bbctol

The apotheosis of this would be Michael Craig-Martin's An Oak Tree,[1] which some consider nonsense and I think is superb. All's fair in art and so on! That said, in the case of Bourgeois I find a lot of her work powerful without explanation.

[1]https://offthewalls.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/an-oak-tree-mic...

"Nurse, bring the crash cart!" "Hang on, this guy's got a... some kind of weird tattoo?" "No time to worry about that, he's flatlining! Now start compressions, and break a few ribs if you have to!"

It's odd; I'm usually a big proponent of terror management theory, but I think this take applies it so clumsily it's made me more skeptical.

Left here, not unfathomable or particularly surprising. You don't need to go back to Clinton to find a Democratic president who expanded border security and cracked down harshly on illegal immigration; Obama did the same thing, despite all the rhetoric that the Democrats want open borders and lawlessness. What's weird is how negative a reaction things like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals got, seeing as it's just a milder form of H. W. Bush and Reagan's executive orders to prevent ICE from breaking up families in the 80s and 90s.

...the king said, just before the blade fell.

That's not a great summary of libertarian beliefs, and the exact opposite of Thiel's stated beliefs.

I mean I hate him because I read Zero to One and noticed his thoughts on monopoly are insane, but sure, you can assume people aren't doing independent thinking and research while in turn not doing independent thinking and research.

It's not literal, but it is basically a molasses cake baked into a pie topped with sugar, so yeah. Sweet.

What? The government sets budgets for the long term all the time, even leaving aside the fact that it's pretty able to predict its tax income for the next year.

Black Sails might be the closest to what you're looking for. While it's a Starz show, with the requisite amount of violence, sex, and general wackiness, it actually ended up a pretty complex political drama.

No one cares about Richard Spencer other than media figures who needed a dude in a suit to claim to be the leader of the alt-right. He's a random non-entity that was virtually unknown even in cryptofascist circles until liberals decided, for no good reason, to start paying attention to him.

...not suggesting this, but since you seem dissatisfied with the other options: direct action? If you're really concerned about uh, serving on the front of the liberation of earth.

Serious question: what far-left subreddits? Not trying for snark, I really don't know what the left equivalent of like... /r/DylannRoofInnocent would be on reddit.

Deepmind does a ton of work in meat neuroscience, and are actually publishing useful research in the field (a recent if somewhat controversial review at http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(17)30509-3) And they're about the most prominent deep learning group I can think of.

Yes and no. Neural nets are somewhat inspired by neurons, but it's a pretty loose relation, and the more NNs improve, the less similar to the brain they look. Individual neurons are much more complex than the nodes of a neural network, and even if research into NNs provides insight into the way the brain works, it may be that the analogues of NN nodes are clusters or regions of neurons, or something more mathematically abstract.

That link gives some context to the tension between postmodernism and relativism. A claim that postmodernism is based on the idea that "truth is relative" is a pretty severe overreach; even the most radical of influential postmodernists are going to be epistemic relativists, not truth relativists (even Derrida was baffled by accusations that he didn't believe in objective truth.)

It's because this is a moral panic from people who think they're immune to moral panics.

It's interesting how a modern system that lines up with evolutionary theories can either be framed as "the natural, healthy way we were meant to to do x" (if you're pushing a paleo diet) or "the pre-civilized, caveman way of doing y" (if you don't like Tinder.)

For the record, I think those sorts of evolutionary histories are usually poorly supported anyway, so there's a double layer of nonsense here; you can speculate a lot about how our prehistoric ancestors behaved, and then modulate whether or not your speculated behavior seems good or bad, so any argument can be justified in some direction with appeals to our evolutionary past.

I just... appreciate art, I guess? It's a beautiful book. The experience of reading it is unpleasant, but that's separate from aesthetic appreciation--I don't read books just to be taught lessons.

Yes! I might spend the rest of the day plugging The Unconsoled, which I think is one of those masterpieces that's doomed to forever be underrated because experiencing it is so unpleasant. It captures exactly what it feels like to have a long, stressful nightmare in a way that no other work of art has. Unfortunately, that means reading it feels exactly like having a long, stressful nightmare.

A lot of Ishiguro's works do this; I think The Unconsoled is a fantastic book, but it's so truly painful to read I understand why most people hate it. The Swedish Academy said he "in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world" which I think is a pretty good description of his style.

Fire self-replicates. It maintains its existence by consuming fuel and spreading itself. It's not as skilled at this as a human, but neither's a worm. What about an individual bacterium? Does it have a goal? Are they conscious in a way a humble virus is not?

Oh yeah, I mean I'm definitely plowing through the tail end of a manic phase here, and HN isn't the appropriate place. C'est la vie.

My goal is to make sure no one cares about what I (or another) has to say.

