Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
"Crack cocaine addicts should not be carrying guns" seems like a rare gun control policy proposal that I could imagine a lot of 2A diehards getting onboard with.
I agree in the abstract, but it's still not a serious enough infraction for me to change my assessment of the situation.
It's weird funny that I specifically asked you why you think this action was "virtuous", and part of your answer is, in essence, that was a wonderfully spiteful act of malicious revenge. Which is quite far from what I typically think of when I hear the word "virtuous".
Spite and malice can be virtuous. Who told you they couldn't?
Virtue is the appropriate response in the appropriate situation. It's not a static table of naughty and nice feelings that can be drawn up in advance. There's no reason a priori to think that spite is never an appropriate thing to feel.
To give a simple example, if a criminal is breaking into your house uninvited in the middle of the night, then the virtuous thing to do is certainly to respond with malice.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
Why?
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Why should a father not protect his son when he is able to? This should be the default position (not an absolute position of course, but the default one, at least) - especially for a crime as minor as tax fraud.
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There's something heartwarming about the party that has recently been so obsessed with procedural norms and maintaining the moral high ground learning that there are, in fact, situations where a strict literal interpretation of the norms should be suspended. This may be more of a tactical consideration than a purely ethical one, because it helps Republicans illustrate how absurd the prosecution of Trump has been.
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It's an appropriate parting "fuck you" to a political establishment that conspired to replace him without his consent in the 2024 election.
What a bizarre way of saying "there's no point in having rules or laws of any kind".
That's not what I said, and that's not the position I endorse.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
I would not, however, have promised in the first place to not do it.
This is reasonable. It's rarely a good look to contradict yourself so blatantly in public.
I'm not sure why you're referencing "TheMotte" here as if it were a hivemind, particularly when you're only the fourth person into the thread.
I was combining this thread with the post in last week's thread on the same topic, which got 3 additional replies that were critical of Biden.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
Good for him. This was the virtuous thing to do. The world needs more humans, and fewer bots who are governed by algorithms (even, and perhaps especially, when that algorithm is the algorithm for “justice”).
Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case? Be honest now.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d ago
One solution would be to have the laws only apply to the half of the population that has traditionally focused on child rearing, while the half of the population that has traditionally focused on innovating and building companies would be exempt.
But that's certainly a conversation that no one wants to have.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
The idea is that virtually everyone, as a free and politically engaged liberal subject, will have to deal with questions of politics, culture, and ethics; but not everyone will have to deal with STEM in the sense of actually requiring technical knowledge. On this particular day, there were probably more people who had to engage with questions about transsexuality (and therefore might benefit from an understanding of the history and philosophy of the concepts of sex and gender) than questions about calculus or linear algebra (particularly if we exclude people who require that sort of knowledge for their professional work). The humanities are thought to contribute to the education of a "well-rounded" individual because the humanities are everywhere while STEM knowledge is primarily utilized by professionals (and is therefore closer to a type of vocational training).
I say this as someone who makes a living as a software engineer. Knowing how to code is obviously useful for making money, but I don't think it really makes someone "well-rounded" in the way that studying history or art does, and certainly not in the way that studying philosophy does.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
Western philosophy, sure, but I don't see the Socratic school having much influence on Confucius, Mencius, Han Fei, Laozi, Zhuangzi, or any pre-20th century Chinese philosophy. Many of them seem like the sorts who'd object to holding up a guy who trolled Athens so hard he got cancelled from life (as I once heard it put) as an example for sages to imitate.
Yes, that's certainly correct. I think that's what makes the European (and specifically Socratic) tradition distinct from any other philosophical tradition; the emphasis is on a dynamic process of conflict, rather than a static body of received wisdom. There's someone in our midst who claims to be wise? Very well then, let's put his wisdom to the test, let's see how much he really knows. The principal figure is not the sage, but the prankster, the rabble-rouser. (I would speculate that this impulse in the European mind is part of why empirical science, industrialization, and broadly speaking "modern civilization" in general, arose first in the West and not anywhere else.)
a Chinese individual arguing that Western philosophy went off the rails with Socrates and Plato, and has spent the last two millennia and change building airy edifices of dangerous nonsense.
