I'd guess most of us have at least a high school education. That would probably give a higher IQ than the average, which includes those who did not complete high school. Is it a detectable difference in an ideal world where there is data on all regular posters? Is IQ an appropriate measure for philosophical merit? Maybe, but we don't have any data and no, definitely not.

Talking about that goes even further away from poor @Sam26's thread topic. Which, I imagine, is supposed to be a series of vaguely Wittgenstein influenced confessions of how the analysis of language has changed how we think about philosophical issues. Emphasis on the specifics, like 'How reading Wittgenstein made me an anti-theist' or 'How reading Austin turned me off Chomsky's approach to language'.

If we have the addendum that philosophy mostly consists in the creation/discovery and analysis of concepts, then I think we see eye to eye.

You think about stuff, then you make stuff to help you think about stuff, or you discover some structure in stuff. Sometimes you make stuff to help you think about stuff and then that helps you discover a structure in stuff. Philosophy is the study of how stuff hangs together.

Edit: this contains the silly idea that philosophy is done by individuals rather than being a product of a relation between individuals and history mediated by individuals and history mediated by...

I can think of a few problem sets which don't seem to be fundamentally reliant on the analysis of language to be addressed:

Philosophy of time: presentism, block universes etc.
Metaphysics of science: emergence, character of natural law
Political philosophy: the vast majority of issues in it. 'Are Marx's classes of proletariat and bourgeoise still present in capital? Have they changed over time?'
Logic: foundations of mathematics (eg, we used to think set theory was the only way to axiomatise things, now we have topos theory!), properties of formal systems.
Meta-ethics: cognitivism, non-cognitivism (Frege-Geach for a specific debate)
Ethics: real world ethical issues - environmental conservation, overpopulation, morality of torture, relationship of ethics and legal systems.
Philosophy of language/linguistics: performativity and speech act theory, pragmatics vs formalism.
Epistemology: epistemic dependence

It seems to me that the analysis of most problems doesn't turn on the analysis of language. To be sure, being a careful reader and writer is useful for understanding and contributing.

Perhaps this kind of thing is suggestive.

Sensory and motor homunculi.
The Wound Man


The first pair of images are sensory and motor homunculi. They take an anatomically correctly proportioned human body then scale the body parts to the proportion of sensory/motor brain functionality devoted to that body part. You can see that there are a lot of similarities between them, but there are some differences. For example, the sensory (left) and motor (right) homunculi both have giant hands; lots of brain effort is concerned with hand movement and the sense of touch in the hands, but the legs on the motor homunculus are quite a lot thinner than those on the sensory homunculus. In terms of bodily movements, this corresponds to the comparatively more constrained movements afforded to the human legs than to the human hands.

You can also use each homunculus in turn, the sensory capabilities of the hands facilitate greater tactile location sensitivity than those on the legs. If you want to see this yourself, close your eyes and touch your knuckle with one finger, then touch just below the knuckle on either side. It's very easy to tell on which side of the knuckle the touch occurred. Close your eyes and try the same thing on the front of a quadricep on the legs, take roughly the same distance and compare the sensations; it's a lot harder to discern the relative locations of the touch points on the quadricep than on the hand.

The motor homunculus has similar comparative information; hand movements are a lot more versatile and need to be more precise than leg movements, and this is shown by how big the hands are.

You can also take both homunculi and see that the sizes of the body parts in both of them are strongly correlated; which is suggestive of the fact that sensory processing and the possible variations in movement and the required precision in movement go hand in hand. A hand needs to discriminate on at least a centimetre scale for most tasks, a leg doesn't have to for its usual load bearing and walking.

These maps have different functions again to the archetypical 'wound man', which is a labelled roughly anatomically correct catalogue of wounds and surgical interventions for them. Which differ again from the muscular and skeletal structures.

None of these are 'more correct' than any other, and they provide a different lens with which to view the objective features of a human body.

Yet notice that history has marched on in other ways too, notably that the left has changed from trying to overthrow capitalism to trying to mold it in quite a cooperative way. (Bernie Sanders is a perfect example). And civil rights naturally have not been something only promoted by the left in the broader historical context. — ssu

I was trying to highlight that the 'liberal elite' trope you find in political discourse has two functions. First it can be used to automatically gainsay anything, secondly its most common use is to delegitimise anyone highlighting a systemic injustice.

Some of the left dislike people like Sanders and Corbyn because they believe an incremental approach to political change is misguided. I don't agree with that approach, it dichotomises political activity into useful = revolution and useless = anything else.

I see it as more important to pay attention to how groups respond to systemic injustice and discourse around it than to retroject categorisations of various civil rights movements by belonging to a contemporary part of the political spectrum. The only unambiguous way to see those shared ideas from past civil rights movements to contemporary ones is to categorise based on topic of interest; which marginalised groups' interests are being highlighted.

I don't think that the right or the liberal left has a particularly strong alliance with contemporary issues of systemic injustice. I use 'leftists' as a name for those people who have political concerns with systemic injustice and its attendant inequalities. MLK wasn't part of the communist movement of his time, but that didn't stop the state from demonising him as a commie. Similarly with Malcolm X, he was demonised as an anarchist. The suffragettes were allied with the workers' movement at the time. It's more important to see people with common topics of political concern as allies than to categorise past movements in accordance with the metaphor of the political spectrum. Though, if we're ever in a position to say MLK would have been concerned with ethics in video games journalism... we're in a bad shape. Much like those white nationalists who appropriate Malcom X and Garvey.

