Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14hr ago
I mean, if the lab meat was literally identical in every way to real meat, then sure, I’d eat it. In practice though, I’d imagine it’s more like AI-generated media: the difference in quality is noticeable, but certain factions downplay the differences for political reasons.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
15hr ago
He's saying that socialism can't create a perfect utopia, but it can make things better. This is a pretty common attitude across multiple ideologies. A standard American capitalist liberal might not think that we can create a utopia, but he does advocate for making things better through legal reform, scientific advancements, etc.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17hr ago
Here's a sentence out of that paragraph
But why did you ignore the other two sentences I quoted?
The institutions of a socialist society, even in their most democratic form, could never resolve all the conflicts between the universal and the particular, between human beings and nature, between individual and individual. Socialism does not and cannot liberate Eros from Thanatos.
Why do you think these sentences say "we know how to solve all our problems"?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
20hr ago
Has Zizek ever put out any idea that had any tangible effect on the real world?
You could ask the same question about the majority of academics in both the humanities and STEM and the answer would be "no". So it's not a very interesting question.
That being said, Zizek is reasonably well-connected and is e.g. friends with Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, so I wouldn't be surprised if he influenced the thinking of someone in power at some point.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
It's interesting how "thou shalt not take too much dick" is a universal prohibition for both genders. There's something of an asymmetry here.
Straight men having a lot of sex is praiseworthy, and society seems to have less of an intrinsic disgust reaction to lesbians than to gay men.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
It's a bit odd to me that everyone is so confident in their answers (regardless of which answer they choose).
I don't feel like I have a good enough baseline intuition about how dangerous bears are to answer with confidence. How likely is the average bear to attack you? Is it possible to outrun a bear? This is far outside my domain of expertise.
I certainly understand why a lot of women would say "bear", even if they might ultimately be mistaken.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
Wait, what?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
So if:
-
The AuthLeft and AuthRight are defined by a belief in the right to wield absolute power over all other humans without accountability or restraint - all members of the AuthLeft and AuthRight believe this, and furthermore members of other political ideologies don't believe it, and
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This belief is the most salient factor in determining identity among political ideologies,
then sure, the AuthLeft and the AuthRight are the same. But this is less of a substantive sociological/philosophical thesis and more of a tautology. You're using these idiosyncratic concepts "AuthLeft" and "AuthRight" whose applicability to broader political discussions is questionable.
The space of possible political positions is much broader than you give it credit for. I would encourage you to read some of the original works by any of the thinkers we've been discussing lately - Zizek, Lacan, Marcuse, Derrida, Nietzsche, or Heidegger - and see if there's anything in there that surprises you.
Marcuse put it very succinctly:
The institutions of a socialist society, even in their most democratic form, could never resolve all the conflicts between the universal and the particular, between human beings and nature, between individual and individual. Socialism does not and cannot liberate Eros from Thanatos. Here is the limit which drives the revolution beyond any accomplished stage of freedom : it is the struggle for the impossible, against the unconquerable whose domain can perhaps nevertheless be reduced.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
Hlynka reminded me that there is no solution, that there is no plan, that we are not in control of the world; all we control is ourselves; we make our choices and live with the consequences.
I'm in complete agreement on this point!
Anyway, I think one of the crucial issues is that, as I raised at the end of the previous thread, "we know how to solve all our problems" isn't a good criteria for partitioning equivalence classes of political ideologies. As an epistemic attitude, it can be mixed and matched with multiple different ideologies.
Suppose we have three different people:
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#1 is a Marxist who thinks we know how to solve all our problems. He unabashedly thinks that the proletarian revolution will usher in a utopia.
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#2 is a standard American libertarian who also thinks we know how to solve all our problems. Say the story is something like, free market democratic capitalism is the only ideology that will engender the type of scientific research and economic growth we need to develop ASI. And once we have ASI we'll have a utopia.
