Showing posts with label Transhumanism and Transgender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transhumanism and Transgender. Show all posts
Friday, August 21, 2026
The Philosophy Chair and Rector at Ghent U stood accused by an astonishing 70% of the Philosophy staff of violating the Ghent U Code of Ethics for having appointed Cofnas. They reviewed his public statements in favor, for example, of the disappearance of Black faculty at…
Since becoming rector in October 2025, De Sutter has presided over the transformation of Ghent University's Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences into a European hub for the race science movement.
Nathan Cofnas – A philosopher who wrote that "the number of Black professors would approach zero". Hired in March 2026. Defended by De Sutter when 45 philosophers called for his resignation, accusing him of promoting "racist pseudoscience".
Bouke de Vries – The professor who hired Cofnas. Formally reprimanded for teaching replacement theory. Accused of legitimizing eugenics.
Craig Willy – De Vries's PhD student. Regular contributor to Aporia magazine—a publication of the Human Diversity Foundation, a far-right organization whose members argue certain ethnic groups are genetically superior.
Arday was fragile, like Swartz and Graeber. Graeber was a fantasist and Arday was little else. He and Swarz were killed by their enablers, but Arday had conned them, and they were desperate to be conned. Petra De Sutter is a man.
Friday, December 13, 2024
Late because I never got around to it.
Danny met Grace, an academic, in 2015, two years after the birth of The Toast, a sly and chaotic website that also made Danny’s co-founder, Nicole Cliffe, a beloved internet presence; it closed up shop with a eulogy from Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2019, he turned 33, married Grace, took her last name, and broke contact with his family, publicly holding his pastor father to account for choices you’d never want your pastor to make. As now perhaps the most famous trans couple of a certain slice of literary America, they decamped abruptly from California to New York.
A year after the Lavery wedding, Grace met Lily online. Lily was teaching art history at Michigan State and — by her account — “reading Killing Eve fan fiction and masturbating.” They fell for each other.
Sunday, November 24, 2024
For what it’s worth, nobody I know has ever jerked off on the thigh of one of their interns while on the clock in their office, so that’s one way Clinton is not like us. https://t.co/rSCVLGAV4U
He couldn't think of the obvious, and had to imagine something implausible.
It took me back. The politics of earnest, seemingly sexless, men. Also of course, some women.
It's the self-blind politics that makes support for transwomen obligatory because they call themselves women; but Philosemitism is suspect, and Rachel Dolezel earns mockery.
I find this reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling. Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas?
Like Moyn's pathetic politics. And he's doing it again. Brazil just indicted Bolsonaro, but somehow the US is supposed to be above such things. The model is the faculty lounge.
2020
repeats. The distinction between collaborative reason in the academy, and adversarial reason in the world at large.
2017
The fetish for happiness, for demand for resolution of all conflicts, external and internal, the denial of the possibility of tragedy, the liberal institutionalization of narcissism, while denying the possibility that it could exist. Cafe revolutionaries, liberal Zionists, transsexuals, the popular triumph of wishful thinking. The absolute triumph of course is fascism.
The overlap between critics of liberal transgenderism and defenders of Zionism, and critics of Zionism and defenders of male fantasy. Zionist fantasies have become reality through the state of Israel, and Palestinian reality has become tied to fantasy.
I really feel almost alone
Lewinsky tells her story
“And so we moved to the bathroom and were more intimate. There was some attention paid on me and then I was reciprocating, where up until that point he had always stopped before completion on his part,” Lewinsky said, delicately trying to explain their encounter.
“I sort of stood up and said I wanted to move past that stage and so he finally said OK.
That’s when the dress was soiled, but Lewinsky didn’t notice at the time. “So that finished and then I hugged him after. And he hugged me,” she said. “And off I went.”
The 30 year old man on the right is officially a woman, named Giulia Valentino.
Posner and Verlmeule's op-ed was pulled so quickly that Balkin had to link to a cache file that died within a year. Now the piece has been republished. There's no telling if it's been cut but I'm betting it hasn't. That's how far we've come.
I found out it'd been republished because I had to search for it again after ridiculing a member of the extended PRC apparat who was defending the honor of China against a Foggy Bottom intellectual. The link in his header and the pinned tweet is to an interview with Vermeule.
"A lesson of virtue" in The Beijing Review. Vermeule must follow him because he blocked me, again.
Whining about the Cold War is like asking McDonalds or KFC to stop competing with each other; the difference is the armies and the nukes. The only option is to reject US and Chinese foreign policy goals as such, and look to the small states forced to negotiate a path between them.
I think the reason all these academic intellectuals follow edgelords and fascists, is that their minds are too dead to think for themselves.
Working all day makes it easier just to troll than think, but mindless repetition being what it is, sometimes ideas pop into your head.
"Woke" is the knee-jerk response of guilty liberals—if post-war Germans can be defined as liberal—goaded by justified anger of marginalized groups—make your own list—who craft technical fixes to avoid the burden of coming to terms with a given problem. From reconstruction to Brown v Board, the conquests of Liberia and Palestine, to the sterilization of teenagers.
The anti-woke left are all Zionists and aligned with reactionaries: anti-idpol with white identity.[includes Jäger on Charles Maier. see below] It's not even interesting watching Leusder and Jäger anymore; too often one click away from certified race science and fascism. I could write a long list of readers of Razib Khan and Richard Hanania. The last link is to Buppie Bourgeoisie in the NY Times, who does movie reviews with Ganz, the "leftist".
