FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
Mm.
So in your opinion, when some guy spraypaints #BLM, multiple hammers and sickles, and the publication date of the Communist Manifesto on a public structure, what do you think is going on in that guy's head? Would you expect the misconception he's suffering from to be common or rare?
Suppose there is a person who is very concerned with social justice. They believe that racism and sexism are among the most serious problems facing our society, they are deeply committed to battling the kyriarchy hydra. They are interested in cultural critique, in sociopolitical theory, and have educated themselves extensively on these subjects. In my experience, such people are not particularly rare, and probably most people commenting here will have encountered several of them.
Based on you experience, how likely is such a person to be familiar with and use the term "late stage capitalism"? My experience would be that it is very likely; does yours differ?
If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?
Why does the kyriarchy hydra in the linked comic have a "class" head, and why is that head resolved into "economics" in the last panel? What sort of economics do you suppose the author intended?
That comic is from the website everydayfeminism. If I search that website for references to "capitalism", I get many, many hits. How many of those hits do you suppose involve discussion of Capitalism as a positive force in the world, versus a negative force? Why should that be?
....I've just searched "Patriarchy and late stage capitalism".
Having previously identified the socialization and naturalization of inequalities, we now look at the influence of capitalism. Although patriarchy pre-existed it - many societies were already characterized by a sexual division of labour, gender-based violence, or gender norms often privileging the male - the specific contribution of capitalism was undoubtedly the institutionalization of the devaluation of women and their work. The devalued or even unpaid domestic work, the concept of the “housewife” that accompanies it, as well as professional segregation, have their origins in the era when capitalism gradually replaced the medieval feudal system. They are thus not, as we often hear, the remnants of a dark and barbaric medieval era, but rather constitutive of the first phase of capitalist accumulation which, as we shall see, led to a phenomenal regression in the status of women.
Judging by this excerpt (or the article as a whole, I'm not your dad), what general branch of political philosophy do you think has formed the author's worldview?
The dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background that models gender difference on class relations. The relation between manager and worker is not just one of “difference.” The manager and worker are situated within a system of social relations that unequally distributes money, power, status, etc. Likewise, men and women aren’t just “different,” but are categories of persons – like manager and worker – that are defined in terms of social relations that position them in a complex class/race/sex hierarchy. Given this background to the dominance approach, it is useful to consider a bit of the history of the relation between Marxism and feminism.
What do you think the author means when she says that "the dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background"? What does it mean to "model gender differences on class relations?" Why do you suppose the author spends so much of their paper discussing Marx? Why does she believe that "Socialist feminism involves a commitment to “the practical unity of the struggle against capitalism and the struggle for women’s liberation." Why is she interested in a struggle against Capitalism, and where does Marx come in to this struggle?
This article argues that modern imagery of the Black female body exists in opposition to sexual health and sexual rights by focusing on existing representations of Black female eroticism as a legacy of colonialism. It addresses Black feminist thought on the history and contemporary use of the Black female body and offers a human rights perspective on uses of the Black female body within patriarchal capitalism.
Where is this idea of "Patriarchal Capitalism" coming from? Do you think the author developed it herself? If not, how did she come by it?
Contemporary feminism is currently at a crossroads, facing a concerted onslaught from both neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. While these ideologies are inherently different—neoliberalism often appropriates feminist language to serve capitalist ends, and neoconservatism typically attacks feminist principles—they similarly reinforce the traditional role of families as providers of welfare. This crisis of alienation in feminism is characterized by three key factors: the gender divisions brought about by feminism’s shift to identity politics, the obscuring of feminist critique of capitalism by the spread of commercialization, and the instrumentalization of feminism in politics. These challenges have resulted in increased class antagonism and the further marginalization of lower-income women, reinforcing one another. To address this multifaceted crisis, a return to Marxist thought is deemed necessary for women’s liberation.
How can Feminism "return" to Marxism, when it never had anything to do with Marxism in the first place?
Anxiety disorders are one of the most prevalent mental disorders globally, and 63% of those diagnoses are of women. Although widely acknowledged across health disciplines and news and social media outlets, the majority of attention has left assumptions underlying women's anxiety in the twenty-first century unquestioned. Drawing on my own experiences of anxiety, I will the explore both concept and diagnosis in the Western world. Reflecting on my own experiences through a critical feminist lens, I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.
Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?
