1). I agree that the physicalist and mythemic models are orthogonal. They intersect at the truth, and while we can map accordingly, good luck getting to the center of that Tootsie Pop in three licks.
2). The Gilead Insurgency is a well-documented S&M artifact, as is the Pink Pussy Hat Brigades, the Mater Paraphilias of YA fiction, and basically anything written by an art critic, opinion journalist or bureaucratic turd-herder in the past forty-seven years.
3) The Sahuagin vs Mermaid problem was resolved by a guy named Ben Franklin long ago. It's just a matter of age.
4). I'm still only halfway through this beautiful madness. More later.
John, You know I love your stuff. But I will never have 82 minutes to listen to this and other visual types will not, either. (Yes, I don't watch TV, either.) As I have urged many sites (and most have seen the light) I hope you will pass this through an auto-transcriber so the rest of us can see what all the excitement is about. They are free/near free and, while not perfect, are plenty close enough to get the idea virtually all of the time. Us visual learners would surely appreciate it.
I don't usually have that long either, which is why I tend to listen to podcasts on 2x speed ;) In any case, that's a good suggestion! Although the transcript of an hour and a half long podcast might itself be pretty long (and include more uhs, ums, errs, broken grammar, and incomplete statements than the literary mind can bare!)
'tis true - in another life I have a podcast and had to learn long-form will only be listened to by 10% of subscribers. I've had to learn to bring discussions down to 30-40 min OR break it up into a part series. My stats suggest that after 20min almost everyone drops off and when I did a poll about this many people came back and said, "Well that's the time it takes to get to work" or "That's my walking time", etc. Which for me is alien because if I want to listen to a podcast when walking or driving and I don't finish it in that time, I'll go back and finish it off later on. Apparently, according to my stats, most people don't go back and finish the podcast - they must move on!
Anyway, really appreciate John and Jay getting together and having a free association session :-)
You got the right idea. Some folks will listen to your podcast who won't read your essays, some will read your essays but not listen to your podcasts, and some will enjoy both formats. And podcast transcripts don't read nearly as well as actual essays. This way you can develop your ideas in different formats too (speaking vs writing), which seem to involve some differences in thought processes, leading to better-developed ideas after you've both written about an issue and talked about it.
Video doesn't just double the amount of work, it seems to create 20 times the amount of work. Audio is good because it appeals to people who want to listen while doing something else, which video doesn't work for. Unless there's something specifically visual you need to get across, it doesn't seem worth the extra time, effort, or expense.
Ha! I'm getting that too - 'something went wrong' - "No kidding!" is my reply, but I think the platform has a different 'wrong' than the broader one I'm thinking about.
I listened to this while I watered plants at big box behemoth. I knew I was in for a ride right off, when John called Luc a halfbreed. It only got better after that. Lucky only the plants heard me laughing out loud the several times I did. Most fun I've had listening to a podcast in a long while.
Jan 24, 2023·edited Jan 24, 2023Liked by John Carter
Brilliant stuff!!!!! The insight on THE HANDMAID'S TALE as a rape fantasy establishes Martian Wonderland as one of the essential podcasts...it is definitely up there with Caribbean Rhythms.
Re Tonic Masculinity itself, I'd suggest that the intellectual martial art of formal logic needs to be included in the underground curriculum of resistance.
You made a very good point about the European ethnonats identifying the managerial state as the enemy and an even better ones on the use of diversity hires as flak-catchers for the system and America as an imperial regime.
I definitely agree. The grammar of formal logic is an essential component of intellectual warfare, since it enables those who master it to dismantle shit arguments by abstracting them to their basic components and identify disjunctures that might otherwise slip through unseen. It isn't sufficient though, as it's on its own it's relatively powerless against bad premises. A developed mind needs to be able to switch between logico-empirical and mytho-emotional modes in order to dodge around Gödel traps.
With you on the insufficiency angle. Reason is powerless against people who cannot engage on that level. Analytic forms of thinking are very much a minority thing...a lesson that I learnt way too late in life. The value of clear thinking is self-evident to the usual suspects, but it is also useful as a way of signaling to other disaffected types.
