FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
and my guess is that Rittenhouse hatred would correlate strongly with belief that this guy was innocent.
The comment would make more sense if you interpret it as "they sympathize with actual murderers" rather than "they sympathize with people they believe to be murderers". That is to say, there appears to be a significant population whose assessment of murder and indeed of justice generally is nearly perfectly inverted from what one might, optimistically, describe as "actual reality".
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
since these people find the current world unsatisfactory.
There's a lot of that going around.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
However, it also happened more than 25 years ago, when video surveillance was far less ubiquitous than it was now, and forensic technology was less advanced.
Video evidence is indeed quite something.
On the other hand, large branches of forensic science have operated for decades and then been revealed to be fraudulent. Bite mark analysis, burn pattern analysis, psychological profiling; @gattsuru has linked to an article about how the justice system's conception of shaken baby syndrome is based largely on fictions. This, combined with the degree to which jurors and the public generally overestimate the reliability of even valid and well-grounded forensic methods does not inspire confidence.
Justice is not, in fact, a solved problem. I'll certainly concede that it's a whole lot more solved than our decaying system can implement, though.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Reminds me of a pivotal scene from the Rifters books.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Or just that it's awfully unnerving how easily it would be for non idiots to get away with random acts of murder?
That's the one.
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
Here, we are seeing that there is a significant gap between the perception and the reality of "getting in too much trouble." Awareness of the gap invites arbitrage.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Why write so many questions when you clearly already have intended answers for them?
Because I want to find the points at which people diverge into disagreement. Starting from the obvious and moving to the obscure seems like a better way to achieve that than smacking each other with contradictions endlessly. Sure, we disagree. why do we disagree, exactly?
And that's the thing. It seems to me that the further you get down the list, the less obvious the answers to the questions get.
Why make another post for the same discussion?
Because I'm attempting to approach the discussion from a different angle, and I'm putting enough effort into it that I'd prefer it not be immediately buried deep in a comment tree. Why not do this?
In the end this is meaningless, taste is subjective and I can't do nothing except to say "actually fifth prison cell is good if you give me more shelf space".
I concede that someone who isn't interested in conversation indeed cannot be conversed with. I do not concede that your statement constitutes an actual answer to the questions above.
And I don't see majority of people disagreeing with this gymnasium building being something cool and novel.
I think if you polled people on whether the hallway, stairwell and classroom shots were acceptable for an educational environment, most of them would answer negatively. I think if you posted those pictures on Reddit under a fake headline like "here's the schools Republicans want your kids to attend", you could power New York City for a year off the outrage they'd generate.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Because it implies that the police are incapable of anything beyond security theater. A lot of other evidence is accumulating behind that hypothesis, and it bodes ill if you value a government monopoly on violence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Look at any given person who has strong opinions about this case, the rights of the accused, and how the criminal justice system railroads the innocent. Then check their assessment of the Rittenhouse case, or whether Kavanaugh is a rapist.
People argue about the light or the dark, but it's the contrast that kills.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Sure. I'd also like a pony, and to rob banks and shoot it out with the police without all the pesky bleeding and screaming and dying. Sadly, reality intrudes.
When I observe unionized workplaces, I see inefficiency, doors closed to good workers, and economic failure. By contrast, the workplaces I've observed that were most efficient, dynamic and productive were, as a rule, not unionized. I like being able to find a job by demonstrating positive value to a prospective employer offering what I consider a reasonable wage, without then having to persuade a second group of people who believe that they have a direct economic interest in keeping me unemployed.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
The actual outcome was achieved years ago, and they were not capable of overturning it. Their efforts to overturn it bode ill for more recent cases, and especially for the cases they'll be initiating going forward. "Justice was served in this case because the people now in power did not have a time machine" is not a terribly reassuring summary.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
But also... Prison is a punishment? And punitive measures can be used to achieve utilitarian and/or moral goals? Not every cell needs to be designed to make its inhabitants sad, but at least some of them probably should.
Which ones, in your view?
