Aesthetic Materialism

  Hegel's radical idea is that, rather than the conditioned being derived from the unconditioned, instead: the unconditioned arises, and can, necessarily only arise out of the conditioned. That is, reason can only arise from unreason; freedom can only arise from unfreedom. 

  Marxism: an optimism that gradually becomes more and more meaningless. 

1. Anything is better than nothing. 2. Whatever works.  3. Build a bigger movement.

The commodity form existed long before capitalism.  I think it existed since at least ancient Sumeria. Bronze age Sumerian society was essentially a factory for producing idols.  How can we discount the commodity fetishism of actual , literal fetishes?

  So-called "libertarians are right to assert their rights - to say things like, "So long as it's between consenting adults, people should be able to engage in any kind of sexual activity they want," or "people should be able to do all the recreational drugs they want," and so on.   But they are naive about how to achieve the goal of the kind of free society they imagine. There's an irony here: libertarians often tend to say things like "You can't legislate morality." What's naive about libertarians is that they think that merely by declaring what should be the case - that, for instance, "So long as it's between consenting adults, people should be able to engage in any kind of sexual activity they want," that that's what will happen.  In short, they are trying to legislate morality. In order to establish a libertarian society, it is not enough to imagine, to declare, to wish. To create a free society, one must trans...

You can define the morally good as: that set of behaviors which you have many strong reasons to train others to do, especially through rewarding them with praise.  Similarly, morally bad (or "evil") can be defined as: that set of behaviors which you have many strong reasons to train others not to do, especially through negatively reinforcing them with condemnation. We are all subtly training each other, especially through praise and condemnation.  But especially, parents tend to train children, and in general, older members of a social group train the young.  Thus training can pass down from generation to generation.  But younger people, especially from the ages of about 3 to about 11, are more susceptible to training than older people.  After this point, the rate of acquisition of training slows, and humans may even become resistant to training.  Old people may become very incapable of, or very resistant to, new training.  That might be a bug, or it m...