And by the way iambiguous … you can’t just call people you can’t debate or outdebate as a person with a condition everytime without being seen as the one without a condition.
Let’s get into this. Let’s see what you have.
Are the walls crumbling around you…?
That you don’t have a fractured self after all?
I’ve beaten you at 3 debates on ILP already.
Actually…
I beat you at 4 debates now that I think about it.
1.) pro choice
2.) that your self is not fractured or fragmented
3.) that you were never born and never die
4.) that in a no god world, you can’t be punished
And to be sarcastic … pick a number as a context and debate me on it
I have another thing to add to my last couple posts…
Are you jealous that I’ve been to hell and you haven’t ?
You shouldn’t be. But I think you are.
You’re not used to being put in your place.
Which means you’re not used to learning.
Let me explain a vanity autobiographical briefly.
Do you know my past?
When I 16 fucking years old I was building the mathematical architecture to read the minds of others with computer programs. I can’t program worth shit, I can’t even program a computer to say “hello”…
But I did know how to do this.
Then a few years later, I discovered how to create a machine that could control everyone remotely without implants.
Guess what happened?
The spirit world hit me like a freight train. In an instant.
I didn’t understand the implications of what I was doing at the time. It’s just what I did… some part of me thought it would help people. Wow was I ever wrong!
But when I saw the spirit world…
Everything changed.
My super genius tools were garbage.
And that’s the truth.
Everything is spirit iambiguous and you are blind and have no idea.
I know people get really defensive about not knowing something.
After this, my entire mind became dedicated to spirit.
The whole thing.
See what I’ve set in motion!!!
A full-blown tantrum. One fantastic assertion after another. It’s what I’ve always feared. That I’d be the one to send him completely over the edge.
Or, sure, is he just getting started? 
godot to iambiguous:
You’ve made your point. Now back the fuck off!!!
A tantrum? I’ve written every message in this thread with no anger in my heart. Sometimes I use sharp words… but no anger. Are you projecting perhaps?
Now you’re another URWRONG…
Just another propaganda minister.
On the contrary, if I were another Urwong, I’d be insisting that others were wrong times a 1,000 if they did not share my own set of assumptions about you. Whereas I flat out acknowledge that I could very well be wrong about you. All I can do is to react subjectively given my own “fractured and fragmented” sense of self.
Same as you. Only, in having a “condition”, you may not be capable of grasping this. And wouldn’t it be ironic if I were the one who rescued you from yourself?
iambiguous to godot:
I hear you. And I’ll do my best to wean myself off responding. It’s just that, waiting for you, it’s so damn entertaining!!
Also, as I noted elsewhere, I’m still not entirely convinced that ecmandu isn’t just a character he plays here. For his own entertainment.
Iambiguous…
This is not a joke. Nobody is the messiah. And you are not everyone’s home.
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5#p2860175
The easiest thing anyone in life can say, no matter what’s thrown at them is: I disagree.
That’s how you’re arguing at this point.
Me: “trees exist”
Iambiguous: “I disagree”
For anything…
What do you think you know that I don’t know that would make you such a piece of shit?
I want to hear it.
Note to Meno:
Please run this by Alan. Ask him if ecmandu qualifies here. To be honest, he can be as unintelligible to me as you often are. But then what do I know about being unintelligible, right?
Iambiguous. To be perfectly honest. You’re a human who can’t pass a Turing test.
If I’m reading you correctly, you’re saying that I expressed myself as though I were an ordinary objectivist who thinks my point is correct and those who disagree with me are wrong. It raises the question: how would one express themselves as though they were a subjectivist? Would they have to qualify every statement they make with, “I could be wrong but…” or “…at least according to my views”? Would it be acceptable if they added this to every paragraph? Once for the whole post?
The problem here is one of language. The brain is built to express itself (its thoughts, its experiences, its feelings, etc.) in statements, and statements are structured to describe objective states or objective facts. For example, if I want to describe the color of the sky as I see it, I will say, “The sky is blue”… but that sounds like “The sky actually is blue, objectively.” It is how statements are interpreted by default. But this is true regardless of whether I’m an objectivist or not. I could be a subjectivist, but if someone asks me what color the sky is, I’ll still say “the sky is blue”. This no more affirms objectivism for me than it does for a 2 year old who looks up at the sky and says “the sky is blue”, a 2 year old who hasn’t the mental capacity to even understand what “objectivism” and “subjectivism” mean. This is because the brain, by default, experiences the world as objectively there, and thus constructs language to express the world in an objective way.
