Sunday, January 31, 2021

Dissident Speech And Freedom Of Reach

         

Eternal Problems And Pat Solutions


Imagine being unceremoniously thrown out of a new friend’s home after saying one thing that caught him off-guard. In the moment you figured that your line would be interpreted as another benign statement, but it utterly repelled him. The line’s contents are irrelevant for our purposes. For all we care; a spin on the recent news, a twistedly crass joke, a thinly-veiled threat directed at someone you both know, a flawless syllogism getting at a sacrilegious truth. It could’ve been anything. Apart from the isolated utterance, suppose also that you had ample reason to suspect that the unapologetically opinionated personality you’ve been told you have many times over could have gone on to ruffle the friend you’ve just begun to know. You had a sense that it could happen, or would happen, somewhere down the line. You didn’t figure it would be this soon, but there you go. What’s important is that you chose to speak in a free-wheeling manner, as you tend to, instead of letting your apprehension of a possibly unpleasant confrontation stop you.

 

You believe exactly what the impartial spectator believes. The impartial spectator can at once understand that you were not entitled to remain guested in the salty friend’s pad, while grasping that he acted like a jerk for booting you. As a conversationalist, your friend is free to have an intensely negative overreaction to what you said, and indeed to any statement, for any reason. But as a host, and especially as one who considers himself to be at least somewhat gracious, he is morally analyzable in this circumstance. He is capable of properly handling vs. mishandling his follow-up action to the gut-level reaction that any statement spawns in him. This is something he can do well or badly even when he’s not in the midst of hosting company, but he can do it egregiously poorly whenever an opportunity to mistreat a guest he’s invited into his home arises.

 

So I want to be clear that the host’s knee-jerk sensibilities are not what lands him in the wrong. His freely acting on those sensibilities, to the tune of that gut-level defensiveness, is what makes him wrong and a graceless bastard. By catering to primal hankerings; by welcoming the outburst, the ex-friend shows himself to be inadequately introspective of his first-order mental faculties.

 

This behavior is improper in some moral ways (he wronged you) and in some non-moral ways as well (he’s plain undisciplined and incurious). His giving you the boot entails what I like to call dualistic misconduct as it captures two main sources of misconduct; epistemic and moral. 

 

To recap; you have no rights claims (i.e. legal, constitutional, contractual) to remain on this person’s property, and you know it. Yet this sheds zero light as to the evaluative status of the host’s decision to expunge you from his home and, presumably, to end the friendship over it.

 

If you see nothing wrong with this summary, consider yourself conceptually spared from about ~99% of False Dilemma arguments surrounding Big Tech deplatforming supposed ideological groups on ideological or non-ideological grounds. Maybe the ~99% estimate is pushing it, but honestly I can’t see it being much lower than that. It would take me less than twenty seconds to recount the totality of people who frequently discuss these themes and who manage to avoid indulging various low-resolution mental models for calibrating the problem-deliberation-solution dynamics and stakes. Most of the commentators with whom Im familiar have shown themselves to favor something akin to one (or two) of the following three proposition-paragraphs:

Monday, December 28, 2020

Affective Altruism

Affective Altruism

 

Redirecting another post over here because I apparently have no willpower and could not stop myself from piling on to it until the end product became unacceptably oversized for YouTube’s community tab. Its fine though, this one probably merits a spot on here anyway.

 

Will MacAskill back on the Making Sense podcast:

https://samharris.org/podcasts/228-doing-good/


Too much of this turned out to be a rerun of their 2016 edition, so I’ll spare you a retelling of the more substantive objections I’ve already aired in the wake of that first conversation. Right now I want to delve into an altogether different observation that keeps bugging me about these two. I’m finally able to recall how the same something managed to irritate me during the first go-round as well. It’s one of those vague somethings that never fully crystallized for me, until a few days ago.

 

Monday, November 30, 2020

Islamic Hybridism

This was originally meant to be a Community Post for my YouTube channel, but it ran long. It’s a good deal shorter than the usual essay-length post reserved for Extensive Arguments, and though I have two unfinished Sequence Trilogies that have been pending for eons, and embarrassingly so, I’ll publish this too-long-for-the-community piece over here anyway.

