All gut feelings and opinions but:

My hunch is you can't do much to change who you're sexually attracted to. But I also think sexual attraction can develop even if wasn't there at first sight. In any case, bringing reason or conscious will into it will probably just repress actual attraction into a pressurized reservoir where it will remain until it bursts and you're suddenly idealizing someone to both of your mutual detriment.

These sometimes tight-knit communities are often run by a vocal few, but there can be hundreds or sometimes thousands of lurkers who do nothing but absorb what gets said (they're also significant entry points for new members). Deploying effective rhetoric against them in that setting can have a strong influence on individual members of its community, especially the less hardened. Specifically, by "great success", I'm essentially referring to the influence I was able to have in those mediums. — VagabondSpectre

I've checked out a couple & I think I know the dynamic you're talking about. Let me know if this is your experience as well ( since I'm generalizing from only a couple visits):

There's usually a couple guys who are charismatic in the way a fuck-the-system senior might be attractive to angst-ridden freshmen. They combine a confident seeing-through-the-bullshit ideology with a seeming easy mastery of christian theology, or history, or something scienc-y or some other Western Knowledge signifier. The appeal seems to be that they echo the same doubts you've had, and they have a bunch of extra knowledge to fill in the blanks. They hold court and the people who have just un-lurked try to get their attention and cautiously advance their own ideas and look for approval and direction. (in another lens: you feel humiliated and powerless? well here is validation that you're actually right plus very powerful [knowledge/culture signifier]

I do see the potential for arresting radicalization in these venues. I'm too old to have been a young lurker on discord - my charismatic older figure was Zizek (for the same reasons, he echoed doubts I had and helped make sense of them, and knowledge signifier (german idealism, even tho he knows it for real, it still had a signifying aspect) so I lucked out.

Two caveats:
(1) While I think this works in the pirate corners of the internet, I'm not sure the logic carries over to larger, more mainstream platforms. My guess, no offense intended, is that you've probably swayed a very small number of people. Showdowns draw blood and attention, but on the enemy's turf things scab over pretty quick.
(2) How are you measuring the influence you've had? Is it dms confirming you've had an effect?

I've used that understanding with great success in such debates, despite the unending theatrical pretense they entail. — VagabondSpectre

By 'great success', what exactly do you mean? (& in terms of the venue - are you talking about posing as an alt-righter on a discord or something similar?)

But Shapiro & Spencer don't argue in good faith. Shapiro's thing - much like Peterson (on politics) - is just the aesthetic of reason. I'm not saying they're not smart, I think they are, but Shapiro's appeal is the smouldering fuck you ('facts don't care about your feelings' etc) underlying his stuff. Everything else, including his ' look-i-like-pop-culture!' is veneer. There are very, very few people who agree with Shapiro who are going to be persuaded through debate, because its all theater. The arguments don't matter - its the emotional stance embodied by the character.

Very beautiful, preening myself, not willing to fight in the very real, very serious trenches of saying 'i want a world where no one listens to shapiro'

You know my point is negative, you're not a complete incompetent so maybe stop pretending. — StreetlightX

Yes, but I always argue with people who are closest to my view. It's negative, and the negativity sustains itself on the 'positivity' it grapples with, so it diffuses into nothingness without it. That's exactly why it's words in a vacuum. My post sustains itself off that sustaining, so I'm trying to drag us both down to the fiery pit where it doesn't matter at all what we think about Shapiro. I could clap you and it would be meaningless.

I don't know what you mean by dreck. I don't even know what 'dreck' means. It sounds like an insult from a 19th century novel. I feel like you're going to call me a 'sniveling blackguard' next.

I mean, I've been pretty upfront with what I'm saying and I stand by it. What's the alternative? I invite a response, as always. I'm asking what you would do to make a world where no one would listen to Shapiros. If you say that's what you want - and I agree - I'm open to suggestions. A better reproach would be that I haven't offered anything either, and I haven't. But I'm sincerely interested in ideas in that vein.

