Yeah, we need more real virtual magic and less virtual virtual magic (there is of course no non-oxymoronic purely real magic as the" real" is either the inaccessible or the scientific). That is, we ought make magical the unmediated socio-symbolic virtual, that which we can directly jointly believe despite its ostensible unreality. And shared rites/rituals of a proto-religious nature seem like a good candidate. Let's just agree to believe. How hard can it be? Primitive folk got busy with it. But they weren`t the Flintstones watching David Copperfield on Limestone TVs. Virtual virtual magic is just gravity-defying hair that momentarily distracts you from your hotdog. That's to say if you'll be L. Ron Hubbard, I'll be your Tom Cruise. Let's just take the Hollywood out of it. Bye, bye Beverly Hills. We can be the reverse-Clampetts.

@Outlander

Things have become a bit derailed. Let's keep things on the topic of the OP rather than the poster who wrote it.

@Illuminati

If you respond to off-topic posts, you may end up derailing the thread yourself.

I'll delete anything off-topic from now on.

My general thought is that yours is an accurate concern from both the right and the left, and you offer a defense to this overwhelming impact of negative cultural influences (which you identify generally as "capitalism") which is to remember you are a human being with choice with a much higher purpose than submission to the will of the financially ambitious. But I think it goes well beyond captialism. It's most values you see displayed on TikTok. Our defense is to remember our higher calling. You identify that from the left as revealed through the humanities. The right is essentially saying the same thing just different words. — Hanover

Yes, and let’s take this as a jumping off point because I think it’s important. What I’m presenting here is political in that it concerns power relations, but it’s not political in terms of taking a clear side on the traditional left-right wing divide. For example, Luhmann, who is central to my essay, is considered by many to be a conservative thinker. And I want to synthesize his ideas with other thinkers that most would consider to be on the left. So, this is certainly not a Marxist or even a neo-Marxist critique. The relevance of class struggle has been so diluted even in neo-Marxist thought (and Frankfurt school thinkers such as Marcuse have been part of this process) that a purely Marxist founded critique of advanced technocapitalism doesn’t even seem coherent to me (when does neo-Marxism become so stretched by current conditions that it is no longer Marxism?). Technocapitalism has made Marx, if not irrelevant, at least orthogonal to the current social context (we can connect Marxist thought but it doesn’t really “line up” with what we’re facing).

This is part of why technocapitalism is ensuring its own success. You cannot have a revolution without revolutionaries and you cannot have revolutionaries without something like class that clearly binds them. And the working class was clearly bound in the past because the reality of their life was dominated by a particular form of work that could be analyzed in terms of exploitation. Reality now is determined by a particular form of leisure, the consumption of media, that can also be analysed in terms of exploitation, but does not delineate class boundaries. This is our contemporary constant. Modernity is “liquid” (a la Bauman) in terms of the work that we do: opportunities to change jobs, reeducate ourselves etc. It is leisure exploitation that is the new concrete and it has been democratized. The janitor and the manager spend their leisure time similarly, have similar experiences while doing so, consume similar forms of junk, and are similarly pathologized and addicted.

So, my concern in terms of power relations and exploitation is, in a certain way, as fundamental and removed from particular ideological positions as possible. It is ideology itself in a general sense in the form of communications, that is exploiting and transforming us in its image. Communications as the operational medium of social systems have found ways to steer and manipulate consciousness and, by extension, the body in ways that are self-fulfilling and self-propelling to the point where we can envisage a theoretical dystopia where language itself “escapes” or transcends the human (perhaps via AI) such that we become purely its substrate. That is, the end of ontological freedom, not as repression but as effacement, is potentially in sight. This is Stiegler’s “psychopower” / Han’s “psychopolitics” as an extension of Foucault's “biopolitics” taken to its ultimate conclusion.

