It is also about what they did to our ancestors. Do not forget that eugenics was a progressive and transhumanist idea. Unlike backwards conservatives, we progressives understand The Science of Darwinism, and we also have moral strength to do what is right. We will employ population-wide controls to weed out genetic diseases, and make humanity clean once and for all. There will be some eggs broken making this omelette, but the only thing that can cast moral judgement on us is the man at the end of history. And we know for sure that this Man is a transhumanist of unspecified cultural and ethnic background, but who has unlocked the universal [trans]human potential in his true consciousness. This man will thank us for progressing The Work ushering him forth.
georgioz
11mo ago
Reading this post makes me more inclined believe this part of the article:
And yet, with those caveats in mind, it’s still my judgement that K-pop fandom is more intense and has more unhealthy elements. I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but that’s my judgement after having read through dozens of forum pages, Reddit threads, Quora answers, and articles on fan adoration of idols.
georgioz
11mo ago
Don't worry, Western Marxism is still alive an doing well. Just wait until the oppressed take control of means of [cultural] production - then we will solve all the contradictions, including those that soviet style communists could not resolve.
georgioz
11mo ago
I think of banality of evil more in line with the Moloch idea. And I also find it useless. For instance I think that everybody involved in transitioning kids is taking part in great evil, of course they think they are doing good. In the end most people involved ranging from receptionist in gender clinic to actual surgeon who chops off healthy organs of kids will be fine. They are not doing anything illegal presumably. Another example - everybody knows what is happening in Xinjiang, China and it does not mean squat. Disney executives had no qualms filming Mulan next to it, literally thanking Xinjiang government for their tremendous help.
I most probably would not do shit about Jews were I living in those times. I don't do squat about kids being tortured in North Korea or literal slavery all over the world. So there is that - am I evil for just watching Netflix while all that is happening around me, possibly even contributing by paying slavers money for their products? If yes, then I don't care, it is not my business to solve these injustices.
georgioz
11mo ago
Sure, I probably participate by buying cheaper clothing from Xingjian cotton. I also work for international company, so I am sure that I am making products that help some really nasty people do some really nasty stuff with said product. I also like eating meat, which of course makes me a banally evil monster in eyes of many people. Take your pick of Moloch-like idea that I profit from or participate in and I am by definition banally evil person.
georgioz
11mo ago
I think she did. People only put nazism on some pedestal of evil, so they think that Arendt had some incredible insight. In fact it is just another version of moral outrage porn. In above example I admitted that I am absolutely fine with eating meat, I have only smile for my butcher. Of course many people would say that I am evil, while I am just going about my day not thinking twice about it. There are people in US army devising WW3 plans for nuclear holocaust or who are one cog in the machine of identifying and striking targets for Predator drones including civilians. Then they go home, hug their children and do whatever.
Arend's insight is absolutely useless. For instance I think that doctors who transition children are absolute scum, I am sure that many of them are monsters and I think the same about every single person working in child transition clinic. Some conservatives think the same about about abortions. And now what, how should one act upon this knowledge of banally evil people doing their evil deeds while thinking about themselves as perfectly normal people? Absolutely nothing except maybe being more active in next elections and of course acting properly outraged when the society finally permits it.
georgioz
11mo ago
Excellent, this is actually a perfect example of another counterargument. Who knows what is really going on in Auschwitz or Xinjiang or whatever. Only time will tell and in the meantime let me deal with my day-to-day problems.
She absolutely did NOT mean it to refer to bystanders who did nothing, because she was not seeking to explain the behaviors of bystanders, but rather only the behavior of government officials who implemented the policy.
Sure, nobody is talking about doing nothing, we are talking about people supporting 3rd Reich in one way or another. Which is how this thread started.
They think that Arendt had some incredible insight because, in 1963, it was in fact a unique and controversial insight.
I am with you on this. People fetishize Nazism as somehow unique and Arendt kind of ruined the party, I am not dissing her - I am dissing people who need her.
It is the exact opposite of outrage porn; in fact, Arendt was criticized at the time for not being sufficiently outraged. Her entire thesis was that Eichmann was not "a monster" and was not even particularly anti-Semitic.
Here I did not mean Arendt's particular schtick, but how it is used now: Ah, you are not particularly hardcore Nazi, you are just banally evil so I can still punch you. I meant this.
If so, then they are not an example of the banality of evil. They are an example of regular old evil.
