Casual racism comes from contact with other ethnicities, noticing differences, having ingrained biologically-driven preferences, and having bad experiences with an out-group. All of that is unfortunate, but it's part of life.

The joke is literally that South African languages have clicks in them. How is that funny? I mean, it doesn't offend me, but there does seem to be this weird sort of racism to it in that the very notion that a language might make use of a sound that yours doesn't is enough material for a standup routine. Likewise, how is it 'funny' that Mandarin speakers sound like Mandarin speakers?

I guess, If I were you responding to yourself, I'd say that noticing differences is unfortunate but part of life? Are you outraged? I'm assuming you'd want to say no, based on earlier posts. So what's your point? (See, I agree with you, but you seem to also want to go beyond this and chastise other college ppl for chastising non-college ppl.)

You suggested that the Avenue Q stuff was left projection. It really isn't, not at all, not even close. And so I agree that the systematized ideological racism of certain well-educated people is pernicious in a whole other way. For sure. But I'm still not sure how you're reconciling the it's-wrong-to-look-down-on-poor-whites-for-their-ideas stance with the I-can't-stand-people-who-make-jokes-based-on-arbitrary-cultural-differences stance. (I'm assuming you're not trying to do a thing of the guy in that video wasn't white while libs at college specifically hone in on poor whites?)

Idk man, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

I think maybe people on the left project their own racism onto everybody else. It reminds me of that Avenue Q song, Everyone's a Little Bit Racist. On hearing it, I got the feeling I was supposed to laugh along and think, 'yeah, I've totally thought those things!' but I hadn't, so the impression was more like, no, that's just you that's racist, retard.

Listening on youtube. I think this is interesting. You accuse the educated left - a lot - of condescendingly scolding poor whites for their views. But you seem more than a little irked at the racist ideas in Avenue Q which you don't harbor - but hey, they're 'projections'

Let's go through the racist ideas in the video.

(1) People with similar 'ethnic' names must be related (or at least this is a solid thing to joke about)
(2) Rap is bad for kids because of the language and ideas
(3) foreign workers should learn to speak english
(4) Asian people say words funny
(5)Jews control finance
(6)White people have all the power
(7) Ethnic taxi drivers have bad BO

Poor whites are on board with almost all of this. I hear this kind of stuff day in, day out (when I dispatch a call, part of that involves giving the name of the person who placed the call. Goldstein, chang, mohammed, and nyongo all get reactions. Often.)

So what do I make of this? You clearly on aren't on board with these ideas (or even admitting that people beside projecting privileged whites harbor them!), but you also aren't on board with ivory tower libs calling out poor whites for having these ideas - so what do you want?

This is my suspicion You don't care either way - you just want an angle to attack other people on campus. All this shit is just fodder for intracampus sniping, fuel for local resentments. Which is ivory tower thinking on steroids.

Prove me wrong! Walk me through it.

So I agree with all of that (except the Avenue Q part, just because I've never heard the song.) But I get the sense you're trying to gesture toward a point beyond what you've explicitly said?

Rub it in, jerk

Cooking aside, that trump/racism article is very interesting but I think it's wrong. The way I see it, the problem with Trump and race isn't that he's actually racist but that he's perceived as being so by people who harbor deep racial animus, which goes well beyond registered white nationalists (and he very clearly encourages this perception while also maintaining plausible deniability) - what this does is foster an environment where it feels ok to be racist or whatever-ist. The president can say on tv he never meant that, but you still feel safe lashing out in public. The national tone or mood shifts. I personally don't think he's that much more racist than your average American. But that's irrelevant. If the argument is that by accusing Trump of strengthening racist sentiments*, we forfeit the right to be taken seriously if we call a candidate who endorses the kkk racist (i.e. we won't be able call people who declare that they're racist racist) - well that's a bad argument. isn't it? Don't say 'racist' until the president commends lynching during the state of the union? If someone is openly endorsing the kkk and still has a shot at winning, then things would have gotten bad enough no dissenting voice would make much of a difference.

