That's such a great song.

rl to w/e, but not to u

"My Back Pages" by The Byrds

In retrospect, I think that I should've opened the floor for a discussion on Simulation and Simulacra.

The Nordic Model is a syncretic form of Social Democracy and laissez-faire Liberalism. You effectively have things like free universal healthcare and free access to higher education, a generally socially liberal society, along with a rather highly specified form of an only so regulated market. It is claimed that it is falling out of favor in the Nordic countries, which I don't necessarily believe. I don't think that the situation there is too comparable to Hungary, though.

I live in the United States and, among certain right-wing intellectual circles, there seems to be kind of a tendency to be overly-critical of the Nordic countries, which is something that I've never understood. I just figure that it's sort of like the general attitude towards the French intelligensia that exists here, but one that, in this case, doesn't even pass as somehow warranted.

I know that a lot of people moved to Canada in order to dodge the draft in the 1960s. Now that there isn't quite conscription in the United States like there was, while I'm sure that it's probably a nice place to live, I don't see too much of a reason to move to Canada anymore. I've always been kind of fascinated by Quebec, though.

There's something to be said for High Fantasy, y'know?

Okay, so, the Nordic countries have always had certain things going for them, namely that they're fairly wealthy, which offers them a certain advantage when it comes to things like their ranking within the World Happiness Report.

Being said, by that whatever international bodies there are that put forth such reports consistently report them at the top, I do think that it is safe to assume that their general governance has been overall effective. What effects a person's quality of life more than the socio-political and cultural climate that they live in? There are plenty of countries with considerable wealth in the world, but only those who have adopted the Nordic Model rank at the top of these charts time and time again.

The aristocracy had adopted this kind of millenarian, technocratic, Neo-Classical, Aristotlean, substitution of the Liberal democratic project à la constitutional monarchy that effectively relied upon the only so well meaning invocation of the aforementioned "philosopher kings". As intuitive as it could be for anyone to think that people who believe in the cultivation of wisdom ought to be the sort of people to guide the general organization of society, what this philosophical interloping within the Liberal democratic project was is precisely what produced the various forms of class that exist today.

I have quoted the film, Clue, before and I will quote it again, "Communism is a red herring." Neither you nor I live in the Russian Federation or China and, regardless as to what historical lessons there are to learn from the humanitarian catastrophes that occurred there, the abuse of power on the part of either Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong, neither of which you have provided any support for that I am somehow defending, is just simply completely irrelevant within this discussion.

What I am suggesting is that electing philosophical kings wouldn't be terribly different from the only so functional form of representative democracy that already exists today. I have also pointed out that doing so would fail to eliminate one of the fundamental flaws with the general culture of the intellect, being the creation of various classes. What I have posited is that, rather than only having a few intellectual savants to rely on for spiritual guidance, if you will, that it ought to be the case that just about everyone ought to be able to become a philosopher. What I suspect there is to draw from this supposition of mine is that it would just simply be some form of participatory democracy or another. I, further, theorize that Anarchism, as per my interpretation of it, is a kind of Liberal apotheosis and have highlighted a certain paradox to my general political inclinations, being that I don't tend to get on very well with Anarchists, but see its full reification as the culmination of all that is veritable of civilization as a whole.

"Communism is a red herring."

Within academia, there are all kinds of petty intellectual squabbles, neuroses, chauvinist disputes, sectarian ideological camps, Mentalist prejudices, somewhat arbitrary formal credential requirements, and pomp and circumstance that people, usually intellectuals who are keen on such things, bemoan, and rightfully so. The Western intelligensia hazards a certain malaise, despite what is tenable of it. When the source of this malaise are the various forms of class that both become created or have been inherited because of either social or material capital, why should we recreate the circumstances which brought them about? What I am not saying is that society has no need for specialists or that there haven't been great thinkers whom we ought to laud for their life's work. What I am saying is that what the aristocracy in the Nineteenth Century generally thought was something along the lines of that society should be ruled by philosopher kings and that this very same aristocracy set in motion the course of events which have resulted in the form of Liberalism that exists today. In a way, that kind of a lot of politicians have taken Plato at his word for that the Athenian democracy would eventually culminate in tyranny has created all kinds of plights throughout the general course of human history. In the field of Nuclear Engineering, I can understand how it comes to be that much of what goes on revolves around the theories of only a few specialists. When it comes to the organization of human society, however, there only being a few intellectuals whom are let to cultivate an intelligensia will necessarily result in the formation of an intellectual class, with what limited good and all of the general bane that comes with it.

Bangarang!

Let the record show that Sweeden is a great country and that, should, at the level of a totality, there not occur a global nonviolent revolution and establishment of a loosely affiliated set of freely associated Anarchist communes, only an unrepentant, unabashed, and unreserved faith in the Nordic Model can liberate the so-called "masses" from the yoke of the partisan deadlock generated by the ascendency of Neo-Liberalism.

That may well be true. I have no doubt that there are and were people who explore Marxist ideology with the fanatical determination of a scholastic theologian and can creatively connect it to a range of situations. — Tom Storm

That's a good way of putting it, I think. Among radicals, I think that people do often get swept up within political slogans or incendiary phrases with little to no understanding of their theoretical basis. Among the true believers in any ideological tendency, though, it is an excess of theory, often through the invocation of ideological purity, which I, myself, have even been guilty of in the past, that is what gives rise to the various collective delusions that I generally term "cult pathology".

I think that that's kind of a glib way to put that, typical of the very hipsters I am trying to critique.

