Jordan Peterson Psychological Significance of the Biblical S

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techstepgenr8tion
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31 May 2017, 7:52 pm

I don't know what the other options are.

The only sane type of Marxism, or anything close to it as far as I can tell, is the sort of socialist/capitalist hybrid that western Europe had and to the extent that we have social security, medicaid, and medicare here our own hybrid corner of it.

Equality of opportunity is the only thing that turns out reasonably sane though, anything that attempts to enforce equality of outcome is going to be really draconian.


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03 Jun 2017, 4:52 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
I don't know what the other options are.

The only sane type of Marxism, or anything close to it as far as I can tell, is the sort of socialist/capitalist hybrid that western Europe had and to the extent that we have social security, medicaid, and medicare here our own hybrid corner of it.

Equality of opportunity is the only thing that turns out reasonably sane though, anything that attempts to enforce equality of outcome is going to be really draconian.


haha. social democracy is what that "socialist/capitalist hybrid" is called. social. not socialist.
yeah, it's the sort of leftist fukuyamaist attitude- even the lefties can't come up with a better system.

but hey, I mean, until an Indian dalit child with 13 siblings has equal chances to an only child of an ivy league graduate in the financial industry, growing up in boston, we don't need to worry about equality of outcome


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03 Jun 2017, 11:08 pm

shlaifu wrote:
but hey, I mean, until an Indian dalit child with 13 siblings has equal chances to an only child of an ivy league graduate in the financial industry, growing up in boston, we don't need to worry about equality of outcome


Lets try this then, since we're stuck in this mode.

Is there an extant national economy that's practicing the solutions your seeking or has practiced them successfully that you can point to on a map or in history that we can look at? I'm not so much looking to challenge the idea as that I feel like we're just going round about metaphysical abstractions - which I can't tell if I'd agree or disagree with because there's nothing provided so far in this discussion that we can talk about the real-world fruit of. You're suggesting, or at least seem to be (correct me if I'm wrong), that social democracy and UBI don't go far enough and that we need an equal-outcome based system due to historical and regional inequality. While I'm sympathetic to the desires behind it I haven't seen an example of this working. I could just be that ignorant that the presence of such a country, particularly it's small and not in the usual first-world setting, it hasn't garnered either any media attention or political commentary.

Regardless without some kind of tangible example of a place that's enforcing equal outcome successfully without authoritarian dictatorship about all we can do is agree to disagree, and I think the point I'd continue to disagree with you on without that is the suggestion that Jordan Peterson's views on politics and economics are so pernicious that they outweigh the good he does with connecting gaps in the human knowledge base whether conscious/subconscious, memetic, archetypal, etc. etc..


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05 Jun 2017, 5:30 pm

I wish I had a positive example to discuss over. In general, I do think the social-democratic countries in europe worked best for their people, but I'm afraid - while they still do work best - that best is showing just how relative it is.
They are failing, slowly, due to global capitalism, which just can't be bothered with all the democracy.
As Zygmunt Bauman noted: the process of decisionmaking- democracy-, and the power to put things into action -economic power- have split.
But, yes, I'm sorry, I don't have an answer.
Maybe UBI and social democracy are the best things to hope for, if it weren't for the global inequality and maybe capitalism is here to stay until the planet has become a toxic garbage dump /desert, because we can't figure out how to live without 18 flavours of wheath thins. in the words of slavoj zizek: I'm a pessimist here.

also in part because there is next to no space of experimentation. basically, either you play ball with the rules of global capitalism, or you are completely out of the game. You don't have to be democratic, as china and singapore show, but you have to stick to certain rules on how your economy functions. Not that I'm a big fan of any of the Communist countries, but it would have been interesting to see what would have become of a place like Cuba if it hadn't been embargoed by the western world for the last half of a century. you know Castro's joke "the benefit of revolution is that even our prostitutes have university degrees"-

Plus, I'd like to mention: I think it's important to note that, while Peterson is connecting a lot of loose ends, I don't buy a much of it, in the sense that: yes, biblical stories do prescribe how to live- but it's all based on the happy coexistence of singular desert dwelling tribes in the bronze-age, not people with oral contraceptives and the easy availability of intercontinental migration. ... I thought we had moved beyond that.
I thought "do not kill" wasn't something that needed divine justification anymore, but reasonable modification with a "except in self-defense"...
Peterson is very much a storyteller with an agenda - a conservative one, and he explains his reasoning and under his assumptions it's fair, but I wish he would engage with some science on how to behave better than we did the last 30.000 years.

