Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Throw in any philosophy. It's a four thousand year exercise in ruling class justification for the world as it is, or conversely, a world that's worse for everyone but the ruling class as its members conceive themselves, sometime in the future.

In the vulgar - fuck philosophy. Show me a philosopher, and I'll show you a man who ought to be plowing a field until he figures out that words about words are just words about words.

Now, formal logic has its uses...

You mean to tell me that people actually have a choice in whether they do evil to others? That just because we're placed in a situation we lose our own ability to discern moral choices?

I'm shocked! Here I was thinking I'm just putty in the hands of those that control me.

What if the desired end is not knowledge, but ethically crippled managerial types?

Well possibly, but it seems like a waste of time and money. Capitalism had been producing and will continue to produce plenty of ethically crippled managers without any help from Phillip Zimbardo or brains in pans.

A little off topic, perhaps, this very brief travel vignette:

http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2010/12/23/travelers-feel-a-little-safer-seeing-rape-victim-dragged-across-airport-by-police/print/

JC is funnier than MM, though, it must be said, not intentionally, and he's also less informed, talented, and self-aware. Seriously? You posted 1000 words about Debord not a fortnight ago, titmouse. Debord

I don't rise to defend philosophy overmuch. But, still...

tarzie,

Yes, it is a waste and yes, you're right about capitalism's seamless production of ethically crippled managers. There's no actual need to factory farm them. It's pointless, unless there's a market. In that case, there's a need for Zimbardos and his ilk, who can do research on the corporate dehumanizing environment on a cost effective basis.

Put another way, can you imagine anything more useless than Matt Yglesias? Yet people will pay to have their kids turned into Woody Mattchucks and perception management entrepreneurs will hire them by the thousands. There's a market. Not a rational market, but a market nevertheless.

The usefulness of a thinker has no *necessary* relationship to or with the silliness of his philosophy. Philosophy is almost entirely without value. Scratch that - anything said by a philosopher can be said without the jargon, mysticism and ruling class perspective of a bon philosophe, with less bad conscience, and in ordinary language. Philosophy itself is fundamentally suspect. It nonetheless does not follow that everything a philosopher - self described, or woefully afforded the ungainly title posthumously - has written or said is without value: Wittgenstein had a great deal of useful things to say; Nietzsche amuses.

The doing of philosophy, itself, is a colossal waste of human time and effort, Dawson. Not that I expect a sophistry enamored dialectical pointillist to agree. Or get it.

Still, the bell rang, the dog slavvered, and entertainment ensued. That's something.

It is almost without fail the word drudgery of leisure time shills for the ruling class. Perhaps that's why academic remora fish get their mouthparts around it, so easily.

But, hey, aren't there "consumers" to fret, out their in the world you don't inhabit?

"Scratch that "
from" a ruling class perspective "
...you're fired !!!

i ran companies

climbed nordic pine trees

courted orange apes

Put another way, can you imagine anything more useless than Matt Yglesias?

Well, he's useless to me certainly but not to those on whose behalf he writes wonk-flavored propaganda.

I guess the way in which Zimbardo's flawed experiment fortifies ethical impairment is what I do not see so clearly. If experiments like the prison experiment are done with an ideological end in mind, it seems to me that end is give scientific weight to a misanthropic hopelessness about human beings. This surely also serves the ruling class, but not in the way you seem to mean.

Nice try, JC (well, not really). Your string of gibberish almost formed a barb there! Too bad it was merely random Big Words you've heard that have no relationship to any reality.

In the process, despite the appearance of "Erich Fromm" in Al's post, you manage to confirm again that you're a proud meathead, with nothing but teenage slogans to say about anything.

You'd have made an excellent lieutenant to Pol Pot, too, if we're actually to believe you hold the position you defend here, despite your affection for gaseous elephant-feelers like Guy Debord. Why, you could have had the great honor of shooting the likes of that terrible bourgeois trickster Erich Fromm!

Moron.

You're almost as petty as Owen, Dawson. But you drool quicker. And Op at least manages that Hegelian haiku thing.

In the brief - philosophy is stupid. Which says nothing about thought. You missed that, but you're on the bus to a dialectical nowhere land, so whatever.

You know what's just sad, Dawson? Your manner of reply. It's never addressed to the thing written or said. It's always a sword drawn and waved only at the thing you think is there. At your own mental demons, the bitter ravings of a tired mind that sloughs easily into ad hominem whenever it touches the edge of a thing foreign.

I write that I think philosophy - a ruling class recreation - is a waste of time. Because I think this itself goes hand in hand with Al's original observation. You reply as if I've written that culture, intelligence, thought, wit and language were a waste of time, and further respond as if I'm arguing that slaughter is the only solution. It's not my fault that you assume that anyone who even remotely resembles an anarchist is a bomb thrower. That's your set of errors.

Your assumption, as always, is so far from the truth that it borders on the sublime, for all its grotesque ridiculousness.

I reject *philosophy*. Philosophy, a ruling class entertainment. Not language. Not communication. Not rationality. Not planning. Not engineering. Not forethought. Just philosophy.

You, on the other hand, seem to have abandoned critical thinking, and reading, itself.

Sad, really.

And that doesn't make you a moron. Just a smart guy with unquestioned fixed ideas, lashing out from your keyboard as if you alone possess an insight into human suffering.

If experiments like the prison experiment are done with an ideological end in mind, it seems to me that end is give scientific weight to a misanthropic hopelessness about human beings.

That's what Fromm suspected—about Milgram' experiment too. It's a good thesis.

A tendentious mining of the historical record would have served both of them better than their bogus experiments. There's no shortage of bleakness to be found. Of course that's not in behavioral psychology's bailiwick. Experiments are part of the career package.

Assuming the accuracy of the thesis, there's some historical irony. The experiments caused so much outrage and disgust that the rules governing experiments on humans are much stricter now—experiments which are still pursued, in spite of the implausibility of a lab setting producing scientific results and in spite of Zimbardo's and Milgram's disgrace. That's why I think there's something more than ideology involved.

Your string of gibberish...you're a proud meathead...You'd have made an excellent lieutenant to Pol Pot...moron

the bell rang, the dog slavvered, and entertainment ensued...the bitter ravings of a tired mind...as petty as Owen...But you drool quicker.

[music] Do they know it's Christmas time at all? [/music]

Maybe they wasted money on this Stanford experiment, but, you know, people were still mystified, to put it mildly, about the German experience ("could a whole nation be made mad?" -- that kind of thing), and so it was worth it to find out if "ordinary" American kids had something of the same potential in them. And voila!

What's also wrong with this kind of study is that it's conclusions are quickly taken to be reports about an essential human nature, which in this case happens to buttress conservative philosophies. So Fromm took up the cudgels of liberalism, and argued that human beings are actually cooperative in nature.

What's also wrong with this kind of study is that it's conclusions are quickly taken to be reports about an essential human nature, which in this case happens to buttress conservative philosophies.

Absolutely, and also the liberal/progressive "nudge" philosophies: that people need constant, procedurally correct operant conditioning. The end result is a horde of Woody Matthchucks.