Compare and contrast. Mark Graber and Steve Benen on 'objectivity'.

Every now and then, a Supreme Court justice or Supreme Court justice wannabee writes a history of the Supreme Court. With a few variations, they are all the same. In the interest of saving Balkinization readers time and money, I present the following condensed version of those histories.

Chapter One: The framers were committed to [whatever theory of government holds broad popular support at this moment]

Chapter Two. Marbury was correctly decided by heroic justices who recognized that judicial review is necessary for democracy, constitutionalism, world peace and Santa Claus.

Chapter Three. Every other major Marshall Court decision was right.

Chapter Four. The Taney Court was pretty good, except Dred Scott. Everything is wrong about Dred Scott, including the penmanship.

Chapter Five. The Supreme Court did nothing anyone would ever be interested in between Dred Scott and the New Deal, except Holmes and Brandeis delivered a series of opinions demonstrating the constitutional commitment to [whatever theory of government holds popular support at this moment].

Chapter 6 The Hughes Court after 1937 acted both democratically and consistently with the framers' intent.

Chapter 7. Brown v. Board of Education demonstrates [my preferred theory of constitutional interpretation] is correct.

Chapter 8. Once we know why Brown was rightly decided, we also know why my votes on abortion, gay marriage, guns, the commerce clause and the most valuable player in the NFL are also right.

Or you can buy the book. Best advice; wait for the movie.


It's been one of the most glaring flaws in major American media for far too long -- news outlets can tell the public about a story, but they won't tell the public's who's right. Every story has to offer he-said/she-said coverage, and every view has to be treated as entirely legitimate. ("Republicans today said two plus two equals five; Democrats and mathematicians disagree.")

To tell news consumers about a controversy is fine. To tell news consumers who's objectively correct is to be "biased."

Rationality, objectivity, neutrality, functionalism.

1- note taking/posted elsewhere. 

My problem with the “analysis” of advertising as with politics is that the language of engineering reinforces the culture of engineering. It’s like talking about grammar as if grammar were synonymous with language. The ethos of expertise is a form of functionalism, and the older model of intellectualism is replaced by one of simple professionalism. And with this we get corporate psychologists and anthropologists, and HTS. [The active cultivation of sensibility is concomitant with the awareness that you have a sensibility. Functionalism supplies you with one ready-made.]

Designers of slot machines have learned that one of the things that keeps people seated at their machines is the repetitive motion and sense of time, “flow”, and that “flow” is broken by hitting the jackpot. But it can be preserved by paying out less money more often -no sudden shock (defamiliarization)- so that even after winning people stay in their seats and keep playing, and needless to say since slots are a losing game for the player, losing more money.

There’s an amorality to expertise, as there’s an amorality to numbers and to language as grammar. But the use of language carries a moral weight and a moral responsibility. You can’t speak without expressing value. The culture of academic expertise, as engineering and “theory”, has never come to terms with that or the values behind its own forms of speech.

2- The Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (C3) is a partnership between thinkers and researchers from/affiliated with the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, and companies with a keen interest in deciphering convergence culture and the implications it can have for their business. Members of the consortium gain new insights and ideas about a very intractable and urgent set of questions that they are already grappling with in the current business environment. We aim to expand the role of industrial leaders by informing them of dynamic humanistic scholarship while providing them with early access to the cutting-edge ideas that emerge through the consortium.

3- But the mistake you are making is to assume that Palin needs or wants to play by the standard rules of American politics. Or that it even occurs to her to do so. Trash her all you want (even you Republicans who are doing it all the time behind her back) for being uninformed, demagogic and incoherent, and brandish the poll numbers that show fewer and fewer Americans think she is qualified to be President. Strain to apply political and practical norms to Alaska's former governor. You are missing the point.

Surely you've come to accept the reality that as a businessperson, Palin is a genius. The gusher of revenue from her speeches, books and television deals sweeps away any doubt that she can brilliantly harness her energy, charisma and popularity into a moneymaking bonanza. But what you need to appreciate is that the same dynamics of supply and demand that Palin has cleverly exploited for financial gain also make her inimitably formidable as a political force.

"Pretty soon, we’ll be having serious, completely un-self-conscious discussions in major magazines about the servant problem."

Krugman is beginning to understand the distinction between society and government. He's becoming a critic of culture.

The distinction between society and government; between obligations and laws.
The focus on law "...like saying that since all art is abstract the best art is nonfigurative."
Abstract, formal, due process vs "substantive" due process.
The undefinability of "substance"/"meaning"; Quine.
Meaning, naming: "Venus"; "Morning Star", "Evening Star".
Meaning in this use is temporal/perspectival. Naming is atemporal, but still perspectival. Is that the only difference?

"...a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science."

