YouTube Video: Opposing Nature

A new Adam Curtis-style video, based on Opposing Nature: Life's Meaning in the Monstrous Universe.

Video: The Heartless Vision of Nature

Here's a movie I made based on Stultified by Reason: The Heartless Vision of Nature. Unfortunately, the movie may not play on some devices (maybe mobile phones and video consoles), because it was flagged for copyrighted content; I used excerpts from some well-known movies to make my points, which is supposed to be allowed under fair-use laws. This is evidently some corporate-friendly compromise I didn't know about. 

Anyway, from now on the movies I'll make will be shorter and won't use clips from major motion pictures. The next one will be based on Opposing Nature: Life's Meaning in a Monstrous Universe.

Documentary Film Teaser

To the left is a teaser picture of something I've been working on. It's the introductory sequence of an Adam Curtis-style documentary tentatively called "The Horror of Life's Meaning: From Eastern and Western Religions to Liberal Humanism." The movie pulls together some themes from my blog and adds some ideas I haven't written about yet, especially with regard to monotheistic religions, and it will be around three hours when it's done. By "Adam Curtis-style" I mean that it's mainly a collage of archival clips with music and me talking in the background.

Mystical vs Modern Enlightenment: Eckhart Tolle and the Undead God

In this YouTube video, I compare mystical and modern enlightenment and I criticize mostly Eckhart Tolle's kind of spirituality, but also the modern kind of wisdom (secular humanism).

Hopefully, one of these days I'll figure out how to fix the focus problem with my camcorder, although it's not so bad in this video. I think maybe I have to sit farther out from the background wall...

Anyway, cheers!

Guns are for Sissies

Here’s my new YouTube video, which looks again at the American gun cult and the sissification of postmodern men.

And below the video are the notes I used to prepare for this video

Cheers!

American gun culture, but more like a cult: Hollywood myths of power, manliness, and heroism (Westerns, gun fights, meme of American military “performing brilliantly” (22,000 hits on Google)); cops and robbers TV shows, NRA, survivalism, and Christian apocalypse fundamentalism; mysterious in Canada, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere which don’t celebrate guns; Question: Why is the gun cult an American phenomenon? Two-part answer: (1) the US is conservative, whereas most modern societies are more liberal, and conservatives pride themselves on being more masculine (authoritarian, honourable, absolutist; see Jonathan Haidt); (2) the US is the most powerful country so the power spills into its culture and Americans reconcile themselves to their domination with militaristic myths, which entail the worship of guns

Question: Why is the gun culture grotesque and pathetic? Two incomplete answers: (1) Feminization, emasculation thesis (Bill Maher and Fight Club novel and movie): rise of women and machines (globalization); men can’t compete and have lose their sense of masculinity; the gun cult is meant to restore or protect masculine values, whereas masculinity in modern societies is clearly in decline; (2) Freudian gun-as-substitute-penis thesis

Gun cult fails to reenergize men, because guns are for sissies: guns don’t augment martial virtues or inspire masculine heroism, since guns kill in a relatively cowardly fashion, allowing the shooter to kill from a position of complete safety, as in sniping and drones; the gun does most of the work and merely has to be triggered with a finger flick to shoot; compare with ancient bow and arrow and spear, the difference being that in the ancient world, men used those weapons to hunt (to kill for their own food); even when they used those weapons in war, their cultures were authentically masculine, because they didn’t have machine as slaves to take care of the necessities of life; compare Bill Maher’s statement that the 911 terrorists weren’t cowardly, contrary to what the US politicians said (the terrorists were infantile, deluded, and irrational, but not cowardly, since they obviously put themselves in harm’s way as they killed their so-called enemies, as opposed to shooting from a distance)

Manly weapons are swords, knives, or fists, since it’s much harder to kill without putting yourself in jeopardy; true, whenever almost everyone has a gun, as in the US, no one is safe, but you still don’t have to get your hands dirty when you shoot, versus killing an animal with a spear, which teaches you the horror of death (similar to the two views of war, those of soldiers and civilian politicians: the more distance you have from war, the more gung-ho you tend to be, since you’re ignorant); the gun dual is meant to make the fight perfectly fair, but it still doesn’t teach masculine virtues, since it makes the fight turn on a flip of a coin; in modern war too, it’s mostly a matter of luck whether you get shot since bullets fly from all directions, as WWII soldiers found out when they stormed the beaches (low US casualty rates recently, since it doesn’t fight real wars against near-equals)

Rise of mixed martial arts addresses the poverty of the gun cult, since fist-fighting obviously takes more heroic kinds of courage and skill

Gun cult an indicator, then, of modern decadence: impotent, doomed defense of manliness; absurdity of bragging about gun collections or killing in gang warfare, because that modern weapon makes you less of a man; it doesn’t teach you humility or honour; it makes you a monster (psychopath), a coward, or PTSD victim (if you experience the chaotic, dehumanizing nature of modern mechanized warfare)

Anthropocentrism and Misanthropy

Here's my new YouTube video, called Anthropocentrism and Misanthropy. Yes, it's kind of a mouth full.