I don't think any of them should be. If someone commits unusually egregious crimes, I'm fine with executing them. If they haven't done something deserving execution, I'm fine scaling their sentence up or down as seems appropriate. I'd even be fine with replacing some of the lighter sentences with prompt, extremely painful corporal punishment, on the theory that for some criminals that might actually get the point across better than a long-delayed incarceration. But in no case would I wish to intentionally make their environment worse and more depressing than the physical practicalities of confinement in a cell require. I could be persuaded otherwise with evidence that prisoners in especially ugly or depressing environments had lower rates of recidivism, but lacking such evidence I see no benefit to inflicting unnecessary misery or indignity for its own sake, and certainly don't see the benefit of being so indirect about it as to bake it into their environment.
In any case, if you were to implement ugly cells for prisoners, who would you expect to be most likely to oppose you: admirers of Eisenman, or his critics?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Have you ever ever obtained any sort of credential with a barrier to entry that enabled you to do specialized, abnormally renumerative work?
I got a forklift certification once. Does that count as a "labor monopoly"? I think I'm pretty glad that forklift operators are required to undergo safety training and a comprehension and skills test, but I'm not sure what that has to do with unions.
Other than the forklift certification, no, I've never gained any credential of the sort you describe.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
It's in every worker's interest to become part of a monopoly on labor so they can force pay above market equilibrium.
It's not in my interest now. It wasn't in my interest when I did factory work either. I've never had a job where I perceived it to be in my interest.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
"makes me sad/makes me happy" is a separate axis from "good/evil" and a very separate axis from "ugly/pretty."
...Though I don't begrudge the Sagrada Familias of the world their status, it is no sin to build in styles more dour than rococo.
Do either of these points seem, to you, salient to what I've written above?
Take the six cell images in the OP, and assume that we are specifically designing a prison so that the environment experienced by the prisoner captures the general emotional and psychological feel that each encapsulates. Would it be evil, in your view, to intentionally design a prisoner's environment to maximize "ugly/makes me sad"? If not, do you consider the money and effort we expend making our prisons look more like cells 1-3 rather than 4-6 a needless waste, or perhaps actively counterproductive? Perhaps you believe convicts would also benefit from styles more dour than rococo?
I wouldn't really call it within Eisenman's style, it's much more contemporary than that.
Would "generally representative of Eisenman's philosophy" be a better description?
It also bears little resemblance to any of the prison cell pictures, which increase in unpleasantness largely with the cheapness and decay of the fixtures, and the dirt and squalor of their upkeep.
Why are cheapness, decay, dirt, and squalor unpleasant? Where is the emotional effect coming from? As I mentioned to another answer, imagine that these environments have been made this way on purpose, that the corrosion and the dirt had been applied through painstaking labor to achieve this effect on purpose. Would that make it better for the occupants?
Then too, consider #5. Is it actually dirty or decayed or squalid, or is it only conveying a sense of dirtiness and decay while actually being fairly clean? The latter seems more accurate, does it not?
The gymnasium is very carefully done and very clean, at least in these photos.
If you had to rank the photos of the Nikken Sekkei building and its various interior and environments in terms of general goodness, how would you rank them? For me, I'd say Kendo Room > Gymnasium Interior > Pillared underpass > Interior walls > Building Exterior > Hallways >>> Stairwell > Classroom. The classroom in particular is so bad that it is actively offensive that someone built a room like that specifically to put children in. By contrast, some of the shots of the gymnasium interior look legitimately grand, with the strong natural light spilling down the pseudonatural detail of the wall.
The gymnasium interior and the kendo room look reasonably clean in the photos, aided greatly by the polished simplicity of the flooring. The rest of the shots, particularly the classroom, stairwell and hallway shots, look grimy and decaying even though I'm entirely certain they're in perfect condition and clean enough to eat off.
