Category Archives: Life

The Meaning of Philosophy Today

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While listening to forty-five minutes of Brian Wilson, then 22, creating “California Girls” with a group of studio musicians (“this is real good now, take 43”), I read a series of brief philosophical articles on “Finding Meaning”:

“In this series of articles, contributors from a variety of perspectives reflect on what the philosophical life means to them. In doing so, they do not attempt just to account for what personally led them to philosophy, but what philosophy itself has become today in the wake of “the death of God,” the age of nihilism.”

I don’t think meaning exists in the world independently of us, but rather that we find some things, like particular songs, meaningful (or not). The final paragraphs of the entry written by Mark Anderson, a philosophy professor at Belmont University in Tennessee, were interesting to me, even meaningful:

Philosophy today, as far as I can tell, is mostly either scholarship or the refinement of arguments for the journals, all with an eye toward a monograph with the right academic publisher. This is to be expected when a civilization’s faith in grand Truths and meta-narratives has collapsed. What else to do but dispute the hermeneutical minutiae of other people’s ideas or tweak this or that old chestnut of an argument, especially if such activities are the route to security and prestige among one’s peers? Ahh, it’s all one big job-talk…

I exaggerate, of course, but I’ll let the hyperbole stand.

Maybe I’m saying that philosophy is dead, and that we have killed it. That authentic philosophy was asphyxiated by the philosophy profession. That’s too facile, but it’s true that there are no Platos or Nietzsches around today. Platonists and Nietzscheans, yes. Plato and Nietzsche scholars, in abundance. But where are the living philosophers, the scholar-artists, the creatively deep thinkers? The problem has consumed me for years, and for years I wanted only to become a philosopher myself. Maybe I succeeded; I used to think that I had. But these days I no longer care. Or, rather, my cares have been transformed. I have come to regard our “psychic explorations” and “ontological investigations” as so much internal chatter, our talking to ourselves about the meanings of words and the relations between and among concepts, those meanings we happen to know and those relations that happen to strike us. Hyper-intellectualized, and all too often gloomy, distractions from the real—the real with a lowercase “r”.

Plato set us going on this misguided—this imaginary, illusory search for the Real, and although Nietzsche nearly overcame it, he declined too young to reclaim his true youthfulness. I suspect that if he’d lived to follow through on his own insights, he would have come to Cratylus’s conclusion (shared in a way by Zen, though distorted by religion accretion). He would have let his Übermensch and Will to Power slip into the river of flux and float away; he would have realized that preferring his preferences to others, and wanting to argue about it, is an endless and silly game; he would have held his tongue and, if questioned, only wiggled a finger.

Or maybe not; I don’t know. Plato and Nietzsche were unusual men. Who can say what they were after? But as for me: Lin-chi remarks that when you understand that fundamentally there is nothing to seek, you have settled your affairs. I think maybe I have settled my affairs. Finally. I am done with the make-believe search, stalking the mythical minotaur of wisdom; and although I cherish the years I wandered though the psychic labyrinth, I feel liberated, and rejuvenated. Returned to the sun and the land of the living, out of the shadow of the death of God.

What? Isn’t this just another form of darkness? Isn’t this nihilism! Call it what you will. I call it ataraxia.

Unquote.

“Ataraxia” is Greek for “unperturbed” or “without mental trouble”. Wikipedia says the term was “first used in ancient Greek philosophy by Pyrrho and subsequently Epicurus and the Stoics for a lucid state of robust equanimity . . .”

Ataraxia or not, job-talk or not, Prof. Anderson is chairman of the philosophy department at Belmont University.

Hatred and Delusion United

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How strange it is to see this story displayed as if it’s just another bit of today’s news.

Untitled

It’s strange but not unexpected. Here are two meditations on current events from columnists for The Washington Post. First, Paul Waldman:

If you were dropped in from another country without knowing anything about the United States and surveyed our current political moment, what would you conclude about the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement it represents? As 2020 comes to an end, what is conservatism about?

After nearly four years of Dxxxx Txxxx’s presidency in which no misdeed was too vulgar or corrupt for conservatives to defend, now culminating in an outright war against democracy itself, you might be tempted to answer, “Nothing.” Though that’s not quite true, the real answer is not much more encouraging. . . .

The one thing that unites the right and drives the GOP is hatred of liberals. That hatred has consumed every policy goal, every ideological principle and even every ounce of commitment to country. . . .

When 18 Republican state attorneys general, more than half of House Republicans and multiple conservative organizations all demand that the results of a presidential election where no fraud was found be simply tossed aside so that Txxxx can be declared winner, something more profound has been revealed. . . .

