Strypey
"... sacredness is a stance toward the world, not an inherent quality of some bits of it; ... adopting the stance that everything is sacred generally leads to better outcomes than the stance that nothing is sacred."
https://vividness.live/sutra-tantra-and-the-modern-worldview
djsumdog
Arguably that's because they are variations of the same thing. That's what most anarchist traditions say about employment by capitalists, and I find their arguments fairly convincing.
I find the watering down of slavery one of the dumbest modern ideologies. The idea of a "wage slave" is stupid because in a capitalist society, the laborer gets to chose what to study and where to offer their human resource in exchange for capital.
In feudalism, you are a farmer because your father was a farmer and that is all you will ever be, unless your lord needs knights, in which case you might enlist and move up if you don't die. You farm land you cannot own ... you do have a LOT more leisure time, but you also can't spend that leisure time reading books (because you can't read) and a bad season means your family starves to death.
Real slavery restricts movement and restricts all employment. A closer modern equivalent might be a company in the UAE that gives you a job far above market value, but you have to hand over your passport.
Also this article on Buddhism shows they were amazingly BASED! The author obviously has crazy leftist ideology and is making the awesome parts seem terrible, but at least it seems like he's portraying it accurately.
Strypey
"There is also no clear modern legal definition of slavery. There are gray areas, and it is surprisingly difficult to draw a line between slavery and employment."
https://vividness.live/buddhist-morality-is-medieval
Arguably that's because they are variations of the same thing. That's what most anarchist traditions say about employment by capitalists, and I find their arguments fairly convincing.
(1/?)
Strypey
But even then, it would be good to have some kind of structure that continues to support us in our leaning and practice. Helping us to anticipate and mitigate common gotchas, for example. Helping us figure out how to support fediverse maintenance and development, and then maybe how to start taking part in that work.
(6/6)
Strypey
Once we've had this minimum-effort experience of what the fediverse is like, people can decide for ourselves whether to engage with it more, and how. After all, supporting personal and collective autonomy is one of our most central shared principles.
(5/?)
Strypey
We need to find fediverse equivalents of Shamhala and Vipassana, which allow people to dip their toes in. So they can experience whether or not any of the promised benefits are actually delivered.
Are there really "no nazis"? Are people really friendlier? Does it really respect my privacy more? Do I really get to own my data? These are all ways I've seen people pitching the fediverse. What's the quickest, easiest way for someone to test whether they're true?
(4/?)
Strypey
But this doesn't just apply to personal development. It's just as true of the fediverse, and decentralised networks in general. We can't expect everyone to embrace any of the theories and practices that come with decentralisation before they even get in the door, let alone all of them (which as with Buddhism it seems, is neither possible nor desirable anyway).
(3/?)
Strypey
People are generally sceptical of anything radical enough to be usefully transformative. I think healthy scepticism is legitimate and valuable. So any system that offers an opportunity for transformation - whether personal, social or institutional - needs to be able to prove it's value with a minimum of initial commitment.
Shambhala Training is a good example of this. As are the 10 day Vipassana meditation courses offered at no charge (donations optional) by volunteers around the world.
(2/?)
Strypey
"Secular mindfulness meditation is commonplace now, but this was radical then. Shambhala was an opportunity to learn advanced Buddhist meditation techniques without having to buy into Buddhist beliefs and institutions. For me, and tens of thousands of others, that was hugely valuable."
https://vividness.live/shambhala-training-was-secular-vajrayana
I think there are some important lessons in this, which could be useful outside the field of spirituality.
(1/?)
Strypey
This seems important. It reminds me of how taoism has been regularly repressed in China, in favour of Confucianism. Then in favour of "socialism with special Chinese characteristics" (in many ways just secular Confucianism with Marxist wallpaper).
Perhaps there's something even the most rigidly rationalist would-be revolutionary can learn from religious movements that are suppressed as threats to theocratic power? This makes even more curious about what vajrayana might have to offer
(2/2)
Strypey
"Even into the 21st century, Tantric Theravada has been regarded as a political threat, and actively suppressed by governments. Partly this is by force, and partly by propaganda. Governments have advocated Hinayana as the clean, bright, modern Buddhism, and denigrated Tantra as corrupt, dark, and backward."
https://vividness.live/tantric-theravada-and-modern-vajrayana
(1/2)
Strypey
The pamphlet emphasizes though that it's important not to just mix ingredients from different ideologies at random. It's essential to think critically thinking about how they fit together.
Some combinations make sense and some don't. Some may fit many different situations, while others are no use in any. Just like the way some combos from different musical traditions can make exciting new ones, while others just make incoherent noise.
(9/9)
Strypey
Revolutionary Self-Theory talks about ideologies as products on shelves in a supermarket of the spectacle. You're supposed to pick one and consume it whole. But the situationist is the rebel who tears open all the packages, and tips all the contents on the floor. So they can mix and match them to the needs of the situation (thus the term 'situationist').
(8/?)
Strypey
Coming back to the situationists (that earlier digression had a purpose), a big part of what helped me escape the mental straitjacket of my fundamentalist stance toward music - and in fact most things - was learning about situationist theory. Particularly a pamphlet sometimes known as Revolutionary Self-Theory, written by one Larry Law. The version I'm familiar with was published in 1985, as part of a series he published under the name Spectacular Times;
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/larry-law-revolutionary-self-theory
(7/?)
