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Primaprimaprima

US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%

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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."


				
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Primaprimaprima


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
US government confirms the existence of aliens in 2026: 100%

				
				
				

				

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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."



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Wellness Wednesday for July 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oh I didn’t think you were snippy at all! And even if you were, that’s nothing to apologize for, goodness gracious. Your daughter is the most important thing in your world, of course any time you talk about her it’s going to be emotionally charged. Plus I appreciated hearing the extra context.


I do hope everything works out for you.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for July 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My apologies, I didn't know how much you had already tried!  The whole "therapists and soft safe closets" thing made you sound like the permissive type, but if you're not, then fair enough.


The design space of possible minds is very large.  I suppose there are some people who would just die without drugs; and perhaps they did, for most of history.  That's a bit sad though.


Do what you have to do to live a normal (and physically safe) life obviously.  Although I do think you should listen to your intuition that "it doesn't sit right with you".  At the very least, don't let anyone talk you into thinking that it should sit right with you.  You can at least have that much.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for July 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
idk, when I was super little and I would start acting up in public my dad would physically pick me up, carry me to the car, and say "we are never taking you anywhere ever again if you're gonna act like a brat".  And I would usually shut up pretty fast after that.  For in-house infractions they'd hide my toys or something until I calmed down.  Seemed to work well enough.  It's possible I was a more "mild" case though, because by the time I was in first grade I had already become a relatively docile teacher's pet.


Basically I'd throw out all the psychiatry shit and say "sink or swim kid, up to you".  That's how people did it for, you know, all of human history up until the last ~50 years or so.  You think they had L-Theanine 1,000 years ago?  No they said pick up a fuckin' shovel kid or we're all gonna starve this winter.


I think we could all be diagnosed with a little PDA, yeah?  I got PDA for days.  I'm still a lazy piece of shit as an adult who doesn't like to do anything.  The only thing that makes me actually acquiesce to the "demand" is a hard deadline (with consequences) and a swift kick in the ass.  It never goes away, you just gotta learn to deal with it.  People like me appreciate the kicks in the ass, trust me!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for July 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah.  You just gotta accept it and move on and make the best of what you got.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Thinking and Feeling aren't so alien to each other.




Right, I'm always trying to explain this to people.  The "logic vs emotion" dichotomy is clearly overly simplistic and not really tenable.  But at the same time, I think it's pretty clear that different people do think and experience in fundamentally different ways, and we need some kind of language for talking about it, even if we end up not using those terms specifically.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oh, not sure why you removed the Paul Klee section, I was going to comment on it...


Klee was an artist, not a philosopher.  Most artists are frankly not very good at talking about their own work.  They tend to not actually be that knowledgeable about art theory, let alone philosophy in general.  That's why they're artists and not philosophers.


The Klee stuff you quoted seemed pretty bad and uninteresting and I would have nope'd out after a few sentences.


When someone is actually trained as a philosopher, and their work is recognized as philosophy by other philosophers, you can take it on good faith that there is a method to the madness.  I quoted that Heidegger comment about poets for example to give an example of one of his more extreme flights of fancy, but at the same time, it's undeniable that Heidegger was extremely well-versed in the entirety of the history of Western philosophy, and (at least some of) his work makes genuine contributions to legitimate philosophical problems. (His What is Metaphysics is interesting and approachable.)




Thus Spake Zarathrusta threw me badly though and I've not returned to it since.




Aaaaa what a tragedy!  Zarathustra is a terrible book, it's easily the worst thing he ever wrote.  I don't blame people for assuming that it's a natural starting place for reading Nietzsche though.  He himself insisted from the day it was published to the day he died that it was his best work.  I have no idea why.  He was simply wrong about that.  I can only assume that he was just trolling and trying to filter people or something.


If you ever want to return to Nietzsche, I would recommend Twilight of the Idols, Gay Science, and Genealogy of Morality in that order.  I think that would give you a relatively balanced overview of his project and his main concerns.




But in general I have the sense that much appreciation of continental philosophy actually primarily relies on vibes and not coherent sense-making.




Like I've been saying, you have to make judgements on a book by book, paragraph by paragraph basis.  Almost all the specific books I've recommended throughout this thread are approachable and can be read like any other book, and they do make coherent sense, such that you could explain them to analytic philosophers without too much trouble.


