/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2885500
Waste of digits on grandma

>>2895177
Looks like things have gone from Sinbad to Sin-worse!

>>2895015
Extremely based post btw

No u

>>2895301
Extremely cringe post btw

>>2895015
>the biggest problem with western society is that we listen to them too much.
This "problem" made possible that children don't die before 5 years old, women don't die at childbirth and people don't die from colds.

>>2895330
Marxist (pseudo)intellectuals achieved none of this

>>2895291
Good one, sad day on leftypol

>>2895359
>chomsky is an anticommunist
>ignores secondary effects of communism in AES forcing capitalists to compete
Ngmi son.

>>2895330
>This "problem" made possible that children don't die before 5 years old, women don't die at childbirth and people don't die from colds.

poor rural farmers and indigenous tribes figured out all that shit out long ago through generations of experience and trial-and-error and their knowledge was dismissed as folk superstition and heretical witchcraft by the european intellectual elite who believed in crackpot theories about bad blood and miasma. hell, at one point the intellectuals just straight up threw in the towel and declared that human ailments are fundamentally untreatable and medical nihilism became their prevailing ethos. it wasn't until very recently in history that the intellectuals were finally able to figure out what the common folk had already known and put it in their own language that legitimized it and made it marketable. that's all "empirical knowledge" really is, is sellable knowledge, the kind of knowledge that can actually be communicated in a dysfunctional social group of strangers and charlatans who cannot trust one another, that can get a stamp of approval from authority figures who have the final say on what is true and what isn't.

>>2895502
brother do you have any source for what you claim?

>>2895502
>poor rural farmers and indigenous tribes figured out all that shit out long ago through generations of experience and trial-and-error
Yeah, slow trial and error was surpasses by scientific fast trial and error. Also, miss me with that ahistorical analysis of "folk knowledge". And intellectuals aren't a monolith. The scientific revolution was possible due to rejection of religion and folk infallibility. But yeah I bet you think communism is about "muh people".

>>2895545
>But yeah I bet you think communism is about "muh people".

i'm not a communist and i don't give a shit about communism. you're not a communist either, by the way. you're just a former poltard who got bored with cosplaying as a nazi because too many people were doing it and it lost its edge, so now you are cosplaying as a commie. you'll grow out of this performative nonsense eventually and become a typical dullard with mainstream down-the-middle political views just like your parents, this is just a phase for you.

>>2895502
sorry peasantoid it's better to apply a rigorous standard to knowledge and the creation of peer review was a good thing

>>2895502
Insane pol pot tier fantasy. For every folk remedy that worked there were 100 stupid bullshit ideas that at best did no harm and at worst were harmful.

>>2895502
I wish this was true, do you have evidence of this. The only thing that comes off the top of my head is Ignaz Semmelweiss and his general prophylactic techniques. Would be interested in more info on similar cases.

>>2895569
based reply

>>2895593
tbh that "rigorous standard of knowledge" is not that rigorous. Also peer review sucks massive cheeze bawls. Peer reproducibility is much better, but it would destroy the academic industrial complex. Modern academia has very disorganized knowledge and leads to total bullshit being passed peer review.

>>2895611
Yeah, that's my qualm with that statement, I know a lot of folk remedies worked on placebo so to me it's more like for every 1 remedy that was legit, 5 were hocus pocus.

>>2895624
>do you have evidence of this

well there's the fact that the human species didn't go extinct, there's a start. in the old days poor rural people in america relied on local midwives to deliver babies, often black or indigenous women, who were respected professionals who had vastly better success rates compared to the white male doctors that wealthy families hired who were like butchers who knew nothing about infants or female anatomy and often transmitted pathogens to the newborns and twisted and crushed and permanently disfigured them or killed them or made them retarded by trying to pull them out with forceps and shit. american indians invented syringes hundreds of years before europeans did, inoculation was developed by various indigenous people in china and india and africa hundreds or thousands of years before edward jenner was credited for inventing the smallpox vaccine. until well into the 20th century, affluent white people were in the fucking dark ages when it came to medicine and they were too classist or racist or misogynistic or paranoid about witchcraft to pay much attention to the valuable scientific knowledge that the rest of the world had accumulated, not just in medicine but other things as well. europeans couldn't even navigate the oceans until they developed the magnetic compass, meanwhile pacific islanders were doing it in outrigger canoes for thousands of years by attuning their brains to the movements of the waves beneath the boat by some means modern neurology still doesn't understand and communicating the knowledge across generations through folk songs. the ruling class were and still are dismissive of process knowledge, the kind of knowledge that cannot be abstracted away from the human being into a written book or some kind of external mechanical instrument so that they can make use of it without having to suffer the unbearable humiliation of deferring to people they saw as inferior to personally teach it to them and giving them power.