I'm not immune to the appeal here. Some of the shots of the Gymnasium interior actually look quite good. But a lot of the other shots look straightforwardly hideous, and I think that we should consider this a bad thing, for the same reasons that we should prefer our prison cell designs to conform to cell 1 rather than cell 6, and for the same reasons that we should continue to paint our prison cells rather than leaving them bare concrete.
I think it would be morally wrong to choose, for aesthetic reasons rather than practical ones, to inflict the style of the Nikken Sekkei gymnasium on actual prisoners. Would you disagree, or would you argue that prison life would be enriched by such design choices as we see in those photos? And if you agree that it would be wrong to do this to prisoners, why is it better to do it to innocent children?
The materiality and texture of the wooden formwork is trying to emphasise the cavernous qualities of the inner volume.
Combined with the natural color and texture of the concrete, it creates a strong impression of filth, decay and squalor. It's immortalizing trash in stone. Why do that? Of all the textures available, why those?
They also realise that these textures perform best under lighting conditions that play light across the surfaces instead of directly onto them.
I'd agree, but then why use the textures in places where they will not be lit to their advantage?
At the end of the day, though, if I was a teenager playing basketball, I'd vastly prefer to play here than in your replacement-level rec centre.
I would certainly prefer that gymnasium interior to the standard white box. But would you rather spend an hour a day in that classroom, rather than a replacement-level classroom? Would you rather trade the hallways and stairwells for their replacement-level equivalents? I would vastly prefer accepting the standard white box gymnasium to not have the rest of that structure inflicted on me. Then too, any gymnasium with a open balcony would be a strict improvement, just for the novel perspective.
If you have time, I'd be interested in your thoughts on the rest of the questions.
Not doing your series of questions justice, but briefly, the prison cells are awful because they are made so carelessly and cheaply and not looked after.
Suppose #2 were brand-new, and what you saw was exactly as the designer intended it, to the point of intentionally and carefully corroding the steel where the toilet meets the sink with meticulously-collected and -applied urine. Would that make it better?
It seems to me that the series displays cleanliness, simplicity, and order on one end, and filth, complexity and chaos on the other. What's notable to me is how the design of the gym intentionally recapitulates similar impressions of filth, complexity and chaos, particularly in the cement castings, and particularly in the classroom, hallway and stairwell shots. If I had to slot the gymnasium shots into the cell sequence, it would be somewhere around #5.
I'm an artist. Intentionally designed filth, complexity and chaos are a basic part of my day-to-day job, because I need to use these things to induce particular emotions in my audience. What I'm perplexed by is why someone would use these techniques in a public space that people are, to a considerable degree, compelled to interact with.
...Out of curiosity, which of the gymnasium shots do you find most pleasing, and which least? For me, the kendo room and the gymnasium itself are head and shoulders better than the rest of the shots, spaces designed for competition and struggle. Does it seem that way to you also?
Below, in the discussion of Architectural philosophies, @Primaprimaprima provides an admirably concrete statement:
There's no cognitive dissonance because there's no evil here, anywhere.
Eisenman's buildings range from "fine" to "pretty darn cool" in my view. "...Architecture that similarly alludes to a deeper or alternate view of reality" in a Lovecraftian fashion is also cool. Rad, even. I want more of that. Sign me up. This isn't even some complex "well we have to understand the dialectical nature of suffering and how even negative emotions can be valuable" shit. This is just very straightforwardly an architect who makes cool buildings that he thinks are cool and other people think are cool. There's no malfeasance here, no shenanigans.
To me, your question sounds akin to someone saying "how exactly can you support Harry Potter books pushing Satanic propaganda on our children?" It's hard to provide an answer because I disagree with the entire framing.
If the framing is the issue, perhaps it would help to examine that framing from the ground up, as it were. Is there such a thing as "evil" architecture? Should we recognize this as a thing that exists?
Here are a half-dozen variations on the theme of "prison cell": 1 2 3 4 5 6
Considering the above six images:
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would you expect that the ordering of the above images was random? If the ordering was not random, how would you describe the ordering principles?
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What details of the environments seem emotionally salient to you? What colors, textures, contrasts, symmetries or asymmetries, rhythms, etc stand out?
