Well, okay.

To also clarify, it's not really this forum that I have a certain set of qualms with; it's just the socio-political climate that it is reflective of. Both Liberal and left-wing academia all too often all too willing to readily dismiss just about anyone, usually via some form of cynical mockery or another when they could easily change their mind with just a simple conversation. As I don't plan on ritually slaying my political opponents in any indefinite and indeterminate future, at least, that is what I have decided to posit. I guess that I just keep challenging the status quo here as an experiment.

Half of the time, though, what's really going on is that I'm trying to figure out how to shout well enough into the void of The Philosophy Forum so as to level a dispute with a set of rather arcane Anarchists who call themselves Communists primarily in the U.K. an France, best, perhaps, described as half of the readership of Ill Will, at least, to the best of my knowledge, so to as abolish the form of arbitration that they have secured over the Anarchist movement, thereby granting me my position as a Pacifist within it, when I'll probably just continue to claim that I have become a-political, anyways.

All of which is to say that it's nothing to you and is just errata.

Anyways, you are correct about the general discourse centered around CRT. That ToothyMaw has confused it as such, I think, is evidence of that.

I think that ToothyMaw has just titled his thread as such to sound more academic on a forum that they believe is as such. While they have clearly confused black supremacism with Critical Race Theory, when Maw engaged them in conversation, they did seem to be willing to take what he said into consideration. I get that it's vexing for people to offer opinions on things like this when they know next to nothing about them, but giving them a basic clarification as to what it is and referring them to an article or two about it is just the sort of thing to change their misguided opinions.

About - Black Lives Matter

I don't think that you give them enough credit. Though somewhat vague, which I think has more to do with being inclusive than anything else, there is a clear push for either police reform or prison abolition and a general anti-racist imperative. They only came together recently as a relatively decentralized network and don't have too concrete of goals because of that. Sure, the protests have been going on for years, but, they haven't received the degree of attention and support that they have until just recently. They're not like what Zizek said of certain riots in that they were an act of "pure protest".

For instance, I remember a (former) facebook friend of mine posted a meme claiming that BLM was sending people of color in buses to go riot in (Minneapolis?). The post was hidden behind a button with a disclaimer that it was fake news. This is an insidious trend. Do we really want to give the CEO’s and the boards of directors of corporations the okay to dictate what is fake news? Certainly not, and this is one of the few instances in which a slippery slope argument is actually warranted: not only are people on the fringe right being censored, but also many leftists: https://nypost.com/2021/01/22/twitter-suspends-antifa-accounts-with-over-71k-followers/ — ToothyMaw

I think that you fail to take into consideration the situational context in which the posts were labelled as "fake news". Both Donald Trump and Matt Gaetz had made explicit comments which nearly warranted the hunting of people within the loosely affiliated set of anti-Fascist activists that is generally referred to as "Antifa". The articles had incited a moral panic and there were armed right-wing militias who were preparing to defend the suburbs from an ostensive Antifa invasion. Had they not labelled the articles as such, the situation could have gotten out of hand.

Obviously, there's an inherent danger to a company deciding what information is deemed veritable, especially one like Facebook, but this is actually one of the few instances where I think that they adequately responded to a dangerous cult phenomenon that occurred on their platform. They didn't ban the articles or their users; they just added the disclaimer that they were "fake news". Though such disclaimers could be used as a form of censorship, they can always be checked by the First Amendment. It seems unlikely to me that a company in the West would be willing to cope with a lawsuit for violating the First Amendment. Then again, though, only so unlikely. I don't know. Perhaps the danger you foresee is real, but that the example you have chosen isn't quite to the point? When it comes to cult phenomenons, you just have to consider the situational context.

Within the context of its use in the U.K., a "cunt" is a person who is psychologically and intellectually weak and lacking in integrity and resolve in a manner that is thought to be womanly. A "waffle" is just a euphemism for exactly the same sort of person. To describe speech as "waffle" is just to suggest that it is pretentious prattle. To call someone a waffle is just a euphemistic way of calling them a cunt, as "waffle" also denotes a vagina.

What I expect to have happened here is that Banno agrees with my assessment of the usage of the term and has chalked up his insinuation to colloquial speech in order to save face. Cleary I am correct and a "cunt" is just a fucking problem.

Being said, I did actually not take offense to his original comment as, as I have already stated, I thought that it was a pretty good dig and am not the sort of person who takes great offense at insults, at least, when I can rationalize their having been levelled. I am only so well read and do tend to ramble. Though somewhat philistine, I thought that his quip was fairly clever. I have only expanded upon this because I have devoted a considerable portion of my time to thinking about insults.

To avoid derailing this thread and to return to the topic at hand, I went through a period of my life where I would compulsively read philosophical texts fairly rapidly without processing any of the information well whatsoever. I, now, tend to read texts fairly slow with kind of a lot of deliberation. I have only read so many texts because of that. Despite that having finished a book offers a person the semblance of self-confidence within conversations that refer to it, without having processed the information well, reading it at all seems to me to be entirely pointless. A personal example of this is my reading of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I am willing to admit that I did not understand a single word within it.

