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J_RBG posted:But Freud is good and more people should actually read what he wrote? In my opinion Sam Kriss is fine but usually requires being conversant in literary theory. I am decently conversive in philosophy of the sort he talks about and let me tell you: He knows just enough that somebody who knows nothing about what he's talking about can't EASILY call him out on bullshit.
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Jul 25, 2017 01:44
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This is reminiscent of several times I've heard people knowledgeable in continental philosophy 'proper' opine on its use in lit theory. I enjoy Kriss (though he has a weird habit of jarring dud notes), but not because I expect him to advance rigorous arguments to convince me of propositions. Normally I would say his attempts against the new atheist/science fan/whatever cluster are some of his worst but ironically Vosgian quoted something that aligns closely with an idea I've been rolling around in my head for a while: a basic problem of your stereotypical bad modern atheism is the self-image of intellectual heroism, when atheism hasn't been an intellectual achievement for a long time. The original overthrow of religion in the 'intellectual' world was heroic but that was a century or more ago. Since then religion has been on a basically defensive posture, reliant on its enormous cultural inertia. So becoming an atheist, while it might (or might not) be courageous in your own social context, doesn't mean being a bold freethinker and certainly doesn't imply genius of any kind. It's an extremely well-established position. But it dresses itself up in the glory of free thinking and genius from when it was actually revolutionary. And this makes it easy to launder your other prejudices through it because you've already proved that you're a mental colossus by overcoming the hollow shell that is contemporary intellectual justifications for religion, so you don't need to be paranoid of what your brain is suggesting to you. I'm not really convinced this adds anything over more mundane peer-pressure/demographics of community explanations though.
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Jul 25, 2017 01:52
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J_RBG posted:But Freud is good
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Jul 25, 2017 01:54
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There's value in reading Freud (I hope, I'm doing it soon) but it's due to his cultural significance and philosophical influence rather than his empirical psychology.
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Jul 25, 2017 02:26
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Yeah, reading Freud is reading the Bible: you're there to understand the influence, not take it as written.
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Jul 25, 2017 02:31
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I haven't been convinced it's worth trying to read (rather than cliffnote) Lacan, on the other hand.
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Jul 25, 2017 02:35
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Peel posted:There's value in reading Freud (I hope, I'm doing it soon) but it's due to his cultural significance and philosophical influence rather than his empirical psychology. I've read chunks of him and my friend has read a lot more (and actually has a psychology degree) and this is the conclusion we both independently came to. Pretty much all his ideas have been overturned by later actual science, and he's got that same problem the Austrian school has of not really doing experiments to back up his rationally-derived ideas of how things work, but he's interesting just for being one of the first people to sit down and think real hard about people's thinkmeats.
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Jul 25, 2017 03:25
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I mean he's interesting and historically important. Honestly reading him is kind of like my experience watching The Village. I'm engaged and interested in what he's talking about and then the Oedipus Complex walks in wearing a park ranger outfit and everything goes to poo poo.
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Jul 25, 2017 04:04
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Reading Freud is like reading about Manichaeism while studying the origin of Christianity. It's not that any part of Manichaeism necessarily maps with our modern understanding of Christianity, but it shows an alternate path that with no extant descendents that evolved in roughly the same time and location and gives insight into the environment in which both formed.
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Jul 25, 2017 04:29
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divabot posted:I think you may be mistaken, because Sam Kriss's writing is bad. My friends keep recommending it, but I keep seeing bad writing. I posted with the guy, a decade and several accounts ago, and it was exactly as bad as you might imagine.
