Re: You know you are a Philistine when...
Posted: Sat Nov 09, 2019 11:32 pm
All of the below from a Sanders fanatic who are now in full bloom- recycled hope/change 2020:
The anti-Sanders cult is an ideology. "Ideologies are patterned clusters of normatively imbued ideas and concepts, including particular representations of power relations. These conceptual maps help people navigate the complexity of their political universe and carry claims to social truth" (James, Paul; Steger, Manfred [2010]. Globalization and Culture, Vol. 4: Ideologies of Globalism).
These anti-Sanders ideologues are certain that their assumptions are based on "reality" and "the truth", when the facts of the matter are -- for all intents and purposes -- politics is at least half (and probably more) based on entirely subjective choices.
That goes for us who are campaigning for Bernie Sanders also. What's "objective" or provable or evidence-based or concrete about confidence, trust, loyalty, empathy, compassion, making a long-term effort to give love rather than just receive it?
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” ― Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Take a good hard look at the actual people behind the anti-Sanders commentary. Are ANY of them guided by great feelings of love for the working class? I get that feeling from Bernie. Do I have "evidence" or "proof" that Sanders has compassion for those without access to health care and those working for 7$ an hr? No. But I feel it. That's enough for me. If it's not enough for the anti-Sanders crowd, let them bark as they eat dust.
“The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.” ~ an old Arabic proverb
=========
Extinction Rebellion could evolve into a full-scale revolt.
=========
For the record, I don't believe that you are an acclerationist, a racist, a right libertarian, a xenophobe, an incel, a homophobe, a transphobe, an anti-Semite, an Islamaphobe, a cisphobe, a misogynist and a misandrist.
You're simply a human being with desires and interests and individual character traits which evolve resulting in different outward and cognitive behavior compared to when we were in our 20's and 40's.
Do you have a group identity? I don't know. I cannot recall us ever discussing it.
=========
I'm not going to condemn the Democratic party as some monolithic entity, but I'm not going to defend the party either.
There are a handful of pols & writers & political commentators I admire who see the Dems as the lesser of two evils and who suggest strategic lesser evil voting.
I'm not going to condemn the members of Congress who are also of the Democratic Socialists of America just because they have a "D" after their name.
Neither will I condemn Sanders for running as a Democrat.
If that attitude earns me condemnation from progressive leftists, I can live with that condemnation.
I look forward to the day when progressive leftists can point to their/our "changing the world or the country for the better" achievements.
===========
Actually I consider Sanders' support of HRC a political gaffe.
You consider it "treason".
I consider you and HRC two peas in a pod when I compare your "deluded sheeple" comment with her "basketful of deplorables" comment.
Both of you are elitists.
Both of you are bourgeois.
Both of you are reactionary.
"That's what blind tribalism, selective morality, and cognitive dissonance are all about." Yep. Too bad you cannot recognize it in yourself. Bourgeois elitist reactionaries look down on the masses.
============
The article is how the corporate media is marginalizing Sanders. This is the same media who gives millions of dollars worth of exposure to the most reactionary segments of the bourgeoisie.
You and your anti-Sanders cultish ilk are also intent on marginalizing Sanders.
Thanks for your transparency.
It's good to know that your advocacy for the working class is merely vacuous rhetoric.
===========
I otoh don't find it "hilarious" how similar calling one's fellows "a basketful of deplorables" and "deluded sheeple" is. Sanders merely supported HRC's presidential bid, fulfilling a campaign promise. You behave like HRC, i.e. pious guilt mongering.
As per Nietzsche
The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the Vampire Castle has recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way. Now, here it is …
The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups – the more ‘marginal’ the better – into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering – those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.
Mark Fisher, "Exiting the Vampire Castle"
When leftists begin utilizing "all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented", that's when my commitment to ally myself with "the Genuine Left"™ is annihilated. I suspect it's the same with young people who are becoming aware of socialism due to the Sanders movement and who read rhetorical rants by "the Genuine Left"™ against Sanders, i.e. how he's a "traitor" against the working class.
You may utilize the troll's prerogative and have the last word. Internet trolls are everyday sadists.
