Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I’m having a body snatchers moment, ever since Dase jumped in angry in a ‘da juice’ discussion I was having with SS where I was just pointing out the imho postmodern trappings of his argument. I thought with all the bitching about wokes, the criticism of postmodernism was baked in, but it appears it’s a major fault line on the board. So how many of you are postmodernists?
Wokism is a classic Hegelian grand narrative. So are many forms of fascism, certainly in the more popular German incarnation thereof. The current progressive ideology doesn't descend, whatever MAGA QAnon types declare, from the "Frankfurt School". It descends much more linearly from the longstanding liberal-progressive tradition of grand narratives that brought you such hits as prohibition. It descends almost entirely from gentiles who were the key figures in enlightenment philosophy. Postmodernism was 'invented' by leftists but was widely derided, even initially by Orthodox Marxists as covertly reactionary. This is because postmodernism is a framework by which one could conclude, quite rationally, that the Marxist mission and the Marxist historical narrative (ie. dialectical materialism) were wrong or at least substantially irrelevant and/or not necessary.
All post-modern movements (that is to say, all major political movements that are either not explicitly Hegelian or which do not explicitly involve recreating or extending pre-modern ways of living, like the Amish) are deeply influenced by postmodern thought (including by the Frankfurt school). This includes the 'tradcath revival' that followed Vatican II and filtered into the modern FSSP/SSPX. It includes modern political Islamism as imagined by Bin Laden. It includes weird, esoteric online subculturalist politics. It includes the modern Anglophone 'dissident right'. These aren't entirely postmodern movements by any means, many rely on older ideologies (part of postmodernism is that it allows, unlike modernism/grand narrative room for many smaller premodern narratives, including traditional memes). One can acknowledge this or reject it, but in the end what the postmodernists (or those currently considered academically 'postmodernist') particularly the French like Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault were able to provide was the framework for the cultural criticism of the progressive grand narrative in which the modern internet right engages, in which almost all of us engage. Moldbug and many other reactionaries have acknowledged this over time, as I said last week when we last had this discussion.
Dase's argument in that thread is relatively weak. There are plenty of things to be argued among 'power worshippers'; Western elites, as even Karlin has finally acknowledged, are broadly of a high quality even if they have adopted some low quality memes. Certainly there are very few historical societies people can point to that had universally higher quality elites (as I believe even Signals - or another ethnonationalist regular - noted a few weeks ago, the class of effete, educated, extremely classically well-informed sort of people who ruled Europe before 1914 fucked up big time themselves, in the end, and so many of their sons died for it). American elites rule over Silicon Valley. Even if they did nothing to create it (they did indeed do much, many American elites are Silicon Valley to the core) it is hard to call this incompetence, whatever the state of the homeless in San Francisco. It's also, if anything, something of an ahistorical notion to suggest that early America had particularly high quality elites compared both the present and to many other countries at the time, so I don't think this is merely residual quality now fading. I read an account of the final attempts at reform in China over the last decades of the Qing dynasty and was struck by how absurdly competent certain parts of the court were in that period - they really did try everything they could, but it was too late. Some would argue that the Russians in that post-Japanese war, pre-WW1 period attempted similar.
'Might makes right' is facile but it is also one of the major longstanding narratives in which the right engages, while it can just be discarded or even blatantly ignored when it becomes inconvenient, it is compelling and certain sectors of the dissident right do wash their hands of it a little too much on a case-by-case basis.
My argument is that these things are extraneous and I think your example shows this best. Karlin's new practice of LARPing as a postgenderist progressive freak on
steroidsHRT is entirely downstream of Russia's military humiliation. Could the «elite human capital» have convinced him of the potency of their memes without the demonstration of superior (to Russia) kinetic power it can compel? Clearly they have failed to do so over his years in the West, so he came to Russia to venerate Based Putin's symbolic cult of power (I admit I also like the fact that this… thing exists, The Statue notwithstanding). Could the Russians reconvince him of the validity of Russian Nationalism without taking Odessa at the least? He mocks their ideas openly after years of sympathetic writing. In fact, this suggests he doesn't understand either – he cannot recognize the nugget of moral truth in the progressive doctrine, only see its power and grovel at its feet. Progressives, on the other hand, are vindicated in having not deigned to debate his type: Javelins succeeded where words had proven useless. They will likewise prevail over this clown.I am not a power worshipper, so I can produce arguments beside Chad "who cares lmao my team can fuck up your team" (which is especially helpful when it can't). And I have a consistent set of beliefs that made me deplore the war in the beginning, when it seemed like Ukrainian defenses are being overwhelmed, and make me deplore it now (as a bonus, they allow me to better predict how wars will go), so I hold Karlin's judgement in contempt both then and now.
