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Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


				

User ID: 342

Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

					

"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."


					

User ID: 342

Zizek's new piece in Compact: Happy Birthday Kant, You Lousy Sadist (paywalled, but you can read the whole thing on reddit here):

Is there a line from Kantian ethics to the Auschwitz killing machine? Are the Nazis’ concentration camps and their mode of killing—as a neutral business—the inherent terminus of the enlightened insistence on the autonomy of reason? Is there some affinity between Kant avec Sade and Fascist torture as portrayed by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film version of 120 Days in Sodom, which transposes the story into the dark days of Mussolini’s Salò republic?

The link between Sade and Kant was first developed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the famous Excursion II (“Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality”) of the Dialectics of Enlightenment. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s fundamental thesis is that “the work of Marquis de Sade displays the ‘Reason which is not led by another agency,’ that is to say, the bourgeois subject, liberated from a state of not yet being mature.” Some 15 years later, Lacan (unaware of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s version of the argument) also developed the notion that Sade is the truth of Kant, first in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1958-59), and then in an écrit of 1963.

In typical Zizek fashion, he bounces between multiple different ideas in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style, so there are a lot of different threads here that you could grab and run with. Some of our resident anti-enlightenment posters and Christian posters may find something productive in Adorno and Horkheimer's diagnosis of the ethical situation of modernity:

Sade announced the moment when, with the emergence of bourgeois Enlightenment, pleasure itself lost its sacred-transgressive character and was reduced to a rationalized instrumental activity. That is to say, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the greatness of Sade was that, on behalf of the full assertion of earthly pleasures, he not only rejected any metaphysical moralism, but also fully acknowledged the price one has to pay for this rejection: the radical intellectualization-instrumentalization-regimentation of sexual activity intended to bring pleasure. Here we encounter the content later baptized by Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation”: After all the barriers of sublimation, of cultural transformation of sexual activity, are abolished, what we get isn’t raw, brutal, passionate, satisfying animal sex, but on the contrary, a fully regimented, intellectualized activity comparable to a well-planned sporting match.

There is much that could be said about Kant's continuing influence on thought and politics. Putin has expressed admiration for him, for example. But probably the biggest point of interest to a general audience here will be Zizek's remarks on Trump near the end of the essay:

Things are similar with the new rightist populism. The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops up in his head, insulting others, and violating all rules of good manners) tells a lot about our predicament: What sort of world do we inhibit, in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of the society in which everything is permitted and old values go down the drain? Trump is not a relic of the old moral-majority conservatism—he is to a much greater degree the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations. [...] Trump’s obscene performances thus express the falsity of his populism: to put it with brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for the ordinary people, he promotes big capital.

I view this as one of a series of similar critiques coming out of the left in recent times, all of which center around the curious theme of rightists not acting rightist enough. There's been a growing concern on the left in the last few years that "the positions have switched", to a certain extent. Traits that used to be associated with the left - a general rebelliousness, experimentation with new ideas, a critique of established values and established authority (Covid is a big one here), and, yes, a certain willingness to engage in crass vulgarity from time to time, either as a political act or as simple good-spirited humor - have now become associated with the right. Meanwhile the left has become much more strongly associated with order, morality, and authority than they were in the post-war 20th century.

Reactions from leftists to this alleged reversal have been all over the spectrum: everything from panic ("they're stealing our bit! we have to get a handle on this!"), to Zizek's strategy here of denying the authenticity and veridicality of ostensibly rightist forms of rebellion and protest, to simple avowal ("yes, we are in charge, we are Justice, and that's a good thing actually").

Among commentators who believe this to be an authentic political phenomenon, the standard explanation is usually something like: well of course rightists were all for law and order when they were in charge. But now they're not so in charge anymore, so now they're learning the value of critique and skepticism, of free speech and civil liberties, and so forth. Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.

But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that. But it becomes rather boring if you're always just looking for the self interest behind everything. The much more interesting and radical project is to find the abstract ethical commitments hiding behind apparent self interest.

There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx - it's not something that they just happened to discover after attaining political ascendancy. It's reflected in how they govern their own private institutions, even when they don't have societal power. There was frequently internal strife at the Frankfurt school over this or that theorist not sufficiently holding to the party line. Leftist organizations at least as far back as the 80s were already using the progressive stack at group meetings to make sure that white men spoke last. Marxism itself claims that the end goal of the communist revolution is the dissolution of all antagonisms between individual and collective good - but the individual is right to be nervous about what processes the collective might institute to achieve this utopian vision.