I think Robert Sapolsky is more useful in the 21st century, less pushing an agenda (but also not under threat by crazy SJWs):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

that doesn't mean Peterson is necessarily wrong, but I do think he acts way too certain, way to full of the importance of his ideas, interesting as they may be.


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07 Jun 2017, 8:24 pm

I had the chance to listen to about half of this at work today. It hit on some pretty macabre topics, most particularly what the brain does to itself under circumstances of defeat:


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07 Jun 2017, 8:36 pm

shlaifu wrote:
Not that I'm a big fan of any of the Communist countries, but it would have been interesting to see what would have become of a place like Cuba if it hadn't been embargoed by the western world for the last half of a century.

Add to that they were our neighbor in an era where we were in a very tense place with the USSR.

I don't think it's likely that any new communist countries would quite turn out the way the USSR or PRC did, though I look at Venezuela which I think went communist in the 1990's? I don't know if that's still a poor example of the way the alternatives shake out for other reasons but it seems like one thing's held pretty consistent - ie. the appearance that communism ignores the terrain of human realities to its own demise and does so consistently. Could someone possibly do something, on a small scale and in a small country, where they don't directly threaten anyone and are able to make a benevolent affair of it? I don't know, and I don't think we'll know until we see it. Either way I don't even think we'd have a sense of what could work until such a thing happened and did work.

I think the way most people come down on this issue though - the people who come down on the side of capitalism usually aren't doing so because they for some reason love capitalism warts and all. It has a lot more to do with a deep concern that for as badly as capitalism works it's been the only thing, so far historically, that doesn't promise the moon and end up giving the people of a given country something far worse than what they started with.

shlaifu wrote:
Plus, I'd like to mention: I think it's important to note that, while Peterson is connecting a lot of loose ends, I don't buy a much of it, in the sense that: yes, biblical stories do prescribe how to live- but it's all based on the happy coexistence of singular desert dwelling tribes in the bronze-age, not people with oral contraceptives and the easy availability of intercontinental migration. ... I thought we had moved beyond that.
I thought "do not kill" wasn't something that needed divine justification anymore, but reasonable modification with a "except in self-defense"...

I don't even think that's an interesting part of what he's talking about. The evolutionary psychology bit is huge because it points to issues that are largely immutable and that our politics have really done violence with recently on the grounds of believing that it's all learned/environmental. It seems like anything we do while ignoring that we do at our deepest peril and it's a heck of an important thing to understand if we want to go forward and have societal systems (culturally, economically, etc..) that work at all.

Also, if I were really to air out my own biases - the human condition is an incredibly dark affair. It's dark enough that I don't think most people can stomach looking at it straight on. To that end I think people tend to hide out either in full-faith religion or in postmodernism for similar reasons; ie. in hopes that something they really wish was true could be true and, if not, that it could at least be a good enough anesthetic to shield them from what's beyond their narrative bubbles.


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07 Jun 2017, 9:13 pm

On a completely different note and more to the football we're kicking back and forth:


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09 Jun 2017, 7:50 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

Also, if I were really to air out my own biases - the human condition is an incredibly dark affair. It's dark enough that I don't think most people can stomach looking at it straight on. To that end I think people tend to hide out either in full-faith religion or in postmodernism for similar reasons; ie. in hopes that something they really wish was true could be true and, if not, that it could at least be a good enough anesthetic to shield them from what's beyond their narrative bubbles.


