Oh, yeah, do come to the reading group if you feel like doing so. As it states, all are welcome. Until we meet again!

And, here, I thought that I was just defending a point. Y'know it kind of reminds me of this story that I once heard about a man with a peculiar manner of speech who lived in a city where everyone spoke perfect Standard English. He suffers from schizophrenia and becomes convinced that everyone there has developed telepathy. Needless to say, he doesn't get on very well and eventually dies in some nameless alley outside of a world renowned theatre. I can't remember the name of it or its author, but I recall reading in an interview that they said that it was about Victorian mentalism. That or to have been inspired by A Brave New World. What's the difference, really?

When you divide by zero, you can say that it is positive infinity. When you divide by positive or negative infinity, you can say that it is zero. That is what I am saying.

Infinity is the limit. It is not the numbers that approach it. Within such a mathematical system, zero could, perhaps, be like a limit as well. I haven't exactly reasoned this all of the way out.

Edit: Zero, I think, would actually not be like a limit, perhaps especially. It'd be like the negation of a limit.

You have mistaken your metaphor, my friend.

As, I am sure, this is both warranted and welcome, I will elaborate.

The problem is not the wanton experimentation in writing, philosophy, or political theory. That is a symptom of the problem, which, like any form of neurosis, can be resultant in extraordinary bouts of wisdom and mania.

The problem is the incessant appeal to every form of revolutionary fanaticism simultaneously. It's like dealing with as many cults as you can imagine during a political debate. All of them, some more than others, take an extraordinary amount of time to explain as to how and why it is that they are, in point of fact, cults, and none of them are willing to show any form of restraint in silencing anyone who categorizes them as such.

Philosophers, such as yourself, think that what has happened is that we have been driven mad by Existentialism, so-called "Continental" Philosophy, or Critical Theory. What has actually happened is that some people, and, though they are few, their influence is extraordinary, have become so taken by terror chic that they are entirely unwilling to consider what actually attempting to reify their revolutionary program will actually be like, which almost invariably just ends up being starting an actual terrorist cell. They don't think that they'll go the way of Holger Meins. They think that it'll be like living in a Jean-Luc Godard film. Neither they, nor Godard, understand the Dadist elements to his works. That is what the problem is.

Academics just entertain the people whom such charismatic leaders would attempt to inculcate within their respective political factions for long enough for them to give up on every form of revolutionary crusade and either vote for this left-wing Liberal or another or somehow ultimately vaguely agree to some form of implicit nonviolence.

Jean Buadrillard once actually cited Ecclesiastes as stating that "the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." I feel like you just don't get it.

You also know nothing of what is wrong with the Left. I does have so much and so little to do with a rather flippant disregard for quote unquote reason, though.

Some people talk to pigeons and some people will never have enough room, even in a world with infinite space.

Love is the only force in the world capable of inciting the experience of ekstasis long thought to be exclusive to divine revelation. Every form of free expression has been born out of it. It is only through love that we can come to an understanding of freedom. Love is a blissful, devastating, and cathartic experiment in the exploration of the only truly unknowable domain within our visible universe, the free human psyche. Love exists. Like the Messiah of yore is said to during an age of revelations, it conquers all.

Kant seemingly makes sense. It all makes sense if you believe in some sort of abstract transcendent ideal and in a quasi-eschatological "kingdom of ends". The categorical imperative, however, deprives Ethics of circumstance. There is a world of difference between stealing an old Gibson that was the parting gift of a musician's late mentor, stealing a pair of expensive headphones produced by multinational business conglomerate, and stealing a loaf of bread because you are hungry and poor. That you shouldn't steal because you shouldn't will that all of society steals, thereby resulting in that it becomes comprised of factional sets of feuding marauding bands, breaks very quickly down when you don't assume that people need to given universal laws so as to ensure that society doesn't disintegrate. People are entirely capable of understanding that an act is made within a given situation, analyzing its circumstances, and determining whether or not the act was ethical.

Kant provides some of the world's best moral framework, without realizing that no such thing can exist. To use the extreme example, in Nazi Germany, it would seem to be easy to say that people shouldn't lie, as, when you have a society that is predicated upon a lie, the effect can be catastrophic. What about under interrogation by the Gestapo, though? To me, to Kant, it makes no difference as to whether I am under interrogation by the Gestapo or have been brought before a human rights tribunal. Perhaps, I do misunderstand him, though.

Emmanuel Levinas has a short parable that I have always liked, called The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights. The poignant double-entendre at the end has led me to what someone once described as "nihilistic optimism". Ethics is like that, in a sense, without a thought. To create an entire methodology, however, predicated upon some sort of innate good will and deprived of subjectivity almost entirely, to me, just seems to be somewhat absurd, if not somehow both condescending and naive.

