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Talkin’ about a Revolution

drb.ie

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Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#261

Post by bloomingeek »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #229
bloomingeek wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your quoted sentence is an example of a group of people who have no idea of how to run a country. They are using the uneducated voter to support an agenda that is mostly unconstitutional. We Americans, just like other countries with a rule of law, determine our own culture within those laws. To use federal power to reshape our culture is both arrogant and, since Project 2025 is how they want to do the reshaping, is a…

As always, much of the conflict comes down to what constitutes "your lane". The government we have is far from a libertarian "live and let live", regulating nearly every aspect of life and taxing one person to give to another. It decides what children are taught, who can work jobs, what is a crime, and who pays for different services.

Absolutely true, the Constitution has to be the norm for society. Religious people, such as myself, must find a way to live within it. (easy for me, not so much for others.) The current administration, supposedly run by Christians, are far afield of their "lane", but don't seem to care. Your last sentence is the one that worries me the most, because of what the Project 2025 could morph into, meaning outside the parameters of the Constitution.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#262

Post by s1artibartfast »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #254
s1artibartfast wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think trans advocacy is interesting and different from gay rights because it goes beyond "live and let live" and is also an ontological battle. That is to say, it is a battle not just for equal rights, but over what people think, believe, and desire. It ask is not just for the right to exist, but to be placed within the gender heterosexuals are attracted to and accepted as no different. In this way, it lacks the li…

Maybe you're too young to remember when "gay rights" was also an "ontological battle" ? -- a huge a fight over whether such an "identity" was anything other than a fundamental deviance, and a lot of rhetoric to the effect that it violates "natural order." It wasn't just theological thing from Christians, it came from the mainstream of society. Some people still speak this way in North America but it is fringe. It was…

I remember the nature vs nurture debate, and always disagreed with it. I think it pigeon holed and disempowered the gay and the queer community for decades. I think it overstated the science, and understated the value of human autonomy.

That said, the battleground was about what they could do, so a live and let live compromise was possible. Gradual acceptance followed and continues increasing today.

With Trans, there battleground is belief, and even more critically, identity. Accepting homosexuals didnt require people to redefine themselves, their own gender, and that of the one they are attracted to. Self identity is incredibly important to people.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#263

Post by righthand »

lynx97 wrote: post #236
righthand wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decades of name calling and refusing to compromise from the right and it’s the left with the bad attitude that’s dividing people?

Yes. If you pretend to be the better person, you better make sure you act like it. If you give up and fall back to name calling, people will judge you based on your actions. "But I used to be the good guy" doesn't count at all.

If people judged name callers based on their actions then how did we get here?

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#264

Post by mardifoufs »

dlubarov wrote: post #260
mardifoufs wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? I don't think it's the Muslim world that did the cleansing lol. At least in morocco most of the Jewish population left after Israel was founded, after the actual Holocaust in Europe . Not because of ethnic cleansing (though I agree they were treated badly, and I understand why they left). But according to you the ethnic cleansing of the Jews was okay because it somehow wasn't a genocide right? Otherwise why woul…

You don't believe that Jews were ethnically cleansed from Muslim countries? Considering Egypt for example, what else would we call the expulsion of 25,000 Jews? Morocco in particular didn't have an explicit state policy of ethnically cleansing Jews, but "treated badly" is a bit of an understatement, considering the pogroms and the government policy of essentially holding Jews for ransom.

Actually you are right, I was wrong about that. I was thinking about before Israel's foundation (as in, Jews lived in the Muslim worlds for a long time without ethnic cleansing). As for morocco, yes they were very much treated as worse than second class citizens.

So yeah, I agree that Jews were basically pushed to leave, and at some point were just directly kicked out and cleansed out of a lot of Muslim countries.

I just find it weird to justify Israel's actions by saying that what they are doing is "just ethnic cleansing" which is basically what the comment I was replying was doing. Not only is it super weird, but it's also telling to only apply that logic to Muslims. Can Jews just go and massacre Germans and Europeans because of the Holocaust? Then why justify the wholesale destruction of a Muslim city with that?

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#265

Post by brigandish »

DeathArrow wrote: post #17

[flagged]

You missed Gentile off the list, Neo Hegelian and “godfather of fascism”.

