problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
Late to the party I started
Fashionably late, I would say.
but spending money to incentivize a change in outcomes in my opinion is categorically different then legally enforcing those outcomes
I'm only relying on the example of "DEI" provided in your original comment. Unless DEI encapsulates "spending money to incentivise a change in outcomes" (in a discriminatory way I might add), why would you include "Women-owned businesses" as an example of a DEI initiative? Is there a law mandating that women-owned businesses must be X% of businesses? AFAIK most of the benefits that women-owned businesses receive involve preferential access to funding and grants and so on, but they don't amount to an explicit mandate that women-owned businesses must be 50% of the businesses in a given field.
Unless that actually exists and the situation is even more ridiculous than I initially thought (I seriously hope this is not the case but won’t rule it out), or unless your opinion is that it must be in the legislation to qualify as DEI, which seems overly pedantic as to how the incentive should be implemented, I find the statement you've made here to be in conflict with your previous ones.
the former is not strictly DEI imo, whereas the latter is.
I would think they are both DEI due to their shared objective of achieving representation for "marginalised groups" and that most people would consider them such. DEI isn't defined by a hyperspecific set of actions so much as it is by a loose set of beliefs and objectives IMO.
But to paint it is as DEI is imo aggressively retroactive because the west has a century of history of programs that attempt to bring about positive social change through funding, but the phrase DEI only recently came into the lexicon.
This reasoning is quite odd, to say the least. The concept of social programs is an old one, however that doesn't mean that the word "DEI" can't be used to refer to a set of (largely discriminatory) social programs that attempt to bring about social change through funding based on a specific ideological outlook, within a certain cultural context. Just because something can be defined as part of a broader phenomenon does not mean it can't also be specifically singled out for its peculiarities.
And even if DEI-like things existed before the term was coined, I don't necessarily think a term being retroactively applicable inherently makes it invalid. If that was so, a large swath of terms used within scholarship to define systems of social organisation that have been around since forever would need to be thrown out.
And maybe I'm typical minding, but if it was anything like the times I've blindly trusted a woman who told me she was on birth control, the truth of the matter is that in the moment I didn't give a single shit if she might get pregnant.
Would you have had unprotected sex with her had she stated she was not on birth control? If no, then clearly you did in fact give a shit to some extent if she might get pregnant.
If you would still have done so, then yes - I'm not sure it's appropriate for you to be typical-minding.
I am with amadan here
So I'm under no impression that Amadan will ever agree with me (or that many of the people advocating this will ever agree with me, really), which is why I declined to pursue the point too much, but okay let's examine the core of this moral evaluation for a bit. If it is really the case that a child not only has the right to provision, but has the right to provision from both biological parents - if depriving the child of this is so unacceptable that freedoms should be curtailed to pursue that objective - then the following should also be a logical corollary of this belief:
1: A woman should not avail herself of the services of a sperm bank, as it results in the production of a child without the father involved. Single women should be barred from using a sperm bank under any circumstances, and if they do they should be aggressively socially shamed for intentionally producing a child who will grow up in that deprived state. After all, the statistics on children raised by single mothers speak for themselves. Same thing for men and surrogacy.
2: It should be against the law for a woman to leave the biological father off the birth certificate, or to fail to inform him of the existence of a child. She should be required to identify the father and get him involved in supporting the child either by choice or by force. A woman who does not do so is being horribly negligent and selfish and should be castigated.
3: Women should have no access to safe haven abandonment (or adoption, for that matter) under any circumstances, possibly even extremely coercive ones. Under this moral framework that is even worse than paternal surrender as it results in the unilateral abandonment of a child and alienation from both biological parents, and is a complete and total infringement of the child's right, excluding it support from even just one parent and possibly consigning it to become a ward of the state.
Of course, none of these things are currently the case. Are you willing to assent to all the above, and state that anybody who makes the above choices in contravention of these dictums is being capricious and immoral? If so, I would say you're perfectly consistent. Understandable, have a nice day. If not, it stands to reason that children do not in fact have the inherent right to the support of both biological parents, and that it's permissible for a child to end up without this supposed right for many reasons, including "she just wanted to be a single mother", and "she just didn't want her child". In practice I don't actually think most people believe that a child has an inherent and inalienable right to support from both biological parents, they certainly don't prioritise it above all else. They are perfectly willing to infringe on this principle especially if they can be convinced that it gives women more choice.
