DocWatts

@Tyler Robinson Perhaps you didn't intend it this way, but this sounds to me like a demonization of people exploring gender roles that they weren't assigned at birth. Why are you uncomfortable with some women moving into traditionally masculine roles, and more men exploring femininity? Is moving beyond gender essentialism a problem if doing so helps a person live more authentically?

Demonizing feminism may mean that you've developed a shadow around SD-Green. The core of feminism is healthy and making a positive contribution to society. The idea that feminism is primarily motivated by misandry is an emotionally engaging way to onboard alienated people into a right wing radicalization pipeline.

I'll restrict myself to Hegel since I'm far less knowledgeable about Spinoza, but you make a good point. Hegel was very insightful in his criticism of Kant's transcendental idealism for bifurcating Reality into a knower and an unreachable 'thing in itself'. Implicit notions that human beings are connected to an Absolute through a Great Chain of Being have been common throughout much of human history. Hegel's contribution was to reinvigorate this idea in a society that was losing its taste for esoteric mysticism. The way he was able to do this was by thoroughly secularizing it using the tools of a rigorous process oriented method (his dialectics). So while precursors to embodiment could be extracted from implicit notions within Hegel's dialectic of the Absolute, it took until the advent of phenomology to work out the specifics of how embodiment is actually disclosed to us in our direct experience. And of course it's worth bearing in mind that we're just talking about the West specifically, as Eastern philosophers had already been exploring embodiment for thousands of years by this point.

Rationality is a powerful cognitive tool that only becomes a problem when misused in a reductionist way (the same goes for empiricism). Unfortunately Western philosophy has made this mistake over and over, and it wasn't until Heidegger and later Merleau-Ponty that this epistemic error was deconstructed in a penetrating way. The fatal error of all rationalist epistemology is the mistaken assumption that the mind is disembodied (ie a detached observer), rather than being embodied and embedded in a world.

Great list. Would highly recommend Hannah Arendt and John Rawls in particular.

That's only true if you conflate all of the gaming industry to what the AAA studios are doing. Indie gaming is better now than it's ever been. No way that highly creative, thoughtful games like Undertale or Disco Elysium would have came out in 2009. Calling these more creative types of games needles in a haystack would be seriously overstating things. It's the equivalent of saying modern movies suck because you don't like corporatized big budget superhero movies, while ignoring the more low profile art films that are still coming out, and aren't even that rare. Nostalgia goggles just makes us think that everything was better during a formative period in our life, when that's often not the case.

This cartoon actually does a decent job in giving one a sense of some of Alfred North Whitehead's ideas. ( Fun fact: Whitehead actually knew Einstein, and much of Whitehead's philosophy is an attempt to integrate 20th century revolutions in science into a construct aware framework)

Hello everyone.

High quality 20th century Western philosophers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Alfred North Whitehead all engaged with the problems of Western philosophy that you outline. If you're into Heidegger I'd highly suggest checking out Merleau-Ponty and Alfred North Whitehead in particular. Both do a really good job deconstructing the epistemic problems of materialist philosophy. Merleau-Ponty tackles the meaning of embodiment in a very penetrating way, and Alfred North Whitehead outlines a very sophisticated treatment of the dialectics between Being and Becoming in his process-relational philosophy. Both philosophers are very good for cultivating Construct awareness.

Well done sir lol.

Besides showing what a despicable human being Ron DeSantis is, this is also a good case study for how the SD-Red/Blue doesn't understand SD-Green. Tldw; DeSantis misleads and then strands migrants seeking asylum as part of a political stunt for his racist Voters, and is now being investigated for human trafficking. The hope was that the progressive community at Martha's Vineyard would show themselves to be hypocrites by reacting in the same way that Republicans would when someone needs help; slamming the door in these people's face. Apparently it didn't cross DeSantis's selfish mind that the folks over at Martha's Vineyard would go actually out of their way to help these people. On a related note, I could also mention the disturbing parallels in the contemporary far Right to attitudes common in early 1930s, when Hitler announced to the world that Germany would happily oblige other European countries that wanted to import Germany's "criminals" (ie its Jews). Which was intended to imply of course that it was hypocritical to criticize Germany's cruelty, because of the supposition that everyone else shared the Nazi's contempt for the people it was being cruel to

Just thought I'd share a recommendation for a criminally underappreciated YouTube channel I came across, that does a great job of covering philosophical topics in depth in a very approachable way.

