Oh, sure, this has been happening with Trump since the beginning. My objection is to the naughty-three-year-old-with-hand-in-the-cookie-jar response of pointing to his brother and saying "He did it!" when mummy catches him. Although in this case, for Trump and his apologists, it's "He did it" (the Dems) and "Mummy did it" (the "fake!" news media). Anywhere that's not a space for idiocy should immediately disinfect itself of that ideological cockroach poo.

From what I've read, the only reason he said he was unhappy with the chants was at Ivanka's cajoling. But throwing his supporters under a bus didn't play too well with the Breitbart crowd so he retracted his non-racism and lauded the racists as 'great patriots'. It's a rather random dance of whim and dumb which could lead anywhere at this point.

More funny/sad. But we don't have to go as far as the Guardian to highlight this kind of absurdity. Right here in this discussion you have the asinine suggestion that racism is not a problem because a poster can't see it and therefore those who object to racism are actually promoting it. How do you combat that lobotomized level of stupidity? Someone who insists on believing the 'other side' is the cause of the very thing their side is blatantly espousing or covering for is suffering from more than a defect in IQ, more than run-of-the-mill ignorance, they are on a plane of emotional blindness that regular folks just have no access to. They are beyond help. What can we do but pray for them. :pray:

Let's all go out and tell some Jewish Americans to go back to where they came from because Republicans not at all being utter hypocrites will pat us on the back and tell us that's just fine. :confused:

Here's another funny/sad. The exact words Trump tweeted are quoted in federal guidelines as being a racist comment that is against the law to utter in work places. But of course I'm sure the Dems put that in because this is all their fault for pretending racism exists. :lol:

Funny, while Trump's minions are out there pretending he hasn't been openly racist, one was asked by Chris Cuomo: "Well, what if he said he was actually a racist? Would you support him then?" The poor guy was stumped. "That's a tough one" was the best he could he manage.

But, yeah, Trump warned us he could take a gun out on the street and shoot someone (preferably a black or brown person, apparently) and his supporters would still cheer him on. I think his ego is leading him to test that theory re racism. He's wondering how far he can take it before Republicans refuse to continue to walk the goose-step behind him. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

Banned @Ilya B Shambat for persistently posting low quality OPs copy-pasted from elsewhere on the internet after being warned not to.

Others can just look at the data re Phil majors.

http://dailynous.com/2019/01/03/philosophy-majors-make-money-majors-humanities-field/

@Wallows
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/democratic-socialism-social-democracy-nordic-countries

Worth a read. (Particularly re the essential ownership of means of production aspect to socialism).

What other forms are there, asks the uneducated pig... — Wallows

Depends who you ask. It does go well beyond Marx but he's still the dominant figure, certainly in unis.

I strongly dislike Marx, by the way. I don't equate him with socialism at all. — Terrapin Station

How would you define socialism such that it excludes Marxism? Or are you just saying that the two are not the same thing?

I'd pay it myself except I'm a broke socialist relying on capitalist charity to live. Which reminds me, I'll need a coupla more centuries on that loan...

Tbh, I'm speculating from what I know from unis outside the U.S.

Marx is not generally covered in finance and accounting though maybe to some degree in economics whereas he's likely to feature more in philosophy courses, I would think. And yes, the unsures stats suggest only lawyers know less about socialism than business majors. :D

Why do you think philosophy majors are so enamored with socialism? — Wallows

Because they understand it. Hence by far the lowest numbers of unsures.

But why can't we applaud someone for the important things while ignoring everything else? I mean we all applaud Hitler for reducing joblessness, don't we? ... Don't we?

:lol:

So, Trump achieved more jobs by borrowing money during a boom created by his predecessor and handing all the loot to corporations and the rich. His grand economic plan is to borrow when you already have money, splurge it to make stupid people happy then have no money when you need it and blame it on poor people scrounging welfare so you can take what little they have from them to give to rich people during the next boom. Of course, this is totally unsustainable, but who cares? A country can just go bankrupt and then start again, right? ... Right?

Just watched the full video and it is fucking awesome. More so for its implications for broader language acquisition and sociocultural research than any specific conclusions drawn, which the researcher didn't really get into. There's a very dark side to this too but that's probably for another discussion. I'll have to look the guy up for more details on how his work plays re language acquisition theory (thanks for the links) but the method jives well with the sociocultural approach.

