In relation to the op then, can you put your finger on the "dogma" or even the ideology involved here, which could motivate this sort of atheist politicism. Surely the issue is more complex than the "fact/value" distinction of the op. It appears to me like the proper subject matter would be better described as the power/money relation. The relation of fact over value does not seem to have the same motivating force as the relation of power over money. "Value" and "money" are comparable, which would mean that the dogma which motivates such an atheist movement is power based rather than fact based. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don’t think they’re competing explanations. I’d say that the power/money ideologies build upon the fact/value separation, because the reduction of values to subjective preferences—this being the corollary of the triumphant objectivity of science and the profit-driven progress of technology—entails, through its removal of meaning from the social and natural whole, a norm of rational behaviour where the means are paramount, and the ends are the unexamined personal preferences conditioned by a socially stratified society, i.e., status, power, wealth.

Obviously this is not to say that power and wealth were not pursued in the era of enchantment.

I realize it’s a fine distinction and I’m just trying it out.

For hope to have any value, you must have the optimism it can happen — Hanover

No, that’s still just hope. The way I’m using the terms right now, optimism is when you believe it will happen. When you believe it can happen, and you want it, that’s hope.

Hope’s value doesn’t come from some will to believe or some such personal courage, but from one’s experience of bad stuff.

Your post is mostly misguided, but I will say that the point of “hope without optimism” is that optimism in effect dismisses the horrors that people have experienced, because it is a temperamental and unearned turning away from reality in favour of an imagined great future; and without knowing and feeling the horror, it negates hope in the most meaningful sense, namely the yearning for a better world in the midst of the lived and felt reality of hell on Earth.

The optimist thinks it will happen, come what may, thus nothing already experienced matters at all. In contrast, the hoper wants it to happen, despite everything.

It was partly your posts that prompted me to write this hammily rhetorical stuff a few months ago:

The idea of general progress is necessarily one of forgetting. It sits alongside a dismissive attitude to suffering, a callous and shallow triumphalism (I know because I was guilty of this myself). Not only that, but the narrative offers either the present day or a future utopia as a stand-in for the Day of Judgement, or perhaps for heaven, and it begins to look like a matter of faith. Faith that progress can redeem humanity, that everything will be worth it in the end.

The truth is that nothing can absolve humanity of its crimes and nothing can make up for the suffering of the past, ever. Nothing and nobody will redeem humanity. Nothing will make it okay, and we will never be morally cleansed. We certainly ought to strive for a good, free society, but it will never have been worth it. — Jamal

radical optimism — Hanover

Sounds all right. It’s the triumphal rhetorical banalities I don’t like.

You seem to accent the negatives more than you accent the positive achievements of humankind.

Are you another pessimist? — universeness

You ask me this because I attempted to confront the reality of the twentieth century? Why should I be an optimist? Seriously, why? This is a venue for philosophical thinking and discussion, not for atheist proselytizing or rousing the masses into revolutionary fervour.

Optimism is often facile and banal.

The optimist cannot despair, but neither can he know genuine hope, since he disavows the conditions that make it essential. — Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism

The title is where I'm at: hope without optimism.

Or is it the other way around? :chin:

Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? — Hanover

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

So yeah, in some ways it hasn't gone very well so far, despite N's optimism.

@universeness

On the atheism of the Nazis, there seem to be roughly two positions from the capital "A" Atheists here: (a) National Socialism was a religious movement; and (b) National Socialism was not an atheist movement, shown by the fact that it was happy sometimes to use religion to gain and maintain power.

Position (a) can't really be taken seriously, but position (b) (which seems to be where @universeness is coming from) is usually just a defence against those militant theists who claim that atheism is inherently evil. I think (b) is fair enough. The Nazis emerged from a still quite religious milieu, which most of them did not care enough about to give it much thought for or against, thus they were neither religious nor atheist in general, and there was probably a diversity of opinion among Nazis on the issue.

But some leftist atheists during and just after the war came to believe that there was something in the secularized culture of modern Europe that allowed totalitarianism to happen. European antisemitism at the time of the Nazis had become scientific in character (it was pseudo-scientific, of course). It took up the older religious tradition of antisemitism and ran with it in a racialist direction, so it was motivated and justified differently than it had been in previous centuries. So some pessimistic atheist social theorists blamed the very historical evolution of which the loss of religion's social importance was a central feature. From this point of view, it is something in the process of secularization that led to totalitarianism and genocide (the instrumentalization of reason and all that). In other words, religion was being lost, and without anything to take its place, bad things happen.

This seemed to be further supported by the existence of another of the world’s most brutal and totalitarian regimes, one which was atheist and which engaged in the persecution of religion, namely Stalin's government of the Soviet Union.

Me, I certainly wouldn’t say that atheism or secularism necessarily result in totalitarianism. The minimal point I suppose is that society can end up in oppression, war, and violence whether it’s religious or not, and therefore that these evils have other causes. The idea that it's all caused by religion is no better than a conspiracy theory.

The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch.