Don't get me wrong, having an online community like actualized.org has been really great, but I've also been yearning for ways to find face to face ways to connect with folks who share a similiar set of values. Which I guess could be loosely described as an appreciation for perspective taking, intellectual and spritual curiosity, or more broadly a contemplative approach towards life. Of course I'm fully aware Yellow values are still pretty rare, so not like I'm surprised that finding folks IRL who appreciate the sorts of things we discuss here is going to be inherently challenging.

Check out John Vervaeke's 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis' series on YouTube

Holding others to epistemic standards that you don't hold your own metaphysical beliefs to... Watch out for that shit, as it's probably more ingrained in your thinking than you're aware of. Hence why epistemic humility is a good precept

Alfred North Whitehead talks about this extensively in his ruminations on the epistomology of science. We create reductionistic models in order to simplify Reality, but the reduction can never be complete because Reality itself is inexhaustable, and more complex than we can ever fully capture in our abstractions.

As a society we can't even agree that other humans deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, otherwise things like universal health care and an end to exploitative labor practices would be an uncontroversial as giving women the right to Vote. (I'm writing this as an American). So concern for the well being of animals is sadly a luxury at this point. Which of course doesn't take anything away from how monstrous practices like factory farming are, just that far more people within society need to expand their circle of concern for anything to change.

I was actually thinking of John Vervaeke as I was writing that, and I'll second your recommendation for Russel's 'History of Western Philosophy '.

Sure, but that can be mitigated by seeking out multiple authors who interpret the original work from differing perspectives and with differing areas of emphasis. I wouldn't recommend someone read Heidegger who wasn't already well versed in the history of philosophy, since the entirety of something like Being and Time is an attempt to reevaluate the entire Western philosophic tradition. That said, part of the work of good contemporary academics is to give non-specialists an onramp or starting point to begin to understand what's essentially a circular endeavour.

Problem is that the majority of these texts were written for other academic philosophers, with close to zero consideration given for people who aren't already hyper specialized in that philosopher's sub-field. Then also add to that a language and/or cultural barrier, and the fact that a lot of great philosophers were unfortunately just bad writers. The average person isn't going to get anything out of trying to read Hegel of Heidegger. There are better ways to get the insights of Hegel than by fruitlessly bashing one's head against the Phenomenology of Spirit. That said there are some philosophers that have made an effort to make their ideas accessible to the public (Bertrand Russell comes to mind) but these are the exception. In %90 of cases you'll be better off finding a contemporary author who specializes in making the work of other philosophers more accessible to non-specialists (for example someone like Hubert Dreyfus would be a better go to understand Heidegger than trying to read Heidegger directly).

Also worth keeping in mind for context the brutal survival conditions under which communism was actually tried. Imperial Russia and China prior to communism were both backwards countries under the thumb of brutal and incompetent dictatorships. So it should be no surprise that a revolutionary vanguard consisting mostly of SD-Red had the best chance of winning a power struggle (and civil war) under those conditions. Had communism been tried under more favorable survival conditions perhaps things could have turned out differently. We'll never know. One thing that's certain though is that Marx was dead wrong in his prediction that communism would take hold in the most advanced countries first, which should have been a warning that, his excellent critique of capitalism notwithstanding, his theory of what would replace capitalism was fundamentally flawed. Which isn't the damning condemnation of Marx that it might seem, as plenty of other brilliant people have been insightful in some areas while being dead wrong in aspects of their theory. And I'd argue that there's plenty that can be salvaged from Marx, as people like Richard Wolfe have demonstrated.

This %100 ^

Political scientists who study democracy tend to categorize the United States as a flawed democracy.

Okay then a more nuanced take for how to rebuild the US prison system could be use the Scandanvian model of humane treatment as a baseline, with privileges being rescinded for bad behavior, for truly heinous crimes, and for repeat offenses in a reformed criminal justice system where there exist support structures that give individuals a realistic chance to succeed once they leave prison. Build different types of facilities that prisoners are sent to depending on the severity of the offender's crimes. No reason that someone who was sentenced for stealing a car should be locked up in the same facility as someone who's committed multiple murders. The threat of having one's comforts rescinded or being sent to a different type of facility if the bad behavior is eggregius enough would be a better way of incentivizing good behavior; far better than using harsh punitive measures such as solitary confinement (which the UN considers to be torture) for that purpose. And it should go without saying that we shouldn't be sending nearly as many people to prison as we are, so these reforms would have to coincide with sweeping reforms to our criminal justice system, systemic anti poverty measures, and an end to the (racist) war on drugs. Not that any of this is a realistic political possibility any time soon; rather it's what a potential SD-Yellow prison system in the United States could look like someday.

If the choice is between the human rights abuses and hellish conditions of the US prison system, and a system that's humane at the cost of affording a comfortable existence to some of its worst offenders, that's not a difficult choice to make.