And sometimes you get sentences that function on multiple levels, instead of adhering to a strict "semantic meaning vs vibes-based" distinction.  So, for example, when Lacan says "woman does not exist; Woman cannot be said", you can "decode" this to get the "literal" meaning of "there is no single paradigmatic successful example that women can model themselves after, unlike how an individual man can aspire to be 'The Man' (people say 'you're the man, man' but they never say 'you're the woman, girl'); social expectations for women are perpetually and irreconcilably split between the Madonna and the whore".  This is how many of his commentators interpret him, especially if they're writing a "Lacan 101" type introduction.  But you can also choose to just let your mind run free with the poetic, vibes-based associations.  I think some continental texts are very much intended to get your brain to trigger both modes of cognition at once.




I have you pegged as "flighty wordcel who is way too interested in austere, self-referential literature and art" and that's meant as a compliment. The profile of your interests isn't super typical here and it adds flavour and depth to the Motte, I don't like it much when people downvote them.




Thank you, I really appreciate that.  Some number of downvotes is actually a good thing.  If I only ever got upvotes, then that would mean I was just agreeing with the hivemind on everything and I wasn't saying anything that challenged people and made them push back.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What? The majority of people here are either INTJ or INTP…


(Ok among the self reports here it’s only slightly tilted to INTx rather than super strongly tilted but I still think INTx is a solid majority)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I’m definitely the sort of person whose most conscious experience is thinking through things like I’m making a logical argument, pulling in information from the environment to try and enhance that logic, and then dragging my feelings along.




That's really interesting!  I didn't have you pegged that way based on some of your other posts, but I suppose it does fit.


The idea that someone could experience "logical argumentation" as their default mode of conscious experience is definitely very interesting to me.  I mean I understand intellectually that there's no reason why that couldn't be the case, and I know that there are many people who would report that they think this way.  But it's rather foreign to me, because logic to me is a tool, it's not where I live.  The urge to typical-mind is so strong, so when people report to me that this is how they are by default, I always have a little urge to ask... really?  Do you actually not experience your mind as a buzz of images and sounds by default?  It's quiet and "logical" up there?  Really?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Based on the descriptions, I'm more of a Four.  (...and that's exactly what the test gave me, 4w3.  That probably should really be 4w5 though, because I have rather idiosyncratic conceptions of "status" and "success" that probably don't line up with what the test authors had in mind.)


I think there's a difference between, do you like to categorize people because it's another interesting data point about how they work, or do you like to categorize people because you want to know the color of their soul.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This is a disgusting form of submissive behavior.




Surely that all depends on your perspective, doesn't it!


I would never get one myself, ever.  But I don't judge other people for getting them.  The correlation with criminality seems rather low given how popular they are these days.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Japanese pop culture may not be for you, unfortunately.


(Although, it should be pointed out, there is an entire subgenre of shows/games/books that feature, well, all-male casts, if you'd prefer that...)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


"Beauty is pain."




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, I think part of the reason why I'm so drawn to this stuff is that I'm always looking for language to describe why I feel so different.  I'm both highly abstract and also feelings-based, which is... just unusual in general I think, but especially so for men.  When I read the description of Ni-dominant thinking I was just like, yeah, that is what it feels like (subjectively speaking anyway).


I agree that MBTI can be overly restrictive and has a hard time describing people who are blends of different traits.  It's a bit silly that according to MBTI you can't have both introverted thinking and introverted feeling for example, I think it's pretty clear that there are people who fit the descriptions of both.  But I still think there's something illuminating about it regardless.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, Panic and Avril




Your daughter has fantastic taste in music, but it’s a bit interesting that kids today are still listening to the bands of the previous generation, no?


Maybe there’s something to that whole “death of culture / cultural stasis” idea.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oh yeah for sure, anyone who identifies as a Rationalist in the LW sense or has an affinity for that style of thinking is basically an INTJ or INTP by definition.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is a really big area that I’m largely ignorant of. Here’s an overview of the historical development of the Big Five model with copious citations, particularly with reference to studies on cross-cultural validation of the Big Five categories.


I note that the paper notes that, methodologically, research into the Big Five “originated in studies of natural language trait terms […] For the layperson, personality is defined by such terms as friendly, high-strung, and punctual. These are the basic ways in which individuals understand themselves and others”. I sense an effortpost in the future on the relationship between ordinary language philosophy and this approach to psychology.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Does anyone here know their Myers-Briggs type or ever tried to figure it out?