Right. Well, this position is not alien to Western philosophy itself. You can find it in Heidegger (Plato as introducing the terrible mistake of thinking that Being as such could be identical with a specific being, the Form of the Good, the Christian God, or what have you), you can find it in Nietzsche (Socrates as physical symptom of a degenerating and sickly organism), and others.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
I mean, I'm not going to have a kneejerk egalitarian response and discard your proposal wholesale. But if we're going to have a widespread public university system, then I don't see why we would intentionally handicap all but a few of those institutions. If Ohio State has a right to exist at all, then I don't see why it shouldn't have English and philosophy faculty as well, all else being equal.
On a personal level, there are also certain academics scattered around random state schools whose work I greatly enjoy and follow closely, so I have a personal interest in perpetuating the current system roughly as it exists now.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
As soon as you try to build something you're no longer a
critical theoristnag
Well, yes, but that's the point to a certain extent. The philosopher is a professional nag - that's his job, ever since Socrates. So one can argue that critical theory is actually quite traditional in this regard. (Of course if you asked the classic Frankfurt school guys what they wanted to build, they would have unhesitatingly answered "communism", but that just moves the question back a step, as the content of that term is itself very ill-specified).
The Apology really should be required reading in schools. Socrates went to the statesmen, the poets, and the artisans, for he was told they were wise; but when pressed and questioned, their wisdom amounted to nothing. When the oracle at Delphi was asked who the true wisest man was, she answered that it was Socrates, for he knew that he knew nothing. And this is the ideal by which philosophy has attempted to conduct itself ever since (but, as with all ideals, mortals fall short).
The philosopher isn't in the business of building things; he's in the business of criticizing, poking holes, formulating problems but no solutions. He is the grim, persistent reminder that you might not know as much as you think you do. Understandably, people tend to find this frustrating (in the case of Socrates, frustrating enough that the Athenians put him to death).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
Recently in Compact Magazine: How Professors Killed Literature. Perhaps relevant given the other recent posts on contemporary media and writing:
English degrees have declined by almost half since their most recent peak in the 2005-2006 academic year, despite the student population having grown by a third during the same period. Romance languages—my area of specialty in a teaching career spanning more than two decades—have done little better. German departments are in free fall. Doctoral students from departments that used to concentrate on literary studies are confronted with a frightening absence of jobs.
In one common account, the responsibility for this collapse falls on the shifting preferences of students, who no longer want to read, and, by extension, on the shifting media landscape in which young people are now growing up. This explanation lets professors off the hook too easily. Students may be turning away from literature, but we abandoned it, too.
It's a fairly standard lament about the decline of the English major, the kind of which has been in circulation for at least a decade now. There were a few points in particular that I wanted to elaborate on and respond to.
[...]“The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.”
Reading this statement, I was struck by the dispassion of the dean: Far from the horror with which similar things are uttered in private conversations, she is understanding of and even sympathetic to this surge of illiteracy on one of the most elite campuses in the world. Claybaugh seems jovially resigned to the fact that “different capacities” of her students don’t allow them to access those things to which she presumably devoted her life: literature as a practice, as a set of exceptional texts, as a tradition, as a celebration of language.
The assertion that the texts of the literary canon are "exceptional" is, of course, not an unassailable axiom that is beyond the purview of critical inquiry. I believe I have remarked here previously that the social prestige enjoyed by literature as such (that is, written narrative fiction, without the use of audiovisual elements, in something that at least resembles the form of the novel) is somewhat arbitrary, and in need of justification. I don't think there's anything intrinsic in the literary form that privileges it above film, video games, comic books, etc, in terms of its ability to accomplish the sorts of things that we generally want artistic works to accomplish. (For a critical examination of the institution of the "English major" from a leftist perspective, see here and here).
I don't think it will be a severe loss for humanity if undergraduates don't read The Scarlet Letter. Although the fact that they might find such a task difficult is concerning for independent reasons.
Three solutions were attempted in an earlier phase of this crisis, all guided by the assumption that students abhor the strange, the ancient, the remote, and like the familiar, the modern, and the close.
