I wonder what Žizek (re: 'ideology') makes of Houellebecq ... does anyone here know? — 180 Proof

Off the top of my head, Žizek believes that Houellebecq is an "intelligent conservative" who, unlike reactionaries, does not offer a solution but is simply honest about the problems at hand.

This is peripherally related to the discussion, but I like George Carlin a lot, and I want to share two recordings of him talking about women and men because I think it is valuable to hear, and the contributors to this thread may appreciate it.

Can people change other people's extremely rooted beliefs? — Eugen

No, change my view.

that qualities and capacity often dismissed as ‘feminine’ has VALUE in relation to all of humanity. Things like patience and kindness, connection and collaboration, as well as the realisation that dominance is not what we should be striving for, either individually or collectively. — Possibility

Agreed. It would be nice to combine the good parts from both genders, remove the bad and then dispense with the concept of gender.

When answering the question "who should dominate?", perhaps the question that first needs to be answered is, why should anyone ever be dominated in the first place? — Tzeentch

:up:

End women's liberation that does not liberate women but makes being feminine taboo and forces us all to conform to the male standard. An evil plot that does not make men any better than they have been. :lol: — Athena

What do you mean by "being feminine"? I have read some feminist literature and would like to share my thoughts.

I am not a woman myself, but from what I can tell, "femininity" is a standard imposed upon women by men. It is an expectation that they be submissive, nearly child-like, listen and don't interrupt, shut up when they are interrupted, be a sex toy for the silverbacks and do all the chores that men don't want to; but also cultivate virtuous traits like patience, kind-heartedness and beauty that, if displayed in a man, would make him emasculatorily gay and ultimately strip him of any power to dominate.

My observation is that much of second-wave feminism (the scary, exhilarating kind) is populated with figures that are "anti-gender", and they seem masculine because they are taking up roles, responsibilities and personalities that are typically only associated with men. It is not that these women were trying to be masculine, but rather they were denying the reality of masculinity, and demonstrating that some of the things associated with masculinity are things that any grown-up, self-respecting human has. Becoming less feminine meant becoming more human. Not a child/doll/object, but an adult with agency.

Imagine children growing up in homes where mothers and fathers love each other and enjoy working together for the good of the family. — Athena

I'd rather just imagine people getting along and maybe living together without the need to have children.

I thought feminism was about leveling the playing field with men and not turning the tables on them. :gasp: — TheMadFool

Well, liberal "if-you-can't-beat-them-join-them" feminism might be about that, but who honestly takes them seriously?

Just because it looks exotic to you, doesn't mean its wrong. — schopenhauer1

it...it...it's CULTURE!!!

I've been thinking about this - is it that I'm usually so morose and anxious with no clear cause, which makes me feel isolated, that when everyone feels similarly, I feel more connected? — csalisbury

Yeah, I can see that. I think for myself I just prefer to work by myself, undisturbed by people. My productivity has skyrocketed, lol

Darth, what do you think of the idea of a worldwide effort try to shutdown wild animal markets to prevent spread of viruses like COVID-19? — schopenhauer1

They should be shutdown regardless.

Poor allocation of food and medical supplies/equipment could lead to the progress made in the developing world the past few decades being nullified. — I like sushi

What areas of progress do you have in mind here?

That's about what I was thinking too. Most everyone I know seems to be taking the stay at home order as an annoying inconvenience that they reluctantly semi-participate in...the bubble has not popped yet, coronavirus still has not become a real thing. Once people they know start getting sick and/or dying is when it will suddenly become much more serious.

On the positive side, as very introverted person the stay-at-home order has made my job much more comfortable and enjoyable. I'm eating healthier and exercising regularly. Obviously this is not the case for many people, especially those who have lost their jobs. Silver lining, I suppose.

Joining the conversation late so perhaps this has already been discussed; where I live there is a statewide quarantine until mid-April since last week, and I have been working from home since the week before. I suspect the stay at home order will be extended. Others I have talked to have predicted the same, but for how long seems to be up in the air. Some have said May, others June, and still other September and even November. Mid-April seems too early, but to extend it to November seems impossible to enforce and will tank the economy in ways that will ultimately hurt more people than the coronavirus itself would.

What do people on here think? When do you expect things will begin to go back to "normal"?

