/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Leftychanbros… Biden is coming for us

>>468129
So what's the fix for this ? Can this be fixed via political lobby work ?

Or is this a technical problem ?
Like if you build a information system that can be censored, it will be, and the only viable option is to design the system in a way to rule out the possibility entirely.

America is gearing up for Cold War 2.0. It needs tighter control over the means of information to wage ideological warfare against its rivals. American political establishment is in a desperate bid to prevent the decline of US hegemony and the rise of China, because they think China is an existential threat to America.

>>468136
Increasing control is part of a general trend and development in the mode of production, not simply something that results from a rivalry with china

Remember when Trump wanted to ban TikTok, and shitlibs freaked out. Fast forward a few years, and this sweeping legislation is about to be passed which goes far further into invading privacy and asserting full spectrum control.

The liberal muhleft is the mortal enemy of freedom

>>468136
>America is gearing up for Cold War 2.0.
more like Hot War 3.0

nuclear subs to Australia
evacuating factories from Taiwan
largest military games with South Korea
South Korea says it wants nukes
Japan remilitarizing
tik-tok and balloon hysteria

the writing is on the wall

>>468146
>more like Hot War 3.0
Some neocon hardliners perhaps, but they be crazy.

They can't engage China in a war, just look at the size of the Chinese industrial base, it's at least 3 times larger than that of the US. It would be a hopeless charge into total defeat. They can't even match the volume of Russian industrial war production.

>>468157
Don't talk to me retarded zygoid

Hot War would mean a war economy, only after transition to a war economy you could make comparisons about who is outproducing who

>>468159
>only after transition to a war economy you could make comparisons about who is outproducing who
case in point, I unironically think that North Korea would be a bigger military threat to the US in the region than China, especially if they get some time to streamline their tactical nukes

North Korea can go full total war mode even tomorrow

>>468160
>North Korea can go full total war mode even tomorrow
The only problem would be an oil deficit. But I think Kim negotiated with Putler's banana republic some fuel supplies to stockpile in exchange for missiles and artillery shells.

I just hope Norks would play their cards right. Don't be a useful idiot for China. Don't ever trust anyone. Juche. Self-reliance. Let them fight it out and finish off the wounded.

>>468131

Well, firstly… it's not "either / or." Yeah, you should use whatever legal means you have to oppose this. Yes, it is possible to not allow the government this kind of power. If you're asking if people change the law to make it easier to make things worse, then the answer's yes, and that's bad.

They can find a way to censor anything. If you build a censor-proof internet, then when it comes down to it they can just ban that if they want. That doesn't make this project futile, that doesn't mean people shouldn't work on alternative communications infrastructure… it just means there isn't a magic ban-proof technology.

On top of that, it's very difficult to create the kind of communications infrastructure which is as big & fast & far reaching as the one we've already paid for with tax dollars. It's a valuable thing, difficult to replace, and… yeah, they keep fucking with it. They haven't even managed to staff the FCC in the past two years, it's been blocked by the telecoms who don't want net neutrality (rules preventing private internet companies from censorship, discriminatory service, and extortion) back. So again… it's good to look at alternatives, but it's unlikely we're going to have an efficient replacement for this. Letting them continue to shit all over it would be ill advised.

>>468166
OK i get it, we should protect the existing internet as much as possible.

>If you build a censor-proof internet, then when it comes down to it they can just ban that if they want. That doesn't make this project futile, that doesn't mean people shouldn't work on alternative communications infrastructure… it just means there isn't a magic ban-proof technology.
I disagree that it's possible to ban technology, like that has been tried before, in fact almost every technology was at some point subject to banning attempts, and i can't think off a single example where bans were anything but temporary roadblocks.

For network technology they can only fuck with it because it needs lots of physical infrastructure, like wireless towers, cables and network switches. If you have a star-trek communicator that has a planet-wide wireless communication range, that's pretty much ban-proof.

I don't think that "scifi subspace" is real, but there are physical phenomena that could function similarly. You can make harmless low energy particles that pass through matter very easily but are still relatively easy to detect and emit by technology. It's possible to send a low-power signal right through the mass of the entire earth.

Before you say that this technology would just be suppressed, i guarantee you that it will be developed because it has overwhelming advantages in every metric, like less latency, more bandwidth, lower power requirements, and will never suffer from NO-SIGNAL. Every military wants this because it's much easier to secure and near impossible to jam.

I know that at the moment this might at best be a physics laboratory experiment, and this is a very long way off and irrelevant for our present situation, or even perhaps our lifetimes, but the arch of history bends towards information technology becoming more democratized, even if at the moment we might be teetering at the edge of a new dark age.

>>468128
REMINDER liberals are constructing this authoritarian legislative apparatus with the explicit purpose of handing it over to the fascists once they sieze power

I say let them do it. Maybe people will start using alternative platforms again like the old internet was and like this board. Let them do it. The monoplization of the internet is a bad thing anyways.

>>468128
Not to be a simp but china restricts Information for legitimate reasons. The wests ideology is infective and parasitic and china is building up a different mode of production than the West so they have a reason to restrict it. They’re operating on different platitudes essentially.
>>468136
>>468136
More and more I see evidence as to how the west is shifting Into neo feudalistic capitalism. There is an attempt at having pure ideological control that feudalism had. A sort of stability that maintains it for hundreds of years as opposed to the manifest destiny it possessed initially

>>468179
But why do they do that ?
If this is about the rivalry with china, fascism is a lot less attractive than what China has to offer. If the offer is "Win-Win cooperation" on the one side and "submit to the master-empire" on the other, most of the world will prefer playing with the Chinese.

>>468181
>Not to be a simp but china restricts Information for legitimate reasons. The wests ideology is infective and parasitic and china is building up a different mode of production than the West so they have a reason to restrict it.

It's fine for them if they do it as some kind off protectionism to build up their own culture/media-industry. And get their other stuff in order like securing their telecommunication systems. But it's not possible to wall out the nasty stuff forever, eventually these battles have to be fought. In the end their ideological-cultural-production has to be so good that the Chinese population just favors it over everything else.

Also the nature of socialism has to be such that it eats capitalism if the two come into contact, that's the only way the change in mode of production becomes truly irreversible.

>They’re operating on different platitudes essentially.
Not sure I understand. A platitude is a banal remark that lacks originality.

>I see evidence as to how the west is shifting Into neo feudalistic capitalism.
I see that too.
>There is an attempt at having pure ideological control that feudalism had
Feudal ideological control was based in theocracy which kinda fucked up science and technology. We know how that contradiction plays out.
>A sort of stability that maintains it for hundreds of years
Was feudalism really stable ? I mean the agrarian mode of production was stable but the political structures in feudalism seemed like they were in constant flux.

>>468146
Wouldn't that be counterproductive for America? Generally wars for hegemony have been launched by the challenging power not by the one trying to preserve the status quo.

>>468188
>Wouldn't that be counterproductive for America?
Yes

>Generally wars for hegemony have been launched by the challenging power not by the one trying to preserve the status quo.
I don't think that's entirely true, declining empires tend to get involved in costly and irrational "military adventures". Like the British empire logged out with the Suez crisis in 1956. It basically destroyed their imperial status.

There are specific economics of empire that push old empires to do this. When capitalism reaches the imperial stage, they follow the investment strategy of investing in means of imperialising and as returns for their investment they get the loot from the imperialized countries. Means of imperialism can be many things but usually it's a lot of military, spy-stuff and predatory finance. (In the colonial era it also included occupation bureaucracy).

When the empire reaches the limits of expansion, which can be a strong opponent they can't conquer, or just a natural barrier. They get a political problem. During the hay-days of empire, imperial returns are better than any other returns, and that means that the imperial bourgeoisie will be the strongest faction in domestic politics, which makes it very hard to divest from empire when it becomes irrational. And what usually happens is that at the end of an empire is the imperial bourgeoisie leveraging it's political and economic legacy power to dramatically increase budgets for military and all the other means of imperialising, even when it's a objectively a bad investment. The empire starts canibalizing it's home turf.

So far China doesn't seem to show any indication that they are gearing for offensive war, their military budget rose very little. China basically undid the US-Saudi alliance when they brokered middle eastern peace deals. That is an impressive show of soft-power. If this was a CIV-game they would be trying to get an economic victory.

Of course the US is upping it's military budget more and more. While they can't use that to outright win against China they might be tempted to "discharge" it in order to inflict a lot of damage to China. Of course that's throwing away military people like sacrificial pawns. If the ruling class pisses off those heavily armed people that usually leads to a revolutionary situation.

>>468182
>Was feudalism really stable ? I mean the agrarian mode of production was stable but the political structures in feudalism seemed like they were in constant flux.
They seem to be shifting towards more of a rent extraction and revenue collection that feudalism possessed rather than being based in agrarianism is what I meant. And you can substitute theology for the west attempting to pose its epistemology as the only valid form of knowledge

>>468182
>Was feudalism really stable ? I mean the agrarian mode of production was stable but the political structures in feudalism seemed like they were in constant flux.
feudalism had frequent famines, but it can be counted as a stable mode of surplus extraction due to all the peasant uprisings being successfully suppressed until the arrival of capitalism and bourgeoisie

>>468181
>neo feudalistic capitalism
the biggest meme

what does that even fucking mean?
<inb4 muh rents means feudalism

niqqa rents were there all throughout capitalism

>>468222
>feudalism had frequent famines, but it can be counted as a stable mode of surplus extraction due to all the peasant uprisings being successfully suppressed
or more precisely it was self-reproducing even in cases where peasant uprisings succeeded like in china or where external shocks like the black death wiped off nobles and peasants alike

>>468223
A system characterized by an increasing extraction of rents and fees rather than simple market exchange, in which econ inequality is increasingly maintained not as a simple function of capitalism but rather a goal unto itself. Why is it so hard for nullskulls mouthbreathers to figure this out? Added to this is the growth of the state bureacracy and social management
>Inb4 something something commodities
Ya, those existed under fuedalism and persist under neofuedalism.

