I think about the glass ceiling of my intellectual development. And indeed many people on here would point out the first mistake that I do is wanting to find out the reasons for my stagnation with the help of an AI chatbot. So today I fed chatGPT with 31 political articles that I read today. And I wanted to find out the patterns of what I consume and where I have gaps in my education. To make it short: the best thing for my education would be going back to college. But I couldn't cope with college it was so overwhelming. I am way too much of a mental wreck.
ChatGPT considered following points to be a weakness of my approach. I should read more papers that focus on empirical evidence, texts on causality, methodology, statistics...yeah I had these courses in college. They made me extremely depressed. People told me I would have been very good in it. One of the best. I think this wasn't true though. I think forgot most of the content anyway afterwards. I hated to think about statistics and methodology. It made me crippling depressed. I can remember I was so fucking depressed learning for these courses. It was a nightmare. I think empirical evidence and methods as a side topic can be interesting. I think though when I want to understand a topic I want to fully understand it. And this is a never ending rabbit hole.
I clearly prefer qualitative methods to quantitative methods. So I tried to think to make progress without having to deal with quantitative methods too much. But that's sort of cheating. And for progress there is no ther way around. So I am doomed to remain an intellectual fraud. I try to read more political theory. I watch political lectures in my freetime. And I think I watched almost all political/media lectures on German on Youtube. I read almost all articles of the dossiers of the Bundeszentrale fĂĽr politische Bildung of the recent years. They are also scientifical but more in-between top tier academic journals and usual media outlets. There are a few professional journals that I read. I think I started rambling where was I? ChatGPT recommends to produce more texts on my own, develop my own thinking and not only copy narratives or line of arguments of other thinkers. It is true I barely produce own texts anymore. I discuss politics with friends. But this cannot replace exchanges on the college campus for example. I don't take notes when I read articles. I don't write summaries or share my own remarks. Sometimes I do that on Sanctioned Suicide. And it is something that I will do in this thread later. The texts I consume are on German and they often contain a jargon that is hard to translate for me. So it is a lot of effort. Another step would be to start reading books on these topics. I binge-read articles but I hardly read books. For me articles give me the feeling of a higher efficiency. But I also have the feeling watching a lecture can be extremely valuable. It structures your thinking. Whereas in an article you rather follow a line of thought/argument. I wish there were more politics lectures on the internet for free. I already watched a lot of them but I am curious for more. I think I need to develop an independence of my own critical thinking. The problem is an AI chatbot had to point that out. What an irony....Find the problem....Moreover, I also think I am not that good in politics. My biggest strengths are hyperreflexifity, metacogntive thinking, creativity on some issues, thoughtfullness and being a deep thinker. Whereas I am not extraordinarily smart. Though, chatGPT made a comparison I once made in this forum. I compare myself all the time with the education and knowledge of the quantum physics professor that I met. But it is sort of unhealthy and unfair to compare myself to him all the time. I said something like ths would be a comparison to a Champions League soccer player if you play in a Tier 3 team in the German Regionalliga. ChatGPT said it would be similar to comparing yourself all the time to Lionel Messi in measuring how good you are at playing soccer.
I have subscribed to a new journal recently. It offers in-depth essays about politics. I only read one piece and after that I have subscribed to it. The offer was amazing though. It gives me access to myriad of texts for 10 bucks for 3 months. The author of the piece is a German assistant professor at Amherst College. The article is called Trumps male's fantasies.
Here are some key pasages/findings of the text translated into English.
Central thesis: Trump's hypermasculinity is not a stable form of masculinity, but a hysterical compensation for a fragile, threatened, and insecure masculinity.
Or Trump appears hypermasculine because his masculinity constantly fails and therefore has to be continuously exaggerated and asserted.
The argument is: Trump's toxic masculinity is so exaggerated precisely because it conceals feminization, insecurity, regression, and dependency beneath the surface.
The point is to show that Trump is not simply the strong patriarchal male. He is a figure in whom masculinity, femininity, homoeroticism, and childish regression become entangled.
