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.
3mo ago
My read is that this is just standard leftist wealth envy/hatred.
I'm not wealthy wealthy, but I am significantly wealthier than the median American. I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day. And I feel no moral guilt about this whatsoever. So no, I have no envy/hatred of wealth.
You're upset that people exist who are not satisfying "from each according to his abilities".
I'm upset that our vital and necessary work is being done by immigrants and illegals instead of native-born American citizens.
If we get back to the point where the work of maintaining American society is again being done by Americans, and there's still enough surplus to go around to enable some people to live as NEETs, then fine by me. Bully for them. Being a NEET is great! I've done my share of NEETing in the past. I empathize fully with why people want to do that and I have no criticisms of them from a moral perspective.
There are humans out there who are not doing the specific thing you want them to do, so you will simply tweak society to engineer conditions that force them to do your will.
There is no politics unless someone is being forced to conform to something. There is no civilization unless someone is being forced to conform to something.
Obviously some civilizations are much more totalitarian than others. But even the most libertarian among us will still usually support some minimal state order for the purposes of punishing violent crime, enforcing property rights, etc.
If this doesn't work, or X and Y fail to complete your goals, perhaps some still manage to mooch and others just feel some additional hardship, then we must go further.
Incorrect, see above.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
The Brevity thing is the most important piece of advice about writing or speech.
Absolutely not! Good heavens.
As with many questions of this type, the answer to "how long should it be?" is always "as long as it should be". Sometimes that will be quite short, and other times it will be quite long. Context and purpose matter. When I'm looking up technical documentation at work, I usually do want it to give me the answer I'm looking for as fast as possible with little ado. But thankfully, people can write things other than technical documentation.
In general, if someone is a good writer, then we would prefer him to write more rather than less. More of a good thing is good! Saying that you prefer writing to always be as short as possible is a bit like saying that the best sandwich is the one with the least meat on it. We would have to assume that such a person is not much of a meat eater to begin with.
Not everyone is a lover of words, and that's fine. There are plenty of things I don't care about either. I have little taste for music, for example, beyond the most superficial enjoyment. Which is why I make no attempt to generalize my musical preferences into universally applicable strictures.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
As a discipline so untethered by constraints
It... depends on what you mean by that. In some sense, yeah, philosophy is more radically free of constraints than any other discipline, in the sense that any foundational premise or assumption is always fair game for critique. If you're a physicist and you think Einstein was wrong, you're a crank. If you're a mathematician and you want to be an ultrafinitist then at best you're engaged in a non-standard project that has little relevance to the work of mainstream professional mathematicians (and at worst you're a crank). But in philosophy, if you want to argue that philosophy itself is dumb and not worth doing and is incapable of generating truth or knowledge (as, arguably, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein held at times), then you're not a crank. You're just doing philosophy, and philosophers will praise you as an insightful and original thinker if you're capable of supporting your position.
But in another sense, it's just as constrained as any other discipline. With few exceptions, the vast majority of Western philosophers past and present have taken themselves to be addressing questions that had correct and incorrect answers, and their goal was to arrive at correct answers and support their positions with arguments and evidence (yes, even the "postmodernists" - the "relativism" of Foucault and Derrida was greatly exaggerated through misreadings of their work).
And, when it comes to breadth, someone like Scott, Cremieux, or even a top 4chan autist is going to have far more of it than a philosophy professor at Oxford.
My use of the word "breadth" may have been misleading there. I meant "breadth" insofar as you can bring a wide range of relevant knowledge and references to bear on a specific question or problem you're addressing. Not in the sense of, you can give me hot takes on a lot of different topics that may or may not be related to your specialty.
To give a concrete example, the work of Ted Sider and Trenton Merricks addresses, in far more meticulous and thorough detail, the problems that Scott outlined in The Categories Were Made For Man.
The modern information network has created polymath monsters
"Polymaths" almost always grossly overestimate their competence.
Academia is so stilted that it rarely produces novel thought at all. Who are these radical new idea-smiths, sharpened by years of formal training?
I linked the work of François Kammerer regarding illusionism about consciousness elsewhere in the thread. It's not uncommon for people in internet debates to express skepticism about the hard problem of consciousness, but they tend to be unfamiliar with the existing academic work on the problem, and frankly they usually don't understand what the problem is even about in the first place. Contemporary defenders of illusionism both understand the problem, and they appreciate the severe uphill challenge that illusionism faces, but they still defend the position, which is interesting if nothing else.
Todd McGowan's work on reinterpreting Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of his Zizekian reading of Hegel (part 1 of a brief overview and part 2) made Lacan's work a lot more interesting and accessible than Lacan himself did, and it had a significant and enduring impact on the way I interpret my own actions and the actions of other people.
Chris Cutrone managed to convince me that the Marxist tradition was more intellectually interesting than I previously assumed.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6mo ago
there is no fundamental conflict between Big Tech and the Woke.
