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But all this is very limited, no? An expansive politics can well include questions like: "who could I be?". The whole question of what you call 'assoc...

Yeah. Democracy does not do well in conditions of adversity or emergency. It functions best in stable regimes, where the sense of urgency does not ove...

I hope so. Americans'll live. Probably at the expense of everyone else, but they'll live (unless of course you're a bit off-white, in which case you m...

Yeah. It's one of the reasons I listed - without citing - Raymond Geuss's view of it: politics as a question of who does what to whom for whose benefi...

I've studied democracy most of my adult life. Political philosophy was my way into philosophy. The notion of it is far richer than what Americans thin...

Cool beans.

That's... my point.

This is fair. I mean, I like to think that I believe in a roughly understood set of societal and institutional arrangements, held together by a certai...

:chin: I didn't say it would 'amount to identity politics'.

I'm not convinced. It's increasingly clear that politics is often thought of in institutional terms. And from the responses here - 'corruption, force ...

Huh? I didn't cite the passage (of mine) you quoted as a question of identity politics.

I like to think of democracy as qualitative. Most of them, where they exist, are in poor health, getting worse. Some exhibit signs of pathology. What'...

It's not yours! Jeez. Americans. No, but a distaste for politics has always been a bad sign of things to come.

I'm not American, thankfully. As for politics as predicament - that's another interesting one. A problem to be solved, rather than a field of life to ...

A shallow but increasingly common view of politics I suppose. How depressing.

Some interesting reactions here. 'Politics is about force to kill'; 'politics is corruption'. People wanting to place themselves at a distance from po...

Sometimes. Even often. Sometimes this too. But there are plenty of other ways in the politics plays out, as I tried to relate.

How lucky you are to be a position to do that. Imagine if power relations were different...

Tell me where I was wrong. There's nothing neutral about co-operation. Co-operation requires conditions which enable and sustain it. And those conditi...

To some degree. Established identity can be a bulwark against harm or unwanted change. To call upon identity is to potentially call upon a very rich t...

Views like that end up naturalizing existing power-relations under the guise of being 'power-free'. Every time that happens it ends in tragedy. It's t...

Perhaps, but the converse does not hold. But this is naive. All societal action is power bound, and the attempt to say it isn't is just unreflective a...

Yeah, I don't mean institutional politics, or at least, I don't mean it exclusively. Loosely: any societal action (which might include setting up inst...

'Tis a fantastic book, but yeah, it was Apo. The best current book for the lay reader is Nick Lane's The Vital Question. Super in depth look at cuttin...

I meant that you should save yourself from the torpor is all! It was a dig at forums, on which I waste plenty of my time too - not you. Apologies it i...

I don't doubt it.

Oh you need to spend more time on a philosophy forum (although on second thought...). Anyway, it just strikes me that alot of the the circle-jerk of m...

What a cutie.

I'm not a pessimist! I believe very much in what Agamben once called the courage of hopelessness. It's those who think things are peachy that you have...

There's nothing inherently good about joy. It can be abused - and can be made abusive - like most anything else. Joy even accents evil; maybe the only...

People are too easily impressed. Then they get ideas. Like God. Which only adds to the misery of the universe. It's awful.

You.

Nothing's 'difficult to understand'. You're simply absuing words is all.

Still makes no sense.

Stop using terms you don't understand.

This makes no sense.

What do you mean 'new life'? New species? New individuals? New domains of life?

Eh, the universe is largely horrible. Vast expanses of nothingness, where most everything will kill you, and not even with intent but out of sheer ind...

Evolutionary theory is an account of how life, which is already there, evolves. It is not an account of the emergence of life from 'non-life' (abiogen...

True. Theology goes up against the wall first, when the revolution comes. Multiverse theorists get a slightly nicer wall.

The basic rule of philosophical writing is: respect the intelligence of your reader as you would your own. If you find yourself being asked to to 'exp...

My favourite God. An impertinent little shit. Also for once I agree with @"Wayfarer": multiverse theories are as much a failure of thought as all of t...

Titles thread: "Obfuscatory Discourse".

You can blame Plato. He was the dolt that kept insisting upon what the Good the True and the Beautiful really were, in contrast to all the other stuff...

I suppose, but I'm holding the Old Man to a deservedly high standard. Given all the Omnis and all. Reckon maybe a C+, as far as things go. Might just ...

It's a staple response to ID that had an intelligent God created the world, he would have to have been supremely incompetent and not all that bright, ...

Yeah, the moves continue...

Joseph Carew - Ontological Catastrophe: Zizek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism Started this yesterday and I'm 2/3s through. It is fa...

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3025641/hong-kong-leader-carrie-lam-announce-formal-withdrawal Thank bloody Christ.

Speaking of Plato, he was pretty chill with death too in fact, but for reasons almost diametrically opposite to Nietzsche. Thus, in one of the worst t...