>>2895611
>For every folk remedy that worked there were 100 stupid bullshit ideas that at best did no harm and at worst were harmful.

the same goes for so-called "proper science", it all ultimately comes down to experimentation, trial-and-error, but when some folk methodology happened to work the knowledge of the working method could spread by word-of-mouth to other tribes/villages, whereas in a society where people are highly motivated by personal profit and do not trust one another it was more likely for the knowledge to become a trade secret, wealthy professionals would hoard the knowledge to prevent competitors from forcing them to lower their prices, a practice that continues today in the form of patent law which creates this absurd situation where you have all this state of the art medicine that most of the people in the world do not have access to because it's locked up behind patents and pharma monopolies who charge exorbitant prices that almost nobody can afford.

>>2896074

the term "noble savage" is truly a product of paternalistic liberal thinking if there ever was one, like it's racist and offensive to believe that indigenous people are human beings capable of thought and reason and ingenuity like any other, that they could be anything other than just helpless permanent victims.

>>2896081
My friend you don't seem to actually know what "noble savage" as a term means

>>2896073
Medical licensing in the united states came about because you had charlatans calling themselves doctors and selling snake oil to desperate people. All it takes is one look at youtube or tiktok to see that all the rubes that believe in healing frequencies, crystals, and out and out magic hull your "stuff that works spreads by word of mouth" theory at the waterline.

>>2896074
They were just savages as Marx and Engels wrote (that's why slaughtering them was good). Of course it's ridiculous when these modernists claim hunter-gatherers drop down from pricking their finger because if you actually look at tribal people they do crazy piercings and scarification rituals.

>>2896094
Hell, to this day even in china you can get a diploma in traditional chinese medicine or acupuncture (both are entirely placebos)
What I find impressive is how much details you can elaborate on something totally fake, if anyone here has read about pressure points for exemple, it's insane how much there is to read about it when the conclusion (including chinese scientists too) is that none of it has any basis in reality

>>2896094

there's a reason why you have this modern phenomenon of people rejecting valid medical knowledge from the establishment and throwing the baby out with the bath water when it comes to big pharma and buying into anti-vax conspiracy nonsense and alternative medicine quackery, and it's not because people are stupid. their irrational behavior is rooted in a very rational sense of disillusionment with the system, a very real erosion of credibility and social trust that nobody wants to acknowledge because it is more comforting to believe that people are just intrinsically stupid than to believe that our entire civilization is crumbling under the weight of its own greed and dishonesty. it's a lot easier for common working class people to believe that they can cure their terminal cancer with needles and magic crystals and shit when the actual medicine costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. when you chalk it up to just the stupidity of the unwashed masses you're just internalizing the elitist thinking of the ruling class and their contempt for common humanity, which is what got us into this situation to begin with. also it's worth noting that what is called alternative medicine today is just a commercial appropriation of various elements of folk medicine aggressively marketed by for-profit institutions, it's not really folk wisdom as practiced in decentralized human societies where the practitioners had to actually earn their reputations by personally helping people and saving lives and establishing their own local network of trust one patient at a time, and didn't have powerful institutions and marketing departments and book publishers and celebrity gurus to help them promote their ideas as gospel truth with nothing to actually back up their claims.

>>2896136
>there's a reason why you have this modern phenomenon of people rejecting valid medical knowledge from the establishment and throwing the baby out with the bath water when it comes to big pharma and buying into anti-vax conspiracy nonsense and alternative medicine quackery, and it's not because people are stupid.

