Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...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
28d ago
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.
The anti-egalitarian right has a strong streak of closeted mostly-homosexual eroticism that revolves around dominance/submission.
There certainly can be an intimate link between politics and sexuality. But I don't view this as inherently delegitimizing or discrediting. The type of phenomenon you describe (and other analogous phenomena) certainly could be a perfectly legitimate expression of individual will, individual creativity, etc, although this determination ultimately has to be made on a case by case basis.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
19d ago
That's slave morality right there, friend.
See my post elsewhere in the thread on the nature of slave morality, and read essay I of Genealogy of Morality if you want a deeper elaboration. Or just read the whole book. It's unbelievably beautiful.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
26d ago
In general I'd prefer to see high quality, well written posts that address the substantive thesis of the parent post, instead of posts that nitpick on a single sentence. Regardless of political valence. A low effort drive-by comment that calls someone out for attacking white men is still a low effort drive-by comment.
In fact if there was an otherwise well written, well argued post that happened to include a jab at straight white men, I'd view that as a net positive overall, because it would be evidence that our ideological diversity situation is improving.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Paging @2rafa or anyone else who can explain to me what an investment banking analyst actually does: AI is coming for Wall Street: Banks are reportedly weighing cutting analyst hiring by two-thirds (paywalled for me on desktop but it's loading fine on mobile):
Incoming junior Wall Street analysts could be in danger of losing their jobs to AI, sources within banks told the New York Times.
Big firms are reportedly mulling whether to pull back on hiring new analysts as Wall Street leans more heavily on AI, several people familiar with the matter at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other banks told the publication this week.
Incoming classes of junior investment-banking analysts could up being cut as much as two-thirds, some of the people suggested, while those brought on board could fetch lower salaries, on account of their work being assisted by artificial intelligence.
I don't know how to evaluate the claims in the article because I have little understanding of what a banking analyst actually does on a day to day basis. How much of it requires "thought" (not thought of incredible complexity and originality, but thought nonetheless) and how much of it is just plugging numbers into Excel in a relatively formulaic fashion?
In general I lean towards being skeptical of these claims, especially in domains where I have little expertise, because the dominant pattern of the last 2 years is that people who don't know much about X tend to overestimate how good AI is at X.
If I compare this to a domain where I do have some knowledge (computer programming), most of the tests that people use to demonstrate LLMs' coding ability aren't particularly representative of what programmers do on a daily basis. Sitting down and opening a new blank file and "writing code to do X" is certainly part of the job, and it can be a bigger or smaller part of the job depending on what type of organization you're at and what type of project you're working on etc, but it's not the whole job (for some programmers, it's a very small part of it!)
So I'd like people with more domain knowledge to weigh in on what aspects of these financial jobs are liable to be automated today and what the forecast for the field is like.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
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.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
16d ago
imo there should be a blanket policy that mods have to recuse themselves from moderating direct replies to their own posts (just get a different mod to do it).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
21d ago
Let's say you fail to keep a promise, a promise made to someone you have a great deal of respect for. Is it appropriate to feel shame then? Or maybe some other emotion?
My memories are hazy but I think there was at least one teacher who read it aloud (I’m a couple years older than you).
Probably around 2014/2015 was the absolute cutoff point. Things changed very rapidly then, almost overnight. I distinctly remember around 2012, my gay friends thought I was very avant garde for knowing what the word “cisgender” meant. It’s crazy how far things advanced in just a year or two.
On the same topic, we had some mock debates in my high school civics class, and one of the topics was gay marriage. It was just taken for granted that it was something that reasonable people could disagree on, and you could take the anti- side without being perceived as a moral monster.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Only then can you really destroy them by pointing out how ridiculous they are.
But what counts as "ridiculous" in the first place is itself politically determined. I personally think the left acts out in a lot of ways that I would classify as ridiculous, but it plainly hasn't discredited them on a national scale so far. The extent of your pre-established narrative dominance determines whether your particular mode of acting out will be seen as legitimate (BLM riots) or illegitimate (January 6th). So before you goad your opponent into acting out, you have to be in charge of defining what counts as "acting out". I think that's a more fundamental goal.