The post being moved here started out as a Poll soliciting answers to a deceivingly simple question. As with my other polls, I added a few short lines to explain the broader context of the query, only to then catch myself snowballing the explanations in order to make doubly sure that no one downplays the gravity of what's being queried. So much for that.


Motivation for the Poll: The string of murders in France and elsewhere in Europe over the last two months, particularly the aftermath-spurred debates over how to solve or mitigate the problem of Islam-inspired violence legally or socially, while avoiding overkill (i.e. human rights violations). To those who have decided that there’s no overkill, or that there’s no point in worrying about overkill, you're probably not the target audience, and I imagine you’re in for a disappointing read.


The intended poll:

 

Non-muslims familiar with the Qur’an are correct to rank-order Muslims in the following way, morally speaking:

 

Cultural Muslims > Moderate Muslims > Devout Muslims > Islamists > Jihadists

 

A: Agree

B: Disagree

C: Agree in theory, but this specific ranking is wrong

D: Ambivalent (on non-empirical grounds / i.e. the value of non-judgmentalism)

E: Indecisive (because we lack some pertinent facts / still pro-judgmentalism)


To answer contextually, you will need to keep reading. (Sorry)


Friday, May 15, 2020

Electoral Fideism


And now for a terribly delayed post in what seems like an unending streak of terribly delayed posts in this space. Regrettably, I have succumbed to another disruption of a three part sequence project which I intended to finish long ago. The sequence will be completed... wait for it... In The Future. 

Until then, it’s Me vs. SkidRowRadio in… This Time, It’s Electoral.


Some of this will feel dated. The spar I am revisiting, screencapping and hopefully concluding was instigated in early March, so in the thick of Super Tuesday when the American primaries were hotly and then lukewarmly contested. I would normally self-cringe for taking a time-sensitive topic and putting the finishing touches on it roughly a month after its time-sensitivity expires. And I am self-cringing, believe me, just not as strongly as I might need to. This is because I tamely believe the lateness has an out: cyber-normies won’t be exposed to this. People who experience time in internet years where days are weeks and months are years, will not be reading this.


Abnormal readers — who might be thought to represent the old normal, where “a month ago” does not absurdly feel like ancient history — are the prospected readers. My clash with SkidRowRadio (henceforth SRR) initially centered on decision-theoretical issues fraught with probabilities and uncertainties. Few of these issues remain unknown to us as of my writing this [2020-04-14]. But the developments and later knowledge (i.e. Bernie endorsing Biden) don’t make those disagreements any less steep or unworthy of reposting. SRR's responses to my criticisms, and other radical mishandlings of similar criticisms, remain, put amicably, instructive.


All this to say that I am cautiously optimistic that the disciplined reader is the one who won’t care how non-current or non-recent this technically current-events themed post is. If you do care and are wondering why I didn’t have it up sooner, skip to the bottom for a psychological sob story from me giving a detailed account of what holds me up these days. Otherwise head straight to content.

Also, I created a (hopefully helpful) visual that summarizes what I'm battling against here.



Saturday, February 29, 2020

Change Against The Machine





Have philosophers developed an adequate taxonomy for interrogating the most mature divides and zigzags on life and existence as bearers of disvalue or value? If you believe that they have, tell me what you think that is. For instance, which descriptor best summarizes your outlook on life? Which descriptor have your mortal enemies adopted? Are these terms prodded by assessments of lives as they are in actuality, or are they licensed to go a step further by assessing matters as they might be, however plausibly or implausibly?

What’s a complete outlook on life anyway? Do speakers owe their audiences a theory of meaning, or are they justified in remaining silent about the arguably hazardous possibility of meaninglessness despite their eagerness to advance a lucid theory of value/disvalue? Would subdividing 'meaning' along cosmic vs. terrestrial lanes make any real difference?

Should armchair-derived outlooks have their own labels, or are they better kept overshadowed by the formal and orderly labels philosophical evaluators have come to depend on?

