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
you think that growing the economy through pursuing advances in science and tech leads to decrease in well-being of the population
My more direct fear is that critical reflection on questions such as: what is "well-being"? to what extent is "well-being" worth pursuing? does it make sense to have a single unified metric of "well-being"? - will cease. Such reflection is naturally at home in humanities departments.
You can argue that we don't need state funding to think about such questions. But a culture that sees no value in the humanities in general is unlikely to find value in these questions in particular.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
Defining art in the way you do is like defining marriage as a convenient way to save on rent
That's exactly what it's not! That would be a utilitarian definition of marriage. I am offering what I believe to be a thoroughly anti-utilitarian conception of art.
What is the work of art to you when it no longer has a use? When it doesn't teach you anything, when it doesn't help you do anything, when you don't gain anything from it? Do you only value it as long as it still has a functional purpose, as long as there is still some benefit to be gained (such as, knowledge of beauty and truth)? That's the real question.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
If your artistic output is taken as inspiration for torture chambers designed to inflict psychological damage on prisoners of war, then something has gone seriously wrong.
Your modus ponens is my modus tollens. His work may have been used as inspiration for a torture chamber; but Klee was obviously a fantastic artist regardless. So we can conclude that that is no great indictment of him.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
an architect might respond that he should be unconstrained by the ressentiment of the plebs when he is exerting his own will upon the built environment at massive scales.
This is roughly the position I would endorse, yes.
It's ironic that on the one hand Eisenman is being accused of being a socialist, and on the other hand we have multiple people arguing that Eisenman has a moral duty to uphold a certain traditional standard of beauty in the public commons, even if this runs contrary to the intentions of his private financial backers. Should we put all architectural decisions up to a public vote, to ensure that no buildings are ever constructed which the majority would find offensive? If I found the appeal to democracy to be persuasive, then perhaps I would be more likely to be a socialist! But I am not a socialist, and I have no particular fondness for democracy. I will celebrate any opportunity for an artist to carry on his work while unconstrained by the demands of mass taste.
As for Eisenman's work itself, it's maybe not perfectly aligned with my own taste, but it's also not nearly as grotesque as some of the people here are making it out to be. I think his House VI is quite lovely, although admittedly that's largely due to the juxtaposition of the structure with the environs rather than due to the intrinsic properties of the structure itself.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
What if music challenged you?
Great idea! You'd be missing out on a lot of brilliant music if you avoided everything that was challenging.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3mo ago
Is that relevant to your evaluation of whether DOGE should be allowed to seize their headquarters?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo 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.
7mo ago
I agreed with you yesterday on needing to have more compassion towards anti-vaxxers
I didn't use the word "compassion" in the posts I wrote about vaccines, and that's not what I was asking for anyway. I was asking for understanding - an understanding of the conditions and values that cause people to do what they do and think what they think - but that's different from compassion.
There's an intense sneering involved in what you're saying there
No there isn't.
It's just a fact that some people are more fit for biological reproduction than others. But I don't think that evolutionary fitness is tied in any direct sense to your ultimate moral worth. Some of the greatest men to ever live (Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, etc) had no children.
Nature is dumb; it is opinionated, certainly, but you can decide for yourself how seriously you want to take its opinions. The appropriate response, upon learning that you are defective according to nature, isn't "ah, I am defective, all hope is lost". The appropriate response is "very well, I am defective. I accept this designation. But now what? What can this defective organism accomplish? You might be surprised at the answer."
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
With the same attention that Christians allot to Christ, Judaism allots to the practice of ritual rule-following.
I have always found certain aspects of Judaism to be rather appealing, including the rule-following. It tickles my autism.
"And when, baffled by the inadequacy of his human standards, your philosopher refers justice to the "categoric imperative," he betrays the triviality of your world . What is that "categoric imperative," that helpless compromise and confession? What man recognizes it, will bow to it? That phrase itself is its own denial, for he that refers mankind to a "categoric imperative" is himself neither categoric nor imperative . But even the deaf will hear and tremble when the Prophet thunders: "Thus saith the Lord." There is the categoric imperative!
(- Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles)
In some ways, Judaism is the Kant to Christianity's Hegel. God and his Law as absolute Other, the thing-in-itself imposed from the outside, an inscrutable and uncognizable limit to pure reason, vs. contradiction introduced into the heart of the logos, the thing-in-itself shattered: a God who can be mortal, a God who can die.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
I'll be as gentle as the decorum rules require. If the mods think that my post violated the decorum rules then they're free to let me know. I don't think it did though.
If we took every request to be "gentle" seriously, then people could just preface every post with "please be gentle" and then soapbox about whatever they wanted to with the expectation that they would receive no pushback, which is obviously not desirable. This is a space for having your ideas challenged, so if you post here, you should expect to have your ideas challenged. I raised the points that I thought were a) salient for understanding the foundations of OP's worldview and b) possibly fruitful for a broader discussion.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil
I'm not an absolutist. Or, let me phrase it this way: to the extent that I'm opposed to the death penalty, it's not due to an overriding commitment to pacifism. If a man were to witness another man murdering his wife, for example, I would not fault him for disposing of the murderer in whatever manner he pleased. When we speak of the "death penalty" though, we aren't speaking of an impassioned response to a personal injustice; we are instead of speaking of an impersonal state apparatus, one which operates over vast distances and vast quantities of time, and which publicizes (the knowledge of) its executions as a spectacle. Now things are different.
Nietzsche said most of what needs to be said in On the Genealogy of Morality, specifically in the second essay, which deals with the historical genesis of criminal punishment:
But in particular, the creditor could inflict all kinds of dishonour and torture on the body of the debtor, for example, cutting as much flesh off as seemed appropriate for the debt: – from this standpoint there were everywhere, early on, estimates which went into horrifyingly minute and fastidious detail, legally drawn up estimates for individual limbs and parts of the body. [...] Let’s be quite clear about the logic of this whole matter of compensation: it is strange enough. The equivalence is provided by the fact that instead of an advantage directly making up for the wrong (so, instead of compensation in money, land or possessions of any kind), a sort of pleasure is given to the creditor as repayment and compensation, – the pleasure of having the right to exercise power over the powerless without a thought, the pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire’, the enjoyment of violating: an enjoyment that is prized all the higher, the lower and baser the position of the creditor in the social scale, and which can easily seem a delicious titbit to him, even a foretaste of higher rank. Through punishment of the debtor, the creditor takes part in the rights of the masters: at last he, too, shares the elevated feeling of being in a position to despise and maltreat someone as an ‘inferior’ – or at least, when the actual power of punishment, of exacting punishment, is already transferred to the ‘authorities’, of seeing the debtor despised and maltreated. So, then, compensation is made up of a warrant for and entitlement to cruelty. –
The right to inflict misery - or rather, the right to know that misery is being inflicted on your behalf, the right to know that somewhere out there, people are "getting what they deserve" - is its own reward, a reward that the state so generously apportions out to citizens as an incentive for good behavior. It is straightforwardly pleasurable; there are hardly any complexities or nuances to mention here. The idea that justice is painful to those that mete it out, the idea that it is only done begrudgingly and through gritted teeth, is of course nonsense - all advocates of "justice" like to imagine themselves as the executioner. Legal executions serve as a socially acceptable, state-sanctioned outlet for cruelty that cannot permissibly find expression elsewhere. The erotic pleasure of the business itself is the operative animating impulse behind the expansion of the state execution apparatus - likely ahead of any utilitarian concerns about reducing crime, and certainly ahead of any concern for a formal, symmetrical notion of justice.
Perhaps this state of affairs is the only alternative to a society of unrestrained vigilante justice (although, if that's true, it can only be true of a given culture at a given time - many countries have abolished the death penalty without descending into madness). Perhaps this impulse - the impulse to delight in the misery of others, the impulse to pawn off one's own injustices by proxy onto the condemned - must necessarily engage in subterfuge, must necessarily take on the false appearance of "justice" while it performs its vitally important social function. But, that needn't prevent us from performing an honest analysis of its origins.
Your post adduces evidence for the view I have outlined:
I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary.