Odd, or predictable, that he should end up all that trying to elevate speculative metaphysics. "If only we imagine ourselves scientists..."
Nietzsche: "If only we imagine ourselves gods..."

If I'm with a friend looking at a painting or listening to a piece of music and one of us makes a comment noting a specific phrase or gesture, with the other acknowledging both the comment and the gesture, we're sharing in the recognition of a formal arrangement; there is no shared meaning. Meaning is private, what's public is form. A Representative Formalism is the rhetorical slight of hand through which we indulge the illusion of shared meanings. As a rhetorical space it's the basis of politics, the ground on which it takes place. Quine takes us to the point of acknowledging this and goes into reverse, to demi-science, following the the vulgar followers of Marx and Freud to anti-politics. He ignores the obvious, that private meanings invade form, and the effect of those invasions. To call him an empiricist is absurd. He's a rationalist defending empiricism as an idea, but he seems more interested in strengthening rationalist claims to the territory.

Representative formalism is a functional oxymoron: Shakespeare's sonnets, Noh theatre; the rule of process and substance, law and man. Any non-fascist form of governance is a form of representative formalism. Fascism is ideal form imposed/collapsed/unified with, meaning: the man with a gun demanding more than obedience; the fantasized unity of self and other, of private and public. And who's going to argue with a man with a gun? It's not the rhetoric, the form, of unification between self and other seen in politics and art, but the pretense -the demand- that it exists in meaning: that life is art. It's the difference between irony and hypocrisy.

Any attempt to avoid or elide the reality of politics -the lack of shared communicable meanings- is anti-political, and anti-humanist. The relations of due process to "substance", of abstraction to "representation" are political: temporal, unresolvable. Democracy is founded on their need to be re-argued, on formalism being reconstructed again and again. If justice is blind, where is the place for compassion? If justice is compassion then how is it blind?
Authoritarian conservatism is not the elision of politics, or of the distinction between public and private, it's simply the control of public form/space. Conservatism doesn't care what you think, only how you act, or that you ask to be forgiven. Fascism is the imposing of the lie of shared meaning through the destruction of the private.

17
… But now we have another problem.
What is that?
What if we find out what makes each of us internally consistent? What if I find your proper name, that thing which describes exactly what you are?
Than I will always be honest, or predictable at least. And you will be able to interpret everything I say and never be wrong. And of course I’ll know your name as well.
No dishonesty, no subterfuge, no Freud, no art… Then we can all be logical positivists.
But it doesn’t matter. That dream’s irrelevant.
I want unification.
It’s an illusion.
I want the illusion.
Do you want the illusion or do you want the illusion to be real?
What’s the difference?
One means that you have an appreciation of the arts. The other means that you’re a fascist.

The danger of government as such is the danger of anti-political government, a government where meanings are assumed by the rulers while not -or no longer- shared by the populace. A representative formalism, founded on trust, not necessarily on the will of the people but on assumptions of stability, becomes unrepresentative when the form is no longer seen to represent anything, or when private meanings become so fragmented that culture/community no longer founded on functional contradictions becomes simply dysfunctional.

Democracy however is based not only on a representative formalism as such but explicitly on public engagement with its forms. Democracy is the culture of language in use. The attempt to imagine universal meanings and then rule by them in a technocratic order is not democracy. Authoritarian liberalism is not social democracy for the reason among others that its arguments are not founded in the social but in the ideal, an ideal formalism -form as non-contradictory idea- that the social is meant at least to approximate. Putting grammar before language has been tried, in both language and politics. It failed. Regardless of claims [or "intentions" (and again meanings are private)] such arguments function as anti-political. The desire to overcome contradiction, to join form and representation, to try to bypass the aporias, the politics, the ad hoc-ness of culture and especially of democracy, is anti-political no matter who desires it.

Greed has gone from being seen as one of the seven deadly sins, constantly deferred to or forgiven as "authority", to being seen as eradicable, to being seen now by liberals -almost it seems because it's can't be eradicated- as a form of the good. This transition took place over the course of decades, but somehow the transition in intellectual discourse is not itself a subject of intellectual discourse, at least in the academy. The forms of academic discussion haven't changed, but the object of representation has. Meanings have changed. Academics discuss the same forms as before, but not the new values behind them.

A more recent example, over a shorter timeline, is the confused response among academic intellectuals to illegal downloading, defended in language that waffles back and forth between idealism and realism. But setting aside the relations of musicians to corporations, the only logical defense of downloading is that it's ubiquitous, and that the cost of interdiction and punishment, in every sense of the word— economically, politically socially—just isn't worth it. The attempt at an idealist defense is just absurd; it has nothing to do with what's necessary as a matter of political empiricism and everything to do with a need to maintain the illusion of philosophical idealism in those who demand both that and, temporally at least since new markets will form, the ability to get something or nothing. 