Adam Tooze follows Khan. And Khan follows Emil Kirkegaard; the link is his memorial for Richard Lynn.
Leiter used to be a fan of Lemoine, now a partner in Hanania's absurd little substack "The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology", but that changed at some point.
He still links Freddie deBoer, a man on "the actual left". deBoer interviewed by Razib Khan as a member of the "hereditarian left"
Two repeats, now as a pair.
In the end there's not much thought in any of the above. The thinking was over mostly years ago. It's just plug and play.
Tuesday, August 22, 2023
I'd forgotten, Jäger on Charles Maier, previously. Also linked above
--
“We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century,” Charles Maier notes in an announcement for his new book The Project State and Its Rivals. Both haunting and tantalizing, the sentence’s past tense speaks to a profoundly contemporary mood. As the twenty-first century progresses, confident visions about the previous century conceived from the vantage point of the 1990s—the “age of extremes” resolved by a set of liberal settlements—no longer seem safe and secure. In 2023, the European extreme Right is establishing itself as a force of government, populism is going global, and inter-imperial tensions have ushered in a new arms race. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland is currently polling above 20 percent, while Modi is set to win another term in India with an approval rating near 80 percent. To the desperation of liberals nostalgic for the 1990s, the “end of the end of history” has arrived.
The project state begins with the Jacobins and continues through to the Zionists. I'm not going to repeat myself, again.
Watching gay anti-trans arguments attacking queer theory, the libertine underground.
People writing about Andrea Dworkin threatening Allen Ginsberg because he was a member of NAMBLA. And Liberals have no idea what the fuck is going on.
Though I knew it before, the anti-woke left is fully pro-Israel. And the ties to anti-black racism, at best race science curious are clear. Overlapping ecosystems, in and out of academia, with or without advanced degrees.
On twitter following lesbian feminists, detrans teenagers, Ukrainian leftists, Russian and Arab dissidents, Iranians, Palestinians, academics in/from other countries, journalists mostly but not all from other countries. And I'm still bored.
updated a few time, this time at the top. It's all so fucking stupid.
The Idiot Tushnet, and co., restating his old argument.
The Supreme Court has unanimously held that Jackson Pollock’s paintings, Arnold Schöenberg’s music, and Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” are “unquestionably shielded” by the First Amendment. Nonrepresentational art, instrumental music, and nonsense: all receive constitutional coverage under an amendment protecting “the freedom of speech,” even though none involves what we typically think of as speech—the use of words to convey meaning.
Jackson Pollock from 1952,
Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles (Number 11)
Daniel Bell 20 years later. "Behind the chiliasm of modern man, is the megalomania of self-infinitization."
Atomization, isolation and the illusion of absolute community. The low buzz and hum—the violence and warmth—of neurological overload.
[Weber] imagines an impersonal relation to the world. It’s a common trope of the literature of the period, but the impersonal in art and technocracy, though the product of the same events are very different things....
By the time anything becomes known as an idea, it’s been around for awhile
From rationalism to positivism to a world of shit.
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Two from the NYRB
“There is a big secret about sex,” wrote Leo Bersani in 1987. “Most people don’t like it.” The same might be said of translation, which many readers secretly consider a necessary evil.
Translation is transliteration. It's a necessary evil. Utilitarianism turns practical necessity into the ideal, so its weaknesses are now "secrets". And another name for the file of women getting their model of sexuality from homosexual men. Post-feminism is pre-feminism on crank, and rationalism makes you stupid. Or the other way around. An asshole doesn't have a clitoris. Call it female circumcision by category error.
In his films for children, Hayao Miyazaki has used the labor-intensive art of animation to study the major problem of adult life.
That was the subhead, but still. No fucking shit.
The director sticks to a deliberately vague line, one that could be applied to the most anodyne Disney venture, that all his films are about “how to live.” Few scholars or critics have done the work to penetrate this author’s statement. “What’s it about?” asked Nigel Andrews of Spirited Away. “Simple answer: Everything.” Ligaya Mishan writes that Miyazaki’s films seem to “thwart the Western mind.”
A world of idiots.
Miyazaki is the benign ruler of his domain. He's a master and treated as one by his employee/servants. He's a filmmaker and an artist. His wife "hasn't forgiven him" he says, for making her stop working as an animator. Nothing about any of this"thwarts the Western mind". There are many things in his work that are foreign to the Western mind, but French art is foreign to the English. You can't translate Rimbaud, Mallarmé, or Lady Murasaki, but there's nothing to translate in a painting—a material thing—or an image; the difference is in the perception by individuals and members of various groups. Japanese people understand Miyazaki in ways Europeans will not, but the thing absent perception is the same.
Spirited Away is a film about children and the adults who care for them. Miyazaki's closest equivalent in the US is Maruice Sendak. In Europe it's Tove Jansson.
You will never understand the inner workings of another mind; all you have to work with is your perception of their actions, or the record or description of those actions by others, rendered in form. Proust is untranslatable; he could never be an English novelist; the past is another county. Acknowledging these things is the beginning of adulthood and intellectual life. We're ruled by big children in university chairs and editorial offices, and it makes me want to puke.
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in re: the "Western mind". A commenter, Zina Hitz, on Leiter's post reporting the death of Harry Frankfurt
When I met him at Princeton I was already trained as a scholar in Greek philosophy. But I had not fully realized that I could use philosophy to think about my life or what t means to be a human being.
Princeton philosophy in the 80's
"My students were all obsessed with sex. Not the idea of sex, or the meaning of sex, but sex!"