Below the video you'll find some notes I used to prepare for the video.

Enjoy!

Anthropocentrism: core embarrassment of theism, the most basic, untenable aspect; i.e. injecting human nature into the answers to our ultimate questions, typically by personifying the First Cause, that which completes all explanation; this is no longer tenable after the modern period and especially after the Scientific Revolution; there were ancient checks on animism and anthropocentrism such as Greek or Indian skepticism as well as the mystical traditions in the great religions and an appreciation of natural cycles (in Egyptian and Chinese cultures, etc) which decentralizes us, but that decentralization/humiliation (bringing us down to Earth) is made intellectually necessary after modern technoscience, which shows us the alien/inhuman scope of the natural universe; vestige of anthropocentrism in psychologism and metaphysical idealism, as in mentalist interpretations of quantum mechanics, but QM already has an alien logic, so any consciousness/observation which is fundamental isn’t given a commonsense meaning

Q: Does atheism avoid the trap of anthropocentrism? A: Not necessarily, since secular humanists make human nature central, replacing God with people as the measure of all things; values become subjective, we become the center of our artificial worlds which technoscience produces, and humanists regard this as progressive; so while we’re no longer crucial to all of nature or to the First Cause, we’re still ultimately important for the humanist in so far as we merit human rights and establish all normative values; we become metaphysically dependent on impersonal forces and systems, given the humanist’s naturalism, but we nevertheless become central to our worldviews, if not to the world itself, given the humanist’s optimism; human interests and values predominate in liberal humanistic atheism, by definition of “humanism”; e.g. in the humanities we study ourselves (history, anthropology, psychology, etc) to fulfill the ancient obligation to know ourselves and thus to be wise

Debate with YouTube Antinatalist, Inmendham

This written response to Inmendham's (INM's) aborted response to my video "Nihilism or Transcendence?" will finish up my exchange with him—for the time being, at least. Here's his video:



And here's my point-by-point reply, written in note form (the times given from the video are approximate):

1:00 INM: Living things are merely machines competing to replicate the DNA molecule; that’s our natural function; BC: that is what animals tend to do, at some level of explanation, but there’s nothing objectively right or wrong about that function; this is why INM’s anthropomorphic game metaphor is misleading; in any case, humans are clearly unlike other animals in that we’ve gained more self-control so that we’ve partially transcended that primitive function; INM commits the genetic fallacy when he reduces all human behaviour to its evolutionary origin in some primitive function; “magic” isn’t needed for this transcendence, since natural forces and systems plainly add levels to themselves through evolution and complexification; INM fails to understand the implications of nature’s evident creativity

1:30 INM: some animals are also conscious and so they feel pleasure and pain and the ratio of those mental states is unfair; BC: here INM commits the naturalistic fallacy, since he hasn’t shown that pleasure and pain are really good or bad; his reductionistic naturalism implies only that animals subjectively care about their pleasure and pain, but that’s just another natural fact that has no normative implications; what INM needs is a normative axiom or principle that isn’t identical to any statement of mere fact, but that would be tantamount to conceding my point about how nature transcends itself—in this case by adding a normative dimension to the factual one

2:20 INM: BC says life is worth living, but he has the “right” to say that only because he’s an “arrogant optimist”; BC: INM hasn’t shown how anything in nature is right or wrong, so his talk of anyone having the right to do anything is vacuous, as far as his worldview is concerned; until he comprehends how nature transcends itself, thus falsifying his reductionism, his moralistic naturalism will be incoherent and he won’t be logically entitled to his AN (i.e. to his condemnation of procreation)

Nihilism or Transcendence? A Reply to Inmendham

Here's my video response to Inmendham's four-part response to my video critique of his radical pessimism and antinatalism. And below you'll find the first part of his multipart response and my point-by-point response I typed up but didn't go into fully in this nevertheless long video reply.

Update: below you'll also find Inmendham's embarrassingly impatient and ignorant video response to my "Nihilism or Transcendence" video.