All communication is political. The relations among competing theories in theoretical physics are not political to the layman, but they become political at the level at which they're argued by physicists. And where there is a consensus among experts who refer to ideas/objects by atemporal "names" the moment those names brought into the world, in situ, in context, they will have new meanings those experts never imagined, in the eyes of others.

All people are politicians in everyday life and democracy is the representative formalism of the everyday. Focusing on the ideal to the exclusion of language in use, which again is synonymous with politics, is counterproductive to the point of being no more than simple anti-social, anti-political reaction. The perfect may be the enemy of the good, but it's also the enemy of the better.

Introducing The Mia

That's our new currency unit, the Months In Afghanistan. One Mia buys one month in Afghanistan, currently about $6 billion.
I have no idea if the best idea for a transportation project is a new metro line to Dulles. But I do know that it costs all of .66 Mia.

Millennium Development Goals: Fight against Aids hit by $10bn shortfall.

For the first time change is happening at the heart of the epidemic," Sidibé said. However, he added that the $10bn shortfall in the funding for HIV/Aids in 2009 could put further progress at risk. UNAids said an estimated $25.9bn was needed for the global response, of which only $15.9bn is currently available.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
March to Keep Fear Alive
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

I've said this before but it's important to understand just how far ahead Stewart and Colbert are of "serious" "intellectual" liberals.

The last time Stewart went on Fox, he managed to broadcast more criticism of the channel on the actual channel than anyone could remember, accusing it of being a "cyclonic perpetual emotion machine" that has "taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy, and turned it into a full-fledged panic about the next coming of Chairman Mao".

Stewart is a master of comedy but he is also seriously influential. When he blasted CNN's dog-pit-style political pundit-fight Crossfire programme back in 2004, saying it was "hurting America" with its mindless, partisan bickering, the show was eventually cancelled, with Stewart's criticism cited as one of the reasons.

Stewart and Colbert are probably the only liberal figures who actually confront their opponents rather than merely commenting for their own audience. It's not that either of them are more to the left than straight liberal pundits, but they're less superior, less aloof, and therefore more engaged. They're comedians not college professors and even sympathetic academics and experts don't quite understand how and how much they've usurped political, academic and journalistic authority. Stewart and Colbert are on the side of historians against philosophers, but thats another discussion.
Less self-consciously intellectual, what they do carries more intellectual weight. Jon Stewart will outlast John Rawls.

Repeating from two days ago :"For all the hand-wringing about open anti-muslim bigotry none of those now expressing such concern have ever thought of a muslim life as equal to an Israeli one. As with torture the distinctions begin with proximity."

New York Review on Dayton [history here and here]

Islamists have hardly been the only critics of Dayton and the security forces. Last year, in an Op-Ed entitled “Jericho’s Stasi,” Bassem Eid, head of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, wrote, “I would like to suggest that General Dayton not just train agents in the use of weapons, beating and torture…but also train them how to behave among their own people.” The National Security Forces trained by Dayton are not authorized to make arrests, but they regularly lead joint operations with Palestinian security services whose senior leaders have been trained by the USSC, and that have, according to Human Rights Watch and Palestinian human rights groups, practiced torture. A year into Fayyad’s first term, Mamdouh al-Aker, then head of the PA’s human rights organization, spoke of the government’s “militarization” and asserted that “a state of lawlessness had shifted to a sort of a security state, a police state.”

Foreign Policy

Mustafa Barghouti, the head of the Palestinian National Initiative (a leading and increasingly strong political movement inside Palestine) and one of the most prominent leaders scheduled to speak at the meeting was in the crowd as it was pushed out of the meeting house. He attempted to maintain order and separate the meeting's attendees from the group disrupting the gathering. "People were pushed into the street," he remembers, "and that's when the beatings began. It was very violent. The General Intelligence people were pushing people to the ground." On the street in front of the Protestant Club, meanwhile, members of the Al Haq staff began to document the incident. "We had a camera, one of my staff members had a camera," Jabarin says, "and we were trying to take pictures. But my staff member who had the camera was pushed down and the security official attempted to take the camera, to break it. This man was beating him and when one of my other staff members tried to help him, she was pushed to the ground and beaten. They got the camera."

From the same article

Meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas in Washington, Barack Obama characterized the Hebron as "a heinous crime," while State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley speculated that the attack was timed to coincide with the opening of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In fact, while the attack's timing was not coincidental, it followed a series of highly publicized clashes in al-Buwayra, near Hebron, in which Israelis from the nearby settlements of Kyriat Arab and Harzina attacked Palestinian villages with clubs and set fire to their orchards. By the end of August, the attacks were widened to include Canadian and Danish "internationalists," who had come to protect al-Buwayra's villagers.

