Meta-physics is the science of "what can't be — Gnomon

I thought metaphysics was the science of the conditions of possibility of ‘what can be’. As such it includes within itself things and concepts.

I think Hume's account of causality is self-refuting: — Noisy Calf

Any philosophical approach that utilizes a notion of refutation courts skepticism.

what does "fiction" mean in " kinds of useful fictions" - not true? — Banno

It means true in the context of a contingent and relative value system.

Why shouldn't the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But doesn't fiction belong with an author?” – couldn't we shoot back: “Why? Doesn't this ‘belonging' belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren't we allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate and object? Shouldn't philosophers rise above the belief in grammar? With all due respect to governesses, isn't it about time philosophy renounced governess-beliefs?” – The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (1901/1967 Will to Power) — Joshs

I don't doubt the cat's on the mat, or that gravity doesn't apply the next county over, but as I move from the set of things certain toward the Great Uncertain, I arrive at some point that is somewhere in the middle. — csalisbury

What does it mean to say that the above are ‘certain’ , that they correspond to a subject independent reality? Is that how you are reading Nietzsche?

There isn't any contradiction (though, yes, there is when Nietzsche is too casually cited as a cheat-code for Pure Relativism — csalisbury

If Nietzsche argues for the notion of truth as contingent and relative to continually changing values systems , is that a form of ‘pure relativism’? Or is it a relativism of temporary stabilities?

“The belief in “immediate certainties” is a moral naivete that does credit to us philosophers: but – we should stop being “merely moral,” for once! Aside from morality, the belief in immediate certainties is a stupidity that does us little credit! … It is no more than a moral prejudice that the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world's most poorly proven assumption. Let us admit this much: that life could not exist except on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and inanity of many philosophers, someone wanted to completely abolish the “world of appearances,” – well, assuming you could do that, – at least there would not be any of your “truth” left either! Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are intrinsically opposed? Isn't it enough to assume that there are levels of appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance – different valeurs, to use the language of painters? Why shouldn't the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But doesn't fiction belong with an author?” – couldn't we shoot back: “Why? Doesn't this ‘belonging' belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren't we allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate and object? Shouldn't philosophers rise above the belief in grammar? With all due respect to governesses, isn't it about time philosophy renounced governess-beliefs?” – The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (1901/1967 Will to Power)

Really? Is that true? — Banno

True as in conforming to an unchanging standard or true as in describing and embodying an irreducible
complicity between appearance and transformation?

Useful fiction=metaphor — frank

It certainly does

So, it is not my intention to say that we can distinguish between the real and personal, the process of narration blends them together so well that although it is surely true that these two components are what is being blended together, once they have been blended, it not a simple matter to undo what has been done, or to even recognise what has been done. — Judaka

Can’t we just agree with Nietzsche that the ‘real’ and the ‘true’ are themselves only kinds of useful fictions?

In ‘ Human Immortality: two supposed objections to the doctrine’, William James offered a creative ‘empirical’ hypothesis concerning the possibility of life beyond death.

“It is true that all this would seem to have affinities rather with preëxistence and with possible re-incarnations than
with the Christian notion of immortality. But my concern in the lecture was not to discuss immortality in general.
It was confined to showing it to be not incompatible with the brain-function theory of our present mundane
consciousness. I hold that it is so compatible, and compatible moreover in fully individualized form. The reader would be in accord with everything that the text of my lecture intended to say, were he to assert that every
memory and affection of his present life is to be preserved, and that he shall never in sæcula sæculorum cease to be able to say to himself: "I am the same personal being who in old times upon the earth had those
experiences.”

https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/JamesHumanImmortalityTwoObjections1898.pdf

Gödel was trying to find a way to make a line in between what can be known and what can not — Gregory

According to Roger Penrose Godel was a “very strong”mathematical platonist, so even if proof leads to an infinite regress, you can read Godol’s theorem as perfectly compatible with an absolute god-given grounding for. math.

Reality exists independent of us. We have no way to perceive the majority of things around us — Don Kotlos

I’m going to self-plagiarize here and re-post a comment from an earlier thread.

