Continuing the discussion from Sandy Hook Truthers are the worst:
Each of us determines what society is as much as anybody else does.
No, all of us determines what society is. If you are the lone voice of dissent, you don’t determine much of anything. Yes, it’s important to still send postcards to the mad engineer threatening to blow up the town*, but it doesn’t mean it will work. And it doesn’t mean that you are determining his actions.
* Hofstader, in some article.
Society is inherently plural.
That’s a big “if”. Maybe my society is not yours. And dissent presumes consensus. Since so much effort is put forth to establish consensus, it seems reasonable to assume that people feel that there is an incentive in doing so, which suggests bias. This practice bypasses consideration that consensus may not be accurate, or even desirable.
Indeed. And thank you for this separate thread. Is there a way for bbs coders to automatically reroute all of his “If only you people would try harder to understand that everything you do is a coercive fiction!” derailments here?
Since I like brevity, how do you rectify that in 25 words?
Then it’s not society, but some other thing that you are referring to with the word “society”, but not actually telling anybody that.
Perhaps it is imperialism for one to assume that their society exists as a totality for others! The notion that all people, everywhere, can and should live the same way can be seen to support this.
The pluralism of discussing a society has a lot of precedent. It can be synonymous with representing a culture, or a community. It is a fairly recent perspective to put forth that somebody who exists apart from your society, can categorically not be said to exist in another. It seems subtly coercive to me.
Sorry, I couldn’t think of a way to clearly condense it further!
A predominant concept few attend to is the distinction between feminine and masculine, and between society and chaos. This suggests the use of neoconstructive semioticism to analyse and modify culture. Your model of socialist realism suggests that class has no significance, but mine may well differ. FFS, who are you fronting for, anyway?
Language is part of the defining characteristic of society, but it is not so much language, but rather the fatal flaw, and eventually the defining characteristic, of your social order, not mine. The term “society” denotes the role of the participant as failed dissident, and a number of discourses concerning a universal paradox are thus revealed. But if socialist realism is to hold together, we have to choose between subcultural constructive theory and absurdity. The subject is contextualised into a paradigm of consensus that includes truth as a whole.
[Hey, I can do it too! With the help that is of a postmodern discourse generator. I’m wondering now if it’s possible that all this time, we’ve been talking to one of those …]
Saying that we are all part of the same society is not the same as saying that we should all live the same and that that society does not need to change.
But it does require you to acknowledge that those who could not flee Katrina did not, for the most part, do so out of choice or free will.
Is there?
It does?
The only consensus I see is the lack of consensus.
And this is where we disagree on what we as physical agents may do, but we agree on the overall societal system. For example:
I may not acknowledge money. You may.
I may not acknowledge ownership. You may.
I may not acknowledge trivial laws. You may.
That isn’t consensus–disagreement about whether rules exist at all can’t be consensus. And it doesn’t need to be.
I am totally gonna go off on a tangent, but it’ll take a few minutes.
(Totes arbitrary limit :D. How about a haiku?)
This describes me perfectly.
Hey, me too!
I guess even a pomo disco generator is right twice each day. 
I just don’t think anyone is saying that. And living in a state or country ain’t the same thing as a society.
I lived in a society that had their own rules, exceptions, autonomy, and economy. It was called a small town.
Yes, if I committed a crime I could be repremanded by a neighbor for being an ass, be arrested by a local cop, get hauled in by the FBI, or be tried for human rights violations.
But there are layers, and if I wanted to be a society of One I could have. Or of a hundred, or a thousand. Happens literally all the time.
But if my actions influence another group, all the way up to $ARBITRARY-SIZE I don’t get to choose how they interact with me.
Thus, you make an ass of yourself at a public event and you get thrown in time out for a bit.
Perhaps not, but as I was saying, what you put forth is a fairly recent take on the word and concept. I am extremely mistrustful of some people’s desire to make social interaction a monolithic totality. Monoculture in other domains can be easily demonstrated as a disaster, in ecological and biological terms. It is the tendency of expansion and assimilation for its own sake, with little consideration for the diversity requisite for long term survival.
Larger groups require more suppression of individuals, which needs to be more or less voluntary to work. The slight-of-mind in practice is that contemporary western cultures suggest the possibility of multiculturalism and a degree of personal autonomy - yet, to achieve this, require participants to use the same protocols. But the protocols are not truly neutral. A given set of protocols to facilitate one way of living, may well prevent or prohibit another. This is often intentional!
To extend the idea of social protocol along a computer network analogy, the notion of one Society of all people seems not dissimilar from mandating the same network protocol for all people. Is one protocol really good enough or necessary for all people? Does every user and device truly need to be networked to every other? And for what purpose? There are many protocols people can use based upon their needs, individual or collective, to use the right tool for the job at hand.
I don’t know how this or the other discussion suddenly became about Katrina. You mentioned “the hurricane”, and I have been in other hurricanes. Since we are both in CT, I thought you might be talking about a local one. That storm represents a gap in my knowledge, so I will need to learn more about it. What I can say is that it seemed to demonstrate that a big centralized bureaucratic hierarchy can drop the ball, and be more trouble than it is worth. Also, states and municipalities tend to be extremely naive with regards to basic ecology and climate matters. If people choose to live in a certain environment, they might well try to make accommodations for the full range of weather which is likely to happen. Such as living on a river delta in hurricane country. Or my town, which is on Lon Guyland Sound, much of it at sea level, or within 15 feet of sea level.
Since we have not had a disaster here, I won’t be accused of victim-blaming. I have talked with people here, and nobody takes the ecology of the area or expected weather into any consideration when deciding how to live, there is no voluntary adaptation. There isn’t even discussion about it. How many consider that within a few decades, the water might be up to or inside their house? How many make aquatic homes, such as stilted or floating designs? How many have waterproofed their cars or home electrics? This town floods, and floods badly, yet it seems as if nobody is supposed to point out that is a poorly-thought out tract of suburban prefab homes.
You mean like how our legal system works in the country in which you were born, are a citizen, and find yourself still embedded?
You are conflating two distinct orders of conceptual abstraction here:
A legal system is a structure, while making assumptions is one possible model of a thing or event. These are different kinds of concepts.
So, no, that wasn’t what I meant. Also, your question was phrased with presumptions. I have never told anybody here where I was born. But your question can seem to illustrate that you assume nationalism to be universal, that anybody born anywhere must naturally do so within the jurisdiction of a country. This is what I was actually talking about, not an actual legal system, but some people’s tendency to put those who they don’t know into default hierarchies. I am curious as to what precisely this process does for you, or anybody else.
For the record, counselor, were you born within the borders that the United States claims as its own? Also, were you issued a birth certificate and, later, a social security number within the United States?
As to what it does “for me,” I have no idea what you mean. As I’ve said before, quoting Dick, reality is that which doesn’t go away when you quit believing in it. Just because you don’t “believe” in the US government, money, taxation, etc. doesn’t mean you won’t be subject to its effects if you live in the US (and we both know you at least live here). I’m not sure what pretending that you are some kind of hunter-gatherer in an urban landscape gains you either.
Well, he is attempting to engage in an act or acts of active resistance to the predominant social paradigm - but acts of resistance doth not a non-member make. Indeed, the very act of resisting affirms ones own awareness of membership, so the denials are that much more dishonest.
So the real act of noncompliance is to just relax and do whatcha wanna do.