There is a section of Andrea Long Chu. The core argument is: Desire makes us passive.
When I desire something, I am not fully sovereign. I am seized by my desire. I am no longer entirely master of myself.
Within patriarchal culture, passivity has often been coded as feminine. Therefore, Chu provocatively argues:
In that sense, all desiring subjects are "female."
Trump desires recognition, beauty, power, admiration, male bodies, and public validation. This makes him dependent rather than sovereign. His exaggerated masculinity serves to conceal that dependency.
3. Transphobia as Fear of Desired Feminization
Trans women are threatening to compensatory masculinity because they make visible the possibility that feminization can be actively desired rather than merely suffered.
For an ideology that associates masculinity with superiority and femininity with degradation, this possibility is intolerable.
The aggression directed at trans women is therefore not only directed toward a minority group but also toward a repressed possibility within the self:
What if feminization is not merely humiliation, but also a desire?
4. Trump as a Drag Queen / Camp Figure
The author is not claiming that Trump is literally a drag queen.
Rather, the argument is:
Trump performs masculinity in such an exaggerated, artificial, golden, theatrical, and grotesque manner that it functions similarly to drag.
Trump is makeup, gold-plated interiors, giant flagpoles, superlatives, spectacle, posing, and excess.
The key insight is:
Trump is not masculine despite being artificial. His masculinity functions through artificial exaggeration.
Masculinity here is understood not as a natural essence but as a performance.
5. Nietzsche: Ressentiment
Here, ressentiment means:
I suffer, but I misunderstand the cause of my suffering. Therefore I search for scapegoats.
Trump is described as a "redirector of ressentiment."
He takes genuine forms of suffering:
and redirects them toward substitute enemies:
Trump succeeds because he translates real suffering into false hostility.
6. Trump as a Hysteric
In psychoanalysis, the hysterical question is:
Why am I what the Other says I am?
Applied to Trump, this becomes:
Am I really great enough? Strong enough? Masculine enough? Loved enough? Presidential enough?
Hence the constant repetition:
biggest crowds, most beautiful flagpoles, strongest military, best economy, nobody has been treated more unfairly, everybody loves me
The repetition itself reveals insecurity.
7. Sports as a Masculine Substitute World
Sports provide Trump with a world in which masculinity appears measurable
This helps soothe hysterical uncertainty.
Sports also provide a shared language with other men. This is why Trump's appearances in the manosphere often seem so effective: there he appears less like a politician and more like a friend discussing football, MMA, and physical strength.
Sports replace politics with masculine-coded familiarity.
8. Theweleit: Male Bodies, Swamps, and Floods
Theweleit's work analyzes fascist masculinity as a fear of dissolution, fluidity, femininity, bodily vulnerability, and inundation.
The author reads Trump's politics as an attempt to armor the threatened male body:
Borders, walls, and tariffs function as political body armor.
9. Butler: Shameless Sadism
The essay argues that Trumpism operates not only through repression but also through openly enjoyed cruelty.
The author distinguishes between:
Moralized sadism:
We must be cruel in order to protect what is good.
Shameless sadism:
We are cruel because cruelty itself is pleasurable.
10. The Political Conclusion
What desire lies behind these masculine fantasies?
The author does not want merely to condemn this energy but to redirect it.
His political hope is:
Ressentiment contains real suffering. That suffering should be directed toward its actual causes: capitalism, alienation, war, patriarchal masculinity, and ecological destruction.
Instead of asking: Why do people vote for Trump despite his cruelty?
the essay asks:
What pleasure, what fantasy, and what form of suffering make Trump politically attractive?