>>468229
>A system characterized by an increasing extraction of rents and fees rather than simple market exchange, in which econ inequality is increasingly maintained not as a simple function of capitalism but rather a goal unto itself.
Aside from the semantic debate over whether or not this should be called feudalism or not, i think the prediction is wrong.

Marx predicts that rentier capital will loose the power struggle with productive capital. Marx got a few things wrong but never anything structural. Marx's argument is that productive capital is self-expanding, the means off production can be used to make more means of production. While rent-seeking capital can't self-expand, the means of rent-extraction can't be used to make more of it self. Growing systems beat stagnant systems. I haven't seen anybody counter the structural demise of rentierism theory.

I get the impression that this conflict between rent-seeking and productive capital used to happen within economies and now the struggle seems to have become externalized. So economies dominated by rentier-capital struggle against economies dominated by productive capital. All that said I have no solid structural analysis to explain the development where some economies turn toward renterism while other turn towards productivism, only a few hunches.

>>468257
Falling rate of profit from production of durable commodities vs the ease of ensnaring customers in subscription contracts for services. Likewise, it's a matter of capability owing the the advancement of technology centered around communication, policing, and surveillance - the likes of which didn't exist 100 years ago. The shift toward any MoP is, ultimately, determined by the base, afterall.
Otherwise, I agree. And we're seeing the conflict play out between western rentier capital vs productive asian capital

>>468263
>>468257
I know that this isn’t any real analysis or anything. But my personal theory is that the “dengist” method is correct and is what has the west in complete panic. The west understands that china is attempting to exhaust its capitalist system and shift into a legitimate form of socialism. One that is not maintained by intense bureaucracy or culture that is just biding it’s time until it’s productive bases are fully built up; rather, a socialist economy that can fully support itself and exist entirely outside of capitalism. Better yet, has completely 0 need for it and has surpassed it. The west does not have the material capability for a war economy, at least not yet. This can be shown by the futile effort that was the Middle East campaign (not to mention how chinas economic deals practically unraveled everything). The fact that the Ukraine effort is a huge financial black hole with nothing to show for it. And the fact that Taiwan upon seeing the fate of Ukraine being a proxy for western powers, has now developed intense anxiety for any potential conflict against china. I think the west’s only option at this point is to seep itself into every corner of society before entering a war economy. Shifting into an industrial economy would just revitalize a dying proletariat and potentially raise class consciousness alongside it. The only option now is a feudal level of extraction and control before it can engage in imperialism again
>at least that’s my theory

>>468263
>ensnaring subscription
>technology centered around communication
>policing
>surveillance

Those are all means of political domination, these could be fleeting, because subscriptions break core ideological conventions of liberalism. Surveillance or interference with communication isn't even compatible with bourgeois law. It only works as long as people cooperate and most of that stuff is upheld by political will not structural forces.

But lets assume that all this stuff is solid and helped propel rentierism into prominence, non of it really impacts the power advantage of productive capital. Because self-expansion kinda is a "killer feature".

If there is to be great this competition between Asia and the West. The West has to re-instate productivism or it's going to get lapped by China every 20 years.

>>468272
I agree that if China flips the socialism switch they will get an economic boost, because of greater efficiency.

>The west does not have the material capability for a war economy, at least not yet. This can be shown by
<recent events
I agree with that too, however what comes next is wrong:
>I think the west’s only option at this point is to seep itself into every corner of society before entering a war economy. Shifting into an industrial economy would just revitalize a dying proletariat and potentially raise class consciousness alongside it. The only option now is a feudal level of extraction and control before it can engage in imperialism again.
A feudal war-economy isn't going to do more than a wet fart. I agree that shifting into an industrial economy will bring back proletarian class consciousness, but it's kinda the only viable option.

>>468275
Fuedalism is based on the expansion of the means of control though…

Baguette faggots are just as bad

>>468314
>Fuedalism is based on the expansion of the means of control though…
Well feudalism grew out of slave societies and, peasants were much more free than slaves, so feudalism actually represents a reduction of control.

Of course feudalism was very controlling and it did try really hard to throttle the productive capital of the bourgeoisie during the 17th century but after 1800 steam-power came in and the bourgeoisie just brute-forced all opposition out of the way. Marx would have witnessed at least some of this, and that's probably where he got the idea that modes of production would change once they turned into a fetter of the means of production.

The thing is that means of control have to be produced and when your mode of production sucks, it's just going to be over-powered no matter how draconian you are. A feudal mode of production can't hope to match industrial production on any level.

If the west really regresses into some kind of feudal arrangement while China moves forward into a socialist mode of production, the economic power differential is going to grow into unimaginable dimensions. Lagging behind 2 modes of production, that's really going to be a insurmountable disadvantage.

>>468317
Except the part where China also has a neo fuedal MoP. No idea where you guys get the notion that workers were ever in control of any nominal socialist country. It was always state bureacracy acting in the name of the workers.

With regards to industrial production, there really isn't much to be gained (in terms of power) by making even more plastic shit more efficiently.

>>468320
>Except the part where China also has a neo fuedal MoP.
This is a wild assertion, without anything to back it up.

>No idea where you guys get the notion that workers were ever in control of any nominal socialist country. It was always state bureacracy acting in the name of the workers.
This is a somewhat fair criticism, but also so far none of the socialist countries fully finished the transitions into socialism. So to an extend you are also complaining about unfinished projects lacking the features of a completed project.

>With regards to industrial production, there really isn't much to be gained (in terms of power) by making even more plastic shit more efficiently.

Sure there is little need to produce more low quality crap, however the next step in industrial production is to produce very high quality goods at low cost. That's going to cause a reverberating shift in economics.

>>468275
>if China flips the socialism switch
The only way that's ever going to happen is if China has a second revolution. The Mandarins have seized control of state power and aren't going to let go without a rumble from Chinese workers.

>>468325
But you can’t deny that they are basically creating conditions for socialism

>>468326
Sure I can, because that's an insipid, meaningless phrase that can apply to any other industrialized capitalist country. Do you really think it applies in a substantive manner any less so than a place like the United States?

>>468327
>it can apply to any other industrial capitalist country
Okay but no other “industrial” capitalist country is industrializing at an rapid rate and essentially trying to exhaust its capitalistic MoP. To the point where it’s a world power
>do you think it applies any more than the United States?
Yes because the us is neither state capitalist nor an industrial country.it’s entirely dedicated to service industry and technology (and military R&D). I don’t care if you think china will transition into socialism or achieve it through political struggle, you are a retard with 0 capacity for economic and material analysis if you think there is no base for socialism.

>>468328
As it turns out, bureacratic management of a capitalist economy can be pretty based and effective, so long as it's carried out along vaguely populist lines and not merely to entrench to power of a few faggot oligarchs with swarthy Slavic phenotypes and German last names. Who woulda thought?

>>468329
Says the person who thinks socialism is when le revolution happens. The more revolution you have the more socialist it is

>>468331
No.

I basically think that the mode of production is determined by the level of the productive forces. Whatever you want to call it - 'late stage monopoly capitalism,' 'state capitalism,' 'socialism with xyz characteristics,' at its core, some form of neo fuedalism/neo tributarianism is inevitable, with shades of political and cultural differences.

Personally, I'd prefer a neofuedalism which is a bit more populist and vitalistic (and which respects local distinction) rather that purely plutocratic and oligarchal (and promotes homogeneity). Which way it goes still depends on class/social struggle.

The notion that some classless, stateless society is feasible is the ultimately brainlet-loser take. Literally the only people who desire or think that's possible are incompetent midwits and the youthfully naive.

>>468339
A classless society without "the state" as we recognize it today is possible. The anarchoid vision where there is no struggle whatsoever and everything just-so happens is a fantasy. Hilariously, the outcome of philosophical anarchism is a version of what you want - feudal relations in which every petty lord is in an endless struggle with each other and the subordinates, and a few intellectuals pull the strings. That's always been the dream of European aristocracy, their vision for the whole world. It's a degenerate model and it has never worked. Every success Europe ever knew was in spite of their ruling class and institutions, and Europe doesn't start overtaking the world until they are able to involve themselves more in the much larger Asian market and have the Americas basically to themselves once they conquered the natives. The European aristocracy and all it stands for has been a cancer on the entire project, which is one reason why America, which was never fully "European", was practically destined to rule over Europe. It is why the model of superstates dominated by intelligence agencies was destined to overtake this fantasy version of nationalism and ideology that was given to the slaves.

Those who are really smart understand the function of the state is not a good one, and out of necessity, the worst excesses of state ideology and institutions have to be curbed by some force that makes men virtuous. Without this, the purer the ideology, the greater the insanity and the greater the force within an empire cannibalizing all that is useful and substantive.
The classless society is easier to imagine still. We have always required, out of necessity, to ignore the class or caste system when there is a practical need to do so. Upholding class society for its own sake has always been a burden, and a certain degree of class mobility was necessary for any society to adapt to a real world. Those who seek to arrest class mobility always have the stupidest rationales and favor pettiness and superficiality over that which would be useful. If a class cannot truly justify itself, then what use is it? Of course, those who hold institutions have no inherent reason to give up their hold on power, because no civilization can survive without virtue, and virtue is ultimately a train of individual men. It is not found freely in nature, ready-made for someone to capture. Nature has no use for our conceits of who rules and what is morally good.

