Hyperion
1d ago
There are plenty of philosophers like Hume, who awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, or the late Daniel Dennentt, who aren't building on this pile of nonsense.
There are also various social scientists, historians and other academics who just roll their eyes at this nonsense. There are prominent ones like Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins who even poke the hornets nest from time to time.
It's not hard to tell, there is real stuff being discussed it's just not being discussed by this inbred movement within academia.
Hyperion
2d ago
If Derrida can do it, then anyone can. Post-modernism is the intellectual equivalent of a banana duct-taped to a wall.
Hyperion
2d ago
I think the biggest issue is that he assumes all these 'great' thinkers of the past actually had a point. From my perspective it's all a tower of nonsense with more dung being flung on top and each successive generation just adding more nonsense to the pile.
Saying that Adorno or Horkheimer said something isn't a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place. You can't just cite each others claims as authoritative if those claims are bullshit in the first place.
Not that Zizek cares, his whole philosophy runs on vibes and free association. He is a clown and he likes it when you laugh at him. Trying to argue with a clown is like wrestling with a pig.
Hyperion
5d ago
There is some in the Balkans, but you have to remember that after WW1 and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there were massive population transfers between Turkey and the Balkans. Ataturk, father of the Turks, is almost certainly just a Turkicized Albanian, what with his bright blue eyes.
I assume Mongols, Magyars, Turks, and so on don't count?
Not that it matters, but their blood lies, spilt, in the dirt of the Pannonian Plain, not in any modern Europeans in appreciable quantities.
I think you're regurgitating a lot of, far leftist, Frankfurt school theory uncritically. Stuff like The Authoritarian Personality, and countless other works. There is a whole cottage industry of stuff like this by post-modernists and cultural Marxists. Not that I have any sympathy for the far right either; but, to uncritically regurgitate Marxist-Freudian psychoanalyses done by their ideological opponents seems like a bad way to get to the bottom of their actual psychology.
I mostly just wish people would take to the idea that Marx and Freud were bad social scientists and that the entire edifice built on their works should be cast aside.
Hyperion
6d ago
No, with pillarization everyone is still under the same government with the same laws. The millets were more like autonomous zones, but defined entirely by ethno-religious affiliation, not by the territory the people lived in. They had formal laws and collected taxes.
Pillarization is more like what the middle east was like before the millet system and now after. People lived in pillarized ethno-religious communities with in the various states, but there was no formal system of legal division at the level of the state.
Hyperion
8d ago
Those college campuses still had actual conservatives on them, don't forget that. The radical left and leftists in general, were a minority of a minority then. Conservatives and centrists still dominated the campus. Now the radicals are the minority of the leftist majority, bolstered by the foreign and immigrant Islamic student population.
Also, the radical minority from before is now running the asylum. They pushed for the creation of 'studies' programs that could only accept leftist professors and pushed out conservatives and moderates wherever they could. They use DEI initiatives to further marginalize anyone who would go against them even in STEM fields.
The march through the institutions is almost complete, now we just have to wait for perestroika and glastnov in 3 generations, if we're lucky, maybe I'll still be alive then.
Hyperion
11d ago
Now in practice I think it's more complicated; 'if only the tsar knew' is a meme for a reason. But- formal one man rule seems to incentivize anti-corruption drives at the very least.
You don't seem to be advocating one man rule. You seem to be advocating feudalism. China had formal one man rule and this rule was carried out by a massive, powerful bureaucracy. Same thing in France, Britain or Prussia. Whether the state was being run by a parliament of nobles, an elected parliament or just a king. They all needed bureaucracies once they became centralized.
Hyperion
12d ago
How are kings and nobles going to run anything except through bureauracies? These were things created by kings to run their countries. Kings and aristocrats will still need bureaucrats and courts to run things, your just changing who gets to decide what the laws and regulations are, not the need for them.
It didn’t happen in ancient history like after the siege of Melos.
There are countless examples of women and children being massacred throughout history. The sack of Magdeburg, the sack of Baghdad, Nader Shah's sack of Delhi, the Sand Creek Massacre, or this massacre of Globular Amphora Culture women and children(they might have even been killed by proto-Germans). History is littered with stuff like this, human brutality isn't rare and it isn't exceptional.
