Has anyone seen the film, Old Joy? There's a SPOILER ALERT quote at the end of the film that I really liked. He says that "Sorrow is just worn out joy." I was wondering if anyone might know the Buddhist concept or saying that this originates from. Kelly Reichardt or Jonathan Raymond could have just made it up, but it did seem to be inspired by some sort of Buddhist notion.

Okay, so it does make factual claims, but that they are factual need not necessarily be the focus of Ontology. I have a vaguely agnostic attitude towards the factual nature of claims made while practicing Ontology.

You do decide what you consider to be closest to the truth, but what is true can never be fully uncovered.

Not really, but why does it matter?

I stated that it was a factual claim. My point was that Ontology is not necessarily concerned with factual claims even though it can be.

I've always understood "radical" in the political sense as referring to advancing a complete reform of a political body. Anarchists can be Radicals, but some Anarchists may not identify as such.

Just slating Anarchism against heirarchy is fine by me. I had thought that it was more of a problematic concept than it actually is as I had assumed that heirarchy implied that there was just one person at the top. I don't really think that President of the United States of America can be held to be responsible for all of the plights within the current geopolitical situation. It doesn't actually mean that necesssarily, and, so, my qualms were unfounded.

To state that a particular shade of red can never be adequately described is still making a factual claim, but the point of presenting such an argument is not to address what can be considered to be "fact". The intention is to suggest that there is an unintelligable infinite variance of color which can never be adequately described. An Ontological project may be primarily concerned with factual claims, but Ontology itself is not necessarily.

I think that the facticity of Ontology is somewhat absurd. Ontology speculates upon what Being is like. You can only ever glean certain things. You don't really ever arrive at any truths concerning Being.

I am an Anarchist. I interpret Anarchism as advancing some form of maximal liberty and equality. Because the State has stood so much in the way of this historically, Anarchism is often slated against the State, but I don't necessarily define "Anarchism" as being in opposition to the State. Some people might, and they could be correct, but, as I don't think that they are, I don't see a reason to adopt another term to refer to my political philosophy. Anarchism can be defined as what it advances positively as well as what it is slated against. I'm somewhat critical of a purely negative political approach as I think that it fails to offer a creative alternative to whatever it is critical of. Granted, I, too, don't have much to suggest as to what I think it is that society ought to be like. The distinction between Anarchism and Communism as being that Anarchism is slated against the State and that Communism is slated against Capital is, to me, somewhat confusing. It's easy to generally regard this as being true without taking into consideration the problems that doing so will eventually result in.

I replied twice becuase I edited my post too much.

A regimen is like a minor regime. It's like a microcosmic totalitarian order enforcing political body. There is a regimen of Avanguardia Nazionale and a regimen of the Italian state. The social configuration of the Italian state is ultimately negative, but it is not negative in the same sense that the rule that Avanguardia Nazionale seeks to impose is negative in spite of that there probably is a connection between Avanguardia Nazionale and the Italian state. When you are dealing with either the Italian state or Avanguardia Nazionale, you are dealing with two entirely different political bodies. Everything is like this. The problem is that there are particular regimens who enforce something like their own will to power and not necessarily that there is a particular social configuration that necessarily results in illiberal, unequal, and warlike society.

This is an idea that I've just cooked up, and, so, it's probably bound to fraught with contradictions and drawbacks.

I am not advancing that the State plays no role in whatever it is that goes down. To do so would be absurd.

In my opinion, aside from that there are wars and that there is a criminal justice system that could be regarded as being unjust, the State is, anymore, just frustrating. It's just kind of a nuissance and not necessarily the problem itself. I feel like there is some other heirarchic social configuration that is really what causes the most harm. I see it as being somewhere between the State and Capital and, perhaps, encompassing something else entirely, but am unsure as to what exactly.

I would, perhaps, invoke a concept of "regimens", but, as I have only just devloped this idea, I am only capable of saying so much.

Proceeding partially from Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "Several Regimes of Signs", I would suggest that there are regimens who enforce unjust social arangements. There is a regimen of what is negative about the State. There is a regimen of the war apparatus, a regimen of the police, a regimen of the mafia, a regimen of Capital, etc.

I don't know how useful this would ultimately be, but that is something that I am tossing out there.

