So over on the alt-right subreddit, because of course there is such a thing, the regulars are discussing an article from a century-old encyclopedia suggesting that Jews are many times more likely to be insane than their goy counterparts.
A fellow calling himself Motor_City_Cobra offers a rather, well, perplexing explanation for this alleged fact. See how many sentences you can make it through before getting completely baffled! (I got through four!)
You guys should probably just stick with the “Happy Merchant” memes, because that makes no damn sense at all.
@ =8)-DX:
Yeah, it’s pretty much a clusterfuck.
One of the problems I have with philosophy, less the subject than those who practice it, is the tendency of people to express ideas in such convoluted ways in order to appear more intelligent or profound than they really are to those who don’t know better.
Perhaps it’s just me but someone having to be so opaque or obscurant to make such any point, rather than be more succinct and accessible, is really suspect…
@NickNameNick
Damn, I feel the same way.
Of course, this tendency isn’t confined to philosophers.
@ Spaniard in the Works,
I think Imperator is Miggy. With Miggy, everything leads inexorably back to the beach where he hunts his seagulls. I’m looking forward to his cooking tips for preserving anything in a non-salty brine.
And here I thought someone was testing out a random post generator.
Imperator (lol) might be MRAL. Hasn’t he been lurking around here again lately?
OT
Highly problematic news here yesterday. Mainstream right wing party Moderaterna have declared that they’re now interested in working together with neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats in order to bring down the Social Democrat & Green Party government. The Christian Democrats are on board with this, while the Centre Party and Liberals probably won’t be.
In practice this means, based on 2014 election results:
Moderates + Sweden Democrats + Christian Democrats = ~40%
Social Democrats + Green Party = ~38%
Centre Party = 6.1%
Liberals = 5.4%
Left Party = 5.7%
Since the election it’s clear that the almost all parties, especially the Greens, have lost support, while Sweden Democrats, the Left, and the Centre have gained.
The poll numbers from December say:
Social Democrats: 27.6%
Moderates: 22.2%
Sweden Democrats: 15.2%
Centre: 9.1%
Left: 8.4%
Liberals: 6.0%
Greens: 5.2%
Christian Democrats: 3.6%
Note: A party needs at least 4% of the popular vote in order to enter parliament. As it stands, the Christian Democrats would be irrelevant if these were election results. However, it’s common that some of the smaller parties drop below 4% in polls but then crawl back up to 4-5% when it’s time to actually vote.
In my (amateur) opinion, there will be a new coalition consisting of the Moderates, Sweden Democrats, and Christian Democrats, with an approximate 40-43% support. My assumption is that Moderates will lose some support while SD will gain some, and Christian Democrats will remain largely unchanged.
Social Democrats will, in this case, need to seek additional support in order to form the largest coalition and push through a budget proposal. The natural path would be to invite the Left to form a minority government with 41-42% support. A few problems:
– 42% might not be enough.
– The Left is the only major party to stick with actual progressive policy. Thus, all parties right of centre view them as cancer.
– The Left might not accept the offer without major concessions from the Social Democrats. Progressives were not happy being left out of government after the 2014 election.
Instead, I think it’s likely that Social Democrats will reach for the centre. They could reasonably gain support from the Centre and Liberals, but that means the Left is definitely out of the picture. Liberals have also been very firm on their view that the Social Democrats would need to drop the Greens if they want any kind of support from the centre-right.
In my (again, amateur) opinion, these are the groupings that will arise:
The Right (Moderate Party, Sweden Democrats, Christian Democrats) = ~40-43%
The Centre (Social Democrats, Centre Party, Liberals) = ~42-45%
The Left (Left Party, Green Party) = ~15%
My assumptions are that Liberals will gain support from this reshaping of the political landscape, Social Democrats will remain somewhat stable, Centre Party will drop slightly, Left and Greens will slowly gain support in opposition, Christian Democrats will gain, Sweden Democrats will initially gain but stabilize around 16%.
The Social Democrats have been creeping toward the centre for decades, and I think it’s a natural progression that they will now seek to establish a centrist government while cashing in on polarization fatigue. I believe that the Moderates will suffer from their decision, in the long run. However, opening up to the fascists might be a successful strategy in the short term.
Next election is scheduled for September 2018, but if this coalition restructuring proceeds as expected (by me), it could very well led to an extra election in late 2017, as was originally scheduled (but eventually evaded) for early 2015.
Whether the election happens in 2018 or sooner, my prediction is it will lead to a historical restructuring where the exact coalitions won’t become clear until the days or weeks after polls close, as the various parties scramble to find a 1% or 0.5% lead through all kinds of unholy alliances.
TL;DR: The political left is probably dead. It’s gonna be the right vs the centre.
But on a positive note, at 07:47 this morning our population reached 10 million.
….I don’t even have a song for that, IP. That sucks infinite ass.
I mean, what he’s saying does in fact make sense and is a common criticism of modern psychology.
(I don’t know how or why he’s blaming it on Jewish people, but as I understand, it’s typical for these people to blame everything on the Jews.)
Worth noting that this is also the general view espoused by Ryan Gosling’s character in the 2001 film The Believer (well, I think that’s worth noting because The Believer is one of my favorite movies and it never stops being relevant); the idea is that basically, Jews are all about abstraction and deracination, and as the world has become more and more influenced by Jewish ideas, people are more and more cut-off from their essential humanity. It falls apart as soon as you poke at it, of course, but it’s a lot more compelling than your average ‘the Jews run Hollywood’ type of arguments. The film’s writer/director, Henry Bean (who’s Jewish himself), said that he wanted to find the most interesting anti-Semitic argument out there; I think the whole ‘Jews as conductors of dehumanizing abstract thought’ thing has been floating around the more (relatively) intellectual spheres of anti-Semitism for a long time now.
I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen; but I’ve heard people say that about science as well, and in that case at least it’s untrue.
We talk in nigh-incomprehensible jargon, yes, but that isn’t to confuse non-scientists so much as to enable rapid and precise communication within the community. Unfortunately, this means that it’s difficult for non-scientists to tell the difference between the real thing and Deepak Chopra.
Similarly (I would hope) Foucault and Derrida are probably extremely clear and precise when read by other philosophers; and to a philosopher it’s very obvious when something is nonsense and when it’s meaningful. It would be great if they could let the rest of us know – some sort of philosophy version of Ben Goldacre would be someone I’d read until my eyes bled.
“philosophies of textual-miscegenation” is a great album title.
@ EJ
You’ll possibly appreciate this.
@ IP
This is further proof of my previous intimations, regarding the return of the great White Tribe breaking out of its Zionist-imposed cage of racially-hydrogenous serfdom and forced melting-pot obscurity. The White Tribe is reclaiming the lands that it has always been heir to, with Marxist jazz weasels like the soft-core Leninists of Sweden, who have been used to having their way with the indigenous White population through forced miscegenation and Bolshevizing the Northmen’s Racial Memory, finally getting their limping asses kicked by the resurgence of right-wing populist men with high sperm counts. The culturally-inept, racially-insipid international shitlib order of White Guilt is showing signs of weakness, wherein it shall be defeated by the heightened racial consciousness of the old, not the new, White Race, and the Gods of old mark their return.
That could have come straight out of Mein Kampf! I congratulate you, Imperator, on your epic skills at parodying white nationalist scum!
Oh wait, you were serious, weren’t you?
Oh hi, Pro Patria Truth Teller.
I wish I was good at photoshop, so I could illustrate this. It’s my new name anyway.
<3 IP. I really hope that your left wing undertakes a bit of a resurgence between now and 2018. I believe in you!
Go back to 4Chan, Unperator. I mean, good try at emulating the subject of this article, but y'ain't much by comparison.
@EJ
The problem comes when the jargon starts to be impenetrable even by the people who should, in theory, be quite fluent in it. The classic example is Sokal’s work in Social Text.
@Imp
We weren’t Nazis even back in Nazi days, so you’re way off the mark there. Learn some history, dumbass.
@bekabot
Stalinist propaganda, if you please. Communism’s something else entirely, and Stalin wouldn’t have known it if it put him in front of a firing squad. As Motor_City_Cobra so aptly demonstrates, Stalin’s rhetoric and policy was essentially fascist in nature.
@Imperator
So, when we were all discussing what gibberish the clown in the OP had put out, we weren’t meaning that y’all should try to be less coherent. Seriously, it’s not a contest.
In my experience, papers that are written to be understandable are denigrated as being too “simplistic”. The paper’s got to be absolutely stellar for it to be both acceptable and accessible. Further, they want their papers to be as long as possible, so that they can publish as full papers. It’s basically all about stretching out the minimally-publishable-unit into as large a piece as possible.
So yeah, it’s stupid and backwards and exactly the opposite of what good communication should be. White papers aren’t about communication, though, they’re much more of a social and economic battleground than they are a communication medium. In my opinion!
@Mike
See, this is already where it starts to break down for me. I’m not Jewish, so this is an outsider’s perspective, but it has always seemed to me that Jewish culture is intensely focused on roots and history. Also, I find it pretty ludicrous in general when white Americans talk about other people being rootless and atomized.
@IP
Of course they are. They’re crypto-fascists themselves, why wouldn’t they?
@EJ (TOL)
AFAICT, it’s very similar to the problem with economics, in that the field is full of people deliberately passing off garbage as meaningful content because the garbage supports some ideological point. Physics has less of that.
@Pie:
The jargon ends up dividing academia into cantons, I think. Physicists can’t understand social theorists; in fact we can barely understand chemists, and sometimes have trouble understanding the different fields within the topic.
This is mostly okay to me, because I seldom stray from my own canton; and when I do I don’t expect to understand it.
(As a digression, I don’t have much sympathy for Sokal. He knew full well that the people at Social Text weren’t physicists and so couldn’t tell good physics from bad physics. They were simply trusting him to act in good faith, and he chose to betray that trust.)
@Scildfreja:
My least favourite are the “we haven’t published anything for months so let’s just put some data in a table and put it on ArXiv” papers. They lead to inflated bibliographies and little else.
@Dalilama:
That’s an interesting point. I’ve railed against economics’s lack of internal cohesion before, and have been smacked down for my physics arrogance.
Most of my economics reading comes from a Keynesian perspective. You know more about the Marxist side of economics than I do; is the same true over there?
@EJ(TOL)
No, you were right. I mean, econ is partially a social science, and everything gets complex and fuzzy when a lot of talking monkeys get involved, but mostly the lack of internal cohesion comes from those Austrian/Chicago school dipshits and their insistence on passing off right-libertarian nonsense as actual research.
Yes and no. Ask two commies about their economic ideas and prepare for a fervent dispute about the virtues of at least five mutually exclusive proposals. That said, there’s a basic agreement about how the world actually works (one which is largely shared with the Keynesians; the argument is over what should be done about it, not what’s actually happening). Communism* and Keynesianism both float viable models for a working economy, depending on what, philosophically, you want the final economy to look like. Unfortunately, Keynesians, being capitalists, tend to be overly sympathetic (and often susceptible to) the ‘arguments’ presented by the freshwater economists and their ‘unregulated markets for absolutely everything’ routine, which always ends in unmitigated disaster. (see Chile in the 70s and 80s, or the US in the 80s and onward, for examples)
*If I started in on the problems with Marx and his acolytes, I’d be here all day. The short of it is infrastrucure; he had no fucking clue.