What I'm suggesting about your idea of philosopher kings is that it is something like what the aristocracy already thought. As I assume for you to be a left-wing Liberal and not some sort of cryptic monarchist, what I'm trying to explain is that to put it into effect in the ideal sense that you are proposing could only result in a better form of the Liberalism that we already have today. What's the point of just recreating the circumstances for the very inefficiencies and inequalities that already exist? Were you to set up such a society now, thirty years later you'd have two political camps, one in favor of something like Neo-Liberalism, and one in favor of something like the Nordic Model. I'm not pressing you for information, but am merely asking a rhetorical question when I say, "What would be the point?"

While an excellent assessment of what is off about the social ecology of the Anarchist movement, I don't think that you have considered well enough as to what I mean about Marxist-Leninist ideology. Your average sociological study in Titoism, Hoxhaism, Brezhnevism, Inkpinism that you'd find on RevLeft, the various tendencies to support this or that relatively obscure vaguely Marxist-Leninist personage, was not at all uninformed of Marxist orthodoxy. They did read Marx and could, perhaps, recite lengthy passages from certain texts from memory. Contrary to what you experience with you average activist lacking in political philosophic rigor, they had an extraordinary knowledge, if you will, or their respective political theories. It was kind of through this appeal to an odd sort of bureaucratic authority that I suspect for Marxism-Leninism to have been able to have been maintained as what was, particularly under Josef Stalin, a totalitarian ideology. People in the Soviet Union were not uniformed; they were merely misinformed. The Soviet Union actually had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, which has carried over into the Russian Federation today. It's not that people were lacking in knowledge; it's that they were indoctrinated within this or that ideological tendency.

I'm not trying to press you for anything or anything. I just thought that you created an interesting thread that, admittedly, offered me a forum to go on about all sorts of things that I just have kind of a vested interest in going on about.

What I am saying of your idea for philosopher kings, however, is that it just seems like it'd be as a society similar to that of academia today. Though I do view academia somewhat favorably, I think that there are implicit inequalities within it, which, if we are to imagine an ideal political scenario, we could just as soon do without. I also kind of think that academics would probably just kind of create a slightly better version of the Liberal democracy that exists already. It'd be an improvement, but, if we're going to imagine the best of all possible worlds, why not imagine an effective participatory democracy wherein everyone can be as a philosopher?

To continue with the music metaphor, though I would prefer that people just take the older guys in the band up on whatever wisdom, if you will, and common sense that they're trying to dish out, why recreate a situation where only really those dudes have all too good of an idea as to just what it is that is going on? It's like how it'd only be cool for a person to discover the band, The Hunches, as a teenager. Society being as such, has certain circumstantial advantages for some which are ultimately unfair. What people generally dislike about the music community, even the parties involved, is a tendency for people to be overly critical, judgmental, and form cliques. I'd bet that you can somehow trace this back to the social ecology of Classical music. When we're going to imagine an ideal music industry, why recreate the very inherent flaws which resulted in what people generally dislike about it?

What I'm suggesting is that the training of philosopher kings is kind of nepotistic and almost vaguely aristocratic. I'm not trying to level too much of a dig at you, but I am of the opinion that it just wouldn't be all too great of an idea. When nepotism and aristocratic excess eventually led to what people dislike about the form of Liberalism that we have today, what would be the point of recreating the circumstances from which they were born?

I assume for the World Happiness Report to be fairly reflective of a person's general livelihood and of their relative freedom and meaningful participation within a democratic process. Though you are correct that my assessment is not statistically accurate, I think that this is a safe assumption to make.

My encounters with Marxists, which have, granted, been mostly online, has actually been quite different. In the way back when RevLeft was still operative, nearly every conversation seemed to require a rather lengthy set of deliberations and references from marxists.org . I remember getting into a conversation with a Hoxhasit, I think, Marxist-Leninist, and Soviet apologist about Leon Trotsky's alleged Fascist collaboration. I had pointed out that, by that Trotsky had written "Fascism: What Is It and How to Fight It" and, to my albeit limited knowledge of the details of his life, he had never collaborated with the Nazi Party, it seemed unlikely for this to be the case. This poster then, in, perhaps, a near traumatic revelation that I had regarding the power of ideology, proffered "proof" of his collaboration, being this document from what has come to be called "The Moscow Show Trials".

The Swedish living standards may be higher than the Russian ones but in terms of democracy both systems are very similar. — Apollodorus

How can you possibly make this claim?

Sweeden is listed as the world's seventh most happy country on The World Happiness Report, behind a number of other Nordic countries, I might add, and the Russian Federation is now the defining example of a defunct democracy corrupted by both their mob and former apparat. It's like Italy with Marxist-Leninists.

I'm kind of an outlier of this forum, as I just use it to ramble, but I think that the goal of The Philosophy Forum is to facilitate a kind of erudite and nuanced discussion, the likes of which you could find on a forum like r/CriticalTheory, but often becomes a tangential foray within this or that person's exploration of mania particular to philosophers, of which I am only fairly exemplary.

I like that it is open to everyone and without the rather arbitrary rules you will find on Reddit, but the gripe that the mods have that the discussion almost invariably becomes completely off-topic is somewhat well founded.

The qualm that I have it are merely reflective of online discourse as a whole, which is that people often think that what they say on the internet just does not matter and fail to realize that the person on the other side of the other computer screen is actually a person, and, so, can occasionally become fairly denigrating by that account.

