The Matrix vs Ghostbusters

Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Zizek's emphasis on the "+" in LGBTQIA+ sorta gets at this, that the next addition to the label is pre-emptively constitutive of the current label.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
And you start thinking, wait. A colony of insects had a problem—let's re-spawn—and they hashed out how to do it, and figured out the best way for them, for their interests. And then they went and did it. Not because they had an antagonism towards the crew of Moya, but because they didn't care. They didn't even consider or think of the crew! It would have been inconvenient to start questioning whether the crew's welfare matters!

And we do this constantly. We do it with plants, for example. It's not that we know, definitely, whether plants feel pain, or have ethical value, either way. We really don't know much at all about the phenomenology of plants, and our conception of ethics is still so immature.

But it would be so deeply inconvenient, to have a world where you have to incorporate the ethical worth of a fucking plant that, well, we don't ever think too hard about it. Many reading this may be offended by the sheer possibility that plants matter ethically, because of what an ethical catastrophe it would make the reader complicit in, were it true.

But that's how tragedies happen. "Evil" is just indifference, at the end of the day.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
suspended said:
One of the great things about Farscape (there are many) is that every time something bad happens to the crew of Moya, they assume it's some agent acting with malevolent intent toward them, someone who's after them, someone trying to destroy them.

But then they realize, actually, some alien is optimizing for their own welfare, without considering the crew. Conflict born not of "evil" but the necessary antagonism of goals: If I take your ethical worth seriously, it makes my optimization problem more difficult.

So, e.g., a bunch of space cockroaches colonize the ship to use for a re-spawn, which threatens hull integrity/internal liveability. The crew keeps insisting they have a virus on board, or some "parasite"—but what's a parasite? Not someone out to "get" their host. Someone who's optimizing for their own well-being and your well-being's just not a part of their considerations.
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Great points, but yeah consideration can take time which can constitute a liability under certain circumstances. A progressive capitalist game theory may help us here, one that may be able even to integrate dialectics as a merely sufficient means of reconciling conflicting interests via policymaking.
 
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
version said:
Yeah, but the point is it's difficult to make that argument whilst also claiming anyone apprehensive about the vaccine is evil/stupid/deserves to die and should be forced to take it or be treated as a second-class citizen.
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Sure, but that in itself is an extreme minority position.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Yeah one of the great boons of standpoint epistemology is that it makes the engine of moral dialectic churn.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
suspended said:
But that's how tragedies happen. "Evil" is just indifference, at the end of the day.
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Yeah so we should avoid abdicating inconsiderate decision-making of its immorality, but on the other hand, as you point out, its not like being evil is necessarily in ones best interest.
 
V

version

Well-known member
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sus

sus

Moderator
Mr. Tea said:
Sure, but that in itself is an extreme minority position.
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Yes, but essentializing groups as "idiotic," or just broadly "bad"/"good" isn't.

People didn't act like Trump voters should be "treated as individuals." There was no interest on the left as to why, contextually, an individual made a decision to vote for Trump. The mere fact that liberals/lefties view Trump as racist, and that a buncha people voted for him anyway, makes that buncha people all racist by extension. I know dozens of incredibly smart young-to-middle-aged lefty-liberals who think this including my parents and several staff editors at major NYC culture publications; it's probably the default coastal Democrat position.

And yet, when someone like Biden or Clinton, who has done their own share of shitty things, comes up, well—these same lefty-liberals are choosing "the lesser evil," making a pragmatic decision. It's not that they support drone strikes in the Middle East.

But it's this exact same, transitive or syllogistic essentializing going on: Y supports Z, X supports Y, so X supports Z. Guess what, politicians and policies are "bundles," they don't stand for or advocate a single position! The liberals go, Well, I had a good reason for supporting my candidate, but they were clearly a racist, that's the only possible reason someone would vote for Trump. (Nevermind he was more isolationist—a single-policy isolationist voter should have voted for Trump over Clinton, and if you estimate that Trump spared us even a single conflict in the Middle East, that might have been a vote to spare hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. So who's looking like the piece of shit now?)

People have lots of priorities, they're balancing tough optimization problems with many constraints, many interests to balance. But essentialization strips all those individual contexts, variations, motivations, values, beliefs, and just makes them all "idiot Trump racists."

Whatever, man.
 
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sus

sus

Moderator
"Horton Hears A Who" is probably the most important anti-colonialist tract of the 20th C.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
In one episode, their ship (which is bio-mechanoid) gets pregnant without the crew's knowledge. She starts getting all crazy hormonal, and the crew is about to rip out her higher reasoning skills to "save" her from a virus.
Zhaan points out that without Pilot, "Moya is out of control." She notes that Moya's showing major chemical surges, which plays nicely into John's whole incorrect "virus" theory. There's an elegant symmetry here to the fact of this assumption that it's death, not life, that she's harboring; that this assumption is being made by the people inside her; that they're all inside Moya for the duration as they grow and change.
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But what're they really doing? They're preserving their own lives. They see, in that which threatens their existence, only "death." But what is actually threatening them? Only other life, seeking to bring itself into existence.
 
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