Ok yes I know it's pseudoscience, I know it's not much better than a horoscope, but it's the fun thread gimme a break.  If we can talk about tarot we can talk about MBTI.  (MBTI at least is willing to talk about the weaknesses and negative aspects of different personality types, which makes it a little better than a horoscope.)


I think I'm an INFx (never quite sure on the last letter).  Or at least an INxx.  Probably most people who enjoy long internet arguments are an INxx of some kind.


Most people think you're supposed to just mix and match the four letters (decide if you're an introvert or extrovert for I or E, thinker or feeler for T or F, etc) but actually what it's really "about" is the "cognitive function stack", the cognitive tools that you use to process information and make decisions.  The four letter personality type is just a code for a specific function stack.  So for the INTP for example, their functions (from most dominant to least dominant) are Ti Ne Si Fe - introverted thinking, extroverted intuition, introverted sensing, and extroverted feeling.  The "introverted" functions are more private, more about determining the texture of your inner experience, more about how you generate thoughts and ideas internally, and the "extroverted" functions are how you interface with the outside world, those are the aspects of your experience that you want to share around and make public, you're more likely to want to know how other people are experiencing that same function, etc.


If nothing else, I think the idea of different individual aspects of your cognition being introverted or extroverted, rather than introversion/extroversion being a single trait, is interesting and may have some use.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I thought baggy masculine clothes were the style for zoomer girls? (I know of a couple irl examples.)


Could be a regional or Blue/Red thing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I feel like Nietzsche is cheating a bit.




Yeah, I mean I can see why you wouldn't say he's continental continental, but he's obviously not analytic either.  If someone was coming from an analytic background and wanted to broaden their perspective on what philosophy is capable of being, I'd tell them to start with him.




I'm glad some people like you do the reading to pass on some level of understanding.




Thank you!  I'm glad there are people who enjoy these exposés.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Which half though?




Just read Nietzsche.  If you don't get anything out of him then don't bother with the others.  He represents the "continental mind" at its best.




Girard




Never heard of him.




Continentalists seem to get very mad at Analyticals misrepresenting them, without themselves having a consensus about what was "really" meant by any given thinker.




Think of philosophy as being like one big internet argument.  (It basically is that, quite literally.  Many of the questions we discuss regularly on TheMotte are philosophical questions.)  There has never been any time in history when someone made a forum post on a non-trivial political question and everyone thought "yep, that's correct, there's nothing to clarify or add, he simply got it right".  At minimum, there will be a dozen replies telling the guy how he actually got everything wrong.  Frequently, these posts will wade into interpretive matters -- asking for further elaboration or clarification on point X, asking if in this particular sentence he meant Y or if he really meant Z, asking if his arguments really support W or if that's really what he even wanted to argue for in the first place, etc.  Undoubtedly you've seen this play out many times.  This is just what happens when you discuss complex matters using natural language.  So it goes for philosophy in general.


Think about how people still, after all these decades, can't agree over whether pro-lifers "really" believe that abortion is murder.  I mean, they even say in very plain language that they think it's murder, and people still can't agree what such utterances "really" mean!  Skeptics will say, well they can't actually mean that, because it's not consistent with their other beliefs/behavior, or their arguments clearly don't support that conclusion, so they have to mean something else.  On and on it goes.


Sometimes the interpretive difficulties with a philosophical text are literally at the level of "I don't know what this sentence is saying".  Typically they're more subtle than that though.  There's a persistent interpretive difficulty with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for example over whether his metaphysics is a dual substance theory (two types of objects, appearances and things-in-themselves) or a dual property theory (only one type of object, but it has phenomenal and non-phenomenal properties).  Kant was an unusually meticulous thinker, the CoPR is 800 pages of densely pedantic arguments, but on this one (rather fundamental) issue he simply never addressed it explicitly.  When we're writing, we can't predict every question that every reader will ever come up with; sometimes we think something is perfectly clear even when it's not, or it just never even occurs to us to ask that particular question at all.  I'm sure you can again think of many examples from your own experience.


That being said, although interpretive difficulties in natural language debates can never be entirely eradicated, some interpretations of a text are clearly better than others, and Russell was notorious for not being a particularly careful reader of the thinkers he profiled in A History of Western Philosophy.  See this for example for a criticism of Russell's interpretation of Kant.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


insanely twisted way of framing that forum




Bruh, this




”The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.”




has been the header on /b/ since the 00s. They embrace it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you for the thorough reply.  I love getting to talk about this stuff.