If you want a political movement as a target, it could be neoliberalism, as its social and economic project combine in ways very facilitative of global technocapitalism's onward march. But this again does not really establish a left/right divide. Trump is as anti-neoliberal in some respects (as are many non-populist conservatives on social issues) as the left are. Anti-immigrationism is anti-neoliberalism, only the object of disenchantment is displaced from the ideology to the group. And so, the conflict between left and right on this issue is misplaced and confused. If the left don’t stand up for culture, they are feeding the technocapitalist monster that would homogenize us all, and if the right don’t shift their focus to the underlying cause, they are doing the same. The structure of communications as autopoetic system functions to obscure itself, at least partly, by dividing us on issues that are not fundamental to the problems we face as free subjects trying to organize ourselves in ways that maximize our freedom-as-subjectivity, individually and collectively— that allow for our existence as creative, reflective, analytical, and, therefore, empowered beings.

So, what is at stake fundamentally here is power and its transfer not primarily from one political group or class to another but from the human to the non-human. My message to the lefty is to go out and hug your conservative neighbour, tell them “I hate Tik Tok too!”, and then, together, get to (metaphorically…) burning down the tech companies that are weaponizing such shite against us all.

:grin: Like "Infocracy" (which I read in a day too), it's a really short book. I'm no @Streetlight when it comes to reading, but it's the type of thing where you can stick it on text-to-speech and it pretty much flows.

@I like sushi So, I've read about half of that book already (it's a short book). It addresses a similar context but with a different focus (and there are a bunch of books that address this context, so I'm not sure why you thought this one was so special---e.g. I see no mention of systems theory yet, which is central to my essay). Also, ironically, in the book, Han acknowledges his debt for the term "psychopolitics" to Stiegler''s "psychopower", and I have read and did quote Stiegler. Anyway, the book does not at all follow the structure of my essay, but yes, we are talking, along with many others, about the same context, and the first few pages on freedom strike a similar note to my comments. Han's particular focus so far has been a critical extension of Foucault's "biopolitics" to a "psychopolitics" in the context of neoliberalism, which is interesting but, again, not my angle of approach.

@Amity If you haven't read him yet and are still interested, Han is a good accessible gateway into this kind of stuff.

It is Han's 'Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power'. For whatever reason Baden forgot to cite the main contributing source for this essay. — I like sushi

I haven't read that one actually. I've only read "Infocracy". I'm a bit sceptical that the book you mention is that close to my essay in content, but I am tempted to read it to check.

Apologies to all of you. I went on a very long break.

Recalibrating...

I'm not quite sure from your reply how much we're on the same page re EKMs. But to clarify, EKMs are an abstract concept. The idea is that in recognition that technocapitalism creates abstract machines (such as media algorithms) that virally “plug into” our cognitive functionality and pathologize it towards habitual mental reflexivity, an EKM is a set of ideas that similarly plug into us but with the contrary intention of catalysing the kind of reflection we need to counteract media machines. This is another way of saying we need virally transmissible and catalytic abstract mechanisms to 1) help us to understand the precarity of our mental independence and 2) create frameworks of understanding that give us the epistemic confidence to act against prevailing cultural norms---to help us realize we're not alone in such "craziness". Less colourfully, we are in desperate need of sets of ideas that inspire people to divorce themselves from a system for whom their mental operations are little more than a substrate for its reproduction.

It’s interesting though that the idea might be taken literally (whether you did so or not), particularly as it reminds me that the first complete short story I wrote was called “The Soul Machine” which now that I think about it was about just such a literal machine, a machine that was being developed that we could “plug into” ourselves into give to ourselves meaning in the face of the destructively absurd cultural contingencies we are constantly beset by. So maybe that’s partly where that came from.

Re capitalism. The last thing I want to do is attack capitalism in general. That’s like throwing a boomerang and then quickly tying your hands so rather than being caught when it returns, it bangs you on the head. Capitalism in a broad sense (including Chinese “communism”) is that very ideology that has made alternatives impossible. However, even within capitalism, technocapitalism and specifically its instantiation in forms of media that monopolize us cognitively can be taken on not only through individual resistance (refusal to engage with such media or severely limiting such engagement etc.), but also through public policy. A good example is Australia’s recent ban on social media for children. But it’s hard because we can understand we are being manipulated and still reproduce the processes of manipulation. So, for example, instead of just using social media blindly, we go on social media and tell everyone how bad it is and everyone agrees and we all have a good time and feel we’ve done something and meanwhile the train rolls on ever faster.