>>468339
>>468420
All that said, it is generally agreed that some institution will persist, and that the division of society into classes can always assert itself. The proposition of communism did not entail that everyone would be exactly equal in ability, but that the most ruinous characteristics of class society would be abated out of necessity.
The world where classes are abolished as they have existed would likely scare the shit out of anyone contesting politics today. It wouldn't necessarily be a good world, nor would it be inherently stable. It would be possible to divide the tasks of society not by the qualities of particular men, but by the fnctions of those men - by what they do, with the functions of men understood by all participants in society. This is one of the struggles at present - the struggle against the crippling overspecialization of people and the prevalence of institutions which demand secrecy and shows of domination over other groups.
There is a way to overcome this with what we have at our disposal, but there is among the liberal intelligentsia a conceit that doing this is against their interests. They see most of humanity as superfluous and life unworthy of life, and so have chosen a path that is now irreversible. Whatever comes out the other end of this, when it arrives, will not be like anything socialism envisioned for the world. It might qualify as a kind of socialism, but the sorting of humanity into classes was forced into existence by certain entities who favored the thrill of ruling and seeing others suffer over all other moral values.

>>468339
>The notion that some classless, stateless society is feasible is the ultimately brainlet-loser take. Literally the only people who desire or think that's possible are incompetent midwits and the youthfully naive.

Class societies are only possible within a range of technological development. If you look at primitive human society, those are pretty egalitarian because they don't produce much in terms of wealth that could be accumulated.

If you level up the productive forces a little, quite a lot of wealth gets produced that can be accumulated by a ruling class. At those lower and medium levels of tech, ruling classes are somewhat able to defend them selves for relatively long stretches of time, before they are killed off. Ruling classes some times fall to a revolution by the masses. The masses always have ultimate power and can strike down every ruling class with great ease. However the masses find it hard to coordinate towards their common interests and usually can't use their power very efficiently. But on the occasions they do, all that opposes them is swept away. However most of the ruling classes that end up dead are getting offed by rivals from their own ranks.

At those low and medium tech levels the attack vectors are relatively few. But once you shift technology into higher levels, the attack vectors increase a lot, and eventually there comes a point where the social model with a ruling class becomes impossibly unstable because the rulers won't last more than 5 minutes. Imagine for example trying to survive as a feudal lord once the level of technology is similar to that in star trek. 99 out of 100 lords probably wouldn't survive their crowning ceremony.

Stable societies that can maintain a super complex high technology base have to become very wealth egalitarian, in order to reduce the level of societal hostilities below the threshold where the system destabilizes to much to function.

There is a conspiracy of the current ruling class to entrench their class status in some form that resembles feudal relations. But they aren't really creating a new social system, they are just wrecking society in the attempt of doing something that isn't viable.

>>468423
Primitive society was not "egalitarian" in a formal sense - there were chiefs, men who were stronger and let you know it, humiliations, endemic violence, rapes, you name it. What defined primitive society is that no state could reach very far, and it was impossible to impose the state or society onto people in the way settled society did. You can go to hunter-gatherer societies today and see clear hierarchies, favored groups or individuals, a game of competition within the society, and so on. The idea of "natural collectivity" ordained by nature is an anarchist trope, to suggest naturaliziing a particular and very modern conceit of society and the state. The people in primitive society are not stupid - they have some awareness of what politics is in their experience, and they were able to recognize what civilization meant when they came in contact with it, and that civilization was hostile to their way of life. It's one reason civilization has always been imposed by the sword, rather than by convincing people of the merits of civilization. People see correctly that in civilization, they're going to be fucked and at the bottom of a game that was decided a long time ago. Some might press their luck and try to make it, only to learn just how rigged state society really is. Usually, though, those who are dragged into civilization are not given a serious choice in the matter, and may not be allowed that choice at all. It wasn't a realistic option for the natives of the Americas to join settler society. Those who tried learned the hard way that the colonists simply wanted the natives dead, and didn't want to hear anything about assimilation. It was the same with the Romans - a few tokens from the tribal ruling class would receive some fringe benefits of civilization, while it was just toil and trouble for most of the people, usually resulting in either slavery or serving in the army which amounted to the same thing. You can go around the world and see a similar pattern - the imperial core civilization asserts itself against the barbarians, in one way or another. The imperial strategy is not uniformly and maximally hostile, in the sense that those who hold empires are pure Trumpian degenerates. It is only in recent times that such a ruling idea could intellectually defend itself, since in an earlier time the true heart of humanity was too foul to be allowed to live. The world stopped humanity from realizing its potential, and it was a good thing that it did for as long as it did. Civilization required both a drive to conquer and temperance to moderate its vices, but human beings chose in the end to embrace what they always were at heart, and so this is the only world that did happen. The imperial strategy today sees the cannibalization of all that is useful as good in its own right, because the chief threat to empire is too much product and too much quality entering the lower classes, who have no reason to go along with imperial state society and no need of any ideology or myth states create.

Class society at its heart is not ordained by anything in nature, aside from a want in humans to make it so. We could have, from the start, never regarded class society as legitimate. Within class society, there was always an element that understood class distinctions did not serve any legitimate purpose, and that class society relied on one scam after another. It was because the scam was possible that it perpetuated. In the past, it was not possible for class society to perpetuate for too long, and the incentive of people to resist domination could acquire resources to prevent such a thing from happening. Advance in warmaking and herding, and then the development of spiritual authority beyond the crudest and whole worked-out theories of rule, is what allowed class society to exist and begin its imposition on the world. There is nothing in the human project that would avert this, that is inherent to humans or their actions. It is only a world outside of humanity that would sober the delusions humans held about themselves, and perhaps guide humans to do something other than the worst possible thing. Moral philosophy in modernity deliberately emphasized the glory of evil and avarice, excising all other considerations.

>>468426
It is not a given that because it is possible, that the scam is a given and inevitable. It rather means that there is a struggle in the world that is ultimately decided by a human willingness to "want it more". What humans choose to do with that is an open question. Reducing this to a struggle, let alone a cosmic Manichean struggle, is missing what changed to make this scam possible. It was not built into fundamental nature for us to do this, for if it were, not one new thing could develop and we would remain at the level of roving rape gangs covering the world.

The end of class society can only happen if there is a counterforce that wants it more - that is, if there is society as an assemblage of actual people, rather than "society" as an idea imposed from on high to command the world. Those who aspire to power have no reason nor natural impulse that will make them surrender that power. By knowledge alone - and thus so long as science is the spiritual authority - the tendency will be towards greater autocracy, greater tyranny, until the ruin of the contending classes happens. There is no version of ideology or "class struggle" that ends any other way.

My point is that only by some spiritual authority other than "the science" or appeal to nature is there anything else at all. The outcome of the reign of science is here for us to see. It turns out the "best and brightest" chose to select for perversion and crass delights over anything we would consider good, and there is no argument by reason to tell the intellectuals they shouldn't do this. If the full outcome of the project is revealed, they simply recapitulate its necessity, and declare "of course it is this way, what are you, retarded?"

>>468428
The decisive factor, and the true class that is the pivot of what is possible, is and always has been the lowest class, or the class that exists to suffer. It is not "the workers" due to some generative force of their labor, and it is not any class that is construed as useful in a material sense. All of these material utilities in labor are premised on the existence of absolute suffering and absolute depravity. Without the suffering class, it is not possible to discipline labor with the ultimate threats, and if that is the case, then capitalism or managerialism would not be possible. There is no situation in nature that would deny to those who rule this ultimate threat to make others suffer, and so long as it exists, the hand of the rulers will always hold an advantage over labor. Labor can mitigate the threat for themselves, and this is what was exploited by the eugenic creed - that the workers would be induced to cannibalize their own, and to an extent they would be convinced that this was their idea, or that it was better that the weaker of them die than the stronger. In this way, the general populace could be divided and conquered by those who possessed the means of inflicting suffering on others. Those who could inflict suffering most efficient would, in the long run, win out over any other interest, and they would only need to find some material force that would feed the torture machine.

>>468426
>>468428
>>468429
Within your thinking, is the ability to make threats a function of spiritual authority? And if so, does spiritual authority encompass intelligence communities, the military, and policing forces of a state?

And do you think that the executors of spiritual authority need it's sacrifice-class in order to carry out it's functions, in a way similar to how revolutionary unionists/certain kinds of marxists think that the ruling class needs the proletariat for their labor?

>>468500
Threats are a very temporal authority. Spiritual authority usually entails claims of existential crisis and a weakness of the soul / spirit, rather than someone claiming your soul. It gets muddy with ritual, sacrifice, the exposure of sin or failure, which take on spiritual significance beyond the material fact of the acts themselves. There is a spiritual element to compromising yourself, in the habit that utilitarian pleasure-seeking encourages. It's why the scummiest militaries keep their grunts in line with drugs and encourage them to torture for fun, and tell the grunts that this is the entirety of what militaries do. That is not a military that is intended to win battles against competent opponents, but the military usually entails a boring task of grinding down people and conducting this sacrifice of the unwanted. War historically was a check on population growth and punished those who transgressed the social order of the day, while those who rule are nearly immune to the consequences of war. It has long been the aim of those who rule to eliminate all risk they would face, and capitalists are very conscious of risk. No capitalist takes on risk he doesn't need, unless he is in a desperate struggle against a superior capital and has to violate the norms of capitalist thinking. Monopoly and oligarchy will construct a society in which their risk is non-existent and the monopoly can do entirely as it pleases, and the flipside of this is that the slavery of those disfavored by the oligarchy must become absolute.