If you think this terminology can be covered by anti-natalism and natalism, or by anti-mortalism and pro-mortalism, or by the more conventional and general standoffs between pessimism and optimism, I humbly ask that you rethink those picks as you read through this.

Saturday, January 4, 2020

Constraints On Procreative Wrongness




Global anti-natalists part ways with local ones in two important respects; (i) in contending that the overriding harms of existence bear on all birthed subjects rather than on some or most ones, and (ii) by believing that moral criticisms of procreative acts can be levied at deliberative agents broadly considered, rather than narrowing the pool of censurable agents to their peer group only, and/or to those who are similarly situated to themselves only.

Here my deployment of global vs. local anti-natalism focuses on the divisions captured in (ii), where moral judgment takes center stage. While local anti-natalists understand moral scrutiny of procreative acts to be position-relative in principle, global counterparts take their admonishments to be position-neutral broadly speaking, and perhaps even in principle. Birthing is a blamable act, according to the global group, insofar as the deliberative agent who births does so volitionally / non-coercively / knowingly. For the local group, standards for blameworthiness must undergo a further probing, leading to their thinning, owing to position-derived wrong-making features and other contingencies.

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Unvirtuous Ethics


Unvirtuous Ethics


 
Context: Word on the street is that beginning December 10th, YouTube will start deleting content from users who refuse to or who are unable to monetize their uploads and posts. I am one such user, and though I cannot gauge the likelihood of this threat, a trusty friend who has been on-the-ball about this sort of stuff before has assured me that I have nothing to fret over.

But just to play it safe, I plan to re-upload many of my videos to a different platform, and to convert most of my Community Posts over to this blog. This will require much work on my part, and knowing me, plus the number of videos/posts I consider worthy of the move, along with the indexing of paragraphs and the structuring of typological emphasis never carrying over from YouTube, what needs to be done in a timely fashion will not be done in a timely fashion. So if my semi-legit fear about YouTube targeting un-monetized content turns out to be grounded in reality, some worthwhile content stands to be wiped out before I get around to giving it a new home.

By worthwhile content, I have some videos in mind, but mostly the community posts and comment exchanges. Here’s one post stimulating a fruitful exchange which should be moved ASAP. The initial post by me is fine I guess, though it’s another example of an inconsequential rando inducing ill-tempered scornfulness in me, in lieu of well-tempered engagement. Which segues nicely into what the comments are about!

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

The Joker And Its Discontents, And Their Discontents

Behold, the other outrage-culture machine at work:


And to think, I almost decided to not bother clicking on this video and its magnificently alluring title when I spotted it earlier in the day. Must've been sixteen hours ago now. Never ran across this YouTuber prior to today, mind you. 

Despite being unaware of the channel's existence, the video came up in the recommendations and had me instinctively go "Oh that looks like it must be worthy of a watch" followed by "Gosh there sure are a crapload of Joker-related videos infiltrating my YouTube page. It's gotten worse in the last few days too. It's really bad today. The undemanded supply never ends! What's going on?!" followed immediately by "Oh crap, it's probably another clickbaity piece of garbage with the uploader capitalizing on the tidal wave of publicity The Joker is receiving right now, and wanting some for himself, aka modern YouTube in a nutshell." (yes, that's exactly what I thought, mind-verbatim).


I'm not done. That last thought-sentence was followed by "...but I don't know that for sure, and there's only one way to find out, and I can't expect me to just not find out. Not finding out would make for unhealthy levels of self-denial and shit" which was followed by "No dumbass, that's exactly how they get you! It's how clickbait works: You don't know, you kinda wanna know, then you really wanna know, then you find out, but by that point it's too late and you've already fed the beast" followed by "Yeah, I'm/you're absolutely right, I'll avoid it. It's probably as bad as I'm suspecting. Off I go...".

And this was followed, a few minutes later, by the thought-sentence "Meh, it's one extra click. Contributing an extra click won't make or break the beast" followed by "Where have I heard that one before?" followed by "Well, you did upload that highly informative video back in mid 2017 about the probabilistic insignificance of each person's individual vote, especially when the vote is being cast in national or presidential elections, with millions of voters participating". 

