Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
Ah, FC, FC. I believe it's been a little while since we last spoke.
During our earliest one-on-one conversations, I had us pegged as being very similar types of minds. Although in every conversation since then I've gathered more and more evidence to the contrary. That's not a bad thing, not at all; it just is what it is. Either way, you continue to make a surprisingly excellent sounding board for different arguments and ideas, perhaps because of your enviable generalized easygoing nature. And so I'm going to babble incoherently at you for a bit about the topic at hand, in the hopes that at least one person reading this will find that the words contained herein bring clarity to some aspect of their own experience. @IGI-111 will possibly be interested in this as well.
To be perfectly frank, I find most of the typically stated "rational" reasons for the animus against pornography -- "it makes sex workers feel bad", "it's too addictive", "it distracts men from finding a real partner" -- to be, essentially, distractions. They don't really strike me as psychologically realistic, they don't smell vigorous, y'know? They give the impression that something is still being concealed. "Sex is special and pornography is somehow a violation of what makes it special" -- ok, getting closer, but say more, special how? There are lots of "special" things in the world, but they don't all draw this level of persistent sustained ire.
Roughly, my thinking is that there are two principle psychological causes of the general unease that many people feel with pornography:
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Either the animus springs from the same unconscious mythopoetic wellspring as the prohibition against graven images of God, or:
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There is a primal fear of its sheer destructive potential that cannot be reduced to any "rational" factor; although the line between this point and the former is blurry, and they may very well be the same thing. For what could be more frightful than the wrath of God, the wrath that God very nearly visited upon the Israelites for worshiping the golden calf.
Don't for a second think that there is no relationship between God and sexuality. An image of sex is very nearly an image of God, it is reasonable to confuse them, there is a very real risk that people might start worshiping the image as an idol. Lacan thoroughly explores the indissociable link between the two in Seminar 20 (humorously enough, the very same seminar that features the infamous dictum "the sexual relationship does not exist"):
"It seems clear to me that the Other -- put forward at the time of 'The Instance of the Letter' as the locus of speech -- was a way, I can't say of laicizing, but of exorcising the good old God. After all, there are even people who complimented me for having been able to posit in one of my last seminars that God doesn't exist. Obviously, they hear -- they hear, but alas, they understand, and what they understand is a bit precipitate.
So today, I am instead going to show you in what sense the good old God exists. The way in which he exists will not necessarily please everyone, especially not the theologians, who are, as I have been saying for a long time, far more capable than I am of doing without his existence. I, unfortunately, am not entirely in the same position, because I deal with the Other. This Other -- assuming there is but one all alone -- must have some relationship with what appears of the other sex. [...]
There is a little connection when you read certain serious authors, like women, as if by chance. I will give you a reference here to an author... [...] I don't use the word 'mystic' as Péguy did. Mysticism isn't everything that isn't politics. It is something serious, about which several people inform us -- most often women, or bright people like Saint John of the Cross, because one is not obliged, when one is male, to situate oneself on the side of [the phallic function]. One can also situate oneself on the side of the not-whole. There are men who are just as good as women. It happens. And who also feel just fine about it. Despite -- I won't say their phallus -- despite what encumbers them that goes by that name, they get the idea or sense that there must be a jouissance [enjoyment] that is beyond. Those are the ones we call mystics.
[...] For the Hadewijch in question, it's like for Saint Teresa -- you need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she's coming. There's no doubt about it. What is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it.
[...]Thanks to which, naturally, you are all going to be convinced that I believe in God. I believe in the jouissance of woman insofar as it is extra, as long as you put a screen in front of this 'extra' until I have been able to properly explain it. What was attempted at the end of the last century, in Freud's time, what all sorts of decent souls around Charcot and others were trying to do, was to reduce mysticism to questions of cum. If you look closely, that's not it at all. Doesn't this jouissance one experiences and yet knows nothing about put us on the path of ex-sistence? And why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance?
[...] [The Other] is barred by us, of course. That doesn't mean that it suffices to bar it for nothing to exist thereof. If by [the signifier of the barred Other] I designate nothing other than woman's jouissance, it is assuredly because it is with that that I am indicating that God has not yet made his exit."
So, essentially, pornography is evil because it gets too close to recording the truth. It risks making a graven image out of this "extra" jouissance ("jouissance" being the French word for "enjoyment", but the specific connotation here is that it's an enjoyment built out of pain, an enjoyment that you can never actually possess for it would simply be the immolation of the subject, it is the "enjoyment" of Exodus 33:20: "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live"). That's not the sort of thing you can just put in a picture and go passing around willy nilly! God jealously guards his (her?) secrets.
