To be fair to you I do have a mild contempt for most statisms, whether it be socialist, conservative, liberal, or fascist. The only difference between them is who ought to benefit from State power, the rise of which increases in inverse proportion to social power. In my mind, until State power decreases social power will never increase, and I think that makes me more socialist than I care to admit out loud. Unfortunately I lack the brain wiring required to accept any kind of collectivism.

I wonder if since N's time the idea of the "industrialist" and "commercial magnate" has gone under the sort of makeover required to form him into a being more interesting, that a worker might follow him as obediently as a soldier would his general. There are definitely obsequious and servile workers, but then again I'm not sure the stereotype of the industrialist has been altered too much since those days.

On the other hand, and despite the atrocities of the 20th century, State prestige has only grown in accordance with its power. Petitioning the state, taking part in its elections, and casting ballots is now the only means by which we can secure any right, which the state gets to confer at its whim and fancy. State power, then, becomes the means of salvation. That's why I would argue that the replacements for the old enchantments of religion and the divine right of kings is the State.

As you know, Nietzsche is no fan of socialism. I only consider what Nietzsche previously wrote of socialists and assume it in this aphorism. He mentions “socialists and state-idolaters” in the same book, but it goes further back, for instance, in Human All Too Human. Their desire for state power is unavoidable.

Maybe I’m wrong but my reading is that Nietzsche was psychoanalyzing the socialist, criticizing how he dehumanizes the employer. The employer is unknown and uninteresting. At the same time he is a cunning, blood-sucking dog of a man, while everything else about him—his name, shape, manner, reputation—no socialist cares about. In my mind this is dehumanization.

But, in an extra little slight upon the socialist, following a tyrant into tyranny isn’t as painful, and if “the nobility of birth showed in [the employer’s] eyes and gestures, there might not be any socialism of the masses.” Perhaps this is why, historically, socialists have followed tyrants and demagogues.

As for capitalism, there is no system that does not consider the management and segregation of capital. In that sense, all economic systems are invariably capitalist, socialist or otherwise, the only difference in being who controls it, private or the State. Had socialists named it something else, like the Monopolist system, we might well have been passed it by now.

I'm not sure how this fits into your thread, but if I have strayed too far, I apologize.

Great thread. Good read.

The divine right of kings was at least more consistent than the divine right of politicians. Given its premise and the prevailing beliefs, there was perhaps good reason for the passive obedience to a king’s will, whereas for the politicians and leaders of today there is none. In the absence of the divine right of kings some philosophers supplied the legitimacy of power with newer, but just as baseless myths, like the Social Contract or the right of some majority to determine who has authority over whom. In a sense people continue to hold in fact doctrines they have rejected in name.

So it is with Nietzsche’s socialist. He is unable to legitimize the business owner’s authority as he once did the leaders of a superior kind, those militant types who hitherto governed them with force and subjection. The act of submitting voluntarily to someone who is neither superior in class or race was too foreign to him, I suppose, so the socialist runs, serf-like, to the politicians and the State.

I would say the magical forces do not manifest as economics and economy, but as politics and the State. The relationship between employee and employer rises from the Law of Necessity (in Nietzschean terms) whereas the relationship between man and state is one of unbridled superstition.

I think you guys are just mad at the guy because he exposed the extent of the propaganda you’ve been fed for years in one single segment. So you have to sift through one or two out of context texts for gossip. No matter; I’ll listen to the worst propagandist before I consider a peep from any busybody.

Sounds like hell, to me.

Oh sorry, “Centres for National Resilience”. It’s right next to the Ministry of Truth.

I agree with your general point. “Slipping back” is progress of a kind, after all. To where and to what we are progressing is never mentioned. I wager we could even progress too far, off a cliff, right back into those “primitive conditions” or something far worse.

Not sure what that means.

No, it’s the govament. Speaking of which, they just forced Americans to be prisoners in their own homes for over a year, wear masks etc, and all the 393 million guns in the nation did nothing to stop it. Australia’s Covid response was similar in strictness. What needs to happen before the guns come out? Death camps?

I’m pretty sure that if the government sent goons to an American’s house and threw them in a quarantine camp like they did to their own citizens in some Aussie states, there would be some violent standoffs. But the US has a Bill of Rights.

His measure is not whether it is from the past, but whether these conditions have become better or worse over time.

Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull‐​wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony.

All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress.

So isn’t that the past itself is bad, but that conditions were worse than now. If his conditions were to reverse he would have to say the past is worse according to his own measure.

Pinker says “We know that countries can slide back into these primitive conditions, and so we ignore the achievements of the Enlightenment at our peril.” So it’s not clear that these conditions need be consigned to the past, only to wherever the achievements of the enlightenment are gone, forgotten, or have never manifested. But it is clear he is not speaking about the past as such, only the barbarity that is often found there.

It isn’t me who is denying you your fundamental right to defend yourself.

They probably won’t invade with the US continuing to shoulder their defense burden. But should the US step aside, an unarmed populace will have to welcome their new overlords or hide in the outback.