Part of me wasn't about to give in, and so, that was followed by "Nah that was a little different, even though both themes do overlap substantially with the Sorties Paradox. And besides, subsequent exposure to some philosophical faggots sufficed in convincing me that the anti-voting argument I relied on in that video rested on a shaky theory of intentionality and could be dispensed with, with relative ease". (it's a thought, you see, meaning you're not allowed to think less of me or to give me a hard time over my use of faggot, unless you're prepared to (1) believe that even thinking the word faggot earns the thought-agent a hefty dose of disapprobation, (2) ask me to exclude the word faggot and thus relay these thoughts with modest levels of inexactitude, or (3) want me to write phaggot instead of faggot. I can certainly do that last one, seeing as that captures the non-homophobic spirit in which I thought-called them faggots anyway. I mean phaggots.

Okay then, to cut a long thought-process short: turns out I failed to avoid clicking on the embedded video, even though I knew full well that ignoring it was the right thing to do. Had I mustered the willpower to Dare to just walk away and not watch it, I could have spent my day more productively, by working on one or more of my draft posts which have been in draft form for what feels like a century now. Or I could have spent the day recording the rare video for the tube, or perhaps learning more about financial markets so that I can invest my savings prudently for once and shave decades off my wage-in-a-cage work-life, like a proper Jew reliably does.

Ah, so I'm pretty sure that that wasn't a thought-sentence, but a real sentence-sentence, and the only extant one of the two.

If I am correct about the majority of my readers being rigid substance monists who ultimately endorse physicalism, that sentence-sentence is the real deal and will surely get me in trouble. But wait a tic, it's not like I used any slurs pertaining to Jews in that sentence, I just implied that Jews on average are superior to non-Jews on average when it comes to investment and the intricacies of contemporary finance, and that's a positive attribute to have! Sure, it can be argued that non-earned income in a world where so many sweat for the bare minimums is ethically dubious. I've argued that myself, but I've also argued that game-theoretical obstacles to absolute moral purity make compromisers of us all, and doubly so for those paying attention to the world at large. The more you see, the more you'll understand that swimming with sharks is a must. At least some of the time. To advance the impartial good.

So unless you want to say that no one should evaluate human behavior and moral agents from the standpoint of interdependent rational choice, it totally can be ethically acceptable to sit back and invest. Frankly, construing it as acceptable is underselling it, provided the investor tacks on the right caveats, such as longstanding involvement with optimally or modestly effective charities. So if anything, that was a deeply pro-semitic remark I made, and anyone inferring something sinister from it is way outta line.

But anyway, I could've spent my time better is the point, and I blew it. And for what? For that stupid, irritating, hypocritical, reverse-outrage-culture video (remember that? the embedded thing? I do! I memba!). What's worse is that I didn't just watch it. I also didn't just read many of the sycophantic comments thoughtlessly praising it while condemning reviewers who belong to The Media. I went further; posting a rather long critique of it. It's sitting on my trusty Community page, which I'll now copy-and-paste here, because it ended up being surprisingly longer than the regular longish write up I reserve for that page, and because I've been wrestling with the notion that it's beyond time for me to resuscitate this blog. Its epic 10 Year anniversary is coming up, and I sorta don't want to have that temporally-induced landmark event be as flat as my YouTube channel was on its 10 Year anniversary. Or do I really care about any of that? Put this way: If a negative thought about a specific thing that bugs you pops into your head approximately twice a month, does it constitute a thing you truly care about? Or would it be more like, the tiniest of abstract nuisances? Probably the latter, but who's counting.


Wait, what?! What the fuck is this?! Why in the cold hell am I writing up an off-the-cuff quicky-style post on a topic I've never contemplated blogging about (DC film, seriously?) before today?! What the shit?! Was I not supposed to bring you all the long awaited Part 3 of this masterpiece series on meta-politics instead?! I originally planned for it to be out in May of this year. Guess I'm running a little late, so it's not going to be as smooth a sequence as the poetic "March is Part 1, April is Part 2, May is Part 3" plan I had such high hopes for.

