User:Reversedragon/FirstNineThousand/proposed-3

Unsorted Items (page 3)

Page left over from when the server was down, approximately between pages 1 and 2.

618. chatgpt going in circles when asked to reply with the seahorse emoji
618. Hays code (1934 - 1968) [1]
618. banning Brians via Hays code / banning talking animals that despite animation hyperboles read as zoophilia with the Hays code -> thanks Family Guy analysis for my new euphemism for this
618. Anarchism generates Identitarian fascism
618. Don't ban Trotskyist literature as long as it genuinely advocates Leninism -> you'd think this requirement is lax but it's stricter than you'd think. a lot of early Trotskyism was nothing but tearing apart Leninism. so like a bunch of Trotsky's books are technically bannable by the strictest reading of this even though I would not recommend that
618. Trotsky video: world's policeman / "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you" [2]
618. Stalin believed that if you oppose The Left you're a fascist [3] -> not even true. Stalin spoke a lot about "the bourgeoisie" but he knew that process existed on a separate plane below the development of bourgeois chunks into Liberal-republicanism or fascism, and because he understood that he knew Liberal-republicanism doesn't immediately develop into fascism. despite the way that practically, 66 years later a lot of republics do just polarize straight into fascists and non-fascists. molecular division of countries into parallel Social-Philosphical Systems stuck under a republic is something I say, not something Stalin said.
618. All anti-leftists are fascists [4] -> should be untrue but is backhandedly true for the wrong reasons, just because Liberal-republican countries naturally homogenize such that non-fascists and fascists neatly sort into piles and one day everyone in the "right" pile just happens to be one.
618. Menshevism is a bigger and bigger government / Socialism is a bigger and bigger government (PragerU) [5] -> they say the right things with the wrong words. it's really strange how they sometimes have their facts right, like knowing Nazi Germany was more "biological" and fascist Italy was more based on culture. the dumb thing is the more they say this, they won't necessarily generate Tories and they _will_ generate anarchists who are strictly against Menshevism and republican government and yet do believe in anarchism and don't believe in Toryism.
618. The Left wants equity, not equality [6] -> true. it's a matter of attempting to feel around and find Materialism instead of just believe in Idealism, but doing it kind of clumsily. people begin to realize, forced by the brutal realities of structural racism, that doing "tent of freedom poles" based on Idealism just leads to all their allies getting killed and Tories having an inherent advantage in elections and "systemic phenomena" alike, so they have to do it based on Materialism or something resembling Materialism if they even want any people left alive to vote. then they move to these really confused concepts that when big fast-growing chunks are crowding out small chunks that it's because the big chunks chose to do it and are maliciously "greedy", while in my opinion the true cause of the conflict is that interactions between separate chunks are an undesigned process that never contains any volition; consciously choosing how chunk interactions actually go is impossible, and even choosing how the internal behavior of a chunk goes as an individual is fraught because all the individuals inside the chunk are going through these undesigned unchosen types of interactions between each other too. can some individual Bob Stills choose who actually becomes president? he can't, that is the product of undesigned un-chosen interactions between millions of individuals. and every single thing "a culture" or "a community" does functions similarly to that kind of presidential election event. but there is hope because absolute determinism does not apply, local relativistic determinism applies. individuals can make decisions based on their own internal content, even if the choices are limited, and the right collection of people will retermine a positive result. so in a way you can get to any positive result which is not ruled out as materially possible but it's just about figuring out the correct way to spatially order people to achieve that result, and how to order people to want to order people better, which is hard. "communities" are a fundamentally mathematical thing. it's not shameful, it's not depressing, and we don't need a bunch of vibrant spiritual metaphors to explain why people are connected.
618. Hobbes vs Rosseau [7] -> you think this issue is simple, but people really present this problem in such a strawman of how to actually apply it. you'll see it totally slanted like nobody could reasonably take the side of Hobbes and reasonable people could only believe in Rousseau, when if you look into what the statements are actually saying at all you'll see that none of the descriptions of Rousseau really mean anything and they require like twenty levels of definitions of definitions of definitions to make sense. what is direct democracy? how is a social contract formed by free individuals? what is nurturing through society? are social contracts of free individuals singular or plural? "legitimate political authority" is the only thing that makes some kind of sense, because you can tie that to the idea of nation-states that remain stable and don't simply dissolve because everybody in them hates the current structure. but even there there are cracks in that because a population can sometimes dissolve on grounds that are strictly cultural incompatibilities and have nothing to do with central political authority itself — is "legitimate political authority" impossible in a sheer collection of mismatched countable cultures that doesn't want to be a population? are these cultural incompatibilities inherently political even though they aren't part of a government or State? if so, is that to say that tolerance itself is a social contract, and it is not exercising "empathy and compassion" to make people tolerate each other when they don't want to? there are whole scales of society not covered in this particular opposition of Hobbes vs Rousseau that threaten to unravel both of them but much more Rousseau.
