[MP-Ryan]

Yeah, that's equally possible. There are some things out there that are quite "soft", and I'm happy to agree with that assessment, and join your skepticism. But it's not that I've heard a better and even, gasp, sympathetic to the priests, explanation of this utter puzzling and barbaric phenomena.

How about this:  denying that Homo sapiens is a species that includes sexual activity in a wide range of behaviours (and not just exclusive to reproduction) and attempting to [forcibly] abolish those behaviours may lead to their hidden expression in ways that are socially deviant.

No sociophilosophical bull**** required.  In fact, that is testable (in a practical sense, if not ethical).

[General Battuta]

Jesus Christ have you seen the things chimpanzees do to frogs

that **** is ****ed up

[Luis Dias]

Hey, MP, if you leave out your irritation and actually read what I wrote, then you'll see that you are just repeating what I said previously, with the exception that "my" explanation was more complete, since I started to write with that obviosity in mind. Here, let me help you in your reading exercise:

It had all to do with the internal culture among sexually repressed priests.

Mkay?

[Luis Dias]

Jesus Christ have you seen the things chimpanzees do to frogs

that **** is ****ed up

omg, what you made me seee MY EEEEYEESSS

[MP-Ryan]

Hey, MP, if you leave out your irritation and actually read what I wrote, then you'll see that you are just repeating what I said previously, with the exception that "my" explanation was more complete, since I started to write with that obviosity in mind. Here, let me help you in your reading exercise:

No, you're explanation talked about tribalism, philosophy, internal culture, and groups.  And not one shred of it is remotely testable.  It's philosophical babbling at it's finest.  Let me quote it, again:

... and rightly so... religious "fundamentalism" had little to do with the sexual scandal within the catholic church. It had all to do with the internal culture among sexually repressed priests. Zizek talked about this, and I agree with him that such phenomena has to do with a barbaric aspect of human tribalism, which is whenever you enter a kind of a group, you have to indulge in practices that are anthitethical to the deontological aspects of the group itself, secretly and humiliatingly. This humiliation is required, so you are accepted as "one of them". Unfortunately, in priesthood, it seems that the selected practice is child abuse. This is a complex phenomena, but we are derailing the thread

By contrast, what I've written talks about biology and behaviour, both of which are observable and testable experimentally [EDIT: and note I'm merely saying my hypothesis is testable, not necessarily correct.].  The two are not even remotely alike.

And our primate cousins undoubtedly have some "normal" sexual behaviours that look mighty strange to us, but I imagine they might look at humans and just think we're boring   For the second time this month, I'll just say that bonobos seem to have the right general idea

[Mustang19]

Mustang talked about this too and he said that whenever you can't make it in the real world, you have to indulge in unsupported assertions using words like antithetical outside the vocabulary skills of your average college hipster audience itself, secretly and unfalsifiably. Making unsupported claims disputing the unsupported claims of other philosophers is required, so everyone becomes "a tenured cultural studies professor".

But it's not that I've heard a better and even, gasp, sympathetic to the priests, explanation of this utter puzzling and barbaric phenomena.

How about, um, a more parsimonious explanation such as the priests took advantage of the power over clueless children they had just like anyone else in their position would?

[General Battuta]

Mustang talked about this too and he said that whenever you can't make it in the real world, you have to indulge in unsupported assertions using words like antithetical outside the vocabulary skills of your average college hipster audience itself, secretly and unfalsifiably. Making unsupported claims disputing the unsupported claims of other philosophers is required, so everyone becomes "a tenured cultural studies professor".

Look, I don't think that's a valid critique. The fact is that philosophy is performative. Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.

[MP-Ryan]

using words like antithetical outside the vocabulary skills of your average college hipster audience itself

This, tangentially, reminds me:  I'm a well-educated fellow, but I'm getting really tired of reading Luis' posts with a Google tab and a dictionary tab open ready adjacent to HLP in Firefox.  Seriously.  Obscure terminology does not make one's points valid, just painful to read.

Look, I don't think that's a valid critique. The fact is that philosophy is performative. Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.

I said it more concisely, although with considerably less irony

[Mustang19]

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms.

Nope. No norms required.

but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.

Then what the hell else determines it?

Your reasoning appears to be as follows.

B follows A.

C follows B.

D follows B.

Therefore, A follows pancakes.

[MP-Ryan]

Therefore, A follows pancakes.

Only if there's maple syrup involved.  Otherwise, I'm having no part of A.

[Luis Dias]

By contrast, what I've written talks about biology and behaviour, both of which are observable and testable experimentally [EDIT: and note I'm merely saying my hypothesis is testable, not necessarily correct.].  The two are not even remotely alike.

I don't see how Zizek's thesis isn't testable. At least as hard as your thesis is to test. I actually believe in his thesis prima facie because it quite agrees with my life's experience with behavior observations of different groups that I've seen since I was a child. To enter a group, sometimes you seem to need to enter some kind of humilating praxis to get your new "friend's" approval. It's like a personal sacrifice. You are sacrificing your pride (in the priest's case, their moral authority between one another!) in front of your comrades, and it's like a new dirty secret that binds you more into the group.

And our primate cousins undoubtedly have some "normal" sexual behaviours that look mighty strange to us, but I imagine they might look at humans and just think we're boring   For the second time this month, I'll just say that bonobos seem to have the right general idea

I don't think they think at all. Sometimes, that's an advantage!

[Mustang19]

sometimes

Sometimes != all the time (as in the original quote)

 

Look, I don't think that's a valid critique. The fact is that philosophy is performative. Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.

Actually Mr Zizek Mouthpiece I see what you did there. You repeated exactly what I just said except less clearly and with a "you're wrong" disclaimer at the beginning. Beautiful.

[Luis Dias]

Look, I don't think that's a valid critique. The fact is that philosophy is performative. Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.

Man this quote is full of win!!

MP, it's not my problem if I happen to use certain words that are less obscure in portuguese than in english, and it's not an attempt to obscurantirizate my speech, bkay?

If you guys want, I'll try to speak like a teenager, like, stuff, or smth.

[General Battuta]

sometimes

Sometimes != all the time (as in the original quote)

 

Look, I don't think that's a valid critique. The fact is that philosophy is performative. Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.

Actually Mr Zizek Mouthpiece I see what you did there. You repeated exactly what I just said except less clearly and with a "you're wrong" disclaimer at the beginning. Beautiful.

I just want to make sure you see what I actually did there

(it was butler)

[MP-Ryan]

I don't see how Zizek's thesis isn't testable. At least as hard as your thesis is to test. I actually believe in his thesis prima facie because it quite agrees with my life's experience with behavior observations of different groups that I've seen since I was a child. To enter a group, sometimes you seem to need to enter some kind of humilating praxis to get your new "friend's" approval. It's like a personal sacrifice. You are sacrificing your pride (in the priest's case, their moral authority between one another!) in front of your comrades, and it's like a new dirty secret that binds you more into the group.

Prove it.  Or rather, since one can't "prove" a hypothesis, design an experiment to collect evidence in support of it.  Prima facie arguments have no credibility [edit]and no relevance[/edit] anywhere other than law and philosophy.

(Not going to bother picking apart the flawed interpretation that all priests are aware the sexual abuse by other individual priests, as I'm confident that no experimental design is going to provide a ladder out of Luis' well-dug hole in the first place).

[Luis Dias]

I don't see how Zizek's thesis isn't testable. At least as hard as your thesis is to test. I actually believe in his thesis prima facie because it quite agrees with my life's experience with behavior observations of different groups that I've seen since I was a child. To enter a group, sometimes you seem to need to enter some kind of humilating praxis to get your new "friend's" approval. It's like a personal sacrifice. You are sacrificing your pride (in the priest's case, their moral authority between one another!) in front of your comrades, and it's like a new dirty secret that binds you more into the group.

Prove it.  Or rather, since one can't "prove" a hypothesis, design an experiment to collect evidence in support of it.  Prima facie arguments have no credibility anywhere other than law and philosophy.

Sure. Just collect evidence from these kinds of groups and see what their "more secret" practices involve. This thesis predicts that if a certain group that shares a kind of repression that is typical of its image will have "secret" practices that run counter to this image. So I fail to see where the difficulty lies. Zizek has a mouthful of examples, I don't remember them too well to defend them...

(Not going to bother picking apart the flawed interpretation that all priests are aware the sexual abuse by other individual priests, as I'm confident that no experimental design is going to provide a ladder out of Luis' well-dug hole in the first place).

The fact that the institution repeatedly protected their own priests in their scandalous behaviors, despite that it was something that was blatantly against the very definition of priesthood, you know, someone you could trust for their moral authority, is a very hard evidence going for not only Zizek's thesis, but also the fact that many priests knew what the hell was going on.

[General Battuta]

Prove it.  Or rather, since one can't "prove" a hypothesis, design an experiment to collect evidence in support of it.  Prima facie arguments have no credibility anywhere other than law and philosophy.

Sure. Just collect evidence from these kinds of groups and see what their "more secret" practices involve. This thesis predicts that if a certain group that shares a kind of repression that is typical of its image will have "secret" practices that run counter to this image. So I fail to see where the difficulty lies. Zizek has a mouthful of examples, I don't remember them too well to defend them...

Man I hope you don't think that's an experiment.

[Luis Dias]

Yeah that was stupid. It's called verification.

[MP-Ryan]

Yeah that was stupid. It's called verification.

It's not even verification.  You can't [scientifically] verify something that hasn't ever been tested.  You vaguely suggested collecting evidence.  How, what, when, where - and most importantly, why does it support the hypothesis?

The fact that the institution repeatedly protected their own priests in their scandalous behaviors

Doesn't mean that all, a majority, or even a significant percentage of individual priests participated in the behaviour or knew about it.  The assertion that this was a secret practice of the group suffers from logical inconsistency: the group must participate.  You have no facts to bear this out (nor do such statistics exist).  If you're going to argue that a practice is a ritual that promotes group membership, you'd better have some hard facts that the group actually engages in said practice.

Without those facts, you can't even begin to test your earlier statements (which are not a hypothesis, because they aren't testable) - and as such, we're back to its status as sociophilosophical bull****.

When you've got something resembling a position based on testable science, post it.

[Luis Dias]

Yeah that was stupid. It's called verification.

It's not even verification.  You can't [scientifically] verify something that hasn't ever been tested.  You vaguely suggested collecting evidence.  How, what, when, where - and most importantly, why does it support the hypothesis?

Again, if you observe groups and you fail repeatedly to see the kind of activity I'm suggesting, then consider it falsified.

The fact that the institution repeatedly protected their own priests in their scandalous behaviors

Doesn't mean that all, a majority, or even a significant percentage of individual priests participated in the behaviour or knew about it.  The assertion that this was a secret practice of the group suffers from logical inconsistency: the group must participate.  You have no facts to bear this out (nor do such statistics exist).  If you're going to argue that a practice is a ritual that promotes group membership, you'd better have some hard facts that the group actually engages in said practice.

The group participated in protecting their priests. It's supporting evidence, but sure it isn't sufficient.

Without those facts, you can't even begin to test your earlier statements (which are not a hypothesis, because they aren't testable) - and as such, we're back to its status as sociophilosophical bull****.

Yeah whatever dude. Like I said, it's not as if I buy it wholesale.