I'm sure I'm not the only note you'll get on this, but (as yet another ex hill staffer) I don't think the "expiry over $250K" vote is nearly as easy a vote as you make it out to be. Certainly it polls well, but a lot of members see the $250K+ people as their donors, coevals, colleagues, friends, etc. Most of the people (lawyers, lobbyists, business owners, PR people) who walk through the door of your average congressional office on a daily basis (excepting constituent tourist visitors) are making well over $250K.

As I've said before, Democratic politicians make their money the same way republican politicians do, so their interests don't align with those of their constituents. Politicians are elected and can be led if the people choose to lead, but if their constituents imagine that their own interests align with the wealthy then democratic politicians are able to represent their own interests while claiming to represent the will of the people.

it's not in Democratic politicians' self-interest to argue against Republican con men and snake-oil salesmen. It's in their self-interest to be passive; they can always blame others for the result.

Adversarialism is the key requirement of democracy, and markets are one form of adversarialism; but adversarialism is formal and not always free.

For all the conservative and neoliberal defense of competition, the relations of the classes are always required to be collaborative.

For all the hand-wringing about open anti-muslim bigotry none of those now expressing such concern have ever thought of a muslim life as equal to an Israeli one. As with torture the distinctions begin with proximity (physical and linguistic) and formal as opposed to informal relations: state, non-state; law, non-law [illegal/"alegal"]; killing, murder.

Imagine a beach and a small group of people sitting on blankets having lunch. Another group comes onto the beach a few feet away and sets up a volleyball net between themselves and the first group. They start lobbing volleyballs over the net that all go unreturned. When the count of unreturned balls reaches 25 the second group declares the game over and themselves the winners. Another group arrives, friends of the second and wanting "their turn." They tell the first group to move so that they can play. A rule book is consulted and it is decided that the first group lost their game and have no right to occupy the "volleyball court". The police are called and they are removed by force.

The deaths of Palestinians are called "heartbreaking." The deaths of Israelis are called a crime.
Chris Hedges, Gaza Diary

It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker.

"Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!"

I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" "Your mother's cunt!"

The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.

A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.

Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered—death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo—but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

“If it has the impact it deserves, it will transform American public arguments about politics and policymaking.”
Henry Farrell

"If my work were were properly understood it would mean the end of monopoly capitalism."
Barnett Newman

Fabric Study, 12"x16"

Daily press from the IPA

Turkey’s “Yes”

US Saudi weapons sale. Pat Lang

The Iranian threat? Oh, yes, of course... Somehow I think this is as much to do with "commissions" passed around in the royal family/courtier crowd. 5% of 90 billion plus will go a long way.

Kant, An Answer to the Question:
What is Enlightenment? (1784)

Here as elsewhere, when things are considered in broad perspective, a strange, unexpected pattern in human affairs reveals itself, one in which almost everything is paradoxical. A greater degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people's spiritual freedom; yet the former established impassable boundaries for the latter; conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom provides enough room for all fully to expand their abilities. Thus, once nature has removed the hard shell from this kernel for which she has most fondly cared, namely, the inclination to and vocation for free thinking, the kernel gradually reacts on a people's mentality (whereby they become increasingly able to act freely), and it finally even influences the principles of government, which finds that it can profit by treating men, who are now more than machines, in accord with their dignity.

note taking
An exchange with Ronald C. Den Otter at Balkinization

Attempts to separate judgment from politics always strike me as bizarre. If you want to get rid of judicial review you need to get rid of the Constitution, or at least change it from law into a Statement of Principles. There are reasonable arguments for that (in my opinion).

"A legitimate decision is one that passes the test of public justification and the best decision is the one that is most publicly justified, that is, based on the strongest public reasons. These reasons are those that an ideal reasonable person would accept as good enough because they are as uncontroversial as possible."

"A reasonable person" in 2010 is not the same as a reasonable person in 1925. Reasonableness may be a constant but what it refers to is not. That's why there's no such thing as (static) "public reason". What there is or needs to be is a (static) norm of civility in argument under rules of "public form": divided government, adversarialism, the rule of law etc. with the accepted purpose not as ideal justice but public acceptance of the outcome.

The best argument against SSM being decided in the courts would be to say that because there is no way logically to move beyond private moral preference in separating the right to same sex marriage from the possible right to multiple marriage, which "reasonable people" now oppose but may not in the future, we should leave it to the political process.

You try to replace the reliance on " 'truth' of... conceptions of the good life" with 'truth' as to public reason. You substitute a dream of ideal justice with a dream of ideal justices. Hard cases still make bad law.
# posted by D. Ghirlandaio : 7:31 PM


D.Ghir., you raise some serious points and I wish that I could respond to them in more depth than a blog like this allows. But in the book at least, I tried to do so.

