At a certain point, you have to ask: Is a slightly more sophisticated version of a COD player calling everyone else a fag really where I want to stake my claim? — csalisbury

It might be. Some insults are clever because they cut so deep, toward subconscious inadequacies people have. There is no limit to how mad you can potentially make a complacent person.

With respect to Trump, here is the gist as I see it. There are roughly two sorts of people, who have different reactions to the following video:



One sort will becomes more sympathetic to Trump after seeing it, the other sort will be horrified. This was intended as a video critical of Trump – but it just doesn't work. Trump is funnier than the creator, and arranging why he is funny in artful sequence only emphasizes that.

You have to have some sense of humor to see Trump as worth a vote. People will respond and say that when it comes to their safety, etc. they can't afford to find things funny, because their lives are at risk. But then, I think this is grandstanding and crocodile tears. Because again, when complacent you lack a sense of humor.

Another golden age r9k production.



I used to think that the humor was an endless spiral, and that maybe there was a sort of ethical duty to remain committed to it, which precluded ever adopting a 'serious' ideology. The people who stick too hard to the alt-right have found their serious ideology, and so it can make the humor fade, because they won't suffer a joke to the thing that they now take seriously. I don't know if I feel that way anymore, and I think I would adopt an ideology if it was something worthwhile, even at the risk of not seeing the funny as clearly anymore.

Also, once something becomes mainstream, the population becomes composed of people who don't have the years of subtle in-group training baked into their experience. So when you see a 14 year old Canadian girl or whatever talk about how she's 'red pilled' and wants immigrants to leave it's not really anything but sad.

I'll give you an example of something I found utterly hilarious. It's hard to explain out of context, and wasn't even connected to the alt-right directly, but to a sister board on 4chan, r9k, which is infamous for being a meeting place for losers (although I don't know if it still is). There was a time when people started posting fake advertisements on the board for fast food restaurants, extolling their virtues and including prices of meals and saying which were their favorites. But they were written in a way that made them sound eerily casual and conversational, but still with the hallmarks of an obvious advertisement. It was just so fucking funny, the self-deprecating undertones of understanding why a self-understanding 'loser' would be a fast food connoisseur and at the same time an unwitting advertising pawn for them, it was just perfect. And not only that, they weren't repeated, but each time it happened they were freshly rewritten. It's hard to explain exactly why it was so funny because the number of subtle factors were too high. But it was in a way also a very dark sort of humor. It's that sort of thing that I think if you aren't in pain in some way, you simply cannot produce. And people who are in power, who are complacent, are not in pain in that way. The alt-right is a wing of that style of humor, and sometimes taps into it.

I don't think Milo is alt-right. He's co-opted the label and tried to make it seem like a classical liberal thing, but the core seems to be white nationalist. It's not a realistic political ideology, nor one given my race I can participate in. But, like with the radfems, they're funny – that's a fact. Real humor comes from dark places, not from high places. Complacent people cannot be funny, which is why moderate liberal comedians who were in support of the Clinton campaign (Louis CK, Patton Oswalt, Amy Schumer, etc.) are profoundly unfunny when doing so.

Is clickhole like The Onion? I was raised in a center-left household where that sort of humor (Onion, Funny Times, Daily Show) was what we grew up on, and while I think it has its place, there's a sense in which it can't be truly, gut-bustingly funny.

Here is a dose of the respect Clinton supporters have for women.

You could, but I have some sympathy for the alt-rghters because they have a quality that others don't -- they're funny. There's something about what's funny that can't ever fail. The people who are wrong are always unfunny. I think part of it ultimately is that those who are in power can't be funny, because anything disruptive by definition hurts them. Witness the all-embracing attempt to define what satire is and isn't, and delineate when it 'punches up' versus 'punching down.' Only a profoundly unfunny person thinks of humor in this way.