I agree on this.
I happened to live in a very religious third world country for a while, teaching at a college. And I could not understand, for quite a while, how things worked there. The incredible poverty and the contrasting affluence in the gated communities such as the campus on which I lived really got to me.
I had a brief holiday back home over christmas, and when I told stories that had happened to me, and how I thought I could improve my work with the students, it tended to come down to trying to change their mindset - to which my friends back here in europe reacted somewhat shocked, telling me that I couldn't impose my culture on theirs and so on. And they may have a point, but really, watching children defecate on the streets, or come up to your car in a traffic jam in the middle of the night to beg for change for food.... I shed my liberal attitudes quite quickly.
And some of my colleagues told me that I was not supposed to give those children money, as those children are being used by some gangs of criminals to get money from foreigners
I could not see how, if ever, I could change my student's view on the world before breaking myself, so I quit.
I'm not sure if culture shock fully apllies as a term, but it sure made me think about my own culture.

Righ now I'm teaching at a university in Europe, and I'm trying to teach a narrative in which post-modernism was a progressive tool against fashism (which in itself was an attempt to make tradition work in times of modernity), but in its extreme turned sour- and now we're lacking a narrative that works.


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09 Jun 2017, 8:16 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
On a completely different note and more to the football we're kicking back and forth:



this guy seems to make sense, regarding the "management class" and such, but I'd like to mention he's working for Peter Thiel, who, in one of those big think videos, argues for small government on the basis of "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely"- which I find a fun thing to say for someone who is sitting on billions of dollars. How is he safe from the corruption of his enourmous economic power? - and that's sort of what worries me- that all those tech-billionaires speak of communist utopias, but argue against governments and democratic processes of control.
Tesla apparently has horrible working conditions.
Facebook's content filter division appears to be a horrible place, too.
All these billionaire techies talk like Marx, and run their companies like Engels.

F*ck. The true face of apple and google is foxconn suicides and "artisanal" coltan mining. Yes, that's an actual term for digging up tantalum ore with one's bare hands in the DRC.


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09 Jun 2017, 7:31 pm

shlaifu wrote:
I happened to live in a very religious third world country for a while, teaching at a college. And I could not understand, for quite a while, how things worked there. The incredible poverty and the contrasting affluence in the gated communities such as the campus on which I lived really got to me.
I had a brief holiday back home over christmas, and when I told stories that had happened to me, and how I thought I could improve my work with the students, it tended to come down to trying to change their mindset - to which my friends back here in europe reacted somewhat shocked, telling me that I couldn't impose my culture on theirs and so on. And they may have a point, but really, watching children defecate on the streets, or come up to your car in a traffic jam in the middle of the night to beg for change for food.... I shed my liberal attitudes quite quickly.
And some of my colleagues told me that I was not supposed to give those children money, as those children are being used by some gangs of criminals to get money from foreigners
I could not see how, if ever, I could change my student's view on the world before breaking myself, so I quit.
I'm not sure if culture shock fully apllies as a term, but it sure made me think about my own culture.

The flavor of local custom is very hard to shake. I remember a few middle-eastern Christians on Gad Saad's show recently and the one guy, a Moroccan, mentioned that even a private conversation with his brother that was somewhat critical of Arab politics caused his brother to go home and tell the whole family that his brother had become a Zionist Jew. In situations like that I really don't believe that the light of day can really work its way in that well, especially as one heads in more toward the interior, ie. the gulf region, where atheism, liberalism, or anything like that are legally actionable offenses.

To that end I might also have to put the Hindu cast system only slightly behind Sharia in it's negative effects on culture. I remember reading Rene Guenon, just out of curiosity on what Traditionalists were on about, and it ultimately seemed like he was saying that the West hadn't had a valid esoteric current since the middle ages, he went on about the reign of quantity over quality, and seemed to be calling for the bad-old-days of religious authoritarianism (really the caste system as a primary recommendation) to retake the blight he thought of as modernity. Julius Evola was something of a correlated successor to his worldview and it's been interesting to see this also hearkened back to lately by, in Russia, Aleksandr Dugin, and to some extent Steve Bannon. Fascinating how bad ideas can come full circle.

shlaifu wrote:
Righ now I'm teaching at a university in Europe, and I'm trying to teach a narrative in which post-modernism was a progressive tool against fashism (which in itself was an attempt to make tradition work in times of modernity), but in its extreme turned sour- and now we're lacking a narrative that works.