My comment: Holy shit why can't I come up with such an essay? And who the fuck is paying me for delivering conent like that. I will have to add my own thoughts in order to avoid copy-right issues. I think though I have not much sophisticated to add to this essay. I was pretty stunned by this essay. It is a provocative and speculative essay. But still very impressing. I have the feeling it goes way deeper in its analysis compared to the analysis you read in mainstream media. First, of all the analysis that Trump is actually insecure and overcompensates it is nothing new. Just listen to the Iranian distracks about the Trump regime. (Your government is run by pedophiles). I wonder whether the trans analogy really works perfectly well. And I would be interested in takes of members who know more about the topic/people who are affected. In the essay it seems to work when it comes to m2f (men to female). But It cannot really explain the hatred against f2m. If we followed the Trumpian logic of the essay MAGA had to be in favor of f2m trans people because they worshipped masculity and they are even willed to do anything to reach that goal. Maybe the author would argue that the Trumpian ideology is not fully coherent and actually contradictory. But I am not sure whether this would be the perfect defense to this. Moreover, I read an interview of Peter Thiel. (this narcissistic psychopath) and he argued that he had no hatred for trans people. The issue he had with trans people was they would not go far enough in their transformation. That's probably copium and a smoke bomb. The policies of Project2025 target trans people and I agree very much with the bottom line of the article that Trump redirects suffering and searches for scapegoats. And actually they are the most vulnerable groups and this forum is full of them. Thiel wants to make the point that the path transhumanism had to be researched without considering ethical borders. Thiel's arguments don't make much sense to me when we look at Trump's policies. Of course Trump is against regulation and Thiel has libertarian fantasies mixed with unconstrained monopolies of tech company. And actually these monopolies should be avoided in order to guarantee economic competition and well this is sort of socialism just for companies. The policies favor a small tech elite while Fox News fear mongers about the crumbs people at the bottom have to fight for. If Thiel's statements were genuine I see no reason for the agitation against trans people. The line of argument by the essay makes way more sense to me.
There is something interesting about the following paragraph. I recently read a college thesis about homosexual references in a book. I am refering to this part of the essay to make my point.
There is a section of Andrea Long Chu. The core argument is: Desire makes us passive.
When I desire something, I am not fully sovereign. I am seized by my desire. I am no longer entirely master of myself.
Within patriarchal culture, passivity has often been coded as feminine. Therefore, Chu provocatively argues:
In that sense, all desiring subjects are "female."
Which place has homosexuality in this equation? There were nazis that had a cult around men like Röhm (who was later murdered) for them sex between men was the peak of masculinity. And there were a lot of closet homosexual nazis that felt love for the Führer (Hitler). In his campaign Trump shared anecdotes about the size of the penis of a famous golf player. On the other hand, Trump considers homosexual people as inferior and mocks them. While at the same time prasing masculinity over and over again and considering feminity as weak. There is some irony that Peter Thiel once was outed as gay. Is there a form of homosexuality that isn't bad for these people? There is a very conservative German politician who flirts with MAGA Jens Spahn who also is homosexual. And there are some right-wing politicians in my country that are gay but look down at trans or queer people. There seems to be a lot of self-hatred. Is sex with men not gay if there is no desire? Referring to Andrea Long Chu. Think of Nick Fuentes who famously claimed "Sex with women is gay". And who again according to rumors is homosexual. Honestly, this is only a stream of consciousness but you find so many conservatives and fascists with a lot of self-hatred and insecurties that overcompensate that. You feel like for the MAGA people the love for Trump could have another connotation. One could also look at Russia and its warfare against Ukraine where sexual violence is quite common. And for Thiel modern Russia has the role of the Katechon the actor that delays the arrival of the antichrist. It seems to be the logical conclusion that when we think of sexuality in such terms that sexual violence ultimately becomes a weapon. And oh well who had rape charges against him...? Who was the best friend of the most infamous child predator of the modern age? The conclusion of enjoyed cruely hits harder when we consider the allegations against Trump. And who does the Trump regime blame for child abuse? LGBTQ people...Well, he points the fingers at minorities as a smoke bomb....
This is all I could deliver for today. This took quite some energy. I think I shouldn't aim to write a thread like this on a daily basis. Any feedback on it?