So if you're for equality for non-whites, women and other minorities, that's great. The right envisioned in the OP does whatever it can to frustrate those progressive ideals.

Don't you think that the rhetoric of the right is in principle inseparable
from the rhetoric of the left? — Number2018

No, they're a lot different. EG: there's no way to see how 'cuck' is used as anything but an attempt to undermine the autonomy of women or to mark the impossibility of women being friends with men. There's no criterion of whether it's right to call someone a cuck or not in its common use except using it for in group/out group signalling.

Contrast that to @Hanover's supposed list of leftist buzzwords. All of them are based around highlighting injustices, and where they go wrong is cashed out in terms of inaccurate or oversimplifying use.

No non-prejudiced person would use these alt-right buzzwords with their original intention. Some sensible people can use the left buzzwords accurately with their original intention.

If it really is the case that highlighting racism, misogyny, transphobia and other systematic injustices are nothing more than left rhetorical tools political discourse is in a bad place. And we should look to see where this equivocation is coming from.

I think adversarial joy and shame have a coimplication. Joy is an extreme state of comfort and satisfaction with a state of affairs, a person loses themselves in whatever they're doing and everything feels right. In shame, a person and their activity sticks out like a sore thumb, inviting their identity to become pained in contrast to the reality of their decisions.

I imagine that the success of consciousness raising political activism has produced a counter ideology that seeks to eliminate shame, which renormalises that which has been exposed as a problem. The transformation of political debate on the internet into manipulating the attention economy (and thus the Overton window) has this as a component, strategies which allow indifference and immediate rejection of criticism based on a problematised identity spread as a salve for an ego which didn't know how deeply it could be hurt.

Instead of trying to sublimate that pain into a greater sense of decency and fraternity, it is very tempting to insulate ourselves from what we see as the sources of those slights - the people who are identified as the kind of people who raise such things as problems.

With tweeting and Facebook etc. the discourse has become a parade of short witty replies and gotchas. Longer responses that intend to seek some kind of consensus or solution to an issue are rare and... dull, difficult. In fact, what I find lacking are the kind of discussion openings that don't follow the dichotomy of being for or against some issue promoting clearly the agenda of one side or the other, but find good and bad things in the issue and hence aren't clearly for or against it. These kind of answers just confuse the partisan crowd as the answers aren't simply the reurgitated talking points. — ssu

I share this lamentation. It's a damn shame that any attempt at objective analysis of social issues can be deemed propaganda from the liberal elite and hence rejected if it does not conform to the expectations of people who hold that prejudice or worldview. The successes of various civil rights movements; from the suffragettes to MLK and Malcom X, or the LGBT activists who got homosexuality and transgenderism depathologized, invites suspicion on any person who positions themselves as indifferent or hostile to the progress achieved by these movements. We live in a less prejudiced world because of the hard work of activists and journalists in resisting discriminatory practices.

Where I differ from you, I think, is that I see that rejection of the kind of analysis I advanced in the OP as propaganda from the liberal elite as an illegitimate rhetorical strategy which serves those who would hold their prejudices against history that has marched on without them.

Unfortunately, this means that everyone advancing a political position has to care a lot more about optics than they would if things truly were decided in the court of reason, and not through networks organised to promote maximal exposure to exaggerated opinion. Ideas have to be crafted as viral content in order to gain wider audience and start convincing people.

The alt-right realised this a long time ago. One of the most popular ways of defending bigoted opinion is not just to defend those opinions, it is to raise the possibility of defending those opinions as endowed by the rights of free speech. You can see exactly the same pattern in some of the debate on whether creationism can be taught in schools; the possibility of debate between the two invites an equal platform between them which never should have been given in the first place. luckily the courts in the US removed any legal support for teaching creationism in schools. I don't think reasonable people bat an eyelid at that shit because it's established fact, and hurrah for the state supporting the truth with law. The discriminatory practices against the systematically marginalised are just as established in the court of reason, all room left for debate is a question of extent and quality.

There is a room for people who show 'structured contempt' at the same time as explaining why and how systemic injustices work and exist, but it has to be given sufficient rhetorical flourish to gain exposure.

forming, expressing and satisfying mass desires. — Number2018

I think analysing the rhetoric of the right and how it's penetrated political discourse is a different topic from discussing the intersection of political and consumer identities. The idea that all politics is done from the sole motivation of satisfying consumer identity (like virtue signalling! in/out group signalling as referenced by @andrewk) is anathema to those who really do have skin in the game on those issues, and those who support such stakeholders.

The buzzwords of the left used against the right are "racist," "biggot," "paranoid," "priviledged," "anti-intellectual," to name a few. All of this is aimed at deligitimizing the right. — Hanover

There are sensible ways to hold non-left opinions, just as there are sensible non-left opinions. Not all conservatives are racist, not all conservatives are paranoid, or anti-intellectual etc. I can sympathise with people who look at the banker bailouts in 2008 and draw the conclusion that government intervention in the market is a bad idea, just as much as I can sympathise with those people in poor neighbourhoods in the UK who feel immigration is alienating them from their own sense of community.

