~

fwiw, I was a baby-boy, too-nurtured. Might have been ok, but crisis (age ~14). If Mom & Dad didn't lose it, I probably would have been fine classwise- not full middleclass, exactly, but I would have been socioeconomically blanketed. They did lose it: divorce, roman catholic social snubbing. Family friends with a professional class who really did let us go, quicker and easier than you'd expect. Social equals to objects of occasional charity in a snap.

I was - am- the oldest of five. Safe six-figure family became mom of five on a ~30k teachers salary. Dad had a waspy background but no interfamilial respect and lawyered away financial support. Shitbag guy - became a lobbyist in DC for the motorcycle industry, of all things. Might as well have hit reset and started a new life, though he did offer to buy me a couch once.

Sob story, but everything is relative. It was very difficult to go from socially ensconced to persona non grata. It did suck. Cause, dude, it's hard to make that change at 14. Socially Situated Handsome Grandson to 'rumors are he's a heroin addict'. It's funny in retrospect, but it wasn't at the time. (Of course plenty of people are 'rumors are he's shitty' cradle-to-grave, and I lucked out of that. I realize my sob story isn't the sobbiest)

What this did is make me mad. I already was mad (on account of normal nerdy-kid social struggles and normal oedipal family dynamics) but I got real mad. Super mad. It's still there, and still irrational. I'm mad mostly all the time and I hate it. I don't think straight, almost ever.

Anyway, that's my story. And it's sort of a lie, because I'm packing it up too neatly, which... I mean the first part of your post is, in some ways, a dressed-up dating profile.Which is what all the preceding was too. So.

When I date, I'm smart, but shy, introverted but clever
I'm 'this seems right' for ~three months. Nice guy but when you try to get intimate....[being confined to a skull that feels less less your own like a horrified child running blindly through an ancient, creeking, ramshackled, winding maze of a sprawling structure 'full of sound and fury signifying nothing' but (the promise of more) pain, with no doors, no windows, no way up or outside, only down steps in the dark, wet slicked steps, down darker, further, deeper, pulled downward ... ]

yes, exactly. but how do you say that? you don't. You don't, you can't. You just pretend and get more distant and sadder and lonelier and madder. (big caveat here.There is a thing where you can do the identity of the guy who says the thing you said (the prose descent) as Tortured Hero. That might work, to some extent. But it only works in a limited way. The Tortured Hero is supposed to act like the Tortured Hero, and not like the actual torturing thing the tortured hero suffers from.)

Now nothing is less sympathetic than an ok-appearing white guy BUT (counterpoint) fuck you, i've spent my last fifteen years feeling like teeth dragged five miles down shitty backroad pavemet. I've clung with all my might to schopenhauer and cioran and beckett and Krasznahorkai and so forth. But what are they doing? ( I have a theory here. )

*Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet?*
:lol: — Wallows

It'll arrive. One of these days. Probably right when you forget to ask

For me, when feeling ontophobic, trying not to does feel like some kind of cowardly retreat from rationally confronting the only meaningful problem in existence. But when feeling ontophilic, such concerns seem like obviously irrational obsession with an entirely illusory non-problem. For people stuck indefinitely in absurd despair and deprived from periods of awe and serenity, I can understand why they would see trying to break out of that as cowardly even though being like that hurts themselves. It’s like an addiction to something you hate: doing it brings you no pleasure, it may even bring you pain, but you just feel like you have to and it would be wrong of you not to. But once you’re out of it, it seems completely different, and looking back on yourself when you were in that space, or at others still stuck it it, it just seems pitiably irrational and self-destructive to be in that space. — Pfhorrest

Yes, that's it exactly! The difficulty is that, in ontophobia, you can't access the quality, for lack of a better word, of ontophilic space. You can only see it conceptually as something opposed to the ontophobic. So it has no fullness, or reality of its own. It seems to just be [non-ontophobia], a conceptual void defined in terms of its opposite.

I think, for those of us prone to severe mood swings, there's an art to figuring out how to leave conceptual 'anchors' that let us stay connected when you can't access that ok-ness. I find that I can 'know' that there is a kind of 'full' memory I can't access,that is presently barred from me. Knowing it's real, but for some reason barred, helps me realize that a limited depressive state is not as comprehensive as it pretends to be. That probably wouldn't have worked when I was younger but seems to work now that I've seen the depressive state run its course enough times.

My feeling about suicide is that it's a response to an emergency that can be handled in various ways, but the person experiencing the emergency can't access any of those ways but one. I think the defining feature of a suicidal emergency is that it can't be understood and dealt with by outside sources. It's a breach in the space of reasons, if you like. I've noticed you've talked recently about how stoicism and many other approaches can't help. That sounds like the edge of a suicidal crisis - not fun.

I've spent a lot of time with the idea of suicide and feel very close to it. I've always lived with a shade of that idea, but there was a bad point where for a month it became pressing and unavoidable. I 'handled' it like so :

I went to the same bar every night. I got as drunk as I could and walked home. I would wake up and smoke cigarettes all day (2 packs or so). I checked myself into mental hospitals and then, checked-in, tried to find ways to get out, because it wasn't helping, and I needed to commit suicide.