To be a subjectivist is not to undergo a structural transformation in the language centers of the brain such that one no longer express one’s self using objectivy sounding statements . It is merely to do, I guess you could say, a meta-assessment of your own experiences of the world. It is to take the primary (default) way of experiencing the world (i.e. objectively) and decide whether the world really is objective as your experiences make it out to be, or whether it is really subjective. If you decide on the former, you’re an objectivist. If you decide on the latter, you’re a subjectivist. Either way, you don’t change the fundamental way your brain works. You still experience the world as objectively real and you still use objective sounding language to describe it. What makes one an objectivist or a subjectivist is not whether they continue to use this language or not, but whether they feel that language, as such, is adequate to convey the way the world really is or just to describe how we experience it.
I, for one, prefer to let others know that I am a subjectivist, and that means that for any statement I make, there is an implicit “according to how I experience it” tacked on the end. I don’t want to make that explicit with every statement I make as that would make speaking way to cumbersome, so I expect others to understand that it’s implicit. In other words, whatever statements I made before that lead you to accuse me of being a fulminating fanatic pinhead objectivist, you failed to infer the implicit qualifier “at least, that’s how things seem to me”.
Now, I know, I know, I went waaay up in the sky on that one, didn’t I? Too hard for you to grasp? Just another “blah, blah, blah” word vomit from gib? Well, at least I understand it.
But you’re the only one allowed to do that, right?
If you’re setting the bar, Biggy, that’s a gap that no one can close.
[size=85](Note to Pedro: see the part in bold–that’s Biggy’s famous “all rational men and women” challenge–the tangent we’re on might be better directed at him.)[/size]
As true as that may be, this board only allows posts less than 60,000 character long. If you want me to relay each and every event in my life that may have had an effect on where I stand today on the trucker convoy, you’re gonna have to sit back and buckle in for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong read. What I do know is what I did go through which did determine where I stand on the trucker convoy today, and even that required more time out of my busy schedule to write than I should have taken.
What’s with the language of “as though”, of “absolutely, positively”, of “issue by issue”? I certainly didn’t use those terms. Why are you projecting them? Does it all come down to language again? The points I made above? About language being constructed to sound objectivy by default? That “I was brainwashed by MSM” comes across as “I was absolutely, positively demonstrably brainwashed by MSM”? How can I say it such that it comes across as “I was brainwashed by MSM at least according to how things seem to me right now but I could be wrong”? Do I have to say it like that explicitly?
(And for what it’s worth, I believe it’s all brainwashing–left, right, and center–media, all media, is in the business of brainwashing us–and there’s no such thing as not being brainwashed.)
You say that as though you can absolutely, positively demonstrate to us, issue by issue, what it means for the MSM to be part of the media industrial complex.
Again, more of “it’s okay for me to do it, but not for you.”
You drove Ucci away?!?!
Not that you’ll believe me, but no, I call myself a subjectivist. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in objectivity. I just think it’s couched in a subjectivist framework. Subjectivity and objectivity are not mutually exclusive opposites. They can coexist. Even the objectivist believes in subjectivity. Ask any objectivist if they believe subjective experiences and opinions exist. They will tell you yes and give you examples: the value of a painting, the quality of a movie, whether a woman is beautiful or not. It’s not that objectivists don’t believe one can have these subjective appraisals, just that they can’t exist except within an objectively real world. I as a subjectivist just flip that around and say the world is fundamentally subjective with pockets of objectivity here and there. Mathematical truths are objectively real within one’s subjective reality. Objects are objectively there within one’s subjective experience of the world. So I have no issue stepping into the objective world that subjectivity creates and describing it like it is. The world, for me, the one we all share, is objectively real even if it’s basis for existing is our subjectively experiencing it.