Underground paedagogy (and, lets face it, we are heading for the catacombs) should involve integrating formal logic with neuroscience/behavioural science. As a survival strategy.
If I were to give advice to a youngster just starting out, I'd recommend getting instruction from a clinician with experience on dealing with dangerous types with hair-trigger responses to potential offense on how to spot them and how to engage them. Longhouse types were bad enough in the 80s (when I was a teenager), today they are truly toxic.
Yes and no - we exchanged posts in the comments section but not on this subject.
I reached my conclusions after some extensive reflection on personal experiences over a lifetime. I am totally convinced that some of the dangers of the contemporary education sector and workplace can be overcome. There is no need for people to develop answers from scratch if there is a reservoir of extant expertise that can be tapped.
Clinicians deal with all kinds of very unstable and easily triggered people all the time. The good ones can do this in perfect safety. These skills are highly relevant for youngsters (especially the kinds of spirited and intelligent kids that are most likely to react badly to regime ideologies that are transparent b.s.) and for those in employment.
Teaching or sharing practical skills is a prosocial activity. There is no reason why this cannot be done to a high standard and the gold standard in this area would be to combine genuine thinking skills with the interpersonal hacks that are needed to survive/thrive in toxic environments. We all live in Cthulhuland for the foreseeable future...we have to be practical and there is nothing more urgent than intellectual autonomy.
Also formal logic is a great way to demonstrate the real-world value of classics like Aristotle.
You're spot on. Those social skills are key to navigating an environment suffused with offensive stimuli, as well as characteropaths who have learned how to passive-aggressively elicit responses that damage the social standing of the target. I've seen quite a few young guys fall victim to those attacks, and I'm far from immune myself.
The enforcement of socio-political norms at the interpersonal level by means of wokecraft is almost 100% passive-aggression...at least on the part of the enforcers. It offers a dopamine hit at the expense of the disfavoured and it blends, Hobbesian, Sadean and Darwinian elements. The enforcers understand that they have a social licence to torment others.
That we need to incorporate 'stress inoculation' (as per training for special forces) with debating technique is further proof that civilised life is close to collapse.
2 points. The best way to teach logic for debate/conversation/interpersonal exchange is with practical exercises. Perfect subject for small groups or workshops. Have long wondered about how extra-systemic education might proceed under present day conditions...underground, 'Operation Mayhem', most likely.
I'd expect that many of the youngsters already involved in SD would be interested in such things or would appreciate its relevance. So SD or martial arts could function as a gateway to today's 'forbidden knowledge' for the Muad'dibs of tommorrow.
" the intellectual martial art of formal logic needs to be included in the underground curriculum of resistance."
Yes. And no. Story: when I took Formal Logic in college (mid 70s, Canada), the class was full of math and engineering students from Hong Kong. Since it was a "philosophy" class, it counted as their "Humanities" option. Of course, to them, it was ridiculously easy, while something like "Rise of the English Novel" would have utterly defeated them.
Point is, whatever its ultimate value, Formal Logic is really just another math class, and doesn't do anything to actually help someone analyze and critique everyday arguments. As it happens, two other professors in the Philosophy dept. then and there were beginning to develop a discipline they called "Informal Logic" aka practical reasoning, a more heavily theoretical version of the old Rhetoric classes, which was intended to actually teach, as they called their textbook, "Logical Self-Defense." (Known to us teaching assistants as LSD). Students spent their time analyzing real examples from op eds or political debates, learning how to identify conclusions and premises, and recognize fallacies such as Appeal to Past Practice or Ad Hominem, etc. (In retrospect, both guys were utter shitlibs, even for Canadians, and spent their time attacking the usual "obvious fallacies" of the usual "right wing Nazis and troglodytes. " I imagine they had a lot of fun with Trump, and consider Justin to be "another conservative sell out" delaying the Glorious New World Order run by rational people like themselves. But I digress).
Later, at Wayne State, I ran into Larry Powers, who was obsessed with finding out why rational people create or fall for bad arguments. So here's a freebie for you all: He concluded that all of the various "fallacies" boiled down to one: ambiguity or equivocation. An invalid argument has an ambiguous term: read one way, the argument is valid but the premise is false; read another way, the premise is true, but the argument is unsound. Much simpler than working with the usual bag of dozens of "fallacies" and trying to match them to the argument.