Yeah, that's the draft of the second thing, which is fun to read as repeated edits get more and more deranged while I slowly realize that each edit is making the case against publishing it in the first place. There's a link at the top of that to the Cliff's notes version of assorted quotes, will convince exactly 0 people and re-affirm the biases of 100% of readers, basically as it should, since it's not a good argument.

Well, on the one hand, thanks, on the other, that sensation of your emotions and thoughts crystallizing into clarity is usually a sign of an oversimplified worldview, sometimes being supplied by someone trying to manipulate you.

So... I've got a weird and evolving philosophy about those sorts of arguments in general, which is what led to me taking most versions down, and why I'm not really comfortable with spreading them any more either. (And why I feel bad about getting so mad over this, too.) I really do think that people on the Internet underestimate how much making a persuasive and well-sourced argument is about the skill of the arguer, rather than the ground truth. That's one of the reasons Breitbart and Bannon have been so successful, and why trying to combat that with persuasive and well-sourced arguments isn't really a good idea morally or practically.

My advice now if you're curious about what Bannon thinks or what Breitbart really does is: don't start from a position that they're bad, don't believe the media frenzy, don't follow the line of reasoning of people you agree with, definitely don't assume they're neo-Nazis or white nationalists, don't go out looking for arguments one way or another. You just have to start at neutral and spend a ton of time reading Breitbart, listening to his radio episodes, reading what former Breitbart workers have to say, getting savvy to how the community thinks, and, if you can stomach it, using the anonymity of the internet to ingratiate yourself to online fascists until they open up. That's how I did it, anyway. Not sure I can actually recommend it.

Basically, I think I really would rather people did their own research and came to conclusions I might disagree with than listen to my arguments and evidence. Which is the sort of frustrating thing to say that leads people who want to be told what to think to conclude that everything I believe is bullshit. Oh well. Back to taking a break from writing/getting mad on the internet.

Jesus, I just realize there's a whole generation of people on the internet who think the fact that no one will argue with them means they're right. Like, are you really going to go your whole life thinking that your worldviews are confirmed any time someone tires of you saying "postmodernism exists to promote marxism" and ignores you?

Anyway, funny story: after he was appointed Chief Strategist I wrote up a little thing explaining Bannon's white nationalism, with links to his writings, public statements, endless radio show, and quotes from people close to him from across the political spectrum, including not just liberals but libertarians, modern right-wingers, and traditional conservatives, who clearly understand that he's just another authoritarian who wants a racially and religiously homogeneous society. Because I've been paying attention to Bannon for years, ever since I decided to go and see what white nationalists actually thought, and got a bunch of alt accounts to hang out on fascist sites where they love what the guy's doing. Worked on it, edited it, expanded it out to a pointless book length, tried to make it as solid as I could. Shared it as wide as I could, tried as hard as I could to bring it up when someone (rightfully!) pointed out that most people criticizing Bannon just make fun of him for looking like a drunk or make casual and irrelevant Nazi references.

Didn't do a damn thing. Which I should have known, I mean I'd basically been aware that despite the claims of wannabe logicians, any high school debater knows that arguments don't really change minds, but hey, I was scared. But that sort of thing is never going to reach the right people, and it's never going to change the minds of people who ask for it.

Sorry for taking this all out on you, it's not really relevant, but like... christ. You think this is what being intellectually serious looks like. There's so many people out there vaguely mimicking logical processes like a cargo cult, but only ever asking to be spoon fed information. You're seriously going around asking people you disagree with for lists of sources, like you're trying to get a trophy and not actually understand the world. If you want a path to knowledge, challenge yourself, do your own research, try to find things that would disrupt your worldview, and stop taking shortcuts by trying to make other people make arguments for you to agree or disagree with. Actually live with the people you disagree with, rather than just studying them to recite lists of fallacies. The only people who will give you a worldview over the internet are propagandists.

Again, not really about you, exaggeration and all that, and this probably isn't the right place to vent, either. You're probably a fine person most of the time, but just please know that when people make bad arguments at you, it's not because we're stupid or wrong, it's because we've seen enough people doing your same song-and-dance to know that no amount of argument will convince you, time is limited and frustration is real, and there's a lot of work to be done in the real world.

Nah, Bannon's just a mixture of economic leftist and authoritarian nationalist that got pretty popular at the beginning of the last century, too. (It, uh, fell out of favor.) He wants to regulate tech companies because it would be good for the people, and he also wants to make sure that "the people" doesn't include too many non-whites. Don't dismiss his economic views just because his overall worldview is awful.

I thought this tweet was interesting: https://twitter.com/libbycwatson/status/857943302599053314 It sure looks like a political campaign, but maybe the more connected things get, the more political everything becomes, and the more everything turns into campaigning.