If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger? A life for a life - that's at least a plausible principle of justice. But "a life for an intent to take a life", or "a life for being an accomplice to someone else taking a life" - now things are no longer so clear. The fact that such nuances are of little interest to you indicates that the execution itself is the prize for you. Of course you can find other "tough on crime" advocates who don't even want to stop at murder, but are happy to advocate capital punishment for rape, assault, even perhaps petty theft in the case of repeat offenders. Is it really about justice at that point, or is it about casting an ever widening net so we have enough sacrifices to fuel the revenge machine?
Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath.
Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
10mo ago
(and I do expect her to win in November, as a direct result of the corporate news media being the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party--the fix is clearly in).
The fix was in in 2016 too. What makes this time different?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
24d 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.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Yes but it's only correlated with those things. It itself isn't really a bad thing. Much like how a college degree is correlated with professional skill, but it's not equivalent to professional skill, which is why it's not unheard of (especially in say, tech) for people to get hired to highly-skilled positions without degrees.
(You also don't need to measure single motherhood by proxy. It can be measured directly. The child has a correlation of 1 with itself, and the absence of children has a correlation of 1 with the absence of children.)
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
No, they probably are not.
What is your position on HBD in general, and the genetic basis of IQ in particular?
From the study that was linked in the article you linked:
In aggregate, all tested genetic variants accounted for 8 to 25% of variation in male and female same-sex sexual behavior [...] Same-sex sexual behavior is influenced by not one or a few genes but many.
We can get into the weeds over what exactly "8 to 25% of variation" means -- how many recalcitrant homosexuals should we expect to find in a given population, how easy is it to change one's sexual orientation or set someone on a different path of development via environmental factors -- but nonetheless, the paper states plainly that there is a genetic component. (The introduction to the paper also makes no mention of epigenetic factors or the pre-natal uterine environment, both of which could conceivably contribute to someone being "born that way" despite not being part of the genome proper.)
The article you directly linked states:
The scientists behind the study do not mince words regarding this conclusion. The study’s first author, Andrea Ganna, stated to the New York Times, “it will be basically impossible to predict one’s sexual activity or orientation just from genetics.”
but this is just a caricature of the hereditarian position. There's a genetic component to IQ too, but no one thinks that you can predict someone's IQ just from genetics either (environmental factors can easily lower it).
I'm always surprised at the number of people who take a staunchly "realist" position on the biological reality of sex and race differences, but who stubbornly refuse to believe that homosexuality is anything but a matter of political propaganda and personal choice. I think there's a clear ideological motivation at work, stemming from the hope that we could eradicate homosexuality if we simply got the LGBT propaganda out of schools (much like how leftists think we could close the black-white achievement gap if we simply devised the proper education program; both projects are futile).
Look at it this way: there's a stunningly diverse range of maladies that the human body and brain can be afflicted with. People can be born without eyes and limbs, they can be born sterile, they can be born with profound mental retardation; is it that much of a stretch to think that a male could be born liking other males too? A healthy, properly functioning human is heterosexual; but there's always a possibility that an organism can simply go wrong and start functioning improperly.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
On the hardware side of ML the most innovative chips are all manufactured by one 95%-Han-Chinese island that everyone else is struggling to catch up to
That's not really what HBD advocates have in mind when they talk about "innovation" though.
There's a hierarchy of innovation/creativity with some advances being more fundamental than others. The Chinese may be great at manufacturing chips, but they didn't invent the computer itself. The dominance of Taiwan in chip manufacturing seems to be, again, yet another example of "the Chinese are great at executing and improving upon fundamental ideas that other people came up with", unless perhaps their designs and manufacturing process are reliant on substantial advances in fundamental physics that they came up with themselves (this could very well be the case and I'm just ignorant of the facts, please educate me if so).
Granted, the opportunity for ideas as fundamental as the computer (or even the transformer) don't just come along every day. They can only occur under the right historical conditions. But even accounting for that, the sustained European dominance in the area of such fundamental ideas has been striking, and deserves an explanation.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7mo 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.
8mo ago
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claim that we've passed the point where any individual drawing/painting can constitute a "significant enrichment to human culture".
Well now you're putting words in my mouth, which I don't appreciate.
I wasn't trying to attribute that claim to you at all. I'm sorry for the confusion. That's a claim that other people have made, and I brought that up to give some context about my thoughts on painting as a medium.