The term “late capitalism” regained relevance in 1991 when Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson published Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Drawing on Mandel’s idea that capitalism has sped up and gone global, Jameson expanded his analysis to the cultural realm. His argument was that late capitalist societies have lost their connection with history and are defined by a fascination with the present. In Jameson’s account, late capitalism is characterized by a globalized, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable. In this capitalist stage, we see innovation for the sake of innovation, a superficial projected image of self via celebrities or “influencers” channeled through social media, and so on. In this time, whatever societal changes that emerge are quickly transformed into products for exchange. Unlike those who celebrate postmodernism as replete with irony and transgression, Jameson considers it to be a non-threatening feature of the capitalist system in contemporary societies.
How can Marxist analysis "expand into the cultural realm"? If the term "late stage capitalism" were related to attempts to expand Marxist analysis in this fashion, would the prevalence of the term be some level of evidence for the memetic spread of this expansion?
...In my younger days, this is the point where I would drink several cups of coffee and spend the next twelve hours pasting the first paragraph and a few pertinent questions for every one of the first five hundred of the search results in the fifteenth tab in my brave window and then wrap it up with six solid pages-worth of compact, four-letter obscenities, but I'm older and I have kids now and my back hurts, so let's not do that.
It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly. I think the above position can be defended unassailably by looking at the academic output that constitutes the headwaters of the Social Justice movement. I think that those who argue that the obvious, inescapable ties between Social Justice theory and Marxism are some sort of hallucination or sloppy categorization are either woefully uninformed or actively dishonest. To those who have advanced such arguments in the thread on the subject below, I offer an invitation: assuming the above examples are insufficient, what level of evidence would satisfy you? How many papers from how many journals do you need to see? How many quotes from how many prominent figures within the modern social justice movement, and the people who taught them, and the people who taught them, and so on? How far back do we need to go to satisfy you? How deep do we need to dig to bring this question to a conclusion?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
Realistically, I think it's just because to conservatives of a certain generation, 'Marxism' is the scariest and most evil word available, so calling everything they don't like Marxist is just a habit. It's equivalent to the way people on the left call everything 'fascism'.
Would you classify Black Lives Matter as a Marxist movement, or no?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8hr ago
that thing doesn't care about pollution. it uses a new system of territory, and only goes hostile if you build in its area. Pretty sure the lava planet doesn't have pollution at all, since the air is already a toxic stew.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
And they were wrong that such chaos wasn't worth it, and indeed that it could even potentially be avoided in any case.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Would looking at statistics of which party the journalists employed at the networks donate to make it less nebulous?
Let's say that reference to "the Cathedral" or "the Elites" is not a good way to approach this conversation. What would be a better approach? Reference to Blue Tribe?
The post two levels up adds the word "forcefully" to a description of such a coalition that did not previously contain it. How did that insertion add to the conversation?
It seems to me that @sulla's critique is on point and @MotteInTheEye's point is likewise a reasonable attempt at communication. I don't have nearly as much time as I used to for reasoned argumentation, but if you or @mdurak think the thinking here really is fuzzy, I can at least attempt to throw my hat in the ring as an interlocuter.
Creating a fully-automatic helium-powered submachine gun that can push at least one 30-round magazine of 9mm-equivalent-or-better projectiles at lethal speeds is trivial with current materials science
My own experimentation indicates that it's possible to get:
- 32 ~9mm equivalent projectiles travelling at lethal speeds
- With a burst time under 4 seconds
- in a roughly SMG-like form factor
- In a form that is not regulated as a firearm under federal law
- using no commercial ammo
- using no pressure-bearing metal components
- using no advanced tooling
- using no controllable materials
- using a DIY process that the average teenager can easily follow
- for an very conservatively estimated unit cost of $50 per weapon, and likely half that.
- and with a total from-scratch cost for all materials and tooling needed for producing both the weapon and ammo costing less than a poverty pony AR15.
Such a weapon would have a number of tradeoffs, but it illustrates another corner of the possibility space. It's all a question of what you're optimizing for; right now, almost all optimization is happening in a very small area of the possibility space, focused on a very narrow cluster of factors, because the gun culture has not generally been sitting down with a piece of paper and a pencil and really thought about the nature of the problem for five minutes. There's low-hanging fruit absolutely everywhere in terms of legal frameworks, capital-intensive manufacturing, DIY, you name it. The fruit isn't being picked because people in the gun culture, generally, aren't looking at things from the correct perspective to make that fruit visible. They're thinking in terms of incremental shifts from what the current state of things, not about desired end-states and the most efficient route to them.