(1) I never separated law and politics as sharply as you think but you're right that I believe and hope that to some extent, in important constitutional cases, it's possible. If constitutional law is really, in the end, politics by another name, then I don't see the point of having judicial review (by judges). Just leave such questions to the people or to their elected representatives.

(2) I don't think (and explain why in the book) why reasonableness is not tied to particular times and places.

(3) Related to (2), I could be wrong about this, but you sound like you're much more of a constitutional relativist than I am. That is, you don't really believe that there are right or at least better answers to hard constitutional questions. I do try to take the sting out of such skepticism. Whether I really do so is another matter.

I appreciate the comments...
# posted by theottersden : 2:43 PM


I don't see how you can avoid judicial review if you have a written constitution, and as to relativism, if that means I'm more interested in process than product, then you're right.

The most serious opponents of relativism are also critics -often opponents- of democracy. The strongest defense of democracy is to argue that truth is fundamentally private and that what's public are formal rules and more importantly, informal obligations among actors/players. I'm a relativist about truth but not method.
# posted by D. Ghirlandaio : 2:45 PM

AA

Can someone ask this Imam to shut the hell up?
I mean, why can't he just shut up and go away. Every time he comes up with an idea or with a sentence, he causes trouble--primarily for Muslims in the US. Of course, the First Amendment protects dumb speech. And this Imam is a specialist in the production of dumb speech. And this Imam, why does he not speak during other times of the year and not around Sep. 11? And don't you like it when Muslims/Arabs on the defensive get frantic to remind Americans that they are Americans too? "This will strengthen the radicals in the Muslim world, help their recruitment, this will put our people -- our soldiers, our troops, our embassies, our citizens "

Rauf, Jeremiah Wright, and Bill Ayers are narcissists, but liberals don't see the relation because Muslims aren't part of their consciousness as anything but idea, so we get the idea of tolerance not what's necessary to produce it. Focusing on abstractions and principle more than people, liberals ignored what they saw immediately with Ayers and Wright and partly as a result fascists now are speaking publicly in NY and Muslims are worried less about principle than their safety.
---

Josh Marshall
"Tariq Ramadan of all people says the organizers of Park51 should choose another spot to build on."

Josh Marshall last month
"We grew up in America where Islam, as a domestic social or cultural reality, was close to invisible."
As I said then, that statement comes from someone who called the founding of Israel "a necessary crime".
Ideas are not people.

"Nine years ago today... we saw the innocence of a nation crumble to the ground."

Weds.

In a 6-5 ruling issued this afternoon, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handed the Obama administration a major victory in its efforts to shield Bush crimes from judicial review, when the court upheld the Obama DOJ's argument that Bush's rendition program, used to send victims to be tortured, are "state secrets" and its legality thus cannot be adjudicated by courts.

Topsy-Turvy
CS Monitor:
"...Iraq has quietly agreed to pay $400 million in claims to American citizens who say they were tortured or traumatized by Saddam Hussein’s regime after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait"

From FLC

Colm Tóibín, The Pope Wears Prada

This makes it difficult for Ratzinger, who is probably the most intelligent and articulate pope for many generations, to be heard properly when he speaks about matters of faith and morals. He wishes to make it clear, from a position that is starkly coherent, that moral values are not relative values, but absolute ones, that we must follow God’s will, and that the Catholic Church is in a unique position to tell us in some detail what this entails. However, rather than listening to this message or bowing our heads as he offers us his blessing, because of what has happened, because of a new suspicion which even the most reverent feel about the clergy, we will find ourselves examining Ratzinger’s clothes and his accessories, his gestures, and checking behind him for a glimpse of the gorgeous Georg with whom he spends so much of his day.

When philosophy professors and others in the related social sciences discuss contemporary thinkers, they make use of empirical methodology and data. But when from there they discuss the foundations of their arguments they go into into the past, to Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau et al., authors for whom propositionalism is as much a literary device as a logical one. The most important commonalities between the present and the past are the claim to be a reliable narrator and the use of the word "science". Political philosophers read Aristotle but not Euripides. Are we supposed to credit Derrida with leading us to the understanding that this distinction is absurd?

We create patterns to make order/power out of perceived disorder/powerlessness. Patterns, the sense of autonomy and belonging within them, give pleasure. Any discussion of "rational action" has to include not only actions that are rationally chosen but also those that are rational as predictable, as aspects of a pattern. Reading text without subtext is irrational in the first sense, in ignoring relevant information. Assuming that it's rational in the second, what other function might it fulfill?

Contemporary political philosophers read Aristotle seriously, but not Euripides. For fun they read the literature of precocious early adolescence.

"Kill Teams" as murderers

Note taking.
My comments posted elsewhere.
Badly written but it'll do. Link found via Leiter. The "debate", such as it is, is just stupid.