I'm saying that creepy fetish art will never make human culture even a little bit better and have a good chance of making it slightly worse.
Right, and I disagree, for the all the reasons I outlined in the OP. I think that sexuality is privileged as an artistic subject matter, and therefore a pornographic painting is no worse off than a landscape, a still life, etc.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8mo ago
But your comment, while thought-provoking
Thank you, that makes me very happy! I really appreciate it.
has done nothing to dissuade me from my original perspective that human culture is not in any way enriched by a rendering of the bunny rabbit from Zootopia getting gang banged.
Something I may not have emphasized enough was that there's a fundamental ambiguity in that claim. Does a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia getting gangbanged enrich human culture? Does, say, a non-sexualized drawing of a horse enrich human culture? We can't really answer the question as it's posed. We need more information, more context. Is the drawing of the horse Guernica, or is it something that a kindergartner put together with finger paints to take home and put on the fridge? That information is going to change how we answer the question. So it is with fetish art as well. That's my position.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claim that we've passed the point where any individual drawing/painting can constitute a "significant enrichment to human culture". We've been painting images for thousands of years and we've explored a tremendous amount of the possibility space. It's possible that we've simply run out of fresh ground to cover, within the confines of this one medium. But a painting with a sexual subject matter is no worse off than any other type of painting here.
I think the future possibilities of art lay in what could broadly be described as "narrative", and I do think some of those narratives will contain sexual content that might strike some observers as "excessive" at first glance.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
Philosophy especially seems to be really bad about spending hours debating the meaning of every word used
Do you have any examples of published philosophical works that do this? (I'll grant that you might be able to find something - some published philosophy is just bad, after all. But, I can easily point you to works that don't do this as well.)
Some amount of discussion about the definitions of terms is necessary. Think about how often we debate the appropriate definition of terms like "left" and "right" on TheMotte. We just had multiple sub-threads last week about what "cultural Marxism" means. Do you think the posters here are just being irrational or intentionally obscurantist when they engage in discussions like that? I don't think they are. I think it makes sense that we would debate what those terms mean, because they're contentious terms that get used in different ways by different people, so we need to get clear on what they actually mean in order to have a productive conversation.
When I redefine common English words in philosophy
Again, what sorts of examples are you thinking of? I really don't think this happens often at all in philosophy. There's jargon, certainly, but much of this jargon ("epistemic", "qualia", "a priori") is unique to philosophy and wouldn't be confused for ordinary English terms. If anything, philosophers like to invent new words and phrases to use in place of ordinary words if the ordinary words are too ambiguous (see for example the use of terms like "error theory" and "expressivism" to describe more precise sub-variants of what non-philosophers would call "moral relativism").
the point is quite often to make a simple argument sound profound.
How much academic analytic philosophy have you read? They really do go out of their way to make the writing as straightforward (and, frankly, dry) as possible.
Writers in the "continental" tradition are known for writing with more of a poetic flourish, but, so what? They're having fun and it makes their works more fun to read, so, good for them.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
But I wish I could find someone who actually thinks that.
The manosphere (think Andrew Tate) thinks this way explicitly. I know people who think like this in real life. No amount of pleading about how unfair it is will phase them. They'll just shrug and say "men and women are different", therefore the categorical imperative does not apply (different rules for different types of humans).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
no babies to take care of and no STDs to treat and she’s not getting murdered by a psycho, so everything should be fine because those are the central examples of bad outcomes from sexual activity between humans?
Yes, those are the central examples of bad outcomes. I would want her to be careful and be aware of the risks, of course. But the mere fact that there are risks isn’t a reason for total abstinence. Driving a car is risky too, but I wouldn’t tell her not to drive.
Were there other types of bad outcomes that you had in mind?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9mo ago
the reality is that I find the overwhelming majority of porn 'actresses' so incredibly visually unpalatable that I'm unable to enjoy the material.
I'm glad I'm not the only one! The typical woman in mainstream studio porn looks terrible. I'm not big on most celebrities either. I find "average" women to be far more arousing. I always just attributed this to my own sexual deviance though, not to IQ.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
18d 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.
Yeah I wouldn't exactly be opposed to it either. Which is how I know it won't happen. Reality is always maximally disappointing.
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