Decide who you will be:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/h...=pocket-newtab
Decide who you will be:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/h...=pocket-newtab
Whatever it is that is making people obese, it has spread to other species:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/t...=pocket-newtab
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
Thomas Mann's War Against ******
This is about how awful Thomas Mann is really. You can't easily say "Thomas Mann was awful" even if he's not widely read, but the people who recognize him know you "should" respect him. This takes him down pretty subtly. Thomas Mann was originally a Nazi sympathizer, then he switched to writing anti-****** polemic that was shallow and worthless while taking orders from a couple of known Nazi party members besides other conservative crypto-fascist Germans and then told the US to become Stalinists from the time between 1945 to his death in 1955. I once had a Thomas Mann book for German students and I threw it against the wall and then made dada out of it before basically just cursing academia for having so many crypto-Nazis and not-so-crypto-Marxists (in other words, Thomas Mann) in it. If there was an artist as big as Thomas Mann who wasn't awful like him, ****** might not have come to power or at least could've been foisted out. Thomas Mann has comparable blame to ****** even though it's much less direct as I see it, because he could've done a lot of things to stop ******, but didn't, instead saying, "well, Jew-murdering insanity is the direct result of Disneyesque romanticism and ****** was, like, Dr. Caligari and we liked him though the Jews just killed him and ruined it, but he should've left them alone, shrug. Yeah."
I'm going to be reading this book. I don't think anyone here is concerned with Thomas Mann though probably they should be because it seems like something censored from the most-referenced period in history. People say it like Germans and/or Americans and Brits had no idea about the Shoah but everyone knew and was basically watching with popcorn and at the middle of the "action" was Thomas Mann.
Brain Scans and Visual Identification: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/h...-identity.html
"The brain scans of 84 volunteers were used to create reconstructions of their faces....then tested against photographs. A facial recognition program correctly matched 70 subjects."
Media ignore unmasking of twitter exec as british psy-ops officer:
https://fair.org/home/media-ignore-u...syops-officer/
Bomb attacks are now a normal part of Swedish life: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/...-swedish-life/
METAMODERNIST // MANIFESTO
If you read this and understand, you're initiated into the inner circle of the learnéd. You're welcome.
THOMAS MANN AND BERTOLT BRECHT: ANTIPODEANS IN EXILE. A TALK BY DIETER BORCHMEYER.
Music and the Holocaust: Kurt Weill
I hope my article about Thomas Mann didn't leave anyone thinking they have to boycott Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht just for living in Weimar on the Pacific together.
There is hope yet. National conservative party Sweden Democrats (fiscally centre-left and socially centre-right) is now the second largest party (in some polls they've even scored as being the largest). The Christian Democrats - another refreshing breath of sanity have also gotten bigger, and were the first to open up to dialogue with previously mentioned party (they've been excluded from literally all dialogue in the past since they're so 'racist'). The Moderate Party, while at times perhaps a bit too libertarian for my tastes, are also nearing these two parties in various ways. My wish is that these three form a conservative coalition government to clean up after all the years of 'social democratic', extremist left liberal insanity. We'll see what the election of 2022 has to offer - will be very exciting no doubt, unless the leftists and liberals come in to undermine democracy itself again (too long of a story to get into here, but that's what they managed to do after last year's election).
Notes on metamodernism
This is the original paper on our cultural times. Basically postmodernism is Mephistopheles, modernism is Wagner, and we're Faust, though no one but me has ever said that.
I think I'm too knowledgeable to be posting in this environment but I might as well leave a Dostoevsky turnip for everyone since this is a much more diverse place than Dostoevsky hell.
So Many Watchmen Fans Have No Idea What It's Really About
I want to read this soon.
Escapism
Almost all the worst escapists do pretend to like realist fiction in my experience or a subgenre like romance or thrillers that are mostly realistic. Non-escapist fiction is equally likely to be as wildly fantastic as Dante's Divine Comedy as it is to be as grounded and mundane as Balzac's Human Comedy, though that doesn't excuse the comic-book-addled people I know.
If you want to escape from your life, take up empiricism. At least you'll come back with observations.
What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?
This paper is kind of ridiculous and really historically inaccurate but an interesting view into some people's minds. It's the psychology of raving politicized American left-wingers in 2004. Yay. We can see the common thread of politicized people feeling oppressed by everyone, except in 2004 deranged Democrats complained about aristocrats instead of dead white males. This seems to be the true signifier of political alliance, because deranged leftists always seem to complain about a different well-defined group of dead people oppressing them while deranged rightists consistently complain about being oppressed by every living group they're not a member of.
Last edited by Metamorph; 11-02-2019 at 09:31 AM.
Both Postmodernism and its polar opposite Logical Positivism (extreme modernism) have been overreactions to the fears that unchecked ideologies may lead to catastrophic failures. And those fears were legitimate. But their solutions were nonsensical.
