PreteenCommunist - ask me anything ^.^

I suppose that's a decent comparison. French = Hindi, Latin = Sanskrit, Malayalam = English. Although the issue is that those are but three when there are like thousands. French never sounded romantic to me either, just pompous. German is neat, yea the cases aren't really hard. And Hindi can sound bad if its not coming from Bollywood. An angry mother speaking in Hindi is no treat, just annoys me anyways. But I'm second gen USA so my mom was a German who grew up in the US and spoke English.

Not sure I'm a big fan of Durkenheim, but I will say his writing style is neat. Again, I may be a biased source, but I think that the Nazis just took that scientific approach too far, so if you water it down, it makes sense.

Well yea that's the big issue of course. When greed leads to an imbalance of power. That's what the fascists solved. But I guess I can understand sticking to the mainstream.

Yea I can agree with that, France is further left in rhetoric but in reality, isn't. Yea, that revolutionary fervor is a bit annoying. Most European states are further left than the US of course, but France just seems to do it better than anyone.

 

I'm a bit drunk right now, last day of summer vacation and all, but I can wholeheartedly agree with you. The plight of the left is idealism. Taking the world for what they want it to be and not what it actually is. Which is what makes it so destructive. But the right takes the world as it is, and tries to keep it that way, making it the most backwards form of thinking we have yet to discover. Oh yea, blast to the past, when everyone worshipped a guy in a white hat and people had the plague. Not to say, of course, Stalin was any better, but still, all things considered....

 

Aren't you a bit too young to be drinking?

 

Nevertheless...

 

Well don't get yourself into any trouble!

 

Hey Commie,



Why do you suppose Republicans on this forum are always harping on all kinds of things but never coming up with proposed solutions to their complaints?


Consider this:


http://www.politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=473002&page=4&p=1066594388#post1066594388



I repeatedly challenge them about their complaints - but they NEVER offer solutions. All they do is criticize but never even try to change things for the better.




Since they pay so much attention to this thread, can you do me a favor and ask these deluded pundits to answer my question. It is, after all, a fair challenge.

 

Bloody Europeans the whole damn lot of em. Bastards.

 

Yeh, she has a marked case of what I call "Hermione's Syndrome" May she never be cured

Hmm...so "Freedom is Slavery?"

 

If you let a bull run around and it ends up hurting itself, is that really freedom? But on the other hand, training the bull to harness its emotions and thus to live without getting hurt, that bull is freer from its training than from living in the herd.

The human race is the same thing. Controlled by our emotions, we have eroded our planet, each other, many things. But harnessing our emotional faculty, we're going to be a much more capable species. Think of how far we've already come, how much further can we go with harnessed/optimal thought?

 

Who's harnesssing the bull? Whose optimum are we using?. People have their own thoughts and are not animalistic creatures of instinct. Oxen are not any better off being yoked from the oxen's view at all.

 

"I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature." What separates us from the beasts? We are a part of the animal kingdom whether you like it or not. Superior in intellect and skills perhaps, but a part, nonetheless.

 

dunno where you live but it has happened around here a few times though it never gets media coverage as most incidents are hushed up - true story

 

Yea, euro-trash! God Bless America!

Lol, no seriously, not really a big fan of any of em.

 

I was once a Syndicalist, so I am very intimate with Chomsky. Being a libertarian I now disagree with him on most stuff, but meh.

 

I live in the United States. I think you are full of it, TBH. If it isn't covered then how would YOU know about it? And yes, there are crazies in every group. Calm down your hatred.

 

Honest to God. Happens far more often than is reported in the news media. If you don't want to believe it, fine. But that's political correctness for you.

 

So much to reply to...wish me luck :/

Ha, I get it, it's fun to release your inner motivational speaker sometimes. I do that all the time at school.

Mereology is basically the philosophical study of the constitution of objects; there's a good little summary here. I brought it up because I thought we might get into the idea of the individual as a composite and thus, in my opinion, as non-existent.

Isn't everyone thus part of a unit/collective? Is there any "individual" who exists externally to a unit?

Well the 2nd person grammatical subject is the 2nd person grammatical subject (in the sense in which A is A) but I don't think that there is such thing as a "you", "I", whatever in any other sense.

So are you arguing that because free will (in the philosophical sense of an agent's ability to choose from a selection of possibilities) exists, an individual agent must exist? I guess that would be true, but free will is yet another concept which I find incoherent. To use the disobeying parents example, maybe my parents would tell me one day to do A and I would think "no, I don't want to do A because R, I'm going to do B instead." But what exactly would have given me the idea of disobeying in the first place? What would have made me find R a sensible reason and B a reasonable course of action? However far back you follow the causal chain behind my thought process, you arrive inevitably at a set of factors external to "me", and therefore it makes no sense to say that "I" exercised my free will in "choosing" to disobey my parents because external factors determined my course of action.

But where did the components of the person originate?

Very few people seriously argue that people born poor are meant to be poor. When I (and Marxists in general) talk about things being predetermined - a rather unfortunate word - we are referring to previous actions and circumstances as said determinants, not some kind of ultimate purpose.

I guess I'd agree, though this sounds more like poetry than theory.