What I wonder is whether the question ought to be put to you: “Are you one of them?” I know you’re a nihilist but I don’t see how nihilism gets you out of objectivism. You still believe in the objective reality of the either/or world, and as for the is/ought world, any nihilist worth his salt dismisses it, as you do, as an intellectual contraption. ← But this to me is no less an objective statement that goes: there is no is/ought world except as an intellectual contraption. So I would hazard a guess that you’re more an objectivist than you let on.
^ So make of that what you will. Am I “one of them” or not? Or is this just more “blah, blah, blah”?
Hey, it’s what you asked for.
Well, hey, when you ask someone for a life account that explains how they got to the point where they’re at today, and they deliver, you know you’re projecting when you read so much more into it than just that they delivered what you asked for. It’s called projection… PRO-JEC-TION… A good psychoanalytic therapist can help you with that.
Ah… if he were rational.
The problem is, how to identify such a thing?
Yes, one way or another. A subjectivist – a moral nihilist – starts with the assumption that one would have be omniscient in order to grasp every single component of the truckers protest. He would have to be fully knowledgeable about every aspect of the covid pandemic and the role of government down through the ages. Then the one and the only manner in which to grasp it all together.
Like you? And certainly like Urwrong. Go ahead, ask him.
I make it clear that in examining the arguments of those at both ends of the political spectrum here reasonable points can be made given certain intial assumptions above covid and government and the well-being of a community in terms of healthcare policies. Neither side is able to make the points raised by the other side just go away. So, given my own initial assumption regarding “I” as the existential embodiment of dasein re my signature threads here, I am “drawn and quartered”. I’m not into calling those who don’t agree with me necessarily wrong because they are not “one of us”.
It really comes downs to how one construes “I” at the existential – historical, cultural, experiential – intersection of identity, value judgments, conflicting goods and political economy.
Given a particular set of circumstance.
As for this truly ponderous “intellectual contraption”…
…yeah, you did go way, way, way, way, way, up into the intellectual contraption clouds.
But: With worlds of words, the sky is the limit, isn’t it?
Now…
Note its relevancy to the truckers protest. And note how it might be construed by you to be an effective antidote for those here concerned that they too might become “fractured and fragmented” in regard to their Precious Self wholly in sync objectively with The Right Thing To Do.
My point, however, is that for the moral and political objectivists among us, not only do they include their own political dogmas – really just political prejudices rooted in dasein – in their set of assumptions but exclude the assumptions of all who don’t think exactly like they do.
Then back to where you fit in here re the trucker protests such that you explore this in coming down out of the sky. Not a fulminating fanatic pinhead like Urwrong but not fractured and fragmented like me.
You tell me. A non-dogmatic objectivist assessment of the truckers’ strike? of abortion? of gun ownership? of the role of government?
An assessment that makes the points I raise regarding dasein here largely moot? Calling it “your job” doesn’t make its relevance to you and your own political prejudices here go away.
“As true as that may be…”
Why don’t you take more time to think through the implications of that regarding your own profoundly problematic political prejudices. The more you come to grasp just how true it is, the less likely it will be that you do end up being just another authoritarian pinhead like Urwrong.
Of course, the truer it becomes to you, the more the likelihood that your own measure of dogmatism might begin to crumble. After all, how much psychologically do you have invested in being able to call those who don’t think like you “libtards”. Or whatever names you prefer in going after those who don’t share your own self-righteous assessment. Feel free to borrow pinhead if you wish. Call me a pinhead if that comforts and consoles you. We all draw the line here in different places for different people.
Again, however, the pinhead objectivists do make distinctions between those who think like us and were not brainwashed by the MSM and those who think like them and were brainwashed by the MSM.
And only by going “issue by issue”, given a specific context like the trucker protest can we note in particular how the MSM is brainwashing us. And [my point] the manner in which for the objectivists you are brainwashed if you don’t think like they do…left or right.
Most crucially however [for me] is the extent to which someone can react to all of the many, many complex and convoluted components of the trucker protest and still insist that only their own moral narrative and political agenda actually nails it.
