TreadOnMe

Look, there was friendly-fire in r/cth all the time, it was an assumed part of the deal, ans we are getting used to it again.

I totally understand that. I've always found the idea that Schopenhauer just forgot to eat and got cranky when he was writing sometimes to be very funny (which is an Existential comics bit). You might enjoy Kierkegaard then too, even if he does get a little preachy, he very much loves and hates his morose Christianity.

Well, depending on what happens in the Philippines over the next decade or so, you might get your wish. That said, if that does go off there is a very good chance that you would be facing weapons from China, hence where my level of critique does come from. We'll see though, the future is wild and very silly.

I call him a meta-physical philosopher because much of what he talks about is derivations of ethics and the nature of religion and God in relationship to those ethical categories. It's arguably more tangential to metaphysics than metaphysics itself, but claims like 'God is dead' and the historical-socio-ethical reasoning behind that are incredibly metaphysical statements. However, you are correct that most of his actual metaphysical work is derived from an re-phrasing Schopenhauer, but I didn't read any Schopenhauer until college, so I didn't know that and at the time it blew my little freaking mind.

I will be honest, my preference is for Hume, as Kant is an enormous windbag, though tiny compared to Hegel. That said, you really should give 'Critique of Pure Reason' another go-around, it's one of those seminal texts that will be constantly referenced in everything forever, and really makes up the majority of his and everyone's groundwork for literally everything afterwards particularly liberalism. Regardless if or not you think he actually solved Hume's is-ought pincer and problem of causality, it is basically impossible to understand why Kant leans so hard into deontology without reading it. But if you really want to piss people off, just read and retort with Hume, he is basically the philosophical linebacker for Western philosophy.

It really depends on how they deal with the inevitable development crises, though they continue to handle themselves well so far. As long as they don't let the fucking Shanghai clique dictate policy they should be fine, but there is a lot of money rolling around in that area and I never count the bourgeoise out until they are pushing up daisies. Fortunately, people, especially in Beijing, generally seem to hate the Shanghai clique because they fuck up so many government mandates, so they will likely only continue to play a marginal role in government for the foreseeable future. That said, it definitely seems to be one of those cases of 'friends close, enemies closer.' which is a difficult thing to juggle, particularly when they keep clumsily trying to stab you in the back.

Yup, I hope I am around to watch it happen, but I really doubt it at this point. What will really be interesting is to see who ends up taking over after Xi, because he is an very talented politician. Now I can be called a 'Xi shill'.

I mean you should have just straight up posted it rather than prefaced it. I'm sure I've probably seen it before unless it is one of JoeySteel's or BMF's more obscure posts.

I, in general, agree with all of this, you should be posting this at CatholicSocialist, not me. My general criticisms of Marx's social revolutionary model are ones that he recognized himself later in life (and would be incorporated into Lenin's labor aristocracy critiques as well), which is that it is the periphery proletariat and peasantry that has more revolutionary attitude and need to organize and create a social revolution. He just never actually published them, so I struggle to really call them a part of Marx's 'social revolution model'.

My general description of China as 'left-liberal capitalist' stems from the fact that while the party holds the vast majority share of political power in the country, many of those party members are members of bourgeoise, though not even close to a majority, with none of them making up the upper echelon of the party. However, notably, they are almost entirely made up of members of the industrial or petite-bourgeoise, not the FIRE or tech sectors, which is an unspeakably enormous improvement over the Western neoliberal model that fits incredibly neatly into Adam Smith's idealized version of classical industrial capitalism described in the Wealth of Nations, which Marx saw as a clear and total upgrade to the feudal mode of production.

That being said, I am perfectly content to call China 'first-stage socialism' when not in mixed company, but ultimately these stages are rather arbitrary, and it will be seen what happens when China actually achieves it's destiny and breaks the shackles put around it by the U.S. I generally am in good faith about it, as I have seen factory conditions all over the place and China's are, in general, much better than your average place, and the proletariat seem to be mostly in high-spirits and believing in the project and the government and their ability to change what the government is doing if it is doing something they don't like. It's a completely different attitude than the U.S. and it is completely alien to my experience in any other Western country. Even our most 'patriotic' chuds think that the government is out to screw them, so it is weird to see a patriotic nationalism that actually believes that government can and does do good things. Whatever their central mode of production, they are very clearly trying to achieve communism.

You can just send me the pasta and I'll read it and see if it makes sense from my general understanding of Marx and Engels.

Lol, worked on you though.

Usually there are a couple of churches in a diocese that do it once a week with the express permission of the diocese. There have been instances of diocese forbidding priests from doing it, or from performing the Eucharist during it (with the general ideological split being if the diocese sees these masses as an outlet for wacky conservative Catholic frustration, or as a gathering place for wacky conservative Catholics to create a different, heretical sect), but in general most of the large population centers in the U.S. will have at least one church that does one mass in Latin a week, usually on a weekday. Monasteries also generally follow their own dictata and are often done solely in Latin, with them only holding common mass in vernacular.

Orthodox Churches are even weirder about this, with them only holding mass in the vernacular that the Church came from (so a Serbian Orthodox mass in Los Angeles will be done in Serbian).

I've just been through this rigmarole before, so I generally don't see the need to bother with it. Thanks, though! You as well!

The occasional breeze through a liberal arts class that my friends are like 'What the fuck does any of this even mean?' satisfies my ego enough to sustain me, lol. Thanks though, I appreciate it! Best of luck to you as well and solidarity!