/lit/ - Literature

Communism, like so many other things, is great in theory but always gets fucked up in practice.

The biggest flaw that commies have is there no mechanism in their plans post-revolution to prevent a cunning, power-hungry asshole from taking power. And, surprise surprise, this is what has happened in the aftermath of every single communist revolution. Stalin. Mao. Castro. Pol Pot. All these power-hungry assholes that, once the commies were actually in power, proceeded to kill all their rivals, consolidate power, and rule their countries with an iron fist. And the really funny thing is that the first ones to be killed are always the "true believers." The intellectuals, the good-hearted reformers, everybody who's actually in it to help the working-class and bring about a worker's paradise on Earth. They're ALWAYS the first ones to get knifed in the back.

About the only halfway-nice commie leader was Ho Chi Minh, and Vietnamese communism isn't really super gung ho about actual communism, it's more just an expression of anti-imperialism. All the rest were monsters.

>people seriously trying to say that Moby-Dick is bad

You know it won't amount to anything, right? It's like trying to say Hamlet or War & Peace is bad. We all know anyone who says this is either stupid or shitposting.

>>15852273
>he doesn't realize that Aristotelian causality is superior to modern definitions of it
>he doesn't realize that Aristotle, and by extension Aquinas, is right about almost everything he ever wrote
>he doesn't realize that Aristotle is the greatest genius in all of history and Aquinas isn't far behind

>>15850607
>rack up huge amounts of debt living an extravagant lifestyle
>don't ever pay any of it off, just keep racking up more and more debt and keep getting more and more credit
>when it finally gets too much and the bills come due, stiff your creditors by fleeing the country and living an even more lavish life of "exile" in Europe

I wonder if it would still be possible to pull this off. Probably not, given how international banking and finance has become.

>OP makes the classic "post an image more interesting than the thread topic" mistake

Remember when Moot threatened to delete /pol/ after he refounded it? Remember when he said he'd delete it all over again if it became /stormfront/ again?

I remember.

>he thinks it's all a metaphor

Reminder that even the Church Fathers who considered certain parts of Genesis to be metaphorical believed other parts of it were absolutely literal. In particular, the story of the Fall is absolutely taken as having literally happened. Saint Augustine, the man who wrote the most-cited "Genesis as metaphor" text, heavily relies on the literal reality of Satan tempting Adam and Eve into Original Sin for much of his theology.

Also, the Flood has to be real, because Jesus Himself treats the Flood as having literally occurred when He mentions "the days of Noah" in the Gospels.

>/lit/ doesn't know about James Martin
>/lit/ doesn't know about the modern-day Jesuits in general

Boy do you fuckers have a lot of catching up to do. Spoiler Alert: the Jesuits aren't nearly as based as they were back in the day.

>>15528302
>Not really. No one was aware at the time of the destabilizing effect of overthrowing ruthless dictators. We didn't learn than until post-Iraq/Libya/Syria.

Did you know there's a Machiavelli thread up on /lit/ right now? And did you know that Machiavelli predicted the instability to a state and a region if you violently overthrow its ruler, all the way back during the Renaissance?

A lot of these 19th and 20th Century thinkers are actually not intellectually honest. They go into texts with preexisting ideas in mind and are perfectly happy to warp or lie about the texts they use to make sure that their preexisting ideas and theories are "proven" by those texts. Nietzsche is notorious for this, Nietzsche just fucking lies and bullshits about so much of literature and philosophy because he WANTS them to say certain things, thing that may not actually be supported by a more honest reading of the texts.

The reason we are not actually talking about Kantbot or Logo or Delicious Tacos in this thread, the reason this thread has gone off-topic, is that none of these guys are actually any good. Logo's book is mediocre. Kantbot is a mediocrity who knows some cool trivia and is a convivial podcast host, but so what? So is Bill Simmons. Tacos is probably the best of the bunch but that is like being the tallest midget.

NONE of these guys are geniuses. None of the guys on Chapo or Red Scare or whatever are geniuses. They are riding a wave that they did not create and they were all in the right place at the right time. And even with all that, what have they actually produced? What great art, what great beauty, have they produced? >>15233002 is right, the only genuinely good writing I ever saw from this crowd was from people who didn't become "personalities" like Kantbot et al. have become.

