DocWatts

Since there seems to be some confusion what fascism actually is, here's one of the better definitions I've come across for it. And for anyone curious, this definition came from a comparative politics series that gives an in depth analysis on fascism; why it's a symptom of failed democracy, why it has its roots in aggrieved populism, and how it differs from other forms of authoritarianism. https://youtu.be/m6VSdwInpnc

What JP deserves to be ridiculed for is his misplaced and delusional ideas around what he believes the problems facing the world to be; delusions which he platforms to his immense audience. I.e. thinking that younger generations (correctly) assessing that very little is being done to address an unfolding ecological catastrophe is the problem, rather than Climate Change itself. Or that Progressives being unreasonable about pronoun usage is a bigger threat to the world than the rise of fascism as a symptom of failing democracy in the United States and Europe. He doesn't deserved to be ridiculed over fact that he's crying while obviously going through a difficult time in his life. What I'm left with is feeling pity for the guy. Pity, because it's hard to be completely sympathetic for him considering the context where this video took place (a reactionary political rant), and when his tears are also bookended by him shaming others for thier body types and sexual preferences (ala the magazine cover debacle).

If someone votes for a reactionary political party that's actively working to end democracy, they're supporting fascism (regardless of whether they're ignorant of the consequences of their actions).

Not fake, just pitiable that his life purpose is tied to an ideological paradigm that's so out of sync with the current problems facing the world.

Imho most of the insightful aspects about stoicism are also contained within Buddhism, with the main difference being that Buddhism actually has a practical methodology for training the mind to overcome self-destructive tendencies, something that stoicism lacks.

Seems pretty evident that white supremacist terrorism is the logical endpoint for the fReeDuMB (mis)conceptions around freedom of speech. Which primarily entails allowing Bad Actors the 'freedom' to spread toxic and dangerous disinformation (in this case fascist conspiracy theories) without accountability or consequences. Someone like Charles Manson was thrown in jail because of the influence he had over his followers who went on to commit a series of horrific murders, despite Manson not murdering anyone himself. By that same metric, at the very least Civil Litigation against people like Tucker Carlson who are using white nationalist ideology to indoctrinate and radicalize men who go on to commit horrific murders is equally justified (regardless of the odds of actually winning such a case in court)

I would think that a far better indicator of why no one should take JP seriously would be the recent video of him crying crocodile tears over Climate activism. Not over Climate Change mind you, but over people actually being concerned about the unfolding ecological crisis. It's the equivalent of smoking two packs a day for twenty years while being in complete denial about the obvious impact this has on your health, then directing your ire towards the doctor who tells you that you'll be dead in ten years if you don't change your lifestyle.

The sad fact that we have to come to terms with is that white nationalism has moved from a fringe ideology towards becoming (or more accurately returning to) a mainstream narrative on the American Right, thanks in no small part to a for-profit media environment that rewards Bad Actors for radicalizing thier audiences. In an environment where people like Tucker Carlson and Steven Crowder are given a free lisence to broadcast fascist conspiracy theories to tens of millions of people, is it any wonder that some portion of those indoctrinated into a belief that an impending genocide is about to swallow thier race will decide to take action and start killing people?

If you're serious about this question and don't mind putting some work in, the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote a very penetrating and insightful explanation of how Time is disclosed to human experience. To grossly simplify a very nuanced work, despite what some philosophers would have us believe, we don't actually experience time as a collection of Nows. This is of course a high order abstraction stemming from our habitual tendency to think of Reality as a collection of 'Things', which is an illusion that we also extend to the notion of Time. Rather, the way we experience time is inextricably coupled to our capacity for Care. Time is innately meaningful to us, because by our very nature we are Temporal Beings. That's to say, time is significant for us because the past and the future form the context and horizons of significance that make our capacity for Caring possible.

