perhaps such a real need not just be a trauma, maybe it can also be a source of joy, empowerment and discovery. — fdrake

Heidegger rolling in the flowers type thing? Speculative again, but depends how condensed the joy of transgression is into the fear of punishment. I'd tend to say the prohibitive is constitutive. Primally and developmentally, fear is dominant re the macrosocial (society) level with (ideally) a balancing love at the microsocial (family) level. So, applying socio-linguistic (ritual) origami to nascent awareness gives you a recognizably human consciousness, the price of which is psychological boundaries that may be practically impenetrable. Transgression can be joyful but as pleasures are behaviourally conditioning, the telos of that path veers towards ostracization / incarceration / self-destruction, and that presents a huge mental barrier for Joe Average. But, sure, the potential is likely there.

Some cultures are more heterogeneous than others though. And American culture would be well out on that scale. Hence your culture wars etc. Ilya's (implied) criticism seems to be of American liberalism.

Maybe the Lacanian real is a useful concept here. The ultimate "reality" is a monstrous, suffocating, inhuman, and even forcefully antihuman... well, let's call it a black hole that we build ourselves out of with ideology. Or to put it in Rilkean terms "The heaviness of life is heavier than the heaviness of all things". So the real is the invisible gel in which the symbolic order lies suspended and which nourishes it so making it possible yet at the same time threatening through its potential crushing pressure its utter destruction. And rituals are those exercises of the symbolic order on whose patterns identity can manifest and reinforce said order. Thus we escape the black hole by cleaving to social cuts in the fabric of an ultimate trauma we're not even aware we spend our lives trying to avoid. This world of escape is the world of Marmite, which distasteful as it can be offers the basic sustenance of meaning on which we base our existence. But then Marmite isn't everything, only everything we can handle.

Of course I could be mangling Lacan but who cares.

Looks a little too much like a submission for The Onion, Ilya.

I guess I could get affordable weekly brain surgeries by just waiting at the curb for the brain surgery truck to roll by. — Hanover

God knows you need them. Let's start a collection.

@schopenhauer1 Funnily enough, I had just been thinking along related lines when I came across this discussion. When most people speak of “work”, they refer to tasks that they would not voluntarily do but require some form of monetary incentive for due largely to the boredom you mentioned. And so when we put efforts into what we enjoy doing and for which no pecuniary recompense is forthcoming, we are widely regarded as “not working” and by extension of not being productive. Of slacking off, lounging about, or—with vicious ethical precision—of being takers rather than givers. So why is it that work, that socially necessary currency of mutual respect, should be generally defined as boring with non-boring alternatives treated with such suspicion, and what does that say about the way we live now?

Identity is invariably ritualised and symbolic — unenlightened

Yes, I'd put it that identities are products of the prevailing mythos, or ideology. And facts are wrapped around ideologies, presenting as clear and unassailable to the extent those ideologies are rendered invisible. The fact-ideology-interpretation-production complex then is us. And this does pose the appropriately linguistic functional question: who or what is doing what to whom or what, where, when, and how? Which is a perennial.

There are some points of contrast though. It seems in "traditional" societies, your place in the symbolic order was more clearly defined and was what gave sure weight to you as an individual. That is, your individuality was more firmly rooted and clearly framed. What's new is the widespread idea of the individual constituted in opposition to the existing symbolic order, the ideological rebel, as anything other than tragic or destructive. And even if the current romanticism of rebellion is in some sense just another cloak of ideology, it's an odd self-refuting one. We can't all be rebels, or to the extent we are, we're not.

Inference, or patterned structural linkage of interpretation and sensation seems rooted in our perception/sensation as much as in our deliberation; when one reasons about what play to make, they find they already understand how the pieces may move. — fdrake

:up:

So I hypothesise that language - the spoken and written human peculiarity - is a particular form of something more visceral, more important in the sense of having more import or meaning because more directly connected with emotion and embodiment, that is the ritual and symbolic interaction that constitutes still, the large weight of human interaction. Discussions of grammar and syntax delve into the froth of the reality of existence. — unenlightened

I would have tended to think of language and ritual as being co-evolutionary. Maybe just because ritual is usually so soaked in language. But then there is this:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep22219.

Kind of like when a newborn's diapers fail and they have to rely on their personal knowledge of hygiene.

However, I am betting this will be dispatched to the Lounge in the twitch of a lip. With a roll of the eyes, a raised eyebrow and a bored 'Really?' :roll: :brow: :yawn: — Amity

In principle, the subject matter is fine as a serious philosophical topic. (Or a scientific one).

It'd be far juicier than what I'm proof-reading right now, which is about as dry as a sun-fried bug in the Arizona desert.

Sigh. I wasn't claiming that Nike was making a racist gesture. — Bitter Crank

I know you weren't claiming that. The quote was to do with the perceived claims re K. You seemed to be looking for a PC-gone-mad nail to hammer down and instead found a boring corporation doing boring corporate stuff.

Yep. The statistics do hammer it home. But we all knew that, or should have.

Tim Tams in your honour.

It turned out well enough to justify a spectator seat. I'll :zip: now

Come on, Banno. You know you have to do better than that. 5 words? Fucking Australians. There's a good chance the moderators will delete your post, with good reason. — T Clark

I guess we were too late. And he'll justify it by wringing at least 10 pages out of you suckers.

The fact that we're talking about it is playing right into their hands. — Harry Hindu

BC is clearly a sleeper agent and cackling into his complimentary $800 sweatshop plimsolls as we speak. Yes, he wears them on his face. He's that edgy.

OK, so maybe you know best or maybe a company that spends multi-millions on knowing best, knows best. We'll see.

Not true. It has been more than suggested by the big orange among others on several occasions.

We'll see. I don't have a dog in the fight. Nike plimsolls are overpriced crap and I wouldn't wear one even for a big wet kiss from a beefy American ballplayer.

Who are known as, by and large, their customers. That's showbiz.

(Not that all criticism of him is unAmerican, but the more extreme is. And fwiw my position on the flag is just that I prefer green to red and blue and potatoes to stars).

No fall for ideological sales tactic, eh? Nike are going to want their bribe back. Fair point, anyhow. I suppose my major objection here would be to the criticism that the kinds of things K does or Nike are doing in following his advice are unAmerican as, apart from the idea that the profit motive is American as Apple Pie sprinkled with grits and baseballs, the freedom to be unpatriotic is too. That's what separates you from those countries where what is done to people who don't bow before the flag is exactly what the unAmerican critics of Kaepernick would like done to him.

I presume they ran it through some focus groups and decided they needed him and his fellow travelers more than the opposition. Hardly surprising a youth-oriented company would take the edgier route anyhow. The flag will continue to symbolise what people believe it symbolises, no more and no less. K's chances of winning the wider argument on it are roughly zero. And Nike I expect already have the damage-limitation PR ready for whatever Fox News etc. throw at them (which in any case will probably be only to their advantage—"Help, we're being attacked by some old white guys on media most of our customers hate, what ever shall we do?").

Nike are legally obliged to maximize profits for their shareholders. If anyone believes anything matters to them that doesn't ultimately serve that goal then they don't understand how business works. Ergo, criticizing them for having the "wrong" attitude re the flag is silly. Their obligation is to take whatever attitude is more profitable.

Sounds awful. You have my sympathy and best wishes. Your best bet is to see a professional and take anything you read here with a grain of salt. Good luck.

If Kapaernick is looking for mountains in molehills, then his critics are doubly-so. Nike's job is to make money any way they can. K is apparently helping them do that. All sounds very American to me.

So, expressing concern that X symbol has been co-opted by others who are racist is not the same as claiming that if corporation Y uses symbol X, it's a racist gesture, so, unless there's something more to this, it looks like you might be raging against a strawman here, @Bitter Crank.

Thanks. Puts it in better context.

Using Kaepernick's reasoning — Bitter Crank

What reasoning? What did he actually say? And where's the link to the full article?

Where's the bit where someone said the flag was racist? Sounds like a regular business decision otherwise

It would appear so although I'd be a bit hesitant drawing a firm conclusion without reading more of him. Maybe @Maw has more to add?

Recent bannings:

@Frotunes for low quality.
@Pollywalls for low quality+.

Can you elaborate on that? — schopenhauer1

May have been answered in the meantime by others, but anyway:

“This is the way things (in the most general sense) are” + “evaluative (or partially so) statement X” is more of an expression of identity, or more accurately, the outline of a framework on which identity is constructed, than anything else. And the proper response is not a converse positioning, which tends to direct both parties to their trenches, but an examination instead of the inner logic of the framework, how it functions as a psychological support etc.

Looks like you made a monkey of yourself.

(For the record, sushi's calling us half-witted fuckedy fucks (or whatever it was) wasn't modded because it's feedback where there's more leeway to vent. A little restraint would be appreciated though.)

You don't have an automatic right to appeal the decision on another posters' deletions (of which there were many in this case). At least I'm not going to go digging into it. If any other mod considers this worthy of a forensic examination, they can do so. Feel free to ask someone else.

Our job is to enforce the guidelines not to convince people who don't like them to stay. Low quality, flamey, off-topic posts like frotunes' recent contributions have always been deleted here as a matter of routine and will continue to be. If that upsets you to the point where you want to leave, then feel free to do so and good luck.

Bye then.

We routinely delete overly flamey and low quality posts because they're against the guidelines and that will continue regardless of how the targets of these posts feel about them.

*Puff of smoke* You called?

Ah, yes. I'll PM you @Fobidium