Logical Positivists' fear was that unchecked theories and hypotheticals may lead us astray into a world of hypothetical nonsense that has been further removed from reality. Ironically, Logical Positivism proved itself to be self-contradictory, irrational and nonsensical.
Postmodernists' fear was that the apparent "totalitarian" nature of hyper-rationality may lead to things like Nazism. It started out as a moral philosophy, but ironically it descended into a total moral anarchy by supposing that there's no such thing as objective (moral) truths.
Those fears can be mitigated by the fact that we can criticize and put checks-and-balances on any kind of systems or systems of thoughts. But both of those ideologies have been about restricting and containing things to a very narrow scope, and suppressing any kind of criticisms of their own core tenets.
The remnants of the Logical Positivism still lives on in our popular culture, with buzzwords being used like "empirically-validate" "evidence-based" "scientifically proven", and the overall dismissal of any kind of theories as being "just a theory". It's unfortunate that Postmodernism, which was once a fringe-ideology of some lefts, is now being adopted by the fringe far-right, because it proves itself to be so good at deflecting any kind of criticisms that it doesn't want to accept.
Go be a professor or some kind of adjunct at least, @Singu.
I can’t believe you said that to him without giving him a chance to ready his dildo first @coeruleum
Philosophy has always seemed to me to be a lot of BS attempting to justify a personal, individual bias.
I think that the only things I've encountered which I would never have thought of myself are:
1. The concept of geometric "proofs". If you create some carefully constructed definitions, then you can "prove" some things.
2. The fact that you can use math to predict the future to some degree of accuracy: Newton's laws, statistical mechanics.
3. Many systems can be treated as if they are actually made of information.
4. You can use the method of "reverse entropy deconvolution" to accurately predict the details of an image that are blurred by turbulent clouds.
5. The fact that you can group people into behavior-predictive categories by their faces. (Socionics)
I think that all of these things heavily involve Ti and I, apparently, am Ti-Ignoring.
Or... why do you not think that Socionics is just categorization of already-existing philosophies and philosophies that existed before?
People change their philosophies over time, you know. They go from "Te-based philosophy" to "Ti-based philosophies" or whatever that you wish to categorize as.
Sure, I used to have the same view of philosophy as being pointless and a waste of time, but again my view of philosophy changed over time.
Reverting to the relativist "Well that's just your own personal bias of your culture/group" is just Postmodernism, but people here call it "Socionics".
Making a rational, objective argument is impossible, because it could simply be referred to as "Ti bias" or "Te bias" or "Fi bias" or whatever.
Is there a such thing as a bias? Yes, but there is also a such thing as an objective argument that anyone can make and anyone can understand.
She said she only thinks it's a waste if you never use it. I agree with her position over yours and over Adam Strange's (former?) position that philosophy sucks.
These forums are absolutely contaminated with postmodernism though. Also, wake up because I've done more to fight it off than you have.
Well actually I don't really care much for philosophy, just epistemology. And you apply epistemology to science or when you come up with scientific theories, or even any kind of theories. It improves your overall thoughts on things.
The problem is much bigger than this forum. Postmodernism isn't that big of a problem in say, the US because most people don't care much for it.
But really the biggest beef that I have with is people who just want to blindly defend whatever it is that they want to defend, usually some authority or pet theories or governments or corporations or nations.
Epistemology being useful is an argument for philosophy being useful. Of course, most people mentally think of philosophy exclusively as ethics and then think it's for bad people who reject religion which is not even true of ethics, never mind epistemology, metaphysics, etc.
Postmodernism in the US is a lot like Rumpelstiltskin in Grimm's Fairy Tales: it follows you everywhere you go, is hideous and annoying, has completely overstayed its welcome, and wants your first-born child in exchange for spinning straw into gold, but no one can even say its name to make it go away.
I don't think all of philosophy is useless, just most of it. Epistemology is immensely useful in both sciences and non-sciences. And anyway, I don't think using the criterion as "usefulness" is a good one, and that's just utilitarianism. Mathematicians come up with a lot of "useless" theorems with apparently no real-world application, but we don't ask them "What's the point if you can't use if?".
Anyway, people ask questions like, "How can we make Socionics scientific?" or "How do we know that Socionics is valid or not?".
How do we even know that its very approach is the right one? If the premise is wrong, then the entire conclusion is going to be wrong. If you want to answer those questions, then I think answering the questions of epistemology is going to be unavoidable.
I think every idea should be used, but ironically it wouldn't be very productive if that were the primary concern of everyone making, researching, or pondering anything at all. All true mathematics ends up applied, for example, but if no one were fine playing in their heads for decades on end, much less would get discovered. Considering I love "impractical" things such as music and would rather not grovel in a hole like a mole, my idea of "use" is more about activity and being able to re-apply ideas in different contexts.
