I have something to say.
I AM a philosopher. I have philosophical views, on a range of subjects, of my own devising. They are informed by extensive reading; written in relation to modern western philosophy since Descartes, and intended to save the world by providing for a long, prosperous, sustainable future.
Recently, I showed that the subjectivist, post modernist, anti-truth position of the left is false, with numerous examples, in an argument peppered with literary and philosophical references, and ran into an ideologically indoctrinated brick wall of direct contradiction. This inability and/or unwillingness to learn plunged me into a sudden and deep depression, for - if humankind cannot learn, cannot correct this mistake, we are doomed.
I can show, that Descartes contemporary - Galileo, was arrested and tried for the heresy of proving the earth orbits the sun. I can show the effect on the subsequent development of philosophy, and how science was used as a tool - while being ignored as a means to establish valid knowledge of reality, and that, consequently, having applied the wrong technologies for the wrong reasons, we are headed for extinction.
To my mind, this is a significant philosophical argument - and it requires attention. Yet it gets none, and I need to know why. Is it me? I am not the most sociable of people. I'm a nerd with no social skills type. And the last thing I want to do is queer the pitch of my own philosophy with my ... inability to see that as my problem. I'm the one with something important to say. I shouldn't have to blow smoke up the arses of idiots to be heard. Or should I?
Recently, I showed that the subjectivist, post modernist, anti-truth position of the left is false, with numerous examples, in an argument peppered with literary and philosophical references, and ran into an ideologically indoctrinated brick wall of direct contradiction. This inability and/or unwillingness to learn plunged me into a sudden and deep depression, for - if humankind cannot learn, cannot correct this mistake, we are doomed.
I can show, that Descartes contemporary - Galileo, was arrested and tried for the heresy of proving the earth orbits the sun. I can show the effect on the subsequent development of philosophy, and how science was used as a tool - while being ignored as a means to establish valid knowledge of reality, and that, consequently, having applied the wrong technologies for the wrong reasons, we are headed for extinction.
To my mind, this is a significant philosophical argument - and it requires attention. Yet it gets none, and I need to know why. Is it me? I am not the most sociable of people. I'm a nerd with no social skills type. And the last thing I want to do is queer the pitch of my own philosophy with my ... inability to see that as my problem. I'm the one with something important to say. I shouldn't have to blow smoke up the arses of idiots to be heard. Or should I?
Comments (93)
I agree that post-modernism opened a can of worms, which I suppose is fine but since the box hasn't been closed, the worms of post-truthism are now all over the place. Which leads me to my question: why do you lampoon only the left? Hasn't Trump been the king of anti-truthism lately? Or are you amongst the ones who happen to believe him?
Then for how many years do you imagine your interlocutors have worked to obtain their knowledge? What is the exact difference in years worked between someone who will discover the truth and one who will not. I'm interested because I've put in a few years myself - am I nearly there yet?
It'd help if you didn't frame your views in ideological terms. You don't seem so much interested in creating a coalition to further your goal as you are in identifying who the enemy is. Which, in your case, incongruously is "the left", even though people on "the left" are a lot more likely to agree with your focus on cheap, clean energy.
Have you actively sought to abandon your assumptions and base your arguments in solid realities, like epistemology, evolution and physics, and then see if your philosophical favourites can be sustained in those terms?
Or are you looking down the wrong end of the telescope - starting with some metaphysical concept, like being, or some moral purpose - like equality, and bending the world around it?
Do you have a tendency to think in terms of superlatives - highest, fastest, biggest, strongest? That's often a road block.
Are you unreasonably attracted to nihilistic despair? You know you can just turn your back, because nihilism supports no value that requires you accept nihilism. All these, and a thousand other things - I've had to force my way past. Have you?
The climate catastrophe is now inevitable. It's gonna start hitting badly by the end of this century only, if we're lucky. What form of 'civilisation' will sustain and survive for centuries ahead in spite of climate change, I don't know. I guess we'll all take a hit, some bigger hit here, some smaller there. But I would hope that societies built on common search for truth and respect for truth stand a better chance of surviving the incoming crises than societies built upon lies.
And you think the right wants that, and the left does not, because?
Quoting counterpunch
I consider myself "on the left", and I don't want authoritarian eco-communism. So I wonder why you'd think all people on the left are the same, or why you think that they are somehow not rational.
Yes. This guy has an irrational fear of the commies. Or is raising a straw man.
I'm reluctant to put stock in armageddon predictions because I believe that if matters come to a head, better sense will prevail and the world will put up a united front against whatever man-made catastrophe that's threatening the globe.
That said, one need only look in the right places for evidence of cataclysmic events we simply lack the technology to prepare for. The dinosaurs were wiped off the face of the earth by an asteroid impact 65 million years ago and who knows another one of those space rocks may be hurtling through space on an earth intercept course as we speak.
There's the spirit!
Quoting Olivier5
There's a massive source of clean energy inside the earth - that we can tap into and use to extract carbon from the atmosphere, and sequester it in the earth. This isn't just producing slightly less carbon, because we get a small fraction of our energy from wind and solar, but actively reversing climate change - using the heat energy of the earth itself. So no, climate catastrophe is not inevitable. It's a matter of the technologies we employ.
Where philosophy comes in, is that this approach implies a global solution, and ultimately, a post material world. This is externalised by national and economic ideologies. Politicians want the huge kick-backs from all that windmill building, they want bumps in the mining stocks in which their final salary, index linked pension pots are invested, they want 'green' jobs, and the pretence of sustainability, more than they want sustainability. A global solution providing limitless clean energy is contrary to the idea that nation states are sovereign entities; like the world were a jig-saw puzzle made up of nation state pieces, and not in fact - part of a single global environment with ideological lines drawn on it.
Quoting Olivier5
That's exactly what we don't have. We are dealing with people who believe nation states exist, and that there's a man in the sky who will drop down at the last minuet and make everything all right. And people who think, just in case, they'd better die with enough gold on hand to bribe their way across the river Styx. That's the problem. We are technologically advanced, but ideologically, we haven't moved an inch since Galileo was being shown the tools of torture and asked if he might like to reconsider his earlier answer.
Yep.
Quoting counterpunch
Nope.
Quoting counterpunch
Nope.
Quoting counterpunch
Nope.
Quoting counterpunch
Yep. 1001, in fact.
So...how many years?
Let's start with epistemology.
What can we know, and how can we know it?
I'm not speaking technologically. Technologically we can send people live on Ganymede.
I'm talking of what is possible politically, in practice, given limited means and time. Realistically speaking, the world needs to turn around tomorrow. This is not going to happen, full stop. Hence we're screwed.
My hope is the smartest will survive. Some societies are smarter collectively than others. In my view the center-left ones.
My point entirely. Galileo did well BTW. He was wise to live, unlike Bruno. Descartes had his own manuscript almost ready about the superiority of the solar centric system, and he wisely decided to shut up. He did not print it, seeing the risks taken by Galileo.
But the Church was burning people alive for heresy right through to 1792 - well into the Industrial Revolution. Refusing to afford science any moral authority, as the means to establish valid knowledge of Creation - meant, we worshiped the book, not the Creation itself, and maintained the religious, political and economic ideological architecture of societies, intact - unreformed in relation to this burgeoning understanding of reality, even as we pressed ahead with technology, produced by science reduced to the status of a whore.
We need to grow up real fast, accept that science is true, and act accordingly. It doesn't mean turning the world upside down. We have to get there from here. It begins with massive, base load clean energy from the molten interior of the earth. In terms of the fundamental physics, doing anything requires energy, and we need massive amounts of it. Not less energy - from wind and solar, but radically more, from the big ball of molten rock beneath our feet.
