FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
My assessment of the current internet is that it probably has a far more significant population take-up of New Age religions, sex cults, exotic drugs, serial killers, and Godless communists than the 60s and 70s did. I'm not highly confident about the math, but it looks to me like what would be maybe a few dozen-thousand people in a handful of geographic hotspots is now multiple millions of people spread through every layer of society, fully normalized and monetized. See the seminal "toaster fuckers" meme for a straightforward description of the mechanism, then observe that the Trans movement we're now perhaps seeing the tail end of would not have been wildly out of place in the 60s or 70s, but there it would have been grassroots and confined to a neighborhood or two in each of a few major cities, and the current iteration has been nation-wide and received overwhelming support from most institutions of note.
I do not think our current era is winning the less-crazy game.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
27d ago
Would it surprise you to learn that arguments about discrimination, concern over those arguments, and actions taken to address those concerns have been a notable driver of sociopolitical change in our society for at least the last century?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
27d ago
Let me attempt to be more precise, then. Do you expect arguments against societal-level discrimination to continue to hold water?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
27d ago
Do you expect arguments against discrimination to ever hold water in any context, ever again?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
A very simple definition would go something like this: Modernism was the initial recognition that all the grand narratives of the old world have been smashed to pieces by technology and the War, Postmodernism is living in that "heap of broken images" and trying to have fun throwing the pieces around, and the "post-Postmodern" movements since then have been trying to will a grand narrative back into being.
Modernism drew deep on the coffers of civilizational history and set out to build a glorious cultural edifice.
Postmodernism noted that the work was not going well, but assumed that we might draw deep again so that the work might continue and something like the original goal might be reached.
We now recognize that the coffers are empty and that the work has failed, that the creditors are beating on the door and that there is nothing with which we might pay them.
Put another way, it seems to me that one of the notable features of Postmodernism was that, for all its critiquing, it appears to have assumed that the conditions in which it was born would obtain indefinitely, that the cultural assumptions and material realities it framed itself would ensure its own relevance. One might say that it did not take its own arguments seriously enough.
I direct your attention to the portion involving the following passage:
This is an entirely reasonable interpretation of Darwin's initial comment, and it seems pretty similar to the interpretation several of the posters went with when formulating replies, which were then ignored. I think what you wrote would have been a much better comment than what he went with, considerably less inflammatory, and somewhat higher in content. Unfortunately, the problem is that this is an argument you are imagining, not the argument Darwin actually is making. He absolutely is not claiming that Bezos or any other businessman has a right to sell whatever they choose. He absolutely is not arguing that private censorship is okay (or wrong), or even agreeing that state censorship is wrong (or okay). The argument you are imagining does not exist in that thread.
That may seem like a strong claim. Fortunately, I can prove it pretty solidly, because in that very thread darwin himself very explicitly said so...
[Insert lengthy quote from the comment under discussion]
...In other words, he doesn't actually endorse anything he wrote in that original comment. Nothing you described above was at all the argument he claims to be making, which is unsurprising since the argument he claims to have been making cannot be straightforwardly derived from what he actually wrote. Everyone in that thread who assumed he was speaking plainly and in good faith wasted their time, as you did just now, because he had zero intention of actually prosecuting the argument he implied he was making. His actual argument was that agreeing with BJ's position necessarily makes you either a socialist or a hypocrite, because the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it. That's the entire content of his original post, according to a detailed explanation by the man himself.
Welcome to arguing with Darwin.
Given that his own explanation of his comment completely contradicts your understanding*, it's worth looking at what he actually said in some detail.
Yes, if you completely ignore the difference between government coercion and private businesses.
Did the original essay ignore the difference between government coercion and private business? No, in fact, because the essay is solely about why "book burning" is a bad thing in the abstract, not about whether people should be prevented from doing it, much less how this prevention might be accomplished. His final conclusion is that "book burning" is a loser strategy anyway, so there's no point in worrying about it. Darwin completely ignores the argument BJ made, preferring to substituting an argument that he himself finds more convinient. He does this, by his own admission, because he was annoyed that BJ was saying something negative about his preferred ideology.
Of course, it wouldn't be very persuasive for him to straightforwardly say "This abstract question is dumb, let's talk about a different concrete issue instead". What he does instead is frame his comment as an accusation: "you completely ignore [x]", rather than as a statement of his own views: "I think [x]". Because he does this in as inflammatory a manner as possible, people are too busy reacting to his snarling tone to notice he's pulled a switcharoo on the actual argument being made. Further, the frame of the discussion is now whether the OP did or did not ignore something important about an issue the OP did not even address; meanwhile, in darwin's mind, he has not even offered an opinion of his own at all, so he has zero reason to respond to those like yourself who "misinterpret" him as having done so.
I would be interested to hear how the above is best summarized as me "not liking his arguments".
And by contrast, the sexist/racist hiring for production of cultural products in the US has resulted in an astonishingly massive drop in content quality across the entire entertainment sector, and several of the most notable entertainment disasters ever seen.
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