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Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
On August 13 2016 06:52 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
Sorry, but no matter how purple the prose you write is motklewarding, emotions are not an observable fact. Quoting A. E. Housman does not an argument make.
Depends on the meaning you assign to the word "fact," but emotions are observable; every time WhiteDog overuses the word "seriously" in a comment I can make an observation on his fragile emotional state.
Going back to Farvicola's comment though, presuming that I had actually argued what he supposed I had argued, he would be dishing out a strange argument from negative conceivability, which is a pretty undemanding argument.
Arguments such as "You are not qualified to cite Hegel," "That is a very bad argument," "X does not imply the absolute absence of Y," or "Quoting A.E. Housman does not an argument make," may all be valid assertions, but they are irrelevant as such. They exist because their authors feel a need to make some kind of response - any response, to some position that has rubbed them the wrong way, and they will have their moments of outburst regardless of its usefulness.
And that is merely one way that we can "observe" emotions.
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On August 13 2016 06:22 Nyxisto wrote:
Pretty dangerous to define happiness in terms of expectations or some kind of subjective metric because you can justify pretty much anything you want that way. I mean it makes some sense if we're talking about developed nations where material considerations are less and less important but if we're talking about the developing world we should better stick to some materialist account of happiness because it's not even possible to have any sensible discussion in any other way that's actually based on observable facts.
Especially the left often turns to occult concepts here because international liberalisation and trade actually has led to giant creation of wealth and that's pretty hard to reconcile with the anti-globalist position that's popular atm.
Materialist account of happiness is very flawed. It has been proved that after a certain degre of GDP per capita, happiness does not rise in a society (and by happiness here I mean simply asking people if they are happy or not).
WhiteDog overuses the word "seriously" in a comment I can make an observation on his fragile emotional state
You're so full of shit LOL.
Everytime you write I see you masturbating while watching your own photo.
SERIOUSLY (this use of seriously means that I am aroused by you or that I feel somewhat insecure knowing someone is strong enough to masturbate while thinking about himself or that I peed my pants three days ago thinking seriously about you, seriously)
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I did actually concede that happiness is harder to measure in developed nations in that post you quoted, but I'm just not buying that it's rocket science to imagine that someone who goes from living on a trash heap to working in a foxconn factory is not better off. If you have no water to drink or table salt and you have water and table salt the next day I think it's fair to assert that this makes you a good deal more happy. And that's a situation that hundreds of millions of people are still in and the growth and consumption model is the only thing we have that's making it better.
Reminds me of the decade old Krugman piece.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1997/03/in_praise_of_cheap_labor.html
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On August 13 2016 07:25 Nyxisto wrote:
I did actually concede that happiness is harder to measure in developed nations in that post you quoted, but I'm just not buying that it's rocket science to imagine that someone who goes from living on a trash heap to working in a foxconn factory is not better off. If you have no water to drink or table salt and you have water and table salt the next day I think it's fair to assert that this makes you a good deal more happy.
Yeah it's much more complicated and the kind of discussion driven by an out of touch vision like that of Moltebullshitwarding has no interest to me. Reality is most migration waves comes from people who lost their position in the society they live in : ex agricultural worker in a society in the process of industrialisation, or high ranked worker losing their position after a revolution, etc. People rarely flee poverty per say. Migration are really dictated by social and political matters more than economics (pretty sure, in this case, that unemployment is more important than living condition or poverty to understand migrations).
After this point, they are neither part of the country they migrated to, nor part of the country they fled.
So sure, there are huge advantages of living in a western country, from a materialist standpoint and even more. But for a big part of the migrants this is actually not the most important reason that explain their mobility.
And seriously speaking of course.
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On August 13 2016 07:16 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2016 06:22 Nyxisto wrote:
Pretty dangerous to define happiness in terms of expectations or some kind of subjective metric because you can justify pretty much anything you want that way. I mean it makes some sense if we're talking about developed nations where material considerations are less and less important but if we're talking about the developing world we should better stick to some materialist account of happiness because it's not even possible to have any sensible discussion in any other way that's actually based on observable facts.
Especially the left often turns to occult concepts here because international liberalisation and trade actually has led to giant creation of wealth and that's pretty hard to reconcile with the anti-globalist position that's popular atm. Materialist account of happiness is very flawed. It has been proved that after a certain degre of GDP per capita, happiness does not rise in a society (and by happiness here I mean simply asking people if they are happy or not).
I am sure that based on Nyxisto references to developing countries, he is refering to countries where the GDP per capita is below that certain degree where standards of living do increase when GDP per capita rises. In any case GDP per capita is a poor indicator of standards of living after a certain point especially in recent years in most rich countries simply due to rising inequality.