It's always amusing when philosophers give up on religious logic. Do literature professors give up on fiction because it's not "true"?

Philosophy descends from theology, and for all the discussion of pragmatism it's concerned with the idea of pragmatism more than the implementation.

Quinean naturalism is no more than an arch formalism, descending from the dreams, as "speculative metaphysics" of a scientific Marxism or Freudianism. The human imagination slides from reason to unreason pretty quickly, and no system will protect us from that. The physicist and atheist Steven Weinberg is a racist, with a politics as founded in irrationalism as the equally atheist Donald Rumsfeld. Atheism is no cure. Various attempts at a universal system of belief are as founded on irrationalism and doctrine as is the Universal Church. But the irrationalism is hidden under mountains of rigorously formal logic. Scholasticism is still scholasticism: logic founded on illogical assumptions. [Dualism in the philosophy of mind is transubstantiation]

Philosophy and philosophers seem still to dream of meanings in the world, as too many scientists do: there are things we must know. The search for more facts is transposed to the search for more "truth". It's like mountain-climbing and no less absurd. But like mountain-climbing and unlike religion or literature, the process is technically rigorous and specific. You can "make mistakes" and mistakes can be costly. But the end result of this fixation on technics is that fact-mongering regarding the reproductive life of a subspecies of Sri Lankan moth becomes justified by higher philosophical reason in a way that studying Shakespeare or Bach, let alone performing their works[!] is not.

"Philosophers" [professors of philosophy] dream of replacing the false certainty of religion with another form of certainty. That need for certainty is just that: a need. And the dream is fundamentally religious. Desire is irrational. [it may perform a necessary function but that's another thing entirely. And these idiots don't care about function. The question makes them nervous]

There are no meanings in the world, only facts we will always shade into values. Taking values for granted is the biggest mistake we can make.

See also the previous post.

There is no such thing as "public reason". Reason is always private. What there is is "public form".

I think that's the misunderstanding that pisses me off reading professors of philosophy. What's fantasized as public reason is no more or less than civility: an element of trust among compatriots, and between collaborators and opponents in a public game.
[Prosecutors and defense attorneys.]

Expertise is not public reason. Mathematics is not public reason.

David Kurtz of TPM says "Muslim Is The New Gay", which is a convenient way of avoiding the more appropriate if discomfiting comparison of Muslims to Jews. It's still a fact that the European right, including the Pope, defends "Christian Europe".

When a German banker and former government official spoke publicly about a unique “Jewish gene,” when he attacked Islam as a source of violence and stunted development and when he espoused genetic theories that evoked the fright of the Nazi past, the political leadership here quickly condemned him as racist and called for him to be fired.

But the banker, Thilo Sarrazin, an executive with the central bank and a former Berlin finance minister, has not emerged as the marginalized hate-monger that the initial condemnation suggested. His book, “Germany Does Away With Itself,” which laments the growing number of Muslim immigrants, contending that they are “dumbing down” society, was released Monday and is already in its fourth printing, with sales expected to exceed 150,000 copies, according to his publisher.

Mr. Sarrazin has set off a painful public discussion here that highlights one of the nation’s most vexing challenges: how to overcome what is widely seen as a failed immigration policy that over decades has done little to support and integrate the nearly 20 percent of the population with an immigrant background. It is a policy that also stokes anti-Islamic sentiment and hostility.

Non-Jewish support for Zionism has always been more than simple defense of a right of Jewish emigration. Beyond that, open ideologists of racial separatism will always defend their own. Zionism is Jewish Garveyism- another obvious parallel that's been ignored. And now Israelis worry about demographics for the same reasons Germans do, and contrary to most assumptions with less history on their side. Palestinians are among other things the descendants of Jews who never left. I say that too often but that doesn't make it less true.

America’s Faltering Search for Peace in the Middle East: Openings for Others?

Remarks to staff of the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, separately, to members of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
1 September 2010, Oslo, Norway

...Vague promises of a Palestinian state within a year now waft through the air. But the “peace process” has always sneered at deadlines, even much, much firmer ones. A more definitive promise of an independent Palestine within a year was made at Annapolis three years ago. Analogous promises of Palestinian self-determination have preceded or resulted from previous meetings over the decades, beginning with the Camp David accords of 1979. Many in this audience will recall the five-year deadline fixed at Oslo. The talks about talks that begin tomorrow can yield concrete results only if the international community is prepared this time to insist on the one-year deadline put forward for recognizing a Palestinian state. Even then there will be no peace unless long-neglected issues are addressed.

Peace is a pattern of stability acceptable to those with the capacity to disturb it by violence. It is almost impossible to impose. It cannot become a reality, still less be sustained, if those who must accept it are excluded from it. This reality directs our attention to who is not at this gathering in Washington and what must be done to remedy the problems these absences create.

