vershy versh

Well-known member

luka

Well-known member
liberalism is the avoidance of conflict as the ultimate ethic
Ristorante Italiano
You go Your Way
And I'll go Mine-o
 

luka

Well-known member
craner saw the muslims as an existential threat
becasue their one god universe admitted no other way
and they sought to force the issue with terrorism
goading liberal society into a response and a permanent war footing
 

luka

Well-known member
the liberal response was to say, don't mind them,
it's just a few discontents, let them do their bombings and that
and we won't rise to the bait we will pull together, put on a brave
face and rise above it.
 

luka

Well-known member
whereas craner said this is suicidal. we have to eradicate them utterly
raze the whole religion to the ground, like gaza. but to do that is to abandon liberalism
and its cosy dream of everyone living together in benign tolerance and mutual disinterest.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I listened to a podcast about Islam yesterday. The scholar on it was saying that Islamic societies tended to be quite cosmopolitan in terms of allowing different faiths to coexist, and that it was the Christian nations that tended to, for example, persecute Jews.
 

luka

Well-known member
When Robin Williams managed to make a gorilla laugh again after he had been mourning the death of his friend for six months.
Some American ethologists had taught a gorilla named Koko to speak to humans, through sign language.
Koko was extremely intelligent, but was going through a very difficult time, so much so that biologists feared he had begun to suffer from a serious form of melancholy.
The researchers wanted to help Koko, finding him a new friend, and at the same time they wanted to study how he interacted with humans.
In fact, having studied sign language and being able to communicate with our species, compared to other gorillas, Koko was the perfect specimen to establish whether there were real cognitive boundaries between our species or not.
They then asked Robin Williams, known mainly for being a great comedian, if he wanted to spend a few hours in the company of Koko, trying to interact with him naturally, as if he were a normal person in need of help.
Williams immediately accepted, even if he had doubts about the manner of the meeting. He was not an expert on primates and feared he would be too awkward to interact peacefully with the animal.
However, when he arrived in front of the gorilla, Williams had a real epiphany.
By allowing the animal to get to know him on its own, Williams realized that interacting with Koko was as if he were interacting with a very curious child. Little by little, the gorilla became more and more interested in the visitor, so much so that he was fascinated by his pair of glasses and wanted to see him with "his strange eyes made of glass".
Koko soon began to talk to Williams, using sign language, suggesting they play or asking him surprisingly intelligent questions, which shocked the actor. The two, in a few minutes, even began to joke, tickle each other, play and tell some of their life experiences.
This deeply surprised the researchers, who asked Koko to define the actor with a chosen word. The term that the gorilla used was "friend".
Williams himself was positively disturbed by that meeting, especially when he learned that he had managed to make a gorilla laugh who was at risk of falling into depression due to loneliness.
Following this, he then decided to visit Koko whenever he could and to shoot commercials with him, in favor of the conservation of protected species and against animal experimentation.
The bond that was created between Koko and the American actor was so deep that he survived Williams' death, which occurred in 2014. In fact, when the old gorilla learned of his friend's death, he signaled to his instructors if he could cry and remained thoughtful for a few days, his lips trembling in mourning.
Koko was inconsolable in knowing that he would never see him again.
Koko died 4 years later, in 2018, at the age of 46. Today he is remembered as one of the most important primates in the history of scientific research....
 

okzharp

Well-known member
Chomsky's cute (glib) observation that authoritarians don't care what you think, but will police the fuck out of what you do... liberals can't or won't police what you do, so will need to find ways to control what you think.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Is that true? Surely authoritarians absolutely DO care about what you think and liberals are (ideologically, if not in practice) interested in policing what people do, so long as what they do harms others?
 

vershy versh

Well-known member
Vimothy just DMed me this article.


This is worth reading. The author manages to acknowledge Schmitt's criticisms of liberalism whilst also picking holes in them and slapping him about for being a slimy Nazi trying wriggle off the hook.

