problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
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
5mo 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
5mo 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.
I have watched a whole bunch of anime off the recommendations of friends and unfortunately have to concur with @George_E_Hale: Anime in general sucks. Yes, even the classics. Even the ones which are known for their stories and themes.
I will admit to having a soft spot for Ghibli movies. Those are the exception, not the norm.
I'm not a Marxist (although I do think they make some good points that are worth taking into serious consideration), so I'm not here to defend Marxism qua Marxism, and I'm certainly not here to defend the specific economic policies of the USSR or China.
Okay, fair enough. Consider my question revoked then. You bring up some interesting points, I have some thoughts on a couple of them.
Marx never said "you have to immediately and forcibly collectivize all farmland".
An aside - Vietnam's implementation wasn't exactly immediate; it was a gradual rollback of the possibility of private enterprise involving multiple steps. It started with the Land Reform Law which involved redistributions of land from landed Vietnamese to those the VCP considered to be impoverished, then progressed towards forming mutual aid teams of farmers who were encouraged to aid each other with work on their fields (which, at this point, they still privately owned) during periods of peak labour demand. Then they created agricultural production cooperatives obligating them to perform collective labour for the state, rewarding them with workpoints, and it was then that the process of collectivising proper started.
I do realise this isn't the main point so I'll move on though.
What he did say is that there need to be a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which the proletariat would commandeer state power and use it to begin the process of overcoming capitalism. But no one can decide for the proletariat how they should go about this or what exactly this process should look like; they have to decide it for themselves, concretely, as they struggle through the actual process. (I think the DotP is a bad and unworkable idea for many reasons, which in turn is one of the many reasons why I'm not a Marxist.)
I have read this and Marx does state the following about the dictatorship of the proletariat:
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible."
"Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production."
"These measures will, of course, be different in different countries."
"Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable."
"1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes."
"2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax."
"3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance."
"4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels."
"5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly."
"6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State."
"7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan."
"8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture."
"9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country."
"10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c."
"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character."
It's not exceptionally specific, but it's not non-specific, either; many broad goals are laid out, including abolition of land and collectivisation of production by the state, and it notes that this should be achieved via "despotic inroads on the rights of property". This model outlined here actually parallels what a lot of communist countries in effect chose to do; they were in fact loosely following the instructions contained within Marx (and Engels') famous manifesto. I think this model clearly has not worked in any case in which it has been implemented.
Guilty as charged, yes. I think all the sophisticated ones would admit to this.
Which is an issue when your movement has a strong urge to tear down and then proceeds to have no idea what to do once the much-hated system has been completely dismantled. My perception upon talking to many Marxists in my time around these people is that there isn't that clear of an idea regarding how one would handle the incentive problems, coordination problems, etc that the envisioned society would face. I find many of them don't really have a proper theory of governance; they pretty much just cross their fingers and hope ideology does the work of sorting all these issues out once capitalism is no longer an obstacle.
When you're working on things as complex and fragile as entire societies, you just can't operate like this.
Of course almost everyone is going to want to be assured of their basic survival and security. That one is pretty hard to get around.
Proceeding from the assumption that this is a prerequisite for human flourishing, I would like you to illustrate how a state governed by the principles of Marxism would be superior in securing "value" for people (however you define this) as opposed to capitalism. It's not difficult to radically question others' conceptions of value and attack their stated goals. Sowing philosophical doubt via endless Socratic questioning is easy, especially when it comes to a wishy-washy question without an answer like "what is value?". It's not quite so easy to make your own value proposition, defend it from criticism and prove that your preferred social structure best satisfies that. As such I find Marxists are really good at subversive critique of the existing order, but their ability to demonstrate the utility of their own system is downright anaemic. It is characterised by evasive, wishy-washy arguments meant to distract people from the fact that their vision for society is extremely ill-defined.
Personally, I think we have enough evidence that a Marxist state struggles to grant the majority of its populace even the bottom tier of Maslow's hierarchy and thus fails at the first hurdle. Vietnam's experience with collective production is a pretty illustrative example. Collectivisation nearly starved that entire country and after private production, trade and other capitalisty things were established and bolstered by the government, agricultural production skyrocketed and the populace explicitly stated they considered themselves better off. Is there any better measure of value than the people's own assessment of their well-being? If there is one, I would like to hear it.
I suppose it is always possible that the Vietnamese were brainwashed by the nascent capitalist system into valuing the wrong things... ah, false consciousness, how many issues thou can explain away.
