but that is in the thought it was not too graphic for you. — noys

What?

It is fair to fear immigration if you have different skin color to the immigrants — noys

This is the very definition of racism - discrimination based on skin color.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/07/jair-bolsonaro-coronavirus-positive-test-brazil-president

I legitimately hope this son of a bitch drops dead.

Barring that, if someone could stab him in the stomach again, this time with a bigger and more serrated knife, that would be fine too.

Damn you I'm trying to read other stuff look what you're making me do.

via Jose Benardete, I think the most concise definition of metaphysics I know - at least in it's classical guise:

"Metaphyscis in its classic sense has always been understood to be the rational investigation of the eternal order. Central to that investigation is the distinction between that which is eternal and that which is perishable, and though metaphysics addresses itself to both of those grades of being, its primary concern lies with the eternal, so that if there is nothing eternal, or if nothing eternal can be known, then metaphysics is an impossibility. The distinction between the eternal and the perishable may be said to be a cosmological one, in that the concept of time is cardinal to it.

That distinction may be translated into what might be styled ontological terms, as a distinction between the necessary and the contingent. What is eternal must also be necessary, and in this sense metaphysics is the science of being qua being, or of being as such, or of being insofar as it is necessary. If there is nothing which is necessary, or if nothing necessary can be known, then metaphysics is impossible." ("The Analytic A Posteriori and the Foundations of Metaphysics")

No idea what you're on about.

This is dumb. You may as well have said that 'one objection to anti-racism is racism'.

Ronald Bogue - Deleuze on Literature

How many race riots were there during Jim Crow? Oh yeah, quite a lot. There was a relative quiet spell after the war until the early 60s. In the 60s the first riots started in 1963, before the first draft of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and before the assasination of JF Kennedy. Kennedy initially wanted to stay out of the "civil rights mess" and it was only after the escalation in Birmingham in May 1963, civil rights got on his to-do list. There's a riot that directly influenced the leader of the nation to do something about the underlying causes.

It was Lyndon B. Johnson who had the Act passed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act wasn't passed until 1965. King was assasinated in 1968. Most of the riots were the year before (the long hot summer). But yes, riots also broke out after his assassination. — Benkei

:up: The civil rights movement was wrought end-to-end with violence and it's threat, and anyone who thinks otherwise has had their history whitewashed and sanitized.

Why, Aesthetics of course.

Don't know how I missed this but this is kinda cool I guess:

"New York’s City Council approved an austere budget early Wednesday that will shift $1 billion from policing to education and social services in the coming year, acknowledging protesters’ demands to cut law-enforcement spending but falling short of what activists sought.

The vote by the council came at an extraordinary moment when the nation’s biggest city is grappling simultaneously with a $9-billion revenue loss because of the coronavirus pandemic and with pressure to cut back on policing and invest more in community and social programs.

...The police department also would give up control over security of the city’s public schools, a function the NYPD took over from the Department of Education in 1998. The city has about 5,300 civilian school safety agents. De Blasio said details were being worked out, but the Education Department would train the agents. Money would go instead to education, social services in communities hit hard by the coronavirus and summer youth programs for over 100,000 people."

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-07-01/new-york-billion-dollar-cut-nypd

The 1b figure is fudged (by about 500m even, according to some figures) if details are taken into account, but this is the kind of shit direct, collective action helps facilitate. More.

Well, from HKers perspective, they are resolutely anti-communist (China), so it's very possible for BoJo to use this to shore up his anti-communist credentials.

Yeah this is fair. An exaggerated imagine against an exaggerated image. I'll cop that. Still, I think Jameson was essentailly right in his intro to Lyotard's PC when he wrote that:

"Lyotard's affiliations here would seem to be with the Anti-Oedipus of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who also warned us, at the end of that work, that the schizophrenic ethic they proposed was not at all a revolutionary one, but a way of surviving under capitalism, producing fresh desires within the structural limits of the capitalist mode of production as such. Lyotard's celebration of a related ethic emerges most dramatically in the context of that repudiation of Habermas's consensus community already mentioned, in which the dissolution of the self into a host of networks and relations, of contradictory codes and interfering messages, is prophetically valorized.