Even this inefficient search method is probably enough to get us where we need to go, but if the perspective shifts, we could get there a hell of a lot faster.
[EDIT] - I want to elaborate on the subject of optimization.
The gun culture has moved from the standard longarm being a shotgun or bolt-action rifle to the AR15. That was an optimization process driven in large part by political and social conflict, and the route it optimized down was capital-heavy industrial production. One of the tradeoffs it largely accepted was conforming not only to the letter but also the spirit of state and federal firearms legislation, with the goal of getting the highest-quality firearms possible under the constraints they imposed. This has worked really, really well, with the result that we now have arrived on more or less the pinnacle of industrially-produced cartridge-firing autoloading firearms. All longarm designs converge on the AR15, and all handgun designs converge on the Glock, and both designs are well into their grind to the asymptote.
Now that we're chasing the asymptote with capital-heavy industrial production of small arms, the best value comes from expanding out into optimizing other factors. One of these is erosion of existing weapons controls by dropping adherence to the spirit of the rules; we see this with bump stocks, FRT triggers, pistol braces, suppressor paperwork streamlining, all of which are a good start. One of the obvious bits of low-hanging fruit is to do for destructive devices what's been done for SBRs, full-auto and suppressors; there's some small activity visible on this front, but clear potential for much, much more. Another piece of low-hanging fruit is what we might call the Liberator angle pioneered by Defense Distributed: focus on cutting cost and complexity of manufacturing to get the simplest, cheapest, easiest-to-produce firearm possible, and then work back toward effectiveness from there.
And in this factor, it's interesting to note how the logic of crowds flows through the possibility space, and how memetic effects determine the rate and direction of flow. DD established a paradigm of 3d-printing guns, and now the DIY space is focused on optimizing the 3D-printing paradigm, so we get the FGC-9. But while the FGC-9 is a fantastic development, you can already see how people are still thinking in terms of capital-intensive high-quality manufacturing: they're trying to reproduce a commercially-produced pistol-caliber-carbine from the low-cost DIY angle. 3d printers are still relatively expensive and relatively complicated to set up and operate, and the guns they turn out vary significantly in quality. They're working toward "effectiveness", but their definition of "effectiveness" is based on a commercially-produced cartridge firearm. It seems to me that there's more opportunity in defining effectiveness in terms of lethal effect, total input costs, ease of manufacture, and ubiquity of material. The community obviously appreciates this, with their efforts to answer questions like "what about barrels" and "what about ammo", but there's a sense in which they're committing to building a pencil, when they could in fact use clay and a stylus or, indeed, a printing press. Is the goal to have a pencil, or is it to write a text? Is it to write a text, or is it to disseminate ideas as widely as possible? To what extent does commitment to specific forms and factors get in the way, especially in a contested environment where powerful interests are to a lesser or greater degree actively hunting communications infrastructure?
And there's considerably more besides, but that's at least a start.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
I still think that overall, mentioning the cat eating thing was a mistake by Trump, because it allowed the Democrats to reframe the debate in a way which is very advantageous for them.
Can you point to a statement offered or an issue raised by a Republican that has not allowed Democrats to reframe the debate in a way that is very advantageous to them?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Entirely true. I'm happy to see evidence either way.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Has the CIA done this in the war on terror? No, it hasn't.
I would vastly prefer that it did. I would much, much rather they attempt to eliminate a terrorist with a half-ounce of high explosive than a twenty-five-pound warhead. I would much rather they deliver that explosive by secreting it into a target's personal items, rather than aiming a hundred-pound supersonic missile at some part of a building from ten miles away through a low-resolution thermal camera.
You are consistently playing language games. These aren't "IEDs" any more than a hand grenade is an IED. This isn't "terrorism" any more than any other state-sanctioned use of force is terrorism. The CIA probably would not have approved of this attack, but that is not to the CIA's credit; they've routinely approved of far, far more objectionable attacks. This is doubtless very inconvenient for the US government, and is a great example of why we should not be involved in any of this, but that doesn't actually make the attack itself objectionable on any fundamental level.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
A drone strike also requires a chain of command to strike a certain target at a certain place, an IED does not.
I think it's probable that these bombs were better targeted than the average drone strike. The chain of command observably sucks at identifying and designating targets, and often resulted in significant collateral damage. I care about striking particular people at particular places because I want harm to bystanders minimized. These bombs seem likely to have done a very good job of minimizing harm to bystanders.