If it is perfectly moral for a single woman to use a sperm bank and produce a child out of wedlock which will not be entitled to any support from the father, by extension it should be perfectly moral for a man to surrender responsibility for a child before birth; after all it produces the very same outcome if the woman decides to keep it. This especially applies if he was duped into becoming a father through false representations, regardless of whether or not he was "thinking with his dick". But I don't think most people who advocate this position have really thought through its moral ramifications.
Personally in a situation like this I'd try to get custody of the kid and bring it home with me.
In theory I agree that would be good (I would not want a child of mine in the custody of a woman who would do something like that), in practice that's not going to be easy.
I don't think there is an ideal solution that adequately "punishes" such a mother or restitutes the father while not also being cruel to the child.
If you ask me I think letting the child remain with their biological parents is actually more cruel to the kid than anything else. Especially with the biological mother. Such a woman should be presumed unfit to parent.
Letting a child grow up under these conditions, where the father is an unwilling parent and the mother is using them as a bargaining chip to entrap the father, is horrific to me. If designing policy I would not be aiming for a perfect, happy-family situation, since the possibility of that is long gone; rather I genuinely believe the ideal solution in most cases would be to place the child with an adoptive family when young. It also has the advantage of not rewarding terrible behaviour from the mother. The state should intervene not to enforce a system that's bad for 2/3 of the parties involved, but to make sure the child gets placed somewhere better.
Then we can start talking about prosecution of the biomother, for causing injury to the father and child alike.
As it is, it's not uncommon for the state to punish the father for being victimised, ensure the child remains in a dysfunctional family situation, and reward the mother for committing an atrocity. You might at least understand why I view the way we've collectively chosen to deal with this as messed up.
EDIT: added a paragraph
Yeah this definitely reflects a deep-seated and probably intractable difference in morality. As I said, one of these terminal moral values.
But, that being said, I would at the very least like if those who advocated such positions made attempts at ensuring moral consistency. I can't say and won't make judgements on whether you have or not, but in my experience people generally don't.
The law certainly doesn't meet these standards, anyway. It should go one way or the other. I know what I would morally prefer, but any consistency is better than no consistency.
That sucks. But if there's a human being you created with your actions (and you chose to put your dick in her), I absolutely despise anyone who'd refuse to take responsibility for that and leave the child you created to poverty and probably being brought up in the same life, no matter how much you despise the mother.
I don't actually view the father as being hugely responsible for the creation of the child in this circumstance. The child was created primarily via the mother's deception, and the father was operating under a situation of false information. In addition, in similar fashion to another user in the thread, I don't have a high opinion of the inherent role of DNA in creating a link between child and father.
Finally, as I noted, this assignation of responsibility to the father creates a pretty horrendous incentive structure where baby-trapping is incentivised, since that system allows such women to benefit from it. The net result might in fact be more children born in such a dysfunctional situation and raised by fucked-up women, and that seems like a rather anti-utilitarian outcome one would want to discourage.
I think most people would find the idea that a woman who's had a child due to holes being poked in a condom should not be able to avail herself of safe haven abandonment or put the child up for adoption (for the ostensible benefit of the kid) pretty displeasing. Granted, she could've taken a morning after pill or birth control to mitigate her risk, but she relied on the biological father's representations. Though I will say that the argument for that prohibition is actually stronger given that the woman in question had options like abortion once she realised she was pregnant, and thus actually had to decline to take steps to terminate the pregnancy before a child was produced.
Of course, safe haven abandonment, adoption etc is allowed for women due to their default custody of out-of-wedlock children, even in situations where the woman in question was being exceptionally irresponsible, whereas legal paternal surrender is not often considered legally or socially permissible even under circumstances of coercion or misrepresentation.
You can argue they could have or should have chosen some other (likely even more miserable) grind, but you don't actually need to despise them.