Here’s Husserl’s critique of representationalism, the idea that reality exists independent of us:

Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external? On Husserl's anti-representationalist view, however, the fit and link between mind and world – between perception and reality – isn't merely external or coincidental: “consciousness (mental process) and real being are anything but coordinate kinds of being, which dwell peaceably side by side and occasionally become ‘related to' or ‘connected with' one another” (Husserl 1982: 111

“For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that
the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our
access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and
intersubjectivity. Indeed, rather than being the antipode of objectivity, rather than constituting an obstacle and hindrance to scientific knowledge, (inter)subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary enabling condition. “

My point isn’t that bias exists as the opposite of impartiality but that the dichotomy bias-impartiality is incoherent. It is not that pure lack of bias is an unattainable ideal , but that truth as correspondence with a fixed external reality is an inadequate philosophical position.

I think PC and woke ideas are new or rehashed biases. — Andrew4Handel

Give me an example of a position or feature of philosophy that is not a bias of some sort or other.

A theory that explains everything explains nothing.
— Karl Popper (Philosopher Of Science) — TheMadFool

As the good Kantian that he was , Im sure all we’d need to do to please Popper is adjust the TOE so that it acknowledges we can never reach the thing in itself, and instead aim to approximate absolute truth as asymptotic limit via progressive falsification.

It leaves me wondering if it will get to the point where philosophy is seen as an appendix of knowledge, especially that which is developed in science.

My idea of a deadend is like a cul de sac, or point in a maze, where there is no way out, or no obvious way forward. It is equal to coming to stagnation, or a standstill. — Jack Cummins

From my vantage , the opposite is the case. It is the sciences that are in a kind of stagnation relative to philosophy, especially the physical sciences that are beguile so many on this forum as the ultimate authority on questions such as the nature of time and reality. The enslavement of physics to metaphysical, or at least empirical , realism keeps it frozen in late 19th century philosophical territory. The most promising developments in the sciences are coming from scholars who are being inspired by recent philosophy ( ‘ recent’ meaning beginning more than 100 years ago ) .

The nervous system does not allow us to perceive reality. It tries to reconstruct the part of reality that is important for its survival. A tiny fraction that is. — Don Kotlos

Sure it does. Reality is what appears to awareness as it appears to awareness. Reality isn’t a thing in itself out there that we try and ‘fit’ our representations to. It is the interaction itself between organism and environment.
Francisco Varela and other researchers integrating enactive cognitive neuroscience with phenomenology have embraced dynamical systems models of time perception which emphasize the interactive no -linear element over the linear computational representationalist approach of classical cognitive science.

Varela writes:”In fact, we have inherited from classical physics a notion of time as an arrow of infinitesimal moments, which flows in a constant stream. It is based on sequences of finite or infinitesimal elements, which are even reversible for a large part of physics. This view of time is entirely homologous to that developed by the modern theory of computation. […] This strict adherence to a computational scheme will be, in fact, one of the research frameworks that needs to be abandoned as a result of the neuro-phenomenological examination proposed here” ( The specious present: a neurophenomenology of time consciousness p. 112)
The traditional sequentialistic idea is anchored in a framework in which the computer metaphor is central, with its associated idea that information flows up-stream . Here, in contrast, I emphasize a strong dominance of dynamical network properties where sequentiality is replaced by reciprocal determination and relaxation time.”

Check out the following link. It introduces Husserl’s phenomecological model of time consciousness and integrates it with neuroscientific research.

https://fdocuments.in/document/the-specious-present-a-neurophenomenology-of-time-the-specious-present

sentiment appears to have no place in philosophy, as well as personal bias.
Knowledge does not equate to preferences or sentiment. — Andrew4Handel

You appear to believe that the striving for absence of bias is the ‘correct’ role of philosophy. Others will suggest that this view is just one among competing notions of what philosophy is about. A substantial community of philosophers today rejects the idea that there could be such a thing as an unbiased perspective , or that such a goal was even desirable. From their vantage your aim is what they call a god’s eye view, or a view from nowhere. It seems to me that you’re taking notice of these truth relativists now that ‘wokism’ is spreading such ideas to the general public like never before. ‘Wokism’ is a big category, including on it’s conservative flank believers in moral absolutes and on its liberal fringe those who completely abandon notions of absolute moral and empirical truth. What all points on the wokism spectrum have in common is the belief that implicit bias can never be eliminated, which likely conflicts with your view. Not only does it likely conflict , but the ‘wokists’ will push hard to expose your view as ‘oppressive’.