With some difficult philosophical texts, I find that I'll go through a process to gain an understanding them. I read Homo Sacer once, again while noting the references that were lost on me, again after looking some of them up and taking notes, and once more just straight through. From this, I have developed kind of a process so as to better understand texts that I find to be particularly difficult. It's also, perhaps, notable that my notes look kind of like a visualization of a concept from A Thousand Plateaus and greatly differ from what you would expect from your average Chemistry major. Taking them is more of a way of focusing attention and visualizing concepts than it is a manner of recording information. As only I can be myself, I am unsure as to whether or not I should recommend this to others. Most people would probably assume for them to be some sort of mess-aesthetic art.

An aside:

I came to a number of realizations about reading philosophy upon discovering that I knew absolutely nothing of the theories of one, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but, before doing so, a notable absurdity to my general approach to reading philosophical texts is that I read nearly every journal of Lacanian Ink on lacan dot com without ever having read a single work of Jacques Lacan or even watching one of his lectures. I have both come to appreciate and fear that this, along with the postmodern left-wing philosophy and books published by semiotext(e) that I breezed through have become embedded within whatever you want to call my subconscious.

Well, okay, then. When I looked it up, though, the definition that I found does have the same connotations as that other term, at least, as it is commonly misused in the U.K..

Oh, well, that'd make sense, I guess.

It basically has the same connotations as a certain expletive used to describe female reproductive organs. Oddly enough, what I object to is not its use, but how it is used. I have traced its usage to ascribe a certain intellectual fainiancy to a drunken letter that Guy Debord wrote to Charles Auguste-Bontemps, which has made it very difficult to explain that people shouldn't both shouldn't use it and that Debord had done so improperly. That a member of the Italian Socialist Party could use it to describe someone like Benito Mussolini would be apt, as, in the United States, we do know that it is reserved for people who create wholly unwarranted and unnecessary problems, but, as there are better ways to insult such people, I do think that people should avoid using it because of its clearly sexist connotations. For some reason, particularly within radical circles in the U.K., this is thought to be forthright heresay, however.

While I am willing to admit to being a talkative diletante, as I think that I am the only person of the opinion here that reading philosophical texts is only so enjoyable and that I have put better thought into existential literature, Criterion films, albums, and role-playing video games and clearly ramble, as well as thought that it was a good enough dig, I do think that people should generally object to the usage of "waffle", as it is effectively a euphemism for another four-leter word, and an often misued one at that, as in its proper context it refers to a person who is just simply a problem, that almost everyone takes as offhandedly sexist. I assume that Banno is from the U.K., though, where that sort of thing is, for whatever reason, considered to be acceptable, and have not taken offense because I thought that his joke was clever and have chalked the rest up to cultural difference.

You were insinuating that I was a waffle, which is clearly an insult. I don't really care, though.

Well, okay. Easy it will be taken.

I suppose that cultivating an inflated sense of superiority via psychological abuse is a sign of intellectual maturity.

I am going to ignore your insult so as to further expostulate.

To use Anarchism as an example. Even were you to cite a widely read text, let's say Mutual Aid, were you to cite a particular passage from that text, one that was not often cited, you couldn't reasonably expect for the other parties, even assuming that most of them have read it, to remember it well enough to hold a detailed conversation about it. Despite this, it is quite often the case that a person claims some sort of intellectual superiority because of a lack of knowledge of some particular reference or another.

If you would like to talk about that particular passage, you could cite it in the original post and post either a section of it or a link to the entire thing. If you would like to cite it as evidence, you can do more or less the same thing. In a casual conversation about Anarchism, despite that Mutual Aid is a widely circulated text, it wouldn't be fair to cite a relatively obscure passage from it as evidence of another person's ignorance. I'm not saying that this sort of thing is too common here; I'm just saying that it's common enough online to note.

To apply this metaphor to Philosophy, I, for instance, haven't read The Phenomenology of the Spirit. I have, however, read Being and Nothingness. In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre references The Phenomenology of Spirit. To understand those particular passages well enough to make arguments about them at the graduate level, you do need to read The Phenomenology of Spirit. To gain a general understanding of Being and Nothingness, you do not. To understand the concept of false consciousness, you kind of only really need to read the Wikipedia page on it. In a passing conversation on false consciousness, you only have to be aware of what the idea is. In an in depth conversation, you probably should've read Being and Nothingness. It would still be absurd, however, to be vexed at that a person engaged in a conversation about false consciousness hasn't read The Phenomenology of Spirit. Only discussing those specific passages or the relationship between the two texts would warrant that. All that I am saying is that it depends upon the conversational context. Sometimes, there's quite a lot that you should have read and sometimes you don't actually have to have read anything at all.

I see what you're saying, and do, in part, agree, but am not sure that that sort of thing can be avoided here.

