I don't know. I think a few states will immediately ban abortion.

:up:

The project has been a horrendous failure so far and it has no current prime representative. But capitalism has been in many ways a horrendous failure too, so the spectre of socialism will continue to haunt the world. — Jamal

So it exists as a ghost who is invoked because of the problems with liberalism. :up:

It just means a woman in Mississippi who wants an abortion will have to drive a while to get to a state that does them. A woman who doesn't have transport will probably be able to get a local one illegally. That's how it was before Roe.

I think Searle might have been better at sexually harassing his students than he was at philosophy.

was thinking more of mental preparation. Really big catastrophes leave little opportunity for meaningful preparation. Like, the dinosaurs should have expected a meteorite to wipe them out? Ukrainians should have known the Russians would wreck everything in 2022?

On the other hand, lots of people regularly put themselves in harm's way. They buy a house located in a flood plain. They build a house in the fire-prone Northern California forests. They site a nuclear power plant on a known earthquake fault. — Bitter Crank

So be flexible. Plan for life to continue as it has, but also recognize that we might be in a world war next week.

I can do that.

There must be some geologists in Russia who know that you can't "plunge" the UK into the sea. It's a prominance on the Eurasian continent.

So Searle is a pretty standard indirect realist. :up:

That approach doesn't work for me, that's for sure. But we can at least expect bad things to happen -- plan on them, prepare ahead. — Bitter Crank

I'm actually not sure how to plan ahead for a catastrophe. I'll have to think about it.

A lot of "what is going on" seems very "edgy" which is to say, not highly understandable, probably not widely supported. Four year olds switching genders and reactionaries who want to see women back in the kitchen in heels like 1950s advertisements, are both "far out". Left and Right just seem irrelevant terms for such of this (crap). — Bitter Crank

It just sounds like you're saying the American culture has arrived in an ideological ditch.

Are we just in limbo in between wars and economic disasters? I think sometimes about how the 20th Century started with a pandemic, a world war, and an economic disaster, and in the US there was also an environmental disaster that affected the Great Plains and the Tennessee Valley. Could this century be repeating that? That’s probably too simplistic.

Ancient Greece, for example, started off as a collection of separate city-states based on farming and trade. — Apollodorus

Oddly enough, they were all gay.

Little remains of the "left" or "far left" of my youth (60 years ago). The last generation of people for whom "left" and "leftist" had a fairly clear meaning are dead or will be gone in another decade. This passing isn't anything tragic or new; it's normal. — Bitter Crank

That was a helpful post. Thanks.

Do you know what has taken the place of the left-right conflict? Is there a conflict that's well formed enough to be named?

Yes. Being a moderate or independent typically means youre anti-extremist and anti-collectivist. — Harry Hindu

Are you a moderate?

A living organism is sort of self generating. The creature you are now was created by an earlier version of you.

That's vaguely a definition of life.

Do you get tired of being utterly vacuous? 10.7 thousand posts…95% fatuous.

Spend less time on Twitter. — Xtrix

Sorry. I'll try to improve. I'm not on Twitter.

If one views the world from a far left position, rather like the far right. All you see is failure, or things getting worse. While what you would want to happen, will never happen because it’s to idealistic, theoretical to be successfully applied. This powerlessness can be frustrating. — Punshhh

You may be right.

Sure. But the economic ideology organizing the global economy is presently neo-liberal, not Marxist. That's the palpable relavence I referred to.

One only leaves a thinker behind by incorporating the valuable features of his work into a new whole, such as to think him better than he thought himself. I’m not convinced you or Hayek understand very much about the history of philosophy since Hegel — Joshs

So. You're saying Marx is ground zero for everything in philosophy since Hegel?

Probably not.

Interesting.

Let's start by looking at how Hayek and company were a reaction to fascism. Interested?

Who criticized him and for what? Marx called himself a materialist and differed only on what he called Hegel's idealism. — Jackson

Fine.

Seems to me at the core. Marx thought of himself as Hegelian. — Jackson

He was criticized for failing to be Hegelian and he admitted it. He was more into Feuerbach than Hegel.

Marx was Hegelian--the concept of history as dialectical — Jackson

Maybe a little around the edges.

I dont live in his world. You live in his world. — Joshs

There aren't many places untouched by his views. If you're American, you definitely live in his world. Why not look into it?

I'm not a fan boy. I'm just interested in how the world works. Aren't you?

Darwinism as Hegelian Dialectics Applied to Biology:

https://evolutionnews.org/2020/09/darwinism-as-hegelian-dialectics-applied-to-biology/ — Joshs

Oh good grief. Are you serious? Darwin was a naturalist. He demonstates the influence of Democritus in our world, not Marx.

I'm not insulting Marx by the observation that history has left him behind. It's just a fact.