So to really answer your question, religion or the spiritual authority of the day has always been the assistant of temporal authority, and the spiritual authority of today explicitly exhorts the use of material and temporal force to impose its vision of the world. Spiritual authority can make threats, but the smart priests and kings and rulers pawn that task off to subordinates. That is explicit in how Plato's Guardians shunt all of the actual work of the state to the auxiliaries, who are trained only to make the rest of us suffer. In practice, the spiritual authority of humanity tends to be bad, tends to concern itself overwhelmingly with the state and thus spiritual concepts that are analogous to the state. It's why Satan or something like it is a recurring motif - what is described in the tradition of God and Satan's relationship is a theory of revolution and spiritual authority overriding a more crass temporal authority. God, whatever form he takes, is the good cop, and Satan is the bad cop; but in reality, both of these deities are "Satans", and one Satan rises to dethrone the previous Satan, or the sitting Satan for whatever reason abdicates and grants the world to the new Satan. This is portrayed sometimes as a cosmic struggle, but in many religions, the godhead and the Satan or figure like it are not adversarial towards each other. The Satan in Jewish tradition is the adversary of Man, and this is done not because Satan is petty or spiteful but because it is Satan's job to do this. YHWH of course punished Man long before the Satan was in the picture, and this itself is another metaphor for a process where humans developed political thought and concepts of how to manipulate each other to go along with any of this. You can try to claim that YHWH was well within his rights to smite these stupid monkeys who thought they could know anything, after the whole Sodom episode. Man can't really make an argument against this except "me wantee". This is where you start to see that religion is something very different from what it is portrayed as. Earlier religions made little secret that they were aligned with the ruling interest, and at most religions were "national religions" or spoke of potential cooperation in society. Christianity is particularly fucked in this regard, which is a whole other topic, and it should be understand that Christianity is directly oppositional towards Judaism, or at least the version of Christianity that rose to prominence was. This is another one of those early Church history things that people argued about all the way until basically now.
(Full disclosure: I am not and never have been a Christian, Jew, or Muslim, so all of this is me studying something that is alien to how I was raised; and I never adhered to any religion at all. I have a particular antipathy for Satanism and Luciferianism because I've seen enough of these people and what they think, and have no reason to like it. Lately there's been a game where the Satanic and Christian elements play off each other, fully knowing that they're both essentially on the same team and want to fuck over the rest of us.)

Lemme take a breather and I'll get back to the response. I don't want to stray too long from OP and will try to bring it back to the original discussion when I'm done.

>>468500
>>468591

Okay so intelligence agencies are not a copy-paste of traditional religion but something very different. The "state religion" as such today is much larger than one agency, and the intelligence agency or intelligence university serves a very particular function in the state. It is not, as the fascists would try to tell you, the singular seat of legitimate thought, and the smart intelligence operatives have been aware of this from the start. Fascism is always an ideology for the slaves, those who are inclined by their nature to abase themselves most readily; and this is the case for ideology generally. A Marxist would appreciate the role of an intelligence agency, since the establishment of such a thing is inherent to the Marxist conception of history and truth and so on, but the intelligence agency is not uniquely Marxist. Every intelligence agent who knows their shit would be familiar with Marx and what the Marxist conception of communism entailed, and so the intel agencies had lines to the communist movement from an early stage. There was never a truly independent communist movement from the national security state; rather, the communists were one of many factions vying for supremacy in what was effectively a one-world system. The world wars were not wars between nation-states which just-so happened to conflict, but were battles within this one thing for control of the world market, and through it, the world.

What the intelligence agency actually does is operations and operational research. Its influence over ideology is always a means to an end; no one competent actually takes ideology as their purpose for doing what they do, and they're smart enough not to fall into the narrative traps. Everyone who tries to sell you these narratives holds you in contempt. We used to not allow these people to lie so shamelessly, but now the lie perpetuates so much and is given sanction. The lying is always done to a group of people selected to die, and those selected to live know never, ever to break ranks from the lie. This is the standard Hilterian strategy. The idea itself does not hold any authority; the intelligence operative is one of many who ensure the ideas are made true by praxis, and the intelligence agent does not do this alone. In effect, the intel community are state planners, or amount to it. The way the US did it was not as straightforward as it was in a communist country, but neither was the CIA so incomprehensible that they always got away with it. Really, the CIA has been able to operate so brazenly because there is nothing of substance opposing it. They can dance and cheer as they assassinate Bobby Kennedy and no one dares to go against it. There are many reasons why they know they can do this, and the brazenness became their calling card. Flagrant disregard for past conceits of law, order, decency, and so on shows the strength of the institution, when it comes to advancing their goals.

The spiritual authorities in the US are the unviersities, the scientific elite, certain professions which were given a state monopoly on knowledge and authority in certain respects, certain cults and societies that were present before the national security state, and a fairly large network that is interested in this project. A full description could not be limited to one class or a small set of institutions, but neither is this structure so impossibly complex that it cannot be described, and it does not subsume everyone equally. You are still dealing with a fairly large segment of the global population that is fully aware of what they constructed and their long-run mission. Eugenics is not merely an idea unmoored from history, but institutions which were able to conduct a coup of governments around the world and effectively seize imperium, or the power of life and death. If a eugenic interest can say "retarded" and that person is immediately a ritual sacrifice, that is a very effective basis for an empire, and they're never going to give up something that is as free as shouting the word and making it real. The spiritual authority in America, and for most of the world, is oriented around this eugenic idea of what humanity should be, and such an idea has supplanted any other idea that could guide humanity. It has imposed itself on us generation after generation, and with each generation, living memory of a world without eugenics is destroyed.

The claim of eugenics is that it is eternal and will arrest history. The truth, and this is known by a few people in one way or another, is there will come a time where eugenics has killed enough people and has modified human behavior so much that overt eugenism will be unnecessary. At that point, you'll see more of what this really was and what the contending parties want as the next thing. I can't say when this will happen, but I would guess near the end of this century, with a tentative date of around 2070-2080. If this plan fails, they expect to throw the nukes, or they regress into full eugenism and everyone and everything is cannibalized. There is enough interest among those in the know to ensure that eugenics serves this purpose, but eugenics precludes that any of us have any role in the future society. That has been locked in. Also locked in is what eugenics did to us. We have already effectively formed the castes of the future society, which follow roughly the Brave New World model. The Epsilons were the first broken off and it has been widely accepted who the retards are, and the Deltas have formed from the wretches of the working/soldier class who think of nothing but revelling in blood in the present situation, and whose thought has been reduced to a few crude utterances, beneath that of even the typical Ingsoc follower. The Gamma caste is the nerd / soyface archetype, Betas are the degenerate sectors of bourgeois decadence, and the Alphas are the favored caste who nonetheless are modified to strip away the last vestiges of prior humanity. A small group is pulled aside to perpetuate the caste system, which is taken as a fait accompli and unchangeable. It is easy enough to take a few malcontents or people with special training and pay them handsomely to support the system, and there is no incentive of anyone to fight it. Any concept that humanity could avert this has become inadmissible as a serious idea. The only way it could be changed from this is if humans conceived of themselves and their functions in society very differently, and the caste arrangement has built-in incentives maintaining it. It would require not just a spiritual transformation that has yet to take place, but very likely humans would be materially and intellectually very different, and see themselves very differently. It would require basically the end of humans viewing themselves as individuals, and not in a socialist sense of self-abasement to an abstraction of "society" or any form socialism or communism took thus far. It would be something very alien, and one manifestation of it would be humans dissociating regularly and behaving in ways that are incompatible with present working life. Of course, part of the present society has been to weed out anyone who isn't broken into a small number of permissible roles, and to limit as much as possible any idea or practice that would inhibit the present course of action. We're locked in for depopulation, and the only thing that is possible at the moment is bitter survival without any hope that humanity will be other than it has proven itself to be.

>>468500
>>468591
>>468592

With the CIA's reach, it must be understood that there are a number of interests in society that want exactly what the "shadowy cabal" intends for us, because they think they'll be on the winning team and get to jump on the lifeboat, or celebrate in the orgies. This will lead to mass ritual torture and sacrifice in secret parties, where those selected to die are put through the ultimate humiliation and those in the know join in the thrill of maximal torture. That's one of the things that are alluded to with the "Eyes Wide Shut" parties, which are presented as tame rituals at the moment but which have always entailed much more gruesome rituals. There is of course a lot of private sacrifice, and there are scum of the Earth who join in the fun becuase it is their nature. When you see enough of that, you see a pattern that this is not something a small number of sick people do. There is a considerable base in humanity that has always been given over to this program in some way, and there are many in humanity who faithfully follow the cult no matter what. The followers who chant "my country right or wrong" or other such stupidity were never, ever going to be anything other than that. The thought that it could be different simply never occurs to them. You can connect the dots in the simplest way possible and they will simply be unable to process the concept that there is anything other than "me wantee" or "respect who is bigga". The conservative is more animal than man ans has always supplicated to anything, even when their way of life is openly attacked. They're natural slaves and cuckolds. Most of the common people are too fearful, self-interested, or simply disinterested in the idea that the world or humanity can change or should change. To most of the lower class, the world has never been anything other than a dreary existence, and if anything good happens, it is some sort of miracle from heaven and will never last. To the common man, it is very easy to view the entire human race as absolutely depraved and devoid of any potential for redemption, but the full consequences of absolute depravity are only on display now. In the past, there was plausible deniability. Since the 1990s, it has become clear that there can be no more keeping your head down. That's why I was screaming - because I saw where this leads and wondered how anyone could go along with it. I didn't know that they all knew full well what this was, and for their own reasons chose to either embrace it or accept it. If they were going to rail against it, they weren't going to win.

