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User ID: 1083
If this is baby trapping and she lied about being on birth control, I would reiterate my assertion in my prior comment: This is something she's committed against you and as such you're not obliged to participate. But it ultimately depends on what you feel you can live with.
Sorry, I get that this is stressful and maybe I sound judgemental (you do, in fact, have my sympathies). If she's not asking for much then not really a problem then, I suppose. The issue is if the requests for payment continue.
But your other concern isn't actionable. If she really babytrapped you, there's not really anything you can do short of engaging in criminal activity to stop that from happening. You can only control what you can, and either choose to get involved or not (I don't blame you at all if you choose the latter, the baby was primarily her responsibility and not yours).
Of course it's not literally impossible, but every part of this reads like a textbook scam and I would place the probability of this being the case at somewhere upwards of 90%. She is a stripper and probably has experience with hooking up with clients, what is the likelihood that she suddenly had a lapse of judgement or her birth control failed in this specific instance? It's far more likely that this is a scam, either the baby was entirely planned, she was already pregnant or there is no baby. (The first possibility strikes me as the most unlikely of the three.)
If you really need certainty there's @sun_the_second's suggestion that you should probably send just enough for the abortion then never speak to her again. I would not necessarily recommend that course of action though, even if it would ensure your peace of mind. The only thing worse than becoming a target is falling for the scheme. Just because she looks innocent and sounds truthful doesn't mean she is.
Southeast Asian here. I very much doubt she is pregnant. Seriously, as someone who has had a family member be falsely accused by a Filipina for money, she was trying to trap you the entire time. This chick took one look at you and probably (correctly) sussed out you were an easy target.
Lots of stories like these. Watch this video, containing an anecdote where a Filipina tried to convince a guy that she was pregnant by using a friend's urine. The ability to produce a positive pregnancy test is not evidence of her pregnancy.
Also, I wouldn't say this but it seems you need it:
- Don't get drunk and stupid in foreign countries.
- Use protection.
- Don't hang out with random thots who clearly want your money.
These are regular "white people in Southeast Asia" precautions. You are going to attract a lot of attention, most of it unwanted; do not put yourself in compromising situations.
When you have something of great value, it tends to become the only thing that people ever want from you. We can consider Elon Musk as a figure of intense material and symbolic value. He's one of the wealthiest men alive, he runs X, he runs SpaceX, he had a spectacularly public falling out with Trump, and these factors undoubtedly dominate in virtually all of his interpersonal interactions. It's probably a bit hard for him to just be a "normal guy" with "normal friends", innit?
This is something that is far more blessing than curse; a member of the aristocracy may chafe at the fact that their inherent social standing is all they will be known for, but it's sure better than being the serf that finds themselves without much value by default and who will need to scrape and bleed if they want to reach even a fraction of that. This dynamic shows up in the relations between the sexes as well, even in symbolic ways. Hell, women's clothing is skewed far more towards that of the aristocracy than men's clothing is; many items of male fashion evoke utility and/or discipline in some way (even male formalwear derives from military uniform), whereas many female fashions are expensive, throwaway fripperies which embody the idea that status is earned through not having to display utility, and being able to attain resources without having to dirty your hands by doing hard work.
Really there's a grand irony here that I think puts the lie to the idea that women would want to be treated like men: The only reason why women can even complain about that is because of that inherent value. The only reason why anyone even listens to these complaints in the first place is because they are women, and people feel their needs should be catered to and that their complaints carry more weight than that of the male sex. It is okay if women consume resources; they are the appropriate beneficiaries of help, and attending to their complaints is a worthwhile use of others' labour. The same is not true for men. Even the people making complaints along the lines that women can never stop being seen as women often self-consciously capitalise on the fact that they are either female or acting on behalf of women to give their point more weight.
If we are to start treating women like men (something I fully support, by the way, PLEASE actually start doing this), the answer to this complaint should be "suck it up, buttercup, and deal with it". The fact that it is not, and that women expect people to actually take these complaints seriously and spend time, resources and effort dealing with the supposed problem, tells you everything you need to know. Nobody, not even the women making these protestations, truly want women to be treated like men. So many women have been spoiled with this pernicious and unrealistic idea that tradeoffs are not or should not be a thing, that they can "have it all" - but the reality is that they can't, and that results in them never being happy and treating equality like a buffet where they can just pick the parts of the bargain they like while leaving behind everything they don't (so, the last century or two of gender activism). Try as you might to force reality to conform to that fanciful ideal, that's not how anything works.
I hope you'll forgive me if I end up not going to more than one church or cemetery from the list haha.
Fair enough. I'm a bit of a fanatic when it comes to obscure historical sites and will often seek them out and hit many of them up in one day. I mean you probably know that since you've read a travelogue of mine.
If you're going to just one of the cemeteries I would probably say Highgate is the main event (though I've heard to get the most out of it you need to book a tour; they bring you into the catacombs).
Alright, this took a while, sorry about that. Note I have excluded all popular tourist sites like St Paul's, Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, etc. Also note this list is not exhaustive, I might add more later.
Churches: There are too many historical churches in London so here is a list of those you may find relevant. The entire stretch from St Bartholomew's Church to Southwark Cathedral in this list is rather nice, but all of these churches are packed close together and are rather easy to visit. Really many of them are worth visiting and possess their own draw. St Bartholomew's Church is London's oldest parish church, Temple Church is a unique round church built by the Knights Templar as their English headquarters, All Hallows by the Tower has a crypt with an exposed section of Roman pavement, Fitzrovia Chapel boasts beautiful mosaics, etc. I would recommend you do some research and figure out which ones you want to see.