I hope nobody wins the nomination, but if it has to be someone, then Sanders

a few riots and a couple deaths will please everyone just fine

What should religion do for us today? — Michael Lee

GTFO

Serotonin by Houellebecq

Dune (1965) — 180 Proof

:up: one of my favorites

Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq

Approximately a year ago, I collaborated with several people of various nationalities in an effort to document the work of the Argentinian philosopher Julio Cabrera. His work focuses on what he calls "negative ethics". I have copy-pasted the section on negative ethics from Wikipedia. I think it has direct relevance to the topic at hand. Perhaps you will find it interesting:

"In his book A Critique of Affirmative Morality (A reflection on Death, Birth and the Value of Life),[4] Julio Cabrera presents his theory about the value of human existence. Human life, for Cabrera, is "structurally negative" insofar as there are negative components of life that are inevitable, constitutive and adverse: as prominent among them Cabrera cites loss, scarcity, pain, conflicts, fragility, illness, aging, discouragement and death. According to Cabrera they form the basic structure to human life, which he analyzes through what he calls naturalistic phenomenology, drawing freely from thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Cabrera has called his work an attempt to put together Schopenhauer and Heidegger, introducing a determinant judgement of the value of being into the analysis of Dasein, and putting morality above life, against Nietzsche.

Cabrera develops an ethical theory, negative ethics, that is informed by this phenomenological analysis. He argues that there has been an unwarranted prejudice in ethics against non-being, a view he calls "affirmativity". Because affirmative views take being as good, they always view things that threaten this hegemony as bad; particularly things like abstention from procreation or suicide. Cabrera criticizes affirmative ethics for asking how people should live without asking the radical question of whether people should live tout court. He argues that, because of the structural negativity of being, there is a fundamental "moral disqualification" of human beings due to the impossibility of nonharming and nonmanipulating others. Nonharming and nonmanipulating others is called by him the "Minimal Ethical Articulation" ("MEA"; previously translated into English as "Fundamental Ethical Articulation" and "FEA"). The MEA is violated by our structural "moral impediment", by the worldly discomforts – notably pain and discouragement – imposed on us that prevent us from acting ethically. Cabrera argues that an affirmative morality is a self-contradiction because it accepts the MEA and conceives a human existence that precludes the possibility of not-harming or not-manipulating others. Thus he believes that affirmative societies, through their politics, require the common suspension of the MEA to even function.

Cabrera's negative ethics is supposed to be a response to the negative structure of being, acutely aware of the morally disqualifying nature of being. Cabrera believes children are usually considered as mere aesthetic objects, are not created for their own sake but for the sake of their parents, and are thrown into a structurally negative life by the act of procreation. Procreation is, as Cabrera argues, a supreme act of manipulation, a harm and a violation of autonomy. He argues that the consistent application of normal moral concepts – like duty, virtue or respect – present in most affirmative moralities entails antinatalism. Cabrera also believes that a human being adopting negative ethics should not only abstain from procreation, but also should have a complete willingness for an ethical death, by immediate suspension of all personal projects in benefit of a political fight[5] or an altruistic suicide, when it becomes the least immoral course of action.

Cabrera's Critique is one of his most systematic defenses of negative ethics, but he has also explored the same ideas in other works, such as Projeto de Ética Negativa,[6] Ética Negativa: problemas e discussões,[7] Porque te amo, não nascerás! Nascituri te salutant[8] and Discomfort and Moral Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics and Procreation."

Positive ethics is intra-worldly, i.e. how to live.

Negative ethics is prior to the world, i.e. whether or not one should live.

Once a person exists, they have interests which include having positive experiences.

Before a person exists, they have no interest in having positive experiences.

Metaphor: once noodles are boiled, the noodles cannot become rigid again. They also taste better with spice.

One cannot have two forms of explanation. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Are you familiar with the Leibnizian notion of dual explanations, the realm of power (mechanism, e.g. "I see because I have eyes") and the realm of wisdom (teleology, e.g. "I have eyes so I can see")? These are two distinct, mutually-existing explanations, and both are useful in accounting for phenomena.

Bonus question:
What is the meaning of life? — Pfhorrest

This begs the question. Before asking what the meaning of life is, it should first be asked whether there is a meaning to life.

Good is Unnecessary. — TheMadFool

What if the good is what goes against one's nature? If someone has a proclivity to doing evil things, is it not good that they abstain from doing them?

Could it be that good is an absence?

don't have kids, mm'kay

Empathy is a faculty that contributes to someone being moral. A defective or missing faculty of empathy will make it more difficult to be moral.

I wouldn't do philosophy if I believed in God.

Old blue template was good. It's jarring on the eyes now.

dissatisfaction is the essence of everything dude

yes

I believe it is wrong to make babies.

I also believe that the urge to make babies is one of the strongest urges a person can feel.

I think some things are wrong and go against human nature, while other things are wrong but are congruent with human nature. The latter are blameless acts of immorality, which includes the mistake of having children.

The Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno

It's bullshit

I work in the software industry. Software development is a subset of computer science, however in practice it is more like a trade. When entering the trade, one begins as an apprentice, before advancing to journeyman and finally master. Sometimes this involves a university degree.

There are guild-like organizations and communities that are built around "philosophies" of software engineering. These philosophies are different ways of developing software.