"Some find it hard to reconcile sadism with the concept of 'normal' psychological functioning, but our findings show that sadistic tendencies among otherwise well-adjusted people must be acknowledged," says Buckels. "These people aren't necessarily serial killers or sexual deviants but they gain some emotional benefit in causing or simply observing others' suffering."
https://www.health24.com/Me...
I suspect that you anticipate with relish the suffering & resignation of Sanders supporters.
"'Resignation' is the driving force behind worker's lack of militancy during periods of capitalist dominance." ~ Vivek Chibber, "Consent, Coercion and Resignation: The Sources of Stability in Capitalism"
==========
You're carrying water for the anti-Sanders corporate media and the most reactionary segments of the bourgeoisie and the owners but -- because you see probably yourself as a member of the elitist leftist intelligentsia -- you're probably totally unaware of who you're carrying water for. That's false consciousness for ya.
As I told Maxwell, I've outgrown you and the anti-Sanders cult.
If I was like another member of your cult, I'd block you. But I'll leave you & your ilk to what you do best: specialize in -- along with the Alex Jones cult -- guilt-tripping, shaming, execrating, finding fault with the "sheeple".
Maybe you're aware/conscious enough to recognize how Nietzschean the term "sheeple" is.
“Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.” ― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
==========
Can there be both a vertical paradigm and a horizontal paradigm?
============
When someone like Maxwell claims to be a hard-core realist, it raises a red flag, i.e. I become aware of my bullshit detector flashing. It's too much like someone claiming that s/he's in possession of the Truth with an emphasis on the capital "T" or when someone is in harmony with "the Real" (i.e. "the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language" [Jacques Lacan]). It's like a hard-core materialist getting mystical.
I don't really know what "idealism" even means to hard-core materialists like Maxwell. Materialists use the word "idealist" like some sort of epithet, some sort of proof that the "idealist" is unworthy and ought to be shamed. Why? What's essentially wrong with ideals, ethical values, the cardinal virtues? Without these, don't we become monsters? "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster" (Friedrich W. Nietzsche). Besides, it sure seems to me that being BOTH reasonable AND pragmatic allows for some sort of conflict resolution between what's realistically practical and what's idealistically non-negotiable. After all "the law of the unity and conflict of opposites" must allow interplay between however materialists interpret "the Real" and whatever non-economic ethical values (as an example of "a [Platonic] Ideal") actually ARE behaviorally.
Is Max acting outside of goodwill and fellowship?
Yes. By covertly disparaging all members of the proletariat who are supporting the Sanders movement -- by insinuating that they're all enamored with and following a sparkle pony -- Maxwell has abandoned goodwill and fellowship. I stand by that judgement. If I'm wrong, I'll gladly suffer the consequences. May all the followers of Maxwell excommunicate me.
Are you thinking that Max is ill-willed? Against 'fellowship"?
One of the more insightful things I've recently read from a psychotherapist is that "everyone has an agenda." Whatever Max's agenda is, I don't trust it. It leaves a bad taste. It's malodorous. I simply get the feeling that there's something off with his agenda -- off the rails, "off" as in butter that's going rancid or milk that's going sour. I cannot put my finger on it, but after reading Mark Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" and reading about Marxist accelerationists, agents of chaos, emotional vampires and everyday sadists -- like how these anti-Sanders cultists seem as if they can hardly wait for Sanders to lose the nomination because of their implacable hatred for all people associated with the Dem party so that they can glory in the grief of yet another setback for the commoners -- I was like "I don't want to be a part of this anymore." I don't want to turn into a Maxwell or an ARIC or a V4Vendeta or a Bassy Kims of Yesteryear or anyone who upvotes (what I see as) despising people who are about as far removed from the agenda of the ruling class as possible. The "despisers" seem to see ordinary people as the enemy. I cannot countenance that.
How is "Realism -- unalloyed with imagination, idealism, goodwill and fellowship -- is depressive" an insightful quote? I guess it's the difference between materialistic/naturalistic realism and the sublime/the mystical. I guess it's about the "fanatical atheist's" (Einstein) rejection of everything outside of sense-experience.
