Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

Good points, never thought abt that

Hm, it seems mostly just speculation to me? Most western countries have enough impoverished foreigners for anyone to fit in... I also think for the first point, we might be confusing religion and politics again. Yeah, the middle class will be most political, but the poorer classes will be more likely to go with religious fanaticism (I think).

For me it's not really about the immigrants in France being 'poor', and therefore choosing terror, but they're clearly marginalized. And this is not just about marginalization leading to terror, of even more importance seems to me to be that they are so marginalized, so shuffled off to the side and left alone, that the security agency's have lost control of them.

I've started to notice right-wing nativists using the language of "indigenous studies." My question is: If switching the X in "We are the indigenous people of X" turns it from a liberation statement to a racist statement, maybe the entire paradigm is of little value outside political expediency?

I haven't really reviewed the studies on whether suicide bombers mostly come from the poor or middle class or whatever, but I do think it's worth considering whether the "disaffected" people who might join terrorist groups could be disaffected on account of something other than pure material conditions.

ISIS, for example, provides a very tidy answer to the question "what is my life for?" as well as the promise of adventure and the potential for a glorious death.

Sorry those two posts were a little more disjointed from each other than I thought when I wrote them.

i think generally the left is less sympathetic to existential disaffection than material alienation

mordy, i think you're right re: identity politics and political expediency. not sure i've ever found that particular faustian bargain worth making but the alternative is a total deconstruction of "race" that just doesn't seem to get any purchase outside of academics and high brow philosophy.

see also derrida on the "assinity" of "the animal" as a category that in effect erases the near infinite differences among living beings.

Mordy, maybe that's true of the American left, but elsewhere one finds other preoccupations (e.g. Sartre)

the academic left? i mean sartre was not very popular among activists when i was in school - moreso among lit ppl

been wanting to read this forever:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Vxte4wdtL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I don't know about activists in the USA, I'm just observing that there's a left elsewhere and that existential concerns remain important there, even when the participants are largely atheist (though cf. e.g. Lévinas and Ricoeur)

i think material deprivation in the US has become the primary focus though obv these other concerns aren't inconsequential. from my perspective the problem w. existential alienation is that there is no fundamental justice to be readdressed - the wealthy and the poor alike can fret over their eternal soul, their alienation from society and family, their sense of meaninglessness + worthlessness. in fact it seems to me that the most unsympathetic crimes in contemporary society (like hate crimes) are also products of existential alienation. but what is the action to be taken? what injustices can be readdressed? it's much simpler to focus on areas of observable inequality. imho.

the problem of drawing the line between the shitty things we have to live with and the shitty things we don't (because we made them shitty) is a problem because we have to draw that line from within culture, social construction, etc and thus it's always a contingent boundary. which is not the same thing as saying that the boundary doesn't exist.

pikkety weighs in, suggests (somewhat unsurprisingly) terrorism is related to inequality, I'm not sure if argument is thought through https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/30/why-inequality-is-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-the-islamic-state/

probably important to distinguish between terrorist movements, civil wars, insurgencies in the MENA-region and terrorist attacks like the one in Paris - maybe the latter are less likely to be directly linked to poverty/economic inequality

I've found that I like texts that undermine large parts of contemporary Western society, philosophy + consensus. I'm reading "After Virtue" which is very provocative and I enjoyed the Unger I read (in light of the link posted in the rolling philosophy thread). Earlier we discussed the Moldbug manifesto as well, though obviously he's a particularly flawed critic (if not a still entertaining one). What are some other authors/texts that posit that our current intellectual/ethical infrastructure is broken/illusory/nonsense that might be entertaining to read?

Well, don't know about ethics, but Karen Barad extrapolates from quantum mechanics into a broad attack on Cartesian thought in Meeting the Universe Halfway. I liked that one.

mb peter sloterdijk, tho also a douchebag, if not quite as much a douchebag as moldbug

Yeah, Critique of Cynical Reason is amazing!

thx guys, they're both going on the pile

Macintyre is fabulous, read more of him; in particular the Gifford lectures, published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.

do you know Charles Taylor? start with The Ethics of Authenticity, then go to Sources of the Self.