So some of these may have been detonated in schools, hospitals, or diplomatic facilities, crowded markets, places which would not be targets for drone strikes following a chain of command.
This would concern me if they had been randomly airdropped by a helicopter. It would concern me if Israel simply put charges in every pager in the country, and then detonated them all. But the story at the moment is that they compromised Hezbollah's pager supply specifically, which means that anyone harmed by one of these pagers is overwhelmingly likely to either be a member of Hezbollah, or was gifted a pager by a member of Hezbollah. Maybe that impression is mistaken, in which case I'll happily agree that my assessment is invalid. But if it is accurate, I think my assessment stands.
I don't particularly think that schools, hospitals, diplomatic facilities, or indeed crowded markets are intrinsically off-limits to war. They are vulnerable and valuable, and efforts should be made to minimize harm to or within them... But if the above holds, then the reason these areas were bombed is because an active member of Hezbollah entered them. Further, the places themselves were not harmed in any significant way. If the Iranian diplomat was injured, it sorta raises the question of how he got within area effect of a bomb this small, likely being held by a Hezbollah operative. My sympathy is limited.
There's no accountability like there would be for a drone strike.
Could you unpack the word "accountability" in this sentence? What "accountability" applied for drone strikes, and how does it differ from the accountability applying here? Some agent of a government did both. If either kills innocents, there's going to be negative consequences, but probably not serious ones. What's your model here?
Obviously a bombing in a market causes the market to suffer the harmful effects? What are you even denying at this point?
That the market structures, contents, or occupants generally were harmed by the physical effects of overpressure or fragmentation, which are the central examples of "harm" caused by a "bomb". Here's some examples of the destruction caused by central examples of "bombs" in a market.
It causes obviously immediate disruption and panic and potential injury to bystanders. In the long term it creates fear and instability.
War tends to cause disruption, panic and potentially injury to bystanders, as well as fear and instability. If you don't want that, avoid war.
If you think the people hit weren't actually Hezbollah, say that. I'm willing to believe it if there's reasonable amounts of evidence.
If you think the people hit were Hezbollah but this method of hitting them was inappropriate, I'm curious as to what a more appropriate method would be better. This method seems on the order of individual bullets from a sniper, which is pretty damn selective.
You think this is closer to a drone strike than it is to an IED?
"Your honor. I spent hours meticulously crafting these. To call them 'improvised' explosives is an insult."
Jokes aside, yes, it is very clearly closer to a drone strike than to an IED, and it is not particularly close to a drone strike.
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You can think of it in terms of energy-in-the-system. IEDs in a middle-east context are generally remote-detonated artillery shells, suicide vests, or vehicle bombs. Drone strikes are usually a hellfire missile. In any of these cases, we're talking about dozens of pounds of high explosive and almost always significant added fragmentation. Recently, the US has been deploying the R9X hellfire, which trades the HE warhead for deployable blades, relying on pure kinetic impact... but even that is less discriminate than these pagers; people standing within arms-length of one of these are extremely likely to be unharmed. These are not "bombs in a market", because that implies that the market, in general, suffers the harmful effects of the bomb. They are literally bombs in someone's pocket. The fact that the person might be in a market when they go off is irrelevant; unlike IEDs or hellfires or even the r9x, the market and the other people in it will almost certainly be fine.
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You can think of it in terms of discrimination in lethal effect. arty-shell bombs, suicide vests and car bombs are all designed to maximize lethal effect across the widest radius possible. Hellfires are not optimized for lethal radius, but their warhead and kinetic energy often deliver a similar effect. The R9X is directly intended to minimize lethal radius, and these pager bombs take it to about the minimum possible value while maintaining effectiveness. This minimization is possible because the attacker delivered these bombs in a way that maximized the chance of intimate contact with the target before detonation. IEDs are "to who it may concern"; these are, again, literally in the targets' pockets. And again, the Israelis did this blind, so they can't guarantee that it's a Hezbollah guy holding the hot potato when it pops. But you can't guarantee that the target of a sniper attack doesn't turn out of the line of fire at the last second, and you hit someone in the background instead. Mistakes happen, but this method seems to be quite optimized for minimizing them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
Drone strikes seems like a reasonable one. I'm not a fan of Israel by any means, but this seems straightforwardly preferable to the classic "hellfire missile into a compound that turns out to be a wedding". As I recall, there were a lot of incidents along those general lines, any one of which was almost certainly much more objectionable than this entire attack.