"Reality, says Rudolf Christoph Eucken, is an independent spiritual world, unconditioned by the apparent world of sense. To know it and to live in it is man's true destiny. His point of contact with it is personality: the inward fount of his being: his heart, not his head. Man is real, and in the deepest sense alive, in virtue of this free personal life-principle within him; but he is bound and blinded by the ties set up between his surface-intelligence and the sense-world. The struggle for reality must be a struggle on man's part to transcend the sense-world, escape its bondage. He must renounce it, and be 're-born' to a higher level of consciousness; shifting his centre of interest from the natural to the spiritual plane. According to the thoroughness with which he does this, will be the amount of real life he enjoys. The initial break with the 'world,' the refusal to spend one's life communing with one's own cinematograph picture, is essential if the freedom of the infinite is to be attained. We are amphibious creatures: our life moves upon two levels at once—the natural and the spiritual. The key to the puzzle of man lies in the fact that he is "the meeting point of various stages of Reality." All his difficulties and triumphs are grounded in this. The whole question for him is, which world shall be central for him—the Real, vital, all-embracing life we call spirit, or the lower life of sense? Shall 'Existence,' the superficial obvious thing, or 'Substance,' the underlying verity, be his home? Shall he remain the slave of the senses with their habits and customs, or rise to a plane of consciousness, of heroic endeavour, in which—participating in the life of spirit—he knows reality because he is real?" (Evelyn Underhill (1911), Mysticism, p. 40)
I guess I was trying to run away from "spiritual warfare", but now I'm being drawn back in.
===========
Maxwell has turned into a parody of leftism/Marxism.
He's rather be an obstructionist than organize.
He and his ilk are cynics, not dialectical materialists.
“Scratch the surface of any cynic, and you will find a wounded idealist underneath. Because of previous pain or disappointment, cynics make their conclusions about life before the questions have even been asked. This means that beyond just seeing what is wrong with the world, cynics lack the courage to do something about it. The dynamic beneath cynicism is a fear of accepting responsibility.” ― John Ortberg
Max calls himself a hardcore realist. So what? "Realism, unalloyed with imagination, idealism, goodwill and fellowship, is externalized depression, or as my high school English teacher observed of my poor usage (and of my typical effect on fellow classmates): depressive."
=========
The anti-Sanders cult is an ideology. "Ideologies are patterned clusters of normatively imbued ideas and concepts, including particular representations of power relations. These conceptual maps help people navigate the complexity of their political universe and carry claims to social truth" (James, Paul; Steger, Manfred [2010]. Globalization and Culture, Vol. 4: Ideologies of Globalism).
These anti-Sanders ideologues are certain that their assumptions are based on "reality" and "the truth", when the facts of the matter are -- for all intents and purposes -- politics is at least half (and probably more) based on entirely subjective choices.
That goes for us who are campaigning for Bernie Sanders also. What's "objective" or provable or evidence-based or concrete about confidence, trust, loyalty, empathy, compassion, making a long-term effort to give love rather than just receive it?
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” ― Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Take a good hard look at the actual people behind the anti-Sanders commentary. Are ANY of them guided by great feelings of love for the working class? I get that feeling from Bernie. Do I have "evidence" or "proof" that Sanders has compassion for those without access to health care and those working for 7$ an hr? No. But I feel it. That's enough for me. If it's not enough for the anti-Sanders crowd, let them bark as they eat dust.
“The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.” ~ an old Arabic proverb
=========
Extinction Rebellion could evolve into a full-scale revolt.
=========
For the record, I don't believe that you are an acclerationist, a racist, a right libertarian, a xenophobe, an incel, a homophobe, a transphobe, an anti-Semite, an Islamaphobe, a cisphobe, a misogynist and a misandrist.
You're simply a human being with desires and interests and individual character traits which evolve resulting in different outward and cognitive behavior compared to when we were in our 20's and 40's.
Do you have a group identity? I don't know. I cannot recall us ever discussing it.
=========
I'm not going to condemn the Democratic party as some monolithic entity, but I'm not going to defend the party either.
There are a handful of pols & writers & political commentators I admire who see the Dems as the lesser of two evils and who suggest strategic lesser evil voting.
I'm not going to condemn the members of Congress who are also of the Democratic Socialists of America just because they have a "D" after their name.