Moreover, didn't this entire blog come to a screeching halt due to my inability to wrap up Part 3, by which I mean: for me to be content enough with the final version of Part 3 so as to publish it? Didn't I mutter to myself for months "No, you're doing a three parter, remember, and this means you don't get to publish any posts in between the parts, got it? This ain't no fun park carnival, god damn it, it's a blog! A blog that's visited by hundreds of unique visitors per week, on a good week. Dozens on a not-so-good one. Some of these visitors presumably stick around to read up to a quarter of a given post that's on display. So you better straighten up and stay true to that 1-2-3 part formula you decided on back in January of this year, when you began writing Part 1, dammit!"

Actually that wasn't a real mutter, it was another round of thought-sentences, transcribed to perfection right here, right now. Welcome.

Well that was then, and this is now. I've decided to no longer care about sullying the glorious sequence of that terribly complicated three parter on meta-politics. I can paraphrase its impossible Part 3 here anyway: More "yay pragmatism", more "boo structuralism". I mean there's more to it, and it offers some pretty sharp observations, but yeah, that's the gist. I will finish it when I finish it. In the meantime, enjoy my criticism of the abysmal video I embedded (way) above.

If you continue reading from here, you should consider watching that video first. Though that video by that vlogger is just a microcosm, so you might not even need to watch it to proceed, assuming you've seen at least one of the other hundreds of videos making similar arguments against The Media by shamelessly using The Joker as a springboard, or have read at least one of the thousands of comments and articles making similar arguments against The Media by shamelessly using
The Joker as a springboard. It really is a parrot-world out there.


Commence Community post:

So the media needed this particular undismayed film to fail, even though this wasn’t their emotive or cognitive motto when covering countless other culturally undismayed films over the decades, each with their own antihero protagonists and convention-abiding antagonists. Each with their own fist-shaky messages about societal sickness, their identifying the sources/causes of these sicknesses, and in some cases; their offering up pet remedies (to varying degrees of specificity). All widely discussed and reviewed; positively, negatively, indifferently, by media figureheads and toadies, and without suspicions arising from outsiders that The Media needed any of those films to fail, and needed it badly. So what’s different here? Why The Joker, of all things?

Having seen the film, and having suffered through hours upon hours of coverage surrounding its release, I can say firmly that nothing is different here. Not a thing. At least on the Dinosaur Media’s side of things. The alarmist wings are doing their dour thing, as they do, and it’s barely a departure from the norm. The media is often referred to as an empire, and you'd think this framing would cause people who declare themselves as hostile to The Media and as distrustful of The Media to analyze each wing as a distinctive unit (as with Empires). But nope. The video I’m sharing below (to your right?) contains a "for all intents and purposes" style admission of (minimal) variation, but nothing that the vlogger actually incorporates into his thinking or script-writing. Because, for the script and the video to work, and for his massive punch to land in the humongous way he intends, there can be no alarmist vs. non-alarmist wings, reporters, journos, etc within the media landscape. There are only alarmist wings and their pathological contributors. In effect, there's You And Yours vs. Media Critics. And even on that front, as insufferably reductive as it is, his video is still riddled with nonsense.

Recall that Gibson’s 2004 Passion was banned in Israel, and the over-the-top scathing treatment it received in most pockets of North America had me convinced that it was a few degrees shy of being banned here too. That’s one example, off the top of my head, of awful coverage fanning the flames. Could it be said, then, that everybody in The Media, or that large swathes of The Media, felt like they needed TPOTC to fail? Hell no. Some were plainly offended by it, because they're devoutly religious and can't think beyond that. When those (religious) people were also the media insiders, they capitalized on the megaphone they own, or the one they have daily access to, and went on about the wrongness of the film from those pulpits. And when people with this mindset were the media outsiders, the media was there to give them a megaphone, and then to give the other side one too. Some outlets managed to stay neutral, others not so much. Then as now. No difference.

Nay, the difference resides in alt-media’s reaction to traditional media’s predictable coverage, like with this video. For the record, I hate the term alt-media, but screw it, using it here. Guy has an obvious axe to grind, and not grinding it to oddball reviews of The Joker would’ve been a missed opportunity. He even outs his motivated reasoning when he discusses how some barely known outlet tried to do a hit piece on him a while back. So? Why is “X is not a monolith” a perfectly fair point to make in every X vs. Y ordeal not involving The Media, but applied to the media, it becomes inconceivable. Why are truisms treated as anathemas, in this space? 