I believe I'm fully aligned with the author's sentiment here. If an education in the humanities means anything, then it has to involve exposure to the strange, the remote, and probably the ancient as well. Whatever specific form that might take.
Already in the 1990s, the standard graduate seminar in literature departments comprised several chapters of books or short essays of some of the new (primarily French) authorities that were summoned to provide the clues for another, generally smaller, list of poems, essays, or narratives. Back then, we called it “theory.” Often, in practice, it was philosophy read outside of its native disciplinary context and thus understood in somewhat nebulous terms. Derrida’s work was elaborated in dialogue with the great representatives of the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas. There is no reason to expect a doctoral student in literature to be able to reconstruct this lineage or adjudicate the complex debates between these figures.
Ironic that he calls out Derrida specifically here. In The Truth in Painting, his longest sustained treatise on art as such, Derrida raises the question of why the philosophical tradition has perpetually subjugated the image to the word, the poem, the logos - a gesture that the author of the current piece appears content to recapitulate.
Meanwhile, political talk largely edged out discussions about narrative structure, textual sources, or the sheer beauty of a given author’s prose. Faithful to an idea of the intellectual as overseer of social decency and as a moral tribune, literature professors took on the grand history of our time, the march of freedom incarnated in the struggles of one group or another, and the quest for emancipation and the resistance it met from reactionary forces.
At a basic level, there's nothing wrong with analyzing a literary text from an explicitly political angle. Politics is both very interesting and very important! Frequently, the politics of a work (both in terms of its immanent content, and in terms of the political context of its production) is one of the most interesting things about it. Questions of race are important, questions of gender are important, these are things that we can and should be thinking about when we talk about art.
The issue that we find ourselves confronted with today is that the very concept of "politics in art" has been colonized exclusively by one side of the political divide (I'm reminded of the joke about how presumptuous it was of the LGBT community to think that they could claim something as universal as "refracted light" all for themselves), and this side has the virtually unchallenged authority to enforce their point of view in academic institutions. A priori, we should be all for politics in art. But when "politics in art" comes to exclusively mean "going book by book, explaining how they were all written by evil white men to oppress women/browns/gays/etc, and thereby concluding that the way forward is puberty blockers and mass immigration", it's understandable why the right would want to throw in the towel on the whole discussion and retreat to a position of castrated neutrality.
A genuine, honest inquiry into the political nature of a work of art has to allow for multiple possible conclusions. Maybe the book is ultimately about how great white men are, and that's a bad thing. Or maybe it's about how great white men are, and that's a good thing! There's a certain repetitiveness to works of "critical theory": the conclusions are always predetermined in advance, the line of argument predictable, it always finds exactly what it set out to find. Which raises concerns about how "critical" it is in the first place. If you always know the answer in advance, then you're not actually engaged in critical inquiry; you're just grandstanding.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
Hypersensitive, perhaps. Deliberate seeking, certainly not. I can assure you that the reaction (to the aforementioned video game features) is as spontaneous and vigorous as the left’s reaction to, say, confederate flags and statues.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8d ago
I don't think anyone is thinking about it that deeply
Sure, but you don't need to think deeply about it to have an intuitive understanding of what things (policies, ethical commitments, artistic portrayals, etc) will be helpful or harmful to your agenda. People tend to have good noses for these things.
If progressives wanted to avoid the perception that femininity could be dangerous they wouldn't have imposed toxic femininity - e.g. totally unchecked forms of feminine-coded social combat like gossip and cancelling
I mean, the point of accruing power is that you have to exercise it at some point, and that's necessarily going to generate some pushback. That's unavoidable. That's where the thought policing comes in, to try and minimize dissent.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
8d ago
It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.
Well, no, it's not ironic at all actually. The writers know exactly what they're doing, at least at a subconscious level. The idea that femininity could be manipulative and dangerous is a bad look for women, so obviously they would rather not depict such characters.
Feminism as a concrete social movement is about advancing the material and social interests of women (or at least, the interests of a certain subset of women). It's not about "giving people the freedom to explore their identities" or "recognizing the complexity of every human" or any claptrap like that.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
There's a lot to unpack here.