I don't mean to imply that "Structural Antisemitism" does not 'exist'. Stalin's campaign against Leon Trotsky was "structurally" anti-Semitic. He treated Trotsky as a 'Jew'. I just don't think that it is beneficial to invoke the concept.

There are of course, reasons. Everything has reasons. That doesn't make them good.

I think that humans are vaguely Pacifist in nature. I would probably suggest that while, in nature, human beings are neither violent nor nonviolent, that they can generally be considered to be somewhat nonviolent. I have an only partially optimistic view of human nature in general. I also think that it only 'exists' to a certain degree.

Those reasons being that they are a means to maintain an ostensibly illiberal and unequal society which only benefits a select few. That the governance of the Pharohs made sense does make it at all desirable.

I am a very particular Anarcho-Pacifist with interests and critiques of Autonomism and Communization.

That it is constant in history does mean that it should be done. Slavery was sort of a historical constant. Just because things have been the case does not mean that they should be.

I am in favor of a style of living that radically differs from what exists now. I would contend that a continuation of politics as such is not necessarily positive.

I don't know that Situational Ethics rejects necessarily rejects the Categorical Imperative, but I do think that "Relativism" does. It's a bit strange to discuss "Relativism", I think, because the term was sort of used a pejorative for the common Relativist Fallacy within the Soviet Union by the likes of Ayn Rand. I don't think that that is at all what "Relativism" is, but, to my understanding, the term is somewhat nebulous.

We can come up with general guidelines, but I would arguge that it is only so useful to do so. The logic of the general rule has a way, in my opinion of running away with itself.

You could, for instance, argue that it was wrong for Gavrillo Princips to assassinate Franz Ferdinand based off of the general rule that it is wrong to kill. When you begin to apply general rules to the situation, however, I think that the Ethical concerns get kind of out of hand. To deduce that it is wrong to kill a political leader because this hazards starting a world war fails to take into account the particulars of Princips's situation. He was only nineteen, a somewhat disaffected youth who became involved with parties who had nothing to do with the kind of society that he sought to create in the midst of political situation that he could not be reasonably held accountable for. That the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was a somewhat lone act by an alienated teenager is a drastically different interpretation of the event than that Anarchists present a clear and present danger to peaceful society.

I'm not sure if that argument really makes too much sense. I just kind of wanted to bring up Gavrilo Princips for some reason.

I guess that what I'm suggesting is that the attempt to create general rules and guidelines hazards jumping to conclusions in a way that what I percieve to be Situation Ethics does not necessarily.

I think that problem is focused badly in the context of "hate speech". The problem is the organization of Fascist terror. Wearing a Joy Division T-shirt in the wrong context in Germany might constitute Volksverhetzung, but the real problem is that there are Fascists who are out there who intend to do harm. Arbitrary bans on forms of expression merely appear to address the problem. Perhaps I'm too cynical, but I just don't see a ban on hate speech effecting anything other than that the State decides to make an example out of someone like Ian MacKaye so as to gloss over the role that it had to play in the formation of the Neo-Fascist project.

To me, there's something that's just implicitly totalitarian, and, therefore, totally undesirable, about regulating how it is that people choose to dress. Even if such legal actions are made in order to promote some Liberal principles which I may agree with, doing so seems to violate a basic right to free expression, which I am unwilling to concede. I am not of the opinion that is acceptable for a state to make such concessions.

Say, for instance, that an art band creates a glyph that they put on a shirt. This glyph somehow gets co-opted by Fascist terrorists through no fault of the band. The wearing of the shirt in support of Fascist terrorism becomes enough of a phenomenon to warrant concern. The banning of the wearing of the shirt is not a solution to the problem. The root causes of Fascist terrorism need to be addressed.

I think that the existence of God is meaningless can be interpreted as proceeding from what Nietzsche meant by "God is dead." To say that "God is dead." was, in my opinion, to say that God is no longer philosophically relevent. You can interpret ignosticism quite radically as suggesting that the question of God's existence is meaningless from an ardent atheist standpoint. I'm not suggesting that that is what the ignostics do; I'm just stating that that is a possible interpretation of Ignosticism.

Whoa. This is pretty sweet.

On some level I think that ignosticism can be considered to be more atheist than atheism itself.

That's probably a good approach.

I think that Situational Ethics are grouped under the category of something like Moral Relativism, but you may be right that there is a real distinction. I think that "relativism" just denotes that a person doesn't believe in abstract moral truths. It, perhaps, shouldn't. But, to my estimation, that is what it generally refers to.

