This is a very large sweeping claim. How do you know this? — darthbarracuda

Because life's problems are structural, and individual gestures don't remedy them.

This is why you teach a man to fish. Or even better teach him to be a vegetarian. You get them back on their feet so they can live life again. — darthbarracuda

If you were actually interested in 'teaching how to fish,' then by this you would mean stopping reproduction altogether, since the source of starvation is reproduction.

There's nothing inconsistent in saying that life has the potential of being quite bad, especially since the world revolves around the egos of the least trustworthy. — darthbarracuda

Life does not revolve around anyone's ego. Again, the problems are structural: they are not caused by the whims of 'bad guys,' nor will their replacement with 'good guys' and 'happy thoughts' cure them.

So, actually, I would argue that it is you that must reconcile your position of vehement anti-birth with your conscious decision to endorse your own birth by continuing to live. It's one thing to not have a child because you fear that they may potentially experience something truly horrific (my position); it's quite another to resist having a child because you think there is absolutely no worth in living and at the same time continue to live. If you are to take the latter route, then you logically must feel suicidal to avoid being disingenuous. — darthbarracuda

Continuing to live isn't endorsing your own birth. I had no control over being born, and it would have been better if I hadn't been.

Also, complaining won't do anything at all whereas helping people will at least keep the suffering lower than it has to be. — darthbarracuda

That depends on what you mean by 'helping people.' Most things that you might think would help them actually won't, and those that do (like giving them food) arise due to structural problems that 'giving a man a fish' will not solve in any substantial way (they will starve tomorrow instead of today). And the structural problems all, of course, end in birth.

When did I say this? (hint, I never did) I'm an anti-natalist because of the existence of things like suffering, although I don't dwell on the fact of birth. It's merely unnecessary. — darthbarracuda

If you don't approve of life because it's not good enough to live, then you need to reconcile this with your views on your own life, which are inconsistent.

What the hell does this mean?! If you can't rationalize suffering than you must not be able to derive any meaning from it. — darthbarracuda

Meaning is not 'derived.' We do not 'make our own meaning,' that's liberal bullshit.

Meh. Help the starving, it will make you feel good, or at least more than complaining will. — darthbarracuda

The best way to end starvation is not to reproduce. You approve of the suffering of starvation because you accept that the world should continue as it is.

"But I want to help starving people! I don't like that people are starving!" <- This is a lie, because you approve of reproduction, the consequence of which, more starving, is inevitable.

You misunderstand me. When we see no reason for suffering, when we see no way of rationalizing this suffering (btw rationalizing suffering is normal, healthy and productive), that is when we open ourselves up to suicidal nihilism. If I were to give you a cockroach to eat, and as you munched you found it absolutely disgusting and you could not find anything redeemable about it, you would spit it out just as you would kill yourself if you thought the amount of irredeemable suffering was greater than what you could handle. — darthbarracuda

You can't rationalize suffering because rationalization is itself a response to suffering.

But I would stress that you can "transcend", so to speak, the basic revolving around food. Perhaps food is one of our weaknesses or our anchors, but it is certainly not usually the number one thing people are worried about in a first world country. — darthbarracuda

It literally, factually is. And not only those who are starving!

We could easily just say that people go through the trials of work and marriage just to be able to afford the bed they sleep on. — darthbarracuda

Sleep is another physical need.

It seems like you are struggling to come to terms with the fact that life is completely meaningless and filled with suffering. The inherent meaninglessness of life does not have any logical connection to how much we enjoy our lives. And if it seems to be the case anyway, then there are a plethora of existential literature on this, from the Stoics to Sartre. It's the suffering that matters and is problematic. I believe it was Frankl that said that humans despair at suffering because they find no meaning behind it; if there is no meaning behind suffering, then suicide may as well be the best option. (Frankl was a Holocaust survivor). — darthbarracuda

Life can't both be meaningless and filled with suffering: suffering is a kind of meaning, a bad one, which is why it matters.

Also, I don't buy the paternalist angle (see above, 'benevolent brainwashing' and so on).

Perhaps if we were wild animals without access to a supermarket, our lives would quite literally revolve around eating. — darthbarracuda

Your life literally does revolve around eating, though. In order to have your needs met, you must spend the largest portion of your life doing things you would rather not do, and in turn damaging your body and mind. If your physical needs were automatically met, you could just do whatever you wanted.