That's not the argument you dumb faggot. You made very specific claims here

>>2896073
<the same goes for so-called "proper science", it all ultimately comes down to experimentation, trial-and-error, but when some folk methodology happened to work the knowledge of the working method could spread by word-of-mouth to other tribes/villages, whereas in a society where people are highly motivated by personal profit and do not trust one another it was more likely for the knowledge to become a trade secret, wealthy professionals would hoard the knowledge to prevent competitors from forcing them to lower their prices, a practice that continues today in the form of patent law which creates this absurd situation where you have all this state of the art medicine that most of the people in the world do not have access to because it's locked up behind patents and pharma monopolies who charge exorbitant prices that almost nobody can afford.

And you were given specific examples against that kind of folklore "people will just share what works" idealism.

Get fucked, dipshit.

>>2896091

i know what it means, it's a clumsy failed attempt at criticizing the problems of our westoid imperialist conception of civilization by intellectuals who were still operating in the eurocentric and pseudoscientific framework of biological determinism, dividing the human species into discrete subspecies of "primitive" and "intelligent" people. instead of considering the possibility that we aren't as intelligent as we think we are or that human intelligence is universal and relational and there's really no such thing as stupid or smart people, we come to the conclusion that our advanced intelligence is a curse and the stupidity of the savages makes them more "pure" and "natural" like concept of the "holy fool" from christian ideology.

>>2896137
>That's not the argument you dumb faggot.

it is the argument, if you take a step back and remember what this whole thread is about, the fundamental dispute between elitism and populism, whether common regular people are capable of intelligence and figuring things out for themselves or if they require elite rulers and intellectuals and vanguards and bureaucracies and codified dogma to do all of their thinking for them. in my opinion, the historical record has repeatedly demonstrated that the former is true and that common people, usually driven by poverty and desperation, are capable of incredible feats of intelligence and creativity and self-governance, whereas the elite are quite often very sheltered and stupid and self-absorbed and just take credit for everything and take advantage of their position to be the authors of history, which eventually unravels under future scrutiny. to bring it back around to noam chomsky, he is actually a good example of the limitations of the intellectual elite, despite being somewhat of a maverick in his time and going against the mainstream views of his fellow intellectuals when it came to linguistics and political theory, his social status and internalized elitism made him an incredibly poor judge of human character, giving some billionaire pedophile the benefit of the doubt and being duped by his scams just because he was a fellow landed gentry.

>>2896073
the same does not go for "proper science", proper science inverts the ratio.
when you get a toothache, do you reach for asprin, parcetamol, or ibruprofen? or do you reject his bourgeois superstition and these genericised products of big phrama for the REAL cures: holding some cow-shit against the sore side of your face, or was it a frog? some suggest eating ladybugs, or talking to a pear tree, or putting both your socks on one foot…

>>2887164
>happier countries - and US states - usually have higher suicide rates than unhappy ones
Pretty sure that's just cope from western statisticians.

>>2896151
elites believe in institutions, common people believe in interpersonal ties. institutions win every single time.
you can see this in the macro scale today: do all the elites governing things have problems? yes. there is some kind of competency crisis.
but are these problems multiplied a thousandfold when a Trump figure comes along and starts breaking things at random to appeal to the coalition of morons and shysters he's put together in the name of the common sense of the common people? a thousand times yes. give me a man who can read a chart but judges character poorly over Trump's remarkable interpersonal aura slammed together with trying to tariff uninhabited territories.

the fundamental flaw of vanguardists is that despite being a would-be elite, the institutions they imagine creating are bad at what they set out to do. but institutions themselves are essential if you want to achieve anything.

>>2896212
if western statisticians are flagrant liars, why would they not pretend to have lower suicide rates? (indeed, there are suspicions that Japan does the opposite, pushing up the "suicide" rate to keep the murder rate low…) without putting forward a methodology and a way of verifying it, why is you saying it's cope any better than me saying that you are coping right now?

if anything, it wouldn't be "cope from western statisticians", it would be bad statistical data from poorer countries. (many African countries GDP figures, for example, consist of a handful of guys guesstimating the numbers based on whatever ad-hoc information they can find, which is often little better than "well, my friend got a job in a factory, so manufacturing must be booming". not because they're malicious or incompetent - in domestic terms they're elites! - but because that's the best their institutions can furnish them with.)