To return to your original question, though, you do owe it to those who care about you not to take any suicidal impulse too far. Some people never give up mountaineering, however. Should they fall, and almost all good climbers do fall someday if they don't give it up, is that really the sort of thing that you should hold against them?

Responding to your question and not your post, yes, absolutely. Extreme, perhaps, isn't quite the right word, as the really are very few political terrorists in the world, but, there are fanatics within every political faction, most certainly including, but not especially limited to the Left.

Anything divided by infinity is equal to zero and anything divided by zero is infinite. I've been told that this isn't necessarily true in almost every Math class that I've taken since high school, but I still hold to it. Bernhard Riemann seems to have thought so as well.

Well, now that you said all of that, I'm not sure what this has to do with Kant. To me, the supposed right to put yourself at risk does, to varying degrees, exist, but, from a Kantian perspective, it would seem that you shouldn't, as you shouldn't will that everyone else do the same.

Upon a second reading, it still seems to be about how the categorical imperative bars you from the freedom to ride motorcycles. I don't know. Whatever.

Following Kant — tim wood

The inherent flaw in your reasoning.

Simply the heightened risk of being killed or catastrophically injured in an otherwise minor accident of the sort motorcycles are subject to, at a cost the victim cannot himself bear. That is, he, usually a he, hurts everyone, and some greatly. There can be no such freedom to either cause or unreasonably risk such harm. — tim wood

"But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.” - Hunter S. Thompson

Quoth Zizek, whom I sure you can't stand, "freedom hurts". I don't think that you have to give up riding motorcycles because of Kant, if that's what you're asking. For someone, perhaps?

I'm talking about the abolition of Philosophy as system, though. I'm talking about it becoming praxis.

So, it's just cross paths, then. Carry on, I guess.

I see it somewhat blankly. The cage is like Chekov's gun. Once the cage is built, it just finds a bird to live in it. It's about how authoritarian societal structures have a life of their own. I think it's sort of an Absurdist phrase.

Gus, have you ever thought about giving the answer, "Neutral Evil", to the question as to what you Dungeons and Dragons alignment would be, but thought twice about it? I'd, in good faith, take you for a chaotic neutral, but, there's just this aspect of Egoism that I've never been able not to let unnerve me.

I feel like Marx and Engels foresaw something in Stirner, which is the reason for their diatribes, absurd as they are. I'd still hold it against them; it's just I feel like they foresaw something in him.

That is what I would like. Anyways, I don't want to derail your thread.

I had forgotten what I had learned in Civics class, and, so, meant to say that Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act. Johnson just signed it into law. By my estimation, it seems to have been his bill.

Eisenhower, whatever. I don't really feel a need to contend this outside of that he is ranked well and Kennedy is not.

Truman, though...

the stated purpose of which — tim wood

What, to American Intelligence, that entailed was the arming, training, and funding of who, I guess, at the time, would've just been Fascists, as per what generally gets referred to as "Operation Gladio", as that is what has come out of the Italian courts, a set of clandestine actions that would later lead to a coup d'état in Iran, which we orchestrated, one in Greece, which we are known to have been involved with, and one in Chile, which we are long suspected to have backed, though the website for the Central Intelligence Agency still denies this.

An actual bulwark against Soviet expansion in Europe would've been comprised of regular standing armies. The CIA effectively became as it did under Truman which, though Operation Gladio isn't officially listed as having begun until 1956, does lead me to suspect that such machinations have been part and parcel to their praxis since its inception. There's an American G.I. who has an interesting bit on Klaus Barbie in the documentary on it. I'm also pretty sure that such operations were well underway in Italy before then, but the only real evidence that I have to support this is that the Gehlen Organization was set up immediately after the war.

A lot of this is speculation, but I do kind of think that Truman could be directly responsible for some of the more notorious abuses of power by the organization throughout more or less all of postmodernity. Everyone thinks that he was a fairly good president, though.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also an atrocity and the origin of the Cold War.

Being said, it could've just been Eisenhower, though. It was one or both, but not neither of them, and, so, at least one of them should get a -1 and Kennedy should get a 3.

Edit: Taking a look at our involvement in regime changes on Wikipedia, I've decided to blame Eisenhower for this. We backed the Christian Democrats in the 1948 general election in Italy and subsequently blocked any Communists from participating within elections for the next twenty-four years, but the regime changes didn't really pick up until Eisenhower, which is how, though, perhaps, beginning before then, I'd suspect that the strategy of Fascist collaboration really took hold around then.

