domain:cafeamericainmag.com
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6m ago
Thank you for taking the time to reply, I really do appreciate it.
I think this is an instance of the Motte of a Motte-and-Bailey that is commonly deployed in defense of every academic discipline that operates according to "humanities rules". Motte: "This is just a bunch of guys shooting the shit. Sometimes they even produce interesting things that I personally enjoy. Why do you, an outsider who doesn't even appreciate any of this, barge in and try to impose rules such as your 'epistemic standards'?"
Sorry if I didn't emphasize this enough, but I did say that you had to evaluate every work on a case by case basis. What I meant that "guys shooting the shit" is a helpful way to approach some continental works. I don't think it's the best way to approach all continental works. Derrida's Voice and Phenomenon lays out some claims and arguments in the philosophy of mind that, I think, can be phrased in simple and accessible terms. Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a pretty down to earth history of the development of the western prison system over the last several centuries. They're just, like, normal books. Nothing too mysterious going on.
I do think that Lacan goes off the reservation sometimes, to the point that the commentaries and secondary sources on his work are sometimes better than the original works themselves. But that doesn't mean that everything he wrote is bad, and it certainly doesn't mean that every work of continental philosophy is bad.
Bailey: "These people are the world authorities on philosophy. We pay them to do philosophy and all philosophers agree that they are the most influential and insightful philosophers, so we should defer to them in matters of philosophy."
"Deference" to an "authority" is a concept that's about as antithetical to philosophy as you can get. For every single claim in the history of philosophy, you can find examples of someone asserting the opposite; for every canonical philosopher, you can find another canonical philosopher who thought the first guy was an idiot. Even if you were to just focus on continental philosophy alone, I really can't emphasize enough just how fragmented it is. Philosophy just is debate and disagreement, in a way that no other field is. I mean it when I say that if you walk into an English department (which is where continental philosophers usually hang out in the US) you can find people who think that Lacan was bullshit and evil, Sartre was bullshit and evil, Derrida was bullshit and evil... who is the authority to defer to? No one would be able to agree!
Analytic philosophers I think are quite scrupulous about this, to a fault. Because of continental philosophy's greater focus on specific figures rather than isolated positions and arguments, it's more common to get people who are "fans" of one figure or another, and I acknowledge that sometimes it looks like they're treating them as an authority figure. Although I don't think that's really what's going on usually. When someone says "Marx said X" for example, it should be read as more like "X is a claim that was developed in Marx's work, so you should refer to his works if you want further justification for it" or "I believe X is true, but I didn't come up with it, Marx did", rather than "you should believe X because Marx said so". More like citing your sources, rather than an assertion of authority. Even if someone did start treating their favorite philosopher like an authority figure, they wouldn't be able to do so without major cognitive dissonance, for all the reasons mentioned above; they'd have to explain why there are a lot of other philosophers who think their favorite "authority" was wrong about everything.
I can't personally vet the psychology of everyone who talks about philosophy. Maybe there are some people who really do believe "X is true because Y said so". But, that doesn't reveal anything in particular about philosophy itself. That just reveals that that particular person is dumb and wrong. It would be like saying that data fabrication is a part of science because some scientists have fabricated data before.
As a result, there are Lacanians and Deleuzians sitting in IRBs and ethics boards and asking to be persuaded, in their terms, before I am allowed to use my funding to perform scientific experiments
I would be legitimately fascinated and highly interested if you could provide specific examples of that happening.
we defer to them in questions of what arguments are acceptable in politics and school; and ultimately they are what anchors the chains of trust and authority that we use to determine which political movements are legitimate (at risk of pulling clichés from the bingo board, the argument that the druggie who runs off with five pairs of sneakers as he torches the store is misguided but has his heart in the right place ultimately leads back, via many chains of simplification for political expediency, to some humanities tract full of "poetic language") and which ones are to be treated as threats.
I think you're overestimating the real world impact of academic philosophy here. I think it would be kinda neat if it actually did have that level of impact. But I don't think it does.