Hegel is useful to me as a shortcut to knowing that anything or anyone deriving from his ideas is awful. I seem to recall Bertrand Russell didn’t seem fond either, Hegel’s entry in the History of Philosophy certainly wasn’t a glowing review.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#266

Post by gsf_emergency_2 »

keiferski wrote: post #42
nonrandomstring wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not limited to philosophy. All of academia is broken this way. Sadly, we think the only alternative is "industry", an equally broken set of incentives. That limits fronts of human progress to two types. We either get committee-driven institutional science leveraging huge resources, supercomputers, particle accelerators - blighted by cutthroat competition, opaque "publishing" and fraud - or radical popu…

Agreed and that is a really good, but simple, point that I didn't realize as clearly before: there is no real alternative to the academia vs. industry dichotomy. What is needed might be a third option that allows for exploration without the pressures of profits or publications.

Common to all "3rd options" seems to be their (read, immediate) implicit/tacit "dual-use" assumption:

Egs:

DARPA: every new findout is an edge for beating the soviets

Patronage: sooner or later, but most likely sooner, you come up with something your funder can brag about or profit from or simply feel good about

(Detour back to second options.

Academia: professors must bring in the tuition bacon at the very least

Industry: academics can immediately reverse engineer your artifacts or even patents, if they happen not to be mere positioning.)

Bell labs: if you squint hard enough, everything is related to infocomm infra

Sorry, had to try to beat that "one day everything will see the sun!" clause

https://archive.today/latest/www.nytimes.com/1985/01/06/nyre...

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#267

Post by goatlover »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #235
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the way I see it: The people behind the 2025 stuff etc have been on the "losing" side of the culture war since 1969. And they're sick of it, they're desperate, and now are just laying their cards on the table. I grew up in an evangelical church in the 80s-- albeit in Canada -- attending "Focus on the Family" events, Bible studies, etc. that promulgated heavy socially conservative ethos -- so I feel like I h…

The evangelicals believe that anyone who doesn't believe in their god will be tortured by their god for eternity. There's nothing worse than eternal torture, so they see it as their moral obligation to do anything at all to prevent others from being tortured for eternity by their god. Nothing they do to others can possibly be worse than that, so as long as they're focused on saving others any actions they take are ju…

Which means either they don't really believe in the exercise of free will, or they don't believe God is in control of who gets saved (predestination). Either way, they're not acting according to their interpretation of scripture. Being saved for a Christian shouldn't be up to governments. It wasn't for the early Christians. It was an individual choice. They're acting more like Constantine.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#268

Post by harimau777 »

graemep wrote: post #19

The world gets both better and worse. it is something that I regularly get voted down for saying here, but IMO the west is unduly pessimist because it had a golden age from winning the cold war until the late 2000s, took an overly optimistic view of the future and the inevitability of progress (remember "the end of history") and cannot cope with things going back to normal. Things get better, sometimes they get worse…

I think that sort of analysis ignores the things that we gave up to get our golden age; such that a return to normal would actually mean ending up worse than we were before in many ways. We accepted Capitalism's race to the bottom in exchange for the benefits of consumerism. Now we are being asked to give up consumerism but there's no indication that we will also go back to a time before everything was cheaply made plastic crap.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#269

Post by harimau777 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #224
aaaja wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pushback against trans rights advocacy is quite interesting because unlike with same-sex marriage, there are several distinct groups opposing it for fundamentally different reasons. Religious conservatives are one group. Radical feminists, female athletes, medical whistleblowers are others. And almost everyone draws a firm line against accepting gender identity beliefs in their romantic and sexual lives. Trying t…

I think trans advocacy is interesting and different from gay rights because it goes beyond "live and let live" and is also an ontological battle. That is to say, it is a battle not just for equal rights, but over what people think, believe, and desire. It ask is not just for the right to exist, but to be placed within the gender heterosexuals are attracted to and accepted as no different. In this way, it lacks the li…

Conservatives present it that way, but I haven't seen that in practice. The majority of trans people are perfectly happy with people believing whatever they want as long as they treat other people with respect and don't discriminate against them.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#270

Post by harimau777 »

nozzlegear wrote: post #148
baxtr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I talked to a history professor recently and asked him how he viewed the whole situation. He leaned back, thought for a bit and answered: It’ll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy will continue to increase its footprint, people will lead better lives. It’s the next 30 years I’m worried about. PS: ofc, I have no clue if he’s right or not. But I thought it’s an interesting take to share.

I have no comment on what your professor said, but reading the replies here just confirms to me that cynicism, pessimism and doomerism are certainly the mood of the current zeitgeist. Optimistic outlooks are too often met with a kind of reflexive dismissal or despair in a "I feel like things are really bad right now, have never been this bad before, and thus can never improve" diatribe. There's a pervasive sense in o…

Part of the problem is the whole "In the long run, we're all dead" thing. If things are going to be bad for the next 30 years, that's most of the rest of my useful life. If my life leading up to this point was miserable and the rest of my life is going to be as bad or worse, then I'm not sure I care how things will be in 200 years.
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