Gin > Recent Status Updates

“The fetishization of parsimony means that unwieldy theories are often dismissed on these grounds alone...
No doubt there is something less satisfying about settling for inelegance, but the best theories won't always feel right. Elegance is not a suitable heuristic for veracity” - Nina Strohminger

Chapter 6 - poor means of measurement and individualisation of structural problems, but from a progressive angle.
Chapter 7 - crisis of non-replicability. A finding in search of a hypothesis
Chapter 8 - Nudging, which works, but only up to a certain limit

Cross reference to the work done by John Friedman and Matthew Jackson et al. It’s the same story about the wealthier being able to withstand more shocks and be exposed to better influences that help them succeed.

Jangle fallacy

Chapter 1 - Causation vs Correlation
Chapter 2 - Conceptual fuzziness and statistical misuses
Chapter 3 - P hacking
Chapter 4 - unskilled intuition

“… the hope of [Dialectic of Enlightenment] was already not to reverse enlightenment but to encourage enlightenment to become enlightened about itself. Once thought’s autonomy is turned into an absolute, it becomes delusory; yet, without some resistance to sheer heteronomy thought cannot even begin to reflect on what conditions it

Pollock’s view makes sense to me in 2026. That’s what we have seen, and explains why the left is incapacitated - monopoly capitalism as a reason?

Really good explanation of Marx’s commodity fetishism, and Lukác’s History and Class Consciousness, and how Adorno drew from the latter. Much is on the concepts of use and exchange values.

End of the chapter on the Dialectic of Enlightenment. A most useful chapter, providing the necessary context, background and explanation to better allow me to grasp the original work. Essential to read before embarking on the actual work.

So much to digest in this book, but this point here - “… if profound social and economic instability resulted in a craving for familiar cultural forms…” could this also be one of the reasons for the pushback against immigration across societies that have experienced this “unparalleled rate of change” and “unparalleled standardisation” that Fisher quoted Jameson earlier in the page?

Putting a pin on this first because I barely understood what I read so far. Going to read Capitalist Realism again and then the Jarvis introduction to Adorno before heading back.

“…propaganda here is primarily a technique of mass psychology. It is based on the model of the authority-bound personality… The unity lies in this appeal to the authority-bound personality. One hears time and again that these movements all promise something and that is true as a characteristic of the lack of theory.” Again, MAGA and Trump come to mind, and the most recent example of what Adorno talks about.

Third paragraph describes Trump’s US to a T.

Psychoanalytically speaking here - “Someone who is unable to see anything ahead of them and does not want the social foundation to change really has no alternative other than…’The end.’ This person, from the perspective of their own social situation, longs for demise… the demise of all.”

“Fascists movements as the wounds, the scars of a democracy that, to this day, has not yet lived up to its own concept.” - what Zizek mentioning someone saying the same thing - the rise of fascism is an outcome of a failed revolution.

“… even the people who stand within the production process already feel potentially superfluous… they totally feel potential unemployed.” Adorno refers to the production line workers but almost 60 years later in 2026, this can also apply to service/intellectual labour with the advent of AI. The form may change but the underlying substance does not.

The last paragraph of this page refers to the Nazis, but can easily describe today’s situation in many countries. Most aptly, the MAGA movement, and how Trunp is seen by them.

Personalisation of politics through idealism akin to Harvey’s notion of aesthetics as opposed to material basis of political power ( parallel the ethics domain of Harvey)?

The concept of “socialised semi-culture” which I think is key to also understanding the readiness to turn to some form of “ersatz rationality”, such as superstition or other brief structures like fascism or dialectical-materialism (diamat). In today’s context and within American society, the MAGA movement is a contemporary example.

Adorno’s concern with superstition is in how as a mechanism of contemporary mass culture, it leads and influences people in a certain way that keeps them dependent through “exploiting certain factors in the masses themselves.” For Adorno, the mass culture is the ideology of those wishing to exploit those masses. What allows this to happen is what

Second-hand superstition - ideas that are “cranked up and boosted by material interests, essentially by the interests of journals, magazines and newspapers I. Order to increase their sales and spread their influence.”

NOTE: Discusses projection here, and sees it as a fundamental mechanism of the authority-centred character:
“Process by which we suppress certain impulses within ourselves… and proceed to transfer or ascribe these impulses to other human beings.”

Substitute gratification (from depth psychology) is used here to show how stereotypes of good and evil and authoritarian nationalism fits well together. Think of present day examples - Trump’s US today, rhetoric on migrants etc.

The term refers to “the gratification that people derive by elevating and glorifying themselves, provides a kind of satisfaction that compensates for what they lack in reality.”

The authority-centred person as one who is incapable of undergoing experience, or learn through experience. The world for these people are basically material for him to work upon in a more or less manipulative manner.

“Pathic” prejudice - first introduced in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightenment. ”… the kind of prejudice that is entertained by human beings who cannot be brought to abandon this prejudice even by experiences that would seem to counter or disconfirm it.”

Adorno differentiates pathic prejudice and prejudice as prejudgment here.

SEE THIS PAGE. Adorno’s citing of Freud, and ok progress, and how it fits our world today to a perfect T! The unease experienced by people “has entirely real objective grounds.”

Over-identification with the state of the world lead to human beings accepting things as they are because they cannot see the possibility for change - “the very prospect that the situation could be changed has effectively died within them.” Stockholm syndrome. Capital Realism as drawing from Adorno, and a very apt reflection of the world today apropos Zizek’s quip on the end of capitalism.

A good look at the relationship between technology and human beings. Technology is a tool performs a function - and how it does so depends on the shape of the society and whether it is rational or otherwise.

So this helplessness results in apathy, and especially in fostering political apathy, can be detrimental to us as it “ensure that everything basically remains as it is, yet drives us towards the sort of catastrophe we have to talk about if we are not to fall back into empty chatter.”

It’s not because we cannot exercise thought but because increasing insights into contradictions make life harder to live.