Philosophy, fandom and football

[Ingram85]

37 minutes ago, fruitvilla said:

I could argue you don't.

Yawn

[fruitvilla]

43 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

 ...      men ...  are collectively considered morally complicit.

I can't help thinking ... being honest and working towards what we want rather than what we imagine is moral will lead to better outcomes.

[fruitvilla]

22 hours ago, sheepyvillian said:

Opinions, that's what it comes down to.

In my opinion, this sort of argument while true is banal.

Is two plus two in the base 10 system four? In my opinion yes. Some might not agree and argue it is all a social construct.

Was Liz Truss o good prime minister for the Conservatives to choose? I would argue no, but some Labourite might argue she was great for getting Labour elected.

The point being, some opinions reflect reality more accurately than others. When people say "it's all opinions" I find they don't have the evidence to back up the opinion.

[sheepyvillian]

16 minutes ago, fruitvilla said:

In my opinion, this sort of argument while true is banal.

Is two plus two in the base 10 system four? In my opinion yes. Some might not agree and argue it is all a social construct.

Was Liz Truss o good prime minister for the Conservatives to choose? I would argue no, but some Labourite might argue she was great for getting Labour elected.

The point being, some opinions reflect reality more accurately than others. When people say "it's all opinions" I find they don't have the evidence to back up the opinion.

Pass me that coat, please. Banal?, I'll say.

[fruitvilla]

1 hour ago, MakemineVanilla said:

a lot of people become very solipsistic when they talk in absolutes on the subject of whether certain things are funny

I am impressed ... a reference to solipsism 

I think the concept of solipsism is absolutely true, but this quote absolutely nails it.

… a small frontier fortress. Admittedly the fortress is impregnable, but the garrison can never sally forth from it, therefore we can pass it by, and leave it in our rear without danger.
Arthur Schopenhauer describing solipsism

[fruitvilla]

Recently, I bought a pair of runners. Nike I think. Tried to limit the price to under a hundred Canadian.

4 hours ago, Risso said:

Last time I saw Bicks he was wearing a pair of these:

 

 

Now I wonder what the value of a pair of runners is, bearing in mind economies of scale, mass production and inexpensive labour. I certainly could not make a pair of runners cost/time effectively. What is a fair price?

[fruitvilla]

Here's a question for those that believe in morality ... bearing in mind the responses to walking the lion photos.

What should be done with P-22, an ageing Californian mountain lion?

P-22: Los Angeles celebrity mountain lion captured - BBC News

"Nothing has been disclosed about what will happen to the cougar."

Should the lion be euthanized, set free, held in captivity for a year or two, or something else? Answers on a back of a postcard, please.

[fruitvilla]

On 15/12/2022 at 10:32, fruitvilla said:

Here's a question for those that believe in morality ... bearing in mind the responses to walking the lion photos.

What should be done with P-22, an ageing Californian mountain lion?

P-22: Los Angeles celebrity mountain lion captured - BBC News

"Nothing has been disclosed about what will happen to the cougar."

Should the lion be euthanized, set free, held in captivity for a year or two, or something else? Answers on a back of a postcard, please.

Apparently, P-22 was euthanized, and there is a bit of kerfuffle over what to do with the big cat's body. Go figure.

[chrisp65]

On Saturday, my local team were losing 2:0 in the 88th minute. The game finished 2:2.

This evening, my local team were winning 2:0 in the 88th minute. The game finished 2:2.

There were people there tonight taking it far far too seriously. Seriously angry we could be so bad as to not be able to defend for another few minutes.

Personally, I thought it was a good entertaining game and overall a fair if annoying result.

But I enjoyed a couple of beers, I enjoyed a couple of hours of forgetting about staff rotas and fee bids and building regs submissions. I enjoyed taking the piss with a bunch of mates and shouting absolute rubbish at strangers playing and reffing football. 

Others have gone home to smash up the crockery like something from Ripping Yarns. That’s no way to be is it, placing so much importance on the random acts of others that you can’t greatly influence? 

[Mark Albrighton]

I think there are some people who broadly speaking have no significant jeopardy or grievances in their lives and use football to supplement that. Something to vent or get worked up about.

I also think there are some people who do have a lot of stress in their lives and use football as a bit of escapism. And also as a chance to vent about something if they feel they can’t do so about the real stress they endure.

And I think there are some people who don’t really fall into either category.

I’m never quite sure which type there is more of. FWIW I’m probably closest to the first type. 

On the subject of playing football in particular I haven’t done so in years. As I got older I enjoyed it less as people seemed to take it more seriously, if anything. 

One of the final times I remember this lad on my team getting so irate because he didn’t receive a pass from someone (could have been me, really can’t remember). It wasn’t a league match or anything, literally just an after work thing we decided to do on a bit of a whim. Not really sure who he was either, I certainly didn’t recognise him so I assume he was brought in to make up the numbers. It was just a bit…”You ain’t going to receive a medal if we this game mate, it’s not worth getting worked up about.”

I think we lost the game. Hope we did. The prick.

[fruitvilla]

Just out of curiosity how many VTers believe:

in cause and effect
exceptions to cause and effect
free will

It is the Israel/Palestine thread that is prompting this question in me.

[maqroll]

On 21/08/2022 at 17:04, fruitvilla said:

Courtesy of Douglas Adams' Zaphod.

There is a lot of talk of people's ego. And I can't help we talk a lot of nonsense about it. We have a theory of mind (ToM) and we apply it to others to explain what the motivation for doing stuff, what the underlying causation for what we (I) do. In reality that causation is a whole bunch of electrobiochemistry going on in the brain that is informed/activated by nerve cells from our sense organs.

So when we say something like Gerrard did something because of his ego, we are talking nonsense.

I knew all along that Gerrard's major flaw as manager was his blatantly obvious electrobiochemical imbalance. He might still be the gaffer if those critical synapses hadn't been deactivated. 

[Rugeley Villa]

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law"

[mjmooney]

29 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law"

So mote it be. 

[Rugeley Villa]

7 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

So mote it be. 

You’re one of us then, say no more 

[mjmooney]

13 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

You’re one of us then, say no more 

 

[fruitvilla]

Positively weird. 

[Marka Ragnos]

@fruitvilla, any chance you might be willing to retrofit this topic as just plain Philosophy? Looking for a place to talk Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Adorno. Is that allowed here? I really want to talk about the "jargon of authenticity" -- and this guy particularly:
 

Quote

 

That said, Adorno critiques Heidegger, and the existentialism he spawned, for reducing our understanding of reality down to a “Concept,” one that moreover, leaves many important aspects of human reality out of the picture. More importantly, Existentialism, and its Jargon, that of “Authenticity” - being authentic, being yourself, owning your self, looking inward, being self-sufficient, focusing on exercising your will, focusing on your own projects and life, etc. (or in Heidegger-speak: resoluteness, thrownness, fallenness, projection, facticity, etc.) - leads to a situation that in fact further enhances, defends, protects, and enshrines the violence, exploitation, immiseration, alienation, reification, and destruction of Industrial-Consumer Capitalism, its handmaiden, Objective-Instrumentalist Scientism, and its political enabler-controller, Totalitarianism (whether Fascism or Neo-Liberalism).

To begin, instead of looking for systemic, social, institutional, and structural causes of the problems of alienation, self-immiseration, depression, anxiety, ennui, etc., existentialism says look inside, and so therein sells a philosophy of “adjusting yourself to your circumstances,” in lieu of acting in a collective-social manner to efficaciously and permanently change and alter those circumstances. Moreover it locks human thought into a theocratic-moralizing discourse of “being authentic,” a concept that under analysis becomes rather vacuous and empty. What is being “authentic,” after all, cant a Nazi be Authentic, and if a Nazi can be Authentic, or if a rapacious industrial capitalist, or corrupt politician, or even serial killer be “authentic” then how effective is your philosophical position. Being authentic is not enough, if it is anything at all, and so it doesnt in fact get at the important aspects of human evaluation.

Furthermore, as stated, instead of talking economics and politics, talking about our individual authenticity leads us into a moralizing discourse, where everything is viewed in terms of “individuals” and whether we should “judge” them as being “good” or “bad,” and how we can castigate them to then shape their behavior. This is religion 2.0 - with its codes, priests, precepts, etc., where the very concept of “Authenticity” becomes seen as in fact just another way of managing a herd!!! Here authentic jargon becomes a tool of totalitarianism (in all its forms), as it erects a new interpretative scheme that overlays actual-actuality and when inculcated into one’s life re-renders an individuals existence/experience into a internalized pre-set script of self-discipline, guilt, self-correction, guilt, repentance, and the like.

