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    #51
    There are severe problems with Marx’s conception(s) of how Communism would be realized. He never had one consistent idea of how the Dicatorship of the Proletariat would be conceived and then wither away. And the reality of Marxist Leninism made everything worse. Fucking Bolsheveiks. But then fucking Kerensky and his uselessness as well. But the likes of Adorno or Walter Benjamin are beholden to no narrow Tankie or fucking Trot (let alone “but Karl said”) orthodoxy.
    Last edited by Lang Spoon; 16-02-2018, 21:19.

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      #52
      Haha, yeah, political critique of music is often pony as fuck.

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        #53
        It’s like the liner notes on the Manic’s first album. Not too far off some of the lyrics that Mr James Dean Histrionic Bradfield had to fashion into tunes either.
        Last edited by Lang Spoon; 16-02-2018, 21:45.

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          #54
          Originally posted by Bruno
          And of course there's Luther and Calvin tilting the balance toward individualism within Christianity.
          Sure, the antecedents of the idea go back further, but I was thinking mostly of Locke, etc, but that's not the point. The point is that it was never universally - or, until recently, even widely - accepted in Europe or North America and it wasn't a "discovery."

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            #55
            Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
            Adam Ferguson (now overshadowed by Hume and the willfully misread by bastards like PJ O’Rourke and the Heritage Foundation and obliquely funded dangerous crank UK think tanks Adam Smith) is worth a read HP as far as “Scottish Enlightenment” philosophy goes. In some ways his works are a precursor to modern Sociology, and his critique of Commercial Society puts the boot into the exploiters way more than Smith (whose condemnation of the rentier class and call for universal education as a panacea for the drudgery of industrial labour, and limited protectionism for when country is attempting to develop a new industry would be condemned as Socialism if the pricks who eulogize him actually bothered reading him).

            Unlike the agnostic but Smug Racist Tory Hume, and the at least outwardly Religiously Respectable and studiously apolitical Smith, Ferguson was (originally) a Calvinist Minister who could speak the Gaelic of the dwindling minority (through willing emigration/moving to Lowland Scotland/language assimilation/Involuntary clearance for sheep) of Perthshire. Yet his work in comparative religion and of different societies seems strikingly modern and sympathetic. An influence on Hegel and (Jordan’s fave) Marx. Those were different times. I guess the madness of religious zeal could also burn with the fire of social justice in the Name of Christ’s Kingdom.

            If I could be arsed to study dialectic enough and still had my wits in full I’d be a Frankfurt School Marxist. Anyone who tries to blame them for the deaths of 100m can get tae fuck.
            I didn't mention Smith, but yeah, he was not the free-market libertarian he is praised as.

            I think his main animas was against mercantilism.


            It's also perhaps worth noting that the hard dichotomy (conservatives love hard dichotomies) between Eastern and Western conceptions of the individual oversimplifies the eastern idea. Confucianism et al wasn't so much about order and harmony that it didn't acknowledge the value of the individual at all. It's not that simple. And in any event, their understanding of social interaction makes a whole lot more sense then the atomic idea of the self so popular in "the west," not to mention a strict interpretation of Cartesian dualism which is just stupid, and yet still haunts religion as well as what passes for common sense.

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              #56
              Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
              I didn't mention Smith, but yeah, he was not the free-market libertarian he is praised as.

              I think his main animas was against mercantilism.


              It's also perhaps worth noting that the hard dichotomy (conservatives love hard dichotomies) between Eastern and Western conceptions of the individual oversimplifies the eastern idea. Confucianism et al wasn't so much about order and harmony that it didn't acknowledge the value of the individual at all. It's not that simple. And in any event, their understanding of social interaction makes a whole lot more sense then the atomic idea of the self so popular in "the west," not to mention a strict interpretation of Cartesian dualism which is just stupid, and yet still haunts religion as well as what passes for common sense.
              There is some recent research which places the extreme scepticism of Hume’s (which as well as Kant, also created a reaction against the worship of Nothing with the Stout Empiricist Common Sense School (largely a Scottish philosophical reaction against Hume’s negation of causation and God)) A Treatise of Human Nature (written in his twenties, he got fat and rich from smug pithy essays and Histories for the remainder of his longish life) as owing more than something to his parsing a Jesuit library in France that contained sympathetic Sino/Tibetan based Jesuit monk’s descriptions of Buddhist philosophy from failed missions.
              Last edited by Lang Spoon; 17-02-2018, 03:18.