Link?
AK returned to his true self, his Russian phase was the LARP. For him, it never anything than play, nothing more than pixels on screen.
Imagine: long awaited and greatly hyped game is finally, after many delays, released.
You immediately download it and start playing - of course as Orc, because Orcs are cool. But when you spend few hours, in is not as cool as you expected. The game mechanics are crappy, the gameplay is unbalanced, the story line makes no sense, and Orcs and Orc land are just plain ugly, dirty, covered in filth and cockroaches everywhere.
What to do? No hard feelings, just delete your character and start again, this time as Elf (and then find it is the same, except Elves are all maximally up-your-face LGBTQ+ and everything is in most garish eye-hurting rainbow colors imaginable).
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It was one of the descriptive panels in an extraordinary just-opened exhibition at the British Museum that is on until October called China’s Hidden Century about China between 1850 and 1912. There is a whole section on failed Qing reforms; the exhibition itself is told through artifacts (including fascinating early manufactured Chinese goods that venerated late Qing political figures), many of which I believe have never been exhibited before. I will try to do a post on it. I know your interest in China, if there’s any way you make it to London before October I’d recommend it. It really is one of the best, most interesting museum exhibits I’ve ever seen.
I am unlikely to make it to the Old World in the next two years or so, thus would be interested in a detailed post.
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Well of course , because it can criticize anything and its conclusions are arbitrary.
I would say Postmodernism is a revolt against enlightenment rationality, not a continuation of it, but the lineage of the idea doesn’t matter to me. Postmodernism is more than a criticism of grand narratives (bailey).
There are important questions that I deny and @FCfromSSC , @DaseindustriesLtd , @SecureSignals, the woke affirm (you probably too). Questions like:
Dase’s bizarre “power worshipper” insult, as far as I can tell, comes from the foucauldian idea that truth is just a mask for power. So he hears power when I speak of Truth.
I don't think so. Even for fundamental natural-law sort of questions, the available evidence feels finite. Maybe from an anthropic principle? Issues which we couldn't observe?
Trivially true.
Not sure I paraphrased correctly, or exactly what you meant by "trails off." I do think that this describes some bias failure modes, but not normal operation, so I guess I'll say "no."
In the sense that it must be taken as a starting point, and cannot be arrived at from evidence? Oh yeah. I understand that other people don't feel this way, but I find it very hard to empathize, in the same way that I fail to imagine having a deep-seated feeling about gender.
Generally, no. Such political effort is neither subtle nor particularly efficient. Not that truth fares too much better--I'd say opinion evolves from the chaos of signaling and countersignaling. It is Moloch made manifest.
Even though this thread has some interesting parts, I don't expect it to really resolve your conflict. Y'all are talking past each other. It's not (just) because of ambiguities in the terms, either! Most people are not philosophical purists. They may believe one or two or more of your questions without applying them in all situations.
You can call Dase a postmodernist, but it will only get you partway towards predicting his positions. More importantly, telling other people that he is a postmodernist won't give them that much information.
Let me put it a different way: suppose you wanted to be certain about the existence of God, the way you are about Gravity. How many books have been written on the subject, for and against? If you started now and did nothing else, could you read them all before you died? How many other books would you need to have the right background to understand those books?
@fuckduck9000, as I understand it, claims that when we want to answer a question, we just look at all the evidence and draw the obvious conclusion. I'm attempting to point out that "looking at all the evidence" is itself frequently an intractable problem; there is more evidence than you can actually look at in your lifetime for single issues, and we must reason about multiple issues.
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Thanks.
I mean obviously they are different in some ways. The question is along the lines of 'Is only gravity subject to evidence, while ideology is a matter of choice?'
Ambiguous. I think it is possible to answer the question of the existence of God or of an invisible dragon in my garage through evidence, it just delivers a negative answer. That is not the same thing as saying it is outside the reach of all evidence (proving and disproving) (which would require a legitimate axiom). The postmodernist trick here is to confuse the two, avoiding the update evidence provides.
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The postmodernists themselves would say exactly the opposite!
A lot of people will look at Nietzsche for example and say that he was just a romantic poet railing against rationality because he thought it was like, stupid or something. But those people haven't actually read his work; his arguments are far more subtle than that.
Essentially the argument is not that we should reject (an overriding commitment to) rationality as something external to us, but rather that rationality "overcomes itself"; it undermines itself from the inside. In order for the irrationalists to be "wrong" in some objective sense - in order for rationalism and irrationalism to not just be two arbitrary sides of the same coin - then there has to be a sense in which we just "should" believe what is true. We should believe the truth because it's true, and if you knowingly choose to believe something false instead, then you're doing something wrong. In other words, there have to be normative facts about what we should believe - there have to be objective facts about what you should or shouldn't do in a given situation.
