domain:gurwinder.substack.com
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
22hr ago
For one, the extent to which Hamas operates from structures (hospitals, schools, etc) which are protected by international law is quite unusual.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22hr ago
You're missing the point about how conflicts actually happen and how tension propagates. Very, very few people are actually motivated by what happened 2000 years ago. Basically no one is acting out those kind of grudges, and it's ludicrous to suggest such, and equally ludicrous to be... grateful for past cultural and identarian destruction? There's this thing, which is real, which is called a cycle of violence, and part of how that happens is more immediate concerns always foreshadow old ones. Insofar as longer term tension exists, it's quite often intimately related to structural tensions of a more practical nature. Sure, cultures sometimes get into beef with each other over small stuff, but those beefs are always centered in the now or recent past, not the ancient past. In fact I struggle to think of any examples where 100+ year fights recur over something of equivalent negligible value like "miniscule patches of barren land".
Lizzardspawn
22hr ago
"Hitler did nothing wrong"
Not going to fly in my friend group. We all agree losing wars is wrong.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
22hr ago
· Edited 22hr ago
Free Palestine types don’t want to because it shows that Israel’s response isn’t particularly unique and that America has glassed half the Middle East in response to terrorism before.
America has never "glassed" the Middle East. That idiom refers specifically to total nuclear destruction (from the idea that the nukes are literally turning the desert to glass). America has invaded the Middle East, and conquered parts of it (which were relinquished, in a more orderly (Iraq) or less orderly (Afghanistan) fashion), but no glassing or anything even close to it (e.g. Dresden-style firebombing) has taken place.
Nor, of course, has Israel glassed Gaza, though they've certainly bombed the hell out of it.
10 to 25 percent of the Jewish population of Israel has citizenship elsewhere and that’s disproportionately held by the wealthier upper strata of the population.
And how much of that is useless Russian citizenship?
What! But there are so many lovely works of critical theory! Even Marcuse. "The Aesthetic Dimension" is a wonderful book, I always recommend it to everyone.
I might read this + Derrida's Truth in Painting and get back to you at some (undefined) point in the future. There's never a reason for me not to read something new; I will try to be open minded when evaluating them. I can't say I've read a whole lot of Derrida myself.
What specifically did you read that made you hate critical theory? I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything, I'm just curious what you read that caused you to form your opinion.
These papers from Marcuse linked in this thread are some examples. Anything political the Frankfurt School or its descendant schools of thought wrote induces anything from disaffected ennui to downright hatred. But I won't go for that extremely low-hanging fruit here. It's just too easy to criticise.
A while back I looked at Eclipse of Reason by Horkheimer, which I didn't think was very good. It’s a rather dreary account of how instrumental/subjective reason infects everything, and metaphysics (or non-instrumental/speculative thinking) is increasingly crowded out in modernity. Horkheimer's issue with subjective reason seems to be this: Because positivism and subjective reason rejects objective morality, no goal can be objectively measured as being "better" than another goal - after all, "should" claims are not factual claims. As a result of this, science can be used as a tool to help achieve any goal (including ones Horkheimer would disagree with) and therefore this is bad and we should reject positivism. He claims it denies that principles of human morality are fundamental objective truths.
He states "According to formalized reason, despotism, cruelty, oppression are not bad in themselves; no rational agency would endorse a verdict against dictatorship if its sponsors were likely to profit by it." But formalised reason doesn't say anything is bad in itself because "bad" is a moral judgement. Reason can tell us what "is" and what "is not", it can't tell us what our social goals should be (though it can inform how we get to these goals). Moral judgements about "should be" are not intrinsic in the universe, they only exist in human cognition as a byproduct of our evolutionary circumstances. Ethical statements such as theft is reprehensible do not represent facts. Therefore, they are not truthful, and cannot be proven or disproven using reason. Horkheimer never really proves this statement to be wrong.
