Euro 2016 Juanfran's was the only missed penalty during the shootout. Ronoldo's goal sealed it.


A repeat from 2012


I watched the game and I didn't know what they were singing.

The Spanish played beautifully. Once or twice I saw an Irish player smiling at a Spanish player in respect. Tony Karon called it the best moment of Euro 2012. I'm pretty sure the Irish fans in Gdansk were drinking for free tonight, a lot of it courtesy of the Spanish ones.

And new:


"We've got Alli,
Dele Alli,
I just don't think you understand.
He only cost 5 mill,
He's better than Ozil,
We've got Dele Alliiiiiiii…"

The original was Arsenal

"We've got Ozil,
Mesut Ozil,
I just don't think you understand,
He's Arsene Wenger's man,
He's better than Zidane,
We've got Mesut Ozil."

Alli is English-born, Nigerian and English parents; Ozil is German-born Turkish; Wenger was born in Alsace; Zidane is French-born Algerian, spent his professional career at Real Madrid and just won Euro 2016 as their coach.  Neither Alli nor Ozil are better than Zidane.

Filed under: Barbarism and Civilization, The Fucking Peasants, It's Called "Football", The New Old Europe.

Filed under: Culture, Determinism, Naturalism, Fascism, Futurism and Data Culture, Utopia and Intentional Communities, Sexuality, Philosophy, Politics, Transhumanism and Transgender, Make it Idiot-Proof,

A letter to TPM

Keeping it brief: Thiel essentially got his public start by founding the Stanford Review. That publication quickly, if not at its inception, was devoted mainly to “anti-PC” arguments, defending in particular fellow reviewer Keith Rabois, another future PayPal zillionare who, as a Stanford Law student was involved in "screaming 'Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!' and 'Can't wait until you die, faggot,' in the direction of the resident fellow cottage of lecturer Dennis Matthies.

According to a Stanford news release at the time: "first-year law student Keith Rabois ... sent a letter to the Stanford Daily confirming the allegations."

"Admittedly, the comments made were not very articulate, not very intellectual nor profound," Rabois wrote, according to the news release. "The intention was for the speech to be outrageous enough to provoke a thought of 'Wow, if he can say that, I guess I can say a little more than I thought.' 

Both Thiel and Rabois were/are gay.

This wasn’t just a youthful indiscretion. ... Thiel rode the incident to a book deal and publication in the Wall Street Journal. I assume his conservative bona fides, rooted here, played a serious role in his public profile and early business network? They also weren’t straightforwardly voicing some political/religious position: they were rather rancidly scapegoating other gay men as part of some closeted psychodynamic.

So Thiel’s high horse on speech about gay people runs rather contrary to his own actions (to the NYTimes: “Gawker has been a singularly terrible bully”?), which he has benefitted from—which he was only too happy to defend and promulgate on grounds of free speech/press. ... Don’t know why Gawker hasn’t called him out on this particularly: Thiel’s philosophical (come on) position hasn’t really diverged; while he’s now posing as a champion for liberal sensibilities about his sexuality and privacy he’s still happy to take positions against political correctness, immigrants, women’s suffrage and undermine the press he used as an exemplar of his own protections.

Thiel

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible....

As a Stanford undergraduate studying philosophy in the late 1980s, I naturally was drawn to the give-and-take of debate and the desire to bring about freedom through political means....

As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college. The world appears too big a place. Rather than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many of my saner peers retreated to tending their small gardens. The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd. Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking; the smartest libertarians, by contrast, had fewer hang-ups about positive law and escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it....

The events of recent months shatter any remaining hopes of politically minded libertarians. For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand....

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron....

The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world,...

On and on it goes.

If you inter-railed across Europe, only stopping with gay fascists, there aren’t many sights you’d miss. France’s leading post-war fascist was Edouard Pfieffer, who was not batting for the straight side. Germany’s leading neo-Nazi all through the eighties was called Michael Kuhnen; he died of AIDS in 1991 a few years after coming out. Martin Lee, author of a study of European fascism, explains, “For Kuhnen, there was something supermacho about being a Nazi, as well as being a homosexual, both of which enforced his sense of living on the edge, of belonging to an elite that was destined to make an impact. He told a West German journalist that homosexuals were ‘especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want ties to wife, children and family.’”

And it wouldn’t be long before your whistlestop tour arrived in Britain. At first glance, our Nazis seem militantly straight. They have tried to disrupt gay parades, describe gay people as “evil”, and BNP leader Nick Griffin reacted charmingly to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in 1999 with a column saying, “The TV footage of gay demonstrators [outside the scene of carnage] flaunting their perversion in front of the world’s journalists showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures repulsive.”

But scratch to homophobic surface and there’s a spandex swastika underneath. In 1999, Martin Webster, a former National Front organiser and head honcho in the British fascist movement, wrote a four-page pamphlet detailing his ‘affair’ with Nick Griffin. “Griffin sought out intimate relations with me,” openly-gay Webster explained, “in the late 1970s. He was twenty years younger than me.” Ray Hill, who infiltrated the British fascist movement for twelve years to gather information for anti-fascist groups, says it’s all too plausible. Homosexuality is “extremely prevalent” in the upper echelons of the British far right, and at one stage in the 1980s nearly half of the movement’s organisers were gay, he claims.

etc., etc., [etc.,] etc.,  etc.

It’s always amused me how many people refer to queer theory and queerness as being attacked by the right, without defending it explicitly as being of the left. But Queerness isn't a critique of class and economics; it's defined as mocking bourgeois normalcy. Over the past two centuries both the left and right have done that and now especially there's confusion about who's doing it and why.

But what replaces normalcy? For the majority of whatever political, sexual, religious or philosophical persuasion, the answer's, "nothing".  Fantasies of permanent revolution, the entrepreneurial spirit or the fabulous life, are all fantasies of a minority; most people want stability and stability is boring. The focus of contemporary theory on systems of power relations assumes that if society and normalcy are coercive they must also be unjust. It's an argument from hypertrophied individualism mixing Plato, Foucault and Ayn Rand with the accent on one or another according to preference, and stating either that the powerful are powerful because they are and that this therefore is just, or that rules will always be broken and we shouldn't defend them nor even the ambiguous relations of laws and their undoing—that being the definition of the arts and specifically of literature—but merely celebrate their breaking. All of this is based in turn on a romantic reading of Freud and a hatred of him for his mistakes, a fondness for de Sade and The Story of O, and/or a televangelist’s version of Adam Smith. If capitalism in its ascendancy was the child of humanism, anti-humanism has become the philosophy of it's maturity. It's held variously that we are never conscious, that we do not behave responsibly in the face of desire, that we need to be free, that we're greedy, and that the greedy are the most free.

Click on the fucking links and learn something.

Individualism has dumbed us down.

Abstract:
Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

Link from Farrell, writing about "vindictive billionaires".
He's still on good terms with Tyler Cowen

Tyler and I debated this on Twitter – I didn’t come away convinced by his answers (you can find them on my feed or his), although perhaps others might be. He has since written three posts on the topic. One inquires into the status reasons why billionaires might complain. One reposts extracts from an interview with Thiel where he says that he was doing this as an act of charity (a claim that Tyler independently made yesterday) and from Jason Willick’s argument that this all doesn’t really matter very much because there is no obvious policy solution (this seems to me to contradict Tyler’s tweet yesterday, suggesting that this is not very relevant, because there are policy solutions, but that’s an aside). The last post is a tu quoque, arguing that environmental organizations too file lawsuits, that Tyler has heard gossip suggesting that they are perhaps sometime getting funded by rich people who want revenge, and that this is perhaps OK, and anyway, the left doesn’t seem particularly bothered when this happens.

