"Lenin used severe methods only in the most necessary cases, when the exploiting classes were still in existence and were vigorously opposing the revolution, when the struggle for survival was decidedly assuming the sharpest forms, even including a civil war.
Stalin, on the other hand, used extreme methods and mass repressions at a time when the revolution was already victorious, when the Soviet state was strengthened, when the exploiting classes were already liquidated, and Socialist relations were rooted solidly in all phases of national economy, when our party was politically consolidated and had strengthened itself both numerically and ideologically. It is clear that here Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality, and his abuse of power. Instead of proving his political correctness and mobilizing the masses, he often chose the path of repression and physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies, but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the party and the Soviet Government. Here we see no wisdom but only a demonstration of the brutal force which had once so alarmed V.I Lenin…" (Nikita Krushchev)
(hey I had a chance to get some funny shit on vid in the home depot but it didn’t work out. I’ll tell ya about it. I see opportunities for this kind of stuff all the time. I’m telling you… I shoulda been a producer for jackass)
the resident Nietzsche expert’s - professor milikowski - claim that N did not advocate a master/slave system of morality.
the irony contained in the concept of the oobermensch as it is contrasted against the opposite type which it, itself, is responsible for creating via the culture forming powers of the aristocratic elite who shaped society.
the modern reevaluating required of the ubermensch in order to give the concept any political significance in a world where capitalism, due to it’s late stage of existence, is no longer revolutionary or remarkable.
Remember that today’s leftisists with their oversensitivity and moral panic/outrage didn’t evolve in a void. Their neurosis is manufactured from within the diversifying cultural wastelands of capitalist/consumerist society.
s’what makes conservatism so powerful and insidious; it mutates, weakens and destroys any possible opposition. Look at millennial liberals and how soft they are.
s’why the Bolshevik millennials were nothing like this. They didn’t grow up in a shallow culture of consumerism.
Mm-hm. I suspected as much. Went and got himself pwned by Sam Harris in debate, then snuck off to get him some downers to deal with his new found existential crisis.
This Harman fellow’s got some good stuff. He’s another one of the ‘x made easy’ authors that writes with simple, clean accessibility. Even yo gram mama would be like ‘ohhh okay.’
i’ve watched four and a half hours of harris/peterson debate and can provide some navigational information about it. in the second debate of the series peterson began to rest on a single question he felt harris was failing to answer. harris, in turn, tried to answer - and in fact did in his own way, but i was dissappointed in how he did so. peterson wants to know how harris can ground his claim that there are recognizable differences between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘suffering’ and ‘bliss’, etc., in the facts alone… without appealing to what peterson wants to call a kind of ‘apriori intuition’ that gives us the capacity to value these things and be able to identify a difference between them. now harris should have simply appealed to evolutionary psychology/biology and argued that there needn’t be any allusion to kantain transcendentalism in order to substantiate the having and holding of values (in ethical terms); this capacity is both instinctual as well as socially learned. peterson insists that there is something else going on here in order for this to be possible. same thing craig does in his debates. it’s the card moral objectivists play against moral relativists who claim intersubjective agreement can be made about what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ without any recourse to some metaphysical foundation. peterson insists harris can’t do that without implying the existence of god. harris replies that, essentially (and in line with wittgenstein’s thought), we don’t need to know why we are able to draw values from indifferent facts in order to experience the utility of agreeing on them and making them meaningful. for harris, altruistic and normative ethics is ‘built in’ neurologically, not a capacity added to the animal by some metaphysical source.
what got peterson going on this stubborn questioning that he kept drilling harris with was harris’s apparant contradiction in his book ‘the moral landscape’ when he mentions moore’s ‘infinite regress of the good’… and then proceeds to claim there are obvious ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ despite the impossibility, via moore, of grounding any series of goods in a final good. this is why peterson insists that harris is actually admitting an apriori intuition of the moral good that allows him to conclude some things are clearly good or bad. for example, harris would say genocide is bad. peterson then asks ‘but that’s just a fact. how do you draw the value ‘bad’ from it?’ see what’s going on here? peterson isn’t satisfied with a biological explanation and tries to push harris into needing to believe in some kind of transcendental structuring of the moral intuition. and kant is largely to blame for this stuff.