Being said, and this is less common here, in casual conversation on, let's say, r/Anarchism, it does become the case that a person has a basic question about Anarchism, like, "Is a global revolution even possible?", before being referred to a series of texts that will take them months, if not years, to read before ever being able to respond within the conversation.

Wayfarer is correct to correct me for also making fun of him and he is correct to assume that I have decided to champion this cause because of my own fragile psyche.

I don't want to keep talking about this as I don't think it helps anything, either. I haven't come to the aid and comfort of the Republican Party as a whole. I have merely been attempting to play off an instance of internet bullying. I haven't done so well, and, so, here we are. I say that we wait for someone to post something that is actually relevant to this thread now and just carry on like nothing happened. That's what I'm going to do, anyways.

Obviously, you don't, but I also that there's a certain absurdity of expectations within conversation as to what a person could have reasonably read. To hold a good conversation about necropolitics, you would have to have read the book of the same title by Achille Mbembe. Though a good author to recommend, it would be absurd in most political conversations to expect for the other party to have read Necropolitics. It seems fairly often to be the case to me, especially in online forums, for people to be referred to a list of books to read so as to understand this concept or another without just simply giving them a succinct explanation of it.

It depends on the conversation, I guess.

I never mentioned the American Revolution. — James Riley

I was providing another historically speculative example that could not be cited as evidence of that Pacifist sentiment is somehow colonial or white supremacist.

You say too much. Regardless, there was talk about giving plantations to slaves, but it ended up with 40 stupid acres and a mule. Why? — James Riley

I haven't been saying that there is no case for reparations. I do think that there is one. What I have been saying is that said case not having been made at said point in time has nothing to do with Pacifism.

I also take issue with your use of the term "pacifism". Are you saying the abolitionists, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, et al were pacifists? You should get that term out of any discussion of the actual history of the civil war (it was a war), which you are pretending to hold me to in my patently hypothetical lesson to those who would tire, invoke white privilege, or otherwise not destroy the enemy's will to fight. — James Riley

I am talking about the anti-war movement.

That's why I stipped to your use of the term; ill-chosen as it was. All your history lesson on pacifism is irrelevant to a discussion on whether a life-line should be thrown to one who is in bed with, and has failed to reject alt.right nationalist racist people who have absconded with whatever credibility might have existed in conservative economic or social positions. — James Riley

We have been talking at cross paths. I was reading into your writing and not thinking of it within its context. I am at fault for this confusion.

As it concerns NOS4A2, what I am saying is that it is just nihilistic to continue to have a go at him. We learn nothing from it and it is just distracting. Had he done something like threaten Black Lives Matter protesters with an AR-15, I wouldn't defend him. What I am saying is that people have had kind of an extensive go at him here when all he has done is derail this thread. The threads on the presidency go on forever and often get derailed, anyways.

I don't know, despite that ToothyMaw seems to have thought that Antifa was going to invade the suburbs was bona fide news in the wayback when Trump was in office, I do kind of feel like a university-level education ought not to be requisite for someone to voice their opinion on the internet.

Regardless as to things like whether reparations could have been given following the end of the American Civil War or whether slavery could have been outlawed following the end of the American Revolution, what seems extraordinarily unlikely, to me, is that there were concrete plans for reparations being made that were abandoned in the name of maintaining peace between the North and South. You have made a highly speculative historical argument concerning the peace process at the end of the Civil War in order to slander an ethos that didn't really begin to take hold until the First World War and didn't become popularized until the Vietnam War. It's out of keeping with any historical reality. Though I am sure that the concept of reparations has existed in some way, shape, form, or another for as long as there has been an abolition movement, I also don't think that it came to be understood as it has until sometime in the Twentieth Century. If we are to look at history in chronological order, your synopsis of events contains some evident anachronisms.

The only thing that most Pacifists are in danger of is being ineffective. Pacifism came to be slandered as being somehow colonial or white supremacist sometime in the late 1960s in any number of attempts on the part of any number of political factions vying for power within the protest movement as a whole. The sum total of bosh that this has culminated in is contained within the Anarchist text, How Nonviolence Protects the State, an exemplary exercise in sloganeering, and repeatedly reiterated in the form of the "diversity of tactics" by the likes of Crimethinc. Though Malcom X's original theoretical strategy can be interpreted as technically precluding strict nonviolence, the text was actually written in a call for a broad-based collaboration of the protest movement as a whole.

Though I am sure that members of Students for a Democratic Society were not wholly absolved of every form of prejudice, it does seem implausible to me that they could meaningfully be compared to actual imperialists. I am suggesting that they were characterized as such so that quote unquote revolutionaries could conscript people into whatever cult it was that they were in the process of creating.

Pacifism, for whatever reason, is wildly unpopular in Anarchist circles these days, though, and, so, I am sure that you will assume that I am just a Liberal, which isn't actually true, but I don't take offense to.

