Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
Right. Well, if my kids are going to become woke Maoist third worldists, then I can't really stop them, nor do I have any desire to. The whole point of being anti-woke is that people should be free to think for themselves. If I set limits on what my kids are allowed to think, then I'm no better than the wokeists.
I think the influence of external propaganda on political belief formation is not quite as big as is generally supposed anyway. Many years ago I stumbled on /r/shitredditsays when it was relatively new. The whole concept of "SJWs" was quite new and I was like, hey this seems kinda fun, I could get into this. You get to call other people racists and sexists and then feel morally superior to them. You're doing a good thing AND earning social credit in the process. That seems like a great deal. I imagine that's how most people initially get involved in social justice.
So I genuinely tried to be a leftist and integrate myself into the community for like a month, but I just couldn't do it. I was too viscerally disgusted by the behavior I saw there and I quickly turned on them. I tried to make myself believe in the content I was reading, but I couldn't. There was something about it that intrinsically disagreed with me.
I think that if someone is intelligent and independently-minded, they're going to believe what they're going to believe. And if they're not, they're just going to get swept up by the socially dominant ideology regardless, so why fret?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
Disclaimer, I don't have kids yet, so this is all hypothetical, and people are famously bad at predicting what they would do in a hypothetical.
I did a moderate amount of drinking and drugs (and in fact I still do!) and I turned out fine, so setting hard limits for my kids here would be hypocritical and seemingly unnecessary.
I also personally know a couple people who either died or fucked up their lives pretty significantly due to drug-related issues. So I know that there can be serious consequences and I don't take the issue lightly. But at the same time, I know that outcomes this severe are uncommon, assuming no exacerbating circumstances. Everything carries risk. I'm not going to ban my kids from driving just because they might get in a car accident.
As for the political content that reddit is worried about, that's just the stuff I myself watch/read anyway, so stopping my own kids from watching/reading it would be even more bizarre and hypocritical.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
On one hand, allowing countries to subvert foreign elections seems obviously bad
Is there a steelman for simultaneously believing that a) we should have relatively porous borders and lax immigration controls, and b) foreign interference in domestic elections in the form of social media posts is a bad thing? Because surely there are many individuals who have expressed support for both positions.
If the Russians first crossed the southern border illegally and then started trying to drum up support for right wing populism, would that be ok and democratic? Now they're just undocumented residents instead of foreign nationals, right? You could say "no that's still election interference", but then it just seems like you're saying "advocating for the side I don't like is election interference", which is a bad look.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
It would be ridiculous to study from a Calculus book written by Newton or Leibniz, wouldn't it?
This is certainly a valid point, and there's a real phenomenon there that needs to be investigated. However, Marx is a particularly poor example to illustrate @ArjinFerman's original point ("Just talk about their ideas, if they're so great"), because people do in fact talk about his ideas, much more often than they read his original texts. Phrases like "class struggle", "proletarian revolution", and "capitalism in crisis" are deployed frequently without specific reference to Marx's name or one of his texts. There have been plenty of avowed socialists who never read Marx. So clearly his ideas have taken on a life of their own beyond the confines of his original writing.
As for why there's still continuing interest in Marx's original texts themselves: think of philosophy like a giant thread on TheMotte. When you pick up a book written by a contemporary Marxist philosopher, you're reading a big post full of quote replies that's 20 levels deep, and it's replying to a bunch of other people, who were ultimately replying to Marx's OP. When you're trying to get up to speed on a long conversation with lots of back-and-forth arguments, isn't it better to read the whole thing yourself so you have the full context in all its nuance, instead of relying on someone else's paraphrase? Because that's what we're dealing with here: it's a dialogue between people about politically fraught issues, rather than a mathematical or scientific treatise.
If you wanted to understand someone's views on, say, abortion, would you rather read a paraphrase of their views, or would you rather read their own explanation of their views in their own words? Philosophy intrinsically deals with issues where the definitions of the principal terms are vague and contentious, and attempts at paraphrase and simplification are prone to distortion by preexisting biases. You probably wouldn't want to rely on a committed pro-choice advocate to give a sympathetic gloss to a pro-life article, especially when you can just, you know, read what the pro-life person said in the first place. Even another pro-life advocate might introduce inaccuracies into a paraphrase that the first pro-life advocate might reject, because despite being on the same side, they might not share the exact same conception of central concepts like "life", "murder", and "personhood". The contentious nature of the issues makes it harder to substitute out the original texts.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
I'm planning a longer post responding to Scott's comments about taste, so I'll have more to say there, but I just wanted to remark on this briefly:
…so much as that it cemented a new romantic vision of the Artist. The Artist was a genius, brimming with bold new ideas that the common people could never understand! The Artist defied the norms of bourgeois society! The Artist was part of some official collective with their own compound in a trendy part of the city! The compound produced manifestos explaining why their vision of Art was better than everyone else’s!
