IMO this is almost a bizarro #lolbrooks.
At the same time, it succeeds wonderfully in elucidating just how fucked the left is, and why they are, not only in the points that Murphy makes, but in the "care" in which he makes them.
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.”
I had no idea about #lolbrooks. I had a discussion-based class in undergrad that featured his articles heavily, and I hated it. If you want a classroom split into (pretty evenly) disengaged and enraged students, make them read David Brooks and talk about it together for a grade. I asked this question in Pubski last week: "To what extent is it our individual civic duty to try to reconcile with political opposition?" What Murphy doesn't touch on (yet?, I haven't finished) is that engaging in these racist frames is not only "vertiginous", it can be truly sickening. My wife is black; I'm white. It didn't occur in the conversation I referenced in the link above, but my interracial marriage has been leveraged against me in my conversations with far-Right aligned mavens. It's disorienting enough to listen to someone parrot "gorilla arms" insults about Michelle Obama, but I will not tolerate it about my wife. Yes. In some cases, you let them figure it out on their own. If that means they die in a cesspool of their own making, it wasn't for my lack of trying to get them out of it. They're not entitled to my conversation or my viewpoint.All I am saying is that to draw this line of militant non-engagement at the level of “thinking and speaking with a racist frame” would require us to tell millions of people to go die in the cesspool they were born into
My wife is Chinese (I'm white), which is more excusable in those racist frames. Personally, I feel no need to educate people with racist views, or to decide whether or not their condition was one of circumstance, or whether or not that question even makes sense because every condition is one of circumstance. However, what perplexes me, is that Murphy is carefully revealing common sense as enlightenment. The lamentable situation is that the left has their heads so far up their own asses that the even the contemplation of examining opposing ideology is considered to be bravery. Not only is shunning people that are 'wrong' self-defeating and hypocritical, we just aren't that fragile to begin with. When circumstances and motivation allow for reflection and engagement, then yeah, we should reflect upon and engage other points of view. It's not novel, and the benefits of doing so are pretty well understood.
Ahh. I wasn't sure what made this a bizarro #lolbrooks until you pointed out the mundanity of simply engaging those with differing viewpoints. It's sad that it's considered brave, but it's true. I'd ask your thoughts on what one of the commenters on Murphy's site said in response to this piece: I'd nominate Charles Murray as such a person. In The Bell Curve, he laid out a theory of how the world works: That cognitive skills increasingly determine whether a person can find a remunerative career, and that the potential to develop such skills varies widely at birth, consigning those without such gifts to become part of a permanent underclass. As a caring solution, he recommended a universal basic income. Given what's happened to him since, it's hard to argue that he didn't genuinely risk himself on solving the problem.> In my view, this tradeoff between being correct about how the world works and caring for each other enough that we can cooperatively change it in the direction of peace and abundance for all—this is perhaps the most vexing and urgent puzzle for a genuine revolutionary left today. Yet remarkably I am not aware of a single person genuinely risking themselves on solving it...
Charles Murray is a racist shithead. By engaging the "intellectual" through a frame of "research" you ignore the remarkable curve-fitting performed by Murray - if your core argument is that people fail because they're inferior, the rest of us do not benefit from acting as if you've contributed to the conversation. Unfortunately, most of these discussions are basically finches squawking at each other. If you can't say what you're trying to say in such a way that your waitress understands you, you have nothing to say.
Except it's not, at least in the specific way he means. Nick Land has gotten a lot of attention from the left, or at least accelerationists on the left. Moldbug less so, because blowhard bloggers aren't very interesting, but Nick Land wasn't a complete nutjob in the 90s so he got plenty of attempts at charitable reading when he came back all yay corporate feudalism.It's sad that it's considered brave, but it's true.
I haven't read The Bell Curve. It sounds a bit irresponsible if what I've read of it is true. IMO the failure of the left has much to do with navel gazing debates around the paradox of respecting differences and not wanting anyone to be treated differently. Just like the critiques of The Bell Curve point out, why you are doing it matters most. If a white guy in a group of black people dropped his keys before leaving, should you mention his skin tone in describing him? Yes, you should. It's idiotic to build a world so fragile. Now if you are sussing out why someone scored highest on the chem exam, then what the hell are trying to do? Murphy's comrades need such assurances of care because they, not so unlike Murray, are constructing differences, for ostensibly* different reasons, but to a similar effect. Their observance (creations really) of sacred differences are paralyzing and patronizing. *Yeah, ostensibly. I'm not convinced base tribalism doesn't underpin most of the motivations (comrades?).
It seems that by distinguishing 'smart people on the right' from just any right-leaning person, Murphy may have been precluding discussions with patently offensive persons who are only interested in the verbal equivalent of assault. That said, I'm sympathetic with your Pubski post. I've had my faith in humanity tested by some truly gruesome assholes after only a fraction of the time you spent engaged with one. It's hard not to be discouraged.What Murphy doesn't touch on (yet?, I haven't finished) is that engaging in these racist frames is not only "vertiginous", it can be truly sickening.
Really? To be caring means to not tell someone about their flaws? I thought it was more about paying attention, listening, and looking at positives in lieu of the mistakes a person makes?I am keenly suspicious of the politics of high-IQ subcultures, precisely because I know there is a trade-off between being correct and caring. Because we care about each other, there are certain things we refuse to see or else refuse to tell each other about what is really true. That’s fine, and perhaps a hard constraint of the types of beings we are on the radical left. But “smart” far-right people, who do not give a fuck about how people feel, they might just be the only ones capable of telling us those truths we need to process if we are ever going to have a sufficent command on reality to generate the systemic transformations we believe in-
That's such a ridiculous position, because it assumes that people on the right don't care about how others feel. Some of the most charitable people I've ever known are also some of the most conservative. This guy thinks he has some sort of magic power to talk to conservatives, while also assuming that he's talking to people who inherently view the world through a racist, self-centered lens like characters straight out of Ayn Rand. Good luck, dude. You should stay put in your "radical leftist" safety zone.
I think you omitted the markup text to format your first paragraph as a quote.