Thanks! As far as works that deal with embodied cognition, after The Embodied Mind I'd probably recommend Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff (the quote at the bottom of my posts is from that work). While The Embodied Mind deals more with the science, Philosophy in the Flesh (as might be guessed from the title) deals with the epistemic and ontological implications of embodied cognition. In particular it goes to great pains to demonstrate how mistaken assumptions that the Mind is disembodied (handed down to us from Rene Descartes) have led to epistemic errors that plague philosophy and Western thought to this day. In addition to the above work, though written 70 or so years before The Embodied Mind, Martin Heidegger's philosophy is also a good exemplification of how our embodiment has very important philosophical implications. His work Being and Time is largely about the meaning of Being in light of our embodied nature. Be warned that this one has a well earned reputation for being a difficult read, so having a guidebook handy for this one is almost a necessity. Very much worth it though if you're in to that sort of thing, as Heidegger's system is probably the most penetrating explanations of our embodied experience of the world I've yet to read.

The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243436.The_Embodied_Mind @Leo Gura Just curious if you've ever gotten around to reading this, and if you've considered adding it to the Book List. Ken Wilber heavily references this non-reductionist approach to cognitive science in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, and it's definitely worth a read on its own. It's a great example of how science can stand to gain by incorporating contemplative practices as a legitimate method of scientific investigation. It's also valuable as a guide for an enactive approach to cognitive science that pushes back against reductionist notions that cognition is simply a representation of a pre-given world. To everyone else, I'd certainly recommend the book as a great starting point for scientifically minded folks to start questioning some of thier Materialist and Reductionist paradigms. The book is written in palatable language for people still in that paradigm (it in no way comes across as woo-woo or New Age). And even if you've already outgrown that paradigm, the book is still a great example of how questioning science can lead to better science.

Rare life-changing or mystical experiences not withstanding, in my experience most people generally start to question their worldview by degrees. Dropping advanced spiritual or epistemic concepts into someone's lap who doesn't have a sufficient Frame of Reference for it isn't going to be helpful for that individual. Instead, offering someone stuck in a materialist paradigm avenues for a "Soft Landing" away from their entrenched worldview seems far more likely to be effective. Dialectical thinking and applied epistemology would be the logical next steps for someone paradigm locked to scientific materialism, since they both provide Value on their own while also giving that individual the Tools needed to begin deconstructing materialism. In this regard, having clear epistemic understanding of your pre-existing worldview is so important that I'm tempted to call it a prerequisite for productive deconstruction. The book I'd be most likely to recommend to this hypothetical person as a 'first step' would be Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, precisely because it deals with the epistemic roots of science in an accessible way.

Hence the danger of constructing your sense of identity on a political ideology, regardless of what that ideology happens to be. Of course that's not to say that the particular ideology one makes this mistake with doesn't make a difference, as some are far more pathological and destructive in a given context than others. It's also a good demonstration as to why spirituality is important. Since it opens the possibility of becoming aware of the Constructs we use to form our identify, and gives use an opportunity to cultivate more authentic values. Which in turn makes it far easier to relate to our beliefs as something tentative and provisional, rather than an emotional or epistemic anchor.

Also, the problem with labeling ideologies that you have a personal distaste for as 'Totalitarian' or 'Evil' in a reductive way is that it becomes a circular definition which doesn't explain or illuminate anything. Even calling something like fascism Totalitarian and leaving it at that isn't helpful, because it doesn't help explain anything. There are reasons why fascism appeals to people, and there's an internal logic to fascist ideology that can be articulated for the purposes of understanding what role it fills in a community and why certain people are drawn to it. Likewise, socialism is a broad spectrum of ideologies that differ in all sorts of ways, and range from Libertarian to Authoritarian. In this respect it's not so different from Capitalism, in that Capitalism can exist both in democratic and authoritarian contexts. And hybrids can exist between any of these. Taking a Reductionist approach to any of these ideologies is intellectually very lazy.

Just thought I'd highlight this video from Second Thought as a useful resource worth a recommendation. It does an excellent job of articulating what socialism is in easy to understand language, and why socialism is relevant to an average person's day to day concerns. Considering how misinformed most people are about Socialism, having a basic understanding of the essentials will at least allow someone to evaluate this ideology from a more informed perspective (if they're willing to listen that is).