Someone who is not racist should not be called racist, nevertheless a society can be called racist if it has systemic injustices against some ethnicities. Similarly for sexism and women. I think there are two types of privilege, privilege whereby someone benefits by injustice inflicted on another due to the relationship of their identities; and privilege where a person is spared an injustice by virtue of their identity. Someone's opinion is not false just because they have a privilege of either sort. The times where it is appropriate to highlight the role privilege plays is when a person's opinion appears to be justified more from their societal circumstances framing what representative and relevant evidence they have easy access to, and less from a sustained effort of thinking.

Everyone's speech should be free, we should just be very careful in how we use that to legitimate the expression of peoples' opinions. Free speech can be used rhetorically to defend an idea irrelevant of its content. Just because everyone has a right to free speech does not mean that every view should be given a large platform. This applies to leftist tankies as much as it does to white nationalists.

The implication of your post is that the left buzzwords are more often used inappropriately than used appropriately. Of course I believe that they should not be used inappropriately. When someone is bigoted or when there are systemic injustices, it should be called like it is. Same for either when they are not. There is no appropriate way to use the terms above without simultaneously trying to subvert their meaning. The symmetry you're alluding to just isn't there.

Another major difference between left buzzwords and the right buzzwords I highlighted is that they are specifically tailored to legitimise bigotry, or function to promote bigotry by proxy (like 'post modern neo marxism' being the 'leftist elite' narrative mixed with the 'cultural marxism' narrative).

It's kind of ridiculous to me that you can react to an exegesis of how certain popular terms in internet debate were literally pieces of memetic social engineering coopted or created by fringe groups for the purposes of normalising bigotry by saying 'the left does this too!'. Usually however the left does not try to legitimise bigotry.

Though, maybe we mean different things by left. If you think of the American democratic party as the left I can see why you would believe leftists often try to legitimise bigotry. I use left to refer to at minimum Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn or the Norwegian Workers' Party left, rather than 'left liberals' which don't differ substantively from conservatives.

For someone the OP can informative, yet the vitriolic hatred tells very well just how much the sides hate each other in the American discourse. Hence likely the few genuine alt-right people would just love fdrake's outburst which remind me of Captain Haddock's famous curses. — ssu

In my experience talking with people on this right, they really don't like having their rallying memes highlighted. It strikes me as very strange that you would believe my OP is just fuel for the alt-right. In no way have I expressed that bigoted ideologies are to be taken seriously intellectually, and in fact I advocate treating them as worthy more of structured contempt than debate.

The vitriolic hatred is intended to be a mirror of the hatred applied to those who come under the use of these terms. As always, when bigoted opinions are treated objectively they are found to be baseless speculation grounded in a feeling of disenfranchisement.

Also, this isn't specific to American political debate. It's about internet discourse on politics. It's largely irrelevant to the topic that Trump supporters are often ideologically quite close to the perspectives framed by the words I analysed.

The correct response to such bigots isn't to bemoan that their opinions are never held to light in the count of reason, the correct response is to realise that their opinions have already been judged in that court and found wanting, then to frustrate the procedures which propagate their horrible ideologies.

Y'know, I used to spend a lot of time on social media. The unfortunate thing about quitting social media is that it destroyed most of my friendships in real life. The friends I kept I see and email, the rest... I was just managed out of their personal attention economy by stopping using these sites. Whenever we talk it's great, but they need to make time for it, rather than having spontaneous chit chat occurring passively as they look out on their interface to the world.

It's good to know where words come from, but just because their source isn't kosher, doesn't mean they aren't handy terms. I've been a "social justice warrior" much longer than the phrase has been around. I like the term, both in its ameliorative and denigrating sense. I like "snowflake" too, and the type exists, left-right-and center. Pains in the ass, all of them. POMO is a favorite term too. Cuck? Cuckold has been around for a long time--Old French into Old English. — Bitter Crank

I think similarly to this. This is why I added the vitriol at the end of my OP, and why I wanted to make a post highlighting the inauspicious origins and original intentions behind the terms. Words are powerful influencers of political opinion, the more memorable the better. Words also carry their history with them as a component of their meaning.

The right knows the power of words in internet debate, this is why you end up with bigots sticking to left liberals and centrists on Youtube - like Sargon of Akkad and Thunderfoot. Bigots find their antipathy to 'social justice' and feminism empowering, just like they find the idea that the left has cultural hegemony empowering.

Perhaps I'm also a bitter crank, the idea of calling an antifeminist an incel cuck definitely appeals to me. However, the prevailing use of those terms now has the unfortunate consequence of dominating the exposure to their contexts of expression (see the bits in the OP about attention economy on social media), which is why parroting such things uncritically is dangerous.

@Coldlight

There is an idea, a noble and generous idea, that how good a political idea is should always be negotiated in the court of reason. As an impulse, this is beyond critique, and is a vital part of our intellectual heritage. We need to be able to talk about things honestly and openly, to call out bullshit for what it is, and to demand evidence for any position.

What remains unsaid in such a perspective is the assumption that the evaluation of political ideas does and can only occur in such an abstract context. Unfortunately, the evaluation of political ideas is not confined to the court of reason. People are born into identities and ideas, people grow into them not of their own choosing, people are branded with them as an objective feature of our shared social reality.

All of this is very personal - it concerns each as much as it concerns all, so it should not come as a surprise that those who would devalue the contributions of others to this court of reason seek to subvert and control the acceptable boundaries of discourse. This can be done very insidiously, the call for free expression applies equally to those who would raise 'the Jewish question' and those who cry out to stop the systematic abuses afforded to non-whites and transgenders.

However, those bigots who claim that whether there is an international conspiracy of Jews should be debated in the court of reason apply this noble impulse very selectively, they seek to silence and delegitimise perspectives alien to their own. These operations in discourse are not done in the court of reason, they are done in terms of framing devices like insults, outright harassment, or in terms of violence in the street like at Charlottesville and Ferguson. It's all well and good in the court of reason until someone memes their car into a crowd or beats an unarmed black teenager to death.

We need to remember that those who support universal fraternity, and those who support sharing our over-abundance of prosperity more equitably, have this generous spirit sometimes in excess. We often forget that those who raise things like the Jewish question, or believe that the disenfranchisement and disempowering of non-whites are the just sufferings of degenerates do not seek to vindicate their ideas solely in the court of reason. They propagandise, they go to the pulpit, and use lies in service to what they believe.

This means they know how to play the game, and we should not allow them to set the terms of expression in their favour. Just as they mock and delegitimise we have a responsibility to do the same to any bigoted ideology. They know the game is played by these rules, and a powerful move in such a game is to selectively appeal to our generosity of intellectual spirit.

We shouldn't let them get away with the move, this means reframing and poeticising as much as it means evaluating the evidence behind positions. Political discourse isn't a level playing field, and we can't treat it as such without giving voice to bigots. They are people who would destroy their enemies - uproot families and condemn others, on the basis of things their enemies cannot change. Like their gender or race.

While perhaps you can prove there are those who can effectively demonize their opponents with demeaning buzzwords, you can't prove that they are more prevalent on the right. That's just your bias speaking. — Hanover

Can you give me some examples of very popular terms in internet debate that come along with a socialist, marxist or anarchist framing? I can't think of any recent ones. The only one I remembered I put a reference to in the post 'identity politics', which is the locus of contradiction between orthodox Marxists' central emphasis on class over all other vectors of injustice.

Let me Google this for you.

Cuck. In which cuck is used in much the way I describe. Interestingly there are a lot of women profiles posting in accordance with the stereotype. I wonder if this is a parody or if it's entryism. I'm sure some of them are sincere. If you want an actual far right person using 'cuck' in a similar way look at this use of cuckservative. Sorry for linking to a far right blog.

Snowflake. In which snowflake is used in much the way I describe.
Eg:

Replying to @ThomasNovth @realDonaldTrump
@ThomasNovth needs to re-think what it means to be an American. STOP DEMONIZING REPUBLICANS AND START SUPPORTING AMERICAN VALUES- #snowflake

Also 'quit being a victim, #snowflake'.

For discussion of SJWs, look at this bollocks. Contains choice picks like:

Most people who get offended are somewhat retarded, and the only remedy is offending them. #SJW #PoliticalCorrectness

. You can see it's pretty similar to snowflake. The equivocation between 'snowflake' and 'SJW' is something I didn't write about in my OP, but it's pretty easy to notice.

For cultural Marxism, look at this , has things like:

If you're fed a steady diet of #CulturalMarxism, which is what "African-Americanism" essentially is, it takes nothing short of divine intervention to avoid this PERPETUAL VICTIM mindset. That's why @UnhyphenAmerica stands against the cancer of Leftism.

and 'let's see what we can call racist today, healthy food!'. It's such a broadly appplied trope even Wikipedia documents it.

For the perception of identity politics, this is reasonably representative.

I dislike a lot of what I hear from over-the-air media, on-line media, blogs, etc. I've never read a 4chan page, and I haven't come out for confederate statue fan meets. On the other hand, I haven't come out for antifascist demonstrations, feminist demonstrations, and so forth. My demo days have been over for quite some time. Most of what I hear/see is a somewhat incoherent cacophony from all sides. — Bitter Crank

Yes. We are the chattering classes after all.

Take the current problem of Venezuelans fleeing to Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Columbia. On the one hand, of course they are fleeing -- life in Venezuela has become economically untenable for millions. On the other hand, the neighboring states are not rolling in gold. Let an aid agency exec. who spoke this morning stand in for the SJW viewpoint. "People have a right to go wherever they want to live!" he said. "The response in neighboring states is xenophobia." — Bitter Crank

Of course it's understandable to be anxious about the effects of mass immigration on your community. Even though there's not a consensus of evidence that mass immigration effects a nation's economy as badly as people fear it does, it still makes sense that people get uncomfortable. In most of the industrialised countries I'm aware of, the only formal exceptions being Norway and Sweden, people with very little money end up sharing space with refugees and poor immigrants as a byproduct of housing policy. So I certainly can see why people end up worrying about having 'their' space coopted by people of different races. What it actually reveals is that the spaces they love were never theirs to begin with, they have very little power on who comes and goes, over whether houses in the area meet basic standards of living and so forth.

No, it isn't "xenophobia". It's competition for scare resources. The theory that people should be able to move to and live wherever they wish sounds good in theory, but it entirely dismisses the people in the destination cities. Their right to live where they wish also requires a stable economy and decent pay, and it isn't xenophobia for them to fear the consequences of 500,000 or a million economic refugees suddenly taking up residence. — Bitter Crank

Framing anxiety about immigrants in terms of competition for scarce resources, jobs, food etc only makes sense to the extent that a government fails to extend and enforce basic employment rights to those immigrants. There's no evidence that mass immigration is bad for an economy, and no evidence that it causes food or job shortages; the former because of massive overproduction and the availability of cheap food through globalised food production, the latter because population increases create jobs about as much as they demand them. Unemployment needs more than immigration to increase, it needs a state to fail its population.

