Hello Continental Philosophers

SYNTHESIS

Postmodernism isn't anti-Enlightenment as such. It's Enlightenment brought to its dialectical conclusion.

The issue, OP, is not reason as a whole but instrumental reason and scientism. Dominating the fear of the unknown quickly turns to the domination of nature, which turns the domination of nature within man, which turns to the domination of man by man.

Polio vaccines are great. Concentration camps not so much.

Fuck postmodernism, fuck identity politics and fuck their screwing around playing word games and not taking anything seriously. Postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism.

Marx was a product of the enlightenment and the dream of a free, classless society without poverty and without alienation is the ultimate fulfillment of the enlightenment ideal.

postmodernism only allows art as long as it's liberal democracy

I wish people on this board actually knew what post-modernism is.

Post-modernism has done nothing wrong except be supported by the wrong crowd

Socialism is the most Enlightenment philosophy there is ; equating it with classical liberalism shows a lack of understanding of its basic principles. Indeed, it is the conclusion of liberalism. Enlightenment philosophers stressed the capacity of men to create a society based on reason. So great was their faith in the agency of human beings that they resented all hierarchies that they could see, and broke through the apologetics of the previous order that set itself up as natural. And liberal capitalism has, for sure, destroyed many forms of oppression basing themselves on feudal relations. It has mercilessly attacked all traditions that foster its economic development. However, it has cemented hierarchies of its own in the process. The Reason that so many Enlightenment thinkers spoke about has taken a definite form, that of the market mechanism. When reading the apologetics of the current order, it is impossible to miss their idealisation of the "perfectly competitive" market, the ultimate aim of the supply/demand equilibrium, the amazing capacity of unregulated producers to amass wealth.
We are told that intervening in the free market leads to disaster ; that human selfishness takes on a special form in the combined mechanism of the economy, leading to a positive result for all involed. We are told that workers need incentives to create all the wealth that we share in, so it is just to cut those welfare programs that stifle the workings of the marker. Non-western countries are urged to adopt these policies, conveniently ignoring how their anglophone masters amassed their wealth through interventionism in the first place.
This is not Enlightenment thinking, it is the ideological superstructure of the dominant mode of production. Its defenders have learned from past mistakes and are able to postpone their demise with greater force than any previous economic order. Meanwhile, the Enlightenment spirit is carried by the socialists and the anarchists. To proclaim that we do not need this market mechanism any longer, that we can rationally carry out production and distribution of our resources to benefit all members of society, that the current order constrains man's potential and puts him under a master of his own making, is the true inheritor of the Enlightenment.

fascism is intertwined far more tightly to the post-modern than liberalism or socialism, some public intellectuals of the age like Heidegger viewed fascism as an answer or the logical conclusion to the post-modern world.
"I will not apologise for nazism, nazis should apologise to me"

History supports this line of thinking. Socialism has carried the torch of the Enlightenment through its periods of weakness in the late 19th century and in the interwar period.

Socialism is nothing but the logical conclusion of enlightenment thought.

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youre right, the movement that created science has nothing to do with the generation of science

i wish i was as smart as you

this tbh

how much science has carl of swindon done lately?

World Bank poverty stats are bullshit btw, they continually manipulate the metric to make it appear as if poverty is falling, when in reality they have actually lowered the poverty line in terms of real dollars over time

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It took this long for someone to point out that the OP image is bullshit. This board sucks.

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aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-great-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html

The received wisdom comes to us from all directions: Poverty rates are declining and extreme poverty will soon be eradicated. The World Bank, the governments of wealthy countries, and - most importantly - the United Nations Millennium Campaign all agree on this narrative. Relax, they tell us. The world is getting better, thanks to the spread of free market capitalism and western aid. Development is working, and soon, one day in the very near future, poverty will be no more.

It is a comforting story, but unfortunately it is just not true. Poverty is not disappearing as quickly as they say. In fact, according to some measures, poverty has been getting significantly worse. If we are to be serious about eradicating poverty, we need to cut through the sugarcoating and face up to some hard facts.