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#3 is a standard American libertarian who is virtually identical to #2 on all substantive policy issues, except that he doesn't think we know how to solve all our problems. He doesn't think libertarianism will lead to a utopia, but he believes in it and advocates for it anyway, even though he acknowledges that the ultimate outcome of all our political actions is always uncertain.
So, who is identical with who? And who's the odd man out here?
Based on the importance you assign to the criteria of "knowing how to solve all our problems", it seems like you'd be forced to say that #1 and #2 are the same, and #3 is different. But this just seems wrong. The more natural classification is that the two libertarians are the same (and indeed, getting hung up on whether libertarianism can lead to a utopia or not would be a narcissism of small differences), and the Marxist is different.
I'm also skeptical that, if given the choice between living in a Stalinist regime ruled by #1, or a somewhat more libertarian version of 2024 America with #2 as the four year duly elected president, you would say "it doesn't matter to me, they both think we know how to solve all our problems, so I have no preference for one country over the other".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
the higher level stuff doesn’t seem that useful to me.
Sex isn’t very useful either most of the time, but that doesn’t diminish the appeal.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
What are your standards for unclear writing??
Hegel can be unclear at times:
In self-sublating real possibility, it is a twofold that is now sublated; for this possibility is itself the twofold of actuality and possibility. The actuality is formal, or is a concrete existence which appeared to subsist immediately, and through its sublating becomes reflected being, the moment of an other, and thus comes in possession of the in-itself. That concrete existence was also determined as possibility or as the in-itself, but of an other. As it sublates itself, this in-itself of the other is also sublated and passes over into actuality. – This movement of self-sublating real possibility thus produces the same moments that are already present, but each as it comes to be out of the other; in this negation, therefore, the possibility is also not a transition but a self-rejoining. – In formal possibility, if something was possible, then an other than it, not itself, was also possible. Real possibility no longer has such an other over against it, for it is real in so far as it is itself also actuality. Therefore, as its immediate concrete existence, the circle of conditions, sublates itself, it makes itself into the in-itselfness which it already is, namely the in-itself of an other. And conversely, since its moment of in-itselfness thereby sublates itself at the same time, it becomes actuality, hence the moment which it likewise already is. – What disappears is consequently this, that actuality was determined as the possibility or the in-itself of an other, and, conversely, the possibility as an actuality which is not that of which it is the possibility.
The negation of real possibility is thus its self-identity; inasmuch as in its sublating it is thus within itself the recoiling of this sublating, it is real necessity.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
He was right that the AuthLeft/AuthRight horseshoe is in fact a circle
I assume that you are here claiming that the AuthLeft and AuthRight are really "the same" in some sense, in line with your previous posts on the subject.
On what criteria are you making this judgement?
I don't believe that your previous criteria used to support variations on this thesis in the past have been successful. You claimed that progressives and white identitarians are not distinct because they have no relevant "differences in policy, action, or outcome" beyond "which specific racial groupings should be favored". I responded by citing multiple substantial policy disagreements between them that were unrelated to race. (Admittedly though, it's not clear to me if "progressives" and "white identitarians" are the same thing as the "AuthLeft" and "AuthRight", and the arguments I outlined in the old thread may not be relevant to this new thesis. Please correct me if I'm going astray.)
You later claimed that the far left and far right are actually the same because they both endorse the same core philosophical commitment, specifically the commitment to the idea that "we know how to solve all our problems", presumably using Enlightenment reason or something equivalent. But I argued that there are leftists (communists, even) who deny this axiom.
So, what is the current criteria you endorse? Did I go wrong in one of my earlier arguments?
that both are progeny of the Enlightenment/Progressive movement
Maybe. (I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea of the "Enlightenment" as a discrete identifiable event.) But even granting this, I don't think it changes much. Things can be derived from the same source and still be different. Humans and apes are descended from a common ancestor, but they're not "the same" in any meaningful sense.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d ago
I think the biggest issue is that he assumed all these ‘great’ thinkers of the past actually had a point.