Being said, it's probably the best forum for discussion online and, even though some of the mods fail to realize that my rapport with libcom is now fairly good and it is another set of rather arcane left-intellectuals that I have both personal and political qualms with, I am glad that it exists and do think that there should be more users of it from all walks of life and philosophical or political perspectives.

Though all in all, a good forum, as some of the discussion requires kind of a lot of time and effort, I would, perhaps, warn against using it compulsively. There's ultimately not really anywhere else to go to have a good discussion about Philosophy, though. Even r/CriticalTheory, which I think is the second-best philosophy forum online, is of this sort of way where it's kind of like, if you don't have a graduate degree, you can just forget about engaging in the discussion.

I don't know. If you look past a certain set of mismatched personalities, it's not at all a bad place to chat it up. I'd say that it's a pretty good forum, which by that I think that it's the best forum on the internet, ought to be indicative of that I am fairly pessimistic of discourse online in general. It is pretty good, though.

I'll say what someone once quoted from the film, Heathers, to you, which is that "it's all about the inherent inequality to a game of croquet."

To go back to the Classical music metaphor, within an orchestra, you have a person who plays the first violin and someone who plays an accompanying viola part. I would imagine that a person who plays the viola, at some point or another, is likely to wonder as to how much they really contribute to the orchestra as a whole, whether or not nearly every orchestral piece ought to showcase virtuosic violin playing, and if it's really fair for the orchestra to be designed in such a manner that does.

If we are to give such a preference for intellectual savants, which we already have done, I would imagine that similar sentiment would arise.

I don't play Classical music, but do play Experimental Rock and Roll. I have theorized that the standard Rock and Roll line-up, consisting of four members, one lead guitar player, one rhythm guitar player, one bassist, and one drummer, doesn't fully encompass what a Rock and Roll band could be capable of. What I think is that there should be something like a first guitar, second guitar, a lead singer and synthesiziser play, a bassist, and a drummer. Given this set-up, where the first guitarist obviously plays a Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall half-stack and Marshall head-stock, the second guitar player plays a silver Gibson hollowbody through a Fender Twin Reverb and a Tone Master headstock, the lead singer and synthesizer player somehow convinces Moog to create a digital synthesizer for them that is designed to reproduce the sounds of the original analog Moog, the bassist plays a Fender Jazz Bass through whatever equipment they so desire, and the drummer has a similar set-up to that of Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, it would seem to be the case that most of the songs would probably be written by either the first or second guitarist or lead singer. It would also seem to be the case that the band would be led by one of those three people. What, were I to be in such a band, I would find to be kind of vexing were that the bassist, within a song that they didn't write, to believe for themselves to be the person who should lead the band. The reason that a person play the bass is so that they don't have to take the spotlight on stage, mill about in this or that corner of the venue after the fact, look standoffish and cool and be capable of finding partners by virtue of being in an Experimental Rock and Roll band.

I am not an idiot. Even though I, too, agree that "the abolition of any form of either evident or implicit hierarchy" is the only agreeable definition of Anarchism, I understand that, within any given social situation, there are people who will take on some form of leadership role and everyone else.

What you are proposing, however, is just a society akin to what academia is already like. Though I see enough within the cultivation of the life of the mind to participate within it, I am willing to admit that there is a certain degree of wealth and class that comes with academia and, though it can result in the creation of great works, it is already kind of absurd for Philosophy to be like Classical music. To make a comparison within the arts, I think that it should be more like Abstract Expressionism or Free Jazz. If it is not the case that just about anyone can learn to become a philosopher king, then, there will be created certain classes and society will not differ too much from what already exists today.

I would also like to note that my theoretical genres for such a band are Baroque Shoegaze, Postmodern Punk, and Dream Rock, but kind of think that it'd just be cooler if all that it said on bandcamp, and, as bandcamp will save the independent music industry, there is only bandcamp, was "experimental rock and roll".

My apologies for deviating from the political aspects of this interesting conversation but to look at religion in the above light misses the point. — synthesis

I was merely giving an anecdote as to why it is that I became an atheist. To my experience, the way in which The Story of Isaac is taught within Catholicism is in such a manner that the only real lesson to learn from it is that Abraham had an inspiring devotion to God. Reflecting upon this, I felt like it was just sort of way to suggest that you should just listen to what this or that religious order tells you and not ask too many questions. I did say that I came to a more nuanced understanding of the story after reading Kierkegaard, though.

Politics reveals the all the nastiness that social man can conger, with his lying, cheating, and stealing on full display. Despite these inconveniences, the purpose of modern politics (the debate itself) can not be under-estimated in its importance to facilitating prudent social policy, something better (in most cases) than allowing the lunatic fringe to have their way. — synthesis

You are, perhaps, correct about this to some extent. I have presented both Politics and debate in a manner to suit my general inclination to avoid them. What I'm suggesting is that the aforementioned "prudent social policy" often is not facilitated in a manner that is sincere or to an extent that is genuine.

I, for instance, voted for Barrack Obama twice. I think that there did need to be established something like medicare and medicaid and, as I am on medicaid, I am not only glad, but also somewhat reliant upon that they have. Being said, the form of universal healthcare the exists in the United States today is neither comprehensive nor efficient, which, I think kind of a lot of people here, from any political perspective, will tell you. The Democratic Party, and, perhaps not even the Obama administration particularly, because of their respective electoral campaigns, only really managed to provide so effective of a form of universal healthcare because of that they understood that most Americans, within the full breadth of their reason, were likely to agree with their doing so, and had utilized it in such a manner to garnish them votes. The oft-levelled complaint about the website, which is fair, is somewhat evident of this.

