Most modern "liberal" philosophy is oriented around non-discrimination and non-judgement as the ultimate, unquestioned values, which basically negates thought (which is instrinsically judgemental), and ultimately necessitates the falsification of reality. (That's why you get, for example, the silly argument, so common with the Left generally and the PC cult in particular, that if someone isn't doing as well as someone else, it must necessarily be because they're being exploited or oppressed or discriminated against - the presumption being that without the hypothesized "systemic" discriminatory or exploitative social relations, everyone would do equally as well, which is of course absolute nonsense.)

People are better at things than others (including "being a better person" morally), and some people are better at a lot of things than others. Some races and ethnic groups are also better than others at this or that, on average. However, that doesn't necessarily have any dire implications because comparative advantage is a thing. (i.e., even if you were better at everything than anyone else, it would still pay you and everyone else, to delegate the things you're less good at to others - even if they're less good at those things than you are - so you can focus time and energy on the thing you're super-best at.)

There's a higher level of abstraction at which the similarities between human beings outweigh the differences, though (i.e. everyone who is at least basically competent is equally a self-steering agent), in which case saying someone is "better" than others tout court is a bit off.

It's a question of perspective. While the difference between the capabilities and potential of a janitor and the capabilities and potential of a CEO matters a lot in the human world, in the full context of the natural world, both share a huge amount of functionality and a whole raft of amazing capabilities that we take for granted (e.g. the ability to walk, a difficult task, as robotics people like Boston Dynamics found out, though they are obviously cracking it); while the differences in genes and brain structure, etc., that make such a huge difference in the human world are in fact usually relatively small, the tip of the iceberg, in relation to that shared mass that's roughly equal. No doubt if you were Ant-Man you'd learn to recognize individual ants, but from the point of view of an ordinary human, they all look the same. Similarly, the janitor and CEO are close enough for jazz if you zoom out and treat the tiny differences as noise.

And at the highest, "spiritual" level, in most religions and systems of mysticism, all sentient creatures necessarily have a sort of equal dignity in being emissaries, or miniatures (microcosms) or "sparks" of the Absolute, God or whatever you want to call the hypothesized underlying Engine of the mystery of existence.

It depends on what you mean by philosophy. Personally I prefer the older sense, in which case any question is a philosophical question, and philosophy is the opposite of simply taking things for granted. I like Wilfrid Sellars' encapsulation: the aim of philosophy to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. That's a bit cutesy in the dry way that things said by analytical philosophers can sometimes be cutesy, but it does pretty much describe the enterprise in a nutshell. So philosophical questions then, would be questions around that topic. In the ancient philosophies too, there was a sense in which "wisdom" wasn't just knowledge, but also a way to navigate life, an idea about what the good life might be given that context of knowledge.

There's a more specific sense of philosophy in the last few centuries, in which we could say that philosophy has hived off all sorts of questions about all sorts of things to specialized scientific studies (science as the natural philosophy part of philosophy). In that case, what's left that's specifically philosophical? It's the reflective phase of the study of "how things hang together" - the phase in which we inquire into what we think about the world, and how our thought relates to the world. (So it's basically knowledge about the world, including us, and then also knowledge about our particular relation to the world, or the image or idea we have of the world, as thinking beings.) In this sense, philosophical questions are mostly questions about the ideas, language and concepts we use - which is not as boring as it sounds.

It's not so hard when you're as wise as me. — Sapientia

Yes, I figured out that was the gist of your responses :)

"Thinking" is just the name of that thing you're doing, and being a naming convention it's not a thing for proving.

The idea of the cogito as I understand it is that "I am a thinking/experiencing thing" is indubitable because even in the extremity of doubting that idea, one is thinking, because doubt is itself a form of thought/experience.

"I think, I am" is therefore true apriori, without having to consult experience or the content of thought.

Where this leaves us, essentially, is that we can be absolutely certain of what we're saying, so long as we prefix everything with "it seems to me" or "I am having the experience now of ..."

IOW, regardless of whether anything is some particular way, we can be certain that things seem to us to be that way.