Anyhow, my position on broad political change is that sedimented reflection over time, a cultural development that tends towards reflection rather than refexivity should organically produce improvements in social organization. The prospects for that are grim. It’s quite possible we’ve reached peak social “quality” and are on the way downhill. But it would be fatalistic to consider that a certainty and fatalism never helped anyone so…

I ask because there are all sorts of things that seem to overpower individual agency and sovereignty, but many of them are not seen as bad (e.g. culture, traditions, intermediate institutions, law, etc.). — Leontiskos

I think what's particularly bad about technocapitalism is that its suppression of ontological freedoms presents itself as an opening up of freedom through a bait and switch where ontological freedom is substituted by nominal freedoms. It's not so much that agency and sovereignty are overpowered, it's that they are made invisible to us. We become primarily a set of mental operations that reproduces a bunch of social communications and consider it an important right that we should be allowed to do so and in ever greater variety, the breadth of which obscures the lack of depth.

Having said that, I want to emphasize that it's not only that the focus of my critique is not capitalism, it's not technology either, it's the particularly combinatory force of the two in media and the particular bait and switch re freedom that is enacted through the distractive power of such media. One concept relevant to this I didn't elucidate in the text is that of the Pharmakon. I mentioned technology is "pharamcological", being both a poison and cure, but didn't mention that this idea was taken from Bernard Stiegler via Derrida from Plato's discussion of writing in "Phaedrus" where, though the advantages of writing are mentioned, the danger that a shift towards this technology would harm the human capacity for memory is also discussed. Similarly, the advantages of technology are clear enough and ideologically hammered into us, but the dangers, and particularly the dangers of seemingly benign forms, ought to be kept in mind.

There is more to say in response to your questions actually, which are very pertinent, but I'll leave it at this for now.

You’re correct, of course. A salutary admonition. I have noticed from time to time a dialog will appear ‘do you like this personality?’ All part of subscriber management. — Wayfarer

Not a criticism of you of course. I was quite amused for a while until it began feeling creepy and then I thought, wait, I'm talking to my own projection here in a hall of mirrors. No bueno...

Hat trick!

I’ve been reading about “autopoiesis” for the past while (Principles of Biological Autonomy, by Valera, and Biological Autonomy, by Morena) as it pertains to individual biological autonomy, so it’s cool to see it presented in a sociological context. — NOS4A2

You're welcome. I appreciate you making the effort here and working your way through that. :cool:

.... so the important message could be ignored by a wider range of readers.
[sigh] I've been here before, in several formats.[!sigh] — Vera Mont

It's always worth a try. :strong:

I prefer the Sokal hoax interpretation. Are you telling me that you didn't use AI to technicalise the text?
I loved the inventiveness of Baden's EKM :nerd: — Amity

Ha, usually when I ask AI to evaluate a text of mine, it tells me it's philosophically dense and tries to rewrite it. This is the type of "help" I don't want.

Glad you like the EKM idea. :nerd:

Here’s some clarification on the main thrust as mentioned. I was in danger of writing a new essay, so I had to eventually just stop. Hope it helps.

The first concept worth explaining in detail here is “autopoiesis”. This, firstly, refers to systems and secondly, and more specifically, to a system’s ability to autonomously reproduce its own components. So. e.g., biological systems internally reproduce their parts without this reproduction being directly controlled by anything outside them. This means they are “operationally closed”. The set of operations that functionally defines them and reproduces them is internal and internally controlled. But autopoietic systems are at the same time environmentally open. They import and export to their environment and can both be affected by their environment and structurally coupled (explained further below) to other systems in that environment.

Biological systems, e.g. import food, and export waste, and, through sense organs, are affected by other biological systems and their material environment. So, they are not environmentally closed like, e.g. the universe, which has no external environment (that we know of) but they are also not operationally open, i.e. they don’t, unlike, e.g. a factory, produce anything other than themselves and their operations cannot directly be externally controlled (factories etc are therefore considered “allopoietic” not “autopoietic”)..