I re-read my comment: I think one thing is important to add. I think the quality is quite medicocre I had to spend way more time for something sophisticated to share on such an ariticle. But actually I don't want to start publishing academic papers on here. Maybe that's my copium.
ChatGPT considered following points to be a weakness of my approach. I should read more papers that focus on empirical evidence, texts on causality, methodology, statistics...yeah I had these courses in college. They made me extremely depressed. People told me I would have been very good in it. One of the best. I think this wasn't true though. I think forgot most of the content anyway afterwards. I hated to think about statistics and methodology. It made me crippling depressed. I can remember I was so fucking depressed learning for these courses. It was a nightmare. I think empirical evidence and methods as a side topic can be interesting. I think though when I want to understand a topic I want to fully understand it. And this is a never ending rabbit hole.
I clearly prefer qualitative methods to quantitative methods. So I tried to think to make progress without having to deal with quantitative methods too much. But that's sort of cheating. And for progress there is no ther way around. So I am doomed to remain an intellectual fraud. I try to read more political theory. I watch political lectures in my freetime. And I think I watched almost all political/media lectures on German on Youtube. I read almost all articles of the dossiers of the Bundeszentrale fĂĽr politische Bildung of the recent years. They are also scientifical but more in-between top tier academic journals and usual media outlets. There are a few professional journals that I read. I think I started rambling where was I? ChatGPT recommends to produce more texts on my own, develop my own thinking and not only copy narratives or line of arguments of other thinkers. It is true I barely produce own texts anymore. I discuss politics with friends. But this cannot replace exchanges on the college campus for example. I don't take notes when I read articles. I don't write summaries or share my own remarks. Sometimes I do that on Sanctioned Suicide. And it is something that I will do in this thread later. The texts I consume are on German and they often contain a jargon that is hard to translate for me. So it is a lot of effort. Another step would be to start reading books on these topics. I binge-read articles but I hardly read books. For me articles give me the feeling of a higher efficiency. But I also have the feeling watching a lecture can be extremely valuable. It structures your thinking. Whereas in an article you rather follow a line of thought/argument. I wish there were more politics lectures on the internet for free. I already watched a lot of them but I am curious for more. I think I need to develop an independence of my own critical thinking. The problem is an AI chatbot had to point that out. What an irony....Find the problem....Moreover, I also think I am not that good in politics. My biggest strengths are hyperreflexifity, metacogntive thinking, creativity on some issues, thoughtfullness and being a deep thinker. Whereas I am not extraordinarily smart. Though, chatGPT made a comparison I once made in this forum. I compare myself all the time with the education and knowledge of the quantum physics professor that I met. But it is sort of unhealthy and unfair to compare myself to him all the time. I said something like ths would be a comparison to a Champions League soccer player if you play in a Tier 3 team in the German Regionalliga. ChatGPT said it would be similar to comparing yourself all the time to Lionel Messi in measuring how good you are at playing soccer.
I have subscribed to a new journal recently. It offers in-depth essays about politics. I only read one piece and after that I have subscribed to it. The offer was amazing though. It gives me access to myriad of texts for 10 bucks for 3 months. The author of the piece is a German assistant professor at Amherst College. The article is called Trumps male's fantasies.
Here are some key pasages/findings of the text translated into English.
Central thesis: Trump's hypermasculinity is not a stable form of masculinity, but a hysterical compensation for a fragile, threatened, and insecure masculinity.
Or Trump appears hypermasculine because his masculinity constantly fails and therefore has to be continuously exaggerated and asserted.
The argument is: Trump's toxic masculinity is so exaggerated precisely because it conceals feminization, insecurity, regression, and dependency beneath the surface.
The point is to show that Trump is not simply the strong patriarchal male. He is a figure in whom masculinity, femininity, homoeroticism, and childish regression become entangled.
There is a section of Andrea Long Chu. The core argument is: Desire makes us passive.
When I desire something, I am not fully sovereign. I am seized by my desire. I am no longer entirely master of myself.