No mention at all of what Thiel actually believes

Commenter TM:

[Farrell incl. italics] “liberals and leftwingers do tend to discount the power of the state” 

Which explains why only right-wingers are out on the street to protest the latest police shooting. Oh wait.

As always, back to commenter Marfrks

What an extraordinarily interesting debate. Thanks to everyone. It seems clear to this reader–who has nothing at stake–that Henry is refusing to see things, while Kerr is smoothly awful (the last line about natural law theory and legal positivism is so absurd that I thought at first it was a joke). I feel a cliched impulse to find something balancing to say about Greenwald, but no impression of him is as strong as those two impressions of the others. My own view of the divide may only reflect that it hits a fault line in my life: the difference between an academic and a non-academic approach to things. 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.

Academics see ideas are games because it would be rude to see too much subtext, too many delusions, in the arguments of your peers. Academia is a collaborative effort among friends, and an elite.

But élite colleges [é] don’t educate commonweal-size populations. A guiding principle of today’s liberal-arts education—the gold-filter admissions, the seminar discussions, the focus on “leadership” and Emerson and exposure to difference—is the cultivation of the individual. And students like Eosphoros are where the inclusive-élite model gets tested. If students’ personal experiences are beside the pedagogical point, then diversity on campus serves a cosmetic role: it is a kind of tokenism. If they’re taken into account, though, other inconsistencies emerge. “As far as what people talk about liking, you have to listen to the absence,” Eosphoros said. “I’m actually still trying to reconcile how unhappy I’ve been here with how happy people were insisting I must be.”

The academy is a culture

U.K. sitcoms tend to be darker than American ones, encouraged by a powerful public broadcasting system whose aim is to serve the varying tastes of taxpayers, not the upbeat preferences of advertisers, and by a national psyche fixated on the immutability of the class system, not on a dream of self- improvement. Americans believe that things will get better. Brits laugh at how things stay the same. To become a hit in the United States, “The Office” not only had to transform the tragic, grating boss into a less tragic, less grating, more well-meaning boss; it had to cast off the message, central to the British original, that work is where you go to waste your life.

It's also the difference between Oxbridge and academic idealism and, the vulgarity of theater, including the theater of law and lawyers.

An earlier paragraph from the first of the two pieces, introducing the student Eosphoros. My underlining.

This spring, at Oberlin, I tracked down Cyrus Eosphoros, the student who’d worried about the triggering effects of “Antigone.” We met at the Slow Train Café, a coffee joint on College Street, one of the two main streets that make up Oberlin’s downtown. (The other is called Main Street.) Eosphoros is a shy guy with a lambent confidence. He was a candid, stylish writer for the school newspaper and a senator in student government. That day, he wore a distressed bomber jacket and Clubmaster glasses. His hair was done in the manner of Beaver Cleaver’s, with a cool blue streak across the top. Eosphoros is a trans man. He was educated in Mexico, walks with crutches, and suffers from A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder. (He’d lately been on suicide watch.) He has cut off contact with his mother, and he supports himself with jobs at the library and the development office. He said, “I’m kind of about as much of a diversity checklist as you can get while still technically being a white man.” 

"Eosphoros elsewhere identifies her/himself as a "Trans Mexican" and as a "White Mexican."
On Storify: "I Literally Do Not Understand Non-Utilitarian Morality"
[storify is gone. The tweets are still up]

lol one of the worst arguments I’ve ever had with loved ones was three different people getting in on being horrified that I had - to ask what was inherently wrong with dehumanizing people - aka the infamous fight which I had with three people at once about how it’s bad for some reason to class employees under your - list of resources as an employer/company/ organizer “you’re saying they’re tools to you!” “that is what I am paying them to be???” -  “look, imagine if someone said ‘you are a mere resource’” “what’s ‘mere’ about a resource?” -  people were like “if my employer sees me as just a resource they can make me miserable/work me to death” - and I’m just like “??? ‘resource’ does not imply bad resource management tho” - personally I think seeing people you contract with as resources should lead to /better/ treatment tbh

A repeat from 2014

I didn't expect to have to wrap my arms around Leo, a Chicano student who stood shivering and sobbing in front of Poughkeepsie police after getting jumped on Raymond Ave by kids he called "my own people." Didn't expect to take him to the police station and have the questioning officer ask Leo, "Why do you use the term 'Latino'? Can you tell me what country the boys who jumped you were from?" The officer told Leo that his partner was Colombian and could tell where a person was from just by looking at them. Leo told me that he felt "most Chicano, most Latino, and most like a Vassar student" that night.

My comment then

What kind of life would a Chicano kid in the US most likely have had to be shocked to be jumped by "my own people."? And what bubble would he have to have lived in to say that he felt "most Chicano, most Latino, and most like a Vassar student" after being shocked again by the cop's question? Vassar is part of a very specific bubble, an east coast prep-school college. 

 Hypersensitive geeks and emo-robots. Back the Yale and Mizzou

This isn't about freedom of speech but insult and deference to authority. The kid with the video camera in Mizzou is autistic and the whole thing has now reduced him to tears. But he can't imagine that the kids forming a circle were protecting friends who were as oversensitive as he is. Autism is self-blindness. And that's what philosophy has been reduced to: the objective, aperspectival reason of autistics, now brought to bear on emo kids. It's sad all around.

Drip... drip... slip... slip... Drift.
Beginning to see the light.  Still no self awareness.

Academic lawyers do a fair bit of pontificating too, though not nearly as much as the academic philosophers, and theirs is almost always confined to real politics. The really revolting aspect of some academic philosopher behavior on FB is its "high school with tenure" quality: back-stabbing, preening and posturing, endless displays of righteousness and "pearl clutching", faux solidarity with all the oppressed and "wretched of the academy" (less often the actual wretched of the earth), and so on. An awful lot of academic philosophers on FB come across as teenagers desperately seeking approval and affirmation. I've managed to "unfriend" most of the offenders, but it was really a kind of depressing and sickening spectacle while it lasted.

Why don't academic lawyers on FB engage in this kind of tawdry behavior? Academic lawyers, having gone to professional school and often worked as professionals in practice, may just be more mature as a group (though I also suspect there is a selection effect at work, i.e., those academic philosophers most prone to this behavior are drawn to FB). But another part of the explanation, I suspect, is that academic philosophers are more powerless than academic lawyers: many of the latter are actively engaged in policy work, law reform, and litigation on the issues they care about. All academic philosophers can do is posture and preen on FB.

But what's really interesting is how different the actual lawyers on FB are: there's none of the tawdry displays of virtue and righteousness, and there's hardly any of the pontificating. The explanation there is, I think, pretty simple: they are way too busy to indulge themselves this way. The same goes for most of the other regular people I'm friends with on FB. FB, alas, seems to be evidence that academics do have way too much time on their hands.

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
John Philpot Curran

"The behaviors attributed to me go fundamentally against what I believe, teach and write about.” Thomas Pogge

The academy is built on a collaborative model of intellectual life. Even the "discovery" of our self-interest is seen as the product of the practice of its opposite. Pogge is whining narcissist, in a culture of whining narcissists.

There is no aspect of scientific knowledge that mandates institutionalized instrumental reason in all aspects of life. There is no telos to the world beyond entropy, and even that puts too much of a glow on physical events. The 18th century was the age of enchantment with science, an enchantment morphing over time into various forms of a philosophy along a line also described in the arts, which themselves describe (again) not the world but our perceptions of it. Equality in the language of philosophy originates in the discovery or construction, by members of an elite, of the idea of equality, rather than in the recognition of the practice of it by the people, and has ended in the study of people by that same elite not as equal but alike: the study of each of us only in terms of the aggregate. And in this the logic of individualism becomes its opposite, except that the elite observers have quietly removed themselves from the game. The greatest heroes of technocracy are those who can predict the behavior of the middling and in this they have become middling themselves. But it’s these heroes who are left to make the decisions for the rest of us. [also here]

Repeats: A lecture on feminism and the rule of law from Jian Ghomeshi's lawyer. I have more respect for her than the plaintiffs in these cases. I have pity for them, and pity isn't respect.  Marie Henein isn't a scientist or a pseudoscientist; she's an advocate playing her part in a game that she takes very seriously.