Sellars' question, if I understand him correctly - is whether the specificity of reason ought to be taken at face value when approaching questions of ontology. — StreetlightX

Yeah, I think I grasp what the problem is, and it's really difficult. The way I've thought of it in the past is how our categorical thinking seems to "overlay" a world that's happily describable ontologically in terms of mechanistic laws that have no room for meaning or value. Another way of thinking of it is in terms of Sellars' distinction between the manifest and scientific images. How the hell do you marry that dull, mechanistic ontology with the grandeur of the variously-populated world revealed by thought?

I think there's probably a complex "tear" (as in paper) line between the two - some everyday categorical concepts do overlap with highly "chunked" parts of that simplistically-described baseline ontology, and some don't, some are just arbitrary ways of chunking events, perhaps developed in the meandering process of cultural evolution, with functions in evol psych terms, but not any real truth to them. (I'm thinking here of an analogy: the difference between the simple rules of Conway's Game of Life, and the larger regular structures and super-structures those simple rules produce as being things in themselves. Are those large patterns that grow from such simple seeds really things? Well, sure, they're big recurring patterns that you can name and that have a describable "fuzzy" logic of their own, quite different from the crisp, super-simple logic of the game rules. But at the same time, in a different sense, they're not really things in themselves, for they only exist only insofar as they are generated by the rules, the rules are prior, they have a deeper underlying reality.)

I have a big beard that has a recognizable gestalt shape of its own. That shape was somehow "latent" in the simple growing rules for the hairs on my face, but the shape of it is not represented or described in those simple rules. There's no plan for George's beard anywhere, and yet there it is - every time I stop shaving more or less the same "thing" sprouts.

This also speaks to the Hegelian/Marxian idea of dialectic, the organic development of concepts, etc., I think. Concepts (or for Marx, various social relations) are "latent in" and grow out of other concepts - but without having a represented plan within the original concept.

So, have you never found any philosophical question or topic to be superficial or shallow or having an obvious answer? — Sapientia

No, not really. There are questions asked in the course of investigation into philosophical topics that might be superficial, or shallow, or have obvious answers, and sometimes what philosophers have made of the Big Questions have been Shallow Questions; but the problems themselves seem to me to be deep and difficult (within the parameters of our limited intelligence and knowledge - or maybe that's just my limited intelligence and knowledge ;) ).

It's all very well chucking a philosophical problem in ordinary language philosophy solvent, and I do it myself sometimes. The bluff common sense of a David Stove is also salutary now and then. But really that's no more than clearing the decks for some real philosophical thinking.

I think what it is, is that there's a crucial philosophical distinction, the philosophical distinction par excellence, which has been put numerous ways (apriori/aposteriori, Hume's Fork, Wittgenstein's distinction between "grammar" statements and empirical statements, etc.) but it's actually extremely difficult to pin down in one's mind, it's elusive and of such dizzying abstraction it's hard to keep straight, but it is one of the major philosophical discoveries, and the main tool of philosophical thinking. (The way I think of it is in terms of the difference between the dictionary and the encyclopedia.)

Anyway, it's the difficulty of grasping that distinction, and how it might apply to the Big Questions, that's the hard thing about philosophy.

I don't think the substance/accident ontology is just some notion that we unthinkingly introject because we use words in a certain way, I think it's something that comes from observation of nature - which is the same whether you're American or Chinese. The classical ontology didn't just suddenly appear or mindlessly coalesce, it was built up over hundreds of years of dialogue and argument between notable philosophers right up until about the modern period.

Also, our understanding of those terms since modern philosophy is a feeble, truncated thing, relative to what the Aristotelians and Scholastics would have understood. (For example in the classical philosophy, substance and accident are tied up with concepts like actuality and potentiality - there's a whole bundle of closely-related topics in that area, that we don't really understand unless we make a study of the classical philosophy.)

I'm old enough to remember several attempts at linguistic relativism - and funnily enough, Sellars' argument actually shows why they fail (because there are numerous ways of using symbols to signify the same thing different language users have noticed in reality).

But that's evasive. — Sapientia

No it's not, it directly addresses your "what if?"s.

You'd have to give me a reason to think one of your "what if?"s is true, for me to climb down from an "always."

