Off the Rail Politics

[Retro-Grouch]

Gentleman (or other), off your soap boxes, please. Enough is enough. Arguments about photo matters, yes. Endlessly so if need be. But Identity and sexual politics, no thanks.

Can we not go back to just good-naturedly chaffing one another about matters photographic? That is after all what RFF is all about, and what it does best.

I get enough political and sociological rants from the mainstream media.

Respectfully suggesting you all agree to disagree and call a truce...

Truce, yes. But everything is connected; we can run, but we can't hide.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Off the rail, and onto the side-track.

 

[chuckroast]

I think we're done, but I'd like to point out that no one was mean, there was no personal attack, and civility was the order of the day. Also, @Retro-Grouch has smelly feet...

 

[AndyCapp]

@Retro-Grouch - You wanted a rant? Here you go ...

We should be studying the "book" that explains which human behaviors have been historically successful and which ones have not. The greatest vanity of modernity is the assumption that tradition is awful/bigoted/exclusive and thus needs to be replaced by entirely untried social fantasies foisted upon society by government force.

The real irony of all this is that it is primarily because of religious conscience that slavery was abandoned in the West after 300 years when it had previously existed for tens of thousands of years across nearly every human society.

The real irony of this is that the only reason people of variant sexualities enjoy freedom today is because of the philosophical structures put in place by Locke and others during the Enlightenment.

But Locke and his buddies, in turn, depended on the Reformation thinking that placed the power of conscience on the individual and took it away from large ecclesiastical-government structures. There is a direct line from the Renaissance, to Luther, to Locke, to the modern liberal state that affirms individual liberty. (N.B. The worst butchers of history were all either areligious, occultists, or atheists. The worst abuses of the Roman church in total pale by comparison to an afternoon in Stalin's gulags.)

The real irony here is that - after tens of thousands of years of economic disparity and oppression - Capitalism and Markets became the instruments that produced so much wealth for so many people, we today have the money to pick up the tab for the economic underclass, even the ones who jolly well just don't feel like working.

The real irony here is that the modern liberal nation-state (with secure and defined borders) that emerged from these movements is the only thing that has ever been powerful enough to be effective in curbing human rights abuses and genocides, interdicting in famines and large scale human tragedies, and bringing some measure of stability to high tension areas of the world.

But the Modern Mind (tm) is waaaaay too smart for all that. Faith, family, capital formation, markets, and national integrity are to be discarded in favor of the drug induced hallucinations of the We're So Smart Crowd. And the resutls are everwhere. We have people who "know' there are 80 genders but can't do elementary arithmetic. We have people who've read Zinn's execrable history of the US but don't know any actual US history and why it's so remarkable. The same people who marched against nuclear power, are now squealling about the coming bad weather. We see "Transexuals For Palestine" unironically marching when they really should call themselves "Chickens For KFC". We are truly living in an Idiocracy.

You can have the Modern Mind (tm). It's full of fools, charlatans, idiots, and cause pimps. No thanks. You cannot screw around what took thousands of years to figure out, and replace with stoned masturbatory fantasies and expect good outcomes.

P.S., I have lived in three countries, am a citizen of several, and have traveled and worked in probably a dozen more. I've see the alternatives to those traditional systems of living and they are awful. If you don't think so, walk through the ashes of Dachau or Treblinka. The Modern Mind (tm) is setting us up for the next mass genocide.

P.P.S. We've become so unmoored intellectually, socially, and spiritually, that even hardcode atheists like Camille Paglia are admitting that letting the 60s counterculture (aka "The Smelliest Generation") throw out all of those traditions including religion, was a really bad idea.

P.P.P.S. Veering every so slightly back onto topic. The popular photography of the 1960s largely sucked and continued to thereafter. When Annie Liebovitz is the the apigee of a photographic generation, we'lve lost all touch with real art. When Mapplethrope is taken seriously as an artist instead of what he was - an agent provocateur - you get some insight into just how screwed up you become dumping all traditional structures,. Your worldview dictates your art. If your worldview is a sewer, your art will smell like ... well, you know...

