What are the ends the criticisms are a means to? — Joshs

Criticisms from Dark Enlightenment people aren't supposed to accomplish anything. The downside to wokism is viewed as self-correcting, so if anything, the admonition would be to accelerate wokism. Go faster. Accelerate capitalism. Stop dragging this out.

:up:

I think English speakers have the same thing with pink and red. It's hard to grasp that pink is light red because we never call it that. We have potent and distinct emotional associations with each, so it's almost a little magical that adding white to red makes pink.

I think habit has a lot to do with the way we describe things. Habit actually configures highways through the nervous system, so maybe language (not just the syntax, but the whole history and emotional anchoring) influences what a person is conscious of.

I’d rather audaciously stumble into the unknown. — Joshs

The human race needs that too. We temper one another.

:up:

I think it is the eventual fate of all our best ideas to appear from the vantage of hindsight as the ravings of idiots. — Joshs

If it's inevitable, we should value all the more the restraint our conservative nature gives us: first, do no harm.

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

Fair enough. Wasn't your point that lobotomy lead to progress, and so is to some extent redeemed by that? And likewise, the mistakes made while transitioning pre-pubescents should be seen as worthwhile? Or did I misunderstand you?

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 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.

Was lobotomy idiotic? — Joshs

Yes. Have you read much about the advent of transitioning pre-pubescent people?

Lobotomy was once a thing. But it led to progress. After all, we still use ECT. — Joshs

We aren't going to be making progress on transitioning youths. Both the US and the UK (the two countries that mysteriously became manic about it) have realized that it's a bad idea.

At this point progress means waking up to how idiotic we were.

Imagine that we decide to become woke about the issue of vaccines. There is controversy. It's being said that we've slept long enough, allowing these substances to be injected, even though we all knew big pharma was raking in the profits from it. We'll take that as a sign that we need to reassess this.

How would you want to start this reassessment?

I don’t have answers to your questions, but I would agree that cultural reassessment comes with costs, as does the time before it. — Antony Nickles

It comes with a cost if it's joined to aggressive social engineering. The cost is unnecessary pain and suffering as we learn from our mistakes and try to back up. I think the tide is turning against wokism because much of it was never tested for reasonableness before it was established as the bar we all need to be reaching for.

I’m not sure anyone imagined trans as anything but a preference adults had, and that it had something to do with wearing women’s clothes and padding a bra, so I’d say no, the interests and needs of young trans wasn’t in the cultural awareness. — Antony Nickles

I think the problem is that the interests and needs of young trans people was created by woke culture. We now know that gender dyphoria is not a sign that a child needs puberty blockers and surgery. That both the UK and the US tripped over themselves providing that kind of "therapy", without research, was a result of the power that wokism had for a minute. That minute has now passed, I think. This is not a backlash from the right. It's just a recognition that we screwed up.

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?

. I think it is just a different kind of moral issue when our culture is overlooking something — Antony Nickles

Do you think of support for trans youths as something that was previously overlooked? Many (both right and progressive) now see it as a problem created by woke culture.

Folk here are almost desperate for qualia to make sense. — Banno

It makes sense to me.

It's just a way to refer to the part of consciousness that isn't covered by functionality.

So, what's your solution to this? — kirillov

Life is suffering because consciousness depends on a story arc in which pain and suffering is overcome. The end of the story is the resolution. Satisfaction is death. This is Schopenhauer's point.

Realizing that the world doesn't need to be saved, that it's exactly what it's supposed to be isn't armchair philosophy.

Yeah, probably a losing battle on my part. But I'd like to see more pushback against the easy acceptance of the fiction that a program is an entity or even an agent. With a name! Who starts sentences with "I . . . "! — J

But if you're talking to a computer, you aren't talking to the program. The program is formal. Strictly speaking, your voice is being sampled and that data is being manipulated by the hardware according to directions in the software. It's all dynamic. It's actually so similar to what happens with a real human, that the only thing missing is awareness.

Computers were originally developed to take the place of humans (with regard to basic math calculations). I think going forward, the dividing line will become more and more blurred.

It means some drugs will cost more. I guess the goal would be to inspire more pharmaceutical production in the US.