Yeah. If I had written a longer post I would have gone into more nuance, but, the relationship between big tech and woke is very complex. One of my principle criticisms (but certainly not the only one) of big tech is, indeed, their complicity as a vehicle for the dissemination of wokeness.
Unfortunately we do have to be constrained by reality to some extent in terms of political strategizing. I’d like to just say “I’ll support the Good People, where the Good People are the ones who would just do whatever I would do if I was the God King”. But there’s no guarantee that there will be any organized constituency that matches those exact values. So we have to make do with what we have.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo 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.
8mo ago
Have you ever felt pain? If yes, then you know what it means to have a conscious experience. It's that, and the other things like that (sensations more generally, the way things look, the way things sound, and the like).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
See what I wrote here and the ensuing replies. If we're going to accept that people have things called "desires" at all (and that is a philosophically contentious claim - it can't just be taken for granted, any more than Freud's theories can be taken for granted), then we have to accept that we don't have direct empirical access to them. So any model of desire-attribution has to be holistically evaluated across multiple axes: parsimony, elegance, ability to unify multiple disparate phenomena, etc.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
and expected us to share your judgment of its quality.
No, certainly not. I'm aware that my tastes are unusual. If the works I've shared here aroused curiosity in even just a couple of people then I would be quite happy.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
There's no accounting for taste!
Something about man-made structures that appear to have been dropped in the middle of nowhere just really does it for me. I love the Viaduct Petrobras for similar reasons.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
How did architecture become entirely centered around philosophical navel gazing? We'd all be better off if architects put down the continental philosophers and started again with firmitas, utilitas, venustas.
Again, don't you see the tension here in these two sentences?
What you've suggested here - architecture should be beautiful, architecture should serve a function - is itself a non-trivial philosophical program that must be argued for rather than assumed. Architects can't operate in the absence of philosophical commitments altogether, because this is impossible. Instead, you're asking that they adopt your own philosophical commitments without reflection. Phrased in this way, your recommendation no longer seems as manifestly self-evident.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
There's no cognitive dissonance because there's no evil here, anywhere.
Eisenman's buildings range from "fine" to "pretty darn cool" in my view. "...Architecture that similarly alludes to a deeper or alternate view of reality" in a Lovecraftian fashion is also cool. Rad, even. I want more of that. Sign me up. This isn't even some complex "well we have to understand the dialectical nature of suffering and how even negative emotions can be valuable" shit. This is just very straightforwardly an architect who makes cool buildings that he thinks are cool and other people think are cool. There's no malfeasance here, no shenanigans.
To me, your question sounds akin to someone saying "how exactly can you support Harry Potter books pushing Satanic propaganda on our children?" It's hard to provide an answer because I disagree with the entire framing.
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
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.
1d ago
The long answer would involve starting here.
The short answer is that I didn't say that, under self_made's described social system, the man would enjoy his wife's transgression per se, but rather that the feeling of power he derives from exercising his authority over those who have transgressed offers something to enjoy.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
Why do you think so?
Because she's hot and I wanted more. Give her a 100 day route in the DLC, Kodaka.
(The dynamic is as you described in your linked post, but there's an entire genre of femdom / role reversal fiction that works like this, it's not at all limited to /ss/)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
It's the "doesn't owe you femininity" of the art world.
I kinda think that's just true though! The artwork doesn't owe you anything. In fact, it's a good exercise to ask yourself what you owe to the artwork.
Walter Kaufmann said of Kierkegaard, "there's no other author in world literature who gives me such a strong impression that my soul has been placed on the scales, and found wanting". I think that's what great art should aim to do. There's something fundamentally anxiety-inducing about it.
Of course, if the work serves literally no purpose whatsoever, aesthetic or otherwise, then yes, by definition we would have to question what the point of making it in the first place was. But it's actually quite hard to find a work that meets that criteria; maybe impossible. You know, even something like Joseph Kosuth's "Art as Idea as Idea" where he would print placards with dictionary entries on them and hang them up in an otherwise empty room... even something like this produces an aesthetic experience. It has its own kind of texture, it induces its own kind of perception. It's more subtle but it's there if you can grab onto it. He probably didn't even want that work to induce a "classical" kind of aesthetic experience, and yet it does, because it's inescapable.
Ever notice that, especially evident with how the Western world interacts with other Kodaka VNs, that 'how the presentation will be perceived' is a central element of every ambiguous-gender character
Well, that's a result of the fanbase being largely tumblrites.
I've loved Danganronpa ever since SDR2 first released in English but I never really interacted with the community, so I was surprised to see what a big tumblr/fujo following it had. I suppose it was a result of Danganronpa being relatively "gender neutral", and having some pretty boys like Nagito to latch onto. Although I was even more surprised that the fujo contingent showed up for Hundred Line as well, because that one is much more unabashedly targeted at a straight male audience.
Which one?
I want Hiruko to step on me!
