What Banno said (thanks, I was too lazy to break it down myself).

Funny how people always think that people they agree with are good posters. — Benkei

This is definitely a thing. But personally speaking I can appreciate quality posts that I don't agree with. For example, I think you're a good contributor despite being full of shit.

If you have cause to complain about staff members then have the decency to complain directly to me by PM or in a feedback thread, instead of griping and disparaging the forum as a whole.

By the way, everyone is free to examine the posting history of banned members.

Thanks for the info on a question I didn't ask. — Professor Death

It wasn't for you.

In case it has to stated explicitly: this is not a Russian website, it's in a foreign language, and it's a philosophy forum with no mass appeal, and certainly not in Russia. The Russian authorities don't care about us and I'm happy for people here to criticize the Russian government if they want to.

Tzeentch made some good points and you were too lazy, rude, or ignorant to discuss them.

I don't see why. You're clearly on a war footing already, and it's clouding your judgment.

I serve the TPF members, not the Russian state.

Yeh, they only allow me to keep this forum going on the condition that I stamp out any criticism of Putin or the glorious FSB, defenders of the Motherland.

I moved it to the Lounge because it's a low quality or informal discussion. The one interesting post, from Tzeentch, gained only a stupid response.

To answer your point: that's fair, but because it's not automated it doesn't always happen.

I banned @Asif for unmitigated low quality.

Again no philosophy, and again quite Russia-centric.

Recent highlights:

Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

The characters are grotesques or ciphers: rather than developing, they're only revealed, more or less gradually, and we know that how they respond to circumstances is the only way they ever could. The plot relies on several incredible coincidences. The satirical irony is laid on far too thick, even though we can share his anger and righteousness. Despite his progressive treatment of social issues, and despite his ironic targeting of snobbery, he's still a class-bound snob himself. And the repeated contemptuous descriptions of "the Jew" make for uncomfortable reading (I read somewhere that some of Dickens' Jewish friends complained about this during its serialization, and that he removed the phrase "the Jew" after a certain point in the finished book, but at least in my edition it's there up to the end).

But aside from all that, it's great. The intensity and distinctness of the characters (unchanging as they may be), of the most dramatic scenes, and of his scene-setting descriptions is brilliant. And it's great fun.

War and Peace, Lev Tolstoy

I read it straight after the Dickens and had grouped the two books together in my mind as classic mid-nineteenth century novels, but of course, Tolstoy could hardly be more different. War and Peace feels much closer to my world and my life, and it's more real. The characters develop, change their minds, behave unpredictably. The war bits are much more realistic than I expected, intentionally emphasizing the cowardice and the chaos, the comical errors, the blood and guts, the self-serving lies of the officers, and the basic uselessness of orders and tactics. Tolstoy has some persuasive historico-philosophical arguments and manages to weave them into the plot (except for the final epilogue, which is a repetitive and anti-climactic essay).

Also it's great fun to read. It's full of energy and a passionate love of life and the world--not what you get from Tolstoy's contemporary Dostoevsky.

All Hell Let Loose, Max Hastings

To correct my ignorance of the Second World War--I didn't have a good idea of what happened and when--and especially to see how the Soviet Union fitted in to everything else that was happening, I wanted a one-volume overview, and this turned out to be a pretty good choice. Knowing that Hastings is politically a moderate conservative, hovering around the centre-right, I was surprised at how devastatingly critical he is of the British war effort, not only from a strategic-military point of view but also morally. He shows great sensitivity to the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians in all the countries involved, and doesn't hold back when smashing apart the myths of heroism and sacrifice that have been part of the Allied story ever since 1945 (not that he claims heroism and sacrifice were non-existent). One of the unique features of the book is that almost every paragraph contains quotes from archived letters written by people at all levels of society and the military.

Next:

Anna Karenina, Lev Tolstoy. I know some people say this is the best novel ever, but I can't help but expect it to be a let-down after W&P.

A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov. I confess I got this partly because I discovered that his ancestors were the Learmonths from Scotland. Maybe I'm homesick or something.

The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro. I read this when it was first published, when I was in my early twenties. It creeped me out, I didn't get it, but I was fascinated. Now that I'm older and it feels like time is running out, it'll make more sense.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56, Anne Applebaum. For me this is going to be a kind of sequel to the WW2 book.

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, Anne Applebaum. I mentioned to a Russian friend that I was going to read this book and she impatiently said "It wasn't just the Ukrainians who suffered under Stalin! It was us too!" :roll:

War and Peace again, because it was so good.

Instead of many, why not read a few? It's not all or nothing.

Also it might just be me but all I see is this: — Michael

A direct link to the image gives a 403 "Your client does not have permission to get URL..." — Michael

Me too. Maybe only you can see them @SophistiCat.

I always do when I see them.

Then is blame is always a mistake, and is there no such thing as agency, which would seem to follow?

I was just curious. It seems to me there's a great confusion, at least a great divergence of opinion, about what the difference is.

Because people see mental illness as a character defect rather than a biological disease. — Wheatley

Do you think there are character defects at all?

:cool:

I'm only saying what I'm saying. My first post was kind of making fun of the fact that you're still bitter since I deleted or moved one of your discussions a couple of weeks ago. In my second post I said that anxiety was hard, asked you to explain something I didn't understand, and wished you well. No need to be confused.

By the way, when I talk about stupidity I don't really mean a lack of intelligence so much as an attitude, e.g., thoughtlessness, lack of good sense (being pedantic), laziness, refusal to change one's mind no matter what, and so on.

Neither do I want to exclude people without any philosophical education. It's about the attitude.

I'm not sure you would understand but it's all in my head. Its anxiety. — Wheatley

That stuff is hard sometimes.

If you really want me to stop, I'll stop. — Wheatley

Stop what?

Signing out for a while... — Wheatley

Take it easy.

It's been at least two weeks Wheatley. I thought you'd be over it by now.

I do feel as if a push for heavier moderation has come in the past year or so, but maybe that's my own perception. — Noble Dust

There hasn't really been a concerted push for heavier moderation of low-quality posts. Every so often one of the staff might say to the others, "let's get rid of all this X crap", or "can we stop X from posting all this Y", but very often we don't see it through strictly, and we've been doing that from the start anyway.

What has changed is that we've become less tolerant of racism and sexism, but that doesn't apply to most of your examples.

I pretty much agree with @StreetlightX and @Banno. I think we're too lenient. There's too much low quality stuff on the forum, because the mods are busy dealing with flaming and trolling.

@Noble Dust In my view, Baden's post on how to write an OP lays out an ideal, and casual discussion topics are sometimes all right so long as they're not stupid. Banno divides opinion, but I think his topics are examples of OPs that haven't taken a lot of effort but which are not stupid.

Sorry ssu, but your post is shallow, stupid, and ignorant. Ciao xxx.

And things would have been better if they have stayed in the countryside without an industrial revolution? — ssu

No. It's really annoying when you do this. Many things got worse for many people, but it doesn't follow that I think things would have been better had the industrial revolution never happened. It's really odd that you feel the need at every turn to stamp your foot and insist that capitalism is better than what came before. It is not black and white, obviously.

You minimize the trauma and destructiveness of capitalist ascendancy, but you don't even have to do that to defend the status quo.

Sorry, did the vagabonds or, ahem, Luddites own the land? Who was it stolen from? Or is the argument, as Proudhon put it, that property is a theft? — ssu

Vagabonds existed because the common land was stolen in the enclosures, with many peasants being evicted. Luddites protested the unfair situation that led to the devaluation of their skills, owing to the growing power of the capitalists as traditional economic relations were broken down. But yeah, I guess the treatment of the Luddites is not the best example of direct repression in defence of land-theft, as that battle had been mostly won already.

Well, let's remember again that they weren't as slaves forced into the factory. — ssu

Obviously they were forced by circumstances, if not by direct coercion.

Likely as factory workers, however bad the conditions were then, did get better salaries than working the fields and literally facing hunger. — ssu

What you describe here is poor farmers being forced to work for capitalists.

In any case, I don't know if anyone is saying things were better for peasants than they were for the working class, although in some cases they probably were: peasants sometimes had a level of economic independence that factory workers could only dream of.

But yes, people all over the world go for urban living and factory work instead of staying in their villages. The degree to which they are forced varies geographically and historically. That doesn't go against my points.

So, is the answer Communism or is it capitalism, where we try to fix the problems, jamalrob? — ssu

Although it's irresistible, communism seems like a dangerous utopian dream if it's meant to be an immediate aim. Even as a distant goal it can serve to justify present-day suffering. I am not sure what the answer is ssu.

Your response to KK is emotive and irrational.

It's hardly debatable that the concentration of the ownership of land, and capital in general, can be traced back to theft in the form of such legal measures as enclosures and clearances, with accompanying punishment and repression of the victims (vagabonds, Luddites, etc).

The question we have to address is: radicalism or reform? That land ownership originates in theft might not justify the wholesale dispossession of the owners in one fell swoop. Conservatives and moderates can point to the Bolsheviks' terror-frenzy of dekulakization, starting with Lenin and culminating under Stalin, which I agree was a crime that no original theft can justify (even if the victims had primarily been rich landowners, as claimed). Also, such radical projects usually turn out to be disastrous. And yet, we do live in societies whose unequal distribution of ownership is a legacy of that original theft. So, what to do eh?