- St. Bartholomew’s Church
- London Oratory
- Westminster Cathedral (if you haven't already been; this one is somewhat well known)
- Chapel of St Peter and St Paul
- Temple Church
- All Hallows by the Tower
- St. Etheldreda’s Church
- St Bride's Church
- St Clement Danes Church
- St. Mary-le-Strand
- St Stephen Walbrook
- St Pancras Old Church
- St Magnus the Martyr
- The King’s Chapel of the Savoy
- St Olave's Church
- St Dunstan-In-The-West
- Fitzrovia Chapel
- Southwark Cathedral
- St Mary Aldermary
- St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate
- St Margaret Pattens
- St Mary at Hill
- St Mary Woolnoth
- St John Priory Church
- St Martin Ludgate
Magnificent Seven Cemeteries: Yes, I put cemeteries on here. These are sprawling Gothic cemeteries, established in the early 19th century to prevent overcrowding in small parish churchyards. These cemeteries were built by companies that attempted to tempt customers with beautiful architectural features, things that make them worth visiting today. There are many important graves in these necropolises - Highgate Cemetery for example is the resting place of Michael Faraday and Karl Marx alike.
- Highgate Cemetery
- Abney Park Cemetery Trust
- Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park
- Nunhead Cemetery
- West Norwood Cemetery and Crematorium
- Brompton Cemetery
- Kensal Green Cemetery
Heritage houses: Some of these require tours and may or may not be closed. Check before visiting, I can't say I remember the schedules (I know Spencer House is only open to the public on Sundays, though during the week it is possible to enter via a prebooked tour). Again, lots of stuff here: Handel Hendrix House is the back to back residence of George Handel and Jimi Hendrix, Leighton House was the high-class home of a painter who had the interior lavishly decorated with intricate Orientalist aesthetics drawing from North Africa, the Middle East and Sicily, Sutton House is one of the last surviving Tudor houses in London, and so on.
- Handel Hendrix House
- Leighton House
- Charles Dickens Museum
- Dr Johnson's House
- Spencer House
- Clarence House
- Fenton House
- Sutton House
- Kenwood House
Historic alleyways/neighbourhoods:
- St Michael’s Alley
- Magpie Alley
- Artillery Passage
- Goodwin’s Court
Misc:
- Freemasons Hall
- Crystal Palace Subway
- The Charterhouse
- Museum of the Order of Saint John
- Lock and Co Hatters
- Hampstead Hill Garden And Pergola
This is a lot, so I'll also add a link to a map with all the sites pinned for your convenience in a bit.
In exchange, please tell me something useful about places to visit in London today.
Why not visit some lesser known historic sites like St. Bartholomew’s Church and St. Etheldreda’s Church? They’re both close to St. Paul’s and get overshadowed by it (I assume you have already visited that, otherwise what tf are you doing on here asking for places to go). There are also some Roman ruins nearby. Just west of that there’s the St Mary Le Strand church, so they can all easily be visited together for a church-oriented outing.
If you get bored of all the religious sites and are interested in music at all there’s the George Handel House and Jimi Hendrix House, these musicians’ Georgian townhouses are adjoining. I’m a big armchair traveller; I could post a list of places to visit in and around London if you wanted (after I get off work). Let me know if you wanna take me up on that.
I love it too. It's probably the only online forum I participate in at this point; I've been spoiled rotten to the point I can barely enjoy any of the rest.
Though I wish I had more energy to effort-post. I used to make big posts full of citations and dense argumentation more before and get into spirited disagreements and butt heads with users but I feel like my contributions have been rather lacking as of late. Life gets in the way I guess.
The original question in my head was ‘how first world can you get without driving your big cats extinct’ which then evolved into the broader question with wealth as a proxy.
If so, I don't really think any answers to this question (your broader one) are really indicative of much because there is one glaring confounding factor in the metric you're using. Most megafaunal extinctions did not occur during the transition to industrial modernity; rather they occurred when all modern humans were still firmly in the hunter-gatherer stage. The giant ground sloths in South America, the mammoths and mastodon in North America, as well as Diprotodon and the marsupial lion in Australia were all driven extinct via a combination of human pressure + environmental shifts during the late Pleistocene. 65% of megafaunal species went extinct during this period, and when it came to animals above 1000 kg, 80% of them disappeared.
What really does this metric in is that this loss of megafauna wasn't exactly evenly distributed throughout the world, it was particularly severe in the Americas and Australia, whereas Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia were less affected. And the worst Pleistocene megafaunal die-offs occurred in regions which happen to correlate with first-world-ness today. Long before any human societies became recognisably first-world the distribution of megafauna globally was already very skewed, and relative megafaunal diversity in any region has a whole lot to do with whatever happened during the late Pleistocene and not quite so much to do with industrialisation.
I probably should have defined "meaningless" better and generally articulated my argument more systematically, that's my bad; I was writing down my first reaction to the passage and had not yet properly distilled how to explain my point. What I mean by "not meaningful" is that there might be no way to prove or disprove the statement, and as such it can be considered an example of a statement that's not even wrong. In terms of its utility in shining light on the world around it, it's not particularly helpful; this is the case due to the fact that it has not been and perhaps cannot ever be evaluated through reference to formal logic, mathematics, or any natural sciences. Marcuse has presented a statement of fact without proof or rigorous logical argumentation as to its validity. He's not even built his conclusion based on reasoning from other assumed priors (not perfect, but better). As such it is a bare statement.