Obviously, the party that won the democratically expressed mandate of the Palestinian people to represent them – Hamas – is not there. Yet there can be no peace without its buy-in. Egypt and Jordan have been invited as observers. Yet they have nothing to add to the separate peace agreements each long ago made with Israel. (Both these agreements were explicitly premised on grudging Israeli undertakings to accept Palestinian self-determination. The Jewish state quickly finessed both.) Activists from the Jewish diaspora disproportionately staff the American delegation. A failure to reconcile either American Jews or the Palestine diaspora to peace would doom any accord. But the Palestinian diaspora will be represented in Washington only in tenuous theory, not in fact.

Other Arabs, including the Arab League and the author of its peace initiative, Saudi Arabia, will not be at the talks tomorrow. The reasons for this are both simple and complex. At one level they reflect both a conviction that this latest installment of the “peace process” is just another in a long series of public entertainments for the American electorate and also a lack of confidence in the authenticity of the Palestinian delegation. At another level, they result from the way the United States has defined the problems to be solved and the indifference to Arab interests and views this definition evidences. Then too, they reflect disconnects in political culture and negotiating style between Israelis, Arabs, and Americans.

To begin with, neither Israel nor the conveners of this proposed new “peace process” have officially acknowledged or responded to the Arab peace initiative of 2002. This offered normalization of relations with the Jewish state, should Israel make peace with the Palestinians. Instead, the United States and the Quartet have seemed to pocket the Arab offer, ignore its precondition that Israelis come to terms with Palestinians, and gone on to levy new demands.

More from Helena Cobban

The intended audience

In contrast to the international media, where the attack was roundly condemned, in Palestine the attack earned plaudits not only from Hamas’ core constituency, but also from a broad swathe of Fatah and secular activists, including some senior actors, disillusioned by 19 years of negotiations based on an ever flimsier framework. Unlike the Annapolis process or the “road map,” the twin Bush administration initiatives that the Obama administration chose to ditch, the current negotiations lack any terms of reference or agreed-upon script. Palestinians ask why Abbas agreed to meet Netanyahu given that none of the Arab targets required to turn proximity talks into direct ones were reached prior to the Obama administration’s announcement of the meeting. When American elder statesman George Mitchell presented the parties with 16 identical questions on the core issues requiring yes or no answers, Israel responded to each with a question of its own. In his August 31 press briefing before the White House meeting, Mitchell again declined to specify if Israel had agreed even to extend its (partially honored) settlement freeze past the September 26 expiration date.

Becevich
Obama Wants Us To Forget the Lessons of Iraq.

FLC

Salon

Five years later, a richer, whiter New Orleans.
Statistically, New Orleans is experiencing something of a boom. But don't be fooled about the reason why.

Repeat, from a few months ago.

Duncan Black's neighborhood was majority black before the redevelopment that brought him in. It's now 67% White and 12% black.

"I generally think concerns about the ill impacts of urban gentrification are overblown."

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"Contretemps at Cato" again (see below). Another tack.
Brink Lindsey's article in support of a future war against Iraq.

Well, I beg to differ. Iraq is no joke: The crimes that the Baathist regime there has committed and may intend to commit in the future are deadly serious business. Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has invaded two of its neighbors...

The first of those two invasions -the attack on Iran- was supported by the US. Lindsey knew this. If he regrets his support for the war, does he regret lying in defense of his position? Read the whole thing. As someone wrote on the thread at CT, it's hard to see it as argued in good faith. Either way it's argued by an idiot. But it's not a question of politics and bedfellows but of whom you choose actively to defend and why. Friendship needs no defense, but friendship doesn't require you to defend a friend's position. An inability to separate friendship and opinion weakens both.

Another example (and another repeat). Two obituaries by Brad Delong.
Jeane Kirkpatrick

Let me express my condolences to her two surviving sons John Evron and Stuart Alan Kirkpatrick, whom she loved beyond all measure.
She was a good friend to my grandfather Earl. She was an American and a world patriot: her counsel--even at its most boneheaded--was always devoted to advancing the security of the United States and the cause of liberty and prosperity around the world.

William Safire

Let the record show that William Safire spent the last 35 years of his life being loyal to his longtime boss Richard Nixon: trying not so much to build Richard Nixon up but to tear everyone else he thought he could--Bert Lance, Jimmy Carter, Nancy Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton--down to Nixon's level...

If DeLong had had a family connection to Safire he would have found a way to write something more respectful. Kirkpatrick's record of corruption in defense of what she would consider moral is no more or less public than Safire's. When DeLong defends Kirkpatrick he's putting friendship and family loyalty before politics, though he won't admit it. Friendship is fundamentally emotional, and DeLong's response is an example of the "tribalism" that technocrats call anti-modern. He'd be horrified to admit he's acting like a Sicilian peasant (or a Neapolitan aristocrat).

