Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Dak]

I'm not removing anyone's agency. The agency is already gone.

Please tell me how my identifying a cultural atmosphere that restricts the options for employment equals me actively restricting those employment opportunities. You're misidentifying me saying "this is the state of things" as me actively perpetuating that state.

I'm not saying that blacks aren't capable of doing something; but I am saying that cultural conditions have prevented them from doing so.

Everyones options for employment are restricted in some way. I know you prefer Dubois perspective to Washingtons, but was the school able to find and expand on business opportunities in the Deep South of all places? Yes. Was it easy? Hell no. But it's the best way to go about things. If Washingtons example were replicated broadly as a solution, instead of agitations and "LBJistic" approaches, I don't think we'd be having this conversation right now.

 

[Einherjar86]

I think it's almost certain we would be having it, because unfortunately there weren't enough Booker T. Washingtons to found schools like this. Why not? Because the majority of blacks didn't have the means to do so.

I'm not saying his school wasn't successful; I've never said that. I'm saying it wasn't enough.

 

[Dak]

Washington didn't have the means. That didn't stop him. He could have just sat in the dirt feeling sorry for his shitty lot in life.

 

[Einherjar86]

That's what it has to be. Those who didn't found schools or do anything productive must have just been feeling sorry for themselves.

 

[Dak]

That's what it has to be. Those who didn't found schools or do anything productive must have just been feeling sorry for themselves.

I wasn't referring only to the founding of schools, but to the attending of them etc. Everyone doesn't need to be a Washington, but there not only needs to be more than one, but the entire approach doesn't need to be denigrated as "capitulation" or miscast as "letting whitey win" or whatever other such thing.

One doesn't get along by determination alone, but you have to put yourself into positions to succeed. Washington did so, and then payed it forward by trying to create an institution to allow many more to succeed, if they would but try. He was told it wouldn't work/he couldn't do it also, but tried anyway. This beats tsk tsking or feeling sorry every time.

 

[Einherjar86]

The fact that you clearly believe the majority of them feel sorry for themselves is where the problem lies. This is your perspective, and it's clearly influenced by your experiences in life.

There are plenty of black people who work their asses off and make jack shit, and who still can't afford to keep healthy. You have this ridiculous belief that this is impossible - that if you work hard, you can get by and even achieve a comfortable position. This isn't the fucking case.

 

[Dak]

The fact that you clearly believe the majority of them feel sorry for themselves is where the problem lies. This is your perspective, and it's clearly influenced by your experiences in life.

There are plenty of black people who work their asses off and make jack shit, and who still can't afford to keep healthy. You have this ridiculous belief that this is impossible - that if you work hard, you can get by and even achieve a comfortable position. This isn't the fucking case.

There's a major problem in the US of people finding reasons to feel sorry for themselves, and it's not racially exclusive by any means.
Feeling sorry for oneself doesn't mean just sitting around doing absolutely nothing, but it does involve refusing to take steps because if an infinite litany of excuses. Just going out and logging a lot of hours at anything isn't enough in any era in history or before, whether dealing with racism or not.

I'm not saying that if everyone takes a Washington approach it's going to turn out golden every single time - but the alternative is almost certain to fail, supposedly even most lottery winners go broke again relatively shortly. Why? Because the same mentality that depends on lottery odds continues to make decisions based on lottery odd mentality - because of the ironically terrible feel-sorry idea that "nothing else is going to work".

This idea was inculcated first in black Americans because of their extreme vulnerability, but has been creeping into the rest of American society, a constantly self-fulfilling prophecy.

Edit: Both of my parents have fallen into this trap as they have gotten older, and my inlaws have been there probably their whole lives. I'm well acquainted with the mindset.

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm backing away from this entire aspect of the argument because I don't see it as all that relevant to begin with. You've swayed the entire subject toward the problem of feeling sorry for oneself and not taking proper initiative.

I maintain that a large number of blacks in this country do take the initiative and still remain under the poverty line. So this whole line of argument about feeling sorry for themselves is a red herring, in my opinion.