While Obama was in office, there became a sweeping security program with our National Security Agency. While I am loathe to quote Vladimir Lenin, I don't really have a better summarization of the Obama administration's overall performance than "one step forwards, two steps back".

I like Barrack Obama. I think that he is charming, kind, intelligent, well-spoken, and relatable. I had a lot of hope for his presidency and became very disillusioned by his effective continuation of our foreign policy. If he couldn't make the difference in the oval office, I'm not sure as to who can. It'd seem that there are what you might call "structural" socio-political problems with the American government in general that can only be so well altered by what person we elect.

Right, that's what I'm saying. You don't consider the concept of marriage whatsoever or the state's role in defining it in that case, you are just given two sides to choose created from two separate political platforms and taught that one person within the debate will come out as the victor.

I don't know if that quite explains the certain absurdity that I'm trying to get at.

The Situationist International developed an ironic faux-aristocratic mein to effectively mock the common misconception that, within the art world, it would be somehow hip to act like a certain set of clandestine quasi-crypto-Fascist "lifestyle anarchists", if you will, which, for them, created a certain paradox. As much as they were extraordinary artists who created groundbreaking work, they kind of became a living caricature of an intelligence community. The reason for this, I suspect, is that they became kind of lost in their own act.

Upon thinking about the rationale behind the orchestration for the Holocaust for kind of an extensive period of time, I reasoned that, by that the Gestapo must have known that the Jews did not have some sort of sempiternal cloak-and-dagger control over geo-politics, following through with their various machinations was just kind of a baseless act of human cruelty. I, further, reasoned that Nietzsche was mistaken, there was a good and evil in the world, and that the Nazis were just simply evil. I, then, set out to discover what evil was.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that evil was the attempt to exploit human cruelty in order to accumulate social capital, usually in the form of political power, and to conspire to do so further. Though I never came up with an adequate definition of good, I suspect for it to be whatever counters this.

I, later, came to suspect that how this operation was put into effect began with psychological manipulation. Psychological manipulation begins psychological warfare, the originary coercion, which begins authoritarianism, the epigenesis of nearly every political plight.

From this, I concluded that people think that they should be psychologically manipulative, something that is often justified through an odd kind of lesser evilism in their respective pursuits of whatever goals, was the source of the problem that I had with both Politics and Pop culture, both within and without the utlra-Left and independent music industry that I was formerly a part of, being that they were just kind of generally cultish. I probably should've come to this realization earlier, but I was kind of blinded by my devotion to both the ultra-Left and an odd kind of hipsterdom.

The paradox that I uncovered in my various attempts to counter this was that what seemed to work best was to just kind of make sort of a show out of a litany of rather chauvinist displays of both intellectual and aesthetic panache and, in my own sort of way, kind of just ended up just like the Situationist International, which was rather ironic, as my thinking about their going about things in the way that they did was what set off this journey in the first place.

Having explicitly left the ultra-Left faction that I had formerly claimed to be a part of and the Anarchist movement, I am now fairly unsure of how to proceed, especially since I have picked up so many habits along the way. I guess that I'd just like to point out that this idea that people have that, for them to achieve this or that goal, they, as the world they project would benefit more than what relevant harm they could effect, can be somehow justified in just being kind of psychologically manipulative is actually what begins nearly every either personal or political plight.

To offer further, probably incoherent speculation:

If you think about The Incredible String Band for kind of an extensive period of time, you can figure just what sort of person the Situationist International developed a habit of pretending to be, as The Incredible String Band developed the same habit. Of this sort of person, I will say that they are let to cultivate a cult personality so that they can convince people to do things, usually without any monetary reward, that just simply aren't really all that much to their benefit. Though there are actual instances of this, people only believe for this sort of thing to have anything to do with espionage because of a certain other party consistently generating a certain cult pathology in that regard. What I have come to understand is as to why it is that both the Situationist International and The Incredible String Band went about things as such, as within both the far-Left and the music industry, people, for whatever reason, do seem to think that they should adopt the mein of the aforementioned sort of person, and what the best way to convince them not to seems to be is to just pretend to have taken things further than they ever could.

The problem that I really have is that, having carried on as such and finally no longer seeing a reason to, my having done so has had the effect of getting everyone to pay close attention to everything that I do, which is also ironic, as, originally, believing for myself to suffer from Schizophrenia, I had just kind of wanted to be an amicable artist who didn't always feel like they were in the center of attention.

Anyways, what I think that there is to take away from this is that the act that such people adopt often relies upon an odd kind of chauvinism and what I would suggest is that pretending to be a chauvinist fairly obviously won't ever convince you that you just don't need to anymore. There's something to be said for artistic and intellectual flair, though. I don't know. I'm kind of just rambling.

A final supposition and set of clarifications:

Peter Kroptokin wrote in his memoirs of the hazing that went on at the gymnasium that he attended at a young age. The Volker Schlöndorff film, Young Törless, based off of the Robert Musil novel, deals with the same subject matter. For me, his character, Reiting, sort of embodies the original sin which produced the postmodern condition. Such deportment, I suspect, was later transferred to and became a generalized code of conduct within Fascist intelligence. Though they adopted a different mein, I think that my previous formulation could also apply to the Soviet apparat.