Quoting counterpunch
Political correctness is useful insofar as it keeps ad-hominem and poisoning of the well at bay. It makes sense to take care that our language doesn't unduly label and marginalize people who might have important opinions to contribute. I don't really care much about it beyond that, it's sometimes taken too far, but even where it is it doesn't really seem worth worrying about to me. It plays into the whole "culture war" thing, which as far as I am concerned is a distraction from actual problems.
Quoting counterpunch
I honestly don't know enough about their exact goals and approach to form an opinion on extinction rebellion specifically. I think it's entirely understandable that people take to the streets in desperation after decades of inaction on climate change. It certainly has helped to get the problem more firmly embedded in people's heads.
Quoting counterpunch
Some left-wing people might. The left has it's share of authoritarians, neither side has a monopoly on those. But personally I believe in the things I believe partly because I think they'll increase freedom. Of course I understand freedom as more than "being left alone" and include actually having the freedom to act because you're not starving or homeless etc.
Quoting counterpunch
It's a bit of a Truism that having less stuff is more sustainable. If we were more frugal with our resources, that would free up a part of said resources for investments into the future. The "western" consumer economy is extremely wasteful and certainly not sustainable. So having less seems a very obvious first step to take. And most people only actually use a portion of the stuff they own. I'd rather invest that portion into a Mars mission or something.
The pay more part mostly comes from trying to accurately price the environmental impact, which seems to me a perfectly fine market-based approach, if difficult to do accurately in practice.
Quoting counterpunch
Sure, but the same is of course true of your own good intentions. So that can't be the difference between your good intentions and mine.
We agree on a lot of things. That science is the way to gain knowledge about reality. That this knowledge shows us some obvious priorities (cheap, clean energy can solve a whole bunch of our problems). That failing to recognise those priorities could lead to disaster (via climate change, environmental degradation or simply not having an asteroid defense system when you need it). We also broadly agree that market based solutions are often good, that concentrating too much power in few hands is very dangerous, and that freedom is valuable.
So why are we bogged down in an ideological conflict about left and right?
The irony is that the book that triggered Galileo's second trial -- the Dialogue Concerning the Two Main World Systems -- was written at the request of no other than pope Urban VIII aka Maffeo Barberini, a Florentine humanist and a friend of Galileo (who was from Pise and worked in nearby Florence much). Galileo had publicly stayed out on heliocentrism since his first trial circa 1615. The new pope asked him to present the two systems comparatively in a neutral manner, so Galileo tried to do that but apparently the resulting book was quite slanted in favor of heliocentrism. Maybe Galileo saw his revenge at hand and mocked his past prosecutors a bit too much...
The Jesuits hated it and used it against Urban VIII whom they branded as weak against heretics and Protestants. Geopolitics weren't too good for the Church, thirty years war and all... Urban VIII had to deny any association with Galileo and agreed to a trial, although he commuted the ultimate prison sentence for his ex friend into house arrest.
Quoting counterpunch
You have a plan, huh? Any funders yet?
It is kinda weird that you identify with the left - and when I challenge prominent left wing ideas, you say "How dare you assume what I, personally believe?" Suddenly, you're not a collectivist - supporting a dictatorial dogma. Suddenly, you're a lone wolf - as is everyone on the left!
Quoting Echarmion
Is that so? It's not an incoherent and unjust philosophy, in direct contradiction of human rights like freedom of conscience and expression? It's not a basis for de-platforming academics, shutting down people's opinions, controlling the internet and avoiding discussions you find uncomfortable?
Quoting Echarmion
You don't think political correctness unduly labels and marginalizes people? Or is it that, because it only does it to white people, that's okay in terms of your identity politics hierarchy of victimhood?
Quoting Echarmion
It IS the whole culture war thing. It's the left's war against our culture!
Having responded to your first paragraph - it occurs to me that you've shown elsewhere, that attempting discussion with you is pointless. You will not engage with the points raised, but just directly contradict them by repeating your dogmatic position. I find that deeply depressing and I'd rather not waste my time responding to the rest of your post. But I can't resist this:
Quoting Echarmion
No. That's profoundly wrong. But what it is, is confirmation that you are in the mainstream of left wing thought, on everything from political correctness to climate change, and yet would deny it. Either you are blisteringly lacking in self awareness, or radically dishonest. Either way - I'm not banging my head against that brick wall. So thank you, and fare thee well.
And here you have the answer why noone will seriously engage with your ideas: it's because you already think anyone who disagrees with you is either an idiot or a liar. Why would anyone talk to you, given that attitude?
But good luck anyways, you'll need it.
You seem to know more about Galileo's trial(s) than I do, which is also quite ironic. I do know that in Dialogue, Galileo put the argument for geocentrism in the mouth of Simplicio - a pun on 'simpleton' in the common Italian. That was probably a mistake. He was dealing with ideas that were very serious in their sacred and political implications, particularly at the height of the Protestant rebellion against the authority of the Church. He would have been much better offering the Church a way out - not least by refencing St Augustine, and construing science as man's understanding of the word of God made manifest in Creation.
Quoting Olivier5
Therein lies the problem. The Jesuits, and the Papal Court of the Inquisition. No-one expects the Inquisition!
It begins with massive, base load clean energy from the molten interior of the earth.
— counterpunch
Quoting Olivier5
I have plans. I know what needs to be done and how to do it. But I don't have funds. I've communicated my ideas to a few people who say they're interested in this area, but I get nothing back. It's like, they're offering funds for innovative technologies, but they've already decided - and it's just a publicity stunt and/or a tax write off.
If you've already decided that everything you believe is necessarily true and any contradiction must therefore be ideologically motivated irrespective of its content and justification, you're still, in philosophical terms, a bug under a rock. All you're doing here is proving what everyone already knows: you are incapable of rational discussion. You get the reaction you deserve.
It also doesn't help that these beliefs you hold to be beyond contradiction lean heavily toward the racist, homophobic, transphobic, fascistic and, in the case of your ideas for environmental science, utterly batshit insane. Maybe acquiring some decency and humanity will make people want to engage with you, and maybe some light reading on the subjects you wish to proclaim on will give them something to work with if and when they do.
I'm joking, of course.
You're not the only one with plans, sweetheart... But consider that, whatever the technology you use, putting CO2 out of the atmosphere will probably cost us more energy than it would cost us not to pump it in the atmosphere in the first place. We are not capable of the latter, and we will most probably never afford the former. These ideas of sucking out CO2 from the air make no economic/energetic sense. Not pumping CO2 INTO the atmosphere is what we need to do. Hence taxing carbon emissions is a good idea.
East Anglia ONE off the UK coast, 102 turbines producing 714 megawatts - enough to power 600,000 homes. Cool right? Wrong. It took 10 years to build, cost £2.5bn, and in 25 years it will be scrap.
We would need 6000 windmills of this size to meet the UK's current energy demand - and that's without factoring in plans, from 2030, to begin adding the energy demand of 30 million electric cars to the national grid. So that's 10,000 windmills - minimum, roughly costing £2500bn, to provide energy for 25 years, and then, the same again. That's not a plan - it's a disaster.
By drilling into hot volcanic rock, close to magma chambers beneath volcanoes, and at subduction zones where one continental plate meets another, lining the bore holes with pipes, and pumping water through the pipes, to produce steam, to drive turbines - I believe we can produce virtually limitless amounts of electrical energy. It would require significant investment, but it wouldn't need replacing in 25 years, and it would produce more than sufficient energy to meet our needs. Sufficient in fact to extract carbon from the air, and desalinate water to irrigate land for agriculture, recycle everything - and genuinely provide for a prosperous and sustainable future for humankind.