Rakesh Bhandari comments about Frankfurt's discussion of 1st and 2nd order desires. Maybe Frankfurt will be remembered for teaching geeks that there's more to life than being geeks, the same transition Derrida played a part in. One of them would be amused. I still think I coined the phrase second-order curiosity, meaning the ironic awareness of an interest, as a way of explaining the problems of analytic philosophy. Autism is the model of first order curiosity: subtext, and other people, are irrelevant. "I'm a liberal"; "I'm a nice guy!" "Some of my best friends..." "I have an extended mind!"
Mathematics can't tell you why you wanted to be a mathematician. "Science can't even justify science." Steven Weinberg, whose philosophy justifies Zionism, as Leiter's does.
Two by Tushnet: one pushing his version of the "unitary executive" and another, on free speech and art, again. He belongs with the idiots above.
A few weeks ago, my family went on vacation in Copenhagen, where we ate at several top-of-the-line restaurants. My reaction to the meals? “How incredibly creative of the chef.”
A few weeks ago, my family went to DC, where we met with several top-of-the-line law firms. My reaction to the briefs? “How incredibly creative of the partners.”
None of these cases are about speech; they're about the relation of speech to commerce.
The idiot
A different example, with the same analytic structure, clarifies the problem. Switch from discrimination on the basis of religion to discrimination on the basis of race. Now the chef makes dishes to preserve white culture. An African-American comes to the restaurant, but the chef says, “Sorry, I won’t serve you because my message that these foods are preserving white culture would be diluted if people saw Black people eating at the restaurant.” We might say that the restaurant owner’s choice of a business model is his way of expressing himself: His expressive conduct is his expressive activity.
White Trash Cooking is a cookbook, and anyone can buy it. The KKK can open a restaurant, but it has to serve niggers, gooks, spics, and kikes. Equal access to the market, in a commercial culture: from Wickard vs Filburn to civil rights, the market takes precedence over social and private life.
After Tushnet's open letter:
—NBC, Alabama Republicans refuse to draw a second Black congressional district in defiance of Supreme Court.
Tushnet is a famous opponent of judicial review, and now Alabama Republicans and supporters of the independent state legislature theory have heeded his call. On executive supremacy, Posner and Vermuele at least are consistent. And all of this and everything above, with the same paper-thin idea of language, and politics.
Monday, July 10, 2023
Caitlín Doherty, "poetry editor" at a journal so over-the-top that its editors used mocking criticism for its blurbs—
Swimming in the blood of her own body, in labor and in pain, the woman is a half-human who achieves her half-human fate in pregnancy and childbearing. The canal through which the infant is extruded is the man’s place of sex; he enters, not wanting blood to drown him or contaminate him or pollute him; the blood makes her dirty and threatens his pristine penis; this makes her an abomination.
Susie Bright was right, she's a great pornographer. She's wrong to call her a lousy writer; that's a good paragraph. But how do you deal with so much self-loathing; anger directed first at herself and then out at the world? Dworkin did it by making her hate into a kind of art that laws she promoted would ban, or should if they're followed. Far from the first artist to make an art from self-destruction.
Doherty is no better than the women she's responding to, all of them focused on style to avoid what they can't face, following Dworkin's model rather than trying to understand it. But Doherty can't accept that it's the style that makes it personal; and even the impersonal is a style if it's filled with details. It's those details that make it the communication between one single, specific, individual, person and another or others, and that's what the other writers are responding too. It's the details that make it the writing of "Andrea Dworkin". But Doherty—the poetry editor!—has no interest in the specifics of another life; she can't even read "Fascinating Fascism" for what it is.
Doherty has to pretend. Programs and positivism: so earnest.
It cannot be overstated how deeply boring all this is. How unthrilling, how inessential, to how few urgent questions this seems to contain the seeds of any possible answers. As Dworkin said of porn (after her friend said it of heroin): ‘The worst thing about it all is the endless repetition.’ We’ve been here before, of course, in the past few years’ debate over Afropessimism. Similar risks adhere to a negative feminism: if the aim is to move from a biological conception of gender, as of race, to one that is socially constructed but no less real for it in its consequences, might it not behoove us to arrive at a category definition that does not condemn all those who fall within it to limitless amounts of pain? Feminism has no absolute right to existence. It must describe something about the world accurately for it to make sense as a political-philosophical position. And that description must contain within it verifiable truths about the current situation of women, or else it will be – only – a style.
"Afropessimism", academia like big pharma, evergreening the blues, "double-consciousness", "down by law", the history of black experience, and the experience of the working class, of any race, for the age of buppies; like Zionism and "little Israel".
And then this: "...if the aim is to move from a biological conception of gender" Brilliant.
"And that description must contain within it verifiable truths about the current situation of women, or else it will be – only – a style."
All of this describes the current situation of women. But it's up to the next generation to read the details and understand the inner lives of the dead.
I've said it before: I was was shocked when I learned, late, that Brecht never recognized his own decadence. It was always the doubleness, contradiction, the violence that made the hairs on my arms stand up, that gave me shivers. I always saw everything for context. Everything's always been double. Or if it wasn't needed to be. If it wasn't double it bored me. But the obliviousness of people now, those who should know better if only because they've read the history, and even teach it! amazes me.
"and the experience of the working class, of any race". Cracker pessimism
Thursday, June 22, 2023
But Pageboy doesn’t read defiant, strong or joyful. It reads sad: the story of a vulnerable girl thrown into the entertainment business at the age of 10; unprotected by her family; struggling with food; closeted, and reminded by the casual homophobia of Hollywood to stay that way; and subjected to sexual assault and harassment by people who should have been trusted colleagues.