Hayek may have lived in the 20th century , but his political theory is derived from philosophical ideas that are considerably older than Marx. Essentially Hayek is an 18th century philosopher in the cloak of a 20th century political thinker. — Joshs

I don't think so, but it's a moot point. His view is still the the blueprint for the world you live in.

Given your respect for him, I wager your own notion of the cutting edge of philosophy (and by derivation political theory) consists of figures like John Stewart Mill , Kant , Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, although you may know their ideas chiefly through contemporary interpreters on the right. — Joshs

I'm a fascinated, but neutral observer. I'm immune to academic retching. It just makes me feel pity.

Today’s political left and far left were born out of the aftermath of Hegel’s project. — Joshs

Marx wasn't particularly Hegelian, though. The community around him was.

What also emerged from
Hegelianism was Darwin’s theory of evolution — Joshs

How so?

Marx is completely irrelevant to Hayek and his followers because they don’t consider him an influence on their thinking — Joshs

With all due respect to their genius, Hayek's views won. As we ponder where we go from here, it's Hayek we need to understand. Why was neoliberalism so devastatingly successful? What problem did it solve? What problems has it left us with?

Marx is completely irrelevant to Hayek and his followers because they don’t consider him an influence on their thinking. Their political philosophy is pre-Marxist — Joshs

Hayek is 20th Century. Marx was from a world that's gone now.

I would suggest that it is not possible to understand contemporary thinking on the left and far left without making your way through Marx — Joshs

That may be, but what relevance does the left or far left have in the world today?

I wouldn't characterize either the PRC or USSR as ever being "representative of leftism". — 180 Proof

So they weren't even on the spectrum?

Libertarian socialist / Green movements & Human Rights activists/NGOs rather than nation-states IME represent the hard left today. — 180 Proof

Ah. Doctors without borders is an NGO I contribute to, so I'm a hard leftist.

Both extremes are forms of collectivism, while the moderates of both sides value individual liberty. — Harry Hindu

That's interesting. Neither extreme can accept diverse viewpoints, so in a sense they're both collectivist in their own ways. Is that what you mean?

means that they are not agree on how European Union works. They see the institution as pure capitalists defending the interests of a few. — javi2541997

Isn't it?

we spend our money, what we are allowed to say, etc. While it may seem that the far-left values and fights for the little man or minorities, they are really just using identity politics to create a problem of victimhood for certain groups as a reason to acquire more power over everyone's lives. — Harry Hindu

You're saying the left fears individual autonomy. People need to be controlled, guided, and cared for.

On the one hand, this is just valuing life. On the extreme, it wants to reduce all citizens to children.

I would say the left uses identity to achieve equitable egalitarianism while the right uses identity to continue to assert and justify the powerful to do whatever they want regardless of the consequences to those less powerful. — Philosophim

So the difference is about social safety nets. The extreme left would have the state take care of everyone's needs?

I think far left are socialists and far right are nationalists. — SpaceDweller

Sounds good.

Is this strictly a political question? Do you measure the leftness of the left solely in terms of proximity to Marx , or can ‘left’ mean progressive or radical in a different sense? What about a philosophical far left? Do you think Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida were to the left or the right of Marx politically? What about philosophically? It seems to me the ‘far left’ is a notion concocted by conservatives like Jordan Peterson, who is constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between figures like Derrida and Marx, and between postmodernism and socialism. — Joshs

I got into Hayek recently, and you can't separate his economic view from its political context (which is a little self contradictory). But his proposals are meant to address a problem that has to do with emergence of fascism. However his viewpoint may have later been hijacked, he was trying to be one of the good guys.

Since Hayek is relevant now and Marx is really completely irrelevant, I'd want to judge leftism by how it relates to Hayek. So by his perspective, leftism is about how organized a society is top down. It's about how information in the economy is processed. Per Hayek, the market is the superior organic organizer of information. He saw totalitarianism as the best way to protect the free market, tho. Thoughts?

Is identity politics a sign of leftism?

Interesting to point out that some of them feel kind of euroskeptic. — javi2541997

What's that mean?

:up:

Streetlight is a far left, it can be a burden if taken to far. — Punshhh

I think "far left" is an actual political perspective.

Institutional fact: you co-opt ideas from sources and then puke links to said sources onto a thread and pretend it's you taking a position on something you would have people believe is philosophy--that is, when you're not hopping on someone else's thread to puke ad hominems and abysmally misguided proclamations of "fact" (fiction).

Hey, thumbs up. — whollyrolling

:lol:

For anyone who isn't an aristocrat and a bootlicker — StreetlightX

You're pickled in slave morality. That's why you're hyperbole gets so ridiculous.

Ressentiment is good. — StreetlightX

Good for what?

You're a giant ball of ressentiment, tho.

Maybe you shouldn't project so much? — StreetlightX

Maybe you should read more Nietzsche? Seriously.

But we don't all claim to be heroic and virtuous for doing it.

But all you're doing is posting weird stuff on a website. The real world continues on its own course regardless.