Doctors are only one cog in the machine that goes from lawmakers, through Eichmann style beurocrats interpreting said laws, through insurance companies, hospital management, through psychiatrists, receptionists and so forth. The surgeon who is cutting the organs in fact has quite a good excuse doing what he does, he has mountain of exculpatory paperwork to freely do what he is gonna do. In fact if the doctor would refuse in some fit of consciousness, he or she would probably suffer severe career consequences. How is he evil in the old sense? He is law abiding citizen, respected even.
georgioz
11mo ago
Asian is also useless category as it ranges from hardcore Pakistani Muslims to Spanish speaking Filipino Catholics, high achieving Indian IT professionals but of course also Chinese/Japanese/Korean people. So there is that.
georgioz
11mo ago
This shit tends to explode. Look at Balkans where you have a mix of Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christians as well as various ethnicities such Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians and others. These peoples and religions lived in that place for centuries and yet these fault lines reappear again and again. Similar story now in Lebanon. One day Beirut is enlightened Paris of the East and the next day Christians and Muslims and Druze or people from any of 18 recognized religious groups as well as various ethnicities such as Arabs, Kurds, Turks or Armenians and others - it all can explode in sudden violence. I guess we now all live in Balkanized world.
This is completely inaccurate take. Anheuser-Busch never really apologized, they refused to admit that they did anything wrong. The best non-apology strategy they have is something like that this was one among many influencers and that it was not a campaign and so forth. So in a sense there is no apology to accept.
It is too late to downplay the situation now and pray it disappears - they voluntarily walked into this political mess, so now deal with it. Obviously they do not want to back down and say they did wrong, because then they would anger woke people - plus I'd guess that PMC people in that company genuinely despise their customer base and they would never admit they did anything wrong. So I think it is absolutely okay to continue despising them back, there is no resemblance with your apocryphal proverb. If they come out that they fired all people responsible for that shit, and that they pledge percentage of sales to go for anti-woke causes - like let's say helping detransitioners with their plight - then I would reconsider.
This is also why I vow never to buy Gillette product unless they denounce woke stuff - which will of course never happen.
georgioz
10mo ago
All analogies and comparisons break down at some level. The way I understood the comparison is that the model goal of "predict next word" produced "correct" but repetitive answers. Therefore the parameter of temperature was added, so that the model can go and explore some novel ground and go off the track a little bit. It is the other side of the hallucination, it is almost impossible to prevent it. Also probably because one man's hallucination is other man's creative work.
georgioz
10mo ago
Alexander had everything laid out for him. It was Philip II who reformed Macedonian army, consolidated power in his hands and who provided Alexander with the best tutoring. And Philip also had good sense to get killed while Alexander was young.
The true self-made men were the likes of Genghis Khan, who literally comes from refugee family that almost all died in harsh Mongolian winter. Napoleon definitely counts as well. Possibly Caesar, but less so since he was born into patrician family.
This is deliberate effort to bring scientific sounding language into an already settled situation to confuse and muddle waters. It is also isolated demand for rigorous categorization, something that for instance is not required if the same person argues for let's say race-based affirmative action where OMB recognizes 6 races (Hispanic or Latino, White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander), quite a shallow categorization of immensely diverse situation - don't you think?
As others said, everybody knows what man and woman is even with all the "subcategories" such as post-menopausal or infertile women and so forth. Everything else is unnecessary sophistry. I can use another more innocuous example as an analogy: what is a chair? There are so many subcategories. You have office chairs and kitchen chairs, you have chairs with multiple legs or even those designer chairs without legs. You can have metal chairs and plastic chairs, you have chairs with or without armrest and who even knows what is a difference between chair and stool and even table for that matter - you can sit on a table and you can eat from chair, can you not? It is all so fluid, chair is whatever you think it is. Except no. Everybody knows what a chair is for purpose of virtually all the conversations in human history. We are not interested in this kind of sophistry outside of some funny niche philosophical discussions, we do not have to bring it into the mainstream for sure.
Capitalism is just another of the words that permeates our culture and even day-to-day life which is basically meaningless stand-in. It may have some prosaic "definitions" such as private ownership of means of production, but virtually nobody uses them this way. In the eyes of many, capitalism is whatever we have now, which is to be problematized, criticized and changed. On the opposite side we have socialism, which is also not strictly defined, it is just opposite of our current shitty system of capitalism, it is an ideal state that will work and whatever it is, it is definitely not capitalism. So capitalism is just useless umbrella term with negative connotation be it insensitive free-market capitalism or it may be late stage crony capitalism and it may be even party-state capitalism under current regime in China.