Yes, it would need replacing. Everything does after a while. Geothermic energy has been tried in places, and if it was some kind of magic bullet, I think we'd know already.
Were that a good argument, we'd still be living in caves. Geothermal energy has been tried. It's employed extensively in Iceland and New Zealand, for example, but even there - not in the hard core industrial manner I proscribe. I'm not talking about dipping your toes in a naturally occurring hydrothermal vent. This is magma power at 700 'C - not warm water power at 100 'C.
No you're not. That's what you really believe:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
There's no need to pretend you're joking. I'm not going to de-platform you for speaking your mind. I would have applauded your honesty if you hadn't pretended to be joking, before I told you you're mistaken. Objecting to political correctness isn't racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic. I'm not any of those things - but I am myself, a straight white male, with interests I refuse to put second to the interests of others just because they're black, gay, women or like to pop on a frock at weekends and call themselves Veronica!
The problem is you think deferring to others on the basis of their arbitrary characteristics is the definition of decency and humanity - even while under the auspices of political correctness black people are fed some false narrative and incited to riots and looting, and children are fed puberty blockers that will destroy the rest of their lives, etc, etc, you continue - blinkered in your absolute conviction that political correctness is the answer to all the moral questions that have taxed the minds of philosophers throughout the ages, you think you left wing ideologues have solved it at last, and that anyone who deviates from the dogma must be a bad person. You're wrong.
Oh no, I really am. I have zero expectation that you would ever acquire sufficient humanity to give you pause before cheering on a murderous mob if that mob's interests happen to coincide with your own, or to pause before suggesting that unarmed, already-restrained black men have it coming when they're murdered by cops. I also have zero expectation -- and the OP bears this out -- that you would ever think you have to learn about a subject before declaring your beliefs about it beyond criticism.
I really was joking about that.
Quoting counterpunch
The beauty of not being a piece of shit is that I don't have to base my attitudes on secondary characteristics. Wanting, say, gay people to have the same quality of life as me, the same opportunities and advantages, follows naturally from an egalitarian position. Your view is that extending these opportunities and advantages to people with different characteristics to yourself is bad because it doesn't help straight white males, i.e. people with your characteristics whom are already amply advantaged compared to others.
I don't need to be asked to stand up for equality. When you're not a piece of shit, that happens naturally.
And I have zero expectation that you would ever back democracy against fraud, or law and order against a black criminal.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You don't think you're a piece of shit? Even though you believe truth is subjective and relative? You should see yourself from where I'm standing.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What are you dribbling about? Political correctness IS identity politics. You lump people into groups based on their arbitrary characteristics. What you don't do is treat people as individuals - regardless of race, gender, sexuality, nor respect their freedom of conscience and freedom of speech.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Many gay people are quite well off. Some are not. Why lump them into the same, supposedly disadvantaged group on the basis of who they are attracted to? It makes no sense. Similarly, not all black people are poor. Not all white people are privileged. There are plenty of poor white people. Who's arguing for them if you assume they are privileged - merely because they're white?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
No. That's not it at all. I would argue that people should be treated fairly, as individuals, regardless of what arbitrary group categories they happen to belong to - because those coincidences of identity say next to nothing about who an individual is, or where they stand in society. Particularly as equality legislation on race, gender, sexuality - was passed into law years ago.
What you seem to be arguing for is not an equality of rights, but equality of outcome - with the most privileged, regardless of individual merit, for everyone but poor whites, about whom you couldn't care less. It's why the Labour vote collapsed in the North, and why Americans voted for Trump in huge numbers. Left wing, politically correct ideology disenfranchises them - and the left shouldn't ignore that, less yet double down on the demonization of ordinary people.
I will quote my own ego:
"Those who are stoned, lynched and repressed today, will be worshiped as saints by the regret of the future."
Record what you know, make it clear what your vision is, and if you are sure of what you say, do not deny yourself the truth.
The fact that your brain takes "Murdering black people is wrong" and gets to "Would defend a black criminal against prosecution" is a testament to precisely how racist you are. They are not comparable. Wanting law and order is not a carte blanche to murder criminals in your protection.
Quoting counterpunch
No, *you* do. Equal to that's in your eyes is a failure to represent "straight white males".
Quoting counterpunch
That is not a rational measure of the D advantages they may have had specifically because of their sexuality.
Quoting counterpunch
All white people are advantaged insofar as they are white, which hugely lowers their probability of being attacked because of the colour of their skin by your lot.
Quoting counterpunch
Yes, much of it by the party you disparage for not focussing on "straight white males" and for giving a shit about "Muslims, gays and trannies". You don't get to both object to it and claim credit for it.
Quoting counterpunch
This is incoherent. I can't simultaneously aim for equality of outcome and a privileging of everyone except poor whites. That makes no sense.
I do argue for timeboxed approaches to gaining equity though, you're right there. In my capacity as an academic, I was involved in getting more female undergraduates in the physics department, and have always supported any effort to overcome the identification of "physicist" with "man". I support Labour's all-female shortlists for safe seats, and equal opportunities measures to ensure that women and ethnic minorities aren't disadvantaged by potential employers who share your views. If and when equity is obtained, I would object to such measures for the same reason.
Did you mean that as an accusation? :rofl:
Maffeo Barberini, when he was a cardinal, had taken Galilei's defense when the disputes on the various hypotheses of floating phenomena began in Florence . Therefore, when he was elected pope (in 1623), Galileo was led to hope in a benevolent attitude of the new pontiff towards him and his studies.
At the end of 1623 Galilei published a volume entitled Il Saggiatore , with a dedication to the new Pontiff. In this work the scientist, dealing with the motion of comets and other celestial bodies, indirectly confirmed the validity of the Copernican theory. He also argued that knowledge always progresses, without ever settling on dogmatic positions. In other words, man has the right and duty to broaden his knowledge without ever having the claim to arrive at absolute truth. This position, according to the scientist, was in no way contrary to the Faith.
Galilei's work was positively evaluated by Urban VIII. The Pope officially received the scientist in Rome in April 1624 and encouraged him to resume his studies on the comparison between the two systems, provided that the comparison was made only on a mathematical basis. This was to be understood in the sense that a mathematical certainty, that is abstract, had nothing to do with the certainties of the real world. Even with this limitation, the Church of Rome seemed to have softened its position on the new theory.
On 21 February 1632, fresh off the press, the scientific and non-scientific community had in their hands the last work of Galilei, Dialogue on the two greatest systems of the world (the Ptolemaic and the Copernican one), in which the validity of the heliocentric system was definitively upheld.
The hostile reactions were not long in coming. In the summer of the same year, Urban VIII expressed all his resentment because one of his theses had been treated, according to him, clumsily and exposed to ridicule. Furthermore, in the text, there was more than one reference to the pontiff as defender of the most backward positions. Finally the work ended with the affirmation that it was possible to dissertate on the constitution of the world, as long as we never seek the truth. This conclusion [...] infuriated the Pontiff.
I see that your ideas are founded on a strong will to change the world, or to cause the same change of thought that had completely transformed the future of humanity as Christianity did in late antiquity. You seem convinced that you know something that we all don't know.
Your mission is noble, your willpower is to respect. The only problem is that the individual, when aware of its goals, does not achieve its purposes. We live in times where any changes that could prevent a dark future can no longer be made.
We have already contemplated the light of advancement and prosperity, and now, we are heading towards the abyss. Your question should no longer be how to avoid it, but if you want to fall into it in complete hopelessness, or dancing...
