"Bellicism" means you're an asshole on principle. — T Clark

"Bellendism" has similar connotations.

There's a quote function for quoting, which I didn't use — Benkei

:up:

The paraphrase was totally clear in its form and its intention.

Funny, it's so obvious that it ought to be a double bluff.

Evidence suggests he was @John Harris, @Thanatos Sand, and @Thanatos Sannd.

Banned @Jack Rogozhin for being a returning banned member.

You don't have any. Maybe they were deleted by mods. If you haven't posted recently, there's not much we can do, unfortunately.

I took some time to respond as when dealing with genius one ought to choose one's words carefully. My considered opinion is that when we speak of "aliens", we are speaking primarily of stuff we've seen in movies, which I expect has little or nothing in common with actual aliens if there are any. The plot of this movie starring the U.S. congress and a few supposedly reliable witnesses won't be interesting to me until it starts to get significantly weirder.

No. They should move this “thread” (just a question and an emoji) to The Lounge. — javi2541997

:100:

Isn't that the best we can say? — Hanover

I think I just did the best saying.

I want to believe there are aliens so Trump will never have been the most powerful person and/or alien in the universe and/or in the future will not have been being so ever.

Cool. I don't do YouTubes so I'll have to look that up later on wiki or something to reassess my skept levels.

I strongly disagree with Mikie's generalization as per the quote — Baden

For balance, I very much agree with:

I don’t care about whether people are Christian or not; I care about what they do — Mikie

OK, fair enough.

That's not really a mod bias but the prevailing mode of discussion, which is not necessarily indicative of what we want to see. There's superficial atheism and superficial religiosity. In a consumer society they dominate and hardly differ, imo. Does it even matter what most people say on the subject when the basic way of life, notion of success etc. is so similar?

tl;dr - the evangelism guideline is generally used to catch people who broadcast the same message, all the time, in multiple threads, and do not engage in reciprocal discussion. — fdrake

:100:

@Leontiskos

I strongly disagree with @Mikie's generalization as per the quote, but his is an opinion that's perfectly acceptable to express here, just as it's perfectly acceptable to express the opposite view. What is not ok is to use the forum predominantly as a tool for whatever ideology, religious or otherwise.

The scientific American article was a good read, yes. I don't have anything to add on the other articles as I only read Kennedy's words there, and confirmed them in Wiki. His words themselves are enough to justify the criticisms of him. That's my last comment on this.

:lol:



No, as, for one thing, I never "lauded" the articles you criticized. Also, I (charitably, considering the context) expressed agnosticism on anti-semitic intentions. And @unenlightened exposed Kennedy's tactic neatly. So, there's nothing left to say except he did it to himself and it's a good thing he did.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-robert-f-kennedy-jr-distorted-vaccine-science1/ — RogueAI

Good read. Shows what real lies and distortions look like. All in the service of attempting to thwart proper healthcare for e.g. kids to the extent that could cause their deaths. It's great that he's binned himself now and a nice irony that he's complaining about being misquoted in the process. Essentially a parasite that used his wealth and family connections to manipulate the gullible and ignorant into supporting him on an issue he helped manufacture.

@jorndoe I'm not going to engage with his fellow conspiracy theorists on this. But I'll add that it's a good thing that the individual in question, who is deliberately mendacious or mentally ill or both, is finished and out of the race. His latest comments (regardless of whether the intention behind them is anti-semitic) are a hardly necessary addition to prove his unfitness for any kind of public responsibility whatsoever. It's a real pity he had to ruin himself on vaccines when he actually has good positions on other stuff and that the Dems can't come up with a decent candidate to challenge Biden, who is awful.

Ignore the bizarre defences of Kennedy. The best thing to do is to direct people to his Wikipedia page which gives a good summary of this disturbed individual's life and has lots of links to his books, articles, and interviews where people can read firsthand his promotion of ridiculous and dangerous anti-scientific conspiracy theories, listen to his vicious attacks on Fauci and other health professionals, and generally experience the deeply twisted mind of an irrational propagandist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr.

As for the latest stupidities, of course the actual quote, his exact words, are contained in the news articles as well as on the Wiki page and the excuses of his apologists are absurd (ignore them). Anyhow. it's not surprising a privileged rich dude living off and exploiting his famous heritage thinks he can get away with stuff like that when he's been getting away with it his whole life.

why single out sex? — unenlightened

Hypothesize your reaction to a son or daughter coming to you and declaring their intention to begin a career as a sex worker vs. a sports professional. Wherein there is a difference lies the answer to your question. The open minded liberal tends to be open minded and liberal about prostitution as long as it's "them" that's doing it.