[edit] the above is a response to the pre-edited post ["Do you have anything else other than this dreck? Or is this all you know how to do?"]

Ah, I hadn't picked up on the modest timbre of your posts.

e.g.

if you want to know where Sapiro et. al. emerged, perhaps, just fucking perhaps, one ought to look at the material conditions of the poor white working class, rather than 'Muh Free Speech Under AtTaCK fROM ThE LeFt'. Long story short, to put the etiology of the emergence of Shapiros down to 'the left' is such, such, such a stupid and historically myopic idea that it simply cannot be taken seriously. But the liberal simply has no fucking language or vocabulary other than 'free speech' by which to track these issues, so of course for him it's all about 'speech'.

I guess you have to read between the lines

I feel like the relevant thing here would be whining about whining about free speech.

The thing of Shapiros not mattering. 'Because if he had all the platforming in the world, no one would care." Me too! I also don't want [any bad thing.]

Leaving aside the sheer fact the deplatforming works, despite the unemprirical meme that it doesn't, the point is to get us to a point at which the 'platforming' - or not - of Shapiros shouldn't even be an issue. I want to live in a society where Shapiros don't matter - not because he's 'deplatformed', but because even if he had all the platforming in the world, no one would care. — StreetlightX

Well, clearly deplatforming works against individuals, but not against the ideas they're vessels for... otherwise this conversation wouldn't be happening, and otherwise it wouldn't be barreling inexorably toward what you've said, which reads, quite literally as, " It was because of NAFTA, not the left, I want things to be different." Yes, so....

@StreetlightX I think the point is one which @VagabondSpectre is gesturing toward above. There comes a point where deplatforming is like sticking your finger in the dam only for three new leaks to open above you.

I want to differentiate myself from what I take to be vagabond's stance in that I don't think the right tack is to argue with Shapiro or whoever on their own ground (which is so deeply disingenuous that I think even Shapiro doesn't realize how disingenuous he is.)

But the point is that shaming w/ fiery rhetoric, even if you're right, has no positive effect. It worsens things. It's a show of weakness. That's why the most 'clap' worthy medium piece is going to get parsed as 'liberal tears' by the right. 'clap' worthy pieces are only going to land for those who agree with you already , so it amounts to circling the wagons, a defensive maneuver.

That doesn't work, but arguing seriously with e.g. anti-blm is no good either because [anti-blm] stuff is always, always motte and bailey, even tho half the time people are tricked by their own rationalizations and don't even realize the difference between their motte and bailey.

But what is there that isn't performative? I don't know, but I think it's not taking a heroic trash-talking stand against the enemy. As if the mccoys would listen to the hatfields if only the hatfields really gave it to them.

There's a new-left thing of flirting with the vibe of violence and revolution while certainly not advocating it because real violence isnt real violence, its symbolic violence etc. Here's a poem by Brecht only of course I don't mean it like that. But for anyone not already sympathetic, this looks deeply silly and structurally symmetrical (not equivalent- value-symmetrical) to what the rights doing. This is at least one major part of the engine that keeps the whole thing churning. This is ultra-performative.

Whatever's outside is probably something like: a real alternative. Which the left has become expert at not-offering. The first thing is probably to let go of 'theory' which is fine as an exciting private pursuit, one which I also enjoy, but from the perspective of political efficacy is nothing but series of very clever footnotes to Marx which alternate between cerebral self-satisfaction and a community founded on mutual recognition of well-struck poses. It doesn't work. Empire & Zucotti should have been the last hurrah.

No, I think it's fair. When the rhetoric skews toward 'words in a vacuum', you have to supply the non-vacuum action. You can't use that ploy without offering something else. The words have teeth now. Or they pretend to. You don't have the right to that rhetorical move, unless you have something else in mind. That rhetorical move shifts registers. Fair play, if you have something on that register. What I'm asking is - what is it?

It is a characterization of liberal political ontology (one I actually agree with.) 'Words simply float free of any gravity of worldly consequence.' It seems like a characterization which is also an attack. Right? Presumably, if the characterization characterizes one's own position, one is equally attacked. The idea, as I understand it, is that that liberals talk and talk, and it amounts to nothing.

