Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
I also put science in there. So are you saying that science produced by jews 'won'(ie, worked) because it was effective propaganda that was memetically powerful, and not because it was right?
And again, I do not believe that might makes right, or that what is right always wins in the court of public opinion, but it is correlated with it (that's why you cited american public opinion in 1939 to defend your isolationist views).
I am about as far from SS in views as it is possible to be, and do not wish to support their argument, but you are so obviously wrong I cannot restrain myself.
Drop the Jewish part, I have zero interest in that.
We know for a certainty that "science" that is not in any way factual or true can "win", in the sense of being adopted as scientific fact society-wide, purely because of effective propaganda and memetic power, while being absolutely false in its factual claims. Fucking Freudianism did exactly that! Lysenkoism was forced at gunpoint, but Freud's bullshit rewrote vast chunks of our society, based on fucking nothing beyond a story people were primed to believe. His disciples continued the scam, and their disciples continued the scam, and it's still fucking going!
I would dispute that, obviously, given the battle lines in this discussion. So you refuse to proclaim that HBD is true out of fear it might help people like him, but have no compunction agreeing with him on the cornerstone of his epistemology. Looks like you have 'axioms' in common. And even though you can "choose to believe" less distateful things, your opinon, like his, will remain a lifeless copy of the real thing (an opinion guided there by the truth and subject to updates).
He had and has his detractors. But more importantly, why does an error invalidate the whole system? It is absurd to deny the signal because it wasn't strong enough that one time. Last time, you tried to put a barrier in your epistemology between ideology-like and gravity-like knowledge, but postmodernism burned through it as I expected, and now you're questioning gravity.
The evidence for "junk science can dominate actual science for generations at a time" is orders of magnitude stronger than the evidence for "genes are why achievement gaps exist". I have never claimed to not care about evidence, only that evidence does not force conclusions. The fact that conclusions are chosen does not mean that all choices are equally good or even honest, and in fact some choices are much better or worse than others.
You have made a claim. I have presented very strong evidence against that claim. You are resisting that evidence, in exactly the process I have been trying to point out to you throughout this entire conversation. You aren't even wrong to do so! The evidence is ironclad, so far as it goes: you can't claim that Freudianism wasn't bullshit, and you can't claim that it didn't dominate for generations, but this evidence contradicts your axioms, and those axioms are firmly cemented. So what do you do? You take note of the phrase so far as it goes. You look for other evidence, kick up a meta-level, etc, etc, and the discussion continues. And this is a good and proper and reasonable thing to do! Not doing it would not improve your reasoning capabilities! But that process involves choices in sequence, not deterministic forced state transitions. You can choose, right now, to ghost this conversation, and your mind certainly will not change. You can choose to continue this conversation but just be a maximal dick, and again your mind will not change. You can choose to continue the conversation in good faith as you more or less have to date, because you value some greater axiom more than the axiom in question here, and maybe your mind changes and maybe it doesn't. You can choose to really dig into the question and look at evidence, or just go off cached thought. I have all these same choices.
All of those choices are choices, not deterministic forced state transitions. Your mind cannot change without them. If the sum of a sequence of choices is you changing your mind, you have chosen to change your mind.
The unmerited success of Freudianism doesn't make electrical engineering stop working. It does prove that the social construct we call "scientific consensus" is fundamentally unreliable, that things can be called science without actually being science. It also demonstrates why the epistemological problem I've been gesturing at actually exists. You cannot, in fact, assume that truth is winning in your local environment at any given point in time. You cannot rely on social consensus in any form for fundamental questions of reality. You cannot uncritically assume that evidence offered you second-hand is actually trustworthy, which means that the overwhelming majority of evidence available to you is at least somewhat suspect.
What you can do is grab as much evidence as you can fit in your metaphorical pockets, bang these pieces against each other to see which bits crumble, look for patterns, make predictions, and track how they work out. This is enough to get you, if you are careful and dedicated, to reasonable grounds to start examining the axioms you're choosing from in something approaching a rational fashion. It is not enough to get you to certainty, of the sort provided by simple, inevitable, universal natural processes like Gravity.
When I accuse you of rounding my arguments to absurdities, it's because of things like this. At no point have I actually questioned gravity, but you appear to be certain that I have. Presumably you believe that what I'm saying necessarily implies questioning gravity, but I have no idea why you believe this, so I have no way to argue the point other than to point out that you are continuing to assign to me arguments that I have not made.
Everything’s not an axiom. Definition time:
Axioms don’t change, they’re the start, what you reason from, not what you argue about. Calling your beliefs axioms is artificially locking them up, where the evidence and arguments can’t get to them.