harris’s main point is that while religious belief can be useful here (in the way that narratives and stories encourage human behavior), the same encouragement can be gotten from a rational approach that is completely free of religious dogma. science would provide the same useful stuff, but without all the negative baggage and collateral damage that religious dogma carries with it. then peterson comes back an says ‘but your allusion to science to answer the question of how moral intuition is possible, is also dogma.’ this goes back and forth for hours.
i’m in the third debate now. this one is a little meatier than the former two. finally harris is defending his position with more advanced epistemology. he didn’t go this distance in the last two.
Just out of curiosity did the debates ever focus in on conflicting goods that do not involve extreme situtations…like genocide.
Or that do involve extreme situations like aborting human babies in the womb but in which there is no where near a clear consensus that this is either right or wrong.
Instead, with abortion, there are millions who insist a woman must have the right to choose an abortion while millions more insist that the unborn have the right to life.
When it comes to extreme behaviors [like genocide or gang rape or torturing a child], sure, there is a part of me that can’t shake the possibility that these things may well be inherently wrong. But, given a No God world, how on earth would that be demonstrated? And what of the arguments of the sociopaths, who justify any behaviors if they sustain their own self-interest. Their own fulfilment and satisfaction.
In other words, to what extent are the debates here not just a serious of intellectual contraptions?
If they are embedded substantially out in the world of actual conflicted goods derived from dasein, sure, I will invest all those hours in exploring their points.
In that third one, on the subject of immigration, Peterson makes the worst analogy - and the lamest attempt to rationalize - I have ever heard in the history of public debate at 1:42:27.
calm your horses, biggs. harris ain’t no ‘philosopher’, and the fact that as a thinker he’s grounded in neuroscience and common-sense, is, for me - someone who has spent decades traversing ‘serious philosophy’ - a very great relief. ten years ago i would’ve thought ‘harris isn’t going deep enough’… but now after having gone to those depths myself and discovering there is nothing there, i am delighted to find someone like harris… and relieved to know harris is gaining popularity within contemporary philosophical circles because we need someone like him in there, bro. somebody’s got to cut through all the bullshit while at the same time leaving the spirit of intellectualism intact.
you’d probably find that there’s much in common between the two of you… and you’d be hard pressed to find another guy so willing to ‘explore’ and engage in open conversation about the problems we are faced with, but without all the pedantic pretense of the typical serious philosopher. the dude couldn’t be more down to earf, biggs.
hahaha… I’m almost done with part 4 of the Peterson/Harris debates, and I noticed something funny evolving throughout the series. There’s a slow intolerance and impatience for/with Peterson that’s slowly building over. The debates began with a feeling of congeniality, but over time Peterson becomes less and less credible in Harris’s eyes - despite Peterson’s genuine well mannered enthusiasm. Finally you notice Sam wanting to imply ‘enough is enough with the ubiquitous rambling’, although he wouldn’t say it.
Go to 1:42:00 in the 4th one to catch a glimpse of Harris’s exasperation at Peterson’s obscurity. Lol.
i did two takes because rarely am i satisfied with anything i say. my brain is always moving too fast for my mouth so the ideas push and shove to get out; result, impatient, incoherent rambling. my points remain solid… but my articulation of them leave much to be desired. i would be willing to take a ‘how to be an effective speaker’ class as long as you pay for it, not me. well because i already know the troof. and if you want me to be able to tell you the troof, you’re gonna have to pay for developing my skill to provide it to you. you’d pay a college professor, right? so what’s the difference. if you’re genuinely interested in the Troof, i’ll open a pay-pal account.
All of this prompts me to create a new thread. One that explores minds like Harris’s and Peterson’s discussing relationships that are clearly of interest to me.