Strypey
Rather than judging music as 'good' and 'bad', I evaluate it by whether it's suitable for a given situation.
I generally don't sit around at home listening to trance. But I love dancing to it all night at a rave. I love listening to reggae on a sunny afternoon, or dub while winding down in the evening. But I wouldn't try to get rave DJs to play it all night, that would be a recipe for putting the whole party to sleep early.
(6/?)
Strypey
These days, I still have strong opinions about music. But I don't kid myself that they're universal, or that there are any universal Truths about music (or anything else for that matter). Or that any one group of people are inherently 'right' about music while others are getting it 'wrong'.
(5/?)
Strypey
I was vicious in my criticism of the 'wrong' music, and the people who made it, sold it, and listened to it. They were counterrevolutionaries, and clowns paying good money for sonic shit sandwiches. They needed to be either convinced and recruited to our side, or fought, defeated and culturally annihilated.
(4/?)
Strypey
Anyway, for a while there, I definitely made my devotion to musical alternativism into a fundamentalism.
I believed there was 'right' and 'wrong' music to listen to, and rational criteria for selecting it. I believed that people who didn't listen to alternative music were doing it wrong, and needed to be converted, so they too could enjoy the fruits of the musical heaven I believed my fellow faithful were working towards.
(3/?)
Strypey
Coming back to the theme of fundamentalism, as a youngster I went through a period of being an alternative music fundamentalist.
I was still an eternalist rationalist at the time, so I would have scoffed at the suggestion that it was in any way a religious thing. But as I've since learned, neither is fundamentalism.
(1/?)
Strypey
Fundamentalism is an approach - or to borrow David Chapman's term, a "stance" - that can be unconsciously applied to literally any belief system;
https://meaningness.com/fundamentalism-countercultural-modernism
It's vaguely akin to what the original situationist writers tried to describe using the term "ideology";
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jan-d-matthews-an-introduction-to-the-situationists
Confusing most people who try to understand what the situationists were on about, because the word "ideology" is more commonly used to mean belief systems in general. But I digress.
(2/?)
Strypey
"Monsters who know they are monsters are harder to threaten or confuse. No werewolf would have cooperated with Milgram; they would simply have eaten him."
https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/we-are-all-monsters
(5/5)
Strypey
My dialogue with 'Ed' allowed me to start unearthing those qualities, and processing some of the trauma and conditioning that had led to burying them. Enabling me to shake off my fear of becoming a monster if I unleashed them, and giving myself permission to use them heroically, in balance with my ethics, self-reflection and other yin qualities and skills.
This triggered an unsettling but powerful wave of personal evolution, that lasted for years afterwards.
(4/?)
Strypey
Specifically 'Ed' was the yang parts; aggression, assertiveness, discrimination, and so on. The parts every person needs - in balance - to stick up for ourselves, and to be effective in the world. With those qualities suppressed, I was vulnerable and often ineffective. Both in my personal growth and my activism.
(3/?)
Strypey
"It is easy to act ethically in good conditions. When we feel threatened or confused, humans can become unboundedly destructive.
Pretending this is not true makes the problem worse. It is only when we acknowledge that maybe we would have tortured an innocent person to death, in Milgram’s experiment, that we can start the transformational work to make that less likely."
https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/we-are-all-monsters
(1/?)
Strypey
A few years ago I had a breakthrough, with the help of an excellent mentor, about how to deal with the rage monster that's lived inside me all my life (as a very small child I strongly identified with David Banner's Hulk problem). I gave it a name, and started writing a dialogue with it in my journal.
This was incredibly insightful.
What I learned, over days and weeks, is that 'Ed' was made up of important and necessary parts of me. Broken off and pushed into my shadow self.
(2/?)
Strypey
"There are several excellent reasons for me not to write about this. In short, I am totally unqualified.
However, most of what I have to say, no one else seems to be saying. If I don’t say it, perhaps no one will ... I’ll put a big red warning up front that I may be completely out to lunch.
Fortunately, since I have no credentials, no one will listen unless what I say makes sense. So probably no great harm can come of it."
https://vividness.live/reinventing-buddhist-tantra
This is pretty much me too ; )
Strypey
Because I suspect Māori and other indigenous peoples trying to preserve and pass on their cultures and traditions to future generations face many of the same challenges Chapman describes, about Buddhists trying to preserve and pass on Buddhist traditions. Particularly the twin risks posed by slipping into fundamentalism or consumerism.
(2/2)
Strypey
This kept things fresh, producing original thinking and new practices. But it also introduced the other risks Chapman talks about on that page, including the dilution of core ideas by interpretive drift, or by mixing them with whatever is currently trending as a proselytizing strategy.
(4/4)
Strypey
"Fundamentalism recognizes the meaningfulness of the sacred, but attempts to lock it in place as form: as ultimate Truth. Fundamentalism denies the meaningfulness of ordinary enjoyments, attempting to lock it out as non-existent. Consumerism denies the sacred, and attempts to lock everyday desires into fixed forms."
I'd love to get perspectives on Chapman's writing (in both Vividness and Meaningness) from Māori, or indigenous people in general.
(1/2)
Strypey
The anarchist movement I joined in the late 1990s was already on a "slipperly slope to rigid, sterile orthodoxy". The most flexible, living parts of the movement were on the boundaries with other philosophies, both secular (eg environmentalism, feminism, situationist theory, hacker culture), and religious (neopaganism, Taoism, Buddhism, Catholic Workers, etc).
(3/?)