I couldn't do it because I was too disorganized. and too fearful. I couldn't jump off the high places. I spent two weeks going to the high place every night. I could not live another minute, and I also could not jump. Maybe that's cowardice. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't think straight this whole time.

I was very much aware of the thing of 'it gets better' and I had nothing but contempt for it, but....

What happens before the crisis is you have certain ideas about how and why to live. The crisis burns them all away. Whatever is left after is what's valuable. The only thing that helps in my opinion is that it's necessary, and that it passes. You can't know why it's necessary or what it's doing until after, so no peptalk and positive talk will help. But it does pass. If it's really really really impossibly bad, you're getting close to the release, and you have to just hold on.

I've noticed a pattern in pessimistic literature where any immediate feeling of meaning and contentment can only be read as a retreat from horror. The Abyss - and the existential confrontation with it - is elevated (sacred.) Anything outside that confrontation is considered profane. There is an implicit judgment attending words like 'pain', 'pleasure' and 'boredom'.

This sacred/profane distinction runs deep. Cioran talks about the Heights of despair, for example.

I once met a childhood trauma specialist who had become an alcoholic and sex addict. He didn't make the connection for a while. Traumatized in childhood, obsessed with trauma. It didn't click. But he was fucked up and he knew that. He wasn't just a sex addict. He had a specific fetish -married women. What got him going was knowing they were drawn to him (avatar of the abyss) in favor of their beau. There's a thesis to be written on the relation between violation and pessimism.

I wonder to what extent something like this subtends the whole pessimistic approach.

I don't see why experiencing meaningful existence isn't just experiencing meaningful existence. But when you add resentment to the mix, you can see how it might warp.

Melville treated the theme of 'retreat' very well. Jonah, furtive, getting as far away from an internalized judgment as humanly possible.

Well we all have our white whales and we all have our Babels-in-reaction-to-the-Flood. Mortared tightly and seeking to kill the one thing we cannot let live.

I often think about that guy and how he ended his relationships with the women whose lives he ruptured and how he made sense of that. David Foster Wallace did a story on this in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - maybe the presence of the destroying force was necessary to educate the destroyed. Who knows?

You can believe in a motive force of 'contradiction', and still disavow Mao. In fact, I'd recommend it.

Let me summon a muse, because I might be out of my depth: John Updike: "writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing on the open sea." I'm freestyling here. I don't have any firm verse to hold me, but if I swim out a little...

A contradiction of present states, like presently-being-burned or not-presently-being-burned, is very clearly susceptible to the LNC. Being burned sucks. It's painful, then you die. it's a big mess. The dialectic can't save you.

But most of the time, any current state is in the process of moving toward something. And there are multiple, contradictory, ways of conceiving of the state it's moving toward. That's the important thing here - temporality. How do you conceive of something in flux? And why would you ever think a conception of reality that excises flux is anything but a sterile safe-spaced nothing? A bold-fonted catechism can link up to the firm and ever-present real god. Grappling with the real takes a little more.

What's Hegel doing? He's trying to understand the process of how a present-oriented logic deals with the slipperiness of the flux-y thing it's applied to. In everyday life, we're either being burned or we're not. Wittgensteinian approaches hold firm, here. But when we get to the delicate matter of applying man-made categories to the extra-human essentials of being, it doesn't quite work. The world won't yield to our conceptions. And instead of throwing up his hands in narcissistic rage, he traces just exactly how that plays out. Doesn't do it great a lot of the time, but you can see where he's coming from, if you pay close heed.

Same with Marx. If contradiction as engine of history seems too esoteric, just read any account of the 2008 crisis. Not too arcane, is just that the system of granting mortgages was a present practice, based on an idea of the future, that ran up again other present forces, tending somewhere different. The contradiction isn't present; its how the present holds contradictory visions of itself, with reference to the future.

Re-reading the thread, I feel I replied to something nobody said. Well, that's embarrassing. — Dawnstorm

I thought your post was really good. You approached 'subjectivity' as something like, I think, a role in a game. It was a structural approach. And I think it's what we're all talking about, but more fleshed-out. You drove the point home in a concrete, textured way. I got what you were saying. I kind of intentionally ignored your post because it worked against the grain of the narrative I was advancing. Which I'm still advancing, to be fair.

I'm being opportunistic, as always. I think your approach was founded, was textured, was concrete. I am skeptical that the use of 'subjectivity' by others is anything like that.

The lady's the bible, the zizek's the 'you still like her,'

I have to start with something petty

So yeah, there's alot motivating and informing this particular crossing of concepts, and if all you get out of it is that 'being together changes people', well, I think you're being unfair. — StreetlightX

In fairness I didn't get {'when people are together in crowds, the fact of being together, changes them. Being together as a crowd lets them do things they couldn't do alone?'} out of your subsequent post, but out of the Jodi Dean quote and I think that gloss accurately captured what she said.

My interest is 'two-way': what can thinking crowds in terms of subjectivity tell us about subjectivity itself? And what can it tell us about crowds? (put like an essay question: 'what can thinking about crowds and subjectivity together tell us about both?'). In terms of the latter question (your question): thinking about crowds as subjects allows us - me - to bring to bear upon crowds all the philosophical resources that have been developed for subjectivity. Like what? 'Historicity' for one: like, it's widely acknowledged today that subjects are historical, 'created' under these or those conditions: feudal subjects, neoliberal subjects, gendered subjects, medical subjects, each of these having a history shaped by institutions, cultures, events, etc.