Dealing with the facts, or at least the academic consensus, is a lot different from dealing with the optics of the situation. With this in mind, I believe it's important to affirm the difficulties people feel over immigration, like concerns about cultural change and job market saturation. Saying yes to treating people decently doesn't always make decency easy. Especially in the context of systemic injustice.

The argument for refugee rights is incoherent when it is one sided -- and quite often SJW talk is very one-sided. Pay equity for women isn't a simple issue. Claiming that all women are victimized by wage discrimination is sometimes true, but is often not. Men who do not adhere to the desired corporate commitment of time and talent (long and late hours, extremely competitive environments, continuous employment over decades, etc.) are also penalized, just as women are who do not conform to the desired pattern. — Bitter Crank

Yes, it's not a simple issue and overt sexism and racism should not be given the sole blame for the economic and social disparities women and non-whites are subject to. All well and good, it's important to study these things to see where they're coming from and how to alleviate them.

But, despite that your analysis is very considered and sympathetic to those who like social justice, this level of consideration is not part of the discourse surrounding the disparagement of SJWs. Most of the time the term is used to browbeat on anyone who highlights or acts against injustices, or promotes prosperity through community food initiatives and the like.

A reasoned more central viewpoint becoming a shield for bigoted opinions is similar to UKIP in the UK being a socially acceptable face for racism, they co-opted the debate about the tension between EU membership and national sovereignty. Being pro-EU membership was equated with being OK with immigrants, being anti-EU was equated with being not-OK with immigrants, and the discussion followed the cultural tropes Baden highlighted earlier in the thread. Similar to the Gamergate thing I brought up earlier with regard to the SJW term, these equivocations in the debate have been advanced by white nationalists for as long as there have been white nationalists.

So, people end up speaking in code even when they don't realise it. The code is mostly a bundle of framing devices, and the spread of those framing devices is what's shifted the Overton window right in a lot of ways in the last couple of years.

Rather than that cathartic rant, better response from me, would have been to highlight that the SJW meme, as a talking point, provides a criteria of exclusion for anyone who cares about women's rights or racial injustice.

Anyone who says anything critical of the establishment can be called a social justice warrior so long as they aren't prejudiced.

and

The real 'alt-right' has always done this, and uses free speech and our consumer ideology of the marketplace of ideas to spread. The difference between this alt-right and our popular right friends is that the alt-right knows it speaks in code. — fdrake

go hand in hand. The alt right, the bigots in their 'culture war', approach public discourse in this way. They make framing devices which, ideally, become viral content. This defines opposition out of existence - it really isn't a coincidence that any person who is antiracist or pro women's rights is a social justice warrior, it was put into the term 'SJW' for the purposes of social engineering. The criticisms of systemic injustices that are excluded through the term become 'combatants in the marketplace of ideas', which serves only to legitimate bigotry as the inversion of social justice.

That feminism, antifascism and antiracism have become disparaging slurs is a testament to the effectiveness of these framing devices. Your usual somewhat left of centre Christopher Hitchens loving internet rationalist accepts these ideas as reasonable subjects of debate, which shifts the Overton window right by the presupposition that equality for women and mitigating systemic injustices need to be defended in principle. Doing what you can to make the world a better place has almost become toxic because some shitlords living in their mothers' basements Hitler saluting each other over webcam who decry their involuntary celibacy while wearing only a cum-stained fedora have a better practical understanding of political discourse than our impassioned champions of civil rights.

I don't think it makes sense to consider nations as hosts of specified ideological constructs any more. The contours of our shared social reality are determined by how shared media and institutions propagate rather than primarily the nationstate, at least for those people who are above the lowest classes in industrialised nations. I don't have a citation to prove it though, only anecdotes of the people I've spoken to from different industrialised nations have essentially the same conceptual scheme for politics, but with historical constraints on the content. This comes along with a shared culture which is the underbelly of norms expressed in widely broadcast media, which is typically American and British. Capital continues what conquest prefigured. In Lacanian/Zizekian terms the symbolic imaginary of politics is transnational.

The political realities of organising a nationstate are also to a large extent transnational too, due to global differentials in production and production specialisation. EG, Yemen has as much right to rail on the Saudi government as the British government's compliance with BAE. Again, in Lacanian/Zizekian terms, the symbolic real of politics is also transnational.

The ideology of weakening every state imposing on trade - neoliberalism - makes sense upon the backdrop of globalised production.

But, yeah, this is way too left to be seen as relevant to the SJW debate.