Would you class nietzsche and dostoevsky as phenomenologists? — Zenny

Neither of these are phenomenologists in Husserl’s
sense.

I don’t think he actually changed his mind. His intent all along was to found an absolute grounding in subjectivity for science , logic and math, not an empirical one. This is in the best tradition of continental philosophy: dig deep down beneath the assumptions of math and science to those truths that are indubitably true for all, everywhere, at all times. This is something that Nietzsche tried to do, but not Freud. That for me is the difference between psychology and philosophy. The former is a conventionalized, conservative derivative of the latter.

Psychologism is the view that all true knowledge comes from feelings of certainty rather than "objective" truths independent of subjectivity. — Zenny

Psychologism, in the pejorative sense in which it was used to critique Husserl’s work, for instance, refers to a confusion of contingent and relative empirical facts with an a priori grounding. Husserl made claims for the origin of arithmetic in mental processes which were universal and ‘apodictic’, which was read by critics as an attempt to make contingent empirical psychological processes absolute and certain. He later changed his ‘psychological’ grounding of mathematics to a transcendental grounding, so that his model could not be misinterpreted as psychologistic.

Does not every object of experience I encounter in the world that surrounds me, from the most simple to the most complex, have something inherently "mysterious" about it that has nothing to do with me or my ways of trying to describe, explain, or getting to know it; something that goes beyond, and will always transcend, whatever kinds of simple or complex interpretations I might give to it, or any ways I might claim to participate, epistemologically, in its partial or complete creation (e.g., Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel)? — charles ferraro

Absolutely. But experiences can be utterly novel in one sense and yet be recognizable as similar to what one has known. A new experience can belong to a prior theme and at the same time subtly redefine that theme. Events can surprise us and yet be identifiable.

Husserl actually began in vol. 1 of Logical Investigations as a "realist" or even as an "objectivist". — waarala

Husserl may have changed his terminology over the years but I don’t believe he ever treated reality as mind-independent.

Is there instead in each case only what appears to me in the mode in which it appears to me and nothing behind it, no thing-in-itself?
— Joshs

No, I think the relational nature of the universe would exclude such a view (epistemic solipsism). There is a thing in itself, but we have no direct access to it, needing to conceptually construct the thing in terms of the information we have about it ( idealism ). We get closer and closer to the thing in itself but can never have perfect understanding, perhaps because the thing in itself is an evolving process, as are we. — Pop

That’s pretty much the default position on this site , but it isnt the view of phenomenology or post-structuralism.
Their position isn’t epistemical solipsism, since the subject cannot simply imagine any reality they want and have it be pragmatically useful to them. Some construalsare more ‘valid’ than others, because the world which is in inseparable interaction with us imposes affordances and constraints, but those affordances and constraints are reciprocally shaped and transformed by our construals. These are the ‘things in themselves’ but only as appearances which become new ‘things in themselves’ as my experience changes.

If you want to say that the thing in itself is an evolving process that co-evolves with us in inextricable fashion , then I would agree.

In the process of integrating external information, and conceiving a world view ( status quo ), it also adjusts and aligns a self in relation to that information. — charles ferraro

This is just one side of the equation. The environmental ‘information’ is reciprocally adjusted and aligned in relation to the normative aims of self-organization. Making it a one way street in which only the organism adapts to environment is the neo- Kantian realist move.

You might find this comparison of the phenomenological position with representationalism interesting:

https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism

Are you in agreement with Putnam and Husserl, re: the representational human cognitive system, or are you using them just as some informational response to the OP? — Mww

I am in agreement with them. I was too lazy to write my own response.