>>2896228

elites don't really believe in institutions so much as they begrudgingly depend on them because it's the only way a small group of people can govern a very large group of people over the long term and the trump figure coming along and the institutional decay is not a random stroke of bad luck, it is an inevitability when the elites become increasingly myopic and eventually come to resent the institutions and view them as unnecessary expenses and limitations of their power. we treat the political elite and the business elite and the intellectual elite as different kinds of elite, but they really are not, they're all composed of ambitious opportunistic ladder-climbers who tend to become more irrational and amoral the higher up the ladder they go and the more their position insulates them from reality. today's eisenhower is tomorrow's trump, the good intelligent forward-thinking leader is a product of the same meritocracy as the bad stupid myopic leader. the fundamental flaw of vanguardists is the fundamental flaw of elitism and meritocracy, which is that they are based on the incorrect assumption that human intelligence and morality are intrinsic qualities of the individual human being which can be isolated by a system of social filters that separate the good people from the bad people and appoint them to positions of power. the truth is, intelligence and morality are just statistics, they aren't intrinsic rpg attributes, they are just a scorecard of a person's past behaviors which can only be determined after the fact and just because a person behaved intelligently and morally in the past is no indication that they will continue to do so in the future. in other words, the entire concept of the elite is a lie, there are no good people to select for and the kinds of people to rise to the top of any kind of social hierarchy are just people who are good at gaming the system and doing or saying whatever it takes to help them rise to a position of greater power, usually the ones who had a headstart by being born into a position of great privilege to begin with.

>>2896059
Ok thanks for this. Have a nice Oakeshott for your effortpost.

>>2896370
basically a very good post. I think you underrate how effectively institutions can select for good people to some extent, though in the long run you get an arms race between selection criteria and goodhart's law. (a measure that becomes a target stops being a good measure)

still, I think a degenerated elite institution type model is better than the cult leader or big man model of governance. (though undermining this slightly is, as you note, the problem that many elites don't believe in their own institutions, they just want what they can get..)

>>2896827
>I think a degenerated elite institution type model is better than the cult leader or big man model of governance.

well the problem is the former tends to easily turn into the latter, all it takes is an erosion of public trust in the elites and one charismatic leader to bring down the republic and history has very clearly demonstrated this pattern over and over again.

Truth nuke

Once you understand that any power not wielded by the working class will be wielded against them, and you begin to find yourself in a position of acquiring power, then you begin to understand the necessity of reading Lenin.

History does not have time to wait for utopia, the planet will die if we are not steadfast in our cause.

>>2885583
>There's a reason people hate you freaks even more than fascists
because most people are illiterate and stupid like you

>>2885576
bodied that freak

>>2913930
>Once you understand that any power not wielded by the working class will be wielded against them,
This is exactly why the party apparatus must be prevented from enslaving proles.

>>2913969
It can only be prevented by having no vanguard party and dismantling the state

>>2895015
Intellectuals have a role though. They have the resources, time and training (in theory) to see through the lies and make rational arguments.

Most people don’t have the resources, time or training for this. Especially in developing countries. Intellectuals should try to offer an explanation of reality and perhaps offer some suggestions on how to organize. The problem is when these intellectuals feel superior to the masses, which is quite often

>>2916854
That's easy to circumvent, you make it so they're only paid minimum wage

>>2916873
University professors often earn a provided wage compared to the masses

>>2896059
i looked up the syringe thing
<Pre-Columbian Native Americans created early hypodermic needles and syringes using "hollow bird bones and small animal bladders"
that's fucking dope

>>2896059
>s, meanwhile pacific islanders were doing it in outrigger canoes for thousands of years by attuning their brains to the movements of the waves beneath the boat by some means modern neurology still doesn't understand
wait what? I thought they just followed birds from island to island

>>2885576
>he Party isn't some self-appointed club of enlightened intellectuals

It literally is though.

This is why I support CLR James's Every Cook Can Govern, whereby governance is drawn by lot from the population (with certain technical roles reserved) https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1956/06/every-cook.htm

>>2917103
Swiss model is better than having randoms decide.

>>2895502
Bro thinks miasma wasn't believed by the common folk LMAO