That's why I say and repeat:
Record your truths. If you are convinced that you can keep it, even if it is the ashes of the flame of the past two centuries, do it. The same ones who use doublethink and hypocrisy to destroy the current world, out of resentment and regret, may discover your thoughts in the future and, then, they will say:
- This is a saint! He speaks the truth that we didn't hear 300, 400, 500 years ago!
(Currently, it makes no difference whether you want to disturb the applecart or not. He no longer cares about it, and his apples are already rotten. He himself poisons them and sells them at an exorbitant price! Where will you buy it? What difference does it makes? Get them, or die.)
Murder is wrong. Show me a murder and I'll tell you that's wrong. Show me a criminal - who fought off four police officers while handcuffed, and was restrained, and died... I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to the police. With you, it's quite the opposite. Because the criminal was black, you immediately infer racism, and call it murder. You have no doubt. Rather than answer my question: What was racist about it? - you attack me with accusations of racism.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Straight white males are singled out by political correctness for a lack of representation. I treat people as individuals regardless of race, gender or sexuality. You put straight white males last, and then insult them into the bargain.
"Many gay people are quite well off."
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The question was:
Quoting counterpunch
Answer the question, or don't respond. The latter is my preference - if that helps!
that it's not a murder if the victim is a black man in handcuffs. We've danced that jig already.
Quoting counterpunch
I.e. they have to share their rights with women, ethnic minorities, and gay and trans people. Ain't that a blow.
Quoting counterpunch
The question was based on a false premise as explained. Do better thinking, ask better questions, get better answers. Simple!
That's a bit of an unfair observation. I see the way the world works, and write in relation to that - not what you, personally, know or don't know. I'm not out to put anyone else down, but it remains that we use science as a tool, and ignore it as an understanding of reality. Instead of recognising science as a means to establish an increasingly valid picture of the reality we inhabit, we have maintained overlapping religious, political and economic ideological architectures; justifications for the application of technology, in apparent denial of science as truth. Do you know this?
Did you know that we used science to create 70,000 nuclear weapons at the height of the cold war because we disagreed about how to organise an economy? That we ignored climate change since the 1950's to make money from oil, and now want to spend trillions on climate change, all of a sudden, without recognizing that climate change was caused by applying the wrong technologies for the wrong reasons - and asking, are windmills a sufficient answer to the problem? If not, what is?
Maybe I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Maybe we are headed, inexorably for the abyss. Maybe that's what we want - to wipe ourselves out. I don't know what you know. I'm not a particularly sociable person. But I know I want to belong to a species with a future - because otherwise, it just makes everything I am and everything I do seem...masturbatory.
Yes. Humanity and everything it has built and developed has been maintained for thousands upon thousands of years of hypocrisy and lies. And why? Because we are intrinsically egoist beings; we want individual, not collective, achievement. When the group was forced into the human psyche, everything stopped being done in practical-physical delight - aka, real - for something symbolic-metaphysical - aka, false -.
You are not part of a species destined to progress, because progress is a modern idea, therefore, a false idea.
Oh! Can't you see it? It is the fact that the masses are aware of the lie that they are that has put the world in the precipice that it is today.
No. That's not right. Human beings lived as hunter gatherers, in tribal groups of around 40-120. Then, these tribal groups joined together to form civilisations. To join together, to prevent any little dispute splitting society along tribal lines, they needed laws, and so needed to justify law and order in society. They made God the objective authority for law and order. It was a convenience - not a lie, and civilisation has conferred huge benefits.
I'm getting a heavy Nietzsche vibe from you, but Nietzsche was wrong. Primitive man was not an amoral individualist. He was a tribal animal, and could not have survived unless he were also a moral animal that shared food, and protected the women and the young. Man has a moral sense - that was made explicit when tribes joined together, and needed God to justify law and order in society.
That was the 'inversion of values' of which Nietzsche wrote - not from individual to social, not the strong fooled by the weak, but an implicit tribal morality made explicit in a multi-tribal society. This is the "lie" - but there was never an individual, amoral freedom to call truth. We are, and have always been constrained by the moral requirements of society - tribal, and later, multi-tribal.
Read my article here in the forum called "Egoism: Humanity's Lost Virtue"
"Stirner is often seen as one of the forerunners of nihilism, existentialism, psychoanalytic theory, postmodernism and individualist anarchism."
The idea of egoism is extremely compelling - for it cannot be denied that the individual often finds his egoistic (hedonistic?) interests second to those of society, until one remembers that he was not always able to wipe his own arse, let alone feed himself, wash his clothes, make his bed, and still have the energy to:
Quoting Gus Lamarch
He would have to be a complete psychopath to forget that his egoistic self was born helpless, ignorant and dependent, and was nurtured at the bosom of his mother, in the schoolroom, and at an apprenticeship, where others put their egoistic desires second to his development. Do you suggest the individual just soak up all that social benefit and then declare himself owing nothing to anyone but his own egoistic purposes?
Even in his prime man is dependent on others, and the social division of labour. Either he will be constantly occupied building himself a house, making his own cloth and pots, raising crops (and not be able to do any of those things as well as a specialist) or, to pursue his own egoistic purposes he must necessarily outsource all kinds of needs. He could live in squalor, I suppose - like Diogenes, but what kind of egoistic purposes can a squalid individual pursue? He eats scraps with the dogs, but he is free? It's compelling, but it fails. It's not honest.
You have not been able to realize that when you are part of another organism - in the case of your gestation: your mother - you still are your own absolute property. This is nothing more than another proof that the individual ego is still superior and primary in all matters.
You, your essence - your egoism - could simply be molecules in the organism of "another" being. However, your maximum individual property obviously could not be what you currently call "I", but, in the case discussed, your mother - "Yours". The use of this word already demonstrates the egoistic nature of Man -.
To be, you only need the "I".
Quoting counterpunch
I do not deny that there are influences from third parties in the creation and development of the individual. I never stated otherwise in my article and in any of my publications.
What I say is that all this same development - consciously or unconsciously - is done in favor of the realization of someone's egoism - in this case, of its parents, or of its relatives, friends, teachers, etc... - There is no man-made action that is not self-biased.
Quoting counterpunch
It is obvious your perception that "needs" are things that are not based on the individual's egoism and will to power.
I affirm that the nature of Man is "Egoism", therefore, any and all his actions, from his first inspiration of the oxygen that permeates the planet we call home, was, is and will be based on irrational - or, on many times, rational - will to realize itself in existence. Leave this view of egoism as a sin to the past. The Ego is the starting point of all humanity, its own motivation, and its goal. A perfect cycle: Created, moved and completed by the same essence.
Quoting counterpunch
I'll use Stirner as an answer for this one:
"Do I write out of love to men? No, I write because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world; and, even if I foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up from this seed of thought — I would nevertheless scatter it. Do with it what you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me. You will perhaps have only trouble, combat, and death from it, very few will draw joy from it."
As some sort of leftist, I agree with you that a lot of the subjectivist, post-modernist, anti-truth, political correctness..." of the left is wrong, or sometimes not even wrong. Some of it is just plain nonsensical. I don't socialize much with people, especially the younger (or youngish) adults among whom there seems to be a lot of "leftist affect" (meaning, they sound like leftists but most likely are not). The literary theory of post-modernism is the worst slop I have encountered in a life-time of reading.
As time passes, it seems like the terms "left" and "right" have become less meaningful. It isn't that the continuum of opinion doesn't exist, but that the labels have been emptied of meaning by overuse. Lots of words have been ruined by excessive use and abuse.
Magna Magma: The only problem your idea of capturing energy from magma has is that the industry required for economic viability hasn't appeared. In 1945 there was no industry in place for atomic energy. It got built, but it took decades. The same goes for steam-generated coal powered electricity. The industry had to be developed over decades. There are hot-spots here and there where geo-thermal heat is close, or relatively close to the surface. Iceland; Yellowstone; various places on the pacific rim, etc. Many other areas sit on thick cold rock, and we'd have to bore much deeper.