The discussion of the "I love Hispanics" taco pic seemed so tone deaf I couldn't tell if the author was trolling. (what? that frat bro is a misogynist? he posted on facebook about how much he loves women! we'll know it's bad when he stops posting stuff like that...)

*To be fair, the author mentions those who accuse Trump of spearheading a white nationalist agenda, with white nationalist priorities. Those voices are out there, sure (as were the voices of those who thought Obama was an african-born radical socialist) but by and large people are more worried about the nonchalant integration of people with racist/xenophobic views into positions of power, and how that will play out, not about a conscious and concerted effort to make the US a white ethnostate)

I have a relatively shitty job. Viewed in the broad context of human history, it's not so bad, but I make well below the national average (and median) and there're few challenges or opportunities to apply my natural strengths and talents (tho i do get to make use of my gnarly typing skills - soo many words per minute) I dispatch for AAA northern new england. So pretty much a call center, with just a little more agency. But I need it - someone with more discipline could make good use of swathes of work-free time and someone with less social anxiety could find ways to regularly interact with others outside of coerced teamwork. But that's not me, at least not yet. Left to my own devices, I'm fine for a few weeks but eventually descend into a reclusive hell of addiction and distraction. Work structures life for me, makes my freetime rewarding rather than crushing, and forces me to interact regularly with other people. Until I develop better self-discipline and an ability to freely overcome my inclination to withdraw, work is something I deeply need.

Thanks man!

Then they shouldn't have gotten [mortgages] to begin with. That's an easy one. The government also shouldn't be forcing certain banks to offer risky loans to under-qualified people, which was the primary catalyst for the housing bubble and subsequent crash.

Yeah, but see that's the problem in a nut shell. Invisible hand didn't stop them from getting them. The idea that the CRA is responsible for the 2008 financial crisis is taken seriously by almost noone except those clamoring for a talking point. Where'd you come across it?

sick >10 yr old meme


if you liked that, you'll love these.










just messing thorongil, ur my boy.

I'm going to shamelessly post having read very little of the thread. I just really like the question and want to get an answer out there.

So, the first thing I'd say is that one very big reason I continue to live is that I know the toll suicide takes on loved ones and I'm too cowardly to do it anyway (I was very close & learned that truth about myself and it crushed me.)

But I guess that would answer a different question: Why don't you stop living?

So, what I live for. Very rarely, but often enough that I can't chalk it up to a handful of meaningless anomalies, I experience a piece of a music or a gathering of friends or a book or whatever in this strange very intense way. Everything has a different quality. I feel like I'm actually seeing things for what they are, and what they are is way more expansive then I thought. I understand myself better too. Things are simpler, but also more complex, and my normal way of viewing things seems incredibly flat and limited. It's clear to me during these experiences that there is a rich, complex layer of life - I'm fine with calling it spiritual - which is a kind of transcendental condition for the brittle simplistic habit-driven life I usually live. It's clear to me, then, that there's a lot I don't understand and that the world can have this deeply meaningful spiritual texture that is usually foreclosed (one poor but suggestive enough analogy is to the kind of meaning and import you feel as a kid playing or exploring your grandparent's home etc. It's a bit like a grown-up version of that) Importantly, these experiences don't feel hallucinatory or supernatural or surreal - they feel hyperreal. These experiences are sometimes joyful (though they're just as often painful) and it's a joy that's very difficult to convey. (The problem is that I'm trying to talk in my brittle habit-driven state about that which exceeds it.)