While I am willing to concede that you have given a well articulated and reasoned defense of your having insulted NOS4A2 as such, to my limited experience, in the three or four threads that he has commented on, though he has made a conscious attempt to derail them so as to issue a particular set of right-wing points, which I found to be fairly manageable, he was not so distracting that I was not capable of continuing the conversation otherwise. On, at least, one occasion, I was even capable of engaging with him like a fairly normal human being. With this in mind, I am willing to put to question as to whether or not he has warranted the animosity expressed towards him on this forum.


Surely Pacifism is why racism persists in America to this very day.

Okay, so, perhaps I shouldn't have made the claim that you are insane.

What I am saying is that tim wood just compared you to a stray dog that has pissed on his living room carpet, which I imagine to be fairly dehumanizing. Though he does seem to be of a temperament that leads him to say such things on occasion, in your case, that he does seems to be fairly well received, if not encouraged or even celebrated. Given such circumstances, I would've abandoned Trumpism or left The Philosophy Forum by now. Were I to be a Trump supporter, the latter would probably be more likely.

Being said, there does seem to be a desire for you to remain here and to be fairly contrarian so as to inspired a certain repartee, and, so, perhaps, albeit distorted, there is a kind of symbiosis that I just haven't picked up on?

Who have I called a racist? I'm saying that the Right bemoans terms like "woke", all the while relying upon other thought-terminating clichés, thus a double-standard.

Well, okay, then, but I am saying that, as an insane person, you are probably somehow insane as well. I can't rationalize as to why a person would do this otherwise.

It is as suspected. You wouldn't get it. It's nothing for or against you, as you'd have to have fucked up your life in a particular way in order to get it, but you just wouldn't get it. As much of a satire on extolling the virtues of cowardice as it is, it's also kind of a joke about how he should just take his advice. I can explain it to you, but you won't get it. People who say things like that tend to be kind of reckless, and, so, perhaps you'll get it someday? You'll laugh when you do.

There's a scene in the filmed version of Catch-22 where Nately, who is played by Art Garfunkel recites a variation of that that Zapata quote to an old opportunist Italian. The Italian responds, "You have it backwards. It is better to live on your feet than it is to die on your knees.". I've always thought that that was a very clever scene. I don't think that you'd get it, though.

Okay, but what's the point of continuing to have a go at NOS4A2 when he is probably insane and suffering from the delusion that he enjoys that this thread, which has outlived the Trump presidency, has come to revolve around more or less just everyone else here insulting him? He is not a challenging political opponent, which means that carrying on like this doesn't offer any of us a greater understanding of the world or the perspectives of those within it. It seems like the patrons of this forum just let themselves be bothered by him, when they know that he is just kind of intentionally being contrary, often escalating in a succession of vitriol. The whole thing just smacks of Nihilism.

Besides, letting things continue as such will have the effect of reminding me a period of American history that I would just as soon forget sooner rather than later.

To be honest, I find your approach to be so idiosyncratic and anachronistic to not really make much sense. — hwyl

It is both of those things, but you can make sense of it all if you do read and think about what I post.

And your interpretation of the Spartakists and Marxism-Leninism seems bizarrely lenient and accepting. — hwyl

My interpretation of Marxism-Leninism is critical to a point of vigilance. I have always assumed that the Spartacists were council communists, as Rosa Luxemburg was one.

What I focus on is simply violence, systematic state terror - that's where I find that Stalinism and Nazism are virtually indistinguishable. — hwyl

For someone with such an idealistic inclination towards the freedom from coercion, you sure have spent a lot of time here defending a clandestine arrangement with a state within a state. I consider for myself to be an idealist and think that you should reflect upon that.

I appreciate your historical knowledge but to my mind you expect totally unreasonable things from actual contempories based on much later events. — hwyl

What I have been saying is that, given what we know now, we can only regard the Ebert-Groener Pact as having been a mistake. Personally, I am not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt within the context of which the deal was made, as I think that he ought to have known better than to trust someone like Wilhelm Groener at the time. That, however, is a matter of debate.

Anyways, very interesting discussion! — hwyl

I feel like we've been at this for long enough as well. I have only been so adamant because of that I don't think that history of the Weimar Republic is the sort of thing play partisan politics with. Being said, I have gone on with surfeit censure and to an excess of length, and, so, apologize for that. 'Til we meet again!

In order for me to have made an "apologia" for the Spartacists, they would have be guilty of something. You have only speculated upon that they could have taken power in Germany and that their doing so would've turned out like Bolshevik rule in the former Soviet Union.

I am not quite so sure that you have depicted the events leading up to the revolt well, but that is neither here nor there. I have said that I don't think that the Spartacists had a right to boycott the elections, but that I may have felt sympathetic towards them after they were put down by the Freikorps. I later, though there is no reason for me to have been brought to do so, clarified that, because of that Rosa Luxemburg was one of their leaders, I may have mixed up the general sentiment of the Spartacists with what she explicitly declared.

Though I have no qualms with the utilization of the term, "totalitarianism", which does connote a vague comparison between the Third Reich and the former Soviet Union, I think that your invocation of such theories in what obviously is tacit attack against my person serves only to entangle all too serious of a political concept within your personal propagation of a rather closed-minded interpretation of Social Democracy.