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Jul 25, 2017 05:04
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Peel posted:This is reminiscent of several times I've heard people knowledgeable in continental philosophy 'proper' opine on its use in lit theory. This is a good way of describing why the Dawkinses/Harrises of the world are so banal, and also why there is so much overlap between nü atheism and neoreaction. They're facile rejections of the ideas people feel have been imposed on them. It's teenage rebellion (healthy, normal) perverted into a pseudo-ideology. It's a short journey from the type of scientific reductionism you get from Dawkins and Harris, to their inevitable turn toward racism. Dawkins has more scientific bona fides than Harris, but Dawkins hasn't been a working scientist since the 1970s, and most of his contributions to the scientific landscape are either irrelevant or downright wrong. Harris is a simpler case, as he is a complete fraud with no meaningful credentials and no actual scientific work to support his reputation. When the schisms began in the "skeptic" and atheist online communities, you could see the seeds of Neoreaction there, as you could see them in Gamergate. PZ Myers cast his lot with the SJWs and God bless him for doing so. He could see what was up and has been proven right a dozen times since.
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Jul 25, 2017 12:20
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Consider me a "reformed" new atheist, because that poo poo got stupid. (Or maybe I was stupid.....) I'm wondering where Hitchens would've ended up if he hadn't kicked the bucket. I heard an apt description of him recently in that he took his left-wing internationalism and dropped the left-wing part of it, and saw in the United States an almost liberal-secular-cosmopolitan version of the Soviet Union that would export revolution to the rest of the world. Oh yeah this idea has been totally discredited now. I think he'd pretty much despite the current regime in the White House though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz5Yk5MyA60 (Actually referring to Perot.) BrutalistMcDonalds has a new favorite as of 12:37 on Jul 25, 2017 |
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Jul 25, 2017 12:31
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Yeah, I deliberately left Hitchens out there because to me he was a more unique animal. I don't know how to contextualize his neocon phase, other than as the same thing as Harris' and Dawkins' and Bill Maher's islamophobia. But the thing is, unlike the rest of those guys, Hitchens had actually read a book in his life and was far more erudite. He doesn't deserve a full rehabilitation, for many reasons. But I can't believe that he would have gone full alt-right or truly reactionary had he lived. Strikes me as more of a Corbyn/Sanders type?
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Jul 25, 2017 13:00
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Peel posted:Yeah, but you like Worm. while it is true that four years later about 90% of what I read is still Worm fanfic, uh LOOK OVER THERE J_RBG posted:But Freud is good and more people should actually read what he wrote? In my opinion Sam Kriss is fine but usually requires being conversant in literary theory. no, the cited piece is a good example of him writing beyond his actual erudition, and that's when my eyes started sliding off it. I know that style of bullshitting, I slip into it myself enough if I'm not careful. Peel posted:So becoming an atheist, while it might (or might not) be courageous in your own social context, doesn't mean being a bold freethinker and certainly doesn't imply genius of any kind. It's an extremely well-established position. But it dresses itself up in the glory of free thinking and genius from when it was actually revolutionary. And this makes it easy to launder your other prejudices through it because you've already proved that you're a mental colossus by overcoming the hollow shell that is contemporary intellectual justifications for religion, so you don't need to be paranoid of what your brain is suggesting to you. It's still relevant in the fundie areas of the US, where nearly half the population are literally creationists. But if you spend your life in civilisation, it's way less meaningful. Compare our friends the neoreactionaries, who are all espousing these ideas but living in civilisation rather than the conservative areas where their views are mainstream. Neon Noodle posted:Yeah, I deliberately left Hitchens out there because to me he was a more unique animal. I don't know how to contextualize his neocon phase, other than as the same thing as Harris' and Dawkins' and Bill Maher's islamophobia. But the thing is, unlike the rest of those guys, Hitchens had actually read a book in his life and was far more erudite. Hitchens wrote about this in some detail in Hitch 22 - he very specifically wanted Saddam Hussein deposed, and thought these guys would do the job (and was appalled how badly they'd botched it). He'd had a hate-on for Saddam for decades. But you couldn't really call Hitchens any sort of Islamophobe.
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Jul 25, 2017 15:45
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Even if Hitchens wasn't an Islamophobe (and I think he is) its not an accusation that could drag his character down any further, his scumbaggery is self evident in all of his post 9/11 writing.