What exactly is the basis for objection here?
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The targets are Hezbollah agents. I don't see any reasonable objection to Israel targeting Hezbollah agents.
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The method involves explosives, which are not perfectly discriminate, so there's risk of collateral damage. Only, these appear to be very small bombs, such that you need to be either touching them or quite unlucky to be seriously maimed or killed.
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The explosives are delivered "blind", in the sense that when they're detonated, the people detonating them don't know where they are or who actually has them, raising the risk of collateral damage. On the other hand, they were delivered in a way that provides a very high probability that they will, in fact, be in the direct personal possession of legitimate targets, and those not in the personal possession of legitimate targets probably got there by the actions of the legitimate targets, not the attackers.
My distaste for the Israeli state comes from them frequently being indiscriminate in the application of violence, either maiming and killing people who I do not consider legitimate targets. This attack in particular seems orders-of-magnitude better than the average in terms of target discrimination.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Cheney and Romney are the prototypical examples of Blue Tribe Republicans.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
I'm just delighted to see the classics are still appreciated.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I've heard accounts from women who have an abortion, and then years later see mothers with their children, realize that could have been them, and experience significant and lasting regret.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Mm.
Suppose we have the following two statements:
"There's nothing wrong with these acts or the communities that celebrate engaging in them."
"These communities were ground-zero for a plague that has to date killed an amount of people roughly equivalent to a world war, and the acts they engaged in and their celebration of those acts resulted in a highly disproportionate amount of what we know term super-spreading, particularly in the early stages of that pandemic."
Are these statements compatible?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Pinging @Hoffmeister25, since he seemed interested as well.
Is that from Blindsight? Looks familiar.
Yup!
Anyway, I see what you (and @coffee_enjoyer) are getting at, but as a book nerd (and also a wannabe-never-was writer) I think the great Literature vs. Entertainment debate is a false dichotomy.
To be clear, I entirely agree! One of the things I learned as I got older and a bit wiser was that entertainment for its own sake is, ultimately, empty, and not even particularly entertaining. You can't extrude it by the hundredweight according to a set formula without losing the special something that makes the best of it so delightfully seductive in the first place, and part of that special something seems to be insight, something that echoes and accretes in the inner self, that leaves an impression where lesser matter washes in and away without consequence.
I am not sure if you are complaining about "literature" that seems pointlessly navel-gazing with no real message to it, just exercises in masturbatory wordsmithing, or literature that you think has a bad message (i.e., a weapon in the culture war). Both those things exist. But appreciation for literature doesn't necessarily mean being a Barnard English major sniffing one's own farts.
Both, certainly. Some of it definitely feels either pointless or juvenile, in a Wow-I-Am-Very-Deep sense. On the bad message side... I'd be hard-pressed to find an author with worse messages than Peter Watts, but he's still a treasure to me because even if I fundamentally disagree with his worldview, I still come away feeling like my perspective has been sharpened thanks to the clarity with which he communicates it. To quote another favorite, "here comes, thank heaven, another enemy". And it's not even about naïve enjoyment, either; his Rifter trilogy was horrifying in the most literal sense, did permanent psychic damage to me, and I don't think I ever will want to read them again... but boy, did they leave an impression!
But there's a lot of other stuff that's just sort of unreflectively, unrefinedly bad. On the recommendation of a Mottian, I read Middlegame. There was a lot I really liked about the plot and the characters and the style, and I really wanted to enjoy it. but ultimately, the villains were one-note caricatures of misogyny, and eventually they stopped being monsters to me, and just became cartoons. They weren't doing what they were doing for sensical reasons, but rather because it was Very Important that I Update My Opions About Misogyny Now. And it killed the narrative for me, not because I think misogyny is super cool and don't like seeing it attacked, but because trite sermons from someone else's religion are really boring.
...Your point about Madame Bovary is well taken. Here's the thing, though: why was it assigned to you in high school?
Suppose that there's this idea that books and humans interact deterministically. People observe that good books leave an impression on the reader, and that the best books leave an impression on most or even all readers, and they think hey, we can shape people into the sort of people we want by having them read the right Good Books in the right sequence. Only, it doesn't actually work like that for a whole host of reasons, not least because people are different, and what they're ready for and what's relevant to them is different, and we lie to ourselves or are mistaken about what actually leaves an impression and which impressions are valuable... and so the end result is this big, unpleasant, brutalist machine covered in grime and bloodstains with a sign on it that reads "happy fun good-things dispenser."