I think this is a variation on a story that many people repeat uncritically. The story goes something like: "for thousands of years, being an artist was just like, a job, like any other. People knew there was nothing particularly special about art as such - they would have laughed at our modern snobs. The artist was just some dude who went to his 9-to-5 and made stuff because people thought it was pretty or funny, or because a rich king asked him to, or whatever. And then one day in the 1800s, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, ~10 German guys decided that artists were actually Geniuses and they should be revered as such, and this was called Romanticism, and lots of people fell for it and we've been dealing with the fallout ever since".
I think the cracks in this story start to show when you look at the historical record. The idea that there's something distinct about art as an activity that sets it apart from more "mundane" types of work is an ancient one. Greek and Roman poets and sculptors certainly did try to create works that would live on and be passed down to posterity; they were aiming at a certain kind of "immortality". Plato said that there was a quarrel between philosophers and poets over the correct approach to wisdom and virtue; there was no analogous quarrel between philosophers and saddle makers. Aristotle saw fit to dedicate an entire book to poetry and drama, but not an entire book to woodworking.
This is of course not to say that conceptions of art and The Artist haven't changed over time, or that there's nothing historically distinct about the Romantic conception of art. Only that the purely deflationary narrative, the claim that any distinguished status for art is a historically recent invention, is at best incomplete and lacking in nuance.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White?
Oh, where's that old SSC post about all the "weird" things that seem to disproportionately attract white people? Cycling, bird watching, cosplay, whatever the examples were. Special interests in general seem to be an inherently "white" thing.
The creativity of the European mind means it's also more creative in finding new ways to destroy itself. (Although of course the generalized culture of anti-whiteness we have in the West today isn't helping.)
Fittingly, the ad itself gives me strong Midjourney/Sora vibes. Lots of disjointed static shots with minimal action.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
It’s to avoid situations exactly like this. As of the time of this writing, the happening appears to be over. It’s no longer newsworthy, or at least it’s no longer BREAKING NEWS worthy.
At least if the OP includes some original commentary/analysis instead of just headlines then the post might have more lasting value even if the original situation dissipates.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
I understand you want to make Nietchian strong-man arguments
I briefly outlined the reasons for my judgement in another comment in this thread. None of them have anything to do with Biden's "strength". (And for the record, the idea that "good = being 'strong' and doing whatever you want" is, at best, a highly simplified distortion of Nietzsche's actual views.)
I am supposed to appauld someone for taking advantage of power to enrich their personal loyalties as virtue?
It does depend on Biden's motivations to an extent. If it was done out of genuine love, then yes, you should applaud. If it was a purely self-interested act of political calculation, not so much.
Finally, Biden is a professed Catholic, and there's nothing in Catholic morality that upholds loyalty to flesh as virtuous (quite the opposite, tfh). If we want to appaud Biden's virtue, he should start by renouncing the all the other duities and affiliations that this virtue undermines.
Forsaking your flesh for Christ - there's at least a real dilemma there. That's at least an interesting problem. But forsaking your flesh for the abstract idea of democracy and the rule of law? Well, I'm afraid that's where I'll have to part with Catholic morality, if that's what it recommends.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
"Crack cocaine addicts should not be carrying guns" seems like a rare gun control policy proposal that I could imagine a lot of 2A diehards getting onboard with.
I agree in the abstract, but it's still not a serious enough infraction for me to change my assessment of the situation.
It's weird funny that I specifically asked you why you think this action was "virtuous", and part of your answer is, in essence, that was a wonderfully spiteful act of malicious revenge. Which is quite far from what I typically think of when I hear the word "virtuous".
Spite and malice can be virtuous. Who told you they couldn't?
Virtue is the appropriate response in the appropriate situation. It's not a static table of naughty and nice feelings that can be drawn up in advance. There's no reason a priori to think that spite is never an appropriate thing to feel.
To give a simple example, if a criminal is breaking into your house uninvited in the middle of the night, then the virtuous thing to do is certainly to respond with malice.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
Why?
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Why should a father not protect his son when he is able to? This should be the default position (not an absolute position of course, but the default one, at least) - especially for a crime as minor as tax fraud.