Well, writing is one of the things I do and I like to jazz things up sometimes. I've admitted before it's self-indulgent but I'd always be willing to explain what I'm on about. Pinky promise. :wink:

No you didn't. You picked one sentence from a thinker you're unfamiliar with and strawmanned him on the basis of interpreting the words in that sentence for your own purposes.

What I'm asking you to do is read about the ideas of the thinker you're criticizing so at least there's something to be discussed. Here's a whole chapter, for example, specifically on thought and word. Try that for a start. And note particularly:

"... the basic methodological defect of nearly all studies of thinking and speech – that which underlies the fruitlessness of this work – is the tendency to view thought and word as two independent and isolated elements whose external unification leads to the characteristic features of verbal thinking.

We have attempted to demonstrate that those who begin with this mode of analysis are doomed to failure from the outset."

Thinking and Speech. Lev Vygotsky 1934 Chapter 7 Thought and Word

Just read the posts and the quotes. You're wasting our time here. And no it wasn't a personal attack any more than your comment on Vygotsky was a personal attack on him. If you're going to dish it out, be prepared to handle the same.

I am going to follow this piece of advice, from website: — Amity

The advice goes without saying. What it often comes down to is which theory is least inconsistent with the observable facts of language learning. For example, Skinner's behaviourist approach doesn't account for novel constructions etc.

Had a look at some of the vid. Interesting that in the minute or so I watched the speaker already used a Vygotskyian influenced term, i.e "scaffolding" and the process seems very tied to the sociocultural approach. So, thanks for the link. Will watch more and say more anon.

My father once said to me "Michael, behave." in a somber and serious, but not at all angry, voice. I was around three to three and a half. I answered, "I am being have". Pronounce that with a long "A" not short, as in "behave". I had drawn correlations, associations, and/or connections between being good and behaving. Being have was being good.

That wasn't parroting. It was a misuse of language, but perfectly understandable. — creativesoul

So you're arguing against a behaviourist approach a la Skinner (which is thoroughly outdated and has been refuted anyway) not against Vygotsky who proposes a sociocultural approach.

Rubbish.

Some. Certainly. Most. Certainly. Not all. It takes pre-existing thought to learn words/language. — creativesoul

So, it's rubbish but it's certainly mostly true? You seem to be having trouble with the concept 'rubbish'. Perhaps some thought would help. Your posts are confused strawmen based on taking one sentence out of context and mangling it.

I mean if you had even bothered looking at this on the same page:

"The relation of thought to word is not a thing but a process, a continual movement back and forth from thought to word and from word to thought"

Your whole criticism falls to pieces.

Though it should have been obvious anyway as Vygotsky said "not merely" rather than "always" in the part you quoted

"(No bumps allowed. If you want to attract replies, think of a better way)."

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/480/site-guidelines/p1

Coincidentally, that was @Michael's addendum to the rules--if memory serves.

As per un's point, the extent to which the lack of activity referred to as laziness is so referred in that pejorative sense is fairly arbitrary across and even within societies and historical periods. One person's man of leisure is another's layabout. One's free spirit is another's bum. One's esteemed aristocrat is another's parasite. So the evaluative term doesn't tell you much apart from that folks like to control each other's behaviour by making them feel bad about it especially when they resent the positive aspect of that behaviour which they are forced through the same kind of social pressure they are in the process of applying in furthering said evaluation to obscure from themselves. So, what is "laziness"? A weapon-word used to whip donkeys into shape—very often by wannabe flowers of civilization.

When you throw crap at Trump, he just eats it and shits roses.

In fact, this place is entirely a product of his colon.

Ah, it's eating me inside that I've not yet read Vygotsky. — StreetlightX

First came across him through a uni course in linguistics. Haven't read as much of him as I should have, but from what I have, I like the way he rolls.

Or yet another revision: words don't mean things; we mean things by way of words. — StreetlightX

Yes, and then become aware of the process, confusing ourselves along the way.

Self-sedimenting of inner voice' - that sounds murky.
What do you mean by this? — Amity

Oh, I mean more or or less the gradual development of self-consciousness (viewed as self-reflexive social functioning) which occurs through the gradual internalisation of the external (the sociocultural context including language).

Via Vygotsky:

“Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.”

https://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/social-development/

Bump — Wallows

Please don't do that.