So I don't think the criticism has to be on their terms, as saying 'no, I'm actually smarter than you.' The point is to take it away from a battle of intelligence, which is really not about intelligence anyway, but a surrogate for class, and ultimately to deny the premises on which they predicate their worldview, as a product that you're not interested in buying.

I would be happy never to have to hear an undergraduate open their mouth again, to be honest -- what's in that video is not, from my experience, in any way atypical. And I just can't stand when someone uses a word you can tell isn't part of their native vocabulary like that, and signals 'someone told me to use this word in this situation.'

What I am telling you is that if you believe the picture of what happened that you just outlined, you are delusional. It may be due to insularity of news source, I don't know. But to say that Clinton's criticisms of Trump were policy-oriented is totally insane. Clinton's campaign thrived on a number of fears and divisive rhetoric, including purposefully calling on and inflaming bad race relations (with the not-so-subtle implication that a huge number of Americans were crypto-white-supremacists), and abusing insults like 'misogynistic' so badly that it's a wonder if they will have any meaning over the next few years. It also relied on a massive amount of really bizarre neo-Cold War rhetoric and fantasies about Russia, with a disturbing pro-war message beneath it. What can a person call all of this, if not fear and hate?

In what sense was Trump's campaign more fueled by fear, hatred, 'the other,' anger, and doubt than Clinton's? This is what I mean about being delusional. You simply can't afford it anymore. Look at what actually happened, not what you wished would have happened because it comforts your world-view.

To emphasize the point about being out of touch with reality, the reactions to the people who were watching the election and not pleased with the results around me was not, 'oh no, this is happening,' but 'I can't believe this is happening' or 'How is this happening' or 'Please tell me this isn't happening.'

There is an important difference between these reactions.

It's the same with 'working white class people voting against their own interests.' As soon as the tides turn, it's always 'I can't believe these rednecks' [totally not a racial slur btw] have votes that count as much as mine.' And don't even get me started on Uncle Tomming.



Universities are heinous.

By and large, the delusion does run that deep. Liberals have a serious problem with conceiving of minorities as people with opinions. And I say this because as of now liberalism is still a fundamentally white worldview with deep historical ties to racial guilt and messiah complexes.

Another thing that bothers me is that my social circle (what little there is) is mostly academics, and academics have a smokescreen in front of them because they are largely cosmopolitan and rootless, having few ties to the country and/or state in which they work, either because they are originally foreigners, and almost always were at least born somewhere else entirely in the country, and even if they did grow up in the area know in the back of their minds that their work can and will taken them anywhere in the western world. Most people do not live like this. They do not go to conferences in Barcelona. They do not work in a discipline that is spread across several prestigious institutions none of which are in driving distance of each other. Their fortunes rise and fall with the land they live in, and they are tied to that land in a way academics are not. They do not have the luxury of making every election about hypersensitive, hysterical moralizing and tertiary social issues largely orthogonal to the presidency. Most people care about where they live more than academics do. The American heartland will never share academia's values, and that does not make them 'stupid' (code for 'poor').

They weren't predicting the popular vote. They were predicting the election.

Yet what they saw on TV was literally just him talking. And then they went to his rallies and saw him in person.

The people who can't distinguish between media and reality are those who took anything CNN, Fox, or MSNBC said seriously for a second.

I see it the opposite. The television told us all one thing, and reality smashed it.

I am not enthusiastic about a Trump win but I don't see it as a sign of the apocalypse. I hope that above all else, every pollster, media station, and complacent liberal who is 'surprised' right now takes a long hard look at themselves, and realizes 'I am completely out of touch with reality, with my country, and the desires of the people, and have little conception of the way that people think or what they value.'

That's the lesson to be learned from this. There are a lot of people who need to let sink in just how wrong they were. The media stations are all reporting that nobody saw it coming.' Yes, they did. You didn't see it coming. Because you are deeply, deeply deluded and incompetent.