You raise a valid point in that there are a lot of ugly/undesirable women who miss out on a lot of the benefits that conventionally attractive women get. But at the same time, I think the average woman (so, not outright ugly/disabled/etc, but decidedly not 95th percentile either) still underestimates how much attention she gets just for being a woman, because she's never had to experience the other side of things.
To put things in perspective: if you even have a "social circle", like at all, then you're already doing pretty damn well for yourself relative to the entire adult population. There's a non-trivial number of men, especially among the spergy AGP population we're talking about, that have essentially no friends or social connections of any kind. They got nothin'. There are women who find themselves in this sort of position too, but they're significantly more uncommon than their male counterparts.
If only the top 5% of women were experiencing substantial amounts of male attention, could feminism really sustain itself? It's a rare woman who doesn't have a story about a bad relationship, or at least an instance of catcalling or harassment, something. Clearly there are lots of women who are having lots of interactions with men! Otherwise the "gender wars" wouldn't be a political topic in the first place. For the type of isolated recluse who's been essentially invisible for his whole life, even the idea of negative attention like catcalling can become part of the erotic fantasy.
(I'll also just note that if you actually dive deep into AGP porn, you'll find a surprising number of "status loss" stories, i.e. rich white businessman gets transformed into a poor Mexican cleaning lady, things like that. It's not always a power fantasy of being in the top 1%).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9d ago
Compassion isn't a social affect: it's an act of the will.
This makes it sound like something you can arbitrarily turn on or off "at will", which can't be right. But it also can't be right to say that it's entirely outside of your control either.
I suppose I would say it's something like an "unchosen choice".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10d ago
I think the criteria is that if it’s not bad enough for your own side to care (I mean a large number of people genuinely caring, en masse, rather than just some senators thinking “I’m gonna have to burn some political credit to confirm this guy”), then it’s not a genuine moral infraction, and it can be assumed that the alleged outrage on the opposing side is largely performative.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10d ago
Wow, what a great point. And this applies to so many other groups, not just vegans. Thank you so much for this, I’m stealing this.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11d ago
I don't mean masculine in some spiritual sense of idealized masculinity (masculinity of war, hunting, bravery, leadership etc) but in the empirical sense of percentage of partakers in the activity.
Right. But shouldn't we take special note of this distinction? When you look at this personality type that's "at risk" for AGP - nerds, aspies, autists, whatever you want to call it - isn't there something about it that's "in between" masculine and feminine? (Appropriate, given the topic at hand). In one sense you are correct that it's "hyper male" just in terms of sheer statistics. But at the same time, these men tend to display traits that are decidedly unmasculine - higher in neuroticism, more emotional in general, higher verbal ability, less physically aggressive, often averse to traditionally masculine interests like (physical) sports, etc.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11d ago
Genuine empathy cannot be compelled. And to the extent that it could be, it would have no value. We should encourage understanding; that is, a rational understanding of the physical and social causes that make people think as they think and do as they do. But such understanding is distinct from empathy and compassion as emotional affects.
What I find most obnoxious about the contemporary transsexual "movement" is that they have legislated, by social fiat, a prescribed position on a philosophical question that rightly should be a matter of free inquiry and debate: namely, the metaphysics and ontology of gender. This really grinds my gears like nothing else. Possibly more than anything having to do with bathrooms or puberty blockers. The right to open inquiry is one of the closest things I have to a sacred value. When you are forced to refer to an MTF transsexual as "she", you are being compelled, under social duress, to assert as an ontological truth that this person just is a woman (and all parties are aware that that's plainly what's going on here - otherwise it wouldn't be such a heated topic of disagreement in the first place). I can't accept being compelled to assent to such a contentious position.
For my part, the two positions on the ontology of gender that I take seriously are the conservative position - that there are such things as men and women, and the way we usually sorted people into those buckets up until ~40 years ago is basically correct - or the eliminativist position - that no person is either a man or a woman, and thus "X is a woman" is vacuously false for all X. On either position, to say that an MTF transsexual "is a woman" is to utter a falsehood, and thus I do not believe that such a statement should be socially compulsory. There have been serious attempts to develop an ontology that would support the transsexual position, and I treat them with the same respect that I give by default to all positions that I disagree with, but I don't personally consider any such view to be a live possibility.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11d ago
I don’t understand why more people don’t recognize that Allman is clearly superior.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11d ago
Undoubtedly so! Although the point is that I'm less of an outlier when compared with the transsexual population, as they're more likely than average to be hypersexual and have a wide range of paraphilias.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
Why is this such an issue? Restrooms have stalls.
