The Ongoing Political, Philosophical, Social Theory Thread

[peter12]

You cannot logically assert that something is unknowable just because it is currently unknown. "At this point" is true, certainly, but at one point we didn't understand that emotion was felt in the brain, not the heart or the liver. We didn't learn that truth from deconstruction of language, either.

Progressive, rational inquiry is a good thing, however, there may be such a thing as diminishing returns or there may be inscrutable mysteries that we may never unravel.

The language of 18th century materialism seems to apply less and less today.

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by peter12

A kind of world superpower. The butchery was not worth it.

As opposed to all of those superpowers who didn't butcher, right?

[peter12]

Originally Posted by rubecube

As opposed to all of those superpowers who didn't butcher, right?

Stop muddying the water.

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by peter12

Stop muddying the water.

How am I muddying the water? Name me a superpower/empire that didn't commit bloodshed and cruelty on a massive scale.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by rubecube

As opposed to all of those superpowers who didn't butcher, right?

So there is only powers that kill innocent people and powers that don't. And if you kill innocents, it doesn't matter whether you kill 1,000 or 10 million. It's all the same.

I love how the tens of millions killed in the great leaps forward of Russia and China can be chalked up to breaking a few eggs to make a cake - a price worth paying. But if any people are killed securing Western societies, it's an inexcusable crime that only highlights their moral bankruptcy.

The false equivalence is staggering.

[peter12]

What he means is there is either Denmark or the United States of America.

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

I love how the tens of millions killed in the great leaps forward of Russia and China can be chalked up to breaking a few eggs to make a cake - a price worth paying. But if any people are killed securing Western societies, it's an inexcusable crime that only highlights their moral bankruptcy.

The false equivalence is staggering.

Please show me where I stated or implied this, or is this another one of your strawman and run jobs? I said all superpowers have shed blood. I didn't say they'd shed equivalent amounts of blood.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by rubecube

Please show me where I stated or implied this, or is this another one of your strawman and run jobs? I said all superpowers have shed blood. I didn't say they'd shed equivalent amounts of blood.

But you used it in a specific context - namely to water down the horrifying crimes of the Soviet Union with the strawman of "superpowers," whatever the heck that may be.

One of the ends of the Soviets - particularly Stalin - was to be murderous.

[indes]

After reading this thread it just seems like the 'evolution' of politics and idealogy is basically the changing of people's intolerances. All I get from all this is that everyone on any 'side' finds another 'side' to condemn, to reaffirm their personal beliefs. Sure we're less violent than the past but I really think our intolerances have only changed, not weakened in society as a whole.

[wittynickname]

Originally Posted by peter12

But you used it in a specific context - namely to water down the horrifying crimes of the Soviet Union with the strawman of "superpowers," whatever the heck that may be.

One of the ends of the Soviets - particularly Stalin - was to be murderous.

To me it didn't come across as "watering down," rather it was pointing out that yes, what happened with the Soviets was awful...but what America did on its rise to glory was also pretty awful. I feel like the natives that were raped and murdered and poisoned probably thought those crimes were kind of "horrifying" as well. The black people who were dragged here and forced into slavery (also beaten, raped, killed, sold as chattel) probably found that pretty "horrifying."

We here in North America like to ignore all of that, though. Our history is also blood-stained, we just like to whitewash the hell out of it.

[sworkhard]

Originally Posted by TheIronMaiden

To be clear, I am not denying the utility of science, I am asserting that a science needs to be critiqued and challenged by theory. Furthermore, I am implying that science, as well as theory, is incapable of finding an objective truth. Science is ideological, it is this point one should keep in mind when learning about a "discovered truth".

Science is an excellent source of knowledge, but its authority is not absolute.

Science is is not an authority. It's a process of acquiring knowledge by modelling nature, but it doesn't provide certain knowledge. This lack of certain knowledge is it's primary strength, ensuring these models can adapt and be replaced as better understandings come along. Even the process itself is up for revision, with important distinctions from one field to the next. This can be for ethical reasons (major part of social and medical sciences), or due to the unique subject matter at hand (people and animals are harder to study than rocks, for example. so double blind studies aren't a thing in paleontology, while they are in medicine). The whole point of science is that as something is studied, the ideology of the scientists wont color the results.

Now people can appeal to science, but they are not appealing to the authority of science in that case, but to the results of one or more tests or theories. If they are appealing to an authority, it the authority of the scientist, not science itself.

However, if you say science cannot provide objective truth, then you are asserting that objective truth cannot be had about material things; the whole point of the scientific process is that it reduces to a minimum the influences of human biases and error, thereby providing objective facts. This does not result in perfect objectivity, but, to use math terms, you might say it's limit approaches complete objectivity as the quality of the research increases. Objective knowledge and certain knowledge are very different things.

Of course, the way science is currently practiced has it's flaws, especially medicine and social sciences. Across the board, incentives are currently wrong, encouraging exciting new discoveries over validation (or dis-confirmation) of less exciting but more promising early research. Samples sizes are often too small, data isn't published, p-hacking, and so on are some problems resulting in a rafts of earlier studies and experiments with too small samples being suddenly overturned by later ones with larger samples, better approaches, and so on. Corruption sometimes gets in the way. However, the solutions to all these problems is not abandoning science, but doing it better; indeed, every-time something commonly accepted as scientific is overturned, it's better science doing the overturning.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by rubecube

One wonders what it could have accomplished had it not had to engage in an arms race with another superpower who decided to wage an ideological war against it. That supposedly liberal superpower being all tolerant of dissent and whatnot.

Probably would have collapsed in the 1970s or earlier without the militant enforcement of citizens within their own borders.

But this is off-topic re: this discussion i think

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by wittynickname

We here in North America like to ignore all of that, though. Our history is also blood-stained, we just like to whitewash the hell out of it.

Do we? It's not 1955 anymore. We don't make movies where white settlers are the unquestioned good guys and the cavalry triumphantly blows away Indians. A year doesn't go by without a Hollywood movie or pulitzer award nominated book about the horrors of the African American slave experience. Nobody who has gone to school or watched a Hollywood movie on the subject in the last 50 years is unaware of the tragedy of native Americans or slavery.

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by peter12

But you used it in a specific context - namely to water down the horrifying crimes of the Soviet Union with the strawman of "superpowers," whatever the heck that may be.

One of the ends of the Soviets - particularly Stalin - was to be murderous.

Do the covert actions of nation count? Are they not just as appalling, and possibly more so, than the overt brutality of a nation?

[TheIronMaiden]

Originally Posted by sworkhard

Science is is not an authority. It's a process of acquiring knowledge by modelling nature, but it doesn't provide certain knowledge. This lack of certain knowledge is it's primary strength, ensuring these models can adapt and be replaced as better understandings come along. Even the process itself is up for revision, with important distinctions from one field to the next. This can be for ethical reasons (major part of social and medical sciences), or due to the unique subject matter at hand (people and animals are harder to study than rocks, for example. so double blind studies aren't a thing in paleontology, while they are in medicine). The whole point of science is that as something is studied, the ideology of the scientists wont color the results.

Now people can appeal to science, but they are not appealing to the authority of science in that case, but to the results of one or more tests or theories. If they are appealing to an authority, it the authority of the scientist, not science itself.

However, if you say science cannot provide objective truth, then you are asserting that objective truth cannot be had about material things; the whole point of the scientific process is that it reduces to a minimum the influences of human biases and error, thereby providing objective facts. This does not result in perfect objectivity, but, to use math terms, you might say it's limit approaches complete objectivity as the quality of the research increases. Objective knowledge and certain knowledge are very different things.

Of course, the way science is currently practiced has it's flaws, especially medicine and social sciences. Across the board, incentives are currently wrong, encouraging exciting new discoveries over validation (or dis-confirmation) of less exciting but more promising early research. Samples sizes are often too small, data isn't published, p-hacking, and so on are some problems resulting in a rafts of earlier studies and experiments with too small samples being suddenly overturned by later ones with larger samples, better approaches, and so on. Corruption sometimes gets in the way. However, the solutions to all these problems is not abandoning science, but doing it better; indeed, every-time something commonly accepted as scientific is overturned, it's better science doing the overturning.

Well said, what I like about this comment is that you agree that science is liable to be problematic. This is a nuanced debate, and it is difficult to articulate how one should believe in the ideals,while still thinking critically about the results and the institutions.