Neither will I condemn Sanders for running as a Democrat.
If that attitude earns me condemnation from progressive leftists, I can live with that condemnation.
I look forward to the day when progressive leftists can point to their/our "changing the world or the country for the better" achievements.
===========
Actually I consider Sanders' support of HRC a political gaffe.
You consider it "treason".
I consider you and HRC two peas in a pod when I compare your "deluded sheeple" comment with her "basketful of deplorables" comment.
Both of you are elitists.
Both of you are bourgeois.
Both of you are reactionary.
"That's what blind tribalism, selective morality, and cognitive dissonance are all about." Yep. Too bad you cannot recognize it in yourself. Bourgeois elitist reactionaries look down on the masses.
============
The article is how the corporate media is marginalizing Sanders. This is the same media who gives millions of dollars worth of exposure to the most reactionary segments of the bourgeoisie.
You and your anti-Sanders cultish ilk are also intent on marginalizing Sanders.
Thanks for your transparency.
It's good to know that your advocacy for the working class is merely vacuous rhetoric.
===========
I otoh don't find it "hilarious" how similar calling one's fellows "a basketful of deplorables" and "deluded sheeple" is. Sanders merely supported HRC's presidential bid, fulfilling a campaign promise. You behave like HRC, i.e. pious guilt mongering.
As per Nietzsche
The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the Vampire Castle has recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way. Now, here it is …
The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups – the more ‘marginal’ the better – into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering – those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.
Mark Fisher, "Exiting the Vampire Castle"
When leftists begin utilizing "all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented", that's when my commitment to ally myself with "the Genuine Left"™ is annihilated. I suspect it's the same with young people who are becoming aware of socialism due to the Sanders movement and who read rhetorical rants by "the Genuine Left"™ against Sanders, i.e. how he's a "traitor" against the working class.
You may utilize the troll's prerogative and have the last word. Internet trolls are everyday sadists.
"Some find it hard to reconcile sadism with the concept of 'normal' psychological functioning, but our findings show that sadistic tendencies among otherwise well-adjusted people must be acknowledged," says Buckels. "These people aren't necessarily serial killers or sexual deviants but they gain some emotional benefit in causing or simply observing others' suffering."
https://www.health24.com/Me...
I suspect that you anticipate with relish the suffering & resignation of Sanders supporters.
"'Resignation' is the driving force behind worker's lack of militancy during periods of capitalist dominance." ~ Vivek Chibber, "Consent, Coercion and Resignation: The Sources of Stability in Capitalism"
==========
You're carrying water for the anti-Sanders corporate media and the most reactionary segments of the bourgeoisie and the owners but -- because you see probably yourself as a member of the elitist leftist intelligentsia -- you're probably totally unaware of who you're carrying water for. That's false consciousness for ya.
As I told Maxwell, I've outgrown you and the anti-Sanders cult.
If I was like another member of your cult, I'd block you. But I'll leave you & your ilk to what you do best: specialize in -- along with the Alex Jones cult -- guilt-tripping, shaming, execrating, finding fault with the "sheeple".
Maybe you're aware/conscious enough to recognize how Nietzschean the term "sheeple" is.
“Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.” ― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
==========
Can there be both a vertical paradigm and a horizontal paradigm?
============
When someone like Maxwell claims to be a hard-core realist, it raises a red flag, i.e. I become aware of my bullshit detector flashing. It's too much like someone claiming that s/he's in possession of the Truth with an emphasis on the capital "T" or when someone is in harmony with "the Real" (i.e. "the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language" [Jacques Lacan]). It's like a hard-core materialist getting mystical.
I don't really know what "idealism" even means to hard-core materialists like Maxwell. Materialists use the word "idealist" like some sort of epithet, some sort of proof that the "idealist" is unworthy and ought to be shamed. Why? What's essentially wrong with ideals, ethical values, the cardinal virtues? Without these, don't we become monsters? "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster" (Friedrich W. Nietzsche). Besides, it sure seems to me that being BOTH reasonable AND pragmatic allows for some sort of conflict resolution between what's realistically practical and what's idealistically non-negotiable. After all "the law of the unity and conflict of opposites" must allow interplay between however materialists interpret "the Real" and whatever non-economic ethical values (as an example of "a [Platonic] Ideal") actually ARE behaviorally.