In retrospect, this was the only philosophy class I was involved in (on the creating the book end, I never took it as such) that had any subsequent value, and that was considerable. I suspect when people try to sell philosophy as "useful in real life" they are thinking of picking up these skills randomly and hit and miss, just through years of reading and discussing Plato and company. Formal Logic, on the other hand, doesn't really make an impact on one's own reasoning skills. A class that isn't Formal Logic but, OTOH, unlike years of majoring in Philosophy, gets down to teaching the practical skills, is the ticket.
Thanks for sharing that, it was really interesting. You make a good case that informal logic has useful implications. The acronym made me lol. Any other good acid tabs in that toolkit?
Jan 26, 2023·edited Jan 26, 2023Liked by John Carter
James, yours are all very good points that need to be made. I understand where you are coming from. I once took a class in formal logic which was very dry and pretty useless (though not as painful as the lectures on social philosophy which were worse than dental surgery). Reproducing the failures of the system is the very essence of insanity.
I am approaching this from the assumption that a) developments in neuroscience should be integrated into paedagogy, b) genuinely critical or analytic thinking is an essential skill that is neglected in the education system, c) engagement in argument or contestation with hostile or potentially dangerous types is an exceptionally serious risk to people inclined to think for themselves, d) the formation of the next generation cannot be left to the system, e) clinicians have awesome interpersonal skills that would be useful for dealing with woke crazies (as distinct from mere midwit enforcers of orthodoxy). I suspect that there is a constituency for something along the lines of what I have been proposing.
The limitations of formal logic in particular (or disciplined thinking of any kind) when being pestered by a midwit with conventional regime-compliant views is pretty obvious. No one can win an argument with them. The point is to inoculate youngsters so that they do not get overwhelmed by views other than their own. At the moment most people rely on gut instinct to suss out the bullshit. This works to a point. Many/some want to understand the mechanics of why b.s. is what it is. Formal logic (properly taught, properly applied) can help.
Also, learning new skills in a safe environment is intrinsically good and very pro-social. I expect that knowledge is going underground...back to the 17th c. in fact. We develop capacity outside the system or accept that subsequent generations of deplorables will be tongue-tied helots. If we can't do better, we are fucked.
You truly hit the nail on the head with your final comment: practical skills are indeed the way to go.
I saw Philosophy Cat on the Jolly Heretic's YouTube channel. Y'all like the Jolly Heretic? He's a hoot but I get a little nerve-wracked listening to him. Like Russell Brand. 10 min. in I start feeling breathless from the speed of their speech.
Now, for some esoterica - Vardis Fisher: a writer best known for his popular historical novels of the Old West. The Mountain Man (Jeremiah Johnson was based on this novel and The Mothers, a novel about the Donner Party) From Goodreads: "He wrote the monumental 12-volume Testament of Man (1943–1960) series of novels, depicting the history of humans from cave to civilization. It was considered controversial because of his portrayal of religion, especially the Judeo-Christian tradition, emphasis on sexuality, and conclusions about anthropology." I promise, his works won't lower your testosterone levels. The paperback covers alone, with lurid romance novel depictions of women, pretty much speak to the time period when these novels were published. I read the Testament series when I was about 15. Probably above my age-grade but man, did those books influence me to read stuff I probably shouldn't have laid eyes on until I was at least an adult. No fish-f-king though.
I agree with your theory on frigid leftist women's hatred of DJT.
It is heroic to ultimately die for the cause if doing so furthers the cause.
Enjoyed the conversation - sorta felt like I was eves dropping on a couple of guys shooting the breeze a la' stream of consciousness. Kept me up a half hour past my bedtime🥱
Ed Dutton is a wonderful sperg whom I watch regularly, but I know what you mean about manic - he's one of the few I listen to on 1x speed. The Philosophicat interview was highly entertaining, too - a meeting of minds that couldn't have been more different, both completely unable to speak the other's language, and therefore talking completely past one another. I've tried getting PCat into McGilchrist, because I think his ideas would help her communicate more effectively with science autists like Dutton.