The most powerful expression of the poverty reduction narrative comes from the UN's Millennium Campaign. Building on the Millennium Declaration of 2000, the Campaign's main goal has been to reduce global poverty by half by 2015 - an objective that it proudly claims to have achieved ahead of schedule. But if we look beyond the celebratory rhetoric, it becomes clear that this assertion is deeply misleading.

The world's governments first pledged to end extreme poverty during the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996. They committed to reducing the number of undernourished people by half before 2015, which, given the population at the time, meant slashing the poverty headcount by 836 million. Many critics claimed that this goal was inadequate given that, with the right redistributive policies, extreme poverty could be ended much more quickly.

But instead of making the goals more robust, global leaders surreptitiously diluted it. Yale professor and development watchdog Thomas Pogge points out that when the Millennium Declaration was signed, the goal was rewritten as "Millennium Developmental Goal 1" (MDG-1) and was altered to halve the proportion (as opposed to the absolute number) of the world's people living on less than a dollar a day. By shifting the focus to income levels and switching from absolute numbers to proportional ones, the target became much easier to achieve. Given the rate of population growth, the new goal was effectively reduced by 167 million. And that was just the beginning.

After the UN General Assembly adopted MDG-1, the goal was diluted two more times. First, they changed it from halving the proportion of impoverished people in the world to halving the proportion of impoverished people in developing countries, thus taking advantage of an even faster-growing demographic denominator. Second, they moved the baseline of analysis from 2000 back to 1990, thus retroactively including all poverty reduction accomplished by China throughout the 1990s, due in no part whatsoever to the Millennium Campaign.

This statistical sleight-of-hand narrowed the target by a further 324 million. So what started as a goal to reduce the poverty headcount by 836 million has magically become only 345 million - less than half the original number. Having dramatically redefined the goal, the Millennium Campaign can claim that poverty has been halved when in fact it has not. The triumphalist narrative hailing the death of poverty rests on an illusion of deceitful accounting.

(Cont.)

But there's more. Not only have the goalposts been moved, the definition of poverty itself has been massaged in a way that serves the poverty reduction narrative. What is considered the threshold for poverty - the "poverty line" - is normally calculated by each nation for itself, and is supposed to reflect what an average human adult needs to subsist. In 1990, Martin Ravallion, an Australian economist at the World Bank, noticed that the poverty lines of a group of the world's poorest countries clustered around $1 per day. On Ravallion's recommendation, the World Bank adopted this as the first-ever International Poverty Line (IPL).

But the IPL proved to be somewhat troublesome. Using this threshold, the World Bank announced in its 2000 annual report that "the absolute number of those living on $1 per day or less continues to increase. The worldwide total rose from 1.2 billion in 1987 to 1.5 billion today and, if recent trends persist, will reach 1.9 billion by 2015." This was alarming news, especially because it suggested that the free-market reforms imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on Global South countries during the 1980s and 1990s in the name of "development" were actually making things worse.

This amounted to a PR nightmare for the World Bank. Not long after the report was released, however, their story changed dramatically and they announced the exact opposite news: While poverty had been increasing steadily for some two centuries, they said, the introduction of free-market policies had actually reduced the number of impoverished people by 400 million between 1981 and 2001.

This new story was possible because the Bank shifted the IPL from the original $1.02 (at 1985 PPP) to $1.08 (at 1993 PPP), which, given inflation, was lower in real terms. With this tiny change - a flick of an economist's wrist - the world was magically getting better, and the Bank's PR problem was instantly averted. This new IPL is the one that the Millennium Campaign chose to adopt.

The IPL was changed a second time in 2008, to $1.25 (at 2005 PPP). And once again the story improved overnight. The $1.08 IPL made it seem as though the poverty headcount had been reduced by 316 million people between 1990 and 2005. But the new IPL - even lower than the last, in real terms - inflated the number to 437 million, creating the illusion that an additional 121 million souls had been "saved" from the jaws of debilitating poverty. Not surprisingly, the Millennium Campaign adopted the new IPL, which allowed it to claim yet further chimerical gains.

