Comments by "LS O\x27Brien" (@lsobrien) on "Then & Now" channel.

  1.  @EF-wy3di   Sure, people would like to maintain (or improve) their lifestyle. That's hardly worth saying. But you're mistaking means and ends. And most people would prefer a different means. That's where leftism comes in. You haven't provided some knockout point. Only revealed yourself as someone out of touch.
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  2.  @EF-wy3di  Okay, yeah, you're just having an argument with someone in your head. What an old fart.
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  3.  @shawnruby7011  Dem reps?
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  4.  @shawnruby7011  Oh yeah, I agree that those people were malicious shits.
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  5. What's the point of making this video, when you could just save our (and your) time by directing us to Jacob's essay in the London Review of Books?
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  6. No, an ideology doesn't necessarily do that at all. Famously, Marxists, for example, think dialectically about everything. For them, there's no room for blanket denunciations. You can also consider conservatives, who say everyone is bad; a lot of anarchists, who subscribe to a pessimistic view of human nature; and liberals, who (the smarter among them at least) believe everyone is both good and bad. The fact that you think as you do suggests you're ideologically possessed by Peterslam.
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  7.  @gorequillnachovidal  Have you read any Marx, or are you basing your opinion on Peterson's misreading of a pamphlet? Again, you're sounding completely ideologically possessed. (In case you're interested in personal study: the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte would dispel that notion of yours/Peterson's. And Marx sought to attain for the proletariat the lives of the bourgeoisie - do you think he wanted to make them "evil"?)
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  8. "If we were to draw out a history of order-making, of cleanliness, the Third Reich would be in it." As would the United States. What was Manifest Destiny if not the cleansing - the ordering - of North America?
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  9. Modern "stoics" are the most irritating people I've endured. This video has lots of brilliant arguments, but we shouldn't overlook what a dolt stoicism can contort you into.
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  10. Brill.
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  11.  @tigerwolf2243  Peter Singer's idea of the "expanding circle" is about consciousness, not strictly empathy. Without grounding moral feelings, a basic consciousness of another's mind is a capacity shared by everyone from the Pope to serial killers. In fact the best manipulators have a phenomenal awareness of the consciousnesses found in others: all the best to use them. Although I must admit, Pinker has talked up the benefits of empathy: when it allows him to ingratiate himself with the cultural elite. He has argued, for example, that literary exercises in empathy-building has contributed to "human progress". A teleological form of thinking best left for the children.
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  12.  @tigerwolf2243  Pinker has a whole sub-chapter where he explains why he considers empathy overrated. If you have the book it's around page 350. You appear to have misunderstood my point re: progress. I was referring to his broader, liberal, "humanistic" teleological, stage-understanding of history (or History). In other words everything good that has occurred is a feature of our "Western Civilization," - it's very form, as Wittgenstein criticised. Everything bad that has happened can be considered an aberration, a rejection of that ideal civilisation. His Enlightenment Now expounds this view directly. It's a childish way of looking at the world, and I'm still amazed that anyone above the "age of reason" still hasn't seen through him.
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  13.  @tigerwolf2243  I do, and yes, you're right, it is a common framework people adopt. But if Pinker read literally past the first sentence (which he quotes) of Dialectic of Enlightenment, and beyond the spark notes of Bauman's work, he would realise things are more complicated than Progress = good. If you're interested in that idea, I really recommend the work of Adorno/Horkheimer and Zygmunt Bauman. Other than this channel's vids, I wrote about them through the links in my bio.
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  14. This reads as if it was written by Peterson during his post-Zizek demolition, benzo-fueled coma stupor.
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  15. Do I need to be clearer? What you wrote is literally nonsense.
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  16. You: "see the way the debris shattered and plastered the track after that horrific train crash? Well, make sense of it."
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  17. Why should I? I don't have much faith in debate at the best of times, but - here? I don't know how I can explain this to you any clearer: what you wrote originally: Does. Not. Make. Any. Sense.
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  18.  @ariekanibalie  You make some great points.
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  19. Honestly better than anything from the BBC.
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  20.  @dudenamepo  Oh my.
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  21. The only law is decay.
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