Our minds are not able to create the existence of a naturally occurring objective fact, but our minds are able to interpret, in a variety of ways, the meaning of the existence and nature of a naturally occurring objective fact. — charles ferraro

A ‘naturally occurring objective fact’ implies certain consequences, properties and relations, and all of these only make sense i relation to a body that interacts with them. Put differently, it is impossible to think about a so-called objective fact about nature without that fact implying and specifying systems of interactions between us and the object. That in fact is what an ‘object’ is , a system of correlated interactions between us and it, both actual and anticipated. When we change our thinking about the object, we are producing a new system of actual and anticipated interactions. To say that it ‘exists’ independently of us is to say nothing at all.

“To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:

If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.”

Francisco Varela, Embodied Mind

I agree that the pace of cultural
change has accelerated. I disagree that one can lift out science from among all of the modalities of cultural
creativity ( the arts, poetry, politics, music , philosophy) and give it sole credit from this acceleration. All cultural
modes of an era are inseparably intertwined and thus all are equally , reciprocally responsible for intellectual development.

Is there a simple, reliable criterion one can use to isolate and identify precisely those characteristics the human mind contributes to the objects of experience? — charles ferraro

Here’s the problem. One can look at a printed word and perceive it only as a random series of physical shapes, one could recognize it as a string of letters, or one could perceive it only as its semantic meaning. Now, are we justified in saying that each perception is of an objective fact independent of what our perspective contributes to it? Or are the phenomenologists correct in claiming that it is incoherent to assume a world of facts outside of our apprehension of them? Is there instead in each case only what appears to me in the mode in which it appears to me and nothing behind it, no thing-in-itself?

People are thus what Metzinger calls naïve realists, who believe they are perceiving reality directly when in actuality they are only perceiving representations of reality. — Wikipedia

Here’s Husserl’s critique of Metzinger’s representationaliam, according to Zahavi:

Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external? On Husserl's anti-representationalist view, however, the fit and link between mind and world – between perception and reality – isn't merely external or coincidental: “consciousness (mental process) and real being are anything but coordinate kinds of being, which dwell peaceably side by side and occasionally become ‘related to' or ‘connected with' one another” (Husserl 1982: 111

“For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that
the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our
access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and
intersubjectivity. Indeed, rather than being the antipode of objectivity, rather than constituting an obstacle and hindrance to scientific knowledge, (inter)subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary enabling condition. “

Here’s a good argument from Hilary Putnam for why the subjective dimension of experience cannot be separated from our objective , empirical descriptions of the world , including our attempts to reduce consciousness to biological structures. Since subjectivity is inseparable
from consciousness , this is at the same time an argument for the irreducible character of 1st personal
experience, the impossibility of splitting it off from or reducing it to 3rd person accounts.

Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”.

Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes (Putnam 1992, 120). Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what w e cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices” (Putnam 1987, 33). We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two.

It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned (Putnam 1990, 28, 1981, 54, 1987, 77)

Lacan was a post-structuralist in the sense that his psychological philosophy proceeded after structuralism, but not in the sense that he had moved beyond it. — thewonder

Post-structuralism is a kind of amorphous label, but the group of mostly French philosophers who critiques the structuralist models of Levi-Straus and Althusser tended to critique the notion that structural linguistic representations could be assigned a truth value with respect to their meaning. Lacan did believe one could pair a structural signifier with a signified as a correspondence of truth.

Derrida certainly didn’t think he was a post-structuralist. His symbolic rendering of the unconscious seems to be a classic structuralist move.

All places in America, both Latin and North, are uninhabitable. The air there makes lazy. — Daniel Banyai

For two hundred years , from Leibnitz to Heidegger, Germany absolutely dominated philosophy. Then it destroyed its intellectual environment thanks to two world wars and the extermination of many of its best intellectuals. Most of the rest fled to the U.S. and elsewhere. For a brief period , from the 1940’s through the 1980’s ,France took up the slack as the default philosophical center of Europe( Sartre, Levinas, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bausrillard) but since then I would argue that Europe has not produced any philosophical ideas more notable than what is coming from Britain or the U.S. In my opinion. the U.S. has taken the baton from Europe as the new philosophical center of the world. I think it was helped in this regard by the wave of intellectual refugees from the Nazis who settled in places like NewYork and made the new school for social research a haven for cutting edge thought. And later on French thinkers like Derrida and Foucault spent much time in the U.S. and influenced American writers like Judith Butler.
Throughout the centuries , remarkable centers of philosophical talent have emerged , such as Athens , Alexandria, Florence, Amsterdam, Paris , Vienna and New York. But one should probably start by listing those living writers that mean the most to one and see if they happen to be clustered in a particular region. Or pick a single figure and see if you can find a way to study with them.

