Sam Harris explains why Trump is a dangerous candidate.

[Slimebeast]

Soundwave said:

Slimebeast said:

I know, that's why I share most of his arguments in principle. He i (and I) are on Trump's side in many issues ideologically, but Trump's implementation and persona comes in the way.

Cultural Marxism, yes sadly it's associated with the extreme right and anti-semites, but since it's an accurate term for a phenomenon I prefer it.

My definition, I'm using my own terminology and understanding for a variety of reasons. I try to understand this and discover this largely "by myself" and not copy pre-defined definitions. Also there are few good sources about Cultural Marxism, it's largely a meta-subject so to speak. By following for example feminism, SJWs, Alt-Right, immigration debate and nearly all ideological debate in modern society, but also practical reforms in state politics, you get an understanding of Cultural Marxism. So my definition is not all-encompassing or complete. And lengthy reply following here because other members have questioned my use and claims about Cultural Marxism.

Cultural Marxism is an ideological movement that largely stems as a result of post-revolutionary communism failures and the realization that socialism wouldn't be able to conquer society with physical revolution and socialism wouldn't most likely win over capitalism by following traditional methods. So socialist thinkers examinated themselves, identified and accepted some of the limitations of traditional communism and incorporated ideas from philosophy (Freudianism, critics of Westernism) and sort of created a new ideology. They entered a new field where they thought they could win, the field of knowledge and ideology, the battle of our minds. The idea was to infiltrate classical culture, academia and media step by step and conquer society by changing people's minds on a very deep level, to change the nature of humans.

It started perhaps in the 50's or the 60's and the so called Frankfurt School, I don't know. Then came the '68 student revolution and the Vietnam protests. I think that was the first public victory and I don't think it was an accident that it started in academia. But in the last 10-20 years in the West it has absolutely exploded. It permeates so many different fields nowadays and has made society increasing political. I know my own country the best, but the trend is the same all over the West. Even our foreign policy now is outspokenly feminist. Our right wing parties a little over a century ago made a huge analysis, admitted loss and came to the conslusion that they can't win elections by traditional conservatism, but they had to adapt. So they decided to simply leave the ideology debate, and instead incorporated leftist ideology in many fields just to concentrate on the money issues. Many other Western right wing parties did the same.

When the police defines a new action plan, in the past they might write the plan based on the number of crimes reported versus how many police officers are employed, but today the concerns are if the plan accounts for gender aspects, minorities, how it's communicated, what words they use. You take video games, and increasingly we have not just a debate but a general awareness of how to portray values, inequality, minorities, women - politics really. These things were just unheard of 20 years ago.

The agents who work to advance Cultural Marxism in society don't do it only consciously (and they certainly don't identify themselves in this way) but also largely unconsciously. So I don't claim there's a "huge conspiracy" behind it. The term political correctness ties into the definition of Cultural Marxism, but is too narrow of a term. And to just say "post modernism" or "post cold war socialism" is not accurate enough.

Political correctness I think is an excellent term and most people understand it well and I like how it has become popular in debate and in the mindshare. But when talking only about PC we miss a lot. We miss the historical background and the driving motivation. PC is diffuse and it sounds like people are passive and just following some "popular opinion" that magically popped out in existence from above. Cultural marxism explains that there actual people acting as the driving force behind an ideological phenomenon and explains its ideological and political identity.

Another aspect of Cultural Marxism is extremely un-pragmatic. I claim it doesn't care about the realities on the ground nearly as much as about theory. It doesn't care about people's practical suffering nearly as much as about justice in theory.

And it's totalitarian. It's so important what everyone thinks. While priding itself with words like tolerance, multicultural, open-minded, globalist etc it's actually very much an intolerant thought police (largely itself being unaware of this paradox). It's not satisfied until all minds are conquered.