To my interpretation, Guy Debord defined The Spectacle to describe a political foray where the various forms of psychological manipulation which beget authoritarianism became diffuse. I have this created this thread so as to put to question as to whether the active disengagement from it is possible.

I should like to think that it is, but have attempted to explain a certain paradox within my life so as to indicate as to why I would even be skeptical of that it could be.

Of myself, I will say, the best two digs taken at my general ethos and way of going about things, at least, to my imagination, are that I am a "justified true believer in lifestyle anarchism" and an "a-political extremist". As much as there is to say of irony, I do, in good faith, take things like that well and don't really think that there's too much of a reason for anyone to concern themselves with whatever it is about me.

Though I have, perhaps, used to the homonym of free association to a point of excess, I will say that different lens with which to view the world can offer a good bit of perspective and that it isn't too absurd for me to make a set of political statements and then proceed to carry on in this thread. While contradictions may not exist, their semblance often does. It's just how you look at it all.

I guess that there's a certain poverty to a lack of meaningful engagement with Politics in that what I often end up doing are things like cooking up good cryptic life advice for teenage girls, like "even though The Stone Roses were a great band, you shouldn't let the music community convince you a band whose hit single was "I Wanna Be Adored" should make another great act, like The Wedding Present, seem second-rate", and am somewhat hesitant to commit to it by that account.

I should probably just think more about Philosophy, to be honest.

Anyways, I'm going to stop rambling now. Feel free to comment on whatever or even not to.

I have realized that I had forgotten to point out as to just what the qualm that I have with certain parties within the ultra-Left actually is. You see, there's kind of an informal way of the word travelling among radicals and I am of the entirely sapient opinion that it ought to do so without any either explicit or implicit coercion whatsoever. As I think that this is entirely keeping with the idea of free association, I assume for my assessment of Yoko Ono's all-white chess set as being good art to be correct. While such a supposition, in the beaten way of an imagined metaphor, can result in any number of absurdities, of which we need only point to the music industry for examples, I do not feel like I am mistaken in my assumption that the peace ought to be kept with the messenger.

I have also held a longstanding and deep-seated suspicion that certain left-wing intellectuals, of your garden Raspberry Reich variety, had taken it upon themselves to exploit my good nature in an attempt to conscript me within a set of clandestine actions before proceeding to betray me by a certain set of clandestine parties, which ought to be indicative of a certain ground truth to the hows and whys of how and why it is that I came to leave the Anarchist movement, as an Anarcho-Pacifist, "in protest of its general proclivities towards crypto-Fascism and political violence". I can't prove any of this and am certifiably insane, and, so, certain things remain hip and I am just generally thought of as kind of a schizophrenic loser.

Addenendum:

I should further like to point out the situational context with which it is that I find for it to be impossible to disengage for the battle for hearts and minds, as, within the Left or whatever, there has become such a diffuse popular myth of an ostensive Pacifist divide and conquer which has had the effect of leaving me with a many-colored broom with which to sweep and, among the Liberal intelligensia, there has been left a lock for me to pick, when it is all too easy for someone to claim that I think that "property is theft", which I do, to an extent, so as to leave me with my broom, cleaning the dust out of a library that was abandoned centuries ago.

This is wrong. The two parties often adopt the positions of the other party when they are in power precisely because they want the win for their party and not for the other party. Just look at the fight over the Supreme Court. — Harry Hindu

I was referring to the basic structure of an organized debate at the university level. I wasn't actually talking about the Democratic or Republican party.

Exactly. This is how I became an atheist, too. Only after really learning what religion/politics is (group-think), do you come to abhor them. — Harry Hindu

I became an atheist after considering that it was just completely insane that God told Abraham to kill his only son Isaac, he decided to go through with it, and what we are supposed to take away from this is a lesson about Abraham's devotion. It just seemed offhandedly authoritarian, if not self-interestedly didactic. Though I later came to have more of a nuanced understanding of The Story of Isaac after reading Søren Kierkegaard, I will say that what they generally teach you within Catholic catechism about it is just totally insane.

As an atheist, I would kind of just prefer to just kind of generally avoid religion and spirituality, whereas, as someone who is, to some degree, a-political, I feel like I should be actively opposed to much of what Politics has come to be. I guess that I haven't quite let go of enough of the knack that I had developed for spectacular displays of political strategems that I had honed while still somewhat fanatically ascribing to some sort of theoretical ultra-Left to understand that I would ultimately prefer to just kind of withdraw from the political arena at this point. I would basically deconstruct the dizzying array of manipulative tricks that I had pulled while doing them so that anyone keen on what I was up to would discover just what was wrong with the general conduct of more or less any person engaged in Politics. Within certain sets of society, people occasionally refer to this as "running numbers". I had effectively designed a number that would bring people to a realization that they just shouldn't run them. This tactic became so extraordinarily successful and useful to me that it became sort of a habit. I've been trying to kick it ever since, to only so much success.

The First Earth Batallion later became American psychological operations and even Richard B. Gregg's "moral jiu-jitsu" bears a certain predicament when taken too far. As much as I doubt that they will, I should hope that everyone can learn from my mistakes, even if I, myself, have only done so so well.

I don't know, I feel kind of like training philosopher kings would be sort of like training artistic savants within Classical music. The entire intellectual edification would revolve around far too few of people. If you really wanted to predicate governance by Philosophy, it would have to be the case that everyone could become a philosopher. Within a political context, that seems kind of like some form of participatory democracy. Only an Anarchist commune can free me of the burden of being an Anarchist. It's a paradox of apotheotical disenchantment.