Strypey
"The problem is that honest efforts to preserve Buddhism can head down a slipperly slope to rigid, sterile orthodoxy. This has happened over and over through Buddhist history. As we slide further down that slope, essential principles and functions are forgotten. Experiential understanding is replaced with scholarship; then scholarship is replaced with text-worship. Living practice turns into rote ritual performance."
https://vividness.live/responsibility
(1/?)
Strypey
This is a risk for any organised attempt to pass on a philosophical system to future generations, and not just to religious ones either. For example, it's a risk for science and the university system too. It's definitely happened to Marxism, and libertarianism, and I'd argue it's happening to anarchism too.
(2/?)
Strypey
"Personally, I hate organizations. I am not a 'joiner' by nature, and I find that organizations usually end up mainly performing meaningless bureaucratic rituals for the benefit of the bureaucracy.
However, delivering Buddhism involves much work by many people. The scale of this is not obvious, until you look 'behind the scenes'. We have to coordinate all that work. In the best case, that is all an organization is."
Strypey
You go on explaining the structure and functions of Ghost, how to get it working on a server, along with various add-ons (eg the ActivityPub module). None of it is material. But it's nevertheless very real, and has measurable affects on people's behaviour, and thus on the world as a whole.
(5/5)
Strypey
"If it's not real, if it's just a bunch of ideas, any way of installing it will work just as well as any other", they say. You assure them that's not the case.
There are specific processes for getting Ghost installed, configuring and running, and a bunch of gotchas it helps to be aware of. If you don't follow them, or gain the necessary understanding before trying to vary them, it won't work. It could even endanger your computer. That's why you volunteered to teach this workshop.
(3/?)
Strypey
But despite agreeing to attend, knowing the topic of the workshop and who was teaching it, this person appears to think they know better. Like everyone's opinions about software are equally valid, and nobody is qualified to teach anyone else. You sigh, and ask them to either pipe down so others can learn, or leave.
(4/?)
Strypey
"If it's not an object in the world, it's not real", they insist. Oh. That's never struck you as a problem before. You've come across a plethora of bugs that can stop software working, but not being a thing made of stuff has never been one of them.
You try again to get back on on track. "No you can't poke software, but it's nevertheless useful", you point out. How about we talk about how to install it? But your interlocutor smells blood in the water now, and will not be redirected.
(2/?)
Strypey
“'Can’t we all be teachers to each other?' No. You could teach your chemistry professor to ski, if you know how, but you can’t teach them chemistry. Carrying over egalitarian political beliefs into a chemistry course is unhelpful. This is not a political situation. If you think everything has to be political, you can’t learn anything difficult."
https://vividness.live/how-to-learn-buddhist-tantra
Ouch!
(2/2)
Strypey
Imagine you're trying to explain to a group of people how to install an instance of Ghost for their own blog, and what it can and can't do for them.
"But ghosts aren't real", someone says. You look at them quizzically, wondering why that's relevant. "It's just what the software is called", you explain, "a label for a package of digital infrastructure". "Can I see it", they ask, "can I poke it with a stick?" You raise another eyebrow, "no", you say, again wondering what their point is.
(1/?)
Strypey
“'Spirituality' is one of those domains everyone feels they have a moral right to an opinion about, which is as good as anyone else’s. Such domains somehow transfer the Western liberal tradition of egalitarian individualism from the moral, legal, and political realms, where it is critically important and mainly correct, into others in which it’s irrelevant and absurd."
https://vividness.live/how-to-learn-buddhist-tantra
Wow, that's challenging! I'll need to think on it.
(1/2)
Strypey
"You might like to think your teacher is special and you are ordinary. That would transfer responsibility for your spiritual development from you to them—which would be great if it worked! But it doesn’t."
https://vividness.live/how-to-learn-buddhist-tantra
Fucking this!
Chapman's metaphor of spirituality as walking a poorly-marked path in the mountains seems useful here. A teacher is a guide. They know some things their students don't, and it's worth following their advice. But they're just humans.
Strypey
We can read as many books about Tai Chi as we like, and have as many conversations, and attend as many classes. But if we don't practice the methods diligently, and seek expert help to make sure we're doing them right, we still won't know how to *do* Tai Chi. Nor gain anything much from it.
What I'm coming to understand about vajrayana Buddhism is that the same is true. I don't know if it's for me yet. But at some point I'll need to piss or get off the pot.
Strypey
"The Tantric lama uses brute force and a fixed set of cheap tricks to blast through the student’s avidya—their stubborn 'non-seeing' or 'unenlightenment'. That may be enormously valuable, and necessary at first, to give the student an initial taste of the electric, sacred, vajra world. It is limited because it can’t communicate any specifics about that world, or how to work with it. It’s just shoving you into it, BLAM."
https://vividness.live/evolving-ground-learning-relationship
Sounds much like taking entheogens.
Strypey
Not to mention that whenever you say "Lama" to someone in the modern anglophone world, we immediately get a mental image of a llama. Which is not altogether conducive to the sense of reverence needed to recognise someone as a spiritual teacher.
(2/2)
Strypey
"Vajrayana is attractive as an approach to Buddhism that affirms the value of everyday life, and aims to enjoy and enhance the real world, rather than to reject and escape it.
However, Vajrayana is said to be the most advanced and difficult of all Buddhist approaches, and to be entirely impossible without extensive instruction from a lama. 'Lama' is the Tibetan translation of 'guru', and gurus have a bad reputation in the West now—often deservedly so"
https://vividness.live/evolving-ground-learning-relationship
(1/2)
Strypey
"The aim of tantra is not to fix the world. The world is unfixable. The aim of tantra is to liberate it from imposed meanings."
Strypey
"Creativity is central in tantric Buddhism. However, the goal is not “self-expression.” (Selves are not particularly interesting.) Nor is it to make something new just because it’s new. Nor is it about connecting with the Absolute Infinite.
Creativity means allowing the spaciousness of specifics to express themselves. It means being the space in which latent meanings coalesce into visible forms."
Strypey
"Another strategy is to turn down the master volume knob on your whole being. If a particular problem energy is too strong to deal with, you can’t turn it down, but you can drain energy out the whole system.
This produces low-energy stuckness. It can appear as depression, niceness, cluelessness, and general uselessness. Many people misuse Buddhism this way, as a tool for lobotomizing themselves, because they haven’t got a better way of handling intense emotions."
Strypey
"This is, of course, a common theme in all of Buddhism. Psychology sees loss of self as a temporary illusion, though; whereas Buddhism sees the self as a temporary illusion."
https://vividness.live/tantra-and-flow
(2/2)
Strypey
"But emptiness is not non-existence. Nihilism—for Buddhism—is the refusal to see that emptiness is also form. The emptiness of meaning is not a problem. The ambiguity of purpose, value, and ethics is no cause for worry, much less despair. Meanings continually arise spontaneously. Their lack of any ultimate source does not make them any less real or compelling."
https://vividness.live/a-dzogchen-shaped-hole-in-the-culture
Strypey
"In flow [states], commonly you lose your self. Activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; you stop being aware of yourself as separate from the action. Musicians report that 'the music plays itself'. Footballers feel their body as part of a joint organism, the team, which acts as one. In sex, you may lose track of whose body is whose."
https://vividness.live/tantra-and-flow
(1/2)
Strypey
"Or would you rather be a nice no-one-in-particular? Would you rather suppress your unruly passions? Would you rather shut off the firehose of energy? Would you rather find peace by retreating into a bland, safe space, inhibiting your impulses to get involved?"
https://vividness.live/free-flowing-energy
(3/?)
Strypey
"Fortunately, this is not a one-time choice. It is possible to take both approaches at different times, depending on your ability to cope with more and less intense circumstances."
https://vividness.live/free-flowing-energy
(4/4)
Strypey
"Do you want to face your peculiar self squarely? Do you want to experience your spiky feelings fully, not flinching? Do you want to throw yourself into the world, with all its vivid fascinations, its unpredictable agonies and ecstasies, acting as best you can and accepting the consequences?"
https://vividness.live/free-flowing-energy
(2/?)
Strypey
"It is the tantric attitude that transforms—and remember, that attitude is the union of spacious freedom with passionate connections. Those tend to dissolve arrogance, aggression, and self-aggrandizement. Tantric power comes from unclogging energy—not from collecting and concentrating it."
Strypey
"... this is exactly the choice between tantra and sutra (mainstream Buddhism) ..."
https://vividness.live/free-flowing-energy
(1/?)
Strypey
Maybe that's a reflection of psychotherapy or counselling practice in the US, where Chapman lives? All my encounters with psychology and counsellors in Aotearoa have been based around the idea that emotions (and dreams) expose truths that we try to rationalise away. Because we can use our rational faculties to lie to ourselves, but we can't do that with our emotions.
(2/2)
Strypey
"Romanticism (and its descendant, the psychotherapeutic world-view) consider that emotions are inherently meaningful, and superior to reason as a path of understanding. This can produce pathological inwardness, and wallowing in feelings, which leads nowhere.
Tantra values emotions as tools, but does not consider them inherently meaningful. It leads out, not in."
https://vividness.live/passionate-connections
I'm not sure that's a fair summary of the psychotherapeutic view of emotions.
(1/2)
Strypey
"... that passionate, active connection was rejected by most traditional Buddhisms. However, it’s so highly valued in the secular West that Consensus Buddhism—based on Theravada and Zen—has tried to incorporate it.
This seems to me an uneasy fit. I’ll suggest that tantra may be a better starting point for modern Buddhism, because its fundamental values are closer to modern ones."
Strypey
If Chapman's descriptions of vajrayana are accurate - and they do seem based on deep reading of primary texts, or at least translations - I find it easy to agree that it's a practical and potentially useful spiritual path for modern geeks.
But I'm left wondering what #Tantra has to do with the Buddha or Buddhism? Other than arriving in the anglophone world in the luggage of Buddhist teachers. Tantra predates Siddartha Gautama, and nothing Chapman describes about it seems particularly Buddhist.
Strypey
"The problem with rejecting spirituality is that often the only alternative seems to be nihilism: the idea that everything is meaningless. That leads to rage, depression, and sterile intellectualization.
Tantra has a cogent answer to nihilism, and upholds purpose, meaning, and value. At the same time, it has a practical, realistic, engineer-like outlook, without fanciful metaphysics."
https://vividness.live/tantra-is-anti-spiritual
(2/2)
Strypey
"There are no spiritual problems; but there are real problems. Small ones like dirty dishes in the sink, and big ones like global warming.
Spaciousness and passion both lead you to regard all situations as workable.
...
'Workable' does not guarantee that there is a solution. 'Nothing is fundamentally wrong with the world' does not mean that everything can be fixed, or that life can be made perfect. Catastrophe is always possible. Death is always certain."