I think it may be helpful here to draw a comparison between Marcuse's claims about value and your own previous comments about anime. You said "I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad". Now, is this something that you could absolutely rigorously logically prove 100%? No, of course not. But does that mean the sentence is meaningless? No, that's not true either.
Right, I think that this elaborates the difference between our epistemologies and our opinions on the standard that academic scholarship should ideally strive towards. I generally adhere to logical positivism (very INTP of me, I know /s), and while I don't act like this all the time in practice, I do believe that principles of falsifiability and offering up proofs/disproofs are the kinds of standards that scholarship should exemplify. As Scott describes it: "The truths of science are verifiable empirical claims and ... the truths of logic and mathematics are tautologies. These two constitute the entire universe of meaningful judgements; anything else is nonsense."
Something like "Death Note was not that good" is an evaluative judgement of quality, not a statement of fact. Every argument surrounding aesthetics will be vibes based as a result, and the point of it is not to get closer to any truth; rather, it's to impress upon someone your subjective experience and make them viscerally feel it on a deep level. The point is to impose your personal feelings on someone. The reason why people structure it like a rational argument is specifically because we assume that other people believe certain things are good too, we assume other people share our own cognitive characteristics. We create premises and then we can possibly use logical (more often, pseudo-logical) argumentation to show how these premises result in an inevitable conclusion.
Of course, there is a point beyond which you can't get much closer to agreement through this method of argumentation. Say a film critic enjoys films that are talky and philosophical and idea-based and the ordinary viewer enjoys stuff that's more action-packed. There isn't really a way for these two parties to come to any consensus on the quality of films. While it's possible to try to argue it if there's some other related point of commonality you can reason from, a big part of convincing people in this regard is trying to force them into your mental framework; to get them to understand you on a qualia-level. Discussions surrounding aesthetics proceed with the inherent assumption that truth is not what is being discussed, and as such they do not need to meet the criteria for evaluating a truth-claim. (There is a way to discuss aesthetics which is amenable to proof or disproof by appeal to the majority or analysis of human neural structure, but when most people discuss aesthetics they're not trying to make a claim about whether most people like something or not but instead getting someone else to adopt their own subjective evaluations of a piece of media.)
On the other hand, assertions such as "Art that emphasises subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" aren't of the same nature that "this show was bad" is, in that they are not value judgements. It is a factual claim about the effects of a certain course of action. This automatically raises the bar for the kinds of arguments that should be accepted when evaluating these statements. Because when you agree with that statement, you're not agreeing to adopt a certain personal evaluation of things. You're agreeing to a statement about how the world operates. Discussion of such things needs to proceed among logical or empirical lines, and if it cannot, all you are doing is relying on your own emotion or personal bias to try and divine a fact. When discussing this one cannot subject themselves to the same criteria that one would subject a movie review to.
The kinds of statements I consider meaningful are exemplified in this quote from Scott in his post about logical positivism. "[W]hat is there such that, using reason rather than emotion or made-up pseudologic, we can actually change our minds about and correctly judge as having one probability of truth rather than another?" It really doesn't matter much to me that the majority of philosophers seem to think the Vienna Circle has been invalidated; if I'm to judge the effectiveness of these principles I distinctly note that these institutions that operate under things that look and sound a lot like positivism do far better.
Perhaps that makes me a pragmatist instead.
But "dumb" and "wrong" are importantly different from meaningless. I get the impression that you already think that Marcuse's claims here are at least level 3.
Correct, I think Marcuse's claim is level 3 as presented in your list. It contains a clear statement of fact that can be pretty straightforwardly understood. I do believe this is true for much continental philosophy, though they fail other epistemological criteria and sets of standards.
No, I really have to disagree on this. Many people self-consciously base their own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency. No one thinks that there's anything mystical or unarticulable about this. Therefore, its denial should not be mystical or unarticulable either.
I think we've talked past each other on this point, I don't mean to say it's mystical. What I mean is that people would accept Marcuse's claim not on the basis of formalised reason or empirical proof but on the basis of the fact that it resonates with them and they deeply feel it is true; they think it sounds right and seems reasonable in spite of the lack of concrete reasons they should believe it.
Also, the distinction I've made between a value/moral judgement and a statement of fact, as well as the different burdens of proof which should be placed on them, rears its head here. Statements such as "I base my values on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency" and "You should not base your own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency" are value judgements. "Emphasising subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" is a statement about how the world works.
Eagles are probably Switzerland.
I would say Australia is a very good contender for this. The wedge-tailed eagle has a massive wingspan and length and it is endemic to the Australian continent. They are often seen here and are in fact the most common of the world's large eagles. IIRC Australia also has higher median wealth per adult than Switzerland, though also lower average wealth (I suppose Switzerland's average is pulled up by a small percentage of really high net worth individuals) so I think it fits well here.
A possible runner-up is Japan (probably features third behind Australia and Switzerland because it's not super wealthy, and it represents the edge of the habitat range for the species in question). The Steller's sea eagle is one of the heaviest eagles and can be commonly found overwintering in Hokkaido (they are also found in South Korea and China but in smaller numbers, so depending on your definition of marginal you could count them or not). The actual core of their habitat is in Russia, but that country definitely isn't wealthy.