[sworkhard]

Originally Posted by TheIronMaiden

Well said, what I like about this comment is that you agree that science is liable to be problematic. This is a nuanced debate, and it is difficult to articulate how one should believe in the ideals,while still thinking critically about the results and the institutions.

Not so much science itself, but scientists and their institutions and sponsors. For example, right now it's up to companies to prove the efficacy of their proposed medical remedies; however, when doing this, if they perform 100 double blind studies, only 5 of them show positive results, and the other 95 show no difference or negative results, they can still get the drug approved by only publishing the positive ones. The science here showed that the drug didn't work, but, by withholding much of the science, they can then claim that it's scientifically 'proven' to work, even though it's not. This deception won't be caught until independent or antagonistic scientists runs bigger, better experiments that prove that it's efficacy is suspect at best.

[wittynickname]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Do we? It's not 1955 anymore. We don't make movies where white settlers are the unquestioned good guys and the cavalry triumphantly blows away Indians. A year doesn't go by without a Hollywood movie or pulitzer award nominated book about the horrors of the African American slave experience. Nobody who has gone to school or watched a Hollywood movie on the subject in the last 50 years is unaware of the tragedy of native Americans or slavery.

Really? That's like saying racism is over because we had a black president. Just because authors write books and people make movies doesn't mean that the general, average, everyday person in America is really educated about the actual history about the genocide of and stealing the land of the Natives, the true horrors of slavery, etc. Did you attend school in the US? Because I did, and everyone I know did, and movies aside, actual honest to god education in this country does not give much information about this.

In school, history focuses on discovery of the New World, kinda skips over that whole part where Christopher Columbus and his crew were actually awful human beings, it talks about forming treaties with the natives, and then it glosses over all the bad stuff. Slavery the same way, it kind of skips over how long we allowed it straight to Lincoln and the Civil War.

The average American is vaguely aware that slavery was bad and maybe we weren't super nice to the Natives, but in general the history classes here focus on the rah-rah America part, about how we worked with the Natives for creating treaties, how we ended slavery, and we skip over the fact that we were actually at fault for a lot of really terrible things that happened.

Just for reference:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/o...s-history.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...ilemma/411601/
https://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...oliday/409984/


Hollywood tells a dramatized version of historical events, but that is in no way an example that people in the US really know the ins-and-outs of their history unless they go out of their way to research.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by wittynickname

Hollywood tells a dramatized version of historical events, but that is in no way an example that people in the US really know the ins-and-outs of their history unless they go out of their way to research.

But that goes for everything, not just natives and slavery. Americans are woefully ignorant of history in general, not just the unpleasant stuff their government did. Take World War 2, a key part of America's patriotic past, lionized by conservatives as well as liberals, and a global event that happened within living memory.

And yet a quarter of American students couldn't identity who Hitler was. Most couldn't name the major combatants. Half couldn't identity when it ended.

Only half of Americans surveyed can even name the three branches of government.

[wittynickname]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

But that goes for everything, not just natives and slavery. Americans are woefully ignorant of history in general, not just the unpleasant stuff their government did. Take World War 2, a key part of America's patriotic past, lionized by conservatives as well as liberals, and a global event that happened within living memory.

And yet a quarter of American students couldn't identity who Hitler was. Most couldn't name the major combatants. Half couldn't identity when it ended.

Only half of Americans surveyed can even name the three branches of government.

So basically you're making my point for me. The US whitewashes and tidies up our history, but we treat other nations'/regimes' crimes with full clarity, which was the original point being made.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by wittynickname

So basically you're making my point for me. The US whitewashes and tidies up our history, but we treat other nations'/regimes' crimes with full clarity, which was the original point being made.

No. Americans have little interest in history - theirs or anyone else's. Do you really think the people who don't know anything about native Americans or the history of slavery are well versed in the Gulag system or the Cultural Revolution?

And really, are there any countries where people are intensely interested in their own historical crimes? Maybe Germany. I can't think of any others. Though Western countries today in general are more self-critical than others. Much of the rest of the world, especially China, is still in our 1920s-30s level of hyper-patriotism.

Again, why is it so hard for progressive to acknowledge the progress we've made?