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                #57
                Though that’s unfair to Dugald Stewart and especially My Man Thomas Reid of the Common Sense School. They weren’t Proto Fox bastards, they believed in an innate sense of fairness/equality built into humanity and maybe even the Higher animals. They abhorred the amoral possibilities in Hume’s negations and denial of causation. They were Kurious Oranj. And there are now experiments with crow type clever birds and chimps etc that show “clever” animals at least get pissed off if food is not shared according to the accepted rules of a game.
                Last edited by Lang Spoon; 17-02-2018, 02:07.

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                  #58
                  Originally posted by Bruno
                  Well, by the same token it's simplistic to say that Christianity has "nothing remotely to do with" individualism. I think the mechanisms that it put in place for "the West" coming to value the individual, to hold that each individual is worth something, vis-a-vis the system that it was diverging from, are fairly self-evident.

                  I wouldn't have called it a discrete discovery, but I think individualism can fairly be called a discovery. I don't have an opinion on who should get the most credit for it. It appears to me that Peterson is more interested in comparing the present-day and more recent "West" to non-Western societies, in terms of who values the individual more. I think he's right that much of the left veers toward prioritizing group identity over individual identity and I reckon it would be best to find a squishy midpoint.
                  I said the “sovereignty” of the individual is not a Christian idea. Christians are supposed to be about taking care of each other. The Jewish culture that Christianity grew out of generally thought in terms of God’s relationship to the community, and certainly not individual salvation and that was generally how it was understood throughout most of Christian history up to and including the Puritans.


                  The left doesn’t primarily prioritize group identity. It’s the far right that does that. White supremacy is the ultimate “identity politics.”

                  Beyond that, the left rightly recognizes that people are oppressed or denied human rights based on their identity - ethnic, gender, etc. So it only makes sense that the response to these injustices would take the form of identity groups. The mushy Liberal (in the original sense) middle that says “I don’t see color” is, whether it means to or not, doing a “Now now. let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who...”

                  Where the left does go astray, I suspect, is not trying harder to get these different groups - each born from a specific problem, often in a specific place - to see the big picture and work together. That’s what intersectionality is all about but I don’t know if that’s happening in practice. For example, Black Lives Matter is proud to be specifically black - and they certainly shouldn’t be ashamed of it - but surely many of the same reforms they want are reforms sought by Latino and Indigenous communities. It’s a lot of PFJ/JPF stuff.

                  But I suspect they often are reluctant to merge with other groups, and continue to fixate on their group identity, because, for generations, their group has struggled for the opportunity to define itself, and in some cases struggled to stay alive at all.

                  Now, of course, “cultures” shouldn’t be essentialized or reified, but as somebody smart said - I forget who - culture matters because people matter and, as indigenous people especially know, erasing culture does a lot of real damage to real people.

                  Like, there’s been a big effort in Virginia in recent years for a few tribes that were once part of the Powatan confederacy (I think that’s the best word) to gain federal recognition. Some of these groups have just a few hundred members and their traditional way of life and connection to their ancestral territory is long gone. But they don’t want to be erased. I have no idea what that feels like and I doubt many white people do. So I’m not going to tell them to just get over it and move on.

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                    #59
                    Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                    Adam Ferguson (now overshadowed by Hume and the willfully misread by bastards like PJ O’Rourke and the Heritage Foundation and obliquely funded dangerous crank UK think tanks Adam Smith) is worth a read HP as far as “Scottish Enlightenment” philosophy goes. In some ways his works are a precursor to modern Sociology, and his critique of Commercial Society puts the boot into the exploiters way more than Smith (whose condemnation of the rentier class and call for universal education as a panacea for the drudgery of industrial labour, and limited protectionism for when country is attempting to develop a new industry would be condemned as Socialism if the pricks who eulogize him actually bothered reading him).

                    Unlike the agnostic but Smug Racist Tory Hume, and the at least outwardly Religiously Respectable and studiously apolitical Smith, Ferguson was (originally) a Calvinist Minister who could speak the Gaelic of the dwindling minority (through willing emigration/moving to Lowland Scotland/language assimilation/Involuntary clearance for sheep) of Perthshire. Yet his work in comparative religion and of different societies seems strikingly modern and sympathetic. An influence on Hegel and (Jordan’s fave) Marx. Those were different times. I guess the madness of religious zeal could also burn with the fire of social justice in the Name of Christ’s Kingdom.