There is only a small, almost insignificant minority of humanity that could conceive of the world actually changing, and they have never found any exemplar presenting their program in full. Such a program at this point would be almost impossible to describe while remaining politically correct, since the political values today are discordant with anything that the commoner would consider good. It's literally a rule in the only political theory we have that the commoners axiomatically lose 100% of the time. Only the truly desperate may manage to think of a different world. Most who have this moment are, in one way or another, co-opted into the ruling system, or were always of the ruling interest and merely saw a crisis for their situation and how the world might change. The visions that would truly transform the world would not be able to spread during modernity. Any book which spoke too plainly about what was really to be done would be suppressed, regardless of any permissibility of speech. Only scattered concepts of what a future world might be made it into the literature or any circulation, and they remained an inchoate mess of contradictions.

>>468500
So to answer the last question, about the necessity of the "suffering class" - if the current crop of sacrifices were exhausted, it would be necessary to find new ones to maintain the ruling ideas. Sacrifice and humiliation are at the center of so much humanity does, and it has been taken for granted that this is the only way we can be. Only the most desperate envision a world where this is even mitigated, let alone abolished. I do not think it could ever be abolished, as suffering and the general fear of living, thinking and knowing creatures is premised on some basic truths about the world. We could very easily not do this shit though. There is no excuse for the ritual humliiation and degradation schools impose and the Satanic cycle generally, and there is enough disgust towards it that human beings have, out of necessity, resisted this impositon through their existence. This resistance is not universal, for as I mentioned, there are certain types of humans in society who have always embraced this program and sought to maximize it, and who scoff at the idea that there can be anything else. We as a society could do very, very basic things to mitigate the worst excesses of political and class society, and these are things that would cost nothing. Very likely, if they were pursued, then the state and its institutions would last longer, and the outcomes for all participants would be better. Even something as simple as merely putting down the lower class to spare them the misery would be an improvement over what Fabianism has done to us; but none of us should have had to go through this, and everything from Reagan on has been such an abomination that its advocates should have been dragged out and shot at the least. A moderate solution would be something on the scale of the Final Solution, but to the people who actually caused the world's problems. We're not going to get that though, nor will we get anything like it. I can tell you that the only thing that will stop these people is ruthlessly purging them, or confining them on reservations or shoving them in their underground cities and locking them there forever. There is no other way to contend with them, and it's the only language they regard as meaningful. Since we're not going to do that any time soon, we're pretty much fucked. I have no reason to pretend it was going to be any other way at this point. I wish it weren't this way, and I would much rather that these people never started any more shit with me. They don't believe in that though. If you ever plead with them to stop, no matter what reasoning you can find that this would be beneficial to them, they don't care. The thrill of torture is what they believe in and the supreme value above all, and it is this which made them such a formidable opponent. It is their willingness to destroy the world for their cause, which they claimed a monopoly on, that allowed them to press as much as they have with this particular campaign. Without that willingness, or if the counterforce were able to challenge them in the open, these people would likely act very differently, and would think twice before saying more brazen bullshit. That might have been enough before the 1990s, but after the 1990s, they showed their hand. There is no going back from their stated positions and their intent. They die or we die, it's that simple, and so far it's been us defectives who have been dying. The democide and extermination is not a future state of humanity. It started in earnest in 2008, and we've been told to pretend it isn't happening. You don't get the level of crazy in America if it weren't Naxified after 2000 and weren't actively purging whatever it could. All that stands to change is the intensity and openness of the purge, and the narratives told to cover it. More and more, the influencers are pushing to glorify the torture and death in the open. This is especially apparent with the RW influencers, who are completely shameless and revel in blood. They know what side of the war they're on.

A game of edgelording has been the norm for several decades, escalating dramatically after 2008 and the regime's command of internet propaganda. Increasingly, there is no room for mystification or muddying of the waters. The world has always been comprised of opposites, and all that was excluded in the middle is disintegrating.

>>468500
If you see the origins of "neo-Marxist" internet jargon, it has no origin in Marx's actual writing or what communists wrote. The communists were never truly friends with the people and were willing to join sacrifice with the rest of them, but to espouse that openly and proudly as the eugenists did would have been suicide for a serious communist project. The acceptance of eugenics in any form would be the undoing of any possibility that communism would work, and this was understood by the Marxists. In the end, the Marxist intellectuals had no genuine answer to eugenics, and they suspiciously dithered when they had to fight, and fought on fronts that were not worth fighting intellectually or with any political capital. The Marxist-Leninist program was rife with so many errors that it is a wonder the USSR lasted as long as it did, and that mostly came out of dire necessity to survive and who ruled the US at the time.

So getting back to the OP… shit is getting ugly real soon. I was warning you guys that we are in for massive depopulation in this decade. The internet influencers have been utterly shameless in their claims that history does not move until a thought leader declares it has moved. Shit has been happening rapidly since 2020, but you're not allowed to speak of it too plainly. Too many who are permitted to speak know what side of the war they're on and have chosen mystification. There are a few who give out hints of what is coming and the nature of what is happening now, but you're not going to be given a full theory or accounting, or anything that suggests the commoners can survive. The people, by and large, know it has been over for some time now. If you told them there was going to be a revolution, they'd wonder what the hell you are smoking. Their experience tells them just how fucked the situation is, and that this really is the end.

I for one have chosen to go out shouting and attempt to live as long as I can, but there are limits to how much shit I will endure for a lost cause. My only wish is to spite the fuckers who enabled this rot. Those who engineered and planned it are never going to be stopped, but the enablers and functionaries who did it for a cheap thrill can and will be exposed for what they are. They're fucking cuckolds and faggots for letting this happen and doing it for so little a reward. If not for them, we would be living in a much different world, and in theory the enablers could stop any time and the situation would reverse. For many reasons, though, they won't. They're trained like animals to follow through what started in the 1990s. The time to fight was back then, and we all knew it.

The war in Ukraine I believe is a test case for what they can get away with, and testing military tactics in a European / "white" civilizational theater. There hasn't been a war in Europe to use as a barometer of what to expect since Yugoslavia in the 90s, and much has changed since then. The US has been eager to try out their mind control techniques at home, rather than in the Middle East with less reliable Muslim/Arab guinea pigs. We're seeing that tested with the influencer brigade, and they are attempting to instigate a US civil war if they can do it.

I would urge everyone here to never support this faggotry and resist it to the bitter end. A US civil war means the world will become much uglier, and the mask comes off in more ways than you know. The idea that you're going to have a war of that magnitude and it "just so" happens, and history never really changes, is exactly what the bastards want you to think. This shit will not end the US Empire, but reform it into something worse. All a civil war means is killing off whatever hope there was that this beast could be stopped from here, and what comes after will be a grim nightmare, for us and for most of the world. Some faggot krauts will cheer it on because that's always been their plan for us, because their shit country and culture is a failure and always has been.

>>468597
I read all of your replies but will respond primarily in relation to the OP, as you seem to be conscientiously moving the discussion.

I would argue that censorship is carried out primarily through social, and not legal repression with legal repression only acting as an auxiliary to social repression, America is based more in lynchings than in book bannings.
I think this is part of why people with both your moral, political intentions and ability to speak out, your lack of being mute to be clear are nearly non existent. Due to a mixture of shame and lack of knowledge, knowledge which is intentionally destroyed in the totemistic shaming rituals you can witness so readily on social media.
There are mechanistic reasons that psychological trauma causes lost time and repressed memories, it can destroy sensation and the ability of the mind to make connections. Tragically children are especially vulnerable to this, and hitlerites know this and target them and their communities for their grooming. The legal repression will make this worse of course, though there's always magical realism and other subtle methods of speaking out…

I was very intrigued when you said "It would require basically the end of humans viewing themselves as individuals… …one manifestation of it would be humans dissociating regularly and behaving in ways that are incompatible with present working life" and I'd like it if you expanded on what you meant by that.

One last thing on self preservation. I think that the best way to combat a death cult is through self preservation and focusing more on protection of allies than on destruction of enemies. That's easy to say but when the enemy has optimized their intelligence agencies/war machine for pursuit and mobility, both kinetic and social, it's not very easy to carry out. But if hypothetical alternative societies were able to break out, somehow both in the cities and the countryside. With the ability to take care of themselves, to repair and maintain electronics and vehicles and machines, to retreat and move about physically, produce or procure and preserve food, and preserve their organization in the face of infiltration, if they dedicated themselves to rescuing and protecting the suffering class. Do you think these rescuing operations could drain the eugenicists of their civilization's lifeblood just as surely as a bullet would drain the lifeblood from their bodies?
That's an idea I've been toying with though I'm certainly not anywhere near being able to organize anything on this scale, and to be honest probably won't be until it's really, really too late. But just hypothetically, for now and probably ever.