I mean, were they? What is "winning"? Is the winner the one with the most weapons, or are the weapons just a means to some other win condition?
You've admitted that the need for survival and security is "pretty hard to get around". Guess what having weapons is meant to help with? Arms races that involve the production of resources are a fact of life in any remotely multipolar system, and unless you live in delulu land everyone knows they have to participate unless they want to be somebody else's punching bag at best, and wiped off the face of the earth at worst.
Having resources does not directly equal value, no, but it sure helps achieve most terminal goals aside from "starvation, poverty and the slow death of my entire society".
Having read many books and papers about the acts of communist regimes, lots of brutal and frankly sadistic executions are pretty par for the course. The best books I've read on the topic contain such a large number of casual documentations of atrocities that one feels sick for hours afterwards.
One of the most stomach-churning books I've ever read is about the Great Leap Forward, written by a scholar who had lived through it and somehow toed the party line throughout (realised the whole thing was rotten afterwards). Here is one of the many sections of the book that calmly lists off reams upon reams of atrocities inflicted on the populace:
Excessively high requisition quotas made procurement difficult. If farmers were unable to hand over the required amount, the government would accuse production teams of concealing grain. A “struggle between the two roads” (of socialism and capitalism) was launched to counteract the alleged withholding of grain. This campaign used political pressure, mental torture, and ruthless violence to extort every last kernel of grain or seed from the peasants. Anyone who uttered the slightest protest was beaten, sometimes fatally.
At the end of September 1959, Wang Pinggui, a member of the Wangxiaowan production team, was forced to hand over grain kept in his home, and was beaten with a shoulder pole, dying of his injuries five days later. Not long after Wang’s death, the rest of his four-member household died of starvation.
In October 1959, Luo Mingzhu of the Luowan production team, upon failing to hand over any grain, was bound and suspended in mid-air and beaten, then doused with ice-cold water. He died the next day.
On October 13, 1959, Wang Taishu of the Chenwan production team, upon failing to hand over any grain, was bound and beaten with shoulder poles and rods, dying four days later. His fourteen-year-old daughter, Wang Pingrong, subsequently died of starvation.
On October 15, 1959, Zhang Zhirong of the Xiongwan production team, upon failing to hand over any grain, was bound and beaten to death with kindling and poles. The brigade’s cadre used tongs to insert rice and soya beans into the deceased’s anus while shouting, “Now you can grow grain out of your corpse!” Zhang left behind children aged eight and ten who subsequently died of starvation.
On October 19, 1959, Chenwan production team member Chen Xiaojia and his son Chen Guihou were hung from the beam of the communal dining hall when they failed to hand over any grain. They were beaten and doused with cold water, both dying within seven days. Two small children who survived them eventually died of starvation.
On October 24, 1959, the married couple Zheng Jinhou and Luo Mingying of the Yanwan production team had 28 silver coins seized from their home during the campaign and were beaten to death. Their three children, left without anyone to care for them, starved to death.
On November 8, 1959, Xu Chuanzheng of the Xiongwan production team was falsely accused of withholding grain. He was hung from the beam of the communal dining hall and brutally beaten, dying six days later. The six family members who survived him subsequently starved to death.
On November 8, 1959, Zhong Xingjian of the Yanwan production team was accused of “defying the leadership,” and a cadre hacked him to death with an ax.
And:
In the calamity at Guangshan County’s Huaidian people’s commune in the autumn of 1959, the commune’s average yield per mu was 86 kilos, for a total of 5.955 million kilos. The commune’s party committee reported a yield of 313 kilos per mu, for a total of 23.05 million kilos. The procurement quota set by the county was 6 million kilos, which exceeded the commune’s total grain yield. In order to achieve the procurement quota, every means had to be taken to oppose false reporting and private withholding, and every scrap of food had to be seized from the masses. The final procurement was 5.185 million kilos. All of the communal kitchens were closed down, and deaths followed. Liu Wencai and the commune party committee attributed the kitchen closures and deaths to attacks by well-to-do middle peasants and sabotage by class enemies, and to the struggle between the two paths of socialism and capitalism. They continued the campaign against false reporting and private withholding for eight months. Within sixty or seventy days not a kernel of grain could be found anywhere, and mass starvation followed.