Home stretch! How is everyone feeling! I'm sorry this has been dead for several days – my mental effort has been taken up elsewhere. We're on the final chapter, then it's on back to the introduction. Let me know if anyone wants to volunteer to summarize again, if not, I'll do it (though it may take me a bit).

The first part of this chapter seems super dumb. Any thoughts on that?

Go for it. But this chapter is....I dunno.

Husserl begins to speak at some point of sedimentation, whereby a transcendental ego is affected by a past and starts to take on a personal 'style' of constitution.

Wooooooooww, holy shit

The crux is this: can you be introduced to a piece of music midstream and have it seem from your perspective that you had been listening all along? If so, then retention loses some of its plausibility, since just like with the future it seems this experiential conditioning from past to present doesn't rely on retaining the notes in perception, since ex hypothesi you did not perceive the other past notes (but the effect was the same). In other words, we don't know whether the past notes are important for the reason Husserl says, or if just because independently they condition your resent perception in certain ways, regardless of our account of perception.

It may be that Husserl's notion of retention is really supposed to be razor's-edge, just a very bare retentional shade that defines any perception no matter how transient (and so in a weird way, perception never 'starts').

But my familiarity can't have a bearing on retention. Unless I've horribly misunderstood, retention cannot extend years, or even hours, into 'the past.' We would either have a secondary memory here (recollection), or more plausibly, a sort of experiential conditioning (sedimentation, maybe) that itself could possibly be accomplished without having to have any perceptual retention attached to it.

It seems implausible to me. It's easy to imagine hearing a note out of the blue, but, again, a dominant is relational. There is no more a dominant without a tonic then there is an uncle without a niece or nephew. To hear a dominant is to hear the tension between itself and the tonic. So, even if we didn't actually perceive a tonic before, we'd have to hear to the dominant as if we had - and how would one characterize this as if? — csalisbury

I guess it depend son what you think of Omphalos hypotheses. Put it this way – if I'm familiar with a piece, and I hear a note or chord from the middle, might my previous conditioning not influence me to hear the pitch as influence by something prior, even though I cannot be retaining the prior pitch because ex hypothesi I have not actually heard it (this time)? I know if my case there are songs that have such deep resonances with me that hearing jus a moment from them allows me to hear them in the context of what came before, but I cannot be retaining this, since I haven't heard anything to be retained.

I think the case is more plausible for retention. And that is what Derrida specifically criticizes (again, without comment on why protention ought to be ignored), so I don't know if beating up on protention specifically will help that much. However I agree that there is something weird about this, I would just diagnose it differently from Derrida: Husserl meant what he said, but his linearizing of time was still partly naturalistic, and the 'names' he was looking for had to do with ethical qualities his philosophy wasn't attuned to.

I agree, but don't think the various avenues you tend to offer (or really that Henry does, ultimately) are an interesting antidote for these woes. To my mind the world is a lost cause and has little of value, and while there may be some divine spark that could in some conceivable sense be nourished, in practice that is not going to happen, and studying for what reasons humanity is miserable just has merit as an intellectual curiosity, and not under the delusion that it will at some point be less miserable. (And I think philosophy, including continental philosophy, is generally not only itself miserable, but a positive collaborator in and agitator of that misery). But you really should read Barbarism, because nobody tells the truth quite like Henry.

You should read that book. It's not very rigorous, it's just him telling it like it is for pages and pages straight. A certain kind of mind will find it extremely cathartic – it's less a monograph and more an uninterrupted rant.

That doesn't seem like a terrible result. There's even a good case to be made that James and Nietzsche are at least proto-pomo, which fits with this characterization.

I think this is a wrong way to look at protention though. It's not that we see or missee a future that is there - it's that we're incessantly projecting into the future. I don't think there's anything mystical about this. — csalisbury

If we're not seeing the future, then protention is not, contrary to Husserl's claims, preception. We can of course project into the future without seeing it in any sense. This is ordinarily how we think about these things, and is not what Husserl is claiming, so far as I see it.