Mark Fisher wrote a highly controversial piece on this tendency in 2008, Exiting the Vampire Castle. It's worth a read. — fdrake

Thanks for reminding me of Mark Fisher. I need to go back and read his books again. :pray:

As an aside, Sands is an interesting case because he died protesting the re-categorization of IRA members such as himself as criminals rather than de-facto prisoners of war. So his epistemic status was in dispute. The British "knew" he was a criminal because they decided to know that, whereas he and his supporters "knew" he wasn't because they decided not to recognize that decision.

Also, why is it an 'idiotic question' to ask whether you believe we currently live in a patriarchy? I think that is a pretty key question since it determines whether we're limited to judging your theory in a historical context or in a contemporary one, and I think there's very little substance when judging it by a contemporary one. — Tzeentch

Un has been stating his belief that we currently live in a patriarchy across at least three different threads over the past month or so. Why is there little substance to his theory? He's taken a clear biological human distinction and drawn cultural and ideological conclusions from it. Where does he go wrong? Do social values of modern consumerist societies not seem broadly more masculine to you? Is corporate and political power not still predominantly in the hands of men? Refuse to call it a patriarchy if you like but then give your theory as to why this has been and continues to be the case.

The Nordic model may be as close to heaven as we are going to get. Soviet-style communism is not. — BC

We can dream. Anyhow, I saw something cool today that's a propos. Some graffiti downtown read "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?'' Someone had written on a post-it note stuck up next to it ''Because I'm smart.''

:love:

Either you want the U.S. to be a democracy in which case it's absurd to wish rival parties out of existence (this is the one place where choice and competition are actually important). Or you don't want a democracy but a dual party system that makes a minimal pretence to democracy but where corruption, laziness, and complacency are the norm. I understand in individual cases actual democracy can be inconvenient but the degree to which it is so is directly proportional to your inability to believe in it.

I'm not saying I know of any solution better than the Nordic model either. Which is what? Consumerist lite? I will continue to loudly complain though. :smile:

As though, for instance, the obesity epidemic would be solved if people were just less lazy and had more willpower. — Judaka

The approach is always on one level self-contradictory and on another totally consistent. Self-contradictory in that the solution tends to be dominated by some or other consumer context (buy a gym membership or low fat foods or this diet book or do this ad-laden online course etc) the logic of which is to process real willpower (freedom to refuse) into freedom of choice--while being saturated in talk of willpower. And totally consistent in that that is just what consumerism is, an attempt to process the will / freedom away to create malleable and reliable consumers that are as predictable, manipulable, and 'free' as farm animals.

Imagine if we taught our kids, "the less stuff you have and the less material wealth you can get by on, the more character you are likely to have and the stronger a person you're likely to be. An important goal in life is to have less and do more with it and the route to that goal is exercising the freedom to refuse". That is, imagine if we taught them the truth, which is the exact opposite of the prevailing ideology.

Good OP. :up:

To what extent should consumers be free to make choices about what products and services they consume in the context of neoliberal capitalism? — Judaka

To what extent are consumers aware that more important than freedom to choose in this context is freedom to refuse? And that, as per your analysis, fostering addiction is the corporate war on freedom to refuse (because that freedom is an existential threat to them). But from freedom to refuse comes the self, so their war is on us and our capacity to understand our situation. Education would be nice but relative GDP is the dominant indicator of a "successful'' society, so it seems we're in a Moloch-type race to the bottom.

Thank you thank you, magical talking crow — Italy

Love it. :starstruck: Can I be "mystical murmuring monkey'' or some such?

It would be a very odd imbalanced view to completely reject all masculine traits, yes.

This is not Matriarchy. This is just Patriarchy ruled by females.
In the future you mention there is not much change of the world, you just put the women in place of men and the system remains more or less the same.

Matriarchy and Patriarchy are created out of feminine and masculine qualities, not gender (although obviously there is correlation there.) — TheMadMan

Exactly. Just swapping bodies is not what this is about.

Edit: Just noticed this is a month old comment but the point is still being missed on several related threads...

:chin:

But quite possible that people originally started wearing clothes for other reasons, e. g. warmth, protection etc. and this, following Un's logic, is what sexualised nudity and brought the taboo into being.

I find it quite worrying that people attribute such things to masculinity without batting an eye. In my view, this is nothing other than misandry - man-hating — Tzeentch

Or you could look it more neutrally. Aggression is often on lists of masculine traits and violence is a heightened form of aggression. None of this suggests any essential link between biological sex and violence because masculinity is a way of characterizing traits and behaviours that can apply to either sex, though they are ideologically associated with men. Or the way I've put it, marketed to men.