In the memoir, Page says: “At certain points I’ve referred to myself using my previous name and pronouns. This is a choice that felt right to me, occasionally, when talking about my past self, but it’s not an invitation for anyone to do the same.” But talking about Page’s past as though it happened to a boy is nonsensical: Ellen’s experiences are tied to her femaleness, and more than that, her lesbianism.
Not that Page refers to his pre-transition sexuality as “lesbian”: “queer” is preferred, and when the word “lesbian” comes up, it’s marked as something held in contempt, by others if not by Page. At one point, Page calls lesbianism a “repugnant” feature that directors cannot allow on-screen.
Any resistance to compulsory femininity — high heels, tight dresses — is cast by the industry as Page being “difficult”. Roles for women are so sexualised that at one point Page describes Juno as representing “a space beyond the boundary”. This is, remember, a film in which Page’s character is pregnant: you could hardly get a more female role. But because Juno is not “hyperfeminised” — because Page wears tees and jeans for the part — the pressure of gender is lifted, somewhat.
But 2007 was also the year that trans writer Julia Serano published Whipping Girl, which is probably the most influential text in terms of solidifying gender identity theory. In it, Serano argued that “feminine verbal and aesthetic expression” are “driven by intrinsic and deep-seated inclinations that are likely to be the result of biology”. In other words, regardless of your actual sex, if you don’t act or dress “girly”, you might not be a girl at all.
As this idea gained intellectual purchase, femininity standards in popular culture were growing ever more exacting. This pressure was even dramatised in Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody’s follow-up movie, Jennifer’s Body, which starred ultimate hottie Megan Fox as a cheerleader succubus, and Amanda Seyfried as her hoodie-wearing, jealousy-gnarled best friend. The space for the kind of girl-character Page played — girls who were not limited to being objects of desire — was shrinking.
But Hollywood was only amplifying messages Page had heard from her family. Page’s mother informs her daughter that she can “do anything a boy can do”, but from Page’s perspective, this is never sincere. There is continual maternal pressure for Page to be more girly, as well as an absolute rejection of the possibility of homosexuality. One of the few vignettes in which Page recalls his mother being happy is when Page requests a shopping trip to buy “girl clothes” as a teenager. (Page enjoys the way the new wardrobe alters her social standing, but not the way the clothes make her feel about herself.) When Page initially comes out as gay, her mother’s reaction is to yell: “That doesn’t exist!”
Becoming a “transgender guy” doesn’t spare Page from judgement and disgust. (Page still seems wounded by a Jordan Peterson tweet that referred to the surgeon who performed Page’s mastectomy as a “criminal”.) But it does resolve the problem of being a lesbian: Page’s mother, at least, seems better able to accept a trans child than a gay one. “She loves her son endlessly,” writes Page. Transition also makes Page’s body safer — a body that has been repeatedly violated and threatened. Page mentions an “acquaintance” who told her, after she came out for the first time, “I’m going to fuck you to make you realise you aren’t gay.” There’s also a male director who “grooms” her, a male crew member on an early film who forces oral sex on her, and a female crew member on another film who sexually assaults her while presenting it to Page as a consensual relationship. Over and over, Page is informed with violence that her body is not hers.
Again, Hollywood reinforces what began in Page’s childhood. Her adversarial relationship with her body can be seen in her reaction to her stepmother’s cooking. Page hears an “internal voice” saying “no, that can’t go inside you” when she’s confronted with food that scares her: a terror of adulteration, of losing control. Puberty inevitably heightens this. Page describes the age of 11 as “the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent”. This is, I think, a common sensation for girls: puberty ends an era of uncomplicated, happy embodiment, and launches you into a world where your body appears to invite dangerous attention against your will. Not a shift from boy to girl, but a shift from “person” to “thing”. As Hilary Mantel wrote, some girls want out. They starve themselves, or punish their bodies, and now they have the option to disown their sex entirely.
"It’s time for some game theory"
In order to maintain free speech, liberalism proposes a norm of reciprocity: it’s in everyone’s interest to defend free speech for their enemies so that their enemies will defend free speech for them.
"Carl Beijer" doesn't know the history of what he's attacking any more than of what he's defending. He thinks politics is about talking to your friends, not about convincing strangers that they should agree with you. He defends the dictatorship of the pure like a moralizing high school student from the American suburbs.
John Quiggin, 2008: "Sunstein argues that the echo chamber effect tends to reinforce existing views and produce a poisonous partisan divide. It seems to me that exactly the opposite is true. "
repeats
I always thought Sunstein's point was obvious, especially for any culture founded on individualist liberalism. It's that culture that's given us Facebook and surveillance capitalism and personalized marketing, the virtual store where the displays are changed and items moved to the front to fit your last purchases. Newsfeeds work the same way, reinforcing biases, from narrowcasting to microcasting to the narcissism where the world is reduced to a mirror.
Twitter changed its algorithm years ago, forcing you to choose between replying to a tweet and quoting it, limiting the exposure of either your followers or those of the person you're replying to. Up to that point a reply appeared on both timelines.
Ryan Cooper
Have you ever argued with a conservative? They won't learn anything no matter what I say or where I say it. Whatever I say is wrong by definition.