I'd like to see more articles like yours above on this site. Many of us here are already in the last quarter of our lives, and some of us have developed syntheses and perspectives to take note of. (+follow)
The search for "The Book" is doomed to fail. Even if you take all the books ever written, the real world is still beyond their scope.

 

[AndyCapp]

Yes, but which book? Do we read a book that confirms what we think we know, or do we read a book that challenges it? The "echo chamber" isn't just on the internet; it's always been an understandable but unfortunate impulse for people to want their biases confirmed. The first necessity is to step away from our self-definitions that we so desperately cling to, and the second necessity is to refrain from the categories that we think we need to place others in. I jokingly referred to myself with a laundry list of "identities" in my earlier post; they're all true, but none of them, nor all of them together, is "me". Let's recognize that we all contain multitudes, and celebrate our endless complexity and diversity, and skip the name calling. Life might be so much richer, and the world better.

Yes, but which book?
I am listening to "The Three-Body Problem" by Ken Liu and Cixin Liu. I downloaded it as I could not make sense of the Netflix filmatisation. My son, who is very much with it, told me it is a book you must know. Recently, I listened to Stanislaw Lem's Solaris and watched the film (the original Mosfilm version is available on YouTube). Finally, after decades, I understood the tragic love story that was the essential point. Or so I think today.
The problem with falling asleep in these stories is the weird dreams that follow.
Recently, I learned about a study where intelligence and bias correlate positively on both sides of the aisle.
The conclusion was that we mostly use our capacity to confirm the ideas we already have had for years. The brighter you are, the sounder the logic. This becomes clear when you look at what the elite minds spew out in their HUM department echo chambers.
We should remain skeptical and curious. Life should be more about challenges than threats. It is how you look at it.
Am I partly blind, or why have I not seen aggressive argumentation here at all? It has been all civil thus far.

 

[AndyCapp]

The government regulated the construction of this bridge. Now that it broke, the government's answer will be more regulation.

I am curious to see what they find in the fuel. A total blackout of a 100,000-ton vessel seems like a serious design flaw or sabotage.

 

[chuckroast]

Am I partly blind, or why have I not seen aggressive argumentation here at all? It has been all civil thus far.

In the vast social disorder that was the 1960s, however quarrelsome and confrontational they were, the central discussion was about ideas.

Today's most common debates are about brand - what tribe you belong to and the virtue it imputes, is all that matters. That means that substance doesn't get discussed much. More importantly, entire branches of ideas get sawed of because it comes from a particular party of ideological group. I believe that this is because today's youngsters have been taught that all truth is personal and therefore how things make you feel is the most important thing of all. If someone says anything that gives you the icks, they must be shouted down.

But here we have been debating/discussing ideas, not each other, not the brand, not the tribe we belong to. We haven't really talked extensively about our feelings, our own experiences, our personal truth or any of the rest of stuff that passes (wrongly) for a modern system of knowledge. This tends to lead to civil discourse.

I count among those in my social circle, Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, straight people, gay people, white people, black people, brown people, Asian people, traditional conservatives, MAGA Republicans, centrist Democrats, far left progressives ... rinse repeat. With only one exception in my entire life, I have never lost a friend or acquaintance to the vigorous debate of ideas. Quite to the contrary, I've been challenged and been made to rethink my own views on many occasions.

And this is the central problem with our kiddos. The answer to bad speech is more good speech, not shutting down the bad speech you don't like.

 

[AndyCapp]

In the vast social disorder that was the 1960s, however quarrelsome and confrontational they were, the central discussion was about ideas.