I do understand that I have adopted a near unilateral interpretation of this event, but I have only done so because I just simply think that it is self-evident that it is correct. There is one causal link on the chain of events between the Ebert-Groener Pact and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Friedrich Ebert established a pact with Wilhelm Groener in order to put down the January Uprising. It was contingent upon their agreement that the German military retain its status as a state within a state. Wilhelm Groener, who later came to be the de facto leader of the German military, was the mentor of Kurt von Schleicher. He, though various machinations, effectively engineered the decline of the Weimar Republic in an attempt to first ally himself with and then blackmail the Nazi Party. He and Groener collaborated in various ploys before he betrayed him. The military retaining the status that it did was what allowed for all of this to happen. Because of the catastrophic consequences of the decline of the Weimar Republic, namely the establishment of the Third Reich, in retrospect, the pact can only be considered as a mistake. You can debate the degree of culpability that Ebert had if you like, but to claim otherwise is just simply to rewrite history.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

Of the paper, you had levelled the charge as if it were akin to Lenin's ban on the press leading up to and during the Russian Civil War. What I was suggesting is that, by that the paper openly called for the murder of KPD members that the analogy didn't quite hold up.

Clearly it was rational. I have not disputed that. I'm saying that it was a strategic mistake, which I don't think can be denied, aside from that it was unethical.

It may have been you or someone else in this thread, but someone had said that they weren't clairvoyants in defense of the SPD, which may free them from the charge of proto-Fascism, but doesn't wholly absolve them of having allied themselves with a faction that they knew operated as a state within a state.

I, apparently, haven't looked too far into this as I just found this on the Wikipedia page for the uprising:

"Rosa Luxemburg drew up her founding programme and presented it on 31 December 1918. In this programme, she pointed out that the communists could never take power without the clear support of the majority of the people. On 1 January she again demanded that the KPD participate in the planned elections, but she was outvoted. The majority hoped to gain power by continued agitation in the factories and by "pressure from the streets"."

I have always associated the Spartacists with Luxemburg, whom I do hold in a certain regard, and, so, have been, in part, defending them by that account. She, apparently, even later came out against the revolt.

There's this as well:

"On 8 January, the KPD resigned from the Revolutionary Committee after USPD representatives invited Ebert for talks. While these talks were taking place, the workers discovered a flyer published by Vorwärts entitled "Die Stunde der Abrechnung naht!" (The hour of reckoning is coming soon!) and about the Freikorps (anti-Communist paramilitary organizations) being hired to suppress the workers. Ebert had ordered his defense minister, Gustav Noske, to do so on 6 January. When the talks broke off, the Spartacist League then called on its members to engage in armed combat."

I'm sure that the Spartacists would've used the talks to levy for power to be given to their councils, but, it does seem like some diplomatic options were available to the SPD. In the general course of the debate in this thread, it has been taken, by that I have been critical of what I have rediscovered was the Ebert-Groener Pact for a tacit support of nearly every aspect of the KPD, which is indicative, to me, of that the people engaged in it are only interested presenting the SPD as having been somehow infallible by characterizing any claims to the contrary by nascent Marxist-Leninist dogmatism. Outside of the historically tennous field of Political Philosophy and within that of History, I think that it's fairly well understood that the alliance that the SPD forged with German military officials led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and was, therefore, a mistake, depending upon a person's political proclivities, to varying degrees of culpability. What seems to be a matter of debate is of the character of Friedrich Ebert. I am suggesting that he must have known that the military officials whom he allied himself with were just simply proto-Fascist and that he shouldn't be viewed favorably, which you can debate if you like. What doesn't seem debatable to me is as to whether or not effectively granting the person who engineered the decline of the Weimar Republic was a mistake, as it clearly was.

I don't really want to keep on like this, but I just don't think that you've put enough thought into this, as I have just done so, myself.

The first one-hundred and forty-five pages of this thread are just a relatively normal conversation about Donald Trump that you would expect from a philosophy forum. The last four-hundred and forty-five pages are just NOS4A2 trying to convince a single other person here to support Donald Trump. I don't think that I've ever participated within a thread for more than five to ten pages. By that he has done that, I do think that it is probable that he is insane. Carrying on like this seems likely to exasperate that, rather than alleviate it in any way, aside from that I think that he's the sort of person who believes that he likes to feed off of negative energy. Why give him the floor in that sense?

I haven't followed this too closely, but, to my estimation, though his position is what it is, he hasn't said anything that is too damaging. Though I haven't read all of his comments, as he hasn't been banned from the forum, I do assume for this to be true.

A person doesn't subject themselves to two years of psychological abuse on an online forum without something else going wrong with their life or mind. Even upon refusing to let go of Trumpism after Donald Trump was impeached twice, it doesn't seem like people should level attacks at such a person.