I'm uncertain if it's even possible for the left to push the pro-Palestine stuff "too far" at this point. I don't know how many centrist swing voters are left in America. Probably still enough to influence the results of national elections, but not enough to uproot the entrenched zeitgeist or really impact the way things are heading overall.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
Wait, what?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
It's telling that far and away the most active threads this week were this thread, and Kulak's post about Indians.
You are the forum. If you think we talk about race too much, then write more posts and comments that aren't about race.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
15d ago
If you’re having trouble with the linked Zizek piece, that’s probably just due to unfamiliarity with the ideas (they’re largely remixed from earlier texts) or the writers cited, because on a word-by-word level it’s pretty clear.
Zizek’s big heroes Lacan and Hegel are much harder to parse than Zizek. So if he really wanted to make his writing more obscure, he’s intimately familiar with a good model to follow! But generally I’d say his writing is on the clearer end for continental philosophy.
It's Chesterton, not Lewis
Sorry, I was typing on autopilot, I had AhhhTheFrench's posts on the brain.
Anyway, with regards to Nietzsche's perspective on these points:
Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual.
Nietzsche was, above all else, a meta-philosopher. Despite appearances to the contrary, the ultimate object of his critique and analysis was always, in the last instance, philosophy itself.
His aim was not to give a theory of justice (justice has much too long a history for that - "Today it is impossible to say precisely why people are actually punished: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history can be defined." - Genealogy of Morality II.13), nor was it even to explain the historical processes by which people might arrive at an incorrect conception of justice. Rather the properly Nietzschean question is to examine the phenomenon of inquiry into justice (or other philosophical concepts) itself - what exactly are you doing when you ask what is justice, or what is beauty, or what is truth? What is the nature of this practice we are engaged in, where we adopt "positions" and give "arguments" to support these positions? What is the origin of this practice, to what uses has it been put, where did it come from and where is it going? (See On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, and also the chapters "The Problem of Socrates" and "Reason in Philosophy" from Twilight of the Idols)
He certainly does spend a great deal of time outlining what appear to be straightforward first-order positions on ethical questions, but these are frequently subject to qualification, revision, and contradiction at various points in his corpus, because his ultimate concern is with the dyanmical unfolding of thought itself rather than with any fixed static position. Less "you believe X" and more "how did you come to hold X? What type of person holds X? What are the conditions of possibility of holding X?"
All that being said as a necessary disclaimer, to show that determining "Nietzsche's conception of justice" is a very fraught question; I'm not sure where in his work you're pulling the claim "Discipline for the whole society is surely more important than justice to an individual" from. To the extent that he ever says anything about the purpose of society as a whole (he is far far more interested in the analysis of individual archetypes, their psychological properties and motivations, etc), he basically thinks that the best thing society can do is to create the conditions for the highest types of individuals to flourish. Society being subordinated to the (or a particular) individual, not the other way around. I can't recall any instance where he talks about a relationship between "discipline" and society. There are innumerable passages where he talks about the opposition between "the herd" and the higher individuals. Gay Science I.3 comes to mind.
you must allow for a certain high spirit and haughtiness in the superior type.
Sure. You can get away with being haughty if people already think you're cool. Trump gets away with antics that most normal people couldn't get away with. A lot of people are fine with this. So I don't think this is a particularly controversial statement, nor does it need a philosophical defense.
Just as the sight of sin offends God, so does the sight of ugliness offend Apollo. The beautiful and princely must, of necessity, be impatient with the squalid and...