The Testament of Man sounds absolutely fascinating. I'm going to have to check that out. Sounds like it had a similar impact on you that Starship Troopers and Conan stories had on my impressionable teenage brain ;)
Yes, Ed is charming in his own autist-way. His books are quite readable and engaging. I frequently pepper my comments and conversations with the terms spiteful mutants and mid-wits where applicable - far too often it seems.
Fisher's books are hard to find. The Mountain Man is available on Amazon Kindle, but none of his other 35 books. Several years ago I found a very old incomplete set of paperbacks of the Testament of Man series on a used book site. Thriftbooks.com has a limited selection. Of what they have I'd recommend Pemmican, The Mothers and and The Mountain Man. These are the historical novels, and they all portray archetypical "tonic men". I'd like to see his Testament of Man series back in print but it would take a gutsy publisher to even consider it.
Which is what makes YA fiction so important, and why the septic state of the genre now is such a dire problem. Boys raised on stories of strong independent grrlbosses will be simps; girls raised on those stories will be insufferable. It's a mass culture tailor made to set up an evolutionary mismatch that can only lead to mass misery.
The empire's tactics abroad always return home, because the tools used by the ruling class the empire creates are ready at hand for them. This is one of the primary hazards of empire.
This is why I love Substack - I'd never run across most of the writers I follow without it. Their absence in my life would render it quite bereft of intellectual stimulation.
I'm one of those rare birds who doesn't flock with Twitter, show my face on Facebook, or do anything with TikTok except indulge my prurient interest via Odins Men in the freak show prominent on that brain-drain. When one of my Substack writers reference an author or book I haven't read I always check it out. For sure, since I was a grasshopper, I've been reading authors way outside the mainstream.
Same. I haven't been active on social media for some time - partly because it's a distraction, partly because it's dangerous to one's career. Although I'm trying to build a presence now so I can leverage Twitter's network effect, it being orders of magnitude larger than Twitter. That said - the quality of readers found on substack is I think much, much higher.
Ahhhh! It's Me-sus, not my-sus. Good lord, im going to buy you a copy of human action. +1 for galaxies edge, better than star wars would've been even if it wasn't being driven into the ground by talentless hacks
It's a tricky thing: what's done is done, they're here now, and while many might be induced to leave not all of them will. Nor is that necessarily necessary or desirable. I think there's a way for the nations to preserve themselves in the new, networked world we're living in, which doesn't necessarily imply ethnostates. But it does require that the nations stop eating shit and assert themselves and their interests.
Precisely so. For America, and the West more broadly, to recover itself, it must make peace with the concept that groups are different; each needs its own space, where it can live according to its own rules; and group-level outcomes are not, never have been, and never will be the same.
To clarify, Jay is a co-host, not a guest - doing the podcast was actually his idea ;)
His main point, which I tend to agree with, is that America isn't, and has never been, a nation in the classical sense. It's a federation of nations. Present problems are largely due to the denigration and oppression of the founder nations, and that needs to be dealt with. An ethnostate would necessitate breaking America up; whether that's an acceptable solution or not is up for debate, but it's worth remembering that a fractured America would be a lot weaker.
I might have missed it, but I don't recall Jay trying to assign guilt anywhere.
1). I agree that the physicalist and mythemic models are orthogonal. They intersect at the truth, and while we can map accordingly, good luck getting to the center of that Tootsie Pop in three licks.
2). The Gilead Insurgency is a well-documented S&M artifact, as is the Pink Pussy Hat Brigades, the Mater Paraphilias of YA fiction, and basically anything written by an art critic, opinion journalist or bureaucratic turd-herder in the past forty-seven years.
3) The Sahuagin vs Mermaid problem was resolved by a guy named Ben Franklin long ago. It's just a matter of age.
4). I'm still only halfway through this beautiful madness. More later.
This being the closest thing to podcast notes, I have pinned the comment.
I'd completely forgotten we talked about 1). And I wasn't even drunk.
John, You know I love your stuff. But I will never have 82 minutes to listen to this and other visual types will not, either. (Yes, I don't watch TV, either.) As I have urged many sites (and most have seen the light) I hope you will pass this through an auto-transcriber so the rest of us can see what all the excitement is about. They are free/near free and, while not perfect, are plenty close enough to get the idea virtually all of the time. Us visual learners would surely appreciate it.