Oh God, I wish! No income taxes.

I take representations to be impotent reactions to material conditions. Trying to change the material conditions by changing them is like trying to make the sun go out by putting on sunglasses.

And even if it weren't, it still perversely advocates granting institutions like the Oscars legitimacy by admitting that they are so important that we can't live without brown people (who, according to liberal politics, form a coherent class, 'people of color,' as distinct from white people, who are unique and prestiged in that they are 'colorless,' have transcended ethnic culture, and so have a duty to provide culture for everyone who has not yet made the climb) getting statues from them. But the Oscars are just the institution we're supposed to hate, according to the liberal narrative -- no no, they say, we only hate them insofar as they don't do the benevolent brainwashing they're supposed to. I just don't buy it. I don't think that supporting this kind of rhetoric about representation is harmful, but rather emblematic of how impotent and deluded liberal politics is. Maybe this talk of ontology has something to do with it.

Maybe if someone who has my skin color plays the lead role in Transformers 6, I'll become a bound variable...the more you think about it, the less it makes any kind of sense.

So the solution is to beg entry from the dumb people who run dumb institutions, in hope of being part of them?

Something does not add up here. And I am extremely skeptical of the claim that media portrayals influence attitudes, rather than vice-versa. It smacks of 'representationalist' politics to me. I don't know; maybe the 'linguistic turn' in AP is part of this general shift in attitude toward top-down views of the world, things being how they are as a result of how they're represented.

So why is the solution, on behalf of people afraid they will not exist if people the same color as them are not awarded statuettes, to stop caring about the Oscars?

Instead, the response is to demand entry into the institution that has admitted it doesn't much care for them. So the message seems to be: we are only worthwhile insofar as worthless institutions accept us.

I don't know, the Oscars seems to me to be the epitome of dumb / decadent identity politics. They're literally nothing but that.

And it seems to me to be a reductio. Premise; things matter to the extent people think they do. But people think the Oscars matter, even though they don't. Therefore, the premise is false.

What is the excruciating pain that you speak of? And given that you have internet access, I would assume you have the means to obtain sufficient nutrients. — darthbarracuda

Hunger/starvation. And it doesn't matter whether you have sufficient nutrients, any more than it matters that you have sufficient heroin. Without it you collapse into horrible pain and death, and your life has o revolve around preventing that. We call that a cognitive disorder, an addiction. A very, very bad one.

And you have white actors nominated across the board for two years running for best actor/actress, you do have to wonder what the actual fuck is up (Stallone over Idirs Elba? Please...). But of course these are only gestures, and they ought to feed back into material conditions, which themselves ought to be the subject of political action just as much as representation and and so on. — StreetlightX

But the Oscars don't matter. They have no artistic importance, anyway.

I also want to say that the above is in some way a response to Ciceronianus the White's question about why questions about being can matter so much. If the above is correct, and being cannot be delimited to the field of language alone, it might will be the case that our "ontological commitments" are normative through and through, not at the level of what we say, but at the level of what do. One rather disastrous effect of 'deflationary ontologies' like Quine's might in fact be to disavow the fact that ontology operates in a manner that goes beyond mere intellectual debate, and flows right into the way in which power is both sustained and exercised across various domains of life, in which what one 'says' is not at all the issue. It's a nice, 'respectable' exercise of course, to confine questions of being to the parlor where we debate about Pegasus and so on, but some debates take place on the streets, conducted in a key other than language - perhaps sometimes violence. — StreetlightX

I think modern 'liberal' politics has taken this on as an explicit belief, that representations of things somehow precede their existence: thus we need to raise awareness, and grant representation. There seems to be a genuine fear that if you do not see yourself in a movie, you will cease to exist (where 'yourself' means someone of your color or whatever it might be: sublimation of the individual's suffering into an abstraction). And there is also the notion of self-identity: there is some quasi-magical means by which committing oneself to being a certain thing, ~*identifying*~ as it, means that you are that thing: ontological commitments in the form of desires or choices to represent those things in public or in the media make the things we talk about real, and so we are all collections of acts of ~*identification*~ and not whatever we were supposed to be before.

Okay, I think this creates its own kind of horrors, where claims of or representations of things are taken to have all the power of what traditionally was taken to be those things themselves. So the age-old phenomenon of crocodile tears is impossible because there is no disingenuousness when to be represented as evil, oppressive, oppressed, etc. is the same as being any of those things.