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There's something heartwarming about the party that has recently been so obsessed with procedural norms and maintaining the moral high ground learning that there are, in fact, situations where a strict literal interpretation of the norms should be suspended. This may be more of a tactical consideration than a purely ethical one, because it helps Republicans illustrate how absurd the prosecution of Trump has been.
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It's an appropriate parting "fuck you" to a political establishment that conspired to replace him without his consent in the 2024 election.
What a bizarre way of saying "there's no point in having rules or laws of any kind".
That's not what I said, and that's not the position I endorse.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
I would not, however, have promised in the first place to not do it.
This is reasonable. It's rarely a good look to contradict yourself so blatantly in public.
I'm not sure why you're referencing "TheMotte" here as if it were a hivemind, particularly when you're only the fourth person into the thread.
I was combining this thread with the post in last week's thread on the same topic, which got 3 additional replies that were critical of Biden.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
Good for him. This was the virtuous thing to do. The world needs more humans, and fewer bots who are governed by algorithms (even, and perhaps especially, when that algorithm is the algorithm for “justice”).
Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case? Be honest now.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
One solution would be to have the laws only apply to the half of the population that has traditionally focused on child rearing, while the half of the population that has traditionally focused on innovating and building companies would be exempt.
But that's certainly a conversation that no one wants to have.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
The idea is that virtually everyone, as a free and politically engaged liberal subject, will have to deal with questions of politics, culture, and ethics; but not everyone will have to deal with STEM in the sense of actually requiring technical knowledge. On this particular day, there were probably more people who had to engage with questions about transsexuality (and therefore might benefit from an understanding of the history and philosophy of the concepts of sex and gender) than questions about calculus or linear algebra (particularly if we exclude people who require that sort of knowledge for their professional work). The humanities are thought to contribute to the education of a "well-rounded" individual because the humanities are everywhere while STEM knowledge is primarily utilized by professionals (and is therefore closer to a type of vocational training).
I say this as someone who makes a living as a software engineer. Knowing how to code is obviously useful for making money, but I don't think it really makes someone "well-rounded" in the way that studying history or art does, and certainly not in the way that studying philosophy does.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
Western philosophy, sure, but I don't see the Socratic school having much influence on Confucius, Mencius, Han Fei, Laozi, Zhuangzi, or any pre-20th century Chinese philosophy. Many of them seem like the sorts who'd object to holding up a guy who trolled Athens so hard he got cancelled from life (as I once heard it put) as an example for sages to imitate.
Yes, that's certainly correct. I think that's what makes the European (and specifically Socratic) tradition distinct from any other philosophical tradition; the emphasis is on a dynamic process of conflict, rather than a static body of received wisdom. There's someone in our midst who claims to be wise? Very well then, let's put his wisdom to the test, let's see how much he really knows. The principal figure is not the sage, but the prankster, the rabble-rouser. (I would speculate that this impulse in the European mind is part of why empirical science, industrialization, and broadly speaking "modern civilization" in general, arose first in the West and not anywhere else.)
a Chinese individual arguing that Western philosophy went off the rails with Socrates and Plato, and has spent the last two millennia and change building airy edifices of dangerous nonsense.
Right. Well, this position is not alien to Western philosophy itself. You can find it in Heidegger (Plato as introducing the terrible mistake of thinking that Being as such could be identical with a specific being, the Form of the Good, the Christian God, or what have you), you can find it in Nietzsche (Socrates as physical symptom of a degenerating and sickly organism), and others.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
I mean, I'm not going to have a kneejerk egalitarian response and discard your proposal wholesale. But if we're going to have a widespread public university system, then I don't see why we would intentionally handicap all but a few of those institutions. If Ohio State has a right to exist at all, then I don't see why it shouldn't have English and philosophy faculty as well, all else being equal.
On a personal level, there are also certain academics scattered around random state schools whose work I greatly enjoy and follow closely, so I have a personal interest in perpetuating the current system roughly as it exists now.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
As soon as you try to build something you're no longer a
critical theoristnag
Well, yes, but that's the point to a certain extent. The philosopher is a professional nag - that's his job, ever since Socrates. So one can argue that critical theory is actually quite traditional in this regard. (Of course if you asked the classic Frankfurt school guys what they wanted to build, they would have unhesitatingly answered "communism", but that just moves the question back a step, as the content of that term is itself very ill-specified).
