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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35201 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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What is the difference here between "taking marching orders" and "absorbing things they read and forming opinions"? Why is it different to be inspired by Marx than by LibsOfTikTok?

I'm describing people I'd want to date, as opposed to people I wouldn't want to date. People who read Marx are going to get along with me better. If you truly can't see the qualitative differences between LibsOfTikTok's "intellectual product" and The Eighteenth Brumaire because Communism Doesn't Work, then I don't know what to tell you. Guess we'll never date. Alas, you'll miss out on staring into my piercing blue eyes and feeling my pillowy soft lips on yours. But it just wouldn't work, I love high quality historically important philosophical work whether I agree with it or not.

I guess the difference I'm going for is somewhat analytical? If you're reading big thinkers and understand the nuts and bolts of your philosophy, it's qualitatively different from someone who reads "thinkpieces" and parrots talking points. I'm happy to talk Biblical or Quranic theology with anyone, I'm uninterested in hearing about what anyone saw on the 700 club.

Firstly, let me say that my preferences match yours: I don't care about object-level signals in partners. I care about meta-level engagement styles. If someone asked me why, I would just say I noticed a correlation between the kinds of people I enjoy, and the engagements they have.

  1. Am I making a category error by calling that my reason? Maybe that's just my strategy to satisfy my goals?

  2. Would you accept that as your reason? Does there need to be some grand, real underlying factor?

What I'm suggesting is that the difference between "carefully absorbs knowledge to synthesize into new and personal understandings" and "recklessly takes in nonsense from unreliable internet sources to parrot" is largely the difference between whether you respect the person and their viewpoint or not, and not any sort of intellectual rigor. Some of the dumbest social media hot takes are from academic wordcels who live and breathe their ideologies and by all rights are reasonably high IQ.

I get you on the analytical bit, I appreciate good conversation and coherent thoughts when having serious talks. But alas, you're right: we can never be. I'm pretty aggressively anti-philosophy.

Just philosophy and seven inches of anatomy stand between our love.

Twitter doesn't make for a good look for most academics, though there are exceptions. But over lunch, I get along with most academics I've run into. Longform vs Shortform.

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