Txxxx has often cited the extraordinary loyalty he has received from his party’s voters; it’s one of the few things he says that’s true. . . . When you ask the typical Txxxx supporter what they love about him, they don’t mention some substantive policy position; what they say is that he is a fighter. The petty squabbles, the insulting tweets, the deranged conspiracy theories — the things that the Never Txxxxers and most other Americans find off-putting are exactly what endears him to the Republican base.

Txxxx fights and fights, angrily, bitterly, endlessly driven forward by his hatred of the people his supporters hate. That’s what the base loves, and every other Republican knows it.

Everything about the election that just ended reinforced for conservatives that nothing is more important than hating liberals. The rhetoric of the 2020 campaign, starting with Txxxx but going all the way down the ballot, was that if Democrats were elected, then it would not be suboptimal or bad or even terrible, but the end of everything you care about. Towns and cities would burn, religion would be outlawed, America as we know it would cease to exist. These horrors were not presented as metaphors, but as the literal truth.

In the face of that potential apocalypse, who could possibly care about mundane policy goals? . . . They want to cut the capital gains tax, sure — but its importance pales next to the urgency of stopping the cataclysm that would engulf us all if Democrats were to hold power.
To be clear, there are still thoughtful conservatives out there trying to advance a coherent ideological project. But seldom have they mattered less to their movement and their party. . . .If it doesn’t Own the Libs, it doesn’t matter on the right. . . .

Second, ex-Republican Jennifer Rubin:

. . . With a new appreciation for the inexactitude of polling, it’s possible the portion of Americans who accept Biden’s victory is anywhere from 70 percent to only 50. Regardless, the answer to “How many Americans believe in a baseless conspiracy that the election was stolen?” is “Too many.”

The consequences are grave. It gives Republicans license to continue to break norms and even the law (e.g., threaten election officials). It promotes irrational, obstructionist politics and increases the divide between Americans. Biden voters, I would guess, have never been more contemptuous of Txxxx voters as they are now . . . [with good reason].

Conduct from Republican House and Senate members shows the pernicious effects of this cult of absurdity. Victimology and self-pity (We were denied a second Txxxx term!) mixed with arrogance (Only we know what really happened in those ballot-counting rooms!) do not make people amenable to compromise or empathy. Indeed, it turns seemingly capable and sane public figures into raving lunatics . . .

Expect a new norm to take root in the Republican Party that any lost election is a stolen election. Wholesale attempts to restrict voting (that make voter-ID laws look mild by comparison) and actual corruption of the election process may follow. . . .

And sadly, what we learned in the Txxxx era is that once you are ready to believe utter nonsense in one arena because Txxxx says so, you’re willing to believe — in fact, compelled to believe! — utter nonsense about a lot of things. Coronavirus is overblown. Masks are not needed.

“The Great Leader is never wrong” is the most fundamental principle of closed, authoritarian societies. When communism was crumbling in Poland, people began to put up signs that read “2 + 2 = 4,” a clever reminder that in a totalitarian state, reality is the province of the state and obedience to falsehoods is a requirement for survival.

The Republican Party, ironically the party that used to . . . scorn victim-mongering, now thrives as an institution in which people, as Txxxx said at a recent rally, think “we’re all victims” and accept Txxxx’s alternative reality. Maybe one day an American Lech Walesa will arrive in the Txxxx heartland and revive the spirit of democracy. Until then, the GOP remains the “2 + 2 = 5” party.

Unquote.

Does the hatred lead to the delusion or is it the other way around? I’d say they reinforce each other. On the other side, sure, we hate this president, but it’s not because we’re deluded about his actions. Besides, nobody hopes Democrats will raise the minimum wage or fix the climate in order to irritate Republicans. The two sides really are different, as the Texas lawsuit and its many supporters demonstrate.

Menace to Society

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It’s excellent news that the federal government and almost fifty states are suing Facebook for being an illegal monopoly. Their aim is to break up the company. But it’s too bad Facebook management can’t be sued for being immoral creeps. They know how bad they are, just like the managers at cigarette companies who knew they were causing cancer and the oil company executives who knew decades ago they were destroying the climate.

This report is from the Daily Mail back in May (it’s a newspaper that specializes in less important topics — note the brief paragraphs):

Facebook researchers learnt as far back as in 2016 that 64 percent of all extremist group joins are due to its own recommendations but executives . . . killed any efforts to fix the problem, according to sources.

Research at the social media giant in 2016 and again in 2018 unearthed a worrying trend linking the platform’s recommendations to extremist views on the site.