I don't usually have that long either, which is why I tend to listen to podcasts on 2x speed ;) In any case, that's a good suggestion! Although the transcript of an hour and a half long podcast might itself be pretty long (and include more uhs, ums, errs, broken grammar, and incomplete statements than the literary mind can bare!)
'tis true - in another life I have a podcast and had to learn long-form will only be listened to by 10% of subscribers. I've had to learn to bring discussions down to 30-40 min OR break it up into a part series. My stats suggest that after 20min almost everyone drops off and when I did a poll about this many people came back and said, "Well that's the time it takes to get to work" or "That's my walking time", etc. Which for me is alien because if I want to listen to a podcast when walking or driving and I don't finish it in that time, I'll go back and finish it off later on. Apparently, according to my stats, most people don't go back and finish the podcast - they must move on!
Anyway, really appreciate John and Jay getting together and having a free association session :-)
That's weird to me too. But then it's a 30 min walk to the gym where I then spend an hour, so a 2 hour podcast fits perfectly.
In any case I'm hoping to extend reach to auditory learners using this format.
You got the right idea. Some folks will listen to your podcast who won't read your essays, some will read your essays but not listen to your podcasts, and some will enjoy both formats. And podcast transcripts don't read nearly as well as actual essays. This way you can develop your ideas in different formats too (speaking vs writing), which seem to involve some differences in thought processes, leading to better-developed ideas after you've both written about an issue and talked about it.
That's exactly the plan.
I'm not doing video though. Way too much work.
Video doesn't just double the amount of work, it seems to create 20 times the amount of work. Audio is good because it appeals to people who want to listen while doing something else, which video doesn't work for. Unless there's something specifically visual you need to get across, it doesn't seem worth the extra time, effort, or expense.
Exactly my take, yes. I spent a few days learning how to use video editing software and was like, nah, fuck this.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to listen to this thing twice....
And write the same comment three times ;)
(Noticed substack went offline for a bit, probably related to that).
Yeah, it kept telling me something went wrong. Methinks yer guy's convo crashed substack....sort of like Bisone demolished that bot.
Funny you should mention that. When I was uploading it I was getting constant messages that 'something went wrong'.
The dark spirits of the digital æther did not want you to hear this conversation.
Ha! I'm getting that too - 'something went wrong' - "No kidding!" is my reply, but I think the platform has a different 'wrong' than the broader one I'm thinking about.
Probably the mermen out there got a little anxsty.
You guys had a great diacussion. I just wish I could get the term "fish fucking" out of my head!
😈
Fucking racist!
I listened to this while I watered plants at big box behemoth. I knew I was in for a ride right off, when John called Luc a halfbreed. It only got better after that. Lucky only the plants heard me laughing out loud the several times I did. Most fun I've had listening to a podcast in a long while.
I hope Luc wasn't troubled by that.
If it makes him feel better, I'm just some kind of half-feral mutt 😂
Brilliant stuff!!!!! The insight on THE HANDMAID'S TALE as a rape fantasy establishes Martian Wonderland as one of the essential podcasts...it is definitely up there with Caribbean Rhythms.
Re Tonic Masculinity itself, I'd suggest that the intellectual martial art of formal logic needs to be included in the underground curriculum of resistance.
You made a very good point about the European ethnonats identifying the managerial state as the enemy and an even better ones on the use of diversity hires as flak-catchers for the system and America as an imperial regime.
Man that's high praise.
I definitely agree. The grammar of formal logic is an essential component of intellectual warfare, since it enables those who master it to dismantle shit arguments by abstracting them to their basic components and identify disjunctures that might otherwise slip through unseen. It isn't sufficient though, as it's on its own it's relatively powerless against bad premises. A developed mind needs to be able to switch between logico-empirical and mytho-emotional modes in order to dodge around Gödel traps.
With you on the insufficiency angle. Reason is powerless against people who cannot engage on that level. Analytic forms of thinking are very much a minority thing...a lesson that I learnt way too late in life. The value of clear thinking is self-evident to the usual suspects, but it is also useful as a way of signaling to other disaffected types.