The Apology really should be required reading in schools. Socrates went to the statesmen, the poets, and the artisans, for he was told they were wise; but when pressed and questioned, their wisdom amounted to nothing. When the oracle at Delphi was asked who the true wisest man was, she answered that it was Socrates, for he knew that he knew nothing. And this is the ideal by which philosophy has attempted to conduct itself ever since (but, as with all ideals, mortals fall short).
The philosopher isn't in the business of building things; he's in the business of criticizing, poking holes, formulating problems but no solutions. He is the grim, persistent reminder that you might not know as much as you think you do. Understandably, people tend to find this frustrating (in the case of Socrates, frustrating enough that the Athenians put him to death).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
Recently in Compact Magazine: How Professors Killed Literature. Perhaps relevant given the other recent posts on contemporary media and writing:
English degrees have declined by almost half since their most recent peak in the 2005-2006 academic year, despite the student population having grown by a third during the same period. Romance languages—my area of specialty in a teaching career spanning more than two decades—have done little better. German departments are in free fall. Doctoral students from departments that used to concentrate on literary studies are confronted with a frightening absence of jobs.
In one common account, the responsibility for this collapse falls on the shifting preferences of students, who no longer want to read, and, by extension, on the shifting media landscape in which young people are now growing up. This explanation lets professors off the hook too easily. Students may be turning away from literature, but we abandoned it, too.
It's a fairly standard lament about the decline of the English major, the kind of which has been in circulation for at least a decade now. There were a few points in particular that I wanted to elaborate on and respond to.
[...]“The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.”
Reading this statement, I was struck by the dispassion of the dean: Far from the horror with which similar things are uttered in private conversations, she is understanding of and even sympathetic to this surge of illiteracy on one of the most elite campuses in the world. Claybaugh seems jovially resigned to the fact that “different capacities” of her students don’t allow them to access those things to which she presumably devoted her life: literature as a practice, as a set of exceptional texts, as a tradition, as a celebration of language.
The assertion that the texts of the literary canon are "exceptional" is, of course, not an unassailable axiom that is beyond the purview of critical inquiry. I believe I have remarked here previously that the social prestige enjoyed by literature as such (that is, written narrative fiction, without the use of audiovisual elements, in something that at least resembles the form of the novel) is somewhat arbitrary, and in need of justification. I don't think there's anything intrinsic in the literary form that privileges it above film, video games, comic books, etc, in terms of its ability to accomplish the sorts of things that we generally want artistic works to accomplish. (For a critical examination of the institution of the "English major" from a leftist perspective, see here and here).
I don't think it will be a severe loss for humanity if undergraduates don't read The Scarlet Letter. Although the fact that they might find such a task difficult is concerning for independent reasons.
Three solutions were attempted in an earlier phase of this crisis, all guided by the assumption that students abhor the strange, the ancient, the remote, and like the familiar, the modern, and the close.
I believe I'm fully aligned with the author's sentiment here. If an education in the humanities means anything, then it has to involve exposure to the strange, the remote, and probably the ancient as well. Whatever specific form that might take.
Already in the 1990s, the standard graduate seminar in literature departments comprised several chapters of books or short essays of some of the new (primarily French) authorities that were summoned to provide the clues for another, generally smaller, list of poems, essays, or narratives. Back then, we called it “theory.” Often, in practice, it was philosophy read outside of its native disciplinary context and thus understood in somewhat nebulous terms. Derrida’s work was elaborated in dialogue with the great representatives of the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas. There is no reason to expect a doctoral student in literature to be able to reconstruct this lineage or adjudicate the complex debates between these figures.
Ironic that he calls out Derrida specifically here. In The Truth in Painting, his longest sustained treatise on art as such, Derrida raises the question of why the philosophical tradition has perpetually subjugated the image to the word, the poem, the logos - a gesture that the author of the current piece appears content to recapitulate.
Meanwhile, political talk largely edged out discussions about narrative structure, textual sources, or the sheer beauty of a given author’s prose. Faithful to an idea of the intellectual as overseer of social decency and as a moral tribune, literature professors took on the grand history of our time, the march of freedom incarnated in the struggles of one group or another, and the quest for emancipation and the resistance it met from reactionary forces.
At a basic level, there's nothing wrong with analyzing a literary text from an explicitly political angle. Politics is both very interesting and very important! Frequently, the politics of a work (both in terms of its immanent content, and in terms of the political context of its production) is one of the most interesting things about it. Questions of race are important, questions of gender are important, these are things that we can and should be thinking about when we talk about art.