This isn't meant to be a continuation of the conversation you're having, but my answer to this is: Porque no los dos? It's perfectly reasonable to despise someone who defrauds others in predatory ways with huge psychological and possibly financial consequences for their target; disgust is an appropriate thing to feel. Most people who do terrible things do so because of some prior circumstance; serial killers often have long histories of childhood abuse, mobsters and criminals often grow up in unstable and poverty-stricken backgrounds, that in and of itself doesn't excuse the act. Dysfunction breeds dysfunction. You can feel sorry for all these bad actors while also simultaneously thinking their actions are beyond the pale, that it warrants serious punishment, and that it may not be possible to reintegrate them into a stable society that values prosociality.
That said, on the remote chance that you really did get her pregnant, and she decides to keep it, and you can verify this, do the right thing and provide for your damn kid.
Sorry, but I could not disagree more with this moral dictum and find myself to be far more in agreement with the other commenters here. Especially if this was baby-trapping. OP should have mitigated his risk more effectively, but I don't believe he has any obligation to support a family created entirely against his will, particularly if it was premised solely on the deception of the mother. Here, all choice goes to her, and all obligation goes to him regardless of whether he was duped or not. There is no world where that is an even remotely just outcome, and it creates perverse incentives in favour of patently undesirable behaviour such as baby-trapping which just results in more dysfunctional out-of-wedlock births, the very thing such a policy should ostensibly be trying to mitigate. The only reason why women do this in the first place is that it works. Maybe it shouldn't.
It's particularly unjust in context of the widely-accepted ability of the mother to avail herself of safe haven laws regardless of the circumstances of conception; an abandonment option which unilaterally ensures that the kid will be left without any biological parents by default and deprives the father of any choice to parent if he wishes to do so. (Compare this with paternal surrender; a hypothetical surrender-mechanism that still leaves said kid with one parent and lets that parent decide what relationship she wants to maintain with it, yet it is controversial.)
That being said, we've talked about this at length before and I suspect we're firmly at an impasse on this topic. Probably an example of one of these terminal moral things that's impossible to shift via argumentation.
EDIT: added more
Reddit is really not a good place to have reasoned arguments with people who are interested in actual engagement. I tried getting back onto there under an alt account talking mainly about non-political topics, and made a fairly long post where detractors (including a small number of self-proclaimed credentialed professionals) came in and decided to soapbox at length while refusing to address any of the statistical data posted. The overwhelming sense I got was "I don't have time for this crap".
Just reminds me how much better this forum is as a place for discussion. Not perfect in the slightest, but stepping foot back onto Reddit is like debating with a bunch of bad actors who really just want to soapbox about how right they are, and who love engaging in selective myopia as soon as something doesn't confirm their viewpoint. It's not the kind of forum I'm interested in anymore.
The law is fucked about this actually. Legally speaking, even if the woman intentionally lied about being on birth control or even outright forced you to have sex you could be held liable for child support as the father. The only thing that stops this from happening right now is that you are in the States (I assume) and she is in the Philippines.
What I've stated in my prior comment isn't a legal opinion, it's just my take. It's me just very systematically stating that for the above reasons, if you ask me personally I wouldn't feel obliged to provide support. This is of course assuming there is even a kid in the first place and that it is yours.
Ultimately though, this is a very personal question to ask and I can't answer it for you. In the end it's up to you to decide what you can live with; there isn't any way for me to absolve you of your moral code, no matter how much it might differ from mine. I would not do it though.
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.
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.
I second @4bpp - this anthropomorphising of animals is and pretty much always will be extremely suspect. Mallards are one of these infamous species that supposedly participate in gang rapes - several males will pursue a female and attempt to forcibly mate with her, and as a result males' penises can shoot out with surprising speed, whereas females' vaginas will be corkscrew-shaped so as to make it more difficult to mate. Clearly something to feel disgusted about, right?
Except that female mallards actually covertly elicit this behaviour by intentionally flying over the territory of other males and initiating a chase, drumming up a fight over her, and the corkscrew turns of female mallards' vaginas actually are meant to let her influence the males which get to fertilise her egg.
Do mallards deserve death for this? Does the concept of "rape trauma" exist in such a species? Should the very emotionally-laden human concept of rape even apply? If it doesn't, how can you even tell what is rape and what is not in the animal kingdom? Animals in many cases are basically alien species and should be treated as such.
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