Adversarialism is predicted on the existence and equal authority of the other. We are all each others' others; the only question left is how to extend that understanding to our relations with outsiders, for whom the category of the other was imagined by scholastic philosophers who had no interest in adversarialism.

The philosophy of science—philosophy as science—is the philosophy of metaphysical plumbing and race car engines, the philosophy of intellectual mechanics. With goals assumed, utility defined, the politics is authoritarian. Democracy sees goals as open. It requires tougher people: adults. It's not for rubes or Hollies Golightly.  It's much more interesting. And it's sexier.

Lawyers, not judges, not philosophers are at the center of our legal system.

It's Rashomon, you idiots

Again

Frank Rich, Hillary Clinton's tears, etc. The comedians tag. Liberals used to complain about political commentary as theater criticism. Now they don't.

"No one I know will vote for a son of a bitch like Trump." https://t.co/5GZYN5250r

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) May 24, 2016

Hit the bastard, Ms. Clinton. Then keep doing it until he stops moving. And then hit him a few more times to be sure. 

People react to fear, not love.

They don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true. 

Do you think Mrs. Clinton remembers what fear did to her old law partner Vince Foster? He was a deputy White House counsel at the beginning of Mr. Clinton’s administration, one of the old Arkansas hands who’d never played in the big leagues before. Georgetown normally spits out strangers, but Foster charmed them; people were saying he’d get the Supreme Court before eight years were up.

Depending on whom you believe, Foster was either too damn good a lawyer, an upright smalltown guy who couldn’t bear to screw political enemies, or he knew too much about nepotism and embezzlement in the White House Travel Office. 

Either way, he stuck a gun in his mouth. 

Love doesn’t mean a thing when your back’s to the wall. You have to stare fear in the face and use it, by God. Take it up and beat the bastards back with it again, and again, until it’s your heel on their necks. Or it kills you. 

Take Muskie. Remember his corncob downeast Lincoln act? Kids turned out for him, and he looked like a guy who could stand with Brezhnev. We turned him into a bigot and a pansy, a drunk’s husband who takes pills and weeps in public. 

Hit the son of a bitch until he stops moving, then let the public keep hitting him as he lies there. Go to people’s fears. Or it’s your ass.

He's riffing on a famous, alleged, quote from Pauline Kael. The real quote:

“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

The Bruenig fiasco is amusing. The liberal consensus is breaking apart. The older generation is backing Clinton out of loyalty and youthful members of the apparat are split. I expected better of Joan Walsh, but Jessica Valenti has always been awful. Duncan Black's pathological equivocation:  "Your favorite candidate".  Running away from anything that frightens him, anything he perceives as ambiguous.
The geek need for binary simplicity.

"pathologically opposed to ambiguity" "throw/s up his hands" "pathologically anti-intellectual" "know-nothing" all repeats.

Keeping this at the top for now.


A few small changes and a coda, but it's probably still not done. Something I'm tempted to add; I haven't made up my mind.
---

Since I replace the file, this url is always the most recent version.

Slavoj The Bear got in some trouble over this, mostly from earnest idiots of one sort or another.
He's not great, and never has been, but he's not bad. And he's willing to state the obvious: that immigrants want to come to Western Europe because they share the dream of Europe that European liberals (the ones the right wing call leftists) mock as shallow hypocrisy. And the same liberals coo over the arrival of dark skinned religious conservatives while expressing contempt for native born white ones.

Anyone wishing to understand why thousands of Western-born Muslims are leaving comfortable homes to fight with Isis would do well to watch Deeyah Khan’s powerful new film Jihad: A British Story.

The award-winning filmmaker spent 18 months interviewing some of the founding fathers of jihad in the UK out of a “personal obsessive curiosity” to find out what was driving young people to sign up to such a violent movement and by doing so, find ways to prevent it.

The film, which will be shown on ITV on June 15 as part of their Exposure series, includes extraordinary interviews with a number of British Muslims who were at the forefront of the movement to recruit, raise funds for and fight in wars ranging from Afghanistan in the 1980s through to Kashmir, Burma, Bosnia and Chechnya.

What many people fail to understand is that “this movement is not new”, says Khan. “It is three decades old in the west. The trend of taking western based people from the UK, Denmark, Belgium, began in the early to mid -80s and since then it’s been one conflict after the other. We are only seeing it now because Isis is so absolutely viscous and so public and they are using cameras to disseminate it. In the west our attention only woke up from 9/11 onwards.”

...Khan grew up in Norway to immigrant parents from Afghanistan and Pakistan and says she “understands very well the culture clash of coming from this in-between place”.

Khan’s father was liberal but rather than “arranging my marriage he forced me into a career that wasn’t (my choice)”. He believed there were only two professions where you were not judged on your gender and race – music or sport - and so he encouraged his daughter to become a singer, throwing away her toys from the age of seven and getting her to undertake intense music lessons.

His plan worked and Khan became a successful pop star at the age of ten, lauded as an example of multicultural Norway, but before long she was receiving death threats from members of the Muslim community who felt that a women should not be performing. Constantly being harassed on the street and fearing for her life, Khan fled to London at the age of 18 but after achieving some success in the UK, the death threats started again and Khan ended up moving to the US and giving up performing music all together.

Deeyah Khan is not a leftist. She's a thoroughly Eurobougie glamour girl, who directed a Peabody winning documentary about honor killing in the UK. And here's the ITV page for the new one.
But she's not attacked by leftists.
Khan in the HuffPo UK.

The UK Government recently announced its Counter Extremism Strategy, a document which refers to 'British values' 54 times. Within this report, extremism is defined as 'the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.' These are certainly fine values -- which British governments have consistently failed to support.

Britain has been responsible for the undermining of democracy, turning a blind eye to abuses by its allies, using extraordinary rendition to get around the rule of law, passing over the denial of individual liberties to dissidents, and the evasion of the dismal situation for religious minorities. Ironically, David Cameron's first act after the unveiling of this act was setting trade deals with China, hardly notable for its democracy, rule of law, individual liberty or tolerance for different faiths. This was followed by a rock star reception for Indian PM Narendra Modi, whose rule has seen a shocking increase in Hindu supremacist ideology and attacks on minorities.

Zizek is an intelligent bloviator... we're back to Norman Mailer again, and Houellebecq (the links lead back to here) The worst thing about him is his philosophers' taste in art, which also affects his understanding of politics. But in the end he's a liberal, mostly in the good sense of the word. The worst thing about Khan is probably her music, but I haven't heard it so I can't be sure. Zizek the Stalinist and Khan the immigrant both understand liberalism better than most earnest liberals do.

Linked by someone[?] on twitter. Bertram had made a comment. I replied before I saw the date.

The author is using the pain of others to extemporize on her own life. That’s what we all do when we talk about pain and suffering of others. Others’ pain is an idea. The difference between philosophers and historians or novelists is that the latter aren’t obliged by title to try to solve the problems they claim to see events exemplifying. Philosophers see themselves as the physicists of politics and culture. If you solve the math you solve the problem.