>>468747
There is more overt censorship in the US than you're led to believe. Usually it involves pulling people aside and giving them a friendly bearing or trip to the psych ward, or from some kindly associates of one mafia or another. Lynchings were not arbitrary but usually carried out with the tacit approval of the local government, since the lynch mobs would be led by local leaders, and the lynchings existed alongside a discriminatory legal code that was consciously pushing against the ex-slaves and the poors. They don't tell you that after the war, the situation for poor whites in the South was really dire, and this motivated more antipathy. Those who did attempt a cross-racial alliance with the populists were defeated and broken up very violently, and rivalry and distrust were played up by every means possible.
Books had been banned many times in American history - the first amendment was never meant as an absolute rule allowing you to say anything you wanted. You might be thinking that the Open Society was normal of America, but that was/is a particular period of global history. In many ways the "Open Society" is far more repressive than the older America. Freedoms that were once considered standard even for the poor were now privileges you had to "earn".

I myself occupy an unusual space in this society, and it is a space that didn't exist until around the 1980s - the dispossessed and unhinged maniac seeing depopulation and asking why no one else will stop this beast after such audacious actions of the institutions. So, the ways in which would-be dissenters like me are threatened involve far more than stuff people write on the internet. I've been given threats in real life, before I became a hermit. You wouldn't have the fear on the internet if it weren't supported by such threats extending into real life, and those who forget are reminded of that with flash mobs and exposures.

What I have seen since 2020 is that a lot more people are willing to just say what this is, and no longer feel they have anything to lose. They're not going to stick their neck out - there is no reward in that. There is no small amount of humblebragging by those selected to live that the poors will be killed off while they sip lattes, usually in the teaching professions. This is all a joke to them. They're not dying, and they know they've won. Even if they don't like it, they know it's not going to stop. If it were going to stop, it would have stopped in the 1990s at the latest. Mostly though, I get some random-ass people who will just write on the internet that this is a Satanic country and that the only thing we can do is make the most of this fallen world. That's all that is left. I do not see anything that will challenge what has happened and win any time soon. The best that will happen is that there will come a time when the forces behind the curtain come out completely, having killed and subdued enough of the people and putting to rest the democratic idea forever. The victors will be the masters and everyone else will be outright slaves, or basically slaves. At that point, depopulation can end, and repopulation can begin. There are already hints of that with the Thiel-backed "pronatalist" movement advertising these creepy eugenic families. The ones with the horn-rimmed glasses really get me - that shit is designed to trigger people.

So, I don't believe there is any ignorance about what this is. Whatever ignorance existed has been shattered by shouting "die die die" at maximum volume since the rise of Trump. The message was seeded prominently with the rise of Obama and the events of 2008, and Bush was pushing as hard as he could to bring that into being. I remember the Bush years and normal people thought the neocons were maniacs when they marched around like literal Nazis. It took Obama to normalize it and facilitate it, at first advertising that he was going to pull America away from the brink and then shoving us over the cliff and telling the people selected to live to join the party or else. It was with Obama that liberals went completely apeshit and knew what this was if they were connected to the institutions.

>>468747
>I was very intrigued when you said "It would require basically the end of humans viewing themselves as individuals… …one manifestation of it would be humans dissociating regularly and behaving in ways that are incompatible with present working life" and I'd like it if you expanded on what you meant by that.
Well, you are already seeing in some extreme corners of the internet the only possible response to the democide. There are more people going insane, believing they are "plural", adopting strange beliefs regarding sex and daily life. There is a huge surge of belief in New Age and esoteric practices. Recently I got into some of the occult stuff as a scholar - obviously I'm not allowed to join the societies and do not want to - and seeing how many people know of this stuff surprised me. This in of itself is not the solution, but it is a sign of what is happening - humans are changing their core convictions and moral stance on what a society can be and what they would have to do to live in such a world.

To fight something like eugenics would require nothing less than a new religion. No existing religion is suitable for the purpose, and so a whole theory of spiritual authority and an interpretation of what past religions really were would be necessary. The "religion of science" too would have to be debunked and exposed as a false spiritual authority. I do not know when that will happen, or if it can happen. Everything about the ruling philosophies today forbids any new idea, and seeds false paths to convince dissenters to destroy themselves.

One thing that is clear to me is that if you actually wanted to make people better by selective breeding, Galton's program is about the worst way you could go about it. It selects for a narrow set of traits, does not allow anyone to question what is happening, disdains any genuine empirical evidence of the success of eugenics, and operates entirely through unaccountable taboos and intensifying fear and internal strife. Those conditions are incompatible with any improved traits emerging in the first place. It selects only for those with a predatory mindset, and degrades people to their assigned rank. The leading castes are not an exception to this - they select for avarice and cruelty, and select against any trait that would allow the ruling caste to exhibit noble behaviors or produce anything useful except more eugenics. What eugenics creates is Ingsoc except even bloodier and more torturous.

Ironically, I would consider a genuine "race betterment" plan to be the necessary counter to eugenics. Any such plan would see immediately that if you did want to improve a given population of humans, you would look at the conditions of their development and how they can interact with each other, then all external forces at work. For now, I would concern myself with a particular group, rather than speak for the whole of society. We can define the group however we like, and then select another group and evaluate their conditions, and so on. Basically, you would have the informational structure eugenics implies as necessary, but it would be oriented to destroy the eugenic program of Galton. Very likely this would entail that we just admit that sexual reproduction and the family are lies, and men will have to accept that they probably won't reproduce or shouldn't reproduce, and that they can live happy lives without that. Eugenics implied that sexual rejection was total rejection from society, which has produced the results we see with incels and people going insane over all things sexual. This change in male attitudes towards the family is already taking place. More men are giving up. With the current generation, more than half of men are effectively excluded from mating or any form of relationship, and it is so common that it isn't even controversial any more. There is no longer an expectation that you will have a family or that you should. What happens when that rises to 75% of the male population? What happens when more of the women are excluded, or made to submit to selling their eggs to bourgeois assholes?

We may say that we could make an alternate attitude towards the family, but this has profound implications for how we would view our lives or what we expect to do here. I suspect for the men, there will be increasing rejection of social interaction. They will go in the pod - they don't have any other option - and they will more and more lose interest in what was traditionally human. They will still desire genuine security and some form of growth, but the assumptions we used to make about life are gone. We already know this, but we haven't fully admitted it yet. Only a favored minority get the privilege of things that were once upon a time common. Men have, out of necessity, already taken steps to adapt to this life. There is very little to live for, and if these men think about what they can live for, they won't be content to bring back what used to exist. They know that will never work again, and that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Those who survive will very likely find most of our drive for crap entertainment and junk food disgusting. They will find the false reality being constructed for them to be too toxic to live in, and will out of necessity create their own. The attempt of the failed men is to build something they can share, at least in their own space. The ruling ideas and the eugenic creed seek to invade that space by every means necessary, because we are not allowed to have anything. All we have to do is keep constructing a world without them no matter how many times it is destroyed, while the eugenists have to continue expending resources to terrorize us and maximize the terror. Their hope is that they will be able to "farm" our torture and maximize their thrill that way. That would necessitate the damned, who have no further reason to believe the institutions will ever include them, to turn to strange asymmetric tactics to live with themselves and repel the invasion. You'll see more men and then more people simply disregard all the conventions the eugenists and fascists delight in transgressing, and the piggers of the world will regret that they destroyed the virtue they were feeding from. If they want a Satanic world, they're going to see the consequences of what people do when they aspire to fight the Satan in Hell. We won't be docile animals for them, and we are not burdened by some belief that we will find glory or any hope. "There is no hope, there is no end."

>>468747
On your last point - you cannot run a resistance purely on appeal to death and torture, or the political ideas with currency today. There is a big game to show how tough you are, and it is all posturing. One thing that must be clear though is the nature of what you're up against. It's not just an intelligence agency which you would view as a passive thing, which you would hope to outsmart. States are always active with the monopoly on legal violence. The Romans were never believers in the state actually standing still, as if it were an ideal Platonic republic. (Speaking of our old friend, if you actually get into his cosmology, he knows this model of the city-state is never stable and implies it would have to be a dynamic entity to even survive, but he sees its decay into democratic and tyrannical states as inexorable decline until the cycle repeats. Obviously that does not apply to states of modern type, which are very different creatures and never conformed neatly to a republic.) The nature of the current state is never passive. Its "passive functions", its pretense of maintaining order and establishing authority, has been openly abandoned. The ruling interest today laughs at the idea of authority being a stable or reliable thing, or authority being anything other than a pretext for more violence. It is this abandonment of even the pretense that the state is bound to reality that defines the states of the 20th century and especially the current empire today. This changes considerably the strategy of someone who would want to fight it. The Marxist idea of capturing the state and institutions not only wouldn't work, but would and has contributed to the problem from our perspective. There isn't going to be a revolution or some grand event where the people establish justice. The condition of resistance is one of grim retreat and advances which are bitterly held, often on fronts that were not suspected. To Marxist thinking, the only outcome is the ruin of the contending classes, and for those of us in the lowest classes, we are already ruined. Why would we fear the ruin of the contending classes, if there is no place for us in the institutions? The institutions will not listen to any plea to end eugenics. We have tried that time and time again, and they laugh at that idea. It is anathema to every political idea those in the institutions hold, and the very conceit of themselves and their place in society. They "earned" it by stepping over us in the grand struggle for life, and they don't know of any other way. For them to accept us would violate everything they fought for and won. They're never going to give up what they took from us, and they were never going to let us in their society.