I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong; I'm not trying to put words into your mouth) that you see a direct causal link between continental philosophy on one hand and contemporary wokeness on the other. It's a claim that I've seen repeated in various forms on TheMotte on multiple occasions, and I've always disagreed with it, for 3 main reasons:
-
Broadly speaking, I don't think that people hold the political positions they do because they read a book, or even because they talked to someone who read a book. I think people believe the things they do because they want certain things (wealth, power, various types of freedom, etc). The desire and the need for something concrete comes first, and then they look for an ideology later to justify it. So, for example, I don't think that DEI exists in the US today because of humanities academics. I think it exists because that's naturally the sort of thing that arises when you have an ascendant coalition of racial minorities and a demographically declining racial majority.
-
The "big names" of continental philosophy are not particularly woke (there's little in their work that would be recognizable as modern wokeness, anyway) and in fact I think there are resources in their work that could be a benefit to anti-wokeness.
-
Regarding the point about obscurantist language - do you think that's somehow necessary to leftist politics? If they were forced to only use simple words then the whole thing would collapse? Because I think that's clearly not true. You can easily put all the key tenets and arguments of wokeness into simple language. To reiterate the point above, woke people are woke because of the intrinsic content of the positions, not because they were hypnotized by a humanities tract.
Lost
7m ago
Neoconservatives are not and were not ever conservative. Their origin was in the Democratic party, in many cases as Socialists, who saw an opportunity to take over the foreign politics of the Republican party when they lost a struggle session to New Left Great Society culture leftists. This would be like if the Chapo guys defected with Anna Khachiyan to the right because they had some weird fascination with Eastern Europe and the Balkans and in 60 years you called them conservatives when they defected back to the left to ensure the (D) candidate doesnt stab Bulgaria in the back
SubstackNecron
15m ago
nor do I believe that there is any meaningful number of progressives in positions of power who believe in executing people for expressing conservative opinions.
True if once we got to the point where we decided as a society "we should start just liquidating inconvenient people again" it might not be entirely clear where that stopped or who would be designated disposable under that paradigm. I am just as I said playing devils advocate here, I think if we got to the point where we were just executing either thieves or conservatives society would have gone pretty far off the rails albeit in radically different directions in those two cases.
jeroboam
17m ago
I accept your swap and will vote for whatever candidate I was going to vote for anyway. Thank you for being a stooge.
You are my 117th swap so far this election.
AnonymousActuary
18m ago
if you read any coverage of DeSantis back when he seemed like the rising star you would realize it is beyond likely, it is certain.
Felagund
19m ago
Yes, somehow Grants Pass was the most striking for me as well from this last term, in that it seemed the most tenuous and absurd. I was thinking the whole time, how did that position manage to attract three votes, when it was so transparently not what the 8th amendment is saying?
AnonymousActuary
21m ago
AnonymousActuary
21m ago
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
24m ago
As I’ve made clear before, I don’t believe that there is such thing as “the red tribe”, nor do I believe that there is any meaningful number of progressives in positions of power who believe in executing people for expressing conservative opinions.
SubstackNecron
27m ago
conclusively demonstrated, numerous times over an extended duration, that they’re unwilling and/or incapable of participating non-parasitically in society
To play devils advocate this would describe the red tribe to people who will very likley end up in charge of the US in the long term.
SubstackNecron
29m ago
In a scenario where Taiwan goes hot in the near future
China is rapidly building up there arsenal. Taiwan won't go hot until they know they can slag the US as a going concern.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
30m ago
The undersea SCS sensor stuff is interesting, make a lot of sense for both sides to lay sensors there. I wonder if it would make sense to just fill the whole area with them willy-nilly, dumping them out of ships and aircraft just before going in? For China, if both sides can see eachother's submarines and their missile subs are safe in the Sea of Bohai, it might even the gap.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
33m ago
In a scenario where Taiwan goes hot in the near future and the Chinese arsenal is deployed, I'd expect probably a few dozen mushroom clouds over the USA, due to destruction on the ground + ABM + other targets (Taiwan itself, Japan, South Korea, Australia, possibly others). The USA would probably survive, although things'd be tough for a while.
