Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Jun 03, 2023 2:26 pm
OK people. The sun is shining and I am heading out for a bike ride into the glorious mountains in my region.
That does sound pretty special.
In turn, I took the ferry with relatives over to the glorious island
K'gari for a few days.
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Jun 03, 2023 2:26 pm
Australia, sleep well. May you get the candybar you seek when dawn lifts the veil of darkness and aurora shines her light-rays into the world. (Hope you do not wake up hungover...)
Not to worry: hangovers are from boozing, so there's no longer a risk of a hangover here.
I guess you're pinging me out of curiosity as to my reaction to recent happenings in this thread. Assuming that that's the case, here are my thoughts:
Re the debate over the definition of an "intellectual", I've got nothing invested in the question, nor anything to contribute other than to agree that being an intellectual has something to do with engaging with ideas.
Re subjectivity versus objectivity: in defence of atto, it's possible for subjective experiences to lead to objective conclusions. For example, if somebody unexpectedly expresses out loud in my presence a uniquely distinctive and thus unguessable thought that I had been having privately, then I can infer that, objectively, mental telepathy exists. I just can't prove it to anybody else on this basis. My sense, after reflection, is that these are the sort of inferences about objective reality that atto has made from his subjective experiences. Now, in your defence, AJ: even
if, as you seem to, one accepts that atto has had the subjective experiences that he says he's had, the soundness of the inferences that he's made from them is open to question or at the very least open to discussion.
Re the "impersonal" nature of some of your critiques: I find this characterisation to be... dubious (with a lowercase D!). Even if you only choose the targets of your critiques as emblems of social trends, there is still a very meaningful sense in which the critique
is personal. After all, if one were to say, "There is a growing social trend of pseudo-intellectual paedophiles spreading their deviance as widely as possible, and AJ is emblematic of this trend", I highly doubt that you would brush it off as a mere "impersonal" commentary on social trends, even if it
was true (which, of course, it's not).
Re Gary's book of poetry: a little bit of googling uncovered a few free poems of his, and they're pretty decent. Nice work, Gary. I won't be shelling out money for your book, but then, I do very little reading aside from forums and news anyway, so that doesn't say much. It probably is worth the investment for those who read more.
Re the idea of the fixity of the flexible approach, I think it's a useful insight that, in this sense, the worldviews of Dubious and iambiguous (Lacewing too, though she hadn't yet been mentioned) seem to operate similarly. I don't though seek to debate here and now this notion - nor its strengths, weaknesses, and qualifications - so I will probably forego any response to the reactions of others to these sentiments.
Re homosexuality: there is pretty much only one scenario in which I'd consider it valid to (even if only lightly) suppress gay folk in the way that AJ suggests should be done; I reject all of the other arguments I've heard. That scenario is this: that we inhabit a reality created by a good God, in which gendered beings such as ourselves were from the start exclusively heterosexual by (God's) design, and who all understood that that
was God's design, who all
endorsed that design, and who all
preferred it to be that way - but that then, some time after Creation, an adversarial force infiltrated our (God's) reality, and perverted it such that homosexual inclinations began to occur. In that scenario, while gay people would probably not (depending on various factors) be responsible for having those deliberately perverted, ungodly inclinations themselves, we wouldn't anyway want to encourage, promote, or at all validate those inclinations, but rather to recognise them as an unfortunate affliction by a malign force.
Outside of that scenario, the main argument that I see raised - and which, along with all of the others, I reject - is that along the lines of "Marriage has traditionally been defined to be between a man and a woman, and that tradition should be respected." I reject this argument because:
- If there is nothing wrong with or perverse about homosexuality (as there is in the scenario I outlined above), and if it instead is simply a natural, benign variation of human sexuality, then "tradition" is a poor (and, frankly, reprehensible) reason to deny gay people the same rights as heterosexuals: to love, to marry, and to have their identity adequately reflected in the cultural milieu.
- If, alternatively, there is something wrong with or perverse about homosexuality because something like the above scenario holds, then this argument is not just redundant but also, often enough, and presumably, cowardly: it is wielded by the arguer so as to avoid making the more direct affirmation that homosexuality is wrong and perverse, presumably because the arguer is fearful of the reaction that that claim would elicit in our modern, "woke" society.
(Can I trust, iambiguous, that you will now stop complaining about my lack of engagement with such real-world conflicts?)
If I've missed anything, then let me know. Otherwise, there's the wrap-up of my thoughts on recent events in the world of Philosophy Now's Christianity thread...