Hmm... I'd be curious on what your familiarity is with Mark Blyth's work on sociology and economics? He's the economics professor at Brown University who predicted Trump's rise to power and he also suggested in his lecture, Global Trumpism, that populism was sweeping Europe by and large due to an EU that's been based on a globalist/neoliberal agenda that's really done a number on the poor and the wage class but kept the salaried classes in the same spot. To that end the poor and lower middle-classes having a tougher and tougher time making ends meet and a policy of continuing to bring in foreign labor, add to that the sensational aspects of the terrorist activity, were a large part of what made - for instance - La Pen a serious contestant in the French election.

There seems to be a lot of theory for what fuels fascism in the actual/proper sense of the term and it sounds like it's almost always a reaction to bad times plus particularly intense stressors. I know for instance that after the Russian revolution as well as WWI and the absolutely draconian austerities dreamed up at Versailles there was a lot of room for communist parties to make a good case and it seems like, from what bits I understand, a fascist dictator is typically a 'rational hero' of the sort who comes out and tells people that things are in terrible shape but all is not lost - the rule of law will be temporarily suspended, the scum will be purged, and everything will be back to being what it should be. Fascism in that sense doesn't seem to last very long because it seems to have a very isolated and short-term mission statement and in a lot of ways it looks like populism on steroids. Another interesting note, on the populism on steroids bit, I find it also telling that UKIP's pretty much dissolved its presence in any meaningful sense after Brexit - there was one mission, mission accomplished, and rather than continuing on as a more conservative alternative to the Tory's they seemed to fold up. That seems to be the way of emergency-driven movements in general.

So I think this is where I get back on topic and say some things about postmodernism. As far as I understand it, if it were to be used for any distinctly positive purpose, it would need to be completely overhauled and have its current form disowned. If I'm understanding the shape of it right now it seems like postmodernism is a tool by which people who can't stomach being bound to the harder pronouncements (ie. counter-instinctual, counter-limbic, etc.) of the human condition as laid out by the present state of scientific research as well as the western civic and philosophic traditions have us boxed into morally and ethically in the sense that almost any easy solutions are taken off the table if one is to try and find answers that work across the board and for social cohesiveness and do so without simply redistributing injustices. To that end a lot of people who don't like that scenario of eating their hopes and dreams if the current system of knowledge would say that their ideas don't cut muster or that their suggested solutions can't possibly lead to the outcomes they want seem to have come up with a logical tool that can aid in disregarding any of that which gets in the way. To that end it doesn't seem like it does much other than drive a wedge between activists and accrued human knowledge in such a way that they can disregard the current state of human knowledge and revert back to tribalism with confidence that they can throw down such a powerfully obfuscating gauntlet of linguistic devices that people just won't be able to get in their way or really even be able to keep track of what it is they're claiming.

That said I'll admit that we do live in a scary world, in the sense where I think enough people have come to realize that to just speak the truth barely gets anyone's attention aside from a small minority and where most people, if they aren't single-issue voters based on what someone does for them, they're voting on the candidates looks, the party's social image, or whatever bit of hearsay that they picked up over a few months before an election. The degree to which their informed on current events legislation, etc.. is usually even worse. I can understand the temptation to cut the Gordian knot with these people and give them what it seems like they need being that they simply don't have the means or interest to even know what it is they need. My concern is that if it doesn't ultimately aim at truth and work to self-correct and falsify bad ideas, much the way science or any other similar evolving discipline should, it doesn't do a whole lot more than find ways to destroy what's there.