Though, that's not for lack of trying; he does make some arguments against subjective reason, and one of the arguments made is this: "How this dehumanization of thinking affects the very foundations of our civilization, can be illustrated by analysis of the principle of the majority, which is inseparable from the principle of democracy. In the eyes of the average man, the principle of the majority is often not only a substitute for but an improvement upon objective reason: since men are after all the best judges of their own interests, the resolutions of a majority, it is thought, are certainly as valuable to a community as the intuitions of a so-called superior reason. However, the contradiction between intuition and the democratic principle, conceived in such crude terms, is only imaginary. For what does it mean to say that 'a man knows his own interests best'—how does he gain this knowledge, what evidences that his knowledge is correct? In the proposition, 'A man knows. . . best/ there is an implicit reference to an agency that is not totally arbitrary and that is incidental to some sort of reason underlying not only means but ends as well. If that agency should turn out to be again merely the majority, the whole argument would constitute a tautology."
This is the kind of thing you would only say if you have been cosseted in an academic-philosophical bubble without reference to other fields. The answer to “how do people get their moral intuition if not through something objective" is that human moral intuition is a product of evolutionary adaptation and doesn't necessarily reflect something that is fundamentally true on a deep level. We intrinsically value certain things not because they have any deeper inherent universal value which can be confirmed by reason, we value them simply because the structure of our psychology tells us we should. Just because we think something "should be" doesn't mean there's any fundamental basis to that belief. Every human moral prior is, in fact, baseless. The is/ought problem can never be escaped, and as such morality can only be legibly defined via appeal to a general trend.
Horkheimer in fact seems to believe that moral judgements would entirely disappear without any dictates for what is objectively moral. "All these cherished ideas, all the forces that, in addition to physical force and material interest, hold society together, still exist, but have been undermined by the formalization of reason. ... We cannot maintain that the pleasure a man gets from a landscape, let us say, would last long if he were convinced a priori that the forms and colors he sees are just forms and colors, that all structures in which they play a role are purely subjective and have no relation whatsoever to any meaningful order or totality, that they simply and necessarily express nothing." But that isn't how that works. There's also the fact you can't really distinguish between "instrumental reason" and "reasoning about ends". Any "reasoning about ends" can itself be interpreted as a means to a further end. So any reasoning Horkheimer or anyone else does can never escape critique of its own instrumentality. Therefore, it’s not really clear what he sees as being eclipsed by what. It wasn't a very inspiring piece of literature.
Also, the way Adorno decided to write about music was definitely, uh, a choice. People joke he hated everything that wasn't Schoenberg for a reason. Hell, even Schoenberg himself could not stand the guy: "It is disgusting … how he treats Stravinsky. I am certainly no admirer of Stravinsky, although I like a piece of his here and there very much – but one should not write like that."
In general, I find that many philosophers from the analytic tradition had a habit of defending claims and properly defining terms so as to minimise uncertainty. There's often a more rigorous bent to their writings. But continental philosophy and particularly critical theory tries to accomplish no such thing. It's often extremely fluffy, terms will be so poorly defined that interpretations of their texts bifurcate depending on one's reading of them, and even once you've broken through the morass and divined several possible interpretations of their words, every single interpretation turns out to be endless navel-gazing that has become unmoored entirely from reality. It requires no checks or balances that anchor it to the outside world, everything is interpreted through their own internal framework that grants it legitimacy, and many of the conclusions they arrive at are premised on just... bare claims, which require basically no external substantiation to see if anything they've said actually holds. Much of it is worse than that in fact; it falls into the category of not even wrong.
ABigGuy4U
22hr ago
Your schtick of acting like Israel is the only country in history to ever do naked conquest as opposed to simply being the most recent one is getting stale.
Israel’s only real crime was getting founded just a couple of years after that type of thing became unfashionable.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22hr ago
Officially yes, fascists were opposed to the aristocracy in the old sense of “the second estate”. The monarchists viewed the fascists as upstart revolutionaries rather than as conservatives.
