One hundred and twenty-eight basic archetypes.
I agree, neb: family gatherings are in some inscrutable way boring and stressful at the same time. Comity!
1: Good strip. I plan to start rereading it. I doubt I'll get through it all before the relaunch, though.
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Does anyone know if this scholarship on same-sex marriages in Christian history holds up? Pretty fascinating if so.
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Mumble Borges mumble "In memoriam, J.F.K." mumble now you've gone and ruined it for me, neb mumble.
3: My understanding is that Boswell is not really taken very seriously by other historians of sexuality. (Also, that's some hella flagrant violation of the norm against early threadjacks.)
historians of sexuality
As opposed to asexual historians?
Didn't you make up that norm a few weeks ago? In any case it only applies to threads with topics.
I codified it, but I think a lot of people have long seen it as an implicit norm around here (and some said so at the time). I don't actually think it's that big a deal, personally, but I do think it's a useful norm worth enforcing, and if I have to be the one to enforce it so be it.
And as a general guideline, I'd say that putting something in pause-play indicates an awareness that it is in some sense off-topic for the thread, granting that "topic" is a fuzzy concept in many cases.
8: But surely you didn't mean to include neb's posts? We would never make it to 20 comments.
11: A good point. I may have to think about setting some variable standards.
A little searching suggests that I may have been wrong about Boswell in 5.
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(Is this now also a gay marriage thread?)
Stonewall Was Not a Wedding...Jacobin
This is hardly surprising given the fact that marriage equality is designed to distract liberal consciences and give Democrats political cover to gut social services. While the passage of gay marriage enjoyed the support of prominent campaign donors, it was directly preceded by cuts to homeless shelters for queer youth. It's a campaign season bait-and-switch -- winning votes without making real concessions.Case in point: Bloomberg commended Obama for joining a legacy of "courageous stands that so many Americans have taken over the years on behalf of equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, stretching back to the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village." This days after slashing youth homeless shelter funding by $7 million, in a city where 40% of homeless youth are LGBT.
The article also links to the recent Argentinian Gender Equality Law. Wow. A country not consumed in performative pseudo puke politics
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Let me see, LGBT kid freezing and starving under an overpass...and Hedge Fund Trader marrying her partner in the Hamptons. Ice sculptures. Champagne.
Get back to you loser, after the honeymoon in Dubai. Maybe. Greatest country on earth, though, and fucking terrific President. Obama!!
The name of this delusion is, of course, metempsychosis.
Rimshot?
Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his "self" as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion. (A. S. Byatt, Possession)
I have a past, like any human being, and I know perfectly well that I have a past. I have a respectable amount of factual knowledge about it, and I also remember some of my past experiences 'from the inside', as philosophers say. And yet I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form. Absolutely none. Nor do I have any great or special interest in my past. Nor do I have a great deal of concern for my future. (Galen Strawson, "Against Narrativity")
Most of us are contraptions that we made. (Tom Waits)
The soul as a social structure of drives and affects (Nietzsche).
What's your point?
Metempsychosis
Tme-fucking-sis
Memorable Family Reunions for a thousand, Alex.
Did Strawson the Younger have to meditate long hours to reach that level of nonattachment, or was he just born that way?
20: Interestingly, he claims to naturally be that way. He speculates that a certain percentage of people tend by default to experience their lives in more or less discontinuous ways, rather than as single, unified subjects or selves (whatever that means). I guess if you're feeling a little too continuous, there's always ketamine or family reunions.
I don't really read Strawson as being particularly nonattached—well, maybe on the orientation to the future tip. But about the past, sure; I mean, I'm a slovenly attached pig and all, but I don't have any particular overarching narrative of my life, at least—important proviso!—not the kind of narrative that the people against whom Strawson is there arguing seem to think that you need in order to be a person.
Shouldn't someone mention Derek Parfit now?
I recall reading that Strawson piece years ago, and thinking that he came across as a total dickhead--ok, fine, you're that way, but even a casual glance at the psychologyl literature should show that: (a) you're an outlier; and (b) narrativity is a property of many folks' experience of agency that makes a difference; interventions to help change the story that folks' tell about their own lives are sometimes quite useful for changing behavior.
I don't think he has to deny (b) at all, especially not the therapeutic part of (b). Though it's been a while since I read it.
16: the name of this delusion is, of course, The Aristocrats.
At such gatherings one gets a keen sense of the family "look", and the general family mode of behavior.
I can't say this rings true for me. My last proper family reunion involved branches of the family from four continents and vastly separated (phycially and culturally) parts of the USA. So, especially for the younger generation, there was a lot of culturally introduced behavioural distance. None of my cousins on that side of the family are particularly alike.
25: Darn! I wanted to show off that I still remember something from my Intro to Philosophy class freshman year. My philosophy TA would be so proud!
28: In truth this post was a tissue of lies, and exists solely for the sake of what I am pleased to call its punchline.
30: I wondered about that, because it didn't resonate at all with my experience of family reunions.
I also don't get the punchline, but that's another matter.
I think we're supposed to read the last remark as 'met him psychosis'.
I wonder what the greatest possible ratio of set up to punchline is.
3.2: Hegel, possibly. "Only one man has understood me, and he got it wrong." (Or some variant thereof.)
Also, it should be "met 'em psychosis".
34: Hmm, I almost mentioned The Hunger Artist despite its "relative shortness" (per some internet wag), but was unaware of the Hegel post.
And I see that close reading continues! Plus the Bristlecone pine post was actually readable and comprehensible. ++, would visit blog again.
I have a surprisingly clear memory that my first encounter with the word "metempsychosis" was in the Super Nintendo game Soul Blazer in the early 90s. The final boss gives a little lecture on transmigration of the soul before attacking our hero. Also, he had no apparent "life meter" and was almost impossible to defeat, leading me to think the game wasn't winnable and thus was trying to teach some kind of bleak lesson about the inevitability of death, which impressed young-and-apparently-emo-me. I was shocked and disappointed when one of my friends finally beat the game.
The Singularity will change everything.
That just means you're the product.