But is there basis to what You implied, Peter that perhaps he has no ability to do that, not on terms of being able , but in a sense similar to one wit’s opinion , that we are past the point of ‘kicking Trump out of office’ ( In Lambigious’s own nomenclature)?
Is there something puzzling to say that philosophical process It’s self have afforded overcoming as a way out of existential pathos, not only in the literal sense as Nietzsche coined it. but , in the sense of how fractures in metaphysical development in the most basic forms , from its enlightenment beginnings , from pointillism through pointing -as its post modern counterpart &/or the point of demarcation from Husserl-Heidegger- through Sartre and beyond might be inaccessible to Lambig as a way reconciling them? Even if such a reconstruction was possible, without the bad idea of a flat out statement , like One can not return home again among the multitude?
Or is it that Lambig’s fate fatale parallels the vainglory attempt to come to terms of what is happening to what some terms as almost cataclysmic events?
Are there not any 2 connections which could shadow each other nowadays?
Fatalists and nihilism make odd but necessary bedfellows?
I find that a repulsive attitude after almost 100 years of existentialism.
Despite our recent rather protracted exchange on your thread, your reaction here merely exposes [to me] how, in discussions of this sort, points of view often go in one ear and come out the other.
From my frame of mind, it’s not about being outraged by Trump’s policies, but the extent to which you manage to think yourself into believing that being ouraged is the moral and political obligation of all rational [and decent] human beings.
I once embedded my own outrage at conservatives in that sort of psychological contraption. And it felt great. They were simply wrong to think about immigration or abortion or gun control or animal rights or the role of government as they did. Why? Because we were simply right.
One of us…one of them.
All that is embedded in the “is/ought” world becomes but one more component of the “either/or” world. It was just a matter of choosing a partiular font: religion, reason, ideology, deontology, nature.
Hell, even if we lost a particular battle back then, we could always suckle on the comfort and the consolation embedded in the fact that we were either destined to win the war, or, even if we lost that too, we deserved to win it.
In other words, on our exchange from your thread, you seemed to pay lip-service to the idea that “for all practical purposes”, we’re right from our side and they’re right from their side.
But when push comes to shove you seem to have much more invested in heaping scorn on those who don’t share your own value judgments. Just as they have much invested in heaping scorn on you.
And, sure, given the enormity of the human pain and suffering that can result from policies we don’t agree with, that’s all perfectly understandable.
I simply don’t have access to it the way I once did myself.
I’m still down in this hole [here and now] in a way that you are not. And the irony here – well, one of them – is that it was through philosophy itself that I came to think as I do. Moral nihilism [in a No God world] seems to be an entirely reasonable way in which to construe the existential juncture that embodies identity, value judgments and political economy.
I agree, I don’t identify as conservative, nor liberal, it’s just liberals are more likely to criticize conservatives for being a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists than inversely, so I’m merely point out that, liberals do it too, whenever it’s convenient.
Here the focus tends to be on Putin the narcissistic authoritarian appealing to Trump the narcissistic authoritarian. The two just, well, bonded. Only, unlike George W., they weren’t at all interested in getting the measure of each other’s “soul”.
The most probable was hinted at recently as one which implicates both The Republican Party and Trump’s own predeliction toward setting an agenda to an undefined platform.
It is , as if , the large scale foreign policy issues , have been held at bay for a long time now, creating a specter, similar to what the pre WW2 planners had in mind, with the old apologists, when cementing Chamberlain’s ‘Peace in Our Time’, still reverberating, whistling through the darkness of Wilson type neutral separatism, the exaggerated context of a personal grayish area.
Much of this is well understood , yet the risk is there that the lessons were not well learned.
It is quite possible that the only collusion will consist of a vast symbolic conflict over the Wall, within which ramifications of over the top searches for wider meaning: as , using
separatism to cover all manner of social conflict as springboards to political assessment and action , may be eventually settled , as a norm.
That is , the Wall, signifies an absolute measure , by which all else will be measured.
Once that is funded, most every thing may fall into place.
The grey area will understandably be resolved by black and white necessity.
It would be very surprising for Mueller to come out with a direct finding for obstruction of justice, for the same reason , that it might too severely estop the too far gone Republican Agenda. But an impeachment show ing a lackluster and borderlinely cooperative President with a pre-existing Russian maleformed cyberplan, (with 2 more years of extended litigated window to knock the wind out of sentiment )is a possibility.
“Donald Trump never thought he was going to be president,” the Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien, who wrote TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, told me. “He began this thing as a marketing venture, and I don’t think the people around him thought he was going to win, either. They all jointly saw this thing as a big food fest.”
It’s plausible I suppose. Trump just bumbled and stumbled into this mess by accidently winning the election.
Had the Democrats ended up with anyone but Clinton, s/he would almost certainly have beaten Trump.
I need to remind you that my reaction to Trump is an existential contraption rooted in a particular set of political prejudices rooted in dasein.
And that is problematic down to the bone.
You’re the one [I suspect] who actually imagines that your own take on him reflects, what, the politically correct mantra of the self-righteous objectivist?
Besides, this thread revolves mostly around figuring out how Putin has him by the balls.
It’s lovely how people who would have once dismissed anything that could be called a conspiracy theory, now happily justify conspiracy theories based on rumors at Russian parties. My saying this comes not for any love for Trump, who has always - since long before Presidential interests appeared in him - struck me as a narcissist and potentially psychotic. I just find it ironic how people who would have made fun of conspiracy theorists, appear with ‘evidence’ matching the lowest common level of flat earthers. And they haven’t even noticed this change in themselves.