Whenever I ask people why they think Steam should be allowed to suddenly and arbitrarily delist pornographic games, thus endangering the income of many small artists and game developers ( @gattsuru feel free to consider this a reply to your top level post as well), I am always hoping, begging that they say "because God said so". Because then I at least know they're being honest! They're attuned with themselves. I let them go in peace, I have nothing more to say. It is the sort of thing that God might plausibly say, after all. Maybe he did say that. Who am I to doubt?
Maybe people are just increasingly embarrassed now to say that it's because God said so? Or it could just be a result of where I tend to hang out. I should just go down to my local lower middle class church, because y'know the more salt-of-the-earth people, the ones who haven't had their minds poisoned by so many books and foreign cartoons, their "defense mechanisms" often aren't as developed, if we're going to use psychoanalytic language. They'll give it to me straight. If I ask them what they think of porn they'll say "the fuck's the matter with you? Don't you know anything? Haven't you read the Bible?" And that's really just the answer I was hoping for all along.
Some days I really just feel like I'm done with the whole "argument and debate" thing. Arguments are yesterday's news. What I'm interested in are the mythopoetic symbols that govern your psychic economy. That's where the real shit is. But how to get people to share? They're so often embarrassed to share, or they don't even know themselves. I suppose I could offer a trade -- my symbols for yours. I'm always willing to lay myself bare as far as my powers of introspection will allow me. This could be the next big evolution of internet discourse, huh? It's like "let's talk about our feelings" but on steroids. This idea really has some legs. Just you wait and see.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
When and how did you arrive at the idea that sex is a relationship (this particular kind of distinguished relationship, as you conceive of it)? Did you only decide that porn was a bad thing afterwards, on the basis of this conception, or did you already believe that porn was a bad thing beforehand and this was just one more piece of supporting evidence?
This isn't a gotcha, I have no agenda here. I'm just genuinely and sincerely interested to learn more about how you think about these issues.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
So if they do it for free, is that ok then? Thereby de-commodifying it.
Granted, commodities can be given away freely too, I suppose. But if I were to say, write a poem and put it on my own public blog for free, I don’t think anyone would call the poem a commodity. I’m just creating something and choosing to give it freely. So it seems like I should be able to create and give away my own porn and have that be not-a-commodity too.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
but it's also self refuting nonsense that should never have been allowed to have social impact.
What's the self refuting part, exactly?
Reading Derrida is a journey into the most high grade sort of masturbatory thinking about thinking that allows learned men to convince themselves that their worst urges are actually fine just because they're so clever.
What "worst urges" do you have in mind here?
Derrida's work in particular is relatively light on ethics and politics (depending on which period of his work you're talking about). He spends most of his time addressing relatively abstract and "classical" philosophical problems related to language, meaning, and knowledge.
Incidentally, that's exactly how it was received in France at the time
Depends on who you're talking about I suppose? Lacan was a pretty big deal, it was front page news when his yearly seminar series finally concluded after more than two decades. He was a bit like the Jordan Peterson of his day, except culturally lauded instead of culturally shunned.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
"Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable."
Fair enough! I have no interest in defending any of the specific points listed of course. Just one more reason why I'm not a Marxist.
I will point out that 1) the Manifesto was a relatively early work and Marx's political thinking developed as he progressed into his mature works, and 2) it was a polemic intended for general consumption and may not represent the most "nuanced" version of his views. But I don't have any further relevant textual references to cite.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
You really just have to plainly read critical theory to start hating it.
What! But there are so many lovely works of critical theory! Even Marcuse. "The Aesthetic Dimension" is a wonderful book, I always recommend it to everyone.
What specifically did you read that made you hate critical theory? I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything, I'm just curious what you read that caused you to form your opinion.