However, that said:-

Was it an exaggeration, perhaps? — Sapientia

No, it was a figure of speech - or an admonition, perhaps. Obviously "always" terminates at when you do actually start to understand the problems in a deep way, which as i said probably takes about 10 years or so (at any rate, probably more years than it takes to get a doctorate in Philosophy ;) ),.

What if, in some particular case, it turns out to be quite shallow, and you've just been looking at it wrong? What if you've been caught by the spell, and have yet to have it broken? What if, at some moment in time, which might occur even after years of study, it strikes you that the appearance of deepness has been somewhat of an illusion all along, and a distraction from the reality, which you may have known deep down all along? — Sapientia

Lots of things are possible. The question is which is most likely, and best supported by the evidence.

One has to be on guard against various ways of going astray of course, but that's partly why we engage in dialogue, to make sure we aren't going crazy :)

Is there something about philosophy which invites or attracts a sort of pretence? — Sapientia

Yeah actually I think that does sometimes happen. It's because the topics are so abstract and difficult that it's easy to either make mistakes without knowing it, or to bamboozle oneself or others.

Here's something I've learned about philosophy after about 35 or so years of amateur study: it's always deeper than you think, and you probably won't really understand the main philosophical problems until you've been at them for at least a decade. That's because to really understand the problems you have to have spent some time inhabiting all the various proposed solutions, and thinking they're true, and that just takes time, to cycle round the various positions like that.

It takes time to understand the problems of philosophy in the 101 sense, and then it takes time to get out of the habit of latching on to whatever seems right to you first time, and instead deeply checking out all the main answers, even the ones you don't like. Then you have a deeper understanding of the problems, and then your next round of going through the answers, you start to get a clearer picture of your own opinion, and precisely where it might differ from the known answers.

Eventually you chisel out your own position.

But it's easy to bloviate before then, before you've really understood the problems deeply enough, and come to rash conclusions; and it's tempting to give the impression to others that you're more certain than you actually are from your position.

The purpose of education is twofold: it is to induct a child into the ways of the world on the one hand, and into the ways of the child's people, on the other.

To give children a stock of general facts about the natural world (a rough or preparatory sketch, to be fleshed out with their own experience), and to give children the tools to be able to interact with the social world around them, so that they can learn to communicate, interact and co-operate with others of their tribe in ways they understand.

It is basically to install a child's brain with the collective wisdom of the tribe up to that point, so that it has something to work with, a structure to both rely on and repair (even contribute to the perpetuation of) as it goes.

There's some debate about whether the process of education should lean more towards rote learning or more towards the eliciting of creativity. I think that depends on the personality type of the child. But again one might ask: go with the grain or against the grain? Should we get "square" kids to do fingerpainting and creative types to buckle down and learn their multiplication tables? Or the other way round? Min-max, or bring all faculties to some sort of balance? Again, this is when it gets down to the judgement of teachers, who know more intimately the psychology and character of the particular children they're teaching.

I think it's all pretty wonderful, I wouldn't place man's products above or below the products of nature, because man's products are a product of nature too.

What is special about Marx is that he doesn't accept any particular set of economic relationships as being somehow the natural state of affairs; — Londoner

Neither does economics. Of course relations change all the time (over longish periods). The laws of economics don't change though, they're praxeological, they just fall out of agency, rationality, etc.

On the other hand, in a sense Marx does talk about an unchanging factor throughout history - those who control the means of production set the terms for society.

There is no circularity. The a priori definitions in question aren't the basis for "proving" what is true. They are the basic understanding of the definition of relationships of status and power which we need recognise if we are able to observe when they are occurring in our society. — TheWillowOfDarkness

"Recognize" = "proving." Otherwise there's no point to the exercise, and it's indistinguishable from the confabulation of a lunatic, an LSD trip, the idiosyncratic backyard sculpture of a naïve folk artist - or something true.

So in Marxism for example, I need to understand what constitutes an oppressive relationship, an organisation and control of capital, how is amounts to exploitation, before I can even observe instances where it occurs in the world. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Sure, but how do you distinguish ideological hallucination from reality? Was it ever possible for capitalist relations not to be intrinsically exploitative?