...Lyotard's insistence on narrative analysis in a situation in which the narratives themselves henceforth seem impossible is his declaration of intent to remain political and contestatory; that is, to avoid one possible and even logical resolution to the dilemma, which would consist in becoming, like Daniel Bell, an ideologue of technocracy and an apologist for the system itself. How he does this is to transfer the older ideologies of aesthetic high modernism, the celebration of its revolutionary power, to science and scientific research proper. Now it is the latter's infinite capacity for innovation, change, break, renewal, which will infuse the otherwise repressive system with the disalienating excitement of the new and the "unknown" (the last word of Lyotard's text), as well as of adventure, the refusal of conformity, and the heterogeneities of desire."

Which is to say - as I read it - that the recourse to the paralogism (and the differned, after it) and so on is a strategic initiative, one specifically tailored to the postmodern condition, and not some trans-historical maneuver designed to work at all times in all places. So there's a kernel of truth in Lyotards' own 'postmodernism', but it is, once again, tributary to the condition that 'preceded' him and to which he is responding in his own time and place.

It's just so wildly upsetting. China just doesn't give a shit, and it has its hands in too many pies for many other nations to dare try and speak up. I will say, I have no doubt that it is not an accident that what is happening is happening when a jackass like Trump is in power in the States. China can - and has been - walking all over the US, and Trump is too much of an authoritarian loving fuckwit to do anything other than the bare minimum to help. And the way in which he's treated his own people in the recent civil rights protests - let's just say he's abdicated any international leverage the States might have had in trying to countervail China's treatment of Hong Kong.

We're losing another democracy on this planet, and even as depilated as it was, it was still held a promise that now doesn't exist anymore. I have family who have posted pictures on the streets there and... I don't even know what to say. They are images straight out of dystopian science fiction films.

A consequence of the approach just outlined is that the systematic use of complex symbols is not quite equivalent to a descriptive fact. For any transformation which is sufficiently diversified in application to be of any interest, a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds is not to be considered in determining an important distinction in language use. Furthermore, any associated supporting element is not to be considered in determining the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. For one thing, any associated supporting element is not quite equivalent to an abstract underlying order. Summarizing, then, we assume that the notion of level of grammaticalness is necessary to impose an interpretation on the levels of acceptability from fairly high (e.g. (99a)) to virtual gibberish (e.g. (98d)).

He sure as hell bemoaned what came after.

This is not true. Lyotard was critical of universals and metanarratives in his work. — Kenosha Kid

Yes - Lyotard was subtle enough to have critiqued both metanarratives and their dissolution, without acceding to any false choice between them.

I consider deconstruction and the moving away from a meta-narrative. While deconstruction may be understood without taking a 'subjective' approach, the process by which a meta-narrative gets dissolved often appeals to subjectivity (as in, differences in how different subjects come to understand a text). — Adam's Off Ox

This is ironic because the primary object of deconstruction was the subject. As in quite literally, 'subjectivity' was perhaps the first thing to go, the first thing to have been 'deconstructed', before almost anything else. Any 'appeals to subjectivity' you might find in deconstruction are simply misreadings by the ignorant or the malicious.

Lyotard — Wheatley

Lyotard was a theorist of postmodernity. He was incredibly critical of it, and the fact that he is often called a 'postmodernist' philosopher - as if he advocated or celebrated it - is not only wrong, it is practically the opposite of what he would have wanted. He bemoaned the end of the meta-narrative, which was coincident, for him, with the crisis of capitalism. He was a diagnostician of postmodernity, not a cheerleader for it.

I don't really know what 'postmodern philosophical approaches' are, and neither do most people who use that phrase. It's a reference without a referent. 'Subjective truth' is a phrase and concept far more associated with Kierkegaard and other existentialist thinkers, and its association with postmodernity is arbitrary and largely mythical, employed by people who largely don't know what they are talking about.

Yes, agreeing with you. But you said "as it should in any discussion of postmodernism", which sounds a bit dismissal of the depth of postmodernism outside aesthetic and cultural impacts. — Christoffer

Fair enough. I'm trying to countervail the tendency of those in this thread who treat it as primarily an academic or even philosophical movement of some kind. A confusion - itself confused - of a distinction between postmodernity and post-structuralism, a la @Wheatley.

I did not say postmodernism 'applies' just to culture and aesthetics - whatever that would mean. The point is that it itself is largely a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon. A periodization of time marked by the predominance of specific changes in those fields - themselves tributary to changes in the organization of political economy.

I don't know what you're asking.