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This question is a bit awkward to phrase, so bear with me: If we ordered these images by the most prominent mental and emotional effects we expect them to induce on their occupants, would you expect the given order to change? What are the antipodes of the strongest gradient you recognize, and does that gradient require a re-ordering of the images to convey continuously?
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Would the ranking change if you ordered them by which "looks cool"? For example, if you were picking prison cell designs for a movie set or a video game level, do you think the ordering would change? Note that we can actually make this question strictly empirical by looking at actual prison cells in actual movies and video games.
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Would the ordering change if you ranked them by which you would rather be a prisoner in?
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Would the order change if you ranked them by which you would rather actual convicts be housed in?
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Suppose a person prefers the given ranking if they were a prisoner, and prefers the reverse ranking for convicts, would you describe this as a morally-neutral preference?
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Assuming that the emotional gradient you perceive is relatively positive-to-negative, suppose that a person prefers the max-negative antipode for both themselves and for convicts. Does this show that the max-negative antipode would actually be "good" for convicts? Why or why not?
Elsewhere in the thread, we are provided with a link to this Japanese highschool gymnasium as a positive example of Eisenman's general style of architecture.
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If you ordered the various shots of the exterior and interiors of the gymnasium, which do you consider the best, and which the worst? What principles seem most salient to this ordering? What patterns emerge?
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If we compare and contrast the gymnasium interiors to our original six cells, what commonalities emerge in environmental detail and in expected mood? Which of the six do these interior shots seem to naturally group with? at which end of the various gradients do they fall?
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The gymnasium is, clearly, not a prison. Despite this, are there relevant principles identified in your analysis of the cell variations that you think should carry over to analysis of the gymnasium?
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leaving cell interiors unpainted would obviously be cheaper than painting them. Would it be better to leave cell interiors unpainted, similar to the gymnasium interiors? Is the preference to paint or not paint cell interiors morally neutral?
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More generally, presuming the design of the Gymnasium is a good one, should similar principles be applied to the design of prisons? It's hard to deny that prisons could certainly look cooler than they do. Perhaps we could even make them look Rad. Presuming that this would not compromise first-order expenses or impose first-order security concerns, would it be a good idea to do this?
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Among the gymnasium images, there's a shot of a classroom. Why do you suppose the designer has chosen to make the back wall of the classroom, facing the teacher, smooth and relatively low-detail compared to the front wall of the classroom, facing the students? What would you expect the results of this design choice to be on the intended function of the room?
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Do you consider the preceding question to be a reasonable one?
Bonus Round:
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Consider hostile architecture. How might we apply principles gleaned from the above questions to this separate branch of architecture and design?
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Do you think hostile architecture is morally neutral? Morally positive? Morally negative? Why?
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If someone believes that hostile architecture "looks cool", do you think that should be a persuasive argument in its favor?
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Do you expect that those who enjoy and support the sort of architecture typified by the nikken sekkei gymnasium also support and enjoy hostile architecture? What about those who oppose it?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
Alternatively, the same log can be used as either a pillar or a battering ram, depending on the context in which the user is located. Neither Soviet architects nor Soviet officials were interested in inducing alienation in their home population, because their revolution was complete.
Here's a simple alternative hypothesis.
Almost no one actually saw that debate live. Anyone who didn't see it live can't update their thinking and behavior unless the information contained in the debate was transferred to them. In 1983, a large supermajority of the people in a position to transfer that information to the public at large either directly agreed with or were at a minimum ideologically allied with the supervillain, understood that the ideas expressed in the debate would disadvantage their interests if they were clearly understood and widely disseminated, and so declined to disseminate them to the broad public in such an unvarnished form. Either they kept the ideas from getting a public hearing, or they made sure they were spun sufficiently to actually sound attractive to enough of the populace to not be a strategic own-goal.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10mo ago
But, big picture, you paint a convincing view of the future. If we look at the set of “drones under $1000” rather than literal converted iPhones, I think it’s a rather larger space of possibilities. Scary to imagine.