There is a passage strikingly similar to this in Genealogy of Morality III.14:
Away with this disgraceful mollycoddling of feeling! That the sick should not make the healthy sick – and this would be that kind of mollycoddling – ought to be the chief concern on earth: – but for that, it is essential that the healthy should remain separated from the sick, should even be spared the sight of the sick so that they do not confuse themselves with the sick. Or would it be their task, perhaps, to be nurses and doctors? . . . But they could not be more mistaken and deceived about their task, – the higher ought not to abase itself as the tool of the lower, the pathos of distance ought to ensure that their tasks are kept separate for all eternity! Their right to be there, the priority of the bell with a clear ring over the discordant and cracked one, is clearly a thousand times greater: they alone are guarantors of the future, they alone have a bounden duty to man’s future. What they can do, what they should do, is something the sick must never do: but so that they can do what only they should, why should they still be free to play doctor, comforter and ‘saviour’ to the sick? . . . And so we need good air! good air! At all events, well away from all madhouses and hospitals of culture! And so we need good company, our company! Or solitude, if need be! But at all events, keep away from the evil fumes of inner corruption and the secret, worm-eaten rottenness of disease! . . . So that we, my friends, can actually defend ourselves, at least for a while yet, against the two worst epidemics that could possibly have been set aside just for us – against great nausea at man! Against deep compassion for man! . . .
But it's worth examining the language closely here (as well as the context of the surrounding passages) to see exactly why Nietzsche is suggesting that "the healthy" should be kept separate from "the sick". It's not because he just thinks, like, being a dick is awesome and fuck sick people. Rather it's because the higher individuals have a special task ("they alone are guarantors of the future"), and this task could be jeopardized if they get bogged down by an excess of despair over the plight of the suffering masses.
The failure mode that Nietzsche is thinking of here would be something like Effective Altruism - maybe you could be a great artist or philosopher, or maybe you could just have a beautiful wife and five kids and a white picket fence, but instead you run yourself ragged working at a job you hate just so you can send all your money to people on the other side of the world who you don't know and who will frankly never reach the same heights of culture and civilization as yourself. Nietzsche doesn't think that's right. Lucky people shouldn't destroy themselves to bring themselves down to the same level as the unlucky.
(It's also crucial to point out that Nietzsche was desperately ill due to a chronic neurological condition for much of his life and frequently bedridden, in addition to just being kind of a loser in his own lifetime who got no personal or professional recognition, so whenever he refers to "the sick", you have to assume that he's at least considering that he could be included in that category as well - and it is precisely this intrusion of the philosopher into his own work, the way the speaker deforms our reception of what is spoken, that is one of the primary meta-philosophical points that he wants us to keep in mind as we read.)
In general Nietzsche is just way too nuanced of a thinker to boil his positions down to a few sentences. There's no substitute for actually reading his original works in their entirety. Just one more example, most people assume that he thinks "the strong" are just straight up better in every way and "the weak" can go get fucked, but look what he says about strength and weakness in All Too Human V.224:
ENNOBLEMENT THROUGH DEGENERATION .— History teaches that a race of people is best preserved where the greater number hold one common spirit in consequence of the similarity of their accustomed and indisputable principles: in consequence, therefore, of their common faith. Thus strength is afforded by good and thorough customs, thus is learnt the subjection of the individual, and strenuousness of character becomes a birth gift and afterwards is fostered as a habit. The danger to these communities founded on individuals of strong and similar character is that gradually increasing stupidity through transmission, which follows all stability like its shadow. It is on the more unrestricted, more uncertain and morally weaker individuals that depends the intellectual progress of such communities, it is they who attempt all that is new and manifold. Numbers of these perish on account of their weakness, without having achieved any specially visible effect; but generally, particularly when they have descendants, they flare up and from time to time inflict a wound on the stable element of the community. Precisely in this sore and weakened place the community is inoculated with something new; but its general strength must be great enough to absorb and assimilate this new thing into its blood. Deviating natures are of the utmost importance wherever there is to be progress. Every wholesale progress must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help it to develop. Something similar happens in the case of individuals; a deterioration, a mutilation, even a vice and, above all, a physical or moral loss is seldom without its advantage. For instance, a sickly man in the midst of a warlike and restless race will perhaps have more chance of being alone and thereby growing quieter and wiser, the one-eyed man will possess a stronger eye, the blind man will have a deeper inward sight and will certainly have a keener sense of hearing. In so far it appears to me that the famous Struggle for Existence is not the only point of view from which an explanation can be given of the progress or strengthening of an individual or a race. Rather must two different things converge: firstly, the multiplying of stable strength through mental binding in faith and common feeling; secondly, the possibility of attaining to higher aims, through the fact that there are deviating natures and, in consequence, partial weakening and wounding of the stable strength; it is precisely the weaker nature, as the more delicate and free, that makes all progress at all possible. A people that is crumbling and weak in any one part, but as a whole still strong and healthy, is able to absorb the infection of what is new and incorporate it to its advantage. The task of education in a single individual is this: to plant him so firmly and surely that, as a whole, he can no longer be diverted from his path. Then, however, the educator must wound him, or else make use of the wounds which fate inflicts, and when pain and need have thus arisen, something new and noble can be inoculated into the wounded places. With regard to the State, Machiavelli says that, “the form of Government is of very small importance, although half-educated people think otherwise. The great aim of State-craft should be duration, which outweighs all else, inasmuch as it is more valuable than liberty.” It is only with securely founded and guaranteed duration that continual development and ennobling inoculation are at all possible. As a rule, however, authority, the dangerous companion of all duration, will rise in opposition to this.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
This creates an internal contradiction for them
For the far right?