I'd give Truman a 1, Eisenhower a -1, Kennedy a 3, and Johnson a 1. I'm too lazy to complete this entire list. I'd also give Washington and Lincoln a 5, the abolitionists relatively high scores, Carter a 4, and mostly everyone else not all that great of a score.

Carry on with this thread, I guess.

Edit 2: Eisnehower a 0, for tim wood's aforementioned reasons.

Edit 3: Johnson a 1.5

Again, feel free to ignore this and just carry on.

Truman is responsible for the Truman Doctrine, more or less the foundational basis for the Central Intelligence Agency arming, training, and funding Neo-Fascists and other terrorists around the world. Eisenhower, I guess, did bring out of the Korean War, but that obviously hasn't been terribly effective, and, so, only so much credit can be given to good old Ike, and Lyndon B. Johnson was very much so responsible for our continued engagement in the war in Vietnam.

John F. Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act, brought us to the moon, and his brother would've been the best president in almost all of United States' history.

3 Truman
3 Eisenhower
1 Kennedy
3 Johnson — tim wood

How can you say such a thing? I'm actually kind of a Communist, but still know that those ones and threes need to be swapped.

He seems to have single handedly saved Western civilization during the Cuban Missile Crisis which, if true, would seem to be a bigger accomplishment than pretty much any other president. On the other hand, it was Kennedy's failure to convince the Russians he couldn't be bluffed that was the cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis. So, he fucked up way bad, and then fixed his own mistake just in the nick of time. — Hippyhead

By the "Cuban Missile Crisis", are you referring to the Civil Rights Act?

No. 3

Someday, perhaps?

It's the best forum on the internet, which has me thinking about starting some sort of intentional techno-critical community.

Whoa. Another Ash Ra Tempel fan. Crazy!

I'll just tell you not to learn anything about the history of Philosophy and to just get into Gilles Deleuze, but I'm not too sure that I would listen to myself.

I am one of those "someone's". Our job is to collect the shopping carts from the corrals and bring them back to the store and not to collect them from some parking space fifty yards away from one of the corrals. I also agree with the original post entirely.

I'll take in stride. 'Til we meet again!

I feel like you've been talking to our detractors too much. You can just read Concluding Unscientific Postscript or Either/Or if you want to get into Kierkegaard.

If you're interested in Kant and Lebiniz, you should read Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze. Read it, read who he references, and then read it again. It's very good.

If you'd like to generally learn about Western Philosophy, aside from Plato, you should also read Aristotle. You can just go from Aristotle to Descartes, and people often do, but there are some academics primarily concerned with research who would lament this to absolutely no end. I wouldn't worry too much about it, though.

Honestly, if you're interested in Existentialism, I would do this as succinctly as humanly possible and go straight from Thus Sparch Zarathustra to Being and Nothingness. It's not that the other Existentialists don't have anything to say; it's just that that is just what you came there for. Do what you desire and don't believe that you need to endlessly read before you can appreciate reading what you really like.

The World as Will and as Representation, you can read without any prerequisites, though it can be difficult to understand.

Either/Or, you can read without any prerequisites.

Critique of Pure Reason is a place to start for a general understanding of modern philosophy. There are a few, though.

If you're preparing to read Being and Time, I don't think that you have chosen the correct texts. He references a number of other philosophers in it, but I can't remember which. I'd bet that there's a way to find out, though.

If you're preparing to read Being and Nothingness, just read Being and Time. You only have to understand so much of Being and Time to understand Being and Nothingness.

\

Well Marx and Engels did renounce dogmatic interpretations of their theories on a number of occasions, despite their long and proud history of isolating and castigating their political opponents. The way I see it is that it was just kind of a character flaw that became the basis for totalitarianism. I can see why an Egoist, such as yourself, would take both a disliking and fascination to the most notable detractors of "Saint Max". Marxism-Leninism really does have almost nothing to do with the theories of Marx and Engels, though.

A strange aside: I'm pretty sure that the section of The German Ideology, a text that I don't really at all like, critiquing the philosophy of Max Stirner is actually longer than The Ego and Its Own.

No, I agree with that there is a lot more to life outside of Politics, specifically, the politics of Communist revolution, which, to go to the letter, if such things could ever be done, of Marx, I don't even advocate. I just think that it's an interesting concept of his.

I don't know. I was just longing for the ecstatic and feeling optimistic.

While I do believe that you, in good faith, are perfectly capable of engaging in meaningful political debate, I just think that you're too cynical. If Politics is incapable of becoming as it ideally should, what's the point of engaging in it at all? It seems like things will just forever continue more or less as they are now. Should society really just kind of plateu after the Neo-Liberal era or whatever? Another world, I feel like, must be possible. If a few politicians took a step back and decided to engage in genuine debate, I think that most people would find for that to be so much more preferable to what exists now that it would actually catch on. I don't know.