I was listening to another of Noam Chomsky's philosophy panels and his address to postmodernism and, in the topic as well but not necessarily attached, moral relativism. He seemed to have an answer for both that made a lot of sense to me and for as much as I tend to disagree with him on a lot of things he pointed out to the host of the panel that these are philosophic abstractions that, under examination, are impossible in practice. In theory a person could be morally relative to an infinite degree, in practice a person's a product of their environment, education, and has enough self-interest to play ball with the society they live in to whatever extent that they don't want to swallow the consequences of taking something like moral relativism to the fullest extent. I get reminded of the free will debate here as well where some other members here brought up that when people think in a given instance that they can pet a lethally venomous snake and die from it technically, unless they've had a massive stroke in the more primitive parts of their brain or, as you brought up Sapolsky, have some type of parasite that really prefers snakes to humans as hosts the way some parasites cause mice to be aroused rather than terrified by cats, without pressures to be heroic and self-sacrifice greater than the risk nobody's really free to pet the poisonous snake. The idea that we're free to do what we're not free do to do because no physical force is restraining us from doing it seems to hearken back to a distortion of reality that we've largely inherited from Christianity and our theories of free moral agency. Similarly, I think for practical reasons, cultural relativism doesn't work and long before Islam came back on the radar as a force attacking western liberalism you had Buddhists in their long-view of life and existence, getting trampled under foot by Mao and other communist leaders like him. Mao apparently killed as many as Hitler and Stalin put together so I really have my doubts that the ride to nirvana and paranirvana or Mao just being a momentary blip on the boat of millions of years really washed that down any better. I can't see where postmodernism in the 'it's all one group against another - facts, logic, and reason are just weapons to be deflected' won't go seriously afield of inherent scientific laws, biological laws, sociological laws, really evolutionary laws in a lot of senses, and reap the whirlwind in the way of debt to reality and reflexively all of the consequences of breaking all of the rules.

You might mean something very different in your definition of postmodernism than what I've mentioned above. Even if you do though, is that particular band worth salvaging in its present form? If Derrida was saying something very different than what many people today seem to think he was - is there anyone out there who can settle it once and for all and, if SJW's and the authoritarian left have dragged his name through the mud, redeem his name and philosophy from the profaning they've endured lately? This is part of why I'm really skeptical that the idea of postmodernism can be refurbished, restored, or renewed to any good or useful ends. There could be some useful scraps or derivatives somewhere that could be worked into a system that looks nothing like that but its perhaps better to give that system a different name altogether.


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10 Jun 2017, 7:13 pm

As I understand fashism, it developed as a way to institute traditional order long after the chaotic revolutions had created upheavel - and to do so, it needed a fictional villain -the jew- to make sense. With this fictional villain, a social hierarchy that had been overcome, beginning with the french revolution, was temporarily feasible again.
Communism seems to me to have been the progress of modernity extrapolated, faster and forced before the technology and infrastructure and science could actually sustain such a system- hence the idea now, that with a "zero-marginal-cost-society", some kind of cyber-communism, starting with UBI could be a solution. I just don't trust the idea, because the proponents in silicon valley can't be bothered to pay their taxes NOW - but they tell us to put up with them just a little longer, until the singularity comes. Just a little longer. It'll come.

Postmodernism, beginning in part even before WW2 and Fashism. - There's some good ideas in early postmodernist art, for example, DADA was pretty damn smart in taking apart modernists drive to invent ever new styles and new ideas. It took a while for the rest of the art world to catch on until it hit the world with pop-art in the seventies.
Similarly, the frankfurt school of philosophy had a lot of valid criticism for capitalist society, coming from Marx. (who did get a lot of things right in his analysis. But Marx did never write an instruction to build Stalinism or Maoism, those two made up their own conclusions and Marx was long dead and couldn't defend himself. Plus, yes, Maoism was a monstrosity. However, there is a qualitative difference to the holocaust- Mao had enemies of his ideology killed and millions starved due to idiotic planning of production and so on, but you know, he could basically tell his people that these were necessary victims for progress. Hitler on the other hand knew that the holocaust was so bizarre that the average german could not learn the truth u til after the war. This is not a defense of Maoist killings, this is a note on the qualitative difference of the killings in relationship to the overarching ideology)

Facing fashism, Walter Benjamin for example wrote analysis on the power of images and their means of reproduction, and concluded that only if everyone were i posession of means to create images, power could reliably taken away from the fashists, who created these highly stylised images to underline their supernatural roots-
you can see it in star wars, really. Only, in star wars, both the rebels and the empire are shown in extremely aestheticised images. But when Luke gets his medal in episode 4, - the images could be straight from triumph of the will.
But Walter Benjamin's idea of democraticed means of image production ends up in fake news.