 

  
My Written Reply to Inmendham's Four-Part Response:

Clarification of and apology for my Radical Pessimism video’s definition of AN: AN is the view that procreation is normatively wrong, but I defined AN at the start of my video in a confusing and contentious way. I had a reason for doing so, namely an argument in an article I’d written months before making that video, which argues for the view that antinatalists are on a slippery slope to being opposed to life more generally; incidentally, some of INM’s comments in his reply support that slippery-slope argument and thus my extended definition, even though he also criticizes my definition for being misleading. Moreover, not one of my video’s objections to ultra-pessimism or AN depend on the extended definition (those objections being about consequentialism, the ratio of pleasure to pain, and transcendence in culture, given what Inmendham (INM) presupposes, namely objective reason and normative values). Still, that was my bad.

INM’s method: INM employs the point-by-point method (where you reply separately to every single point—or even sentence or sentence fragment—made in some text or video)—but with a YouTube twist, since YouTubers have a sentimental fetish for first impressions; those impressions are important in mating, but not so much in philosophy; written debates or at least discussions in which each side thinks about what the other has said before responding are far more useful; ideally, you’d want a synoptic view of some part of an argument and then you’d want to prioritize your responses based on your understanding of the logic of the overall argument; even better, you’d want to respond to opposing arguments like a philosopher, engaging in a constructive and cooperative dialogue to discover the truth, even going so far as to help build up your opponent’s argument, which is what I try to do in the first 18 minutes of my video on radical pessimism and AN; this is, of course, the opposite of the bullying, pwning style that produces anti-philosophical competitions, catering to teenaged YouTubers with their infantilized attention spans

Critique of Inmendham's Radical Pessimism

Here's my newest YouTube video, Critique of Inmendham's Radical Pessimism. It raises different objections to antinatalism from those you'll find in my article on the subject. This video was supposed to be up a few days ago, but I had to perform Herculean labours to overcome the software obstacles that were thrown in my way. I shan't bore you with the details of that saga. Needless to say, I performed those labours because I'm proud of this video—it's 57 minutes too!—and I wanted someone other than me to see it. 



My main source of info on Inmendham's extreme pessimism is a two-part YouTube dialogue between him and someone I call "the psychologist," because I couldn't remember his name. This other person is Corey Anton and he's more of a philosopher than a psychologist. He works in communication theory, semiotics, and phenomenology, among some other areas.

Also, I define "antinatalism" (AN) early on in the video. Strictly speaking, AN is just the view that we shouldn't have children, because doing so is immoral, given that the suffering which is produced outweighs the pleasure. The essence of AN, though, is extreme pessimism on all fronts and this pessimism has some other implications. For example, it should be just as immoral to allow all of the other animal species to go on reproducing, since they suffer too. So as long as we could find some way to kill all life relatively painlessly, that immoral act would produce the superior good of ending all of the future suffering that would have otherwise happened. Thus, AN is really about the purposeful termination of all life, as I see it. That's what's at stake when we contemplate this most extreme kind of pessimism.

Lastly, at around the 32 minute mark the video got divided into two parts and I lost a half a second of audio. The full sentence that gets partially cut out there is "No one knows whether there's more pain than pleasure."

I've also added a way to register with this blog so you'll get emails alerting you to new posts. I've tested it out and it works. You get the email sometime on the day there's a new post, but not as soon as the post is up. The registration box is located just below the Facebook icons on the right and above Recent Comments.

Update: Inmendham has responded to my critique with a four-part video beginning with this one:

 

Oh, and here are the notes of mine that I drew from in preparing for this video discussion, which were too long to add below the video on YouTube:

********

Inmendham’s Argument for Antinatalism:

Intelligence vs nature:

Intelligence informs us of the truth, thanks to science and philosophy, but reason comes with emotion and motive (thus Inmendham gets angry and doesn’t present mere logical arguments or calculations)

Happiness is for Sheep

Here's my third YouTube video. It's called Happiness is for Sheep. 

I finally figured out the basics of my camcorder, so there are no camera screw-ups in this video (volume or fade-out issues).

Cheers!
 

Exoteric and Esoteric Atheism

Here's my second YouTube video. I fixed the volume and lighting problems, but this time the camera faded out several times. At its worst, the loss of camera focus happens for several seconds, so it's not too bad (it's a 30 minute video), but it threw me off a couple of times. I should have this figured out for next time.

The next video will be on the goal of happiness.

Also, I added a few more satirical reports below.

Cheers!

RWUG on YouTube!

Here’s my first YouTube video, also embedded below, in which I explain why we’re all in the undead god. Sorry about the lighting and volume level. They’re not too bad but they’ll be improved for the next video, which will be about two kinds of atheism. 

The first several seconds after the titles of this first video show me seemingly at a loss for words. I was thinking of how to start the video off. The silence went on for around a minute and I cut most of it out but decided to leave some of it in because of how amusing it looks. It looks like I’m choking, to use the rapper’s lingo.