Many statistics tell a dark story of the damage the Hippie generation caused in the Western nations.
Crime rate, substance abuse, divorces, dropping out, and AIDS epidemic, to mention a few. The list is longer.
The general ambiance of mistrust started to spread, and questioning everything became the fad—whether politics, art, culture, or even biology. Flat earthers and creationists crept out of their holes and got a lot of undeserved attention. Misinformation and disinformation were invented to censor public discourse that ran amok with lies and conspiracies.
Philosophically speaking, I see a grand cleavage between what is true and what is being told.
The discrepancy will cause huge problems as the propaganda machinery does not regard material reality.
Elon Musk said: "Your theory is not correct if your rocket explodes." He exposed the big difference between science and engineering.
Your line of thinking may be beautiful and logically perfect, but if the rocket goes "Boom!", it is wrong.
(Or if you do not get an Internet connection or your printer gives you hell)

 

[chuckroast]

Many statistics tell a dark story of the damage the Hippie generation caused in the Western nations.
Crime rate, substance abuse, divorces, dropping out, and AIDS epidemic, to mention a few. The list is longer.
The general ambiance of mistrust started to spread, and questioning everything became the fad—whether politics, art, culture, or even biology.

None of those trends were new and have forever been with us. They got sped up and amplified by social media, but they were there long before.

I would submit that what actually happened was this ...

In the 1960s, if you wanted to avoid military service, at least in the US, you stayed in school forever. This produced a glut of Ph.D. we didn't need in disciplines that didn't much matter. Ph.D.s need students to stay employed so they swindled a couple generations of kids and their parents into believing that a college degree was mandatory for anyone to be successful in life. They then hijacked the university system from being an instrument of learning and discovery into a dunk tank for neo-Marxist ideology to further peddle the drool the counterculture had been pushing.

This has now produced several generations of graduates that don't believe in objective truth, who think that everything is about how they feel, and who believe that all tradition is evil and exploitive. The pandamic just highighted this more clearly.

 

[AndyCapp]

Women were not drafted.
Take a look at the statistics.

 

[chuckroast]

Women were not drafted.
Take a look at the statistics.

No, they were not. But this doesn't change the reality of how the universities got hijacked. A good many women of that era also became college professors and social agitators in their own right. That was also the beginning of feminism moving from being an equality-seeking movement to becoming a front for radical political ideologies.

 

[AndyCapp]

Do you think that women just "became" social agitators out of their own initiative? Feminism changed to an invasive movement all by itself?
Did you real Sal Alinsky's Rules for the Radicals? That's the cookbook. The U.S. has been under an organized attack since the eighties.

 

[chuckroast]

Do you think that women just "became" social agitators out of their own initiative? Feminism changed to an invasive movement all by itself?
Did you real Sal Alinsky's Rules for the Radicals? That's the cookbook. The U.S. has been under an organized attack since the eighties.

Feminism in it's early stages was only about equal access for women. It had been a long time coming starting with Suffrage movements of the earlier part of the 20th Century. It's probably worth noting that this early feminism intersected with larger so-called "progressive" figures like Margaret Sanger. Sanger, in particular, was a very fine specimen of humanity who advocated for eugenics and was pretty openly racist. For example, she biased the location of abortion clinics to be near neighborhoods of poor and people of color.

I mention this only to point out that the radicalization of feminism started well before the 1960s counterculture movement. Yes Saul Alinksy wrote the book, but there were many rivers prior to 1960 that all came together to create the radical counterculture tidal wave. Among them included influences of the early century progressives, the mild love affair the Western left had with Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s (while ignoring his butchery), and the music, art, photography, poetry, and writing of the 1950s. I guess what I'm saying is that the 1960s should be seen as an outcome of everything before it in the century not some freestanding movement in its own right, The 1970s destruction of the academy came directly from that. ALL of this happened because of the rejection of traditional values and mores.

 

[AndyCapp]

@Retro-Grouch - You wanted a rant? Here you go ...

We should be studying the "book" that explains which human behaviors have been historically successful and which ones have not. The greatest vanity of modernity is the assumption that tradition is awful/bigoted/exclusive and thus needs to be replaced by entirely untried social fantasies foisted upon society by government force.

The real irony of all this is that it is primarily because of religious conscience that slavery was abandoned in the West after 300 years when it had previously existed for tens of thousands of years across nearly every human society.

The real irony of this is that the only reason people of variant sexualities enjoy freedom today is because of the philosophical structures put in place by Locke and others during the Enlightenment.

But Locke and his buddies, in turn, depended on the Reformation thinking that placed the power of conscience on the individual and took it away from large ecclesiastical-government structures. There is a direct line from the Renaissance, to Luther, to Locke, to the modern liberal state that affirms individual liberty. (N.B. The worst butchers of history were all either areligious, occultists, or atheists. The worst abuses of the Roman church in total pale by comparison to an afternoon in Stalin's gulags.)

The real irony here is that - after tens of thousands of years of economic disparity and oppression - Capitalism and Markets became the instruments that produced so much wealth for so many people, we today have the money to pick up the tab for the economic underclass, even the ones who jolly well just don't feel like working.

The real irony here is that the modern liberal nation-state (with secure and defined borders) that emerged from these movements is the only thing that has ever been powerful enough to be effective in curbing human rights abuses and genocides, interdicting in famines and large scale human tragedies, and bringing some measure of stability to high tension areas of the world.

But the Modern Mind (tm) is waaaaay too smart for all that. Faith, family, capital formation, markets, and national integrity are to be discarded in favor of the drug induced hallucinations of the We're So Smart Crowd. And the resutls are everwhere. We have people who "know' there are 80 genders but can't do elementary arithmetic. We have people who've read Zinn's execrable history of the US but don't know any actual US history and why it's so remarkable. The same people who marched against nuclear power, are now squealling about the coming bad weather. We see "Transexuals For Palestine" unironically marching when they really should call themselves "Chickens For KFC". We are truly living in an Idiocracy.

You can have the Modern Mind (tm). It's full of fools, charlatans, idiots, and cause pimps. No thanks. You cannot screw around what took thousands of years to figure out, and replace with stoned masturbatory fantasies and expect good outcomes.

P.S., I have lived in three countries, am a citizen of several, and have traveled and worked in probably a dozen more. I've see the alternatives to those traditional systems of living and they are awful. If you don't think so, walk through the ashes of Dachau or Treblinka. The Modern Mind (tm) is setting us up for the next mass genocide.

P.P.S. We've become so unmoored intellectually, socially, and spiritually, that even hardcode atheists like Camille Paglia are admitting that letting the 60s counterculture (aka "The Smelliest Generation") throw out all of those traditions including religion, was a really bad idea.

P.P.P.S. Veering every so slightly back onto topic. The popular photography of the 1960s largely sucked and continued to thereafter. When Annie Liebovitz is the the apigee of a photographic generation, we'lve lost all touch with real art. When Mapplethrope is taken seriously as an artist instead of what he was - an agent provocateur - you get some insight into just how screwed up you become dumping all traditional structures,. Your worldview dictates your art. If your worldview is a sewer, your art will smell like ... well, you know...

One of the top achievements I have seen thus far was a feminist who did not know what a woman is.
Sort of an oxymoron if expressed kindly.

 

[DownUnder]

Off the rail, and onto the side-track.

Read Ayn Rand (or watch the movie), and learn what happened to the train on that side track. Splot!!

 

[DownUnder]

I am not enraged, I am saddened to see all that has worked so well squandered by wild eyed ideologues and cause pimps. The youngsters are going backwards and will never know the joys we did, warts and all.

I rather think that you add I would have amazing conversations in person, should that ever transpire.

Okay. If we intend to go down the rabbit-path of hardcore end of world ideology, I'll play.

Here I go with my latest soapbox offer.

I am firmly convinced that the world as we know it is on its way to oblivion, and we are now in the pre apocalypse era.

So the young are acting as they are because of two basic reasons.