Within patriarchal culture, passivity has often been coded as feminine. Therefore, Chu provocatively argues:
In that sense, all desiring subjects are "female."
Trump desires recognition, beauty, power, admiration, male bodies, and public validation. This makes him dependent rather than sovereign. His exaggerated masculinity serves to conceal that dependency.
3. Transphobia as Fear of Desired Feminization
Trans women are threatening to compensatory masculinity because they make visible the possibility that feminization can be actively desired rather than merely suffered.
For an ideology that associates masculinity with superiority and femininity with degradation, this possibility is intolerable.
The aggression directed at trans women is therefore not only directed toward a minority group but also toward a repressed possibility within the self:
What if feminization is not merely humiliation, but also a desire?
4. Trump as a Drag Queen / Camp Figure
The author is not claiming that Trump is literally a drag queen.
Rather, the argument is:
Trump performs masculinity in such an exaggerated, artificial, golden, theatrical, and grotesque manner that it functions similarly to drag.
Trump is makeup, gold-plated interiors, giant flagpoles, superlatives, spectacle, posing, and excess.
The key insight is:
Trump is not masculine despite being artificial. His masculinity functions through artificial exaggeration.
Masculinity here is understood not as a natural essence but as a performance.
5. Nietzsche: Ressentiment
Here, ressentiment means:
I suffer, but I misunderstand the cause of my suffering. Therefore I search for scapegoats.
Trump is described as a "redirector of ressentiment."
He takes genuine forms of suffering:
and redirects them toward substitute enemies:
Trump succeeds because he translates real suffering into false hostility.
6. Trump as a Hysteric
In psychoanalysis, the hysterical question is:
Why am I what the Other says I am?
Applied to Trump, this becomes:
Am I really great enough? Strong enough? Masculine enough? Loved enough? Presidential enough?
Hence the constant repetition:
biggest crowds, most beautiful flagpoles, strongest military, best economy, nobody has been treated more unfairly, everybody loves me
The repetition itself reveals insecurity.
7. Sports as a Masculine Substitute World
Sports provide Trump with a world in which masculinity appears measurable
This helps soothe hysterical uncertainty.
Sports also provide a shared language with other men. This is why Trump's appearances in the manosphere often seem so effective: there he appears less like a politician and more like a friend discussing football, MMA, and physical strength.
Sports replace politics with masculine-coded familiarity.
8. Theweleit: Male Bodies, Swamps, and Floods
Theweleit's work analyzes fascist masculinity as a fear of dissolution, fluidity, femininity, bodily vulnerability, and inundation.
The author reads Trump's politics as an attempt to armor the threatened male body:
Borders, walls, and tariffs function as political body armor.
9. Butler: Shameless Sadism
The essay argues that Trumpism operates not only through repression but also through openly enjoyed cruelty.
The author distinguishes between:
Moralized sadism:
We must be cruel in order to protect what is good.
Shameless sadism:
We are cruel because cruelty itself is pleasurable.
10. The Political Conclusion
What desire lies behind these masculine fantasies?
The author does not want merely to condemn this energy but to redirect it.
His political hope is:
Ressentiment contains real suffering. That suffering should be directed toward its actual causes: capitalism, alienation, war, patriarchal masculinity, and ecological destruction.
Instead of asking: Why do people vote for Trump despite his cruelty?
the essay asks:
What pleasure, what fantasy, and what form of suffering make Trump politically attractive?