"Relativism" can, but does not necessarily mean that you think that Ethics stem from some sort of inner subjectivity. It just means that you reject that there is something like the Ten Commandments which are necessarily 'true' in every given case. It also follows that you would reject any set of abstract Ethical truths which are considered to be 'true' in a similar sense.

To me, it seems to be the case that no set of Ethical truths, no matter how well thought out, can apply to each and every given situation. This arises, in part, out of a preference that I have for subjectivity which is predicated upon that knowledge is situated by experience. @tim wood brought up a good point in a different thread, however, that there is a case to be made for that murder is just always wrong. I think that it logically follows that it is always wrong because it is, by definition, unwarranted. I disagree with his assumption that an abstract ethic should follow from that murder is always wrong, however, as I believe for it simply be an exceptional case. To me, even though you can probably make a case for a few things that are always just wrong, it doesn't really make very much sense to parcel out an abstract set of Ethical truths as the value judgements of any given event are moreso determined by the situation which engendered it.

I did state that that is what it is. That's just a suspicion of mine as a somewhat unapologetic atheist. You don't really have to feel like you're not entrenched enough even though making you feel that way is something that I was sort of doing. The baggage of atheism honestly kind of isn't worthwhile. I sort of wish that I was agnostic. I just simply think that there is no God, though.

In a different thread, I was partially defending the new atheist position against religion, but now I think that they could just be off base and that the thing to do is really to just move away from religion. Agnosticism is interesting because it states that it is impossible to know either way. There's no positive or negative claim to go along with the belief system. It poses the question as the belief. It's kind of cool.

I wonder if I, myself, aren't becoming more of a non-theist as opposed to an anti-theist. I don't see non-theism as an alternative to atheism, but it could be an alternative to anti-theism. Atheism already kind of describes such an approach.

Well, I wouldn't necessarily, but you could argue that Law does not protect its citizens, but, rather, protects only a select class of citizens and is, therefore, part and parcel to the machinations of the State in a negative sense.

That theory makes a lot more sense if you accept my friend's assertion that High Fantasy is just kind of Fascist. There's nothing necesarily Fascist about creating the entire universe of the novel, and, so, I suppose that I wouldn't really hold on to it.

I don't think so. I've never really studied Ethics, and, so, I couldn't really say with certainty, but it seems like some sort of situational ethics wouldn't discount that such things are still problematic. It'd be difficult to argue that according to the situation that the right thing to do would to be a racist or misogynist. Granted, there's always the potential for a reducto ad given a 'relativist' Ethical framework, but I think that if anyone really cared to hash it all of the way out that such problems would disappear.

You're probably right about that that might not necessarily be the case. I think that I just want for that to be predicate for politics. In a political sense, however, I think that you do always demand negative freedoms. It may not be primary, but it is always demanded. There can be no agreeable terms otherwise.

So, can we say that political organizations aren't necessarily rackets, but always hazard becoming them?

I agree with some sort of "relative" ethics. I think that almost everyone agrees that you should respect other cultures. I suppose that Multiculturalism seeks to address this in general. I was thinking that there should be a multicultural equivalent to intersectionality, but then realized that that is just what Multiculturalism already is. I think that that has more or less solved my dillema, but you and whoever else can still go on about whatever if you feel like doing so.


How was the war supposed to have effectively mediated a cultural dialogue?

Well, since I'm not going to make anyone type out the character they won't be smooshed together.

I just used "ey" for God in a different thread. I kind of think that God should have eir own pronoun. I was thinking azey, azem, and azir, but it's too alpha and omega. What about just ay, am, and aur? Maybe "ae"? I kind of like "ae" better.

I also just changed that on the other thread so that this will catch on.

To my knowledge, agnosticism posits that it is impossible to know whether or not God exists. I would assume that agnostic theists assume that God exists, but have doubt and that agnostic atheists assume that God does not exist, but don't disallow for the possibility that ae does.

I don't want to be divisive, but I kind of see agnosticism as just not quite going all the way with atheism. It's more common because it doesn't quite carry the same baggage.

Being said, there are really sincere agnostics. Plenty of people simply think that it impossible to know as to whether or not God exists.

I guess that I do that. One should only ever be so judgemental.