There are salient criticisms that can be made of Socialism, but in order to criticize an idea one needs to put some actual effort into understanding the thing they're criticizing. Knee-jerk ideological responses of this sort may fly on other areas of the Internet, but on this Forum we expect people to contribute to discussions in a more productive and informed way. As a demonstration of this, Leo's talked plenty on the limitations of socialism, and he does so without just calling it Evil in a really reductive way that conflates all of Socialism with Stalin-esque style Communism.

If I knew the answer to how Democrats could win back the South, I'd have a career in politics rather than as a software developer. My gut tells me that focusing like a laser beam on issues that have a direct and easily articulable relevance to people's day to day lives would be the answer. A Green New Deal that directly ties expanded economic opportunities to building the infrastructure we'll need to address Climate Change on a scale comparable to the industrial mobilization for World War 2 would be a smart way of doing this. But unfortunately, the deck is so stacked against Democrats for structural reasons that I don't see a realistic way of that actually happening in a timescale measured in anything less than decades. Either through demographic and generational drift, or from things getting so catastrophically bad under a potential right wing authoritarian regime that the Republican Party becomes discredited for the vast majority of Americans in a similiar way to Nazism being discredited in Germany after WW 2. As far as younger generations, I'm hopeful that on the whole a far smaller proportion of millennials and Zoomers will end up being indoctrinated into right wing ideologies than older generations. I'm less hopeful that younger people who do end up getting indoctrinated are any less radicalized than thier Boomer parents. The alt-right, 4-chan, and incel culture are onboarding tools for younger people that are just as bad if not worse than Fox News.

Socialism is not necessary synonymous with central planning (if I'm understanding you correctly). What most contemporary socialists are advocating for is a form of market socialism, where markets are still used to allocate a large portion of goods and services, but workplaces are arranged much more democraticly than under Capitalism. The 'personal property' that Marx was talking about specifically referred to forms of property that are used to exploit other human beings. Namely things like rent seeking (ie becoming a landlord), and businesses being set up in a way that excludes the vast bulk of the population from owning the means of production. What 'personal property' wasn't referring to was the ability for an ordinary person to own a computer or a car, which is a common misunderstanding of Marxism.

Camus is great. Not only does he confront notions of the absurd in a surprisingly life affirming way, he was an existentialist with a social conscious (which is more than can be said for some his contemporaries, like Sartre).

I think both of these points are quite perceptive, as the stagflation of the 70s provided a good opportunity for free market ideologues to spin what was essentially an oil shock made possible by the US's lack of energy independence, into a narrative that Social Democratic policies (policies that the US middle class was built on) were the culprit. And unfortunately, it worked. Right Wing think tanks went to extraordinary efforts to couple the free market economic reforms they wanted with lingering white resentment towards the Civil Rights movement. Which is where the myth of black welfare queens supposedly living the high life came from, which took off in the 1980s. You can see this playing out even to this day, with hysteria over things like trans rights and critical race theory.

Think of it this way. In a social democracy, there's still a place for wealthy industrialists and business owners, they're just not given free reign to do whatever the hell they want anymore. In an imagined socialist scenario, the Capitalist owner class is likely to be abolished (which is what happened in the Soviet Union). Faced with the threat of something like that happening in the States, much of the Capitalist owner class was willing to begrudgingly accept some amount of wealth redistribution to fund social welfare programs under the New Deal and Great Society. The New Deal and Great Society were designed to provide stability to capitalism, and to nip in the bud the potential for socialism to grow to the point where it had a chance to seriously challenge Capitalism as the predominant ideology in America. Just my own theory, but I think a large part of it is complacency of future generations that didn't live through the Great Depression, and didn't experience firsthand just how awful unregulated Capitalism is to live under. The living standards generated by Social Democratic policies such as the New Deal came to be taken for granted, and corporations had an easier time convincing people that it was Capitalism alone that generated prosperity, rather than a highly regulated form of Capitalism built upon social democratic policies. Add to that the collapse of the Soviet Union removing Capitalism's only major real ideological competitor, and the situation becomes analogous to an Internet Service Provider like Comcast gaining a monopoly once it's competition goes out of business. Then add to all that the diverging incentives structures between democracy and capitalism, and in absense of external constraints (such as a large and active Labor movement, or credible competition from another economic ideology such as Communism) Capitalism eventually eats democracy by capturing political institutions and concentrating wealth along a small group of elites.