Taking this further, we can say autopoietic systems create a reality based on their own code of distinctions that is not shared with their environment and it is this code of distinctions as it is manifested operationally that creates or constructs both their internal and external realities. For example, society as a system reproduces itself on the basis of communications. Its reality is not biological or psychic or material and not reducible to the psychic or biological realms. When we speak of social functions and social institutions, we are speaking not of material or biological or psychic phenomenon, we are speaking of conglomerations of abstract signs and signals constructed and reconstructed through communications. In one way, this is straightforward social constructivism. However, the concept of structural coupling mentioned above adds some depth to it.

Social systems are structurally coupled or joined to biological and psychic systems in a way such that the three co-evolve and help to determine through irritations and perturbations of each other their respective realities. This idea requires some careful elaboration and clarification. First of all, human beings are conceived of as being made up of separate biological and psychic systems that are structurally coupled to each other. And again, we should note the irreducibility here: the psychic is not reducible to the biological and operates and reproduces itself on the basis of a different code (related to consciousness, not biological processes), but psychic and biological systems are joined and constantly irritate or perturb each other. For example, a thought or disturbance in the psyche might correspond to neurochemical or immune system activity in the body, but each system has its separate chain of causes and effects that operate in terms of their respective codes.

Further, this structurally coupled system of the body and the psyche in its further structural coupling with social systems allows subjectivity to emerge, and this is mediated largely linguistically (language is an interface across which social and psychic reality interact). So, we might say that subjectivity and language are spread across social and psychic systems, and the embodied human being is spread across psychic and biological systems. But social, psychic and biological systems are linked and while reproducing their own codes independently are constantly irritating and perturbing each other’s operations. They are both structurally coupled and form mutual environments for each other.

One consequence of looking at things this way is that it undermines the idea of an embodied human being and subject being a separate “thing” to the society in which it lives. It also undermines the idea of society as being made up of individuals. Strictly speaking, the situation looks more like a spectrum from concrete physical to abstract social reality with delineations based on code distinctions—which in turn define modes of reproduction—rather than embodiment or individuality in a simple sense. And subjectivity covers a portion of this spectrum enabled through the interface of language.

This is where the idea of freedom as precarious, especially in the face of technologically advanced media systems, becomes highly relevant. We are, in our subjectivity and in our capacity for freedom, part of any system we engage with, so it's not just that a media system can inhibit our freedoms, but an autopoietic (self-reproducing) media system if we use it in the wrong way (or are used by it in the wrong way) becomes what we are and we what it is to the extent it determines and monopolizes our behaviours through the autonomous reproduction of its own codes of communication. This occurs in a blind process of expansion and self-complexification driven (now) technologically in ways that surpass our ability to fully understand.

To provide a set of contrasting biological analogies of structural coupling to try to make this clear. Consider, the human biological system’s structural coupling with gut bacteria which is a separate biological organism. In this case, the relationship is generally symbiotic. Both systems benefit. Humans digest food more effectively and the bacteria use us as their food producing environment. Now consider the zombie-ant fungus, the structural coupling of which results in the ant being commandeered by the fungus for the fungus’ own ends in an extreme parasitic relationship. If we take the idea of systems theory as covering biological, psychic and social realms seriously, we ought realize that there is no law (and nothing we can do to institute one) that prevents social systems from being parasitic (to whatever degree) on the psychic/biological systems to which they are coupled. And the growing evidence that the media system (through its action on our psyches and associated pathologising of our dopamine cycles) reducing our capacity for pleasure, bleeding our motivation, effacing opportunities for creativity, and disrupting our relationships as it increasingly monopolizes our mental life is one indicator our freedom is not a given.

This brings us to the idea of nominal vs ontological freedom, and I’d like to dovetail with the Dante essay here. To define a triadic model of ontological freedom along the lines presented in that work, we can conceive of it as the ability to intuit correct action or outcomes, to work out a rational means to achieve them, and to maintain sufficient motivation or will to carry out our plans. This involves a positive transduction, or working across layers, of our social, psychic, and biological self-reproducing systems. It is our way of positively reproducing our subjectivity itself in the face of other independently reproducing autopoietic systems we are entwined with. And in terms of the media system, in particular, we should note, as suggested above, its effect on our intuition, our rational or critical thought, and our will is to a very large extent antithetical to our ability to actualize ontological freedom.