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Norway28874 Posts
On August 13 2016 07:25 Nyxisto wrote:I did actually concede that happiness is harder to measure in developed nations in that post you quoted, but I'm just not buying that it's rocket science to imagine that someone who goes from living on a trash heap to working in a foxconn factory is not better off. If you have no water to drink or table salt and you have water and table salt the next day I think it's fair to assert that this makes you a good deal more happy. And that's a situation that hundreds of millions of people are still in and the growth and consumption model is the only thing we have that's making it better. Reminds me of the decade old Krugman piece. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1997/03/in_praise_of_cheap_labor.html
I also wrote that it is possible for a condition to be so bad that the expectation aspect stops being a real factor, real misery is real misery. I used torture as an example, but starvation is another one I accept, some illnesses as well. I do however not believe that life with tv, or internet, or computers, or 20 rather than 2 pairs of shoes, is necessarily more happy than life without these if one lacks the expectation of having them.
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There is a lot of evidence with studies where it turns out that the biggest factor concerning life expectancy in first world countries with good standard of medical care is how content people are. It turns out that communities where ostentatious display of wealth are frowned upon, where there are tight knit communities, have poeple who live far longer lives than average for no discernable reason other than that they are vastly more content and happier than normal.
Also:On August 13 2016 07:16 WhiteDog wrote:Show nested quote +WhiteDog overuses the word "seriously" in a comment I can make an observation on his fragile emotional state You're so full of shit LOL. Everytime you write I see you masturbating while watching your own photo. SERIOUSLY (this use of seriously means that I am aroused by you or that I feel somewhat insecure knowing someone is strong enough to masturbate while thinking about himself or that I peed my pants three days ago thinking seriously about you, seriously) I lolled.
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On August 13 2016 07:25 Nyxisto wrote:I did actually concede that happiness is harder to measure in developed nations in that post you quoted, but I'm just not buying that it's rocket science to imagine that someone who goes from living on a trash heap to working in a foxconn factory is not better off. If you have no water to drink or table salt and you have water and table salt the next day I think it's fair to assert that this makes you a good deal more happy. And that's a situation that hundreds of millions of people are still in and the growth and consumption model is the only thing we have that's making it better. Reminds me of the decade old Krugman piece. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1997/03/in_praise_of_cheap_labor.html
There is an interesting book written by a journalist a few years ago, "The Geography of Bliss," in which the author visits numerous countries which rank highly on subjective happiness surveys (and in one case, Moldova, extremely lowly) in order to discover whether there is any unifying catalyst behind human happiness. As you would expect, "there is not," is the conclusion, and the word happiness itself, which derives from the concept of "good fortune," is an imprecise noun which could be applied to numerous mental states. In certain societies, happiness is wearing a social mask, which is so strictly enforced by cultural norms, that the "social self" that one projects becomes indistinguishable from an "inner self."
In that sense, the pursuit of material wealth does form a palpable quest for happiness among certain people; its realisation grants people the momentary happiness of attainment, but not any kind of enduring happiness, because happiness in th e generic Western conception is linked with the belief in one's own good fortune, but is at heart a contradiction, a contradiction which reminds me of that gorgeous poem by Rupert Brooke:
I THINK if you had loved me when I wanted;
If I’d looked up one day, and seen your eyes,
And found my wild sick blasphemous prayer granted,
And your brown face, that’s full of pity and wise,
Flushed suddenly; the white godhead in new fear
Intolerably so struggling, and so shamed;
Most holy and far, if you’d come all too near,
If earth had seen Earth’s lordliest wild limbs tamed,
Shaken, and trapped, and shivering, for My touch—
Myself should I have slain? or that foul you?
But this the strange gods, who had given so much,
To have seen and known you, this they might not do.
One last shame’s spared me, one black word’s unspoken;
And I’m alone; and you have not awoken.
A sensitively insightful poem; in which the poet recognises the contradiction at the heart of his demands for happiness, for that longed-for "success" would make him more miserable than failure. To this, all the materialist and sociological chatterboxing has nothing to offer. Wagner's "Tristan Chord" had more to say about the nature of human happiness than all these weird inhuman indices put together. What you and WhiteDog are talking about is actually side-stepping the point; the alleviation of physical suffering does not contribute to human happiness in the long run.
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Your poetry is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments. I seriously felt so many emotions so I thought I'd seriously share them with you Moltke.
Love is a state of grace
Transcending time and space
No other way I can describe
Insanely beautiful
Its almost mystical
Cause youre mine
And I cant believe that I feel
What I feel
Such a strange kind of real
Love is a state of grace
Between you and I
Seriously speaking, I did not defended the idea that happiness has anything to do with migration : people migrate to find a place and a situation, not because they are unhappy. This philosophical discussion on happiness is not really relevant to me.
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On August 13 2016 09:02 WhiteDog wrote:
Your poetry is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes to lineaments the properties of objects described by their virtuality. I seriously felt so many emotions so I thought I'd seriously share them with you Moltke.
Love is a state of grace
Transcending time and space
No other way I can describe
Insanely beautiful
Its almost mystical
Cause youre mine
And I cant believe that I feel
What I feel
Such a strange kind of real
Love is a state of grace
Between you and I
Literary analysis isn't your strong suit: the point of Brooke's poem "Success" is a contextualised specimen of what cultural critics of the late 19th century attempted to express more universally: there is no "solution" for the problem of happiness; we can only attempt to account for it in art, in order to reproduce that sequence of human naivite in which it was originally born, from which it then grew to die within our developed self-consciousness.
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On August 13 2016 09:06 MoltkeWarding wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2016 09:02 WhiteDog wrote:
Your poetry is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes to lineaments the properties of objects described by their virtuality. I seriously felt so many emotions so I thought I'd seriously share them with you Moltke.
Love is a state of grace
Transcending time and space
No other way I can describe
Insanely beautiful
Its almost mystical
Cause youre mine
And I cant believe that I feel
What I feel
Such a strange kind of real
Love is a state of grace
Between you and I Literary analysis isn't your strong suit: the point of Brooke's poem "Success" is a contextualised specimen of what cultural critics of the late 19th century attempted to express more universally: there is no "solution" for the problem of happiness; we can only attempt to account for it in art, in order to reproduce that sequence of human naivite in which it was originally born, from which it then grew to die within our developed self-consciousness.
Thank you for the break down, I didn't understood.
Do you want me to give you my own analysis of the magnificient poem I linked you ?
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On August 13 2016 09:08 MoltkeWarding wrote:
Go ahead
So it's Britney Spears she's in mad love with a guy but she doesn't entirely understand the deepness of her feelings and believe it's all a dream.
+ Show Spoiler +
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It's actually blasphemous because "love" enjoyed under a state of "grace" has nothing to do with the raptures of "'cause you're mine." The pop music industry needs to give their songs better semantic density, and employ some more of those old-fashioned poetic turns in their songs.
Because if this is typical of our generation, Britney Spears is the Siegfried of music.
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On August 13 2016 09:12 WhiteDog wrote:So it's Britney Spears she's in mad love with a guy but she doesn't entirely understand the deepness of her feelings and believe it's all a dream. + Show Spoiler +
Wow whitedoge, you really dug deep in the Britney discography. I would have gone with Toxic or Baby Hit Me One More Time. But then, I don't think I've ever heard this song you referenced until now.
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Oh moltewarding, you are so easy to be made fun of. See, you realised that writing blobs of indulgent nothingness doesn't make an argument so your first paragraph actually made some sort of sense, possibly because you are trying to communicate an idea, but then you ruined it with the second paragraph and the poem, and by the third paragraph you have reverted back to your usual cultural psychobabble and empty appeals to authority. What a shame. For one moment there, I thought you took your first steps into a wider world from outside your own head.
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"you are so easy to be made fun of"
that's an awkward construction my man
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On August 13 2016 09:28 MoltkeWarding wrote:
It's actually blasphemous because "love" enjoyed under a state of "grace" has nothing to do with the raptures of "'cause you're mine." The pop music industry needs to give their songs better semantic density, and employ some more of those old-fashioned poetic turns in their songs.
Because if this is typical of our generation, Britney Spears is the Siegfried of music.
I think a more typical song is 3:
One, two, three
Not only you and me
Got one eighty degrees
And I'm caught in between
Countin'
One, two, three
Peter, Paul and Mary
Gettin' down with 3P
Everybody loves me
Oh
Babe, pick a night
To come out and play
If it's alright
What do you say?
Merrier the more
Triple fun that way
Twister on the floor
What do you say?
Are you in
Livin' in sin is the new thing (yeah)
Are, you in
I am countin'
One, two, three
Not only you and me
Got one eighty degrees
And I'm caught in between
Countin'
One, two, three
Peter, Paul and Mary
Gettin' down with 3P
Everybody loves me
Oh
It's the perfect expression of my factual feelings for you and whitedoge.
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On August 13 2016 09:46 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
Oh moltewarding, you are so easy to be made fun of. See, you realised that writing blobs of indulgent nothingness doesn't make an argument so your first paragraph actually made some sort of sense, possibly because you are trying to communicate an idea, but then you ruined it with the second paragraph and the poem, and by the third paragraph you have reverted back to your usual cultural psychobabble and empty appeals to authority. What a shame. For one moment there, I thought you took your first steps into a wider world from outside your own head.