For us, the question is simple. Compliance is not an option. We can either suffer, or we can remove ourselves from this mortal coil to avoid being killed in captivity after considreable torture. We have for the longest time contented ourselves with whatever piece of the world we could hold against the beast, whatever space and interactions we can call our own. We would, and already have, adapt to a life largely spent in grim solitude, or with limited interactions. We would live on next to nothing, and even if the siege ended, we would not expect much but a slightly easier go of what we had been doing during the siege. What started with the democide and eugenics is forever. There is no return to a world without eugenics, nor a future without eugenics for us. The best we could possibly see is a future where eugenics is defeated, but it is not for us. Our fate was chosen, and even if the siege ends, those born after will live with the memory of the siege. Very likely, those who resist will not bear children or much legacy at all. The only thing we live for is spite against what this beast did to us, and we persist out of a sense that if more of us live, it makes the ruling interest upset. That is all we can do. We have relied for the longest time on an understanding of many in society that once the lowest class is liquidated, the beast will cannibalize another class, and continue the death drive. The conditions of eugenics do not permit the intercine conflict and the siege to ever end. The removal of the siege from the rulers would only happen if they are confident they have modified our behavior to their liking, and no amount of willful compliance from us or any subordinated class would change their decision. Their belief is that they do not want our willful compliance, as if we retained independence or dignity. They only ever wanted to see us totally enslaved, our bodies and wills completely dominated by theirs. That's how they think. They don't have any other concept of society, where the subordinated classes have any input.

>>468747
As far as the existence of "alternative societies" - not everything we do is mediated by "society" as this imagined abstraction, where we are all compelled to serve in all things. We've always retained some independence from the ruling interest, whatever it may be. We are not born utterly beholden to the institutions, and that thinking is a very recent one. It has long been understood the price of orderly government is that people retain some freedom to act, and must be convinced to accept the government. If the government is completely alien, then the dispossessed have no reason whatsoever to pretend that the government can be worked with at all, and will be in permanent rebellion. Again, it isn't like you get a choice to comply. If the state has declared you are persona non grata, you either resist or you die. There is no compliance. Usually the way this is resolved historically is that the state only has so much force to bring to bear, so many people are left to their own devices, and given warnings against any act that the state truly doesn't want. Eugenics does not work with that approach to government - "thou shalt not" or even "thou shalt". They believe only in crimes of Being, and simply being selected to die is all they really care about. Those selected to live are disciplined not by threats against particular actions, but threats that if they do not conform to eugenic expectations, they are out. The fear motivates those selected to live to not transgress the eugenic interest, and to not violate the conditions of eugenics - and so those selected to live are strongly discouraged from any action that would end the rot, and have an instinct to go along with whatever the Satan wants. (And yes, if you know the eugenic creed, it is a Satanic morality - I don't call it Satanist just to say it is evil, but that it conforms to a particular moral and ethical view that has been known for some time).

So the question isn't "how can we have our alternative society within the conditions of eugenics". It is "how do we keep these motherfuckers out of our lives?" It is already presumed that those selected to die or those excluded from the institutions are adversarial. Every action of the institutions today presumes that those outside the institutions are guilty of some crime, and must be corrected. The particular deeds do not matter. Very often, the accused are assigned guilt for crimes that didn't occur, while actual deeds are memory holed. The actual deeds are recorded out of necessity, but the eugenic interest has never been reactive. It is always active and considers the legal monopoly on violence to be a tool for active use, rather than a defensive tool. Eugenists religiously do not believe in a defensive state at all, unless it is a defense of the core eugenic religion and its institutions. When eugenists feel they are under serious attack, all of their pretenses are dropped and they show what they really are. The only thing that motivates these people is the thrill of torturing others and their belief that they are gods or immortals and that their will is supreme above all.

>>468752
These eugenicists sound pretty based tbh

>>468755
It's not based when you see the piles of malnourished slaves in concentration camps and remember that this is what they stand for. Then you have some sense of what creates those conditions, because it didn't just-so happen like it was some anomaly of history.
You might think it's cute until it never, ever stops and you're forced to watch the torture porn. They were already conditioning Americans to accept that world when I was in school.

>>468128
Samtime made an exelent parody vido about this

https://odysee.com/@samtime:1/end-of-tiktok-song-restrict-act-parody:8

yeah i saw a pretty good video about it from mister beat

>>468139
>I remember when liberals opposed this, now it has taken an even worse form and they still oppose this. Me mad liberals.
Are you for or against this bill? Or did ChatGPT just hiccup there?

>>468808
The funniest thing is when reactionaries find out that leftists hate liberals perhaps more than they do.

At least the reactionaries don't know any better. They're more a friend of the left than the ostensibly-well-meaning authoritarian lib class, which seeks to maintain the status quo at all costs. "Redpill" quite literally the 4chan kids by telling them that everything they complain about is actually just emerging class consciousness by a group that's consistently been fucked by capitalists, and that the left has been working on this for centuries, and they've been intentionally kept in the dark about it in order to keep fucking them over.

But these ones, they were indoctrinated to worship capitalism from their birth, so it results in this intense cognitive dissonance and they go nuts and find a race to hate or try to get a high score at the local school. (Jesus, guys, at least get some rich fucks if you're really going to become an hero.)

The burger government is trying to ban encryption again.
https://invidious.baczek.me/watch?v=n1S7PSyrvSs

https://www.eff.org/document/eff-letter-senate-judiciary-committee-vote-no-earn-it-act-and-stop-csam-act
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-constitution
https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/s1207/BILLS-118s1207is.xml

Reminder privacy is when powerful people and organizations are effectively and perpetually blocked from collecting information about you.

People use their personal computing devices as part of their bodies. They outsource some of their thinking to silicon, therefore smartphones, laptops, non-work related desktops and similarly immediate personal compute devices, should be considered as an inviolable part of a person just like their human flesh. People are owed perfect control over their "cyborg half".

Encryption is basically just math, it feels like this is originating from a medieval impulse to ban knowledge.

>>469128
There is nothing stopping a state from exercising its right to see into your life and definitely nothing preventing the state from observing the commons and public spaces. Private life as a concept is not some natural ideal that is never violable because a piece of paper says so. If you understood the right against illegal search and seizure, the "illegal" part is most relevant. The reason for that is not because the government claims it has no right to know, but because the state and its officers should not be trusted to "search" and plant anything to declare you guilty. This is what happens when you have a state which is unaccountable to any public inquiry - some slimy security soldier puts a knife on someone and declares "oh, he has a weapon, he's guilty!" This is basic if you are familiar with police fuckery at all. A right to privacy is not a right to make the state ignorant of things it is well within its powers and authority to see, and all a policeman needs to inspect your home is a proper warrant. It is getting rid of the warrant that they really care about, because the only way ordinary people have to protest fuckery is to have a legal right to say the truth in court, for what good that will do. At some point, states have to reckon with the reality of what they do and that people do not like being trampled on. If the people see correctly that the ruling interest wants to kill them, torture them, and takes pride in that, there is no reason for anyone to go along with that at all.

That's what makes the encryption argument so silly. Do they really think the NSA is incapable of breaking encryption methods they release to the public? These are the same people who think Bitcoin will totally liberate the economy. It's dumb cargo cult shit.

At the end of the day, the only way you can obscure information is to recognize what is and isn't physically possible with information technology and communication. If you wanted to hide knowledge, don't put it on the fucking internet, and control what packets are sent and anything you do on a connected device. If you want personal computation apart from the internet, keep your computer off the internet and do not allow it to connect to anything that would retrieve that information; and if you are really paranoid about computers, don't use computers or anything electronic that would give away a signal. Doesn't stop people from reading a written book, or reading your body language.

We pretended for a long time that ignorance would be strength, and that the government couldn't know certain things, but this was always a story and not a convincing one. Only by destroying all sense of scale, standards of comparison, or understanding of any world-view that wasn't authoritative from the pedagogues and dictated by eugenics, is this myth about knowledge and intelligence possible. Before eugenics, it was presumed that if any government wanted to look into your life, by any means available to it, you had no recourse to say the state can't look. That's fucking childish and retarded and people should be ashamed for advancing that stupidity. When the people were defeated in the 20th century though, they had nothing to survive except protective stupidity, and pretending that what was happening was not happening. It has driven us crazier year after year, until we are at this point and the pretenses can no longer hold.

Anyway, the purpose of these bans is not just to "ban knowledge", but to destroy any basis for independent information processing, and enclose the human brain and experience itself. That's why they tried the "metaverse" stupidity, but that shit was never going to fly. They will keep trying with new stories, but more and more those myths are fading, and the Ingsoc shit and marching like retards is more and more prevalent.

>>469208
I'm not sure what to make off your concepts of rights, or where you are going with this.

From the materialist perspective, stuff has to do what it says on the label. So if you have a right that means that it's not possible to be violated. A right to privacy means that there are no organizations or structures that are capable of collecting data and compiling secret dossiers about people. Of course it's not completely absolute, there's still nosy neighbors but nothing happens on a systemic level. The information systems don't really have a technical necessity for collecting all that data about people, they work perfectly fine without that, it costs extra effort to put in all the data collection.

The mass-surveillance/data-mining is imho the result of class society. You have a tiny minority of a ruling class that's getting super rich by draining wealth from the masses. They are trying to keep tabs on the masses because that's who they perceive as their enemy. Because if the masses can emancipate them selves their game is up.

For the sake of security mass surveillance is antithetical.