So can we speak of crowds having histories in this way? Have there been transformations in how crowds have related to the world around them? Can we think of how the agency of the crowds has been shaped and changed under different conditions? I think the answer is yes, especially when one looks to things like techniques of crowd management, the changes in urban space, the mediums by which crowds are brought together, etc etc. Lots to be said here. But what else? What other resources from 'subjectivity' can we bring to bear? — StreetlightX

I agree with all this, in theory. And certainly, the concept should be enriched by what it's being applied to, and not just the other way round. But I'm really looking for an example of a particular insight provided by looking at crowds through the lens of 'subjectivity' . To say that crowds are created under certain conditions, and that there have been transformations in how they've related to the world, is simply to say that crowds are a phenomenon susceptible to historical analysis.

And then there's the flip side - what can crowds teach us about subjectivity? Given that subjectivity has almost always been thought of in relation to the individual, crowd subjectivity really makes the concept super interesting to me. Dean, again, speaks about how subjectivity has continually been 'enclosed', both historically and philosophically, much in the same way in which the commons have been enclosed, linking the enclosure of the commons with the enclosure of the subject (in the individual, rather than the crowd), and in parallel, thinking about crowds in terms of the commons.

And this is important to me because I think this has a particularly important political valence: if subjectivity is a way of thinking about agency, and we can speak of a crowd subjectivity, then we can speak of the particular agency of the crowd. This is important to me because it's so hard today to think about agency in any other terms that that of the individual - there's been an 'enclosure' of agency in the individual just like there's been an enclosure of subjectivity in the individual too. To be blunt about it: how can we think through the freedom afforded to us by the crowd, as distinct from the only freedom anyone ever seems to talk about, the freedom of the individual? And in current conditions when shitty American politics saturates us and the freedom of the individual has basically colonized any talk of freedom, I find thinking of crowd subjectivity both refreshing and almost liberatory (this is the 'celebratory' note you detected previously). — StreetlightX

This makes sense a lot of sense to me and feels like it's setting the right stage for an insight derived from the fusion of subjectivity and crowds. But I'm trying to see around the corner, where that insight isn't just that society has become more atomized, that Thatcher said there's no such thing as society, and that crowds offer the possibility of de-atomization, allowing us to make collective demands or direct collective action in a way that's different than individual demands or individual action. That there are different possibilities and constraints for a crowd, as opposed to an individual. Not that that's a small thing - it's huge - but it's just something we already know.

decrepit and codependent — fdrake

made me lol. De Sade by way of modern relationship therapy.

Once I'd learned (enough of) how the 'magic trick' was/is done - after 10 years of parochial school 'bible study, church history & altarboy service' - I seemed to slip effortlessly, almost helplessly, out of the Catechism's mind-forg'd manacles like a newborn out of the womb again, but this time, fallen wide-eyed instead of wailing onto the pellucidly hard cold ground of my facticity. :joke: Teen apostate, then very soon a 'born again' anti-magical thinker & knowing skeptic. Still, decades on, for me the fascination of 'The Illusion' remains. Thus, e.g. Barton's book, etc. — 180 Proof

Makes sense. My religious upbringing was of the desultory 'I guess this year we're going to try going to mass for a couple months' sort and my spiritual volte-face had more to do with making my mean Dad sad than giving up something wholly enveloping. My 'return' to religion is less a return, then a 'wow, I didn't even get it before' & even then I've been treating the bible more as a text-sandbox to flesh out some ideas on spirituality/literature/history than a place I plan on moving into permanently. Pardon the provocation, I guess I've got a mild crush, and I got heated up seeing her ex badmouth her in public. Seemed like the best defense was "you're just saying that cause you still like her!'

The Gospels, funnily enough.

Continuing on from the Old Testament, alongside a whole lot of secondary literature, and Yale lectures from their open courses. In my exprience, the more I learn about how the bible got made, the more I appreciate what a remarkable document it is. Are both the Old and New Testaments strange, shaggy stitchings together of heteregeneous texts, compilations created in order to serve as mythic propaganda in the interest of power? Yeah, almost certainly. It's no coincidence that a king of an embattled Judah, 'discovered' the deuteronomic laws in a library at the same time many scholars believe the bulk of the old testament was composed. And It's no coincidence the geography of the pentateuch looks a lot the geography of Judah vis-a-vis Egypt at that time. So forth. If you think that the 'magic trick' is 'this is all factual and revealed' then even a small dose of history will dispel the illusion. And it's a lot of fun to learn that history. But does the bible have any power after you understand its sordid, seamy history?

Zizek

"Recall the old Catholic strategy to guard men against the temptation of the flesh: when you see in front of you a voluptuous feminine body, imagine how it will look in a couple of decades – the dried skin, sagging breasts… (Or, even better, imagine what lurks now already beneath the skin: raw flesh and bones, inner fluids, half-digested food and excrements…) Far from enacting a return to the Real destined to break the imaginary spell of the body, such a procedure equals the escape from the Real, the Real announcing itself in the seductive appearance of the naked body. That is to say, in the opposition between the spectral appearance of the sexualized body and the repulsive body in decay, it is the spectral appearance which is the Real, and the decaying body which is reality – we take recourse to the decaying body in order to avoid the deadly fascination of the Real which threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance."