Capitalism vs socialism is best viewed as part of ideological language, it is similar to other radical rhetoric such as oppression vs liberation and so forth. It really is that stupid, we need to fight oppression/capitalism and if result of that fight turns into shit, then some new form of capitalism/oppression sneaked in through reactionary forces and true socialism/liberation was not even tried. History needs to make another another revolution, only next time informed by previous failures until the true utopia will eventually be achieved.
At this point I think that words like capitalism are just brainworms and we are best served if we taboo these words and restart the conversation.
I think that you perfectly describe what is going on, namely trying to use language games and sophism to permeate the borders of some categories often in order to capture some social or legal advantage. This is a standard contention where the left views something as socially constructed - so "social and relational presentation" in your parlance - as opposed to anything else. The issue here is that applying this analogy there are no borders, Rachel Dolezal presents as black and you should accept it, and grant her all the advantages of being black such as those related to Affirmative Action legislature.
And we do not even have to borrow these examples, what if some child thinks that their teacher is their mom? It is this children's reality, in kid's lived experience this teacher is performing all the motherly roles so she is this child's "real mom". On what grounds are you going to dispute this personal lived experience of this poor kid? Parasocial mom is "real mom", so she better coughs up some money for child support or maybe vice versa, this teacher should be able to provide consent for kid to get tattoo or act in some other parental capacities. So this example proves too much, "stepmothers are real mothers" argument can "prove" that transwomen are real women but also that people wearing blackface are real black people. So it is not a good argument.
In reality even the most enthusiasts of social construction of reality do understand the power of categories. Deep down they do not believe in fluidity of these categories, shouting that "transwomen are real women" is a proof that they want to advocate for this change, they do not respect the status quo when it comes to this category.
As for the matter at hand, we do have mothers and setpmothers and adoptive mothers for millennia as categories. There is no confusion to be had, there is no need for new category such as "real mother". In fact there is a similarity where the society uses the word "mother" in stepmother as a courtesy, similarly as it uses "woman" transwoman as a courtesy there. However the very prefix "step" and "trans" implies the difference. Or in other words, stepmother is literally different word, it is not just some adjective such as let's say "tiger mother" or "tall mother".
Paradoxically the "everybody is slave to the meme" claim is itself a meme, deconstruct the deconstruction you memetic slave.
I don't think this is useful way of thinking about this, it is another example of nihilistic attitude. You may as well say that we are all just a womb to galactic AI or that we (including galactic AI) are all just slaves that speed up entropy so the heat death of the universe comes sooner or any other teleological nonsense like that.
There is no life (or righteousness) in the void, only death.
(The text in OP's parenthesis does not follow from the premise so I will ignore that).
I think his main problem is that he's a materialist, like most Marxist intellectuals are.
It depends on what you mean by materialist. Even Karl Marx himself spent most of the 1840ies laying groundwork for his later thinking, but in 1840ies he was much more theoretical. In his books such as Economic and Philosophical Manuscript he inverts Hegelian idealism on its head. But only in so much as to claim that it is not some ultimate idea , or Geist trying to use history and dialectics, but for Marx the role of the Geist is replaced by Man, specifically Man as species being. For Marx the man recreates himself via his Work, unalienated labor that takes paramount position.
But it is this cycle where man uses Praxis of work to refine Theory, which then shapes society which in turn reshapes man in dialectical cycle. The nature of The Work itself is malleable, for Marx it was literally the manual labor of proletariat wielding literal hammers and sickles. But for modern Marxists it may also be broader work, reality is socially constructed is it not? It is our duty to socially shape reality by doing The Work to bring about better tomorrow, reshaping institutions and seizing the means of cultural production. It is at least as important as seizing the means of industrial and agricultural production, because in the end what we are sculpting is the New Soviet Man and he is product of culture broadly defined.
A year ago there was a kerfuffle around A Message From the Gay Community AKA "We are coming for your children" song, which was pretty blatant call that they are the ones who will educate kids into whatever their idea of "tolerance" is - and there is nothing you as a parent can do about that. Of course I think that this is all about clash of ideologies or one can say religions. Of course everybody thinks that they are projecting what is good into the world. There are people who think that books like Gender Queer or surgical transition of 15 years old kids is what tolerance means. So I'd say that "we're coming for your children" can be absolutely terrifying even if taken at face value by the criteria of said group - LGBTQIA+ pride protesters in this case. Radical Muslim imam proclaiming that he is going to teach your children how to interpret the Quran and spread goodness into the world, would probably be taken as a threat, despite his best intention of bringing them to heaven in his own mind.