     I read Hobbes a little differently than most people do. I don't think human beings are "selfish", which worded that way has connotations of being like maliciously greedy and would be this huge sin of inexcusable moral corruption in anarchism. what I think is that human individuals have a core aspect of being uncontrollable no matter how much you want to control them — the only thing that I really think Rothenberg gets correct although I think she might have stolen it from Deleuze and Badiou. human individuals must satisfy their own material needs and that is non-negotiable; this isn't because they personally value themselves over others, it's because they fundamentally can never trust others as much as they trust themselves, others will fail them *either* functionally or morally, and individual humans or households preserve themselves because all relationships can potentially be lost at any time and they need something constant to come back to, which is themselves. a reasonable definition of what "freedom" is can really only emerge from the preservation of self, whether individual or extended household. freedom is the moment that somebody turns against others and refuses to obey or support them even if that would be a good thing because they can no longer trust or rely on the person they are supposed to support or obey. the Trotskyist definition of freedom is more or less a reasonable definition of almost all but maybe not all situations where people seek freedom; people half-accidentally holding up Trotsky as the world's greatest freedom philosopher is a bit backhandedly true if nothing else because he did technically show us why most philosophy is utterly doomed and hopeless and everybody who hopes for or believes in anything is sunk too unless we stop and fix it. which I do think can be done. so to define whether human beings are "selfless" or "selfish" you really have to start at defining freedom and respect that all people want freedom — even though in reality the concept of freedom can be troublingly incoherent. people have needs. they don't have needs out of malice. they defend their needs in order to help and support what is human. this trips up Existentialist types: they think that individuals pursuing Freedom is inherently good for everyone, when it's actually just neutral, not always good, but not bad. as people defend themselves and human rights, they come into conflict with others, and sometimes get very angry at each other, each knowing they deserve something they need yet both materially in conflict where only one can have it. this isn't due to "attitudes", this is just an undesigned, un-chosen conflict that occurs because two people choose a thing that is each good for them and should be good for both of them if they could both have it and then through reterministic social processes end up competing to have and realize the same thing different conflicting ways. this doesn't necessarily get fixed through "natural human empathy", because it's possible any solution makes someone a bit unhappy and leaves them with at least a small bad memory forever; no amount of "empathy" can make you not need your needs or make you not disappointed to give up on your needs if they are in fact your needs.
     there's a loophole in Rousseau. (at least the bad outline version of him, anyway.) you could use all the points he says to argue that given enough natural human empathy people would accept the social contract of standing together with Stalin's government because most people already like it and it has legitimate political authority. given the real historical facts, it would be hard to invalidate this argument. the only real problem with it is that it doesn't explain why Trotsky exists, and thus can't predict the material course of history when Trotsky does exist. you might want to say it's preposterous to apply theory that was supposed to contrast monarchy with Liberal-republicanism to Bolshevism, but under the typical ideological framework Liberal-republicans actually use, where everything is just a bunch of ideas and monarchs are just an idea and "liberalization" or "democratization" is just an idea, it isn't. you're thinking like a Marxist. an actual Idealist can't distinguish between the real Stalin and the real Joe Biden as long as you add the precondition that voting for Trump is fundamentally bad and nobody should do it. Stalin and Biden are kind of like the teacup/donut joke in topology; a real physical world is full of differences between the material substance of teacups and donuts, but the framework just doesn't cover those. anyway. Trotsky appears when a "social contract" is reasonable but due to the underlying conflicts between two reasonable sets of needs it still hurts someone, causing one social contract to tear off into two different social contracts. once there are two different social contracts, things are really different. people can choose to leave, but only if they become loyal to another one and let it control them and that underlying desperation dictates the terms of the agreement. the threat of getting expelled is enough to make social contracts go downhill and become mostly about protecting the group as a unit against the outside, operating back and forth on each "bag of water" in a unity of opposites, both are trying hard not to be forced to be part of each other, not to be each other, not to let the other claim their resources. if you put Rousseau inside Hobbes you actually begin to get a picture of history that's almost correct. people can choose to peacefully become part of things but they largely do it to escape the churning storm of violence that exists outside and between social contracts, and which always beats at the side of any particular relationship toward a "democracy" or republic, making you ask, is it worse to be here than not here, is it worse to be somewhere else or to be here or to be nowhere.
     all of this makes the false solution of Trotskyism sound wonderful because oh my god there just wouldn't be pointless bags of water any more! except that it's not really that easy and that's not really how things work. the bags-of-water problem is a real problem that has to be solved through a real transition to get to the stage where you aren't worrying about that any more.