Bertram: “First, I’m sympathetic, I really am, to the idea that people should work and consume less and that we should attend more to real life quality. But this doesn’t seem very realistic in my own life for two reasons: first, even if my employer were sympathetic (unlikely) I feel very hard pressed now to produce the level of research output necessary for me to stay competitive with other academics (not just in the UK, but elsewhere). I suspect this generalizes to many people in professional jobs: we couldn’t achieve the kinds of things we want to in our careers on those kinds of hours.”
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/01/14/towards-a-21-hour-working-week/

What are the contradictions of politics and career? When should we pick one over the other? I don’t have an answer. We all make choices and moralism doesn’t work. And I don’t pretend to be a physicist of moral responsibility.

Philosophers talk about ideas to avoid facing the full impact of their own choices. Propositional speech is always in the first person; other people and events are reduced to cardboard. The characters in fiction take on lives of their own, rebelling against the intentions of their makers, and a good author will work with them against him or herself. “Literary” fiction without subtext is pointless. Philosophy is “speculative” fiction, more concerned with concepts than with people, because philosophy and technocracy see generalizations as more important that specifics.

The author’s beggars are nameless. Meet your beggars, learn their names and then try to describe what you’ve learned. If you describe it well enough it’ll be art, even if it’s not fiction, because you will have communicated more than you intended, about your curiosity, and your fear. That’s the beginning of politics

Updating. Documenting drift.

When Thomas Pogge travels around the world, he finds eager young fans waiting for him in every lecture hall. The 62-year-old German-born professor, a protégé of the philosopher John Rawls, is bespectacled and slight of stature. But he’s a giant in the field of global ethics, and one of only a small handful of philosophers who have managed to translate prominence within the academy to an influential place in debates about policy.

Leiter

“It breaks my heart to have to say it,” said Christia Mercer, a former colleague from the Columbia philosophy department, “but it’s clear that Thomas uses his reputation as a supporter of justice to prey unjustly on those who trust and admire him, who then — once victimized — are too intimidated by his reputation and power to tell their stories.”

This is also my reaction.

Ludlow, McGinn "It's no secret". Rationalists rationalize.

Leiter links to IHE, on the threat to the liberal arts.

For Talbot Brewer, professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Virginia, the liberal arts need saving in part from the “black mirrors” so many of us are glued to each day. Cellular phones, computers and, especially for children, television, facilitate a kind of “reverse-Weberian,” late capitalistic assault...

Calling attention a “vital resource,” Brewer described it as “the medium of passion, of friendship, of love. 

Not “reverse-Weberian", simply Weberian. And again, for Leiter the whole point of philosophy is that it is not art or fiction, but close to science.  He reads for text without subtext. As I repeat again and again, Leiter, like his friend Posner, is a technocratic anti-humanist.

Maria Farrell (start here or here) discovers "Post-Democracy"

I’ve been reading and re-reading Colin Crouch’s Post-Democracy on and off for about eighteen months, and just spotted a nice precis of it on OpenDemocracy in a piece by Kit de Waal about celebrity activism:

“The term ‘post-democracy’ was coined by Colin Crouch to refer to the fusion of corporate power with government, generating an elite politics based on a political-financial cycle in which money buys power and power rewards money. Post-democracy is a plausible imitation of democracy. It has a popular, consultative appearance, while the real politics of power and money consists of a continuing round of inter-personal transactions among elites.”

What makes Post-Democracy hard for me to digest more than a dozen pages at a time is not, I think, its relentless rightness, which I personally find more or less inarguable, but how little there appears we can do about it. My experience of reading it is basically ‘yes, this is better researched and thought through than I’d ever manage, and I agree; we’re basically fucked.’

I get that I’m experiencing nothing more than the cognitive dissonance of a social democrat who knows capitalism is awful and probably tending towards disaster – but more the chronic debilitating disease kind of disaster of, say, a slow-boiled lobster, than the explosive, revolutionary and strangely psycho-sexual climax of sudden foment and change – but who has neither the temperament nor the constitution for either ripping it up or walking away. (Hello Rosa Luxembourg. Like my hero Virginia Woolf, you would despise me, too.) But simply knowing this doesn’t help.

About a decade ago I was at a weekend conference in New York on what was then called ‘the new philanthropy’. The impeccably well-educated and well-spoken man who’d been Angelina Jolie’s fixer in the world of Davos and the UN system was there to say how great it was that celebrities were now getting down into development issues and doing things that governments didn’t have the will for. At the Q&A, I made myself a bit awkward by asking how democratic it was that those people could re-order policy priorities on a whim, and wouldn’t it be better if they just voted and paid their taxes like the little people....

A smart commenter replies quoting a post by her I'd decided not to read.

Oh I remember you. 

“The question isn’t whether the Easter Rising accelerated Ireland’s independence or made it happen at all; it’s whether it was worth the death of one bow-legged tenement child. Of course it wasn’t."

If you don’t have faith in the people to create democracy why do you mourn its passing?

From the older post

In 1916, my great-grand father, Eoin MacNeill, was the head of a dissident army, the Irish Volunteers. At its height, before many left and volunteered to fight in World War I, the Irish Volunteers numbered about eighty thousand men.

The befuddled sister of a Weberian "liberal" and wife of a career military officer, she prays daily for the health of the Pope, and mourns our fallen state.

The Farrells are from the gentry. They are not "the little people", but for Maria celebrities are vulgar. Her brother's clan, the technocrats, are the new aristocrats, but like her he's never understood the switch. And both in different ways pretend to be defending democracy. I'm with Norman Mailer

Weber's technocratic elite, the masters of "value-free science" could never exist separately from the capitalist elite. They're siblings. Again, see Leiter's friendship with Posner, and Henry Farrell's interest -liberal academia's interest- in libertarianism, which outside of the academy is no more or less than a cult. Technocracy is not democracy. The link's a google site search. Search the web; it's still mostly me. And still obvious.
---

But we can take hope from our own history. Amid unrelenting upheaval and popular anger, the Renaissance left a legacy that we still celebrate as one of humanity’s brightest. It also left wisdom, in both its triumphs and disasters, to help us steer through similar storms. Looking through a Renaissance lens, what to do now becomes startlingly clear. We need to welcome genius. To understand that disruptive change and technological revolutions can spread both immense good and harm. To celebrate diversity and overcome prejudice. To raise public and private patronage. To embrace change, and strengthen public safety nets in ways that embolden us all. To build new crossroads and welcome migrants. To tear up the (mental) maps that unhelpfully divide people. To stoke virtues – especially honesty, audacity and dignity. To champion collective endeavours as well as individual freedoms.

The Renaissance offers lessons on how to magnify the flourishing under way. It also offers warnings about what happens when we fail, in a time of great change, to renew our social bargain with one another.

This is our age of discovery. We can succumb to its pressures, close our borders and our minds to new people, ideas and technologies, and thereby surrender the possibilities inherent in humanity’s present circumstances. Or we can seize this moment, navigate the crises of our own time and co-create a blossoming that the world will still talk about in 2500.

Flounder or flourish? The choice is ours. 

Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna’s Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance is published by Bloomsbury/St Martin’s Press 

Ian Goldin is director of the Oxford Martin School and professor of globalisation and development at Oxford University (@ian_goldin). Chris Kutarna is a two-time Governor General’s medallist, Commonwealth scholar and fellow at the Oxford Martin School (@ChrisKutarna).

According to his Oxford student profile Kutarna was the lead China research on this tome:

Globalization is about Americans outsourcing product development and services to other countries. Globality is the next step.

Globalization has never been about American outsourcing. Globality is packaging and book sales.

"This is our age of discovery." The Industrial Revolution which hasn't ended is being rebranded in the language of Madison Avenue and B. school to refer to the Renaissance as opposed to the Enlightenment. That's the only relevant data point, except for the fact that Kutarna seems to have published a novel in Mandarin.
---

More of the same at The Boston Review

What Is Education For?