Some liberals of course still cling to the notion that material conditions (like not having food) make you poor, but this has already been abandoned for gender, and not the gender ontoogy has exploded because it is as large as anyone cares to say it is. So second-wave feminists who silly them thought that gender oppression was a material status with concrete effects that superseded ~*identity*~ and ~*representation*~, are dead. And I bet you poverty will follow at some point: who is going to be the first rich kid to ~*identify*~ as poor?

Everyone is suffering from a psychological problem: it's called being alive. You are literally moving toward excruciating pain / starvation at every second, and must take steps to avoid this. How is that not a psychological problem? It's far worse than any mundane 'addiction.'

??? You end up unfulfilled and grouchy no matter what you do. All this New Age stuff that jokers like the Dalai Lama are feeding you are deluding you into thinking how you feel is a 'choice.' Wake up, man!

An epistemology not governed by the metaphor of 'access' would be nice.

And why should we believe this claim about the Dalai Lama? — darthbarracuda

Because the Dalai Lama is an astrologist / snake oil selling theocrat.

LOL you might not be happy. — darthbarracuda

No one is happy. Obviously you're not, unless you're just not paying attention to yourself.

A better question would be why, evolutionary speaking, happiness is even a thing at all. — darthbarracuda

It's not, it was made up by toothpaste commercials

The Dalai Lama. Beware of jokers, con men, and bastards.

You're not going to be happy. But there's no 'more important' thing either. Stop being a child.

But humans are like natural disasters. You can't control what they do, and killing them doesn't bring back your loved one any more than trying to kick a tornado does.

But if there is no truth to a crime, then why the dog and pony show of having trials and convicting people? — Marchesk

Pain and confusion, attempting to instill a moral order on the universe. Ultimately like most conventions it's rooted in self-hatred.

Maybe. I think the Academy was already concerned with technical issues of no general interest.

The professionalization of philosophy began with Plato, not in the 19th century.

In many possible worlds frameworks, truth simpliciter is defined as truth with respect to a privileged world, sometimes designated w@, that is, the actual world.

I'm so glad the interesting paper got chosen over all that other boring crap! Quine, oh boy~ /s

"We gain access to the structure of reality"...

Someone take Old Yeller to the back and shoot him, for Christ's sake...

his motivation seems often to simply be the most radical, bad-ass, willing-to-stare-into-the-void philosopher out there — csalisbury

I've come to think, as I got more seriously into philosophy, that this is just true of continental philosophy generally, but it doesn't always manifest as being 'steely and sharp,' but just being the most 'transgressive' in whichever way is most fashionable, by reversing old plays on words with new ones. I think it might just be a bankrupt tradition.

Not that the rest of philosophy is much better, but I think I'm at a point that I spent so much of my life on a certain discipline that it's very painful for me, coming to the realization how bad it is and how much of my life I wasted. I am coming to sympathize with laypeople and scientists who think philosophy is just a load of horse shit, and further that my previous bristling at these positions and desire to defend philosophy came from feelings of personal injury at a discipline I had spent so much time on being outed as worthless. But when you see something like this, I just can't help but feel like there's no denying it, even if it's painful. Time to move on and do something worthwhile with your life, and undo the damage reading philosophy has done to you. It's just a hard habit to kick, like a drug addiction, and I really do believe it's legitimately harmful the way a drug is, poisonous to thinking and maybe life too. It's like believing Deepak Chopra or something, professionalized charlatanism that wastes the intellectual efforts of otherwise promising young people.

I read shit SX writes and think, "do I sound like that? Am I ever going to sound like that?" and it just makes me cringe.

One of my deep displeasures in studying philosophy has been people dumber than Berkeley acting like Berkeley's too dumb for them to bother with. I don't know, it's the Dunning-Kruger effect or something. Not to harp on this one particular philosopher, but he gets a level of disrespect, sloppy scholarship, and flippancy that few other major philosophers make people think they're entitled to. There is little serious engagement with him, yet no end of unserious engagement with him. He is someone that 'needs to be stopped,' not understood in even the most superficial way.

