Aesthetic Materialism

    A good rule of thumb about leftist intellectuals: the more they use the word "dialectics," the less dialectical their thinking is. I'm thinking of the type of people with whom you might have the following conversation: You: This economic plan doesn't make sense, because of X, Y, and Z.  Them: Well, that's because you're failing to consider ~*dialectics*~. Think about how this sounds to a person who doesn't have the same worldview that you have.  In other words, think about how it sounds to a non-Marxist. It sounds a lot like how Christians sound, when they say things like, "This part of the Bible may not sound historically accurate, or it may sound like it contradicts other parts of the Bible, but what you have to keep in mind is that the Bible has a different epistemological and ontological meaning to the truly faithful.  So pledge yourself fully to this now, and afterwards it will make perfect sense."  Which in turn sounds a bit like Nancy ...

Language needs something outside of language in order to function in much the same way that a propeller cannot function without air.  Language needs something to push against.

Many stupid ideas take the form "There is nothing outside ____". ( For instance. ) I like to imagine a person sitting in a cabin in the woods.  They have two choices: they can think to themselves "There is nothing outside the cabin" - a stupid idea, an idea that makes you stupid.  Or, they can succumb to curiosity, reach out, turn the door knob, open the door, and look. One thing that makes ideas stupid is their capacity to capture a brain, to render it incapable of thinking certain thoughts.  We can thus measure the stupidity of ideas in at least two ways: (1) the scope and range of brain function that a stupid idea prevents you from having, and (2) the "grip," so to speak, that this idea has on your brain - that is to say, the degree of difficulty of removing this idea from your brain and liberating yourself from it.  Stupid ideas can be awfully clever.  Wittgenstein is a perfect example of a thinker that was capable of producing ingeniously clever stupi...

    Let's say candidate A and candidate B are running for office on a specific issue or policy.  Specifically, let's say candidate promises that if he is elected, he will make sure that X will happen, and candidate B, for her part, promises that if she is elected, she will make sure that X will not happen.  We could also assume that A comes from a political party that overwhelmingly supports X, and B comes from a political party that overwhelmingly opposes X.  Let's further assume that X is a popular thing that lots of citizens want.  Indeed, it is so popular, and people so fully believe that A is committed to X that it makes a decisive difference on the results of the election, and indeed A wins, and is duly sworn into office.  Generally, at this point, we tend to say that candidate A - or rather, elected official A - has a political "mandate" to do X. Now that the people have voted in A to do X, is X more likely to happen, or less likely?  Let's...

Can I choose to believe what I want to believe? You shout at me: "2+2=5!" You hold up 2 fingers in front of my face, and then you raise 2 more.  You're now holding up 4 fingers. You shout at me: "I'm holding up 5 fingers! Say it! Say it!" Now, I can say , "2+2=5."  But can I believe it? I can say: "You're holding up 5 fingers."  But can I really believe it? It's not up to you to decide what I believe. Is it up to me? Can I decide what I believe? Let's say I really want to agree with you.  Is that the same thing as agreeing with you? As I already said, I can say, "2+2=5".  Can I believe it? I can even say, "I believe that 2+2=5."   I can even say, "I believe that 'I believe that 2+2=5.'" Or, "I believe that 'I believe that 'I believe that 2+2=5.''" I can also say, "2+2=5 is true." Or "'2+2=5 is true' is true." Or "''2+2=5...

[posted on facebook as an answer to a question, 5/21/24 - the person was essentially asking, is there anything worthwhile in Lacan? Or is it a waste of time to read his work?] There's a lot of worthless crap in Lacan (and the Lacanians). I think his stuff is most interesting the further away he gets from Freud. (He's more of a poet, or a priest, or an entertainer, than a scientist. But that applies to Freud, too.)    But anyway, here's a few things that I thought were worth thinking about, all of them so brutally simplified as to be wildly inaccurate (I'm sure Lacanians would hate this):   1. The difference between "aim" and "goal". As Lacan sees it, the aim of the drive is not to achieve the goal, but rather to perpetuate itself as drive. You don't really want to solve your problems, you want to maintain your problems. (i.e., maintain your desire, maintain your longing, maintain your sense of incompleteness.)   2. Lacan doesn...

Quite often, when people are humble, it's just a form of contrariness - under which, one can unmistakably recognize the ego.