The “right makes might” objectivist pinheads. As opposed to those who do recognize the sheer problematic nature of conflicts like this and shift more towards moderation, negotiation and compromise in regard to government policies.
Nope. Back to the part where, before every value judgment of mine I noted “I could be wrong but…” or “…at least according to my views”?
But, over and over and over again, I have made it clear that in regard to my own value judgments “I” am either more or less “fractured and fragmented”. Only the newbies here might not get that part by now, right?
I’d like to think so, sure. He was just another political objectivist to me. Albeit back in the day when ILP wasn’t the pinhead cesspool that it can so often be now.
You know, if “I” do say so myself.
He came here to defend the conservative frame of mind. And his mentality was [in my view] objectivist. What would aggravate him even more than that others didn’t share his own vlaue judgments, was that I would attempt to deconstruct value judgments themselves by suggesting they were but subjective prejudices rooted in dasein.
For the objectivists that is the most disturbing conclusion of all. What if their own Real Me in sync with The Right Thing To Do began to crumble?!!
They could deal with the “libtards” merely by assuming the conservative narrative was in fact more rational and virtuous. But what about where I was taking the exchanges?
Sigh…
Another general description intellectual contraption.
Wrap these points around the trucker protest. Subjectivity and objectivity here in regard to 1] the actual fact of the protest itself and 2] the conflicting moral and political reaction to what can in fact be demonstrate as the objective truth.
Yeah. The either/or world. The laws of nature, mathematics, the empirical world around us, the logical rules of language. For or against the trucker protest, none of that goes away.
Right?
Now, as for the rationality and morality of the protest? What can be pinned down here as applicable to all of us?
It’s not what they deliver that matters nearly as much as the extent to which they recognize the account as an existential contraption rooted in dasein. The more one recognizes this, in my view, the less likely they are to insist that others must jettison their own political prejudices in order embrace their own if they wish to be thought of as rational and virtuous human beings.
Yo, Pedro, you’re still up:
Not yet. I’d prefer to pause here for a second. I find this fascinating (even if not really relevant to the trucker protest)–the way you seem to require that it be tied back to the subject matter of this thread just in order to comprehend it, just in order for it not to be way up in the intellectual contraption clouds. I mean, I realize you don’t understand what it’s about, so let’s just call it X. What I was talking about in the above intellectual contraption cloud is X. So let’s suppose that instead of talking about the trucker protest, we actually were talking about X, that I began this thread by saying “Hey Biggy, let’s debate X!” When it came to the above intellectual contraption cloud, I would imagine I’d be saying the same thing. I would imagine I would type it out verbatim, word for word, exactly as I did. But in this scenario, you would comprehend it. You would comprehend it because it addresses X and X would be exactly the subject matter of this thread. I find that absolutely fascinating, how you’re comprehension skills seem to turn on or off depending on how what you’re reading relates to the subject matter at hand.
I know it has nothing to do with how complex or abstract it is because we’ve discussed far more abstract/complex things before without you failing to comprehend. You’re very philosophy about dasein and nihilism and the distinction between the either/or world and the is/ought world is arguably just as abstract and complex. So it seems it actually has nothing to do with how far “up in the clouds” it is but rather “how far away” it is (maybe into the mist) from the subject matter.
I want to try something. You might have to bear with me as this won’t bring us back the to the subject matter but it will be a very interesting experiment. I want to try repeating the paragraph I wrote above (the cloud) sentence by sentence and see where I lose you. so I started with this in response to you saying this:
^ So does this make sense to you? That I’m proposing the problem is one of language?
I know I cut out my lengthy explanation about why it’s a problem with language, but if this was your first time reading this, would you at least be able to react with “Ok gib, go on.”
But you don’t even give me the benefit of the doubt–despite numerous attempts on my part to assure you that I agree with your dasein argument (i.e. that it all stems from dasein). It seems that just because I express my views in an objectivy sounding way (this was my point above about language), you’re ready to lump me together with what you call the fulminating fanatic pinheads. It’s telling that you describe me as holding my views dogmatically since dogmatism requires a lot more than just expressing one’s view in an objectivy sounding way (i.e. plain English). It requires an insistence that one is right “just because”. I don’t think I’ve given you reason to assume that.