He read their works and found value in them. You can also read his work, look at the claims he cites, and decide if it makes sense to you or not. There’s no confession of faith required, just reading and thinking about what you read, same as you do in many other contexts.
Saying that Adorno and Horkheimer said something isn’t a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place.
No one thinks that simply citing a claim from a canonical text makes it authoritative. Everyone who writes philosophy is acutely aware that, for every historical philosopher they admire, there are legions of other philosophers who think that guy was an idiot, all his arguments were trash, etc. No one has any illusions about anything being authoritative.
Citing a claim is just you telling the reader where you got it from, nothing more. It’s still on you to evaluate the claim, check the primary source if you want, etc.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d ago
If you’re having trouble with the linked Zizek piece, that’s probably just due to unfamiliarity with the ideas (they’re largely remixed from earlier texts) or the writers cited, because on a word-by-word level it’s pretty clear.
Zizek’s big heroes Lacan and Hegel are much harder to parse than Zizek. So if he really wanted to make his writing more obscure, he’s intimately familiar with a good model to follow! But generally I’d say his writing is on the clearer end for continental philosophy.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d ago
Zizek's new piece in Compact: Happy Birthday Kant, You Lousy Sadist (paywalled, but you can read the whole thing on reddit here):
Is there a line from Kantian ethics to the Auschwitz killing machine? Are the Nazis’ concentration camps and their mode of killing—as a neutral business—the inherent terminus of the enlightened insistence on the autonomy of reason? Is there some affinity between Kant avec Sade and Fascist torture as portrayed by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film version of 120 Days in Sodom, which transposes the story into the dark days of Mussolini’s Salò republic?
The link between Sade and Kant was first developed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the famous Excursion II (“Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality”) of the Dialectics of Enlightenment. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s fundamental thesis is that “the work of Marquis de Sade displays the ‘Reason which is not led by another agency,’ that is to say, the bourgeois subject, liberated from a state of not yet being mature.” Some 15 years later, Lacan (unaware of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s version of the argument) also developed the notion that Sade is the truth of Kant, first in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1958-59), and then in an écrit of 1963.
In typical Zizek fashion, he bounces between multiple different ideas in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style, so there are a lot of different threads here that you could grab and run with. Some of our resident anti-enlightenment posters and Christian posters may find something productive in Adorno and Horkheimer's diagnosis of the ethical situation of modernity:
Sade announced the moment when, with the emergence of bourgeois Enlightenment, pleasure itself lost its sacred-transgressive character and was reduced to a rationalized instrumental activity. That is to say, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the greatness of Sade was that, on behalf of the full assertion of earthly pleasures, he not only rejected any metaphysical moralism, but also fully acknowledged the price one has to pay for this rejection: the radical intellectualization-instrumentalization-regimentation of sexual activity intended to bring pleasure. Here we encounter the content later baptized by Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation”: After all the barriers of sublimation, of cultural transformation of sexual activity, are abolished, what we get isn’t raw, brutal, passionate, satisfying animal sex, but on the contrary, a fully regimented, intellectualized activity comparable to a well-planned sporting match.
There is much that could be said about Kant's continuing influence on thought and politics. Putin has expressed admiration for him, for example. But probably the biggest point of interest to a general audience here will be Zizek's remarks on Trump near the end of the essay:
Things are similar with the new rightist populism. The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops up in his head, insulting others, and violating all rules of good manners) tells a lot about our predicament: What sort of world do we inhibit, in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of the society in which everything is permitted and old values go down the drain? Trump is not a relic of the old moral-majority conservatism—he is to a much greater degree the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations. [...] Trump’s obscene performances thus express the falsity of his populism: to put it with brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for the ordinary people, he promotes big capital.
I view this as one of a series of similar critiques coming out of the left in recent times, all of which center around the curious theme of rightists not acting rightist enough. There's been a growing concern on the left in the last few years that "the positions have switched", to a certain extent. Traits that used to be associated with the left - a general rebelliousness, experimentation with new ideas, a critique of established values and established authority (Covid is a big one here), and, yes, a certain willingness to engage in crass vulgarity from time to time, either as a political act or as simple good-spirited humor - have now become associated with the right. Meanwhile the left has become much more strongly associated with order, morality, and authority than they were in the post-war 20th century.