618. paradox of intolerance (Karl Popper) / tolerance paradox / if intolerance is tolerated, it will overrun society [8] -> it gets me that Liberal-republicans both believe that "Hobbes is being hyperbolic" and then will show up with this thing that makes it really clear that social contracts are forced and they aren't optional, that there is a clear event of republican societies taking their pool of bureaucrats that rules society (the "ruling population") and conquering all the evil intolerant people exactly the way the king conquers people in Hobbes. there's no walking out of this. if you listen to actual proto-fascist Tory types, them just going around existing and a republican government being imposed on them is what they actually believe.
618. Psychology Today refusing to publish partisan articles [9] -> I wouldn't have found these articles interesting, I would have just gone "oh there goes Existentialism again"... until they mentioned an actual (recent) historical event I can analyze. that part is the hidden treasure.
618. Exposure to hate speech about migrants changes people's responses in the right temporal parietal junction (rTPJ) that is associated with distinguishing the boundaries of the body from other people [10] [11]
618. No matter our ethnicity, color of skin, gender, or even immigration status, we're all human, and we're all part of the same nation [12] -> no, who are "we"? does simply destroying the government of the Confederacy actually make two groups of people part of the same group, or is it a kind of benevolent, seemingly-justified imperialism? can nations arbitrarily divide one day? was the Soviet Union doomed to divide into 14 countries even if it wasn't overtaken by capitalists? is there a point where holding countries in a nation is simply forced and potentially unethical? don't call me hypocritical for not talking about Tibet, or some particular region of people that appears to be trapped. I want people to understand the basic idea of whether countries should be part of each other before they tackle those more difficult topics and hopefully get them right.
618. Fionna and Cake season 2 will age badly -> this is stepping way out on a limb, but I think it's logically coherent. here's my thinking: capitalism and the justification of capitalism eventually "age badly". few people are at the level of Lenin where you just take the whole thing and are like, this whole thing is broken and the bourgeoisie are constantly trying to make us believe it isn't, and we ultimately need to get rid of the spatial arrangement they are currently in so they can't do that any more. many people instead come to this confused understanding where they get mad specifically at neoliberalism or Toryism but not at capitalism and laser-focus on a very limited part of capitalism in what they falsely believe is a Materialist understanding of the whole "elephant". when I try to figure out what systems will be rejected, I'm of course on the Marxist plane of picking out the deepest layers of things, looking at the whole shovel and then pointing out the dubious shovel dream that's justifying it. when I watched Fionna and Cake season 2, I saw it as a dubious shovel dream that, being quite literal in its writing, almost directly shows the dubious shovel to you. the shovel appears exactly when Cake is stretching across the city and collecting a tiny bit of money from everybody. it looks exactly like "Existentialist inspiration porn". step 1: Fionna trying to pay rent for a public facility is a hero, just for struggling against other neighboring chunks or other possible arrangements of people onto that space and that chunk, and not giving up. step 2: it is asserted that everybody who puts a dollar in the hat does it out of love and kindness and positivity, and it is a matter of support and "solidarity" (in a very Existentialist, Jungian usage of the term where standing together is psychological in nature, not a matter of different physical structures, not class-based). step 1.5: nobody who puts a dollar in the hat does it out of hatred for other things and prejudice against other things existing. step 1.6: nobody who puts a dollar in the hat could ever become so loyal to the hat that they would never ever ever want to put dollars in other equally good hats and accidentally drive the other hats out completely as if they hated them. step 3: investors can put a myriad dollars in the hat, and it's equally as good or bad as two dollars. step 3.1: investor puts myriad dollars in hat, donates myriad dollars to Israel, is the most consistent donor, threatens to leave if you don't put two dollars in the Israel hat, or try to take investor's myriad dollars out of the Israel hat. money or no money, the whole concept of free-floating horizontal friendships becomes toxic quickly because specific individuals become mandatory but good and bad things are tied in the same individual. step 3.2: if this scenario takes place 100 years ago, everybody puts a dollar in the hat, they all love and support each other and work to keep their "community" standing robustly, but they're all White, they all get there before Black people, and the hat quite literally creates de facto segregation. step 3.3: Reconstruction begins. Black people finally open up a hat. although a handful of people get tired of the predominating White hats and leave them, the sticky problem remains that no group of people can be objectively better than another, and so people remain at the existing hats, and the new hats have trouble amassing people, while the new hats will have had to differentiate themselves from the old hats just to be worth checking out for any kind of change from the old hats, and in that process of differentiation, it becomes hard for anyone from the Black hats to go assume control of the White hats because their approaches to hats are now different and they don't want the same things or specialize in the same things, yet people all want what's at the White hats and don't want what's at the Black hats because it's not what's at the White hats. (if you can't tell, my usual examples for this have almost nothing to do with race, and I kind of just made it racial to shock people into listening, because I think it's possible for the pattern to apply in that situation too.)