But aren't all ideologies like this somebody, might ask? Of course an ideology wants to spread to as many people as possible! But actually no. There are elitistic ideologies who are reserved for a few selected (racism, fascism, Nietscheism, satanism just off the top of my head, but Iäm sure there are better examples). In religion, you have ideologies like Christianity to whom it's very important to conquer all minds and therefore is somewhat totalitarian, while religions like Buddhism are very cool about what others believe ("you take it in your own pace, your reality is yours"). In a Middle Eastern tyranny and many other dictatorships the leaders actually don't care very much what people think and believe as long as it holds on to power. So I argue it's not inherent to an ideology to want to conquer all minds. But it's a defining characteristic of CM, and it's almost hysterical about this. It hates free speech like the plague.

To me, again and again and again I get so surprised how important it is for Cultural Marxists that other people adopt their world view and understanding of things.

Okay, this was a spontaneous and somewhat random definition. Long because I don't want to be misunderstood and I want to make a real case here. There are lots more I could say and I wish I had a more "to the point" definition but this is still a wrek in progress and I guess I haven't described the complete picture even for myself yet.

Why is liberalization such a bad thing? There's no 'movement' needed for it, it's simply the natural evolution of reasoned thought. Yes we don't treat women and minorities like second/third class citizens anymore. That's a good thing. 

If the entire world was liberalized it would be a great thing (and it will be eventually, you cannot live in the 18th/19th century forever, sorry Saudi Arabia and etc.). 

Sure there is always a balance to be had and there are random nuts who go to far to the left, but by and large we live in a better society today. 

Hell, even for me in my 30s, I look at kids today and find in some cases at least they're far more enlightened about things than my generation was in high school in the late 90s. If we had an openly gay student at school, that kid would've been bullied unmercifully, probably even physically beaten up, and certainly would have next to no shot at being embraced by the school community. 

Even if you disagreed with that behavior you would shut up and not say anything because it wouldn't be popular to do so. But today I look at kids and this is much less of an issue and treating someone like that today you would encounter big push back. Which is good. 

It's as if you didn't read my post or heard much of Sam Harris on the subject. Well, actually I concentrated on defining what I understand to be Cultural Marxism and not address everything what's wrong with it.

What's wrong with liberalization you ask (you mean as in enacting liberal policies in society?).

"Yes we don't treat women and minorities like second/third class citizens anymore" if reality was that straightforward then it wouldn't be so bad.

But it's not. It's the consequences from these policies. It's the paradoxes, the hypocrisy. The injustice and unfair treatment that follows.

Some examples, and Harris touches on some of these too:

It's bad when liberals are more upset when an ethnic citizen says a racial slur than they are upset about an immigrant beating up a citizen youth.

It's bad that liberals spend so much more energy to crack down on hate speech on the internet than they do on the hate speech in our mosques.

It's bad when liberals are more concerned about how Western couples share their time spent with their children than they are concerned about members of other cultures being violent towards their partners.

It's bad when liberals create discrimination when they try to battle discrimination (like university quotas, we've tried them in Sweden too).

It's bad with the erroneous assumption that immigrants, women and LGBT-people are always the weak part and the vulnerable. It just goes so wrong.

The consequenses are severe. The left always trivializes and misrepresents, "Your privilege is taken away", as if it's only about banal, symbolic issues. No, it's real things. It's not just that tax payers have less money left in their pockets for feeding the migrant waves which you can just shrug off by thinking they are still the wealthiest people on the earth. No, there is real suffering as a consequence.

How a young individual can have his emotional life, confidence and future destroyed by being beaten up by foreigners and then have the whole adult world turn its back and accuse him of being racist and going at length to understand the perpetrator's all imagined frustrations and marginalization and then explain away the violations.

Men losing custody of their children because the family courts are so politicized that they assume the woman always tells the truth and the man is always guilty. I have a colleague who spent $60,000 Euro in court to fight for the custody of his son after a divorse and yet the outcome was that he is forbidden to meet the child (who is now almost 15). There are thousands of these testimonies in Sweden but they are immediately dismissed and written off by media and social authorities who assume they're just bitter complaining privileged white men before they even bother to hear their story (admit it, you assume it too. I do, I do it automatically because a person just cannot withstand all the years of brainwash).