I AM A FUCKING INTELLECTUAL

“That every act of political violence should nowadays be attributed to anarchists is not at all surprising. Yet it is a fact known to almost everyone familiar with the anarchist movement that a great number of acts, for which anarchists had to suffer, either originated with the capitalist press or were instigated, if not directly perpetrated, by the police.”

— Emma Goldman, via occupywallst.org

“The only thing I was tired of, was giving in.”

— Rosa Parks

“Following several years in which many observers noted politically liberal bias in the channel’s programming and news operations, MSNBC publicly acknowledged its progressive agenda in October 2010 while launching a marketing campaign with the tagline “Lean Forward.” In a June 2011 interview, MSNBC president Phil Griffin stated that “MSNBC has established a sensibility, a position, a platform” and that “MSNBC is really the place to go for progressives.”

— 

Wikipedia page for MSNBC.

At least they admit it. You’d never be able to drag an admission like that out of Fox News in a thousand years.

I prefer to call MSNBC’s leanings a bias towards reality.

Behavioral Macro: Reagan’s gone. You’re old. Get over it.

One of the best things I’ve read, ever.

We need to stop revering successful politicians as god-like, and realize that they came up with the proper solutions for a certain situation at a certain time. Even if we accept that Reagan had some special economic insight, that just doesn’t matter, now, in 2012.

markdow:

Sometimes supply-side policies are right and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes Keynesian polices are right, sometimes they’re not. 

Until we approach policies as tools in a toolkit and not as divine scriptures, we are going to be stuck in an ideological logjam, wasting precious time.

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

— Oscar Wilde (via claytoncubitt)

“There is something vaguely dystopian about oppressed peoples in Syria or Iran seeking dignity and liberation inside a corporate sovereign that is, for its part, creating great wealth for its founders and asserting control over its users.”

— The New Yorker’s Steve Coll on Facebook

“When people’s opinions are so different, how can they even go to a film together?”

— Sartre, via As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh

Disagreement != Hateful

Severely misinformed? I can accept that.

Hateful? No. I’m entitled to believe that your beliefs are silly, assuming I know what I’m talking about. Which I admit I may not have!

fedinger:

This is a really strong response to a severely misinformed/slightly hateful post. As an aspiring Buddhist/partner of a Buddhist, I really appreciated this.

philosophyforthewin:

There are a few logical issues us Philosophy Winners had with this post on Buddhism. Here’s some we discussed/argued/hit one another over:

(1.) Zachary states that Buddhism’s matter-of-fact method of justifying its principles is incorrect:

“I accept that it is prima facie true that phenomena are interdependent, and that, for example, we do not make friends by hitting people and fighting with them. But this does not then lead to an explanation of what is or is not moral or ethical. It leads, literally, to an explanation of how not to make friends, and that is all it leads to.”

First, though these are not Zach’s terms, we are led to believe that his criticism of the Dalai Lama “lack[ing] sophistication” is refering to its lack of Western philosophical rigor. For one thing, the Dalai Lama doesn’t seem concerned with philosophical rigor and is more interested in explaining rather than justifying (before you raise your philosophical brow, by this distinction we are noting the difference between getting an idea of something and showing its validity logically).

For another thing, what example would lead to an explanation of morality? We don’t take Zach to mean that an ideal ethical system evades this criticism, but that a good ethical system evades this criticism. In this case, Western methods from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to Peter Singer’s How Are We to Live? employ examples of their ethical systems that do not adhere to this criticism.

Food for thought: to what extent can one justify a normative claim (meaning what one ought to do)? In what ways do philosophers justify them?

(2) The question of inherent desires was an issue for us as well. Zach states: “If an “inherent desire” to minimize one’s suffering carries such moral weight, why not the inherent desire to see one’s self as intrinsic?” The scare quotes around inherent desire are unnecessary. We can possibly agree (though a few in the group say no) that some desires we have just by being alive have more moral worth than others. Pragmatically, we may view the more valued desires as beneficial due to their social and psychological worth (i.e. “I gain comfort from not causing pain and not receiving pain, so let’s agree via social contract to try to avoid causing one another pain.”).

(3) “What a Buddhist is effectively saying when he argues that something may exist conventionally but not intrinsically, is that it exists because we all agree that it exists. Of what use, intellectually, is such a term, “conventional existence”? If we all agree that there is a unicorn in my closet, there is still not a unicorn in my closet.”

We don’t think this is what conventional existence means to Buddhism, nor would the false analogy apply even if it did. This is an example of the failure of logic’s foundation: the principle of charity in which one attempts to give the best interpretation to a reading possible. A quick run down to the Religion department/discussion at the temple/even Google search reveals that conventional existence is more akin to an everyday, expected life. Consider the sentence: “She was living a conventional life with her husband, until she went and did something extraordinary.”

(4) This is our last, big point before we all have to get a slice and a pint.

“There is no humanly possible way to avoid self-interest.”

This point is founded in the ideology of atomistic identity that we are not so fond of at philosophyforthewin (finally, something we all agreed on!). Consider atomistic ethics: even we brought up the age old social contract handed down by Rousseau so long ago. So what is wrong with Rousseau?

Consider the documentary The Trap by the BBC. The documentary elaborates on how our definition of freedom, identity, and psychology have been manufactured for us due to the utilization of game theory during the cold war. Game theory did not necessarily cause but was most certainly a catalyst for the necessity of self interest in political, professional, and even familial life. Game theory promoted notions of love as a self-interested fulfillment of one’s own desire as opposed to it being once a bourgeousie concept meaning reciprocal infatuation and selflessness.

The problem with this line of thought concerning self interest is that it does not factor in one’s sense of self being developed in relation to others. Some other births us, feeds us, speaks to us, helps us acquire the language of others, and most importantly identifies with us. Identity is necessarily wound up in what and who we identify with and the context of that identity allows it the resources from which to pull. To think of oneself as an atomistic identity that is always in relation to its own self interest is to ignore the necessary conditions of having an identity.

Is altruism possible?

Is selfishness not necessarily the desire to make oneself like others, and in this sense paradoxically, selflessness?

Are you hungry, too? Good. It’s time to eat.

zacharyalexstern:

Or, Buddhism - Nihilism for the intellectually dishonest.

As the Dalai Lama calls it on the first page of The World of Tibetan Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism is “universal salvation”. This tells us immediately that the focus of such practices will be on all people, not on the individual, as he…