As for the riddle, my first instinct is to be a killjoy and think about it in terms of evolution, with a whole population of eggs passing the point at which they could reasonably be called chicken eggs at some point in history. I know that misses the point, but that was how I immediately thought of it.

The issue is that "the Man" is a vague, composite and in my opinion non-existent notion. Like "the Idea." Right down to the capitalisation.

True; I think discourse itself is more valuable and constructive than trying to convince people, though.

This kind of discussion straddles the line between politics and philosophy, though, so we need to be clear about which sense of the word we're talking about.

The crux of this whole thing is the origin of such "will." Where does it come from? What causes it? What actually is it, in a non-relational sense?

Right in what sense? How does the environment determine what is the "right" choice?

You should write pamphlets; you have such a poetic style of political reasoning! I basically agree here.

"We", as I've been arguing, is a pronoun. Not a concrete concept.

Seriously, you should publish something on this. People have ended up founding whole new sociological traditions because they disagreed with certain ideas of their theoretical predecessors/influences.

In any case - perhaps the reason the "individual" seems so self-evident and axiomatic is that (1) our language assumes it (which is why I constructed, or half-constructed, a language) and (2) bourgeois consciousness, which is the social equivalent of logic in terms of its axiomatic nature, assumes it? These are, if anything, reasons to deconstruct the concept and question it further, and to subject it to the same sort of scrutiny as any other philosophical postulation.

So you're like a radical centrist? I've always found that whole idea interesting, even if its application has lacked a bit (this is so hypocritical coming from a communist!). I don't think accepting the concept of the individual is radical though

In communism, if things go to plan, I would hope that this ghastly word "rights" would not even exist.

I agree, but I don't think we need any legal/coercive limits on freedom to achieve this sort of state, as long as class oppression no longer exists.

 

Thanks! Do you mean the entries on this site? In those I was reposting a reply to a specific set of questions which another user asked me in my intro thread and don't think I even addressed the concept of human nature, because the question was not asked for once. But I have addressed it plenty of times in this thread and am discussing the "individual" thing with AmericanNationalist. I'm not avoiding discussing these matters.

Which discussion are you referring to? Some of the conversations I'm having in this thread are rather philosophical and need to be explored in depth, and if people don't want to read lengthy posts on such topics they're welcome not to.

As for experience, honestly, I've yet to see anyone put forward an insight which could only have been gained through experience. Experience has as many downsides as benefits - it has a tendency to make arguments more emotive, for example, because people feel personally connected to certain propositions.

 

What I think you're saying is that everyone is in a different situation and has a different mode of analysis corresponding to their own character, and therefore learning/forming conclusions from reading is not appropriate, beneficial or advisable because the reasoning and conclusions appropriate to one person will not be appropriate to another.

Which assumes that when people read theory, they simply inhale the contents of whatever they read and accept an undiluted and uncritical version of it as their belief system. I think you'll already be able to tell that this is not what I do when I read Leibniz or Popper or Hayek, for example, and even with people like Weber whose mode of analysis I like (apart from some more abstract, culture-related analyses), I did say that I did not agree with his conclusions. I consider myself a Marxist and a structuralist and yet I still don't swallow everything Marx or Althusser ever wrote without thinking about it. It is perfectly possible to educate oneself about others' thoughts and still form one's own conclusions, and the former can help the latter because getting familiar with how to construct a line of argument and respond to counter-arguments is incredibly useful. Maybe if you didn't dismiss reading theory, you wouldn't have problems with poor communication.

 

I'll reply to the rest...whenever.

Haha, I think the pomposity depends on what you read and who you hear. When I did a student exchange in France, my exchange family (from western Paris) had such standard accents that they sounded exaggerated, which is probably why we did our exchange in this particular region. But Swiss French is reeeally nice. And they say huitante instead of quatre-vingts, which is so much more sensible. I'm second-gen. too and I've forgotten how to speak every Indian language I knew (I have family from all over) but honestly, I prefer European languages generally, especially Slavic ones.

The scientific issue is difficult; I like scientific approaches, but not when they fetishise science. I don't think greed causes an imbalance of power; regardless of people's attitudes, an imbalance of power will arise if economic conditions permit such a situation, like in the Soviet Union.

 

Unfortunately nowadays, fascism and Nazism seem to be synonymous to racism, which is so far from true. In reality, it is just radical centrism.

 

Yea Swiss-French and Canadian-French is nice. I like that, quatre-vingts is so confusing. Indian languages, there are just too many. I really like Tamil and I'm a fan of Sanskrit revival, and Hindi is great, but everything else really just needs to go away. I always wanted to learn a Slavic language. Just don't have the time.

As for the second point, greed is what feeds an imbalance of power. Because if people weren't greedy, everyone would have enough to eat. When the economy allows for an imbalance of power, you can be sure that someone will take advantage of it, hence the Soviet Union and uber-rich capitalists.

 

Have you ever thought of running for office when you get older?

It's not a bad living and you seem to have a talent for it.

I'd vote for you.

 

My Poor Communication was purposeful but obviously you didn't take the hint.

AA

 

Good point, there. Commie does seem to have good tact and diplomacy.