EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
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User ID: 78
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
7mo ago
So, what are you reading?
Still on The Wretched of the Earth. Thoughts below.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
7mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm picking up Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. It has been on the backlog for years.
Paper I'm reading: Dombrink's The Touchables: Vice and Police Corruption in the 1980's.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
7mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm going through Plato's Protagoras. Have been reading about the sophists recently.
Paper I'm reading: Crombe and Nagl's A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
7mo ago
So, what are you reading?
Still on Paradise Lost. It's incredibly boring whenever the good guys are talking.
Paper I'm reading: Csiszar's Seriality and the Search for Order: Scientific Print and its Problems During the Late Nineteenth Century
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
8mo ago
So, what are you reading?
Still on Paradise Lost. Satan always knows what to say.
Also starting Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, which has been very worthwhile. He's a man both clever and decent, and he writes plainly about things that clever people often don't say. It also has gems like
Adieu! and be persuaded that I shall love you extremely, while you deserve it; but not one moment longer.
I don't think he meant it, but it must have been something to get these letters.
Paper I'm reading: Podgorski's Dynamic Conservatism.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
8mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Paradise Lost. So far God isn't coming off well and Jesus sounds harebrained. On the other hand, Satan seems to have unfortunate ideas about what to do with humanity, which feels personal.
Paper I'm reading: Magnus' Science and Rationality for One and All.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
8mo ago
I think front-page submissions need to be manually approved by mods, or perhaps it needed manual approval because you're a new account. It's showing up now.
Submission statements are for link posts. You don't need one for something you wrote yourself. You would just put something which explains what the link is in the text field.
Welcome!
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
8mo ago
So, what are you reading?
Still on Paradise Lost. In my opinion, all epic poetry should be printed as prose. It reads well reformatted. So far it's hard to think of it as a cautionary tale, though this dubious crowd of lost gods do not inspire full confidence.
Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe.
Paper I'm reading: The follow-up paper from Quandt et al., Dark participation: Conception, reception, and extensions.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
8mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm going through Milton's Paradise Lost. Has been on the backlog for a while.
Paper I'm reading: Quandt's Dark Participation.
Gundam is about the psychic Newtypes, and the fate of empathy which transcends the factions of war.
If you're short on time, Char's Counterattack is the quickest way to get the flavour of it, however, you will be spoiling the original series. I don't know if it would meet your standards of intellectual, anyways.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
9mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm picking up the I-Ching, or the Book of Changes, Wilhelm-Baynes translation. I recently learned that it had a lot of philosophizing in it- not just the divination system.
Paper I'm reading: Simon's The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
9mo ago
So, what are you reading?
Still on a reread of Watts' The Way of Zen. Still in the preliminaries. The books gets interesting after all the historical stuff.
Paper I'm reading: Goldman's A Causal Theory of Knowing.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
9mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm rereading Watts' The Way of Zen. It's one of the most profound books I've read, though it is an idiosyncratic view of Zen, which he admits. This time I'm taking notes.
Paper I'm reading: Riskin's The Naturalist and the Emperor, a Tragedy in Three Acts; or, How History Fell Out of Favor as a Way of Knowing Nature.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
9mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Herzog's Citizen Knowledge. It's a good primer for knowledge debates in recent times, and the references are great.
Paper I'm reading: Hannon's Are knowledgeable voters better voters?
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
9mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Herzog's Citizen Knowledge. I haven't read far enough to say much, but some opposing intuitions have started to surface. How she deals with the independence of expertise will make or break the argument.
Her overall approach is insightful, so this may be a good read regardless.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
10mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Herzog's Citizen Knowledge. I can't say I care much for the discussions of actual events, but there are a lot of interesting references, and its position is very clearly written.
I'm also reading papers found in New Directions in the Ethics and Politics of Speech, edited by J.P. Messina (also open access). Currently, Cohen and Cohen's The Possibility and Defensibility of Nonstate "Censorship." This collection at least seems much more self-aware of censorship issues raised in recent times.
So, what are you reading? (Another book thread in the Fun Thread here)
I'm starting Lisa Herzog's Citizen Knowledge. It isn't out yet, but there's a PDF online, and will be open access when it comes out on September 1st. It looks like a mainstream yet academic take on the misinformation debate. I've recently been taken by a desire to learn how these people who say they know so much think (I mean this with only some sarcasm- these people do know a lot which I don't).
Paper I'm reading: Bannister's "The Survival of the Fittest is our Doctrine": History or Histrionics?