What bewilders me further is that you have a perfect example of a person who will express his views in an objectivy sounding way without insisting dogmatically that he can absolutely, positively demonstrate to the world that he is right such that all rational men and women are oblige to agree with him–you!!!–you know that you make an exception for yourself despite that you use the English language the same way as everyone else (i.e. uttering statements that come off as objective), yet you know your dasein arguments apply to yourself just as much as to everyone else. So I just don’t understand why you can’t grant me the same license, especially when I’ve already told you I agree with your dasein argument. The only thing I can surmise is that your entire MO here is designed to enter into debate and to challenge your contenders–so you can’t deal with someone who agrees with you. Thus, you project a caricature of me when you engage with me–you try your best to interpret me no differently than any of the other fulminating fanatical pinhead dogmatists here.
I don’t get it. My entire life history consists of things like being stood up on a date when I was 16. Am I supposed to gain some insight from that into why I support the trucker protest? I mean, obviously that experience nudged me in a certain direction, but so does the wind nudge a leaf fallen from a tree; does that tell me anything about where the leaf will end up 30 years later? The reason I picked April 24 2014 as a starting point is because I know where I stood on politics at that point (a lefty without knowing it), and I know how I got there (the media). How I got to that point is irrelevant. It wouldn’t change the facts. That I was an unknowing lefty on April 24 2014 is a fact. Everything before that is completely apolitical–and therefore relatively unchanging (at least where my thoughts on politics are concerned).
But I take your point that I should give this some thought on my own time, not that you want me to lay out my thoughts in painstaking detail in this thread. As far as laying out my thoughts about how I got to the position I’m at now (being a trucker supporter), I think what I gave suffices.
A line between what and what?
What if I were to tell you that I’m not prepared to get into that? What would you say if I told you I hadn’t even thought about that question? And what would you say if I said I never much cared for the question? And that if asked to explain myself, I’d decline by virtue of feeling under-qualified to do so? What if I said that, at least from where I stand now, I guess I’m going on a gut feeling.
I suppose I could venture a guess, but it would just be a guess. ← I must qualify it with that for the record–I must show that I’m not trying to demonstrate as rationally and objectively as possible how it is that I definitively was brainwashed by left leaning media–and this is where I think I differ most from your typical pinhead–I make a point of not claiming to know. When it comes down to it, I believe that we, collectively as a species, actually know maybe 1% of all that we think we know. I believe we know incredibly little. You’d know this if you actually read, and paid attention to, my back story which I gave you. It was pretty much one of the biggest arcs of the whole story–that I have abandoned all claims to knowledge and have come to accept my prejudices on faith.
I would say I’m a proponent of that.
But you didn’t, at least not in the statement you made, which was verbatim:
I’m sorry, but I think I took this as the ramblings of a fulminating fanatical dogmatistic salivating objectivist who really believes, as though it were demonstrable in such a way that all rational men and women are obliged to agree with, that “the MSM is part of the media industrial complex, part of what Gloominary refers to as the media ‘corporatocracy’” absolutely, positively, and without contradiction, as though you know it’s true and every one else is just wrong!
^ You see what the English language does?
Nor many “oldbies”. The fact of that matter is, Bigs, you’re a complicated man to decipher. There definitely is something different about you (compared to most posters) in a very unique way–and I can’t tell whether this benefits you more than harms you, or visa-versa–but you are unique. And this is what fascinates me about you (but not in a creepy way… too late), the fact that I’ve never quite met anybody like you.
Now I realize that doesn’t answer your question at all, but I thought it was worth mentioning. I guess the answer to your question is: no, not only newbies but some oldbies too.
Well, wherever you’re trying to take the exchange, I can’t say the reaction you describe on the part of the objectivist is at all unexpected. If you’re debating a point with someone, they’re not just going to go along with you to where you want to take the exchange–that would defeat the purpose of a debate.
Sorry, man.
Well, I tell you what Biggy. I’ll give it the ol’ college try, how bout that?