My beliefs are my honest approximation of the truth, and they can change, like priors. You may think you’ve made an ironclad argument against them, and they may not change after 20, or 2000 comments, but that still does not make them axioms.
When have I ever claimed the opposite. Man, even in our other discussions I was already getting annoyed having to repeat every time that I think Freudianism is bullshit, and I even made a top-level back at the old place on how fucked up modern psychotherapy is because it was harming people I care about. It does not contradict my priors, and I have never claimed that falsehood can’t win, just that it’s harder.
I can’t choose to believe something I perceive as false (like there is a lion at my window). I choose to argue with you to give my perception more time to detect truth and falsehood, that is not choosing my version of the truth.
I choose to look out the window. I see a cow. So I believe there is a cow. Doesn’t mean I have chosen to believe in a cow instead of a crow. I didn’t choose what I saw, and I didn’t choose to believe what I saw either.
Hmmmm, I have to ask, could it be that you picked up the postmodernism strictly to serve as a defense mechanism for believing in God?
If I’m so gullible, woulnd’t you expect me to have less unorthodox positions? What are the fruits of your grand scepticism, worth (imo) sacrificing epistemic integrity? I think you’re missing a signal and wasting your time questioning the 99,99 % stuff.
Because your argument was not limited to ideology-like knowledge and was questioning gravity-like knowledge.
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Strong «I smoke to spite Hitler» energy.
Alternatively, @FCfromSSC just disagrees with him on race and probably other more weighty object-level matters (disagrees with me too), but most everyone accepts that social reality is socially constructed, in precisely the sense that it can systematically deviate from implications of honest scientific investigation, both on the level of a domain-specific narrative and on the meta-level of occasionally prioritizing narratives over evidence and narratively compelling beliefs over epistemically sound ones.
There's no smoking gun here, buddy: it's your epistemology that is the conspicuously deviant sort.
And it's not even consistent, I've pointed out a number of trivial holes and you just angrily shout to not notice them.
Because there is no principled way to delineate «the whole system». History is not a laboratory, everything is a one-off, nothing is truly replicable. Early 20th century psychology had happened exactly once, and got dominated by Freudian bullshit. At the same time, Communism with its blatant lies had dominated much of Eurasia, and in Germany this was countered by you-know-who. If anything, this shows us that grand narratives patently work. And this is indeed fucking strong evidence to ask whether you might also be living in the middle of one such grand narrative – or more. No matter how much it vexes you to adopt the «postmodernist» mindset.
«Postmodernists» actually make a strong, evidence-based point – because modernism fucking sucked for their generation.
Questioning gravity is good. That's how we can study anything nontrivial at all. It's just there are no sound reasons to conclude that gravity doesn't exist (whatever that means), so this questioning, normally, ends with (perhaps qualified) affirmation. This is not in any way a guarantee for any topic.
I wouldn't hide the truth or choose arguments by associates anyway, so the FC 'directed ideological cleaning' process is a mystery to me. Who knows what you guys smoke.
Original motte and bailey. Motte is ‘reality is partly socially mediated’.
Okay I disagree, it's just a weaker signal of the exact same process as science in a laboratory. It is by categorizing and linking distinct events that we can understand the world.
So according to you, if you quote history, it's just meaningless. No conclusions are allowed if a hostile head of state repeatedly violates the terms of the appeasement he gets, while another doesn’t? All completely independent events, no predictive value?
I see postmodernism does exist as a distinct concept when you want it to. Please just fucking tell me what term I am allowed to use for the sweeping epistemological changes you demand.
I’m ready to compare the achievements of modernism against postmodernism anytime you want.
It's a mystery because you don't want to look at it. You're observably doing it in this very conversation.
The motte is "reality is partly socially mediated, and that "partly" can vary considerably at different times and places, even if unmediatable reality can never be shut out permanently." The bailey is "reality is entirely socially mediated, we can think whatever we like and make it stick indefinately."
We're in the Motte.
Categorization and linkage (and observation for that matter) are fraught processes. Not fraught to the point that some knowledge can't exist, but more than fraught enough that knowledge can't be solved like tic-tac-toe.
No, it's evidence. We use axioms to collate and interpret evidence, and evidence in turn narrows the range of plausible axioms, and sometimes outright discredits some of them, but it's a two-way street, and subjective choices are involved when you travel in either direction. That's how reason works, and it's one of the reasons why reason is intractably imperfect, and why skepticism and critical thinking is so very necessary. Epistemic certainty is a feeling, not a fact. You can feel entirely certain and be dead wrong.