This is, perhaps, too evocative of an example, but, in high school, the people that this sort of thing would happen to would develop extraordinary complexes over later being compared to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. As people who, at least, offer the pretense of being mature intelligent adults, I do think that we ought to be above the kind of conduct you would see from certain jocks who are avoiding coming to the realization that they have just taken things too far.

Furthermore, I don't think that the collective revelry that comes with the popular spectacle of taking shots at easy targets, from any political perspective, gets anyone anywhere. It can be fine to mock people to a certain extent, but, as he is clearly only so well versed in political philosophy, I can't help but compare this to an experience that I had in Catholic grade school where a group of fairly athletic boys had organizing boxing matches during recess that were kind of just sanctioned beatings of this kid who never could seem to repair his glasses.

What I am saying is that NOS4A2 is probably insane. A symptom of this is that he has devoted the past two years of his life to debating Trumpism in this thread. While we don't have to give any ground to Trumpism so as to be nice to NOS4A2, because he is insane, we should stop making fun of him. Even though there is a certain humor to this post, I'm not being wholly facetious and am sincerely trying to point this out.

I don't understand why you, as one of the mods, are so dead set on keeping this going.

There's not really a way to explain this without just kind of laying it out there, but, were seeing a psychologist a panecea for any and/or all psychological plights, it kind of seems like it is the case, by that he has continued to engage in this debate for a grand total of 400 pages, he is the sort of person who needs to see a psychologist. In the interest of not having a detrimental impact upon such a person's psyche, I am suggesting that we should just this go now. He's been at it for, at least, two years.

I don't know. I can't imagine that reading 400 pages of personal and political insults and attacks can possibly have had a positive impact upon a person's psyche. While it is certainly clear that, by now, @NOS4A2 ought to have either have been willing to admit that Donald Trump was not all that great of a president or guy or, at least, give up on convincing a single other person to support him here, I do think that he is a human being and that we should stop making fun of him.

As this does fly in the face of the general deportment of The Philosophy Forum, I will speak to my own experience as to why you should agree to this.

I ultimately suffer from kind of a crippling internet addiction. I am fairly intelligent, but have no gift for prose, and it is quite common, because of my awkward phrasing, for people, particularly on online forums, to assume that I am either "pretentious" or a "pseudo-intellectual", the latter of which may be true, but, for all intensive purposes, is not relevant to this discussion. Because people mistakenly believe that chauvinist displays of intellectual superiority are clever and charming, they fear being associated with anyone who has been characterized as such above imprisonment without law, which is to say that they quite often take an instant disliking to me. Needless to say, this tends to result in that I find myself within negative social environments. I, in turn, often take great pains and efforts to alleviate the social ecology which I have found myself subject to, often to the point of absurdity, before coming, all too late, to the conclusion that I should just leave. It's not that I am addicted to using the internet per se; it's that I feel compelled to travail in the heedless attempt to improve my social standing for what I lack in self-confidence. On some level, my general plight has only been generated by what complexes I have given myself and, on some level, I do kind of suspect that society is just to blame.

Anyways, often finding myself maligned and isolated, what I can tell you about that is that in no ways does being mocked make you so inclined to take any other person's opinion, no matter how well articulated or reasoned, into any form of consideration whatsoever.

By that @NOS4A2, has consistently failed to win this uphill battle for, at least, the past two years, I would suggest that, like me, they could be somehow neurodivergent or having failed to cope with some sort of life crisis or something and, by that account, do genuinely think that we should stop making fun of them.

But when thou striketh the king, strike not to wound. — James Riley

What I am saying about @NOS4A2 is that he is just some isolated individual and, despite the geo-political bale of the Trump presidency, it ultimately doesn't reflect too well upon this forum for us to have mocked him for two entire years. It's also just simply the case that ignoring his comments in this thread is the only thing that can make it so that we just don't have to pay attention to them anymore.

I've just noticed that they entered this debate, at least, two years ago around page 144 and have consistently commented within this thread since. There's something to be said for perseverance, I guess.

Though I, myself, have just done this, I do kind of feel like we ought to extend a certain degree of sympathy to @NOS4A2, as they have been repeatedly cynically and savagely mocked by more or less the entire forum for kind of an extensive period of time. Granted, you would think that they would've given up on this by now, but, still, I do genuinely feel kind of bad for them.

@James Riley I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but @NOS4A2 has completely ignored that there are 545 pages of people criticizing the Trump presidency here and, for whatever reason, decided to use this thread in order to convert the members of The Philosophy Forum to Trumpism. Upon enjoying reading Leszek Kołakowski's My Correct Views on Everything, I came to a certain realization about Politics, being that, though I have no intention of conceding to the American Right, I would actually prefer not to just simply habitually ignore everything that any person of any right-wing political philosophy either says or does entirely. I have been beginning to lament this life decision, however, as they seem to have taken that, in good faith, I have decided to take totalitarianism seriously as an invitation to recruit me as a Trump supporter.

