trying to delineate the dangers of polemics in contemporary (digital) political discourse. — VagabondSpectre

I would be quite happy to agree with you about that and plead guilty to participation, if only you were as resolute in your criticism of Scrotum's language as you are of mine. His, after all is demonstrably more extreme, and hugely more influential. I say 'sexist', he says 'obscene' and 'disgusting', and you do not seem to think his language needs criticism.

But in large part, my interpretation is based on the sympathetic understanding expressed here.

I don't think the passage is particularly sexist [...] in the end his views do probably imply a more traditional role for women, that is, a restricted one. But this is a legitimate political position--traditional conservatism--rather than simple sexism or misogyny. — jamalrob

I am open to correction, but on the face of it, I would say that a view that wishes to restrict the role of women is a sexist view in any normal understanding.

To live creatively is to break the "rules" — matt

That is a rule.

The problem of the whole thread is that to define creativity is to negate it. As a rule, rules are derived from the known, which is the past, or tradition. and that encompasses science, technology, conservative and socialist. It encompasses anything that anyone might come up with that is understandable.

Except that I might, or you might, come up with something creative. The old masters, and the old philosophers were creative, but they are not creative now. And to be creative is to be at the cutting edge of now; to make the post that says something new. I'm surprised that in 3 pages no one has mentioned Pirsig. Dynamic and static value.

What does it mean to tell a private institution like a university to stop paying for whatever floats their academic boats? (And what is the manner of such a directive?). — VagabondSpectre

Consider the woman who plays with her clitoris during the act of coition. Such a person affronts her lover with the obscene display of her body, and, in perceiving her thus, the lover perceives his own irrelevance. She becomes disgusting to him, and his desire may be extinguished. The woman’s desire is satisfied at the expense of her lover’s, and no real union can be achieved between them — Scrotum

What does it mean to tell a couple that their lovemaking is an obscene affront and not a real union?

Honestly, it just makes no sense for you to be attacking me for my authoritarian emotive dictatorial views about this guy, and defending his views as somehow liberal legitimate and reasonable. It makes no sense even if you agree with him.

If you want to call him sexist merely because he has opinions that involve women (opposed to opinions that he applies only to women due to prejudice), you're free to do so, — VagabondSpectre

I'm immensely grateful for your liberality. But as has been pointed out his opinions do only apply to women because they cannot be performed by men as a matter of biology. Thing is, I am more moderate in my condemnation of him than he is of me and my wife, so whatever criticism you level at me you are applying to him more strongly than I am. Unless of course you are not being even handed in your criticism.

Ridiculous argument of the day.

Property and money are social constructs.
Therefore to be a capitalist is to be a socialist.

I tried it in a rather desultory way many years ago with no noticeable effect. Eyes are complicated and can be affected by many things - stress is one to consider. It has the ring of wishful thinking to me, though it seems to work in some cases. I guess if you stay away from the more extreme magnifying glass and sun type exercises, it might be worth a go. I had to get glasses to drive, and found I hated the clarity they gave. I find the blurry world much more comfortable.

To be honest, Bates has had enough time to prove himself and totally hasn't, and that puts him on a par with homeopathy, really. Get some specs for when you need clarity, spend time in the country or by the sea where there is a long way to see, (it's good for you anyway) and avoid too much close work. That's my advice. And don't stress.

Just because one repressed idiot writes that people shouldn't masturbate doesn't make it a law for all women, and telling him that he should not have the right to express his views would have a more chilling effect than does risking exposing his views to women. — VagabondSpectre

But no one's telling him that. They're telling the government not to listen to his idiotic views. and in my case I'm also telling the universities and media not to listen to his views and to stop paying him for them. Let him express his views as widely and forthrightly as me. If he has the right to tell women how to have sex, I think I have the right to call him a sexist.

a tangent of questionable relevance to be fair. — Baden

To be fair, I think I would not sack a distinguished professor from a post as advisor over one controversial remark. But when you add the many questionable remarks on various topics to the questionable ethical behaviour, a picture emerges of a rather nasty piece of work, bringing the government into disrepute (if only it had any repute to dis).

He deserves to be called a few names. Which I will leave to the reader's imagination. — Baden

I won't. 'Malevolent' springs to mind.

his views do probably imply a more traditional role for women, that is, a restricted one. — jamalrob

My views imply a more restricted role for Roger Scruton. He affronts me with an obscene display of sexism, racism and the willingness to covertly propagandise on behalf of tobacco companies for money. A legitimate political position, and a malevolent one.

But this is a legitimate political position--traditional conservatism--rather than simple sexism or misogyny. — jamalrob

What makes a political position illegitimate? Is it legitimate to propose 'a restricted role' for any group - blacks, Jews, women, homosexuals, whatever? It's all traditional.