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Jul 25, 2017 15:57
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divabot posted:It's still relevant in the fundie areas of the US, where nearly half the population are literally creationists. But if you spend your life in civilisation, it's way less meaningful. Compare our friends the neoreactionaries, who are all espousing these ideas but living in civilisation rather than the conservative areas where their views are mainstream. I grew up surrounded by southern baptist creationists and got some very genuine shocked and incredulous "you believe in evolution????" reactions a few times from groups of people so yeah it's still useful in some places (though I think the tactics are usually more off-putting than they need to be). I went to a baptist youth group with a friend once to keep him company back when i was a lovely teen and wound up getting in a discussion with the youth pastor about evolution (he was actually pretty chill and nice about it, despite disagreeing entirely) and some of the younger kids there honestly seemed like they had never, ever heard anyone talk favorably about anything other than young earth creationism and were looking at me the whole time like i was some kind of alien.
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Jul 25, 2017 16:16
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Peel posted:There's value in reading Freud (I hope, I'm doing it soon) but it's due to his cultural significance and philosophical influence rather than his empirical psychology. Incidentally, in college I once dreamed that Freud was trying to murder me and chased me down into the sewers, where I then tried to defend myself by stabbing him with a pencil, but it didn't work for inexplicable reasons. If a more Freudian dream than that is possible, I don't know what it is.
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Jul 25, 2017 17:20
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During my years in Texas i more than once had people who had previously been friendly completely cut all contact with me upon discovering that, although i was raised Christian, i did not go to church. I think if you have never actually lived in the bible belt you just literally don't understand the extent of the stranglehold Evangelicalism has on the culture and on daily life down there -- it was alien to the point of seeming outright made-up and "how can this be real life in the 21st century" to my yankee rear end even as I was experiencing it both at work and in social settings. Nü Atheists are still smugly obnoxious shits and that becomes super obvious in their internet echo chambers, but vast swathes of America really are places where it is normal to ostracize people for not being [the right kind of] Christian to a really cartoonish-hyperbole-seeming extent, even while other parts of America are perfectly reasonable about religious (and unreligious) diversity.
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Jul 25, 2017 18:07
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InediblePenguin posted:During my years in Texas i more than once had people who had previously been friendly completely cut all contact with me upon discovering that, although i was raised Christian, i did not go to church. I think if you have never actually lived in the bible belt you just literally don't understand the extent of the stranglehold Evangelicalism has on the culture and on daily life down there -- it was alien to the point of seeming outright made-up and "how can this be real life in the 21st century" to my yankee rear end even as I was experiencing it both at work and in social settings. Nü Atheists are still smugly obnoxious shits and that becomes super obvious in their internet echo chambers, but vast swathes of America really are places where it is normal to ostracize people for not being [the right kind of] Christian to a really cartoonish-hyperbole-seeming extent, even while other parts of America are perfectly reasonable about religious (and unreligious) diversity. In the Oklahoma college town of ~100K people where I grew up, I was not taught a single thing about evolution in school. Sex ed consisted of a nurse visiting my high school biology class and demonstrating how to put a condom on a banana - plus some AIDS Education Week classes where we learned that gay sex will kill you and condoms don't work. It was not unusual for me to have classmates who came from families that forbade playing cards or dice, or where the girls had to always wear skirts and could not cut their hair. I'm pretty sure all of these things and more are normal throughout the Bible belt.
