i love to watch peterson squirm…
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jey_CzIOfYE[/youtube]
marxists.org/archive/harman … /ch02.html
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.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqpYxD71hJU[/youtube]
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.
No ‘particular examples’ really in the debate.
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.
Figures.
I can only imagine them reacting to me. No fucking way I’d let them pull that “serious philosophy” crap at ILP.
After all, I’ve never allowed any of their ilk here to. 
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.
on abortion:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMQtQq5XcqU[/youtube]
on freewill:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwjD4hfrDsg[/youtube]
the biggs is an illusion; a realistic and workable position between material reductionism and emergentism:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fajfkO_X0l0[/youtube]
on the meaning of life:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-dYKGGE_dk[/youtube]
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srxDtefn740[/youtube]
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.
You can’t enjoy this hilarious piece (not as much, anyway) unless you’ve just finished listening to them go back and forth for seven hours.
random audio excerpts patched together: youtu.be/jJTnbSQ-xNQ
motorcycle diaries episode 3
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.
Holy historical materialists… I found the actual teacher and professor of logic that schooled Rosa Lichtenstein. This dude right here… and I found this out here.
So this guy was like the pai mei to her Uma Thurman, then. I mean you can tell the guy was the shit just by looking at em. Those eyes mean business when they hit the chalkboard, folks. It’s no mystery now why Rosa’s such a beast.
that’s right, ya’ll niggas felt the bern yesterday on CNN. first we gonna bring the landlords before a workers tribunal. half a paycheck on rent my ass. dis how we do it brooklyn style.
tell em, bern…
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-1GPBo6IyI[/youtube]
“I am a Marxist revolutionary socialist; Sanders is far too moderate for us. He just wants to run capitalism better than the Republicans and ‘moderate’ Democrats, not terminate it — like we do.” - Rosa Lichtenstein
I’m sorry, did she just say Bernie is far too moderate?
Holy shit. Bernie’s like a living card carrying geriatric red scare on the campaign trail, and she’s calling the guy too moderate.
Man this chick is not playing, y’all. Not playing at all.
Survival of the fittest; a meaningless tautology or a weaponized phrase in the hands of the bourgeois? You decide.
Shaleece, can you just…, please be quiet for a minute? please? thank you. okay it’s obvious you’ve done some research and certainly have a grasp on the environmental influences on intelligence purposely put into place by the capitalists to make you dumber than you already are… wait i didn’t mean it like that. let me start over. i’m trying to tell you the troof and that is very difficult to do, Shaleece. what you have to accept is that there is a definite genetic component to levels of intelligence, but here’s the good news. and listen up because this is important: it’s okay if you’re not a genius, Shaleece, because all that matters in our new meritocratic society is that you are a productive member of society and don’t let your hair touch anyone without their consent. see it’s only because black folks were too quickly integrated into western society and in the totally wrong context (capitalism) that all this mess is going down. naturally, you’re going to be a little upset about this and that’s understandable, but this kind of nonsense has got to stop. really. all that does is make conservative whitey dislike you even more, and the leftists who are trying to help you don’t find it particularly inspiring either. you’re just making the job more difficult with that silly shit.
so let’s recap. yes, environment plays a role in intelligence. you got that part right. but genes do too, and if you are a carrier of those genes, you cannot be a mozart or a godel or a john stuart mill. but Shaleece… you don’t have to be. especially not today when you’ve got things like google and self driving cars. all you gotta do is find your niche in the work force and do you thang… whatever that ends up being. maybe open a hair salon or something like that.
these clowns at fox can’t get anything right, can they? look at these two bashing bernie for being a millionaire. but wait… he makes his money from book sales and campaign contributions… not by paying 500,000 employees salaries and wages which are only a fraction of the value that their labor produces. the first thing parasites like this boch idiot need to understand is what capitalism is and how it distorts the meaning of the word ‘work’. until this fundamental and rather convenient misunderstanding is cleared up, these parasites won’t be able to comprehend why leftists are railing against them. but to understand is to admit, and to admit is to recognize your actual place and role in the chain of production… which is the most minor role in the actual production of value. and who would want to admit that? how embarrassing would that be? wouldn’t you rather be a guest on fox news where you’ve got an audience of ignorant american idiots who lap up anything you say? of course you would.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44-2VPSsQ7M[/youtube]
and look at the forehead on that bitch. what the hell is that about?