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.
9mo ago
many people seem determined to defend the honor of Karl Marx
As I laid out in the last paragraphs of this reply, my main concern in this discussion is that the right not recapitulate the type of sloppy thinking that I find so obnoxious about the left. I raised two issues regarding what I see as fallacious thinking:
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The tendency to refer to every idea on the left as "Marxist" seems to me to be analogous to the left's tendency to call everything they don't like "fascism". Describing every non-leftist position as fascist is simply incorrect; and it is similarly incorrect to describe all leftism as Marxism. Let me put it this way: can someone subscribe to a typical woke agenda (trans surgeries for minors, mandatory racial diversity quotas, the need to overthrow the patriarchy and empower women, etc) and not be a Marxist? Or has (what is alleged to be) the historical provenance of those ideas made them intrinsically and permanently Marxist?
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I believe that the right's preoccupation with "cultural Marxism" carries with it an implicit assumption that without Karl Marx, none of this would be happening. If we just didn't have those darn radical Marxist professors who were giving our kids bad ideas, then men would still be men and women would still be women, racial minorities would be at peace, Jesus would reign and everyone would be happy. And I think that assumption is simply based on mistaken models of history, psychology, and politics. It's the right's version of "if only Trump supporters weren't brainwashed by Russian bots, then they would see that Trump is a threat to democracy just like we do". It fails to take seriously the notion that different people really do just think fundamentally different than you, and that their ideas aren't just random bullshit, but are instead a response to actual real conditions. Woke ideas wouldn't be as popular as they are if people didn't find them genuinely appealing, independent of whatever authority figures endorse them.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Christianity has undergone multiple profound changes - theological, structural, and otherwise - in the two thousand years of its existence.
Sure. But the fact that we're still able to recognize it as Christianity means it has to have something essential in common with the forms of Christianity that came before it. It can change and evolve, but there have to be limits on how much it can change as well; otherwise it would stop being Christianity altogether, and it would become something else. Presumably, someone who denies the existence of God cannot be a Christian, no matter how big we want the Christian tent to be.
Certainly there are many mutually contradictory tendencies and sects within Marxism. But they're still united by certain common features that make them recognizable as Marxism (and the belief that capitalism will be overcome by the workers' class struggle seems to be a particularly essential one). No matter how ruthlessly the contemporary SJW criticizes all that is, if they're not fundamentally invested in the notion of a workers' class struggle to overcome capitalism, then I think it's inappropriate to classify them as Marxist.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]
A little over a year after the landmark UAP hearings with David Grusch that took place in the US House of Representatives, both chambers of Congress are gearing up to have additional new UAP hearings within the coming months. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's office confirmed that the Senate Armed Services Committee is planning on having a public hearing after the November elections which will focus on the progress in UAP analysis made by AARO, the official "UFO office" in the Pentagon. Rep. Nancy Mace further confirmed that the House will have its own public hearing on November 13th.
Would be nice if they had something concrete planned. Maybe we'll finally see that stunning photo that Matt Gaetz mentioned last year? Or at least some new witnesses coming forward.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
See my reply to naraburns elsewhere in the thread. I think the appropriate analogy is more like, if the Mormons denied that God existed altogether, would you still call them Christian?
I do agree that calling cultural Marxism a "conspiracy theory" is dumb. At most, I would describe the term as mistaken or misguided. And regardless of terminology, many of the concrete allegations - the idea that there is a concerted effort among leftists to attain positions of institutional power in order to influence the direction of culture - are just plainly true.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
The idea was to use Marxist insights to determine how to distribute sociological, rather than material, "equality."
Ok. But my question is, is that really still Marxism, necessarily? Redistribution and equality, regardless of their modality, are not intrinsically Marxist ideas; they existed before Marx, and they continue to persist in non-Marxist contexts today. Imagine someone who said "we want to use Christian insights to strive for justice and equality, but we're going to drop all the baggage about Jesus and God and all that stuff, because we don't believe in that". At best, we could say that such a movement is Christian-inspired or Christian-derived, but it wouldn't be Christianity proper, because it rejects the core assumptions of Christianity.