Amia Srinivasan gives the game away
A graduate student once complained to me and my co-convenor that we had not put a content warning on Catharine MacKinnon’s ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State’, even though we had at the start of the course issued a blanket policy that permitted students to skip any class meeting, without explanation – which we had done in recognition that the reading for the seminar was emotionally demanding. Another student, an undergraduate, told me she didn’t want to read MacKinnon’s work because she had heard (from her brother) that MacKinnon was a ‘TERF’ (she is not). A student asked me why I thought it was worthwhile to discuss in a lecture what sort of metaphysics of gender was required to vindicate the identities of trans women as women and trans men as men, given that he (a trans man) already knew that he was a man.
"a blanket policy that permitted students to skip any class meeting, without explanation – which we had done in recognition that the reading for the seminar was emotionally demanding", like a medical student exempted from class because she can't stand the sight of blood.
"...given that he (a trans man) already knew that he was a man", just like Beijer and Cooper and the rest know that they're a leftists. And no one and nothing should ever be allowed to challenge that.
When it rains in pours. Fraser McDonald, in the same issue of the LRB
It’s not uncommon for a student to come to my office to tell me they’re not happy with their exam mark. ‘Perhaps you just made a mistake?’ one suggested to me last year.
"Get the fuck out of my office."
The academy is conservative and authoritarian. That's its strength and weakness. It should be hard to get a governmentally recognized license, and it should be easy to say it's not worth it. These idiots dumb down everything.
At the University of Edinburgh, where I teach, changes pushed through the Senate will allow students to get degrees ‘on aggregate’ (based on work marked to date) but with a greater number of missing course credits than would previously have been permitted. The same is true across the sector. It’s not unusual for students to graduate with missing coursework – the affordance is called ‘special circumstances’. But universities have now turned this occasional act of compassion into a handy workaround to benefit employers. ‘Special circumstances’ are being redefined, it seems, to apply to the university’s crisis rather than the student’s.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active."
Leaders and followers. Hustlers and customers. Who do you blame, the con man or the rube?
evolved (cognitive) sex differences between human males and females explain the universality of patriarchy
Patriarchy and the Original Position
If politics is the art of the possible, political philosophy is the science of the possible. What kinds of societies could there be, not just for Homo economicus, but for Homo sapiens, a recent product of a long lineage of primate ancestors? One obvious—in political philosophy, often ignored—feature of sapiens is sex. Unlike economicus, humans come in two distinct sexed forms, female and male. And one striking apparently universal feature of past human societies (including at least many contemporary societies), is patriarchy: the dominance of males in political and social decision-making. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari says, it is plausible that some ‘universal biological reason’ accounts for patriarchy. If that is right, then patriarchy may seem inevitable, or at least hard to avoid. The first part of the paper outlines some evidence for Harari’s ‘universal biological reason’. The second part brings the first part to bear on Rawls’s use of the original position, and the subsequent feminist adoption of it by Susan Okin. I will argue that ignorance of one’s sex in the original position fails to deal with the problem of patriarchy, and that the Rawlsian approach should be abandoned.
The best exchange at the time.
You do realize that others may still hold the position that the entire talk was suggestive of inferiority while conceding this point. Also, sometimes someone will say "yeah, okay, thanks" just be done with something. Doesn't mean they accept the response.
Do you yourself, new twitter account holder, accept that “cognitive” doesn’t mean intelligence?
Relevance? Doesn't matter what I think--I'm making a logical point.
Labeled "Transhumanism and Transgender" because misogyny is universal.
"political philosophy is the science of the possible" is the most ridiculous thing I'd read in days, but it takes me back.
As I tried to remind Kathleen Stock, the transgender fantasy, like all fantasy, begins in rationalism: the rationalism that says a philosopher is a scientist, or an ethnonationalist a liberal. "I'm a philosopher" "I'm a liberal" "I'm a woman". Men are the new women, iff rationalism is the new empiricism. Sorry, no.
I added this from archive.org, to the link above, since she deleted the tweet awhile ago. It makes me laugh.
It's a good post, but a long one. I used a trick to add extra tags, but the trick doesn't work anymore so I can't fix a broken link to Ludlow's interview. I fixed it here
Imagine Oxford rescinding an offer to publish Nigel Biggar's Colonialism. That would be funny. Academia vs real politics. I'm just going to shrug.
"I wrote a book review last year for the FT... and it was a not very good book about male violence against women...."
Decades ago it would be male editors removing statements of fact made by women; editors still remove statements of fact made by Palestinians, Iraqis, and now Russians and Ukrainians: reports by inconvenient people on uncomfortable subjects. But naive realism notwithstanding—start at the beginning—it's remarkable how the fight for women has become the fight for fantasy to be recognized as state certified reality. Don't blame Foucault. This is liberalism.
And Rachel Dolezal is still white.
Sunday, March 26, 2023
"there is a mountain of evidence that sex is a huge predictor of all sorts of outcomes, from health to pay to crime, to voting, to religion; anything you can think of.... scientifically speaking the view that sex matters is not remotely controversial. Yet many academics and students of course are too afraid to say it... This isn't just an attempt to stop us from speaking; it's an attempt to stop us from knowing. Why are gender identity activists so outraged by data collection on sex?... I think the only answer to that question is that data on sex allows us to state certain facts. And those facts about sex are really inconvenient for gender identity theory."
John Waters sent a birthday card to a mutual friend on his 30th birthday: "Don't worry, you're still chicken."
John Kelly is a very nice man, but being a "Performance Artist"—pretensions limiting his audience and career—he disables embedding. But Joni Mitchell is a fan, and so am I. Click on the link.