My comment: Holy shit why can't I come up with such an essay? And who the fuck is paying me for delivering conent like that. I will have to add my own thoughts in order to avoid copy-right issues. I think though I have not much sophisticated to add to this essay. I was pretty stunned by this essay. It is a provocative and speculative essay. But still very impressing. I have the feeling it goes way deeper in its analysis compared to the analysis you read in mainstream media. First, of all the analysis that Trump is actually insecure and overcompensates it is nothing new. Just listen to the Iranian distracks about the Trump regime. (Your government is run by pedophiles). I wonder whether the trans analogy really works perfectly well. And I would be interested in takes of members who know more about the topic/people who are affected. In the essay it seems to work when it comes to m2f (men to female). But It cannot really explain the hatred against f2m. If we followed the Trumpian logic of the essay MAGA had to be in favor of f2m trans people because they worshipped masculity and they are even willed to do anything to reach that goal. Maybe the author would argue that the Trumpian ideology is not fully coherent and actually contradictory. But I am not sure whether this would be the perfect defense to this. Moreover, I read an interview of Peter Thiel. (this narcissistic psychopath) and he argued that he had no hatred for trans people. The issue he had with trans people was they would not go far enough in their transformation. That's probably copium and a smoke bomb. The policies of Project2025 target trans people and I agree very much with the bottom line of the article that Trump redirects suffering and searches for scapegoats. And actually they are the most vulnerable groups and this forum is full of them. Thiel wants to make the point that the path transhumanism had to be researched without considering ethical borders. Thiel's arguments don't make much sense to me when we look at Trump's policies. Of course Trump is against regulation and Thiel has libertarian fantasies mixed with unconstrained monopolies of tech company. And actually these monopolies should be avoided in order to guarantee economic competition and well this is sort of socialism just for companies. The policies favor a small tech elite while Fox News fear mongers about the crumbs people at the bottom have to fight for. If Thiel's statements were genuine I see no reason for the agitation against trans people. The line of argument by the essay makes way more sense to me.
There is something interesting about the following paragraph. I recently read a college thesis about homosexual references in a book. I am refering to this part of the essay to make my point.
There is a section of Andrea Long Chu. The core argument is: Desire makes us passive.
When I desire something, I am not fully sovereign. I am seized by my desire. I am no longer entirely master of myself.
Within patriarchal culture, passivity has often been coded as feminine. Therefore, Chu provocatively argues:
In that sense, all desiring subjects are "female."
Which place has homosexuality in this equation? There were nazis that had a cult around men like Röhm (who was later murdered) for them sex between men was the peak of masculinity. And there were a lot of closet homosexual nazis that felt love for the Führer (Hitler). In his campaign Trump shared anecdotes about the size of the penis of a famous golf player. On the other hand, Trump considers homosexual people as inferior and mocks them. While at the same time prasing masculinity over and over again and considering feminity as weak. There is some irony that Peter Thiel once was outed as gay. Is there a form of homosexuality that isn't bad for these people? There is a very conservative German politician who flirts with MAGA Jens Spahn who also is homosexual. And there are some right-wing politicians in my country that are gay but look down at trans or queer people. There seems to be a lot of self-hatred. Is sex with men not gay if there is no desire? Referring to Andrea Long Chu. Think of Nick Fuentes who famously claimed "Sex with women is gay". And who again according to rumors is homosexual. Honestly, this is only a stream of consciousness but you find so many conservatives and fascists with a lot of self-hatred and insecurties that overcompensate that. You feel like for the MAGA people the love for Trump could have another connotation. One could also look at Russia and its warfare against Ukraine where sexual violence is quite common. And for Thiel modern Russia has the role of the Katechon the actor that delays the arrival of the antichrist. It seems to be the logical conclusion that when we think of sexuality in such terms that sexual violence ultimately becomes a weapon. And oh well who had rape charges against him...? Who was the best friend of the most infamous child predator of the modern age? The conclusion of enjoyed cruely hits harder when we consider the allegations against Trump. And who does the Trump regime blame for child abuse? LGBTQ people...Well, he points the fingers at minorities as a smoke bomb....
This is all I could deliver for today. This took quite some energy. I think I shouldn't aim to write a thread like this on a daily basis. Any feedback on it?
I re-read my comment: I think one thing is important to add. I think the quality is quite medicocre I had to spend way more time for something sophisticated to share on such an ariticle. But actually I don't want to start publishing academic papers on here. Maybe that's my copium.
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