There's been a lot of discussion in the thread over what counts as properly Marxist or not. To the best of my understanding, the core of Marxism would be something like: "capitalism is the name of a self-contradictory economic order; the self-consciousness and self-overcoming of this contradiction, which will take the concrete material form of a mass workers' revolution, will usher in a post-capitalist economic order that is based on transformed relations of production". That's the Nicene Creed of Marxism. If you don't believe in something that's at least close to that, you're not a Marxist. No matter how egalitarian you are, how sexually experimental you are, how resentful of straight white males you are - if your political program can be fundamentally be realized within the limits of liberal capitalism, then you're not a Marxist, cultural or otherwise. You're something else.
There may be individuals who, while adhering to the core Marxist program, decided that they needed to take a more "cultural" angle, and the term Cultural Marxist may be appropriate for those individuals. That's fine, I don't deny that. I do deny that the majority of leftists today (all the way from professors down to disaffected reddit commenters) adhere to the core Marxist program in any meaningful sense; therefore describing them as Marxist is inappropriate.
It seems to be a popular thesis in this thread that contemporary wokeism, while maybe not Marxist proper, is at least Marxist-derived in some crucial sense. This is an empirical question that I'm relatively agnostic on. It could be true or it could be false; it would require the appropriate historical and sociological studies to make a determination. I do worry that, much like the everything-I-don't-like-is-Marxism fallacy I mentioned earlier, this thesis comes close to being an instance of the all-my-enemies-get-their-talking-points-from-the-same-source fallacy. The left is very fond of deploying this against rightists - "no one could actually vote for Trump or oppose leftist social policies of their own accord, they've clearly all been brainwashed by Fox News/Russian bots/etc". And I don't want "cultural Marxist college professors" to be the right's version of Fox News/Russian bots/etc. Your enemies were not all brainwashed by a single malevolent entity. There really are just people who think differently than you.
But in the United States, the cultural Marxists and the originalist Marxists vote as a bloc, so in practical terms...
Voting patterns are not a useful criteria to determine equivalence among ideologies. Most white nationalists voted for Trump in 2016; but so did other groups, and the fact that those other groups voted for Trump doesn't mean they necessarily have any affinity with white nationalism.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
I believe that I am at least somewhat acquainted with leftist thought, not only through reams of videos and text produced by contemporary leftists online, but also through the works of the Frankfurt school (primarily Adorno and Marcuse), the works of Freudian psychoanalysts from Freud himself up through the 20th century and into the current day, and 20th century European philosophy in general. I have never once heard a leftist refer to themselves unironically as a "cultural Marxist". In fact I have never heard the term used by leftists at all, except when contemporary commentators use it to designate a conspiracy theory. That doesn't mean that no one ever used the term! I could have just missed it. But I am relatively confident that the term has never seen wide usage within actual leftist circles.
More importantly, this preoccupation with cultural Marxism seems to be an instance of the everything-I-don't-like-is-Marxism fallacy, which is the right's analogue of the left's everything-I-don't-like-is-fascism fallacy. Leftists will sometimes collate groups as diverse as ancaps, white nationalists, and monarchists all under the heading of "fascist" (or at least "gateways to fascism"), which is simply incorrect and ignores the many distinctions and divisions between those positions. You can't say that all your enemies are the same just because they're your enemies. There are many people who I would file under the broad banner of "leftism" who are simply not Marxist at all. Someone whose entire focus is, say, trans surgeries for minors or reparations for blacks, could easily be a liberal capitalist who has no overlap with historical Marxism in terms of goals or methodology. And I believe that is precisely the case for many leftists today. (Prosecuting your own particular racial grievances doesn't actually have any necessary connection with forming a global workers' movement to institute a total transformation of the economic system).
