I appreciate your remarks, and I am also a believer in radical inclusion, but not everyone is ready for political struggle. Hell, I’m pretty sure I’m not cut out for it either; except for my dedication to it. But hopefully more people can become ready and produce some new social form we never could have predicted fully, and it grows into something by and for the many. That’s why I try to educate whenever possible, and get involved in whatever work I’m cut out for. I guess this will be the test, the next 4 - however many years

Yeah well I wish I had a clear answer to the problem you’re correctly identifying. Probably the best way to get around at least the first large chunk of issues, is focusing a lot on education. Quite frankly many liberal progressives, the good ones who would value more highly human emancipation and progress than clinging death-like to private property at the expense of all else, function largely based on enlightenment moralism such as a “categorical imperative”, as well as are hardwired for dualism rather than dialectical materialism (for example.) IMO these out of date paradigms are woefully insufficient for the present task.

But even among like-minded individuals there are big problems to move beyond. I’m in a group of political activists that go to great lengths to vet its members. It takes a minimum of 4 months of study and discussion to be even considered to join, and activists had often been studying for years before and continue to study once accepted. The group was formed by some organizers who have been working together for decades before splitting from their old group. We are a very democratically run org, that works to influence mass movements and call for the creation of a workers party by and for the workers, in order to establish a worker state to transition to socialism away from capital and private property.

Long story short we have vicious disagreements despite our collective work, our shared education and frequent comradely discussions. The scope of what we disagree about is narrower, but the disagreements are almost irreconcilable. Personally I think some people could be more introspective, others better communicators, others less dogmatic. Various differences manifest as two distinct factions in conflict, with the rest of the membership left to tip-toe around it, or set up in one camp or the other. And this is a very good group! None of these critiques venture into the sort of interpersonal cattyness, or downright abusive behavior from leaders of other groups. We don’t have those particular problems, but yet problems emerge nonetheless.

But moving into a more “repressive” period under trump might have the effect of unifying many peoples differences and burying different hatchets. Temporarily. Its a mistake to think that individual ideas or ideology is solely responsible for the difficulties of the left. We exist in a milieu that is hostile and confused, at least some of the hostility and confusion amongst us is part of that influence. Having an external “enemy” to struggle against has a way of unifying differences and replacing important priorities with urgent ones dictated by history. Also things can move very quickly once society reaches a tipping point. Objects in our predictable future may be close than they appear. I hope we can get our act together, and will keep working to try and make that real

I don’t think I’m tearing anybody down after the election.

I’m gonna go a different direction and say that people on the left have to learn to disagree productively. Rather than the old dem party “shut up get in line the adults are talking” progressives should be interested in grassroots mass campaigning. What is needed is a mass movement, and that won’t happen if people can’t make basic democratic decisions in a field of uncertainty and shifting priorities.

But if I see my fellow progressives going down a stupid path, like the one the meme seems to advocate for, I’m gonna say something. If my comrades want to arm themselves, great! If they want to organize into a worker militia, that’s 1000x better. But believing we can make change happen with violence divorced from politics is as naive as believing we can make change happen with politics divorced from violence. That’s not what the state is.

I am the last person tearing down anyone. I agree with your point and the urgency of it, but (theoretically) disagreement can be productive and drive discussion, rather than making people more campist and paranoid. Avoiding conflict will not unite the left, but those conflicts will never get resolved or worked through, and they end up staying forever. We need to work past it together rather than acting like we are all bitter enemies judging each other just because we have different priorities. That’s just normal regular politics

The climate movement has to get organized politically first and foremost. Guns are meaningless without a political program, its just fetishism. Not to mention dangerous. This is the most USA brained meme ever.

Put a ring on it immediately.

Great discussion, thanks for sharing your perspectives and sources as well! Good luck on your inquiries!

Formally as in have had a university publish books and articles that I’ve written on it? No, I’m afraid I have very little university education, I’m largely self-educated. I support people having the opportunity to go to college, but my life just didn’t work out like that. I’m all libraries, discussions, book sales, book clubs, writing and IRL political organizing. I’ve had some articles published but most of my writing is in notebooks.

I won’t bore you with bio details, but after sort of rejecting Harris’s vulgar determinism, I eventually discovered Rick Roderick’s lectures on Philosophy and Human Values. The video quality is pretty old, but as a survey of western Philosophy course, I found this extremely useful and compelling. His course on Neitzsche is also very good. His course on 20th century philosophy, its first episode, Masters of Suspicion is a passionate defense of the self, free will, as well as the validity of exploring these questions.