Did he get specific? He all but sees into the minds of media insiders, so he should get narrower than he is being in his allegations. Are there individual culprits? There must be, unless this is intended to be another “The Flaw Is In The System, Not The People” smokescreen. I doubt that's his conclusion, I'm sure he believes the problem can be pinned on individual people (i.e. Media insiders). So where are the names? If you’re going to make an allegation this damming, you need to name names. Tell viewers something concrete about all the wretched people who apparently believe this and feel this way. How many of them are there? Presumably a lot!

Summary of his video: “They need The Joker to fail, because they’ve profiteered from the victims The Joker shines a light on, and they can't admit their role in creating said victims, because they are twisted inside”. That's the pitch, I’m not exaggerating. But if that's the complaint, flashing a few screenshots of articles criticizing the movie will not do. Quoting nothing from the articles beyond their title/heading will not do. Mentioning “Late Night” talk shows and their snarky nature, will not do. Or does he earnestly believe that Kimmel, Colbert, Fallon, Conan, et al feel that The Joker needs to fail? Like, they feel it in their bones and are threatened by its likely success? These hosts, who chose to have Joaquin Phoenix on for cross-promotional ends. He scratches them, they scratch him. Showbiz 101. Then as now. But now with 100% More Fear!

More hilariously, they’ve routinely run ads for The Joker during their shows’ commercial blocks. (Not sure whether Fallon’s show did, couldn’t even stomach the sight of it to do the tiny bit of research on it to confirm, but I bet it did. I can confirm that the other guys all did. Why run ads for a product you fear? Not a product you merely dislike, not one you merely disagree with or hate... but Fear!).


As of my writing this, over 33K people have upvoted this video. This ridiculous video. If you put a gun to their heads, would a single one of those upvoters answer “Yes” to questions like “Does Jimmy Kimmel, deep down, feel like The Joker needs to fail?”. I don’t think any of them would, and this wouldn’t change if you swapped Jimmy Kimmel's name for the name of any other late night host, or their respective creative team and showrunners.


The point stands when our alleger turns his attention away from TV and toward the press. Just as the late night hosts, executives, showrunners, and creative teams have no negative emotional investment in this, the typical op-ed columnist has no reason whatsoever to feel that The Joker needs to fail either. Surely, indifference has to be the rule here, and hopefulness (for success) has to be the exception. And then, finally, a smaller exception noting a hopefulness for failure can be made. But this brand of hope represents a luxury desire, and is not a need. Nothing here can correctly be depicted as the rule, or as the exception, if it is made out to be a need rather than a want.

The standard op-ed columnist is as much of a media insider as the horrible panicky op-ed critics who wrote about and overreacted to aspects of the film (just as they did 15 years ago with TPOTC, or with The Life Of Brian, and so on). When you Nadir Fallacy the media this persistently, you really do deserve to have your calls to the more general Imprecision Fallacy ignored in other contexts. In a way, you've waived your epistemic rights to cite certain things. There is no shortage of better candidates for that, after all.

People who understand how far-reaching the implications of the Imprecision Fallacy run seem to be rarer than four-leaf clovers. It frustrates me to no end, because it's just so damn rampant. By-the-numbers alt-media has nothing good to show for itself here. And sure, I'm prepared to modify this generalization if I'm shown a few examples of alt-media frontrunners being responsible in their fallacy-regulation. I'm not holding my breath. Had YouTube been around and established in 2004, similar efforts would’ve been made by YouTubers to have spacious narratives spun from the Gibson/TPOTC controversy.

The Joker caused a slightly larger stir within traditional outlets, and even that can be explained by the fact that big screen releases throughout the 2010s provided moviegoers with next-to-nothing in the way of gritty, culturally challenging material (way to not boycott shitty movies, shitty general public) compared to previous decades. Had this decade been more like the 1970s or 1980s in terms of big screen releases, I think many more culture worriers would've been desensitized to these 'dark' themes, and The Joker wouldn't have garnered even those barely higher levels of preemptive panic.