Vygotsky categorises this as the movement from word to concept:

"[A] concept is more than the sum of certain associative bonds formed by memory, more than a mere mental habit; it is a complex and genuine act of thought that cannot be taught by drilling, but can be accomplished only when the child’s mental development itself has reached the requisite level. At any age, a concept embodied in a word represents an act of generalization. But word meanings evolve. When a new word has been learned by the child, its development is barely starting; the word at first is a generalization of the most primitive type; as the child’s intellect develops, it is replaced by generalizations of a higher and higher type—a process that leads in the end to the formation of true concepts. …"

Vygotsky - Thought and Language

And this parallels the gradual internalisation of the social to the inner voice whose self-sedimentation obscures the nature of its origin. That voice being the substrate from which said concepts speak.

Yep, while children's ability at explicit logical analysis of language is obviously far poorer on average than adults, they are highly sensitive to the emotional valences and contextual cues around which particular chunks of language are uttered: functions, desires, behaviours etc. Kids instinctively pick up on what's being done and that has a visceral impact on them such that productive use rearises in a similar context. You often hear that children soak up language like sponges, and we think of them absorbing new vocabulary, grammatical rules and so on. But what they're really soaking up is how to live in the context of people speaking, and the words and grammar are less important than the linguistic acts (in whatever form) that can be repeated and / or reformulated (not just imitation @Amity, see Chomsky vs Skinner in the 60s) in order to master the function that needs to be mastered. And it has to be so considering a) how much of language is idiomatic / metaphorical etc. and b) that children are thrown into a socio-linguistic world in which they can only navigate through achieving affects on other language speakers, with the currency of affect, again, not being words and grammar directly but particular speech acts that may even be sentences or phrases that can't be broken into their constituent parts and retain their sense.

Swedish women are beautiful, and Sweden has stronger feminism than does United States. — Ilya B Shambat

Proving, using the same kind of simplistic logic / non-science that pollutes most of your OP, that feminism makes women more beautiful / slimmer etc.

But let's not stop with that... My brother was recently in Houston, Texas. He noted how overweight people are there. Indeed, Texas, according to statistics, has among the highest proportion of overweight people of both sexes in the U.S. Whereas in Colorado, Connecticut, and Massachusetts reside amongst the slimmest folks in the country.

https://amp.livescience.com/18889-cities-obesity-rates.html/

Now, the latter slimmer states are more Democrat and left-wing than the former, and these measures correlate well with feminist views. Again, feminism makes you slimmer.

But let's not stop with that... Another thing my brother noticed as he travelled around was that the working class in the U.S. seemed to be heavier than the middle class. It was out in the wealthier burbs that the slimmest ladies were to be found. But middle-class college-educated women form the very demographic hub of feminism, no? I guess... feminism makes you slimmer.

You might be interested in this one, un.

https://k-punk.org/democracy-is-joy/

"For human beings who want to move in the direction of love and freedom, the only option consists in the apparent paradox of theoretico-practically inserting themselves into the naturalistic matrix of cause and effect. The effect is to break down the cordon sanitaire that Hume placed around emotions, preserving bourgeois thought’s “commonsense” division between feelings and thought. In refusing this opposition, Radical Enlightenment democratises the possibility of what Lynne Segal calls Radical Happiness (with the proviso that Spinoza preferred to think of joy rather than happiness – because of the association of happiness with happenstance)

Emotions don’t just happen, they emerge out of fields of cause and effect which can be analysed. This means that feelings can be engineered, in a hyperstitional spiral, which has more to do with what Justin Barton calls “lucidity” than with what academic philosophers call Reason. I’m using the term “emotion” rather than “affect” here, very deliberately. Affect as it is now routinely used by academics is pretty much completely opposed to what Spinoza meant by it. "

I've only sparred with Lacan and found some of his concepts intuitively attractive. Maybe csal who sounds like he's done the full 12 rounds.

Positing the negation of identity accompanying incursions of the real as necessarily traumatic doesn't imply (in my book) nothing good can come from the trauma or that the trauma need be of some very dramatic nature. It would depend on the specifics of the incursion. You could maintain a conception of the Real as threatening and potentially destructive and so a source primarily of a socially-moulding fear along with ultimately positively transformative effects of specific encounters. I may have hammed up the description in my initial post, but I'm fairly sanguine about the whole thing. As I am about alternatives. Just don't pin the zombie librarian thing on me, please.