A couple of years ago a long-time TPF member proposed floating large arrays of solar cells off shore. Sounded like a non-starter at the time, but I have since read of arrays that have been built, are floating, and producing electricity.
All the approaches that can be done; should be done, including the magna magma option.
You are not the only one running into brick walls. As a sometimes-socialist-agitator I can appreciate your frustration with brick walls. The very word "socialist" is a thought stopper for many people, a no-go zone.
About sustainability and consumption: What environmentalists mean by "reduced consumption" isn't a fixed standardized thing. My own experience is that I can consume less 'stuff' without the slightest reduction in my standard of living. Example: reading books and newspaper in digital form rather than paper. Drinking tap water instead of bottled water (which is often the same water one gets out of a tap). Not replacing clothing that is in very good condition. Keeping appliances until they fail. I use mass transit because I do not drive, and for many purposes it works. For some purposes it fails or doesn't exist anymore. Granted, it doesn't work for many people because of past huge investments in auto transportation coupled with long-term DISinvestment in mass transit.
Given the huge quantity of CO2 that transportation contributes to the atmosphere, that is one of the areas where 'green' will mean changes that will feel like loss to maybe a billion drivers.
I'm from the North of England - and it was economically devastated by the closing of the coal mines and the end of heavy industry culminating in the early 1980's with Thatcher. Labour were ubiquitous where I came from. It wasn't a choice so much as a fact of life. Working people and Labour are synonyms. But even as the Tories destroyed, and then ignored the North for a generation, Labour retreated to North London, and leant heavily into a reverse form of identity politics pitched through culture; civil rights, feminism, gay rights - pushing past mere equality, past positive discrimination to forge the dictatorial dogma that is political correctness. And then they were shocked when the Labour vote collapsed in the North in 2019.
Philosophically, political correctness depends on various subjectivist traditions - in chronological order, subjectivism, existentialism, critical theory, neo-marxism and post modernism - and you're right, it's nonsensical, but then - it doesn't uphold the value of making sense. It's all about power. This manifests most obviously in the fact that political correctness deals constantly in stereotypes - while criminalising stereotyping. It sees everything in terms of race - but then decries others as racist. It draws its power from making it impossible for you to make sense of anything. You end up cheering as businesses are looted and burnt, because they're black - and curse white people protesting that an election was stolen by those who, four years before - claimed the election was stolen! With the impossibility of reason, all you can do is take sides, and submit. And if you don't, then they will impugn you, attack and harass you - destroy you, and care not.
I'm not sure what you mean by:
Quoting Bitter Crank
The technology exists. Fossil fuel drilling technology is amazing - they can drill for miles and steer around corners. The rest is standard electricity generation technology - copper wire and magnets. Tapping into the heat energy of magma to produce electricity is a slam dunk technologically speaking.
Electrolysis to produce hydrogen - is a simple, well established technology. Delivering energy as hydrogen gas, or liquified fuel - much the same. Slight issue with embrittlement from hydrogen, but materials science has that covered. I'd start in the Pacific Rim, miles from anywhere - but I could have it up and running from off the shelf technologies in five years.
Relative to other renewable technologies, magma energy, I think - has the greatest potential to supply sufficient energy, reliably and at the lowest costs in terms of infrastructure. It doesn't imply the same left wing have less and pay more, carbon tax this, stop that approach - because it deals with supply, not consumption. You say:
Quoting Bitter Crank
But what about the people who print newspapers, build cars, manufacture appliances, grow cotton and knit cardigans or whatever. You may be able to go without because you are already quite well off. But what about the jobs of people down the line. You can have less, and put them out of work, but poor people breed more. Only sufficient clean energy can balance the equation - support capitalist growth, sustainable development and continued improvement in living standards, such that population tops out around 10-12bn by 2100 according to the UN mid range projection.
The UK seems to have clearer class lines than the US, but what happened in the north of England has happened here too. The American labor movement didn't die from natural causes--it was murdered. Killed off by the same economic interests that shafted the coal workers where you grew up. It's a disgusting story of corporate and political powers combining to suppress the working class. In this country the Democrats and Republicans found common ground in class warfare (like a Democratic governor in my liberal state who sent in the National Guard to help break the Hormel meat packing strike 40 years ago).
Quoting counterpunch
Yes, of course. It's all more or less on the shelf. What is NOT on the shelf is the industrial structure: the financial capital; the corporate commitment (of suppliers, drillers, pipe and boiler makers, etc.); the thousands of employees with the necessary skill-sets in geo-thermal; the large electrolysis plants and distribution systems; the adaptation of plants to turn generators with hydrogen, and so on.
High speed trains are on-the-shelf tech too, but the US has steadfastly refused to build the new roadbeds and buy the equipment. The big railroads can run their freight trains remotely (nobody on board), so it isn't as if they are technophobes. It's just bad national policy. Bad national policy could prevent geo-thermal too.
Quoting counterpunch
Hydrogen becomes a liquid at ?253°C (?423°F)--getting close to absolute zero. It takes 30% of the energy value in H to liquify it. Well, energy production and distribution always costs a share of the energy in coal, gas, electricity, wind, solar, or whatever. Maybe we have to do more research on that liquifying process.
Quoting counterpunch
Well, it isn't reluctant consumers that are costing most of the jobs, these days. It's automation in its various forms. One of the solutions to automation is to take the profits of automated factories and support displaced workers at a reasonably comfortable level of income. Automation and unlimited pollution free energy should make it possible for displaced workers to have good lives--not just living on welfare, but being supported while they find new ways to manage their lives.
Or, just as easily, we can de-automate factories to produce more jobs. God didn't order us to automate everything, after all.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I'm currently reading a book entitled 'Despised' By Paul Embry - about the relationship between Labour and the working class. It is somewhat different, because Labour were established 100 years ago to represent the working class relative to "the owners of the means of production" - and/or the aristocracy, but it's much same thing; they've abandoned the working class.
It's not that Labour have accepted the value of business though. It's weird. Labour monopolize public services and the media; but they've still switched sides. They court the well off with a bad conscience crowd - and make them ashamed to be white, regardless of the consequences for the working class majority. It's easy to be politically correct if you're insulted by wealth - and it's only on the bottom rung that it makes a crucial difference to have an 'ism' to swing a crust your way. They don't know or care. Champagne socialists.
I'd rather talk about energy. You're right that compressing hydrogen takes a lot of energy - but there's a lot of energy available. Thermodynamic efficiency of transmission and translation losses - to over use the jargon, would be a serious consideration if you were shovelling coal into a boiler - but, there's a lot of energy available from magma, and sending electricity down an overhead cable costs 10% per 1000km, more if the wire is buried, and more still if its undersea. Getting the energy from where it's produced to where it's needed by converting it into hydrogen, is in my view the most reasonable solution. Hydrogen can be used as a fuel burnt in traditional power stations, and hydrogen fuel cells, even a hydrogen internal combustion engine. When you think a little further on about transport solutions, distributing energy as hydrogen begins to make a lot of sense.
You're right about automation costing jobs, but consider the implications of having a virtually limitless amount of clean energy to spend. Did you know, for example - that as little as 2% of the UK is built upon. And UK population density is pretty high by global standards. There's lots of land that we cannot use, largely because of the availability of water. But what if we had energy to spend desalinating water to irrigate land? We could spread out - give value to what until now has been waste-ground, and in doing so, protect forests and natural water sources from over exploitation.