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Jul 25, 2017 18:24
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Fututor Magnus posted:mathematics as a field is what threatens the establishment and not anything else. though that's actually what rev and other reactos believe, that anything that isn't STEM is cathedral brainwashing. see also, sargon wanting to ban social justice courses and all that. Suffice it to say that the majority of STEMlords tend to be computer scientists, which is probably how "soft" you can go while still being STEM. Case in point: Neil "two plus two equals multiculturalism" Kolhatkar is an economics dropout. He is, obviously, wrong about mathematics education. This goes hand in hand with the whole "Common Core is Marxist propaganda" argument you get from the right. It really isn't. Fundamentally, the Common Core standards for mathematics actually help children understand the base concepts in a more intuitive way, and it's adults who have been made functionally innumerate through the failure of rote-based learning who think it's being dumbed down. Common Core is not a panacea though; my own mathematics education, in the UK, resembled Common Core in the early years, but as you get older, it turns into a mess that often prioritises shortcuts, The best part of the first semester of an undergraduate mathematics degree is basically unlearning the A-Level syllabus and re-learning it in a more rigorous way. What should be emphasised, however, is that mathematics, even though it is axiomatic, still relies on social concepts. This is what Margaret Thatcher, a chemist before she was a politician, failed to recognise when she lambasted "anti-racist mathematics"; I mean, for gently caress's sake, Europe didn't even have a concept of zero until the Renaissance. Even today, the concept of imaginary numbers proves a stumbling block to people's intuitions; Gauss was right when he wanted to describe them as lateral instead. Incidentally, the fact that Muslims literally defined a lot of the fundamental building blocks of mathematics (الجبر (al-jabr, lit. rejoining of parts) is probably why actual mathematicians don't tend to subscribe to the Islam as Great Evil hypothesis that is popular in politics. There is a certain irony in STEM supremacy. In their quest to deride "softer" fields of academia, their forget that sufficiently advanced mathematics is indistinguishable from philosophy, the ur-field of naval gazing academic softness. If they read their Bertrand Russell, they would know that. Basically, STEMlords like Yudkowsky are poo poo philosophers and shitter mathematicians, and the presence of STEMlords in our fields is a stain on us all. The "liberal arts" as academic fields should be defended, as theory divorced from humanity isn't really academia at all.
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Jul 25, 2017 18:31
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ate all the Oreos posted:I grew up surrounded by southern baptist creationists and got some very genuine shocked and incredulous "you believe in evolution????" reactions a few times from groups of people so yeah it's still useful in some places (though I think the tactics are usually more off-putting than they need to be). https://twitter.com/sam_kriss/status/754340626183913476
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Jul 25, 2017 18:44
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TinTower posted:This goes hand in hand with the whole "Common Core is Marxist propaganda" argument you get from the right. It really isn't. Fundamentally, the Common Core standards for mathematics actually help children understand the base concepts in a more intuitive way, and it's adults who have been made functionally innumerate through the failure of rote-based learning who think it's being dumbed down.
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Jul 25, 2017 18:53
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I definitely didn't mean to imply there's not immense social pressure against atheism in many places, in fact I think critics of obnoxious atheists sometimes overlook that when making sweeping claims about where their targets place in the oppression olympics. It's more that it's no longer an intellectual achievement the way it might be considered when even philosophers, scientists, etc. were hegemonically Christian, and in much more sophisticated ways than your stereotypical literalist evangelical. You have to be brave to be an atheist in a fundamentalist community, but you don't have to be a genius, particularly if you have an unsupervised Internet connection. And there's a good chance you'll eventually go to college anyway. But being a genius (in the idealised image of whatever scientific heroes) is part of the subculture's branding, which is an understandable way of raising self-esteem among people probably feeling quite isolated, but might have ill effects just like it does among rationalists.
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Jul 25, 2017 18:53
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Peel posted:You have to be brave to be an atheist in a fundamentalist community, but you don't have to be a genius, particularly if you have an unsupervised Internet connection. And there's a good chance you'll eventually go to college anyway. But being a genius (in the idealised image of whatever scientific heroes) is part of the subculture's branding, which is an understandable way of raising self-esteem among people probably feeling quite isolated, but might have ill effects just like it does among rationalists. +1. The frickin' Brights, well gosh.
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Jul 25, 2017 19:00
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pookel posted:I think the more important thing to note here is that Common Core is not ideological, period. It is a standard for educational instruction. If it turns out to suck, it will suck because it was a flawed standard, not because it is "Marxist." If it is great, then it is great because it works, not because it is supported by any particular political group. Exactly. Although the worship of rote-based learning from conservative politicians (looking at you, Michael Gove) means that any challenge to them is ipso-facto leftist tyranny, or something.