If you can make that attack, if their ideas have no worldly consequence, it must be the case that your ideas do have some worldly consequence. Right? What are those consequences?

Could be. But I think when you go full-bore 'action over words', you oughta be able to back it up.

Words simply float free of any gravity of worldly consequence — sx

It sounds good. What's your worldly consequence? Is this really an unfair question?

it's probably trivial, a harsh word, but the point is that all this rhetoric about 'powdered wigs' and 'words' is self-implicating.

When everything around you is ugly, the concern for 'looks' is just about as shallow as it gets. — StreetlightX

The only problem is that literally every post on tpf is 'looks.' We're all doing looks! This is looks, that is looks. It's all looks. you do understand that, right? Like - these ideas aren't politics, or anything even close to it. Do you see that?

It's not mine. — StreetlightX

I don't know what that means, so I think you got me.

You don't know? — StreetlightX

Let's say I don't & want to learn - guide me toward it. You do the words on here, what does your worldly practice look like?

Words simply float free of any gravity of worldly consequence, and the whole content of politics lies entirely in the ephemera of 'argument' or 'agreement', which now come to bear the entire weight of politics. — StreetlightX

Which you'd know if you'd read.... Where's the extra-word center of gravity here?

As a blusterer, I know the litmus test of bluster is how cartoonish the insults get. If you're leaning into calling things 'trash', you're probably covering over the fact you're guilty of exactly what you're accusing others of.

Do politics, not words, c.f. a very lovely piece by...

@fdrake There's also something to be said about 'thinkpieces' which correspond to the 'above it all' position I mentioned. These have proliferated like crazy. There are thinkpieces on thinkpieces, of course, so I'm saying nothing new. It's weird, because like - Dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground,say, would have been a 'thinkpiece' at the time. Maybe even Erasmus or Voltaire or Swift. But is it the same thing?

yes, yeah. A lot to chew on there

Ok, first thing - Scruton's 'context' - the estate, the horses (there were horses, right?). My first thought is, if you lose that, 'good!'

The calming luxury of an estate points toward the calming, sober, power of the master. The meaning of a speech delivered in a warm drawing-room after a tour around the property bristles with everything you've just seen. and the plight of placeless gypsies in Hungary very easily, naturally, rolls into a momentary distaste for [those who would want to disrupt this eminently Placeful Harmony]

from Henry James The Bostonians : a fervent 19th century feminist spending an evening at a wealthy nonfeminist's place:

I must add, however that there was a moment when she came near being happy - or, at any rate, reflected that it was a pity she could not be so[...]His guests sat scattered in the red firelight, listening, silent, in comfortable attitudes; there was faint fragrance from the burning logs, which mingled with the perfume of Schubert and Mendelssohn; the covered lamps made a glow here and there,, and the cabinets and brackets produced brown shadows, out of which some precious object gleamed[...]Her nerves were calmed, her problems - for the time - subsided. Civilization, under such an influence, in such a setting, appeared to have done its work; harmony ruled the scene; human life ceased to be a battle. She went so far as to ask herself why one should have a quarrel with it; the relations of men and women, in that picturesque grouping, had not the air of being internecine. — James

But I understand your broader point to be that internet discourse is a kind of flattening all around. Where everything is yanked from its context, and you reach a sort of critical mass of 'yanking' where the flat space of the internet doesn't reflect a given world anymore, but, instead, everything in the world is already measuring itself against how it would seem in the flat space. Gradually quotes aren't cited in a neutral medium; the medium itself dictates how people speak, all speakers now anticipating how their quotes will be reworked.

In that regard, I agree with you. The tweeted protestations or lamentations of the 'sane' are a performative contradiction It's like Comey doing his sober perspective in biblical tweets (waters of righteousness or something). He's immediately infected, and made memeable. Everyone gets sucked in.