The commune originally numbered 36,691 members in 8,027 households. Between September 1959 and June 1960, 12,134 people died (among them, 7,013 males and 5,121 females), constituting 33 percent of the total population. There were 780 households completely extinguished, making up 9.7 percent of all households. The village of Jiangwan originally had 45 inhabitants, but 44 of them died, leaving behind only one woman in her sixties, who went insane.
There was a total of 1,510 cadres at the commune, brigade, and production team level, and 628, or 45.1 percent, took part in beatings. The number beaten totaled 3,528 (among them 231 cadres), with 558 dying while being beaten, 636 dying subsequently, another 141 left permanently disabled, 14 driven to commit suicide, and 43 driven away.
Apart from the standard abuse of beating, kicking, exposure, and starvation, there were dozens of other extremely cruel forms of torture, including dousing the head with cold water, tearing out hair, cutting off ears, driving bamboo strips into the palms, driving pine needles into the gums, “lighting the celestial lantern,” forcing lit embers into the mouth, branding the nipples, tearing out pubic hair, penetrating the genitals, and being buried alive.
When thirteen children arrived at the commune begging for food, the commune’s party secretary, surnamed Jiang, along with others incited kitchen staff to drag them deep into the mountains, where they were left to die of hunger and exposure.
With no means of escaping a hopeless situation, ordinary people could not adequately look after their own. Families were scattered to the winds, children abandoned, and corpses left along the roadside to rot. As a result of the extreme deprivations of starvation, 381 commune members desecrated 134 corpses.
This is all just from the first chapter.
Given this, not very many of the events that @FCfromSSC has quoted strike me as particularly fantastical. I've stopped reading these since; looking at things like the Khmer Rouge grabbing infants by their legs and smashing their heads against trees until they died (to prevent them from taking revenge for their parents) tends to give one a thousand-mile stare for the ages. It's certainly contributed to my (already intense) misanthropy.
Marcuse then went on to deem the precept of tolerance invalid and advocated quashing any free marketplace of ideas (more complete analysis here), ostensibly to rid society of false consciousness. Many of the tactics he outlined are still present in the strategies of the modern-day left:
- Selective tolerance for movements from the left and intolerance for movements from the right.
- Abolishing journalistic integrity and impartiality, since objectivity is spurious.
- Getting rid of impartiality in historical analysis, so as not to treat the "great struggles against humanity" the same way as the "great struggles for humanity".
- Flooding the education system with leftist and "emancipatory" ideas, so that the seeds of liberation can be planted early on.
He strongly advocates for proselytising his personal belief and value system everywhere and suppressing points of view counter to it, all the while calling it "liberating tolerance". This is supposed to create a society free of indoctrination apparently.
Out of all the philosophers I have read, Marcuse has to be one of the most shameless. You really just have to plainly read critical theory to start hating it.
So the leftist middle class needed a new victim for whom they could claim to fight. Women. Ethnic and sexual minorities (except pedos, because everyone hates pedos).
French philosophers have entered the chat.
No, seriously, not only did existentialists sign petitions calling for the decriminalisation of sex with minors and asking for the release of jailed pedophiles, many prominent members of the French left were also pedophiles themselves. Michel Foucault made repeated trips to Tunisia so he could abuse boys. Simone de Beauvoir groomed many of her female students. It's wild they're still remembered fondly at all today.
I'm the same. I can't really form proper models of people over the internet through just their self-descriptions and their usernames, and it's especially tough considering I have a hard time imagining faces in the first place. Here's you:
- Middle-aged.
- Half-Jewish German.
- Father to a daughter (who he is rather fond of).
- Married to a very dysfunctional woman with whom he has a working partner/SAHM dynamic.
- Does not think Peter Watts is a good writer.
I think it's particularly difficult to form proper conceptions of people in TheMotte in spite of how regular most users are, since this forum isn't all that personally-oriented - it tends to be arranged around debating abstract ideas and less about discussing one's own situation. Also everyone here is very concerned with OpSec because of all the wrongthink bandied around on a daily basis, and many members here have jobs and families they would like to shield from any consequences of their online speech.
I feel a little bad about the deluge of requests you're gonna get. Though you really should have expected this, hah.
You're half correct. Malaysian Chinese, (semi-)short black hair which stands on end as if I've been electrocuted, buzzed on the sides. Dude, 24, wears glasses (is hopelessly shortsighted), perpetual smirk, wears almost exclusively white shirts. Imagining a more well put-together version of L from Death Note probably gets you 95% of the way there.
problem_redditor
5mo ago
How do I look?