I’m currently pulling on a thread where I am spending a lot of time thinking about Theses on Feuerbach by Karl Marx, the short but famous formulation wherein Marx “turns Hegel on his head.” Feuerbach’s formulation of God that begins the process of turning Hegel’s logic against Hegel’s own conclusions, established god as the embodiment of humans own best qualities, and externalizing them as an unreachable other, and how it functions as a tool of repression and intellectual domination finds some common ground with Harris’s antireligious atheism. But this thread leads us closer to a kind of humanism, whereas Harris’s atheism leads us further away from it. Its like atheism’s main disagreement with religion is that it believes that science and industry should be mechanism that alienates us from our selves and each other, not the church. Personally, I would prefer not to be alienated from myself or from other people by any extrinsic mechanism of repression; I’d rather throw it off entirely.

They would have to have their own sorts of media

Disagree. Watch Reds.

Did you say “do Gladio shit”? Like enlist fascists, virulent anti-communists that they are, to carry out terrorist attacks against civilian populations to then blame on communists in order to crush the influence of socialists in government and justify purges of socialists and communists from every sphere of life? That gladio shit?

The revolution will not be won by beautiful dead, tears in their eyes, clutching their rifles. It will be won by a political revolution of the working class for the benefit of all. There will certainly be fighting, of which the internationale sings about explicitly:

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we’ll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They’ll break ranks and fight no more.
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We’ll shoot the generals on our own side.

No, the Internationale!

Oh enshittification is coming for Windows. In the future. Like it hasn’t happened yet or wasn’t the first and worst of these companies for it to come for. But something that hasn’t happened yet, not in the past. Interesting.

Okay, I apologize I went back and read your first post which said something like “the self doesn’t exist is a fun concept to play with” when I was pretty sure you had said just “the self doesnt exist.” I’m sitting here trying to find the thread that connects “the self doesn’t exist” with your seeming acknowledgement of every aspect of it.

I agree its useful to test “wrong conclusions” for the reasons you state. You end up constructing consistent logic justifying it, and can witness for yourself where the reasoning goes wrong, and can speculate as to why. I think it makes relating to people convinced by faulty logic and conclusions easier to relate to, as well as gives you a hint to where their reasoning is off and you cans start to argue against it

But what is experience, how can you find experience without a self doing the experiencing? I’m not trying to put it on you but it is consistent with your logic, as I understand it

I haven’t played them since they first came out, practically a lifetime ago. Actually now that I think about it my friend is really into halo lore I wonder if they saw the show.

It was hokey but I liked it. And yeah I thought it ended really strongly but there’s no plan for a 3rd season

I played the first two

Famously, Kant stripped away all his preconceptions and could prove only the subjective (I think therefore I am), whereas you seem to deny everyone their subjectivity, even your own. In any case since you’re interested in these questions, I assume then you’ll reach a better understanding of these questions, just keep studying and growing on your own terms (which is contradictory to your own thesis, but the whole is always defined by contradiction.)

I just watched the Halo series, thought it was corny but kinda awesome, and then discovered noone else thought it was awesome. Def had some problems, tried to shoehorn in a lot of stuff but by the finale I was super hooked

Well I disagree that “we can’t find it”. I think the inability to find the self is a result of the limitations of empiricism, whereas dialectical and materialist analysis has no problem locating the self within the changing relationships that define the individual, history and nature in context of each other.

And this is what empiricism really fails at: its great at defining an object, defining the parameters that constitute it, and isolating it as a subject of study, but absolutely falls short at being able to identify the relationships between “things” or the historic circumstances that give rise to them.

As observers, an over-reliance on one theory of knowledge, or epistemology, verges on the kind of ideological blindness usually associated with fringe fundamentalism. We wouldnt us a ratchet to hammer a nail, why would we insist that a single epistemic “tool” is the only one that is capable of determining truth?

Honestly I probably agreed with you more some years ago before reading Sam Harris’s Free Will, which was so bad it set me on a very different path of inquiry.

But the self can be shown to exist, unless you deny the existence of subjectivity. this leads to hard determinism, what you referred to as no free will.

The productive, creative process itself, the drive to learn and be curious, to investigate, all of this leads to the conclusion that 1. There is some kind of greater will guiding us or 2. Humans have the ability to make determinations based on their experiences, and choose certain actions based on those experiences.

I’ve seen the deterministic argument that free will is an illusion caused by a chain of circumstances, but I don’t buy it. I think that the view that free will is an illusion is itself a logical error: the result of a dependence of the tendency of dualism to try and turn everything into objects, rather than seeing each object within its relationships, coming together to form a totality. This tendency leads to vulgar empiricism and positivist views. These views always obscure social relationships, which are real, measurable and predictions can be made based on them.

The “I’m so deep I’m a nihilist” trope has got to go. Every TV show or movie where there is some supposedly hyper intelligent character, they always have the most vile, garbage philosophy.

The Book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnneman. Weird self help name, but its a book on biases, research which Kahnneman won the nobel prize. Once I started questioning my preconceptions it completely changed my whole perspective on the world. Its like that list of fallacies that you study in philo 101, but they’re not like dialogical fallacies they appear in our own thinking. And “experts” are more likely to get fooled in their own fields of research than laypeople when asked trick questions