But I have to start with a disclaimer: I’m not sure I can wrap my points around the trucker protest. You see, we went off on a tangent on this point, and when you go off on a tangent in a philosophical (or even non-philosophical) discussion, you may–may–end up talking about something that has absolutely no relevance to the main subject matter of the discussion–so it’s not clear that one can wrap what I said around the trucker protest. On the other hand, if one goes off on a tangent in order to somehow help the main subject matter move along–like someone coming up with a metaphor to explain his main point–then the whole point of the tangent is to come full circle and wrap it around whatever the main subject matter was. I’d have to look back at our conversation, specifically what set it off on a tangent, to determine what type of tangent it is. If it seems there was a useful purpose for which we (or I) went off on a tangent, something we (or I) thought could help in navigating the main subject matter of the discussion, then I can try to bring it full circle and show how it relates to the trucker protest. So I’ll get back to you on that.
I’m convinced the answer is “not much” and I’m satisfied to move beyond it. I’m way more interested in the question: how do we make reality? I mean, if we’re inventing it all anyway, all the time, why not see if we can harness this inventive power that the human mind is, and start creating the realities we want? I’d prefer to live in a reality in which the truckers are right. It would follow from that that all the covid mandates can be dropped and life can return back to normal. So I try to push for and promote that intellectual contraption and hope that as many people as possible can be convinced, by me or otherwise, to make that their reality too.
Well, I think you definitely hit on exactly what the human condition is–at a very general level–arguing with each other is a very instinctual human tendency and, in many circumstances, the only instinct we have for the moment. In other words, we often don’t know any other way than arguing for our point in order to establish some kind of harmony or rapport between us and other people. But I think we can engage in ways that don’t strictly require the building of logical arguments–for example, we can try to show the other person that we will not be judgmental–that can have a very profound effect on the course the conversation takes, a much different course than it would have gone if I just let myself be as judgmental as I wanted. So I don’t think the solution to all these conflicting goods is necessarily to be found (if it exists at all) in justifying our points to the extent that they become ostensible demonstrations of the truth such that all rational men and women are obliged to see. This is why preparing for you an immaculately perfected rational argument to demonstrate why I think the truckers are right was never a top priority to me. I can get through life with other means besides having to prove that to you. So it’s not the most important thing in the world for me. And I’m prepared to act on primal instincts without caring about solving the dasein problem, it seems to me, far more readily than you.
Hey Biggy, remember this?
Well, I have something. It only goes back one round before you started the tangent (and to think, I blamed myself). Here it is:
In other words, you started the tangent by asking “Are you one of them?” The above was just the answer to your questions. I suppose a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have sufficed even without tying it back to the trucker protest but I thought you deserved an explanation since you seem to think ‘yes’ is the answer. Alas, I’m not sure how to tie it to the trucker protest since, at the time of writing it, I had no intention of tying it to the trucker protest as I was instead focused on answering your question.
I suppose, then, that you could tell me: how does your question tie into the trucker protest? Then maybe light will be shed on how my answer to that question ties into the trucker protest.
Note to Biggy: don’t you love that despite 6 long pages of exchanges, we have yet to actually discuss the trucker protest? 
Okay, but it was this context that commenced the thread.
Yep, that’s my aim alright.
But then straight back up into the intellectual contraption clouds:
Note to others:
You tell me how this is relevant to the thread. And attempt to explain what it is he thinks I am failing to comprehend.
With my “philosophy about dasein and nihilism and the distinction between the either/or world and the is/ought world” I have, time and time again, brought this distinction down to earth. With Gib himself in regard to abortion, gun ownership, feminism, and now the trucker protest. Instead, as he does here, it’s him who takes it back up into what I construe to be the abstract clouds.
Interesting to who? The truckers in Canada? The folks in Russia and Ukraine?
Again, there’s the language used to describe the actual objective facts that came out of the trucker protest in Canada, and the language used in either defending or rejecting what they did.
Okay, Gib, note for us your own distinction between the language used to describe the facts of the protest and the language used to either support or not support it.
Actually, I react to your individual posts. Sometimes you veer away from the Urwrong pinhead mentality and other times you seem to be right in the thick of it. And I suspect that revolves around how, at the time of the posts, emotionally pissed off you are at something you encountered “in the news”. Sometimes the “lefties” say or do something that sends you over the edge into the pinhead camp. Other times you are more “philosophical”.