They say the clouds keep heat in, but honestly would rather see sun even if it were colder — TiredThinker

Similarly, they say turnips are good for you, but—get this—I would honestly rather have a pizza or a burger, even if it were less healthy.

It is a peculiar fact about the Christian fundamentalists that they deny their clergy special elevated status (as you might see in the Catholic Church or even among orthodox rabbis), but everyone is offered the same status in the eyes of the community in their ability to interpret scripture, with everyone with the same right to go back to the text and argue their point. — Hanover

This is Protestantism in general, not just fundamentalism. It’s why there are thousands of Protestant denominations.

Factually incorrect. Nazi ideology was religiously motivated, as fascism tends to do — Darkneos

This is spectacularly ignorant. Up your game.

:party:

I’ve done that, but I can still see it when logged in. This is either because the way permissions work makes it impossible to have a thread that only guests can see, or else it’s showing me everything because I’m an admin. If you or @Banno can no longer see the Joining thread, it has worked.

That’s even better than Baden’s idea. I should be able to achieve that by putting it in a new category with custom view permissions.

That’s a pretty good idea. If we’re going to do anything about this, that’s probably what we should do.

I have long agonized over that issue, and you are to be commended for your suggestion, but I don't think those threads should be amalgamated. I often want to link to them separately, I want prospective members to quickly see how to join, members to get to the guidelines directly (and it's good conventional practice to have the guidelines in the form of a pinned thread), and to display the Subscribe thread prominently.

The Chomsky thread is only there temporarily, so it'll be down to four in a short while. If I were to move one of the other four it would probably be the "Joining" thread; maybe it could go under "Help". But I think that might reduce its visibility too much.

During the period of the swift's seasonal residency in Western Eurasia (that's May to September), I prefer the weather to be mostly warm and sunny after a misty morning, with either calm air or a light breeze, and with occasional rainshowers in the late afternoon or early evening from small-to-medium cumulus clouds, and a mid-day thunderstorm when the moon is in its waxing gibbous phase.

I’m not done here.

I’m a member of some online book groups and there are endless stupid arguments pro- and anti-Kindle. I don’t intend to repeat that here. However, I do want to insist that ebooks are real books, lest there be some suggestion that reading an ebook is importantly different, qualitatively, from reading a codex-style book (paper pages bound together between boards or paper). This would be true of “audiobooks,” because you don’t read them—but not of ebooks.

Kindle is better for me for several reasons:

• I move around so portability is important
• The text of codex-style books is usually too small for me to read comfortably; on a kindle I can adjust the text size and font style
• You can look up words quickly and easily
• Most e-readers now have a backlight, so you don’t have to rely on external light-sources and you can read in the dark
• You can start reading a book seconds after you decide to read it
• I can copy and paste into TPF or wherever

The first two points are the most important. If they weren’t important to me, e.g., my eyesight was as good as it was 30 years ago and I was settled in a house with a dedicated library, or I didn’t live in a foreign country, then I would likely read codex books a lot more.

I realize all of this is obvious and goes without saying. But Jamal’s Law is: online, that which goes without saying doesn’t go without saying.

Now I’m done here.

I only read papyrus scrolls.

:roll:

I only read real books — Noble Dust

I still love books — T Clark

Ebooks are real and ebooks are books.

I don't think so. It's dense, long, and pretty bleak — T Clark

On the contrary, I found it exuberant and fun, and dense only in its profusion of monstrous detail.

In Perdido it only happens at moments but not generally, as I recall.

I enjoyed The City and the City so much that I feel I owe it to myself to give him at least one more shot after failing with Last Days Of New Paris. Is Perdido the one? I get the sense The City and the City was atypical, so I’m unsure of how to proceed. — Noble Dust

Of the books of his I’ve read, the Bas-Lag books have stuck in the memory the most, and Perdido is the first of those. I think I’ll probably re-read it. So yeah, I’d say Perdido.

As I mentioned above, I found it disappointing in the last half or third, and I remember the writing as occasionally and undeservedly pretentious, but I might be wrong about all that—and anyway, it hasn’t detracted from the good things I remember about it, and I still want to re-read it.

Yes.

However, I’m wary of answers that go something like this: lonely young men are being turned into misogynists by reactionary patriarchal ideology, to which they’re being exposed because of the internet. I mean, I think that’s true, but (a) it might deflect the sociological questions, and (b) it might fail to appreciate the ideology as itself something new.

I also interpreted it like this. But I believe there's an additional element; those three deficiencies get internalised and seen as universal/essential to the proto-incel. Universal in the sense that reality will always treat them that way; they can give up or adapt. Essential in the sense that reality will treat them that way due to their own personal deficiencies relative to perceived norms. — fdrake

Yes, that makes sense, although I doubt this is always present before joining up. Intuitively I’d expect some of them to join while still thinking they’re just going through a bad patch, only universalizing and essentializing it during their indoctrination.

Predictable oldies that I’ve posted before,,,

Great use of Fripp and beautiful spicy harmonies. I couldn’t get tired of the Roches.