Reactions from leftists to this alleged reversal have been all over the spectrum: everything from panic ("they're stealing our bit! we have to get a handle on this!"), to Zizek's strategy here of denying the authenticity and veridicality of ostensibly rightist forms of rebellion and protest, to simple avowal ("yes, we are in charge, we are Justice, and that's a good thing actually").
Among commentators who believe this to be an authentic political phenomenon, the standard explanation is usually something like: well of course rightists were all for law and order when they were in charge. But now they're not so in charge anymore, so now they're learning the value of critique and skepticism, of free speech and civil liberties, and so forth. Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that. But it becomes rather boring if you're always just looking for the self interest behind everything. The much more interesting and radical project is to find the abstract ethical commitments hiding behind apparent self interest.
There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx - it's not something that they just happened to discover after attaining political ascendancy. It's reflected in how they govern their own private institutions, even when they don't have societal power. There was frequently internal strife at the Frankfurt school over this or that theorist not sufficiently holding to the party line. Leftist organizations at least as far back as the 80s were already using the progressive stack at group meetings to make sure that white men spoke last. Marxism itself claims that the end goal of the communist revolution is the dissolution of all antagonisms between individual and collective good - but the individual is right to be nervous about what processes the collective might institute to achieve this utopian vision.
Similarly, I believe in the possibility of a principled libertarianism that wouldn't immediately abandon all of its commitments as soon as it got hold of actual power. It's true that ideology always has to make affordances for reality at some point, but clearly, ideology has some impact on the reality of governance as well: I don't think you could, for example, explain the different political situations in the US and Russia entirely in terms of their different material and sociological conditions, with no reference whatsoever to the beliefs and motivations of the individual people who actually govern those countries.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
imo there should be a blanket policy that mods have to recuse themselves from moderating direct replies to their own posts (just get a different mod to do it).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
Er… what is Hlynka-in-theory?
As @ArjinFerman correctly points out he was very liberal in handing out bans. Maybe his petty squabbles were with a different ideological subset of posters, but they were petty squabbles nonetheless.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
This creates an internal contradiction for them
For the far right?
They don’t think so. In fact they’ve been anticipating this situation for years, see the parable of the golem.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
The Japanese have a strange affinity for cuckolding porn, but it’s usually not interracial (black interracial even less so).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
I don't mean to keep belaboring the point here. If you're just not interested in Freud's ideas then that's fine. But you are psychoanalyzing Freud and you're doing exactly what you accuse psychoanalysis of doing. You're attributing unacknowledged ulterior motivations to him, in spite of his explicit protests to the contrary (he certainly claimed to be simply following the evidence where it lead him - if you told him that psychoanalysis was just based on wishful thinking, he absolutely would have disagreed. So would you still persist in your claim that you know his motivations better than he did?)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
If we were to fairly apply the progressive criteria of "disparate impact", then we would have to conclude that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
If a meritocratic hiring process results in a disproportionately low number of blacks getting hired, then the process is racist, regardless of the intentions behind the process or its alleged fairness. Similarly if anti-Zionism ends up materially hurting Jews, then it's anti-Semitic.
Of course no one on the progressive left will actually buy this argument, they'll just say "no we're doing anti-racism, and anti-racism can't be racist, duh" and leave it at that.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
Can I ask what your background in philosophy is?
I'm just an avid reader, nothing special.
How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?
It wasn't supposed to be a summary of Freud's ideas at all. It was my own response to your claim that psychoanalysis should be dismissed because it has no "testable theories or experimental controls". Nothing more.
At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.
Well yes, but that's basically what psychoanalytic theorists/practitioners do. They read the theory and they think "yes, I do feel that this applies to my own cognitive processes and I find it to be illuminating for me". It couldn't have survived for this long if people didn't find something compelling in it.