This happens to all of us. Why? Because in regard to politics real lives are affected and the consequences can be deadly. I note the manner in which, rooted subjectively in dasein, “I” construe the meaning of a “fulminating fanatic objectivist pinhead”. Sometimes you come off that way to me, sometimes you don’t. Urwrong and obsrvr524 and Gloominary are, in my view, the caricatures here to me. And occasionally Pedro and yourself. But I do make a distinction.
Thus…
That depends. Suppose the date that stood you up was someone who might have had a philosophy of life and a political narrative that deeply impacted you. That changed how you think about yourself in the world around you.
As though the fate of a leaf is even remotely equivalent to the fate of a human being. Obviously not every single experience you have matters the same. But those that revolve around politics count for considerably more. Like before and after Song Be and Mary’s abortion for me. There is just so much control that we have over our own life. There might be countless experiences that, had they gone differently for any number of reasons, might have had a profound impact on who we think we are “here and now”.
Thus, the crucial point I raise is the extent to which philosophers, ethicists and political scientists can, using the tools at their disposal, take this into account and come up with the optimal or only rational frame of mind that there is in regard to the trucker protest.
Sure. After all, how is our deeply embedded indoctrination as children not brainwashing? And all the more effective because those doing it are often doing it out of love for you and not to “brainwash” you itself.
But if someone spends almost all their time watching news sources that merely reinforce their own political prejudices, that’s brainwashing of a different order. And then my point that left or right, the fulminating fanatics among us will almost never admit that their own value judgments are not in fact the objective truth.
Well, we’d need a “particular context” in which to examine that more fully.
But it’s still just your “back story”. Things that you experienced personally that I have no understanding of at all. Things that, had they unfolded differently – the date standing you up syndrome – your life [and the way you understand it] might have been very different in turn.
Well [to me] that’s a bizarre thing to say. A football game revolves almost entirely around the either/or world. Around athletics and the fact that it’s your team from your community. The trucker protest is national in scope. It’s bursting at the seams with value judgments derived in my view from the subjective parameters of your own particular life.
Yo, Urwrong! How about you?
No, my argument revolves around the points I raised here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … s#p2187045
Now, some may argue that this is an example “fulminating fanatic objectivism”, but I’m not one of them.
I think that moral and political and spiritual objectivists can be dangerous. If I can shoo them away from the discussions, all the better. Only I’m the first to admit that this frame of mind in and of itself is no less an existential contraption rooted subjectively in dasein. But I didn’t “quash” him. He left on his own.
[Well, assuming of course we live in a free will world and not one in which every exchange here at ILP unfolds only as it ever could have in the only possible world.]
On the contrary, my own “amazing and powerful…argument” is no less deconstructed by my own point of view. Of course there may be moral and political arguments [with or without God] able to be defended as objective. All I am noting is that “here and now” if they do exist, they have not been brought to my attention. Or, sure, perhaps they have and I wasn’t “smart” enough to figure it out.
When though?
Instead, from my own frame of mind, you’re off on another intellectual “tangent”…
Please do.
Well, the truckers protested. There were consequences to that. The government reacted. There were consequences to that. Then there were the moral and political reactions to both sets of consequences. It’s the latter that I am convinced are most likely to be embedded in dasein. On the other hand, what prompted particular truckers to behave as they did, as with government officials, is also rooted at least in part in dasein. But at least in regard to the protest and the government policies in responding to it there is considerably more that is likely to be established as in fact true. For one thing in this day and age there will be videos around everywhere to “document” it.
We make particular realities by choosing particular behaviors. But my interest revolves more around why some choose one set of behaviors and others very different sets of behaviors. How that is rooted more in dasein or in how philosophers, ethicists, political scientists, sociologist, psychologists etc., can provide is with the optimal or the only rational sets of behaviors there are.
Thus, from my own subjective vantage point…
Of course here’s where things get particularly problematic for me…
After all, I pushed myself here into believing that with regard to the trucker protest [and all other “conflicting goods” embedded in the moral and political conflagrations that make headlines] “I” am “fractured and fragmented”. And, in many profound ways, that can be just as [or more] demoralizing than objectivism.
