problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
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.
Well it's the weekend for me, so I now have some time to respond to this:
I think appreciating the historical/personal context they were writing in helps contextualize their pessimism a little better. They were all communist Jews who legitimately believed that the world workers' revolution was on the horizon, and then they watched Stalinism turn their Marxist ideals into a hellscape, and they lived through Nazism and WW2, and basically they watched their entire world and all their hopes for the future collapse around them in a spectacularly dramatic fashion. That's the sort of thing that would put anyone in a sour mood.
I do get what they lived through, though I disagree with the entirety of their political bent and find the role they played in the spread of identity-Marxism and its promulgation into Western academia to be extremely harmful (my initial comment in this thread detailing Marcuse's "solution" for the West contained a very scornful remark about how he should have just stayed in Germany and let the Nazis take him; I had the good sense to edit it out because the second I wrote it I just thought "Jesus Christ").
But the lack of self-awareness more broadly in their political scholarship really gets to me. Their writings are full of the idea that "liberalism has failed before, therefore it can fail again; and we need to put in [authoritarian system] to maintain social order". The example they loved to use in all of their writings was the liberal Weimar Republic being usurped by the illiberal Nazi Party, and they used this to argue that the liberal system was obviously insufficient to guard against such abuses. Of course, when you're usurping a liberal system yourself and subverting it to your own ends, well, to use the Weimar Republic analogy, you need to ask yourself the question: Are we the Nazis? It's not as if most Nazis believed they were horrible people doing bad things, after all; they believed they were entirely justified, and their rationale for censorship and repression was undoubtedly similar. How do you know that's not what you're doing?
I will say I think the wars of the 20th century irreparably shaped philosophy, art and thinking in ways that seem to have been a net negative (to me at least). Things start getting very strange during the inter-war period, and then go absolutely wild post-war. This was a period where the idea of jettisoning virtually every vestige of the Enlightenment became vogue, and you can see that trend exemplified in many domains like political philosophy, architecture and art. There were thinkers who advocated it beforehand, but the early 20th century was the point where it spread like wildfire, and WW2 in particular resulted in a lot of the radical German left arriving on American soil; an environment without any antibodies to their memes. Ideals like liberalism and nationalism, the notion of reason and empiricism being desirable, as well as the rationalist neoclassicism of the era, were ravaged in the fire of the wars.
Nietzsche won't bullshit you. (I think we can safely call him continental. He lived before the split of course, but like Hegel he's very strongly continental coded.)
Nietzsche is good. I've had a gander at some of his stuff, though like the other commenter I half-think this is cheating. Thus Spake Zarathrusta threw me badly though and I've not returned to it since.
But in general I have the sense that much appreciation of continental philosophy actually primarily relies on vibes and not coherent sense-making. You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone. Some of what you've mentioned here about your engagement with continental philosophy seems to confirm that belief.
But anyway. In spite of all that. All continental texts are really different from each other and you have to take them on a case by case basis.
This is fair; continental philosophy is a very wide-spanning term that encapsulates a lot of very different philosophical traditions. Still, they have undoubtedly influenced each other and there is a lot of crosstalk, and that broad assertion about "continental philosophy" was just meant as a description of the general trend in my experience - not excluding of course that there is some continental philosophy I can and do actually enjoy.
Also, from your other comment further down in the thread:
I'm glad there are people who enjoy these exposés.
I have you pegged as "flighty wordcel who is way too interested in austere, self-referential literature and art" and that's meant as a compliment. The profile of your interests isn't super typical here and it adds flavour and depth to the Motte, I don't like it much when people downvote them.
EDIT: removed a section
I just took one of these online tests and got INTP. Not the first time I've taken it; I tend to oscillate between INTP (Ti-Ne-Si-Fe) and ISTP (Ti-Se-Ni-Fe), though a far larger amount of the time I score as the former. Even as a participant it's pretty apparent just how low the test-retest reliability of Myers-Briggs is. Introverted thinking as my dominant function and extraverted feeling as my inferior function seems to be a consistent characteristic though.
problem_redditor
8mo 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
8mo 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.
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.
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
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