We certainly need some term to describe the dominant social phenomenon in Western politics today, whether that term is "leftist" or "woke" or "SJW" or whatever. But "cultural Marxism" is not a particularly good term for it, because the phenomenon isn't particularly Marxist, and the "culture" part is just obvious. What political movement doesn't want to shape the direction of culture? The right wants to influence culture as well, and they're fairly explicit about this.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
So, after she arrived at the hospital, do you think they should have operated sooner or no? Or do you think we don't have enough information to make a determination?
(I'm not necessarily expecting a simple unqualified yes/no answer - I'm just curious about your take on the actual situation itself, independent of the issues you pointed out with the presentation in the article.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Basically, the Great Awokening (God bless whoever came up with that designation) is winding down
It's winding down because it won. It has been installed as law. Every society requires a certain set of baseline social and ethical rules to function, and many of these rules require no extra "energy" to enforce. No one needs to be reminded not to go outside naked, for example; it's simply understood. You don't need a permanent revolution to uphold your strictures when your strictures have been integrated into the foundational social fabric itself.
Outside of all but the most deep Red social contexts, its simply taken for granted now that a man who claims to be a woman must be treated as a woman, and that non-whites are to be privileged in hiring, school admissions, and media representation. The revolution was successful. Everyone got the memo. We're not going back.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Huh. Subjectively, I feel like I visually scan the word from left to right and increment a counter every time the scanner passes over an R, but I don’t really consider myself to be a “visual thinker” at all.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
If this is only a "small but meaningful step better", as compared to the massive leap of GPT-3 over GPT-2 and the still-pretty-good-but-maybe-not-quite-as-big leap of GPT-4 over GPT-3, then isn't that evidence in favor of plateauing rather than against it?
I don't see much point in theorizing about an as yet unreleased version of the model with an as yet unrealized amount of compute behind it until people actually have it in their hands and are using it for real work.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
I fixed it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
the new version will be able to write the algo behind the scenes, run the algo, and then give you the correct result
(EDIT: Looks like linking directly to images on reddit is broken because "www." automatically gets replaced with "old." which doesn't work. Used an imgur link instead)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
You need female voters
You're still not taking the abortion-is-murder worldview seriously enough.
Try to imagine that you are sincerely convinced that abortion is murder. Suppose further that, as you say, the pro-abortion position is so popular among women that the only way to have a non-negligible chance of winning a national election is to stop being publicly anti-abortion.
A natural followup question is, why is the pro-abortion position so popular among women? What explains this fact? The way I see it, you have two main strategies for explaining this fact:
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One is to accept the popularity of abortion as evidence for the claim that abortion is not actually murder after all. If we accept as a starting point that most people (including most women) aren't particularly morally heinous, then the widespread popularity of X is evidence that X is not isomorphic to "murdering lots of innocent people for no good reason".
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Alternatively, you can go the route of claiming that most women (or at least a large enough number of women to matter for a national election) actually are morally heinous, because they support the unjustified murder of innocent people. In which case, that's a problem, and you have bigger issues to deal with than who wins the next election. That's the type of deep societal and spiritual rot that can't be undone just by installing the right figurehead for four years.
The point is that "millions of our fellow citizens are complicit in the industrialized slaughter of innocent people, buuut we need to win the next election so let's just roll with it" isn't really a stable worldview. That doesn't fly without some major cognitive dissonance. If you truly believe that abortion is murder, then it seems to me that the natural course of action in that case is uncompromising activism, as opposed to even a qualified capitulation.
(Full disclaimer, I am weakly pro-abortion, but I do get frustrated at how the anti-abortion position is systematically mischaracterized and misunderstood.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Do you eat raw spleen?
Never once.
Which raw organ do you eat for vitamin C
I don’t know. Certainly I don’t eat any raw organs. Is there any vitamin C in milk? I drink a fantastic quantity of milk.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
I’ve eaten essentially 0 fruits and vegetables for the last 4 or 5 years. They’re not a prerequisite for survival.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
but is much improved
No it isn't. This is much worse than what you had in your OP; the "improved" version is horribly stilted and unnatural. What you had in the OP was already fine and it wasn't in particular need of any further corrections.