I can say with a high degree of confidence that the above is significantly underestimating the scope of the problem.
But all that proves is at least one person supports both communism and BLM.
Would you expect American Communists, or indeed communists generally, to not support BLM?
At any rate, I do not draw conclusions about the ideologies of entire movements supported by millions of people from individual graffitos.
If you were persuaded that hammers and sickles were a common addition to BLM-riot graffiti, would this be weak evidence of a connection between the two movements? To be clear, the best I can do after a brief search is two instances, and the vague memories of seeing many more at the time. I'm more curious about your reasoning process.
More generally, do you think the examples linked in this comment are likewise lacking a "developed political platform"? Are those people Marxists, in your view?
On the statue of Christopher Columbus, they scrawled “George Floyd” and “BLM,” as well as rudimentary Soviet hammer and sickle images (now sometimes representing a union of social classes), and stencilled raised fists, often viewed as an emblem of Black liberation and solidarity.
...Could it be that you were mistaken, and the hammer and sickle in that first example only represented "a union of social classes"? Maybe that guy wasn't a communist at all?
Mm.
So in your opinion, when some guy spraypaints #BLM, multiple hammers and sickles, and the publication date of the Communist Manifesto on a public structure, what do you think is going on in that guy's head? Would you expect the misconception he's suffering from to be common or rare?
Suppose there is a person who is very concerned with social justice. They believe that racism and sexism are among the most serious problems facing our society, they are deeply committed to battling the kyriarchy hydra. They are interested in cultural critique, in sociopolitical theory, and have educated themselves extensively on these subjects. In my experience, such people are not particularly rare, and probably most people commenting here will have encountered several of them.
Based on you experience, how likely is such a person to be familiar with and use the term "late stage capitalism"? My experience would be that it is very likely; does yours differ?
If they do use that term, what do they mean by it?
Why does the kyriarchy hydra in the linked comic have a "class" head, and why is that head resolved into "economics" in the last panel? What sort of economics do you suppose the author intended?
That comic is from the website everydayfeminism. If I search that website for references to "capitalism", I get many, many hits. How many of those hits do you suppose involve discussion of Capitalism as a positive force in the world, versus a negative force? Why should that be?
....I've just searched "Patriarchy and late stage capitalism".
Having previously identified the socialization and naturalization of inequalities, we now look at the influence of capitalism. Although patriarchy pre-existed it - many societies were already characterized by a sexual division of labour, gender-based violence, or gender norms often privileging the male - the specific contribution of capitalism was undoubtedly the institutionalization of the devaluation of women and their work. The devalued or even unpaid domestic work, the concept of the “housewife” that accompanies it, as well as professional segregation, have their origins in the era when capitalism gradually replaced the medieval feudal system. They are thus not, as we often hear, the remnants of a dark and barbaric medieval era, but rather constitutive of the first phase of capitalist accumulation which, as we shall see, led to a phenomenal regression in the status of women.
Judging by this excerpt (or the article as a whole, I'm not your dad), what general branch of political philosophy do you think has formed the author's worldview?
The dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background that models gender difference on class relations. The relation between manager and worker is not just one of “difference.” The manager and worker are situated within a system of social relations that unequally distributes money, power, status, etc. Likewise, men and women aren’t just “different,” but are categories of persons – like manager and worker – that are defined in terms of social relations that position them in a complex class/race/sex hierarchy. Given this background to the dominance approach, it is useful to consider a bit of the history of the relation between Marxism and feminism.
What do you think the author means when she says that "the dominance approach to feminist theory arises out of a Marxian background"? What does it mean to "model gender differences on class relations?" Why do you suppose the author spends so much of their paper discussing Marx? Why does she believe that "Socialist feminism involves a commitment to “the practical unity of the struggle against capitalism and the struggle for women’s liberation." Why is she interested in a struggle against Capitalism, and where does Marx come in to this struggle?