     what's happened is like... in a way capitalism has almost already been displaced and replaced with something almost as bad. probably in limited circumstances and not the majority of cases. you take the big especially nasty Tory chunk of a stereotypically bad industry owner and a factory, or something like that, and you replace that with something new: a blue, Existentialist chunk which operates almost the same as the Tory chunk but has different class content. you now have this blue chunk that ruthlessly competes against other chunks, but is a "community", and accumulates the set of people that best align with it culturally and "belong" in it, while attempting to expel the people that don't inherently align with it, whether its arbitrary values defined by its current set of hat-donaters are even good values to have, or simply these mandatory, protective cultural distinctions that divide the chunk from other chunks to prevent them from fighting over the same resources. chunk competition or so-called "greed" hasn't been abolished. if you aren't loyal to a chunk, you're sunk. there are still harsh consequences for not being totally loyal and patriotic to a countable culture, and every member "representing it well" to market it to potential new consumers. markets actually rule individuals' lives more rather than less, because every individual has to directly perform for outsiders rather than simply doing as someone tells them and doing well. markets get to determine the whole existence or nonexistence of a cultural grouping of people based on how well it serves other groupings with totally different wants and goals that may outright be prejudiced against it. (because, remember, making every monetizable countable culture coexist as part of one thing by edict of the central government instead of choose whether to hate each other and destroy each other is Communism.) these blue chunks have done a really weird thing of sort of republicanizing chunks or more specifically distributing chunks across many people, but in a way that's.... sloshy. where the chunks haven't really settled down and formed borders yet, but as they're sloshing around they've been hollowed out and filled with a bunch of smaller things like you had a pool of water and it was filled with sandwich bags containing water but you took one of the sandwich bags and poured out the water and replaced it with dish soap and closed it and put it back into the pool, or the bags were filled with frozen water and you took one of them and replaced it with a bag of non-frozen water. oh, and sometimes you take one of the water bags and pour out all the water and put different water in it. it's very strange. it's like the bags don't actually exist as separate bags for any particular purpose or reason, they just do, but it's mandatory for there to be water bags, and mandatory for them to not merge or spontaneously phase through each other (here thanks to fermion physics). the water is adamant that water bags are necessary, even though from an outside view it doesn't seem to have any point to it or make any sense. is the water playing us? is the water just trying to deceive us that its system actually makes sense? that's what I'm getting at here. the literal content of Fionna and Cake episodes hardly ever bothers me, but the "agenda" in terms of a model of society this one has way below that is interesting and concerning.
     in short: blue chunks arise out of the false belief that society's problems come from "domination" or "one person ruling/owning others" and that everything would be fixed if you crudely made every individual An Equal Individual And An End In Themself, while in reality the problem is chunk competition and chunks of "equal" people still fight each other to exist and really oppress anybody who doesn't fit into them as a threat to Tent of Freedom Chunks. conformity becomes critically important because nobody can be equally respected if they're part of different things which realistically will compete and harm each other.
     final thoughts: I genuinely wonder what an orange chunk would look like. a detached wholly orange chunk which is at town scale like in this Fionna and Cake episode, but when it springs up out of the ether to greet other chunks, it's not blue, it's orange, its internal structure is orange, it surfaces out of a system containing money and chunk competition but it uses what it has to create and realize a chunk which does the minimum it has to do to be orange.
     I do have vague ideas what a violet chunk looks like. in large part it's simply a chunk that doesn't like breaking apart, it builds industries or useful facilities and then like, it doesn't dismantle them because it understands that not having things that absorb population in a world that still regenerates landlords because it can't ever successfully create a single structure that owns unused houses would spell doom for tolerance and understanding and generate a lot of bigots, and it actually has the good sense to compromise on having industries despite the "modernity" "Whiteness" "colonizers" implications of spawning more businesses or producing anything. maybe my models so far live a bit in the past, and violet chunks like these wouldn't happen in the United States even as they'd happen in India, while a different color chunk or a different shade of violet chunk would happen that I wouldn't even expect or be able to recognize right now. that's the great strength of meta-Marxism: it can just start describing the new kind of chunk instead of dwelling on the old kinds if the new kinds prove to be more effective. my big block in applying this framework and getting involved is that nobody wants to think about chunks and chunk colors. I'm ready to tell them, I don't care what color the chunk is as long as that chunk color is good and it's done well, to the best of my ability I'll help you realize the chunk color you want, they just don't even want to know what a chunk color is and they want to believe a whole gigantic country chunk is already blue and isn't brown because they want to believe it is.