So in conclusion, the embedded video is unserious and arguably disingenuous. Enjoy!


P.S. I just have to @10:09 “…This holistic idea that the only one responsible is the perpetrator themselves, it is wrong…” He thinks holistic is another way of saying holier-than-thou. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be petty enough to bring attention to something like this, but he has a massive audience, and in my experience “holistic = holy” style confusions are a trend with tubers who amass large followings (somehow). The word he was looking for is ‘individualistic’, which is ironically the opposite of holistic and runs counter to the point he was making. What a clutz.


So yeah, please look up holism if you’re this eager to use it in a sentence.


P.P.S. Holism is dumb and wrong. Its penchant for deindividuation knows no bounds. Apply its teachings to everyday judicial contexts, and you’ll be chugging poison whether you're the defendant or the plaintiff.

P.P.P.S. Popper argued convincingly that it makes for political poison in the broader sense too: https://www.iep.utm.edu/popp-pol/#SH1b

/End of Community post.


Now that you've read it, feel free to (1) commend my patience and brilliance, (2) suggest what other Community posts, if any, you'd like to see converted into semi-serious blog posts like this one.

There are some lengthy posts which I've considered transferring and expanding on, but always decided against doing so at the end of the day, largely due to my nonsensical commitment to never publish stuff I've written haphazardly, along with my nonsensical commitment to preserve the dignity of The Sequence and to neverendingly follow those stubborn drafts to wherever they may lead me. But now I'm thinking fuck that. Nothing wrong with scrapping the old, self-sabotaging method and applying a more stream-of-consciousness friendly approach to my writing. And if I relocate some other posts from the Community page, I'd also incorporate in the transfer my comment exchanges with a handful of smart cookies which I've always found to be worthy of a wider readership.



Relatedly, I've often gone back to read my old posts on this blog (aka all my posts on this blog) only to find myself disappointed in and irked by their overwritten tenor. This never happens when I revisit an old-ish Community post of mine, or a lengthy comment reply I've left to someone. And by never, I mean never; not once. I always reread those with pleasure, unlike with previous blog posts, which range from slightly difficult to put up with, to outright atrocious. Seems that I've only recently come to terms with the fact that my writing is decent, but only under the condition that I go without proofreading, or when I only get to proofread once or twice before hitting publish.

The moment I embark on some misguided Sequence project wherein I allow myself the indulgence of dozens, and at times hundreds, of proofreads a pop, I inevitably end up ruining all that was good in the early stages of the project. I want to change that. I need to change that, and now I've accepted that the only way forward will see me limiting proofreads to one or two rounds a pop. I will never be the type of person who writes readable books, for I seem incapable of improving my nascent texts as the weeks, months and years pass. Time only helps me worsen them.

I also enjoyed rereading the posts I published on Google Plus, back when they were available. Still trying to find those Google archives which I apparently downloaded somewhere prior to the nuking of Google Plus, so if you have any write-ups of mine that you'd like to see morphed and carried over to this medium, it sadly has to be on my Community timeline and no further back. For now.

Oh and if anyone would like to hear my thoughts on The Joker movie proper, and not the silly nontroversy surrounding it, let me know and I'll go over it in the comments or in a separate post. Hmm, guess it would've been appropriate for me to have done some of that in this post, but I've been writing a lot today and am too exhausted to even proofread all of this diligently, let alone to pile on it with additional sentences reviewing a film with the gravitas of The Joker, as that would require yet more proofreading. 

I'll say this much; this marks the best 2019 release that I've seen so far (though that's an embarrassingly short list), and I'd prefer to not say more about it publicly when feeling as mentally drained as I do at this moment.

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Towards A Grey Pill

You're on part two. To summarize part one, adding to it slightly:

Due to the enormity and distinctiveness of contentious issues, it is improbable that the fabric of political issues would be understood as ideologically combinational in the eyes of an omniprecipient being. Orthodox versions of political nihilism recognize this, only to posit that such a being would do away with all systems and ideologies in equal rungs and never look back.

