I think it is the case that a lot of people don't have any objection to censorship in principle but just want to be the censors. I obviously disagree, regardless of how many dicks on whichever websites are in the authoritarian camp.
@p @Hyolobrika@berserker.town @Onecowstampede @TornadoOfTerror @TrevorGoodchild @teknomunk
I always read Nietzsche after reading Russell for any period of time; he's a fantastic philosopher imo but he was pretty dogmatic in a low-key kinda way.
His chapter on Nietzsche is both funny and revealing (in a ~confession by projection kind of way):
“It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as lordly indifference. His ‘noble’ man - who is himself in day-dreams - is a being wholly devoid of sympathy, ruthless, cunning, cruel, concerned only with his own power. King Lear, on the verge of madness, says: ‘I will do such things-What they are yet I know not—but they shall be The terror of the earth.’ This is Nietzsche’s philosophy in a nutshell.”
@p @Hyolobrika@berserker.town @Onecowstampede @TornadoOfTerror @TrevorGoodchild @teknomunk
Yeah, I'd go a step further and suggest that Russel was blind to the ways that "irrational" behaviours could be productive - he was a very Platonic philosopher in some sense and he failed to see much of the 2nd and 3rd order effects of "evil" as he would characterise it, whereas this aspect of human nature was meat and drink to Nietzsche.
In a nutshell, Russel was the archetypal naive liberal at a time when naive liberalism had great value for society.
@p @Hyolobrika@berserker.town @Onecowstampede @TornadoOfTerror @TrevorGoodchild @teknomunk
> That which Preserves the Species.—The strongest and most evil spirits have hitherto advanced mankind the most: they always rekindled the sleeping passions—all orderly arranged society lulls the passions to sleep; they always reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of de- light in the new, the adventurous, the untried; they compelled men to set opinion against opinion, ideal plan against ideal plan. By means of arms, by upsetting boundary-stones, by violations of piety most of all: but also by new religions and morals! The same kind of ”wickedness” is in every
teacher and preacher of the new—which makes a conqueror infamous, although it expresses itself more refinedly, and does not immediately set the muscles in motion (and just on that account does not make so infamous!) The new, however, is under all circumstances the evil, as that which wants to conquer, which tries to upset the old boundary-stones and the old piety; only the old is the good! The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them, the agriculturists of the spirit. But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more.—There is at present a fundamentally erroneous theory of morals which is much celebrated, **especially in England**: according to it the
judgments ”good” and ”evil” are the accumulation of the experiences of that which is ”expedi- ent” and ”inexpedient”; according to this theory, that which is called good is conservative of the species, what is called evil, however, is detrimental to it. But in reality the evil impulses are just in as high a degree expedient, indispensable, and conservative of the species as the good:—only, their function is different.
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §4
@skells @p @Hyolobrika @Onecowstampede @TornadoOfTerror @TrevorGoodchild @teknomunk
"The strongest and most evil spirits"
I choose to deny the existence of evil, and it's comic co-heart "good."
@Coyote @p @Hyolobrika@berserker.town @Onecowstampede @TornadoOfTerror @TrevorGoodchild @teknomunk good work if you can get it
> King Lear, on the verge of madness, says: ‘I will do such things-What they are yet I know not—but they shall be The terror of the earth.’ This is Nietzsche’s philosophy in a nutshell.
I think you get this already (or at least the "confession by projection" remark makes me think we saw the same thing in that paragraph), but Russell's kind of right, except that it's half the picture, it's the line between good and evil running through the heart of every man. The "no teeth" line really struck me when I saw it the first time. (This is one of the reasons I really liked "A Clockwork Orange", they defang the guy and he's not any less vicious, it just arrests his development.)