I'm mostly responding to this:

Now, all that said, I think that social justice has gotten to the point of ridiculousness, so that, one can see the increasing mockery, and scorn of it. Emotions are complex things, and we indulge ourselves in them. They remind us of good experiences, ties, places we've been, people we've known, good times in our lives, or whatever. We relive those things by attempting to reproduce analogous emotional ranges. Meaning that not only are the teens going to be laughing at and mocking particular groups, and pitying others, but they will be experiencing high intense emotional experiences, that they will spend the rest of their lives attempting to reproduce, with the fetishes of the markers of those experiences. Even when the zietgeist shifts, they will continue to make the same jokes, and signal the same virtues. The memes just get danker. — All sight

Indicating that social justice warriors in the aggregate are ridiculous is a stance on civil rights, gender equality, political solidarity and so on. It indicates a desire, though maybe not in you, to curtail the pursuit of social justice. Which always struck me as strange, considering social justice as a nebulous concept is something that everyone can agree with; it isn't articulated specifically, there are no issues associated with the stereotypical social justice warrior.

Logically this doesn't make much sense, if everyone would agree with an idea regardless of its content that idea is contentless. But politically, how expressing disapproval of social justice warriors works is that it expresses disapproval over people motivated to address injustice. All this shows is that memes about social justice warriors, especially ones expressing general disapproval of them, should not be considered logically; as a set of arguments and ideas linked with reasoning; but considered as expressing a political stance. A political stance which dislikes people who want social justice is a stance which either seeks to stymie efforts for social improvements; like greater prosperity and equality; or is incoherent.

The term social justice warrior actually was brought into internet political discourse by a concerted effort of unapologetic antifeminist trolls on the 4chan board /b/ during the harassment of Anita Sarkeesian and those perceived aligned with her. Which was then branded as 'Gamergate' by those same unapologetic antifeminist trolls. It had been used before, but this is when everyone learned it, and this is the context that imbues it with its meaning.

It used to refer precisely to those people like 'You're a fucking white male!' guy in the Youtube meme, now it refers to anyone who expresses feminist, antiracist or other social justice aligned opinions on the internet. This was done intentionally by racists and misogynists to shift the Overton window right and legitimate their bigoted opinions. Though, even the original article for it uses it disparagingly. I would like to see people using it more restrictively for the Tumblr Activism stereotype, rather than people who care about how society functions. You can read this history on 'knowyourmeme'.

Y'know, every sincere politician is a social justice warrior. Malcom X was a social justice warrior, MLK was a social justice warrior, Rosa Parks was a social justice warrior, the people who criticised the banker bailouts in 2008 were social justice warriors. Do you see a pattern? Anyone who says anything critical of the establishment can be called a social justice warrior so long as they aren't prejudiced.

Finding out all this shit made me stop using the term.

I wasn't trying to imply that you were a bad person or anything like that. I just think that discussing whether 'social justice has gone to far' is a very loaded place to start a discussion on civil rights, equality and prosperity.

I'm sure we'd both agree that equality of opportunity is good, that people should not be discriminated against for their sex, gender or race by any institution, and that being politically active and active in your community to try and make things better is always commendable.

To be sure, there are some people who think vandalising a wall in a suburb to say 'Don't forget Yemen' or retweeting something progressive is a powerful political act; people like that white idiot in the Youtube meme of 'You're a fucking white male!'. Though, who could blame them for acting this way? How else are we to engage politically with our fellow people apart from social media or the protest? It isn't like those opinions are guaranteed representation in our political systems...

Anyway, despite the possibility of idiots, those people who are passionate about social justice historically are the suffragettes, the followers of Luther and Malcolm, the Haitian rebels etc. and we commend trying to act for the good of us all. Right? That's what motivates a social justice warrior, a desire for things to be better. Who could think that is a bad thing?

I think we had much the same goal, it's very much 'on the offensive' to try and manipulate the Overton window. The real 'alt-right' has always done this, and uses free speech and our consumer ideology of the marketplace of ideas to spread. The difference between this alt-right and our popular right friends is that the alt-right knows it speaks in code.

It happens on the left too, but I don't see the same degree of delusion (as is apparent in this discussion) particularly regarding science, intellectuals and anything to do with social justice, which to those selling this anti-intellectual poison reduces down to nothing more sophisticated than the frightening prospect of other people feasting on their tax dollars. — Baden

I absolutely agree with this, though I have a caveat. We could pretty easily have an exchange like this, lamenting the right's irrationalities and anti-science attitudes, but politically what such a dialogue would be is two left cultists talking to each other. In our safe spaces or in good company sure, we could talk like this, but we shouldn't expect to convince anyone of anything without a huge emphasis on optics.

The prevalence of snake oil changes the contours of persuasion, we have to try and redeem certain features of commonality far more than we need to mock the ridiculousness of our opponents.

To the extent that there is a popular right, the popular right doesn't actually realise that it is the right. It thinks it is the liberal left. The social context and ramifications of their talking points and opinions are prefigured in a way that is difficult to subvert and impossible to reason with. They speak in code without knowledge of who benefits and who loses from the encryption.

This popular right has equated sincere belief in equality and prosperity with paying lip-service to it. Every day we hear their outrage and consternation with those who highlight injustice and systemic oppression simply because the words privilege and solidarity taste sour in their mouths. More fundamentally, those people on this right really do believe in the triumph of equality and prosperity over systemic injustice, but are forced to act, think and speak in a dominated tongue.

The way discourse over these issues is prefigured makes the iterability/transmissibility of a message far more important than the truth of its content, and concomitantly adaptive internet search algorithms and content curation make it the easiest it has ever been to vindicate your worldview with facts. This is a political discourse that has more in common with advertising than with any prior political order. This feeds back into itself, creating a more perverse side effect.