Opening the Debate, Danielle Allen: Preparation for democratic citizenship demands humanities education, not just STEM.

Samuel Moyn:  Rights vs. Duties, Reclaiming Civic Balance
The second piece isn't part of the symposium.  It should be.

repeats, repeats, repeats.
Rules can't be contradictory; obligations will conflict. The formalism of truth vs the formalism of process. Liberalism, technocracy and science (and pseudoscience), vs republicanism, democracy, and law (and art).  More of the same.

repeats: "My husband had sex with me while I was in a drunken state. Should I divorce him?"

New

Imagine the following case: Two recent college grads meet in a bar, talk, begin kissing, and go to her apartment. After a little more talking, they resume kissing there. He undresses her and initiates sexual intercourse. She neither objects nor resists. He leaves, and they have no further contact. A month later, she files a criminal complaint with police, complaining that this was rape because she never expressed verbal consent and was physically passive.

Under the law as it has been from time immemorial, the woman's complaint would be rejected because her failure to say no or resist would be considered consent.

But under proposals that will be put to a vote on May 17 at the annual meeting of the American Law Institute, the nation's most prestigious drafter of model laws, the man could be charged with of a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

The new feminism is the old anti-feminism.

Ttranshumanism and Transgender.
The new law isn't concerned with safety but with the demand that the state confirm self-identity. “On the definition of gender identity,  accepts that gender is not a binary.”  Wrong. The law is predicated on the reinforcement of binaries according to ideological commitment.
repeats

When she was asked if she had any prosthetics or implants, she explained, “I’m transgender. I have a penis.” The officers then “freaked out” and claimed they needed to go get male screeners, but Richards insisted, “No, I am legally female. I do not want to be screened by a man.

New

CHESTER, Vt. — The way A J Jackson tells it, he kept his head ducked down and pretended to fiddle with his cellphone as he walked into the boys’ bathroom and headed for a stall at Green Mountain Union High School here.

But the way some of his classmates see it, A J was still Autumn Jackson, a girl in boys’ clothing, who had violated an intimate sanctum, while two boys were standing at a urinal, their private parts exposed.

“It’s like me going into a girls’ bathroom wearing a wig,” Tanner Bischofberger, 15, a classmate of A J Jackson’s, who was not one of those in the bathroom, said this week. “It’s just weird.”

Why does "AJ"'s discomfort with "his" biology take precedence?
The instituting of subjectivism into law undermines the rule of law.

All of the above originates in rationalism which begins with a focus on and faith in the individual imagination. Neoliberalism is liberalism taken to its logical conclusion.

Language is ambiguous by definition, and law is a blunt instrument. Biological distinctions are matters of fact, at least compared to demands founded explicitly in desire.

A comment I tried to post at Opinio Juris

The rule of law is the rule of "rules" written and made public, and includes rules for the amendment and repeal of rules. You could follow rules in deciding to create the office of dictator if you provided rules for the end of his reign. "The end of the war" would suffice. "Until Hell freezes over" would not. The point is a guaranteed return to debate.

Pace Raz and Dworkin, we live in a Rashomon world. That's why we have lawyers, and why lawyers and philosophers have different jobs, and why in a democracy philosophers are much less important. Like the famous story of a panicked Kurt Gödel claiming to have found flaws in the Constitution, the problem wasn't the Constitution it was Gödel's mathematicians' logic. He wasn't wrong, but he didn't understand how language works. 

What's a valid "interpretation"? Words on a page are facts, like rocks and sand. What we debate are meanings and we do that endlessly. The rule of law in a democracy is the rule of public debate, with little points of quasi-solidity: sentences written down for all to see.

"Kurt Gödel meet David Addington". I googled their names together after I wrote that the first time. The relation was obvious but the only reference I found was Balkin and Levinson. I should've guessed. 

Mathematicians and engineers skew far right as to politics. Pedants are horrified by "lawyering". As Joe Jamail says, "Lawyers are the rule of law." Lawyers, not judges, not philosophers, not engineers.

"Kurt Gödel, David Addington" still works.

Frank Rich, Hillary Clinton's tears, etc. The comedians tag. Liberals used to complain about political commentary as theater criticism. Now they don't.

AXELROD: Talk to be about Hillary Clinton as an opponent to him, and what...
STEWART: I've never run against her, so I don't...
AXELROD: ...what would you be saying about her if you were doing your show right now?
STEWART: What I think about Hillary Clinton is, you know, I imagine to be a very bright woman without the courage of her convictions because I'm not even sure what they are. So, I would suggest that, when I watch her campaign - - when I watch her campaign, it reminds me of -- and again, I'm throwing out references that mean absolutely nothing to anybody, so I will continue to do that -- she reminds me of Magic Johnson's talk show, and I won't say anything else.
AXELROD: You had that thought too, huh?
STEWART: If you ever watch Magic Johnson's tele-- Magic Johnson was a charming individual, but he wasn't a talk show host, and when you watched his show you could almost see Arsenio's advice to him, in real time rendering, so he would sit and he would go, "Uh, my first guest tonight -- Oh, Arsenio said, enthusiasm is something that's sell is -- "my first guess tonight is Cher, everybody." But he never seemed authentic and real to his personality. It seemed like he was wearing an outfit designed by someone else for someone else to be someone else, and that is not to say that she is not preferable to Donald Trump, because at this point, I would vote for Mr. T over Donald Trump. But, I think she will be in big trouble if she can't find a way, and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe a real person doesn't exist underneath there. I don't know.
AXELROD: You worked -- you dabbled on the government side when you were advocating for the Zadroga Act for 9/11 survivors. Did you work with her, when she was Senator of New York, on that?
STEWART: No.
AXELROD: So you never had any...
STEWART: I worked with Kirsten Gillibrand.
AXELROD: Mm-hmm. I see. So, she was out of the Senate by then.
STEWART: She's terrific. Kirsten Gillibrand is terrific.
AXELROD: So, Hillary was out of the Senate by then. Now, you must've had her on your show. STEWART: Yes.
AXELROD: And what was that like?
STEWART: Really cool. It's -- look, there are politicians who are either rendering their inauthenticity in real enough time to appear authentic, and then there are politicians who render their inauthenticity through -- it's like when your computer -- you want to play -- if you have a MAC and you want to play a Microsoft game on it...
AXELROD: Yes, yes.
STEWART: ...and there's that weird lag.
AXELROD: Yes. No, I mean...
STEWART: That's Hillary Clinton.
AXELROD: ...that's big problem. There's like a seven second delay and all the words come out in a perfectly... STEWART: Right.
AXELROD: ...politically calibrated sentence.
STEWART: Right. Now, what gives me hope in that is that there's a delay, which means she's somehow fighting something. I've seen politicians who don't have that delay and render their inauthenticity in real time and that's when you go, "That's a sociopath."
AXELROD: That's an uplifting message there. The...
STEWART: By the way, as far as uplifting messages, I have never in my life experienced what I experienced in my one day of lobbying down in Washington, D.C.
AXELROD: Yeah, I want to ask you about...
STEWART: And let me just say, like for however I painted it on the show, it's so much worse than you could possibly imagine. It is a cesspool. There are some good people trying to survive within the lava, but it's a f---ing horror show. No disrespect.
AXELROD: No. STEWART: There is...
AXELROD: Just the fact that you're at the Institute of Politics where we're trying to encourage young people to get into the public arena.
STEWART: Can I say this? Get into it and don't get it on you. I've never -- I was down there with firefighters who had spent a year on the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. The guy that I was with, Ray Pfeifer, had a titanium rod in his leg that was breaking because of the metastasized cancer that was roiling through it that he got from being on the pile. We had the scientific evidence with us. You cannot imagine the disrespect, the lack of compassion, that was exhibited towards this man and this cause by individuals in higher ogce. It was -- I will never recover from it.
AXELROD: So, here's my -- here's my theory, because I can't sit in front of a thousand young people and not say this; you know, you have to -- if you turn away, and you walk away from this and you just seed -- seed all of that to the people you're talking about, you're going to get what you get and it seems to me that there's some obligation to go in there and try and change it. You say go in there and don't get it on you...
STEWART: Yes.
AXELROD: ...but, we need that. We need that. We need that. No, but this is the most public spirited...
STEWART: When I say, "Don't get it on you" I don't mean, don't engage. I mean, take appropriate precautions, wear a HAZMAT suit. Bring your ideals. Whenever I speak to -- and we used to do this thing every year where we'd bring the press secretaries for all the Senate and all the House people that wanted to come in and they would say to me, "So, what can my candidate to have a successful appearance on your show?" And I would say, "He could, or she could, say what she thinks about the issues concerning America."
AXELROD: And he says, "Is there any other way to do it?"
STEWART: But they would say, "But what should I tell them? What works best?" "When people say what they believe." "What's that?" And honestly, like, I know you think that I'm being hyperbolic. I recognize that you don't understand this. I am not -- they are as unaware of their own machinations as you could possibly imagine. It's -- and I'm not even saying its malevolence.