So, I always know that sort of thing is out there, that it feels inexhaustible, and that I'm usually living in a kind of fake sedimented thought-world. That gives me a kind of direction, though it's hard to pin that down exactly. I've learned that seeking it out directly doesn't work - you can go too far too fast (one image I've always liked is that of old mystics warning young kabbalists that if they try to breach the garden of eden before they're read, they'll be cut down by the swords of the cherubim.) I think the condition for experiencing that state more than very rarely (and experiencing it as something joyful rather than painful) is to be ok with yourself. And that involves being a better person during mundane everyday life. And being a better person seems to involve shedding the faulty ad-hoc self-identifications and strategies of interaction developed as a kid and teenager. And being able to shed those involves paying a lot more attention to the patterns in your life.

So that gives me somewhere to start. And I've started a bit. It's slow work, but I think I'm making some progress. But not enough clearly: witness my endless antagonistic interactions on this board.

I don't understand your difficulty. Memory doesn't have to draw any boundaries: it's not like it can choose a different scope or perspective than that which is given by the conditions in which its bearer finds itself. To put it simply, you can't have memories of what you (your body, for lack of a better term) haven't experienced.

The post on memory which you've quoted was a response to John who, at that time, was tentatively suggesting an approach that would make memory the condition of (self) identity, rather than the other way around.. Responding to this line of thought (which he has since qualified and elaborated) I suggested that this would imply a kind of circularity. "You can't have memories of what you haven't experienced" sums up this circularity nicely. If we preclude the idea of a self which pre-exists memory - of any self that isn't created through memory - then memory would have to indeed create its own boundaries.

Of course if we futz with the meaning of 'you' such that it refers, unconventionally, to a body rather than a person, things change. You've gestured in this direction. Which could be a fine direction to go in. It would provide precisely the lower-level continuity that I claimed would be necessary for a psycho-social construct. Could you expand on what you mean? (again, your use of 'you' to mean 'your body' is certainly not conventional.)

No, your thought experiment is not extraordinary. It is indeed so ordinary that it does not present a problem that you think it does.

Would you be willing to sum up the problem presented as you see it? I'd like to measure my intent against the actual effect, in order to revise and tweak.

yeah

You're a very unpleasant person.

And @csalisbury, even if you're right in what is basically a charge of hypocrisy against me, that has no bearing on my criticism of The Great Whatever (cf. Tu quoque).

Red Herring! The criticism you leveled was never a reasoned, logical argument nor even presented as such, so fallacy-sniping doesn't make any sense in this context at all. you objected to TGW on the grounds that you had a different view and didn't like his tone (you cited snobbery, for one...ad hominem! appeal to emotion! blah)

So, yeah, you didn't like his tone or his opinion because you felt like you were being judged for your cultural values and preferences. But so what? Everyone makes such value judgments, including you. So what's your point? I assume you don't want to argue that people shouldn't make value judgments or have tones?

So again, there seems to be this background thing going on where you feel comfortable and confident slyly mocking the beliefs and traditions of others, but weirdly thin-skinned when people mock movies and ordering takeout. Anyway, I'm just saying that's the vibe I get from many of your posts, the tone, and I think this asymmetry (insouciant dismissal of certain values and cultures on the one hand, outrage when you think the stuff you like is being dismissed on the other) suggests extreme narrowmindedness and arrogance.

Nicolas Jaar's BBC mix I don't know how many times I've listened to this. It's v good.

I like that an OP about Bannon has lead to a discussion of cooking.

Yeah, I'm at a point where I get a kind of anxiety whenever I try to cook on my own (like the anxiety before a blank canvas or a blank page) and my cooking friend moved to another state soon after the first two lessons, so I haven't given it another stab since. My cooking is school-project level too. I have that classic perfectionist/flattered-as-a-child problem of being terrified of anything of I won't immediately excel at (which for me is 95% of the lifeskills I want and need to hone) and I'm trying to scheme up a way to tiptoe around my ridiculous superego in order to just go for it.

I have a close friend who is an amazing cook - he gave me some cooking lessons (I came over early before a dinner party to help make the meal and learn) and I sucked at it but it was still super rewarding.

Oh, my mistake

It means you care enough about Marvel movies to get really ruffled if someone suggests they're bad to someone else?

Look you and others routinely preen about how you recognize religion and spirituality as dumb "mumbo jumbo" that you won't be taken in by, but then you get instantly up in arms if people attack blockbusters and suggest cooking is more than a chore.

The idea seems to be that being above religion and its shallow mummery makes you a freethinker with no illusions and this is a philosophy forum so other freethinkers will naturally approve and applaud.

So this whole posture of being offended at people making cultural distinctions is silly.

Though I agree with most of the left's values, I also agree with most of what you've said. Leftists need to find a new way of talking about things to people outside their bubble and they need to do it fast.

(There was some salon or slate article about how it's insensitive to discuss the reasons for Hillary's loss beyond sexism at least until female hillary supporters have time to grieve...that's insane but I've seen people in my fb circle say similar things)

I know this is a bit tangential but which gilmore girl do you like more - the old one or the young one? I think they both have their merits (and god knows they have their flaws - I'm thinking season 2 ep 4 in particular) but in the end they're both trying to get by in this crazy old world. That said, the older one has a sort of pragmatic wisdom the younger lacks and that seems to give the show a moral grounding. Tho the fierce but naive spirit of the young one (played by the always delightful Alexis Bledel) is endearing too - I guess it's the two together that makes the show so vibrant and it's hard to choose one or the other - but if i had a gun to your head, whom would you pick? (Be honest!)

Taking that view (which I think may be close to the view of @The Great Whatever but not sure) What comes first: Desire or lack?

On another note, I really wish I knew how to cook.

I agree that that would help....It's just hard to imagine swathes of the population large enough to have a significant impact actually doing it.

I guess maybe I've been 'sold on' the idea that people are inevitably going to be more passionate and simple-minded in their ideals during their teens-mid 20s, but, idk, it seems to bear out empirically, doesn't it?

Ohhk, yeah, misinterpreted you - I agree that it's a super hard question.

Well, so that's it. It's that whole clockwork orange theme of: young people have to go through their intense, violent, passion-driven youthful stage and there's no way around that. Better SJWS than the Red Guards, right? (And it's probably worth keeping in mind that there's a difference between decrying straight up bigotry (of the type often on display on Breitbart) and demanding safe spaces on every block and trigger warnings for every challenging opinion. These are two very different things.)

Anyway, regarding the german idealist guy: here are the 5 comments on this vid (which I hadn't seen when I first posted)

- ＨＯＷ ＣＡＮ ＷＥ ＣＯＭＰＬＥＴＥ ＴＨＥ ＳＹＳＴＥＭ ＯＦ ＧＥＲＭＡＮ ＩＤＥＡＬＩＳＭ

- Lmfao. Thule society. Vrill society was a lot cooler

- This guy is a legend

- how2shitpostirl

- me irl

-----
I stand by my first interpretation. It's 100% about shitposting and trolling. Also this vid has 208 views, the poster has posted 4 vids and the guy in the clip mentions the alt-right at the end- so we can assume you found this through some alt-right something. It wouldn't have come up in any search.

Here's a vid posted by the guy with the most-liked comment on the german idealism vid:




What's shitty about this video isn't that it's offensive (it's trying so hard it can't be) it's that it's two guys (one's the dominant 'edgy' one, one's the timid foil trying to play along, you can feel their entire lopsided friendship dynamic ) who can't differentiate easy edgy-humor from irl events. It's all the same shit to them. It's all an opportunity to seem beyond-it-all. (tho you know they'd flip at Dad if he stopped footing the bills, you can hear that too or I can)

& Maybe they're just in high school, and I get it, I tried to be edgy too, in similar (tho I hope more clever) ways. You have to break your zeitgeist's idols at some point, if you're ever going to become your own person. But taking this same type of thing past high school, well into your twenties or thirties? That's what the alt-right sometimes feels like to me. And then it's just like: 'C'mon, that's all you've got? That's how you're going to define and express yourself?' kek :'-(

Indeed it does! Good luck with that.

That doesn't seem like a sincere 'good luck,' indeed it seems like a bitter sarcastic one. Why?

there is no connection between voting and what happens in the government.

Local reps wouldn't try to get pork into bills if voting had nothing to do with results. You have to deliver at some level. The whole point, imo, is that everyone tends toward corruption so you have to force government to cater to people. And they do, they cater. Because they're up for re-election. I have no starry-eyed belief that this system works well, or that elected officials cater beyond the bare minimum. I just think it makes a certain antagonism (ppl vs government) internal to the system and I think that's nice, and works better than any other system.

I agree, too, about family - family and close friends are the only thing I care deeply about - but globalization is a fait accompli & I don't know how you would remove those forces antithetical to family without a forceful, planned intervention (as you say, that would be that leftist way of treating things.)

Christianity did a big ideological number on the family long ago and it's grown from there. Can't dial things back.

So I'm down with that perspective---but it leaves us with the exact same question: when and why does the self start self-ing? (verb-ing to avoid the reification of the self). We're left with the same questions about boundaries and memories and all that. (Again, even if we agree that the self is not substantial, the questions remain.)

Yes, people vote based on memes and always have. It's always a circus. But the point is you have to court people, dumb as they are, as susceptible to 'trump's a german idealist' as they are. And not everyone is dumb. And there are intermediary groups and interests mediating between the people and the candidates. And some people actually really do vote based on stuff like healthcare and social security and not pictures of Hillary fucking the anunnaki with a strapon at bohemian grove. The drooling mob thing is a little too easy, imo. But what do you think of Democracy? Is there another system you'd prefer? & why?

Well that was surely the intended effect of his speech - to demonstrate, to others, how people will interpret 'german idealism' as Nazism (which incidentally isn't alll that different from the actual tale of Nazism, but that's another story.) But why did he do that? Obviously to be recognized by his online community as a master troll. (That's obvious to me anyway, what do you think?)

I don't think democracy means the people realize their will immediately in the house/senate/president, but I think the idea is they force the elected body to make compromises. It never works all that well, but it's like that Churchill quote, it's better than the alternative. It's obvious that the people often act against their own interests, and shouldn't be able to instantly materialize their ephemeral passions as policy; but it's also obvious that a governing body of enlightened rulers will grow corrupt, callous and decadent if they have no one else to answer to. Democracy is a forced tension between the two groups, I guess.

Let's imagine though that the soul is preserved in a sort of spiritual 'storehouse' of the type Wayfarer described. And that it reappears on the worldly stage at certain moments. When does the soul enter into the physical world? At what stage of physical fetal development? Is there already a boundary drawn (by some autopoetic physical system) or does the soul itself enter and draw the boundary? But then can it enter and draw the boundary at any moment?

This is a little unclear, but do you see where I'm going?

I guess the problem with that is that it's not leadership. But also no one really cares, I guess. The german idealism thing is funny but also that dude's thing is clearly "I'm smarter than you so i can do and support whatever and it doesn't matter - you're dumb (is it uploading yet?)" fine for 4chan, bad for irl politics. Making democracy itself a cleverer-than-thou shitpost is the saddest shittiest most nihilistic direction for our country to move in.

I'm not sure what "assimilation takes time" has to do with my post but I guess that's true. As to SJWs, you seem especially upset with this lot. You post about them a bunch. I don't really get it but I'll chalk it up to just another senile drama queen fag making mountains of molehills (ooops lookout bet the pc police are coming to get me!)

Yeah, I guess the silver lining is that that maybe that at least gives us a bit of defense against fascism? Hitler felt deeply about certain things, but I don't think Trump cares at all about anything but keeping the show going? But then most of us not having principles also means someone who does can easily sway people (provided he has charisma). It's confusing.

If you knowingly provide a place for racists, xenophobes, anti-semites and sexists to loudly proclaim their views to a large audience, and express no remorse over those views, and profit from them - well, yes, it's possible that you may share none of their passionate hatreds. But, if you don't, and still publish, that makes you one deeply cynical son of a bitch. And someone that cynical isn't likely to balk at anything, should it serve him. (Tho Bannon almost certainly is racist and antisemitic and the rest. And @Hanover is, I'd wager, simply standing behind his man/party. Which I get - liberals have done that with Obama and his drone strikes and national surveillance and the expansion of presidential power etc. But personally, it's always irked me when either side does it. Hanover said, in another thread, that he voted Trump bc Trump was concerned about the centrality of the constitution rather than personal views on social issues, w/r/t to the question of supreme court nomination. But now Trump, in his 60 minutes interview, has explicitly stated he'd select a pro-choice nominee. What does Hanover think of this? It doesn't really matter because it doesn't really matter to him. It was always an opportunistic rhetorical point. Like the claim that if Bannon's anti semitic that's ok bc everyone hates each other anyway! lol)

I understand what you're saying, but the point of such thought experiments is not to consider extraordinary events in-and-of-themselves, but rather to use them as leverage to render explicit certain presuppositions that would otherwise remain assumed and unspoken.

And in any case, I don't think the thought experiment I've posed is all that extraordinary. Throughout history, many people have awaited torture. This is a far cry from teleportation.

I'm sure personal identity is a psycho-social construct, but such a construct requires a lower-level continuity in order to even get off the ground - The construction of a self-narrative requires some kind of spatio/temporal/experiential boundary (boundary-process?) which excludes certain experiences/elements as candidates for integration in a self-construct and includes others.

In other words, calling it a construct doesn't really get at the heart of the issue. Boundary drawing is a little closer. I'm not sure if even that is quite there.

@John has drawn a distinction between the transcendental and the empirical (the ontological and the ontic, the conditions of experience and experience itself) and I find myself sympathetic. But I am sympathetic, too, to @dukkha's challenge.

If memory is to serve as a condition for selfhood, then it must circumscribe some region - it must draw a line and say: that which happens within this boundary will be preserved in the memory of entity x. If memory is to be the eminence grise behind selfhood, it must also be a drawer of boundaries. And that makes things difficult. Because that which draws the boundary is also that which is to be bounded.

This brings me back to another point of Dukkha's: The idea of 'ownerless' experience. It seems to me that 'mineness' is essential (even if it's a lower karma-compromised calcification of a deeper experiential stream or storehouse ( @Wayfarer ) ) because that's precisely what explains the apprehension felt at our own impending torture. If all experience is ownerless, then everyone should be well afeared of anyone's torture, past or present. (Though I'm sure there's some mystic out there who claims we're all participating in the crucifixion of christ: approaching it asymptotically or converging on it from different angles; or that the crucifixion is an event which we all experience ripples of, in a kind of twisted neoplatonic theory of emanation; or that the crucifixion itself is a kind of singularity of suffering which gathers into itself each and every worldly travail, making them equal...the crucifixion as a mystic-metaphysical zero-point that recollects, anticipates and embraces all instances of suffering, forges them into one, and requires each of us to experience the same thing through a glass darkly in a kind of prismatic distribution ---- ) So you could go on, there are a lot of ways to truss this up, but no matter how acrobatic you get, you still need to explain the vulgar experience of mundane selfhood, even if its only an illusion

So, the problem here seems to be that the sense of "sameness/ identity" which is purportedly prior to memory, and in fact to be responsible for its very possibility, would seem to be itself impossible without memory. Maybe we can say that it is memory itself, and not any specific memories, which enables a sense of unity to develop such that particular memories can subsequently be connected to, associated with, that unity. — John

I think this is an interesting direction to go on. Can you expand on what you mean by memory itself though?