Similar to that: after ww2, institutions still were very much the same as before, helmed by the same people.
the biology teachers were still teaching about the superiority of some races over others, of one sex over the other.
That's where Derrida comes in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0tnHr2dqTs

Deconstruction and rethinking and reflection of hierarchies is a good idea, as long as the person doing it is actually capable of doing so.
And I think this is how postmodernism can be useful- as a mode of rethinking one's teachings and standpoints. However, with the SJW generation - and mine, actually- we have been taught by postmodernists themselves. So we haven't actually been taught the tradition to rethink. So we can only rethink and deconstruct the already deconstructed and rethought structures. It took me a while to figure that one out-

In general, it pays to work to figure thins out. For example, the feminist who called Newton's principia mathematica a "rape manual" did so jokingly, to point out the masculine focus in philosophy of the 18th century. And she's right about that. But the term "newton's rape manual" certainly made it into today's culture without any context....

I currently teach storytelling and art history, btw., and I do start with mythology, fairytales- jordan peterson, joseph campbell.
but then I move on to kafka, and from there to tarantino and music videos - because that's what my students grew up with, that, postmodernist art and storytelling, is what they consider "old". After that, I show them how postmodernism turned into this maelstrom of constant rearranging of ideas- culturally, in form of the internet, where everything gets remixed.
And how that led to a stagnation in regard to narratives, as nothing gets to grow or ever gets analyzed, but immediately gets broken down with irony and cut up and taken out of context -deconstructed.

in art, there's then meta-modernism- the idea being to incorporate the deconstruction into the narrative.
the opposite thing that's happening in storytelling is the rise of complete parallel universes, like the marvel universe, or star wars. and I feel, something similar is happening to our societies- people living in their own narrative universes, unable to communicate any longer.

but I do think there's value in meta-modernism, because, taking an example from science: for progress, we need to understand that the rutherfordian model of the atom - a core, and electrons flying around it- is not correct, but only a model (what the post-modernists would call "social construct") - and what the post-modernists need to understand is that a) as long as we don't have a better model and b) for every case the model is working and useful, it is true.
we can't teach physics to kids without the rutherfordian model of the atom, but we have to teach them in what narrow sense it is true. And that they can make adjustments and get rid of it, if they can replace it with something that works as good, and also covers cases in which the old model was not true.
I read some postmodernists, Deleuze most of all. And he's got a point when he says there's innumerable ways to see things, everything can be seen as connected to everything else, and those views all have value. What he neglects to say explicitely is: but if it doesn't work, you need to keep adopting different views until you find one that works in this situation.
Tradition doesn't work for post-modernists, and the postmodernism as it's being performed now works for almost no one, so, if they were capable of actually analyzing the postmodernists and not just regurgitating phrases, they'd realize that probably there needs to be a third way - one that is flexible, but solid enough to build a society on.
In this conclusion, I agree with Peterson. Only, when he says it, after everything else he says, it does appear like a fig leaf for some things he says that could be considered alt-right (but then, he says those in anger over the postmodern aggression he's experiencing, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt)

I'll watch Mark Blyth first thing tomorrow, thanks for pointing him out to me.


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10 Jun 2017, 7:37 pm

regarding politics: I think there's a problem in associatiin, meaning, there are more fault lines than just left-right.
there is culturally liberal v. conservative
there's multicultural v. nationalist
there's economical globalism v. democratically controlled nation states
and there's upper v. middle v. lower classes.