"No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun. It's never what you do, but how it's done."
Mailer, Kubrick, and Baudelaire,  Russell, James and Santayana, (de Boeldieu, and
von Rauffenstein) vs one dimensional men

4: THE LIBERAL PARTY
There was a party first, however, given by an attractive liberal couple. Mailer's heart, never buoyant at best, and in fact once with justice called "sodden" by a critic, now collected into a leaden little ball and sank, not to his feet but his stomach. He was aware for the first time this day of a healthy desire to have a drink for the party gave every promise of being dreadful. Mailer was a snob of the worst sort. New York had not spoiled him, because it had not chosen to, but New York had certainly wrecked his tolerance for any party but a very good one. Like most snobs he professed to believe in the aristocracy of achieved quality—"Just give me a hovel with a few young artists, bright-eyed and bold"—in fact, a party lacked flavor for him unless someone very rich or social was present. An evening without a wicked lady in the room was like an opera company without a large voice. Of course there were no wicked ladies when he entered this room. Some reasonably attractive wives to be certain, and a couple of young girls, too young for him, they were still in the late stages of some sort of extraordinary progressive school, and were innocent, decent-spirited, merry, red-cheeked, idealistic, and utterly lobotomized away from the sense of sin. Mailer would not have known what to do with such young ladies—he had spent the first forty-four years of his life in an intimate dialogue, a veritable dialectic with the swoops, spooks, starts, the masks and snarls, the calm lucid abilities of sin, sin was his favorite fellow, his tonic, his jailer, his horse, his sword, say he was not inclined to flirt for an hour with one bright seventeen-year-old or another when they conceived of lust as no more than the gymnasium of love. Mailer had a diatribe against LSD, hippies, and the generation of love, but he was keeping it to himself. (The young girls, incidentally, had been brought by de Grazia. Not for nothing did de Grazia bear a resemblance to Sinatra.)
    But we are back with the wives, and the room has not yet been described. It was the sort of room one can see at many a faculty party in places like Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Columbia—the ground of common being is that the faculty man is a liberal. Conservative professors tend to have a private income, so their homes show the flowering of their taste, the articulation of their hobbies, collections adhere to their cabinets and odd statements of whim stand up in the nooks; but liberal instructors, liberal assistant professors, and liberal associate professors are usually poor and programmatic, so secretly they despise the arts of home adornment. Their houses look one like the other, for the wives gave up herculean careers as doctors, analysts, sociologists, anthropologists, labor relations experts—great servants of the Social Program were lost when the women got married and relinquished all for hubber and kids. So the furnishings are functional, the prevailing hues of wall and carpet and cloth are institutional brown and library gray, the paintings and sculpture are stylized abstract, hopeless imitation I. Rice Pereira, Leonard Baskin, Ben Shahn, but bet your twenty-five dollars to win an assured ten dollars that the artist on the wall is a friend of the host, has the right political ideas, and will talk about literature so well, you might think you were being addressed by Maxim Gorky.
    Such were the sour and near to unprintable views of the semi-distinguished and semi-notorious author as he entered the room. His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped. Like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy, so was he always depressed in such homes by their hint of oversecurity. If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame for such success into the undernourished lap, the overpsychologized loins, of the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist. Their only quarrel with the Great Society was that they thought it temporarily deranged, since the Great Society seemed to be serving as instrument to the Goldwater wing of the Republican party, a course of action so very irrational to these liberal technologues that they were faced with bitter necessity to desert all their hard-earned positions of leverage on real power in the Democratic party, a considerable loss to suffer merely because of an irrational development in the design of the Great Society's supermachine. Well, the liberal technologues were not without character or principle. If their living rooms had little to keep them apart from the look of waiting rooms of doctors with a modern practice, it was exactly because the private loves of the ideologues were attached to no gold standard of the psyche. Those true powers of interior decoration —greed, guilt, compassion and trust—were hardly the cornerstones of their family furnishings. No, just as money was a concept, no more, to the liberal academic, and needed no ballast of gold to be considered real, for nothing is more real to the intellectual than a concept! so position or power in society was, to the liberal technologue, also a concept, desirable, but always to be relinquished for a better concept. They were servants of that social machine of the future in which all irrational human conflict would be resolved, all conflict of interest negotiated, and nature's resonance condensed into frequencies which could comfortably phase nature in or out as you please. So they were servants of the moon. Their living rooms looked like offices precisely because they were ready to move to the moon and build Utope cities there—Utope being, one may well suppose, the only appropriate name for pilot models of Utopia in Non-Terrestrial Ecologically Sub-Dependent Non-Charged Staging Areas, that's to say dead planets where the food must be flown in, but the chances for good civil rights and all-out social engineering are one hundred percent zap!
    As is invariably the case with sociological ruminations the individual guests at this party disproved the general thesis, at least in part. The hostess was small, for example, almost tiny, but vivid, bright-eyed, suggestive of a fiery temper and a childlike glee. It was to pain Mailer later to refuse her cooking (she had prepared a buffet to be eaten before the move to the theater) but he was drinking with some devotion by then, and mixing seemed fair neither to the food nor the bourbon. It was of course directly unfair to the hostess: Mailer priding himself on his good manners precisely because the legend of his had manners was so prevalent, hated to cause pain to a hostess, but he had learned from years of speaking in public that an entertainer's first duty was to deliver himself to the stage with the maximum of energy, high focus, and wit—a good heavy dinner on half a pint of bourbon was likely to produce torpor, undue search for the functional phrase, and dry-mouthed maunderings after a little spit. So he apologized to the lady, dared the look of rejection in her eye which was almost balanced on a tear—she was indeed surprisingly adorable and childlike to be found in such a liberal academic coven—and tried to cover the general sense of loss by marshaling what he assumed most radiant look, next assuring her that he would take a rain check on the meal.
    "Promise?"
    "Next time I'm in Washington," he lied like a psychopath. The arbiter of nicety in him had observed with horror over many a similar occasion that he was absolutely without character for any social situation in which a pause could become the mood's abyss, and so he always filled the moment with the most extravagant amalgams of possibility. Particularly he did this at the home of liberal academics. They were brusque to the world of manners, they had built their hope of heaven on the binary system and the computer, 1 and 0, Yes and No—they had little to do therefore with the spectrum of grace in acceptance and refusal; if you did not do what they wished, you had simply denied them. Now Mailer was often brusque himself, famous for that, but the architecture of his personality bore resemblance to some provincial cathedral which waning orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his enemy. (Mailer had not been married four times for nothing.) If he was on many an occasion brusque, he was also to himself at least so supersensitive to nuances of manner he sometimes suspected when in no modest mood that Proust had lost a cell mate the day they were born in different bags. (Bag is of course used here to specify milieu and not the exceptional character of the mothers, Mme. Proust and Mrs. I. B. Mailer.) At any rate, boldness, attacks of shyness, rude assertion, and circumlocutions tortured as arthritic fingers working at lace, all took their turn with him, and these shuttlings of mood became most pronounced in their resemblance to the banging and shunting of freight cars when he was with liberal academics. Since he—you are in on the secret—disapproved of them far more than he could afford to reveal (their enmity could be venomous) he therefore exerted himself to push up a synthetic exaggerated sweetness of manner, and his conversations with liberal ideologues on the consequence consisted almost entirely of overcorrections of the previous error.
    "I know a friend of yours," says the ideologue. A nervous voice from the novelist for answer. "Yes? Who?" Now the name is given: it is X.
    Mailer: I don't know X.
    The ideologue proceeds to specify a conversation which M held with X. M recollects. "Oh, yes!" he says; "of course! X!" Burbles of conversation about the merits of X, and his great ebullience. Actually X is close to flat seltzer.
There had been just this sort of dialogue with a stranger at the beginning of the party. So Mailer gave up quickly any thought of circulation. Rather, he huddled first with Dwight Macdonald, but Macdonald was the operative definition of the gregarious and could talk with equal facility and equal lack of personal observation to an Eskimo, a collector from the New York Department of Sanitation, or a UN diplomat—therefore was chatting happily with the world fifteen minutes after his entrance. Hence Mailer and Robert Lowell got into what was by all appearances a deep conversation at the dinner table sometime before food was laid out, Mailer thus doubly wounding the hostess with his later refusal.
    We find, therefore, Lowell and Mailer ostensibly locked in converse. In fact, out of the thousand separate enclaves of their very separate personalities, they sensed quickly that they now shared one enclave to the hilt: their secret detestation of liberal academic parties to accompany worthy causes. Yes, their snobbery was on this mountainous face close to identical—each had a delight in exactly the other kind of party, a posh evil social affair, they even supported a similar vein of vanity (Lowell with considerably more justice) that if they were doomed to be revolutionaries, rebels, dissenters, anarchists, protesters, and general champions of one Left cause or another, they were also, in private, grands conservateurs, and if the truth be told, poor damn emigre princes. They were willing if necessary (probably) to die for the cause—one could hope the cause might finally at the end have an unexpected hint of wit, a touch of the Lord's last grace—but wit or no, grace or grace failing, it was bitter rue to have to root up one's occupations of the day, the week, and the weekend and trot down to Washington for idiot mass manifestations which could only drench one in the most ineradicable kind of mucked-up publicity and have for compensation nothing at this party which might be representative of some of the Devil's better creations. So Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer feigned deep conversation. They turned their heads to one another at the empty table, ignoring the potentially acolytic drinkers at either elbow, they projected their elbows out in fact like flying buttresses or old Republicans, they exuded waves of Interruption Repellent from the posture of their backs, and concentrated on their conversation, for indeed they were the only two men of remotely similar status in the room. (Explanations about the position of Paul Goodman will follow later.)
Lowell, whose personal attractiveness was immense (since his features were at once virile and patrician and his characteristic manner turned up facets of the grim, the gallant, the tender and the solicitous as if he were the nicest Boston banker one had ever hoped to meet) was not concerned too much about the evening at the theater. "I'm just going to read some poems," he said. "I suppose you're going to speak, Norman."
    "Well, I will."
    "Yes, you're awfully good at that."
    "Not really." Harumphs, modifications, protestations and denials of the virtue of the ability to speak.
    "I'm no good at all at public speaking," said Lowell in the kindest voice. He had indisputably won the first round. Mailer the younger, presumptive, and self-elected prince was left to his great surprise—for he had been exercised this way many times before—with the unmistakable feeling that there was some faint strain of the second-rate in this ability to speak on your feet.