Have you ever read any Derrida? He has some beautifully poetic writing, his writings on art are a real pleasure:
everything will flower at the edge of a deconsecrated tomb: the flower with free or vague beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and not adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). It will be, for (arbitrary) example, a colorless and scentless tulip (more surely than color, scent is lost to art and to the beautiful: just try to frame a perfume) which Kant doubtless did not pick in Holland but in the book of a certain Saussure whom he read frequently at the time. "But a flower, zum Beispiel eine Tulpe, is held to be beautiful because in perceiving it one encounters a finality which, judged as we judge it, does not relate to any end"
(This is such a great closing paragraph because earlier in the chapter Derrida quotes Kant as saying "examples are the wheelchair of the mind", and then here in the final paragraph he again quotes Kant as saying "zum Beispiel eine Tulpe", and it's like, huh I thought you said examples were bad, but here you're giving an example, what's up with that eh? It's a really great mic drop moment. Because the whole chapter was Derrida taking Kant to task for his position that the frame/ornament(/example/footnote) has to be excluded from art proper, but Derrida's argument is that the picture can't be distinguished from the frame, so he finds a footnote in the Critique Of Judgement where Kant gives an example, so it's the innocent flower in the innocent footnote that brings the prohibition against the frame/ornament/example/footnote tumbling down and ahhh he was just so delightfully clever with stuff like this.)
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
I would like you to illustrate how a state governed by the principles of Marxism would be superior in securing "value" for people (however you define this) as opposed to capitalism.
I'm not a Marxist (although I do think they make some good points that are worth taking into serious consideration), so I'm not here to defend Marxism qua Marxism, and I'm certainly not here to defend the specific economic policies of the USSR or China. I just want to help people understand what classical Marxists actually believe, so that when they reject Marxism, they have a better idea of what they're rejecting.
"A state governed by the principles of Marxism" is a bit of a misnomer (besides the fact that Marx thought that advanced communism would bring about the dissolution of the state). Marx was intentionally very light on specific details about how a "communist society" would work; we can say what communism is abstractly, but not concretely. Because communism will involve a fundamental transformation of human subjectivity (according to Marx), it's impossible to predict exactly how it will work, because we can't extrapolate from human behavior under capitalism to predict human behavior under communism.
Marx never said "you have to immediately and forcibly collectivize all farmland". What he did say is that there needed to be a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which the proletariat would commandeer state power and use it to begin the process of overcoming capitalism. But no one can decide for the proletariat how they should go about this or what exactly this process should look like; they have to decide it for themselves, concretely, as they struggle through the actual process. (I think the DotP is a bad and unworkable idea for many reasons, which in turn is one of the many reasons why I'm not a Marxist.)
As such I find Marxists are really good at subversive critique of the existing order
That's largely the point, yes. The best way I heard it explained was, "Marxism was not the proletarian socialist movement; it was the self-critique of the proletarian socialist movement". And I think that's correct. Marx certainly did not invent socialism, the workers' movements preceded him, their demands preceded him. Marxism was intended to be a type of self-criticism that would bring the socialist movement to self-consciousness. The incessant Socratic questioning of the Marxists was directed just as much at the socialists themselves as it was at broader capitalist society, if not more so.
their vision for society is extremely ill-defined
Guilty as charged, yes. I think all the sophisticated ones would admit to this.
You've admitted that the need for survival and security is "pretty hard to get around". Guess what having weapons is meant to help with? Arms races that involve the production of resources are a fact of life in any remotely multipolar system
Yes of course. I'm no pacifist. I was mainly asking that question as a way of probing faceh's thoughts on value.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
“In conclusion” was already bad writing long before AI.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?
They’re equivalent because they’re both equally fine, and both equally unworthy of further attention.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
I believe I value multiple things, as one might expect. But I suppose if I had to put my "highest" value in as concrete terms as possible, it would be "that which pays respect to the mystery":
"[Object a] represents God. Object a is the unsymbolized object-cause-of-desire. [This position] is fundamentally unknowing, fundamentally hysterical [in the precise Lacanian sense] because at the very core of his position is an unsayable, unknowable mystery. Christ is the barred subject, because Christ goes, 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' And this is why it's beyond theism and atheism, because technically object a doesn't exist, right? But let's say it's the unsymbolizable real.
"It confronts the congregation to create knowledge. I want to create a church where the liturgy is hysterical. Where the liturgy embraces doubt, complexity, unknowing, and mystery in the music, in the art, in the ritual, in the sermons. You, the congregation, kind of without knowing it, we have an ideology. We have an ideology of wholeness and completeness. We would be confronted by an hysteric discourse that causes us to rethink and generate new ideas and we start to enjoy not knowing. We start to enjoy the process of life itself. And what sustains this entire project is a fundamental ontological mystery."
(I recommend listening to the whole video if you have time, it's really quite lovely.)
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
No it’s not a pejorative! The thoroughness of your empirical research is rarely observed among the brainrotted younger generation.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
You know what gap moe means?
Man I had you pegged as a 50 year old Fox News boomer.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
Increasing efficiency is still pretty close to a primary goal, though.
Pretty close? Is there anything closer?