Thanks for making me consider the idea that people hate philosophy because it tells them hoarding money is a bad idea. No wonder Marx is scapegoated so much when, as much as I'm not into him, Stalin is not his fault. Hoarding money might be making you unhappy, a bad person, stupid, and you could even lose it all due to invisible forces! You mentioned none of that, but "practical" and "good" both seem to be very explicitly based on a pyramid of needs fraudulently and seemingly even maliciously attributed to Maslow, which I will now call The Needy Pharoah's Munchy Sleepy Pyramid Scheme. It's impossible to starve or be deprived even in America in the modern world unless you're schizophrenic or stuck in the middle of nowhere. You don't even need to sign up for resources for poor people because people just leave free rice, nuts, and apples everywhere, so people use the Needy Pyramid Scheme to tell people they can't pursue their more refined longings because food is more important and Maslow said (Maslow didn't say that or make the pyramid.)
Last edited by Metamorph; 11-04-2019 at 01:22 AM.
How the assault on American excellence at Yale–and all universities–threatens our democracy
Yale professor: Some humans are better at being human
Who else wants to be a patrician with me, or God forbid, a master at anything? I would especially rather hear a bad guitarist in concert and not Jimi Hendrix, because we're all equal in every way. That's my punishment for mob rule people: listen to a bad guitarist, and if it crosses into serious territory, eat pufferfish sushi made by someone pulled off the street.
super interesting article (maybe more like blog post) about sexual selection in animals and the absurdity it can reach
https://biogeekery.wordpress.com/201...ual-selection/
another article on dimorphism (when the sexes of the same species look distinctly different)
https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/an...ual-dimorphism
How Snobbery Helped Take The Spice Out Of European Cooking
People ate spices for thousands of years not just because they liked it but for medical reasons. I'm glad my medieval diet is socially acceptable now even if I'm still in the minority because otherwise I'd be fat, stupid, lazy, and ugly eating piles of grease called "French cuisine" and "American food" which you should notice fall entirely into kapha dosha and phlegmatic with some melancholic humor, not that that proto-science is the correct scientific explanation."Think of a barbecue sauce — very medieval," says Ken Albala, a professor of culinary history at the University of the Pacific
@sbbds @Subteigh @Chryssie
Gunpowder plotte was ye false flagge, says 17th century conspiracy theorist
“Gonpoder doth notte blow up Parliament and ye king! PEOPLE blow up Parliament and ye kinge!” he added.
“The onlie thing which mayhap foil a bad Guy Fawkes with a barrel of gunpowder is a goode Guy Fawkes with a barrel of gunpowder.”
Justice Department seeks info on 'Anonymous' author of soon-to-be-published insider book
Is anyone else planning on reading this?
It's more likely to do with the idea of scientism, that everything that there is to know can and should be answered by science.
So what good is philosophy? Well science can only answers matters of the physical world, so everything else must be answered by philosophy.
Apparently, Adam Strange is a "Te" type, and squark is an "ST" type. Which makes them the "practical" types. And if they say that philosophy is otherwise useless, or just matters of individual biases, then given their practicality and their strange & innate accessibility to what is "objective", or the "real world", it must be so.
So by definition, they are Logical Positivists, because they're essentially saying that anything that isn't answerable by science is useless or just playing with words.
So that is the alternative to philosophy, which is ironically even more useless than philosophy. Or at least, it's hell of a lot more limited.
Philosophy may terrify some people, because it opens the pandora's box to unlimited speculation. And philosophy did indeed create a lot of useless things and "dangerous thoughts". But limiting what we can think and can't think is going to limit our growth of knowledge, period, which will limit our progress.
I didn't claim that you said anything. I'm merely alluding to the fact that if people were to conclude that you and Adam Strange said the things (or their equivalent typical opinions concerning philosophies) due to being certain "types", then it leads to absurdities.
I would say that such typical opinions are more reflective of Logical Positivism (whether they're aware of such a philosophy or not, it still has background cultural influence), not types. Basically, if philosophy is useless (I'm not necessarily saying that you've said it), then what's the alternative? The alternative is something that's even MORE useless than philosophy. So what would make of those "practical" types...?
But you did say it was due to "Ni trying to make sense out of Ti" and "ILIs seem to often be really into this kind of thing". So you're also saying that it's due to certain types being this way or that.
Anyway, this is hardly about you, so no need to get defensive. It's just an example, since "Te" and "ST" types are stereotypically seen as the "practical" types.
Suspected bomb in Vienna was in fact a sex toy
Now my classical crossover band will be named Suspicious Movement (just kidding, I don't have a classical crossover band.)
Golden Sunset
Nationalist political party Golden Dawn is on trial in Greece for inciting fascist violence. Other countries with a dangerous far-right should be taking notes.
by Maria Stoian
Posted Yesterday