 

[Dak]

I think the poverty line is a red herring metric. My monthly budget is a poverty line budget and we live pretty comfortably.

 

[rms]

I know you guys might still be doing your own thang, but I saw this today and think it's really good legislation(if passed etc)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/08/obama-community-college_n_6439752.html

 

[Dak]

Corporate handout.

 

[rms]

obvious opinion is obvious!

 

[Einherjar86]

Dak doesn't have opinions, he has facts.

 

[Dak]

I would like to say it's an obvious fact it's a corporate handout, but I understand it isn't obvious. But it is a fact.

Businesses want someone else to pay for the training of their employees, and government training initiatives are a way of offloading the (increased due to added bureaucracy) costs onto the taxpayer - for employees that will in fact still require more training regardless. Ain't nothing free, just a question of who pays. Why are the increasingly unemployed individual taxpayers getting stuck with the bill for training for jobs they haven't even gotten yet that they will still need specific training in house for anyway?

Edit: And maybe one wouldn't need an additional 2 years of government schooling to be "job worthy" if the first 13-14 years were worth a goddamn.

 

[Einherjar86]

I won't admit that it's a fact. I'm wary of facts. It's only a fact if your value system categorizes it as such. I prefer conditions, processes, possibilities, potentialities, perspectives.

Speaking of debt and handouts, this is the kind of perspective we need to offset the balance:

In fact, this [federal] debt will never be paid off. Ne debt will ever be paid off. The final accounting will never take place. If our days are numbered, accounted for, the absent capital, for its part, is beyond any accounting. If the United States is already in virtual breach of its obligations, this will have no effects. There will be no Judgement Day for this virtual bankruptcy. One has merely to enter the exponential or virtual mode to be released from all responsibility, since there is no longer any reference, any referential world to serve as measure.

Provocative, somewhat sophistic (and sophisticated), and certainly not logical. But then, value was never logical in the first place. It could be that, in our modern technological age, the paradoxes of value are beginning to blossom into full-fledged absurdity. This doesn't necessarily mean we face financial implosion, however. I think it's entirely possible that late-capitalist development has struck upon a new impetus of rapid development: internal paradox, autopoiesis.

This is how systems of communication perpetuate their own existence - not resolving internal conflict, but by constructing internal conflict:

The process of communication returns to itself and communicates its own difficulties. It uses a kind of (rather superficial) self-control to become aware of serious misunderstandings and it has the ability to communicate the rejection and restructure itself around this "no." In other words, the process is not obliged to follow the rules of logic. It can contradict itself. The system that uses this technique does not finish its autopoiesis and does not come to an end; it reorganizes itself as conflict to save its autopoiesis.

 

[Dak]

Funny, I paid off several debts last year. Ask Venezuelans how many Judgment Days they have had.

But yeah, people living in Second Life won't care until the power gets disconnected.

Regarding restructures around the "no", I think there is some insight here, but he slightly misses the mark (and probably has to) that has already been hit directly:
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/

 

[Einherjar86]

If they've had Judgement Days in the past, then they've had no final accounting. That's the point. You may have paid some debts, but you haven't paid your debt. As our culture moves increasingly toward a credit/debit system, we'll see more of this happening.

Shackel's take is a typical criticism of poststructuralist thought. He makes a point that has been made before, just gives it a new name (poststructuralist response, anyone...?); but he also qualifies it as distinctly negative. In other words, postmodern thought and philosophy can't reconcile its own inconsistencies and thus resorts to contradictory stands and retreats.

The problem is that when we truly dig into reality, we discover that it isn't rational or logical. Postructuralism was merely a natural encounter with the basic inconsistencies of logic once the sophistries of positivism and rationalism were unveiled. If poststructuralism appears sophistic, the analytical brands are no less sophistic; but they obscure their sophistry in logic. Postructuralism embraces its sophistry in paradox.