But, Nietzsche contends, rationality itself has shown that there are no normative facts! Such facts don't fit in with a scientific, materialist worldview. There is no God to tell us what we should or shouldn't do; God is dead. Just like there are no objective facts about what you should or shouldn't do from a moral perspective, there are also no objective facts about what you should or shouldn't believe either. So a commitment to being rational ends up leading you to the conclusion that there is no reason to commit to being rational, beyond your own arbitrary choice. You can just decide to keep being rational anyway; but then, it's hard to explain how your choice is any better than the postmodernist's commitment to ignoring rationality and simply believing whatever he wants. Obviously, true beliefs are very useful in most situations, but false beliefs can also be useful.
This is a theme that gets repeated throughout the "postmodernist" tradition. Derrida is careful to constantly stress that he's not attacking classical philosophy from the outside; rather his project is to show that a scrupulous commitment to classical norms will ultimately lead to those norms undermining themselves. Whether he succeeds or not is another question. But the concern is there, at any rate.
So, the postmodernists don't think they're rebelling against rationality. They think they're taking rationality to its logical conclusion.
I told you I'm not interested in whether they consider the enlightenment their daddy or not. My problem is the garden-variety claims their otherwise tolerable adherents make in my sub.
You know, I can't take this, I'm going to adopt a tells-it-like-it-is prole persona, and challenge those highfalutin folks to believe poison is actually coke, and then drink it. I'll show them the usefulness of reality.
Sounds like he wasted his life searching for nonsense nobody asked for, and even failed at that.
There’s never been an iron-clad argument against skepticism. Even in ancient Greece you would get people who would sit there and say “nope, nothing’s real, I don’t believe anything, it’s all BS”.
All you can ever do is engage with the arguments someone presents as best you can, or, if you think they’re talking total nonsense, just stop talking to them.
If this was a 'how many dancing angels on a pin' question, I would leave them to their games. But it's burning their epistemology! They think empirical questions are a matter of choice! They are completely incapable of updating on some of the most important questions. Each of them is trapped in their own cell (the woke cell, the anti-jew cell, the anti-elite cell, etc) and despairing. They will only come out to fight each other.
No. I, at least, think you are calling questions empirical when they are not.
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In that conversation, you were saying that if some body of myth won out in the public consciousness, it must have had the most merit. You were making the "might makes right" argument, as in "those narratives won, so they must have been the best." That is not my criteria for whether a narrative has merit:
Notice you concede the argument "everyone has an identity and ulterior motives." Yes, they do. So why not try to understand them when it comes to something like Captain America or Superman? You are saying the ulterior motives don't matter, all that matter is that they won in the marketplace of ideas. But why did they win? Because they created effective propaganda that was memetically powerful, not because they were "right." What is right does not always win in the court of public opinion, which anyone here should admit.
I also put science in there. So are you saying that science produced by jews 'won'(ie, worked) because it was effective propaganda that was memetically powerful, and not because it was right?
And again, I do not believe that might makes right, or that what is right always wins in the court of public opinion, but it is correlated with it (that's why you cited american public opinion in 1939 to defend your isolationist views).
I am about as far from SS in views as it is possible to be, and do not wish to support their argument, but you are so obviously wrong I cannot restrain myself.
Drop the Jewish part, I have zero interest in that.
We know for a certainty that "science" that is not in any way factual or true can "win", in the sense of being adopted as scientific fact society-wide, purely because of effective propaganda and memetic power, while being absolutely false in its factual claims. Fucking Freudianism did exactly that! Lysenkoism was forced at gunpoint, but Freud's bullshit rewrote vast chunks of our society, based on fucking nothing beyond a story people were primed to believe. His disciples continued the scam, and their disciples continued the scam, and it's still fucking going!
I would dispute that, obviously, given the battle lines in this discussion. So you refuse to proclaim that HBD is true out of fear it might help people like him, but have no compunction agreeing with him on the cornerstone of his epistemology. Looks like you have 'axioms' in common. And even though you can "choose to believe" less distateful things, your opinon, like his, will remain a lifeless copy of the real thing (an opinion guided there by the truth and subject to updates).
He had and has his detractors. But more importantly, why does an error invalidate the whole system? It is absurd to deny the signal because it wasn't strong enough that one time. Last time, you tried to put a barrier in your epistemology between ideology-like and gravity-like knowledge, but postmodernism burned through it as I expected, and now you're questioning gravity.