But do you think - My feeling is that a return to context *is* good, even if the Scruton context is abhorrent. Where the speaker draws from a local situation and works with it. I know that's a little luddite, because it means logging off - but I don't see how you can counteract the sheer dissolving momentum of internet discourse - for the reasons you mention - through anything short of dropping out of it. Any attempts to intervene in the medium itself will get sucked into it.

That's a good point. I guess the point of therapy is that it's supposed to let you deal with that -with releasing the anger, with saying no - in a controlled environment?

Easier said than done, of course, because if you need to transfer onto the therapist to let it out, and its the raw thing, you're in the territory of 'going too far' and the therapist has a right to be treated humanely etc etc.

I guess the example hinges on whether Jeff has replicated the abusive situation by seeking friends who are abusive toward him in a similar way. Like you said, as though he's producing a play. In that case, I'd think he'd be justified, since anyone willing to participate in that play is probably producing their own play where they get to abuse Jeff. The two visions align, and Jeff's outburst both expresses his truth and disrupts the shitty play of the others.

It's different if jeff's already gone through that and expressed the whole thing, and found himself with true supporters, who stick with him, but still Jeff keeps wanting to restage the play.

Maybe you can get addicted to the feeling of someone 'hearing' the no? like addicted to the explicit condemnation?

I think there might be a place between condemnation and forgiveness. I agree with you that the latter has to come naturally or not at all. I feel like that place is just - a quieting. If forgiveness comes, it comes; if not, it doesn't. It doesn't matter because it's not your responsibility to forgive.

(postscript: Shaming is not pleasant (obv). Shame is one of the most unpleasant, most shattering, feelings. And it's palliated somehow, by passing it on to someone else. I don't like the whole thing at all. The people who can best shame are the people who are most acquainted with shame. Its this nasty vampiric cycle I just want out of. )

I guess the question comes down to which stories /self narratives do you promote, which show truth and raise autonomy, and which do you fight on all fronts to rid yourself of. Of course, fighting the good fight doesn't mean winning, hence grace (as you've nicely characterised it). — fdrake

Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. I've been feeling lately that my next step is to stop heeding the prompts and self-mystifications of the false narratives, and just be with whats left when the muck settles. What's discomfiting is there doesn't seem to be much left but a kind of somber blankness, which my mind tries feverishly to cover up. It's hard to find what to promote that isn't wrapped up with that covering. Right now all I really have to work with/on is: don't lie, honor commitments, don't make other people feel shame.

I wonder, does something like this idea enter every encounter, or is it a particular psychobabble alarm? Certainly, there is little prospect online of ever escaping the tyranny of the endless string, and that is both its safety and its futility.

A psychobable alarm, i think.

What's weird, looking back, is that my 'idea' depends on a total misconstrual of the therapy. Herman states very explicitly that the point is to collaborate and build trust, to meet on an equal footing. My 'idea' ultimately amounts to this: it is possible for exploitation to take place by masquerading as the opposite of exploitation. In short, it's as simple as - 'yeah, that sounds nice, but they're probably lying, or at least self-deluding'

But that's not what the idea feels like as it arises. It roars to life as some iron philosophical point about the 'truth' of what's being said. The possibility of lying somehow becomes the impossibility of not lying, and it happens immediately and is accompanied by anger.

If you see a recording of therapy going well, you see something indescribable - which I will now describe. There is a moment in what seems a normal dull conversation when something, a word, a gesture, a long silence, connects and penetrates; you can see someone change, something awaken, something release. the technical term for this is "Juju". — unenlightened

Yes, I think I know just what you mean. This is a little self-indulgent, but if you don't mind, I'd like to link to a very short 'story' i wrote a few months ago that I think is very close to what we've been talking about. (the 'voice' in the story isn't mine, though most of the ideas are.)

Streaming

@Maw @ssu @StreetlightX

Is it cynical or paranoid to say that maybe the whole point of an article about Paglia with a Koch thing at the bottom is for a [maw] to post it, disgusted, and an [ssu] to counter it and a whole bunch of others who want to chime in (me included), reading it, click, click, click.