There's a sense then in which men are controlled and formed in ways detrimental to their personhood by the social roles that are expected of them. Viewing things that way, there's no misandry in negative characterizations or criticisms of masculinity. On the contrary, being able to separate our egos from our masculinity frees us to view ourselves as being persons before men or anything else.

Why make some taboos taboo? — Hanover

In several Middle Eastern countries, it's taboo to kiss in public. Suppose we suggested to them that that taboo was unnecessary and their response was "so, by the same token, we should just let people have sex in public!'' I think the point is we choose our taboos (at some level) and we can examine their individual merits. @unenlightened's point about sexualization and nudity is at the very least worth thinking about.

But I love 50s science fiction. It's the triumph of substance over style. There's a purity about those stories, the centrality of the idea, and the demand of the audience that the idea itself be the most interesting thing in a story, not the author's style. — Srap Tasmaner

I think I would have loved PKD too around the time I was reading Asimov, Simak, Arthur C. Clarke etc. But somehow I missed him. So, no disrespect to that, I just can't get back into it. What grabs me now is something different.

I had a career in education that I doubt I'll go back to. Couldn't really stand behind what I was doing or the context in which I was doing it. Similarly to the above, but it wasn't just the exams, the whole thing was drenched in an ugly instrumentalism that made it boring, transactional and stressful for both teachers and students.

You're not eliminating competition, you're just reducing the risk of loss so that the limited reward of winning is worth entry into the contest.

The risk of loss is the stress associated with criticism or being told you rank beneath your peers. The reward of winning is a pat on the back. To get more entrants, you either need to reduce the risk of loss (e.g. don't have an objective rating system or don't permit harsh criticism) or increase the rewards of winning (e.g. give the winner $1,000).

Since we have limited resources to increase rewards, we opt to limit risk. That is, you just rewrote the rules to your competition. You didn't eliminate it. — Hanover

Well, I can't take credit. It was @unenlightened who got me thinking about it and @Caldwell who took charge of the least competitive and most successful round. Anyhow, a couple of points, the first is yes, competition wasn't eliminated, but, as I said "purposely downplayed". That is, the result, winning or losing, was made less important.

But this wasn't done in order to get more entrants (my initial concern was that being less competitive would result in less entrants because I was also looking at it overly superficially). In fact, the idea of adjusting the activity purely on that basis rather than focusing only on what would make for a good activity parallels the idea of entering such an activity to "win" as opposed to participate.

So, we're back to result over process again. We can conceptualise the competition itself as ends oriented (competing against other hypothetical or proposed competitions with the prize being the number of entrants) or we can conceptualize it as process oriented (something that is good in itself where the focus is on the experience) and so with the writing of the stories or anything worth writing or doing (including this debate we're having now). There's usually a balance to be had that doesn't involve the elimination of either aspect. The default approach tends to be skewed towards the competitive though.

As to stress tolerance, a critical attribute of any competitor (arguably as critical as intelligence and conscientious), if that is more a male trait, you are correct that its reduction would benefit women. That thesis would rest on the idea that women seek stability more than men, perhaps owing to their nurturing instincts, but that's an idea based on stereotype, but maybe supportable empirically. I don't know. I've certainly known many stress tolerant women — Hanover

You must have taken me up wrong as this is a distortion of where I'm coming from. It's not a competition between men and women to get society to cater to their respective needs that I'm espousing. That would be unfortunately ironic. What I'm saying is first of all let's recognize that the prevailing and dominant ideology is masculine. We're infused with it and it's evident in the default way we conceptualise our interrelationships>>aggressive, competitive, ends oriented etc. Then let's ask why and what we can do about it to make things better for everyone, male and female (Just as I believe the short story competition was better for everyone when reconsidered as an "activity").

To reiterate, though the primary beneficiaries of a patriarchal society are men, they are not men in general. As@180 Proof pointed out, patriarchy (as I conceive it, simply a society dominated by masculine values) funnels wealth and power to a small cadre of a particular type who happen to be men, but theoretically could be of either sex. And the solution is not to eliminate competition or demonize men or masculine values but to recognize that the way we understand our interrelationships is infused with an arbitrary self-justifying way of looking at things that, I would argue, is deficient and in some senses destructive. (The short story "competition" vs "activity" issue is this in microcosm).

So while maybe men have certain competitive advantages in society, they don't serve to promote happiness. — Hanover

Yes. Everyone loses.

(I haven't read the Yin/Yang thread by the way, but I suspect there's plenty of overlap with what we're talking about here.)

Sorry, but deleted a few posts as this is not the place to have a debate about any particular poster. You have every right to complain to the mod team by PM of course, but let's stay on topic, thanks.

What happens next in your view?