But what I'm having trouble discerning is precisely the implications of subjectivity when brought to bear on the phenomenon of crowds. That crowds have different capacities for action than individuals is, I think, a truism. What the snailshell ought to do, I'd imagine, is provide a novel & useful way of understanding crowds. We turn on the 'subjectivity' filter from our snailshell-cockpit and look out over the crowd and see patterns we wouldn't have, had we not turned that filter on. Or, if we're in the crowd, our understanding of subjectivity ought to give us some openness to possibilities of the crowd that others, without that understanding, might otherwise miss.

I don't see that something like this

"The primary characteristic of a crowd is its operation as a force of its own, like an organism. The crowd is more than an aggregate of individuals. It is individuals changed through the torsion of their aggregation, the force aggregation exerts back on them to do together what is impossible alone."

does that.

Doesn't this just say : when people are together in crowds, the fact of being together, changes them. Being together as a crowd lets them do things they couldn't do alone?

I don't think this is just a quibble about language. I think it's a symptom of conceptual exhaustion. It often feels like doing Midrash on Foucault in order to figure out why OwS didn't work.

A lot of people talk about how the Left has trouble moving from critique to the positive articulation of what it wants, which I think is very often true. But I think the biggest problem is that the left isn't to willing to look honestly at what it's willing to give up. That's the tough question and as long as it continues to remain unconfronted there will continue to be a lot of militant rhetoric divorced from action, a lot of very hazy but promising-sounding concepts (ala 'multiplicity') and a lot of asking the same questions (rhizomatic networks versus hierarchy?) in different ways.

What is wrong ?
What do we want instead?
What are we able to give up?
What are we willing to give up?

And only then:
How do we do this?

I take the OP to be something like : If you think there's such a thing as a problem of evil, then the same logic should lead you to question parenthood. You know how bad things are, you know you have the capacity to prevent people from suffering in it, yet you create life anyway. I think it works, basically, if you accept a pessimistic view. It's kind of neat in that it translates the transcendent frame of the traditional PoE to an immanent one. If there's no single external agent that creates, than any relevant moral choice operates from within. Do we -as the actual agents of creation - keep life going?

I disagree with the OP - I'm no pessimist - but I think it's well-posed.

I'd add : no one worth trusting fully trusts themselves. That doesn't mean not trusting-yourself makes you trusttworthy, but it does mean you have the self-reflexivity to earn an occasional stretch. If you can't float a new concept on an anyone-can-sign-up-plus-we're-anonymous forum*, where can you float it? This seems like a prime venue to try out weird stuff. The worse thing that could happen is you misstep, which isn't a big deal at all. The harbor's still there.

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*unless youre dumb enough to make your username your real name, like some of us

I think it's fair that I give myself some vulnerability. Here's how I think of 'subjectivity' in the sense relevant to this thread. if it's flawed in a severe way, I have some work to do before pursuing my criticism.

There are a lot of ways in which the concept of subjectivity is similar to the concept of agency. Agents have certain capacities, and agents are constrained by their environments. But agency tends to go wrong in its focus on a universalagent. When we're talking agency, we tend to talk as if everyone, essentially, is a particular instantiation of the same universal 'agent', plunked down, or 'thrown', into a situation (Rawls + Heidegger?)

"Subjectivity", on the other hands,begins with specificity (deleuzian qualifier about 'specifiity' and the transportation of difference from a genus through division.) Subjects and their environments are always co-creating one another; subjectivities are always immanently generated. There is no platonic agent that, in descending to earth, becomes colored by this or that accidental feature, like a glass of water taking the color of an external dye.

Instead there is a constant generation of modes of living, and ways of being recognized, that we cannot help but occupy. Everything real is incredibly fine-grained and, consequently, any talk of 'agency' that doesn't understand people as evolved - and evolving - products of a fine-grained milieu is going to err severely. There is no way of being human that : (1)hasn't been formed, (2) is not currently being formed, and (3) won't continue to undergo deformation (reformation, etc.)

---
I think i understand what you're saying about the literature. I'm imagining a harbor that one can return to. What strikes me is the recapitulation, on another level, of recognition which, at least as far back as Kant, is:starting with a concept and recognizing it in the world. What I take you to be talking about isn't quite the same. For Kant, as you know, the inscrutable arts (or how does he put it?) of the schema are bracketed, and recognition functions smoothly. This is more like consolidating and solidifying the categories through fieldwork?

But isn't the purpose of philosophy to create concepts that will carry you forward into the world? Setting forth from the harbor to bring back confirmation versus setting forth with an conceptual tool kit that will let you cope with the encounter and, from that, create?

I agree that self-recrimnation is also priestly and I'll priestly self-recriminate and admit ive been shooting out bad affects (also like a priest.) But isn't the crush and push of the crowd the feeling of forward motion? The affective nature of your post felt partially celebratory, like something moving up up up, but the conceptual part felt like a recognitive replacing, stifling the participatory element through a removed conceptual mapping.