Thus the “win/win” approach I took with Maia. She might succeed in allowing me to come up out of the “hole” I’ve dug myself down into. I come to accept a more wholistic “spiritual” reality. Or I might succeed in bringing her down into the “hole” with me. And I gain empathy.
But Maia hasn’t been around for weeks now. So, I wonder: did I succeed in bringing her down in the “hole”? Is the consequence of that depressing her? Am “I” the reason she is no longer around?
Nope, I’m reasonably certain that’s not the case. I almost never bring anyone down into the “hole”. Maybe because they can’t/won’t let themselves go there. Or maybe because my arguments in defense of it are just bullshit.
I never rule out either one.
Then back up into the clouds you go…
And this is applicable to the trucker protest…how? 
Why don’t you ask yourself that? You’re the one who said you can’t comprehend it (no, I won’t help you; you’re a big boy, you can trace the conversation back to where that was).
They’re a bit preoccupied right now.
Hmmm… hard to tell with this response… but I’ll err on the side of ‘yes’, my proposition that the problem is one of language makes sense to you. Though you seem to want to take it in the direction of languages for objective facts and languages for defending or rejecting the truckers’ actions–which wasn’t where I was going.
So on to the next step. Does this make sense to you:
This doesn’t answer the question at all.
Ah, I see where you’re coming from. Yes, I sometimes do start threads or contribute to them wearing my best objectivist hat, and I post my admittedly biased opinions. I even do so aggressively at times. ← Is that when I become a pinhead?
You see, I think you’re asking the question: why, gib, would you ever want to stoop to the level of a fulminating fanatical objectivist pinhead? But that question presupposes that being a fulminating fanatical objectivist pinhead is a terrible thing to be (just the name “pinhead” does the trick too). I see it as a very human thing to be. We all have our biased and prejudiced opinions that we often don’t feel ashamed to voice and sometimes even get passionate about. I don’t see why that’s such a shameful thing.
You try not to be a pinhead despite admitting that there’s even a pinhead in you that your own philosophy applies to just as much as to everyone else. Yet, you still seem to think the appropriate thing to do here at ILP is hide it.
So I don’t know how you’d want to categorize me–as a “philosopher” who doesn’t mind being a pinhead now and then, or a pinhead who has the ability to rise above and be a “philosopher”.
Well, I can tell you, I was completely oblivious to anything political when I was 16 (and so was she probably). My position on various political controversies didn’t waiver a whole lot as I was growing up, or well into my adulthood. So if you were to graph it, it would be a flat line until I started the Reforming Democracy thread at which point it started looking like the stock market.
And I believe I’ve given you that.
As much as I hate to admit I’m passively allowing myself to be brainwashed by the right, all I meant to say is that I would never say, “they’re brainwashed but I’m not”.
I know! How bout the trucker convoy?!
Yup.
Yeah, but they feel the same to me.
Of course not! You’re I.A. Biguous, the man with the license to make all manner of objectivy sounding statements without falling into the fulminating fanatic objectivist pinhead camp.
What does that have to do with what I said? If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you just zeroed in on one tiny part of what I said (the “amazing and powerful Biggy-style argument” part) and completely ignored the rest. So you tell me, how do you think an objectivist would react if you succeeded in arguing your point to him (whatever “success” looks like to you)?
Done: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5#p2861056
Crazy world, huh?
Idunno. How is this applicable to the trucker protest:
I think Biggy will only be happy with heaven on earth. But if only God can be perfect, we only get him loving us as if we’re perfect like he is. iAmgoodwiththat Without it, I’m a little shit. We’ve established that.
Biggy needs to believe in God again and be graced with his forgiveness. He needs to know he’s gonna go to Heaven. His problem is he grew out of his childhood and rebelled against his religion and now needs a much more robust justification–he needs to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what the truth is. He’s too intelligent for his own good, so any justification he can come up with, or anyone else, no matter how rigorous or sophisticated or groomed, he can imagine a scenario that shoots it down. He can’t rid himself of doubt.