                    If I could be arsed to study dialectic enough and still had my wits in full I’d be a Frankfurt School Marxist. Anyone who tries to blame them for the deaths of 100m can get tae fuck.
                    Lang may yer lum reek, Spoony.

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                      #60
                      Incidentally, as a member of a 'community', I can honestly say that we decide what to call ourselves. But, again, as a member of a 'community', we will decide to disagree at any moment.

                      As a member of the human race, I might suggest that if I were to make someone uncomfortable by my speech, I might take a fucking close look at my reasons for doing so.

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                        #61
                        The right celebrates the individual only if he (and it is always he) is rich and powerful. Everybody else is just a statistic

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                          #62
                          I keep being recommended a you tube video of Russell Brand interviewing Jordan Peterson but it's one and a half hours long and the first five minutes featured so much ego that I had to stop. If someone has more stamina than me I would love a considered precis

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                            #63
                            I'm led to believe it's a good interview. Whatever that means. I assume that they get into serious issues. But they both have an awful lot of self regard and I'm not sure I can watch it

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                              #64
                              Brand’s mix of “socialism” and self help meditation etc bollocks is really depressing. Fucking yoga won’t save the world. Can’t bring myself to watch this. Two cunts that need a fire to die in.
                              Last edited by Lang Spoon; 18-02-2018, 20:37.

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                                #65
                                Originally posted by Bruno
                                I know, but you don't get to the idea of individual sovereignty without first conceiving of and valuing individuals, and Christianity looks to me like an important departure in that direction. Paying attention to the downtrodden, embracing the leper, the good Samaritan, the meek shall inherit the earth, were ideas that nudged us toward seeing individuals with individual problems and characters. The problem early on with Christianity was that it gained power, plugged itself into the existing hierarchical mains and it was a thousand years of what you'd expect.



                                I wouldn't have said they "primarily" do that, but I think one can find extreme cases on both sides, and I think identity politics is pretty bipartisan. If I had to guess, I would guess that there are more left-leaning people who are annoyed by the radical left's identity politics that the radical left is prepared to acknowledge.
                                I would agree with every word of that.

                                The left’s tendency toward unhelpful identity politics is not, however “liberal fascism” the way the dumb right believes, or even what the left is really after - hence the moment “intersectionality” is currently having.

                                I think it’s just an unfortunate byproduct of organizationsal behavior. Everyone of these marginalized groups is worrying they’ll be erased or that they won’t be heard by the larger movement, and if they’re not heard, then their rights and interests will be marginalized again, which defeats the purpose of having a left. So to prevent that, they organize, and then, as in all organizations, there’s a temptation/tendency to focus more on protecting and expanding the organization, often at the expense of the organization’s actual goals. And the cosmic ballet continues.

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                                  #66
                                  I just got an email alert for Jordan Peterson Live at the Hammersmith Apollo, which doesn't do much for the humble academic caught in a whirlwind of others' making angle.

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                                    #67
                                    Who IS this guy? A slightly more intelligent Milo, or a card-carrying cunt with brains?

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                                      #68
                                      A guy earning maybe 80 grand a year now sees the main chance of 8 million a year. Just be fashionably contrarian to the nth degree. Watch him dance.

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                                        #69
                                        Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                                        A guy earning maybe 80 grand a year now sees the main chance of 8 million a year. Just be fashionably contrarian to the nth degree. Watch him dance.

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                                          #70
                                          https://twitter.com/DawnHFoster/stat...907610112?s=19

                                          Lol

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                                            #71

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                                              #72
                                              I've avoided listening to this utter fuckwit previously, but.....is that his real voice?

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                                                #73
                                                It most definitely is. And there are more Kermit videos:

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                                                  #74
                                                  Ah. Ahahaha. Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

                                                  Sorry.

                                                  Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahaha.

                                                  Fucking hell.

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                                                    #75
                                                    I meant erstwhile in the sense that he would formerly have been defined exclusively as a psychology professor as opposed to being "the biggest philosopher since Camus" or whatever that magnificent press release claims. Strictly speaking, I made an incorrect use of the word but there are worse things in this world. Such as refusing to respect the rights of minorities to choose how they are referred to.

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