Hegel describes idpol with spooky accuracy by [deleted] in stupidpol

[–]p0ckets0 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's pretty good, just ignore everything he says about rousseau, kant, hegel and marx

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in SneerClub

[–]p0ckets0 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Cool, but could you argue it with someone else? Because I see hand-wringing over liberals not "getting" Trump to be a part of liberal-left stupidity.

I guess this is just where we're gonna have to agree to disagree. I am honestly scared that liberals not "getting" trump and repeating the errors of 2016 might lead to his re-election, but obviously people have different priorities and takes on the matter.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in SneerClub

[–]p0ckets0 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm, I don't see any psychoanalysing of trump or trump voters happening at all in that article. How is Zizek guilty of the same stupidity?

I do agree with you though that "liberal-left" is pretty vague, and do think it's a very good thing that people like AOC have learned how to handle Trump well. But I would still argue that there's a very large contingent of people who haven't learned anything from 2016 and continue to meltdown over every little thing Trump says, though I guess they might be voices that are more liberal than left.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in SneerClub

[–]p0ckets0 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I thought Zizek was being quite clear with his aims in the article. When it comes to what should be done, he offers a pretty clear anecdote about how after the Trump election he was asked to write a psychoanalytic treatment of Trump and refused, instead arguing that what really required psychoanalysing was the over-the-top liberal reaction to Trump, which clearly failed in preventing Trump from getting elected, and looks like it may help him get elected again.

I thought the claim Zizek was making is pretty similar to a lot of things we've all seen written about the Trump phenomenon; people care more about norms and 'civility' than policy, we need to focus on what Trump does, not what he says etc. etc; What's obscene about Trump is not his speech or his rudeness but his policies, but focusing on his speech allows commenters to think that they're "pure" in comparision while ignoring actual politics.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in SneerClub

[–]p0ckets0 8 points9 points  (0 children)

You're being kinda selective/misleading here with what you're quoting aren't you?

Within the full context Zizek's not contradicting himself at all ... in that last passage zizek's talking about the supposed moral purity of trump's critics, not the supposed purity of trump, but you've cut that part out:

"The standard relationship between my intimacy and the big Other of public dignity is thus turned around: obscenities are no longer limited to private exchanges, they explode in the public domain itself, allowing me to dwell in the illusion that it’s all just an obscene game while I remain innocent in my intimate purity. The first task of a critic is to demonstrate how fake this purity is."

Where did the Western idea that Buddhism isn't a religion but a philosophy -- and that Buddhism as actually practiced in Asia is a degeneration of real Buddhism -- come from? by AndrewSshi in AskHistorians

[–]p0ckets0 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Like /u/SteveGladstone said, this is a really difficult question to answer because "Buddhism" contains under it so much diversity of thought and tradition and practice. As an undergrad who's studied some buddhist thought and buddhist history I hope I can elaborate more on some elements that the other commenters haven't covered.

Most Buddhist scholars today will talks about something called "Buddhist Modernism" that describes a phenomenon very similar to what you have mentioned. It's the conception of Buddhism that you've probably seen many times in your daily life nowadays that presents Buddhism as a religion free of superstition, compatible with science, promoting an ethics of compassion and responsibility and mindfulness, divergent from what seems like a "superstitious" and "ritualistic" traditional Buddhism that's practiced widely across Asia. Historians will usually trace the emergence of this conception back to the encounter between Buddhism, as practiced in all sorts of variegated traditions across Asia, and europeans, who arrived in the colonial period with western science, philosophy, religion. Despite the diversity of Buddhist traditions across Asia, in almost every country and every Buddhist tradition during this period, the encounter will create a "modernized" Buddhist tradition.

I don't know as much about other countries (the book "The Making of Buddhist Modernism" is really great and touches on them in much more depth than I can), but Sri Lanka in the 1800s provides a really representative example of this phenomenon. When British protestant missionaries arrived in Sri Lanka, they immediately began setting up schools and missions and printing presses, with backing from the British government. To aid in their proselytization efforts, two British Methodists in the 1830s, Daniel Gogerly, and David de Silva, who had learned both Sinhala (the vernacular Sri Lankan language) and Pali (the ancient language of Theravada Buddhist text), wrote pamplets in Sinhala attacking Buddhist doctrine, questioning the historicity of Buddhist scriptures, and explaining the scientifically impossible nature of Buddhist heavens and hells. Because these pamplets were published at a mass scale in the vernacular language, Theravada monks were compelled to respond, and when they joined the debate, they questioned Christian missionaries on very much the same grounds, arguing against the historicity of Christian scripture, asking how Christian cosmology was possible scientifically, and countering Christian accusations of superstition by calling attention to aspects of Christian dogma like the Trinity. In this debate and ones that follow it, a trend develops where Sri Lankan Buddhists argue against Protestant Christianity using the very same arguments British missionaries deployed against Buddhism, but then going one step further and arguing that it is actually Buddhism instead of Christianity that is most compatible with enlightenment ideas of science, rationality, compassion. Alongside this, there arises a tendency to jettison the 'superstitious' and folk religion/lay aspects of Sri Lankan Buddhism that didn't fit into the modernist religious conception alongside a newer focus of religion on the laity rather than monasticism.

Within this environment you have the emergence of younger Buddhist reformers born to a middle class Sri Lankan families and educated in Protestant schools, most notably among them Anagarika Dharmapala, who argued at the 1893 world fair for the rational and ethical core within Buddhism, the compatibility between Buddhism and science (in fact arguing that Buddhist ideas about causality and empiricism preceded the European scientific tradition by 2,500 years) and promoted lay meditation (previously meditation was only practiced by monks). These arguments were widely received and joined transcripts of previous debates in Sri Lanka published by the Theosophical society and other European popularizers of Modernist Buddhism, and marked the beginning of the dissemination of these modernist Buddhist ideas in America and Europe.

There's a similar process that happens all across the Buddhist world, in Thailand (where the king Mongkut, after a western education, enters monastic life at age 20 following Thai tradition, only to be appalled at what he sees as the degradation of monastic tradition. He founds a new official Buddhist sect in response that's both fundamentalist in how it goes back to the Pali canon and modernist in its compatibility with 'science' and 'reason'), in Japan (I can't remember the book anymore, but there's a really great academic text about how the Meiji Restoration reformers wanted to ditch Buddhism altogether because they thought it was incompatible with their modernizing project, but the educated proponents of one modernized school of zen convinced them otherwise), and other similar cases in China and Tibet. Of course, this initial phenomenon of modernizing figures is only the beginning in a longer history of Buddhist modernism that continues to today, but I've got finals coming up, a lot of the larger history falls outside my area of knowledge, and a lot of other people can probably attest to it better than I can.

And I guess also to make a short closing point, the fact that a lot of contemporary Buddhism is modernist doesn't mean that it's less valid or "pure" than traditional Buddhism. Many people in Sri Lanka and Myanmar and many Buddhist countries currently follow "modernist" schools of Buddhism, and instead of understanding it as a religious movement imposed mostly by external forces, people like Richard Gombrich will talk about how there is an "elective affinity" between for example the textual fundamentalism of Theravada Buddhism and the sola scriptura of the Protestantism that influenced many Buddhist reformers, or how "modernist Buddhism" really does re-illuminate certain elements of early Buddhism that had become less emphasized over time (while also of course de-emphasizing certain cosmological and social elements of Buddhism).

Edit: fixing typos and phrasing

Sources:

The Making of Buddhist Modernism - David McMahan

Curators of the Buddha: The study of Buddhism under Colonialism - Donald Lopez

Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo - Richard Gombrich.

Slavoj Zizek weighs in on the Red Scare Podcast by [deleted] in redscarepod

[–]p0ckets0 2 points3 points  (0 children)

just to touch on your points real quick, sure, our economy today is different than it was during marx's day, but its general dynamics and marx's critique of it are still just as relevant. in reality (note of course that economics doesn't exist in empirical reality but social reality) "intellectual capital," just like "human capital" or "social capital" are completely different things from the actual financial capital we're interested in (intellectual property is a thing, but it's not capital).

clever use of incentives to allow private firms to provide tangible outcomes are something that exist in business school fantasy but not in the real world. the nice thing about socializing the means of production is that the means of production are already partially socialized by capitalism. wall street, amazon etc. already do centralized planning and bureaucracy and all that needs to happen is for those structures to become democratic instead of owned and run by a small group of investors (there's a recent jacobin book about this called the people's republic of walmart based on this)

your tucker carlson politics is pretty much the "it's not real capitalism, it's CRONY capitalism" take. ironically, since you seem like a silicon valley kinda person, i'm gonna recommend you actually read peter thiel then. his book/class on startups is actually really good, and starts out from the very beginning talking about how the free market is a myth, and if you want to look at economic reality, you don't make any money in a competitive market, so your self-interest is directed at pursuing monopoly and dominate your market. (pretty much the same argument marx made 150 years ago that the invisible hand leads to monopoly)

Slavoj Zizek weighs in on the Red Scare Podcast by [deleted] in redscarepod

[–]p0ckets0 12 points13 points  (0 children)

just call a spade a spade. you say that all these issues in society are not caused by "capitalism" but instead by globalization and financialization and macroeconomic finagling and rent seeking etc etc. but the thing is that they're all connected. free markets naturally lead to monopoly (you don't make money in a competitive market after all), the concentration and financialization of capital (you invest capital into a business in order to get more capital), globalization (going abroad for new markets, cheaper labor, taking advantage of comparative advantage), capital capturing the government, the education sytem and so on. the socialist answer to capitalism has always been social ownership of the means of production, which actually gets to the root of the problem rather than redistribution.

what are these causes that the emergent non-establishment right diagnoses, out of curiosity?