That's a pretty good idea. I should've thought of that beforehand.

Not many fans like the film, but I thought that it was pretty good. The computer generated imagery was extraordinary for its time and is still fairly impressive today. It's not very much like the games, though.

To my knowledge, they have never made a table-top role-playing game, but I am a great fan of one of the more strategic games in the series, being Final Fantasy Tactics. I could even put it as a close second behind Final Fantasy IX.

I am glad. Thanks as well!

This person is both genuine and sincere and was referring to the social ecology of the Irsraeli populace. He had thought that going to Jerusalem would be kind of a revelatory pilgrimage, but was disheartened by that the Israelis seemed to be subject to a kind of collective malaise. That's what I assume, anyways.

The Kurds, unlike the Israelis, seem to be often more or less ignored by the mass media. Despite that the United States Military had been allied with the People's Protection Units in the fight against the Islamic State, the PKK is still designated as a foreign terrorist organization. It was really kind of duplicitous of us to have just kind of left them out there in favor of whatever alliance we have with the Turkish government that had already been pre-established. Though I don't really think that there are sides to take in so far that we are to exclusively consider the conflict between the proposed Kurdistan and Turkey as an ethic conflict, I do feel sympathetic towards the Kurds and think that it wouldn't be too much of a diplomatic effort to convince them not to wage terrorist attacks on Turkish civilians in exchange for being taken off of the list of foreign terrorist organizations, aside from that I think that they ought to be let to claim some form of self-determination.

Though there is also a thriving and vibrant community of Israelis, aside from that I, myself, admit that Israel is probably a preferable place to live in Western Asia, I do still stand by that the militarization of Israeli civil society has had a detrimental impact on it. I'd bet that there are probably kind of a lot of Israelis who would tell you more or less the same thing.

The Wikipedia definition of biopolitics is that it is "an intersectional field between human biology and politics. Biopolitics takes the administration of life and a locality’s populations as its subject. To quote Michel Foucault, it is "to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order." I think that this is fairly apt. It's difficult to adequately summarize Foucault's theories succinctly. You kind of just have to read him to figure them out.

As I interpret biopolitics, it moreso relates to Giorgio Agameben's theories, which proceed from Foucault, particularly in Homo Sacer, The State of Exception, Remnants of Auschwitz, and Stasis, both what I understand best of him and think to be his best work, of sovereign power over life and death. He has this grand concept of "forms-of-life" that a lot of people within the ultra-Left occasionally invoke, but, as he only explains this concept thoroughly in The Highest Power and makes mention of it The Use of Bodies, and, in the former, only really so well, I kind of don't think that most of them have any real idea as to what it is that they are talking about, as I kind of suspect that he only really has kind of a vague understanding of it, himself. Every Critical Theorist will tell you otherwise, though.

I was saying that they were conducting an actual experiment, though they have been notorious for conducting psychological experiments in the past; I was just saying that they were using the nation of Israel as a geo-political experiment. I was using a metaphor. They kind of use the nation as a synecdoche, a single part that represents the whole, for the West. Doing so has the effect of making much of politics seem to revolve around Israel and providing them with cover for clandestine operations.

I really just kind of felt like writing some political poetry, though.

As I have the fortune of being within the libertarian Left, I can always claim that Abdullah Öcalan's change of heart was wholly without any form of subterfuge and offer note terribly critical and more or less unconditional support for the "Libertarian Municipalists" in Kurdistan. My joke aside, I do think that, though kind of an obvious rebranding of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, he was, to some degree, sincere in having turned away from Marxism-Leninism in favor of the political philosophy of Murray Bookchin.

As to who to ally oneself with in the region, it's difficult to give any general political categorization or definite commitment to any particular alliance. There's probably a set of activists who took part in the Arab Spring, a set of intellectuals in some form of vague opposition to this or that authoritarian regime, the Kurds who are actually not interested in engaging in an ethnic conflict with Turkey, some Israelis, some Palestinians, and more or less de facto every person who is sincerely engaged in brining a genuine peace to the region whom I would find as allies.

Despite what is mostly untenable of almost the entire Western Asian political spectrum, there are still good people out there with good ideas who even possibly could make a positive difference in the world no matter where it is that you go. I think that everyone in the West would choose to live in Israel given the alternatives. I am friends with an older man and devout, in kind of spiritual sense, Christian who went to Jerusalem not too long ago and found for his experience there to be fairly unsettling. His only remark was that it was "very sad". I think that kind of a lot of people would have a similar experience.

I do, in part, agree with your assessment, though find for the general proclivity towards Conservatism on the part of certain Jewish emigres to be fairly understandable, aside from that I will say that there are a few Orthodox Jews who kind of have better ideas on how to follow through with the peace process than most Labor Zionists. As much as I am an Anarcho-Pacifist and have a general preference for left-wing Liberalism, what I will say of effective Pacifism is that it does take all types.

Though there is much that any person could take away from the blistering sentimentality of the poetry presented as political theory in my above post, the general gist of what I'm trying to get across to the person in Mossad whom I only imagine to read this is of my rather speculative theory that the CIA has been using the nation of Israel as a kind of geo-political experiment, which I think is just the sort of thing that a person who cares for the well-being of either your person or the community that you belong to would not do. It's a tightrope walk on the fine line between genius and insanity.