Do you think Streetlight is a happy person?

imagine someone replying that in such conversations "focusing on differences in perspective and worldview" instead of direct condemnation of slave-owners. — Maw

Condemnation is easy and doesn’t require thought so much as visceral reaction. You don’t do yourself a service by taking this easy route. The most difficult thing in the world to do is be open to the possibility that the one you are instinctively driven to hate , to condemn, to criminalize, construes the world though an entirely different lens than you do. You think all that separate us is our moral compass , but that is what binds us. What separates us is the almost impossible
difficulty of bridging alien systems of interpretation of fact.

And still you've got nothing but acquiescent silence for Isreali oppression & atrocities. Where's your fucking moral clarity, Joshs? — 180 Proof

Are you serious with this silly over the top rhetoric? Who talks like this? You sound like a walking cliche. You have no idea what my actual involvement or commitment has been to social causes or suffering individuals, because you never bothered to ask me. I don’t think you want to know , because that would threaten your ‘moral clarity’. With all your history of assured , theoretically grounded activism , you’re triggered to insecure belligerence over a few measly provocative paragraphs from a stranger on a philosophy forum? Have you learned nothing from these great thinkers you mention?

Your kind of passion and approach to politics was desperately needed 60’
years ago, when there really was something like moral clarity, and the methods you prefer were appropriate. Today almost every political situation the wokeness cultists attach themselves to is riddled with complexities and ambiguities, but the only tool the cultist has available is a bludgeon. The irony is that notions like CRT are intellectually complex , and so lend themselves best to environments like the workplace and academia, where they are having a real and positive effect.

here.

What on earth is an ‘oppressor’ and what could ‘Legitimate’ possibly mean? The answer depends of course on whether you’re a relativist TWAT and how far you’re willing to take that. For me, the belief that such notions can be defined in anything but a hopelessly partisan way is at the heart of most conflicts.
— Joshs
In any violent, vicious conflict, whom do you side with, Joshs: the weaker or the stronger? "David" or "Goliath"? Hint: The answer is fucking partisan. :shade: — 180 Proof

Your bullying hostility isnt motivated by a need to back the weaker against the stronger, it’s driven by your moralist judgement of the MOTIVES of the stronger. There’s a huge difference between a need to aid the weak out of pragmatic considerations and a thinking which labels the aggressors as immoral, evil, pathological, greedy, selfish. Demonizing your enemy can justify all kinds of ‘evil’ on your part, starting with something even as simple as bullying other commenters on a philosophy site.
I sense a perhaps hidden theological basis to your self-righteousness.

Most Japanese people actually really like foreigners in my experience. — khaled

Of course they do. They’re novelties. Only 2.3% of the country are foreigners. And of those, what’s percentage is non-Asian? Let’s see what happens when foreigners are more than a tiny percentage of the population.

More strawman bullshit. Mazel tov, Bitcon. Now go somewhere else and jerk yourself off. — 180 Proof

I think this writer is talking about you.

“Just as the overreach of the antiracism movement in the summer of 2020 was enforced on social media with ruthless dog-piling and public smearing and shaming, people whose statements have been insufficiently woke—who have failed to cast Palestinians as pure victims and Israelis as pure aggressors—have been subjected to shocking amounts of abuse online.”

Imagine if this discussion was about slavery and someone responded in this manner. — Maw

We SHOULD imagine that this discussion was about slavery, or the holocaust , or serial killers, or Stalin or Pol Pot. That’s the whole point. The model is worthless if it skirts the most blatant examples of alleged oppression and inhumanity.

Textbook example of how many self-described philosophers end up kicking up so much dust just for the sake of it that everything becomes opaque. The result is as you see here: resorting to pseudo-intellectualism as apologia for colonial atrocities. Imagine if this discussion was about slavery and someone responded in this manner. — Maw

On the other hand, there are a group of commenters on this thread( perhaps you included , perhaps not) who seem to evince textbook characteristics of what I call ‘woke cultishness’ . They have been remarkably consistent: a tendency toward bullying ad hominems and an almost compete refusal to delve into moral nuance, ambiguity and complexity associated with the political
issue they are so passionate about. Why is this? I think that in many ways wokism takes the place of religious cults of years past. It shares many of the same characteristics. An intense desire to belong to a community of shared ideals combined with an unsteady or unscholaely grasp of the underlying ideas leads to a hectoring black and white us against them mentality. As Streetlight proclaimed ‘This Israeli-Palestinian conflict provides the ideal example of pure moral clarity’ Well, yes it does if you only see your politics in such rigid terms, which is the hallmark of woke cultishness. Every political conflict must reduce to moral clarity. If it doesn’t they will be compelled to force it into that mold.
These are not the intelllectuals behind the movement , they are the enforcers, the shock troops.

The thing is , I support the intellectual underpinnings of various forms of wokism and CRT. I think they are here to stay in one form or another, and I certainly prefer them to the conservative alternatives. But I think the bandwagon cultists who are not intellectually secure enough to question and reflect on their driving ethico-political assumptions in respectfuldebate are dangerous , because a bullying kind of verbal violence is their main recourse in discussion combined with an inability to actually DISCUSS.

“ If you've been paying attention to social media over the past week, you will have seen this same attempt to redefine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a racial power dynamic, casting Israel as infinitely powerful and Palestinians as completely without agency. And as in America, where antiracism has redefined racism and relocated the problem to a place where it costs little for white liberal elites to "do the work" combatting it, so has this happened in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where real and urgent civil rights abuses against the Palestinians have been obscured by a binary, maximalist view of the situation that's now fully mainstream.”

"Israelis are the OPPRESSORS and Palestinians are the OPPRESSED," one viral Instagram post reads. "There is no 'fighting', there is only Israeli colonisation, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and apartheid." This rhetoric is hardly new to the conflict, but it's become absolutely ubiquitous thanks to the binary of wokeness at play here: There is no "fighting" happening because one side, the Palestinian side, is subsumed by its victim status at the hands of Israeli "colonization." No weapon in the hands of a Palestinian is thus ever real—even, apparently, rockets that have killed Israelis—because Palestinians are the OPPRESSED in the situation, as the drawing would have it, and oppressed people cannot fight, apparently. It's wokeness 101: The oppressor has all the power, all the agency, and the Israelis are the oppressors. Case closed.“

Just as the overreach of the antiracism movement in the summer of 2020 was enforced on social media with ruthless dog-piling and public smearing and shaming, people whose statements have been insufficiently woke—who have failed to cast Palestinians as pure victims and Israelis as pure aggressors—have been subjected to shocking amounts of abuse online.”

i Palestinian suffering is real. Too many have been killed in Gaza. Too many have been brutalized by the police. For too long, Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank have been deprived of basic civil rights, like the right to vote for the government that exercises state power against them and freedom of movement. For too long, Gaza has been forgotten and left to languish under an unnecessarily brutal blockade, its young people and children deprived of any future. Israel has all too often penalized nonviolent resistance instead of bolstering civil society and supporting a new generation of Palestinian leadership. These all fall squarely on Israel's shoulders, and all nonviolent means of pressuring Israel to solve these problems are legitimate.”

BATYA UNGAR-SARGON , NEWSWEEK DEPUTY OPINION EDITOR

Do they live isolated the way Jews used to? — frank

They tend to live in highly concentrated neighborhoods like Willamsburg in New York City or Meah Shearim
in Israel. So they are isolated in this sense but in the midst of large metropolitan areas.

Judaism is a dying religion isn't it? — frank

It is except among the orthodox and ultra-orthodox , whose number have grown wildly. At their current growth rate, they may become a majority of NYC Jews soon.