One, education has been so dumbed down since the 1980s, that they no longer think critically for themselves.

Two, and Irreckon more importantly, the planet is basically screwed. We have - how long? to go before it all falls apart.

Some say it will happen literally overnight and over the next two or three days, like a nuclear holocaust, followed by a total breakdown of basic utilities.

I reckon another scenario is more likely. With every passing year things will get a little worse, until a decade or two has passed, in which time things will be unbearably bad, but like the Soviet proletariat trying to deal with Lenin's sausage theory (Google it), we will mostly have turned away and closed our eyes to what it happening until, inevitably, it will be too late.

Pessimist, yes? What, me pessimist? Or realist?

But by then I hope I will be gone. My cellar of good red wines will last me until I'm 80, if I drink carefully and buy cautiously to replenish the diminishing stock of bottles. At my age, my own comforts are my primary concern. I no longer aspire to saving the world (from itself).

Defeatist, yes, it may seem so. But it's the only rationale I can intelligent come up with.

Comments are most welcome. Convince me I'm wrong, please.

 

[DownUnder]

In the vast social disorder that was the 1960s, however quarrelsome and confrontational they were, the central discussion was about ideas.

Today's most common debates are about brand - what tribe you belong to and the virtue it imputes, is all that matters. That means that substance doesn't get discussed much. More importantly, entire branches of ideas get sawed of because it comes from a particular party of ideological group. I believe that this is because today's youngsters have been taught that all truth is personal and therefore how things make you feel is the most important thing of all. If someone says anything that gives you the icks, they must be shouted down.

But here we have been debating/discussing ideas, not each other, not the brand, not the tribe we belong to. We haven't really talked extensively about our feelings, our own experiences, our personal truth or any of the rest of stuff that passes (wrongly) for a modern system of knowledge. This tends to lead to civil discourse.

I count among those in my social circle, Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, straight people, gay people, white people, black people, brown people, Asian people, traditional conservatives, MAGA Republicans, centrist Democrats, far left progressives ... rinse repeat. With only one exception in my entire life, I have never lost a friend or acquaintance to the vigorous debate of ideas. Quite to the contrary, I've been challenged and been made to rethink my own views on many occasions.

And this is the central problem with our kiddos. The answer to bad speech is more good speech, not shutting down the bad speech you don't like.

As I see it, this is because we are now lobotomized to regard ourselves as an economy, no longer a society or a culture.

Also the dumbing down of education since the 1970s and 1980s. To keep people small and stupid.

 

[AndyCapp]

As I see it, this is because we are now lobotomized to regard ourselves as an economy, and a society or a culture.

I have already written enough about this and other related matters, that I will say no more. Open to discussion, however. Please.

We are not the world, only the world as we know it. Maybe there'll be an apocalypse in the West, a cultural conflict between races and religions, the haves and have-nots, or what have you. In the meantime, remarkable progress is going on in Central Asia along the old Silk Road and further down East. Africa is going to hell; South America could rise if left alone. Cuba certainly would.
Western science has reached peaks that could not have been dreamed of some decades ago. We see the blue-haired howlers, but the STEM institutions are tough. Planes are supposed to fly, and bridges are supposed to stand. Reality is a stern judge.
We let ourselves be carried along with the polarizing media, financed by clicks and big finance.
The truth is still out there, and it is not what MSNBC, FOX, AP, BBC, or RIA Novosti tell us.
There's hope if only we let it in.

BTW: WTH did I have to Google ten times to find RIA Novosti, Putin's news agency, even if it is on Wiki? Are we protected against this info? I finally got it with DuckDuckGo. I do not like being watched.

 

[chuckroast]

Okay. If we intend to go down the rabbit-path of hard core end of world ideology, I'll play.

Here I go with my latest worn-can.

Sadly, I am firmly convinced that the world as we know it is on its way to oblivion, and we are now in the pre apocalypse era.

So the young are acting as they are because of two basic reasons.