Underground paedagogy (and, lets face it, we are heading for the catacombs) should involve integrating formal logic with neuroscience/behavioural science. As a survival strategy.
If I were to give advice to a youngster just starting out, I'd recommend getting instruction from a clinician with experience on dealing with dangerous types with hair-trigger responses to potential offense on how to spot them and how to engage them. Longhouse types were bad enough in the 80s (when I was a teenager), today they are truly toxic.
Have you been talking to Jay? Because you sound like Jay. He's been on this exact thing for a while.
Might put him on the hot seat to explain himself for the next episode actually.
Yes and no - we exchanged posts in the comments section but not on this subject.
I reached my conclusions after some extensive reflection on personal experiences over a lifetime. I am totally convinced that some of the dangers of the contemporary education sector and workplace can be overcome. There is no need for people to develop answers from scratch if there is a reservoir of extant expertise that can be tapped.
Clinicians deal with all kinds of very unstable and easily triggered people all the time. The good ones can do this in perfect safety. These skills are highly relevant for youngsters (especially the kinds of spirited and intelligent kids that are most likely to react badly to regime ideologies that are transparent b.s.) and for those in employment.
Teaching or sharing practical skills is a prosocial activity. There is no reason why this cannot be done to a high standard and the gold standard in this area would be to combine genuine thinking skills with the interpersonal hacks that are needed to survive/thrive in toxic environments. We all live in Cthulhuland for the foreseeable future...we have to be practical and there is nothing more urgent than intellectual autonomy.
Also formal logic is a great way to demonstrate the real-world value of classics like Aristotle.
You're spot on. Those social skills are key to navigating an environment suffused with offensive stimuli, as well as characteropaths who have learned how to passive-aggressively elicit responses that damage the social standing of the target. I've seen quite a few young guys fall victim to those attacks, and I'm far from immune myself.
The enforcement of socio-political norms at the interpersonal level by means of wokecraft is almost 100% passive-aggression...at least on the part of the enforcers. It offers a dopamine hit at the expense of the disfavoured and it blends, Hobbesian, Sadean and Darwinian elements. The enforcers understand that they have a social licence to torment others.
No idea. There are so many variant meanings. Am writing from Australia so my grasp of N. American slang is not assured.
People always complain that I do that. It's not intentional, I was just born loud.
+++
That we need to incorporate 'stress inoculation' (as per training for special forces) with debating technique is further proof that civilised life is close to collapse.
2 points. The best way to teach logic for debate/conversation/interpersonal exchange is with practical exercises. Perfect subject for small groups or workshops. Have long wondered about how extra-systemic education might proceed under present day conditions...underground, 'Operation Mayhem', most likely.
I'd expect that many of the youngsters already involved in SD would be interested in such things or would appreciate its relevance. So SD or martial arts could function as a gateway to today's 'forbidden knowledge' for the Muad'dibs of tommorrow.
This is a fantastic idea and I want to follow up on it.
" the intellectual martial art of formal logic needs to be included in the underground curriculum of resistance."
Yes. And no. Story: when I took Formal Logic in college (mid 70s, Canada), the class was full of math and engineering students from Hong Kong. Since it was a "philosophy" class, it counted as their "Humanities" option. Of course, to them, it was ridiculously easy, while something like "Rise of the English Novel" would have utterly defeated them.
Point is, whatever its ultimate value, Formal Logic is really just another math class, and doesn't do anything to actually help someone analyze and critique everyday arguments. As it happens, two other professors in the Philosophy dept. then and there were beginning to develop a discipline they called "Informal Logic" aka practical reasoning, a more heavily theoretical version of the old Rhetoric classes, which was intended to actually teach, as they called their textbook, "Logical Self-Defense." (Known to us teaching assistants as LSD). Students spent their time analyzing real examples from op eds or political debates, learning how to identify conclusions and premises, and recognize fallacies such as Appeal to Past Practice or Ad Hominem, etc. (In retrospect, both guys were utter shitlibs, even for Canadians, and spent their time attacking the usual "obvious fallacies" of the usual "right wing Nazis and troglodytes. " I imagine they had a lot of fun with Trump, and consider Justin to be "another conservative sell out" delaying the Glorious New World Order run by rational people like themselves. But I digress).