And now I've covered almost everything, including contradictions. Only to add that Kelly is a craftsman and a traditionalist. His performance is conservative in the best sense, and he belongs with Welles, O'Toole, and Milton, linked below. Waters on the other hand is a bit of a nasty piece of work. And Jäger can't come to terms with his conflicts.
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Jäeger and Leusder, Tooze and the rest of the younger generation of technocrats, earnestly engaged with "aesthetics" and "culture", always returning to romanticism, while elsewhere and seemingly unaware of the connection, expressing concern over and admiration for American individualism: Bowling Alone, and "the American experiment has just begun."etc.
Romanticism is the melodramatic longing of individualists for a mythical idea of community. Not recognizing or accepting that they're members of a group and following its codes, they form an intentional community, a subset of their group, an artificial imagined collective dedicated to aesthetics or politics, or a mixture of the two. The first absurdity—separating form from content, aesthetics from ethics—is compounded by the second: the joining of these supposedly separate things into a new unity. The result either way is kitsch, or close to it.
Technocrats as fans of art are just fans of themselves.
Romanticism always begins in fandom and fantasy, the memory of the feelings another older artist's work brought out in the romantic poet's childhood. Thirty years ago I took a drum lesson from a working pro, a session player, who said I talked like someone who listened to music, not someone who played it. I want to think I got the joke immediately. When my father asked a room of freshmen how many of them wanted to be poets, half of them raised their hands. Then he asked how many wanted to write poetry.
"Yes but the point is, surely… This is the point of blank verse, "The lady shall speak her mind freely, or the blank verse will halt for it." Hamlet says this. You don't have to think; you think after the line, not before it, or not during. The line is the thought. This is the point of iambic pentameter."
Every time I hear the phrase "thought leader" I think of John Rawls.
Artists aren't individualists. The craft precedes the craftsman.
I may have found a job I can work at if I need to till I die. A bench job is the closest I'll ever come to a desk job. But J.P. Morgan is sending me wealth management spam again, credit to the Norwegian not at Morgan who's handling my account; I may be able to retire after all. It's good having a billionaire for a stockbroker, even if he's working to make sure dividends cover my rent controlled apartment. Cultural capital is still the next best thing.
People pointing out that the Simpsons called the Michelangelo scandal should watch the episode.
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Romanticism always begins in fandom and fantasy, the memory of the feelings another older artist's work brought out in the romantic poet's childhood.
Listening to the Hammerklavier as I do every once in a while and remembering that I laughed.
"A teacher of mine, Abe Ajay, an arch modernist, a friend of Ad Reinhardt who worked with him at The New Masses, used to complain that Beethoven ruined his music with images. 'All those wonderful notes and then... Birds!!'"
Beethoven like Marx, is sui generis. That's one way to cover my ass. But there is something to be said for being first to cross the a line. He doesn't refer to art; he uses art to refer to something else. That's in the manuscript. But also, now that I've checked, in The Classical Style, Rosensays he used art to refer to itself—as a modernist—which is the debate Rosen has with Brendel. That's in the manuscript too.
The first time I heard the Hammerklavier, I recognized a form—a historically and culturally specific set of arranged motifs—stretched up to the breaking point, but not over it. That tension is modernism. The moment of release is meaningless without what preceded it.
Monday, March 20, 2023
"The Meaning of Rape"
The current UK zeitgeist favours a drive to remove the use of the word “woman” from as many areas of public policy as possible. The word has become unfashionable as a means of describing the female body and this includes the literature and conversation specific to women’s health. Women are “people who menstruate”, “pregnant people” or “people with a cervix”. Even Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, has said “it isn’t right” to say that only women have a cervix. The word “woman’’, it is claimed, is just not inclusive enough and so other words must suffice.
At the same time news reports invite us to believe that a male rapist is “she” and public outrage is the only way to ensure that a trans-identified man who rapes women, as in the case of Isla Bryson/Adam Graham, is rightly housed in the male prison estate. The court Bench rules have been updated to advise that a woman giving evidence should describe her rape by a man by talking of “her penis” if he identifies as a woman, or be reprimanded by judges who must abide similarly with the chosen pronouns of those entitled, rapist men.
Using brute force or state power to compel others to accept your self-definition. "Subjectivism as law". Click the fucking link, scroll down and click again.
Trannies, nuns, D. Boon. Because it works.
Tuesday, March 07, 2023
Lisa Jennings Young, Twitter's former head of content design, was one of the people who specialised in introducing features designed to protect users from hate. Twitter was a hotbed for trolling long before Mr Musk took over, but she says her team had made good headway at limiting this. Internal Twitter research, seen by the BBC, appears to back this up.
"It was not at all perfect. But we were trying, and we were making things better all the time," she says. It is the first time she's publicly spoken of her experience since she left after Mr Musk's takeover.
Ms Jennings Young's team worked on several new features including safety mode, which can automatically block abusive accounts. They also designed labels applied to misleading tweets, and something called the "harmful reply nudge". The "nudge" alerts users before they send a tweet in which AI technology has detected trigger words or harmful language.
Twitter's own research, seen by the BBC, appears to show the "nudge" and other safety tools being effective.
"Content design"
"...because tech platforms are perhaps the most important speech regulators in the world."
Two simple and obvious points:
Social media companies make their money by creating mobs; liberals want to censor the mob and leave the instigator untouched.
In France, and Twitter, you can mock Muslims and and Turks but not Jews or trannies.