I kinda live for this stuff.

my 2 big interests at the moment: biblical religion and temple era sacrifices, and how all contemporary ethics + thought are giant failures. now where can i go to sprinkle this sheep blood?

you might also be interested in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age also, wherein the focal question is: how did we move from a world in which atheism was unthinkable, to a world in which it seems to be a living option?

Rene Girard

seems relevant: http://www.versobooks.com/books/2118-an-american-utopia

https://thecharnelhouse.org/2016/06/05/we-are-not-anti/

translation of « Nous ne sommes pas Anti », a 2005 text by Bernard Lyon of the French group Theorie Communiste - the intro is packed though with links to v fascinating discussions about anti-imperialism, anti-anti-fascism, + related.

from huntington's clash of civilizations:

A universal religion is only slightly more likely to emerge than is a universal language. The late twentieth century has seen a global resurgence of religions around the world (see pp. 95-101). That resurgence has involved the intensification of religious consciousness and the rise of fundamentalist movements. It has thus reinforced the differences among religions. It has not necessarily involved significant shifts in the proportions of the world’s population adhering to different religions. The data available on religious adherents are even more fragmentary and unreliable than the data available on language speakers. Table 3.3 sets out figures derived from one widely used source. These and other data suggest that the relative numerical strength of religions around the world has not changed dramatically in this century. The largest change recorded by this source was the increase in the proportion of people classified p. 65 as “nonreligious” and “atheist” from 0.2 percent in 1900 to 20.9 percent in 1980. Conceivably this could reflect a major shift away from religion, and in 1980 the religious resurgence was just gathering steam. Yet this 20.7 percent increase in nonbelievers is closely matched by a 19.0 percent decrease in those classified as adherents of “Chinese folk-religions” from 23.5 percent in 1900 to 4.5 percent in 1980. These virtually equal increases and decreases suggest that with the advent of communism the bulk of China’s population was simply reclassified from folk-religionist to nonbelieving.

Table 3.3 – Proportion of World Population Adhering to Major Religious Traditions

http://i.imgur.com/pjSI3fn.jpg

The data do show increases in the proportions of the world population adhering to the two major proselytizing religions, Islam and Christianity, over eighty years. Western Christians were estimated at 26.9 percent of the world’s population in 1900 and 30 percent in 1980. Muslims increased more dramatically from 12.4 percent in 1900 to 16.5 percent or by other estimates 18 percent in 1980. During the last decades of the twentieth century both Islam and Christianity significantly expanded their numbers in Africa, and a major shift toward Christianity occurred in South Korea. In rapidly modernizing societies, if the traditional religion is unable to adapt to the requirements of modernization, the potential exists for the spread of Western Christianity and Islam. In these societies the most successful protagonists of Western culture are not neo-classical economists or crusading democrats or multinational corporation executives. They are and most likely will continue to be Christian missionaries. Neither Adam Smith nor Thomas Jefferson will meet the psychological, emotional, moral, and social needs of urban migrants and first-generation secondary school graduates. Jesus Christ may not meet them either, but He is likely to have a better chance.

In the long run, however, Mohammed wins out. Christianity spreads primarily by conversion, Islam by conversion and reproduction. The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 percent in the 1980s, leveled off, is p. 66 now declining, and will probably approximate about 25 percent of the world’s population by 2025. As a result of their extremely high rates of population growth (see chapter 5), the proportion of Muslims in the world will continue to increase dramatically, amounting to 20 percent of the world’s population about the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later, and probably accounting for about 30 percent of the world’s population by 2025.

according to wikipedia in 2016:

http://i.imgur.com/cM7imVA.png

so was huntington wrong? and if so, what did he miss about christianity and islam that has allowed christianity, 16 years after the turn of the century, to halt an apparently decline and maintain approx 30%, and islam apparently to have slowed (tho he got the general trend of growth correct). did christianity open new markets? this seems particularly surprising considering the aging of the West. did he fail to account for latin american catholicism? ongoing conflict in the middle east?

was he confused about birth rates mb, assuming the growth would continue? obviously there aren't many significant things which those 2.2 billion christians have in common, and especially in the developing world the adherence to doctrine can be eccentric, hybridised etc. so more crucially I'm not sure what you can say the draw of e.g. Christianity is in any cultural/spiritual sense beyond the social and material benefits that are often the initial draw of missions

fwiw he argues that the revival of religious sentiment in general was a globalwide response to urbanization, industrialization, globalization, aka crisis of meaning in post cold war moment and doesn't really make much of an argument that christianity has value/appeal above or beyond hinduism or islam. tho i think he'd contest the idea that there aren't significant things which those 2.2 billion christians have in common (or at least that the 'many' modifier is essential) bc he seems religious identification as being civilizationally determinative.