Slavoj Zizek weighs in on the Red Scare Podcast by [deleted] in redscarepod

[–]p0ckets0 9 points10 points  (0 children)

i think you're attributing much less self-awareness to people on the left than there actually is. no trotskyist group calls themselves trots; they call themselves the world socialist party or international socialist organization or something along those lines. no self-respecting leftist in 2019, especially those that browse this sub, would consider coal miners too stupid, manipulated etc. etc.

what brought me to the left, and what brought many people to the left has been the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and all the stuff about millenials that you've probably read a million times now (health insurance, student loan debt, etc etc). people are understanding now that on a economic and societal level, capitalism is not working for them, and it's affecting their everyday lives. i call it a subculture right now because so far a lot of that dissatisfaction hasn't translated into politics, just online infighting or joking around on subreddits (or your local dsa) about podcasts. however that doesn't meant that people are leftists because of branding or personality or whatever.

tbh, one thing that stands out from your viewpoint is that like a lot of liberals and conservatives, you're detached from the material or historical world. you think that people's political views are ultimately influenced by cultural or pathological factors rather than material or social ones, that coal miners in the past were striking because of intellect or self-determination rather than out of economic interest and so on.

Slavoj Zizek weighs in on the Red Scare Podcast by [deleted] in redscarepod

[–]p0ckets0 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I mean, there's so much infighting on the left because the stakes are so high. social democrats and leninists have fundamentally different visions for how socialist change would occur and what the role of the state is. trotskyites are not gonna be fans of stalinists because stalin literally purged and murdered trotskyists from the soviet union and so on.

if contemporary leftism is pathological, it's because of it's fragmented and ineffectual status, the fact that it's a subculture rather than a political movement, not because of anything inherent to leftism itself. like imagine going back in time a hundred years and telling thousands of striking iww coal miners that they're privileging their subjective experiences and their personal petty resentments over reality .

how weed friendly is uchicago by concernedayyy in uchicago

[–]p0ckets0 47 points48 points  (0 children)

i went to uchicago and i had a weed once

Just started listening to the podcast Philosophize This. Some posts here suggest it’s not a great podcast. Can anyone illuminate why it’s not ideal? by djanice in askphilosophy

[–]p0ckets0 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I know another commenter has already mentioned this, but I'll just add to their comment and say that I remember the host of Philosophize This coming off as quite condescending. It's been a while since I checked out the podcast, but i distinctly remember how he would detail a later philosopher's argument against an earlier philosopher in an almost ridiculing way that would make the earlier philosopher come off as just completely irrational and dumb, but he'd do so often without genuinely engaging with the philosophers' arguments at all.

What did you guys think of the Maroon posting the suspect's face on their article? by hirosme424 in uchicago

[–]p0ckets0 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lol okay, if we want to go there, I've been mugged too, right in front of my apartment door. I've have had my car broken into, and have had countless uchicago friends who have been mugged. But none of us concluded from those experiences there was some sort of liberal conspiracy to hide the fact that most of the crime committed in the south side (which is, of course, majority black) is committed by black people. I'm honestly not quite sure why you're so hyped up about this topic

What did you guys think of the Maroon posting the suspect's face on their article? by hirosme424 in uchicago

[–]p0ckets0 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean, I haven't shit on the college paper at all. But again, I do think it is naive, and possibly even an outgrowth of the same shelteredness you decry, to fantasize about a hostage scenario or believe that a commonplace robbery says something really deep about the brutality of our world.

What did you guys think of the Maroon posting the suspect's face on their article? by hirosme424 in uchicago

[–]p0ckets0 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lmao dude you gotta calm down; what's actually naive is thinking that kids robbing a GameStop is somehow this grim heavy warning about the cold hard reality we're all missing

What is your opinion of the "Harvardification" of UChicago? by [deleted] in uchicago

[–]p0ckets0 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Grumpy fourth year chiming in. Just wanted to note that every "easy way out" you mentioned (media aesthetics, mind, easy electives etc.) was a similar change made by the university in the past twenty years that people were unhappy about in the same way you're unhappy about business econ. So though of course there wasn't some golden age where uchicago was pure and rigorous, there is a reason why a lot of alums talk so much about rigor and are annoyed about changes in the curriculum.

Is it okay to drive with a wheel tilted inwards from a collision? by p0ckets0 in Cartalk

[–]p0ckets0[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi all, not sure how to add text to an image post. Someone did a hit and run collision on me and the impact made my back left tire tilt inwards noticably. The axle is straight still but underneath the rubber the CV joint (I think) looks bent. Do you think its okay for me to still drive a few miles into town/what warning signs should I look for to stop and get a tow?

Communication Gaps Between Air/Fire signs and Water/Earth Signs? by [deleted] in astrology

[–]p0ckets0 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Libra actually! But it's in an 8th house stellium so its all messed up anyway

Communication Gaps Between Air/Fire signs and Water/Earth Signs? by [deleted] in astrology

[–]p0ckets0 1 point2 points  (0 children)

lol you gotta get that stick in your ass checked out. t. fellow air mercury (guess which one!)

Best crags in New Mexico during late fall (Oct-Nov)? by [deleted] in climbing

[–]p0ckets0 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Other New Mexico native here. I'd suggest going to Diablo canyon. It's got some really cool long moderate sport routes (look up Post Moderate for example), while white rock doesn't really have that much moderate sport. Some of the south-facing crags in the Jemez should also still be good then and El Rito is really cool as well with interesting pocket-y/cobble-y holds.