They don’t think so. In fact they’ve been anticipating this situation for years, see the parable of the golem.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
23d ago
I remain unconvinced that there's much overlap between smart, competent people and the social outcasts that got shoved in lockers. I think the outcasts cling to this narrative as a coping mechanism rather than genuinely being all that competent.
Sure, partially. But it's not entirely wrong. The idea didn't just come from nowhere.
I feel like I've seen an overcorrection in recent years away from the smart = socially awkward myth and towards a new myth of a pure linear spectrum between blonde-haired-seven-foot ubermensch math PhD star athletes on the one hand and sickly frail developmentally deficient chronic failures on the other, which is also not an accurate model of reality.
I'm intelligent and I was bullied pretty severely in middle school, up to and including physical assault. Things got better by high school and I had multiple friends and a decently normal social life, but I was never fantastically popular.
the smart kids also tended towards being popular and good at sports
Not sure how we're defining "good at sports" but this point in particular doesn't match my experience at all. The stars on the high school football and basketball teams tended to be C students. Professional athletes in most major sports don't strike me as particularly more intelligent than average, at least compared to people who directly make a living off of cognitive skills.
In general the biographies of great thinkers show enough of what today we might label "sperg" behavior to make me think there's a legitimate pattern here - Newton, Kant, Wittgenstein...
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Any organization that is structurally committed to letting rightists speak freely (such as this forum) is, in some sense, already an explicitly rightist organization, and would therefore be exempt from Conquest’s second law.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
20d ago
So it is fiction, about pretending to be forced into some sexual acts, via nonexisting method?
Yes it is fiction, typically mind control erotica features elaborate magic/sci-fi scenarios that aren't possible in real life.
How many layers of indirection people need here?
It's not about indirection. It's very direct. Contra @aqouta, for most people into hypnosis porn (the people who self-insert as the sub anyway; others might self-insert as the dom), the idea of a total loss of control, of utter submission and objectification, ego death, etc., is the entire point. That is the object of erotic fascination. It's not a preliminary step to another thing.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2mo ago
Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage
I occasionally see this self-deprecating tendency among fans of sci-fi and other types of genre fiction, where they assume that there must clearly be some inherent property of classical literature, unbeknownst to the plebians, that sets it apart - that the English majors are hoarding the secret sauce for what makes a work "actually good". I assure you that they're not.
The average work of canonical literature is, in my opinion, not that good, and most of these works have "stood the test of time" only due to accidents of history, rather than their own intrinsic merits. This isn't because of any particular failing on the part of the writers or critics involved, but is instead a simple corollary of the fact that the majority of works in any domain will tend towards mediocrity. The average sci-fi story ranges from "meh" to "ok", just like how the average work of "literary" fiction ranges from "meh" to "ok". It's debatable how many truly Great Books have ever even been written - think of how many physics books/articles throughout history have truly advanced the frontier of understanding in a deep and meaningful way, compared to the mountain of unread and irrelevant papers produced each year to feed the tenure committee machine. All domains of human activity function in essentially the same way, including art, including "high" art.