Big snakes are, I’m guessing, either Malaysia or Singapore.
Singapore definitely wins this, they have the reticulated python. This alone doesn't make them unique - many other countries have large snakes, but what really wins them the title is that they are also very rich.
But I would include Australia before Malaysia in that list. Northern Australia in particular has its fair share of large pythons like the Australian scrub python (which is one of the world's largest pythons, capable of preying on wallabies) and carpet pythons, which can get large: example 1, 2, and 3. Also here is an olive python swallowing a crocodile in Queensland. You're welcome.
I realise this reply is very Australia-heavy but I think people underestimate just how much actually gigantic wildlife there is in the country. They definitely win the "large marsupial" category with red kangaroos, too.
Hopefully this exchange isn't too tedious to you. I have obviously not gotten as deeply into continental philosophy as you have, so I hope this doesn't feel like explaining the concept of addition to an infant.
Oh, not sure why you removed the Paul Klee section, I was going to comment on it...
The reason why I removed it is precisely for the reason you stated: he is an artist and not a philosopher. I quoted him initially because IIRC Adorno was influenced by Klee's art and writings, but later decided that it would just be better to quote Adorno himself instead of doing so indirectly through the writings he was influenced by.
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.
I have been working my way through The Aesthetic Dimension and already have quibbles with the approach just a small amount of the way in. Perhaps this is a mistake and perhaps I should read more before I comment, but:
On Page 2 Marcuse enumerates the following tenets of Marxist aesthetics: Art is transformed along with the social structure and its means of production. One's social class affects the art that gets produced, and the only true art is that made by an ascending class; the art made by a descending class is "decadent". Realism corresponds most accurately to "the social relationships" and is the correct art form. Etc.
Marcuse's critique is that Marxism prioritises materialism and material reality too much over the subjective experiences of individuals, and that even when it tries to address the latter its focus is on the collective and not the individual. The Marxist opinion of subjectivity as a tool of the bourgeoisie, in his opinion, is incorrect and in fact "with the affirmation of the inwardness of subjectivity, the individual steps out of the network of exchange relationships and exchange values, withdraws from the reality of bourgeois society, and enters another dimension of existence. Indeed, this escape from reality led to an experience which could (and did) become a powerful force in invalidating the actually prevailing bourgeois values, namely, by shifting the locus of the individual's realization from the domain of the performance principle and the profit motive to that of the inner resources of the human being: passion, imagination, conscience."
This claim doesn't feel meaningful to me. Subjectivity could and did become a powerful force in challenging the bourgeoisie? Would be nice to get some examples of this, but I doubt he has any concrete ones. The topic of whether focusing on one's inner world invalidates or bolsters bourgeois values is not really amenable to systematic inquiry. But I would say a person's "inner experience" is very complex, kind of nonsensical and pretty much orthogonal to any political or social system you could put in place, and as such it will never map onto anything that could exist in reality (and that includes Marxism), that's not specific to aspects of capitalism like the performance principle and profit motive. The bureaucratic machinations of a central planner are just as alien to it as decentralised market-based allocation and the incentives it creates.
I guess I can somewhat legibly interpret it if I assume the truth of the critical theorist belief that their ideas are uniquely liberating, but I think that their proscriptions for society are just as artificial as anything that came before. Human emotional experience is so disordered and contradictory that expecting it to align with any model of social organisation is a mistake. People are a hodgepodge of instincts and reflexes acquired across hundreds of millions of years of geological time, some of which are laughably obsolete; it won't agree with any principle at all. Hell, it's not even compatible with granting people liberation, whatever that means. Even if you wave a magic wand and give people full freedom the expression of their instincts will often inherently conflict with the wishes of another, and in addition humans get terrified when presented with unbounded choice, and make decisions that don't maximise utility for themselves. The full realisation of human desires is an impossible task. It will always be stultified in some way or another.
This is, to me, a good example of what I said before: "You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone." I can't really reason my way into the conclusion that Marcuse has reached here, and in fact the more I think about that passage the less comprehensible I find it to be. The Lacan passage seems similar, but I have not read it in full context yet so I won't judge. But the reason why analytic philosophy tends to be restricted in its scope compared to continental philosophy is because there are rules that govern what can be legibly said within that philosophical framework.
I suppose I want and need a lot more substantiation and rigour in my academic work than what many of these writers are capable of offering. If you look at my post history, that becomes very clear; I think I demand it more than even your average Mottizen does.
Oh man. In contrast, I'm constantly juggling work from multiple clients and find myself exhausted when the weekend rolls around, yet I still get the sense that I'm not doing enough/working fast enough/taking on as many new jobs as I should. I'm a tax accountant, and most of what I do is annoyingly detail-oriented work where even the smallest slip-up can attract the attention of the tax office and negatively impact a client (even when the problem was caused by the tax office themselves in the first place, yes they fucking suck and I could write a whole essay about how shit they are). The regulatory landscape also constantly changes. The staff are assigned production targets to meet, and whether one can do so or not hugely impacts on evaluations of their performance. Towards the end of the week I find my ability to concentrate goes to shit; one can only maintain proper executive functioning for so long, and I wasn't extremely good at that in the first place.
