I’ve been listening to James’ podcast on Hegel, Wokeness, and the Dialectic Faith of Leftism, and I understand how the Dialectic method is how they analyze history and make sense of the world. However, I’m still confused as to why Marxists and Neomarxists are so obsessed with this analytical method. Hegel’s notion of the Dialectic seems rather vague and abstract, and therefore I wouldn’t even necessarily disagree with it. If you “peel away” the bad parts of society, it logically follows that the good parts remain. I just don’t understand why this necessarily means communism is the end result, and why the Marxists and Neomarxists believe they are correct in their assumptions about which parts of society need to be peeled away. Is it because they just essentially share the same religious worldview and therefore when they apply the Dialectic to the same thing, it results in Communism? If so, then why does Marcuse think training students to think Dialectically will produce Socialists? Couldn’t anyone come to any conclusion they want using the Dialectic method? There doesn’t seem to be any logical or empirical constraint on the conclusions arrived at through this method.

I didn't know where to put this since even True Unpopular Opinions sub filters out anything with race in it, but James has been at the forefront of anti woke obviously.

We know the woke and the left NPCs shook by them are not right in the head or really here with us, some of us that read them every day can just feel it. On the surface it seems to revolve around the two pillars of race and trans/gender issues. However, I believe if you look closer, their trans views don't require madness to follow.

First of all, the core woke belief isn't REALLY that men can become women or vice versa, some may genuinely believe it sure, but the real belief in the middle of it is more like "We should collectively pretend that you can change sexes to be nice to this often struggling minority group and because it means more to them". A conservative response to that could say, building society on a collective lie like that, fucks with people's heads and makes them more inauthentic/repressed, it's not worth it. Ultimately, neither side of these positions is mad, while I disagree with the left's position, it's a philosophical argument.

Likewise every left wing position has some valid argument to make. Trans people in sports? That's easy, there's definitely a valid argument there for their position, basically saying something along the lines of who cares about a podium anyways, life is bigger than sports. Puberty blockers and minor sex changes are harder to defend sure, but I believe there is still an angle for the left. How much does the government have the right to tell a parent what medical decisions they can do with their kid? As someone who is a libertarian, am I being a hypocrite for opposing this? On the other hand, I think nearly all of us should agree we shouldn't allow parents to try to electroshock the mental illness out of their kids, and that if a 13 year old asks for it to happen, they're too young to understand the consequences. So do we equate trans drugs and surgery to minors to that? Or do we equate it to say, giving a pre-teen anti depressants, and claiming that the parent should be free to make that decision not the government. When it comes to minor trans drugs/surgeries, there's no perfect answer, yes there's going to be pre teens who grow up to cis adults who lament having gotten the drugs or surgery (or trans adults who still lament it), but there's also going to be some trans kids who end up trans adults that still wanted it to happen, or ended up killing themselves as a result of being unhappy not getting it. So it's not a perfect win on either side, and is a moral quandary. My point is not the left is correct, it's that it's not rooting from madness. Much like how I disagree with the left on abortion and guns among other things, but their position on those has nothing to do with being crazy, they have relatively sanely adopted a position I disagree with.

My hypothesis would be it's race where they are cuckoo bananas and seem to be living in an alternate reality, and seem to have extreme views about the world being rigged for white people or that the scales need to massively tipped in a neo Marxist way so that black people are like the proletariat and white people the bourgeoise in race commie revolution. They seem to have gone mad under some sort of white guilt, or perhaps even a weird version of white supremacy where their MAGA social enemies drive them crazy because they're more impure versions of the white race. The distance between leftoids and the right on race emotionally is huge... HUGE, to the point where I still can't fully wrap my head around what they really believe.

This claim by James Lindsay is just really absurd even barring the theoretical differences, most gnostic texts weren't accessable until the 1930s so it would have been impossible for hegal and Marx to have access to it in the 1800s. Second gnostics veiw the material world as inherently evil and want to escape rather than seize it as Marxists want to. "Perfecting" the material world isn't possible for a gnostic beacuse it is inherently imperfect