Schmitt’s work can never be read in abstraction from politics, as Zeitlin reminds us. In Concept of the Political, Schmitt insists that “all political concepts, images and terms have a polemical meaning.” Something “polemical” is not merely a controversial topic, but a question of such intensity that it creates a state of “polemos” (war). Schmitt defines the political as that which has to do with the distinction between “friend and enemy,” which brings conflict to the “utmost degree of intensity,” i.e., to war. “Political concepts” for Schmitt are not merely concepts about the political (and thus about friendship and enmity, and thus the possibility of war). They are political. Or—what is only another way of saying the same thing—they are “polemical” (participating in a particular war) and not “polemological” (describing war as such). Political concepts, Schmitt claims, “are focused on a specific conflict and bound to a concrete situation.” They do not reveal enduring truths about human nature. Rather they serve the rhetorical strategies that, for the moment, appear convenient to one party as it attacks another. All political ideas, therefore, are “incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is to be affected, combatted, refuted or negated” by them. One must therefore ask what polemical intent there was behind Schmitt’s claim that all political concepts have political intent—and what enemy this claim was meant to negate.​
[...]​
Liberalism, Schmitt claimed, fails to recognize “the objective nature and autonomy” of politics. Liberals therefore imagine that friendship and enmity, like aesthetic and moral values, can be accommodated in the sort of polytheism that Weber described. Here Schmitt broke with Weber, or radicalized Weber’s pessimism, to insist that liberals do not understand that what makes political values different from other sorts of values is their dangerous intensity. Uniting us to other people in a group of friends opposed to some enemy, political value-setting leads us to the extreme possibility of violent conflict.​
This misunderstanding on the part of liberalism may seem to make liberals naïve, and their preferred form of government uniquely exposed to the unrecognized perils of political disagreement. But precisely because liberals cannot imagine that there is a distinct area of politics, separate from morality and other kinds of values, they transform political conflicts into moral ones. Unable to see their enemies simply as enemies (with no moral valuations involved), liberals imagine them as evildoers who must be eliminated. Liberals’ moralized political struggles are not only hypocritical (liberals do not admit that they are even doing politics) but also “unusually intense and inhuman.”​
[...]​
“Tyranny of Values” is an almost grotesquely self-serving text. Applied to the specific situation of postwar Germany, Schmitt’s historical and psychological accounts of “values” imply that the West German government should not suppress former Nazis on the grounds of their having antidemocratic and anti-liberal values. One may find this implication questionable, the West German government’s policies justified, and Schmitt’s rhetorical tactics contemptible. Nevertheless, if we keep these issues in mind, we can find that “Tyranny of Values” offers enduring insights on liberalism and its enemies.​
Perhaps the most important of these is that liberalism is for losers. It is those who are weak, in a minority, or for whatever reason unable to impose their values on others who appeal to liberal principles of value-neutrality, a separation of private and public life, equal rights, etc. If they ever have the opportunity to wield power (that is, if they ever stop being losers), they are likely to abandon liberal principles. It was only when he could see himself as a victim of the state’s value-based agenda that Schmitt could see the appeal of the liberal neutralizations he had once despised. This seems rather bad news for liberalism. Its apparent friends are in fact powerless losers who turn to liberal principles for lack of an alternative.​
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
I listened to a podcast about Islam yesterday. The scholar on it was saying that Islamic societies tended to be quite cosmopolitan in terms of allowing different faiths to coexist, and that it was the Christian nations that tended to, for example, persecute Jews.
Yes, this is the liberal upper middle class view, precisely because abandoning it would sacrifice liberalism as luka says.

However, I think the cracks in omniculturalism are substantially changing liberal society as they are forcing the creation and proliferation of speech codes.
 

luka

Well-known member
this has all be done to death obviously but crusading liberalism is voth inevitable and paradoxical given liberalims claim to universailty.
liberalism is founded on paradoxes. that's the source of its strength but also where the fractures come from. we all know this because we are all liberals.
 
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