The issue that we find ourselves confronted with today is that the very concept of "politics in art" has been colonized exclusively by one side of the political divide (I'm reminded of the joke about how presumptuous it was of the LGBT community to think that they could claim something as universal as "refracted light" all for themselves), and this side has the virtually unchallenged authority to enforce their point of view in academic institutions. A priori, we should be all for politics in art. But when "politics in art" comes to exclusively mean "going book by book, explaining how they were all written by evil white men to oppress women/browns/gays/etc, and thereby concluding that the way forward is puberty blockers and mass immigration", it's understandable why the right would want to throw in the towel on the whole discussion and retreat to a position of castrated neutrality.
A genuine, honest inquiry into the political nature of a work of art has to allow for multiple possible conclusions. Maybe the book is ultimately about how great white men are, and that's a bad thing. Or maybe it's about how great white men are, and that's a good thing! There's a certain repetitiveness to works of "critical theory": the conclusions are always predetermined in advance, the line of argument predictable, it always finds exactly what it set out to find. Which raises concerns about how "critical" it is in the first place. If you always know the answer in advance, then you're not actually engaged in critical inquiry; you're just grandstanding.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
Hypersensitive, perhaps. Deliberate seeking, certainly not. I can assure you that the reaction (to the aforementioned video game features) is as spontaneous and vigorous as the left’s reaction to, say, confederate flags and statues.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
I don't think anyone is thinking about it that deeply
Sure, but you don't need to think deeply about it to have an intuitive understanding of what things (policies, ethical commitments, artistic portrayals, etc) will be helpful or harmful to your agenda. People tend to have good noses for these things.
If progressives wanted to avoid the perception that femininity could be dangerous they wouldn't have imposed toxic femininity - e.g. totally unchecked forms of feminine-coded social combat like gossip and cancelling
I mean, the point of accruing power is that you have to exercise it at some point, and that's necessarily going to generate some pushback. That's unavoidable. That's where the thought policing comes in, to try and minimize dissent.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.
Well, no, it's not ironic at all actually. The writers know exactly what they're doing, at least at a subconscious level. The idea that femininity could be manipulative and dangerous is a bad look for women, so obviously they would rather not depict such characters.
Feminism as a concrete social movement is about advancing the material and social interests of women (or at least, the interests of a certain subset of women). It's not about "giving people the freedom to explore their identities" or "recognizing the complexity of every human" or any claptrap like that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
There's a lot to unpack here.
You raise a valid point in that there are a lot of ugly/undesirable women who miss out on a lot of the benefits that conventionally attractive women get. But at the same time, I think the average woman (so, not outright ugly/disabled/etc, but decidedly not 95th percentile either) still underestimates how much attention she gets just for being a woman, because she's never had to experience the other side of things.
To put things in perspective: if you even have a "social circle", like at all, then you're already doing pretty damn well for yourself relative to the entire adult population. There's a non-trivial number of men, especially among the spergy AGP population we're talking about, that have essentially no friends or social connections of any kind. They got nothin'. There are women who find themselves in this sort of position too, but they're significantly more uncommon than their male counterparts.
If only the top 5% of women were experiencing substantial amounts of male attention, could feminism really sustain itself? It's a rare woman who doesn't have a story about a bad relationship, or at least an instance of catcalling or harassment, something. Clearly there are lots of women who are having lots of interactions with men! Otherwise the "gender wars" wouldn't be a political topic in the first place. For the type of isolated recluse who's been essentially invisible for his whole life, even the idea of negative attention like catcalling can become part of the erotic fantasy.
(I'll also just note that if you actually dive deep into AGP porn, you'll find a surprising number of "status loss" stories, i.e. rich white businessman gets transformed into a poor Mexican cleaning lady, things like that. It's not always a power fantasy of being in the top 1%).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
Compassion isn't a social affect: it's an act of the will.
This makes it sound like something you can arbitrarily turn on or off "at will", which can't be right. But it also can't be right to say that it's entirely outside of your control either.
I suppose I would say it's something like an "unchosen choice".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
I think the criteria is that if it’s not bad enough for your own side to care (I mean a large number of people genuinely caring, en masse, rather than just some senators thinking “I’m gonna have to burn some political credit to confirm this guy”), then it’s not a genuine moral infraction, and it can be assumed that the alleged outrage on the opposing side is largely performative.
I do think there’s something to the “right and left have switched polarities” theory. The people who go the hardest for wokeness today would have been the strictest Christian moralists if they were alive in the 1600s.
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