Later, at Wayne State, I ran into Larry Powers, who was obsessed with finding out why rational people create or fall for bad arguments. So here's a freebie for you all: He concluded that all of the various "fallacies" boiled down to one: ambiguity or equivocation. An invalid argument has an ambiguous term: read one way, the argument is valid but the premise is false; read another way, the premise is true, but the argument is unsound. Much simpler than working with the usual bag of dozens of "fallacies" and trying to match them to the argument.
In retrospect, this was the only philosophy class I was involved in (on the creating the book end, I never took it as such) that had any subsequent value, and that was considerable. I suspect when people try to sell philosophy as "useful in real life" they are thinking of picking up these skills randomly and hit and miss, just through years of reading and discussing Plato and company. Formal Logic, on the other hand, doesn't really make an impact on one's own reasoning skills. A class that isn't Formal Logic but, OTOH, unlike years of majoring in Philosophy, gets down to teaching the practical skills, is the ticket.
Thanks for sharing that, it was really interesting. You make a good case that informal logic has useful implications. The acronym made me lol. Any other good acid tabs in that toolkit?
James, yours are all very good points that need to be made. I understand where you are coming from. I once took a class in formal logic which was very dry and pretty useless (though not as painful as the lectures on social philosophy which were worse than dental surgery). Reproducing the failures of the system is the very essence of insanity.
I am approaching this from the assumption that a) developments in neuroscience should be integrated into paedagogy, b) genuinely critical or analytic thinking is an essential skill that is neglected in the education system, c) engagement in argument or contestation with hostile or potentially dangerous types is an exceptionally serious risk to people inclined to think for themselves, d) the formation of the next generation cannot be left to the system, e) clinicians have awesome interpersonal skills that would be useful for dealing with woke crazies (as distinct from mere midwit enforcers of orthodoxy). I suspect that there is a constituency for something along the lines of what I have been proposing.
The limitations of formal logic in particular (or disciplined thinking of any kind) when being pestered by a midwit with conventional regime-compliant views is pretty obvious. No one can win an argument with them. The point is to inoculate youngsters so that they do not get overwhelmed by views other than their own. At the moment most people rely on gut instinct to suss out the bullshit. This works to a point. Many/some want to understand the mechanics of why b.s. is what it is. Formal logic (properly taught, properly applied) can help.
Also, learning new skills in a safe environment is intrinsically good and very pro-social. I expect that knowledge is going underground...back to the 17th c. in fact. We develop capacity outside the system or accept that subsequent generations of deplorables will be tongue-tied helots. If we can't do better, we are fucked.
You truly hit the nail on the head with your final comment: practical skills are indeed the way to go.
I saw Philosophy Cat on the Jolly Heretic's YouTube channel. Y'all like the Jolly Heretic? He's a hoot but I get a little nerve-wracked listening to him. Like Russell Brand. 10 min. in I start feeling breathless from the speed of their speech.
Now, for some esoterica - Vardis Fisher: a writer best known for his popular historical novels of the Old West. The Mountain Man (Jeremiah Johnson was based on this novel and The Mothers, a novel about the Donner Party) From Goodreads: "He wrote the monumental 12-volume Testament of Man (1943–1960) series of novels, depicting the history of humans from cave to civilization. It was considered controversial because of his portrayal of religion, especially the Judeo-Christian tradition, emphasis on sexuality, and conclusions about anthropology." I promise, his works won't lower your testosterone levels. The paperback covers alone, with lurid romance novel depictions of women, pretty much speak to the time period when these novels were published. I read the Testament series when I was about 15. Probably above my age-grade but man, did those books influence me to read stuff I probably shouldn't have laid eyes on until I was at least an adult. No fish-f-king though.
I agree with your theory on frigid leftist women's hatred of DJT.
It is heroic to ultimately die for the cause if doing so furthers the cause.