Political pragmatism, as I have sculpted it, makes note of the same, but posits an omniprecipient being who urges political thinkers to perish the thought of doing away with all systems and ideologies in equal rungs. Instead, the kosher pragmatist pictures the masterly spectator as one who declines enough of the essential ingredients from all systems and ideologies. Pinpointing where the "enough" mark sits is an empirical question. This doesn't make it an easy one. The point is, declining enough ideologically essential ingredients leaves the kosher pragmatist appearing politically outlandish to onlookers with principled sensibilities.

Though political nihilists and political pragmatists occupy the same neighborhood, it is a spacey neighborhood. Their home streets are located on the opposite ends of the district, and are nothing alike architecturally.

/Summary  



Worldviews And Narratives

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Nothing But Nostrums

Genre: Meta-politics.

Goal: Depersonalizing debate at every scale.

Credence Level: 90%

Novelty Level: Moderate. I've made noises about this before, but have never truly expanded on my points in the glorious ways I have here.

Priority Level: High. Somewhere in the "things I'm very concerned with and you should be too" stack.

Alt-goal: Improving relations (if any) between pragmatists and pessimists.

Disclaimer: Due to the breadth of this topic and its associated drifts, I have decided to split things. This post is part one of a three part series. The split resembles my Q&A post from 2018, except this time around, the second and third installments will actually be finished and posted sooner than later (the Q&A drafts are on life support, unsure if I'll be reviving them down the road).

Saturday, November 24, 2018

Capitalism ⬌ Socialism: The Other Economic Stagnation


When skilled and unskilled people living in the digital age are asked about the sharpest divides behind economic belief, responses indicate that Socialism vs. Capitalism is (still) where it's at. It will come as no surprise that I am far from convinced that bifurcating economics along this especial a lane is coherent or productive in 2018. That is, once one applies exclusively forward-looking criteria for determining what we have most reason to dispense with and what we'd do well to preserve.

If this comes across as a pitch for the Mixed Economy as the only way forward, it goes to show just how attentively propagandized things are. There's a multitude of so-called Third Ways. Some of them incorporate aspects ofor the totality of the LTV. It would be more accurate to refer to these buried models as Fourth Way, Fifth Way, etc. That won't happen, and each of those highly multifaceted mixed systems will continue to receive zero airtime and attention. So the next time you hear about the drawbacks of the Mixed Economy, try to point out that "it" has as many if not more offshoots as all the unmixed doctrines do.

Hair-splitting example: Whether an economy is mixed or unmixed says nothing about whether it is ultimately grounded in steady-state precepts or in unfettered "growthism". Visual aid time:

Sunday, September 30, 2018

We Are All Deplorables Now


Joyful vs. Diffident Victories 




No matter how impressive a philosophy, ideology, system, institution or modest set of prescriptions comes across as being, it should not be spoken of glowingly. It should not be fawned over publicly, or even in the privacy of its adherents' minds.

The antithesis of it should likewise not be spoken of disparagingly or demonized in the privacy of said minds. Tall orders, these two.

It's normal to ask why. Why shouldn't you feel the way you naturally do? Why pretend that your objectively accurate or wise beliefs stop short of turning you into a protagonist, and that their inaccurate or insane beliefs do something other than turn them into the antagonists?

Since the why is so normalized and psychologically embedded, we might conclude that it is reasonable to run with it. So when a snarky meme comes along and points out that taking pride in one's beliefs is puerile, not only is it acceptable to ask why, it's downright imperative to do so. But no one asks why when called upon to acknowledge the circus that is Party Politics vis-à-vis their individual voting history.

No one with an IQ above room temperature lionizes their 2016 Clinton-Will-Do vote (anti-Trump vote), or their Trump-Will-Do/anti-Clinton vote. Only the electoral flat-earther engages in such lionization. It is generally understood that the options are wretched, that party loyalty is gullibility, and that the more conscientious a voter is, the readier they will be to hold their nose in the booth and select one type of evil to stave off the eviler evils. Apparent anti-idealists love to point all of this out, especially when an inveterate idealist who sat out the last election gets all up in their grill about the impurity of it all.