If I’m allowed into the women’s bathroom, I’m 100% going to listen to women pee and it’s going in my spank bank for later. So if women don’t want that, they should keep men out of their bathrooms!
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
Zizek explicitly distinguishes the death drive from Schopenhauer’s concept of Will:
Drive is a persistence which goes on even when the will disappears or is suspended.
The death drive is the point where the subject contradicts and undermines himself; it belongs to the domain of the unconscious. It is what makes a final state of completion or satisfaction (even in the purely negative sense of being free from desire) impossible. It certainly has nothing to do with any conscious willing or desire.
I didn’t quote the part where he references Schopenhauer by name, but if you check the video, he does mention him.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
I don't suppose I could interest you in psychoanalysis? This would be a "skeptical" position by your standards, but, hopefully it's a type of skepticism that may provide some illumination:
In what, then, consists the gap that separates psychoanalysis from Buddhism? At least, Lacanian psychoanalysis.
In order to answer this question, we should confront what I think is the basic enigma of Buddhism, its blind spot. Ok, maybe some of you are more intelligent, but I was talking with many Buddhists, and all of them, I'm asking them this same question. I didn't yet get a good answer. The simple question is the following one: how did the fall into samsara, the wheel of life, occur? That is to say, the question that we should raise is the exact opposite of the main Buddhist concern; "how can we break out of the wheel of life, this wheel of false passions and so on, and attain Nirvana"? The question is exactly the opposite for me... it's not, "we are caught in this false reality, can we break out of it and attain the void"? The question is, how did we fall into it in the first place? [...] The nature and origin of the impetus by means of which desire, its deception, emerged out of the void, is the big unknown at the heart of the Buddhist edifice. [...]
This question points towards an act that, precisely in the quantum sense maybe, breaks the symmetry of Nirvana itself, and thus makes appear something out of nothing. Freud's answer for this is precisely "drive", trieb [the death drive]. I want to be here very precise. What Freud calls drive, trieb, is not the Buddhist wheel of life. [...] The point of Freud is not, "no we cannot get out, we are forever caught in the wheel of craving which makes us nonsatisfied". Drive on the contrary is a kind of Freudian eppur si muove. The Freudian ontological wager is that even when you traverse the fantasy, go through the illusions and so on, you are not in Nirvana. Something still moves. [...]
...Drive is a persistence which goes on even when the will disappears or is suspended. I think it's wrong, phenomenologically, to read Freud's todestrieb as another expression of "will". Todestrieb is precisely something which remains even when you suspend the will. [...] Again the question that interests me in Buddhism is, to put it in popular culture terms, the question that unfortunately Star Wars fails to answer: how did evil emerge? How did Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? And the film fails there of course, miserably. But there is one useful notion that you find there: this idea of a disturbance in the Force. The idea is, to put it in Buddhist terms - and there are some mysterious passages in Tibetan Buddhist stuff that point in this direction - it's not simply that we have Nirvana, and then samsara, the field of false passions and appearances. Something can go terribly wrong already at the level of Nirvana itself, up there. There is something wrong up there, some pathological disturbance, which is not yet "we are caught in desire and false craving", and that would be "drive", I think. Drive is Nirvana, spiritual enlightenment, going wrong.
I briefly outlined the reasons for my judgement in another comment in this thread. None of them have anything to do with Biden's "strength". (And for the record, the idea that "good = being 'strong' and doing whatever you want" is, at best, a highly simplified distortion of Nietzsche's actual views.)
It does depend on Biden's motivations to an extent. If it was done out of genuine love, then yes, you should applaud. If it was a purely self-interested act of political calculation, not so much.
Forsaking your flesh for Christ - there's at least a real dilemma there. That's at least an interesting problem. But forsaking your flesh for the abstract idea of democracy and the rule of law? Well, I'm afraid that's where I'll have to part with Catholic morality, if that's what it recommends.
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