I met a guy once who was sort of into Bushido and I just rambled about Yukio Mishima because I think too much about Fascism and its various derivatives and then I felt sort of bad about it after the fact because I bet that that guy only really saw things that were good about Bushido and that I had, perhaps, to him, indirectly implied that I thought that he was some sort of esoteric Fascist.

I should try not to do that at least.

Then again, I don't see why you can't talk about Yukio Mishima in the bar if you really feel like it. I just kind of wanted to go on about him because I had been thinking about him lately. I had this experimental film that I was going to do about a guy in a dream state who was hunting down and killing off aspects of his own personality. The figure of the antagonist was going to be reading one of his books. It was supposed to be an Existential horror film.

Perhaps I'm just too bleak. I don't really think that I'm all that bleak, but I may come off that way. Anyways, I've gone quite off topic. Carry on as usual.

I think that he means to imply that they're like mafia rackets. A "racket" is like an esoteric coeterie that conscripts others into doing its bidding via covert forms of coercion. He doesn't really mean what a racket actually is. He's just referring to what people think of when they think of "rackets".


I don't necessarily agree. I think that all people want to engage in politics without coercion. The freedom from coercion is the primary demand of all people at all times. It's more or less the predicate for politics. You are at all engaged in political acts because you necessarily demand to be free from coercion.

Islam doesn't offend me in any way aside from that it tends be patriarchical. Perhaps I should have titled this thread Multiculturalism and Traditionalism. How does multiculturalism cope with traditionalism? I assume that it is a good thing that people should be aware of that there are all kinds of different cultures in the world and that people should take into account that various different worldviews are bound to drastically differ from their own and that you should approach other cultures somewhat openly. I just don't know what to do about that I do ultimately have qualms with certain kinds of traditionalism. Is the rejection of all forms of traditionalism culturally insensitive? How should you approach traditionalism in general?

I'm asking you as much as I'm asking anyone in general.

I think that the term is meant in a more colloquial sense. He seems to imply that they're necessarily coercive. I don't know that that is the case necessarily, but most political organizations are a little too coercive by my estimation. Granted, I mostly just mill about the Left, but I can't imagine that the Right could at all be better.

There are extremists of all faiths, spiritualities, and ideologies. That terrorism is a common means of resistance in the region is resultant of the situation that the West has created there. There are, to them, no other means of revolt. That's not to justify such actions. I actually think that terrorism is reprehensible and tragic.

Consider how many people have died in the "War on Terror" and how many people died because of Islamic terrorist attacks. Is, say, the American presence there, to them, not a form of terror? Is that not motivated, in part, by Christian ideology?

Say you can regard some, but not all of the deaths caused by the "War on Terror" to have been engendered by Christianity. I would bet that Christianity still has a higher body count than Islam.

The West is far more intimidating to anyone living in the region than anyone living in the region is to the West. I do think that Dawkins is being somewhat alarmist. I don't think that he's all that bad. I was actually trying to partially defend him in the first place, but I do think that people should acknowlege that his statements on Islam are a little bit out of place. It's not quite what the Left made it out to be, but it is indicative of a certain Western lack of cultural awareness or something. It's only so big of a deal to me. I kind of get why Dawkins is the way that he is.

I just think that he kind of took the line of the Right in regards to Islam, that that line is motivated by reactinoary Christian fears of the faith, and that he should have, as an atheist developed a better approach.

I don't think that Dawkins is really a terrible person or anything. I just thought that the way that he handled that was disappointing.

He's just alarmist, man. He's not all that bad, but he's just kind of alarmist. That he's alarmist is indicitave of that he's somewhat Islamophobic.

We have not discussed this before to my knowledge, but you may have discussed this with someone else. In that quote he's not all that bad, but I do think that he has sort of alarmist opinions about Islam which are motivated by Western cultural fears of the faith. It's not severe or anything. I just think that he's a little bit Islamophobic.

Well, it was a conspiracy theory, and, so, it was primarily comprised of one thread like that after another. There was an odd kind of logic to it, but it ultimately didn't add up to anything at all.