That's fair. I'm thinking of it like this: The well is, in theory, public.It's never been easier to access 'high scripture.'

But what does the application of scripture to contemporary events look like in practice? I think we both recognize the bumpiness of it, and that's why you began your post with a series of disclaimers.

Now, one thing I've always respected about your usual approach is that you're comfortable jettisoning jargon in favor of straightforward explanations of concepts. Especially around continental figures. I think there's an instinctive sense that that's the right move to make because continental philosophy, tonally, looks like a manic figure. Outside its milieu - usually paris, sometimes heidelberg - it needs a pragmatic interpreter to distill the insights and separate them from the wild gesticulations. But there's also a weird hybrid-philosophy, that I associate with Butler & hardt/negri and similar figures. Thinkers with Continental influence, but who, page-by-page operate in a sober, almost analytic way. I think Foucault is the linchpin here. It's a weird mix because it reads almost like american philosophy, but with these compact terms that draw on an exotic french outside.

I think that's what 'subjectivity' is. It's a shared term for a lot of academics - a compact word that carries a lot of meaning, but once learned, can be treated drily in normal academic prose - but it's really confusing for people outside. It's inherently confusing, and will continue to be. Anyone can learn what t means with some effort, but ...analogically gyms are there, and anyone can run a marathon. But if a million people running a 5k is more valuable than a few running a marathon..

And that isn't even right, because I don't think 'subjectivity' is really that hard-phil. I think it can be translated very easily, without the baggage. Which is what you excel at doing! So why hold onto it? Why not start a post boldly with your own reflections and concepts? Especially if theyre more easily understood?

There is no better way to pacify a righteous rage at real injustice than to give it a fake but clear decoy and let it feel falsely empowered through continuously destroying it (cf. ritual, compulsion, the need for a scapegoat to contain rage) - Cynicus of Alexandria

Cynicus, fake as he is, was only scratching the surface. I think, if he was real, he'd have something to add about religions based around sacrifice and the tonal quality - straight prophets- of those who get drawn to the performative rejection of those religions. As Joanna Newsom says 'what's redacted will repeat.'

:cool:

Here's the contrarian, instinctively pouncing....

Though not really. I agree with those parts of your post that are susceptible to agreement vs disagreement.

In the spirit of the crowd, let's do away with 'subjectivities' -the term has so much baggage, it weighs the whole thing down. If subjectivity makes people think of 'consciousness' and leads people to confusedly attempt to suss out its meaning through the familiar subjective/objective divide - then why keep it around?

What is more antithetical to the spirit of the crowd and collective than a term that solicits confusion and division, basically guarantees it. In deleuzian/nietzschean terms, what does a term like 'subjectivity' do but necessitate a priestly class to explain?

I believe I understand the term, but why couch it in this kind of language, which keeps at bay 'the way that touching against other bodies loses its taboo.'

Well, one way to think about philosophical debate is the way some people, especially men, approach these issues: it's just about the matter in hand in the discussion, the issue at stake, nothing else. One doesn't approach the discussion as social interaction between other people at all. After all, extremely few people here actually know the people here (apart from the mods and admins) and even fewer have met each other, at large we are anonymous to each other. Thus if you upset someone or look foolish in some discussion, it doesn't matter. In fact there are so few of us that if one would by accident stumble to another that participates here in the discussion, the meeting would be very likely a happy event (what would be the odds) even if in the forum the persons are bitter rivals. The cordiality is only defined by the rules of the forum, which are simple. The worst thing what can happen is that the Forum NKVD can take you to the virtual forest and use the ban gun on your head. Afterwards, no more PF for you. Some haven't cared much about that either. — ssu

True, but one thing that women understand very well [traditional gender roles disclaimer] is that men often play out the social aspects of debate, without realizing it.

But let me disentangle this difference from both sex and gender, because I do think carving it along traditional lines is often inapt. (If you think I'm just virtue signalling, keep Nietzsche in mind)

& to do that, let me, further, set up a dichotomy that has traditionally been broken along gender lines. Content vs form, argument versus delivery. It's easier to imagine outside of a pure-language venue like the forums. So : people arguing in a bar. You can imagine an argument at a bar -for sake of argument, let's imagine these are savvy arguers, making good points and counterpoints - being recorded and transcribed. The transcription would look like two people focused on a central idea and arguing around it. What would be left out is the body language, the exchange of glances, the reflexive raising of hands, the modulations in tone. Why someone chooses to take a bathroom break here, and the other person makes a joke there.

Anyone can, theoretically, take either perspective on the conversation - transcript vs social-physical drama -this is why it's not simply a gender thing. But the interesting aspect, to my mind, is that someone within the conversation, can be in a 'transcript' state of mind, while nevertheless participating in the physical aspect. (on a forum, the 'physical' aspect cashes out more as tone, posture, choice of references, intellectual positioning, moral maneuvering)

It never hurts to imagine a conversation you're in as being depicted as a dispute between characters in a novel. You don't want to err too much on that side, because argumentation does have an independent logic of its own, but you never want to forget that you're never in pure argumentation. Especially when it comes to politics.

In terms of the worst thing that can happen on the forums: My dream is to be ban-gunned on a mild winter day, in a picturesque copse, with snow softly falling, dogs barking in the distance.

I was going to post that the act of condemning ‘otherness’ is meaningful because it helps to define us, in a form larger than our individual selves, and enhances group solidarity, but your edit covers it. Maybe the polarizing downside can be minimized by trying to be mindful while in the activity. — praxis

Yeah, I realized after the post I'd left something important out and tried to sneak a patch in. I do think that stuff is important, in moderation.Somewhere on the spectrum between addiction to clap emojis on one end and angelic dedication to neutrality on the other.

As you yourself point out, we should "get real and precise about what policies help people", which, as we both agree, are leftist policies, in order to organize and stimulate a voting block that is not only above Trump's voting block, but beyond Hillary's as well (which had about 4 million fewer voters than Obama did in 2008). There is simply no need to appease Trump supporters or moderate our condemnation of the policies they advocate, thereby normalizing them. — Maw

I see your point. But, like Maw, I don't agree with your tactical assessment. I don't think swaying Trump supporters is the goal. I think the goal is mobilizing the already existing majority for a better candidate with better policies. Of course, locally, in swing states, swaying Trump voters may well be important. But as far as the overarching narrative goes, I think you can leverage the "we are the resistance" sentiment. — Echarmion

Reflecting, I think you guys are largely correct in terms of tactics for getting a democrat elected, and I was incorrect to argue in those terms. That said, this whole divide is a really profound divide. Even if a democrat carves out a narrow victory, it'll hardly be a return to normalcy. If a democrat's elected, and a triumphal technocracy retakes the reins, the passionate discontent of trump-voters is not going to go away. It will probably get worse. I think Streetlight has drawn this out very well in his posts around impeachment.

That's with the people that cannot rise above the level of seeing a philosophical discussion mainly as a competition between individual people and focus on how they themselves come out to other people.

For me it's the forum is a window where you can share your ideas and see if they make sense to other people. The best thing that can happen is that someone takes their time, reads and understands your idea and shows that you have an error somewhere in your reasoning in such way that you yourself get the point. Or gives more insight to the topic. That improves your thinking and your argumentation. Then you are not making that mistake in real life. — ssu

I agree, ideally. And I also find that, more often or not, I'm competing or preening. Not only not living up to the ideal, but roundly ignoring it. I often have trouble figuring out how to get out of this way of acting - it feels like an addiction or compulsion. The quickest and easiest way to dispel guilt and cognitive dissonance is to call out others for doing what you suspect yourself of doing. I find myself doing that again and again. The post you were responding to, which I edited out, was essentially that sort of thing.

And again, Trump supporters belittle and shame liberals in their own ways as well, and yet....crickets. Why isn't this a "bad approach"? — Maw

It is, of course, a bad approach. But if we're on more or less the same side, I can think of nothing less productive than devoting a huge portion of our intellectual effort to denunciating our political opponents, and then agreeing with one another about it, with congratulatory emojis.

Isn't that what it boils down to? Well maybe not, because you're arguing against trump supporters here as well. But why is that? You've just explained why you believe there's no reason to try to sway that population. So. If we're not performatively demonstrating our opposition for each other, and we're not trying to sway trump voters - what are these intense denunciatory posts about? My theory is that they're just an expulsion of anger and contempt. & sometimes, they're just a rush of bolstering our identity, through unloading on an Other. I think that expressions of solidarity are a good means but too quickly become an end. All that angry energy thrown into a void is pure creative capability, thwarted, and wasted.

I think any worldview that focuses on identifying an inherent core of badness, rather than recognizing the inevitability of human fear, anger, weakness and insecurity will keep putting out fires, supressing symptoms. And it'll lead to a never-ending oscillation between devaluation and new mints. Racism is a horrible thing, but you won't fix it unless you provide some way of addressing the underlying causes that feed it. If someone is irredeemable, they have no reason to try to rehabilitate themselves. They'll either go into hiding, or become more brazen. (On the other hand, if social recognition of having-been-rehabilitated is easy to obtain, they'll also have no reason to become actually rehabilitated.)

And whenever someone uses 'true' as an adjective like that, one can be sure that they are bullshitting. The classic case of the bullshitter is Simon Cowell, the world famous transformer of original musical creative talent into bland mediocrity, "...and I genuinely mean that." — unenlightened

Matthew 5:37 - " 'Let your word be "Yes, yes' or 'No, no': anything more that this comes from the evil one.'"

This is orthogonal to the main flow of the conversation, but I've seen you make this point before and it's one I agree with.. Multiplying qualifiers like 'genuine' and 'sincerely' is the equivalent of printing reams of hundred dollar bills in order to deal with inflation. Or creating an auxillary currency during a counterfeiting crisis, whose purpose to is to guarantee the authenticity of the primary currency, but which is just as easy to counterfeit. So then you need a tertiary currency, and so forth.

This is basically what happens with racism and misogyny by the way. Racists and Misogynists, in a world where racism and misogyny earn severe social penalties, rapidly learn to fake being non-racist and non-misogynist. But, being misogynists and racists, they eventually do misogynist and racist things, and we collectively realize how easily the old social currency is faked. For example : Even if we value nice guys who are feminist allies, we learn very rapidly not to trust people who identify as 'nice guys who are feminist allies'.

And now the same misogynists who were able to fake the first currency, just as easily learn to fake the second. They, too, are disturbed by these 'nice guys' who, they'll say, almost always conceal bad intentions behind a good facade. (imagine a parallel example with racism.) And this works for a while but, being racists and misogynists, they eventually do racist and misogynist things, which means ---

But how far can you progress in this direction? How many turns of the screw? "' Great job, and I genuinely mean that. And I know a lot of times people say they genuinely mean something, when they don't, but I -- I just don't know how else to say it. It sucks. We've become so cynical about direct appreciation, that I *would* just say it directly, only I knew you wouldn't believe me, and rightfully so.'

Anyway, that's a character I've been working on - I mean it's just how I feel like everyone talks these days, you know? It's insane. By the way, you did great tonight ' "

Will respond in the morning.

Here they are. Edited: [previously: condensed history of the forums. not the right time to post]

Also @Maw I was really careful here so its frustrating when you bulldoze over it. I wouldn't have qualified population with 'active voters' if I didn't understand the stats you posted. Maybe I should have said 'those who vote' instead?

I don't ask that anyone be more centric ('limp' is the background connotation.) I think it makes sense to get real and precise about what policies help people, which could very well be leftist options (in fact I think this is the case!) But introducing these leftist options after shaming many of the people they'd benefit, means they won't vote for them. so its a bad approach. I don't know why this is controversial. But I do have my crackpot conspiracy theories around why people on the forum over-value being smarter than dumbies, at the expense of political tactics.

I don't advocate treating Trump supporters as literal Nazis. I advocate treating them as literal Trump supporters. That is, treat them as if they knowingly support all the things Trump is doing, insofar as they are a matter of public record or otherwise obvious. This, of course, only applies to current Trump supporters. But it applies regardless for their stated reasons for intending to vote for Trump again.

Voting for Trump is voting for Trump to continue what he has been doing. Trump's policies and behaviour are bad. To argue whether it's fair to claim Trump supporters are racist is, IMHO a distraction from the actual issue - that Trump is a bad president that supports bad policies. If all you worry about is whether or not your support for Trump is wrongly interpreted as evidence for racism, you're already part of the problem.

So, I don't think it matters whether or not it is entirely fair to every Trump supporter to call them racist. Because if you support Trump, you're so obviously supporting "bad things" that it's not a debate worth having. The only debate worth having is how to get enough people to vote for someone who will do less harmful stuff. — Echarmion

In terms of tactics, I think one puzzle piece is to not alienate roughly half of the US population( of voters.) If you begin with an attack, the person will get defensive. This is the same reason leftist attacks on moderate liberals, like Obama, tend to fail. If voting for Obama means knowingly supporting everything he did, then you're in trouble. There are, I'm sure, many people who voted for Trump who are queasy on certain policies. That's the populace you need to sway. If you write off the entirety of active voters who votes for trump, you automatically hand him the win.

[the cheeky meta stuff: your post is too bogged down in justificatory nuance. You make these conceptual distinctions between how you actually see things and how you need to argue things from a tactical standpoint. For me, its handier to categorize you as what I, hypothetical responder, already did from the get-go, namely : [Someone who acts as though he thinks all trump voters are actual nazis] ]

I didn't do that, and that's the only way I was able to respond.

Italian fascism? — Janus

Italian Fascism took root in the Po Valley. It made use of a political/economic space outside real state control to build a parallel de facto state. It leveraged this control, in connection with currents of dissatisfaction with Italy's post-WW1 lot, to go national. I can't stress enough how our incapability as 21st century americans to understand the what it means to have major territories outside state control leaves us handicapped in understanding Fascism. You have to try to imagine say West Virginia developing their own extra-national system of governance that rivals the power of the federal government, and using that to gain seats in the senate, and coming to be seen as a viable alternative to the entire US government.

Think about the scope required for something like that and then think about stuff like the unite the right rally. You can - and should- hate unite the right ralliers without giving them the absurd credit of being as politically powerful as Italian Fascists.

I of course agree that we should constantly be checking ourselves morally. 'Not as bad as the worst' isn't a good standard of measurement. But, then, 'any given poster who disagrees with me politically is inches away from being as bad as the worst, if not there already' isn't a good way of approaching things either.

One side begins to see Hitler purging the clearly marked Other, & the other side begins to see Stalin or Mao purging those suspected of having the wrong ideas in their hearts. Neither approach is good, and both, while being good occasional gut-check ways of appraising the situation, quickly fester if treated as anything more than that - if they begin to dictate our entire way of engaging. (As I said in an earlier post, I was shocked and scared enough to study fascism seriously with my other liberal friends. I did the check you mention, the check which I support, as check. We're not in a near-fascist situation.)

There's a common phenomenon where Trump + immigration camps gets smeared together as part of the same thing - an irruption of proto-fascism. But the US tradition of camping, caging and expelling immigrants was alive and well with Obama. I don't say this as a kind of 'what about' political scoring, I loathe trump and am temperamentally inclined to like Obama, who I voted for and, if I could go back, would vote for again. I say it because we become politically impotent when we can't address immigration camps unless the issue is tied to a wrong party and personality. If you can't address inhumane conditions without couching them in fascist analogies, you won't be able to address them. You'll be titling at windmills, while the real conditions/policies/laws that lead to these camps remain untouched, ultimately helping no one.

You & I are both susceptible to the allure of composing a well-written, koan-y, paradox-spiced, passion-posts in favor of a clear moral cause. But -as I often tell myself next-day lying in bed, ignoring the alarm - sometimes the rush of making the Good Post bulldozes over important details.

I see your point, but on the other hand, a certain amount of categorization is important for social, political action. If we look at everyone's exact position and exact reasons for that position, there is no way to effect social change. Winning an election, changing a society's general outlook, are social problems. You cannot solve them without some categorization into people who are on the right side and people who are not.

Accounting for every nuance will bog you down, and allow less scrupulous people to take the initiative. — Echarmion

Imagine I responded to your post like this: 'Oh here's another person who thinks every one who voted for Trump should be treated as a literal nazi. Big surprise.'

That's not what you were saying, but it does certainly make categorization easier. And it prevents me from getting bogged down in nuance.

I pose this challenge to you. Reject my hypothetical response to you, while defending the substance of your post, and all without using undue nuance. (As an added challenge explain how your rejection and defense is different than what I was saying when responding to Maw.)

I read the article. The worst thing you can do, right, is say 'it's bad, but it's not Auschwitz.' If I said that, I'd be torn to shreds. I wouldn't say that. But the author of the article you linked does (reread it.) In context, of course: it's not Auschwitz, but it could become that. It could, but what is the mechanism by which that stuff actually happens? She doesn't get into it. She focuses on abstract potential.

But I'm not going to defend any of it, it's horrible, it's full-stop bad. I'm not going to weigh things one way or the other. I'm not going to disrespect either the suffering of holocaust victims or contemporary victims by fitting it into a false historical narrative, for political fuel.

Do I think these concentration camps are likely to lead to holocaust-type gas-chambers? No, but I think that's irrelevant to the people caught up in them. Stop that shit. They're not there to score points for disinterested observers. They're in a bad place - don't make that about fascism. Make it about what it is, which is what it is. You don't need Hitler. If you make it about hitler, which it isn't, people will dismiss you on immigration, when they shouldn't. Let's not shoot ourselves in the foot, at the expense of real people, in order to beautifully release our (privileged European- Cioran) anger in accordance with suitably grand narratives. If you care as much as you say you do, figure out how concretely to help. Don't use it to be right for the sake of slamdowns. That's gross.

oh here's the problem — Maw

Literally, who are you talking to? I'm serious man, I would appreciate if you responded to my engaged response. I am responding to yours. I discussed the cartoon. You're...I don't know what you're doing? We're not on twitter, no one's going to like and retweet the snarky one-liners. Who are you talking to? Can we talk freely, or do we have to eyeroll to a nonexistent person who already agrees with us?

Link one: Hanover didn't define Naziism as anything. He pointed out a disanalogy between Trump and Hitler. Of course there is a good point - one you made - that it doesn't make sense to wait until Trumpism & Naziism coincide - because then it's too late. I will point out that Hitler lead the Beer Putsch in 1923, wrote Mein Kampf in 1925. Trump has no signs of being that intensely committed to a pain-hardened vision he's seeking to realize. I'd also point out that Germany was severely economically and militarily humiliated following WW1. I'd also point out that Fascism took root in areas outside state control by installing secondary institutions that could rival the state. None of which apply to America now. It's not really the same, as Robert O Paxton, pre-eminent scholar of Fascism, tried to show in Harpers (that bastion of conservative thought) to deaf ears.

Second link: same response.

Third link does show that conditions are horrible for immigrant children and families. I agree, fully, wholeheartedly, and reject everything Hanover has said about families bringing this on themselves. This is an outrage and I won't defend it.

But, fourth link, I don't accept the analogy between these camps and holocaust concentration camps. (this leaves me open - link me to the concentration camp specialists.)

fifth link. I'm no specialist on genocide but I have taken a class devoted to the sociology of genocide. There have been genocides for a long time, and they have similar structural features, but, luckily we don't seem to be in one today.

sixth link: It make sense to focus on genocide when the rhetorical oomph of the comparison involves genocide. If you don't want to focus on genocide, but rather what led up to it (and again I understand your point that we want to anticipate and stop, rather than react and mitigate) you might rest easier. I had a similar alarmist reaction when Trump won. I was sincerely scared.Me and my friends put together a reading group to study fascism. We did. We concluded, despite the horrible things going on, that we're not in danger of a fascist takeover.

I didn't, because you are over-analyzing a cartoon in a digression that I'm not following whatsoever. — Maw

If the close-reading of the cartoon is confusing, bracket the second paragraph and focus on the first . In the meantime, I'll take the time to read all of your links and respond.

As I said, the cartoon is a response to a specific form of argumentation that Hanover had made. — Maw

I do recognize that. I tried to show in my post that I understand the point of the cartoon, and I also understand Hanover's argument, and I tried to show the disconnect between the cartoon and what it's cartooning. I think I did a good job of that and whether you agree or disagree with my points, I wish you had engaged with it.

You didn't, and I suspect that that's because it was a speedbump in the way of composing the hyperlinked second post. which I will go through now and respond to, shortly, in a subsequent post.