Strypey
"Tantra is unusual—possibly unique—in avoiding both eternalism (fantasies of metaphysical salvation) and nihilistic pessimism.
I think this makes tantra the ideal religion for geeks (like me.) Geeks refuse to believe in things we have no evidence for. We’re usually dismissive of spirituality, because its metaphysical claims are either false or meaningless."
https://vividness.live/tantra-is-anti-spiritual
(1/2)
Strypey
"Technical mastery and intellectual understanding are important in tantra, but not all-important. They are only means to an end. Asking:
What do I need to do, or to understand, to live with greater gusto and wider vision?
is the guide to deciding how far to take particular techniques or studies, and which to take up next."
https://vividness.live/the-power-of-an-attitude
(2/2)
Strypey
"We have no excuse for being ignorant of what the Buddha taught. He established a highly regulated monastic order during his forty years of teaching. About 3000 of his sermons have survived. His arguments are clear, systematic and practical. We know exactly what he wanted his followers to do. He is a most impressive thinker even if we disagree with his values."
#EricHarrison, 2016
https://perthmeditationcentre.com.au/articles/general-articles/why-i-am-not-a-buddhist/
Strypey
"Tantra can seem extremely complex and technical. However, its mass of details are all just hints about how to maintain the passionate, spacious attitude.
The tantric attitude is valuable regardless of how you come to adopt it. On the other hand, the tantric practices and doctrines have no intrinsic value. They exist only to promote the attitude."
https://vividness.live/the-power-of-an-attitude
(1/2)
Strypey
"Secular ethics is basically Christian ethics minus the self-denial. If Tantra has any ethics at all, it is not like that. I would say it simply has no ethics. I consider that a non-problem; it just means you have to take your ethics from somewhere else. However, some Buddhist teachers would disagree."
https://vividness.live/sutra-tantra-and-the-modern-worldview
(2/2)
Strypey
"Secular modernism rejects ethics based on self-denial, as Christianity and Sutrayana ethics both are.
On the other hand, secular modernism is wary of the phrase 'beyond good and evil'. ('Didn’t Hitler say that?')"
https://vividness.live/sutra-tantra-and-the-modern-worldview
(1/2)
technolyze
djsumdog
I dunno ... I see homeless people chose not to work all the time. Sure they rely on handouts and have rotting teeth. There are consequences.
I agree the effect of hard work and results has diminished in the past few decades, but in the 70s/80s, people could work a factory job and still afford their mortgage, two kids and let their wife stay home and raise them. We've lost that .. and oddly due to women entering the workforce, increasing the number of workers and reducing available pay.
maybe real capitalism has never been tried
YES! It has and we've moved away from it! Wages use to be high and there was a lot of competition. The problem we're seeing now is due to the removal of capitalism! We need more of that capitalism that did work back!
djsumdog
eh .. that's a long thread. I'll just stick to this one point
That doesn't necessarily make employment a free choice, and therefore not a form of slavery.
Yea that makes zero sense man. We just had a guy at my job quit due to a bunch of other bullshit going on at the company and he had no other job lined up. He had a choice and he took it.
Just because you might not believe you have a choice doesn't mean you don't have a choice.
The original point was that it's bad form to water down slavery, because actual slavery is really bad. To steelman the argument, I guess you could say a slave has the freedom to flee, but the risk is high (punishment). In your country of Kiwistan or mine of AmeriIsrael .. you can just leave your job. You might have a consequence of not being able to get food or shelter, but human should have to work to survive. What kind of human would survive the ancient world if they were unwilling to hunt, or provide something in exchange to those who hunt for them?
Me or Chapman? Why do you think so?
Whoever wrote the blog you linked. The idea of "Gender equality" is a post-modernist term. Men and women aren't equal on average and have core biological differences. Doesn't mean there weren't outliers, but equality is a super recent ideology (and the British suffragettes were terrorists that killed 8 people in bombings).
Abortion is murder, and sends you straight to hell.
(quote from the blog post) Ancient Buddhists believed in a hell? Didn't know that. Abortion is also a deeply contested moral issue to this day. I knew many Christian Kiwis in Wellington who were appalled by it. The recent US SCOTUS decision shows how it was never really settled.
I want to make it clear, I'm pro-baby killing. But I see no difference on killing an infant 1 month after its born to while its in the womb. I'm against calling it "woman's rights" or "reproductive rights" or any of that propaganda bullshit. Romans had no issue with abortion, and only started to ban it due to the Christians. If you want to be pro baby killing, be pro baby killing. Whether abortion is murder is still very unsettled in the western world.
Strypey
@djsumdog
> the laborer gets to chose what to study and where to offer their human resource in exchange for capital
That doesn't necessarily make employment a free choice, and therefore not a form of slavery. See the rest of the thread.
> The author obviously has crazy leftist ideology
Me or Chapman? Why do you think so?
djsumdog
That doesn't mean any particular person has to work to survive, nor that people's work ought to be under someone else's control (a practical definition of both slavery and employment).
There are many homeless people who don't work and survive off their loss of dignity, begging and The State. They are .. indebted to the State. Welfare creates people who believe they are getting a hand up, but now will favor policies that disincentivize adding value so they can continue their gibs.
Like I said, employment means you can leave and you get paid money fungible for goods. Slave can't leave and get discrete resources to survive. Once again, the whole point of me started was their bullshit of watering down real slavery.
We'll have to disagree on the work thing. If you're not even making an effort to contribute to society and expect free gibs, just fuck you man. If you actually volunteer to work with homeless people, you'll find there are those who genuinely hit hard times and want to get out of their situation. Maybe even a quarter to a third in some cities .... you'll find a good amount though that are shitty people who've fucked over every friend and family member so no one trusts them enough to help anymore.
Strypey
(1/?)
@djsumdog
> You might have a consequence of not being able to get food or shelter, but human should have to work to survive
Humans collectively have to work to survive, and certainly to have luxuries like rapid transit ans pocket computers. That doesn't mean any particular person has to work to survive, nor that people's work ought to be under someone else's control (a practical definition of both slavery and employment).
djsumdog
I don't think so at all. What is logically wrong with what I said? People could at one time support whole families and buy homes (yea I know, property tax, but it's still better than renting) with a single income.
It's the added welfare programs that destroyed a lot of minority neighborhoods by discouraging the growth of families and the pride in one's efforts. That's literally welfare (socialism) v capitalism.
See Uncle Tom (2020) and What Killed Michael Brown (2020)
Strypey
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@djsumdog
> The problem we're seeing now is due to the removal of capitalism! We need more of that capitalism that did work back!
This is a great example of how terminology can block understanding rather than facilitating it.
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Strypey
@icedquinn
> at least in theory
That clause is doing so much heavy lifting there I can hear it's vertebrae being crushed under the weight. The rest of the sequence of posts explains why that (very convenient) theory doesn't match the reality. If I said 'work for me or starve in a gutter' and you 'choose' to work for me, it's not voluntary. It's very clearly a choice made under duress.
If there was a UBI/GMI then it might actually be voluntary (assuming no other subtle coercion is at work).
djsumdog
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djsumdog
its more like boomers rode an easy economy (europe had been bombed to shit, russia had spent a lot of resources helping fight nazis) of us supremacy and then just squandered all of it on the way out.
But the Japanese were bombed to fuck (not just the two big ones, but all the firebombing campaigns) and they rose to be a tech giant as well (they might not have AMD and nvidia, but they have Sony, Toyota, etc..)
it mostly survives on money magic (global reserve currency status, bombing everyone to keep the petrodollar, IMF shenanigans
Yea, agree with you there
americans just don't see the corruption (its behind the curtain a little, unlike third world places.)
I don't feel like this is America alone .. the IMF, WEF, Bilderberge, Israel, etc. are all filled with globalist cabals .. the corruption runs deep and in a global club stretching from the City of London, past Tokyo and straight into the heart of San Fransisco. At least in America, we can freely speak about a lot of it (even if it just gets drown out by propaganda and fake-indie news).
it's also just the natural consequence of market capitalism. someone inevitably wins, the knife fight is broken,
What's the better system? I'd rather have the market capitalism where people eventually fail, collapse and people can try to capture something in the downturn with some innovation, rather than the communistic route of China that cuts out everyone's tongue while tofu cities implode and bridges collapse.
djsumdog
iced depresso
Strypey
(1/?)
@icedquinn
> working a boring job may be generally better than many of the things they "could" do, but not doing those things is a choice they made
Not running away is a choice many slave make on a daily basis (knowing the risks of running away). Does that mean chattel slavery isn't slavery?
Indentured slaves signed a 'contract' that binds then to labour (knowing the risks of defaulting on their debts, or whatever the alternative was). Does that mean indentured slavery isn't slavery?
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djsumdog
wagies tend to leave a lot of communal support off the table (a notorious character flaw of low status/class people; middle and upper class engage in a lot more reciprocity
I generally agree with what you're saying, but I'm not sure if this is true, or it's split the way you think. A lot of lower class with close family (like several families living in the same neighborhood) tend to support each other a lot. That can mean one person's paycheck can get dealt out very quickly to everyone who needs it. It can seem amazing, but it sorta creates a perverse situation where there's not a lot of individual savings. There's also this weird mental shift in this class where money becomes seen as a perishable that must be used to meet need immediately ... it's like money is treated as veggies or gasoline, not something shelf stable like pasta or propane.
djsumdog
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iced depresso
djsumdog
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Strypey
(1/?)
I haven't been to US, but my understanding is that its basketcase economy makes NZ look functional by comparison. I have lived in China (for 2 years), whose economy makes ours look like a basketcase by comparison.
@djsumdog
> I'd rather have the market capitalism ... than the communistic route of China that cuts out everyone's tongue while tofu cities implode and bridges collapse
The propaganda is working on you. China's system *is* market capitalism.
djsumdog
How do you not know this? It was one of the biggest stories from that period. Every country was using the scamdemic as an excuse to print money. It's literary where the money printer go brrrr... meme comes from.
Over 80% of the supply of USD was printed in 2020-2021.
Strypey
@icedquinn
> the fed is doubling the currency supply somewhere every one to two years now
Reference please?
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Strypey
(1/2)
@djsumdog
> I don't think unrestrained capitalism works either
I agree, and it seems self-evident that's what we've been moving towards since the 1980s. But as I hinted a couple of days ago, I think we've reached a point where any term that ends in "ism" is a thought-terminating cliche, that gets in the way of discussing the nuts and bolts that actually matter. As the Paris '68 graffito put it; "all isms are wasms".
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Strypey
(1/?)