The kind of people this job attracts are of a certain breed. My manager recently had to rush over to China because her grandmother was dying of cancer, and even when she was on leave there she was still responding to work emails every now and then. I don't think I'm cut out for this level of grind in a job, and as a result constantly feel like I'm going to get fired. I spend the weekend not working on hobbies or doing anything I actually like but just recovering, or doing some extra work that I don't record on my timesheet in order to make my efficiency look better (then struggling through the following work week while cursing my life). My hobbies have fallen by the wayside, I don't read nearly as much, and my engagement on TheMotte has nosedived as a result. I wish my job was more chill.
Need to get this off my chest: I got a promotion, a pay rise, and a bonus on Thursday. My manager has apparently stated that I am "very intelligent" (though also need to spend less time trying to get things perfect).
I'm currently up at 3AM feeling nothing but panic.
I've never thought of myself as particularly smart, in spite of protestations to the contrary. I get the sense that I compensate for my general lack of mental acuity by just investing a lot of time trying to understand things. And I fear that the higher I go, the more that's going to show. Instead of feeling accomplished or happy, I instead get the urge to hammer needles underneath my fingernails one by one because of just how guilty I feel about it.
Frankly I don't even feel like I possess basic competence, and view a lot of my life as a protracted process of failing upwards. The more things happen for me, the more I feel like a charlatan, and the more I think I'm going to mess up and everything is going to come crashing down in one way or another.
Anyway, back to trying not to think about it.
Well it's the weekend for me, so I now have some time to respond to this:
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.
I do get what they lived through, though I disagree with the entirety of their political bent and find the role they played in the spread of identity-Marxism and its promulgation into Western academia to be extremely harmful (my initial comment in this thread detailing Marcuse's "solution" for the West contained a very scornful remark about how he should have just stayed in Germany and let the Nazis take him; I had the good sense to edit it out because the second I wrote it I just thought "Jesus Christ").
But the lack of self-awareness more broadly in their political scholarship really gets to me. Their writings are full of the idea that "liberalism has failed before, therefore it can fail again; and we need to put in [authoritarian system] to maintain social order". The example they loved to use in all of their writings was the liberal Weimar Republic being usurped by the illiberal Nazi Party, and they used this to argue that the liberal system was obviously insufficient to guard against such abuses. Of course, when you're usurping a liberal system yourself and subverting it to your own ends, well, to use the Weimar Republic analogy, you need to ask yourself the question: Are we the Nazis? It's not as if most Nazis believed they were horrible people doing bad things, after all; they believed they were entirely justified, and their rationale for censorship and repression was undoubtedly similar. How do you know that's not what you're doing?
I will say I think the wars of the 20th century irreparably shaped philosophy, art and thinking in ways that seem to have been a net negative (to me at least). Things start getting very strange during the inter-war period, and then go absolutely wild post-war. This was a period where the idea of jettisoning virtually every vestige of the Enlightenment became vogue, and you can see that trend exemplified in many domains like political philosophy, architecture and art. There were thinkers who advocated it beforehand, but the early 20th century was the point where it spread like wildfire, and WW2 in particular resulted in a lot of the radical German left arriving on American soil; an environment without any antibodies to their memes. Ideals like liberalism and nationalism, the notion of reason and empiricism being desirable, as well as the rationalist neoclassicism of the era, were ravaged in the fire of the wars.
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.)
Nietzsche is good. I've had a gander at some of his stuff, though like the other commenter I half-think this is cheating. Thus Spake Zarathrusta threw me badly though and I've not returned to it since.
But in general I have the sense that much appreciation of continental philosophy actually primarily relies on vibes and not coherent sense-making. You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone. Some of what you've mentioned here about your engagement with continental philosophy seems to confirm that belief.
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.
This is fair; continental philosophy is a very wide-spanning term that encapsulates a lot of very different philosophical traditions. Still, they have undoubtedly influenced each other and there is a lot of crosstalk, and that broad assertion about "continental philosophy" was just meant as a description of the general trend in my experience - not excluding of course that there is some continental philosophy I can and do actually enjoy.
Also, from your other comment further down in the thread:
I'm glad there are people who enjoy these exposés.
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.
EDIT: removed a section
I just took one of these online tests and got INTP. Not the first time I've taken it; I tend to oscillate between INTP (Ti-Ne-Si-Fe) and ISTP (Ti-Se-Ni-Fe), though a far larger amount of the time I score as the former. Even as a participant it's pretty apparent just how low the test-retest reliability of Myers-Briggs is. Introverted thinking as my dominant function and extraverted feeling as my inferior function seems to be a consistent characteristic though.
problem_redditor
2mo ago
Market socialists love to say this, but it's wrong. No amount of increase in compute power can solve the Economic Calculation Problem, because it's not inherently about compute power but about how computers can't read minds.
The economic calculation problem is worse than even that. It's not just that a planner cannot properly figure out how much of each good to produce without price information (though I have had communist-sympathetic individuals unironically tell me that the solution might just be to conduct a whole lot of opinion polling, I am not kidding), it's also that a planner cannot estimate the most efficient method of production for any given good since there is no meaningful measure of profit under a centrally planned economy. As Mises puts it:
"The director wants to build a house. Now there are many methods that can be resorted to. Each of them offers, from the point of view of the director, certain advantages and disadvantages with regard to the utilization of future building, and results in a different duration of the building’s serviceableness; each of them requires other expenditures of building materials and labor and absorbs other periods of production. Which method should the director choose? He cannot reduce to a common denominator the items of various materials and various kinds of labor to be expended. Therefore he cannot compare them. He cannot attack either to the waiting time (period of production) or to the duration of serviceableness, a definite numerical expression. In short, he cannot, in comparing costs to be expended and gains to be earned, resort to any arithmetical operation. The plans of his architects enumerate a vast multiplicity of various items in kind: they refer to the physical and chemical qualities of various items in kind; they refer to the physical productivity of various machines, tools, and procedures. But all their statements remain unrelated to each other. There is no means of establishing any connection between them."