I might read this + Derrida's Truth in Painting and get back to you at some (undefined) point in the future.




Derrida's a heck of a place to start if you're not already steeped in the continental tradition.  He'll rapid fire off references to 10 other books and expect you to be familiar with all of them.  Not that I'm at all trying to discourage you or anything, just saying that it's normal if you find him frustrating.  I only understand what he's saying about half the time.


The Marcuse book on the other hand is rather short and approachable.




Anything political the Frankfurt School or its descendant schools of thought wrote induces anything from disaffected ennui to downright hatred.




I think appreciating the historical/personal context they were writing in helps contextualize their pessimism a little better.  They were all communist Jews who legitimately believed that the world workers' revolution was on the horizon, and then they watched Stalinism turn their Marxist ideals into a hellscape, and they lived through Nazism and WW2, and basically they watched their entire world and all their hopes for the future collapse around them in a spectacularly dramatic fashion.  That's the sort of thing that would put anyone in a sour mood.




In general, I find that many philosophers from the analytic tradition had a habit of defending claims and properly defining terms so as to minimise uncertainty. There's often a more rigorous bent to their writings.




You're right, I don't disagree at all.  That's by design of course.  In the early 20th century, Russell and Moore and their co-conspirators thought that Hegelianism had gone off the rails, and philosophy needed a new beginning that was self-consciously modeled after mathematical logic.  That was the start of the analytic school.


Analytic philosophy was my first introduction to philosophy and I think that permanently shaped how my mind works.  Or maybe my mind just already worked like that and analytic philosophy was a natural fit for it, idk.  But I do feel that on some fundamental level my outlook will always be analytic in some sense.  I'm perpetually annoyed at how, at times, continental philosophers seem to care nothing for running basic sanity checks on their sentences (are terms well-defined, am I making any category errors, etc) (although I'm always equally as sensitive to the possibility that this is just a misunderstanding on my part, or that my whole conception of how one should "evaluate" sentences is wrong in the first place).


But nonetheless here on TheMotte I end up talking more about continental philosophy, partially because that's just what I read more of these days, and partially because continental philosophers speak more directly to the types of culture war issues that we discuss here.




It's often extremely fluffy, terms will be so poorly defined that interpretations of their texts bifurcate depending on one's reading of them, and even once you've broken through the morass and divined several possible interpretations of their words, every single interpretation turns out to be endless navel-gazing that has become unmoored entirely from reality.




I get why you say this, definitely.  But at the same time, continental philosophy is so wildly heterogeneous that it's almost impossible to make generalizations about it as a whole.  It varies heavily from author to author, text to text.  You really have to treat each text individually and take it on its own merits.


I was just talking about how difficult Derrida is, but ironically, I think he's actually the closest to analytic philosophy out of all the "big" continental writers.  His concerns and methods are ones that analytic philosophers can appreciate, once you cut through all the verbiage.  Like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, it's a nice short little book that addresses the question, "do we have privileged epistemological access to the contents of our own mental states?"  That's a perfectly comprehensible and "classical" philosophical question, no issues there.  And he does have arguments; they're perhaps a bit difficult to extract, and they're not the most carefully rigorous, but they're there.


Nietzsche won't bullshit you.  (I think we can safely call him continental.  He lived before the split of course, but like Hegel he's very strongly continental coded.)  Reading Nietzsche is just such an amazing and wonderful experience.  He doesn't provide too many arguments per se (and it would kinda go against his whole project if he did, because he's kinda doing a postmodern performance art deconstruction of the concept of philosophical argumentation itself, which is really not nearly as dumb and pretentious as it sounds, like seriously just read him trust me), but he doesn't need to give arguments because he just like, says stuff, in plain ol' honest terms, and you're just like "damn, that is so true... how did I never think of that before..."