I assumed that if he'd made good arguments in support of his basic contentions I would have heard of them by now. I'm struggling to think of many distinctive solid cultural/spiritual/ethical things most christians believe, never mind all. I don't think the narrative of the cold war had as much meaning for most of the areas where religion has been growing and that in fact the drivers behind the growth predate it

idiot US grad students on fb this morning blaming the brexit on neoliberalism. feel like if we lived in venezuela we'd be blaming our troubles on state-planned economies. maybe life is just hard no matter what economic or political system you live under, and though "suck it up buttercup, life could be much worse" isn't really a satisfying panacea to get ppl to vote the right way, it's really the only honest answer?

^this is why we need the humanities. (only half kidding)

what do you blame it on mordy

the boogie what else

@tinyrevolution
Can't believe the British didn't listen to the all the exact same people who brought them the Iraq war & the collapse of their economy

ppl lack the awareness + education to know how most people in the world, today and historically, have lived. contemporary western society has raised expectations significantly and so ppl who otherwise live historically extremely high standard of living lives get bitter when things are not utopian. moreover there's a huge degradation in trust in institutions and in general sittlichtkeit. families lack cohesiveness, communities are broken, ppl feel no sense of identification with anything larger than themselves. which is not to say that there are no problems w/ the modern capitalist lifestyle (which is itself responsible for a lot of the alienation being felt) but that it's not like there's a magic bullet out there. like it's not that there is a magic bullet but ppl are confused and think it's xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment instead of what it really is. there really isn't a magic bullet. there's no way to make life perfect. we can mitigate problems, and there are reforms to our system that would make a huge impact, but where is this other model that works much better than the model we have? how could it be that the western world is doing the best out of any other system in the world but is simultaneously irrevocably broken?

morbz you maybe don't see this but you have never made a post that contained any level of insight or anything interesting in it. everything you write is dumb and it is humiliating to you and to the rest of us who are humiliated watching you make a fool out of yourself. why don't you read a fucking book or two so you actually have something real to say that you didn't dream up in yr fevered consciousness.

3-VOL oRSON wELLES BIO IS NEXT, YOU TOXIN.

wow i'm sure that will teach you a lot about politics. but seriously, you sound like an idiot. get yrself an education.

"And I said unto him, be fruitful and multiply... but not in those words." - Woody Allen, 1964

look at the title of this thread. does it say "repost dumb tweets" or "quote woody allen" in the title? no? so then what the fuck are you even doing here?

if you put your cursed brain into a dog, it would walk backwards. buh-bye

There was a giant economic meltdown in 2008, and much of the world has still not recovered. It's not as if modern society is humming along, but people feel some weird kind of ennui. The world did actually, for realz, break.

seriously - i cannot believe that you post things like this -- Can't believe the British didn't listen to the all the exact same people who brought them the Iraq war & the collapse of their economy -- and think that you're adding anything. it is the lowest level of thinking a human being can do without just shutting their brain off during an episode of keeping up with the kardashians. it's just kneejerk reaffirmation of the same idea you already believe without any particular insight or novel idea. is it that your brain is so addled that you can't tell the difference between an original thought and the same idea you've expressed literally a thousand times in the last month alone? how could it be? do you not know what interesting thinking looks like? how could that be?

http://ih0.redbubble.net/image.51110193.6052/flat,800x800,075,f.jpg

you're a shitposter. it's not that there's anything necessarily wrong with your ideology (except that it's prepackaged adbusters bullshit), but that you have nothing interesting to say ever. it's telling that 90% of your posts are just copy-pastes from twitter.

like if i thought you had any sincere interest in becoming a better poster i'd suggest that you think before hitting the submit post button and ask yourself "am i adding anything new here or am i just saying the same thing i always say that everyone has heard before"? bc like maybe you think that the way the world works if you repeat yourself enough ppl are just impressed with your stamina. but actually the way it works is that after the 10th time of regurgitating the same talking point ppl just want to know when you're going to go away so they can start to have a real conversation without the peanut gallery piping up.