And this little piggy went 'we we we', all the way home.
(I think he lived in a shoe with an old woman...)

Experience will teach you what you may
And what you may not do
I'll teach you to forget the truths
You always knew.
See what might be,
See what might have been.
Though you yourself created me,
Your own mistake has set me free

I was your slave, now you are mine
I am Time, I am Time. — Robin Williamson

It's always all about identification. Philosophers identify with thought, and thought is the bottle from which no flying thought can escape, with or without a ladder. Thought circles or spirals (who cares?) around a centre that is not thought, though thought names it 'actual'. This infinite centre is the only place to live, because thought is always already dead.

Therefore, houses are infinite flowers, and I and my house are the central attraction for every honeybee.

Just thought I'd mention... carry on.

Edit:

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution. When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind. — J. Krishnamurti

God does all the work, so you don't have to.

You might imagine that this is a modern cult. But the Greeks as usual got there first, with Procrustes, the deity of the modern jobsworth.

Does this happen often in people and philosophy? — redan

In people, yes, in philosophy, less so. The difficulty is that deduction is wholly inadequate to life. To reason about the future involves induction; to come to a judgement of any sort requires values. Even the commitment to truth and the valuing therefore of deduction is not to be arrived at deductively.

Some evil people will be glamorous; some evil people will be banal. — Ilya B Shambat

These are not opposed. Evil is banal because it is destruction, and broken people or broken objects are dull useless lifeless and commonplace. And it is glamorous because it has a superficial puissance, it is much easier to destroy than to create, and one does not at first see that destruction is dependent on and subordinate to creation. It appears glamorous when one cannot see the banality, when one sees puissance and misses the dependency.

Exactly, so why is a political scientist using it as the descriptor of someone who he is defining as guilty of 'identity politics'?

we might agree on this. Those who like to wield and weaponize the term 'identity politics' do make it seem as though they do though. Which is still not to say that the description is not useful, or true of some politics. — StreetlightX

I think we probably do agree, you and I, but I'm not so sure about Corey Robin. "The Identitarian movement or Identitarianism is a European, North American, Australian and New Zealander far-right and white nationalist movement that originated in France." (Thus Google) As I said already, that just isn't what people mean when they talk about identity politics.

All of us are divided in multiple ways, first and foremost within ourselves. That's what politics at its best does: to craft a commonality out of that preexisting division. Identitiarians begin with the most spurious identity of all--the undivided self--and build from there — StreetlightX

Well I'm sorry, but that has the same ring of hypocrisy to me. I craft coalitions of interest and ideology, but when anti-racists and feminists do it... Now if one were to talk of fundamentalisms, that brook no compromise, I could see something of the undivided self at play, but it is not Isis or the KKK that anyone means when they talk about 'identity politics' is it?

can someone enlighten as to what other kind of politics there is?
— unenlightened

Policies based on political philosophies other than one’s sense of oneself. You know - ‘I believe in public education’, ‘I support free enterprise without bureaucratic interference.’ And so on. — Wayfarer

Oh right, so my beliefs and philosophy are not part of my identity? Can you just draw that line a little more sharply for me, because it always tend to look as if my politics is all about high principle, like the superiority of the white man and the absoluteness of property rights and so on, and everyone else's is about religious, ethnic, racial, or sexual identity, and therefore illegitimate.

Re identity politics, can someone enlighten as to what other kind of politics there is?

No wonder you cannot understand anything. I eat off a clean plate, and afterwards I clean the same plate and next day I eat again off the same clean plate, using the same teeth I have cleaned twice in the meantime. Obviously, literally everything is not literally the way it was, even if one did do literally nothing, because if you literally don't breathe you literally die. So probably don't literally interpret literally every word literally, like a literal idiotic pedant.

You have told us some stuff about yourself, that you yourself consider significant.

A. A childhood sexual experience.
B. A debilitating mental health condition.

And you seem to think there is no connection. I am not in a position to contradict you, but I am rather dubious. But I don't think it would be appropriate to go into that further on this site. I hope you can somehow find a trustworthy person to go into all this with in the real world.

But wouldn't you agree, unenlightened, that what has happened in China is that kind of progress that you do accept? — ssu

Have I not made fairly clear what I approve of and disapprove of? I not going to endorse "what happened in China" in some absolute sense. Good things have happened, and a high price has been paid in other bad things happening. To some extent they have been able because of the lateness of development to make a very speedy change from a peasant farming economy to a high tech post-industrial one, but it is the lateness rather than any special political talent that allowed them to bypass the steam age, for example.

