Holy fuck. Flesch-Kinkaid of 16.4. 3700 words. 8:1 self-reference. The last Ta Nahisi Coates was 7.4 and 1:1, the last David Brooks was 9.7 and 6:1. even Slate Star Codex doesn't break 13. How did any of you even make it through this miasma? "We can't ignore difficult subjects just because they're difficult." How fucking hard is this? But he goes on for three more fucking paragraphs! Who is this choad? Oh shit! he doesn't go on for three more paragraphs, that's literally all he has to say. With like one example. Who the fuck is Nick Land? I guess he's a sci fi writer who likes eugenics. What the fuck was the point of all this?On the other hand, any culture of absolute kindness becomes a conservative system of unspoken violence insofar as painful truths get repressed and all participants become deformed over time. It is because I genuinely love my friends on the left that I am stepping up to publicly state, and seriously pursue the implications of, dozens of difficult questions we have basically had an unspoken pact to not speak about for perhaps decades now.
Nick Land of the 90s did CCRU, which is what happens when a bunch of academics who like raves, mind-altering substances and philosophy realize they can combine them and call it working. They'd go on the shelf with Hakim Bey, Grant Morrisson and Peter Carroll except the barrier to entry was too high. Then he had some kind of mental health problem and vanished for a while. He came back to be the alt right philosopher who knew some philosophy. He's interesting because Nick Land of old psychoanalyzed capitalism and decided it had a death drive, and Nick Land of now either has exactly the same view of the future of capitalism he used to but decided it can't be changed so we might as well embrace it or he thinks capitalism is standing on the bridge and he's shouting "jump! jump!" but it's impossible to decide which. He's Schroedinger's radical. Or he was. I think the consensus now is he's either what he says he is or, as our own iammyownrushmore put it, he liked the joke too much to let it go and it just became his life. I think Justin Murphy just came to the party a day late and thinks he got stood up.
As always, your insights and expertise are appreciated. Also, CCRU is indistinguishable from timecube by the lay observer. What you're saying, to my read, is that people can't tell if he's cheering out of fatalism or trolling out of nihilism. Neither outcome seems to warrant 3500 words addressing the angst of whether he should be spoken to. For the record, I hated the fuck out of Aldo Leopold. Aldo Leopold, however, wrote in sentences parseable by rank-and-file humanity. This general readability also applies to Emerson, Thoreau, the Stoics or even, with qualification, Nietzsche (holy shit spelled it right on the 2nd try). Yet modern philosophy seems to be written in Fedspeak. Even discussion of modern philosophy is written in Fedspeak. Is there a reason for this other than to obscure an unclothed emperor?
Eh. Most philosophy isn't hard to read, it's just really dry. I give you 300 pages about whether shadows are things. The stuff that gets attention is hard to read because it borrows from philosophers writing in French and German who got translated awkwardly into English, and people who take their work and run with it in English tend to ape the style of awkwardly translated French and German because they've read reams of it and mostly talk to people who have read reams of it. You can pick up Plato cold and get a lot out of it, but no one can make sense of Plotinus without context. Because it was the Frankfurt school running away from nazis and the may 1968 protests happened in France, the people writing what looks like gibberish are the ones working on problems that everyone cares about, and the ones writing clearly are pondering whether shadows spin.
So is the issue that modern philosophy, as a trade, does not value clarity? Because I haven't managed to find an excerpt of "are shadows things" but the summmaries... ...are almost deliberately obtuse. Did philosophers stop caring whether or not they had an audience other than philosophers?An observer is viewing a double eclipse of the sun. Traveling east is the heavenly body Far. Traveling west and nearer to him is the smaller body Near. Near is close enough to exactly compensate for its smaller size with respect to shadow formation. Near and Far look the same size from his vantage point. When Near falls exactly under the shadow of Far, it is as if one of these heavenly bodies had disappeared. Does the observer see Near or Far? The chapter's thesis is that the causal theory of perception correctly favors Far.
I've always thought that that kind of speak is to make it look like their writing is really precise - if you state something in easy words, you're inviting others to attack you on semantics. "X is bad" "Well what do you mean by bad?..." "X is an atrocious display of awfulness" "Sure."
That's certainly a problem with Aldo Leopold.“When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver; he could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker; he could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.”