@icedquinn
> the usual "business owners are all infinite money bags" thing
... is a strawman. The main reasons to have absurdly high taxes on wealth above a certain level is, for example, to disincentive overpaying the managerial layers at the top of large companies. At the expense of the people doing the unpleasant grunt work that creates the company's value. Letting managers overpay themselves and starve workers creates moral hazard in multiple ways
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Strypey
(4/?)
Game theory is phrenology for behaviour. If you told any self-respecting social scientist that you think policy-making ought to be based on it, they would laugh you out of the building.
Strypey
(3/?)
@icedquinn
> it requires people to actually know game theory
I broadly agree with your conclusions here. Certainly the bits about US "democracy" being a system where laws are made for the benefit of the highest bidders. This systematised corruption and its history were explored in detail in the the Lever News folks' excellent Master Plan podcast;
https://the.levernews.com/master-plan/
But game theory is pseudo- scientific nonsense, created by a paranoid schizophrenic.
Strypey
(2/?)
Another policy option is just to ban it outright. But that seems impolite in democracies.
A third option is to make rules that the ratio between the lowest paid and highest paid person in a company. But this is much easier to evade now than regressive taxes are, using magic accounting on digital steroids to makes money disappear and reappear as convenient.
Point being, tax policy is about incentive-shaping, as much as (sometimes more than) revenue gathering.
Strypey
(11/11)
I note you don't reference any cybeneticians in support of game theory. If you link me to some papers (in credible journals, not fringe blogs), I'd be happy to read them.
EDIT: there's some relevant discussion here;
https://metarationality.com/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial-intelligence
Unless you're interested in the conflict between monist and non-dualist philosophy, free free to skip to the section entitled 'Artificial Intelligence', which is the relevant bit.
Strypey
(10/?)
As for cybernetics having no issues with game theory, I don't buy it. Game theory is mechanistic, cybernetics is systems science. This is like me trying to tell you that plate tectonics geologists vibe with Young Earth theory.
To be clear; my point is not to equate game theory with Young Earth theory, that would be unfair. But rather to equate the differences in appreciation of a) complexity, and b) empirical evidence, between game theory/ Young Earth and cybernetics/ plate tectonics.
Strypey
(9/?)
@icedquinn
> behavioral psychiatry and cybernetics certainly don't have an issue with [game theory]
1 thing I learned in my Psych 101 paper, is that behaviorism has been thoroughly debunked as a theory of social behaviour in the decades since Skinner.
Behaviorists collected some good data. But as with game theory, you have to massively simplify social reality to make it fit the theory. Which makes conclusions based on it theoretically interesting (sometimes), but practically useless.
Strypey
(8/?)
@icedquinn
> i don't know what "social scientists" you're talking about
I'm not aware of any credible social scientists who take game theory seriously as a model of real human behaviour. Graeber wrote a take-down in The Utopia of Rules, but a quick web search will turn up dozens of similar articles by social anthropologist, social psychologists, sociologists, and even economists.
Strypey
(7/?)
There's nothing anticapitalist about this (more's the pity), and it was the dominant way of reducing policy and creating *useful* economic growth in the mid-20th century. You know, that Golden Age we all hark back to (including MAGA), when everyone had the basics of life, and life-improving innovations were being produced so fast we all thought it obvious there'd be Mars colonisation in our lifetimes.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit
Strypey
(6/?)
For people keen on businesses and competitive markets, doing it by giving currently impoverished people more money - higher, more secure wages; unemployment and disability benefits; public pensions for oldies; etc - has a cool bonus effect. In that it puts hard cash in the hands of people who will spend it getting their needs met, putting it in the coffers of main st businesses that provide real value to real people.
Strypey
(5/?)
Which brings us nicely to your reference Meadows' systems work (cool that you've read that)
@icedquinn
> trying to solve poverty with direct cash infusions, which have been tried,
With you so far.
> and have the same meadows problem that its just filling stocks by fiat that are leaking all over the floor
What are you basing this on? Guaranteeing anyone people who can't afford the basics of life a way to do so (monetary or otherwise) is the *only* way to fix poverty.
Strypey
(4/?)
@icedquinn
> it always stipulated the actors *are rational*, which people setting policy backed by high caliber firearms *should* be
Sure. But that in itself doesn't make game theory any more applicable to real world behaviour. Yes, if you simplify most of the real systems complexities out of a situation, then it becomes ...
> ... exactly the kind of minimax scenario the math works for
But effective policy (especially social policy) is all about the engaging with the complexities.
Strypey
(3/?)
@icedquinn
> the flaw of game theory is that normal people don't always act maximally rationally
Exactly. I'd go further; most people (myself included) don't think or behave rationally the vast majority of time. There's also a slice of the adult population who can't do it at all yet, and many are embedded in institutions that actively prevent them from learning how (eg fundamentalist religious hierarchies).
Strypey
(2/?)
@icedquinn
> the mathematician's mental state is
... totally relevant to the way they thought about other people, and applied the game theory math to human behaviour. The Adam Curtis doco series The Trap includes a discussion of this history, and is well worth watching in general.
Otherwise you would have been right about my mention of it being ad hominem (as well as ableism).
Strypey
(1/?)
@icedquinn
> retarded take
Have you noticed people getting ruder as they get less certain, but feel unwilling or unable to admit their position could be wrong or incomplete?
> pseudo-science requires something to be unfalsifiable. game theory is literally a branch of mathematics
It's logical as a theoretical construct. But it doesn't accurately model anything people actually do or the reasons why we do it. Ask a social anthropologist.
Strypey
@hakui
> you can continue to tag the person you're replying to in (2+/?)
I used to, never gave it a second thought. But I did wonder why people used to get *really* pissed off after a few lengthy but friendly exchanges. And sometimes accused me of being a sealion when I was just using my own right of reply.
It was @p who pointed out that my multi-post replies were (as well as being avoidably a lot of words to digest) flooding people's notifications, and creating a sealiony feeling.
Strypey
(1/2)
Process note:
Since fediverse software doesn't automate this, I use a number system - eg (1/?) or (3/3) - to indicate that a post is part of a larger chain. Common rejoinders to the point I'm making in 1 post might be anticipated and answered in a subsequent one.
I get the utility of replying directly to individual posts on such chain (and sometimes do). But it's definitely worth reading the whole chain first, and ideally leaving oneself a bit of reflection time before replying.
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Strypey
(1/?)
@hakui
> starting a business requires upfront costs
Not always, but it definitely helps, even for industries that don't require a lot of capital, eg consultancy.
> covering those costs with a bank loan ... is clearly easier than saving up to meet those costs
Accepting this for the sake of argument;
It's quicker, for sure. It's also significantly more expensive, and makes your business a subsidiary of the bank until you can pay it off.
*But*
This isn't actually how business works.
Strypey
(2/2)
@hakui
> if banks are competing to try to lend out money it's easy to start new ventures
This OTOH is neoclassical dogma. Dreamed up (at least promulgated) by by Friedmanites, as an excuse to transfer control of the money supply from democratic governments to unaccountable corporations. A project that also included the repeal of Glass–Steagall (directly causing the GFC) and bank deregulation in general.
The dogma is not only not supported by evidence, it's directly contradicted by it.
Strypey
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@hakui
> most money is actually credit, which can be extended by banks at will through their loans
This is a structural observation about how modern banking works. It's MMT 101, and I think it's correct.
Strypey
@hakui
> "unlimited growth from free money" works effectively until the free money stops
Intriguing. Can you explain what you mean by "free money" here, and by "growth", and how you think the one drives the other?
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pistolero
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Strypey
@hakui
> you can consider getting yourself a more reasonable character post limit
That was @p's suggestion too. Our server cluster now has a Friendica account I could use for my lengthy diatribes. I find the default Friendica interface deeply unpleasant, but if I can find a good mobile app that supports it well, that might be a solution.
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Strypey
(1/2)
@p
> Whatsisface says it makes thread navigation difficult
Friendica does? I find its UI slow and counterintuitive, and it doesn't seem to have changed significantly since the first prototypes written by MacGirvin.
I used to have an account on the LibraNet instance, and thought maybe they were running an older version, or using an underpowered server. But when I tested the instance set up recently at friendica.iridescent.nz, I had exactly the same experience.
Strypey
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@p
> I think something through and then reply and you've already addressed it in your next post in the thread
I've noticed this with other people too. I'm coming around the idea that Mastodon is just the wrong tool for anything beyond shitposting and casual chit-chat.
As mentioned in the other comment I just posted, I find Friendica unusable for different reasons. I'm loath to put significant effort into conversations using accounts where I don't know and trust the host.
pistolero
Strypey
@p
> I hear it's easy to move to glitch-soc
To move my account or to switch our instance over?
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Strypey
@p
> You've gotta do small bytes and break them up into a few sentences (barely a full paragraph)
This is true. But it also forces me to break my big, hairy analyses into digestible chunks. So when people make the effort to click on the post and read the whole sequence, they probably get a more coherent and *shorter* text.
My post chains are already long for blog posts. Imagine the rambling pamphlet-length essays you'd have to chew on if I had unlimited characters at my disposal! 😱
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Strypey
@p
> he couldn't tell
Who couldn't? Are you trying to avoid saying Voldemort out loud?
> who was replying to what
I've struggled a bit with the same issue in some of @hakui's replies, due to a lack of blank lines between quote and response, as it appears in my app (Moshidon). If there were more than 2 people in our conversation, I don't think I would have any idea who'd said what without reading back.
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Strypey
@p
> The guy that complained about being unable to follow the thread from Friendica
Ok. Never saw those messages.
> I don't watch Game of Thrones
Liar : P
> Pleroma uses the <pre>-style whitespace styling on the frontend
Ah, this is an interop problem. I assumed @hakui was just being sloppy. My apologies : )
pistolero
Strypey
@p
> Interspersed with UI interaction elements and metrics
Unavoidable, yes. But pretty easy to tune out. I don't even see this stuff unless I'm looking for it.
> and other posts
Not if you click on one of the posts in my chains, surely?! If that doesn't gather them all into an unbroken sequence, then whatever software you're using is broke and needs fixing.
Strypey
@p
> forcing everything into a gimmicky character count obviously completely sucks as an interaction method
I've been reflecting on this. See my thread today comparing the email list interaction model to the social media one.
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Strypey
@hakui
> having to click through to see the rest, instead of just getting tagged in every reply part is an additional step for me and i'd prefer the latter
I hear you, I'll do my best to remember. But I have ADH... oh look a squirrel! Urrgh, where was I? Oh yeah, feel free to remind me if I forget ; )
I think the best solution, as @p says, is not to use Mastodon for serious discussions. I really need to document the various alt accounts I've had kicking around, and see which ones still exist.
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pistolero
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