Our attention is adaptively curated to maximise our interest and mouse-clicks through algorithms designed to maximise exposure, advertising has changed from a media parasite to a symbiote. This means that political worldviews are insulated from each-other to exactly the same extent that they are evinced through public resources. A brief analysis of key terms in debate with this popular right shows that its imaginative background is illogical, held together more by affect than argumentation.

SJWs are gay white knights who want to have sex with women, but are also cucks that want to have sex with women they've protected by watching them have sex with an alpha who's better than them. Transgender rights activists are attempting to subvert freedom of speech by forcing us to use certain words, but all they want is attention and recognition. Those who side with either collection of ideas are just virtue signalling, despite their penetration of and influence over all levels of political activity. There are horrible postmodernists believing in the relativism of everything, destroying society's moral norms while absolutising them, appealing to our commonalities with the outdated ideologies of Marxism and state socialism.

Everything in political discourse has turned into a signal of consumer identity. Politics nevertheless affects a common reality to which no agent can access and no group can establish. Reality has been customised for the consumer.

To do progressive politics at this point is also to manage attention through the creation of viral content and volunteer cascades, this was why Corbyn and Sanders achieved the impossible.

One 'is' is the is of predication, stating a property or relation of an entity. Like 'the morning star is a star', one 'is' is the is of identity, stating that an entity is equivalent to other entity - or perhaps more subtly that the symbol on the left of the copula and the symbol on the right are different names for the same thing. Like 'the morning star is the evening star'. A nice historical reference here is this.

The use of both in ordinary language is more complex, like the relationship between designation/naming and the entities named. As usual there's a good discussion of surrounding issues (in analytic philosophy) on SEP here for theories of naming and here for theories of identity.

Please try to make your posts easier to read. The less of a wall of text it is the better. Also hello.

I wonder to what extent you think this reflects changes in the internet itself. Perhaps I have an excessively nostalgic memory of the past, but the old version of this site struck me as far more interested in sophisticated and complex discussions. Very vaguely (since I always lurked but never posted), I remember learning a lot from a Pitt grad student with a Bertrand Russell avatar and a Thai (?) Marxist at Ohio State who made a lot of insightful comments about politics. We have some of those here (Streetlight!), but it seems to me the quality of discussion is not what it was on the old site (e.g. politics discussions between members like Maw and Augustino are vaguely interesting but not hugely illuminating) and there is little to no interest in academic philosophy. (No one discussing even major contemporary figures like Brandom, Ranciere, Noe, let alone serious current scholarship in semantics or QT.) — John Doe

We lost a lot of members who were actively engaged in philosophy. I don't think that's all the forum's fault, it seems just as likely to me that they moved on in their lives. Either to philpapers or away from the study. I don't remember much discussion of contemporary philosophy on the old site, proportionally anyway.

You could look at the news from Amnesty International if you'd like to see a lot of examples of why a globally enforced right to food and shelter would be good. Or anything with the keyword 'post scarcity'.

thephilosophyforum.com is the upper middle brow version of Youtube comments, mostly. It reflects cultural and philosophical issues more than it generates them. It tracks cultural issues much more closely than philosophical ones, as it's quite rare to have a discussion of contemporary academic philosophy. It sticks closer to older issues and major figures, you'll find many discussions of solipsism, scientific realism and horrifically bad interpretations of quantum mechanics much more than people discussing current scholarship on the issues.

We're the upper middle brow of internet disagreement also due to something of a social contract present on the site, enforced by the mods, which reprimands people treating it more like youtube comments and less like an exchange of letters and essays, though we have a lower standard of minimum quality or relevance than other academic interest forums. This is mostly due to philosophy itself being broad in content.

While which topics are treated and presented here, and how they are treated, tracks their representation in the internet attention economy outside of the forum quite well, the coupling of the power of content with the attention it generates and its propagation rate is diminished. This is a good thing, we all have a responsibility to the discourse here to make sure that it's not just a vector from crap to crap.

A consequence of this partial decoupling from the larger attention economy is that the forum looks somewhat like a 'free marketplace of ideas', and people will hold dear to the liberal trope that no expressions should be censored. To use the stereotypes, it can appear that we're sitting behind the screens like mini neckbearded Voltaires against the moderating cabal of cryptofascist cultural Marxists.

This makes moderating the site contentious at times, because it is actually pretty popular for an academic interest discussion forum and what makes it so is higher quality requirements and the mods' resisting the medium's natural tendency toward shitposting and meme-to-meme combat. So moderating policy also has to contain an element of attention economy management, this keeps things on topic and stops the forum being co-opted by special interest groups. Somewhat ironically, this is what makes it an island of free and reasoned expression amidst the sea of piss which is internet debate.

:gasp:

The call of any sinner is to be understood as typical, as if their perversions and failings are the failings of all. What is natural is sexual pleasure, what is natural is freeform relationships, what is natural is the commonwealth of humanity, and sex is no more exclusive than the opinions of its participants.

You who would take your personal failings and brand them with the divine show the worst in men. The perverts, the hysterics, the hypocrites.

Sexual jealousy is a perversion. It has nothing to do with the nature of sex, it has to do with the selfishness and short sightedness of the individuals involved. We both agree envy is a sin. Look at the theological distinction between jealousy and envy, and you'll see it's the latter. Having lost what you wrongly perceive as yours.