A prominent advocate for women’s rights in France is being taken to criminal court over accusations of “misgendering” two transgender public figures. Dora Moutot, a best-selling author and social media influencer, is facing a legal complaint alleging insults on the basis of gender identity, and public incitement to hatred or violence towards a group of people on the basis of their gender identity.
The critic of the PMC defends designers, even if she doesn't "love" them. The critic of expertise defends experts. Rt'd by Jäger, who also rt's an Israeli sociologist hawking a symposium in Jerusalem. East or West?
Fucking genius. New tags for Mirowski and Agnotology, because I've said it all before.
I don't love the term "designer economy" but the article gets right to the heart of what Philip Mirowski called "the agnotology" - post industrial economics just throwing up its hands and saying we don't know and can't know how to plan economically.https://t.co/8N1xkkoYYo
Some fun I delayed having. "The Designer Economy" by Nils Gilman and Yakov Feygin, both previously here: making the case against small business (Feygin), and citizenship (Gilman).
Gilman and Feygin
In a design framework, economic policy focuses on constructing and reaching a specifically envisioned future. This is different from traditional industrial strategy: It doesn’t “pick winners,” but rather pushes government agencies to have a broad awareness of technological and economic trends in order to promote specific potentialities. In contrast to planned economies or developmental states, a Designer Economy’s primary focus is on a dynamically changing future, and it aims to produce tools to enable various actors in the economy to adapt to these changes in a matter that preserves the public’s preferences through iterative experimentation.
From the first link: to a planning paper put of by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Seriously.
The Joint Staff J7 supports the CICS and the Joint Warfighter through joint force development to advance the operational effectiveness of the current and future joint force.
This paper, written by the Deployable Training Division (DTD), helps inform both the joint warfighters and key functions within theJ7, notably lessons learned, doctrine, education, and future joint force development. In addition to this paper, the DTD has also developed an overarching Joint Operations Insights and Best Practices Paper and numerous other focus papers that share insights and best practices for various challenges observed at joint headquarters. All of these papers are unclassified for broad accessibility. I commend these papers for your reading.
From the second link: Charles F. Sabel, "Beyond Principal-Agent Governance: Experimentalist Organizations, Learning and Accountability"
Introduction
The success of LPF, like the success of similar populist movements that preceded it in Austria, France, Switzerland and elsewhere, raises grave questions about the legitimacy of democratic inputs to public decision making and the efficacy of public action however decided. At the very least these successes signal an impaired responsiveness of the democratic state to its electorate: a democratic deficit. Coming at a time of economic well being, shifts in party allegiance of a magnitude not seen since the 1920s are thus widely and rightly seen as extending beyond democratic criticism of this or that incumbent government into a protest against the way contemporary representative democracy works....
My central claim is that current debate over bottom-up and top- down governance reform—in disregard of the lessons of contemporary, practical success in collective problem solving—ignores important organizational innovations, without which the reallocation of control rights to civil society actors is unlikely to result in the social learning about the effective pursuit of the broad, imprecise goals—‘effective’ or ‘adequate’ education— implied by the turn to service-oriented solidarity. I argue further that these innovative, problem solving institutions, though not intrinsically democratic, can be configured in ways that address familiar problems in representative, deliberative, direct and associational democracy; and that, so configured, they are compatible with the Dutch tradition of sharing democratic sovereignty between parliament and extra parliamentary bodies. The core of the paper discusses the principles informing these new organizations; illustrates their operation as regulatory rule makes and providers of a new kind of public service; and speculatively defends their democratic aptitude in general and in the setting of consensual democracy characteristic of the Netherlands.
The third link is to John Dewey, The Public and its Problems
Gilman and Feygin, further in
Rejecting anti-government rhetoric and instead celebrating competent operators is thus a crucial first step. Managing a successful Designer Economy requires a cadre of experienced, entrepreneurial and independent government officials. Today, however, government service is difficult to enter due to a labyrinth of byzantine rules and processes. Moreover, public servants lack social prestige and are often underpaid relative to what they can earn in the private sector; a McKinsey partner earns much more than a congressional staffer or a Commerce Department GS-15. Many staffers are overworked, underpaid and can’t make ends meet in long-term government service.
As a recent report by New America found, congressional staffers with specialist knowledge had virtually disappeared; most saw their posts as stepping stones to consulting and lobbying work. This prevents the government from benefiting from institutional knowledge, experimentation and “learning by doing,” which marks out the most successful industrial policy experiences. Increasing government pay in order to recruit and retain talent, therefore, must be central to the project of enabling the Designer Economy.
Government agencies also need explicit, legislated authority to do economic design work. The role of government in the era of the Design Economy is to coordinate between agencies, business and labor to find a consensus on specific futures and agreements on how to get to these goals. In an insightful interview with Ezra Klein, the Roosevelt Institute’s Felica Wong called these “coordination” problems. The federal government must be empowered to override blocking factions, particularly at the state and local levels. For example, the Department of Energy needs more authority to designate new, interstate transmission corridors and, if necessary, build and operate high-voltage inter-regional transmission lines.
Government analysts need to be trained and empowered to collect and systematize new, granular micro-data on real production processes. Not only has the U.S. government become worse at monitoring and understanding what the real economy looks like and does at the detailed level required for effective design work to take place, it has also lost the ability to flexibly and rapidly make decisions. Streamlining decision-making will allow the government to do more than build or enable the private sector. Instead, it can become a bottleneck detective, finding ways to solve potential problems before they derail efforts to achieve desired goals. This means gathering and sharing information with interested parties — another coordination problem.
Twice they link to Ezra Klein.