You may have an answer, or you may not. It's fine to say you're not sure.
develop tech as close to immortality as you can, then go travel around to see all you can see that's out there.
Wouldn't this just be the sort of pursuit of pleasure/leisure that you've been criticizing? Or do you not see it that way?
As I asked, what use does Marxism have on offer for any rational human being, other than perhaps allowing incisive critiques of the flaws in a Capitalist system which we can then try to address and fix within said system?
I'm much more interested in the way you think about value than the way you think about Marxism.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
I'm still a bit unclear on whether you think increasingly efficient production is a good in and of itself, or if you think it's only good insofar as it can be a means to other ends.
Which can either free up the time and labor of some of the guys who would have been hunting to work on other things
What kinds of other things?
I don't necessarily think there is any 'final win condition,' mind, at least not in an entropy-increasing universe
What if we could hypothetically assume an eternal universe? What then?
the continuation of your genetic line
Well, there are multiple ways to read that.
If we start talking like "the best man is the one who sires the most children", then all we've done is smuggle the same language of marketplace efficiency into a new domain.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
The word "Dialectic" is almost exclusively used by (my) outgroup
The word "dialectic" has had multiple incompatible definitions throughout the history of philosophy. When Marxists use the term, they're using it in the sense that Hegel used it, which is... well, you could argue that even Hegel and his followers didn't have one consistent definition of the term. But I think you can reasonably say that all usages of the (Hegelian) term "dialectical" revolve around the idea of an "immanent internal critique of a concept or position via the concept's internal contradictions". Many common arguments against naive libertarianism could be classified as dialectical (in the Hegelian sense). If you tell the libertarian that libertarianism is bad because freedom is bad, that's an external critique. But many people accept libertarianism's presupposition that freedom is good; they just think that libertarianism fails to live up to its own ideals, that the particular kind of formal freedom offered by libertarianism fails to secure certain actual freedoms that we value. Freedom can in fact give rise to its own opposite, unfreedom (an isolated individual in a pure state of nature is "free", but he's also rather unfree, since the physical world immediately begins to make strenuous demands on him). That's an internal, dialectical critique.
Marxists have a dialectical view of history because they think that the internal (and material, according to them) contradictions of a given mode of production are what give rise to social and historical change.
Why the word "Materialist?"
"Materialism" has two distinct meanings in philosophy. There's materialism as a metaphysical thesis, which is the thesis that everything that exists is material (this is the "God doesn't exist" version), and there's materialism as a sociological thesis, which is the thesis that material conditions are the driving force of social and historical change (as opposed to "sociological" idealism - the thesis that people inventing and adopting new ideas is what drives historical change). In contemporary analytic philosophy, you basically only see materialism/idealism used as metaphysical terms, while in continental philosophy (the tradition that Marx and Marxists belong to), people will freely switch between both usages. The type of materialism that Marxists place the emphasis on is really more of the sociological kind (although they're almost universally metaphysical materialists as well).
See this for an overview of the debate between Marx's sociological materialism and Hegel's sociological idealism.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
If we're talking about a "satisfying human desires" contest, that seems pretty fair.
But human desires are malleable. They are not static across history. That's the point.
A century ago, not wanting to have kids was seen as much more eccentric than it is today. Now there's a whole "childfree" movement and the birthrate is dropping precipitously. Biology didn't change that fast. A change in material and social conditions caused a change in desires. So before you say "well this is the best way to satisfy human desires", you have to ask whose human desires.
Of course almost everyone is going to want to be assured of their basic survival and security. That one is pretty hard to get around. But even then! There have been plenty of people who chose to live an ascetic life and managed with very little.
a tribe that was bringing home more meat and berries and could use its surpluses to make things like fur coats and better tools and weapons were 'winning' in some meaningful way.
I mean, were they? What is "winning"? Is the winner the one with the most weapons, or are the weapons just a means to some other win condition?
Are you using the system of production as a means to your own ends, or is the system of production using you as a means to reproduce itself? (Marxists of course think that under capitalism, it's the latter.)
Capitalism's great "insight" was that you didn't have to go over and raid and pillage the neighboring tribe to benefit from their bounty. Instead you can identify things you have, that they want, and trade such things for mutual gain, then use those gains to bolster your productive capacity again. At some point someone invents 'money' and its off to the races.
This is not how Marxists use the term "capitalism". Not the intelligent ones anyway.