There's a wealth of wonderful creations out there, no doubt. But there's this mass in the middle of it, with an ossified narrative maintained by a sort of pseudo-priesthood, and I'm deeply skeptical of the whole edifice. I would rather talk about "I liked this because I got such-and-such" out of it, and they seem to think they're doing something much more involved and much more serious than that.
Does that make more sense?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
How might we test this theory?
"Technical truth telling" does not seem like a useful term to me. When a paper declares that Kamala is the border Czar, and then claims that there is no such thing as a Border Czar, and edits the old headlines and articles in an attempt to avoid embarrassment, is this "technical truth telling"? If so, I submit that all statements are true if we allow sufficiently "technical" hair-splitting on the definition of truth, so the term is a fully-general counterargument, relying on selective application for its utility.
Likewise, If the role of the media is to give the public a clearer understanding of the world we live in, and we observe journalists pushing a particular falsehood very hard, and then we observe the portions of the public with the highest trust in those journalists disproportionately believing that falsehood, does that disprove the theory? What if we can show that this has happened repeatedly?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I'm not overflowing with examples because I actively avoid most of the stuff, but I can offer a few, direct and indirect.
Bless Me Ultima, a babbies first lit book assigned in an institution of higher learning.
Indirectly, Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy. A friend was enthusiastic about the book, and neither they, the wikipedia article, nor reading a few passages myself revealed why.
Bonus: the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Theoretically, these texts fit the particular shapes of some particular population's mind, sure. But when I try to engage with the people actually claiming to find value on what value they find, I am left mystified or alienated.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
What's you understanding of the role of the homosexual community (and also the hard drug community, similar arguments applied) in the emergence and spread of the AIDS pandemic? Wikipedia lists 42 million dead, among them something like half of the pre-AIDS male homosexuals in America.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
When I was younger, both I and my elder brother wanted to be writers, but we disagreed strongly on what made good writing. Probably the simplest way to describe it was that he liked art and I liked entertainment. We've never really resolved the disagreement, but I've spent a long time contemplating why I enjoy what I enjoy, and most of it seems to come down to one of two things; either the piece encapsulates a feeling, or it encapsulates an idea. Either way, these encapsulations are valuable in that they give one significant control over one's own mental state, and that is both pleasurable and useful in many ways.
I think a lot of my own bogglement with the general category of "literature" is that so much of the time, there doesn't seem to be anything useful being encapsulated. I can imagine that the encapsulations are in some incompatible format, but the general impression left is still...
Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you'll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others.
You decode the signals, and stumble:
I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome—
To fully appreciate Kesey's Quartet—
They hate us for our freedom—
Pay attention, now—
Understand.
There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance.
The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.
Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.
The signal is an attack.
And it's coming from right about there.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Further, when you look at the teachings of Christian spiritual teachers, the point is very often that you shouldn't be praying for random things you want, you should be praying for God to do what he wants.
Just so. For myself personally, though, I think I've leaned too hard in that direction in the past, verging on a sort of fatalism, to the point that I no longer prayed for people to be healed, but only for what God wanted to happen, to happen. It seems to me that this verged on a sort of cowardice, where it became more about not asking for things because I didn't believe they'd happen anyway. On the other hand, I've found the faith to pray to God for things that seemed highly improbable, have in fact received some of those highly improbable things, and am very grateful for them. To a great extent, my life is now defined by those positive answers to specific requests, which inspires great thankfulness to God for granting them.
The rational perspective would point out that this is all just confirmation bias. I've chosen to believe in God axiomatically, and I interpret all evidence I receive according to that axiom. But of course, there is no other way to reason from incomplete data; Axioms are necessary precisely because they cannot be proven, and they are necessary because it is impossible to reason without them.
Agreed that Prosperity theology is radioactive trash.
Would you expect American Communists, or indeed communists generally, to not support BLM?
If you were persuaded that hammers and sickles were a common addition to BLM-riot graffiti, would this be weak evidence of a connection between the two movements? To be clear, the best I can do after a brief search is two instances, and the vague memories of seeing many more at the time. I'm more curious about your reasoning process.
More generally, do you think the examples linked in this comment are likewise lacking a "developed political platform"? Are those people Marxists, in your view?
...Could it be that you were mistaken, and the hammer and sickle in that first example only represented "a union of social classes"? Maybe that guy wasn't a communist at all?
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