As per your question as to specific highly-charged political issues, I think that that such issues even exist is a symptom of this particular predicament. In a world without sensational discourse, that Creationism should be taught during elementary education would never be taken seriously enough to become something that people ever feel a need to debate. The leader of the October Revolution also probably wouldn't be embalmed in a tomb on Red Square like a museum exhibit for an Egyptian pharaoh. Every country in the world would adopt the Nordic model, there would be a proliferation of communes that generally agree to some form of nonviolence, permanent autonomous zones, and micronations, and there would be a forum on the internet for people to have conversations with other human beings and treat them as such other than this one, which, as to what I can tell from my brief intervals here, kind of says a lot about the political ecology of the internet in general.

Trump's new plan to start some sort of Patriot Party poses a significant problem, but, to try him for treason is absurd. The punishment for it is effectively life in prison or death. The guy incited a riot that resulted in violence. He didn't call for violence. It's utter bosh that he's disputing the election at all, but, to try an insane man for such a crime is just totally heavy-handed and sensational. Perhaps you think that we should bring back the guillotine, though? It's not like that's ever gone awry before.

Furthermore, trying Donald Trump for treason is sure to go down in the history of American right-wing extremism like the legend of Ruby Ridge. Why light that powder keg when he's already out of office and may never be able to return?

But I don't think it's much in dispute that we associate confidence with competence as well as status with competence. Perhaps I remember this wrongly though — Echarmion

Oh, this goes on. It's kind of an aporia that people tend to assume that chauvinists make for good leaders and that the wealthy know what is best for society, though.

I don't know that I agree with this distinction between the seriously politically motivated and the general public. It's true that a situation as such exists, but should it be? Aren't, in so far that we're sincerely engaged in Politics, we to assume that everyone ought to both be judicious and well-informed as to what is going on? That common people are somehow incapable of not being misled is either too cynical or patronizing.

The way I see things, Politics is genuine dialogue. The need for it arises because of that conflicts do. Any form of equitable conflict resolution requires that all parties are willing to sincerely engage within a debate, which means to be willing to take the perspective of others into consideration.

To what ends are such political machinations effective. The emotive patronizing that you see on MSNBC and the paranoid anger deliberately incited by Fox News are both effective means to galvanize a populace, but where have they led us now? Donald Trump now wants to start a splinter of the American Right and there is talk of trying him for treason. I like MSNBC better than Fox News because I would prefer to witness people pretend to care for the world, rather than offer the pretense of some grossly misguided righteous indignation, but the both of them are ultimately manipulative. Psychological warfare originates authoritarianism. By that people should actively disengage from the political foray as it stands now, I do think that the world would change for the better.

Alas, though, I feel like I am moralizing and beginning to bore myself. There should just be libertarian socialists, people who care about human rights, various dissidents, and everyone should agree to have calm, rational, insightful, and erudite conversations. Can anyone really not agree with that?

I highly doubt that science proves that most human beings have an innate predisposition to follow authoritarian leaders, which begs that absurd conclusion that despotism is somehow natural.

Mutual Aid was also, in part, put forth as a scientific text.

Oh, I greatly discount such claims as well.

"Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."

So, what, are we going to wage a public hanging now? The guy incited a riot. So what? God knows I've tried to.

I hear what you're saying, but the problem with just not talking with other political actors is that they are out there, in positions of power, and often have produced situations that do need to be somehow mediated, thereby making dialogue requisite, which is sort of an absurd poverty of such a sentiment. What I really mean is that ideally people would engage in discourse not as a contest of wills, but to come to a better understanding of the world, as in Philosophy, or decide upon the best course of action when situations have been produced that require some form of mediation, as in Politics.

I do think that that people should learn to engage in genuine dialogue and to mediate history rather than to become subject to it would actually change the world for the better and to a very significant degree.

Guy Debord, who wouldn't be likely to sympathize with such sentiment, is famous for his concept of the Spectacle. People think that the Spectacle is the mass media, but it is actually the entire political foray. The idea is that it's like some grand melodrama that you just can't look away from. I was and still am of a very far Left political position. I'm not suggesting that people should sacrifice their ideals in the pursuit of some sort of compromise; what I'm suggesting is that people should actively disengage from political debate as such, as all of it is ultimately sensational. In a way, this is sort of a-political, as it is to withdraw from Politics as we have come to understand it. At the same time, it is also markedly political, as it seeks to reify what is veritable of Politics.

To your question of topics, I have few answers, but will, perhaps, address later if I can think of how to.