The sophisticated Marxists recognize that there's no single identifying feature that separates capitalism from other "economic systems" in previous historical epochs. Money, trade, wage labor, private property, and even financial speculation have existed essentially since the beginning of human civilization (I believe Max Weber talks about this in the preface to The Protestant Work Ethic). "Capitalism" for Marxists essentially means "industrialization", or perhaps more specifically, "the contradictions in liberal humanist social relations engendered by industrialization".
such things only ever came about because Capitalism made us productive enough to spare more resources for leisure and alleviation of suffering, and to give workers the leverage to demand better compensation for their labor.
Yes, that is literally just the orthodox Marxist position.
Capitalism is not an aberration or a mistake. It's a necessary phase of development; albeit one that contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is in fact the only thing that can give us the tools to go beyond itself. It is always and only the master's tools that dismantle the master's house (if you believe Hegel).
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
I don't think we should get in the habit of "advertising" non-CW threads in the CW thread. Yeah, it kinda sucks that other threads outside of the weekly CW get less visibility, but, that's just how it goes.
Also, ending with an "In conclusion..." paragraph will make people assume you used AI in your writing.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
But end of the day if your economy is not producing as much of [desirable things] as efficiently as a comparable economy using a different system, you are losing the argument.
But Marxists don't care about winning or losing "the argument". What they want to do is change the rules by which the argument itself is conducted. They want a wholesale reevaluation of what it means to "win" or "lose" "the argument" in the first place.
If your politics is based on "whoever is producing the most goods most efficiently is the winner", then Marxists would consider that to be, to use one of Zizek's favorite phrases, "pure ideology". That belief is an ideological effect of capitalism itself. It's not a natural or obvious conclusion. You could conceivably hold a different belief instead.
This is not to say that Marxists must necessarily adhere to a degrowth ideology of course. Rather they would say that, whatever historical epoch comes after capitalism, the way in which inhabitants of that epoch think about concepts like "production" and "efficiency" will be as incomprehensible to us as the capitalism vs Marxism debate is to hunter-gatherers. Marxism at its core is a theory of history, and how contradictions in social relations drive historical change (e.g. the contradiction between the formal freedom of neoliberal free trade, and the fact that this formal freedom can paradoxically result in less actual freedom as globalized hypercompetition forces homogenization). Your historical epoch plays a role in shaping what counts as a "winning" or "losing" argument to you, what counts as a "reasonable" political aim, etc.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
I don’t hate him, but anyone who ragequits a forum forever because people said mean things about them immediately loses respect from me.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
The Marxist mythology is very much based on the story of Eden and the fall of man. It is imagined that the first stage of human society was "primitive communism", which is when, contrary to your assertion, society was at its most egalitarian, gender and race relations were at their most egalitarian, society was not based on hierarchical relations of authority, etc. And then that whole "agricultural civilization" thing had to come along and ruin it.
The orthodox Marxist position is that "there's nowhere to go but forward", the only way to reclaim what was lost and make Man whole again is through the ever-increasing development of the technological forces of production. But there's also an anarcho-primitivist strain of leftist socialist thought that says that we should actually be going backwards, back to the garden, back to our lost innocence. For certain environmentalists, degrowth is the mythological symbol of the ultimate fulfillment of the demands of woke identity politics.
Not to say that every member of a Green party is a self-conscious primitivist of course, only that this way of thinking is "in the air". People who emotionally resonate with these ideas are disproportionately likely to be attracted to environmentalist politics.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
If someone’s leaving because “I didn’t know people would get so angry when I asked them questions” then it’s possible that they could acclimate after getting used to the general tone of discussion here.
If someone’s leaving because “I didn’t know racism was allowed here” I would tell them to not let the door hit them on the way out.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
I was more saying that the forum can be perceived as a "right wing secret club" because, for example, a feminist might consider some of the writings about feminism to be boo outgroup, only there are no feminists here.
To some extent this is grounded in the objective facts of the matter. We were chased off of two different subreddits because we allowed discussion of controversial views. The controversial views that the authorities took issue with were, invariably, right wing.
The mods try their best to be neutral but they’re only human. There is a set of consensus views here, that does affect the moderation and it affects how users perceive different types of posts, and that’s simply going to be an unavoidable fact of any discussion space you ever enter ever.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
Although these types of retorts are exquisitely tempting, these are also exactly the sorts of reactions that Count is attempting to provoke, which he then parlays into accusations of bias and incivility.
Primaprimaprima
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%
6mo ago
We’d really prefer it if you didn’t leave… we need new people to prevent this place from slowly withering away.
In any smaller and more tight-knit space it takes some time to get acclimated to the local customs, but that’s just like… normal.
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