Most of Europe, kind of a lot of people in the United Nations, people in the United States who have good reason to be critical of our intelligence community, and people who generally care about human rights ought to be the sort of people whom Israeli officials ought to think should view them favorably. On some level, that is sort of already the case, but I am willing to suggest that the military alliance between Israel and the United States has had a detrimental impact upon Israeli society, despite whatever either real or perceived security measures are considered as necessary to protect it.

Judaism will live on just as any other religion or spirituality will and can do so with or without the nation of Israel. I'm really just having a conversation with a person, probably a man, whom I, perhaps, only imagine to read this.

What has become of the nation of Israel, I think, is just tragic. All of the youthful enthusiasm, longing for a spiritual homeland, and hope that came along with things like the Kibbutz Movement have long since vanished. It's just kind of this spectacular postmodern display of the one of the world's foremost security apparatuses and fourth-generation warfare now. The militarization of Israeli civil society has become so diffuse that half of the general discourse of political debate often bears an uncanny resemblance to operations undertaken by American psychological operations. People are fascinated by Israel because it is an emergent form of biopolitics. It's like an intelligence operation that has become a political regime.

Being said, not everyone there is as inculcated within what is a national myth as they are often made out to be and I would prefer to remain hopeful both for the betterment of the political ecology of the nation itself and that it should facilitate an effective and lasting peace process. It is still a Liberal democracy that is entirely capable of establishing good relations with neighboring nation-states. They just kind of ought to choose better allies.

To the contrary, I don't think that capital has anything to do with this at all. I think the ruling order in Israel has cultivated a national myth that it now believes in all too directly. They have become as method actors who can no longer differentiate between their part on the global state in the Homeric epic of the triumph of Western democracy and their real-life roles as diplomats, intelligence officers, journalists, and religious scholars who live in a fledgling democracy that all too often serves as a global synecdoche. Within the general course of collective dissociation and dissonance born out of Israel's troubled history, they have forgotten their oft-cited experience as a somewhat ritualized other and have mistaken the apophenic experience of the call of the epochal for the writ of the divine. They have become lost in what they understand all too well of just what it takes to secure political power. When I think about the political ecology of the nation of Israel, I feel no righteous indignation or misplaced revolutionary fervor; I am merely touched by the twinge of poignancy and a sense of pity. In the beaten way of speculation, I would suggest that they have learned all too well from a certain American correspondence of theirs, one that can't help but know that their entire cataloged history of clandestine actions has done nothing to cultivate any of their former Liberal ideals and that it, much to the contrary, has only served to incite any number of geo-political crises which Giorgio Agamben characterized as "civil war as a political paradigm". People say that Western Asia is a "powder keg". Israeli intelligence has watched their American allies leave the gunpowder on the floor and the matches in the hands of adventurous children. They have seen them smile and will soon learn to do so as well.

I don't think that the nation of Israel cares for capital. I think that it's a pedagogy of the oppressed. T.E. Lawrence closed "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" with this stanza:

"Men prayed me that I set our work,
The inviolate house,
As a memory of you
But for fit monument I shattered it,
Unfinished: and now
The little things creep out to patch
Themselves hovels
In the marred shadow
Of your gift."

I don't wonder what he meant.

He has found fault with the Israelis in the general course of this dispute. Though I, too, think that, as it particularly has unfolded, they are who is bear the lion's share of the blame for the conflict, I am willing to give them more of the benefit of the doubt as per the general course of human history. Regardless as to who is at fault for that the conflict continues, it just simply is only the Israeli government who can take the requisite measures with which to establish an effective and lasting peace. This, first and foremost, means that they must abandon the strategy of settling in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, something that they have consistently refused to do, despite the many allegations of their violating both human rights law and the accords which they, themselves, effectively delimited, and almost definitely also necessitates the eventual recognition of a state of Palestine.

What I suspect for best and brightest affiliates of Fatah to have told Israeli delegates time and time again is that, even were they willing to concede their loss of territory so as to establish a peaceful relationship, should they continue to settle in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, because the situation is just simply out of their hands, the conflict will just simply continue. What I suspect for the Israeli response to this to have been, time and time again, has been to say, either to themselves or even to explicitly inform the other party in these negotiations that "we know an just don't care", proceed to draw a set of borders on a map, and more or less imply, "that's our peace to say and you can take it or leave it."

I, in the general course of this argument, have referred to the subjugation of the Palestinian populace on the part of the Israelis as a "biopolitical program". As I understand that I have a perspective that is situated by my experience of the world, I know that some may take usage of Michel Foucault's concept to be strange, if not indicative of a certain degree of either pretense or cult pathology.

Because @180 Proof his issued his argument in a rhetorical style typical of left-wing black intellectuals, a number of other posters in this thread have assumed for it to be indicative of some form of dogmatism. Being capable of deciphering what he has put forth, I have merely been attempting to clarify that, while there is a certain degree of what you might call "equivocation" to his manner of speech, what he has said is neither controversial nor injudicious.

What he has said is that, should the Israelis want to establish an effective and lasting peace, it is up to them to make a show of good faith by revoking the various machinations that they have undertaken in the general course of the conflict that effectuate the subjugation of the Palestinian populace. What he is suggesting is that peace can only begin when the Israelis abandon the form of apartheid that they have enforced up until now.

While I do not agree with what you have only inferred as what he has been implying, that Hamas is somehow justified in their attacks on the Israeli civilian populace, I do agree that an effective and lasting peace can only be created when the Israelis decide to take the measures of which it would be requisite for them do so.