Your behaviour is dependent on their behaviour. Presumably. That's why you ask, isn't it? — Banno

Yes. It doesn't follow that the answer to my question is identical my subsequent behavior. That doesn't even make sense.

The discussion of relative levels of pain is what decides your next actions. The doing is the thing. — Banno

Their act of rating their pain is not the same thing as what I'm going to do with the information. They have no idea what I'm going to do with it. So whatever the pain is (kind of a weird question), it's definitely not identical to any portion of my behavior.

Rejecting intentional attitudes as private objects does not entail rejecting intentional attitudes altogether. It is instead to reconceptualise them. Not being objects, they are not how things are in a hidden noumenal world, but normative constraints on how we want things to be. They are not objects we detect, but commitments we recognise and undertake. — Banno

I'm not sure how this comes in for a landing in the real world. I don't think of pain as an object, but I regularly ask people to rate their pain and/or difficulty breathing. I even ask them to rate how it was two hours ago, and how is it now? I need to know what they're perceiving. I assume they're perceiving something, and it's not a normative constraint or commitment. It's something consciousness is doing with nervous discharges. It's something the brain stem is creating. They're feeling it.

What is truth?

There's a big sign near my work place that was once a Trump campaign poster. People keep painting new stuff over it in a kind of billboard war.

Today's fresh coat of paint announced:

you voted for a PEDO

In Alaska (which is an American territory — Outlander

It's a state, not a territory.

I think in my world there are opposing ideologies that both justify aspects of the status quo. Sometimes it seems like the real difference is just a matter of tone... the vibe.

Even so, a pure unideological standpoint is not possible; critical thought is itself produced by the society is critiques. — Jamal

Maybe sometimes trying on someone else's ideology would help. By help, I just mean loosen the grip of my own ideas so I might see something I've been ignoring. Or just realize that if I don't take a grain of salt with my ideology, I can end up reacting to a dreamworld, because all I see is my biases.

Maybe kin to ND would be trying to see the world without an ideological lens?

SO back to the point, that the notion fo the trinity is incoherent. — Banno

It comes from Neoplatonism. These days we call it mysticism.

:lol:

In this case, “is” doesn’t mean numerical identity (as in "Clark Kent is Superman") but rather participation in a common essence. — Wayfarer

This is incorrect, but I'm not going to debate it. This is Christianity kindergarten.

I've read that it looks like a contradiction if you assume “is” means numerical identity. In Trinitarian theology, “is God” means shares the same divine essence, not is numerically identical — Wayfarer

The Trinity is explicitly a mystery. You're not supposed to make sense of it. The hypostases are separate, but each one is fully God.

This is not a matter of opinion. It's doctrine.

That's three contradictions.

So you're making up your own religion?

There is no meaningful socialist movement in the US, — Hanover

To the extent there s a socialist movement in the US, it explains why Trump won. — Hanover

:chin:

. The focus on the power of language and material structural aspects of social practices to create and sustain implicit bias derives from Critical theoretic and poststructuralist sources. — Joshs

I wouldn't knock their contribution, but slogans like I am somebody come from the experience of the oppressed with the devasting effects of a negative identity. This was a theme from at least the 1940s onward. I don't think there's any reason to try to locate the wisdom in it to one set of actors.

What the Civil Rights Movement in the US fought for or labour laws in my view isn't anything to do with woke or wokeism. Just as isn't the shortly lived protests against Israel's actions in Gaza. The proponents of DEI surely might see them as the continuation or those that continue to further these past political struggles, but in fact they are not.

The US has a real political crisis with Trump's actions and is on the road for an fiscal, monetary and economic crisis ....sooner or later. — ssu

Wokeism, as it's related to identity politics, is specifically not about addressing economic instability. It's about uncovering sources of social injustice.

Typically as socioeconomic conditions drop, things get worse in every regard, including accidental shootings or failed attempts to thwart attackers. — Hanover

So on top of being poor, I'm more likely to accidentally shoot myself. :confused:

I'm not sure how wokeness is different from an agenda of conserving grudges, as if we lost the momentum and are now losing all the gains from the Civil Rights Movement. We've landed back in the 1960s and the only way forward is to demand corporate virtue signaling. I'm detecting a lack of underlying meaning.

:lol:

Blessed are the cheese-makers, for they shall inherit the earth.