Maybe there's an art of encountering the real, which is risking trauma for something else, using various techniques and social and emotional stores of self-belief to guide you through. — csalisbury

Sounds too uplifting. And your book was due for return yesterday. :razz:

Even if the real is that in which the social and symbolic is suspended, it doesn't follow that the only access to it is trangressive violence to the social and symbolic. If you're playing chess and also want to sip lemonade, you don't have to knock the board over first. — csalisbury

Behavioural limitations associated with norms or personal habits or personalities don't necessarily make us avoid trauma, the limitations can keep the trauma bottled in, giving it structure. Someone who has gone from narcissist to narcissist in their relationship history and has that as their norm need not be so afraid of symbolic transgression perturbing their behaviour. The personality that forms in wake of an encounter with the real is not necessarily diminished one, it could bloom. — fdrake

I'm conceptualising the real (or the Real) here as that place utterly beyond identity and the social, but in which the potential for identity via the social is fostered.

Per Lacan:
"The real is that which resists symbolization absolutely."
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan: Freud's Papers on Technique

So, sure, the swapping of social norms at a micro-level can be freeing, particularly when, as in your example, fdrake, what's being swapped is the smaller exception for the larger rule. But what do you swap the highest level of the social for? What's left is the obverse of identity. It's by definition traumatic.

See also: The Real

"The primordial Real in which a (pre-Oedipal) human subject is born is differentiated from the real which a subject integrated into the symbolic order experiences. In the former, the real is the continuous, "whole" reality without categories and the differential function of language. Following the mirror stage, however, and the eventual entrance of the imaginary and the symbolic (the split of the subject between the conscious imaginary and the unconscious symbolic), the real may only be experienced as traumatic gaps in the symbolic order. An example of this are traumatic events such as natural disasters, which effectively break down the signification of everyday life and cause a rupture of something alien and unrecognizable, without the usual grammar of the symbolic that conditions how to make meaning of something and how to proceed."

Of course, there's no obligation for you to accept that analysis either in whole or in part. But that was (more or less) where I was coming from.

Nobody? Who is Nobody? You might as well use the old fashioned term "God" -- The Abyss that Looks Back - old Gives a Fuck Himself. There are traditions that Nobody can be realised as Jesus or Buddha, but otherwise, it is Little-old Ritual Me running the show and making history. — unenlightened

The idea there was exactly to avoid the society/individual-ritual-which-comes-first-chicken-and-egg-vs-controlling-deity fork while maintaining the idea of something beyond absolute arbitrariness re cultural development. So, not "God" nor "nobody" but "Nobody".

But to be clear, I am describing in words something not thought but felt. — unenlightened

Aren't we all at some level unless we're merely parroting memes? The emotional response gets its validity from being a condensed form of reason as per your analysis. And generally, reconfiguring emotional content using reason may open up novel emotional perspectives and the novel reasons accompanying them. Doesn't sound very sexy, but...

There is a lack of respect for emotion, that culminates precisely in the denial of its reality, that has devastating consequences both for the individual and for society. Matter and energy are fine notions and very useful at times, but reality is made of giving a fuck. — unenlightened

Agree, in a poetic/melodramatic moment I once wrote:

"The automation of instrumental ends, the ultimate efficiency and triumph of enlightenment reason, has, as its dark after-image, the annihilation of thought itself and so the absolute superfluity of the form of reasoning it champions and that underlies the logic of its existence. The triumph of subjective reason then can only be fully glimpsed in its demise. Enlightenment devours itself before our eyes and demands we applaud its victory. And the God we killed in its name revenges himself on us by showing that what is most sacred in us must evaporate just as he did in the brilliant light of progress."

Which was motivated by some of the same concerns, I think.

Colin Kaepernick: 1, Conservative Karma: 0.

@Brett As @Bitter Crank alluded to, logic is not normally a method by which thought processes, but a method through which the processes of thought are analysed.

The Atrocity Exhibition - J.G Ballard
(Particularly funny chapters: "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.")
K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher - Mark Fisher

More from the article:

"...my question about whether we can be persuaded into the “right” belief about our “true selves” rests on the false idea that there is some truth waiting to be discovered. And that we can get at it with enough evidence, as though the Alex of today was waiting, dormant, inside the Alex of 2000, and that the right sort of evidence could have revealed him. Of course it wasn’t."

Great story. Bouncer Alex was no more "true" Alex than toffee-nosed Alex because there was no correct "identity of Alex" waiting to be found. There were and are circumstances and reactions and redistributions of potentials, and out of it comes someone who is more or less comfortable in their own skin. So, identity cleaves to ritual and rituals form of identities in more or less stable configurations. The substance is nowhere to be found and can't be reined in—as in defined and controlled by—rationality. Which leaves a hole in what rationality should be. History never ends and Nobody is at the wheel.