This is damning, since even if the mind of a planner were miraculously endowed with complete and accurate knowledge of the quantities and qualities of the available factors of production, of the latest techniques for combining and transforming these factors into consumer goods, and of the set of all individuals’ value rankings of consumer goods, the economic calculation problem still exists. Without market prices that could be used to determine the profitability of a project, one would still be unable to determine if a given plan for production of goods was optimal, and in fact would never be able to assess that even if the plan was horrifically and destructively uneconomic.
As far as I'm aware, most of these are (1) self-imposed by HR departments and not actual regulation and (2) falling out of favor.
DEI measures have indeed made their way into government policy, they're not just being self-imposed by HR departments.
For example, in my country (Australia):
"Noting that the gender pay gap remained significant, the government announced a $1.9 billion package to improve women’s economic security. The sum takes in $1.7 billion over five years for increased childcare subsidies, as well as $25.7 million to help more women pursue careers in science, engineering and maths."
"The package also includes $38.3 million to fund projects that assist women into leadership roles."
Some quotes from the relevant budget statement:
"The Government’s Boosting Female Founders Initiative provides co-funded grants to majority women-owned and led start-ups, and facilitates access to expert mentoring and advice. The Initiative, announced in the 2018 and further expanded in the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statements, provides $52.2 million in competitive grant funding plus $1.8 million in mentoring support. The program commenced in 2020, with round one of the Initiative providing approximately $11.9 million in grant funding to 51 successful applicants. Round two closed on 22 April 2021."
And:
"To further grow the pool of women in STEM, the Government is investing $42.4 million over seven years to support more than 230 women to pursue Higher Level STEM Qualifications. These scholarships will be provided in partnership with industry, to build job-ready experience, networks and the cross-cutting capabilities to succeed in modern STEM careers. This program will complement the Women in STEM Cadetship and Advanced Apprenticeships Program announced in the 2020-21 Budget, which targets women to enter industry-relevant, pre-bachelor study."
And:
"The Australian Government is committed to supporting more women into leadership positions and to further closing the gender pay gap. The Government is providing $38.3 million over five years to expand the successful Women’s Leadership and Development Program. This builds on the $47.9 million expansion to the Program announced as part of the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statement. This program funds projects such as Women Building Australia run by Master Builders Australia to support more women into building and construction. These initiatives form part of the Government’s response to increasing gender equality, extending leadership and economic participation opportunities for Australian women, and building a safer, more respectful culture."
https://archive.budget.gov.au/2021-22/womens-statement/download/womens_budget_statement_2021-22.pdf
That's from the 2021-22 budget statement, and the 2022-23 budget was no different:
"Further measures in the Budget are focused on helping women into higher-paying and traditionally male-dominated industries. To boost the number of women in trades, the Government is investing $38.6 million over 4 years from 2022‑23. Women who commence in higher paying trade occupations on the Australian Apprenticeship Priority List will be provided additional supports, such as mentoring and wraparound services."
And:
"The Morrison Government is making a further investment, building on the success of existing initiatives to improve leadership outcomes for women, by providing an additional $18.2 million for the Women’s Leadership and Development Program."
"This includes $9 million from 2023-24 to 2025-26 to expand the successful Future Female Entrepreneurs program to develop and grow women’s core entrepreneurial skills. Funding will continue the successful Academy for Enterprising Girls (10-18 year olds) and the Accelerator for Enterprising Women, expanding it to include all women aged 18+, as well as adding a new Senior Enterprising Women program."
"To support women facing unique barriers to leadership and employment, the Government is also investing $9.4 million to expand the Future Women’s Jobs Academy and to support gender balanced boards."
You can undoubtedly find more of this in the recent budget statements. Governments love boasting about how much public money they have funnelled into gender and racial equity initiatives, and many of them cannot so easily be circumvented by those disfavoured by the policy since things like "the desire to become a tradesperson" is not transferable to your wife. In addition, I don't think this is a good argument:
The regulation that I'm most aware of actually pisses everyone off, which is "Woman-owned businesses", where everyone just registers their wife as the proprietor of their business and simply acts as a hurdle for building more housing.
The notion that blocking single men from accessing that benefit would have no distorting effect is a bit peculiar, especially in a society with a significantly delayed age of marriage and where many people spend significant portions of their lives outside of a romantic dyad. In this context, if men have to meet the criteria of having procured a wife to secure a benefit for themselves, it's certainly not irrelevant.
problem_redditor
2mo ago
Yeah, I agree and gave it a shot largely because there are films and books where all of the slow ponderousness actually does pay off and you get presented with some genuinely interesting ideas.
GitS was not like that, to say the least. It's not a very good action movie and it's not a very good existential meditation. It's not particularly good at anything it tries its hand at.