A problem of our era is there’s too little utopian thinking, but one worthy exception is Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” a leftist tract that puts the technologies in development right now — artificial intelligence, renewable energy, asteroid mining, plant-and cell-based meats, and genetic editing — at the center of a postwork, postscarcity vision.
“What if everything could change?” he asks. “What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time — from climate change to inequality and aging — we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness? What if, rather than having no sense of a different future, we decided history hadn’t actually begun?”
Happy talk ordoliberalism? Mr Blandings build his dream state, and his dream body. Even Hollywood has a better understanding of dystopia. And the whole thing is described as a nationalist project, competing with foreign adversaries. Without citizenship? Make up your fucking minds.
Sabel and Joshua Cohen, the political philosopher from "Apple University"
"Global Democracy"
Abstract
In this Article, we describe an emerging arena of global administration. We claim that this arena, not bounded by a state, raises accountability problems of a kind different from those addressed by conventional administrative law. And we argue that measures designed to address these problems will have potentially large implications for democratic theory and practice.
Our argument starts from the premise – stated here without nuance – that something new is happening politically beyond the borders of individual states and irreducible to their voluntary interactions. To distinguish these developments from what is commonly called "international law and politics," we use the term "global politics." The emergence of global politics is marked by a proliferation of political settings beyond domestic boundaries. This proliferation expands the range of relevant political actors, while shifting our understanding of political units and of relations among them: the emergence of human rights as limits on Westphalian sovereignty was a first step in this shift, but not the last.
"the emergence of human rights as limits on Westphalian sovereignty". Human rights against democracy. And liberals complain about judicial review.
Gilman was once a regular reader of this blog, and he followed me on twitter. Until he blocked me.
By mid-September 1981, car bombs were exploding regularly in Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities. One went off in the Fakhani quarter of Beirut on October 1, [NYT 10/2] killing eighty-three people and wounding three hundred, including many women who were trapped in a fire in a clothing factory owned by the PLO. Another one exploded next to the PLO headquarters in Sidon, killing twenty-three. In December 1981 alone, eighteen bombs in cars or on motorcycles, bicycles, or donkeys blew up near PLO offices or Palestinian concentrations, causing many scores of deaths....
A new and unknown organization calling itself the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners took responsibility for all of these incidents. The explosives were now packed in Ariel laundry powder bags so that if the cars were stopped at roadblocks, the cargo would look like innocent goods. The Israelis in some cases enlisted women to drive, to reduce the likelihood of the cars being caught on the way to the target zone.
The car bombs were developed in the IDF’s Special Operations Executive (Maarach Ha-Mivtsaim Ha-Meyuchadim), and they involved the use of one of the earliest generations of drones. These drones would relay the beam that would set off the detonation mechanism of the device. One of Dagan’s local agents would drive the car to the target, under aerial or land observation, park it there, and then leave. When the observers identified the moment they were waiting for, they’d push a button and the car would explode.
Sharon hoped that these operations would provoke Arafat into attacking Israel, which could then respond by invading Lebanon, or at least make the PLO retaliate against the Phalange, whereupon Israel would be able to leap in great force to the defense of the Christians.
State of Terror: Rayyan Al-Shawaf interviews Rémi Brulin
Rayyan Al-Shawaf: Ronen Bergman focuses on the Israeli politicomilitary establishment’s decisionmaking. However, as you have pointed out, Bergman writes—albeit in an endnote—that the FLLF was “a terrorist organization that Israel ran in Lebanon in the years 1980–1983, and which on its own attacked many PLO members and Palestinian civilians.” Is this acknowledgment significant?
Rémi Brulin: You are correct. Bergman does use the term “terrorist” to refer to the FLLF. The quote that you mention appears in an endnote to the book’s prologue. In another endnote, Bergman writes that, according to a senior Mossad official, “[T]he Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, a terrorist movement established by Meir Dagan in Lebanon, was responsible for” the bombing of the home of Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah in Beirut in March 1985. In his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, Bob Woodward wrote that William Casey, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the years in question, had later told him that the CIA and Saudi Arabia were involved in the attack. A total of 83 people, mostly civilians, were killed. A banner stating “Made in USA” was later draped over part of the gutted building. In his book, Bergman suggests that Israel, via the FLLF, was involved.
What is rather striking, and also significant, is that Bergman devotes twelve pages of his book (pp. 234–247) to FLLF operations, yet neither in these pages nor in their endnotes does he use the term “terrorism” or “terrorist” to describe the group’s bombing campaign. Bergman reveals that very senior Israeli army officers—Meir Dagan, Rafael Eitan, and Avigdor Ben-Gal—secretly created the FLLF, a mysterious group that claimed responsibility for dozens of car bombings between 1979 and 1983, in order to “sow chaos” in Lebanon. He describes how then-defense minister Ariel Sharon used the FLLF bombs to provoke the PLO into resorting to terrorism, which would then give Israel an excuse to invade Lebanon in the name of fighting … “terrorism.” In just two weeks in the fall of 1981, Sharon’s car bombs killed at least 100 civilians in what were clearly indiscriminate attacks. Yet, despite the focus and subtitle of his book, Bergman avoids the crucial question of whether this secret FLLF campaign was an example of Israeli “targeted assassinations” or of something else entirely.
Bari Weiss defends her interests as a woman and a lesbian, and she defends her interests as a Jew. Ta-Nehisi Coates defends his interests as a black man. You need to click the links to get the joke.
Most people aren't smart enough to see beyond their own assumptions, but sometimes their assumptions are right. That's the only good argument for free speech.