Bush was conservative, nationalist, economically globalist and upper class.
Obama was liberal, multicultural, economically globalist and mainly upper class, but I do give him credit for doing the unthinkable and spending his 8 years to introduce socialized health care, showing some awareness for the tensions building up.
clinton was liberal, multiculturalist, economically globalist and upper class- but I assumed that she, too, would have shown some sort of awareness for the tensions.
trump is conservative, shamelessly nationalist, economically globalist to the point of being a criminal and shamelessly upper class.

so when people voted against clinton, they meant to vote against clinton's economical globalism and upper classes, by voting for conservatism and nationalism.

similar in the EU. there is actually no liberal, multicultural, democratic nation state, middle/lower class option.
except, of course, bernie sanders. I didn't understand Bernie-supporters on TV saying they'll vote Trump, until I realized that both Trump and Sanders were anti-clinton, but in different properties.

In france, they voted for macron's liberal, multiculturalist, economically globalist upper classes.
in the words of zizek: a vote for Macron today is a vote for Le Pen in 4 years, since Macron stands exactly for the circumstances that created Le Pen in the first place.


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10 Jun 2017, 7:47 pm

A couple quick things I'll say before I give a longer response (if I think it's even needed):

1) If you're right about fascism it should be little more than a sort of echo back to monarchy, particularly in its 1920's and 30's flavor.

2) A lot of what you're describing clearly doesn't sound like postmodernism as I understand it. Essentially what you seem to be saying, which I'd fully agree with, is that information is a tool not a set of handcuffs. If we feel like we have no choices and no future because we can't see a way through it's not the fault of the facts, nor do the facts need to be disregarded or broken in covenant, rather it's a failure of creativity on our part. The Jungian stuff is critical because it gives us the ability to swim deeper into the networks of information we've set up to see where we might have made some bizarre, unnatural, and perhaps tradition-expedited conclusions about a matter that have been carried forward into the now but those axioms, rather than being something like physical or eternal truths, were much more temporal and superstitious. Having a healthy ability to dig into one's own subconscious mind also gives you the ability to navigate through your emotional problems and solve them in that zone where the source of what drives us isn't post-Enlightenment logic but something much more alien, the term 'animal' doesn't even seem to suffice because a good whiff of hypnagogic imagery, emotion, and logic makes it look like a computer language if that computer language had been put together by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, Paracelsus, or some Kabbalist or neo-Pythagorean. That alienness of what's at our own core seems like it's a critical frontier to resolve because I think until we do understand that it'll be as if political calamities keep falling on us from out of the sky and we'll always be clueless as to why either truth or the most plausible or even plausible and observant story imaginable failed to capture anyone's hearts but some sort of primitive drum-beating koolaid stirs thousands or even millions to absurd behavior.


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10 Jun 2017, 8:06 pm

shlaifu wrote:
regarding politics: I think there's a problem in associatiin, meaning, there are more fault lines than just left-right.
there is culturally liberal v. conservative
there's multicultural v. nationalist
there's economical globalism v. democratically controlled nation states
and there's upper v. middle v. lower classes.


I've give absolutely no fight on the assertion that our current sense of left-right is impossibly dumb. That's part of why I brought up Brendan O'Niell in an earlier reply, ie. I've heard him and a few other pro-liberty leftists and thought to myself "Wait....*this* is what a leftist is!?" as I was waiting to hear them say something I disagreed with and it never actually came.