Agreed that initially he does not start out like that. However as you say the Death Note starts taking over after a fairly short time, and turns him into someone who is portrayed as pretty straightforwardly evil. It makes for a less interesting character, in my opinion. I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad, in that Walt becomes less of a cartoon villain and even in the end once he's been fully Heisenberged is still willing to give up his wealth to save Hank, in spite of all his faults. Light on the other hand quickly becomes quite irredeemable rather early on.
L never came off that well in the story for me. It was just a guy who loved the mystery and found the whole thing to be a fascinating game. He had no moral reason to want to stop Light. He just wanted to catch Kira because it was a difficult case to solve.
I mean, correct; L does not have a strong moral inclination. Maybe I worded that poorly, it's just that I would have found their game of cat and mouse far more interesting and multilayered had they had any other deeper reason to participate outside of "I want to play god"/"I find solving mysteries fun". You could have given the audience an impression of their differing outlooks, shown how that informs their behaviour in real life and with other people, and once the show actually puts Light and L in the same room together there could have been an interesting demonstration of what happens when each of their ideals are challenged by that of the other. That's something I would really have wanted to see from the show, it feels like wasted potential that it did not materialise.
What! But there are so many lovely works of critical theory! Even Marcuse. "The Aesthetic Dimension" is a wonderful book, I always recommend it to everyone.
I might read this + Derrida's Truth in Painting and get back to you at some (undefined) point in the future. There's never a reason for me not to read something new; I will try to be open minded when evaluating them. I can't say I've read a whole lot of Derrida myself.
What specifically did you read that made you hate critical theory? I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything, I'm just curious what you read that caused you to form your opinion.
These papers from Marcuse linked in this thread are some examples. Anything political the Frankfurt School or its descendant schools of thought wrote induces anything from disaffected ennui to downright hatred. But I won't go for that extremely low-hanging fruit here. It's just too easy to criticise.
A while back I looked at Eclipse of Reason by Horkheimer, which I didn't think was very good. It’s a rather dreary account of how instrumental/subjective reason infects everything, and metaphysics (or non-instrumental/speculative thinking) is increasingly crowded out in modernity. Horkheimer's issue with subjective reason seems to be this: Because positivism and subjective reason rejects objective morality, no goal can be objectively measured as being "better" than another goal - after all, "should" claims are not factual claims. As a result of this, science can be used as a tool to help achieve any goal (including ones Horkheimer would disagree with) and therefore this is bad and we should reject positivism. He claims it denies that principles of human morality are fundamental objective truths.
He states "According to formalized reason, despotism, cruelty, oppression are not bad in themselves; no rational agency would endorse a verdict against dictatorship if its sponsors were likely to profit by it." But formalised reason doesn't say anything is bad in itself because "bad" is a moral judgement. Reason can tell us what "is" and what "is not", it can't tell us what our social goals should be (though it can inform how we get to these goals). Moral judgements about "should be" are not intrinsic in the universe, they only exist in human cognition as a byproduct of our evolutionary circumstances. Ethical statements such as theft is reprehensible do not represent facts. Therefore, they are not truthful, and cannot be proven or disproven using reason. Horkheimer never really proves this statement to be wrong.
Though, that's not for lack of trying; he does make some arguments against subjective reason, and one of the arguments made is this: "How this dehumanization of thinking affects the very foundations of our civilization, can be illustrated by analysis of the principle of the majority, which is inseparable from the principle of democracy. In the eyes of the average man, the principle of the majority is often not only a substitute for but an improvement upon objective reason: since men are after all the best judges of their own interests, the resolutions of a majority, it is thought, are certainly as valuable to a community as the intuitions of a so-called superior reason. However, the contradiction between intuition and the democratic principle, conceived in such crude terms, is only imaginary. For what does it mean to say that 'a man knows his own interests best'—how does he gain this knowledge, what evidences that his knowledge is correct? In the proposition, 'A man knows. . . best/ there is an implicit reference to an agency that is not totally arbitrary and that is incidental to some sort of reason underlying not only means but ends as well. If that agency should turn out to be again merely the majority, the whole argument would constitute a tautology."
This is the kind of thing you would only say if you have been cosseted in an academic-philosophical bubble without reference to other fields. The answer to “how do people get their moral intuition if not through something objective" is that human moral intuition is a product of evolutionary adaptation and doesn't necessarily reflect something that is fundamentally true on a deep level. We intrinsically value certain things not because they have any deeper inherent universal value which can be confirmed by reason, we value them simply because the structure of our psychology tells us we should. Just because we think something "should be" doesn't mean there's any fundamental basis to that belief. Every human moral prior is, in fact, baseless. The is/ought problem can never be escaped, and as such morality can only be legibly defined via appeal to a general trend.
Horkheimer in fact seems to believe that moral judgements would entirely disappear without any dictates for what is objectively moral. "All these cherished ideas, all the forces that, in addition to physical force and material interest, hold society together, still exist, but have been undermined by the formalization of reason. ... We cannot maintain that the pleasure a man gets from a landscape, let us say, would last long if he were convinced a priori that the forms and colors he sees are just forms and colors, that all structures in which they play a role are purely subjective and have no relation whatsoever to any meaningful order or totality, that they simply and necessarily express nothing." But that isn't how that works. There's also the fact you can't really distinguish between "instrumental reason" and "reasoning about ends". Any "reasoning about ends" can itself be interpreted as a means to a further end. So any reasoning Horkheimer or anyone else does can never escape critique of its own instrumentality. Therefore, it’s not really clear what he sees as being eclipsed by what. It wasn't a very inspiring piece of literature.
Also, the way Adorno decided to write about music was definitely, uh, a choice. People joke he hated everything that wasn't Schoenberg for a reason. Hell, even Schoenberg himself could not stand the guy: "It is disgusting … how he treats Stravinsky. I am certainly no admirer of Stravinsky, although I like a piece of his here and there very much – but one should not write like that."
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. But continental philosophy and particularly critical theory tries to accomplish no such thing. 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. It requires no checks or balances that anchor it to the outside world, everything is interpreted through their own internal framework that grants it legitimacy, and many of the conclusions they arrive at are premised on just... bare claims, which require basically no external substantiation to see if anything they've said actually holds. Much of it is worse than that in fact; it falls into the category of not even wrong.
Ha, Mononoke is one of the Ghibli movies I think is just okay. Different strokes I suppose.
I did watch Death Note too, which you recommended in the original anime thread; I didn't like that either (granted, I did prefer it to Bebop and GitS). Not because of the reasons offered up that it was "too disturbing and amoral", far from it, I quite like things that lean in that direction, rather it felt like there was a lot of missed potential with the characters.
This is true for Light in particular. He was painted as a hubristic megalomaniac who was in large part motivated by a desire to acquire power; it would have been much more entertaining had he been given a legible and consistent moral code which just happened to conflict with that of L. As it was, Light felt one-dimensional and it seemed more like you were supposed to be disgusted by him more than you were supposed to understand him. Which isn't good, considering how much time you spend with this character throughout the show's runtime. I even felt it cheapened the dynamic between him and L, which could have been so much more dynamic and interesting had their differing philosophies and moralities ever been given a chance to clash.
Also, to be blunt, every time Misa Amane appeared on screen I felt like strangling her to death. She was just so aggressively annoying to me.
I have another criticism of them in the link here if you would like to respond. Cowboy Bebop does not only have a substandard plot; it lacks any semblance of worldbuilding and logical consistency.
Honky Tonk Women, the episode I singled out as one of the worst of the early episodes in this regard? The entire plot relies on Spike going to that specific casino, at the same time the trade is happening, sitting down at the right table, looking very similar to the guy who is supposed to make the deal, deciding to keep one chip, bumping into the guy who was meant to make the deal and then accidentally swapping chips with him. What really gets me about this is not just the insane coincidence, it's also the fact that later in the episode Gordon offers to pay Spike for the chip and they make an attempt at swapping it again, but this time they don't faff around with any of that casino bullshit; they decide to stand on the surface of a spaceship to make the swap. It's unclear why they didn't just choose to do this in the first place, since it seems much easier to not be noticed all the way out in the wasteland of space and you don't have to cover up the transaction in a crowded venue under layers upon layers of byzantine obfuscation.
There's also the question of why they even got Faye in to facilitate this transaction as well, seeing that she's an outsider. Supposedly this is because of her quasi-mystical skill at cards, but... the guy wasn't even meant to bet the chip in the first place, he was just meant to tip her with it, so the skill that supposedly makes her a good fit for this job is not actually very useful. Then at the end Spike and Jet decide the tech hidden in the poker chip is too dangerous and decide to lose it by betting it on roulette at another casino, when it would just have been much easier and far safer to, I dunno, throw it into the sun? Smash it with a hammer? Would it not be trivially easy to destroy?
I found myself zoning out during the episodes as a result; I did so because the plot makes about the same amount of sense regardless of whether you actually pay attention or not. In addition, characters are often shallow, and the episode-to-episode emotional beats feel completely unearned because they are often trying to rush out a dramatic emotional conclusion without the appropriate space to do so. It's just very much carried by its aesthetic and style, and to me, that's not quite enough to make a show entertaining.
Then there's GitS. There's a lot of talking in that film, but I find it barely even has enough to chew on to discuss at length - the overarching plot is that an AI called the Puppet Master has been created by Section 6, it becomes sentient and demands political asylum while posing a small number of very ill-defined philosophical musings about what constitutes a mind even, and then spontaneously decides for itself that the purpose of any living organism is to reproduce and hybridise itself with other lifeforms. It's not clear why it would want this or how it has arrived at that judgement. It tries to make a poor analogy to the merits of sexual reproduction in biology by stating that a single computer virus could destroy all of its copies, but that doesn't work here; all of its copies would be modifiable and endlessly updatable in a way that the human brain currently isn't. There's also a serious lack of legibility in how the Puppet Master even thinks; you never get a good model of how its cognition works. It just comes up with wants and needs on the fly without any foreshadowing, which means the plot gets unpredictably dragged all over the place by some inscrutable god.
I was left with a profound feeling of "okay, I guess" after the film ended.
No, I'm assuming that the situation is that she's actually pregnant and it's actually yours. Basically, if it's planned as "a more elaborate scam to get pregnant" like what you described.
Let's say you give her the 20 dollars and a child results anyway:
1: She told you she was on birth control, and if she is pregnant it is almost certainly the case that she was not. If she did so intentionally (note this is likely: she is a stripper who would have experience with this), that is extremely abusive behaviour.
2: You have provided her the finances necessary to buy the abortion pills she needs. She has not availed herself of this option.
It seems clear that any child resulting from this is entirely a consequence of her decisions and actions, and she chose to have it against your will. As such, you definitely do not need to participate.
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