Think about how it changes our relationship to landfills. With such massive amounts of clean energy - we could recycle everything. Mince it all up and process it; bacterial digestion, heating, separation, chemical processing and so on. Given enough energy I think landfills would become gold mines, processed for their resources. There's plenty of potential industries, and economic opportunities that would spring out of nowhere, because resources are, fundamentally, a consequence of the energy available to create them.
There are peculiar patterns in the press and in entertainment. The New York Times, the country's newspaper of record, frequently views events through a racial filter, pointing out, over and over again, that people who are not white are not getting an equal share of ... whatever it is. (If the world were coming to an end tomorrow, the NYT would say "World Coming to End: Women and minorities to be disproportionately affected") As if white men were never poor! Media elsewhere in the country are doing the same thing more often. There was a story about how minority children are not learning how to ice skate as often as white children. Gee, Maybe a lot of minority families come from places where ice skating just isn't a thing?
Another thing, many advertisements feature bi-racial and mixed race children in ads. Nothing wrong with either one, but bi-racial couples and their children just aren't that common. Grey's Anatomy, a medical drama that has has been on for the last 15 years, has placed an increasing number of black characters in the story, as well as many B/W mixed race couples. Seattle is 66% white and 7% black. There aren't enough blacks in Seattle, even if every black person was in a B/W couple. for that many mixed race couples. The producers have apparently decided to showcase multi-race relationships as a way to be hip, with it, progressive. I like the show and I like the leading black characters who are very all portrayed by very good actors (at least for television).
A lot of characters in American film and television are depicted as very well off, well educated, upper-middle class, even upper class. The popular entertaining media doesn't find working class characters all that interesting, and when working class characters appear in comedies they are usually presented as clowns or morons, especially if they are male.
I'm tempted, nay compelled to engage in the usual boiler plate denial of racism at this point, so I'm not going to. This is about how a Labour Party - built to represent the working class relative to the owners of the means of production, have become media luvvies, and gone into identity politics, and cut all ties with its working class roots - leaving us completely unrepresented.
Meanwhile, the right have privatised everything - sold off all the utilities, gas, electricity, water, trains, post office, everything, ended job security, raided pensions and imposed zero hours contracts on workers, all while rents are out of control expensive - and Labour are doing some anal audit on ethnic minority representation in the party, or some such. Don't ask me where all this is going. Those are the two options; in a conspiracy of different interests. Choose your poison.
Here's a didactic story for you:
The story goes that when the Buddha first became enlightened, he was enthusiastic to tell other people about it. So he walked down the road and to the first person he met, he said, "I am the Rightfully Self-awakened One!" The man shook his head and went his way. The same happened with a couple of other men. The Buddha was frustrated and concluded that humans are stupid and worthless and not worth bothering with. Then a deva (a godly being) appeared before the Buddha and pleaded with him, saying that some people have only little dust in their eyes and are worth to be taught, and that out of compassion for them, the Buddha should make an effort and teach them. So he did, and many of his students attained enlightenment under his guidance.
If you don't see the problem with your attitude ...
Dude, your default is that you don't care about people, esp. those you expect to listen to you. But you expect them to care about you??!
'm 'fraid no deva is around ...
Jean Buadrillard once actually cited Ecclesiastes as stating that "the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." I feel like you just don't get it.
You also know nothing of what is wrong with the Left. I does have so much and so little to do with a rather flippant disregard for quote unquote reason, though.
As, I am sure, this is both warranted and welcome, I will elaborate.
The problem is not the wanton experimentation in writing, philosophy, or political theory. That is a symptom of the problem, which, like any form of neurosis, can be resultant in extraordinary bouts of wisdom and mania.
The problem is the incessant appeal to every form of revolutionary fanaticism simultaneously. It's like dealing with as many cults as you can imagine during a political debate. All of them, some more than others, take an extraordinary amount of time to explain as to how and why it is that they are, in point of fact, cults, and none of them are willing to show any form of restraint in silencing anyone who categorizes them as such.
Philosophers, such as yourself, think that what has happened is that we have been driven mad by Existentialism, so-called "Continental" Philosophy, or Critical Theory. What has actually happened is that some people, and, though they are few, their influence is extraordinary, have become so taken by terror chic that they are entirely unwilling to consider what actually attempting to reify their revolutionary program will actually be like, which almost invariably just ends up being starting an actual terrorist cell. They don't think that they'll go the way of Holger Meins. They think that it'll be like living in a Jean-Luc Godard film. Neither they, nor Godard, understand the Dadist elements to his works. That is what the problem is.
Academics just entertain the people whom such charismatic leaders would attempt to inculcate within their respective political factions for long enough for them to give up on every form of revolutionary crusade and either vote for this left-wing Liberal or another or somehow ultimately vaguely agree to some form of implicit nonviolence.
You have mistaken your metaphor, my friend.
[quote="thewonder;492633"]
But I haven't missed you other post. I've read it. I'll think on it. I need sleep.
I was just typing as you replied.
The Copernican Revolution that needs to occur within the Left is that of a change in mindset towards revolution. The wanton experimentation in style is a symptom of the general autopoietic plight. That the variegated sets of ruling orders which comprise of Empire have set out the world in such a manner that makes just about everyone suicidal is tragic, but it is just that. Left-wing academia is as at is because of how various regimens, effectively, rule-enforcing bodies, have set out their various political programs, almost invariably via some form of implicit coercion or another, in response to the revelation as to what world exists for them now.
You mistake the symptom for the ailment. The many absurdities of post-structuralist theory or left-wing academia in general are neither born out of a lack of openness and understanding or rational philosophical rigor; they have been generated because of an incapacity to cope with the political violence that occurred, beginning in the late 1960s. Felix Guattari's Chaosmosis, which I actually like, did not arise because of that he had been deluded into believing in a philosophy that was ultimately an exercise in mania; it was engendered by what I can only think to describe as "Situationist kitsch".
I have and am leaving this forum for the time being, but this is an important point to get across. The problem with left-wing philosophers is that they're just simply neurotic. They're neurotic because they don't know how to deal with the intelligence community, which they never address, but think about in volumes. They're also neurotic, and, perhaps, mainly so, because of revolutionary fanaticism. The Left, despite its constant invocation of solidarity, is an extraordinary hostile political domain. Crusades are crusades, though, and almost every form of discourse is just no use. All that can be done is to create political alternatives of, but without the Left as such.
I do realize that you have made this thread, in part, in jest, and do get it. I just felt like informing you of what it really is that afflicts us.
. Quoting thewonder
Descartes Meditations was intellectually dishonest. He must have been terrified of what the Church did to Galileo. He gave them a conclusion consistent with de-emphasis of the material to emphasize the spiritual; and to cement subjectivity as the only certainty. His method of doubt was skeptical - not rational, he needed God to save him from solipsism, and all of subsequent philosophy is built on that obvious lie.
Nietzsche freaked them out, and they didn't know enough science to prove him wrong. Man is not an amoral monster held in check by God's laws. Morality is inside us, a sense fostered in the individual by evolution in a tribal context. But Nietzsche declared God is dead, and the subjectivists responded with absurdism, existentialism, post modernism, all of them subjectivist - and you say I mistake ailment for symptom. You with the double barrelled intellect? You're looking at the last five minuets. I'm talking about hunter gatherer tribes joining together.
There is a mad proliferation of causes - but what can one expect? It's cause and effect - the details are irrelevant to the mechanism, it's inevitable - we're wrong, and reality will not be brooked. Humankind will die out if we cannot correct our mistake. People sense it - they know the end is nigh, and they're looking for someone to blame. They can be convinced that it's capitalism, and white people, and men - because they're in charge, but it's not that simple. The left are taking advantage of the discontent - the ailment philosophers describe becomes a symptom, we post rationalise and justify, fostering the ailment, and so it goes.