I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell.
I agree that this is a possible failure mode when you start to invoke the notion of an unconscious. There's a risk of becoming too dogmatic if you're not sufficiently open to the possibility of falsification. Certainly.
But are we just going to pretend that unacknowledged ulterior motives don't exist? Certainly not! It's pretty clear to me that they do exist! Sometimes it feels like that's all political debates boil down to - accusations that the other side only claims to support X for principled moral reasons, when actually they just support it for their own self interest. Should we just immediately dismiss all accusations of that sort? I don't think so. They should at least be given a fair hearing. I think it's obvious that sometimes people are not entirely honest with others, and sometimes they're not entirely honest with themselves either. You don't need a fancy theory to see that.
Sociological and political debates couldn't get anywhere if we weren't allowed to speculate about the unobserved mental states of other people. Psychoanalysis is hardly doing anything too different from the average Motte thread, which is replete with speculation about what leftists and rightists "really think".
It's also worth mentioning that Lacanian clinical practice has this conception of the psychoanalyst as "the subject supposed to know" - key word being supposed to, as in a supposition, but that supposition ultimately turns out to be mistaken. One of the central goals of Lacanian analysis is for the patient to come to realize the ways in which the therapist too is ignorant:
This mystery is in the last resort the mystery of the transference itself: to produce new meaning, it is necessary to presuppose its existence in the other. That’s the logic of the “subject assumed to know” which was isolated by Lacan as the central axis, or stronghold, of the phenomenon of transference. The analyst is in advance assumed to know – what? The meaning of the analysand’s symptoms. This knowledge is of course an illusion, but it is a necessary one: it is only through this supposition of knowledge that, at the end, some real knowledge can be produced.
(Lacan is not Freud of course, but he's been central for the reception of Freud's ideas in the humanities since the mid 20th century.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.
I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy. You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx. But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way. There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them. It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!
Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic". Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy. So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).
I find them both such an odd case. It seems like an odd case where they've both been totally repudiated by the professionals of their own fields […] they both just rambled at length with no real testable theories or experimental controls.
Marx just has a political project / ethical vision that many people find deeply appealing. You can say what you want about the labor theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc, but many people will always be attached to him for political reasons.
With regards to Freud, I think you'd have to look at specific examples of contemporary work that references him and analyze how it references him, but my basic statement would be something like this:
Some of the shortcomings of psychoanalysis are not as unique or severe as they first appear. We already tell ourselves a certain "commonsense" story about psychology, a story about a world filled with agents who have intentions and beliefs and desires and emotions. But many of the concepts that make up this commonsense story are already on questionable empirical ground, not unlike the concepts of psychoanalysis.
Consider something as basic as "knowledge", the mental state of knowing something. We attribute knowledge to ourselves and others all the time. I know stuff, he knows stuff, we all know lots of stuff. But there's no empirical test that will give you a yes/no answer on whether someone "knows" something, certainly nothing that would cover all the edge cases and indeterminate cases. Philosophers have been arguing about the nature of knowledge for the last 2500 years and there's still no good answer.
Or consider the sensation of pain, or any other physical sensation - I mean the first-person qualitative experience of pain. You can't actually observe someone else's pain - you can only observe the behavioral and neurological correlates. For all you know, other people could just be unconscious automatons who don't feel anything at all. But you nonetheless assume that they actually do feel things, as a generalization of your own experience.
Or take the concept of desire, a concept that's very central to the Freudian psychoanalytic project. Again, you can't truly make a direct empirical observation here - if you cut open someone's brain, you won't be able to say "yep, there's the desire, I see it right there". You instead observe someone's behavior and infer the existence of a desire, or maybe you interpret the existence of a desire. And what criteria do you use to make this inference? There are a lot of difficult edge cases. Sometimes people seem to do things that they don't actually desire to do, like a woman who stays in an abusive relationship, or a drug addict who wants to stay clean but can't.