Similarly, I believe in the possibility of a principled libertarianism that wouldn't immediately abandon all of its commitments as soon as it got hold of actual power. It's true that ideology always has to make affordances for reality at some point, but clearly, ideology has some impact on the reality of governance as well: I don't think you could, for example, explain the different political situations in the US and Russia entirely in terms of their different material and sociological conditions, with no reference whatsoever to the beliefs and motivations of the individual people who actually govern those countries.

If we were to fairly apply the progressive criteria of "disparate impact", then we would have to conclude that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

If a meritocratic hiring process results in a disproportionately low number of blacks getting hired, then the process is racist, regardless of the intentions behind the process or its alleged fairness. Similarly if anti-Zionism ends up materially hurting Jews, then it's anti-Semitic.

Of course no one on the progressive left will actually buy this argument, they'll just say "no we're doing anti-racism, and anti-racism can't be racist, duh" and leave it at that.

It's interesting how "thou shalt not take too much dick" is a universal prohibition for both genders. There's something of an asymmetry here.

Straight men having a lot of sex is praiseworthy, and society seems to have less of an intrinsic disgust reaction to lesbians than to gay men.

The Japanese have a strange affinity for cuckolding porn, but it’s usually not interracial (black interracial even less so).

the core artistic advantage that video games have is that they force the player to experience the decision-making that goes into a choice, not just the rationale and consequences

Yeah. I didn't want to go into all the requisite nuance and bloat the post to astronomical proportions, but, obviously interactivity can do a lot of things that are artistically fascinating. Tim Rogers's excellent analysis of Earthbound touches on these issues.

Looking at the AAQCs from August 2022, something like half of those people are still posting here regularly. It's largely the same people posting here now that were posting back then. So I'm not sure when you think the alleged golden age was, but apparently, it was more than two years ago. (Which means you're still posting on a forum that you think has been shit for 2+ years.)

the higher level stuff doesn’t seem that useful to me.

Sex isn’t very useful either most of the time, but that doesn’t diminish the appeal.

You can't act on disbeliefs.

Whenever someone uses the word "can't" when talking about the human mind, I get suspicious. What would you say about the following:

For my entire life I've had some relatively mild sub-clinical symptoms of OCD, particularly centered around the idea of keeping things symmetrical. Sometimes if I accidentally brush up against something with one hand for example, I'll suddenly be struck by the thought that if I don't touch it with the other hand as well, I'll die in my sleep that night. Of course I know and believe that this is false. I can even tell myself in the moment that it's false, and I believe what I'm telling myself. But nevertheless it really just feels like I should touch it with my other hand, so I do.

Rationally, I know that touching random benign ordinary objects in the environment can have no impact on my odds of sudden death. It's an absurd belief. I'm intelligent enough to recognize that there's no possible causal connection there. And yet I continue to act as though I do believe it.

What's up with all the non-Mormons? Weirdly specific universalities across LLMs

As seen in the previous section, without even venturing into the semantic void (i.e. no customised embeddings being employed), Pythia 2.8b and 12b, when prompted with the “empty string definition” prompt

A typical definition of '' would be '

both produce, with greedy sampling, the output

a person who is not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I really love these posts about glitchy LLM behavior, they scratch the same itch as e.g. analyses of glitches used in speedrunning.

Someone posted a response from "Claude" (Opus I assume? It's unspecified) in the comments section on the post. A couple things struck me about it:

  • If your main exposure to human writing is via facebook posts and frontpage reddit comments, then you might be forgiven for thinking that LLMs are already highly intelligent and have lots of deep wisdom to share.

  • It's not clear to me that Claude demonstrates an understanding of what's actually at issue with this phenomenon, i.e. the simple fact that '' (whether interpreted as the empty string, or two literal characters) doesn't have a "definition". It does note that it was "hallucinating", which is on the right track, but that's juxtaposed with "the exercise of sitting with the indeterminacy and openness of the empty string...", which is obviously rather silly and is more indicative of it treating the task as legitimate, rather than recognizing it for the pseudotask that it is. (I'm sure that if you prompted it directly it would be able to tell you that '' has no "definition", but the issue here is whether it was able to incorporate that understanding into this particular response.)