But despite researchers coming up with several different solutions to tackle the problem of extremism, no action was taken.

People familiar with the matter have told The Wall Street Journal that the move to dismiss the recommendations was largely down to Facebook VP for policy and former George W. Bush administration official Joel Kaplan, who famously threw Brett Kavanaugh a party when he was appointed Supreme Court Justice in the middle of sexual assault allegations in 2018 . . . .

In 2016, the company carried out research that found there was a worryingly high proportion of extremist content and groups on the platform.

Facebook researcher and sociologist Monica Lee wrote in a presentation at the time that there was an abundance of extremist and racist content in over a third of large German political Facebook groups.

The presentation states ‘64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.’

Most of the joining activity came from the platform’s ‘Groups You Should Join’ and ‘Discover’ algorithms, she found, meaning: ‘Our recommendation systems grow the problem.’

Facebook then launched new research in 2017 looking at how its social media platform polarized the views of its users.

The project was headed up by Facebook’s then-chief product officer Chris Cox who led the task force known as ‘Common Ground’.

It revealed the social media platform was fueling conflict among its users and increasing extremist views.

It also showed that bad behavior among users came from the small groups of people with the most extreme views, with more accounts on the far-right than far-left in the US.

The concerning findings were released in an internal presentation the following year.

‘Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,’ a slide from the 2018 presentation read.

‘If left unchecked,’ it warned, Facebook would feed users ‘more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.’

Cox and his team offered up several solutions to the problem, including building a system for digging out extreme content and suppressing clickbait around politics.

Another initiative called ‘Sparing Sharing’ involved reducing the spread of content by what it called ‘hyperactive users’ – who are highly active on the platform and show extreme views on either the left or the right, the sources told the Journal.

But the efforts – and the research – were reportedly blocked by senior executives including founder Mark Zuckerberg and Kaplan.

According to sources, Kaplan killed any attempts to change the platform branding the move ‘paternalistic’ and citing concerns that they would mainly impact right-wing social media users, the Journal reported.

Unquote.

Facebook has become a big part of the right-wing media machine, partly because the company was criticized for being unfair to right-wingers. In response to that criticism, they hired Republican executives to make sure right-wing lies and conspiracy theories weren’t interfered with, in fact, that they were promoted, as the report above shows. Thus, from The Guardian last month:

Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Txxxx, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. Of those, 13 are posts by the president’s own page, one is a direct quote from Txxxx published by Fox News, one is by the rightwing evangelical Christian Franklin Graham, and the last is the Newsmax Higbie video [“a laundry list of false and debunked claims casting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election”].

The four posts that do not include misinformation are congratulatory messages by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for Biden and Kamala Harris and two posts by Graham, including a request for prayers for Txxxx and a remembrance by Graham of his father, the conservative televangelist Billy Graham.

Beyond Bizarre

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In 1960, after we’d already been introduced to The Twilight Zone, DC Comics gave us Bizarro World. Wikipedia explains:

In the Bizarro world of “Htrae” [“Earth” spelled backward], society is ruled by the Bizarro Code, which states “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!” In one episode, for example, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling Bizarro bonds: “Guaranteed to lose money for you”. Later, the mayor appoints Bizarro No. 1 to investigate a crime, “Because you are stupider than the entire Bizarro police force put together”. This is intended and taken as a great compliment.

Millions of Americans are  now living in Bizarro World, where up is down, left is right. From Oliver Darcy of CNN:

Here’s a transcript of a conversation [radio agitator] Rush Limbaugh had with a caller [on Tuesday]. It’s important to keep in mind that right-wing media has absolutely convinced a fairly significant portion of country the election was stolen. What that leads to, I’m not sure. But it is a dangerous lie:

CALLER: . . . I thank you for everything you’re doing. And my comment today is that the national news media and the Democratic Party are using the fear factor in order to control the people. This is right out of the Alinsky, communist playbook. [Presumably, the caller means that the media and Democrats are inappropriately warning about the pandemic.] It’s to divert people’s attention to the real facts of what they’re doing. It’s clearly a stolen election. We’ve seen the election results. We’ve seen the fraud that’s taken place. We need to have our place in court. We need to never stop fighting. We need a prayer chain and millions of people to get out in the street so that the national medicat ifnore the populace.

LIMBAUGH: Well, that’s gonna be a tough thing to pull off.

CALLER: I know that.

LIMBAUGH: The national media, in the first place, it isn’t media. You’re asking them to all of a sudden start reporting the news, when they don’t do that anymore. . . .

CALLER: If the streets are lined with truck drivers and the roads are lined with people and clog these cities up, it becomes a desperate action. But if they steal this election, they’ve stolen our libertry, they’ve stolen our freedom.

LIMBAUGH: Yeah, I know.

CALLER: We’re done.

LIMBAUGH: Not just that.

CALLER: That can’t happen.

LIMBAUGH: They have forever corrupted the Constitutuion. I mean, the stakes are quite serious.

CALLER: Well, we need to ever stop. The people have to stand up. There too many people too quiet sitting by the waywide, unfortunately.

LIMBAUGH: Why do you think they’re doing that?

CALLER: Well, if 40% of the people are still watching the propaganda — it’s not news, it’s the progranda media for the Democratic Party — anybody that refers to the national news as national news is a fool. They are the propaganda wing. They are the Democratic Party.

LIMBAUGH: Right, I know. Bur why are so may people just sitting by doing nothing?

CALLER: They are just in the phase that nothing can be done. What they don’t understand is Txxxx is Txxxx, and he is the major factor standing in the way of a revolution. This is a revolution. It’s the corporate world and politics mixing together to overthrow democracy and to put control on the people.

LIMBAUGH: Well, there’s one thing. Txxx does know that. Txxxx is very, very aware. He knows what’s at stake too. And that;’s why he’s not going away. It’s why he’s not conceded yet. That’s such an important thing. That has the left kind of discombbulated. They’re running around saying, “We told you, Txxxx will not participate in a peaceful transfer of power”. He’s not gonna concede yet because there go his legal optionns if he does. If he concedes, then it’s officially over. . . .

So Txxxx is not going to concede while all of these legal challenges play out. And it’s got the Demcorats just perplexed because they thought by now that they would have seen to it that the chances that Txxx has for vicctory here are so small, and so tiny, not even worth pursuing. But Txxxx doesn’t see it that way in any shape, manner or form.

Unquote.

Txxxx and his gang have lost over 50 lawsuits aimed at reversing the presidential election. There is zero chance the Republicans will succeed in any court in America, including the one in Washington that now has six Republicans and three Democrats. But it won’t matter. The Republican Party chose a demagogue to run for president, a foolish or rabid minority elected him, and we’ll continue suffering consequences after he leaves the White House.

83% of Republicans polled after the 2020 election said they didn’t believe Joe Biden won

Once you’re at home in Bizarro World, why go back to the real one?

We Need All the Help We Can Get

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Have the U.S. and Israeli governments been contacted by beings from other worlds? This article is from The Jerusalem Post, a heretofore reputable newspaper:

According to retired Israeli general and current professor Haim Eshed, the answer is yes, but this has been kept a secret because “humanity isn’t ready” [no surprise there].

Speaking in an interview to Yediot Aharonot, Eshed – who served as the head of Israel’s space security program for nearly 30 years and is a three-time recipient of the Israel Security Award – explained that Israel and the US have both been dealing with aliens for years.

And this by no means refers to immigrants, with Eshed clarifying the existence of a “Galactic Federation.”

The 87-year-old former space security chief gave further descriptions about exactly what sort of agreements have been made between the aliens and the US, which ostensibly have been made because they wish to research and understand “the fabric of the universe.” This cooperation includes a secret underground base on Mars, where there are American and alien representatives.

. . . It is unclear how long this sort of relationship, if any, has been going on between the US and its reported extraterrestrial allies.

Eshed insists that [President Txxxx] is aware of them, and that he was “on the verge” of disclosing their existence. However, the Galactic Federation reportedly stopped him from doing so [presumably it was a cash deal], saying they wished to prevent mass hysteria since they felt humanity needed to “evolve and reach a stage where we will… understand what space and spaceships are,” Yediot Aharonot reported.

As for why he’s chosen to reveal this information now, Eshed explained that the timing was simply due to how much the academic landscape has changed, and how respected he is in academia.

“If I had come up with what I’m saying today five years ago, I would have been hospitalized,” he explained to Yediot.

He added that “today, they’re already talking differently. I have nothing to lose. I’ve received my degrees and awards; I am respected in universities abroad, where the trend is also changing.”

Eshed provided more information in his newest book, The Universe Beyond the Horizon – Conversations with Professor Haim Eshed, along with other details such as how aliens have prevented nuclear apocalypses and “when we can jump in and visit the Men in Black.” The book is available now for NIS 98 [around $30] . . .

The Jerusalem Post was unable to reach out to this supposed Galactic Federation for comment.

Unquote.

It sounds like an 87-year-old professor is aiming to sell a few books, but I for one welcome our new galactic overlords.

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