Note: Answer will determine whether I ever comment on another post of yours again.
Classic hyperagency/hypoagency. Men need to adapt to fit society (or they are failures who need to be mocked for their fragility), whereas society needs to adapt to fit women (or else it's failing women and victimising them). Feminists malignantly prey on and reinforce this double standard all the time.
This ultimately doesn’t say too much though. You can't really look at a bunch of women's clothing, check for ones that have pockets, see how well they're doing and then draw any conclusions about whether the lack of pockets in women's clothing is demand-driven or not. It is possible for women's clothing with pockets to sell well and for the lack of pockets in women's clothing to still be demand-driven.
To put forward a simplistic example let's say that 15% of women would want pockets, and that the remainder don't. Let's say that a slightly smaller percentage of women would be willing to pay extra for pockets due to the additional cost of sewing on functional pockets (note that pockets are a pain in the ass; even the non-functional ones are if they have flaps and bindings and the rest, but the functional pockets take a lot more time even than that). If ~13% of women's pants have functional pockets, and the remainder do not, clothing with pockets will still sell well even when the relative lack of pockets in women's clothing is demand-driven, since the supply of that good is appropriately scaled to its demand.
Unfortunately I am not aware of any economic studies on this, likely because the topic is trivial and the answer is obvious. Most of the literature I am able to find on it is ideologically-infused sociology without even the slightest hint of rigour. All I can say is that personally, as a dude, I actually don't like pockets, it doesn’t feel particularly secure and I often carry a sling bag along with me in non-professional circumstances where it would be more socially acceptable for me to do so. I assume that the incentive to just use purses is greater when you want to carry makeup and other items (the women I know pack a ton of stuff in their purses; I'm honestly not sure what half of it is for).
I want to make something with my own two hands but I'm not quite sure what. Recently I've been looking at many historical and traditional forms of woodworking, sculpture and pottery, and find myself thinking that I would really like to do something like that to a very high level. To make something functional, practical and yet highly decorative in a way that isn't being satisfied by most of the output coming out today.
If I'm starting this, I want to try to be good at it. Really good. But there's a pretty big issue - unsurprisingly there isn't very much information on most of that stuff and learning these skills authentically seems downright prohibitive if you are unable to be physically present. Much of this is taught through an apprenticeship/mentorship model where you have to be there, and very little instruction on the techniques used seem to be available online. Many of these skills are also hyperspecific enough that just learning the foundations won't be enough, and you'll have to aggressively trial-and-error your way through trying to properly do it (just because you know basic music theory doesn't mean you can compose a fugue).
As an example, I was looking at Chaozhou wood carving today and was highly impressed with all of the layers of multi-level detail they were able to pull off (gallery of examples here and here). Look at this Gilt Woodcarving Large Shrine right here, that looks insane. This is an art form that's still actively practiced in the Chaoshan region of China, so I expected there would be at least some detailed information on the techniques and perhaps some demonstrations of the tools used - but there's nothing. Looking that up in Chinese? Nothing, either. This shit is basically the Dark Arts, passed down through families and occasionally made accessible to the outside world through craftsmen willing to mentor people. To a lesser extent it's the case for high-level European woodworking arts as well, not everyone can carve like a Compagnon. Most online guidance teaches you to do things to a very low level.
Even traditional European Renaissance painting (I'm not necessarily looking at doing painting myself) isn't being actively taught in many art colleges in spite of the fact it was the source of many codified Western artistic techniques. The Royal College of Art, Calarts, and the University of the Arts London offer no specific courses in Renaissance painting techniques, though there is a fine art painting course in the University of the Arts London that... doesn't really focus heavily on classical painting skills but includes other super important topics such as how "postcolonialism, climate change and feminism" have inspired artists' studio practices. If you want to learn how to implement the principles and techniques used by Renaissance artists, you have to go to more specialised places like the Florence Academy of Art, which isn't particularly feasible if you live on the other side of the world. Of course there are plenty of resources on Renaissance painting you can read yourself, but still; one would imagine it would feature more in curricula given its importance to Western art. The situation for other less-known skills are far worse.
I suppose much of this is meant to prepare people for the commercial world where these traditional skills now find a limited market, but it's kind of dismaying just how inaccessible these skills are even in an age where they should be more available to anyone than ever, and that much established art practice no longer covers them. There's not really a systematised way where you can learn how to do some of this stuff, and to do it right, at least not on your own.
Thoughts? What do you think would be a good thing to try my hand at?
