part of the woke methodology of reasoning seems to be avoiding anything on its face that appears anti-woke, and instead analyzing for sub-text, the dog-whistle, looking for virtue signaling or lack thereof. Maga types and conservatives and tradition-lovers, are objects of incredulity, whose behavior and speech can only be examined from the outside, not engaged with directly, (as we are engaged here so you are the exception).
See my conversation with Praxis - that is how it typically goes.
Woke doesn’t clarify what their virtues are. Not to anyone perceived as anti-woke.
Woke doesn’t address what a border is and why it exists.
It doesn’t believe that the race and nationality of an illegal immigrant has zero to do with the issue. Such notions are lies and cover.
The woke person knows immigration policy is about white nationalism, racism and oppression - it’s about winning political campaigns. No need to say “border” at all.
This is one example to demonstrate what I (and others here) see as a pattern, a way of woke argumentation and thinking.
Maybe, over time, and with much more discussion, it will help Mexico and Mexican people if we secure the border. That is an insane and insensitive statement to a woke person, a lie to hide hatred and fear, a careless indifference to the suffering of human beings. End of discussion. Before any discussion starts.
I am willing to debate and be educated, but such debate almost never, in good faith, happens. My opinion is discounted by the woke from the start. That has been the case all of my adult life (since the 80s). Trump and Trumpism hasn’t fixed any of this - he’s just shown the world how there has been no conversation at all before so many changes, wanted by a few, have been forced upon everyone. And to show that, he’s forced changes on everyone - using a bludgeon, like Kid rock used gun, to restart the conversations.
Let’s pretend we are all reasonable human beings who want what is good for all human beings. Even Trump. Even Maga. (Imagine that!!). Wokism, generally, wouldn’t allow any discussion on such grounds. By definition, if I don’t already agree with what is woke, I am asleep and unable to have a reasonable conversation.
That is the problem with wokeism to me - its inability and unwillingness to debate and address reasonable challenge. (That’s what praxis said about me, as he shut down the discussion.) — Fire Ologist
That is the problem with wokeism to me - its inability and unwillingness to debate and address reasonable challenge. — Fire Ologist
At 1:45:11 Harris says that every single male finalist of the Olympic 100m dash since 1980 has been of West-African descent. In effect he asks, "Are we racists or 'racialists' if we notice such a fact? Or do we have to avoid noticing such facts for the sake of political correctness?" — Leontiskos
I just wonder why this process which sounds like it should be neutral as to outcome always yields the same political conclusions. Liberal wokism is the only result of postmodernism - how is such uniformity of outcome possible given such undefined unformed clay as “bodily, material and social interactions.”
Woke doesn’t clarify what their virtues are... End of discussion. Before any discussion starts. — Fire Ologist
That is the problem with wokeism to me - its inability and unwillingness to debate and address reasonable challenge. ( — Fire Ologist
The question is not whether we can but whether we should — Leontiskos
Anyway, another CT insight is that even resistance (wokeness or anti-wokeness) can be turned into a commodity in late stage capitalism.
I think the problem is that the interests and needs of young trans people was created by woke culture. — frank
The question is: was this catastrophe just the cost of progress? Or is it a sign of something gravely wrong under the hood of wokism? — frank
what I am addressing is the judgment I’ve seen that these moral claims are irrational, emotional, personal, etc. to point out that it is possible to get at the so far unknown interests and different criteria, apart from judging the means or even judging what we are told, as we do not yet understand the terms on which to take it. — Antony Nickles
Lobotomy was once a thing. But it led to progress. After all, we still use ECT. — Joshs
But let’s say for the sake of argument that wokism’s roots contribute nothing innovative or valuable to the canons of philosophical thought. — Joshs
I'm certainly not committed to the idea that all philosophy is good... — Count Timothy von Icarus
What I am talking about is humanizing (as in respecting)the claim as if it is made by a serious person. — Antony Nickles
Isn't it confusing precisely because it involves lying to ourselves? Because it involves treating someone who we believe to be unserious as if they were serious? — Leontiskos
There are right-wing descendants of Nietzsche who also draw from Derrida, Deleuze, etc. as well as critical theory, although they tend to also mix in influences no one else pays attention to…
they have been influential through other avenues, particularly in the right wing media space and through their evangelism of Big Tech leaders. Here, the groundlessness of hierarchy and values are precisely why they need to be forcefully asserted (not made known, but constructed and endorced).
There are also some eliminitive materialists (analytics) who pick up on post-modern theory. — Count Timothy von Icarus
isn't it simply an equivocation to say that ignoring X and being asleep to X are the same thing? — Leontiskos
Isn't it confusing precisely because it involves lying to ourselves? Because it involves treating someone who we believe to be unserious as if they were serious? — Leontiskos
I think that if you try to develop these ideas you will find that they break down rather quickly. — Leontiskos
Specifically, you think that to judge someone to be a racist is to misunderstand, failing recognizing that one is complicit in the systemic structures that caused their racism. — Leontiskos
Appeals to status seeking can be merely descriptive as well. It doesn't seem they are prima facie wrong. If they were categorically off-base, then it would also be the case that segregationists and white nationalists cannot be acting to defend their own status and interests. Yet that is, quite explicitly, what they claim and understand themselves to be doing. In their newer forms, they just claim that everyone else is also doing the same thing, covertly or not, and that they're at least honest about it. However, earlier defenders of segregation were much more covert about their ends, and yet I hardly think we can avoid the conclusion that these too were also partly motivated by defending their status and control over resources. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Second, I think I'm the only one who mentioned fascism and the idea (Milbank's, although the seeds can arguably be found in Dostoevsky) is that the logical conclusion of the ontologies of violence is fascism. That is, when there is no transcendent order of peace, goodness, or truth, instead only contingent systems of power, difference, and conflict—when truth, law, and morality are not a participation in Logos, but are rather constructed through acts of force (e.g., discourse, statecraft, capital, language games)—then violence is original, and there can be no counter-violence which truly transcends violence. There is only ever assertion over and against counter-assertion, will to power against will to power (plus or minus some post hoc rationalization, which is itself merely another assertion of value). This is precisely the spiritual logic of fascism. — Count Timothy von Icarus
As for Woke becoming the dominant ideology the way Neoliberalism has been in 50 years, in 50 years China and India will be the world's largest economies. The EU in particular is on a growth trajectory to become increasingly irrelevant, and the war in Ukraine has shown that it seems likely to continue to underperform its economic standing in both hard and soft power. It would take a radical sea change for these ideologies to be allowed to get anywhere in China, even if they were popular there (whereas they are popularly ridiculed on Chinese social media). I don't think India will prove exceptionally fertile ground either. Whereas sub-Saharan Africa will be to that epoch what Southeast Asia was to the 90s-2020s, the main target for new investment and consumer markets, and there are a lot of reasons to suspect Woke would need to be radically transformed to have an appeal there too. I'm just not sure that it will make sense in these settings, and a look at how Woke analogs have developed in Japan and Korea might be a good indicator here. In particular, the Sexual Revolution seems key to Woke, and yet this is probably the number one area where thought indigenous to the developing world has said: "no thanks," and "please stop trying to force this on us." — Count Timothy von Icarus
Rather, your unwillingness to to employ CT expresses your anti-wokeness. — praxis
Another rejection is in limiting what counts as “rational” “argumentation”. — Antony Nickles
I don’t think it is valuing one opinion over another, but valuing one person over another. — Antony Nickles
We are not at this point judging their evidence in the decision but their value at the table. — Antony Nickles
It is not the account of their lives that is valuable, it is their having lived in the context, been affected by the current criteria/practices, etc. — Antony Nickles
the interests and needs of young trans wasn’t in the cultural awareness — Antony Nickles
What if that theory appreciates, as Antony appears to, that ‘rationality’ can’t be separated from what’s being dichotomously treated as merely “feeling -based’ and emotional? — Joshs
The question is not whether we can [sympathize] but whether we should — Leontiskos
And that is a legitimate question. — Antony Nickles
And I am admonishing that clarifying the underlying interests is a process that is being skipped and is possible. — Antony Nickles
If I can take it down a notch, what I am trying to address is the judgment I’ve seen that these moral claims are irrational, emotional, personal, etc. to point out that it is possible to get at the so far unexamined interests and different criteria — Antony Nickles
I am pointing out we start arguing what to do before we understand what is at stake. — Antony Nickles
I’m suggesting setting aside judging whether a person is racist (on any terms) in lieu of unearthing the interests and terms of our language and culture and our relationship to them and our responsibility for them. — Antony Nickles
↪Joshs That has nothing much to do with me. What I'm telling you is they are not synonymous (which is an empirical fact. Wokists do not play out hte tenets of legitimate critical theory. They play dress-up to justify shitty, incoherent moral points of view (on my view)). You can say that you think their actions are justified under CRT and Ill say no, they expressly are not. I'm not personally interested in that debate because it is clear to anyone who has a clue about CRT that things like BLM (2019-2021 type of BLM action, anyhow) were not part of the agenda. We don't need some theoretical approach to notice this. I assume you've read the basic texts. There is no debate here.
If, on the other hand, you are saying that the basis for what's called wokism is something legitimate, so we should trying to tease out what that is - yes, but that has nothing to do with understanding those wokist actors. — AmadeusD
What I am saying is, part of the woke methodology of reasoning seems to be avoiding anything on its face that appears anti-woke, and instead analyzing for sub-text, the dog-whistle, looking for virtue signaling or lack thereof. Maga types and conservatives and tradition-lovers, are objects of incredulity, whose behavior and speech can only be examined from the outside, not engaged with directly, (as we are engaged here so you are the exception).
See my conversation with Praxis - that is how it typically goes. — Fire Ologist
Was lobotomy idiotic?
— Joshs
Yes. Have you read much about the advent of transitioning pre-pubescent people? — frank
Does this sound like a palatable scenario to you? — Joshs
It’s not irrational to reject another’s perspective, no. — praxis
Concepts like status, self-interest, power and control can inform diametrically opposed positions depending on how the subjectivity, or ‘self’, they refer back to is understood. If we start from the self as homo economicus, a Hobbesian figure the attainment of whose desires need not have any connection with the desires of others, then we either settle for a Darwinian Capitalism or find a way to insert into this self an ethical conscience which we will not always be able to depend on. If instead we see the self not as an entity but as a process of unification, self as self-consistency, and desire as oriented toward anticipatory sense-making ( We don’t desire things, we desire coherence of intelligibility), then there is no i weren’t slot between the needs of my own ‘self’ and the needs of other selves. The unethical is then not a result of bad conscience but a failure of intelligibility. The unassimilable Other is found wherever injustice occurs (slavery, genocide).
I have argued that the doctrine of nihilistic will to power is not a plausible explanation for the moral absolutism characteristic of wokism. Such absolutism can only justify itself on the basis of a realist-idealist grounding of some sort, which happens to be the stock and traded of Critical theory. I suggested in another post that the most noxious totalitarian tendencies of wokism can be moderated or even eliminated as more activists discover Habermas’s hermeneutical, communicative brand of Critical Theory and begin to leave behind the violently oppositional language of folks like Adorno, Fanon and Gramsci.
Yes. Lobotomies were performed in the U.S. for 40 years, sanctioned by all the proper scientific authorities. What’s the point of calling them idiots? — Joshs
Of course the difference between trans therapy and lobotomy was than the policies were rushed into place before the chance for any society-wide debate. Did this happen because of the decisions of idiots, or because this commonly happens when a new conception appears on the scene which blurs the lines between the medical, the psychological, the sociological and the religious and results in polarizing political debates which draw in the medical establishment when they are not prepared to navigate the political minefield. — Joshs
I still think it is worth considering why such pluralist sources such as CT and post-modernism, vastly lead to the same progressive conclusions. If it was even 59% it wouldn’t be a good question, but it has to be more like 90% or more. Something is off about the PM and CT methodologies, where all of these more relativist/ pluralist thinking structures, like a funnel, yield the same societal conclusions.
(The pluralist/relativist baseline is why they avoid any sense of self-awareness of their own brand of facism and absolutism that can result when they have power and seek to impose these vastly uniform progressive conclusions.)
Getting rid of absolutism doesn't necessitate a move away from totalitarianism; it can in some cases motivate the opposite move (indeed, I think the case in point is such an example). — Count Timothy von Icarus
Sounds like you are saying fruitful discussion needs to first level set the playing field. Bring all the assumptions to the surface. Or that there is a pre-discussion about “unknown interests and different criteria” and “the terms on which to take it.”… Is that something like what you mean? — Fire Ologist
That sounds right, but would also require good-faith. — Fire Ologist
We have to assume good-will in a person even like Trump — Fire Ologist
I didn't say the activists who ran the transitioning facilities were idiots. I said we were. The whole society took a vacation from reason. It's a drama that echoes the eugenics craze in the US. That also started with pseudo-science that was caught up in a campaign to engineer a better human. If there is a Spirit of Progress, this is its dark side. — frank
I must still agree that it is important for the psychological researcher to see the efforts of man in the perspective of the centuries. To me the striking thing that is revealed in this perspective is the way yesterday's alarming impulse becomes today's enlivening insight, tomorrow's repressive doctrine, and after that subsides into a petty superstition.
Totalitarianism has to lock in, to totalize something. Doesnt it totalize a particular value system? If one says that a radical relativist acquiesces to totalitarianism
because they sanction an ‘anything goes’ approach to values and ethics, how are the systems that are ‘ going’ their own way treated by these radical relativists? Doesn’t anything totalitarian have to get going and then ossify into a self-perpetuating structure? Isnt the indefinite temporal repetition of the same system or structure a necessary condition for calling anything totalitarian? If so, then an ‘anything goes’ relativist would have to embrace the proliferation of an unlimited multiplicity of diverse and incompatible totalitarian systems.
If so, then an ‘anything goes’ relativist would have to embrace the proliferation of an unlimited multiplicity of diverse and incompatible totalitarian systems.
But all these are only preliminary conditions for his task; this task itself demands something else—it requires him TO CREATE VALUES. The philosophical workers, after the excellent pattern of Kant and Hegel, have to fix and formalize some great existing body of valuations—that is to say, former DETERMINATIONS OF VALUE, creations of value, which have become prevalent, and are for a time called "truths"—whether in the domain of the LOGICAL, the POLITICAL (moral), or the ARTISTIC. It is for these investigators to make whatever has happened and been esteemed hitherto, conspicuous, conceivable, intelligible, and manageable, to shorten everything long, even "time" itself, and to SUBJUGATE the entire past: an immense and wonderful task, in the carrying out of which all refined pride, all tenacious will, can surely find satisfaction. THE REAL PHILOSOPHERS, HOWEVER, ARE COMMANDERS AND LAW-GIVERS; they say: "Thus SHALL it be!" They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of the past—they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their "knowing" is CREATING, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is—WILL TO POWER.—Are there at present such philosophers? Have there ever been such philosophers? MUST there not be such philosophers some day? ...
Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil - Ch. 5 We Scholars - Section 211
In NEW PHILOSOPHERS—there is no other alternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert "eternal valuations"; in forerunners, in men of the future, who in the present shall fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will compel millenniums to take NEW paths. To teach man the future of humanity as his WILL, as depending on human will, and to make preparation for vast hazardous enterprises and collective attempts in rearing and educating, in order thereby to put an end to the frightful rule of folly and chance which has hitherto gone by the name of "history" (the folly of the "greatest number" is only its last form)—for that purpose a new type of philosopher and commander will some time or other be needed, at the very idea of which everything that has existed in the way of occult, terrible, and benevolent beings might look pale and dwarfed.
Section 203
"What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.
What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity."
- Antichrist 2
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