I think I've misinterpreted Kendi on "whiteness." It seems fair to give him the last word:
And yet racist power thrives on anti-White racist ideas- more hatred only makes their power greater. When Black people recoil from White racism and concentrate their hatred on everyday White people, as I did freshman year in college, they are not fighting racist power or racist policymakers. In losing focus on racist power, they fail to challenge anti-Black racist policies, which means those policies are more likely to flourish. Going after White people instead of racist power prolongs the policies harming Black life. In the end, anti-White racist ideas, in taking some or all of the focus off racist power, become anti-Black. In the end, hating White people becomes hating Black people.
He also says there's nothing wrong with white culture, only the "cultures of modern imperialism and racial capitalism."
To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
10mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Kendi's How to be an Antiracist. So far, mixed feelings. I have found his attempt to dissolve assumptions of racial difference very humanizing, and of practical merit. On the other hand, while he sounds perfectly innocent when discussing race with other minorities, when prodded far enough it always seems to come back to "whiteness" in the end. In fairness, Kendi's take on white individuals is fairly nuanced.
Paper I'm reading: Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
10mo ago
The context, per Kendi:
White Americans are more likely than Black and Latinx Americans to sell drugs, and these groups consume drugs at similar rates. Yet Black Americans are far more likely than White Americans to be jailed for drug offenses. Black Americans convicted of nonviolent drug-related activities remain in prisons for about the same length of time (58.7 months) as White Americans convicted of violence (61.7 months).
For the first two claims he cites Vice, The war on drugs remains as racist as ever, statistics show, and the report Racial/Ethnic Differences in Substance Use (2015-2019). I'm entirely unfamiliar with the data, so I can't comment on its accuracy.
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Kendi's How to be an Antiracist (updated edition). Kendi takes definitions very seriously, and it seems like everything he believes stems from a rigorous application of definitions which he considers clear and accurate.
Paper I'm reading: Stulík's A Typology of Good and Evil: An Analysis of the Work Education of a Christian Prince by Erasmus of Rotterdam.
In Kendi's world, an antiracist is one who starts with the assumption that no race is inferior, concludes that racial inequities are not caused by culture or innate capacity, and commits to fighting racist policy.
Most interesting so far are his thoughts on culture. I don't know how accurate his numbers are, but at one point he posits a cycle where 1. a seemingly race-neutral policy (the war on drugs) is enacted, 2. the policy is used in a racist manner (he says that it was unevenly enforced on blacks despite whites having similar issues), 3. successful members of the minority group accept the criticism (ie. middle class blacks take to lambasting their own kind for being drug dealers and addicts).
Successful members of minority groups are also important to a recent article on the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, co-written by Kendi. They argue that wealthier Asian Americans have unfair advantages (such as paying for test prep) which aren't available to poorer Asian Americans, who will be the losers of race-neutral policies.
This is especially the case with Hmong and Cambodian Americans, who have rates of poverty similar to or higher than those of Black Americans.
On one hand, I'm pleasantly surprised by an attempt at clarity and consistency, and am much impressed with his mindset, which may bear studying for methods of resistance against power.
On the other, one gets the impression that people would not appreciate being conscripted into a program which mandates fighting against one's own, as much as they try to make it seem like it is the Court which is pitting the successful against the less successful.
Still I must admit that my skepticism could be driven by a certain tolerance for (or at least understanding of) seeking unfair advantages for the benefit of family, and a belief that some individuals are exceptional, and might have their ambitions suppressed by Kendi's preferred policies. I very much doubt that Kendi believes in people who have exceptions.
The biggest problem that I see so far is that, even if we accept his assumptions, he still has to provide a mechanism of this adjustment to racial equity which does not itself invoke the traditional demons of racism. Are we to accept proliferating hatred as a 'temporary' cost towards a promised racial justice through positive discrimination?
Perhaps he has answers which I have not reached yet. Either way, this was worth the time.
So, what are you reading?
I'm picking up Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist. It has been on the backlog for a while as an influential book, but a careless thought has finally given me a reason to be interested: I wonder what impact wokeness has had on highly successful minorities.