Damned if I know why people believe in their guns more than they believe in Jesus.

Wait until someone invades Australia. Boomerangs won’t accomplish much. A defenceless populace is a servile one.

Not only are they using Ukraine as a proxy in their war with Russia, but now a scapegoat.

New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year, a step toward determining responsibility for an act of sabotage that has confounded investigators on both sides of the Atlantic for months.

U.S. officials said that they had no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.

Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say

What if he does not want help?

You’re just playing word games. Dreamlng isn’t just something that is reported after waking. It’s something experienced. It’s the occurrence of visual, auditory, tactile sense data. It’s seeing, hearing, feeling.

It’s more the absence of sense data, in so far as sense data has any meaning. Lights, sounds, touch—what is given to sense—tend to wake us from sleep.

I would sell him the alcohol because otherwise he risks descending into withdrawal, which can be painful and dangerous depending on the severity of his addiction. I’ve seen people drink Lysol or Isopropyl just to avoid the symptoms.

In my mind the best thing would be to reason with him.

If the mind is the perceiver and the idea is the perceived, and the perceiver and perceived are separate entities, how can the mind ever have knowledge of the idea if the idea is forever separate from the mind?

It cannot.

If the perceiver cannot be found in either the mind or the brain, where exactly is the perceiver?

If human perception involves all of the components I have mentioned, the perciever is invariably a human organism, nothing more nothing less. Brains, minds, and so on, cannot be shown to perceive, and so are not perceivers.

The perceiver and what is directly perceived by the perceiver must be one and the same

The perceiver and what is directly perceived by the perceiver must be one and the same

There is X, the mind, the brain, the little man and there is Y, sense data, representation, idea. X is the perceiver and Y is what is perceived.

If the mind, the brain, or the little man can perceive sense-data, representation, idea, both the perceiver and the perceived ought to be able to stand in direct relation to one another, where one perceives and the other is perceived.

But when we take a mind, a brain, or the homunculus and place it in direct relation to sense-data, representation, or idea, perception cannot be said to be occurring by any single measure. At best we have a pile of decomposing organic material, and, well, nothing else.

What I wanted to do with this thought experiment was to take the idea of a perceiver as postulated by an indirect realist, and add to it the necessary components involved in perception, so that we can finally say "Yes, X is perceiving". If it is unable to perceive, it is not a perceiver.

A brain, for example, for instance in a jar, cannot be said to be perceiving. A brain needs vast quantities of blood, and therefor requires a circulatory system, so we add it. Still, all we have is a pile of decomposing organic material. Brains need oxygen, so we add lungs. It needs energy, so we add a digestive system, a liver, kidneys. Still no perception; still just a pile of decomposing organic material. We add the spine and skeleton so at least it isn't all just lying on the floor. We add neurons, visual, olfactory and auditory organs, but it's all just hanging there as if from a hat rack. So we add a skull, muscles, tendons, and so on. At this point he might be able to perceive, but all of it would be excruciating and our perceiver would be a poor soul indeed. So we add skin, eyelids, ears, and so on. Anyways, you catch the drift.

The point is, perceivers have most if not all of the above. Therefor perceivers are not brains, minds, or homunculi.

I'm not sure social constructs are a good way to think these issues, personally, because there are members of the society that had little to no input on how they ought to be categorized. Social constructs suggest a consensus and a collaboration, and I doubt such a thing has occurred.

One can understand the self-identification with a race, though, especially in America, where these distinctions have been pounded into our heads our whole lives, even after the unspooling of the human genome has discredited them. For many it was a matter of life and death. But nowadays it's just de rigueur.

It is a fact that people identify themselves and others with this nomenclature, and no one is saying otherwise. I’m only saying people ought not to. Race is not only the root word of racism, it is the conceptual and logical grounds for it. This isn't really novel or radical thinking, either, according to a brief look.

Stereotyping and prejudice begin from social categorization—the natural cognitive process by which we place individuals into social groups.

Principles of Social Psychology 1st International Edition

There have been a number of studies, all showing that the mere perception of belonging to two distinct groups—that is, social categorization per se—is sufficient to trigger intergroup discrimination favoring the in-group. In other words, the mere awareness of the presence of an out-group is sufficient to provoke intergroup competitive or discriminatory responses on the part of the in-group.

An integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict

Therefore, ridding ourselves of these concepts is necessary, and relatively simple.

Previous studies have established that people encode the race of each individual they encounter, and do so via computational processes that appear to be both automatic and mandatory. If true, this conclusion would be important, because categorizing others by their race is a precondition for treating them differently according to race. Here we report experiments, using unobtrusive measures, showing that categorizing individuals by race is not inevitable, and supporting an alternative hypothesis: that encoding by race is instead a reversible byproduct of cognitive machinery that evolved to detect coalitional alliances. The results show that subjects encode coalitional affiliations as a normal part of person representation. More importantly, when cues of coalitional affiliation no longer track or correspond to race, subjects markedly reduce the extent to which they categorize others by race, and indeed may cease doing so entirely. Despite a lifetime's experience of race as a predictor of social alliance, less than 4 min of exposure to an alternate social world was enough to deflate the tendency to categorize by race. These results suggest that racism may be a volatile and eradicable construct that persists only so long as it is actively maintained through being linked to parallel systems of social alliance.

Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization | JSTOR

None of this entails that we need to ignore racism, its history, and the atrocities committed in its name.

I am against what they say. I would call them “social impositions” because they were born of pseudoscience and imposed upon entire peoples. Besides, the pseudo-scientific justifications for applying these labels have long been discredited.

Racial categorization predisposes one to racial bias. It’s a collectivist impulse; we end up responding to people more as members of a social group than as individual people. In so doing you’ve immediately placed them into an out-group instead of integrating them into your in-group, predisposing yourself to bias against the former and preference towards the latter. Simply changing the categories can reduce the bias.

Travelling and exposure to others would surely help, no doubt, but once you alter your social categories the effects are almost immediate.

Again I could care less about any of your propaganda. Fact is, all these investigations and conspiracy theories over the years and he has yet to be found guilty of anything, despite your assumptions of guilt. But, like a true fanatic, you double your efforts long after you have forgotten your aim.

I honestly don’t care because everything to the anti-Trump brigade is a serious matter until one looks closely. Every conspiracy theory regarding Trump, whether it was Russia collusion or his tax returns, have been massively and comically overstated, and as a result has turned justice into nonsense, journalism into a joke, politics into circuses, and the US into clown world.

It’s gotten so bad that one can adopt a contrary belief without any evidence to do so and he’ll be right most of the time.

I also said “the boundaries between both X and Y are so unclear and amorphous that it could rather be the case that X is directly perceiving X.”

How can we perceive a concept that exists only in mind if our eyes point outward, not inward? If the tree is a concept that exists only in the mind, somewhere behind the eyes, that would place the tree at the tail-end of the causal chain.

Who cares? After years of Russia collusion, Covid propaganda, Ukraine warmongering, January 6th handwringings, and all the deep-state dinner theater news outlets have spoon-fed us these past few years, I’m now supposed to give a hoot over Murdoch disagreeing with Fox News anchors about the results of an election?

Even if it was true that trees are concepts that exist only in the mind, they are at the same place in the causal chain as the rest of the perceiver, as already intimated, and so are not intermediaries between perceiver and perceived. The perceiver cannot put himself before himself on the causal chain.

I’m only trying to argue that we ought not to use racial categories and to quit thinking with our epidermis. For me the fact that people use racial categories to divide human beings doesn’t entail that races themselves are true in any way, social or otherwise.

Remember when Rupert Murdoch was supposed to be some puppet master? He cannot even control his own employees. Another conspiracy theory turned nothingburger.

Racial biases are pretty much ubiquitous. They're built into the structure of our societies and therefore into the structure of our minds. The best we can do is recognize their reality, not feed them in our behavior but analyse and resist them.

You're conflating those who recognize their biases and potential prejudices (as we all should) with racists who embrace them and act them out.

They utilize and further the same superstitions, nomenclature, and taxonomies born of pseudoscience to guide their thoughts and behaviors. It invariably leads to hasty generalizations, racial affinity, and guilt by association where none ought to exist. It creates hierarchies or pits one false category against another. In the case of praxis here it creates implicit racial biases.

So intellectually honest are you that you like to lie about what I said. But at least you were honest enough to admit your racism. So kudos for that.

Everything I say suggests something for you except what I actually suggest. I love being told what I think.

Assuming that anything “within the mind” is also within the perceiver, then one is indistinguishable from the other (so long as it is not a foreign element). The perceiver cannot stand in the way of himself and the outer world, or be his own intermediary, or placed before himself in the causal chain of perception.

I bet you do not welcome racist biases at all and that it must pain you to have them. You have my pity.

I don’t really care how you think things look because you haven’t been able to portray with any accuracy what I’ve been saying and I’ve had to correct and clarify too many times to mention. A futile exercise apparently. Have fun.

However, it has not yet been shown that the world the perceiving agent is perceiving exists within the mind or outside the mind.

You’ve inserted another element or space within the perceiver called “the world inside the mind”.

To avoid question begging and to test whether or not this is an area where a world could be perceived, that it contains a world, and that a perceiver can perceive it, I suggested in the original post that we ought to remove this element from the rest of the man like we can any other part of the man (like any organ), put it on a table beside a perceiver (like we’ve been doing with a perceiver and a tree) for the purpose of analysis.

What is on the table? Who perceives what? What part of the man is perceiver, what part of the man is perceived? Finally, is perception still occurring?

If perception is not occurring, one does not perceive the other, and neither element is perceiver or perceived.

I don’t know what you’re stating, to be honest, besides that you harbour racial biases. That’s probably the clearest thing you’ve come up with. We can leave it there.

No, a racist, because you think the taxonomy of races is as valid as the taxonomy of apples and dog breeds, and you admit you hold racial biases.