I think the current alt-right, particularly in Europe but also to a growing extent in the US, seems to encapsulate the cacophony you're talking about. It seems like Tara McCarthy and the Red Ice Radio folks have been increasingly comfortable bringing up the ethno-nationalist issue, partly because with Merkel and Juncker's immigration philosophy. They, and even more moderate groups who are still multicultural with limits and concerned over the immigration issue and cultural compatibility (ie. Identitaire) have sprung into action. You also have Tara and Henrik bringing up a lot about the religion issue, ie. such as that Christianity has rather naive beliefs about the desire of the different races to ideologically melt and coexist, and so they're starting to wonder if Europe needs something like a Nordic paganism or something that they could use as more distinctly white and less culturally transferable for the sake of making white culture as bigoted as prideful as anyone else's again for the sake of its own survival. Current events in places like South Africa would make it look as if there's some point to that - ie. that the west isn't just trying to not to be racist, but to have whites and western minorities be far less racist and bigoted than anyone else anywhere on the planet. At the same time the alt-right seems very libertarian, nonchalant on moral issues (ridiculing the Grundy-ism on the social justice left), they seem to like neoconservatives and paleoconservatives about as much as they're liked by those groups, and they seem to bare the resemblance - which I suppose by my own understanding of Fascism, does look in ways proto-Fascistic to the extent that it's a movement more related to a sense of emergency, both from unchecked and unvetted immigration as well as the sort of gonzo left that wants all free speech anywhere to stop if it hurts their feelings or presents scientific facts or ideas that don't fit their narrative.

A lot of that makes me wonder if signs of Fascism are more of a warning sign of critical things left unsaid or real problems willfully ignored rather than foreshadowing toward the inevitable rise of a destructive totalitarian force. If you have anything other than neo-Nazi wack-jobs asking whether we need a race-exclusive religion for white people suggests that something's gone terribly wrong and that there was probably no legitimate excuse for things to go that wrong to begin with.

It seems like the concerns will always be in rotation and with differing amounts of validity. I'm also not entirely sure that anyone has that good of a grip on Fascism in terms of what it is properly. If it's a floating specter that resides over anything center to right-of-center it's a fuzzy term that causes more problems than anything in that it can't be falsified, its roots can't properly be identified, and it can't be differentiated from other uprisings to the right that might bare resemblance but not be Fascism in the proper sense.


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11 Jun 2017, 8:45 am

well. "behind every fascism is a failed revolution". walter benjamin. one of those postmodernists. Yes, fascism is an echo of monarchy, one that retains wealth distribution. but again, it needs "the jew" to work, since it's a desperate attempt to go back to an order that eventually led to revolutionary potential in the first place. that built up energy needs to go somewhere- either a communist revolution or a fascist "destroying the enemy is more important"-program.

I like mark blyth, however, I'm significantly more worried about my savings in Euro than I was yesterday.
In his global trumpism speech, he mentions: everyone has to pay taxes.
well. for that to work, basically, a revolution must have preceeded that- lefties must have already won for there to be some sort of global process for taxation - and to avoid environmental catastrophes.


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11 Jun 2017, 11:23 am

shlaifu wrote:
I like mark blyth, however, I'm significantly more worried about my savings in Euro than I was yesterday.
In his global trumpism speech, he mentions: everyone has to pay taxes.
well. for that to work, basically, a revolution must have preceeded that- lefties must have already won for there to be some sort of global process for taxation - and to avoid environmental catastrophes.

You don't think that could happen organically the way our culture's going right now? We're starting to think a lot less inside-the-box, more and more people are waking up to the understanding that neoliberalism as it's practiced today is the exact same crap that Republicans, Tories, etc.. were always banged on for being the 'party of the rich', and if enough people get down to week-to-week who did everything right not to be there I think logic and the necessity of people saying things and demanding action - every day - on all of the offshore tax havens and tax shelters would eventually get something done. As of right now no one does that.

Everyone's unfortunately chasing micro-aggressions, gender pronouns, 'mansplaning', etc.. and I think John Michael Greer really nailed it on this (really any of his more recent political interviews) that the current stream of rich, white, progressive liberals are playing a game where they get to be the white knights who ride in, be the rescuers, constantly give these people new targets in their witch-hunt, and their own privilege never comes into question. I think we'd be way farther along if we phrased it like this - we encourage the creation of wealth, we encourage people to use their talents and succeed, we believe they should be rewarded with personal wealth, however the money you accumulate is a public good - it's the life blood of our economy. When its not in circulation, when it's not in some way active or fluid in the system, it does real and tangible damage. We're wiling to let you have wealth but with wealth comes the responsibility of keeping the funds you've accumulated in the public market in some fluid form.


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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin