yet she wasn't proposing it at all — TheWillowOfDarkness

I know. :confused:

Several responses are working under the idea OP is suggesting every woman be a political lesbian — TheWillowOfDarkness

You already said that, and I can't see much evidence of it, as I've already said.

Yet here we are, with half the thread acting like someone is proposing every woman desperate to have sex with men is meant to be a political lesbian. — TheWillowOfDarkness

None or very few of the responses assume that she's proposing that, as far as I can tell. I for one did notice that bit, and it doesn't make any difference.

Homework perhaps. But she might be back to discuss things and is just waiting to see the responses. In any case the topics are quite interesting.

Well put.

But you have to hear a song in its entirety before you can dance to it.

The novel existed in it's entirety prior to the first report of it. Melville reported upon something that existed in it's entirety while writing the novel as well. — creativesoul

I'm sure Melville talked about Moby Dick (the novel) before it was finished.

If that's a misunderstanding, then you haven't been clear enough.

What I'm doing here with the odd claim is attempting to drive an existential wedge between reports of things and what's being reported upon. — creativesoul

What does this mean? Do you mean you're arguing against idealism? Are you just saying that things and the reports thereof are different? What is the significance of saying that something exists "in its entirety" etc.? Why does it matter?

women withholding sex from men — StreetlightX

This all turns on the misconception that sex is something that men want and women tolerate. — unenlightened

Precisely. A rather Victorian attitude.

I have two problems with the OP's argument.

Heterosexual relationships, even in the modern-day, illustrate vast disparities in the gender roles between man and the woman. For example, in terms of housework, women are left with the most work to do in the relationship whereas men, even in more egalitarian households, continually tend to do less work than their wives. Women also bear the weight in the public sphere of taking time off of work to bear children, something interviewers do not take into consideration when interviewing men. In this post, I will argue that political lesbianism, or heterosexual women willingly choosing to end their sexual relations with men, is a viable option for feminism. The lack of sexual relations is used as a defiance to the patriarchy by making a choice that does not put men in positions of male superiority. Essentially, this view allows women to choose their sexual orientation based off of the political results they want as feminists. — Bridget Eagles

Considering that most women want to continue having heterosexual relationships, how does it help them for feminists to disavow such relationships? How can it achieve the desired political results? Is it a symbolic protest? It seems to me it would make feminism look utopian at best, ridiculous at worst, thus damaging the progress towards equality. Less obviously, for feminists to abandon heterosexual relationships weakens their claim to be fighting for equality within those relationships, because it looks like an admission that those relationships are inherently unequal.

Generally speaking it looks like a political attack on women, rather than on men. Of course, for feminists this is far from unprecedented.

This can be a viable form of feminism because it allows for the action of sex, which typically demonstrates men as aggressive and dominant and women to be subordinate and passive, to be removed from the sphere of heterosexual interactions. This, as a result, removes the disparity in the treatment of genders through sexual interaction. — Bridget Eagles

Not all sex between men and women is like that, but granting that a lot of it is, this still doesn't look like a good move. A feminist should if she wants, without rejecting feminism, desire to be dominated in the bedroom while at the same time fighting for a fair distribution of duties like housework and childcare. To take all differences between men and women as examples of patriarchy is to turn feminism into a caricature. Does equality really depend on a lack of disparity during sex? Do you really want to make feminism depend on that? If male dominance in sex is ineradicable (not to mention desired by and fulfilling and enriching for women), is feminism thereby rendered wrong?

his ceaseless topic spamming and discussion killing soapboxing? — DingoJones

This is why I deleted a lot of his posts.

Scary

Southwest Cilantro — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Sounds like my kind of place.

So you're wondering specifically what percentage of amateur philosophers have this gene?

Tastes great to me. I use it a lot. I call it cilantro these days, to avoid confusion with the seed.

There is some evidence that cilantrophobes can overcome their aversion with repeated exposure to the herb, especially if it is crushed rather than served whole

https://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-cilantro-taste-like-soap-to-some-people

There's something similar going on with milk.

Need we say more? — Banno

Gone.

The fact that we had hard categories in place organized the clutter a bit better. — Wallows

You've said this several times, and each time I've asked you what you meant, but you never explain. As Amity pointed out, we have categories here.

Yes, I meant to say that religious beliefs deserve special respect and tolerance over and above non-religious beliefs. — T Clark

Nope.

Not that anyone cares, but I'll be 30 next month — Jimmy

By the way, congratulations on being nearly thirty, and happy birthday in advance. Thirty is a good age. You stop being embarrassed about tripping over in the street, you suddenly become really good at sex, and you are still blissfully unaware of the horror that lies ahead.

Missed that. Too busy stroking my Capuchin.

Whose face? Roy Wood's?

Yep, before I even existed.

Less than a month before, it's true.

Before my time sorry

Elaborate!

Almost as old as Bitter Crank

I think we've had a thread about this already Jimmy, so you get a big fat zero for originality so far. :wink:

I don't think I've revealed my age on the forum before, though I'm sure it's obvious which range I'm in from my political and philosophical disillusionment and general world-weariness. 47.

Btw welcome to the forum.

I'm not going to defend neoliberalism or the right wing Brexit ultras, but I'll note that Brexit did arguably represent the chance to escape from the neoliberalism of the EU (aside from whether and how that could actually have succeeded). From that point of view, the dominance of neoliberals among pro-Brexit political leaders is owing to a failure of the Left to get behind and shape the Brexit movement, which I'm tempted to say is or was, like Trump's election to president, an expression of people's frustration with the neoliberal policies that, as Monbiot points out, have done a lot of harm.

But maybe the Brexit angle is not your focus.

Isn't it odd ... — TheMadFool

Depends how you look at it I guess. The conditions are unfavourable for building a new skyscraper on the site of the Empire State Building, but pretty good for sustaining the one that's there.

I guess it's possible that life could be appearing quite often, and immediately being eaten by bacteria.

I find the present conditions of the world - liquid water, air, temperature - actually perfect for life to begin, start from scratch. — TheMadFool

Note that the conditions of the Earth at the beginning of life were different from the present conditions.

Hate speech cultivates the conditions of/for war. — creativesoul

Do you think the following example of hate speech cultivates the conditions for war between Britain and the US?

Too much guns, religion, celebrity, flag waving nationalism, egomaniac, warmongering, stupid constitutional rights obsession. The U.S. is like our deformed offspring. — S

If not, is there any circumstance in which you think it could? Or maybe you think it isn't hate speech at all?

I'd rather acknowledge that sometimes words do lead to bad things than allow a situation where someone could order my family to be murdered and receive no punishment because some had an ideological attachment to free speech laws even more irrational than religious fundamentals' attachment to blasphemy laws. — Baden

I haven't read much of this discussion, but...

Do any serious commentators argue that ordering murder etc. ought to be defended on the basis of the principle of freedom of speech, or on the basis of its constitutional safeguards? I don't think even (reasonable) free speech absolutists would advance that position. Now, this may cast doubt on the purported absolutism of free speech absolutism--in that even it admits exceptions to the freedom of speech acts in general--but I don't think it's what is at issue in the wider debate.

on balance I'd prefer a society where extreme cases of hate speech, for example, surrounding a black person, shouting the N word at them and threatening to lynch them was not tolerated — Baden

What you're referring to here as hate speech would surely be covered by things like criminal threat, intimidation, or incitement to violence. Isn't the introduction of hate speech legislation precisely to cover other cases, namely of harm interpreted more widely, or offence--cases that don't fall under the other laws?

Ah. Now I know I was taking you too seriously.

[Rant]...[/Rant] — Pattern-chaser

At the risk of taking your rant too seriously...

As I understand the view of linguists, English English, and more widely British English, are just as much variants (varieties or dialects) of English as American English. Why should the variety spoken in the original home of the language be regarded as primary, in a world in which English is a native language in other places? After all, English has mutated in England too.

I was actually attempting to link to the YouTube playlist, not that interview in particular, which isn't the most interesting of them, in my opinion. I remember most enjoying the interviews with Ayer, Searle, Bernard Williams, Hubert Dreyfus, Marcuse, Martha Nussbaum, Hilary Putnam, and Anthony Quinton. But yes, Magee's ability to summarize and clarify was brilliant.

Who recognizes the music this track is based on?

the overthrow of basically any authoritarian political regime I can think of has happened by at least physical protest if not outright war — Isaac

Yeah I'm not denying that.

It's worth noting that 'tHe RaDiCaL LeFt CrEaTeD tHe RaDiCaL RiGhT' meme is just another function of the liberal inability to countenance politics beyond the thin film of speech. Nevermind stagnating wages, the destruction of primary industry, the corportization of the media, the swelling of economic inequality, the ballooning of household debt, the evisceration of state investment into public works, the explosion of prisionfare, the glaciating of social mobility, the crushing inflation of educations costs, the increasing capture of regulatory apparatus, the meteoric concentration of industry monopolies, the gutting of union power - no, won't somebody think of the fucking salons and how they look. All the rest is ViOlENcE. The InDiGnITy!

Liberalism is cancer. — StreetlightX

Just from a Left-strategic point of view, I think liberalism is precisely now necessary. The Left antipathy to free speech only makes sense from a position of dominance, as in, it's generally not ok to be openly racist and sexist, and we need to protect those progressive gains. That is, it only makes sense for a Leftist focus on culture at the expense of economics and class, because a concern for the latter, as expressed in your post, is what we need free speech for, given that the societal ills you mention are real (and I agree they are). Pretty much any fundamental social gain either depends on free speech or is intimately associated with a fight against restrictions on speech.

Thus the Left is suicidal in abandoning the defence of free speech to the Right. Liberalism still has the potential to undermine its own social conditions, which is part of its enduring value.

But I guess that's an old and obvious argument, and I think things are a bit more interesting than that. Culture war and identitarian Leftists have not merely forgotten about economics and class. Their position is predicated on an outright rejection of the working class as a progressive political force, and on a concomitant fear and suspicion, namely that the average white Joe is always one Shapiro video away from signing up as a white supremacist. So this Left antipathy to free speech is not merely suicidal or naive, but is an expression of a class hostility.

@csalisbury: The danger for me here is that if I start banging on about "liberal elites", as befits my nauseating role right now, I might look like a kind of proto-fascist. Instead, in my attacks I feel the need to use other terms of abuse such as "petit-bourgeois" so I can remind everyone I'm even more woke than woke. But still, I want to say that in saying so I need not be disavowing my position, exactly. It's more that I'm struggling to find or create the language to use, most often failing and falling back.

:ok:

In arguing that the liberal appeal to the neutral ground of 'the free and open marketplace of ideas' is bullshit (I'm certain about that), is it battle lines that I'm casting? — StreetlightX

In the context of the rest of your posts, yes, obviously.

This might be too obvious so maybe it's been said before, but it must be worth noting that it wasn't Leftists screaming FASCIST! who just exposed Shapiro as a strident fool with horrible views, but a conservative journalist on a mainstream news network giving him a platform.

Otherwise, @StreetlightX, you seem to want to have your cake and eat it, to talk politics in order to scorn talking politics. You presume a position of political certainty where the battle lines are drawn--e.g., the Left vs white supremacist murderers--from which you can make an intervention to tell us all that we're wasting our time at best, paving the road to hell at worst.

But the political situation to me and others is different from that, hence the discussion. Hence the need for discussion.

Can Kant be the most depressing philosopher... just based on the fact his prose are like reading an obscurantist, over elaborating robot with the charisma of the bowling shoe ? — thedeadidea

I get the robot and bowling shoe, but Kant doesn't read like an obscurantist at all.

Scruton?

In fact, I wouldn't want the use of it against the rules either. BC used it, and I'd say he wasn't being racist, merely sort of ironically irreverent.