He is also correct to point out that a number of members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, of whom there is much to say, but that is neither here nor there for the time being, do more or less advance the resolution to the conflict that I have put forth, being the establishment of a Palestinian state along what people generally call the "'67 borders", effectively consisting of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and eventual creation of one state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians. Though I think that this state ought to be called "Israel-Palestine", I am willing to concede the moniker in so far that politicians within the nation of Israel become sincere in their establishment of such a genuine state.

My take on all of this is only so relevant, however. We, now, have other predicaments, but, there were enough people in Fatah who wanted to establish an effective and lasting peace for the peace process to be functional and not enough Israelis who were even willing to scale back their settlements, let alone abandon them entirely, for it to be. What there is to take from his claim, that it is up to the Israelis to make a show of good faith so that peace can be meaningfully established, is just simply to the point.

Marx was a gifted theorist and even though I disagree with him, particularly finding fault with The German Ideology, which you have cited, which does serve as evidence of that he did have kind of a habit of deploying incendiary sophistry to a point of excess, as it includes a polemical onslaught against "Saint Max", i.e. Max Stirner, that is longer than Max Stirner's seminal work, The Ego and Its Own, I am willing to admit that.

Your assumption that Communism has never been popular because Communists have never been voted into office, I think, is only so much to the point. The Communist Manifesto had a clear and decisive influence over the general course of human history and it is not as if the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party were the only people to have ever been influenced by it.

He did not shut down the International Workingman's Association that was formerly headed by a man whom I am loathe to defend, as he was a virulent anti-Semite; he levelled a series of political attacks against one, Mikhail Bakunin, and took it over.

When it comes to the various historical reenactments that comprise of the series of debates between the early Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists, I, myself, side with the former prince of the Rurik Dynasty, Peter Kropotkin.

@180 Proof has put forth the point of contention that, if an effective and lasting peace is to be established, then, because the Israelis have undertaken any number of political strategies which have effectively resulted in the dispute, it is up to them, and not the Palestinians, to offer a show of good faith so that the aforementioned peace can be meaningfully established.

He has framed this argument within kind of a black and white style of argumentation that, though I would bet that he would have much to say in the beaten way of clarification in this regard, as he is of the libertarian Left, in all likelihood somehow proceeds from anti-Imperialism.

His point of contention, however, is more than fair.

If you can get past that he has left the implicatures of his discourse open so as to also be as if he were issuing an ultimatum, the substance of his argument is actually quite good.

I'd bet that it's as per their reading of Frantz Fannon, who became common to invoke in debates upon the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, probably beginning sometime in the late 1980s.

@180 Proof is correct to suggest that Hamas's capacity to wage an effective revolution against the nation Israel, of which they have absolutely none, is "evasive", as, what they were suggesting is that, if Israel wants to bring about an effective and lasting peace, then they must first begin to dismantle the apparatus created in order to carry out their biopolitical program.

Well, I think "strategic machination" is employed by the Left as much as by the Right. Marx did borrow a lot from his rivals while at the same time criticizing and attacking them for allegedly being "ignorant" or "insane". Lenin borrowed his "state capitalism" from capitalists like Taylor and Ford, etc. — Apollodorus

The Left is guilty of kind of a lot of strategic machinations, but I don't think that appropriating relatively obscure right-wing philosophy is one of them. Perhaps, among some Nihilists?

Marx was a gifted polemicists, and, so, everyone ought to take some of his words with a grain of salt. His ideas often changed, but he did hold fast to them at any given point in time.

I was a rather ardent devotee of the libertarian Left, and, so, have never been willing to sacrifice our gift for critique for any form of unity, which is to say that I had effectively created my own political sect. I took a class that was sharply critical of the Soviet Union a short time ago that was taught from a variety of different sources and I found to change my attitude towards political perspective. One text that we read Leszek Kołakowski's "My Correct Views on Everything". I enjoyed reading it immensely and was taken aback by that I finally actually cared about what someone on the Right had to say. Though perhaps still somehow suspicious of so-called "unity", I do now think that, when engaged in debate, people ought to agree to gain both a better understanding and perspective of the world. All too often, I had found that, in any given debate, I had merely been attempting to get a set of points across so as to further whatever my particular political position at the time was. I now am merely curious as to what other people know and I can find out about myself.

They are compelled to engage in protest, but not to ascribe to a form of revolutionary fanaticism. Because the Western powers, primarily the United Kingdom and the United States had a vested interest in creating a Jewish state in Western Asia so as to promote a meta-narrative of their "promoting freedom and democracy", a great irony, considering the number of coup d'états that particularly the United States has been involved with there, the Palestinians have very little going for them when it comes to the global discourse and can be so inclined to endorse fairly fanatical ideas by that account. I, too, think that Israeli and Palestinian leaders, perhaps even those who would not be my natural allies, do need to come together and create an effective and lasting resolution to the crisis. What that means is the abandonment of certain forms of Zionism and certain forms of abolition in the creation of two states, which ought to eventually transform into one state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.

There's a lot of troubled history within such a venture, though, as the Jewish diaspora was a partial raison dêtre for the creation of the nation of Israel, and, though I do think that their situation differs from those of people in the former apartheid South Africa, Palestinian rights activists are right to characterize the biopolitical stratagem undertaken against the Palestinians as an "apartheid regime".

As I am a mere Western spectator, I don't really feel like it is my place to offer a resolution to the crisis and merely hope that some human rights lawyer successfully will. People let this dispute become all-consuming when it is extraordinarily particular and wholly unrepresentative of geo-politics as a whole.