That last line... Arendt was right.

He caught a lot of flack for it.

Serious question: Does everyone remember if they were for or against the Iraq war in 2003 AT THE TIME. I honestly don’t.

— John Aravosis (@aravosis) May 9, 2016

Yes.

"Reality based community"

There are scholarly men, to whom the history of philosophy (both ancient and modern) is philosophy itself; for these the present Prolegomena are not written. They must wait till those who endeavor to draw from the fountain of reason itself have completed their work; it will then be the historian's turn to inform the world of what has been done.

Immanuel Kant

[W]hen we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Karl Rove

One (via Leiter)

The problem I see with utilitarianism, or any form of consequentialism, is not that it gets the wrong answers to moral questions. I think just about any moral theory, worked out intelligently, and applied with good judgment, would get just about the same results as any other. Mill developed utilitarianism with great humanity and insight. Perhaps that is why many utilitarians (those with less humanity, insight and judgment) say he is not a true utilitarian. I have said to two of my friends: David Lyons and John Skorupski — both excellent philosophers, who have made a deep study of utilitarianism — that they are my favorite utilitarians. The reaction of both was the same: “But I am not a utilitarian!” To this my reply was: “Ah, so that explains it.”

Consequentialist theories begin with a very simple and undoubtedly valid point: Every action aims at a future end, and is seen as a means to it. (This is precisely Kant’s conception of action.) So one rational standard of action is how well it promotes the end it seeks. Another standard is whether it aims at ends which are good. Both of these, but especially the former, depend on judgments of fact. Utilitarians are usually empiricists who think they can solve every problem by accumulating enough empirical facts. They do not realize that thinking as well as experience is necessary to know anything or get anything right.  ["Thinking" means "thinking with great humanity and insight"?] Philosophy is about getting the facts right, but it is also about thinking rightly about them. ["Humanity and judgement" and "rightly": the contradiction between humility and moralism] Philosophy is more about the latter than the former. That’s why empiricist philosophy always tends to be anti-philosophy (and is often proud of it) [in favor of "science"or opposed to it? (see Hume, below)]. People are often most proud of precisely those things of which they should most be ashamed. (The rightward side of American politics illustrates this very well.) [And academic pedantry is leftist?]

The big problem for consequentialism is that facts of this last form are hard to obtain except for a few determinate ends in the fairly short run. Consequentialist theories pretend that we can set some great big ends (the general happiness, human flourishing), provide ourselves with definite enough conceptions of them to make them the objects of instrumental reasoning, [was Hume an intrumentalist?] and then obtain enough reliable information about what actions will best promote them that we could regulate our conduct by these considerations alone. In fact people do not know enough about themselves and what is good for them to form a sufficiently definite conception of the general happiness (or whatever the end is) to establish definite rules for its pursuit. [Well there goes a truckload of academic literature out the window]

Further, we cannot predict the effects of our actions, [click the fucking links] especially our collective actions over generations or centuries, to use instrumental reasoning toward these big final ends to tell us what we ought to do. As a result, it is possible to use the simple point that it is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn these into what look like moral theories. Philosophers tend to be ravished by the formal beauty of such theories, and they don’t pay much attention to the fact that our human limitations make them pretty useless in practice, while the simple point about instrumental reasoning is too shallow to be of much real moral interest. [Lazy rationalism. Hume was an empiricist, right?]

