Thursday, April 1, 2021

Anglobraining

 English men are still slaves of empiricism. Which means they get an allergic reaction reaction you ask them to generalize about something. This is the legacy of William of Ockham*, where there are no universals in nature. Englishmen by nature do not believe in universals.

"So you end up with these trivialities - they're good at trivialities. The best example would be logical positivism, the end of philosophy, which is the direct heir of William of Ockham as well."

E. Michael Jones in his Degenerate Moderns Brazilian Edition interview

*Link is to the best & most succinct explanation of Ockham's denunciation of universals.

One of the most annoying and constant features of philosophizing in English is the constant pushback against coming to any general conclusions or universals; there is always the desire to find some exception, or to dream up some absurd hypothetical that uncharitably bypasses normal interpretations of the opposition's arguments. Everything has to be couched in such perfect language because there is no longer any principle of charity, nor any desire to actually attack the content of the argument head-on

Let us refer to the act of seeking out edge cases & absurd hypotheticals to bypass universals and normal lines of argument as Anglobraining. It is the effort to turn everything into a discussion about trivialities and exceptions, making either universals or grander logical arguments irrelevant, and the desire to shrimp out of any such arguments, seeing them as impossible or improperly setup. 


One of the First & Most Important Anglibrainers: William of Ockham; note the massive Angloschnoz.

Everything is premised on the world being dominated by a materialistic unreality. By unreality, we mean something that fails to be constant or measurable because the second we put our finger down on it it begins to vanish before our eyes. Everything is reduced to nihil because the anglobrainer will literally drag you into quantum mechanics before he is willing to concede that universals or rationality can provide us with enough to have an actual discussion.

Perhaps a terrific example of this is how any discussion about gender esssentialism has to be completely derailed by the existence of intersex peoples. By intersex, of course, we mean an actual definition of people whose chromosomal sex is inconsistent with their phenotype, which occurs in 0.018% of the population (PubMed).

Of course it is not the case that intersex people are completely irrelevant to a discussion on gender essentialism. They are certainly a category which must be accounted for in an essentialist's position, but most people tend to believe that if something is applicable to 99.9% of people, it is quite insightful of a measure for humans in general. The exception to the rule does not break the rule, it affirms the rule. The rule points out the anomalous, which makes it a good rule, and that which fails to conform to this rule is something that has to be addressed in light of the rule. 

If a species no longer fits into the same genus, the structure of the family is not broken; the system simply refined. But the Anglobrain would have you believe that the very idea of taxonomic rank must be done away with. 

Some people are born blind. We do not let that change our ideas about how eyes should function because, maybe, it is unfair to people born blind to say that they should function at all. Likewise, people who are born with irregularities in their manifestation of sexual characteristics are not viewed as something that should throw an entire wrench into how we should view sexual functionality in humans. 

But the Anglobrain thinks that all talk of essentialism must be called off if there is any sort of complaint to be made against a model based on universals. 

Gender isn't real because we can't empirically conclude that sex is even necessarily real since intersex people exist. 

The same can be applied to discussions about morality. 

A man cannot say we shouldn't change the names of historic buildings in response to a story about General Lee's name being removed from something because he would certainly support changing the name of a campus building named after the historically relatively insignificant pedophile who that donated to have it built, as in the case of Sir Ron Bierley and Wellington College.

Moreover, we are supposed to be forever hung up on the problem of thou shalt not kill  and thou shalt not steal because of arguments about self-defense and Robin Hood. Conversation is never allowed to advance into a rich discussion of ethics because we cannot get over the fact that the language has not been meticulously assembled with nano-optical tweezers & microscopes.

The anglobrain wants every inch of every argument to be painstakingly defined because he has one move: insert the edge case; attack the universal

But it is ultimately not the duty of the writer to turn every broadly philosophical work into a narrow, analytical philosophical paper. It is the job of the reader to understand the core of the argument, and then to make a case corresponding to the argument, pointing out any potential common ground, and pointing out important differences. 

This does not suit some people, though, because they dislike the idea of philosophy being between competing systems for understanding the world that try to navigate a common reality

Their version of philosophy does not include usable universals, thus is not a common reality to be navigated. It's a battlefield of atomized individuals which do not contribute to any whole, but only live out a solitary existence in a world of fog. 

Anglobraining is derailing everything with postmodernity and races toward antinomianism.

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