my current writings. Additionally, I no longer strictly endorse the number of deaths laid out in the following post for a few reasons. First, I think structural issues that cause violence can rarely be subsumed to simple fiscal policy and as such, saying Capitalism killed X or Communism killed Y masks violence perpetrated by larger institutions. Second, and more importantly, while ideology is certainly a driving factor in violence, individuals are just as much to blame and thus I worry that saying a given ideology as such is responsible for a given number of deaths is a convenient way to let individuals off the hook. And third, there are so many deaths that go unaccounted for in our world that it would be foolish to assume that I can provide an accurate account while living in a first world country. Indeed, I think it’s foolish to assume that anyone could provide an accurate number. Given that, take everything with a grain of salt. I leave this post up as it is part of my intellectual heritage. If need be, a longer and more in-depth preface may be written.

To anyone still reading, I do think overall argument / analysis holds, but I do not currently stick to any hard-and-fast number. I suggest that everyone do their own research and use this post as a starting point.

INTRODUCTION:

While there have been other attempts to count up the number of deaths that can be attributed to Capitalism (to counter the figures presented in The Black Book of Communism as well other places), most noteably, determinatenegation’s list and The Castroists’ list, neither critique the methodology used by the the supporters of the “OMG Communism killed 70 trillion people!!1!” nor do they provide easy to verify sources. So while I think both lists are fabulous (and I may use parts), this post will be not only a critique of the methodology used by the other side, but also a more user friendly list.

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Robocop: Capitalism and the Militarization of the Homeland

Part I: “The Near Future”
 
In 1987, the film “Robocop” was released as a “near-future-dystopian-drama” with little grounding in reality and the politics of the day. The themes however, are pervasive and highly applicable when studying the late stages of capitalism and corporatism as well as a militarized police force at home. [Sorry for the fucked up formatting – word->blogspot->wordpress= ;-;]

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Intellectual “Property” and Plagiarism

The following is a paper I wrote for an AP Language course that I feel, at least at this moment, summarizes my views on citations and plagiarism in general. *Note: there will be an afterword explaining my use of citations in other blog posts*    **sorry about the formatting…**

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