Of course I'm by no means advocating for total aesthetic anarchism. Some works are better than others; some works are really bad and some works are really great. And being conversant in artistic theory and the history of art will help artists produce better works instead of worse ones. I just want to be careful that we're not engaging in a knee-jerk elevation of the classical just because it's classical. In fact 20th/21st genre fiction has made clear advancements that were largely undreamt of in previous eras of literature, particularly in terms of the range of plot structures and character types that it treats.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Frequently when people feel this way about HBD, especially as it relates to themselves on a personal level, it's based on a misconception. A common caricature of HBD is that there's an identifiable property of "blackness" that has causal powers; almost as though black skin itself were some foreign organism exerting a downward pressure on your IQ, and if you could only shed your skin then you would unlock the full potential of your inherent abilities. This is completely incorrect.
The mechanisms that determine your IQ and other psychological traits are the exact same mechanisms at work in every other human, and at a purely physical level they have nothing to do with race. "Black" is a statistical concept that emerges at the population level as an amalgamation of traits and individuals. The race doesn't make the people, the people make the race.
That being said. It is a corollary of HBD that the pervasive dysfunction seen throughout Africa and black communities worldwide is in part caused by genetic factors. You are within your rights to think that this is a tragedy - but what of it? We live in a world that's filled to the brim with tragedies great and small. People die of disease, accidents, and violence every day, rich and poor alike, wise or foolish, virtuous or ignoble. HBD is not a unique cataclysmic injustice; rather it is just one more square in the patchwork of immiseration that is mankind's natural state.
You may be interested in the emerging possibilities of genetic engineering to increase intelligence and other eugenic psychological traits; but this is fraught with its own philosophical quandaries.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
21d ago
Without Enlightenment champions like Marx and Freud selling unmoored Utopianism to an Enlightenment society
There was a clear utopian dimension to Marx. I've never heard anyone argue against that.
Freud is a more complicated case. He also had some utopian impulses and was on record as thinking that the release of repressed sexual instincts would be a positive social development, but this was also tempered (especially in his later work) by a recognition of how the self-contradictory and self-destructive nature of the psyche can upset utopian social aspirations (it was really Lacan who took this aspect of psychoanalysis and ran with it, and he was consequently much more overtly politically conservative than Freud, but the seeds of it are already visible in Freud).
I recommend reading Freud's essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle before you write him off completely.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
25d ago
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.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
21d ago
Who are you arguing with?
I'm arguing against the view, which I have seen expressed by social conservatives often enough, that we live in an irredeemably sexualized society that has thrown off all measure of restraint. Sometimes this includes a conspiratorial component that the pornography industry promotes porn explicitly for its deleterious social effects. This view has been argued for on TheMotte before - "The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities."
In fact the primal fear of sexuality is still operative the same as it ever was, and in some aspects has possibly intensified, compared to previous historical eras. (Not that I'm arguing that this fear is necessarily irrational or misguided. Some things do indeed deserve to be feared. When we are confronted with such a deeply rooted psychological impulse that has endured through so many changes in the outward form of social organization, its etiology demands careful consideration. I'm here to understand, not to moralize.)
Visa and MasterCard see pornography as high risk because they get a lot of chargebacks, so they charge adult services producers a much higher rate for payment processing.
Sure, that would be fine if opposition to porn was restricted to payment processors. But it's not just payment processors.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I have to admit I'm in the company of a lot of witches who really just want a place they can spam the n-word, and the communities created by that second group are likely going to suck.
We already know what such a community would look like, it's called 4chan. It's one of the most influential internet communities ever and has been an endless source of entertainment and fascination for me for the past 15 years.
You could ask the same question about the majority of academics in both the humanities and STEM and the answer would be "no". So it's not a very interesting question.
That being said, Zizek is reasonably well-connected and is e.g. friends with Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, so I wouldn't be surprised if he influenced the thinking of someone in power at some point.
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