Oof. I am sorry but facing the disgust you bear me doesn’t translate into a way I want to spend my time. At majority level I DO do this for enjoyment because I like to write… and maybe egotistically consider myself a philosopher albiet not one anyone is going to platform. As I saw it what both of us are doing on this forum is discourse. I am not performing for an audience regarding propaganda. From experience nobody tends to read long posts except the person I address them to. It’s part of why I keep them long. I am having a discussion with you.
I didn’t learn in the alabaster halls of acedemia. I couldn’t afford to chase a European history and philosophy degree so I just read a lot of source material. A lot of what I see happening reminds me of other points in history. When dealing with 1000 year spans no example is universal.
My take on philosophy is not American centric specifically. I am Canadian. I look at multiple democracies that have common philosophical ancestries to draw my conclusions some of which have aspects I admire and other aspects have earned nothing but my sharpest critique. America… Has very specific issues. Most of them are in places the discourse doesn’t really touch because Americans are blind to those things not being the norm.
On a personal note lot of the practical stuff I believe comes from more modern philosophers, Sarah Ahmed, Bhaskar Sunkara, Margot Susca, Ferric C. Fang etc etc etc. But adoption of a lot of the designs of government I am interested are stuck at university testing level. I know convincing people to get behind democratic lottery systems is not going to be an in my lifetime thing. There’s too many assumptions and things people hold onto regarding elections to give such radical ideas a shot. If we get lucky a Municipality level trial might be possible but there are far too many norms people cling to that require a lot of intellectual sparring. We don’t have the coffee parlors of the past and as I see it this platform is the next best thing. I use it as a training ground for learning dialectics so when I interface with politics face to face I am practiced.
I have had my share of union politics and trying to shift power structures to know that change is heartbreakingly gradual and most people who are full of fire but don’t understand the game get rebuffed by those systems… and they just become bitter. But those systems for better or worse are what is in power. Your choices in changing them are to play the game well ,get people onside through eloquence and building concensus and applying political pressure to the system to change - or to violently overthrow them… And personally I do not think violent overthrows ever work. But people don’t understand how important concensus is. Compromise and solidarity with stuff you don’t fully agree with is the engine that makes that run and we as a society were trained out of that. We are all individually acting like toddlers who think yelling and screaming will work. If everyone runs on absolute ultimatums demanding utter purity of all of their aims then nothing is achieved. Movements are atomized and inertia will breed anger until basically the pressure blows and in the end the anarchist uprising get crushed by the standing powers or the most powerful opportunist takes the wheel.
Honestly the enmity you show me here is not encouraging. If you think I am evil there’s not really a point in continuing. You have decided that I am not worth your consideration and you have your hackles up. I am not going to change your mind if you think I am scum so I will choose to part ways instead. So thank you for talking to me stranger. I appreciate your time.
Oh, give it a rest. I don’t go to all this trouble because the people I encounter online “disgust” me. I’ve been at this since 2015 - I’m allowed a certain level of jadedness, I reckon. It’s really hard to be disgusted by text. The text allows me to build a pretty decent model of the dominant ideological narratives that a given person has been exposed to and/or internalized (which is rarely a conscious thing), but that is all. The purpose those narratives serve often ends up angering me because I witness their consequences in real life every time I walk down the street - but it’s perfectly safe to assume that none of the people I meet on here and argue with had much of a hand in creating or entrenching those narratives. These narratives (and the reality they serve to enable and justify) are bigger than us. There is no point in individualizing it - at least, not when it comes to us proles.
Ideology is something that happens to us - all of us. It’s not a personal failing.
I’m not exactly sure what it is you are trying to achieve with this discourse… it seems to me that you are trying to make a case for collaboration with formal power, and aren’t sure why leftists (at least, leftists of the non-technocratic persuasion) reject such a collaboration. That is no mystery - we understand what formal power exists to do. There are only two ways in which those at the bottom can enact change that better our lot in life - you either force change out of the status quo in the form of concessions, or you enforce a new status quo. Each is risky and dangerous (for a multitude of reasons) - but so is doing nothing. Waiting for “nicer” people to change things “from the inside” has never helped anyone except in the self-congratulatory mythologies peddled by the very same kind of people these concessions had to be forced from in the first place.
So there’s an irreconcilable difference right there - I have seen nothing in my years that will convince me that you can build anything that can be called democratic with a straight fae within the rarefied confines of institutionalized power. The best you could hope for is something that power will happily call “democratic” but that will purely exist to serve the interests of said institutionalized power - which pretty much describes the (so-called) “democratic” processes we are goaded into particpating in by the political establishment every few years. It’s not designed to allow our participation - it’s designed to prevent it.
I’d say that if we want something that can actually be called democratic we are going to have to build it in opposition to institutionalized power - that is what we have historically been forced into doing, and that hasn’t changed one bit.
Oof. I am sorry but facing the disgust you bear me doesn’t translate into a way I want to spend my time. At majority level I DO do this for enjoyment because I like to write… and maybe egotistically consider myself a philosopher albiet not one anyone is going to platform. As I saw it what both of us are doing on this forum is discourse. I am not performing for an audience regarding propaganda. From experience nobody tends to read long posts except the person I address them to. It’s part of why I keep them long. I am having a discussion with you.
I didn’t learn in the alabaster halls of acedemia. I couldn’t afford to chase a European history and philosophy degree so I just read a lot of source material. A lot of what I see happening reminds me of other points in history. When dealing with 1000 year spans no example is universal.
My take on philosophy is not American centric specifically. I am Canadian. I look at multiple democracies that have common philosophical ancestries to draw my conclusions some of which have aspects I admire and other aspects have earned nothing but my sharpest critique. America… Has very specific issues. Most of them are in places the discourse doesn’t really touch because Americans are blind to those things not being the norm.
On a personal note lot of the practical stuff I believe comes from more modern philosophers, Sarah Ahmed, Bhaskar Sunkara, Margot Susca, Ferric C. Fang etc etc etc. But adoption of a lot of the designs of government I am interested are stuck at university testing level. I know convincing people to get behind democratic lottery systems is not going to be an in my lifetime thing. There’s too many assumptions and things people hold onto regarding elections to give such radical ideas a shot. If we get lucky a Municipality level trial might be possible but there are far too many norms people cling to that require a lot of intellectual sparring. We don’t have the coffee parlors of the past and as I see it this platform is the next best thing. I use it as a training ground for learning dialectics so when I interface with politics face to face I am practiced.
I have had my share of union politics and trying to shift power structures to know that change is heartbreakingly gradual and most people who are full of fire but don’t understand the game get rebuffed by those systems… and they just become bitter. But those systems for better or worse are what is in power. Your choices in changing them are to play the game well ,get people onside through eloquence and building concensus and applying political pressure to the system to change - or to violently overthrow them… And personally I do not think violent overthrows ever work. But people don’t understand how important concensus is. Compromise and solidarity with stuff you don’t fully agree with is the engine that makes that run and we as a society were trained out of that. We are all individually acting like toddlers who think yelling and screaming will work. If everyone runs on absolute ultimatums demanding utter purity of all of their aims then nothing is achieved. Movements are atomized and inertia will breed anger until basically the pressure blows and in the end the anarchist uprising get crushed by the standing powers or the most powerful opportunist takes the wheel.
Honestly the enmity you show me here is not encouraging. If you think I am evil there’s not really a point in continuing. You have decided that I am not worth your consideration and you have your hackles up. I am not going to change your mind if you think I am scum so I will choose to part ways instead. So thank you for talking to me stranger. I appreciate your time.
You don’t say.
Oh, give it a rest. I don’t go to all this trouble because the people I encounter online “disgust” me. I’ve been at this since 2015 - I’m allowed a certain level of jadedness, I reckon. It’s really hard to be disgusted by text. The text allows me to build a pretty decent model of the dominant ideological narratives that a given person has been exposed to and/or internalized (which is rarely a conscious thing), but that is all. The purpose those narratives serve often ends up angering me because I witness their consequences in real life every time I walk down the street - but it’s perfectly safe to assume that none of the people I meet on here and argue with had much of a hand in creating or entrenching those narratives. These narratives (and the reality they serve to enable and justify) are bigger than us. There is no point in individualizing it - at least, not when it comes to us proles.
Ideology is something that happens to us - all of us. It’s not a personal failing.
I’m not exactly sure what it is you are trying to achieve with this discourse… it seems to me that you are trying to make a case for collaboration with formal power, and aren’t sure why leftists (at least, leftists of the non-technocratic persuasion) reject such a collaboration. That is no mystery - we understand what formal power exists to do. There are only two ways in which those at the bottom can enact change that better our lot in life - you either force change out of the status quo in the form of concessions, or you enforce a new status quo. Each is risky and dangerous (for a multitude of reasons) - but so is doing nothing. Waiting for “nicer” people to change things “from the inside” has never helped anyone except in the self-congratulatory mythologies peddled by the very same kind of people these concessions had to be forced from in the first place.
So there’s an irreconcilable difference right there - I have seen nothing in my years that will convince me that you can build anything that can be called democratic with a straight fae within the rarefied confines of institutionalized power. The best you could hope for is something that power will happily call “democratic” but that will purely exist to serve the interests of said institutionalized power - which pretty much describes the (so-called) “democratic” processes we are goaded into particpating in by the political establishment every few years. It’s not designed to allow our participation - it’s designed to prevent it.
I’d say that if we want something that can actually be called democratic we are going to have to build it in opposition to institutionalized power - that is what we have historically been forced into doing, and that hasn’t changed one bit.