This article argues that modern imagery of the Black female body exists in opposition to sexual health and sexual rights by focusing on existing representations of Black female eroticism as a legacy of colonialism. It addresses Black feminist thought on the history and contemporary use of the Black female body and offers a human rights perspective on uses of the Black female body within patriarchal capitalism.
Where is this idea of "Patriarchal Capitalism" coming from? Do you think the author developed it herself? If not, how did she come by it?
Contemporary feminism is currently at a crossroads, facing a concerted onslaught from both neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. While these ideologies are inherently different—neoliberalism often appropriates feminist language to serve capitalist ends, and neoconservatism typically attacks feminist principles—they similarly reinforce the traditional role of families as providers of welfare. This crisis of alienation in feminism is characterized by three key factors: the gender divisions brought about by feminism’s shift to identity politics, the obscuring of feminist critique of capitalism by the spread of commercialization, and the instrumentalization of feminism in politics. These challenges have resulted in increased class antagonism and the further marginalization of lower-income women, reinforcing one another. To address this multifaceted crisis, a return to Marxist thought is deemed necessary for women’s liberation.
How can Feminism "return" to Marxism, when it never had anything to do with Marxism in the first place?
Anxiety disorders are one of the most prevalent mental disorders globally, and 63% of those diagnoses are of women. Although widely acknowledged across health disciplines and news and social media outlets, the majority of attention has left assumptions underlying women's anxiety in the twenty-first century unquestioned. Drawing on my own experiences of anxiety, I will the explore both concept and diagnosis in the Western world. Reflecting on my own experiences through a critical feminist lens, I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry.
Where does the idea of "Late-stage Capitalism" come from? What are the other stages?
The term “late capitalism” regained relevance in 1991 when Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson published Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Drawing on Mandel’s idea that capitalism has sped up and gone global, Jameson expanded his analysis to the cultural realm. His argument was that late capitalist societies have lost their connection with history and are defined by a fascination with the present. In Jameson’s account, late capitalism is characterized by a globalized, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable. In this capitalist stage, we see innovation for the sake of innovation, a superficial projected image of self via celebrities or “influencers” channeled through social media, and so on. In this time, whatever societal changes that emerge are quickly transformed into products for exchange. Unlike those who celebrate postmodernism as replete with irony and transgression, Jameson considers it to be a non-threatening feature of the capitalist system in contemporary societies.
How can Marxist analysis "expand into the cultural realm"? If the term "late stage capitalism" were related to attempts to expand Marxist analysis in this fashion, would the prevalence of the term be some level of evidence for the memetic spread of this expansion?
...In my younger days, this is the point where I would drink several cups of coffee and spend the next twelve hours pasting the first paragraph and a few pertinent questions for every one of the first five hundred search results in the fifteenth tab in my brave window and then wrap it up with six solid pages-worth of compact, four-letter obscenities, but I'm older and I have kids now and my back hurts, so let's not do that.
It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism. It seems obvious to me that a supermajority of the people promulgating Social Justice theory believe that they are performing some combination of extending, expanding, or (for the truly arrogant) correcting Marxism, quite explicitly. I think the above position can be defended unassailably by looking at the academic output that constitutes the headwaters of the Social Justice movement. I think that those who argue that the obvious, inescapable ties between Social Justice theory and Marxism are some sort of hallucination or sloppy categorization are either woefully uninformed or actively dishonest. To those who have advanced such arguments in the thread on the subject below, I offer an invitation: assuming the above examples are insufficient, what level of evidence would satisfy you? How many papers from how many journals do you need to see? How many quotes from how many prominent figures within the modern social justice movement, and the people who taught them, and the people who taught them, and so on? How far back do we need to go to satisfy you? How deep do we need to dig to bring this question to a conclusion?
Or maybe I'm totally wrong. Let's run with that. If I'm wrong, if the above is the wrong approach, why is it wrong and what would be better?
Japan's a nice place, I hear.
I don't think there's any way to get there from here, though. That is to say, if you implemented their methods here, you would not get even the remotest approximation of their results.
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