Now, here is an interesting example of an individual who communicates not to communicate, but to be a pedant. When WhiteDog says "LOL" to my posts, he is actually committing a time-honed social practice of laughter-as-ridicule, which has been dissected by esteemed internet psychologists here:
3.bp.blogspot.com
This would-be Juvenal has the temperament of the satirist, but not the art, for humour directed against an object performs the social functon of an assertion of superiority, but in the case of WhiteDog's mockery, it falls far short of the standards set by Pope or Voltaire, because he makes no attempt to mock his objects via imitation, one suspects because he basically doesn't understand the thing he's dismissing. From his keyboard, "LOL" is the social equivalent of the wild cat arching its back in order to appear more intimidating to a potential predator.
Not so our friend, the aptly named Dangermousecatdog. His main mistake is that he basically accomplishes via rant the same social feat that WhiteDog manages to achieve in 3 seconds. He takes a shot at an imitation of me, which is commendable in its ambition, but he rather undersells himself; because no one actually believes him when be declares how much fun he is having.
If he were actually having fun at interacting with my absurdities, he would engage me with the same civility that Mr. Bennett extended to Mr. Collins, via snark disguised as affability, but he does not. He asserts that he is writing ridicule and what he actually then writes is critique, critique which if successful, would remove the source of his present enjoyments.
As that great commentator on moronic behaviour, Judge Judy would say, "If it doesn't make sense it's not true"; A wag does not mock you by saying he is mocking you. If he says he is mocking you, he is either a failure or a liar. So why do people use laughter as attack when anyone over kindergarten age can see through these feeble attempts at lashing out? I want this issue addressed once and for all, because it would considerably alloy my social pleasures to think that people are not being honest with me about their true feelings.
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MoltkeWarding make sense, but he enrobe his arguments in pretentious quotation. I should quote endlessly, that would actually help me with my flawed english and protect me against Moltke's deep scriptural analysis.
On August 13 2016 09:34 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2016 09:12 WhiteDog wrote:On August 13 2016 09:08 MoltkeWarding wrote:
Go ahead So it's Britney Spears she's in mad love with a guy but she doesn't entirely understand the deepness of her feelings and believe it's all a dream. + Show Spoiler + Wow whitedoge, you really dug deep in the Britney discography. I would have gone with Toxic or Baby Hit Me One More Time. But then, I don't think I've ever heard this song you referenced until now.
The older the better, like wine.
+ Show Spoiler +I just googled "Britney spears love"
On August 13 2016 10:26 MoltkeWarding wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2016 09:46 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
Oh moltewarding, you are so easy to be made fun of. See, you realised that writing blobs of indulgent nothingness doesn't make an argument so your first paragraph actually made some sort of sense, possibly because you are trying to communicate an idea, but then you ruined it with the second paragraph and the poem, and by the third paragraph you have reverted back to your usual cultural psychobabble and empty appeals to authority. What a shame. For one moment there, I thought you took your first steps into a wider world from outside your own head. Now, here is an interesting example of an individual who communicates not to communicate, but to be a pedant. When WhiteDog says "LOL" to my posts, he is actually committing a time-honed social practice of laughter-as-ridicule, which has been dissected by esteemed internet psychologists here: 3.bp.blogspot.comThis would-be Juvenal has the temperament of the satirist, but not the art, for humour directed against an object performs the social functon of an assertion of superiority, but in the case of WhiteDog's mockery, it falls far short of the standards set by Pope or Voltaire, because he makes no attempt to mock his objects via imitation, one suspects because he basically doesn't understand the thing he's dismissing. From his keyboard, "LOL" is the social equivalent of the wild cat arching its back in order to appear more intimidating to a potential predator. Not so our friend, the aptly named Dangermousecatdog. His main mistake is that he basically accomplishes via rant the same social feat that WhiteDog manages to achieve in 3 seconds. He takes a shot at an imitation of me, which is commendable in its ambition, but he rather undersells himself; because no one actually believes him when be declares how much fun he is having. If he were actually having fun at interacting with my absurdities, he would engage me with the same civility that Mr. Bennett extended to Mr. Collins, via snark disguised as affability, but he does not. He asserts that he is writing ridicule and what he actually then writes is critique, critique which if successful, would remove the source of his present enjoyments. As that great commentator on moronic behaviour, Judge Judy would say, "If it doesn't make sense it's not true"; A wag does not mock you by saying he is mocking you. If he says he is mocking you, he is either a failure or a liar. So why do people use laughter as attack when anyone over kindergarten age can see through these feeble attempts at lashing out? I want this issue addressed once and for all, because it would considerably alloy my social pleasures to think that people are not being honest with me about their true feelings.
There is a timeline problem in your argument, I didn't laugh when I quoted Britney (and didn't wrote lol). I would never laugh while quoting Britney.
Seriously.
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