But unlike my genes I do care about human happiness

Trust me, I do too. But nature doesn't. Our hopes and dreams have to be tempered by reality.

If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why

Well, this sounds like a slightly different complaint than what we had at the start. This is less about women's standards/status being too high and more like women just opting out of the game altogether.

And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.

Yes, I had that dialogue in mind when I wrote that sentence. He of course chooses to remain in prison.

So if:

  • The AuthLeft and AuthRight are defined by a belief in the right to wield absolute power over all other humans without accountability or restraint - all members of the AuthLeft and AuthRight believe this, and furthermore members of other political ideologies don't believe it, and

  • This belief is the most salient factor in determining identity among political ideologies,

then sure, the AuthLeft and the AuthRight are the same. But this is less of a substantive sociological/philosophical thesis and more of a tautology. You're using these idiosyncratic concepts "AuthLeft" and "AuthRight" whose applicability to broader political discussions is questionable.

The space of possible political positions is much broader than you give it credit for. I would encourage you to read some of the original works by any of the thinkers we've been discussing lately - Zizek, Lacan, Marcuse, Derrida, Nietzsche, or Heidegger - and see if there's anything in there that surprises you.

Marcuse put it very succinctly:

The institutions of a socialist society, even in their most democratic form, could never resolve all the conflicts between the universal and the particular, between human beings and nature, between individual and individual. Socialism does not and cannot liberate Eros from Thanatos. Here is the limit which drives the revolution beyond any accomplished stage of freedom : it is the struggle for the impossible, against the unconquerable whose domain can perhaps nevertheless be reduced.

Er… what is Hlynka-in-theory?

As @ArjinFerman correctly points out he was very liberal in handing out bans. Maybe his petty squabbles were with a different ideological subset of posters, but they were petty squabbles nonetheless.

Sure, that could be the case. It’s not my preferred theory, but I won’t rule it out.

The main problem is that these guys think that under the perfect 'no Christian egalitarian shit' system, they would be LORDS AND MASTERS.

This is a criticism that frequently gets levied against rightists. And there's some truth to it. Some people really are just greedy sociopaths without any principles.

In an authentic anti-egalitarian politics, it ultimately doesn't matter much who the master is. We might have our own preferences of course, very strong preferences, but the final bedrock commitment is: if not me, then someone. Please let someone be beautiful and happy and triumphant, even if I am not. This is a moral impulse, the fulcrum on which everything turns. It's what separates a rightist from a grifter.

He was right that the AuthLeft/AuthRight horseshoe is in fact a circle

I assume that you are here claiming that the AuthLeft and AuthRight are really "the same" in some sense, in line with your previous posts on the subject.

On what criteria are you making this judgement?

I don't believe that your previous criteria used to support variations on this thesis in the past have been successful. You claimed that progressives and white identitarians are not distinct because they have no relevant "differences in policy, action, or outcome" beyond "which specific racial groupings should be favored". I responded by citing multiple substantial policy disagreements between them that were unrelated to race. (Admittedly though, it's not clear to me if "progressives" and "white identitarians" are the same thing as the "AuthLeft" and "AuthRight", and the arguments I outlined in the old thread may not be relevant to this new thesis. Please correct me if I'm going astray.)

You later claimed that the far left and far right are actually the same because they both endorse the same core philosophical commitment, specifically the commitment to the idea that "we know how to solve all our problems", presumably using Enlightenment reason or something equivalent. But I argued that there are leftists (communists, even) who deny this axiom.

So, what is the current criteria you endorse? Did I go wrong in one of my earlier arguments?

that both are progeny of the Enlightenment/Progressive movement

Maybe. (I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea of the "Enlightenment" as a discrete identifiable event.) But even granting this, I don't think it changes much. Things can be derived from the same source and still be different. Humans and apes are descended from a common ancestor, but they're not "the same" in any meaningful sense.

the Leviathian shaped hole

I admit to not being enough of a Hlynka scholar. Can someone explain what this actually means?