Are these cases of genuine desire? If you say no, and that we're instead dealing with cases of people doing things that they don't desire to do, then it starts to become even more mysterious how we can have a consistent set of criteria for moving from the empirical observation of behavior to the inference of a desire. But let's say that, despite the outward protestations of the subjects, there is a desire at play here. The woman who stays in an abusive relationship despite seemingly not wanting to, does in fact desire to stay in the relationship to at least some degree, even though this might conflict with other desires she has. We're going to say that if someone persists in doing X, then they have at least some desire to do X - call this the repetition criteria.
But how far can we stretch the repetition criteria? What if we look at not just one event, but multiple seemingly isolated events over time? Consider a woman whose last five relationships have all ended due to abuse. She always leaves the relationship immediately after physical abuse starts, and she makes it clear that she really hates all the terrible men she's been dating and she curses her string of bad luck - but nevertheless there's a clear pattern here. On the most literal reading of the repetition criteria, we can infer that she actually desires these relationships! She repeatedly persists in doing "X", where the "X" here is "enter a new abusive relationship", so we can infer that that is her desire. (We can dispense with any worries that this would require her to "know the future" - she could arrange this with better-than-chance-odds if she really wanted to, she could filter for men who showed outward signs of criminality and acted aggressively during courtship, and so on). If you look at any one event in isolation, there are no indications that she desires this state of affairs whatsoever, but if we look at the broader pattern of behavior, then desire starts to become evident. So, does she have this type of desire? If you say "no", then the repetition criteria needs some sort of modification - and this modification would be based not on empirical observation, but rather it would be based on your a priori conception of what a desire should look like. If you instead say "yes", then we begin to approach the psychoanalytic concept of unconscious desire.
So our commonsense story about psychology already has a lot of potential problems with it. But that doesn't mean we should jettison the whole story. Even the most hardcore reductionist materialist, who believes that anything above the level of a neuron is ontological nonsense, isn't going to stop talking about people as if they had beliefs and emotions and desires - you can't do that, it's not workable. Psychoanalysis simply provides a new story in addition to the commonsense one, and many people find the psychoanalytic story to be deeply compelling. You can argue that its concepts are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious; but we're already wedded to concepts that are empirically unverifiable and philosophically dubious.
I don't think those two have anything in common with each other, really- why did they bring together so many leftist philosophers and writers?
The short answer is that Freud provides the theory of the individual and Marx provides the theory of society - it's a natural complement. There are a lot of contingent historical factors involved here of course, but that's the gist of it.
This is going to sound like edgy contrarianism for the sake of edgy contrarianism, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that it's not:
I really don't care. And if you told me that counter-protesters were being funded by Israel, I wouldn't care about that either. In a conflict where moral fervor runs high, I am an advocate for the freedom to simply not care.
I'm just tired of the moral guilt tripping from both sides. If you want to criticize the protesters, criticize their tactics. There's plenty to criticize there. But their alleged ties to Hamas add nothing to the story for me. In general I have always felt that concerns over "foreign manipulation of political sentiment" were paranoia of the worst kind. If the governments of Russia or China or the US (organizations that have engaged in plenty of nasty unethical behavior in the past that could plausibly be classified as "terrorism") want to pay for a Times Square billboard and fund some student organizations to get their message out then I say let them. Free speech doesn't stop at our borders; I am for open trade in a global free market of ideas.
I can't reasonably bring myself to be invested in every ethnic and sectarian conflict that happens around the world, particularly when its direct impact on me seems rather limited. If the Sudanese Masalit want to organize protests in the US against the RSF then bully for them; whether they win or lose in their struggles, I'm not going to lose sleep either way. I view Israel-Palestine similarly: just another in a long series of ethnic conflicts in a region of the world that is known for being prone to violent ethnic conflicts.
In some sense I am forced to care, due to the generous financial aid that the US supplies to Israel. But my investment doesn't extend beyond that.
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