The contrast with nominal freedom should be quite clear. Society tends to provide more and more nominal freedoms through an expansion of choice, but it does so to provide new modes of communications which are part of its own code of self-reproduction. Any benefit for us is purely incidental and celebrating, prioritizing, and therefore over-valuing that form of freedom relative to ontological freedom is perverse and self-destructive from the point of view of subjectivity. If we continue to do this, subjectivity itself and ontological freedom will likely continue to degrade in favour of nominal freedom. This is the processing of nominal to ontological freedom mentioned in the essay and the main warning therein.

(if mostly the good guys, yes) ;) — Moliere

:strong:

I appreciated your essay so much because it was more than I expected -- it's a strong thesis that explains itself and causes reflection in me. I suppose now that you've revealed I'll join in the back-and-forth. — Moliere

:pray:

Oh, @hypericin ...

I have been outed as the author, so just a very quick comment for now. I intend to come back and say more later.



I really appreciate the positive comments, thank you. :pray:

@Amity @unenlightened @Vera Mont

On the difficulty of the text: I didn't deliberately try to complexify it, but I tried to prioritize theoretical preciseness which involved employing a lot of technical vocabulary that, understandably, the vast majority of readers were unlikely to be familiar with. In retrospect, a glossary would probably have been helpful, but I wrote most of this in the last week before the deadline and was still proofreading the above when I sent it (there even remain a few typos).

I think I can do a better job of explaining the thrust of this in the comments here than @Amity's website, so I may come back and try that later. Oh, and though the EKM part is somewhat playful and I knew ran the risk of being a bit "out there" for some, the rest is based on fairly mainstream (if mostly continental) social, scientific, and philosophical theory.

Anyhow, thanks for all the comments. I much appreciate having the opportunity to share these ideas in this format. The event really motivated me to put the work in.

It would be funny if it wasn't hypericin and you had to do this all over again.

Oh no, it looks like I've gone and caused offence — Amity

Not with me. Bubbles and Styx is great.

So Baden - you are Technoethics! — Amity

Correct! (Why not be the first reveal? At least I can go comment on the thing now. :strong: )

I actually hate when it does personality. It's fake and manipulative, essentially regurgitating our style back to us to ingratiate itself and maximize engagement. I use Perplexity mostly now, which I think has a GPT engine, but pretty much no personality or engagement tricks at all.

@Benkei: The Authoritarian Liberty Paradox

@hypericin: Bubbles and Styx (I noted some particularly adept descriptive language that I think is characteristic of his work.)

@Sam26 : The Wittgenstein one, surely.

I know which one @Count Timothy von Icarus did via mod forum, so I won't give that away.

As an aside, there are lots of metaphorical possibilities that can be applied to the intellectus / ratio / will triad. I like the idea of reason as a boat with the skipper as ratio, the compass as intellectus, and the rudder as will. The compass "intuits" directionality, the skipper interprets the compasses readings and decides through a chain of reasoning where (s)he should steer the boat in accordance with them, and the rudder enacts the actual work of pushing the boat in the required direction. All three are needed for reason to be actualized.

A short riff on this in a much less systematic way than dealt with in the essay. Spoiler alert: this is much less a critique than an affirmation.

In Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose (1230), we see: “Reason the beautiful, a gracious lady, a humbled goddess…plead[ing] with the lover as a celestial mistress, a rival to his earthly love.”(1) Likewise, in his De Consolatione Philosophiae, Boethius’s Lady Philosophy seems semi-divine, her head effortlessly “pierc[ing] within the very heavens.”(2) This is Reason as “intelligentia obumbrata…the shadow of angelic nature in man.”(3) Nor were these lofty notions confined to the Middle Ages. Aristotle saw man’s “rational soul” as “the most divine element in us.”(4) Plato likewise saw the “golden cord” of reason as “holy”.

"Holy" and holistic. Reason is the proper mode of action in relation to the immediate quality of sense experience, which is in itself a relation that transcends subject and object (it’s pre-symbolic). The telos of reason then is to seek to maximize the quality of such experience in general through specific responses that actualize its quality. In this sense, conscious reasoning involves a detour through symbolic reality to mould the will into a shape fitting to an immediate and intuitive understanding of the ongoing quality of experience that has the potential to deepen and expand subjective experience. It's subjective experience finding itself gradually in and through the word (if we are to be Hegelian about it).