Paper I'm reading: Thiele's Things Fall Apart: Integrity and Visibility in Democratic Liberal Education.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
11mo ago
There's probably a lot of confusions in my mind as to what historical greatness really is, so this will likely be a jumble. I apologize if none of this seems to cohere:
I suppose I've landed on the side of those who feel that suffering is in some sense an illusion, and that a state of health and wisdom is in some sense normal. It's the whole "people are fundamentally good" thing, where problems are said to be caused more by a poorly organized environment than by innate problems of the original sin variety. In other words, yes, you can suffer horribly, but when you're back into everyday life, there's probably a way to shake yourself off and carry on as if nothing truly debilitating happened.
The way I see it, the reason that "black box" solutions like AI are popping up is because we're on the cusp of more explicit solutions. I don't think the future is everyone augmenting themselves with ChatGPT, I think the future is us finding a way of spreading knowledge by human hands alone which can compete with ChatGPT in its ability to bring forward implicit knowledge to those who would otherwise take years to learn it. It's probably not even that complicated.
I've rejected the Jungian style of imagination-as-history, where our thoughts stretch back through the ages. It's something more immediate- the feelings of complexity which arise from stories often originate from (universal) structures already existing in the mind, rather than some evolutionary buildup seeking release. So I think what I'm looking for isn't so much an understanding of lost possibility, so much as the state of mind which generates possibility, in the hopes that the stories were intended to be read in such states of mind, and that the message can be heard once I attain it. And I feel as if it can be found in the idea of "character," or in its most reduced form, one's actions. I suppose in this sense I've been studying more the desire to do great works than the great works themselves. The stories seem to be dripping with motive force, and I need to know what that is. Maybe a structure of mind is waiting to be discovered.
I suppose it boils down to a pseudo-gnostic theory that, yes, the goal is to liberate oneself from one's fallen state, but it's probably unusually easy and even normal to do so. One just needs the right knowledge, and nothing will seem so difficult anymore. So the question becomes "what is discipline and thoughtfulness?" and I have a feeling that the price of wisdom is far lower than any of us realizes. The difficulty is in getting it exactly right.
It's just the entire thing, it's all just a large enterprise, and to what end? I guess with all that's been going on with AI (tired subject by now, but), the idea of putting effort into things like evidence standards, law, morality, intrigue, culture, has seemed a little surreal despite myself. And yet the work might be important.
It always seems like people in the past were moved by something that mattered to them. Perhaps I'm wondering what that might have been. I've always been interested, but now it's become a little more personal, and questions of salience have taken on a Promethean quality- the attempt to steal fire.
I don't mean that there's an overt seriousness, just that there's a quasi-superstitious feeling that there's something waiting at the end of the ride (or the read), if I can just pay the minimum necessary fee of discipline and thoughtfulness.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
11mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm reading some Sherlock Holmes stories. I don't know why, but I suddenly feel impressed that these stories were ever written at all.
So far, mixed feelings on The Wretched of the Earth. After reading Sartre's haphazard preface, which bounced from discreditably vicious to euphorically well-written (and admittedly thought-provoking, disconcerting in its assurance of the reader's guilt), Fanon's somewhat more restrained tone is welcome.
Fanon had actual experience in the matters he wrote about, so I'm sure there's some insight here, but I must admit some mild surprise that this often reads like just another pseudo-socialist psychoanalysis. There's so many assumptions involved that one wonders if it ever coheres outside of a narrow interpretation in the context of academic tropes.
In its most basic level, it seems to be arguing that 1. The colonized need a space free from the colonizing culture which purports to be supported by universal values, 2. Various dehumanizing (emasculating?) neuroses take root so long as violent impulses are displaced away from rather than focused towards the colonizer where (he claims) said violence originated, and 3. Since the sole and overriding goal is decolonization, whatever furthers that, even violence, is legitimate. There's a lot more going on that I haven't wrapped my mind around yet, such as his thoughts on how to prevent a revolution from reaching a "reactionary" end, or his analysis of native superstitions.
Unless I'm misinterpreting it, there isn't a one-to-one match with what he writes about and what's going on in Israel. If anything, one wonders what Fanon would say about a permanent state of independently reinforced anger with a theological bent. Furthermore, the question of a realistic endgame can't be ignored if one wishes to invoke Fanon's arguments.
I had the impression before reading that this book was about something like "reclaiming psychological dignity through violence," and while that aspect is present, it definitely isn't a sufficient summary. Fanon's belief in the power of a resistance which faces a seemingly superior force was based on a theory of the colonizer's motives and material needs which constrains his possible reactions, not on psychological factors alone, and it is unclear to me what a similar analysis would say about Israel.
For now, I'm withholding judgement, and wondering what Fanon might say were he alive.
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