I feel like I'm the only person in existence who doesn't like Cowboy Bebop.
It's a very vibey show but it's all aesthetics, the characters and their motivations are about as deep as a puddle, and the episode-to-episode plots make very little logical sense and feel like they were all made up on the spot with a lot of technobabble to cover up the sheer lack of effort put into any of the plotting or worldbuilding. I watched many episodes and never got the sense that it was a coherent world with rules that had to be adhered to at all. Incoherent ass-pulling constitutes a significant portion of how most of the plots in each episode actually progress, and it's really hard to be invested in the episodic narratives when some deus ex machina can be invoked at literally any time to turn the plot on its head. The overarching reaction I had to most episodes was "This is happening now, I guess". Honky Tonk Women is an early example of an episode that's just needlessly contrived and really only exists because of a lot of irrationality and a one-in-a-million coincidence without which the plot would not happen.
They also try to pull emotional scenes at the end of most episodes that don't hit IMO because they spent too little time fleshing out the characters; that moment in Asteroid Blues when it's revealed that Asimov and Katerina won't make it to Mars is clearly supposed to be a pensive one, but you've spent all of 15 minutes with them at that point and so the emotional scene feels unearned. Also seriously, does anyone actually like Faye Valentine? She's superficially charming but is often shown to be a selfish, arrogant, lazy individual who leeches off the rest of the Bebop without so much as a show of gratitude, with a bad habit of gambling all her money away.
Visually, aurally, it's a great experience; the whole atmosphere is immaculate. But you need more than that to carry a show IMO, and animes almost always fall apart on plotting and characterisation for me (Japanese narrative writing generally rarely delivers on these fronts). Ghost In The Shell is another great example of a classic anime with fantastic art direction crippled by a wafer-thin narrative, which purports to be way more than it actually is given that it has basically nothing much to say on the subjects of consciousness and AI it touches on (what it does say is vague and bordering on incoherent). This banger of an intro sequence deserved so much better.
I was indeed offering a hypothetical (mostly based on my limited knowledge of OP's situation and the fact he has described himself as a "depressed shrink"), but I half agree and half disagree with what you've written here.
As for anhedonia I have no answer. It's a term I learned on reddit, meaning at first I assumed it was just a pretend word meant to be a catchall excuse for not getting out of fucking bed. I'm not unwilling to believe it is a real thing, but I would suspect finding the root cause of this and sorting it out should be any one individual's main goal in life if he finds himself suffering from it for any length of time. Of course for the anhedonic there is always the convenient excuse: They simply don't have motivation to do anything. I cannot imagine a household where anyone would accept or tolerate this without taking some action to sort it.
Speaking as someone who veered closer to suicide at one point than I usually care to admit and who has also seen claims of poor mental health used as a way to excuse one's failures and a means of aggressively manipulating others (mostly by women who in retrospect exhibited many traits of BPD), I'm of two minds about this. Often it can be beneficial to adopt the mindset of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps and stop whining" and it helps induce a positive feedback loop wherein doing more productive things in turn improves your mood and consequently motivation, but there is a point beyond which it will actually make things worse; beyond a certain level of despair some external assistance can be necessary. Of course it's always a problem that should be solved, it should never be left to fester, but I find maturity is knowing the appropriate context in which one should deploy these two strategies.
Not enough time is a flimsy excuse. There is nearly always enough time for anything that matters. We carve out time for what is important to us. We do what we have to or need to do before we do what we want to do.
I don't necessarily disagree, but "anything that matters" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here and doesn't really tell you what you should prioritise, since that is a value judgement that's heavily dependent on the individual. There is a lot of grey area in between "what you need to do" and "what you want to do". Yes if you're an extremely unhealthy weight, losing that weight should be a major priority. On the other hand, if you're within a healthy range perhaps reading books, learning things, etc may actually give you more utility than losing that extra weight and getting swole, depending on what you personally value.
Of course if you're just choosing between these two options you can likely do both to some extent. But tradeoffs inherently have to be made, and inevitably you will not have enough time for something. There are legitimate situations and preference rankings which result in goals like "exercising more" being put on the back burner.
problem_redditor
5mo ago
From how it’s presented I assume it is a 5-point scale, with the median value of 3 revised downwards to zero.
problem_redditor
5mo ago
Not OP, but I imagine there are two reasons why not: Time and anhedonia.
Well it's the weekend for me, so I now have some time to respond to this:
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 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.
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 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
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