Maybe I read your comment as if postmodernism should only be about culture and aesthetics? — Christoffer

It's not about what it should be. It's about what it is - and that people need to understand what they are talking about before blabbing on about 'subjective truth' or whatever other wrongheaded trash they associate with postmodernism.

But postmodernism is still broader than just some conclusions easily dismissive — Christoffer

? I'm not sure what I said implied I was talking about 'some conclusions easily dismissive'. To call something aesthetic or cultural is not at all to dismiss it. If anything to say so is to note postmodernism's far broader reach than some academic backwater movement.

Nice to see the discussion has shifted from philosophy (qua discipline) to aesthetics and culture - as it should in any discussion of postmodernism.

You should read too about the female infanticide in China as a result of the one child policy too.

Yeah, if you can't even be bothered to type a phrase in google we're done, thanks.

You said 'I don’t see how having only one child is a threat to womens’ health.' Your ignorance is not my problem.

Nah, this stuff is elementary. I'm not going over well known points with you.

You had said that the population control measures in China were putting womens’ health second to population control, but I don’t see how having only one child is a threat to womens’ health. — Brett

Then you really ought to educate yourself. Seriously, google it, it won't take you a moment, and you'll have learned something from doing it.

Yes, because all are examples of population control measures, weather you choose to "frame" it that way or not. If you want to choose to "frame" sterilization as spring cleaning or whathaveyou, be my guest.

This has to do with responses to when problems are framed in terms of "overpopulation" and the barbarism that follows along with it.

:sad:

Managing global "overpopulation" and reproductive attitudes is in no way more practical, plausibly realisable or less ideological than managing waste, productive and consumerist attitudes. — sucking lollipops

:up:

Of course lifestyles are going to have to change. Drastically, by everyone. That's not even a question. But 'lifestyle' is tributary to massive economic and technological changes which will be needed to be revamped on a planet-wide, systematic level, and not simply a nation-by-nation or population-by-population level. We currently overproduce food by an insane margin. The idea that we can't feed the world's poor is a function of shitty distribution practices, shaped by perverse economic incentive structures, not the fact that there are too many people. And not only is 'overpopulation' a totally bogus problem, the kinds of 'solutions' employed to 'fix' it are usually barbarous and execrable:

"Instead of resolving environmental problems, promoting family planning to save the planet often has deleterious effects on reproductive health and rights. For one, it upholds family planning as a tool to achieve national and international goals like economic growth, environmental sustainability, and national security. At the same time, it points to women’s bodies as appropriate targets for intervention in the name of a greater good.

The abuses of population control show what can happen when women’s health is second to other, more powerful, agendas. China’s one-child policy, while somewhat relaxed, still strictly regulates and restricts fertility, particularly in cities. In some states in India, two-child norms keep people with more than two kids from sitting on local governing boards or from receiving government benefits. Romani women in Central Europe, and women living with HIV in parts of Africa and Latin America, undergo forced and coerced sterilizations. A 2014 audit of California women’s prisons found that tubal ligations were performed for the purposes of sterilization, sometimes without the consent of the inmate. In this context, endorsing population reduction as an environmental prerogative is abhorrent."

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/family-planning-environment-capitalism/

Australians consume roughly 17tons of Co2 per capita; India, 1.73t* - but of course, it's the poor, brown nation that is the problem... This kind of Malthusianism is just racism by another name.

*World average being about 5t.

Pertinant to the OP - education and love are not the answer:

“We have been taught that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, lead to racist policies,” Kendi said. “If the fundamental problem is ignorance and hate, then your solutions are going to be focused on education, and love and persuasion. But of course [Stamped from the Beginning] shows that the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest, particularly economic and political and cultural.” Self-interest drives racist policies that benefit that self-interest. When the policies are challenged because they produce inequalities, racist ideas spring up to justify those policies. Hate flows freely from there.

... “You can be someone who has no intention to be racist,” who believes in and fights for equality, “but because you’re conditioned in a world that is racist and a country that is structured in anti-black racism, you yourself can perpetuate those ideas,” says Kendi. No matter what color you are."

https://theundefeated.com/features/ibram-kendi-leading-scholar-of-racism-says-education-and-love-are-not-the-answer/

Comrade Trump, doing his best to bring down the imperialist beast from the inside:

Why? Because racists need to be dumb enough to cater to your faux-naivety?