We need to seriously rethink these poverty metrics. The dollar-a-day IPL is based on the national poverty lines of the 15 poorest countries, but these lines provide a poor foundation given that many are set by bureaucrats with very little data. More importantly, they tell us nothing about what poverty is like in wealthier countries. A 1990 survey in Sri Lanka found that 35 percent of the population fell under the national poverty line. But the World Bank, using the IPL, reported only 4 percent in the same year. In other words, the IPL makes poverty seem much less serious than it actually is.

The present IPL theoretically reflects what $1.25 could buy in the United States in 2005. But people who live in the US know it is impossible to survive on this amount. The prospect is laughable. In fact, the US government itself calculated that in 2005 the average person needed at least $4.50 per day simply to meet minimum nutritional requirements. The same story can be told in many other countries, where a dollar a day is inadequate for human existence. In India, for example, children living just above the IPL still have a 60 percent chance of being malnourished.

According to Peter Edwards of Newcastle University, if people are to achieve normal life expectancy, they need roughly double the current IPL, or a minimum of $2.50 per day. But adopting this higher standard would seriously undermine the poverty reduction narrative. An IPL of $2.50 shows a poverty headcount of around 3.1 billion, almost triple what the World Bank and the Millennium Campaign would have us believe. It also shows that poverty is getting worse, not better, with nearly 353 million more people impoverished today than in 1981. With China taken out of the equation, that number shoots up to 852 million.

Some economists go further and advocate for an IPL of $5 or even $10 - the upper boundary suggested by the World Bank. At this standard, we see that some 5.1 billion people - nearly 80 percent of the world's population - are living in poverty today. And the number is rising.

These more accurate parameters suggest that the story of global poverty is much worse than the spin doctored versions we are accustomed to hearing. The $1.25 threshold is absurdly low, but it remains in favour because it is the only baseline that shows any progress in the fight against poverty, and therefore justifies the present economic order. Every other line tells the opposite story. In fact, even the $1.25 line shows that, without factoring China, the poverty headcount is worsening, with 108 million people added to the ranks of the poor since 1981. All of this calls the triumphalist narrative into question.

Define Poverty, democracy and basic education. I'm sure literacy just largely feeds into basic education in that graph, so you might as well not have had one of them. Vaccination isn't good on its own, eradication of disease is. Child Mortality is the biggest tangible, objective improvement, so I'll give it that, as well.
Continental Philosophers are mostly continuing the enlightenment project and are critical insofar as they have seen past attempts at the enlightenment as having flaws that need to be addressed, and wish to address those flaws to continue the spirit of the Enlightenment project, rather than just ignore them and do nothing but wank over the 18th century ideals. Obviously this is a generalization and there are some Continental philosophers who are anti-Enlightenment entirely, but it isn't as common as you'd believe.

And the Enlightenment alone didn't change material conditions

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1. The very poor in the world have a much higher fertility rate than the others. Thus, you should use relative measures to assess whether the situation is improving.

2. China matters, even if you don't like it. It's the largest country in the world and it deserves to be included in the poverty reduction figures just as any other.

3. The measure is of extreme poverty. Also, your point on the threshold being too low does not deny extreme poverty is decreasing.

All in all, the facts remain that extreme poverty is decreasing, which is the main goal.

With relative measures the only progress being shown is almost entirely due to China, which although using state capitalism, is definitely NOT based on the western neoliberal model. If you are looking for a vindication of western capitalism then China certainly isn't it, they have major redistributive polices and heavy state control.

Yes it does, because although the number of people living at under $2 per day is decreasing, the number living at under $5 or $10 a day is increasing. Meaning that by an adequate measure of extreme poverty things have actually gotten worse, not better.

kys retard

ebin leaps in logic my man
marcuse was a mistake