In that sense I think that, despite appearances, Brassier (and his many predecessors, all of whom have for some reason done the same thing to this very same philosopher, for 'some reason') is not interested in an engagement, but a sort of ideological blowing off of steam. Of the scholars that study him seriously (Brassier is obviously not one of them), only Georges Dicker is one Im aware of who doesn't as a result of that study come away with a massive sympathy for him. There are the ones who ultimately reject his arguments, but almost wistfully and reluctantly, like Sam Rickless, and those that have their minds blown and just become Berkeleians (John Foster and A.A. Luce are examples -- it's astounding how captivated they became).

The case study of Berkeley in particular was actually one of my reasons for developing a sort of pessimism about philosophy generally, not about its aims, but about the discipline itself. It proved to me in a way that philosophers simply are not very good at their jobs and that, either due to lack of talent, effort, or genuine desire for rigor, those who practice philosophy are uniquely very bad at their own discipline in a way that say physicists or plumbers are not, and that therefore a career in philosophy is not worth pursuing. End rant.

I just want to reiterate that, the issue is not really a subtilization of the argument insofar as, to the extent that Brassier addresses it all in the paper, he does not even get its basic structure right, let alone the claims actually made.

The "Throwing like a girl" one sounds interesting. I used to have a hill I would go out to and read, and a phenomenon I noticed is that, for some bizarre reason, a pair, boyfriend and girlfriend, would often come to the grassy area beneath the hill and throw a baseball around, or the boyfriend would be teaching the girlfriend how to throw one. It never struck me just how different young men and women were when they threw things before. Even I, who had never done any sports that required throwing things in my life, intuitively understood that throwing the ball the way the girls did was just somehow wrong, that I would never do it that way. Whenever this happens, the girls' throw would be a subject of gentle humor for both members of the couple, but to me it seemed more eerie than funny.

I think that's fair. There is nothing inherently good about genius, and many geniuses are people who I wouldn't have wanted to be, or even be around. And if that's true, it does make you wonder what's left to say on their behalf...

Effort by itself is worthless, and if you don't have that spark to seek out the right kind of effort, it won't matter how much time you spend. People can spend their whole lives reading philosophy, for example, but if they lack the temperament to truly have an appetite for it, they will just end up adding footnotes that no one will really be better off for reading.

There is a kind of genuine interest that has to be present which goes beyond mere 'cultural appreciation,' desire to have one's fetishes or psychological predispositions satisfied, yearning for wittiness, fame, or subversiveness, the desire to be clever or 'interesting' in a banal worldly sense, needing to 'be still a man' with philosophy just one of one's quaint side interests or 'mere day job,' with the wife and kids back home being the real target of one's affections and interests, and so on. What I want to suggest is that the non-genius' desires never transcend the above to move into a genuine interest in the subject matter, and so the effort they expend is in effect worthless except insofar as they further those banal desires, which is all the non-genius wants anyway, so everyone wins. In other words, the genius, if they exist, is someone whose thoughts and actions cannot be explained without reversion to the person themselves, whereas it suffices to explain the non-genius' thoughts and behavior to reference where they grew up, what the political climate was, and so on. They have nothing of their own.

I see genius as specifically human powers not reducible to, or explicable solely or primarily in terms of, the milieu in which a person exists. For the average person, their mind can be read 'on the radio,' so to speak -- there is nothing about them that, in virtue of the books they've read and where they grew up, can possibly surprising about what they think or do.

It's in a dialogue between Aristippus and Socrates constructed by Xenophon, in the Memorabilia of Socrates, the second section.

No, it means 'alien' in the sense of 'foreigner.' In context he's literally talking about being physically itinerant and refusing to be a citizen in any one state, so as to avoid persecution.

That quote is about political identity.

Cosmopolitanism was espoused by Diogenes of Sinope: I am a citizen of the world.

Its inversion was espoused by Aristippus of Cyrene: I am an alien everywhere.

Something is right about the gist, that we don't and can't belong exclusively to single communities, that it's a kind of bad faith to latch onto that kind of regional identity. The idea that, however, this is to be ameliorated by reaching out to a world-identity is not something I believe. Rather, it's to admit we have no such identities at all. 'Single community' is an oxymoron.

No, most committed suicide. Those that didn't endured a hollow living death.

They already had everything they wanted so they didn't invent or do much of anything.

There already isn't any joy. That was all made up by poets who couldn't get laid.

Because then there would be no more suffering.