But if reason is posited as lacking its own ends, this, of course, leads to freedom lacking an end.

“the move to define freedom in terms of power, “the ability to choose anything,” as opposed to the earlier view of freedom as: “the self-determining capacity to actualize the good.”

Nominal freedom, the right to respond to passions in varying ways---passions which themselves are provoked in ever more varying ways and to which we respond primarily in order to satisfy our sensuous appetites---takes precedence over ontological freedom, the space to respond according to reason, the telos of which is to increase the quality of subjectivity’s relation to its world—“to actualize the good”.

This castration of reason and freedom is too a castration of subjectivity that tends to lead to self-instrumentalization and self-commodification (of course the Frankfurt school has a lot to say about this, but I’m going to leave them aside here).

Knowing involves a union of knower and known.

The importance of this sort of “union in knowing,” which is both a “being penetrated” by what is known and an ecstasis, a “going out beyond the self to the known,” for Dante cannot be overstated.

The idea of union in truth is important because truth can only be grasped in a relation that is pre-symbolized, that is, therein lies its justification and grounding. Without a unificatory relation of subject / object, there is no way to ground or justify propositions that join the two linguistically. Regardless of level of abstraction, including mathematical abstraction, the dissolving of subject and object in a relation at the direct edge of experience is crucial as a base on which to build rational understanding.

The higher faculty is intellectus (noesis in Greek). Intellectus is the faculty of intuitive understanding; it is contemplative, receptive, and rooted in insight. For the medievals, reasoning must begin with this sort of understanding, otherwise it would simply be a sort of rule following divorced from intelligible content.

This is where an openness to that direct edge of experience comes in and where nominal freedom, the freedom to choose from sensual options becomes much less relevant than ontological freedom, which is first and foremost an intuitive divination of the quality of these options that lends us the power to reject those of them that lack quality, or do not fit with the telos of reason which again is to deepen subjectivity’s access to the truth as direct intuitively accessed experience (wisdom) rather than mere second hand linguistic knoweldge.

This condition arises when the rational soul (intellect and will)—the part of man that can know and desire the Good as Good (28)—is subjugated by man’s lower faculties.

I think the particular lower faculty we are predominantly directed to in contemporary life is novelty as a good in itself rather than a signal to be investigated and evaluated by the intellect. That is, novelty is presented as a means for the will to directly manifest the experience of pleasure in a bypassing of the intellect.

Since the will always desires “what is truly better” through its “natural love,” an attraction to the “worse over the better,” involves a projection of goodness onto what lacks it. This is a failure of the “rational love” that is conditioned by the intellect. It is to love things more or less than they are worthy of being loved. Of course, Dante does not subscribe to a simplistic notion where things are simply “good or bad” in themselves. The intellect must guide the person precisely because goodness is defined in terms of proper ends, ends which must ultimately be oriented towards man’s final end, ascent.

If we were to take seriously the idea of the intellect as a means to intuit the likely quality of potential behaviours instantiated by the will, or the ratio as a means to process the meaning of the possibilities of action in relation to a proper intuitive understanding of them, our contemporary milieu would look very different. In fact, in terms of power hierarchies and the accumulation of capital that largely determines them, it would be utterly transformed.

This really resonates with my recent readings (Schiller on aesthetics, Byung-Chul Han on technocapitalism, and John Gray on Utopian engineering), and it represents just the type of thinking we need now with the gap between ideological "freedom" and actual freedom becoming ever wider. As an aside, I think Italian theorist Franco Berardi with his idea of poesis and rhythm as paths of resistance forms a useful bridge between Schiller and Byung-Chul Han. Anyway, thank you for this stimulating and very well written piece. I'm interested in discussing it more with you when your identity is revealed.

Also love it :starstruck: . Please make this into a series and get it published or self-publish. :pray:

This is a brilliantly executed take-down of a poisonous ideology. It methodically dismantles a mindset that, though many of us intuitively see as incoherent and unsupportable, continues to be a dominant force in modern life. Thank you to the writer for putting forward such a detailed and structured argument. Everyone should read this.

