(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Top Comments: Open Thread [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-11
Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!
Tonight is an open thread night.
You will not be left empty-handed.
1) This entry from Helen De Cruz’s “Wondering Freely” Substack about a philosophizing Chinese factory worker worker was interesting.
The question of whether Chen Zhi is entitled to spend all his free time on philosophy is entangled with issues of gender, the treatment of immigrant workers, the rights of factory workers. It elicited a huge discussion on Chinese social media, and a bit outside too. According to my Chinese student, what was at the heart of discussions in China was whether philosophy is only for those who can afford to do it, such as people with leisure and middle-class jobs and professional philosophers, or whether it is for everyone. Several philosophers, ranging from WEB Du Bois, Jane Addams, Mary Glover, have argued for this latter position. Mental self-improvement is, and should be, for everyone. We should not only seek to better the material living conditions of factory workers and other working class people, but to also give them the opportunity to feed the soul, to improve themselves. Indeed, the former is a necessary condition for the latter, but the latter requires more, such as education and access to libraries. As Du Bois argued in Souls of Black Folk (1903), Black people should also be allowed that “loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self-development.” He remarks that soulless, stultifying labor is racialized (and indeed, it still is), a sentiment we also see in the painting by Romero Bearden at the top of this post.
Here’s the original 2022 story about Chen Zhi
Despite his plea online, Chen was once a student in university. In 2008, after graduating from high school, he got into a college in Hangzhou, in the eastern Zhejiang province, majoring in mathematics. [...] ...And since he spent more time on philosophy than mathematics, his grades began to slip. In the second year of his program, the school asked him to drop out. The university he attended didn’t have a philosophy department, so he couldn’t transfer, and his family would never have let him start over. So confident was he about studying philosophy independently that he dropped out of college. He recalls his mother tearfully begging him to reconsider but, for the first time, he went against her wishes. His father, meanwhile, became distant. “I don’t know. I don’t pay much attention to him,” says Chen. From that day on, Chen has been a migrant worker.
It seems that this story has been a rather inspirational yet controversial story in China. I do think that nowadays, the reactions of an American family would be quite similar to the reactions of family and friends in China, especially in this day and age.
2) Harvard Business School professor and Atlantic writer Arthur Brooks has some observations to make about gaslighters or, as he calls it, “DARVO behavior.”
..DARVO, an acronym that stands for “Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.” DARVO is a technique we may well encounter in our daily life when dealing with sociopathic personalities. This type of person-to-person psychological warfare is designed to deflect any penalty for misbehavior, and turn it instead into an opportunity to gain power over you. For a well-adjusted, mentally healthy person, to be DARVO’d is a bewildering and unsettling experience. But once you understand how the technique works, you’ll never have to be its victim again. DARVO behavior has some features in common with “gaslighting,” a term that comes from the title of a 1938 British play in which an emotionally abusive husband manipulates his wife to convince her that she’s losing her mind. The practice of deception and coercive control in classic gaslighting has led to a looser popular usage that describes how a perpetrator of harm, when called out for it, plays the victim by claiming that their action has been maliciously misrepresented. You can see how DARVO-like this Don’t believe your lying eyes tactic is. This ploy is everywhere in politics, media, and the internet—anywhere, in fact, with a considerable population of bad-faith actors. Some scholars argue that we now inhabit a “culture of offense,” a way of turning a claim that some behavior or statement is offensive into, in effect, a right to be offended, which creates a further claim of victimhood. I expect that we can all think of examples of how this culture can be used as a cudgel to disingenuously keep disfavored views and voices out of the public realm.
Many of those “bad-faith actors” are in our own families. But other than avoiding those whom we see utilizing DARVO behavior, Brooks doesn’t seem to have come up with a way of defusing the the behavior.
And then...there are always...the stars!
x Celestial fireworks 🎇
This sparkling image, released in Hubble's 21st year, shows a young cluster of stars surrounded by interstellar gas and dust.
Called NGC 3603, this star cluster is about 20,000 light-years away:
https://t.co/0Bp6LyNEEh pic.twitter.com/zWB6XhEkhw — Hubble (@NASAHubble) April 9, 2025
Comments below the fold.
TOP COMMENTS
Brillig's ObDisclaimer: The decision to publish each nomination lies with the evening's Diarist and/or Comment Formatter. My evenings at the helm, I try reeeeallllyy hard to publish everything without regard to content. I really do, even when I disagree personally with any given nomination. "TopCommentness" lies in the eyes of the nominator and of you, the reader - I leave the decision to you. I do not publish self-nominations (ie your own comments) and if I ruled the world, we'd all build community, supporting and uplifting instead of tearing our fellow Kossacks down. Please remember that comment inclusion in Top Comments does not constitute support or endorsement by diarist, formatter, Top Comments writers or DailyKos. Questions, complaints or comments? Contact brillig.
No nominations or highlights tonight.
TOP MOJO
Top Mojo for yesterday Thursday, April 10, 2024, first comments and tip jars excluded. Thank you mik for the mojo magic! For those of you interested in How Top Mojo Works, please see his diary on FAQing Top Mojo.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/11/2316008/-Top-Comments-Open-Thread?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