I repeat. Sex for pleasure is a divine gift, and those who share it freely and share in it are expressing a freedom bestowed by the divine. By its very nature, sex is communal and social.

Focussing on the minutia to belay the point. Stop it. Sex for pleasure is a divine gift, and those who share it freely and share in it are expressing a freedom bestowed by the divine.

That is abusive — Agustino

No it's not, it's a sign of the ancient wisdom in the Old Testament. They knew what they were dealing with.

It has happened only in cultures where one man ruled over many others from a position of undeniable strength.

Just false. If true, true incidentally.

False. What's this? — Agustino

As expected, you're painting symmetries when there's no evidence of it. Then you cherrypick bible quotes to vindicate your personal faith.

We have conflicting notions of divinity, deal with that and don't cite that scripture you agree is flawed.

No. Marriage must be allowed to be between a man and many women, if it is to be taken at all. You need only read the Old Testament to see this in its rightful Christian place. You don't even stick to your own holy text without cherrypicking, this is some BS piety you have.

It is an ancient custom, explicitly not forbade in the Bible, for a man to take more than one wife. They are his exclusive property, but the relationship is not symmetrical, as I'm sure any good Christian or bible scholar well knows. Just look at your fellow faithfuls' reaction to polyandry vs their reaction to polygyny, even in the academic scholarship on the topic. The facts are the facts.

Regardless, the Old Testament has it somewhat right, but nowhere near as right as the Sumerian acceptance of communal wives and the sanctity of concubines. As I said, and you have not addressed, with your inevitable strawmen, this is the true divine mandate. A relationship with God is a relationship with the community, and sex is part of that. It is mirrored in ancient honour systems, ancient systems of debt that index ancient economies. Why the hell is your source for an understanding of primordial family relations that predate the focus of Engels' analysis of the monogamous family by centuries Engels? This is the charlatanism you always pull, grasping at whatever straw comes to hand to vindicate your heathen baseness and ultimately your own ego - the conceit of the righteousness of the Christian.

There's no way you can grasp the true nature of divinity while mired in that Christian pit of filth.

Btw, if anyone asks me for sources on this stuff I'll change the topic slightly through uncharitable fisking, then do that repeatedly until everyone that tries, and fails, to offer real arguments against my position falls silent. The last one standing is the winner.

Nah. You've just not read me charitably enough. You're arguing about criminalising adultery, your argument is based ultimately on a contemporary Christian understanding of marriage. This is wrong, the Christian understanding of marriage fosters the commodification of women as property. This is how dowries work, expected payments and fundamentally the right of exclusivity to the woman. You said the latter yourself, the former is implicit in several of your previous posts (like making a profit on a wedding, imagine!).

What I'm doing is showing that your Christian understanding of marriage and adultery is a perversion of a far better, more primordial faith. As the Sumerian religion and the Greek view of marriage, bride prices and concubines prefigured your religious reading of Western civilisation, all I'm doing is going back a few steps to the pre-Abrahamic understanding. Of holy whores and communal wives - respected and necessary positions in a society that places women correctly. All of this flows from my faith and occult allegiance with the ancient Goddess Ishtar, and I've used an interpretation of one part of the Epic of Gilgamesh to facilitate this.

It's highly authoritative, it flows from my faith and the first principles understanding of culture and morality that I have fostered as a successful international businessman.

It isn't BS Agustino. It's my religion. If you payed more attention the posts are actually very carefully constructed. You're not making any real arguments, refute my claims.

It was more than that. The animals ignored him, he became unsuited to the wilds right after his shag. That's why he agreed to go into Uruk in the first place. Then he went to Pret-a-Manger and became a real citizen.

I have a bubble blowing machine with lots of nobs and dials on it. It's a pretty crap bubble blowing machine because it's hard to find the settings that make bubbles I recognise.

For most combinations of nob and dial settings, no bubbles are produced at all. This is sad.
For some combinations of nob and dial settings, bubbles occur in strange dodecahedral volumes that burst within an instant.
For a tiny range of nob and dial settings, normal bubbles come out.
For an even smaller range of nob and dial settings, extremely long lived bubbles come out.

I took a snapshot of the specifications for each setting and took each set of specifications for the bubble machine to a bubble machine factory. I made it so that 10000 bubble machines were produced, and that the proportion of that 10000 going to each design was the proportion of summed duration of a specific bubble type to the summed duration of all bubbles. I did this many times, following this rule iteratively.

The machines produce the same number of bubbles (except for machine 1). So if there were 2 bubble machines, one produces bubbles that last 1 second, and one produces bubbles that last 2 seconds, the total bubble duration is 3, so the 2 second one gets 2/3 of the new batch and the 1 second one gets 1/3 of the new batch.

After the first line in the factory:

There are no non-productive settings left. This is because there are only bubbles of duration 0 - no bubbles at all.
There are very few dodecahedral bubble machines. This is because dodecahedral bubbles don't last very long at all.
There are some normal bubble machines.
There are rather a lot of extremely long lived bubble machines.

After the second line in the factory:

There are almost none dodecahedral bubble machines.
There are few normal bubble machines.
There's a strong majority of extremely long lived bubble machines.

The trend gets more pronounced from there. Geometrically so. After thousands and thousands of generations, there are only extremely long lived bubble machines.

...Therefore God designed the factory to produce extremely long lived bubble machines.