My theory was partially motivated by looking at the structure of British Intelligence under the assumption that MI6 kind of runs the show. During the war, MI5 specialized in counter-intelligence and MI6 specialized in finance. My theory was that while MI5 was spying on Mosley, which I think that they actually did, they were unwittingly spying on the head of a secret branch of MI6. This, through somewhat nonsensical Intelligence logic, had resulted in the percieved need for a cult centered around the "Archangel" Michael. My theory was that they had invented archangels altogether and had inserted the concept into history. You'd need the whole ball of crazy yarn to really get how all of this added up if it did at all which it probably didn't. I think that, in that theory, Arkhangelsk was a MI6 hub, and that British Intelligence was also covering up the role that they had to play in putting Alexander III up to the assassination of Alexander II which had later resulted in that British and American Intelligence had been involved with any number of Russian revolutionary or nationalist factions leading up to the revolution. Pyotr Lavrovich Lavrov, Sergei Trufanov, and Felix Yusupov were allegedy British Intelligence and Rasputin was allegedy American Intelligence. There was actually also supposed to be some sort of internal fallout. I think that that theoy had originally developed out of the theory that I had that British Intelligence controlled the aristocracy and American Intelligence controlled the mafia. It all had an odd kind of logic, but ultimately didn't really add up to very much.

Well, now I do know who the mods are @fdrake @jamalrob @Hanover @Michael @andrewk @StreetlightX.

My theory is that they created the concept of the "Archangel" Michael to assert some form religious supremacy following the end of the Second World War. This was, in part, to cover up the role that British and American Intelligence had to play in propping up the Third Reich. You would, of course, have to accept the theory that Oswald Mosley was a British spy and that American Intelligence was involved with the American businesses who flooded money into Nazi Germany. I don't really believe this anymore, but I did go through a fit of madness where I became deeply convinced of this. It's kind of an out there conspiracy and I just thought that some people might find for it to be kind of interesting.

He called Islam a "cancer". It's been a while since this happened and so, I'm trying to dig up the articles. He's said that it's "the greatest force of evil in the world today". He has said ""Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur'an. You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism." When he called it the "greatest force of evil in the world today" he was trying to be somewhat concerted. Here is the full quote:

"It’s tempting to say all religions are bad, and I do say all religions are bad, but it’s a worse temptation to say all religions are equally bad because they’re not. If you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world it’s quite apparent that at present the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam. It’s terribly important to modify that because of course that doesn’t mean all Muslims are evil, very far from it. Individual Muslims suffer more from Islam than anyone else. They suffer from the homophobia, the misogyny, the joylessness which is preached by extreme Islam, Isis and the Iranian regime. So it is a major evil in the world, we do have to combat it, but we don’t do what Trump did and say all Muslims should be shut out of the country. That’s draconian, that’s illiberal, inhumane and wicked. I am against Islam not least because of the unpleasant effects it has on the lives of Muslims."

I don't think that he's racist against Arabs, but I do think that he is somewhat Islamophobic. It's not deep seated or anything, but just in a sense that is somewhat disconcerting.

The Left made really big deal out of it a while ago.

You are the only mod that I know who is a mod.

Also, you would really put it past them?

I think that it can be worn in some sort of radical sense, but that there is a sort of apologetic that goes along with some of the support for doing so. Anyone can reinterpret anything however they please. This is totally different, and, I do not at all mean to draw a comparison, but, to give an example, I think that when Sid Vicious wore the swastika on national television that he did, effectively, totally recontextualize it. The T-shirt was degenerate and banal, but the swastika on TV was a way of expressing that all that they wanted from him was for him to be a degenerate Nazi. I think that it was rather tragic that, in the end, they sort of got that.

That's sort of a tangent, but, from this, we can see, no matter what it is, it can be radically reinterpreted.

A person can drape themselves in a French flag in as much of an appeal to Communist revolution as they can to some form of reactinoary nationalism.

So, it can be done. The problem, I think, is that that women are expected to wear the hijab is generally somewhat repressive. I don't think that this should be generally supported in opposition to the absurd injunction to ban the hijab. Perhaps the clothing item just needs to be reinterpreted, and, so, in so far that it is, I suppose that that is good, but, in so far that it remains an instrument of repression, I don't think that the wearing of the hijab should be necessarily supported. As to how all of this should be handled, I am still unsure. I ultimately grew up in the West and it is ultimately not really my place to say how it is that a Muslim woman should dress. If asked, however, I feel like you should give a person your honest opinion. I think that it's kind of repressive, but that you should be able to choose how you express your belief system. I don't know whether or not that would go over well. I should like for it to, but ultimately can't say that I've really done the intersectional analysis to adequately put forth an opinion upon such things.