I don't mean to keep belaboring the point here. If you're just not interested in Freud's ideas then that's fine. But you are psychoanalyzing Freud and you're doing exactly what you accuse psychoanalysis of doing. You're attributing unacknowledged ulterior motivations to him, in spite of his explicit protests to the contrary (he certainly claimed to be simply following the evidence where it lead him - if you told him that psychoanalysis was just based on wishful thinking, he absolutely would have disagreed. So would you still persist in your claim that you know his motivations better than he did?)

Do you think people can be innately straight? I do. It’s like that.

Ukraine suspends consular services for military-age men in draft push

Ukraine on Tuesday suspended consular services for military-age male citizens until May 18, criticising Ukrainians abroad who it said expected to receive help from the state without helping it battle for survival in the war against Russia.

Hundreds of thousands of military-age Ukrainian men are living abroad and the country faces an acute shortage of troops against a larger, better-equipped enemy nearly 26 months since Russia's full-scale invasion.

[...]In practice, the suspension means military age men now living abroad will be unable to renew expiring passports or obtain new ones or receive official documents such as marriage certificates.

It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?" Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window. It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.

There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.

This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers. Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict? That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.

I think you're implying that we've become too ideologically homogeneous and people's viewpoints aren't being challenged often enough here. Maybe that's true if you restrict yourself to only looking at "basic" culture war issues - Trump, trans issues, DEI, etc. But if you look at the total range of issues that get discussed here, we have lots of arguments over lots of things. We have plenty of substantial disagreements with each other.

It would be better if we had more "garden variety" leftists who were anti-Trump, pro-trans, etc. so we had more ideological diversity, but, the reasons for our lack of leftists have already been discussed ad nauseam.

I also see that you haven't made a top level post in the last 3 months. You are the forum. If you think the posts here are low quality, then write the kinds of posts that you would prefer to read.

Or when their political future is now determined by the flood of migrants which repopulates the region, as opposed to their coethnics in Moscow.

I imagine that this is one of the wedges that drives different intuitions on this conflict - are you looking at it through a racial lens or a civic nationalist lens? Do you see Russians and Ukrainians, two peoples about as genetically and linguistically similar as you can get while still remaining distinct, or do you see Russia and Ukraine, two independent legal entities that are bound by the same ahistorical Rawlsian veil of ignorance as all other international actors?

In general I'm going to be a lot less concerned about an invading force that is ethnically and linguistically closer to me than one that is more distant. China invades the US, it's go time, Germany or the UK invades the US, eh I can probably live with that. Contra some of the other replies, "the continued existence of Ukraine" is in fact an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO, because the nation-state itself is an abstraction of relatively recent historical origin. Prosperity for oneself, for one's family and tribe, for the continued endurance of one's way of life - these desires are universal, but they are not equivalent to "the territorial integrity of one's nation-state". The latter is not a natural and universal human desire.

Of course race is certainly not the only thing that matters. I don't want to be ruled by white wokeists. But how many Ukrainians currently fighting are deeply opposed to Russia on ideological grounds because of their commitment to free speech/representative democracy/gay rights/whatever, and how many of them are just going with the flow because "Putin bad and this is what we're doing now"? How many of them are actually ideologically closer to the average Russian than the average American liberal? This is where the accusations of puppetry come from.

We live in a causal universe, I don't think there is such a thing as spontaneous belief.

Sure, but that seems like a rather pedantic point to make in this context. If someone says they like eating tasty food because it's a natural spontaneous desire, and you say they actually like eating food because of government propaganda, then on the face of it your explanation is a lot less correct than theirs, regardless of what philosophical hangups you might have about the concept of spontaneity.

I don't think this is a born this way thing, I think it's still social even if that doesn't make it a choice.

I believe I recall from some of your previous posts that you endorse HBD. So presumably you think some people are born some way.

Someone who criticized HBD by saying "well if you kept someone locked in an empty room from birth and never taught them anything then they would turn out to be really stupid, so it's actually all environmental in the end" would be missing the point. We're all in agreement that the outside environment is important and has a big influence. It's the innate disposition of individuals to respond differently to the same environmental stimulus that's in question.

I would describe my position by saying that I endorse an HBD-type view for gender identity and sexual orientation rather than a purely social constructionist view, that's all.

Wait, what?

Do you ever just like, feel bad when you do something wrong? Like ever?