Enjoyed the conversation - sorta felt like I was eves dropping on a couple of guys shooting the breeze a la' stream of consciousness. Kept me up a half hour past my bedtime🥱
Ed Dutton is a wonderful sperg whom I watch regularly, but I know what you mean about manic - he's one of the few I listen to on 1x speed. The Philosophicat interview was highly entertaining, too - a meeting of minds that couldn't have been more different, both completely unable to speak the other's language, and therefore talking completely past one another. I've tried getting PCat into McGilchrist, because I think his ideas would help her communicate more effectively with science autists like Dutton.
The Testament of Man sounds absolutely fascinating. I'm going to have to check that out. Sounds like it had a similar impact on you that Starship Troopers and Conan stories had on my impressionable teenage brain ;)
Yes, Ed is charming in his own autist-way. His books are quite readable and engaging. I frequently pepper my comments and conversations with the terms spiteful mutants and mid-wits where applicable - far too often it seems.
Fisher's books are hard to find. The Mountain Man is available on Amazon Kindle, but none of his other 35 books. Several years ago I found a very old incomplete set of paperbacks of the Testament of Man series on a used book site. Thriftbooks.com has a limited selection. Of what they have I'd recommend Pemmican, The Mothers and and The Mountain Man. These are the historical novels, and they all portray archetypical "tonic men". I'd like to see his Testament of Man series back in print but it would take a gutsy publisher to even consider it.
Ooo a lost literary saga.
Now I'm very interested.
Which is what makes YA fiction so important, and why the septic state of the genre now is such a dire problem. Boys raised on stories of strong independent grrlbosses will be simps; girls raised on those stories will be insufferable. It's a mass culture tailor made to set up an evolutionary mismatch that can only lead to mass misery.
Largely no, and yeah, these days it's 100% grrlpowr.
Got my nephew to pick up LOTR though. Gonna try and get him reading Howard and Heinlein next
The empire's tactics abroad always return home, because the tools used by the ruling class the empire creates are ready at hand for them. This is one of the primary hazards of empire.
This is why I love Substack - I'd never run across most of the writers I follow without it. Their absence in my life would render it quite bereft of intellectual stimulation.
I'm one of those rare birds who doesn't flock with Twitter, show my face on Facebook, or do anything with TikTok except indulge my prurient interest via Odins Men in the freak show prominent on that brain-drain. When one of my Substack writers reference an author or book I haven't read I always check it out. For sure, since I was a grasshopper, I've been reading authors way outside the mainstream.
Same. I haven't been active on social media for some time - partly because it's a distraction, partly because it's dangerous to one's career. Although I'm trying to build a presence now so I can leverage Twitter's network effect, it being orders of magnitude larger than Twitter. That said - the quality of readers found on substack is I think much, much higher.
Ahhhh! It's Me-sus, not my-sus. Good lord, im going to buy you a copy of human action. +1 for galaxies edge, better than star wars would've been even if it wasn't being driven into the ground by talentless hacks
And this is how you know I'm an autodidactic visual learner ;)
Dude I didn't know you were into Galaxy's Edge too! We need to nerd out about this.
I thought you fellows might enjoy this post: https://acko.net/blog/the-hikers-dilemma/
It's a tricky thing: what's done is done, they're here now, and while many might be induced to leave not all of them will. Nor is that necessarily necessary or desirable. I think there's a way for the nations to preserve themselves in the new, networked world we're living in, which doesn't necessarily imply ethnostates. But it does require that the nations stop eating shit and assert themselves and their interests.
Precisely so. For America, and the West more broadly, to recover itself, it must make peace with the concept that groups are different; each needs its own space, where it can live according to its own rules; and group-level outcomes are not, never have been, and never will be the same.
To clarify, Jay is a co-host, not a guest - doing the podcast was actually his idea ;)
His main point, which I tend to agree with, is that America isn't, and has never been, a nation in the classical sense. It's a federation of nations. Present problems are largely due to the denigration and oppression of the founder nations, and that needs to be dealt with. An ethnostate would necessitate breaking America up; whether that's an acceptable solution or not is up for debate, but it's worth remembering that a fractured America would be a lot weaker.
I might have missed it, but I don't recall Jay trying to assign guilt anywhere.
Great to see a fellow reader of THE EXILE out there.