I get the feeling that for most of the people, life has become better overall, though it is hard to judge. Endless toil in the field has been replaced with toil in the factory; food and health has improved but so has stress and environmental degradation. But it is not communism, you needn't worry; China has reverted to its traditional form of government - a bureaucracy. Mandarins rule ok.

You can't subtract and leave everything the way it is, — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes you can; it's called cleaning.

In our lifetime we have witnessed the largest expansion of wealth and prosperity and the decline of absolute povetry especially with the rapid historical economic growth in China, but also the growth in South East Asia in general. Also India has made rapid progress. — ssu

Expansion of wealth, economic growth, rapid progress. Are these all the same thing? Are they the thing that matters? I wonder if we could talk about the concept of 'enough'?

Enough is a variable feast that I have been trying to point towards above. Growth and progress are antagonistic to enough. It is natural, and normal, that one grows, and then becomes full grown, that one makes progress and then arrives.

I'm just watching a program about beard products. Sales have quadrupled in the last year. Beard oil sells for £40 per 100 ml. I have had a beard for fifty years, and once bought a pair of scissors. Nobody needs beard oil. Nobody is happier for beard oil. This is not growth or progress, it is insanity gone mad It has happened because after putting five blades on the razor, there was nowhere left to go.

When you are starving, and there are dirt roads, there is progress to be made, but once there is enough to eat, more food is not progress, and once the roads are paved, covering everyone's garden in slabs and tarmac is not progress.

Mine wasn't a straw man, it was a reductio ad absurdum. That is to say, if one holds that there is no essential difference between mental illness and social stigma, one implicitly holds that Charles Manson (or, another example, Jeffrey Dahmer who raped and ate his victims) is not mentally ill but just someone we have chosen to stigmatize. That there might be hard cases where it's hard to distinguish if the person is mentally ill or whether we just find the person's behavior violative of certain societal norms doesn't mean there aren't obvious cases of mental illness. — Hanover

Well Szaz would be your true absurdist. We do stigmatise murderers do we not? And sometimes we call them mad, and sometimes we don't. And what is the difference, and how do you tell in these supposedly easy to tell cases? Do you measure their madness on the scale of your own repugnance?

I do not say these people are fine. Did you think I might? I say their relationship with others is in a bad way; do you disagree? The odd thing is that this view is not even controversial, merely old-fashioned. It is the basis of talk based therapy, that a personal relationship can be therapeutic, in a way that it is not when there is an organic illness. It is the first premise of the psychoanalytic tradition that the source of mental distress is the exigencies of civilised society. Bears do not become anal-retentive because they get to shit in the woods.

Now I'm in the embarrassing position of more or less agreeing entirely. — csalisbury

A fate worse than birth.

It would be helpful if you could put a clarification as to what for you distinguishes self from identity. The distinction is not fixed, and can be not at all distinct or interpreted in opposite senses, which might confuse your results.

So unenlightened, is that really what industry gives to the Third World? Environmental problems? Sweatshops? Nothing else? How do you add up these two parts of your commentary? — ssu

I've said some stuff. You say some stuff, and then we'll compare. But try not to create a straw man argument based on the virtue of the poor. People without legs don't run in the corridors, but it is not a great virtue.

Talking of paradox, Soros, Poland, Zionism, and stuff, here are some more dots from opposing universes seeming to join up.

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/04/easter-celebrations-in-poland.html?fbclid=IwAR11wcXqAR_-8PLqeZu9yShOphkb80soagSGh5g7pr9H9euXX_9mZ0ZkchY

One o' the best bits as it goes; N Wales, by the seaside. And today is bright sunshine and no wind, and the world and his brother are here for Easter, chips and ice cream. So it's not a personal thing at all.

What I want is a jury. — Wallows

Guilty.

That’s peculiar? I visited last year and found it to be quite magnificent, beautiful, quiet, efficient and clean. — I like sushi

These things are relative, and I'm a miserable old whinger. But it depends where you come from. It's very hard to get away from the drone of traffic, and in most of the cities the air pollution is bad. Public transport is poor, and to be a pedestrian or cyclist in the city is dangerous and unpleasant. When I were a lad, most children walked to school. Now hardly any do. I imagine a visitor heads for the beauty spots and historic attractions that are well maintained rather than the abandoned steelworks and docks and the mouldering terraced houses of the old industrial towns.

Of course, there are many other issues at play in comparing first world and sub-Saharan African energy usages. Do you find this disparity congruent with your expectations of capitalism as it is, incongruent, or do you find other factors more important? — boethius

The UK, where I live, is a relatively crowded place, and relatively wealthy place. But it is not an entirely pleasant place to live. The man-made environment is ugly, noisy, polluted, stressful, unhealthy, and inconvenient. It is the result four submission to the 'necessities of production', where the methods are those of slash and burn agriculture - clear the land, suck the nutrients out of the soil, abandon and move on. Such is industry - it does not need to clean up after itself, and so finds it uncompetitive to do so.

