PRISM
by KIERAN HEALY on JUNE 6, 2013
Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. … This consists on the one hand of technical knowledge, which, by itself, is sufficient to ensure it a position of extraordinary power. But in addition to this, bureaucratic organizations, or the holders of power who make use of them, have the tendency to increase their power still further by the knowledge growing out of experience in the service. For they acquire through the conduct of office a special knowledge of facts and have available a store of documentary material peculiar to themselves. While not particular to bureaucratic organizations, the concept of “official secrets” is certainly typical of them. It stands in relation to technical knowledge in somewhat the same position as commercial secrets do to technological training. It is the product of the striving for power.

Dan Nexon 06.07.13 at 2:45 am
Weber. 

seth edenbaum 06.07.13 at 4:00 am
Your comment is awaiting moderation. 

Dan Nexon: “Weber.”
"They then chuckle together in a self-congratulatory academic manner"

Take it away, commenter “Marfrks”
http://crookedtimber.org/2010/04/01/greenwald-v-kerr/comment-page-6/#comment-309996

“I have been a lawyer for many years, and then got a chance to teach at a non-lawyerly academic institution. I loved it; I loved playing in the garden of the mind. Eventually, however, it became clear to me that academics and non-academics have very different approaches to ideas. Academics, though it sounds odd to say it, don’t take ideas seriously. For academics, ideas are games,”

All the above without a single mention of US foreign policy, no more anti-democratic now than before. You can’t support freedom at home while opposing it abroad, especially not in the age on electronic communication.

Healy responds to events with in-jokes and glib affectations of superiority; Nexon seconds, closing the circle. "They then chuckle..": Farrell's sardonic take on McGinn. The creepiness is the same. The only difference is the sex.

repeats: Healy, Nexon, McGinn. Rationalists rationalize; superiority to politics is anti-politics, laziness, decadence.  Marfrks like Greenwald is an advocate. If you're paid to be biased you understand what it is and how it creeps in. Objectivity does not exist; self-awareness cannot be naturalized.
Old discussion of Farrell, Greenwald, and Kerr, here and here.
---

McGinn contra Judt.
And I'd forgotten about Bertram

QS 06.03.12 at 9:58 am
You’ve turned sexual harassment into an intellectual game, that is where the “creepiness” originates. How do you moderate that? You don’t. You realize that your ability to treat the issue so dispassionately, playing the game of Find the Universal, probably has something to do with your maleness and position outside this particular terrain.

Sexual harassment was banned not because we found the Universal Principle Against Harassment but because women and men who believed it to be wrong fought successfully for prohibition. These people were likely motivated by a variety of ideas and experiences. The way we keep the libertarians marginalized is not by abstract philosophical games but by appealing to this concrete history.

Chris Bertram 06.03.12 at 10:06 am
QS: your latest tells me that you see political philosophy as it is usually practised as involving a profound mistake. You are entitled to that opinion. It is not one that I share.

It's all there. Idiots.