V'ehx is close though, god damn they did her dirty by giving her such a short route...
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
what's your opinion/review on the Hundred Line game?
It's a lot of fun! Definitely recommended. If you liked any of Kodaka's or Uchikoshi's other games you'll like this too. Especially if you liked Danganronpa, because although it's a very different kind of story than Danganronpa it's got a similar "vibe".
you called it a VN where I got the impression it's more like a TRPG. How do the two mesh together?
Yeah so it's not a "pure" VN because it does have a combat system, but most people I've talked to classify it as a VN. (The main gameplay loop is long VN segment with a chance to upgrade units -> battle -> another long VN segment -> repeat). The combat (assuming you play on normal mode, I finished the game before the patch that added hard mode) is more than just a "formality", but it never gets super difficult. It's less complex and involved than what you would find in a game like Fire Emblem or FFT. You're really here for the story, not the combat.
Plus if you keep playing long enough (meaning you explore multiple routes instead of just making a beeline for the true ending) you basically get the ability to just skip combat altogether, which means you're just free to explore and at that point the game becomes a "pure" VN.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
19d ago
Are autoandrophiles even a thing?
They undoubtedly exist, although they’re quite rare, partially because paraphilias in general are rare in women.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
26d ago
That being said, from my short time here it seems like most of the Christians on this site aren't that into symbolism, and tend to be more "rationalist" and materialist in their worldview.
Not entirely sure I follow your usage of the word "symbolism" here, but I do think I know what you're getting at.
I'm an atheist, but I have a religious disposition. A religious "personality type" if you will. Conversely, I've interacted with Christians here and elsewhere who believe in a literal God, but don't seem to possess the religious mindset at all.
Funny how things work out like that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
28d ago
I'm not blowing you off; I just don't have the time in the day to keep responding to everyone for now. I may take some select points here and respond to them in a future top level post.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
29d ago
You continue to misinterpret my claims.
Love, if it exists, is a miracle. But did I ever say, at any point in this conversation, that you shouldn't believe in miracles? I've said no such thing.
I, along with perhaps billions of other people will tell you that
Regardless of what claims you think I'm making, this would not constitute a legitimate criticism of any of them.
You could almost say that it's the business of philosophical reflection to produce claims (or, plausible sounding arguments for claims, at any rate) that almost everyone rejects. It has variously been claimed by different parties in the history of philosophy that cars and buildings and animals are not real, that conscious experience is not real, that 1+1 does not equal 2, that there exist sentences which can be both true and false at the same time. Almost all humans reject these claims; but this is not taken to be any major impediment. Truth is not subject to democratic rule. The philosopher simply carries on with his business; he is well aware that other people will think he is in the grip of some kind of psychosis. When the propositions of "common sense" are finally subjected to long-overdue critique, the results will unavoidably be counterintuitive.
the harm that people like Aella have done to society is to convince people of the incorrect, unhealthy, anti social framework of understanding that you are presenting here.
I mean, you will certainly believe that some people are incorrect and unhealthy and anti-social, but we still all have to try to get along, y'know? Tomorrow it could be you who's getting called incorrect and anti-social.
You, nor Aella, nor the red pill people, nor the pickup artist people before them
I don't agree with the TRP/PUA people at all! I've done a terrible job of explaining my positions if that's what you took away from it.
I'm less familiar with Aella, but I'd probably find points of significant disagreement with her as well.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
29d ago
"A typical relationship is an exchange of resources for sex" shouldn't be taken to entail anything more than what it says on the tin. It doesn't imply there's no such thing as love, it doesn't imply that there's nothing beyond commodification, etc. (There are many complexities here that would have to be addressed, but I probably don't hold the views that you think I do on these questions.)
As I argued in another post, I don't think that the deficiency of prostitution (deficient in love, bonding, companionship, whatever the claim is) entails the moral blameworthiness of prostitution. People seem to think that prostitutes are bad, in some particularly unique way. We're trying to figure out why they think that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1mo ago
If you want to talk to an AI, there's already a place where you can do that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
Zizek doesn’t believe that he “knows how to solve all our problems”.
As a follower of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he believes that the fundamental nature of subjectivity will always lead to both social conflict and internal self-conflict regardless of how we arrange social relations.
His own idiosyncratic interpretation of Hegel’s “end of history” is that “the end of history is just realizing that there is no end of history; there is no final resolution of all contradiction”. Arguable whether Hegel actually meant that or not, but that’s what Zizek believes at any rate.
He has spoken at length about how Stalin’s mistake was thinking that he could transform himself into an impersonal agent of history and rationality; there is no ahistorical viewpoint from which you can judge yourself and your own actions, the outcome of your actions is never guaranteed, they can only be judged retroactively after they have unfolded in history.
Why, given these facts about his work and thought, do you persist in saying that “he thinks he knows how to solve all our problems”?
Seething contempt is fine if it’s expressed politely, which Turok has done imo.
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