The Russian arsenal, assuming for the sake of argument that it works, is a different kettle of fish.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
38m ago
Moreover, nuclear targeting is not done on the basis of a list of largest cities in the enemy’s homeland, it’s done by targeting military and command installations and war critical infrastructure as well as strategic forces. A lot of that is pretty red, although admittedly DC and San Diego are not.
I'd expect both in actual practice; a lot of the point of a deterrent (short of the US/Russian lolhuge arsenals) is that you threaten to go countervalue in response to an attack out of spite, and it's likely that things going nuclear will be the result of a false alarm saying the other side's attempting alpha strike.
Quantumfreakonomics
47m ago
It is entirely possible that I am too election-brained to understand the logic here at the moment, but I am a bit confused at the premise. If there is a relatively large percentage of third party votes in safe blue (or safe red) states, but a very low percentage of third party votes in swing states, literally nobody who matters will be fooled. It will be plainly obvious that voters who have a strong preference for one party over the other, and who could be relied upon to turn out for their preferred side in the event of a close election, are casting meaningless throwaway votes.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
52m ago
I've seen it reference on here more than once, have not seen it anywhere else.
faceh
54m ago
If I know the identify of my counterparty, it should in theory be possible to check whether they cast a vote or stayed home as agreed.
Not sure what the proper penalty would be.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
56m ago
Glad to help. But your claim was that Trump killed that movement, and as I pointed out above, it actually killed itself. Trump did not discredit foreign interventionism; his predecessors did that for him. Trump did not discredit fiscal responsibility; his predecessors did that for him. Trump did not establish that personal character is irrelevant in the presidency; his predecessors did that for him. He is the effect, not the cause, and it seems to me that you are speaking as though this all could have gone some other way, if only his supporters had possessed the necessary moral fortitude.
If you want to argue that foreign interventionism was a sound policy, by all means, take the floor. If you want to argue that the fiscally-responsible promised land was just over the next hilltop in 2016 or even right now, by all means make your case. But it seems to me that you are painting the GOP elite with virtues the historical record cannot remotely support. They lost, and they lost for concrete, obvious reasons. What benefit is derived from ignoring or papering-over their failures?
Foreign interventionism made a hell of a lot more sense when we were fighting the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is gone, and you think nothing should have changed? Why?
Spookykou
58m ago
I remember not too long ago, a bunch of conservatives got excited because the audience for whatever show Colbert hosts now, booed when the CNN affiliated host said something about them being impartial. It was amusing to me, because the conservatives took it to mean, even this progressive audience knows how biased (against Trump) CNN is. Of course, the reality was that they were booing CNN for being biased in favor of Trump, because this was within about a month of the debate and that was the normie progressive take, that CNN was basically in league with Trump.
crushedoranges
1hr ago
Really? Huh. Hm. Shows what I know.
Lewis2
1hr ago
The timing for that doesn’t work out at all. The Second Great Awakening burnt out by the 1830s–40s, several generations before most states eliminated or severely restricted the death penalty. Also, Christians support the death penalty at higher rates than non-Christians, at least in the United States.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1hr ago
Vance was not the announced VP pick yet and did not yet have a SS detail.
Does that make his story too paranoid? Only a vanishing few people would know he was going to be the ultimate pick. But his name was being thrown around.
Although you aren't replying to me, I feel obliged to note yet again that Is =/= Ought. I have no clue why I keep having to spell this out, and in Rat spaces no less.
I am saying that SJ is, probabilistically, less of a problem because there's a fair chance nuclear war gets rid of it rendering most efforts to fight it moot. I am not saying that mass casualties from nuclear war are good because of this. The past couple of election cycles I've been begging all the parties to do anything about civil defence.
More options
Context Copy link