Being said, I feel kind of bad for NOS4A2, as, though every new user of this forum has defeated them in a debate within this thread can be fairly entertaining for the other users here, I'd bet that this has somehow left them lacking in self-confidence, a complex that more or less every supporter of Trump must have on account of just how readily apparent it has been that he may have been the worst president in United States history.

To my experience, it's kind of a habit of philosophers on online forums to claim that arguments are somehow fallacious in general. This, I suspect, relates to a preference for Logic within philosophical argumentation, which only contextually is apt within certain debates.

For instance, an argumentum ad passiones, or "appeal to emotion", may not belong in a debate about the propositional functions used in Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting", but may not be fallacious in one about something like the systemic elimination of people who have been classified as being "insane".

That aside, there are so many fallacies that I think that it'd difficult for a person to conceptualize an argument that wasn't in violation of one of them. Wikipedia defines fallacies as "reasoning that is logically incorrect, undermines the logical validity of an argument, or is recognized as unsound." Whether or not an argument is logically valid doesn't always tell you as to whether or not it can be considered to be good. I've only taken an introductory Logic course, but, to my understanding, validity merely denotes that there is no possible world where the premises of an argument are considered as true and the conclusion false. It only means that the conclusion follows from the premises. It seems as if this can be the sole determinant of the quality of an argument when general discourse is often too complex for straightforward Logical paradigms to be meaningfully applied. It would be absurd for a person to critique as a speech by Elie Wiesel by suggesting that it does not necessarily follow from either his appeal to human compassion or characterization of the Holocaust as having been catastrophic that genocide is not permissible. You will, however, see people claim that this or that argument is somehow fallacious online on a nearly daily basis.

Addendum: To expostulate upon said example, let us assume that the premises, that human beings should compassionate and the Holocaust was catastrophic, are true, which I should hope would be a safe assumption to make. Within the realm of High Fantasy, it is often the case that the merciless slaughter of entire races, such as orcs, is not only acceptable, but even considered to be noble, which, to me, is indicative of a certain lack of ethical consideration within High Fantasy, but, according to the basic rules of Logic, could be cited as evidence that a speech by Elie Wiesel is fallacious, as there is a possible world where the premises are true and the conclusion false, thereby rendering it to be invalid. I, here, am making a reducto ad absurdum, which, within certain Logical theories or Buddhist methodology isn't always considered as a fallacy, but, were anyone to bring this up in a passing conversation about a speech by Elie Wiesel, people would generally assume that they have made an extraordinary lapse of reason, if not that they were somehow nefarious, and rightfully so. Despite this, within a variegated set of online conversations where Logical reasoning is only so apt, this Wikipedia page seems to be the sole reference as to who it is that is considered to be correct.

The utilization of the term, "woke", is just a way for anti-racist activists to popularize the Black Lives Mater Movement on social media platforms, like Twitter. Though ultimately a publicity initiative, it seems extraordinarily doubtful to me that it could, at all, result in a dystopic society that you could find in science fiction.

The Right, particularly the alt-Right, seems to be so inclined to excessively criticize any utilization of a popular idiom or ethos on the part of the Left, despite, themselves being completely reliant upon the proliferation of thought-terminating clichés.

While I am willing to admit that there are occasions where the invocation of things like "white privilege" in activist circles can occasionally effectuate the internal policing of the community, the relentless examples that the Right attempts to make out of such instances is nothing but ironically, as this is, perhaps, their favorite talking point, indicative of a complete and total double standard.

I don't know that that comes off quite right, and, so, will make another attempt to explain this.

I am a vegetarian. I used to eat bivalves because I had reasoned that, because they didn't have brains, they didn't have consciousness. I, later, came across a piece by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals about bivalves, explaining that they were capable of feeling pain. I, then, reasoned that being capable of feeling pain was a form of perception and that perception necessitates consciousness and stopped eating bivalves.

At this point in my life, I remembered getting into a debate with a friend of mine about abortion and vegetarianism. Because I was not well-versed in debate at this point in my life, he was capable of somehow walling me into defending an eco-Fascist pro-life position, which, I think, resulted in my just shouting at him in terminal frustration. He has kind of a knack for debate, but is also kind of one of those left-wing Liberals who, in any given conversation, has kind of a habit shifting the focus of the debate so as to somehow prove that the other party is lock, step, in line with the American Right.

Anyways, upon reflecting upon this, I came to suspect that it was kind of absurd for Feminists to attempt to prove to people who primarily are Christians that consciousness begins with something like the development of the cerebral cortex. It's absurd because it just shouldn't at all be requisite, but also because I just don't think that it can be done. I've never even taken an anatomy class, but I would assume that an embryo is somehow capable of responding to stimuli and that it probably has some degree of sentience before fully developing a cerebral cortex.