When consequentialist theories are developed in terms of an equally shallow psychology of the good — such as a crude form of hedonism — the results can sometimes strike sensible people as revolting and inhuman. People can be reduced to simple repositories of positive or negative sensory states, and their humanity is lost sight of entirely. When people think that moral problems can be solved by some simple strategy of calculation, that sets them up for ghastly overreaching. They think they can turn everything into a “science” the way mechanics was turned into a science in the seventeeth century. [rationalists rationalize] They want to turn everything over to technocrats and social engineers. They become shortsighted or simplistic about their ends, and they disastrously overestimate their ability to acquire the information they need to make the needed calculations. Utilitarians of the caliber of Mill and Sidgwick do not do these things, at least on particular moral issues about which they reflect as human beings. [yes another fucking link]

...Marx is thought of as an implacable foe of capitalism. But go back and read the first section of the Communist Manifesto. Notice how it contains a paean of praise for the way capitalism and the bourgeoisie have both enriched the human powers of production and also enabled us to see with clear vision the nature of human society and human history. It has taken me a long time to realize where I most disagree with Marx. His assessment of capitalism is far too favorable. He took its instability, inhumanity and irrationality to be signs that it was a merely transitional form, which had delivered into humanity’s hands the means to a much better way of life than any that have ever existed on earth. Marx could not bring himself to believe that our species is so benighted, irrational and slavish that it would put up with such a monstrous way of life. He thought that it was inevitable that people would find a better way. We now see that this was not so. Capitalism has not proven to be a transitional form, a gateway to a higher human future. Capitalism now seems more likely a swamp, a bog, a quicksand in which humanity is presently flailing about, unable to extricate itself, perhaps doomed to perish within a few generations from the long term effects of the technology which seemed to Marx its greatest gift to humanity. Capitalism has proven to be a far more terrible system than Marx could ever bring himself to imagine. Those who are so deluded as to find something good in it, or even feel loyalty toward it, are its most pitiful victims. [moralizing fatalism]

Two

David Hume, who died in his native Edinburgh in 1776, has become something of a hero to academic philosophers. In 2009, he won first place in a large international poll of professors and graduate students who were asked to name the dead thinker with whom they most identified. The runners-up in this peculiar race were Aristotle and Kant. Hume beat them by a comfortable margin. Socrates only just made the top twenty.

This is quite a reversal of fortune for Hume, who failed in both of his attempts to get an academic job. In his own day, and into the nineteenth century, his philosophical writings were generally seen as perverse and destructive. Their goal was “to produce in the reader a complete distrust in his own faculties,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1815–1817. The best that could be said for Hume as a philosopher was that he provoked wiser thinkers to refute him in interesting ways. As a historian and essayist, though, Hume enjoyed almost immediate success. When James Boswell called him “the greatest Writer in Brittain”—this was in 1762, before Boswell transferred his allegiance to Dr. Johnson—he was thinking mainly of Hume’s History of England, which remained popular for much of the nineteenth century. “HUME (David), the Historian” is how the British Library rather conservatively still catalogued him in the 1980s. 

["History is like foreign travel. It broadens the mind, but it does not deepen it."]

...Still, it is probably the rise of so-called “naturalism” in philosophy that best explains Hume’s newfound appeal. [Contemporary naturalism is just the sort of pedantry Hume mocked. Is Santayana popular again?] Naturalism has several components, all of which were prominent in his work. Hume stressed the similarities between people and other animals: a century before Darwin’s Descent of Man, he argued that there is no great difference between the minds of humans and the minds of some creatures in zoos. (Hume also anticipated Darwin in implying that certain mental traits function to aid reproduction.) He treated religion as a natural phenomenon, to be explained in psychological and historical terms—which tended to annoy the pious—and he argued that the study of the mind and of morals should be pursued by the same empirical methods that were starting to cast new light on the rest of nature. Philosophy, for Hume, was thus not fundamentally different from science. This outlook is much more common in our time than it was in his.

Hume’s response to the allegation of universal skepticism was that the author of the Treatise—who, he pretended, was someone else—had meant only “to abate the Pride of mere human Reasoners.” He advocated “Modesty…and Humility, [back to Montaigne and Erasmus, and Humanism, not the anti-Humanism of pedants. Humanism is not optimism. Look it up] with regard to the Operations of our natural Faculties.” As for the foundations of morality, Hume anonymously protested that the author of the Treatise had merely denied that “the Propositions of Morality were of the same Nature with the Truths of Mathematicks and the abstract Sciences.” The book did not dispute the fact that there was a difference between right and wrong; rather it maintained that this difference reflects humanity’s “internal Tastes and Sentiments”—which, according to Hume’s pamphlet, ought not to be received as a shocking idea.

"Still, it is probably the rise of so-called “naturalism” in philosophy that best explains Hume’s newfound appeal." The return of the descriptive naturalism of literature and history and the fading of prescriptive pseudoscience. Philosophers are coming to terms with the fact that Modernism is dead. The Enlightenment is dead. Hume's humanism was the humane pessimism of the Renaissance, not the optimism of pedants.

Allen Wood (first link): "I think it is already clear that Rawls is the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century." Rawls was to philosophy what Tolkien was to literature. But Tolkien will last longer.

Another one that I'm not going to go on about.
"Holy Wars: Secularism and the invention of religion"

Relativism and Religion: Why Democratic Societies Do Not Need Moral Absolutes
Carlo Invernizzi Accetti
Columbia University Press, $65 (cloth) 65 fucking dollars.

The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions
Michael Walzer
Yale University Press, $18 (paper)

Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Princeton University Press, $29.95 (cloth)

Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report
Saba Mahmood
Princeton University Press, $24.95 (paper)

"Accetti’s singular insight is that Catholic and secular theorists of democracy, for all their differences, agree on one fundamental assertion: ethical relativism is a problem for democracies."

blasts from the past
Idiot McGinn

I am struck by this passage from Tocqueville: "I have previously stated that the principle of the sovereignty of the people hovers over the whole political system of the Anglo-Americans. Every page of this book will reflect certain fresh instances of this doctrine. In nations were it exists, every individual takes an equal share in sovereign power and participates equally in the government of the state. Thus he is considered as enlightened, virtuous, strong as any of his fellow men." Toqueville's point is that democracy presupposes that each person is as competent and virtuous as any other. But of course this is false: people differ widely in intelligence and virtue. Note that he says "considered" not "really". So democracy rests on a lie. How, then, to defend democracy? Well, if truth, reason, virtue, etc are not objective qualities that people exemplify to varying degrees, but are rather relative to each person, we have a way out: everyone is as smart and good as anyone else to himself. Then democracy rests on no lie, since everyone really is cognitively and morally equal. Relativism steps in to save democracy from its noble lie. Thus relativism finds a foothold. But relativism is rubbish; so where does that leave democracy?

Relativism is foundational to democracies. Democracy is strictly formal as to process and relativist as to absolutes. That's the fucking point.

I shut down an absurd debate about the roots of secularization once with the simple comment that secularization is the simple result of coexistence: once a Catholic girl fucks a Jewish boy it's the beginning of the end for religion qua religion.
To put it in terms of law: modern democratic justice is a Muslim judge hearing the case of a Christian accused by a Buddhist of robbery, defended by a Jew, with the state represented by a Hindu, before a jury of Animists and Jains. In order to function in such an environment you need to engage it in its entirely; you must answer not to one interest or another but to all. 

"The Tunisian “success story,” then, is not that all sides wanted democracy, but rather that all sides had no choice but to settle for democracy."

Necessity is the mother of secularism. Philosophy does not invent; it codifies. Practice precedes theory.

And Michael Walzer is a Zionist. The data is not on his side.

"History is bunk". I do all this on autopilot. That's my only excuse.