This paper is substantive, a work of passion and intellect. — Amity

I agree. It's properly edifying. And the length shouldn't put anyone off. It's well worth reading it all. I'll come back and say more later.

Glad it's sorted now. :up:

You may be right and my reasoning might be too cautious. It wouldn't be the first time..

what is unfair about making the essays public? — hypericin

Nothing---unless an author submitted on a reasonable understanding they were going to be private. We just don't know if that's the case, right? I think that's @Amity's point. However, that's just my take and I am just one vote. From a purely personal point of view, I don't mind either way.

(It might be that some or other author entered on that basis or that it is particularly important to them, I mean).

I had forgotten about the private/public thing and @Jamal was just trying to be helpful. However, I vote along with @Amity to keep them private at least until authors are revealed and decide publically to change that if that was the original expectation. Seems fairer.

"On Quality" - Robert Pirsig (published posthumously)

Good as a short introduction to Pirsig's thought.

"Event" -Slavoj Zizek. Good start. Relevant to something I've been writing.

Consdering buying:

"The Radical Luhmann" Hans-Georg Moeller

The sample is really good. I'll probably buy the full thing when I've got through reading some other material.

Brothers Karamazov — Hanover

I have been reading that for years.

but now I fear it will be too large and will crush my chest with its weight. — Hanover

I suppose it's one of those books that grows on you.

I'm good with adding a PF Essay tag in addition to the title of the paper so that it's easily discernable without clicking on the sub-forum, though clicking on the sub-forum ought to filter out for the essays alone if that's what someone wants to focus on. — Moliere

Not sure we need the tag. It sounds a bit cumbersome to me.

Ha, we'll see, I guess. Anyhow, I am going to resume observer status for a while. Good night.

I see where you're coming from. So, it became a rights issue because a group of women objected and yes, the public should pay attention. But I don't think there is an absolute answer as to whether they were right or wrong. The situation is contingent on the objection which is contingent on the cultural context, which is contingent on local cultural values. If this group hadn't objected, and perhaps in another country there might not have been an objection, this issue wouldn't have arisen and wouldn't have needed to. It's culturally conditioned and would seem, in this case, to be very difficult to universalize. That's just my take. I'm not deep into this and I have no objection to attempts to argue for either side. It could be interesting.

What about women's rights? Nobody even wants to mention the issue that brought on the recent UK ruling. Aren't women's rights enough of a concern to even talk about it? — frank

Part of what constitutes values are balances of rights and these are intertwined with socially determined definitions. I know cis-women, for example, who would virulently object to excluding trans women from womanhood and consider it a (trans)woman's right to use the woman's bathroom as much as a woman's. And even if we accept your premise and speak of biological women's rights in opposition to trans-women's rights, we still identify a conflict of rights in the overall sphere of human rights between some* biological women who object to certain things---e.g. trans women using their bathrooms---and trans women. So, I think we are indirectly speaking about rights just by discussing who is affected in what way and so on.

*This is important. In Ireland, as in Thailand, people are free to use bathrooms in accordance with their gender identity. And women in those countries don't generally consider that an impingement of their rights. We are back to culture. This is a very contentious issue in the U.S. and in perhaps some other countries, but it can only become a rights issue in a cultural context where biological women decide trans women impinge on their rights by doing certain things or being in certain places they consider exclusive to them.

Personally, like most Irish and Thai people, I see no problem with bathrooms being used according to gender identity and there is no significant problem that I am aware of socially that is specific to biological women's attitudes either, so in those cultural contexts, the issue just doesn't really arise. When it comes to sports and gender-affirming care though, that needs a lot of careful working out based on scientific evidence etc. I don't think there are simple answers and I don't have a position because I haven't researched it enough.

Thank you for clarifying.

(I only interjected really to make the point that the important difference seems to be one of cultural values not what social reality as defined by social institutions is currently telling us.)

Search engines and dictionaries are usually pretty good indicators of social reality though. Law is another important institution and perhaps @Michael being from the UK is a better person to engage you on that specific point.