All this is in error. You are not who you should have been. The Church should have embraced Galileo, science and valid knowledge of reality as the word of God. We should be our truer selves, and things should be better for the advent of technology. They are better, but also, worse in ways magnified by technology. Because the fundamental mistake is still there - the mistake subjectivism sought to cover up, and it's that philosophical ground that left wing ideology is built upon. You think you haven't gone mad? No, you're right - you haven't gone mad. It's a pre-existing condition!
Well, thank you.
I actually kind of posit that Existentialism was developed in parallel to Empiricism, and, so, don't think that you can chalk this all up to Descartes.
To quote Kierkegaard and say that "subjectivity is truth" is just not the lapse of reason which has led us here, though. That they created an ostensibly "humane" device to ritually purify France of detractors to the revolution via the political spectacle of public decapitation is how we became as we are.
That's a rather bleak note to end on, but, alas, I must be off. So long!
Galileo's epistemology in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is empiricism. It simply took until the 19th century for anyone to pluck up the courage to defy the Church again, and posit the possibility - less yet, significance of an empirical means to objective truth. Such that, if existentialism and empiricism are contemporaries - why the delay? Existentialism is cast as a concerted effort to disguise truth by splattering mad shit all about!
Quoting counterpunch
Then get yourself published in a reputable journal. Your genius is wasted on a random internet forum.
Can you point to some Bills they've voted for or against that show them to not be representing the working class? Have they voted for Bills that favour employers over employees? Have they voted against Bills that favour employees over employers?
I don't know why you think them speaking out in favour of protests against black-directed police brutality in America somehow means that they no longer represent the British working class. You know that the working class isn't just white people, and that equal rights and respect for black people doesn't come at the expense of the working class?
Poor white teens in 'left behind' towns not going to uni
By Sean Coughlan
Poor white teenagers in England's former industrial towns and those living on the coast are among the least likely to go to university, warns the watchdog for fair access.
"These are the people and places that have been left behind," says Chris Millward of the Office for Students.
The watchdog has used a new measure to see which groups are likely or not to go to university.
MPs are investigating low attainment among white working class pupils.
The Office for Students has looked at overlapping factors - such as poverty, race, gender and where people live - which are indicators of whether someone is likely to go to university.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-55804123
Why would they? Is it something that opposes the interests of the working class?
Quoting counterpunch
Then what evidence do you have that shows them to not represent the interests of the working class?
Because of the BBC news story I posted. Was that not clear? Rhetorical question. There's no need to answer. You're obviously not sincere.
They're not arbitrary characteristics when those characteristics are the reason they're being treated differently. When two people aren't allowed to marry because they're the same sex, their sexuality isn't an arbitrary characteristic. When a man is offered the job over a better-qualified woman because the employer is a chauvinist, their sexes aren't an arbitrary characteristic.
The irony here is that your desire for working-class representation is also identity politics.
The Labour party should have opposed improvements to two train stations in 2015 because a 2019 (?) study showed that poor white teens are underrepresented at university?
That makes no sense.
So, when the Tories promised a Northern Powerhouse and failed to deliver, why didn't Labour hold them to their promises? Why did Labour allow the Northern Powerhouse to amount to two train stations getting a coat of paint?
Because, as mentioned earlier - Labour don't give a fuck about the working class anymore.
I didn't say that. But assuming they were aware of the problem in 2015, why is that a reason to oppose Northern Powerhouse? What is the connection between improvements to transport links in the north and poor white teens being under-represented at university?
But on the issue of poor white teens being under-represented at university, Labour did pledge to abolish tuition fees which likely would have done much to provide more opportunities for poor white teens to go to university.
Jeremy Corbyn: Osborne's northern powerhouse plan is 'cruel deception'
Corbyn pledges £10bn for Northern Powerhouse Rail
Quoting Michael
I didn't say oppose. I said - hold the Tories to their promises. I said kick up a fuss that the Northern Powerhouse amounted to two train stations getting two coats of paint. The only quote you could find was at the launch of two rival policies, by two parties grubbing for votes, and both policies ultimately amounted to nothing. It's one of the rare occasions the North has been mentioned at all - whereas, the drum beat of political correctness is a constant and deafening cacophony. If Labour worked half as hard making noise on behalf of the white working class as they do for their upside down identity politics - there wouldn't be former industrial and coastal ghost towns full of disadvantaged white kids.
That pledge from Corbyn was from 2018, and it didn't go anywhere because Labour didn't win the General Election.
Most likely their position on wanting a second Brexit referendum and Corbyn's personal unpopularity.
All this aside, it remains that the working class majority feel abandoned by Labour because they have been abandoned by Labour. Labour are utterly in thrall to political correctness - and spend all their energies massively over-representing the interests of relatively small sections of society. The "isms."
Capitalism is necessary to a sustainable future? How do you figure that? Doesn't capitalism rely on consumerism and necessarily foster an objectification and commodification of natural resources, and unnatural resources? This seems incongruent to me and I thought I'd say so, but admittedly I'm still catching up on this thread.
Oh dear. I see why you feel people don't want to engage with you.
Quoting counterpunch
Quoting Uglydelicious
We were discussing how political correctness discriminates against straight white males, because the left have gone a long way past their initial demand, that society not discriminate on the basis of arbitrary characteristics, unto positive discrimination on the basis of arbitrary characteristics. I have no problem whatsoever with someone who is black, gay or female - being ahead of me on merit, but not just because they've got an 'ism' card to play to bias the contest - and so discriminate against me, because I'm a straight white male with no 'isms' to play on. I have every right to compete, a right to an opinion, and a right to political representation.
Quoting Uglydelicious
Firstly, capitalism has won the contest of economic ideologies. Communism has failed, and failed every country that ever adopted it. It creates dictatorial government, corruption, poverty, and frequently runs to genocide. It doesn't work.
Secondly, capitalism has the knowledge, skills, resources and industrial capacity to secure a high energy, prosperous and sustainable future. It will not work out any other way. We cannot have less and pay more, carbon tax this and stop that, cycle to work and eat grass - for several reasons:
a) consuming less puts people out of work - and poor people breed more.
b) raising prices and imposing taxes on energy and consumption would unequally burden the poor, in society and in the world, because poor people spend a greater proportion of their incomes on energy, food, transport etc. And, poor people breed more!
c) a pay more have less approach to sustainability presumes failure - because the idea of government imposing poverty on people to remain within some supposed environmental carrying capacity is incompatible with democracy, and inconceivable more generally.
Quoting Uglydelicious
Those are somewhat loaded terms. Have you read Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons? It justifies private property by describing the rationale of farmers in relation to common grazing land. Basically, each farmers natural economic motive is to exploit this freely available resource to death by adding another cow, and another cow, and another - until the resource is destroyed. Whereas, when privately owned, the resource is conserved.
As a matter of scientific fact, resources are a consequence of the energy available to create them - and this is what is meant by a high energy, prosperous and sustainable future. I propose it is in the interests of capitalism and humankind - to exploit the freely available energy in the interior of the earth, in a very, very big way. The earth is a big ball of molten rock - 4000 miles deep and 26000 miles around. For all practical purposes - it's a limitless source of high grade clean energy, we need to tap into, to meet all our energy needs, extract carbon from the air, desalinate sea water to irrigate land, recycle, farm fish - and there's no good reason we can't carry on very much as we are now - warm and well fed, into the long distant future.
Because maybe not everyone who disagrees with you is a moron or biased. Maybe there is no such thing as an unbiased view and all you did was find a view you could no longer upturn.