The evidence for "junk science can dominate actual science for generations at a time" is orders of magnitude stronger than the evidence for "genes are why achievement gaps exist". I have never claimed to not care about evidence, only that evidence does not force conclusions. The fact that conclusions are chosen does not mean that all choices are equally good or even honest, and in fact some choices are much better or worse than others.
You have made a claim. I have presented very strong evidence against that claim. You are resisting that evidence, in exactly the process I have been trying to point out to you throughout this entire conversation. You aren't even wrong to do so! The evidence is ironclad, so far as it goes: you can't claim that Freudianism wasn't bullshit, and you can't claim that it didn't dominate for generations, but this evidence contradicts your axioms, and those axioms are firmly cemented. So what do you do? You take note of the phrase so far as it goes. You look for other evidence, kick up a meta-level, etc, etc, and the discussion continues. And this is a good and proper and reasonable thing to do! Not doing it would not improve your reasoning capabilities! But that process involves choices in sequence, not deterministic forced state transitions. You can choose, right now, to ghost this conversation, and your mind certainly will not change. You can choose to continue this conversation but just be a maximal dick, and again your mind will not change. You can choose to continue the conversation in good faith as you more or less have to date, because you value some greater axiom more than the axiom in question here, and maybe your mind changes and maybe it doesn't. You can choose to really dig into the question and look at evidence, or just go off cached thought. I have all these same choices.
All of those choices are choices, not deterministic forced state transitions. Your mind cannot change without them. If the sum of a sequence of choices is you changing your mind, you have chosen to change your mind.
The unmerited success of Freudianism doesn't make electrical engineering stop working. It does prove that the social construct we call "scientific consensus" is fundamentally unreliable, that things can be called science without actually being science. It also demonstrates why the epistemological problem I've been gesturing at actually exists. You cannot, in fact, assume that truth is winning in your local environment at any given point in time. You cannot rely on social consensus in any form for fundamental questions of reality. You cannot uncritically assume that evidence offered you second-hand is actually trustworthy, which means that the overwhelming majority of evidence available to you is at least somewhat suspect.
What you can do is grab as much evidence as you can fit in your metaphorical pockets, bang these pieces against each other to see which bits crumble, look for patterns, make predictions, and track how they work out. This is enough to get you, if you are careful and dedicated, to reasonable grounds to start examining the axioms you're choosing from in something approaching a rational fashion. It is not enough to get you to certainty, of the sort provided by simple, inevitable, universal natural processes like Gravity.
When I accuse you of rounding my arguments to absurdities, it's because of things like this. At no point have I actually questioned gravity, but you appear to be certain that I have. Presumably you believe that what I'm saying necessarily implies questioning gravity, but I have no idea why you believe this, so I have no way to argue the point other than to point out that you are continuing to assign to me arguments that I have not made.
Everything’s not an axiom. Definition time:
Axioms don’t change, they’re the start, what you reason from, not what you argue about. Calling your beliefs axioms is artificially locking them up, where the evidence and arguments can’t get to them.
My beliefs are my honest approximation of the truth, and they can change, like priors. You may think you’ve made an ironclad argument against them, and they may not change after 20, or 2000 comments, but that still does not make them axioms.
When have I ever claimed the opposite. Man, even in our other discussions I was already getting annoyed having to repeat every time that I think Freudianism is bullshit, and I even made a top-level back at the old place on how fucked up modern psychotherapy is because it was harming people I care about. It does not contradict my priors, and I have never claimed that falsehood can’t win, just that it’s harder.
I can’t choose to believe something I perceive as false (like there is a lion at my window). I choose to argue with you to give my perception more time to detect truth and falsehood, that is not choosing my version of the truth.
I choose to look out the window. I see a cow. So I believe there is a cow. Doesn’t mean I have chosen to believe in a cow instead of a crow. I didn’t choose what I saw, and I didn’t choose to believe what I saw either.
Hmmmm, I have to ask, could it be that you picked up the postmodernism strictly to serve as a defense mechanism for believing in God?
If I’m so gullible, woulnd’t you expect me to have less unorthodox positions? What are the fruits of your grand scepticism, worth (imo) sacrificing epistemic integrity? I think you’re missing a signal and wasting your time questioning the 99,99 % stuff.
Because your argument was not limited to ideology-like knowledge and was questioning gravity-like knowledge.
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Strong «I smoke to spite Hitler» energy.
Alternatively, @FCfromSSC just disagrees with him on race and probably other more weighty object-level matters (disagrees with me too), but most everyone accepts that social reality is socially constructed, in precisely the sense that it can systematically deviate from implications of honest scientific investigation, both on the level of a domain-specific narrative and on the meta-level of occasionally prioritizing narratives over evidence and narratively compelling beliefs over epistemically sound ones.
There's no smoking gun here, buddy: it's your epistemology that is the conspicuously deviant sort.
And it's not even consistent, I've pointed out a number of trivial holes and you just angrily shout to not notice them.
Because there is no principled way to delineate «the whole system». History is not a laboratory, everything is a one-off, nothing is truly replicable. Early 20th century psychology had happened exactly once, and got dominated by Freudian bullshit. At the same time, Communism with its blatant lies had dominated much of Eurasia, and in Germany this was countered by you-know-who. If anything, this shows us that grand narratives patently work. And this is indeed fucking strong evidence to ask whether you might also be living in the middle of one such grand narrative – or more. No matter how much it vexes you to adopt the «postmodernist» mindset.
«Postmodernists» actually make a strong, evidence-based point – because modernism fucking sucked for their generation.
Questioning gravity is good. That's how we can study anything nontrivial at all. It's just there are no sound reasons to conclude that gravity doesn't exist (whatever that means), so this questioning, normally, ends with (perhaps qualified) affirmation. This is not in any way a guarantee for any topic.
I wouldn't hide the truth or choose arguments by associates anyway, so the FC 'directed ideological cleaning' process is a mystery to me. Who knows what you guys smoke.
Original motte and bailey. Motte is ‘reality is partly socially mediated’.
Okay I disagree, it's just a weaker signal of the exact same process as science in a laboratory. It is by categorizing and linking distinct events that we can understand the world.
So according to you, if you quote history, it's just meaningless. No conclusions are allowed if a hostile head of state repeatedly violates the terms of the appeasement he gets, while another doesn’t? All completely independent events, no predictive value?
I see postmodernism does exist as a distinct concept when you want it to. Please just fucking tell me what term I am allowed to use for the sweeping epistemological changes you demand.
I’m ready to compare the achievements of modernism against postmodernism anytime you want.
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My argument is that science winning as consensus doesn't make it right, not that all science that has won out is wrong. The science produced by Jews includes the establishment of an academic, race-denying consensus that has, in my view, had cataclysmic impact on European society. It didn't win out because it was right. Of course Jews have also produced good science as well. What ulterior motive do Jews have to manipulate the laws of physics? The ulterior motives for using authoritarian tactics to enshrine race denial in the Academy are in many cases openly admitted by those most responsible.
How do you separate the right jewish thought that went into 'good science' and the false thought into superman? It just seems like the only difference is you haven't come up with a just-so theory why a certain law of physics benefits jews yet. Which feminists have done for men btw. So keep looking.
It's not a false thought, it's effective propaganda. As Rolling Stone wrote last month:
If you think I describe this as a "false thought" or even a "wrong idea" you misunderstand what I am saying. It's highly effective propaganda. In this case, we know the ulterior motives and the cryptic meaning behind the myths because they are openly admitted to, as in the case of Captain America. But even if they weren't openly admitted to, they could be analyzed in the same way every other body of myth or art is analyzed for esoteric symbolic meaning. The case of Superman is pretty overt, we could conclude this even if it weren't openly celebrated by Rolling Stone magazine. You seem to be pretending that with all myth and art we can work to understand the motivation of the artist, but this content produced by Jews is just completely inscrutable? It isn't, it just takes a little bravery to call out a pattern that is very, very clear.
As in, for example, the Frankfurt school they were open about the academic focus of their work being to find a psycotherapy for the Authoritarian Personality to stop anti-Semitism and another Holocaust. In the easiest cases which are well documented, we don't have to guess at the motivations as they are openly admitted to by the influencers. Madison Grant commented on Jews blocking research into race science as early as the 1910s.
You don't need a "just-so" story, you just need to believe them when they describe the motives and meaning of what they are creating!
Can you at least accept Superman as an example of the phenomenon I am describing, even if you want to continue to argue that this hasn't been a widespread practice in the Culture Industry for the past century?
The issue is the strength of the phenomenom. Of course artists put their personal experiences, often their political beliefs, in their work. That doesn’t mean the resulting public opinion is corrupted, and you can just pick 'which truth' you want to follow. A superman comic can’t convince me to jump off a bridge, and it can’t convince americans to go to war with hitler (I can’t believe I’m writing sentences as silly as this).
Or take you, for instance. You have probably consumed copious amounts of pro-white anime or something, where we don't have to guess the motives and meaning of creators either. Does that mean your pro-white views are corrupted bullshit? I would think there is more behind them than you happening to catch conan the barbarian on the tv one night.
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