It would be more accurate to say that organized labor activism advocating for socialism was able to extract policy concessions from Capitalism. Labor advocacy wasn't trying to save capitalism, it's members were largely concerned with trying to improve things that had a direct impact on ordinary Americans, such as pay and working conditions for laborers, the Right to form a Union, etc. Not to mention avoiding homeless and starvation during the Great Depression. Forward thinking liberals such as Roosevelt and LBJ understood that the alternative to the Social Democratic policies they proposed was growing social unrest that could grow to challenge the stability of the entire system. Keep in mind that at this time Capitalism was competing with Communist ideologies for 'customers' so to speak, and if conditions got bad enough in Capitalist counties there was a competing ideology that people could turn to. This actually served to moderate Capitalism because it didn't yet have an ideological monopoly, so it had to compete with more egalitarian systems.

It's because the New Deal and Great Society were concessions from Capitalism in the face of growing social unrest channeled by an organized and active Leftist movement in America. So rather than the New Deal and Great Society being drafted in spite of fears of Socialism, they were drafted precisely because of the threat that Socialist movements would continue to gain traction in America and potentially challenge the legitimacy of the State. Every Right that you enjoy was bought by people using the threat of force to challenge power structures. Note that force is not synonymous with violence, as general strikes and boycotts are non-violent ways that force can be projected. Governments don't tend to give people Rights out of the kindness of their hearts, they are usually coerced in to doing so by a portion of the population using force the enact policy concessions. This was as true for the Bill of Rights that was only made possible after a Revolutionary War, as it was for expansions of Civil Rights being drafted amidst race riots occuring in cities all across America in the 60s.

Grandpa could begin by pointing out that time and space are high level abstractions that we use to make sense of our experience. He could also explain that paradoxes are the borne out of the way that we use high level abstractions to frame problems that we come across In this case by thinking of an arrow as a discreet object with fixed boundaries, and by thinking that discreet objects occupy a position in something called space that's continuous (non-atomistic). And while we have good reasons for thinking this way in our day to day lives, science has shown that on a fundamental level what we think of as matter doesn't behave in the way we would expect from our interactions with macroscopic objects in our day to day lives. Particles are closer to possibility clouds with no definitive boundaries or position, then they are to billiard balls or anything else you can relate to in your normal life. Because our minds conceive of these two things (objects and space) as having different axiomatic assumptions, we run in to paradox. ...then grandson nods non-comprehensively, and Grandpa remembers that he's talking to a ten year old who doesn't have a frame of reference for Construct awareness

I'm reading a book on the Process Relational Philosophy of Alfred North Whithead right now. Which, by the way if you're a fan of Ken Wilber, I'd highly recommend Whitehead as a much of Wilber's Four Quadrants Theory is built upon Whitehead'a dialectical process philosophy. But I digress... I happened to come across a concise and illuminating analysis on both the utility and limitations of a 'Theory if Everything', that I thought I might share: "The true activity of understanding consists in a voyage to abstraction which is in fact a voyage to the system in which the fact is enmeshed. When a given systematic context is taken as fact, it demands a voyage to a still wider context for its comprehension. Thus there is a dialectical movement in understanding, a movement encompassing the exploration and explication of wider and wider contexts, each step of which further enriches the knowledge of the original fact. The task of philosophical understanding is to criticize these contexts in the sense of constructing a conceptual macro-system capable of elucidating their interrelationships. However, no philosophical system can completely formulate the ultimate context, because it is still abstract. Therefore the philosophical voyage can never reach it's destination; the perfect system is unattainable. The object of trying is not stability but progress. Not is philosohic enterprise an end in itself. Rather it is to render human life and the experienced world meaningful. A philosophy is successful when it expresses the general nature of the world as disclosed to human interests."