In fact it's the other way round from what you say: Marxism is a plain old possible explanation for verifiable, noticeable bad things happening, not an identification of bad things happening that nobody ever noticed before. Very good: but what's the test? In what way could it be a wrong possible explanation?

shut up and listen for a bit if you're unfamiliar with the terms of discussion — fdrake

You cannot possibly be serious that you think this is any way to conduct an intellectual conversation.

Again, I appreciate your thoughtfulness, but from my point of view what I perceive is a smidgin of cognitive dissonance, and you trying to reconcile what you'd like to think are the elevated, noble thoughts of some of these schools of thought, with the reality of how they're increasingly being used to browbeat people - particularly White males, in what is becoming an increasingly blatantly racist and sexist manner (as those terms used to be used, when they actually meant something verifiable).

All of this is rubbish: — fdrake

All identity politics derived from that sorry lot is rubbish - there's some philosophical/political value here and there in the originators, the leading thinkers, as I said. There's food for thought in Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, even someone like Habermas (if you can make it through a page of him without falling asleep) - heck, even a minor light like Shulamith Firestone on the Feminist side (a particular old flame of mine when I was a socialist in my youth) can have sparky, interesting things to say.

But identity politics as it's taught in universities now is a complete mess, a Frankenstein's monster of cobbled-together bits of intellectual arse juice from all those sources.

The problem isn't with the schools of thought in terms of their ideas necessarily - ideas are ideas, you can consider them or not - rather the flaw is in the tic, the automatism, of seeing everything through the lens of "oppressor/oppressed" group analysis. It's the unexamined (un-criticized) water in which the fish of academia swim, and it's polluted.

Plus also the obfuscatory language - if you need your man Roderick to simplify it, something's gone terribly wrong. Nobody needs to simplify Hume ;) But even that wouldn't be so bad on its own - idiosyncratic language use is kind of charming in the greats, it's like a musical jingle - but when it's garbled third hand and fourth hand in academia so that sons and daughters of the Great & Good can get a high paying job sucking the life out of society by working in an NGO or the Stasi HR department of a big law firm - then you've got trouble.

If any of these ideas are crap, I want them to be shown to be crap, you aren't doing that. — fdrake

I thought I did up-thread somewhere, then we went around the houses: I want to see real, verifiable instances of oppression to fight against, I'm not interested in apriori ideological candy floss designed to kafkatrap political opponents.

If you want to dig deeper at a theoretical level, the problem is social constructionism, of the kind that goes back to Rousseau. The fact that our ideas come from our side, or subjectively (as a Kantian might say) as opposed to being directly perceived in the traditional Realist sense, doesn't mean they can't be objective. We bring the tests to the table, we project possible ways of being, sure: but Nature answers yea or nay.

So social constructionism - what's the motive behind that? Well, in the context of a secular version of Protestantism, with its notion of the equality of souls before God, the general idea is that Man is born innocent (with everyone equal) but corrupted by social structures (particularly property). If you want the real root of the poison, that's it right there, in that Rousseaian idea (or rather the idea that Rousseau made immensely popular).

It's more often a rhetorical strategy to delegitimise a movement. — fdrake

How would you tell the difference between that and an actual wolf in sheep's clothing? Or don't the people in your tribe do that kind of thing? Always the good guys, huh?

It's always a bit tricky dealing with someone who has a measured position that I could probably agree with on some points, but who reflexively stands by the "no enemies to the Left" trope.

I'm not one who says that literally everything that's ever come from any of these schools of thought is crap. I understand very well that some things (like Postmodernism) are, or at least see themselves, as evolutions from previous stances, and as part of a continuing tradition, and I think the leading lights (e.g. Derrida, Foucault) have indeed had interesting things to say. It just doesn't translate very well into either (from a critical Left-wing point of view) activism or (from a critical Right-wing point of view) public policy.

Conflating a civil rights movement with Marxism is a very old trick and oft repeated to this day. — fdrake

Well yes, and that's what's often done - by those leading the movements.

But I respect that you're trying to "clean house." However, I fear that you're the exact kind of hopelessly idealistic "useful idiot" who would be first up against the wall, come the revolution ;)

IOW, the problem is always that the rhetoric you are using can be turned against you, and will be. The scum always rises in the Left - and that's never been a coincidence.

