I liked it for you. 
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And it was Jacques Pierre Brissot who said that property is theft, the idea was later popularised by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Marx thought that both property, and the theft of it, were bourgeois concepts.
The bourgeoisie can keep their Earl Grey!
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But has nothing happened? Did slavery not end? Did the suffrage not happen? Did the civil rights movement not happen? This mass of people complaining and doing nothing has done a lot of things. You are calling that delusional, but really it’s just slower than you’d like. It’s slower than I’d like too, but just because people have the faculty to imagine a better world doesn’t mean those better worlds are actually possible. This is what we get.
When a cell randomly mutates it is a lot more likely to be cancer than it is to be something useful. Ideas have a better chance of being good than randomly mutated cells, but the problem remains - the system that is there to stop cancer will stop most of the good stuff too, if it didn’t it would have no chance against the bad stuff. Most new ideas are shit, most non-shit new ideas will be ignored, and no one who has new ideas thinks they are in the shitty pile, so there is no way to know which one we are.
I totally think you are qualified to speak about your experiences, and I think you are speaking from actual experience. There is a good chance that a lot of people didn’t. Why didn’t they? Because there are an unfortunately large number of people who would lie about that kind of thing to disrupt a discussion, particularly a discussion on issues that are perceived to be women’s issues. Maybe their bullshit detector sprung a false positive because you are too far out of the ordinary.
And maybe what you said was actually horribly insensitive and very hurtful (obviously I can’t read it now and form my own opinion). From a cause and effect perspective, if the effect of you expressing yourself on that issue always seems to cause hurt, the thing to do would be to examine how you express yourself and figure out whether there is a way to improve it. It doesn’t matter how precisely or carefully you feel you are expressing yourself if it is constantly taken to mean something you didn’t mean that can only lead us to the conclusion that you aren’t expressing yourself in a manner that is understood. That can either be something you want to change or something you don’t want to change, but saying that other people are delusional doesn’t change anything.
But what conversation would you raise this point in? If everyone else is talking about equality of pay and you start musing about the value of employment as a concept then they attack your position because you are distracting from a very real issue that they are discussing. That’s obviously just a hypothetical, but you can’t just inject radical rethinking of everything into a discussion about issues that directly affect people’s lives. They aren’t on a wavelength to hear that, they interpret it as an attempt to derail an important discussion with esoteric philosophy. And, again with the cause and effect, whether or not it is an attempt to derail the conversation, it may have the effect of derailing the conversation. Maybe their attribution of malice to someone doing something they don’t like is inappropriate, but you are attributing the same malice to them in their attacks with phrases like “go out of their way to misrepresent.”
But have you considered that you are so much of an outlier that you can actually be safely ignored? That’s the conclusion I’ve come to about myself. I find reading what you write and other people’s responses to it depressing because it just confirms for me that if I actually talked about things the way I want to talk about them I’d be exactly as intolerable to other people as I think I would be. The first time I ever argued with you I got what you said entirely wrong, I just have the habit of actually going back and rereading entire conversation threads I’ve been involved with to make sure I’m not misunderstanding something. If I didn’t have that habit, I’d think you were just some sexist idiot.
Even that, I think, shows the depth of the lack of connection between a “rational” cause and effect approach and what is of importance to most people. I think that if I’ve been going back and forth with someone I ought to go back to the first comment they said that I responded to to see what I was really responding to, to see if we’d gotten away from that or if I am still on point. I think for most people a conversation is a process of spontaneous generation of thought, not something with a rational structure or a point at all. Merely believing that we can be explicit about what we mean may be too deviant to be sensible in most interactions. Most people don’t seem to have the desire to hold words and thoughts down and force them to be one thing or another.
But that’s not a condemnation of the process of humanity lurching towards being ever better. The process is what it is, and in order to spawn the useful 1-sigma progressives that actually push things forward, it is necessary to spawn useless 4-, 5- and even 6-sigma progressives who might as well be speaking gibberish.