"Be concise" is one of the most actively harmful "principles" of "good writing" in common circulation, almost on par with the utterly nonsensical "show don't tell" (a word is worth a thousand pictures - there are many "tellings" that are more profound than any "showing" ever could be). Concision is principally valued by those individuals who have neither the constitution to digest substantial amounts of authentically individuated writing, nor the ability to produce it. In some cases, a norm of terseness may function as a defense mechanism. When we tell the empty-headed dullard that he should "be more concise", what we are really telling him is that he should simply not write as much, so that we can spare ourselves the exposure to his writing. But this does not thereby transform the bad writer into a good writer - it merely makes him less of a nuisance. A minute quantity of poison is still poison in its intrinsic constitution, even if it has been reduced to a level where it is no longer dangerous.
Burn all the style guides; they're no good. Read your own writing in good faith, and honestly evaluate the degree to which it is in conformity with the law of your own taste. If you have good taste, it'll lead you right. If you have bad taste, then everything is hopeless from the start, so it doesn't really matter what you do.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Every Sunday there's a Small Questions thread that serves as an ideal home for these types of posts. But the range of topics allowed in the Culture War thread is very broad, and there are some interesting culture war implications in how academia treats "pure" and "applied" fields, so the post is fine here.
Generally I'd say that more abstract sub-fields are held in higher esteem (especially "abstract" in the sense of "fundamental", as in the results have wide-reaching implications in multiple areas of mathematics), in accordance with the general esteem that pure math itself is given over applied math. But this has its limits. Even some pure mathematicians balk at things like category theory, or the study of large cardinals, as "abstract nonsense". I think you're right that there is a certain mistrust of the foundations of mathematics - anything that carries the stench of philosophy is ipso facto suspicious. So it really depends on who you ask.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
There are times when prolonging the life of an organism is the correct decision, and times when it is not.
If an otherwise young and healthy person is afflicted by a serious but curable condition, then they should of course be treated to the best of our abilities. I don't fetishize "letting nature take its course" just for the sake of it. But when the elderly are sustained long past their expiration date - when there is nothing left to live for, when there is only the fear of death to struggle in vain against - then sometimes the most dignified option is to simply pull the plug.
When a particular cultural stratum, race, civilization, or species is failing to perform its basic functions (reproduction in this case), a similar analysis must be performed. Is it a temporary condition that can be alleviated? Or has the social organism simply exhausted its powers, put its best days behind it, and entered a stage of inevitable terminal decline?
All things die - ineluctably we will feel nostalgic for certain forms of life that we have become accustomed to, but this is no excuse for abandoning our sense of perspective. Let us simply hope that something new will be born to replace what is lost, and that this new form of life will be, if not "healthier" in an absolute sense, then at least more vigorous.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Is Yvette Falarca a liberal?
Based on the details of her criminal record, she doesn't appear to be.
Would you agree that there are now large groups of communist thugs in America, with institutional support and cover, committing organized violence against their perceived political enemies?
I think that Antifa would qualify as such, yes. My impression is that lately they've been less active in terms of large public actions than they were during the height of the Trump years, but maybe I just haven't been paying attention as much.
Would you agree that these communist thugs are engaged by the police and the justice system generally much less than we would expect for a random person committing the sort of violent crimes they routinely commit?
Yes.
Would you agree that most of these thugs originate, directly or indirectly, from the higher education system? That is, they were students or employees of the higher education system, or they received their ideology from students or employees of that education system?
I don't know. That's an empirical question that I don't feel prepared to answer. Determining the causality of large-scale social and historical phenomena is always a tricky business.
Generally, I'm in a position where I want to believe in the capacity of cultural production and academic thought to have impacts outside of their own provincial spheres, but I don't know if the evidence actually supports such a claim.