The article seems designed to be culture war fodder.

[incendiary paragraph]
[controversial paragraph ]
'introducing the 2019 chevy blazer.'
[ a paragraph that's just outrageous]
[Charles Koch, can you believe it?? link to show you're justifiably mad!]
'Sofi: no hidden fees on your student loan refi'

Maw, here, is standard issue Internet Leftist rage, tapped into a flagrant sense of intellectual and moral superiority. SSU, here, is standard issue erstwhile-centrist-liberal-now-battling-left-excesses-thereby-inexorably-becoming-right-as-leftists-just-get-more-and-more-ridiculous. i'm standard issue 'this is all just spectacle' buttressing my 'above it allness' at the expense of engagement.

But isn't it nauseating to be playing out types so exactly?? Don't you guys feel as gross as I do here??

I have a reflexive way of approaching posts where I try to turn arguments and ideas inside-out in order to make them self defeating, or performatively inconsistent. I do have that impulse here. But then there's that technique common to both mediation and behavioral therapies (both cognitive and dialectical CBT/DBT) where you don't repress the ideas, but examine them disinterestedly. You still hear their tune, so to speak, you just don't hum along to it. I guess the philosophical analogue is Husserl's 'epoche' where you take things as they present themselves with committing to anything about their reality.

I'd like to still present where my mind immediately goes, when reading the quotes you've posted. But presented in that more reflective, disinterested spirit - not identifying as the speaker of the argument, but looking neutrally at the argument as it arises.

So : One of the roadblocks to the childhood trauma victim in therapy is 'splitting', the desire, mentioned in the quote, that the therapist be an ideal rescuer, free from any flaws. Fury if he's not.

Now when this writer is talking about these artful, subtle, negotiations that characterize successful therapy, I immediately have the thought:

'this is another idealization. We have theoretical pictures of what therapy should be, plus examples which are probably polished and reworked to fit as examples of that therapy. Next thought : If a patient were to work with a therapist fed on these ideas, they would be trying to fit the therapy in that mould, and be blind to anything that doesn't fit into it. They would be constantly translating the therapy, in progress, into examples of the idea. Final thought : I can't help but see all these therapeutic insights and connections, as things captured at the moment, 'bagged' in the field, in service of the germinating book. A therapist of a cetain tier gets prestige through publishing original therapy insights, and knows, having read other books, that they need examples. What we really have is a Nice Idea with real life examples in service of the Nice Idea."

Now, something seems half-complete about these idea, but this is what comes up immediately. If I were't trying to bracket the idea, I'd probably try to polish it and make it seem stronger than it is, as a sheer argument. But I'm presenting it here as it arises.

It's all good. The op's structure raised some alarms for me at first. It seemed, to me, like a trojan horse post. Where you broadcast one idea (this would be Jasser's) and sandwich it between distancing paragraphs. Posts like that are a way of seeing if there's any takers for the main idea, while retaining plausible deniability, if not.

It seems to me now, you weren't doing that. I apologize for misconstruing your intentions.

@unenlightened
Addendum: It's important to undo the simplifying narratives because "grooming" of the already traumatized works exactly by making use of distorted narratives. Your therapist may think you're confusing things, and may even gently offer gentle 'challenges' without outright saying that you're confused, but you know what he really thinks and meanwhile this other guy (at the moment) is totally sure you're right and no one actually gets you, and why are you even doing therapy when theyre all a bunch of expert idiots?

If you only trust people who validate invalid stories, you're only going to trust people you shouldn't.

This (with the last post) is distressing to me, because I don't know how you progress from there. It seems like a double bind.

The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery. Others may offer advice, support, assistance, affection, and care, but not cure. Many benevolent and well-intentioned attempts to
assist the survivor founder because this fundamental principle of empowerment is not
observed. No intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster
her recovery, no matter how much it appears to be in her immediate best interest. In the
words of an incest survivor, “Good therapists were those who really validated my
experience and helped me to control my behavior rather than trying to control me.” — Judeth Herman

This sounds right to me.