And so we live in each others' waste, and are only out of fear beginning to wonder if we need to. We have never much asked how we would like to live together. The necessities have always seemed inescapable, but this is only because they have happened without thought or plan, they are really just accidents. Capitalism is the rule of accident, of grabbing whatever has value, and dumping whatever has none. Socialism is making a plan, and making rules of behaviour to implement the plan. Or perhaps that is wrong entirely. I don't think it matters much whether it is those words or some other words i use to make a distinction that I think is more important than political convention.

What is important is, for sure, to have modern medicine and dentistry, to have good communications, to have food and shelter, security, and a pleasant environment. Now the problem at the moment is that production is not making itself responsible for cleaning its own mess plastic in the sea, fumes in the city, pesticides in the countryside, CO2 in the atmosphere ... and if a rule is made here, industry will go elsewhere where there is no rule, because if one doesn't a competitor will. This is the industrial tragedy of the commons.

But we manage, together, to regulate a water and sewage system according to rules, we manage to have a police and justice system, we regulate and limit ourselves in all sorts of ways to make our environment work, and with a little thought we can solve the problems we have not yet addressed. Perhaps you will not be able to pour petrol into your car, and fumes into the atmosphere any more, the way you are not allowed any more to pour waste chemicals into the rivers. And much will be made of a totalitarian nanny state infringing your God given liberties.

Some fuckwit builder has poured his waste concrete into the sewer. This is what we are doing to the planet. Let's stop being so fuckwitted as to think there is some issue of liberty in such behaviour; it is an act of tyranny.

Form-of-life > language-game > use > meaning. — StreetlightX

Greengrocery >banana wholesale purchase> "About how many hands to a box?"> how big are the bananas?

Philosophy>realism demonstration> "Here is a hand," > meaningless.

Primary school> naming of parts> "Here is a hand." > This part is called a 'hand'.

Is this about right?

The 19 million inhabitants of New York State alone consume more energy than the 900 million inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa. The difference in energy consumption between a subsistence pastoralist in the Sahel and an average Canadian may easily be larger than 1,000-fold — and that is an average Canadian, not the owner of five houses, three SUVs, and a private airplane.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR1FJ9VcytY5vs0hgjC1EzqObkOZlBvKdCbQD6sdbVI0CilvwAIIm415iNc

Too much of a change, or moving the discussion on?

who I am and where I am involved in. — RoteichArmin

It's God, isn't it? At last, I thought you'd never come back.

No wait, I'm smart, I've got all the best words - It's the real DT.

Thinking that our free will and our sense of self is disconnected from that is both narcissistic and arrogant — Christoffer

if you have a cognitive bias towards believing determinism to be wrong, you will ignore those reasons and support. — Christoffer

This line of thinking is just naive. — Christoffer

that's fundamentally corrupt and biased. — Christoffer

Yeah, but don't hold back, dude, let me know when I'm wrong. It's good to know that someone out there is rational and measured.

I've always disliked calling language-games 'contexts' — StreetlightX

Sorry, it was probably me that brought that in as something of a fudge between 'language game' and 'form of life'. I wonder if you might say a word about that distinction?

First, thank you for sharing your story with strangers so eloquently, and in defiance of your paranoia. It shows both strength of character and provides a motivation for your particular theme.

I think everyone has conflicting urges in this regard, on the one hand for being known, as fame or intimacy, and on the other for privacy and anonymity. A hundred years ago, most people lived in a small community - a village - and were so intimately known to their neighbours that keeping any secret was extremely difficult.

And now the internet has produced a global village where secrets are equally difficult to keep. There are real moral issues around stalkers, vigilantes, gossips, and manipulators, but though the technology is new, the morality and immorality is not. Witch-hunts have a history.

The US, and Objectivism in particular, has a great emphasis on the individual, as if every man is the pioneer building his own world alone with his bare hands, whereas China, say, or Europe, has a much more social, community based view of identity. This leads in turn to a rather rigid and intolerant identity in the US, such that any failure to thrive is seen as a personal failure rather than a social problem. One might say that the only social problem is that there are so many personal failures.

So you may be resistant to the idea that the society you live in, or rather fail to properly live in, is set up to keep you out. Failure is privatised and success is publicised, and you are brought up in a shaming world the keeps you out and blames you for it. And a diagnosis of mental illness is the nearest thing to an exoneration you can get.

If you want a theorist/therapist who makes a strong connection between childhood experiences and adult problems, Gabor Mate might be your man.