Systems and communications theory, formalized by Niklas Luhmann and earlier by Friedrich Kittler (both drawing on Marshall McLuhan), attempts to "reconstruct deconstruction," as Cary Wolfe suggests. It's an attempt to critically assess how these logical inconsistencies in fact operate in a positive manner by propelling themselves internally. Poststructuralists acknowledge the fact that their theories turn on paradox and that they frequently contradict themselves. There isn't shame in this, as long as they acknowledge that we can theorize the reasons for doing so.

Furthermore, postmodern/poststructuralist philosophy has had its heyday. It's on the out now. People within the Humanities, while trained on such thought, are actively looking for ways to reconstruct meaning in the aftermath of poststructuralism's onslaught. It was a very necessary step, in a sense.

 

[Dak]

I'm pretty sure I asserted the necessity/inevitability for a reconstruction to follow deconstruction a while ago. There is no reason to create a void except to fill it again with something else. This is one very good reason for skepticism on the outset - inevitably primed for a more sophisticated Nietzschean maneuver. Just cut the crap and go straight to what the replacement is - an untenable move of course, as it short-circuits what is to be revealed as less than desirable, possibly even for adherents. It's easier to replace nothing with something than something with something - so first we must "create" nothing.

Comparing logic with sophistry gives sophists far too much credit. Logic may need further development, but what neither the logists nor the illogists like dealing with is that both the logical and the illogical brain give to the sword. This, imo, may fall into a space that may be paradoxical yet not illogical.

 

[Einherjar86]

That's just it! Paradox need not be illogical, although it was considered to be for a long time, and still to a strong degree in most Western departments.

I have a theory that the crux of paradox and its role in philosophical/scientific thought has to do with the position of the observer. Plenty of analytic strands of philosophy have always maintained that language can be pinned down in a mathematical sense; this is the positivist notion, which Wittgenstein combated heavily. The problem with the conventional positivist/rationalist bent is that it presumes some kind of ontologically qualifiable metalanguage that exists separate from reality and can thus comment on reality in a pure (i.e. unobtrusive) manner; but such a view ignores the fact that language is a part of reality, is embedded in reality, even though it relates us to the world we observe in an ideal sense.

The sophistry of logicians lies in their willingness to obscure the confluence of observer and world - to separate the observer from the world in a manner that implies the world to be the same absent a human observer. Now, this is NOT the same thing as saying that the world depends on our observation of it; it is not even close. It is saying that the act of observation is part of the world and thus contributes fundamentally to what the world is; thus, subtract the act of observation from reality and you've changed reality. So, in a sense, if by "reality" we mean that which we perceive as external to us, then reality does depend on our observation of it, to a degree.

Reality doesn't disappear when we stop observing it, but it does change. Derrida was privy to this idea, but wasn't able to quite work past the dilemma it leaves us in. We shouldn't blame him for this, just as we shouldn't blame Plato for believing in ideal forms.

 

[Einherjar86]

"Can" when they are world's away.

Rachel wasn't tested on Deckard, Tyrell wanted to see if Deckard's/Police force test worked. Rachel wasn't thrown at Deckard posing as a human. She was the leading prototype for inhome/everyday usage and she was no different looking than the Nexus 6.

You read this scene so literally...

Rachel has no idea she's an android. Deckard, at first, has no idea that she's an android. That's the gambit. What are the stakes here? What's going on in this scene? Why does the business care whether the test works?

Not sure I questioned this or anything. Sex, I guess, is a personal definition more than an overlapping one. I don't think the film tackles this point at all either.

I'm sorry, I don't think I'm being clear. I'm saying that the desire for realistic sex means that it makes perfect sense that customers would want realistic androids; and the more human they appear, the better. Fake vaginas might work great, but they don't compare to the "real" thing. Does this make sense? You've been claiming that sex doesn't necessitate that the androids look like humans. Well, it might not necessitate it, but it certainly makes them more marketable!

As far as the merits of the film go, I disagree with you entirely. Visually, it was a whole new bag of cats. It certainly is uneven, but I feel that this lends to its overall sense of uneasiness. Its dark tones, its noir aspects... all of this goes to create a truly original SF experience that hadn't been seen on-screen until then.