But in practice every society has an elite, and this guy was presumably using “aristocracy” as a synonym for “elite”.
The text I quoted was the entirety of the original OP comment.
Blueberry
22hr ago
And her children look like her, so a secretly-adopted-conspiracy can be dismissed.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22hr ago
I did maybe 3 minutes of digging/following links and names. I guess the original allegation's source is basically some citizen-journalist nutjob with "three years" of research, popularized when they were hosted by a spirit medium/fortune teller YouTuber, and they already lost a more minor defamation case over the issue in France.
So basically Owens' main defense would normally be that she was just echoing other research/relating what she heard, but since she doubled down it seems like she's down to the last bit of the US law, which is if she displayed "actual malice" or not. My feeling is that this lawsuit is probably going to go against Owens, which is rare, but the situation at a glance appears to be more or less a textbook example of what a US court considers defamation. I disagree that she would have a good "just joking" defense because she isn't really a comedian. I guess you could try the Fox News "it's entertainment" but again - she doubled down and even allegedly referenced the cease and desists she got, so that weakens the attempt substantially.
It's a bit embarrassing to go to court over it, and risks of course a Streisand Effect, but I think there is probably some actual power in winning a court case to slow rumors like that. Or, Brigitte herself is annoyed enough - not to stereotype too much, but she is at that age where it's appealing to do something like this.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
22hr ago
She was always a grifter.
ABigGuy4U
22hr ago
The “West” has done the kind of thing Israel is doing within living memory.
The most obvious historical analogy is 9/11 and the Global War on Terror. Ironically nobody wants to use that one. Free Palestine types don’t want to because it shows that Israel’s response isn’t particularly unique and that America has glassed half the Middle East in response to terrorism before. Pro-Israel types don’t like it because it’s a reminder that what Israel is doing is probably a terrible idea in the long run.
the other two had settler populations with homelands to return to.
10 to 25 percent of the Jewish population of Israel has citizenship elsewhere and that’s disproportionately held by the wealthier upper strata of the population. Given western polices toward family migration that could probably expand to 40 percent in a matter of months. About one percent of the country’s Jewish population left the country in 2024.
2rafa
22hr ago
What’s your view on it? There are French rightists online who believe it (and who appear to be the source of the whole thing).
erwgv3g34
22hr ago
The hell is this, the Terrible Take Tuesday thread? Cowboy Bebop and GitS are not just good, they are excellent.
Seconded.
The plot in Cowboy Bebop isn't that special (though that isn't what it's about), but overall both are great series.
The overarching plot of Cowboy Bebop is mediocre. The individual mini-plots that make up each episode are great.
guajalote
22hr ago
I think Owens' defense will be that she genuinely believed (and believes) her claims to be true. In the US, to prevail on defamation against a public figure, you have to show actual malice. I don't think she meets that standard. I really do think she believes it.
gattsuru
22hr ago
In the short term, there's no shortage of other locales selling games, including adult-themed games, and other ways to make a living making games... though all are likely to get hit by the same pressures over time and sometimes already have the same sort of motions toward content provider rules.
Maybe that short term is shorter than I thought:
Several people on the forums report not being able to access games that they'd already bought. I haven't yet seen a good list of what titles were hit.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
22hr ago
Yazidi or Armenians or Copts because they were successfully extinguished as viable populations
All 3 currently exist. There are millions of the latter 2.
Quantumfreakonomics
23hr ago
To be fair to Israel, there is a truly massive amount of resources flowing from United States evangelical organizations to Christian missionaries in Israel. It’s not much of a secret that the purpose of these missionaries is to convert Jews into Christians. I’m surprised it took them this long to remember they have borders.
DirtyWaterHotDog
23hr ago
aristocracy
Weren't fascist movements a reaction to erstwhile aristocracy ? They're started by revolutionaries who borrow their power from military and/or church. Both institutions reject blood relations in favor of loyalty to the cause.