What is lacking typically is the understanding just how feudalism was abolished by modern commerce, which is only replaced by very eager figures of speach of "modern day feudalism". As if our current time in the prosperous West with it's democratic structures and welfare state resembles the feudal past. We may have problems today, but they don't anything like under feudalism. Just as our present day farmers, those usually old people who work still with agriculture, are far away from the subsistence farming peasant of the past. — ssu

Feudalism was "abolished by modern commerce" in a specific way that I think justifies drawing a parallel between feudalism and capitalism in terms of the inequality of ownership, property relations, and the relations of production, despite the huge differences between the two systems in other ways.

The bourgeoisie didn't simply cry "feudalism is unfair and we hereby abolish it!", even if it seemed to take that form in certain places and historical moments (where the Enlightenment took its most radical and progressive form (jeez I do sound like a boring old Marxist eh)). What happened is that nobles, even e.g. Scottish clan chiefs, gradually began to find the benefits of capitalism more attractive than their traditional obligations as patriarchs, nobles, or vassals, and became capitalists, alongside and competing with the new capitalists who arose out of commerce. The peasants were out of luck: thus the working class was born.

I don't think anyone is denying that there are huge differences, or that we formally have freedoms that are often beneficial. They key point is, despite that, each of us is thrown into a world in which a small part of the population holds the land and capital, thanks to inheritance and class dominance. Whether one is an owner or, on the contrary, depends on the owners for one's livelihood, with virtually no say over the situation, is an accident of birth--also rather like feudalism.

Well, I hope we still can discuss difficult topics. Because if this forum will have problems for an open dialogue, just think how bad it will be out there in the real World. — ssu

I agree. I want to keep it open to a wide spectrum of views.

Well, he was talking about his rough neighborhood and things what he saw. I don't think he made it up. — ssu

I thought so too at first, but now I suspect he did. In any case, it was his racism that led to the ban. Even if it were true that he'd become racist owing to his bad experiences, it's not an excuse. He was not only "talking about his rough neighborhood and things he saw".

Yes, I considered addressing what you meant by meaningless sex, but decided to assume you were equating it with casual sex.

Well we're in agreement then. But I suspect you have a higher bar for what you consider to be a "genuine connection".

Deceiving and hurting unsuspecting people is bad, sure. I was making the point that lies and manipulation are most often just part and parcel of flirtation and casual sex, entered into willingly by both parties, and thus not bad.

If sex doesn't mean anything, then it's masturbation. — darthbarracuda

For you it might be. For others, casual sex is most often a much more complex and interesting connection between two people than mere masturbation, no matter how brief the encounter.

Fair enough.

But I don't even think it's clear how to distinguish genuine from fake interest. In performing a connection, a connection is made, I think. Often.

I find it uncomfortable as well. Sex without genuine connection seems to me like masturbating with someone else's body. You pretend to care so that you can use someone else.

And to know that another person doesn't care about you beyond your appearance, and to be okay with that, makes it sound like you don't really care about yourself — darthbarracuda

A sad and unimaginative view. The worst thing is that you move from personal discomfort so easily into moral condemnation.

People like to have sex and they play games around that. If both parties are playing the game, it's a form of relating to someone as a person, not merely using someone as a means or treating them as an object.

It's more like a dance. A dance is not made up of truthful statements and there's no reason flirting should be either, just because it happens partly in language.

Wanting to be an "object of desire" is tantamount to wanting to be "treated as an object." — TheMadFool

I disagree with Michael on this: I think you're right. To find someone physically attractive just is to objectify them.

The problem is in treating or viewing someone only as an object, which is probably the sense in which "objectification" is used when described as a problem. One can dress with the knowledge that one will be objectified, but one ought to be able to expect to be treated as a person as well.

It's like Kant's ethics. It's not that you can never treat someone as a means, but that you ought never treat someone as nothing but that.

It was low quality and unphilosophical.

:up:

More than that, though: the "resistance to race", as Street puts it, even if it's a luxury, is no less progressive for that. One can hardly advocate for a world in which a black writer is a "writer" and not a "black writer" by self-identifying as a "white writer"--and feeling faux-guilty about it. I think the focus on whiteness here is entirely regressive.

I'll take it! — StreetlightX

I knew you'd say that.

I'd think you'd make a really good fascist, given a chance. — Marchesk

In style more than in substance. Street would make a better Leninist, I think. Hang the bloodsucking kulaks, that kind of thing.

@StreetlightX Calm down

I don't really care much to equate programming with philosophical thinking. At most it can only map to a logical modality of thought. In programming you create the world entirely and the only thrown errors are the ones which you explicitly check for. Programming doesn't help you to think, it helps you to put limitations on thought. To set bounderies. Programming is all rules and no pathos. Yet philosophy is brimming over with affect (yes even the analytical tradition and the so called logical positivism). — emancipate

:up: