Sports writer kills himself, leaves behind website describing how and why

hodj

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So basically, the only way you can have a non manufactured experience is to risk your life. Except you can do that in a manufactured society every day.

I can walk in front of traffic and get a non manufactured experience.

Stopped drugs, worked hard, all that jazz: fantastic, but that doesn't matter. Your scholarship in whatever and anthropology is great. I have lots of friends in the field, but again it doesn't matter.
Right, nothing anyone else does is valid or real because you said so. Nothing matters except your criteria because...you said so. I know you won't see the arrogance of your statements, but others will, hence why I'm pointing them out. And its anthropology biology and chemistry. What I find funniest about your attempts to discredit anthropology is, of course, its only the most Marxist of all the social sciences. Maybe you should actually look into what post processualism is, how it came about. Interesting to note is its emphasis on...subjectivity of research, and how to mitigate subjectivity bias through the inclusion of multiple viewpoints and fields of study. Its pretty enlightening. Had you had any classes in it, you'd realize how much further the entire social sciences field has moved in the 150 years since Marx. Its a bit like biology and how much its moved forward in the 150 years since Darwin.

but I'm framing the problem of the here and now, not historically why religion or norms of our culture developed generally. I don't care for the moment as it's not important for our task at hand: to realize the pathological social sickness in society today.
This is contradictory, you can't fix an illness if you refuse to recognize the disease.

People do and seek what comforts them. What do you think makes them most comfortable? To belong, to fit in, to be a part of the group.
Sure is blanket statement trying to be applied to 7 billion people at once.

The social psychology of people is the same regardless of the activity being done.
No, the social psychology of people changes from one person to the next. Because people are individuals. In fact, research into this exact area has been conducted extensively between groups of tribes in Africa and other social settings globally and what they find is that people really do feel and behave and interact differently based on their settings. The idea that social psychology is uniform in a world as diverse as to have tribes in the jungle who've never contacted the modern world all the way to gangs in the inner city to the upper echelons of corporate institutions and government institutions, etc. is hilariously bad social science.

Look at someone's brain, and the brains of the members of the group surrounding them, of say, singing at a place of worship and cheering at a sporting event.
I'm going to have to ask: When have you looked at ANYONE'S brain to come to this conclusion? Are you a neuroscientist? Engage in research in the field? Have you attached electrodes to people's brains? No? Then it sounds to me like you're talking out of your ass. But by all means, please, show us CAT scans and the like of the brains of 7 billion people and show how they are all the same and show us the studies which correlate this effect with depression and unhappiness and I'll believe you.

But again, it seems you've another contradiction in your argument, for your argument is that people aren't socially engaged, aren't "genuinely connected" yet....if people in a group are sharing similar brain wave patterns due to their social relatedness in a group, doesn't that pretty well completely refute your argument that they aren't "genuinely connected"? Indeed it does, because the only metric which can possibly be applied to genuine connectedness is how in sync two brains are with one another. You're literally pointing to the one thing that could be considered genuine connectedness and calling it false because you say so.

To not identify the activity being performed and only realize the comfort in being with and as a part of a group performing it is what a sheep is, the very definition.
I'd say the definition of a sheep is simply someone who is easily manipulated.

I never said ALL experiences are manufactured. Listen to my words carefully.
We have been listening to your words. Your words are: Modern society is fake and every experience you have in it is less valid simply by the fact that it was manufactured by people. This can lead to a justified sense of depression and therefore justify suicide

This is false.

It is less real. The qualification of the thing as good or bad is naturalist, but the statement of reality being reality is not. A company's stock is less real, being non-existent, than the bark of a tree.
No, its really not, in fact its more real, because that companies' stock has a real impact on the lives of other humans, while tree bark is relevant only to the tree.

And again you're totally missing the point: the argument is not natural vs. unnatural - it doesn't make a difference. The effect or intent of most of the unnatural (per above) things that we create, the products we produce in modern society, is one in which our feelings and experiences are generated for us and not by us
No, I'm really not. Your point is that modern society is fake and leads to the creation of fake people with fake lives and fake experiences. Its the argument of an arrogant condescending person who does not and will not give anyone but themselves credit for having an actual intellectual thought.

Yes, climbing a mountain or cutting your baby's cord is probably an authentic experience, but the more society 'advances' in terms of this product-commodity psychology of solving our problems, the more we'll feel empty and alone. It's wrong, unhealthy, and fucked up.
Gonna need to see some citation, again, real peer reviewed research that shows that the more products a person owns, the less happy and more unhealthy they are.

A Luddite, Christian Marxist naturalist humanist. That's me! Or you could just say someone looking at reality for what it is, much easier.
Funny, didn't you just say that people choosing to take the easy path were the ones living false, unhappy lives? Yet here you are, telling me I should just take the easier path to assume that your worldview of hyper pessimism is "truth" simply because you said so.