To make clear just how weird this is, say you're listening to a piece of music you've never heard before. You have certain expectations, perhaps, based on genre stereotypes and certain biologically or culturally ingrained notions of how music ought to proceed, involving tonality and resolution, rhythm, and so on. Let's say that you're broadly correct about which direction the piece will go: it doesn't pull a fast one on you so hard that you think 'what the hell just happened?' What is the best way to describe this situation? Did you perceive the piece as it approached, in the way you might see a truck approaching? That is, is it in virtue of the perceptible qualities of the piece that you understood what course it would take? It seems not – for you would have the same expectations regardless of whether the piece actually went that way, making the qualities of the piece itself irrelevant to your expectations and protentions. But if protention is a matter of perception, it must have been in virtue of perceiving the piece that this was possible.

It's hard to answer this because I don't see the difference between the two alternatives. A note is not dominant in-and-of-itself, but only by relation to the tonic. The idea of tonic-colored dominant which doesn't rely on a recently heard tonic is a contradiction in terms. — csalisbury

Must I retain a tonic in order to perceive the dominant as tonic-flavored? Is it so implausible, for example, that I might be stimulated to hear a tonic-flavored dominant out of the blue, without actually having perceived a tonic beforehand? In such a way that I could not phenomenologically distinguish between these? If so, it seems implausible to say that I experience the dominant in relation to the tonic in virtue of literally retaining the tonic in perception, rather than there just being facts about my present perception that are influenced by immediately preceding perceptions.

But take that music example. If we're listening to a piece that began with the tonic, and has moved on to the dominant - in what sense is the tonic 'there'? Certainly it's not there as a note we're presently hearing. But do we still 'hear' it as past? I don't think we do. What we hear is the dominant as colored by the tonic, whose sounding we've retained. So if it's 'there,' the tonic, it's there in a very strange way. But you seem to be using 'there' in a typical, (tho, yes, non-temporal) way as in this quote, from above: — csalisbury

How does retaining the sound of a past tonic describe the hearing any more than the present perception of a tonic-colored dominant? If I satiate my taste buds with sweetness, so that what I taste next isn't as vivacious insofar as how sweet it is, am I not just tasting less sweetness, and even though this is conditioned by a prior tasting of sweetness, is there any way in which I am 'retaining' a past sweet experience (which must mean, I suppose, that I am in some way 'still' tasting it, although with some past-modification?)

Are you suggesting that for protention to be a real thing, we'd have to literally see into the future as through a crystal ball or sci-fi wormhole? If that's what you mean, that seems like a deep misunderstanding, but I may not be following your point. — csalisbury

It would not be a very good crystal ball – maybe on the order of milliseconds, and unable to move where one looks, but yes. That is, being surprised or interrupted would have meant, on your account, that in the same way we missee an object, we can missee the future – look at it, but apprehend its properties wrong. It seems more natural to describe the future as something that can't be perceived, not something that we sometimes misperceive.

Insofar as Derrida's conclusions are in conflict with the principle of principles, yes it would threaten the project. But again this would turn on refusing to believe that perception could be of what is past, the grounds of which I don't understand.

The principle of principles is: all perception is a legitimizing source of cognition.

Well first, the very idea of doing something in a single moment already strikes me as viewing things through an artificial lens. Any action I can think of requires some duration for its execution. — csalisbury

But it seems to me the stretching things into a length is what's artificial. In other words you have to see the timeline as implicitly linear already to make sense of retention, in terms of the duration of an act, in terms of extension. The notion of an extended present still only fundamentally seems to make sense if you believe time is a series of now-points – adding modifications of it doesn't really change the picture. And if it's demanded of us to explain what we call time or temporality as such without resorting to 'temporal' (read: 'linear,' 'pseudo-spatial') terminology, okay, we use ethical terminology instead. 'Duration' means endurance:

late 14c., "to undergo or suffer" (especially without breaking); also "to continue in existence," from Old French endurer (12c.) "make hard, harden; bear, tolerate; keep up, maintain," from Latin indurare "make hard," in Late Latin "harden (the heart) against," from in- (see in- (2)) + durare "to harden," from durus "hard," from PIE *dru-ro-, from root *deru- "be firm, solid, steadfast"