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Jul 25, 2017 19:10
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Honestly this whole conception where you have an intelligence like a DBZ power level inherent to your being is a plague on society and the self-image of developing children. There's even a number for it. Are 'nootropics' like senzu beans?
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Jul 25, 2017 19:16
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pookel posted:Yeah, this. In school, I was accused of being a Satanist by multiple people who insisted that Satanism and atheism were the same thing. I was forced by teachers to "cross my heart" to make promises (I didn't know what that meant) and you would get sent to the principal's office if you refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning. Since I was quasi-Jewish I also got accused of murdering Christ. A girl I knew was once forbidden to speak to me or my friend Sara again, because Sara had loaned her a book with a picture of unicorn on the cover, and to the girl's mother that meant Sara was a witch. My favorite thing that happened to me is in highschool a girl I'd never met before walked up to me at lunch and said "i heard you're gay, are you?" and i'm like "uh yes" and she just said real matter-of-factly "you know you're going to hell, right?" "yeah" "ok bye" and she walked away and I never saw her again. Like I guess she thought maybe I didn't know I was going to hell and she thought she might educate me?
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Jul 25, 2017 19:22
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Gorn Myson posted:Even if Hitchens wasn't an Islamophobe (and I think he is) its not an accusation that could drag his character down any further, his scumbaggery is self evident in all of his post 9/11 writing. Hitchen is the saddest because he was very funny and incisive once.
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Jul 25, 2017 20:57
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I don't think it needs spelling out here that this is a Marxist joking, a definitely non-DE Marxist to boot
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Jul 25, 2017 21:04
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J_RBG posted:I don't think it needs spelling out here that this is a Marxist joking, a definitely non-DE Marxist to boot Well I have to assume anyone who read that would have read the last page Also "joking" https://twitter.com/sam_kriss/status/754342658185854976
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Jul 25, 2017 21:08
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There's a knowing quality to it obviously but I wouldn't call it a joke. He's being edgy.
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Jul 25, 2017 21:12
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*supports a literal fascist for the French presidency* It's just a prank, bro!
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Jul 25, 2017 21:20
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Anil Dasharez0ne posted:I posted with the guy I want this framed in a gilded rare tropical wood frame on my living room wall
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Jul 25, 2017 21:40
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ate all the Oreos posted:My favorite thing that happened to me is in highschool a girl I'd never met before walked up to me at lunch and said "i heard you're gay, are you?" and i'm like "uh yes" and she just said real matter-of-factly "you know you're going to hell, right?" "yeah" "ok bye" and she walked away and I never saw her again. Something like this?
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Jul 25, 2017 21:44
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TinTower posted:*supports a literal fascist for the French presidency* We just weren't dialectical enough to see that saying "better a thousand honest fascists" wasn't supporting fascism Clearly https://twitter.com/sam_kriss/status/851194540845391872 https://twitter.com/bobfrombrockley/status/851200252212334593
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Jul 25, 2017 22:09
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In other news, apparently Zuckerberg said something about how Musk's fear mongering about AI was irresponsible, and Ol' Musky made a statement how Zuck didn't have a good grasp of the concepts.
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Jul 25, 2017 22:45
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A Man With A Plan posted:In other news, apparently Zuckerberg said something about how Musk's fear mongering about AI was irresponsible, and Ol' Musky made a statement how Zuck didn't have a good grasp of the concepts. trying and failing to come up with reasons why my next book won't be called Roko's Basilisk (of course there'll be another one, who the gently caress stops at one)
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Jul 25, 2017 22:49
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A Man With A Plan posted:In other news, apparently Zuckerberg said something about how Musk's fear mongering about AI was irresponsible, and Ol' Musky made a statement how Zuck didn't have a good grasp of the concepts. Zuck knows quite a bit about AI.
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Jul 25, 2017 23:30
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Subjunctive posted:Zuck knows quite a bit about AI. He would, being one.
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Jul 26, 2017 00:14
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Zuck isn't an AI, he's a gentle creature
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