I'm not saying the creation of tools is all bad.
Yes, ultimately, you are, because the society we live in is the end result of hundreds of thousands of years of tool use and making. Commoditization of material reality is the end result of tool making and utilization. Money, homes, cars, jobs, its all because we make tools.

The solution our society proposes to solve ALL human need is the creation of an abstraction of the real medicine, of genuine relatedness to the world and to each other through direct experience.
Seriously. What the fuck does this mean? What the fuck do the words "genuine relatedness to the world and to each other through direct experience" MEAN? Its nice words, but meaningless fluff.

1. You can't solve all human needs and will never be able to. The more human needs you solve, the more human needs will exist.
2. The premise is that modern human social interactions aren't genuine because...manufacturing.

Your conclusion...not supported by your premise. At all.

Its a conclusion without justification.

Thanks for comparing me to Plato, but hardly. Again I'm not making a naturalist argument.
Plato was, of course, not someone a person who has read Plato would actually want to be compared to, since he was a totalitarian and a lover of the elites of his day, an apologist for them, effectively someone who regularly supported the domination of the proles by the elites. Further "Humans aren't having real lives because everything they use and have is manufactured" is the very definition of a naturalist fallacy. That because manufacted goods and human society aren't "natural" in the sense that you've defined them (again, false premise, humans are an integral part of nature and everything we do is simply manipulating nature, not fundamentally altering it into something new) they are bad and a negative influence on our lives. You literally couldn't get more naturalist fallacy if you shit pine cones.

It mostly is superficial bullshit
To the pessimist of course everything appears to be superficial bullshit. That's because you've chosen to see only the worse parts of the world and society out of context with everything else.

There are objective states of mental health just as physical,
No, there aren't, health is not subjective, it is relative to the individual in question, your ideal weight, your ideal calorie consumption, the particulars of your genetics, it all plays a part and what is objectively a healthy state for you is not objectively a healthy state for another.

Two final points.

1. I find it hilarious that a person who quotes Marx chapter and verse tries to discredit the literally hundreds of millions of manhours worth of research conducted over the past 150 years by social scientists, virtually all since the 60s avowed and open Marxists, people who literally went into the social sciences because they read Marx, agreed with his premises and wanted to be directly involved in actual change in people's lives for the positive. People who revolutionized their fields through investment of decades of their lives to research from a Marxist and critical theory perspective, people like Margaret Mead, Claude Levi-Strausse, Boaz, and many many others, far too many to mention at once, when you yourself aren't involved in any research fields and are not actively involved in the real socialist movements of our day, which are entirely built up in the social science departments at our universities.

2. Going back to the fact that social scientists want to create positive change for people. Positive change does not include eschewing our modern society and arrogantly disregarding the feelings, intellectual capacity and lifestyles of the very people they desire to help. Your argument necessarily engages in exactly that sentiment, that others opinions and feelings aren't valid, aren't real, aren't worthy, aren't right, and can't be regarded as truth. Anthropology, especially cultural anthropology, inspired by Marxist doctrine, emphasizes the exact opposite. It emphasizes that individual experiences, lifestyles, relationships and beliefs are, in fact, valid, real, worthy, and most importantlytruthful to the person who holds them.

You could learn a lot from a couple of good cultural anthropology courses. Most importantly how to recognize that others have a right to be heard, to have their opinions and feelings regarded as valid and real things, truth in their perspective, even if it is not in yours. That's really the beauty of anthropology as a field, and what drew me to it, it is holistic, it incorporates every facet of our lives and reality, our culture, our environment, our biology, the interactions between these things and more, into a cohesive whole. That sort of mindset is necessary to comprehend these issues in totality.

Otherwise you end up with a slice of the pie view like you have, with only very slim slivers of the pie being extrapolated out as the whole pie, when the whole pie is the result of billions and trillions of those little slices all compounded over hundreds of thousands and millions of years. When you move out, from the micro to the macro, you begin to see that what's happening is our species is, as always, evolving.
 

Loser Araysar

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Dumar is owning Hodj hard and rustling him good
 

TrollfaceDeux

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i dunno about the mental gymnastic championship but once you set a logical loop where nothing is right, you go into shitty depressive mode. plebeians need simple shit. they need hitler.
 

ZyyzYzzy

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Bets that Dumar works for a lobbyist firm in DC?

Whenever I'm walking in the city from now on and I see a hobo I am going to assume it's Dumar because given his world view I can't see him as anything else in the area.
 

hodj

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i dunno about the mental gymnastic championship but once you set a logical loop where nothing is right, you go into shitty depressive mode. plebeians need simple shit. they need hitler.
Pretty much. Anyone can convince themselves of anything. Hitler convinced himself shoving people into ovens was the best solution for humanity. People convince themselves everyday that a continuing heroin addiction isn't really a problem. I guess if more people convinced themselves suicide was a solution, most of the world's problems would in fact be solved. Lower crime rates, lower population levels, more resources for everyone. I think Tanoomba is the perfect candidate to get the ball rolling.

Dumar is owning Hodj hard and rustling him good
I'm so rustled I went to Chinese class and talked the people's tongue for an hour.
 

Dumar_sl

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1. I find it hilarious that a person who quotes Marx chapter and verse tries to discredit the literally hundreds of millions of manhours worth of research conducted over the past 150 years by social scientists, virtually all since the 60s avowed and open Marxists, people who literally went into the social sciences because they read Marx, agreed with his premises and wanted to be directly involved in actual change in people's lives for the positive. People who revolutionized their fields through investment of decades of their lives to research from a Marxist and critical theory perspective, people like Margaret Mead, Claude Levi-Strausse, Boaz, and many many others, far too many to mention at once, when you yourself aren't involved in any research fields and are not actively involved in the real socialist movements of our day, which are entirely built up in the social science departments at our universities.
Haveyoueven read Marx? And not a survey class reading selections and excerpts, which is likely what you've been exposed to. With this paragraph and others, I don't trust that you have because it's so far off base.

Erich Fromm was a Marxist (Marxian if you prefer): one of thebestinterpreters of Marx's humanistic viewpoints (which is all the rabble you're spewing above) can be found in the works of Fromm. 60s, there you go.

Guy Debord was another great one. So was Gramsci. You think I'm smart enough to come up with these arguments alone? Hardly. They're not mine. All of what I said is taken from Marxian philosophy or from Marx himself.

Do you know what reification is? Hypostatization? Gy?rgy Luk?cs? The whole fucking scholarship of the study of the process by which an abstraction becomes a concrete object in the minds of society? I don't mean to drop vocab and name bombs on you because I'm not in the business of being ivory tower uppity, but bro for serious, you seem completely clueless.This is not anthropology.

Jesus. Have you read the first fucking chapter of Kapital?

Karl Marx_sl said:
As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
How about from the fucking dictionary of Marxist thought? :

Petrovic_sl said:
The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. Reification is a 'special' case of alienation, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society.
If you say yes, Dumar I have, then I am fucking lost on what the hell you're evensayingabove, much less arguing.
 

hodj

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Have youeven readMarx?
That's like Lumie asking me if I've ever read the Bible when I start talking about biology.

It really is a religious doctrine for you.

Newsflash: Your continual attempt to draw on one person's thoughts, solely, as the answer to every debate is the intellectual equivalent of Lumie trying to use Newton and Pasteur as the rebuttal to factual evidence regarding the case for evolution. Marx's contributions to the social and other scientific fields are without doubt, but the way you treat him is effectively an appeal to authority. You can quote him chapter and verse to me and all I'm going to do is continually point out how what you're doing is the literal equivalent of a Jehovah's Witness quoting Genesis and Exodus as rebuttals to scientific evidence for the age of the Earth.

Das Kapital is your Bible. Its been influential in all social sciences, but vast portions of it have been utterly refuted by history and intellectual observation. The very concept of violent revolution as an appropriate means to enact socialism is rejected on its face by the broad body of intellectuals today because every time its been tried its led to catastrophe. When socialism comes, it will come as an end result of the development of technological improvements, the exact superficial, manufactured existence you're decrying.

Also: Your entire post is just name dropping horseshit. Give us all a break and try to have a debate without falling back on your tautological circular reasoning and appeals to authority.
 

fanaskin

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Communism might finally function properly when we have robot slaves for every home.
 

hodj

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Karl Marx said it!
I believe it!
That settles it!

Isn't an argument.

Neither is name dropping a bunch of radical socialist authors and putting them on a pedestal and pretending that everything they have ever said is sacrosact gold from the anus of Christ himself. Give us a break.
 

hodj

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Further proof of my point: His assertion that if you don't agree with his absolute devotion to his religious document, it must mean you've never read it.

Cough cough:

rrr_img_42627.jpg
 

chaos

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Whether or not you have read Marx, this whole argument about "kill yourself because manufactured experiences" is still stupid.
 

fanaskin

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and completely materialistic/exoteric which is exactly why marx is so depressing, there's no esoteric inner directive or free will it's all "you are a robot at the whim of circumstances around you"
 

fanaskin

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because for marxists you don't really have feelings of your own, it's all derived from the materialistic/exoteric world. you don't really have choice or free will, you're really just an automaton that is at the whim of your surroundings.


it's almost as bad as astrology in that you have no free will but a pre determined destiny based on external influences.
 

hodj

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For a guy who rejected and eschewed ALL religion, Marx's followers are like goddamn Mormons with this shit.
 

Loser Araysar

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hodj, just give up bro.

you're clearly out of your element here