The same for me. In my mind the LGBTQIA+ movement is now indistinguishable from radical religious cult. For me it is not unlike Scientologists infiltrating government institutions. So for these radicals to chant that they are going for my children is akin to Scientologists saying that they are going for my children (meaning they will "help" them by using scientology auditing method on them etc.).
Anyways, what is interesting is that there seems to be some self-awareness among these people that maybe they have shown their cards too soon and that they maybe overestimated their grip on our culture to some extent, given the current backlash. A year back there was a song by gay chorus about how they are going for our children, now it is a single voice in pride parade that is viewed as cringe by fellow marchers.
So the argument is that since "sissy hypno porn etc." is available online, then there is no need to be worried that it is pushed in school as it does not do that much harm?
Good, so given that terminally online people have access to gore and snuff videos or ISIL radical propaganda or holocaust denial bullshit, let's move it into schools maybe in slightly sanitized form. It cannot harm anybody to have teachers handing out books written by Nick Fuentes, right? Kids who don't like it will not read it anyway and even if they do, it will not do that much harm.
I can throw the same against you. Trans and Queer activists say they only want to normalize their way of life so that kids can consider being trans/queer too (Bailey). And they do that by getting books like Gender Queer into school libraries with scenes like this in there (Motte). And if parents object that this is not appropriate for school aged children, then suddenly the are "book banning bigots" who attack vulnerable queer community. Oh, and also chanting "we are coming for your children" is obviously a joke.
So my position is that to promote books depicting oral sex on strapon to elementary school children by adults behind parents back is literally grooming. Then lying about it, mocking any outrage against it and fighting to keep that book in the schools is if not grooming at least facilitating grooming.
Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people.
Oh, not this again. The 30% chance was from polls right before the election, the thing people had with 538 was how polls changed completely from day-to-day. On October 17th 2016 the 538 predicted Hillary with 88.1% after it was basically 50:50 on July 30th, then two weeks later on November 4th only it dropped 24 percentage points down to 64.5% for Hillary. The point is that Silver does not have the prediction, he has series of dozens of predictions that swing wildly so it is hard to pinpoint if he was "right" as there is many possible definitions of that.
I stand by my claim that polls in general are more then useless, it is akin to using aggregator to predict weather on a particular day 2 years from now somewhere. You either use absolutely obvious and thus useless take (it will be warm because it will be in the middle of summer - California will remain blue), but you will not know the specifics of events close to the day, such as specific front forming in Arctic or whatnot and thus your predictions are useless until the very day. Silver's polls are useless to watch prior to election because they are for sure to be subject to wild swings so they are not really predictions in that sense, and they are useless to watch on election day because you will have results anyway very soon without needing to then put forth lame defense of how often 1:2 or 1:10 or 1:100 event happens.
Of course it is perfect for Silver's business, we have elections only every few years so it can take decades of data to prove that he is actually full of shit. By that time he will be multimillionaire, in that sense I say well played.
They are either lying, or they are perpetuating the unnecessary pain of inmates for political gain.
Of course they are lying. This article in Voices of Bioethics journal describes wonderful evolution in Canada from right to suicide in 2016 to current murdering of ill people (not even terminally ill, just ill) under euphemism of "death with dignity" or MAID (medical assistance in dying). There were over 10,000 people killed in 2021, over 13,500 in 2022 and the number is rising and quickly becoming leading cause of death in Canada. Presumably unlike executions, killing ill people is painless and wonderful.
One of the counterarguments to this "hard on crime" line of thinking is the problem of mass incarceration. There is a limit to how many people can be imprisoned without compromising the system’s integrity. I learned more about this when I read about the Russian prison system, which developed its own set of rules after the communist revolution in 1917 and following literal imprisonment of whole nations in gulags. A similar phenomenon is happening in US prisons, where powerful gangs impose their own laws and influence both the inmates and the outsiders. Mass incarceration is a problem of the type that stares back if you stare at it intensely enough.
There is also a deeper problem behind this - whether we call it a “mental health crisis”, as some on the left do, or “social fabric being ripped apart”, as some on the right do. It is shocking that over 9% of males can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. Even if we are not among them, we cannot ignore the fact that 10% of males will experience the prison system for a period of time. Therefore, I do not think that the solution is to release violent criminals or to be extra tough on crime.
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