Lighten the fuck up, man. I’m just following Rachel Maddow’s lead on this one. And she’s a self-confessed “prude”.
The only conspiracy here is the one between the life I’ve lived and the existential contraption that is “I” in my reaction to Trump.
I want to see the son of a bitch squirm. But no more so than some folks here want to see me squirm. I just recognize that this reaction is not rooted essentially in any wholly rational rendition of justice. But [alas] only existentially in the political prejudices that “I” have myself become predisposed to wallow in here and now.
How then does “pragmatism” work for you in this regard? Is your own reaction to Trump predicated on a considerably more solid sense of self here?
But then that’s what I keep harping about in regard to your own incessant attempts to come after me here. Your motivation is no less an existential contraption from my point of view.
I can live with you thinking my reactions to you are similar to your reactions to Trump, whatever vocabulary you want to put on that. I am radically less concerned about the effects of your behavior, however, I would guess, than you are of his.
I keep learning from ya. I can only hope for your sake you are learning from Trump.
That you can live with it isn’t what interest me here. What intriques me about folks of your ilk is how folks of my ilk are unable to react to a No God world that is presumed to be bereft of objective morality without being down in the hole that “I” am in, “fractured and fragmented”.
Once I was able to react to Trump [piss or no piss tape] as I imagine folks like Peter Kropotkin and Rachel Maddow still do: more or less objectively.
For them, Trump genuinely embodies all that make the world we live in such a terrible place. And once the right Democrat/liberal with the right moral and political values takes his place, the world will become a significantly better place to live.
Necessarily as it were.
I don’t think like that anymore. I’m not able to. Instead, I have come to presume that my own value judgments are basically just an existential fabrication rooted in the manner in which “I” construe the meaning of dasein.
So, I become a liberal pragmatist because it is the only actual option open to me. But then I think this: that the conservative pragmatists are in the same boat. Neither of us are able to go beyond the assumption that, liberal or conservative, “I” here is just an existential contraption rooted in the lives that we lived.
There does not appear to be a way in which to know [philosophically or otherwise] how one ought to live.
And that’s before both the liberal and the conservative pragmatists are forced to confront the moral nihilists who own and operate the global economy. They are far, far, far less concerned with “the right thing to do” and focus far, far, far more on that which sustains their own perceived self-interests.
Yes, I believe you. Though oddly I will continue to focus on things that interest me. You can always ignore me if this is too unpleasant.
I know. It bothers you. I am not sure if you have ever considered some of the various explanations I have had for this. Could be as simple as genetic differences. Different animals will exhibit different reactions to traumatic experiences. People are different. For all sorts of reasons, some related to dasein. Some related to built in temperment.
Oh, look, a pragmatist, perhaps not just like me, but to this extent.
Perhaps being a liberal pragmatist is as close as you will get. I wish I could fly. I wish I’d won the lotto. I don’t spend much time bemoaning those things, though their were periods when I was younger I might have bemoaned the latter.
I would say I am doing the same thing, pursuing my own perceived interests. My sense is I have more empathy than those two people, however. And while I certainly prefer people who also have empathy, I do get worried by people who think they make their choices out of nobility and goodness. Some of them cause me and what I love no problems - though I am not sure about their families and themselves - but many others I see as rather a threat.
and then I forgot to react to this…
in your view all choices, behavior, attitudes, are existential contraptions. So my ‘coming after you’, as you frame it, would of course bee an existential contraption to you. Calling it that, adds no information, it does not distinguish it from any other behavior, or any other attitude anyone has every had in the history of the world, in your system. So it’s a strange thing to say.
I could see saying this to me if I said ‘I am actively critical of your posts because it is my duty’ or ‘…it’s a noble action’ or for the good of the world or whatever. But I don’t say such things.
It would be like me saying to you ‘But then that’s what I keep harping about in regard to your own incessant posting in ILP. Your posting is no less a behavior from my point of view.’
Huh? That doesn’t distinguish it from any other human action. Perhaps you were just trying to trigger me.
One interesting thing is you don’t bother me anymore. What I have asserted were patterns of your communication behavior still exist and continue, but they no longer bother me. I still find the blind spots fascinating however. And as along as their is development in my reaction and as long as I am learning from the interaction, I will likely continue.
I think this shift has happened for a number of reasons: I see the same pattern so clearly when you interact with others - how you treat their posts, even in threads not yours, as wrong on the criterion they do not solve your hole issue, how you refuse to justify your own points, and then of course the wall of repetition of your position as if it is a response to their posts when it often is not at all. when I am in the middle of a frustrating dialogue with someone, despite how I may come across, I wonder if the problem has to do with my failure to communicate clearly. Seeing it happen again and again with others and them also making the same points about your behavior, shifted something. Then also having dealt with similar kinds of narcissism in face to face life in recent time and confronting it irl, that also gave me perspective.
So sure, frame it as ‘coming after you’. I can absolutely understand how you would experience it that way. For me I experience it as probing again and again to see if you can actually acknowledge the things you are doing and/or develop yourself. And then to see what methods you use to act as if you have responded. I have no expectation that you will even consider what I write, but watching the activity invovled in your making sure you do not acknowledge anything mirrors things people do in face to face life.
And that is very useful. On some level I did not believe people would go to such lengths to hide things from themselves. I should know better, and I should know all the mechanisms, but, no, I am still learning.