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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2

This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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Can someone invent a Curtis Yarvin reading LLM so that I can finally make sense of this guy's massive wall of rambling texts full of unfinished sentences

I think you can literally ask LLM's to summarize. Though I recall someone mentioning that Hegel broke Bing AI's brain, so maybe Yarvin will be the same.

You can’t make sense out of Hegel because Hegel doesn’t make any sense. It’s like asking AI to explain gibberish. It’s impossible. There is no information there.

Oppressors Bad, Oppressed Good, Oppressor and Oppressed classes exist in a quantum supposition largely based on the sympathies of the observer/whoever's assigning the labels.

That might sound flippant and low-effort (it honestly kind of is) but it's still pretty close to his genuine thesis near as I can tell.

That's just one of his ideas to be fair. I'm really not a fan of that one, but Hegel's contribution to philosophy, whilst esoteric, is not this empty.

Chiefly the one thing that's often (though debatably) attributed to him is dialectic and the alchemical view of history as the distillation of the perfect society, and though I don't like that one either, it's massively influential and makes a lot of sense to a lot of people.

Dialectic isn't really that impressive, smart, or original though. It's basically just "Conflict between thesis (feudalism, capital, whatever) and antithesis (labor unions, whatever) result in new synthesis (communism, whatever)."

Most landmarks of philosophy can be described in this reductionist way, it makes them no less significant.

I'm a bit torn on this question. On one hand I do want to show respect to philosophy, and artistically analyzing all the things it analyzes, but on the other I can't escape the impression that a lot of what it does is formalizing what people were already saying, thinking, and doing, adding a layer of obscurantism, and pretending you invented the thing yourself.

A common and valid critique of philosophy.

But I shall take your thesis and anti-thesis and synthesize them:

Philosophy is in large part the art of taking things people are already saying, feeling, thinking and doing and putting them in a coherent framework that can be used for further analysis and propagation.

We wouldn't charge mathematicians who create theories of existing fields of being bereft of insight. Why do we do so for philosophers? Is it just because they look a lot more pretentious? Or because they're talking about questions sufficiently exoteric that everyone has an opinion on them?

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