The tricky part is validation & it's so tricky it gets me frustrated if I think about it too long.

One of the nastier side effects of trauma is it warps how you see the world, and interact with it and the people in it. And that can play out in all sorts of ways. There are protective ways of interpreting the intentions of others that, while understandable in the wake of abuse, can end up, long-term, being detrimental. The emotional experience must always be validated, but validating narratives can sometimes perpetuate a self-sealing self-abuse. Only sometimes narratives that seem skewed are actually real (Freud, "hysterics") and not validating thosedeeply reinforces feelings of isolation and abandonment.

In stark terms, victims of trauma often (consciously or unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly) solicit affirmations of the reworked world they live in, for sheer survival. They are very attuned to signs of disbelief and suspicion, while also looking for ways out of the psychological hell they're in, which ways out would involve someone who can see the way in which they're distorting the world. Only it's hard to know, for an outsider, what's real and what isn't, because if your patient is living in a distorted world, they're probably meeting other people with equal distortions, leading to horrible things that people outside that world wouldn't necessarily understand, and sometimes the very fact of distortion can be self-fulfilling, creating the world it sees, and it's such a mess.

(I guess I'm talking third or at least second stage in terms of the therapy outlined in the link. Obviously, in the first stage, validation and safety is more important than anything else. Mourning and reintegration seem like they require a starker confrontation)

Again, what' wrong with self-improvement or self-therapeutic ventures that philosophy can be? — Wallows

I don't think anything's wrong with that ( in moderation, balanced by other things.)

They could just ask one question, 'how happy was your childhood 0 - 10.' These questions turn out to be more predictive. But they are only trying to measure one thing, andthewse are the questions that succeed in dividing people the best statistically. Whether they are consistent or even meaningful is secondary. They might have found it statistically significant to ask if you liked squishing worms as a child. It's like when the doctor asks where it hurts, it is meaningful to him whether you point with a finger, a fist or a flat hand in terms of how localised. Litmus paper, not a ph meter.

In a bit, I want to have a look at possible therapies in the light of the general importance of childhood experience, that seems incontrovertible in all these varied problems, both mental and physical. I think it's more interesting than worrying about the questionnaire. — unenlightened

That analogy makes sense to me. Looking forward to the part about therapies. It's something I think a lot about, but I also tend to get trapped in my own thought-circles.

Edit: Oops, see that conversation already began, below the post I was responding to.

those conditioned to view Muslims as the enemy — praxis

versus

Okay, it’s settled, a Muslim can see another Muslim as an enemy. — praxis

The former is about a group as a whole. The latter is about a particular member of a group.

In America we are all Americans so we are incapable of seeing any other American as an enemy. Is that the sort of logic you’re using? — praxis

It doesn't look like my logic, no.

Granted. Anything else? — praxis

Jasser's a Muslim of course. So he's probably not conditioned to view Muslims as the enemy. But I feel like you must know he's a Muslim, so the OP is confusing to me. (unless ...[cynical take on the op])

It's a strangely structured OP. A cynical commenter might note that Jasser's take makes up ~half the post, and well over half of the argumentation.

oh i was the parents getting divorced when I was 17, not the other one.

Cannot recommend The Differend by Lyotard highly enough. Funnily - you mentioned Naming & Necessity - Kripke has a big cameo. Lyotard wrote an Anti-Oedipus style book (Libidinal Economies) and felt kind of dumb after and set out to address the continental ideas of the day in a more AP way (the style is close to Late Wittgenstein, if he was writing about the concerns of post '68 contys). It's certainly still difficult, but it's not obscure (some parts presuppose familiarity with Kant tho)

Maybe, but your example was 'why don't you love me?' which question four says exactly!

I do have some of my own issues with the test though. surely being raped by a parent and suffering through a divorce @ 17 should not equally be a 'one'. Admittedly tangential to the op's point tho.

@Wallows @unenlightenedIsn't question number four about emotional neglect?