Lets assume that there is a socialist society that works like cybernetic socialism with democratic economic planning. That society also has to do security. Lets look at the thread models. There could be legacy capitalists trying to overthrow the socialist system to restore their former power. There could be external capitalist countries looking to overthrow the socialist system for the sake of expansion. There could be new people with ruler-aspirations looking to establish them selves as a new ruling class. All what these threat models have in common is that a relatively small group will use sophisticated methods to attempt to undo the socialist system. All the threads are narrow and operate at great depth. Mass surveillance is very broad and shallow, it's not suitable for this stuff.

The masses aren't a threat for socialism because by establishing democratic control mechanisms to direct economic surplus, the information that is necessary to keep the system stable will be gathered through that. Quite simply if the system upholds the interests of the masses and it is receptive to popular will, it'll be perpetually rock-stable, bar some natural disaster.

Of course the security against the afore mentioned narrow threads from motivated groups still has to be dealt with. But i'm skeptical whether surveillance is really effective against those, since all the socialist countries in the 20th century did have powerful surveillance and that didn't prevent the socialist system from regressing back into capitalism. So I'm leaning more towards building detection systems for attack-vectors rather than for "finding the bad guys". For example if you are worried about terror attacks with explosives you go for a grid of chemical detectors that sniff out all the signature molecular clouds of explosives. Once you perfected that you need zero knowledge about individual people to foil 100% of bomb-threats because it'll be physically detected long before anything dangerous can happen. And it's fully objective you don't need to mess around with messy human factors. And you can avoid that special evil of trying to figure out what people think. If you try to read minds, you're already interfering with those minds and will screw up the measurement.

You can set up a friendly competition for every thread-vector where some people try to build security while others try to break it, playing off each other. Once you have accumulated enough thread-vector specific countermeasures with accompanying communities that develop it your system will become extremely hardened without actually having to cajole anybody or having to deal with all that mistrust.

Before you say this society would still be vulnerable to people having their brains "hacked" consider that it is really hard to fool even dumb people if they think about it. Most of the deception is based on provoking emotional responses or by pressuring people to make quick decisions. People that live in a society with unshakable socio-economic security will have the calm to think stuff through. Those intellectual defenses are much harder to overcome. But you can still apply the same principles of creating a friendly competition where one group tries to deceive and manipulate while another seeks to counter it with enlightenment. That way it's possible to figure out how to raise that kind of intelligence that people can acquire through intellectual stimulation. Fools will be few and far between.

>>469214
Why are you assuming a state is somehow naturally limited in what it does or "ought" to do? Almost as soon as the United States Constitution is passed, the second president pushes acts through Congress that clearly censor the press when it says bad things about him, and entail illegal search and seizure up the wazoo. That's something that is not controversial knowledge.
The rights of the constitution outlined rights of the states and federal government, not the people in an individual sense. Collectively, the people were presumed to possess certain rights, but legal rights enumerated in the constititution were clearly about the states and what laws can and can't be passed.

The intent of the 14th amendment did not say "everyone gets unlimited freedom", but was written to ensure that states could not pass laws clearly intended to re-enslave black people, or maintain segregation which effectively restored slavery. The interpretation did not make people morally equivalent to each other, but entailed political rights like not being enslaved.

As for a right to "unlimited property", that has never been the intent of the constitution or any law. It's retarded me wantee thinking. The same is true of privacy. There was never a "right to privacy", let alone a right that was entirely dependent on the government refusing to use police powers available to it. What prevented this in the past was not a constitutional right or any legal principle that was inviolable. What prevented such centralization in a democratic society is that democratic society has every reason to distrust large institutions collecting information about them, and so there would be agitation to prevent this from forming in the first place. Once it forms, there is no law that would stop it, and no force of nature that will make the state stop doing this out of kindness.
Needless to say, virtually everything about the national security state is blatantly unconstitutional and does not even regard the law as relevant. If you understand the political thinking in vogue, the "permanent state of exception" was accepted and eroded republican concepts of the law or any interest of the governed. All of that would now be controlled by a clique of people who controlled all the ideas that were permissible and had an effective veto that was taboo to even acknowledge. That of course was inherent to the very idea of a republic, but the national security state made it clear there was no democratic society after 1947. That is why court rulings steadily broke down the principles that free speech, a right against illegal search and seizure, and so on really meant. After they had been sufficiently abolished, a new theory of "me wantee rights" was advanced to continue the demolition of any actual right, by using false moral equivalence or just bald faced lies. For example, there is no "right" to gay marriage and the legal argument for it is ridiculous even by the standards we abide. There is no right to marriage at all. Eugenics as the supreme law of the land, upheld multiple times, made it clear that states can pass whatever restrictions on marriage they please. Eugenics in principle makes a joke of the very concept of having a law or any rights, and so this brazen falsehood was inherent to the victory of eugenics and the pushing of a eugenic policy. It was doubly insulting because as these fake marriages were encouraged, families were broken up or put under strain from bullshit allegations and social workers off their leash. The entire point of such stupidity was to make a mockery of what marriage laws even pertained to, and create administrative chaos. To this day, the government doesn't actually believe gay men are "married" in any real sense, and that wasn't even something they cared about. The purpose of marriage as an institution is not to be any legal contract, as if you were entering a business deal like any other. Again, false moral equivalence. Marriages being regulated by the state to the extent they were is a new thing. There had long been marriage laws to deal with disputes or inheritance, and the state always maintained the right to dissolve or refuse to recognize any marriage on eugenic or moral or any other grounds they deem fit. Marriage licenses are an explicitly eugenic policy, that was standardized specifically to ensure the underclass had no "right to marriage", and their unions were always suspect and permitted an invasion of their lives. The older policy is that states recorded marriages and it was long accepted that the state's role in marriage was a public interest. If it weren't for the state's interest in adjudicating marriage, it wouldn't even give a shit about who married what. The state did not extend this public interest to things that clearly violated what people would accept, or that denied a union that was generally accepted by the community. More often the state would declare a man and woman to be married against their will due to long-term cohabitation. But that's a whole mess of things.

I bring this up because for so long, the most basic conception of what a right is has been destroyed by vast deception. Most of us have no rights or very few rights to speak of. None of what has happened in the past century would be possible if legal rights were in force or could be defended. All that remains is eugenics, lawfare, and a racket to buy back your supposed rights, which the liberals brag about destroying every day.

Whether you think the security state actually "secures" anything is irrelevant. They built the thing, and dared any of you to stop it. For the most part, Americans accepted or even encouraged the security state, particularly those who were beneficiaries and part of the apparatus commanding the lower classes.

>>469214
I say this because a concept of legal rights is very important - if you don't have that, you have no leg to stand on to maintain any democratic society except rule of fear. These words do not mean anything you think they mean though.

The only right to privacy you possess is that you can stay silent. The government cannot make your silence a crime, even when they insist they can. You would have to be brought to a court or some setting that can make you talk, and there are clear precedents against self-incrimination. It isn't just about not allowing courts to force someone to confess explicit guilt, but about using legal trickery to insinuate someone is guilty of a non-existent crime. Eugenics in principle is a brazen opposition to that, built entirely on baseless insinuations. Its fundamental theory and approach to reason is a gigantic baseless insinuation glorified to its maximal extent. Everything about it is one brazen lie after another. You couldn't construct something more suited to abolish the United States as an entity than eugenics, and that is a large reason why it adopted the stance that it did. It was, in effect, eliminating the United States' governing principles and any idea Americans had about what they thought their rights were, if any.

One more thing that came to mind:
Let's take the Soviet Union, which had a much different conception of rights and values. The Party can control everything, monopolizes the political system, and no one seriously believes they have a direct choice in which high-level politicians rule. That stuff is all decided by the men in smoke-filled rooms, and the people are generally cool with that and figure that's how it has to work. The PArty in principle does not care about the letter of the law in the way Americans are taught to be this litigious. The Party can rewrite the constitution at will, and the constitution isn't a part of the civic religion.

There was one freedom Soviet workers really, really liked though, and this was something ordinary workers said when communism ended: "What good is voting for the politicians if I cannot vote for my boss?" To some extent, Soviet workplaces were democratic, in that workers usually picked their managers at the base level, and the state and party had no problem with this. Directives came from the Party about what to do, and the Party was big on scientific management, but the managerial culture of the capitalist world, where management cannibalizes everything in sight and gloats about terrorizing workers, wouldn't be possible. This didn't prevent your "democratic workplace" from shitting on you or being filled with assholes on the take, but it is a difference that was noted right away.
When the managerial culture of Reaganite America was launched, you can see why people hate this sort of thing. That's when people started going postal, then shot up schools or any institution seen as alien to them - and this made sense to men with nothing to lose, who were openly thrown away and told they were worth less than dogs.
By having a principle that your workplace was intended to have some input from the workers, and was operated in the interest of the workers, you have a right that is in principle very important. It wasn't all that it was cracked up to be, but it makes a huge difference when you see today's managerial overreach and HR tyranny, where the workplace is nothing but a giant eugenics project and treated as such. No one produces a fucking thing in today's workplace, and this is intended. The idea that work entails making anything for the people is anathema to the ruling values of 21st century society. Anyone who worked for that is considered a simp, a retard, or worse a potential trouble source that would end the rot that is glorified by the current political class and their enablers.

>>469253
This by the way is the "stifling bureaucracy" we were told was choking the USSR. They didn't care about the bureaucracy - far from it, the bureaucracy remained large as it was selling off Russian assets after the USSR fell. The "bloat" was all that stuff that the workers watned, and this is in line with the neoliberal ethos of gutting anything that is actually productive. You should listen when Kissinger said he wanted the economy to scream. Neoliberalism is a death cult and you are idiots for being stupid simps and enabling any of it.