But then of course you do just have the really hyper-weird shit.  I wrote a post yesterday where I quoted some passages from Lacan's Seminar XX and, yeah I'll admit, it's fuckin' wild.  You're justified in asking, how am I to take this as anything except the ramblings of a very unwell man who is on the verge of a psychotic episode?  And I'll admit, I'm not sure how much of it can be defended "rationally".  I can give basic definitions of the jargon terms like "jouissance" and "Other", but in terms of justifying why these specific words were put in this specific order and what it means as a whole, such that a sane person would be justified in believing it... yeah, that's tough.  But that doesn't mean I can just throw it out, y'know?  Something about Lacan's ideas and terminology resonates with me.  I don't know what he's onto, but he's onto something.  I can't argue anyone into walking that particular path, but I know that there are other people who are interested in walking the same path.


I wish there was more rigorous work done, both philosophical and historical, about how the analytic/continental split came to be and what it means.  My current pet theory is that there really is just a certain strain of mysticism in continental thought, and as such it tends to attract people who are more open to mystical thought/experience, and this shows through in the texts, although most of them would strenuously deny this.  It's not clear exactly why or how this particular mode of thinking caught on when it did in European philosophy, but multiple of the big "founding fathers" of continental philosophy did flirt with mysticism, to varying degrees of overtness, and this likely set the tone for what "personality type" would be attracted to continental philosophy going forward.


Kierkegaard had his own idiosyncratic brand of existential Christianity, that one is obvious.  Magee's Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition goes into detail explaining how Hegel's thought was influenced by Hermeticism.  And when Heidegger in What are Poets For? is saying things like:




Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods' tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning. The ether, however, in which alone the gods are gods, is their godhead. The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy. The element of the ether for the coming of the fugitive gods, the holy, is the track of the fugitive gods. But who has the power to sense, to trace such a track?  Traces are often inconspicuous, and are always the legacy of a directive that is barely divined. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. That is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.




it's kinda like, what are we even doing here?  We're not even pretending that this is "philosophy" anymore.  (Actually Heidegger rejected the notion that he was doing "philosophy", he said that what he was doing was "thinking", what exactly that means is up to interpretation.)


And Hubert Dreyfus had the chutzpah to say "oh Heidegger was just doing a philosophical anthropology, the 'unveiling of a world' just means how our social practices influence how we categorize objects, nothing unusual going on here".  Come on man.


The result of collecting all these spacey wordcels in one intellectual space, and giving them the freedom to be as spacey as they want without much in the way of outside checks and balances, is a very strange and unique literature that freely transitions between philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, poetry, and religious experience, sometimes all within the same paragraph.  They won't announce when they're "changing modalities", that's on you to figure out.  You might find it frustrating, but you can't say it's not fascinating.


But anyway.  In spite of all that.  All continental texts are really different from each other and you have to take them on a case by case basis.  There's been increasing analytic interest over the past couple of decades in doing analytic interpretations/reconstructions of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Derrida, all the big names, figuring out what ideas are in there that can be extracted and pressed into a more easy-to-digest form.  I wouldn't say there's anything like a "bridging of the gap" between the two traditions but the interest is there.  It's not all bullshit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Officially yes, fascists were opposed to the aristocracy in the old sense of “the second estate”. The monarchists viewed the fascists as upstart revolutionaries rather than as conservatives.


But in practice every society has an elite, and this guy was presumably using “aristocracy” as a synonym for “elite”.


The text I quoted was the entirety of the original OP comment.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for July 23, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Bebop and GitS are not good, they have immaculate vibes but that’s about it. I think they’re mostly carried by nostalgia. If you thought that was the best anime had to offer then I wouldn’t blame you for writing it off.


Most of my absolute favorite Japanese stories come from
VNs and JRPGs rather than anime/manga. Although I do think there are some great anime-original stories. But if you like Ghibli movies I may not be the best person to give you recommendations, based on the alignment of our tastes. The only Ghibli movie I think is really great is Mononoke.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean didn't he literally just get purged for expressing a political opinion?


He doesn't have to read about authoritarian states, he's already living in one!


EDIT: Well that comment didn't last long.  Here's the original:




I didn't watch the entire Mehdi Hasan Jubilee video but wanted to comment on that one guy who was fired after he said "yeah I'm a fascist".






After this, Hasan asks if he's afraid this imagined regime might come after his one day. He says no because he'd be part of the aristocracy that the regime comes from. These spoiled children of democracy have no ida what the hell they're talking about. All authoritarian regimes are full of paranoia about who's going after who. And that ruling class is the most heavily policed. They get purged. Your unwavering commitment to the state's ideology might be your best asset one day and your biggest liability the next. I beg any of these people to read a book by someone who grew up in an authoritarian state.