Disagreeing with you about whether something is "postmodern" is not an argument that Postmodernism does not exist as a distinct concept; in fact, it is the exact opposite.
You can call me Susan if it makes you feel better. You can even keep calling me a Postmodernist; I think you're wrong, but I'm far less interested in arguing about whether I'm a postmodernist or not than in arguing about how reason works, because I think we share enough common ground that you can be persuaded to see the truth of the matter.
OK you’re answering each other’s replies, this thread has a bad case of mitosis. I’m not complaining at all, but I’m not going to be able to keep generating replies of the superlative caliber you’re now used to, plus it’s getting a bit repetitive and line-by-line-y.
But I want to thank everyone for answering my question, and you two in particular for humouring me at length, it’s been fun and informative.
I don’t think ideological questions are ‘obvious’ or can be solved like tic-tac-toe, but I’ll let it go without accusing you of rounding my arguments to absurdities . The way I see it, this sort of ‘strawmanning’ is often an honest attempt at gauging the other guy’s position.
Seems to me he was saying it was fraught to the point knowledge can’t exist, and you implied earlier it tailed off to nothing, but okay, I’ll agree to the above. Still a massive gap between these two extremes.
I’ll leave your ‘unorthodox’ use of the word ‘axiom’ to another comment, when I get to it.
Okay because I need to call you something. I think the thread shows there is some real divergence in our epistemologies.
(Observe the apparent tractability of the question fading!)
...But seriously, this is inevitable. I'm doubtful this thread of discussion itself will actually sort the question either; like the previous discussions we've had, this one will probably taper off inconclusively, because one or both of us will get frustrated or distrated and we'll move on. But over several such, understanding grows, hopefully.
A fair point.
I eagerly await it. Have a good one, sir.
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Grasping at straws.
More effort than this, please.
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My argument is that science winning as consensus doesn't make it right, not that all science that has won out is wrong. The science produced by Jews includes the establishment of an academic, race-denying consensus that has, in my view, had cataclysmic impact on European society. It didn't win out because it was right. Of course Jews have also produced good science as well. What ulterior motive do Jews have to manipulate the laws of physics? The ulterior motives for using authoritarian tactics to enshrine race denial in the Academy are in many cases openly admitted by those most responsible.
How do you separate the right jewish thought that went into 'good science' and the false thought into superman? It just seems like the only difference is you haven't come up with a just-so theory why a certain law of physics benefits jews yet. Which feminists have done for men btw. So keep looking.
It's not a false thought, it's effective propaganda. As Rolling Stone wrote last month:
If you think I describe this as a "false thought" or even a "wrong idea" you misunderstand what I am saying. It's highly effective propaganda. In this case, we know the ulterior motives and the cryptic meaning behind the myths because they are openly admitted to, as in the case of Captain America. But even if they weren't openly admitted to, they could be analyzed in the same way every other body of myth or art is analyzed for esoteric symbolic meaning. The case of Superman is pretty overt, we could conclude this even if it weren't openly celebrated by Rolling Stone magazine. You seem to be pretending that with all myth and art we can work to understand the motivation of the artist, but this content produced by Jews is just completely inscrutable? It isn't, it just takes a little bravery to call out a pattern that is very, very clear.
As in, for example, the Frankfurt school they were open about the academic focus of their work being to find a psycotherapy for the Authoritarian Personality to stop anti-Semitism and another Holocaust. In the easiest cases which are well documented, we don't have to guess at the motivations as they are openly admitted to by the influencers. Madison Grant commented on Jews blocking research into race science as early as the 1910s.
You don't need a "just-so" story, you just need to believe them when they describe the motives and meaning of what they are creating!
Can you at least accept Superman as an example of the phenomenon I am describing, even if you want to continue to argue that this hasn't been a widespread practice in the Culture Industry for the past century?
The issue is the strength of the phenomenom. Of course artists put their personal experiences, often their political beliefs, in their work. That doesn’t mean the resulting public opinion is corrupted, and you can just pick 'which truth' you want to follow. A superman comic can’t convince me to jump off a bridge, and it can’t convince americans to go to war with hitler (I can’t believe I’m writing sentences as silly as this).
Or take you, for instance. You have probably consumed copious amounts of pro-white anime or something, where we don't have to guess the motives and meaning of creators either. Does that mean your pro-white views are corrupted bullshit? I would think there is more behind them than you happening to catch conan the barbarian on the tv one night.
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