From another angle, all of this is merely a form of rhetoric, a superficial-vocabulary that takes structural and institutional problems as well as concrete actual reality and remakes them into a narrative of individual issues and conscience-critique mentioned above. To see the absurdity of this line of thought take the following sentence: “ITS not that slavery is wrong, just that inauthentic slave masters are the problem.” This shows the poverty of existentialist analysis, how it in fact gets at nothing important, as the issue of slavery was not an issue of slaves not being authentic enough, or bad slave masters being inauthentic, but of the ECONOMIC-POLITICAL Institution of Slavery as such, and to change that requires collective-social action, ie. it requires revolutionary political activity. Instead of this what we get today is a collection of individuals, all anxious and depressed, all looking inwards, all focusing on “building themselves” while the world burns and people suffer.

So-too today with the hippie cult-of-self, the rise of spiritual worship and spiritualism, the focus on building your gym body, eastern-religion fetishization, tattoo-my-way to individuality mindset, meditation-yoga eat-organic, blah blah hipster culture of which we currently exist. Here I highly highly highly recommend Adam Curtis’ documentary - “the Century of Self” (its free on youtube) - as a wonderful popularization of Adorno’s basic criticism. Existentialism and being authentic doesnt solve our political, social and economic problems, it is in fact merely a JARGON that re-writes these problems in ways that help the systems of power and domination continue to function - how does it achieve this you ask - by rendering its socially-created problems into individualistic-seeming problems, wherein the problem is actually YOU, and NOT the society that produced and surrounds you. Rendered as such, this further mystifies our sense or grasp of reality, and ourselves, and so leads us into an abstract-idealized depiction of our life. And guess what!!!!!???? We have good news: To be authentic, we simply must now BUY X, Y, Z commodities, and purchase A, B, C memberships, and Shop at P, Q, R stores, and follow 1, 2, 3 kinds of celebrities who tell us about their authenticity in the commodities they sling, all while we all pretend authentic on instagram and tik tok by displaying our commodities proudly. And yet, despite all this focus of 70 years of attention onto the question of Authenticity, people dont seem to be much happier….. let alone authentic…… in fact, all authenticity jargon has seemed to do is serve as an outlet for consumer capitalism and our self-commodification……

For Adorno the holocaust never ended, and today the concentration camp is the wild west of American Consumer Capitalism and Neo-Liberal politics, two Concepts, that enslave our mind and destroy our souls while devastating our planet and future. The Jargon of Authenticity feeds right into this by de-politicizing social problems, and de-collectivizing political action, which it accomplishes by rendering us into a mode of thinking of ourselves as isolated and atomistic units, where we respond to this mystifying jargon by following the commands of preachers of authenticity (capitalists or fascists) therein blinding us to our true social power, all while this forms the advertising bedrock that drives late capitalist consumer culture. The goal isnt to be authentic (which today is actually a form of self-enslavement) it is to be free, the first is the pathway of individualism, neo-stoicism, and a philosophy by slaves for slaves (e.g. nazi fascism in one case, industrialized consumer capitalism in the other), and the second is the pathway of collective action, of political engagement, and of revolutionary economic transformation.

 

 

Edited February 13 by Marka Ragnos

[fruitvilla]

3 hours ago, Marka Ragnos said:

@fruitvilla, any chance you might be willing to retrofit this topic as just plain Philosophy? Looking for a place to talk Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Adorno. Is that allowed here? I really want to talk about the "jargon of authenticity" -- and this guy particularly:

By all means, this was never meant to be absolutely inclusive, of all three ... philosophy, fandom and football. Having said that there is much that I disagree philosophically with fan's opinions of football.

With the little of the second-hand/third-hand stuff I have come across of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, I may not be on board with them. Adorno .. don't remember coming across this philosopher.

[mjmooney]

Philosophy, you say? OK, let's start with Pythagoras. The first three rules of the Pythagorean Order were: 

1. Never eat beans 

2. Never pick up what has fallen 

3. Never touch a white cock 

I kid you not.