You said that it’s a bitter pill that the consensus is delusional. I think the bitter pill is that those who can most clearly see what is wrong with the consensus are basically an accidental waste product waiting have their components recycled into someone who will actually move things along.
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A collective understanding of language on some level is essentially to productive dialogue, though. If one party is defining terms according to their whims, they’re always going to dance around and redefine any logic introduced into the conversation.
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On some level, perhaps. But words will always be amalgamations of concepts, meaning some things to some, other things to others.
There are very broad concepts, such as love, justice, truth, life, freedom, that cannot be defined with any sort of final authority.
The core of “general semantics” as put forth by Korzybski is that most people do indeed talk past each other because they often don’t make any effort to define their terms first. Instead they assume that they mean the same things by the same words. This definitely reflects my experience.
People sometimes even dismiss the attempt at defining their personal word usages as “mere semantics”, implying that defining our terms is a further obfuscation, rather than an attempt at improving clarity. As a stubborn friend of mine used to yell: “YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!” Of course, it is always easier to assume/hope that people do.
They can not, but discussing them without some sort of shared understanding of where you’re coming from makes these arguments futile.
And why argue as if anyone has final authority over any of these concepts?
I’m not sure that’s true at all. Who has said more meaningful things about love, poets and witty quotable people who never tried to give any kind of definition or lay down any shared understanding, or people who actually try to stake out their terms? Most people would say the former. Definitions are after-the-fact attempts to pin down words when words were never made to be pinned down. Defining terms is for discipline-specific jargon, not for general discussion.
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Well sure, @anon50609448, but isn’t trying to paint people with a “doesn’t care if poor and rich kids get different education” brush a little extreme for the topic? What you say might literally be correct, but you make it sound as though they don’t generally care about the education of poor children which is a huge leap. I mean, it’s showing Sesame St. at different times. Maybe you should back off and take a break.
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I’ll admit I was sort of smuggling some insults in there, but did you look at that topic? Sesame St. is offering a premium subscription service and the loud response is, “Who cares?” Maybe it doesn’t make that much of a difference, but we just sit back and take everything being turned into a commodity - along with the accompanying judgement that the wealthy deserve it more than the poor - and this is what we get.
Plus, did you see the response I got? Naming logical fallacies, I can hardly let that drop.
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Okay, you got me there. Whether your original post was fair or not, you can hardly quell your rage when someone responds to you with, “False equivalence. Thanks for playing!”
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“In March 1919, Mussolini joined with several like-minded colleagues to form a new political movement, the Fasci di Combattimento, which brought together nationalist [anti-democratic] and socialist themes.”
Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Makings of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Cambridge Univ. Press 2006) p. 127.
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That there is concern driving trollies.
He doesn’t go as far as to say that he himself is being dismissed but worries that other voices are silenced. His concern and outrage is a derail.
That post has too many logical fallacies to count. It is without a doubt in my mind just a trolley.
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And, from a site a friend just pointed out to me:
Habermas Vows to Continue Struggle Against Postmodernists
and
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Sirens are best avoided.
"‘So far so good,’ said she, when I had ended my story, 'and now pay attention to what I am about to tell you- heaven itself, indeed, will recall it to your recollection. First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. Therefore pass these Sirens by, and stop your men’s ears with wax that none of them may hear; but if you like you can listen yourself, for you may get the men to bind you as you stand upright on a cross-piece half way up the mast, and they must lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself, that you may have the pleasure of listening. If you beg and pray the men to unloose you, then they must bind you faster.
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The Eloi and Morlocks came to mind for me.
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Doesn’t weev have a chestpiece tattoo of a non-ironic swastika? He meets all sirens head-on.
Hasn’t he been garbage since the GNAA days?
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It’s kind of funny. I’d been following some supposed radical leftist cypherpunks for a while, when weev “came out” as a Nazi, and I discovered those people had been opportunistically covering for weev for years, so I lost all respect for them. This, along with re-connecting with some old friends, led me to question the political direction I’d been moving in, and to dramatically revise who I connected to and how I used social media.
Anyway, I expect weev used the metaphor of sirens quite consciously. He’s got a history of abusing his fans.
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