A priori needn't mean unverifiable/unfalsifiable. I agree that we bring definitions of possible things to the table and see if there's anything in nature that answers to those possible natures, or essences - but that very process involves verification/falsification. If it doesn't make a difference, it doesn't make a difference.

If we take Marxism, the "inherent exploitation" only goes insofar as the social context of capital is exploitative. — TheWillowOfDarkness

This seems circular to me.

On the level of a society, certain groups will probably have more advantages afforded to them; sometimes this is ok (like citizens), sometimes it's not ok (like citizens being unable to vote), sometimes there's a lot of ambiguity and horrible shit (treatment of asylum seekers). — fdrake

You're taking a lot for granted here (for example the desirability of a universal franchise, equality, etc.). But at least we can agree that where there's verifiable oppression, people should act - even if it's vague and diffuse, that's still worth talking about, and possibly doing something about (depending on the cost/benefit calculation).

Regardless of theoretical confusions; when you see something like gays banding together for gay marriage to be a thing, people advocating for and setting up needle exchanges in drug infused areas, the end of apartheid, setting up free evening classes in impoverished areas, the entry of all races into most parts of the workforce; would you agree these changes are in part attributable to 'identity politics' in the broad sense? — fdrake

Some of those movements (e.g. gay marriage) I don't see those as natural movements of opinion and feeling, they're mostly astroturf. I'd say the same about most supposedly grassroots Left-wing movements.

Sometimes they take reasonable, legitimate claims and put them through the mincer of PC cult ideology, whereupon they come out as claims for special privilege disguised as redress of legitimate grievances; more often they don't even bother doing that, and the claims are absurd in the first place. The "representatives" of such movements weren't voted for by the group they represent, they thrust themselves forward as representative, gather some well-meaning followers and some noisy followers, and then the asses in the media focus attention on them because it's supposed to be the cool thing. All pure rhetoric and persuasion, not an ounce of reason in it anywhere. Even when there's a kernel of validity to some of the claims, it's co-opted by the ideology, and ends up doing nothing but reproducing the ideology, the particular causes cancel out.

(Obviously I have no problem with evening classes; as far as race goes, I'm color blind and I believe meritocracy should rule - no barriers against, but no affirmative action for.)

But yes they're based on identity politics: among other things, identity politics gives people an excuse to claim special privileges and disguise them as legitimate redress or (that laughable oxymoron) "social justice."

What're the shared things? — fdrake

Mainly an unquestioning belief in equality, which is especially amusing in the context of relativism - but then it can always be excused as a "leap of faith," and by God the lemmings have going for it :)

I don't think that anyone is sitting there believing society is structured to fuck over individuals with certain properties; people are marginalised through omissions, legal restrictions, or accumulated advantages. These structural problems usually have suffering as a blind consequence rather than as a conspiratorial drive. If you notice that people in category X have in rough in way Y, you produce a schism between X and not X, effected by Y and not effected by Y. How else are you supposed to locate sites of historical struggle and of the resistance of individuals to their societal conditions than by coupling those effected with the reasons they were effected? What's so wrong with that? — fdrake

It's a possible analysis, oppression does happen sometimes, just as exploitation happens sometimes.
But it's not the only lens through which we ought to understand history and the relations between human beings. The reason it's become a cult, is because the relevant forms of "oppression" have been defined into existence, rather than found.

You don't have to look hard for instances of actual oppression in the world. They're verifiable, falsifiable, one can be accused of oppression, and be innocent of it, and show one's innocence.

Again, comparing and contrasting with Marx is instructive: actual instances of what people ordinarily call "exploitation," (which is falsifiable) he wasn't all that interested in. What he was interested in was definining capitalist relations as intrinsically exploitative. Something of the same kind of linguistic folderol is at work with the geneological descendants of Marxism (a lot of these schools of thought were created by ex-Marxists, or disgruntled Marxists): relations between man and woman or between blacks and whites are understood to be intrinsically oppressive, in a way that's lost touch with falsifiability - IOW, you are kafkatrapped into being an "exploiter" simply by virtue of belonging to the group defined as exploitative, and you cannot demonstrate that you are not an exploiter, you have to "confess your privilege." It really is quite like Original Sin, and taken in a very Calvinist sort of vein at that.

On the other hand, suppose there are lingering traces of oppression, cobwebs of it here and there in our institutions and working life, should we do nothing about them at all? Sure, you could have, for example, a "Nightwatchman Feminism" to stick around and tidy up the loose ends. But what we have instead is a Feminism long past its sell-by date trying to justify its keep by proposing ever more absurd, made-up categories of human interaction as "oppression of the wamenz." And it's the same for the race-baiting machine, the Diversity Industry in business, etc.

book-burning ways — Baden

Oh for heaven's sake. Universities have the right to have whatever programs and courses they see fit. They can change their minds, and they can be persuaded. The State also has an interest in what it pays for.

It depends on the grain of one's analysis obviously. There are things different about the groups on my helicopter list, sure, but there are also linked genealogies, similarities; and it's the things shared that are causing the problems - as I said, the problem is the typical social analysis in terms of oppressor/oppressed, first practiced by Marx in terms of socioeconomic class, that's been translated wholesale into the idioms of gender and race.

So which examples of identity politics do you think of as irredeemable rubbish and why, then? — fdrake

Anything modeled on the Marxist type of societal analysis (of oppressor/oppressed groups, with the groups marked by their closeness to, or distance from, "power", arbitrarily defined). So: anything based on good, old-fashioned Marxism; anything based on analyses derived from Critical Theory, or any other blend of Freudianism and Marxism; anything based on Feminist analyses, or derived therefreom as a template; anything grounded philosophically in Post-modernism or Post-structuralism; anything based on Intersectionality and/or Standpoint Theory.

Basically, all "xxx studies" need to be thrown into the bin and the humanities need to be cleaned up, university identity politics is a mind-virus and a pseudo-intellectual, quasi-religious cult, as well as a scam that's at the root of the multi-billion dollar NGO/Diversity Industry. The whole mess is just a giant leech on the body politic that's created a generation of periwigged, pompadoured "elites" who've been living off the backs of the common labourer, and who are about to lose their heads if they're not careful.

So, any idea as to where modern conservatism is moving intellectually? — Maw

The problem with conservatives is that they're too scared of being called racist to move to the logical next step of the defense of Western civilization they so desperately want to mount: White identity politics.

Their enemies. the modern Left (and those who would be their friends, if they had their heads screwed on, the Alt Right) see clearly what they don't see: that White identity and the kind of classical liberal politics they like, are intimately connected, and that if the former falls, the latter will fall too.

There's a double irony here in that yahoos on the modern Left are used to twitting conservatives as racist, etc., but actually they're not, they resist race realism and are still enamoured of "color blindness" and the civic nationalist ideal. (The triple irony would be that even color blindness is called "racist" in some quarters of today's demented humanities :) .)

I think a common error along the way, which (fairly or unfairly, I can't say at this point) I'm seeing as exemplified in gurugeorge's responses, is to make this conceptual generalisation of identity politics while still treating identity politics in a more derogatory sense. — fdrake

I've treated the variety of identity politics that's taught in universities in a derogatory sense, but that's not the only kind of identity politics. All politics is indeed identity politics in one way or another - whether it's good or bad depends on the way it's used.

I didn't ask for some random quotes of me, I asked for where I said: "they just all died mysteriously but completely unsuspiciously shortly after voluntarily handing over their land."

Obviously disease is not mysterious or suspicious, and I never said they voluntarily handed over their land.

This is a theme that has long been emphasised by Zizek and a few others, who have noted that the ultimate consequence of Kant's reasoning here is that in Kant, the self has the status of an object. — StreetlightX

That's an interesting point.

I think it's actually the other way round, the self never was anything other than an object, for others; we introjected the self-as-object, and instead of being the self that we actually are (the self of pure consciousness, pure kenning, pure knowing), we think of the perceived image as ourselves.

IOW the first "home" of the self is the image others have of me, of me as a public, perceivable object. And the link is that we can see bits of ourself (e.g. I can see my hand, torso, or I can see an image of myself in a mirror) - but we can't see the eye that we're seeing out of. But subsequently, that self somehow gets from the outside world into our heads.

Another way of looking at it: in public language, when both A and B are in purview, A is a distinct self from B, this is something anyone can perceive, the relationship between them is flat, horizontal, on the surface, we can see it all at once laid out before us, and if A is conscious of B, that means A is evidently aware of it, can step around it, avoid it or cleave to it.

But in private, in that totally imaginary creature "subjective" space, we turn that schema <A is conscious of B> around 90 degrees and put it on our face, and thereby we create an imaginary A "inside" of us looking out at B (intentionality). We double up the meaning of self - so it's not just our self as others see us now, but also some imaginary point of view at the center of us, looking out of the body in some way.

And then, even worse, we imagine that that inner self perceives not the world directly, but a screen of its own mental material.

It's an accurate description of what Communism has turned out to be every time people have tried to implement it, but of course from the Communist point of view, that wasn't real communism :D

There's quite a distance between Communist ideals and Communist reality - but actually it's the ideals that are the problem, that lead to the shitty reality despite the undoubted best intentions of many rank-and-file Communists.

Apparently early Americans didn't massacre the native population at all, they just all died mysteriously but completely unsuspiciously shortly after voluntarily handing over their land. — Pseudonym

Quote?

Western Maoists, Leninists etc... hate identity politics, intersectionality, discourse analysis etc etc. — fdrake

No they don't, they practice identity politics in terms of socioeconomic class - they're just a bit too stupid to realize what the modern Left realized: that race and gender gives you a much bigger pool of people you can entrap.

IOW, it's true that the old, hard Leftists are pissed off with the identity politics of the modern Left, but that's only because they think it's focussed on the wrong type of identity.

Except it's not at all. — Baden

But it is. For example, there's the same mangling of language - the modern Left's rhetorical tricks are identical to those that enabled bastards within older Leftist ranks to rise by kafkatrapping their "useful idiots" (the starry-eyed idealists) using the same rhetorical methods that were formerly used against to kafkatrap the "oppressors."

There's the same atttribution of collective guilt to individuals (formerly via socioeconomic class, now via race and gender). The same pseudo-scientific sense of base-to-superstructure determinism (that if you're part of that group you must therefore necessarily behave in such-and-such a way), and the same impossibility of redemption other than by toeing to the party line.

And above, all the same uncritical idealism, regarding the same unquestioned absolute ideal (equality), that nullifies ordinary moral qualms, because the goal is so beautiful that any means are justified in its attainment.

Because Mao was a savage psychopath who killed millions of his own people. — Baden

You're missing the point, all the big Commies turned out to be savage psychopaths, sure, but that wasn't obvious from their writings and doings before they got power. Before they got power, they wrote nicely, just like modern Leftists do.

So how can we be sure that some of our nice modern Leftists aren't nascent savage psychopaths?

IOW, the comparison is not at all absurd, because the expressed ideology is virtually identical.

new definitions like "race realism". — ssu

There's always been a difference between racism and racialism (which is more mild-mannered than racism), or race realism (which is even more mild-mannered than racialism). There are different possible attitudes you can take to the fact that race is a reality and that it's mostly genetic; hating other races and/or believing one's own race is superior in everything, isn't a mandatory part of some package deal. (And actually it isn't for most on the Alt Right.)

All the alt-right had to achieve as to look as it would be important is for one of the most inept (or likely, the most inept) US Presidents to have, for a while, an advisor that promoted those whacky ideas. — ssu

Trump has nothing to do with the Alt Right, or its ideas, nor did Bannon or any of Trump's crew really - they're all "Alt Lite" from the Alt Right point of view - dirty, stinking civic nationalists ;) Trump is virtually an old school Democrat on many issues (he only became literally Hitler the moment he ran against Hillary) but he was better than the alternatives.

As I said, the confusion around the term "Alt Right" has arisen simply because Hillary decided to smear the whole of the broad anti-Her/pro-Trump coalition with the name of one of its most extremist elements.

And it makes me cringe when he compares today's left-wing activists to Mao and so on. — Baden

Why should it?

I mean, they all seem lovely and that today, but Mao, Lenin and Stalin all wrote lovely things when they weren't in power too (and even when they were in power).

They talked up a storm about the evils of capitalism, about having a true social democracy, about the end of oppression and alienation, about production for need not profit, all that good stuff. You read early Stalin, it's almost like listening to a more intelligent version of the sort of thing a young, enthusiastic Left anarchist would say today on campus.

So what went wrong? And how do we know the mild-mannered Leftists of today won't turn out the same?

(But of course, some of them are not so mild-mannered, are they? In fact some of them are quite violent sometimes, quite street-thuggy - just like Lenin, Stalin, etc., were when they stopped writing and got a bit of the old praxis going. Funny thing that ... )

I'd agree that Peterson isn't absolutely top tier, but he's not that far off, he's better than 90% of the conformist pikers in academia today.

When I first heard the term alt-right a few years ago, I first thought it was defining those now felt disenfranchised by the left. — Sydasis

The waters were muddied by Hillary when she twitted the Trump Train and all who oppose her as "Alt Right." This was an attempted smear by her, but it was taken as something of a badge of pride by the broad anti-Hillary coalition at the time, mainly because (until she Streisand Effected it) most people hadn't really heard of the Alt Right.

But there is in fact an Alt Right, which is a fairly coherent movement that developed (again) around the mid-Noughties, out of a confluence of blogs around Moldbuggery, neo-Reaction, paleo-conservatives, Dark Enlightenment, and some remnants of White nationalists/neo-Nazis who had been plugging away generally ignored for decades. (Originally the term was invented by a paleo-conservative in the mid-Noughties, Paul Gottfried.)

And that's why Hillary was using the term as a smear, because the Alt Right proper (which considers the broader Trump Train/anti-Democrat coalition to be the "Alt Lite"), while it doesn't have any settled ideological praxis (i.e. although it does have some national socialists and neo-Nazis, it also has disaffected conservatives, ex-libertarians, neo-reactionaries, etc.), does have 3 very specific points of agreement/commitments that hang together and are of a piece: 1. Race realism, 2. The Jewish Question, and 3. White identitarianism - and I guess from Hillary's point of view these were the most evil things she could think of, so she tried to smear the whole movement against her with the term. ;)

There is another skein: the Dionysian vs. the Apollonian drive. — Bitter Crank

Yeah good call. I mean, I'm fairly Dionysian on a gut level, I've had mystical experiences, taken the full recommended course of drugs in my time, etc., etc. I'm actually a musician and I highly value pursuits that delve into the texture of present experience, and agree with the fundamental idea that the "point" of existence, if it's to be found anywhere, must be found in the present, in presence.

But again, somehow I've managed to escape the full package deal (that would normally make me subscribe to the full "liberal" program) and come to terms with the societal, time-binding Apollonian element that my Boomer generation has very nearly dismantled.

I flatter myself that it's the result of my dogged pursuit of truth, but who knows :)

The skein of religious history you displayed is one of the topics I would pursue. — Bitter Crank

I think it's a mixed bag, as most things are. There were positive elements that you mention, but Puritan fanaticism wasn't too pleasant, and its descendant in the Puritan strain of the Left today isn't too pleasant either. Frankly I prefer the Quaker strain of Protestantism and the Left - more hippyish ;)

Actually it just occurred to me that you could probably trace those two elements to the psychological factors that Jordan Peterson mentioned re. political affiliation (in his collaboration with a researcher on this - and I think Haidt has a similar breakdown): so the Left has two sides to it, there's the side where it's all kumbaya, let's all love each other and be nice to each other, etc., and there's the side where the "disgust" factor is high - where once you've identified what you think is evil (or in modern terms: "oppression") then you blindly hate those you believe are perpetrating it, with no redemption possible. So that's the Quaker strain and the Puritan strain right there (effectively I think, what happens is that these two cultures would have respectively "taken" more strongly with psychologies already predisposed to them, so Quaker upbringing would make an already hippyish person more hippyish, Puritan upbringing would make an instinctive social justice warrior even more social justice warriorey).

As someone who's moved from the far Left to the Right in the course of a life, I think I'm just an instinctive hippy/Quaker who's been mugged :)