Best guitar solo I’ve ever heard (at 3:00):



The best song ever:



Also the best song ever:



This is the one I’m most into this evening:



Actually maybe this is the best song ever:

I think that in the first two Titus books, the plot is crucial, an indispensable skeleton. With Perdido, it seems like the story either doesn’t matter or it matters too much. What I mean by that is that the monster hunt plot takes over, but on the other hand it’s like the author gives up and surrenders to the needs of a thriller-style plot.

I didn’t like the way it degenerated into a monster hunt. The world building was great, the plot, not so much. It felt a bit like an action movie: fascinating premise, then boring.

On the other hand, what I liked about it made me read his other books, so it’s still up there in my favourite books.

@Benj96 @fdrake

This open access paper, published last month, is quite interesting:

The Rage of Lonely Men: Loneliness and Misogyny in the Online Movement of “Involuntary Celibates” (Incels)

Four things about it:

1. Incels or proto-incels feel loneliness in three ways: in terms of intimacy, friends, and social status.

2. Their loneliness is transformed into misogyny by means of ressentiment.

3. Joining the incel community exacerbates this loneliness, fostering or producing ressentiment, even while providing some degree of social acceptance. This is because it does not provide the kind of social acceptance that they need, i.e., it does not provide intimacy, real friends, or respectability/status in wider society.

4. Joining the incel community means joining a movement with a doctrine. Thus new members undergo indoctrination.

EDIT: Sorry everyone, I forgot to say: incels are really bad! Grrr! :wink:

Do you see a way to thread the needle here without steering into right wing nut job territory? We were also pretty close when trying to humanise "pre-incels". — fdrake

Close to right-wing nut job territory? I don’t think so.

What’s better than submitting to the cancelling mob with self-censorship is thinking things through and speaking your mind. If you’re not a right-wing nut job but what you say makes people think you are, then those people are the problem.*

But I’m the wrong person to ask. I don’t much like joining things.

* It’s a bit more complicated than that.

It's political correctness gone mad!

Is it another example of what Adorno referred to as pseudo-activism, where what matters is the badges you wear, the signals you transmit, and the minimal action you take—no matter how useless—according to templates that define your political fashion?

Not an expert, but I think the pick up artist people sprouted off into the incels. An incel being a pick up artist failure who can't even manipulate women to get laid. — fdrake

But this goes against the idea that we seem to have taken for granted, that misogyny is a result of a lack of success with women. What you’re saying here is that they begin in misogyny.

I'm super sensitised to this because one of my mates lost a lot of their acquaintances because they complained about a bad run of dates, in public, in a frustrated manner. Entitled, resentment, etc. Rumour spread like wildfire. — fdrake

They were cancelled?

There's absolutely no reason to have sympathy with "incels" in their online incarnation — Baden

But there is reason to have sympathy for young men at risk of becoming part of that subculture. Just like Islamic radicalism.

And as victimhood and being different is so fashionable today, the idea of being an incel isn't so bad, at least in the horrible self-help groups of internet echo chambers. — ssu

So the interesting thought here, which I think someone else has expressed in this discussion already, is that what is lacking is shame. In a closely-knit real-world community, one avoids shame at all costs, unless one is out of control. There is a clear distinction between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. And now, with social fragmentation, this is lacking. Since the community that these young men feel is most important in their lives is made up of remote individuals who are free to ratchet up the extreme opinions without any personal consequences, they never meet the healthy opposition that they would have met in the old-style community of people, most of whom they would not have chosen to associate with.

That’s the traditional (communitarian) conservative critique of modernity and postmodernity, and it has a lot going for it.

Not sure I do either.

Nietzsche could have been an incel, but he wasn’t that boring. It’s partly thanks to him that we can identify this certain kind of resentment (ressentiment) in incels. That’s what he criticized. He is to be admired for making himself into something better (but sometimes worse) than what he was—through his writing. In his real life he remained, probably, involuntarily celibate for the most part. But in his writing he is never mean, resentful, or jealous. He still sounds pretty misogynist sometimes, but from a different direction.

I know a young man who, though definitely not an incel, is now a follower of Andrew Tate and, from the way he talks, has absorbed a lot of his ideas from the “manosphere”. I used to think of him as a friend but his sociopathic and misogynist tendencies made me back away, partly just because they made him so horrible to be with.

He and his online pals are part of a self-reinforcing community in which charismatic sociopaths bewitch the less disturbed men with their strong opinions and their charm.

So I wonder how much crossover there is between incels and the sexually successful misogynist “pick-up artists”. Maybe you can graduate from the former to the latter.

I don’t know if you should be worried, but it’s a nasty thing in our society along with many other nasty things, so it’s probably good to be aware of it.

Maybe such thoughts turn to misogyny when the intrusive thoughts become egosyntonic. When anger becomes justice. — fdrake

A scary thought. But then … how and when does that happen?

When the person in front in the queue is old and slow, I have ageist-lite thoughts that I never admit to, so it’s quite a good analogy.