One, education has been so dumbed down since the 1980s, that they no longer think critically for themselves.

Two, and Irreckon more importantly, the planet is basically screwed. We have - how long? to go before it all falls apart.

Some say it will happen literally overnight and over the next two or three days, like a nuclear holocaust, followed by a total breakdown of basic utilities like water, food supplies and so on. And groups of armed thugs roaming the streets, breaking into homes and looting the pantries of our hoarded tins of tuna and Italian stewed tomatoes. With not even any mains gas available to cook pasta to eat it with.

I reckon another scenario is more likely. With every passing year things will get a little worse, until a decade or two has passed, in which time things will be unbearably bad, but like the Soviet proletariat trying to deal with Lenin's sausage theory (Google it), we will mostly have turned away and closed our eyes to what it happening until, inevitably, it will be too late.

Pessimist, yes? What, me pessimist? Or realist?

But by then I hope I will be gone. My cellar of good red wines will last me until I'm 80, if I drink carefully and buy cautiously to replenish the diminishing stock of bottles.

Defeatist, yes, it may seem so. But it's the only rationale I can intelligent come up with.

Comments are most welcome. Convince me I am wrong, please. I fervently hope you can.

But no personal attacks...

I think the cries about the end of the world are vastly overstated. Climate, in particular, has become an unnecessary boogey man. There is this implicit assumption that it should never change and have remained as it was prior to the Industrial Revolution and this is ridiculous. We've been warming since the last ice age. The climate changes (nevermind the reason) and we have to adapt.


We've also way overplayed the hand of technology and science. While these are immensely powerful tools that have brought us much value, they are also isolating, separating, and breaking us. Consider the many studies that show how poorly socialized and ultimately lonely people who make extensive use of social media are.

I cannot commend enough, the book "The Psychology Of Totalitarianism" by Mattias Desmet. He spends a lot of time talking about how we went from being pre-scientific, to the Industrial Revolution, to having now elevated science and it's handmaidens as a kind of quasi secular religion. The result has been a desperately lonely society that is eager for human contact and empathy, and that makes a certain part of the population susceptible to the siren call of extremist causes. It's not an easy book to read, but it absolutely spot on and superb. There are no mechanical answers to spiritual angst, at least no good ones.

 

[chuckroast]

Read Ayn Rand (or watch the movie), and learn what happened to the train on that side track. Splot!!

I've read very nearly the entirety of Rand. She wrote effective political pamphlets and was an able defender of individualism, markets, and freedom. She was also, by turns, an awful writer, inconsistent within her own claimed system, soulless, and - worst of all - a very bad philosopher.

Her groupies have elevated her to be the new Aristotle, but she was no such thing. She flat out assumed things like the sufficiency of reason itself or the existence only of the material universe. Her theory of knowledge is sloppy and is mostly a restatement of Aristotle without bothering to even try to look at the problems he left behind. For example, how to harmonize physics and metaphysics, what you do when you run into the fact that mathematics is inherently contradictory (thank you Kurt Goedel and your wretched incompleteness theorems), and what does being a "good" person even mean. She really goes off the rails in aesthetics. Her entire view can be boiled down to "If I like it, it's good, and all folk art is terrible."

Worst of all, she railed against theism and religious belief, but elevated empiricism and reason to pretty much religious standing. There is a rather fine book on her failings as a philosopher by John Robbins, "Without A Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close Of Her System". Robbins is a Christian theologian who just eviscerates her on formal philosophical grounds. Highly recommended.

That said, she's an important and influential voice in the 20th century. At one point, "Atlas Shrugged" was second only in sales to the Bible itself. I think her best work is actually "The Fountainhead" which is fairly apolitical, but a rather grim look at human behavior.

The closest thing she ever wrote to an autobiography is "We The Living" and it is a tragic and terrifically sad look into her early life in novelized form. It provides a lot of context for her hatred of collectivism (which I share) and how she became the Rand we today know.