What is interesting is how closely tied mainstream software development practices are to capitalism. I was taught and currently work in a development environment called Agile, which is meant to facilitate pipelined production of software in iterations. The cycle of production never ends - as soon as one checkpoint is reached, the next checkpoint is immediately placed. Programmers are told what the customer wants, and they have to negotiate with their boss about the workload. Every day there is a check-up to see what progress has been made and what set backs have been encountered - this peer pressure acts as incentive to work.

With web development, which is one area I work in, the name of the game is efficiency. Everything must continuously be quicker and easier. This is mostly because anything less will lose the short attention span of potential customers. There are lots of gimmicky widgets, like pop ups, infinite scrolls, silent collection of user data, etc that are all meant to help lure customers into spending money, or giving up their privacy (I do not code this kind of stuff).

Computers are like crack to capitalism. They make everything more efficient, more automated, more blind. I think perhaps in the next few decades, programmers will put themselves out of a job by developing an artificial intelligence that can do their jobs.

There are tons of nauseating self-help books for programmers that are written by self-absorbed assholes who think their way is the right way. Often there are pretentious quotes from Lao Tzu or some other sage in the beginning of each chapter. Super cringey.

So my point is that, from an industry perspective, software development is intimately tied to capitalism. But there are other ways of developing software that are less tied to economics - open source software is a great example.

On the other end of the spectrum of computer science is the actual science. This is less tied to capitalism, partly because it is usually limited to universities. And it is close to philosophy as well. This is where you will find philosophical concepts like Turing machines, finite state machines, semantics of programming languages, algorithms, etc.

I think probably the most ubiquitous philosophical mindset of computer science must be a certain reductionism. Abstraction is a fundamental concept to computer science, but nevertheless these abstractions could not function unless the underlying substrate is also functional. High-level applications do not function unless the operation system does, and the operation system does not function unless the low-level firmware does, and the low-level firmware does not function unless the hardware does. The Unix "philosophy" could be described as reductionistic too, because it emphasizes making larger things out of smaller, basic modules.

I think it's safe to say that if you ever hear someone on the internet proclaiming that some difficult philosophical issue "is just" something, this person might be a computer science undergraduate.

But does she know what it's like to be unable to express emotions, things as simple as fear and pain, without the possibility of being outcast and labeled weak? Does she know what it's like to have pent up aggression with no way of relieving it, and to be ostracized as dangerous and problematic when that aggression shows? To fear being accused of rape, and labeled a monster even when found innocent?

Does she know what it's like to be expected to face the horrors of war, to die a violent death, or to return, broken, to a home where one no longer belongs? No. She can never know, because either through biology or millennia of social conditioning, those are not her burdens to bear. She does not envy them, just as men do not envy physical vulnerability or the pain of childbirth. Therein lies my key point: the sexes are not the same, the challenges they face are not the same, and treating them the same can only bring about hardship for one, the other, or both. — Not Steve

The thing is, a lot of these problems may very well be eliminated if we were to transition away from patriarchy, which is exactly what feminism strives for (especially the second-wavers).

Feminist analysis has provided us with a convincing picture that the repression of emotions in males, the obsession with power and domination, warfare, etc are things found in patriarchies. Consider how basically all of the major conflicts of the world have been waged by men. Consider how the repression of emotions in men is generally an expectation put on men by other men.

Being falsely accused of rape (and being labeled a monster) is a byproduct of rape culture. If rape were not so prevalent, and if men were more respectful of women, then the reputation of the defendant might not be so easily tarnished. Ironically, the fact that a man's reputation is immediately tarnished for being accused of rape implicitly means that everyone believes that men are untrustworthy in sexual matters. It is no surprise when a man is accused of rape, because everyone already knows that men are basically the only ones who rape.

9-11: Was There an Alternative? by Noam Chomsky.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker.
Ethics by Spinoza.

Nothing, oh wait Heidegger did that

As much as I bitch and whine about my depression, I ought to still feel happy. I have nothing really causing me distress like loans debt, and such. — Wallows

To be fair, there are plenty of things to be distressed about that are found universally in every human life because they are structurally inherent to human life.

Things like loan debts, insurance fees, disease diagnoses, etc are empirical phenomena that may or may not occur. But the situation in which these empirical phenomena are continually threatening to manifest should not be ignored. That it is possible for bad things to occur (even if they are not currently present), is nevertheless a bad thing.

I kill myself instead lmao

I'm bored, and something's not quite right upstairs, I'm afraid.

Some of us are dealing with crap elsewhere and we don't have the time, energy or interest to participate here in depth.

The mind-body problem concerns the relationship of the mental with the not-mental. What you are suggesting is the possibility that fully knowing the physical substrate entails fully knowing the mental. It surely is related, but by itself does not solve the mind-body problem.

Consider how the knowledge of the causes of an effect does not necessarily entail the causes are the effect. The brain may be the cause of the mind, but that does not mean the brain is the mind. And here we have the mind-body problem.