Hyperion
20d ago
I have trouble embracing the progressive worldview on Gaza because those same principles, applied to WWII, would have me side with the Axis powers. And I am quite certain that the world is a better place because the (Western) Allies won the day. Not that they are perfect (ha!), but I'll certainly stan them over the major Axis players.
The Germans and Japanese starving to death weren't POCs. It's that simple.
Decolonization means removing the colonialists. It's that simple.
Hyperion
25d ago
Oh, I completely agree with you. I'm just coming at it from the other side.
Given how insane their policies were, for all the reasons you listed, they should have never gone down that path; or, realized long ago that it was fruitless.
Given that they did do all those things anyway; yes, only something really shocking could have changed their minds.
Hyperion
25d ago
I wouldn't call Germany asleep at the wheel with regards to Russia. I would consider them turning the wheel as sharply as they could towards Russia.
The only surprising thing is that a crisis as immense as the current war in Ukraine was what was needed to wake up their leadership.
Hyperion
25d ago
Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism.
Why can't conservatives be 'classical liberals'. If you look up a list of historical classical liberals it's people like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Ronald Coase. People like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were considered neoliberals. They were and are considered conservatives as well!
Hyperion
28d ago
I don't think it's just counter-signalling. Freddie really is a dyed in the wool leftist who does have contempt for any remotely rightwing people, even principled liberals and moderates. He hopes he can win those people over to leftism by presenting a more reasonable version, but he knows which side he is on.
Just read this piece from his substack. He hates the anti-woke. Full stop. He hates James Damore and he hates Quillete and he hates Jordan Peterson. He is a leftist. He is 90% woke, he just wants to push for a less insane version.
This isn't a rhetorical tactic, it's what he really believes.
Hyperion
1mo ago
We had, for a while, a middle class of technicians, educated from normal schools, who were able to use our brains to make a good living. But that option seems to be hollowing out.
This upper middle class group hasn't been hollowed out, it's been growing. What is hollowing out is the middle class factory line worker who makes good money despite being effectively a low skilled laborer. The skilled knowledge workers have been growing in numbers and income.
Hyperion
1mo ago
From what I know about 19th century Georgia I don't think it would be that exceptional.
Hyperion
1mo ago
The question is over what kinds of people we are going to make in the future, not over who to cull now. I don't think all beings have an equal right to life.
Hyperion
1mo ago
A world without natural selection would lead to an accumulation of deleterious variants that would quickly lead to the extinction of any species. If I was given a choice between health or sickness, intelligence or ignorance, and life or death, I'd choose life every time.
Hyperion
1mo ago
I find your talk about genetic engineering for intelligence to be basically a form of genocide.
By that definition evolution by natural selection is genocide. Anything that caused differential reproduction of genotypes could be considered genocide even.
Hyperion
1mo ago
But then in the 70's a bunch of psychologists saw computers and were astonished at how much they reasembled human thought, and came to the conclusion that the human mind works like a computer. I'm personally against the expression "Artificial Intelligence" because computers are neither intelligent nor dumb.
All physical processes can be simulated by a computer. They are all computers. You seem to believe animal brains are special, but they aren't. An Intel CPU or an Nvidia GPU are both made of electrons and quarks, just like the neurons in your brain. Both are the same particles governed by the same laws of physics and just as computable as any other configuration of particles.
These philosophers are talking about stuff that overlaps with social science and science in general. Philosophy isn't some separate world where you can say whatever you like. It is bound by the same rules as everything else. If you are making a point about how humans operate you are making a point that overlaps with economics, sociology, history, psychology, etc. Continental philosophers often make claims about humans that go against what we know about those areas, not to mention claims about physics or mathematics. Sokal makes a big deal in his debunkings of post-modernism the ways that they used ideas from mathematics and physics incorrectly.
'I confess myself a worshipper of Mazda, a follower of Zarathushtra, one who hates the Daevas and obeys the laws of Ahura'
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