I take that quote to be saying that Derrida considers Husserl's characterization of protention/retention as perceptive as primarily a reaction against Bretano, to say that there is a kind of memory and anticipation that is quite different then recollection and reflective expectation. But if we keep the idea of perception as involving something being 'there' we lose sight of retention/protention altogether. Thus there's some equivocation with 'perception' in Husserl's account. — csalisbury

I don't think so, unless you assume to begin with that all that can be 'there' must be temporally present. (and so Derrida's favorite pun, present-present, which while evocative is not an argument). Much of what seems to be going on here looks to me like this incredulity in the face of what Husserl actually says.

As for Hagglund, you miss the point. Hagglund doesn't simply express incredulity, — StreetlightX

I think I gave the piece you quoted a pretty fair reading and looked it over a few times. I don't find anything in it but incredulity. It may be that you're more sympathetic to the position, which causes you to infer more argumentation into it than I can see. He seems simply to be denying what Husserl asserts, that the division in the temporal structure is not itself temporal, but just insisting it must be isn't all that interesting. If there's something else in there you'd like to draw my attention to, feel free.

And maybe Husserl thought we lacked names, but so what – that doesn't mean we can't see what he's talking about (naming isn't existence), and as I said, my guess is the names are satiation and apprehension, in the ethical sense. In fact my suspicion is there's not really any such thing as protention of retention, just backformation of these ethical tangles. But then, I guess I don't think there's really anything, along the same lines. *shrug*

I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Why does Derrida first talk about protention alongside retention, then silently drop only to retention, apparently without comment or reason? I suggest it is because protention is less comprehensible.

How can I distinguish that from living purely in a present where I simply know what to do at each (the only) moment? Put another way, perhaps protention only gains plausibility as a retrojection of disappointment and tripping and so on.

Also, note the oddity that if protention is literally perceptive, this means that the future is in some sense 'there' to be seen. A disruption would have to be literally a kind of illusion, rather than a mistaken doxastic attitude, however momentary.

That is hard for me to separate from secondary anticipation, though. Sure, I expect things all the time, but I also have little memories flitting back and forth all the time, little recollections. These are not retentions, since retention has to happen automatically as a condition on perception, and not intrusively as these recollections seem to happen. I guess I can 'see' why the retentional tail is an appealing posit (even though I am skeptical of it). The protentional end is harder. Things get left behind in some sense, but I am unsure I can see the future rather than walking a razor's edge of future-oriented present competence. The more I think about it, the more I seem to live in an endless moment, more than the stretch that Husserl's extended present implies. The easiest example should be a melody, I guess (though even this is misleading because it's not as if anything is happening in a melody that isn't always supposed to be happening), especially a melody that one is familiar with. But here I feel like there are all sorts of little non-passive future intrusions of what's to come as well.

MU, I wouldn't associate the sign with protention as you have. The possibility of repetition generally, or expectation generally, is something far and above protention, which is something a little closer to home: the kind of primary expectation that comes in sort of 'seeing the future' when you watch movement, with things that are about to happen seemingly 'getting ready to happen' right before your eyes.

I think it's no question that retention is easier to understand than protention, which is why everyone focuses on retention even when protention could make the same point. I have expressed skepticism about the phenomenological reality of retention previously, but the reality of protention is even ore contentious; I am not even sure where to look for it. The Husserlian metaphor of the comet's trail is no accident: the tail of the comet may extend quite a ways backwards, but if the primal impression is the rock, there is scarcely a prenumbra 'in front of it' – very short, if there at all.