Is Max acting outside of goodwill and fellowship?
Yes. By covertly disparaging all members of the proletariat who are supporting the Sanders movement -- by insinuating that they're all enamored with and following a sparkle pony -- Maxwell has abandoned goodwill and fellowship. I stand by that judgement. If I'm wrong, I'll gladly suffer the consequences. May all the followers of Maxwell excommunicate me.
Are you thinking that Max is ill-willed? Against 'fellowship"?
One of the more insightful things I've recently read from a psychotherapist is that "everyone has an agenda." Whatever Max's agenda is, I don't trust it. It leaves a bad taste. It's malodorous. I simply get the feeling that there's something off with his agenda -- off the rails, "off" as in butter that's going rancid or milk that's going sour. I cannot put my finger on it, but after reading Mark Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" and reading about Marxist accelerationists, agents of chaos, emotional vampires and everyday sadists -- like how these anti-Sanders cultists seem as if they can hardly wait for Sanders to lose the nomination because of their implacable hatred for all people associated with the Dem party so that they can glory in the grief of yet another setback for the commoners -- I was like "I don't want to be a part of this anymore." I don't want to turn into a Maxwell or an ARIC or a V4Vendeta or a Bassy Kims of Yesteryear or anyone who upvotes (what I see as) despising people who are about as far removed from the agenda of the ruling class as possible. The "despisers" seem to see ordinary people as the enemy. I cannot countenance that.
How is "Realism -- unalloyed with imagination, idealism, goodwill and fellowship -- is depressive" an insightful quote? I guess it's the difference between materialistic/naturalistic realism and the sublime/the mystical. I guess it's about the "fanatical atheist's" (Einstein) rejection of everything outside of sense-experience.
"Reality, says Rudolf Christoph Eucken, is an independent spiritual world, unconditioned by the apparent world of sense. To know it and to live in it is man's true destiny. His point of contact with it is personality: the inward fount of his being: his heart, not his head. Man is real, and in the deepest sense alive, in virtue of this free personal life-principle within him; but he is bound and blinded by the ties set up between his surface-intelligence and the sense-world. The struggle for reality must be a struggle on man's part to transcend the sense-world, escape its bondage. He must renounce it, and be 're-born' to a higher level of consciousness; shifting his centre of interest from the natural to the spiritual plane. According to the thoroughness with which he does this, will be the amount of real life he enjoys. The initial break with the 'world,' the refusal to spend one's life communing with one's own cinematograph picture, is essential if the freedom of the infinite is to be attained. We are amphibious creatures: our life moves upon two levels at once—the natural and the spiritual. The key to the puzzle of man lies in the fact that he is "the meeting point of various stages of Reality." All his difficulties and triumphs are grounded in this. The whole question for him is, which world shall be central for him—the Real, vital, all-embracing life we call spirit, or the lower life of sense? Shall 'Existence,' the superficial obvious thing, or 'Substance,' the underlying verity, be his home? Shall he remain the slave of the senses with their habits and customs, or rise to a plane of consciousness, of heroic endeavour, in which—participating in the life of spirit—he knows reality because he is real?" (Evelyn Underhill (1911), Mysticism, p. 40)
I guess I was trying to run away from "spiritual warfare", but now I'm being drawn back in.
===========
Maxwell has turned into a parody of leftism/Marxism.
He's rather be an obstructionist than organize.
He and his ilk are cynics, not dialectical materialists.
“Scratch the surface of any cynic, and you will find a wounded idealist underneath. Because of previous pain or disappointment, cynics make their conclusions about life before the questions have even been asked. This means that beyond just seeing what is wrong with the world, cynics lack the courage to do something about it. The dynamic beneath cynicism is a fear of accepting responsibility.” ― John Ortberg
Max calls himself a hardcore realist. So what? "Realism, unalloyed with imagination, idealism, goodwill and fellowship, is externalized depression, or as my high school English teacher observed of my poor usage (and of my typical effect on fellow classmates): depressive."
=========