I think the Quicksand lyrics and theme betoken more than a passing reading interest in occultism, he probably got into it seriously for a while, but e...

I gave you the evidence at the bottom of my post - that's precisely what Mussolini said in Utopia as "The Man Who Is Seeking." He had been a Marxist,...

Robert Michels, Hendrik de Man to name two, but there were others. There were several ex-Marxists and syndicalists who participated in the creation o...

Well, in a way Marxism "split" into all sorts of things. There have been periodic "crises of Marxism" where Marxists became disillusioned or started ...

British sense of humour, don't worry about it 🙂

The classical liberal idea of the individual as rational actor, free/constrained agent, and the fundamental unit of social analysis, yes. It's an ab...

Ha, you didn't know the right pharmacists then, darling 😎 😜

Why not? Would you prefer your drug-taking to be boring everyday shit that everyone else does, including your granny, or a transgressive, underground...

I agree with you there @toadstoolwe, it's certainly got something to do with the problem. I think this is why the more "individualistic" approach ...

Sounds good! I dug into the subject a fair bit years ago, but I've forgotten most of the details. I know that some Communist theoreticians were awar...

No, will look out for it!

@shiva No, but I've remembered the book I was thinking of: Teachings of Taoist Master Chuang by Michael Saso.

@toadstoolwe Oh, and I was going to say, re. the point you made above about communism being shitty and authoritarian (or words to that effect), you...

There was a book I came across several decades ago (though never bought, unfortunately) about Daoist magick and magicians, written by a researcher who...

Hold my beer 🙂

I don't know about that, the text specifically talks about the Great Equinox and the "double-wanded one" taking charge at the next one. I'd agree tha...

Marx acknowledged that industrial capitalism had leveled everybody up (especially out of what he called "the idiocy of rural life"), he also thought i...

Eh? Where do you get the idea I was saying it wasn't? Engels is saying the same as what I said above about the conditions of industrial capitalism...

No, not really. As I said, the sense of exploitation in Marx isn't simplistic like that. Slave labour is an older form of social organization based ...

This isn't Marx, in fact it's more like what Marx and Engels would have criticized as "infantile" socialism. Marx in a nutshell: the way things are ...

Yeah I was a big fan of him back in my hippy days - not so much now 🙂 Re. the tombs and monuments, I don't think it's fear of death. Obviously not...

Eh? What is what? The terrifying indifference of the world is the terrifying indifference of the world 🙂 If you mean a balancing or blend of Soc...

The development of the concept of "justice" in the legal system, and the origins of it, should be of interest, should it not? It is after all the pro...

I don't think those Socratic dialogues have had much influence on the concept of justice we have in the West, that comes more from the natural law tra...

I quoted Nietzsche to that effect above the Rand quote, didn't you notice?

Never mind that, am I reading Nietzsche correctly? 🙂

That's not right, the little man (Joe Blow, the average punter, the man on the Clapham Omnibus) wants a world that is intelligible (so he can feel he ...

Please, stop poasting 🙂

A couple of other interesting and important oppositionalities for triangulation:- 1) Blake on Angels and Devils. Blake was astute about how Angels ...

Thinking about "the martial path" - that does actually involved defeat sometimes. Being beaten and taking it on the chin (sometimes literally) is par...

Yeah, but don't you think he was also putting into practice what he talked about in that commentary? I mean, one can walk and chew gum at the same ti...

Isn't that just like, the path of abasement? IOW his feeling about Blacks or Indians being inferior would be precisely the reason why he let them fuc...

Yes that's very clear and, and disposes of Los' misunderstanding. But the problem is at the collective level (godlets doing their True Will), this:- ...

I'm not sure that it's possible to solve the puzzle that kind of Gordian-knot-cutting way. It's quite a bit more knotty than that. I refer again to ...

Evidently not. But think of poor Shiva, how he suffers! Ackshually he served as a medical orderly later on, in 1870 at the outbreak of the Franco...

Yes, I think that's right. The closest Nietzsche comes to metaphysics is the Eternal Return idea, but it's not clear whether that's a blunt physicali...

Quoting one translation of the DDJ isn't a slam-dunk re. some kind of pseudo-Christian ("do unto others" etc.) message in the DDJ, since it's so notor...

I think the ancients distinguished between pride and arrogance or hubris. Part of the master morality idea is that the person who feels healthy, over...

I don't think those quotes are about being "timid" - rather they're mostly about shutting up and not boasting, which is that old kind of Master morali...

Not only was he not a "bad historian," but he read the writings of antiquity in their original languages - Greek, Latin and Hebrew - being a philologi...

Nietzsche's presence on the Marxists website is under the rubric of "Marxism and Ethics." Nietzsche has been a figure of independent interest for the...

No, it's only useful for relatively bland, uncontroversial topics. I'm actually genuinely surprised that you lean so heavily on argument from auth...

lol

There seems to have been a lot of that. As to the thing of "in Thelema" - wouldn't this type of discussion take that for granted? I mean, the top...

Yes, "only ever" - but there's a lot of it. Any time someone comes along and brings up the "Right-wing sounding" aspects of Thelema, here come the sh...

I'm reminded of Crowley's comment in the biography somewhere about when he was a kid and his parents took him to an art gallery, and on seeing a paint...

If you find it "obvious" that there's no connection, maybe you're making a mistake. All of it is relevant, because history, the history of states and...

Other causes are more like concomitant symptoms of the essential cause, which was the breakdown of the old social structures (and the causes of that g...

Eh, the cause of the French Revolution was basically the breakdown of the old order in the sense that the aristocracy was increasingly swanning off to...

The term is used quite generally:- To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (...