It still looks like shouting to me, even if it’s single words. I suspect others feel the same, but I could be wrong.

You know you can use italics instead of shouting with capital letters?

I don’t think I need to quote you, since I estimate that most others reading this exchange will see exactly what I mean. I’m not trying to convince you that you’re fanatical.

your floundering friend — universeness

This was my favourite bit.

Debating you on the area then, is only of value to any readers, of the exchange who may be in danger of theistically ossifying as you seem to have. That possibility alone is worth my effort and my attempt. — universeness

This was in response to @Hanover but it struck me as especially deluded, so I’m butting in.

You give the impression of someone who has waded into a conversation without understanding what the conversation is about, but decides to rant and rave anyway. If I were undecided on the God question, and if your posts had any effect at all, I think you’d turn me towards God. As it is, I’m an atheist, but still think Hanover’s position is far more interesting than yours.

Atheism as such is not a religion, but your sort of atheism is fanatical. Earlier on in this discussion, people including me and you were discussing the causes of oppression, totalitarianism, and genocide, and we broadly agreed that religion could not be identified as the central cause. Better candidates for that cause would be fanaticism and absolute certainty.

Not explicated in his theory is a comprehensive account of how the Will (as manifest in humans or rational animals) utilises its immediate environment. Ellul's conception of technique appears to provide a tenable hypothesis of how humans have come to utilise both inherent faculties (such as cognition) and external resources to reach optimum conditions for evolution. I believe (though I admittedly could not argue this yet) that technique provides adequate motive for the actions of an organism that could not otherwise be reduced to the driving force of Will. — Victor C

This will be a superficial response…

On the face of it, Ellul’s concept of technique, rather than providing a motive or force where the Will fails to provide one, just fills in the details, i.e., describes some of the ways in which the Will is manifest. Technique is, if you like, the particularly human, and particularly modern, manifestation of the Will.

It’s essential to Schopenhauer’s concept that the Will underlies everything, that there isn’t anything that doesn’t ultimately reduce to it. So (again on the face of it), it seems at least compatible with Ellul’s technique, since the latter doesn’t appear to be operating at the same transcendentally metaphysical level.

Oh, and welcome :smile:

The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch — Jamal

I liked it. It’s a short apocalyptic science fiction novel that subverts the escapism and nostalgia of cosy catastrophe by reducing the protagonists to selfish, deluded, incompetent “worms” in a world of transcendent evil. The humans, caught up in…

their own, purely human evils, were not aware of the all-pervading presence of the larger evil that lies without, which we call reality. There is evil everywhere, but we can only see what is in front of our noses, only remember what has passed through our bellies.

There is a lot of biblical allusion too, but none of it offers redemption or hope. It seems to be employed to mock religion, and to mock humanity itself.

I was wondering what made it enjoyable despite its unremitting pessimism and several disturbing scenes. I think part of it is the perverse sense of fun in trashing the facile tropes of popular post-apocalyptic fiction, which is at the same time a more general critique of human delusions. The art of its execution, and the simple thrill of subversion, are what’s enjoyable. In a pleasing dialectical twist, the artistry of the most pessimistic fiction is itself life-affirming.

That said, none of it feels so shocking and important as it probably did in 1965, it falls a bit flat in the middle (I got pretty fed up with the long section set inside the roots of the giant plant), and it’s not as experimental or interesting as I’d been led to believe by Disch’s classification as a New Wave writer. Still, I’ll read more of his work; this was his first novel.

For what it’s worth, my own meagre experience writing stories aligns with what you’re saying, Tom. To a surprising extent, I don’t know what I wrote until someone else points it out, or I see it later on when I’m revising it. Working on it to get it right is not an exercise in consciously sharpening the intended meaning of the piece; it’s a formal or intuitive activity. This is why writers, musicians, and other kinds of artists often talk about channeling a greater force, rather than commanding all their resources in an explicit and conscious way.

I still don't know what it is.

If I get the time I think I’ll make a new discussion about it. There are a few ways art can be truthful. Making connections, cognitive estrangement that allows us to see things anew, analysis of personal experience (the phenomenology that @Janus mentioned), and so on. But the thing that springs to mind is Adorno’s notion of the non-identical. There is always something about the object (a pair of boots, a gas station, marriage, or the Russian aristocracy) that escapes our concepts (and thus escapes science), and yet is not necessarily always perceptible merely by sitting there looking at it or by contemplating it. This is where art comes in: to give shape to this experience. That’s roughly the idea.

In War and Peace Tolstoy occasionally leaves the story to expound non-fictionally on the causes of historical change, but it’s a common observation that these bits are less true to life and the world than the fictional bulk of the book. It’s interesting to look at how this works.

And an offshoot of theism, which is that there is an intentional creator, is that the non-fiction is as much a creation as the human fiction, allowing both the same sort of analysis. That is, read the tales of your life as you would a novel. — Hanover

Does it follow from this that the creator is created too? Anyway, as you might expect, I’d go a bit further and say that the creator is also a fiction. A meaningful one.

the world could not exist without you — Hanover

Thanks.

And none of this requires some leap of faith. It's just a perspective (either culturally instilled or by personal decision) of how you look at things. — Hanover

I think it’s a fundamental social perspective though. It’s what underlies the idea that alongside science, we can investigate the world with the arts and humanities. The latter explore meaning, including the meaning of that which is investigated by the former.

:up:

The reduction of truth to facts and information is characteristic of our age, with its “strong fact/value distinction” (quoting the OP).

It’s kind of frightening that the idea of artistic truth seems so alien to people now. Worthy of a separate discussion I’d think.

People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them — Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

I think you successfully interpreted my cryptic comments, which I didn’t realize were cryptic. I was mostly just summarizing the Frankfurt School and similar critiques of positivism, scientism, the administered society, and the Enlightenment.

I shouldn’t have said “a norm of rational behaviour where the means are paramount”. What I meant was the social situation in which it is the means that are susceptible to rationality, rather than the ends. At the personal level, ends may remain paramount, but these tend to be seen as subjective, a matter of taste or whatever. At the social level, political parties campaign on how best to run the economy, not on what kind of economy there should be—and there too, ends may remain paramount (winning elections for the party, profits for owners of capital) but the rationality of basing a society on the profit motive is not questioned, thus the ends here are unexamined.

What I’ve just written might be a bit of a mess, but since your hermeneutic track record is so good, I’ll lazily leave it to you to work it out.

In relation to the op then, can you put your finger on the "dogma" or even the ideology involved here, which could motivate this sort of atheist politicism. Surely the issue is more complex than the "fact/value" distinction of the op. It appears to me like the proper subject matter would be better described as the power/money relation. The relation of fact over value does not seem to have the same motivating force as the relation of power over money. "Value" and "money" are comparable, which would mean that the dogma which motivates such an atheist movement is power based rather than fact based. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don’t think they’re competing explanations. I’d say that the power/money ideologies build upon the fact/value separation, because the reduction of values to subjective preferences—this being the corollary of the triumphant objectivity of science and the profit-driven progress of technology—entails, through its removal of meaning from the social and natural whole, a norm of rational behaviour where the means are paramount, and the ends are the unexamined personal preferences conditioned by a socially stratified society, i.e., status, power, wealth.

Obviously this is not to say that power and wealth were not pursued in the era of enchantment.

I realize it’s a fine distinction and I’m just trying it out.

For hope to have any value, you must have the optimism it can happen — Hanover

No, that’s still just hope. The way I’m using the terms right now, optimism is when you believe it will happen. When you believe it can happen, and you want it, that’s hope.

Hope’s value doesn’t come from some will to believe or some such personal courage, but from one’s experience of bad stuff.

Your post is mostly misguided, but I will say that the point of “hope without optimism” is that optimism in effect dismisses the horrors that people have experienced, because it is a temperamental and unearned turning away from reality in favour of an imagined great future; and without knowing and feeling the horror, it negates hope in the most meaningful sense, namely the yearning for a better world in the midst of the lived and felt reality of hell on Earth.

The optimist thinks it will happen, come what may, thus nothing already experienced matters at all. In contrast, the hoper wants it to happen, despite everything.

It was partly your posts that prompted me to write this hammily rhetorical stuff a few months ago:

The idea of general progress is necessarily one of forgetting. It sits alongside a dismissive attitude to suffering, a callous and shallow triumphalism (I know because I was guilty of this myself). Not only that, but the narrative offers either the present day or a future utopia as a stand-in for the Day of Judgement, or perhaps for heaven, and it begins to look like a matter of faith. Faith that progress can redeem humanity, that everything will be worth it in the end.

The truth is that nothing can absolve humanity of its crimes and nothing can make up for the suffering of the past, ever. Nothing and nobody will redeem humanity. Nothing will make it okay, and we will never be morally cleansed. We certainly ought to strive for a good, free society, but it will never have been worth it. — Jamal

radical optimism — Hanover

Sounds all right. It’s the triumphal rhetorical banalities I don’t like.

You seem to accent the negatives more than you accent the positive achievements of humankind.

Are you another pessimist? — universeness

You ask me this because I attempted to confront the reality of the twentieth century? Why should I be an optimist? Seriously, why? This is a venue for philosophical thinking and discussion, not for atheist proselytizing or rousing the masses into revolutionary fervour.

Optimism is often facile and banal.

The optimist cannot despair, but neither can he know genuine hope, since he disavows the conditions that make it essential. — Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism

The title is where I'm at: hope without optimism.

Or is it the other way around? :chin:

Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? — Hanover

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

So yeah, in some ways it hasn't gone very well so far, despite N's optimism.

@universeness

On the atheism of the Nazis, there seem to be roughly two positions from the capital "A" Atheists here: (a) National Socialism was a religious movement; and (b) National Socialism was not an atheist movement, shown by the fact that it was happy sometimes to use religion to gain and maintain power.

Position (a) can't really be taken seriously, but position (b) (which seems to be where @universeness is coming from) is usually just a defence against those militant theists who claim that atheism is inherently evil. I think (b) is fair enough. The Nazis emerged from a still quite religious milieu, which most of them did not care enough about to give it much thought for or against, thus they were neither religious nor atheist in general, and there was probably a diversity of opinion among Nazis on the issue.

But some leftist atheists during and just after the war came to believe that there was something in the secularized culture of modern Europe that allowed totalitarianism to happen. European antisemitism at the time of the Nazis had become scientific in character (it was pseudo-scientific, of course). It took up the older religious tradition of antisemitism and ran with it in a racialist direction, so it was motivated and justified differently than it had been in previous centuries. So some pessimistic atheist social theorists blamed the very historical evolution of which the loss of religion's social importance was a central feature. From this point of view, it is something in the process of secularization that led to totalitarianism and genocide (the instrumentalization of reason and all that). In other words, religion was being lost, and without anything to take its place, bad things happen.

This seemed to be further supported by the existence of another of the world’s most brutal and totalitarian regimes, one which was atheist and which engaged in the persecution of religion, namely Stalin's government of the Soviet Union.

Me, I certainly wouldn’t say that atheism or secularism necessarily result in totalitarianism. The minimal point I suppose is that society can end up in oppression, war, and violence whether it’s religious or not, and therefore that these evils have other causes. The idea that it's all caused by religion is no better than a conspiracy theory.

The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch.

They say the clouds keep heat in, but honestly would rather see sun even if it were colder — TiredThinker

Similarly, they say turnips are good for you, but—get this—I would honestly rather have a pizza or a burger, even if it were less healthy.

It is a peculiar fact about the Christian fundamentalists that they deny their clergy special elevated status (as you might see in the Catholic Church or even among orthodox rabbis), but everyone is offered the same status in the eyes of the community in their ability to interpret scripture, with everyone with the same right to go back to the text and argue their point. — Hanover

This is Protestantism in general, not just fundamentalism. It’s why there are thousands of Protestant denominations.

Factually incorrect. Nazi ideology was religiously motivated, as fascism tends to do — Darkneos

This is spectacularly ignorant. Up your game.

:party:

I’ve done that, but I can still see it when logged in. This is either because the way permissions work makes it impossible to have a thread that only guests can see, or else it’s showing me everything because I’m an admin. If you or @Banno can no longer see the Joining thread, it has worked.

That’s even better than Baden’s idea. I should be able to achieve that by putting it in a new category with custom view permissions.

That’s a pretty good idea. If we’re going to do anything about this, that’s probably what we should do.

I have long agonized over that issue, and you are to be commended for your suggestion, but I don't think those threads should be amalgamated. I often want to link to them separately, I want prospective members to quickly see how to join, members to get to the guidelines directly (and it's good conventional practice to have the guidelines in the form of a pinned thread), and to display the Subscribe thread prominently.

The Chomsky thread is only there temporarily, so it'll be down to four in a short while. If I were to move one of the other four it would probably be the "Joining" thread; maybe it could go under "Help". But I think that might reduce its visibility too much.

During the period of the swift's seasonal residency in Western Eurasia (that's May to September), I prefer the weather to be mostly warm and sunny after a misty morning, with either calm air or a light breeze, and with occasional rainshowers in the late afternoon or early evening from small-to-medium cumulus clouds, and a mid-day thunderstorm when the moon is in its waxing gibbous phase.

I’m not done here.

I’m a member of some online book groups and there are endless stupid arguments pro- and anti-Kindle. I don’t intend to repeat that here. However, I do want to insist that ebooks are real books, lest there be some suggestion that reading an ebook is importantly different, qualitatively, from reading a codex-style book (paper pages bound together between boards or paper). This would be true of “audiobooks,” because you don’t read them—but not of ebooks.

Kindle is better for me for several reasons:

• I move around so portability is important
• The text of codex-style books is usually too small for me to read comfortably; on a kindle I can adjust the text size and font style
• You can look up words quickly and easily
• Most e-readers now have a backlight, so you don’t have to rely on external light-sources and you can read in the dark
• You can start reading a book seconds after you decide to read it
• I can copy and paste into TPF or wherever

The first two points are the most important. If they weren’t important to me, e.g., my eyesight was as good as it was 30 years ago and I was settled in a house with a dedicated library, or I didn’t live in a foreign country, then I would likely read codex books a lot more.

I realize all of this is obvious and goes without saying. But Jamal’s Law is: online, that which goes without saying doesn’t go without saying.

Now I’m done here.

I only read papyrus scrolls.

:roll:

I only read real books — Noble Dust

I still love books — T Clark

Ebooks are real and ebooks are books.

I don't think so. It's dense, long, and pretty bleak — T Clark

On the contrary, I found it exuberant and fun, and dense only in its profusion of monstrous detail.

In Perdido it only happens at moments but not generally, as I recall.

I enjoyed The City and the City so much that I feel I owe it to myself to give him at least one more shot after failing with Last Days Of New Paris. Is Perdido the one? I get the sense The City and the City was atypical, so I’m unsure of how to proceed. — Noble Dust

Of the books of his I’ve read, the Bas-Lag books have stuck in the memory the most, and Perdido is the first of those. I think I’ll probably re-read it. So yeah, I’d say Perdido.

As I mentioned above, I found it disappointing in the last half or third, and I remember the writing as occasionally and undeservedly pretentious, but I might be wrong about all that—and anyway, it hasn’t detracted from the good things I remember about it, and I still want to re-read it.

Yes.

However, I’m wary of answers that go something like this: lonely young men are being turned into misogynists by reactionary patriarchal ideology, to which they’re being exposed because of the internet. I mean, I think that’s true, but (a) it might deflect the sociological questions, and (b) it might fail to appreciate the ideology as itself something new.

I also interpreted it like this. But I believe there's an additional element; those three deficiencies get internalised and seen as universal/essential to the proto-incel. Universal in the sense that reality will always treat them that way; they can give up or adapt. Essential in the sense that reality will treat them that way due to their own personal deficiencies relative to perceived norms. — fdrake

Yes, that makes sense, although I doubt this is always present before joining up. Intuitively I’d expect some of them to join while still thinking they’re just going through a bad patch, only universalizing and essentializing it during their indoctrination.

Predictable oldies that I’ve posted before,,,

Great use of Fripp and beautiful spicy harmonies. I couldn’t get tired of the Roches.



Best guitar solo I’ve ever heard (at 3:00):



The best song ever:



Also the best song ever:



This is the one I’m most into this evening:



Actually maybe this is the best song ever: