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The Communist Party’s Human Gramophones, and the Liberal Who Opposed Them

Nanne Binghi Barkdull shared a link.
November 20 at 5:25pm

 

Here’s a rather interesting article “Warshow’s particular métier was analyzing the Communist sloganeers that Orwell typified as “human gramophones,” and the damage they did to cultural and intellectual life. For him, the horrors of Stalinism weren’t limited to the purges, gulags, and mass executions and the American followers who defended them. It was the how it cut party members off from having any ideas connected to reality. He lamented that for his generation coming up in the 1930s the Communist Party’s influence was so great that it “determined what you think about and on what terms” well into the ’50s.

As Orwell sought to save socialism from Soviet influence, Warshow tried to save high culture from Stalinism. Because of Communist domination of culture, one could no longer have “free judgments,” he wrote. One could no longer connect literature to one’s own actual experiences. Instead, culture was boiled down to politically correct individual “responses” promulgated in the most vulgar terms by literary commissars.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/247565/communist-party-liberal-robert-warshow

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PoMo Trend Calling Humans as “Bodies”

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By Richard Culp Robinson

One thing that I really dislike about the Postmodernists or the Left, or WHOEVER started this trend, is referring to human beings as “bodies.” A good friend of mine who is a progressive Democrat in California explained it to me that it’s a “communalist” way of framing the problem of police brutality or oppression rather than an individualist way of looking at it.

I don’t advocate shutting down people who use this vocabulary but I disagree fundamentally on this one. “Bodies” is a cold, rationalist word for describing human beings with souls (or if you want, minds) with aspirations, stories, and dreams. It was when I expressed this and shared how I disliked the materialist outlook that using that word entails that my friend responded with the collectivist argument. He didn’t use the word collectivist.

Do you guys think there is any reasonable justification for using this term to refer to human beings?

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JBP advice for young women

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By Paulina Brodowska

Hi. It might be an inaproprate place to ask such question but I didn’t find any JP group which could be appealing to me.
So, my question is, what advice for living (any category) would you give to a woman in her 20s basing on what JP is advicing and from your personal perspective? I’ve heard JP talking about depression in women assiociated with career pressure; as well as some “love”/”relatonship” related speeches.

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On Marriage

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By Benjamin Heneberry

Jordan Peterson’s recent tweet about marriage, and the controversy surrounding his tweet, got me thinking. How many people in this group are single, and want to get married, and why? And specifically, how many Liberals on here are looking to get married? It seems that marriage is thought of as being more traditional and therefore more attractive to conservatives, so I was just wondering. For myself, I’m a liberal turning 40 next year and I definitely was hoping I could have been married by now.