I later, came to wonder as, when there ought to be a wholly uncontroversial and incontrovertible assessment of the general plight that outlawing abortion just simply would incur, aside from the very obvious arguments there are to make in regards to a woman's autonomy, livelihood, and quality of life, to why it was that this sort of thing had become the entire focal point of the debate upon abortion. What I came to suspect is that pro-life advocates have intentionally led pro-choice advocates into what is a nebulous philosophical domain of qualifying life with which there is no prohibition upon eliminating as inextricably bound to consciousness so as to later slander them as being some sort of Eugenicists.

Perhaps, in some highly qualified philosophical sense, a person could prove that life can be ethically qualified as such and that some highly specified form of Eugenics is permissible. Within the general discourse, however, this would take such an extraordinary degree of abstraction and reasoning that, for any old person watching the debate on television, it'd be far too easy for the other party to just simply insinuate that they were somehow advocating for the systemic elimination of entire sectors of the global population. That the debate has culminated as such, I think, has been entirely intentional.

Though technically non-binary, I do identify as being male and am of the opinion that men only really have a place in the Feminist movement as allies, and, so, I should hope that it doesn't seem like I am making an attempt to secure any agency over the movement, but, as a bit of advice, I think that Feminists would be much more successful by relying upon the tried and true arguments that they do have to make for the legalization of abortion and just simply affirming and developing their basic principles than they would be in the general course that the debate has taken in attempting to make rather odd philosophical qualifications of life and to attempt to justify some highly specified form of Eugenics, as they have only been brought to do so so that pro-life advocates can continue to slander them.

To summarize, pro-choice advocates should not agree to the terms of debate as such, as pro-life advocates have not, in good faith, brought them into a conversation about the ethical consequences of family planning and are merely making an attempt to slander them as advocating for the systemic elimination of entire sectors of the population. The tried and true arguments in favor of the legalization of abortion and fundamental Feminist principles make for much better arguments than the rather abstract set of rationalizations and justifications for the near biopolitical initiative that pro-life advocates have led them to defend. I have included the anecdote about the argument with my friend to draw a parallel to what has happened in the course of this debate, and, though I claim no agency over the Feminist movement, as I generally identify as being male, will contend that this is just good advice. That is all.

I knew that this thread would go this way, but do feel like things would go better for everyone were they willing to entertain that, from a philosophical standpoint, there's probably not a determinate set of conditions to be met as to qualify something as living, conscious, or of such qualified life that precludes its elimination, all the while accepting that a woman's choice is her own and that choosing not to have a child is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. I understand that there exists the perceived need to specify just when it is that an embryo develops consciousness from a scientific standpoint, which I don't even think is possible, because of the the pro-life argument that "life begins at conception", which, in determining qualified life from a purely philosophical perspective, I think would actually be a less nebulous position to take, has the effect of slandering the pro-choice movement as being "murderous", if not a form of Eugenics.

I don't have a uterus, and, so, even I am of the opinion that I don't really have a say in this debate, but it'd seem to me to be the case that Feminists would be better off not trying to refute Christians with science, occasionally backpedaling oddly nebulous philosophical qualifications of either life or consciousness, and just simply relying upon the strength of their argument from a societal standpoint.

Things like the basic claim that outlawing abortion does not prevent it from happening, but just makes it unsafe, to me, seems to have gained them considerably more ground than attempting to navigate their way through the rather elaborate set of philosophical arguments and rationalizations for Eugenics that the other party has only brought them into so as to make this debate go on forever.

After reading Bommi Baumann's How It All Began, I came to realize that kind of lot of people that I had met in the Anarchist movement were fairly similar. They weren't terrorists; I could just relate he and they fairly easily. The ultra-Left is kind of just like the Anarchist movement in that everything that people suspect about it is just kind of simultaneously true. They have this extraordinary gift for political critique and poetry, despite that the caricature of them being a rather cultish adventurous elite that hasn't put more thought into engaging in political terrorism than vapid contention that it would be the coolest thing that they could possibly do. Actual terrorists among such sets are extraordinarily rare, though.

I also once tried to apply an odd kind of liberation theology to some sort of extremely left-wing ethos. I think that I had reasoned that the Holy Bible was a metaphor for the creation of society that was to culminate in the common liberation of all of humanity. It made for some pretty far out reasoning.

I mostly just wanted to suggest that people just shouldn't get lost in whatever their general ethos is, though. I never would've hatched that conspiracy were it not requisite to justify a theoretical far-Left of my own invention. It doesn't just occur within political extremes, despite their being the most cited examples of it; it's just kind of a generalized cult phenomenon that, to my experience, was born out of isolation. I feel like the rule of Reddit to "be a human" is good advice that not enough people take.

The “third camp” should reject statism, collectivism, totalitarianism, and embrace freedom. Only then could they resist using human beings as the brick and mortar of their projects. Unfortunately this means their vision must come about voluntarily. — NOS4A2

My interpretation of what is invoked by "statism" and "collectivism" is more or less anagolous to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, but I think that you mean something else by it. You can feel free to elaborate upon this if you like, though, despite that I have primarily spoken of Communism, the invocation of the third camp would suggest to move away from the meta-narrative of the West as the triumph of Liberal democracy as well.