If any of these people were great artists, we'd know it. We'd know it when we saw it. It's like how you can read Moby-Dick or "The Dead" in Dubliners and be instantly arrested. You know genius when you read it. These guys aren't geniuses. These ideas they're bandying around, playing with like toys, may some day be taken up by people who ARE geniuses, and great art may be created based around them. But these guys, themselves, are basically carnival barkers. You should use them insofar as they're useful, but don't look to them as luminaries.

Why do so many people come to /lit/ purely to tell us that what we do here is a waste of time? Is it because they're intimidated by how smart we are?

Does anybody here ever read the Autistic Mercury? That's that website of his.

>implying you fuckers aren't jealous of OP

He's going to get to hang out, read great Argentinian literature, see a beautiful country, drink delicious wine. All on Putin's dime. You fuckers are seething behind your insults.

>>14420822
Good is merely a word to attribute the alignment of some action towards some state, with bad indicating the alignment of an action against that state. They are words of relationship, nothing more or less. Conflation with positive valence proceeds from this conception, not vice versa.

You either have a horrible grasp of nihilism, or a horrible grasp of what I've elucidated for you, or as I have interpretted: both. All pieces infinitesimal, small as they are, are only inconsequential in your own mind. But in presupposing inconsequentiality, the point made does not stand. A joke cannot be leveraged against something occluded from the ontological catalog, as to do is to strip the entity of semantic usefulness in its entirety. However the dialectical twist is to not fudge the identity of a given thing, but the relationship of the identity to others. This is the elucidation of truth, to shed the false relationships of the parts that the whole which they make up becomes far more clear.

In your own misinterpretation, you have rushed headlong into the trap that I had laid out for you. Humor itself is a product of the human mind, and is an expression stemming from the realization that the tiger in the bush is made of paper. Such realization of the dialectical truth, and the disarmament of material danger, is the very meaning of the cosmic joke. The shape of your mind is deliberately formed to this inevitability, such that the unseen force reaches through your mind and blows a raspberry in your face. At no point does meaninglessness enter the equation, and to reject the complex contradiction as evidence or euphemism for meaninglessness is falling for yet another joke, and in all senses "bad" to the tune of a state that engages with the metaphysical truth.

>>14401302
I get a lot of sexual attention and to be honest everytime I get snagged in a moment of intimacy, I always think to myself "this is kind of not interesting at all, and really not worth the effort. I wish I was at home reading something neat."

Naturally my hair is falling out and my social circle is becoming non-existent. The reality that at some point in my future I'll curse the fact that I brushed off so many opportunities for love is a contingency I'm well aware of. Even still keeping that in mind, it's not even close to enough to compel me to be interested in intimacy in any degree.

>>14313411
Yes, because I've had such an experience and got sick of it very quickly. I have a hard time believing anybody who isn't a brainless coomer can actually put up with daily sex.

It's like damn bitch, give it a fucking rest. You're turning a special bonding moment into a tired routine, it's fucking burning me out. I'm already over it and not in the mood, I need to reflect on things for a while.

>age
>how you’re holding up
>current book

>tfw Italy never had to repudiate fascism the way Germany did
>tfw fascism is still present as a political force in Italy today

>/lit/ knows about Mecha

How many of you fuckers spend time on Catholic Twitter? Be honest, now, we're all anonymous here, there's no need to lie.

BOOKS FOR THIS FEEL???
BOOKS FOR THIS FEEL???
BOOKS FOR THIS FEEL???
BOOKS FOR THIS FEEL???
BOOKS FOR THIS FEEL???
BOOKS FOR THIS FEEL???
BOOKS FOR THIS FEEL???

>>11894550
>tfw you've never read a single page of ASOIAF but you love to read the articles of the various Wikis because the lore is so interesting

I have transcended the need to read this series. I am beyond it. I have found a more efficient means of consuming its good parts.

>>11285683
>tfw you remember people on /co/ and /b/ unironically saying that they learned things about having friends from MLP

This guy's pretty much got us pegged, doesn't he?

>>10108084
>she's a Kantian

Oh boy, this is gonna be good.