Disagreeable people with public platforms are the first go. This guy would've whacked on day 2.
Is there an example of a near-fascist state with significant ethnic diversity that's succeeded ?
P.S: OP deleted their comment, so I'm going off the quote.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
23hr ago
2000 year old grievances
There was no conflict until, at the earliest, 140 years ago. Praytell, what "2000 year old grievances" do the Palestinians harbor and wage war over?
Ha, Mononoke is one of the Ghibli movies I think is just okay. Different strokes I suppose.
I did watch Death Note too, which you recommended in the original anime thread; I didn't like that either (granted, I did prefer it to Bebop and GitS). Not because of the reasons offered up that it was "too disturbing and amoral", far from it, I quite like things that lean in that direction, rather it felt like there was a lot of missed potential with the characters.
This is true for Light in particular. He was painted as a hubristic megalomaniac who was in large part motivated by a desire to acquire power; it would have been much more entertaining had he been given a legible and consistent moral code which just happened to conflict with that of L. As it was, Light felt one-dimensional and it seemed more like you were supposed to be disgusted by him more than you were supposed to understand him. Which isn't good, considering how much time you spend with this character throughout the show's runtime. I even felt it cheapened the dynamic between him and L, which could have been so much more dynamic and interesting had their differing philosophies and moralities ever been given a chance to clash.
Also, to be blunt, every time Misa Amane appeared on screen I felt like strangling her to death. She was just so aggressively annoying to me.
HereAndGone
23hr ago
Oh, way way back when the first shoots of trans right activism were budding, and it was still possible to have civilised conversations around the topic, I was part of a discussion elsewhere where we were assured up, down and sideways that any qualms were just slippery slope conspiracy thinking. No boy or man would incur the stigma of dressing like a woman or claiming to really be a girl in order to get into locker rooms or bathrooms, we were told.
And then events eventuated, and turns out "I am a girl even though all I've done is grow out my hair and change my name" is plenty okay enough to be worth it. For a while, at least, seems Lia Thomas is not having the career promised after all.
Turniper
23hr ago
This is a very pro-anomie sort of take. If my video game playing was eclipsing all my other recreation time, or my porn watching was impacting my sex life, or arguing with people on the internet was filling me with bile, I'd want the people in my life to bring that shit up. It's 2025. 'Just a boyfriend' isn't a thing. The title doesn't mean they're family, but it is definitely not a sign they're not serious and heading in the direction of either a lifelong relationship or proper marriage.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
23hr ago
I hit 15k in MathAcademy today. It feels nice, beyond that, not much. I am trying to stick to a schedule so that I can do my sabbatical well. Life's not ideal, I am still grateful to be where I am, as long as I get the work ethic I desire, I do not have much to complain about. I am nearly a quarter of the way through with object oriented python which is my first intermediate programming book. If I can do it by next week, I will be super happy!
No_one
23hr ago
The narrative about Assad the evil eye doctor using nerve gas to make it clear how evil he is compared to the moderate democratic Al-Qaeda affiliates he was fighting is complicated bc the munitions supposedly used to dispense the nerve gas being very short-ranged garage made contraptions that would have required a truck convoy to get within 1-2 km of the targets. The state department map shows that the only place where these could have been safe was Western Ghouta, were funnily enough basically no actual sarin residue was found.. All the places with actual evidence of nerve gas were fairly deep into the area where government did not have solid presence in.
Those who want to see it in painful detail, aerodynamic calculations were made and published.
This is a classic slippery slope fallacy. If you think there are good reasons why, for example, you'd easily slide from bullet point 2 to bullet point 3, please state them. If not, this is a bad argument. Why on earth would a two-state solution, once established 'backslide' into something else? Makes no sense! Much less the Palestinians doing so, because the last 20 years or so it's been Israel, objectively, that has been deliberately trying to move and wiggle the borders more to their liking - so if anyone should be worried about a slippery slope, it's the Palestinians?
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