Journal of Cogency:
for the philosophical study of power
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Why the Democrats Will Never Love You
Luxury is a game of pretend, that’s why it isn’t joy. It’s a person looking over at the heap of vegetables that have been harvested and smiling while pretending they don’t see the army of slaves behind it. Joy is knowing that no one suffered to produce what you have, no one was ignored, because…
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Protest and the Construction of Power
The surest sign that a protest is effective is if the military opens fire on it. I want to explain why this is. Of course, I’m considering both “protest” and “effective” in a narrow sense here but I think the general point is understandable on its face: as a challenge to the government, a protest’s…
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Thoughts on the Critique of the Gotha Programme
I wanted to talk about the Critique of the Gotha Programme because I feel it has relevance to our current situation where the left is in the political wilderness. The Gotha Programme’s aims, in the eyes of Marx, were to sand down the edges of the socialist movement such that it would not seem so…
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What Is Religion
In this bias I am going to lay out my general approach to religion and parareligion (or “secular religion”), mostly as a base to build off of in future articles. I want to establish a general framework that can be used to analyze religions and similar philosophical structures in a comparative way. I’ve always been…
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Group Discussion: Critique of the Gotha Programme
On Saturday, August 31st, at 8 PM ET, I’m going to host a discussion about Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme in relation to the current moment in American politics. At the time of the critique’s writing in 1875, the German socialists were very far from power and were just about to form an…
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The Romans Had Religion
This will be another hypothesis blog. I’ve done a few of them already, but basically, I’m going to lay out some ideas that I want to follow up on later, especially through research. For this subject I’ve already been pointed to a book that should be really useful — Belief and Cult by Jacob L.…
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Whipping Ourselves and Weeping
This broad tendency among the Western left, from the end of the French Revolution to the present day, is fueled by an impulse towards self-flagellation. The question then is: why does the left feel the need to lash itself in penance? This is not a thorough study but I have been thinking about this for…
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The Democrats Hate You
I know that it is easier to talk about what the Biden administration is doing by acting as if they are making mistakes, but we all know better and I think it would be good if we stopped pretending. Biden and his mob want the American president to openly be a dictator. That’s what it…
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What Is Capitalism?
What is the point of all this? The point is to be able to come to some sort of understanding of what capitalism means so we can understand the political implications and effects it has. We tend to be presented with capitalism as only partly political because it is so strongly associated with money. Because…
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French Propaganda Technique, or Why I Bounced Off of Jacques Ellul
These works of Ellul are thought-provoking but they are not works of first-rate philosophy. Ellul’s analysis in them is too limited. His observations can be made more useful but they will need someone who can go through his works line by line and elaborate the points that he touches on. As an account of these…
Which side are you on?
Ten thousand years or more in jet black meditation. Now I stand here, hands are sore, but that’s my motivation.
— High on Fire, “10,000 Years”