[quote="khaled;497375"] Thanks for your opinion, such as it is. You're kind of a shit stirrer, huh?
As for the actual comment:
You implied in the OP that philosophy is such that if you spend enough time and work hard enough at it, everyone will come to the same conclusions as you. You talked to Isaac for a bit and found that (surprise surprise) you had not, in fact, “solved” philosophy at all, as he had spend similar amounts of effort and did not find such a solution.
The first sentence can be translated to “Maybe the position you lay out in the OP is wrong” and the second translates to “Maybe you shouldn’t conflate the universality or rightness of your views with your inability to upturn them”.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/497983
I thought it was a lot more recent than it was. Didn’t realize I was commenting on something from weeks ago.
Quoting counterpunch
How so? Here is what happened: In the OP you characterized a lot of positions (relativism and others) as nonsense and false. And you called those who believe in them idiots that would require you to blow smoke up their ass. Then Isaac pointed out the obvious: What makes you such an authority? What if you’re the one being the idiot?
Your replied with, effectively: “Because I worked on my philosophy really really hard so I must be right” a piss poor defense, because you then asked Isaac if he has done the same and it turns out he has and yet you two disagree. You then asked him “Then why do we disagree” and got no reply as far as I can see.
So I wanted to hammer the point home in case you didn’t get it. Maybe not everyone who disagrees with you is biased or idiotic as you pretend is the case in the OP, maybe they worked just as hard as you did and with just as much scrutiny if not more and arrived at different conclusions. Maybe your inability to upset your position should not be used as evidence that it is right.
I say this because your kind of thinking is what ends up with people putting themselves in echo chambers and refusing to ever change their mind at any cost. You think you’ve “figured it all out” and all opposition is due to people being morons or disingenuous. Tip: if EVERYONE you talk to is a moron and disingenuous maybe the problem is you not them.
Quoting counterpunch
If you want to call “calling someone out for being a prick” “aggravating the situation” then you’re absolutely right I love aggravating situations.
Quoting counterpunch
Because as I said you were being a prick and I wanted to call you out on it. The guy got mad you were being condescending. You could have either apologized or ignored him. You instead accused him of being an over sensitive loser who is not interested in bettering his philosophy. Sneaking in the word “Sorry” in the middle of the accusation doesn’t change it to an apology.
Weren’t you asking in this thread how to communicate more effectively with us peasants so you can spread the light of your amazing and perfect worldview O wise one? Well here is advice: Don’t be a prick. Also don’t assume your opposition is being idiotic or disingenuous jut because they don’t agree with you.
So you didn't know what you were commenting on...
"Your understanding of it is flawed."
— counterpunch
Quoting khaled
Yet proceed to defend your understanding of it anyway!
Quoting khaled
That's true. There's also the mentally ill!
Quoting khaled
Bu that isn't what I said, is it? What I actually said was:
Then why do we disagree?
Let's start with epistemology:
What can we know and how can we know it?
Issac didn't reply. That's his problem not mine. I'd have put in the work to discover where our paths diverge, and who is on the high road. If he will not, then he effectively concedes.
Quoting khaled
What point?
Quoting khaled
But that isn't what I said either. And again, you don't understand the context. I wrote the opening post in response to ill treatment on another thread by left wing ideologues - utterly in thrall to their post modernist, politically correct dogma. I maintain, there is such a thing as truth, and it matters. Which is why I said, lets start with epistemology - and Issac ran for the hills with his tail between his legs, because left wing epistemology is indefensible. I know it. Issac knows it. The only person who doesn't know it is you! And that because THIS IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!
What you might wish to concern yourself with is why you would insert your uninvited opinions into other people's business. Here, and on another thread in an argument with Tobias. You popped up out of nowhere as soon as we began trading insults, and sought to make matters worse. Why do you do that? That is your business. Why are you a shit stirrer? What does that say about you?
Quoting khaled
This is a public forum every post is everyone’s business. If you want to talk to one person in particular DM them, there is that feature. The fact that you’re not using it implies you want people to read and reply to you. But then you throw a hissy fit when they disagree or call you out. Are you sure you should be using a public forum?
Quoting counterpunch
False. I didn’t notice how old it was. Don’t be purposely obtuse just so make a “comeback statement” like this.
Quoting counterpunch
False. You said:
Quoting counterpunch
Which amounts to: “I worked really hard on my ideas therefore they’re right”
Quoting counterpunch
Ah yes. Calling you out for being a prick is “making matters worse”.
You’re not worth the time I spend writing this. You think that any disagreement is due to the other side being stupid, disingenuous, or mentally ill (seriously, why go to a public forum if you’re always going to argue in bad faith). This site isn’t a circlejerk. People won’t just agree with you. Yet you can’t handle that, and just paint any sort of opposition as stupid or disingenuous so you don’t have to argue with them. Furthermore when someone calls you out for being a prick you cry about how it’s none of their business (on a PUBLIC forum).
You may have some thoughts of value but it’s not worth it for me to try to tease through your close mindedness and inability to be cordial to get at them. Good luck dude. Hope you get out of your own head one day and learn some humility.
It is a public forum. Which only makes your behaviour all the more puzzling. Are you policing this public space? Do you see it as your role to tell people what they can and can't say? How they should and shouldn't behave? Who appointed you guardian of public morality?
Quoting khaled
Oh, because when I found this thread again, I suspected the reason you inserted yourself into the argument between Tobias and myself, was that your post was left unanswered for quite some time. Then when you volunteered that you didn't notice how old it was - I knew that was it. That unanswered post was grinding on you for days - an insult to your ego. No-one can ignore little Khaled!
Quoting khaled
You don't know the context. This thread is a continuation of a discussion on another thread - of which you were not a part. The apparent form, to which you are responding, is not where the meaning lies. Those observations refer to mistakes in thinking identified on the other thread, of which Issac may or may not have been aware.
Quoting khaled
Don't call me a prick again!
Quoting khaled
Nothing you write is worth the time it takes to write it.
Quoting khaled
And yet you continue.
Quoting khaled
Thank you so much.
:rofl:
Yikes. Well you can see that I have many unanswered comments and I don’t mind if you go into my comment history. I don’t go around trying to solicit answers out everyone. It’s hilarious to me that you think you’re so important that I could care less if you responded...
Quoting counterpunch
No not my role. I just enjoy calling out pricks.
Quoting counterpunch
Fair enough. But you didn’t mention the thread in the op in my defense.
Quoting counterpunch
Well I haven’t seen evidence to the contrary. Once I do I’ll stop.
Quoting counterpunch
Any day bro.
I bet you do.
Quoting khaled
You think repeatedly calling me a prick is how you should behave? Because clearly, you're seeking to illicit a response - which is consistent with you being annoyed by the unanswered post. If you couldn't care less - leave me alone. If you had a point to make you've more than made it. Now begone!
Quoting khaled
So you accept that you don't know what you're talking about? How magnanimous of you! Now remind me again why this is any of your business?
Quoting khaled
You've repeatedly insulted me using vile language - and I haven't responded in kind. I'm not the one coming across as aggressive, insulting and BREAKING THE RULES OF THE FORUM!
2) Tone matters:
A respectful and moderate tone is desirable as it's the most likely to foster serious and productive discussion. Having said that, you may express yourself strongly as long as it doesn't disrupt a thread or degenerate into flaming (which is not tolerated and will result in your post being deleted).
I'd call your behaviour flaming.
Flaming is the online act of posting insults, often laced with profanity or other offensive language on social networking sites. This term should not be confused with the term trolling, which is the act of someone going online, or in person, and causing discord.
And trolling!
Get back under your bridge, you flaming troll!