The author of the linked post may be suffering from a bit of myopia. He gives a historical account of certain trends within analytic philosophy departments. But you can certainly still find people in non-analytic philosophy departments, people in non-philosophy departments (English, sociology, the menagerie of "Studies", etc), and people outside of academic altogether, who call themselves Marxists. (Of course, the authenticity and seriousness of such commitments are always open to questioning.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
You might find this interesting - if not for the purpose of developing effective propaganda, then at least for your own edification. It has a bit of a bibliography for further reading.
John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism:
So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.
If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
major antisemite but supports woke prosecution
Damn they should come in for an AMA.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Unironically, what would be Trump’s best response to “I’m speaking now”? If you were wargaming strategies with him, what advice would you give?
Is it just unbeatable because of the broader cultural optics? Part of the problem is that I have no idea what the psychological profile of an “undecided” voter could possibly look like at this point, so it’s hard to craft a strategy that could appeal to them (because winning over Kamala supporters in any non-negligible amount is a non-starter).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
From all the possible gotchas, this is probably the weakest.
It's not a gotcha. It's an argument.
In the military you have duties, and not aiding the enemy is one of them.
OP said "I believe any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted". If he wants to amend his position to "any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted, except for speech that materially aids the enemy in a time of war", or perhaps "except for any speech that violates your previously agreed upon duties", then he's certainly welcome to do so. But that does, prima facie, appear to be an amendment of the original position.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
So, suppose you're in the Ukrainian military, and one of your compatriots is discovered to be relaying detailed plans of troop movements and locations to the Russians (or you can switch the nationalities if you want, doesn't really matter, whichever side you have more sympathy for). It's clear that what he's engaging in is "mere" speech - he's not causing any physical harm himself, he's merely communicating words and numerical coordinates to others. Should he face any consequences whatsoever for his actions? Would you say "well shucks, it's plain that what he's doing is materially hurting the war effort and is directly causing the deaths of our fellow soldiers, but because it is just speech, we can't legally do anything"?
Are you even permitted to fire him from his post in the military? If you are, that already seems like a step down from "absolutism" to me - it may not be jail time, but it's still a consequence of some sort.
When asked for his thoughts on Hegel, Wittgenstein replied, "Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different". There is of course a time and a place for both. But my preferences lean towards the latter.
Certainly, the popularity of anti-capitalist rhetoric in woke circles gives it a superficial similarity to Marxism proper. Certain people in those circles may even profess to be Marxist. But we can't always take what people say at face value. It's more important to analyze what they actually think and do. Conveniently, Marx himself provides an example that can be used as an analogy. He and many of his immediate intellectual descendants said that Marxism was "scientific". Is Marxism actually a science? They certainly called it one. They certainly wanted it to be one, since the name "science" bestows a veneer of intellectual respectability upon whatever it adorns. It's easy to find certain similarities between what Marx did and what scientists do; to at least some degree he engaged in a process of hypothesis formation and attempted to measure those hypotheses against empirical evidence. He revised his thinking as new data came in. But in spite of all this, Marxism is still not a science, because in its essential properties it differs from what makes a science actually be a science. The whole enterprise is crucially dependent on ethical and non-empirical propositions.
My position is that you simply have to examine individual leftists on a case by case basis to determine if they're actually Marxist or not; it can't be assumed just because of their adherence to feminism or anti-racism or any other leftist position. There are undoubtedly some genuine Marxists among today's leftists today, but I'm quite convinced that they're a minority. If, after a careful accounting of someone's politics, their revealed preference is for a world that is essentially similar to what we have now, except with more women CEOs and more government financial assistance for non-whites, that's not Marxism. That's liberal capitalism with some of the money shuffled around.
As a general note, I find considerations regarding provenance and genealogy to be largely irrelevant to this debate. It has been sometimes argued that Western science grew in some essential manner out of Christianity; science as beginning with the conviction that the divine creation was imbued with a rational order that was intelligible to man. Supposing that were true, does that mean that science is Christian in some essential sense? It seems plain to me that science is neither Christian nor non-Christian, regardless of its origins. Origins certainly can be relevant, but not in every case.
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