When Henry Farrell defends Lindsey and Wilkinson he's claiming also that friendship with people of good faith comes first. But that argument again falls flat, clearly at least in Lindsey's case. And I can't see where the possible existence of good faith helps Wilkinson much. But Farrell is trying more than anything to defend his own relation to their larger ideas. He's defending his own dreams of a social democratic/libertarian hybrid by defending those who might help foster it, even if they're purblind rubes and idiots. His loyalty is less to them than to his fantasy.
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Slow change in language: Ali Abunimah in the NY Times.

It shouldn't be so hard for "rational" "logical" and "reasonable" people to recognize the obvious, but it is. And that's because people are not "rational" "logical" and "reasonable", they operate on patterns of assumption. The facts haven't changed in Israel in 40 years.

The conflict in Northern Ireland had been intractable for decades. Unionists backed by the British government saw any political compromise with Irish nationalists as a danger, one that would lead to a united Ireland in which a Catholic majority would dominate minority Protestant unionists. The British government also refused to deal with the Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, despite its significant electoral mandate, because of its close ties to the Irish Republican Army, which had carried out violent acts in the United Kingdom.

A parallel can be seen with the American refusal to speak to the Palestinian party Hamas, which decisively won elections in the West Bank and Gaza in 2006. Asked what role Hamas would have in the renewed talks, Mr. Mitchell answered with one word: “None.” No serious analyst believes that peace can be made between Palestinians and Israelis without Hamas on board, any more than could have been the case in Northern Ireland without Sinn Fein and the I.R.A.

The United States insists that Hamas meet strict preconditions before it can take part in negotiations: recognize Israel, renounce violence and abide by agreements previously signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, of which Hamas is not a member. These demands are unworkable. Why should Hamas or any Palestinian accept Israel’s political demands, like recognition, when Israel refuses to recognize basic Palestinian demands like the right of return for refugees?

As for violence, Hamas has inflicted a fraction of the harm on Israeli civilians that Israel inflicts on Palestinian civilians. If violence disqualifies Hamas, surely much greater violence should disqualify the Israelis?

It was only by breaking with one-sided demands that Mr. Mitchell was able to help bring peace to Northern Ireland. In 1994, for instance, Mr. Mitchell, then a Democratic senator from Maine, urged President Bill Clinton — against strenuous British objections — to grant a United States visa to Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader. Mr. Mitchell later wrote that he believed the visa would enable Mr. Adams “to persuade the I.R.A. to declare a cease-fire, and permit Sinn Fein to enter into inclusive political negotiations.” As mediator, Mr. Mitchell insisted that a cease-fire apply to all parties equally, not just to the I.R.A.

Friday Lunch Club

Veronese Collage, Final. Printed at 11"x 14"

Murakami/August, 12"x 16"

The opponents of Park51, the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” have decided that the litmus test for identifying “good Muslims” is to ask them whether they regard Hamas as a terrorist organization.

...It was only two years ago that Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were removed from the US terrorism watch list — that was 15 years after Mandela had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

"Jan Bonham" One of my old pseudonyms after being banned.
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Substantive due process in argument.
"Contretemps at Cato" Defending Will Wilkinson and Brink Lindsey.
Comments:

Quoting Wilkinson (From the 4th link in the first line, here)

5. The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. This is the first intellectual book I ever reviewed in print. I gave it a mixed review in the Northern Iowan. (I think I had some misgivings about some of the race and IQ stuff, but I understood that it was not a book about race.) A sociology professor either sent me an email or wrote a letter to the editor (I don’t remember which!) condemning me for not condemning the book for being racist. This was my first taste of the excitement and frustration of participating in public intellectual life. I was impressed with Murray’s fortitude and grace in the face of what seemed to me to be outrageously unfair, truly scurrilous attacks. And it helped me understand the difference between trying hard to honestly think through tough social problems because you care and mouthing comfortable pieties in an effort to get credit for caring.

Henry Responds [back and forth]:

"to the contrary – the discussion of Herrnstein and Murray in Kieran’s post can reasonably be read as a quite eloquent and extremely pointed comment – “

"Henry, I didn’t say anyone here approved of the book. But you enjoy the white man’s luxury of magnanimity."

"? ? ? I’m presuming this is a slur of some class, but it’s honestly too cryptic for me to understand, let alone be insulted by …"

I wasn't perfectly clear, but I'm not sure I should have had to be. A black man wouldn't be as generous to Wilkinson as Henry and Kieran Healy are, and I doubt most Iraqis would have much to say to Lindsey. Is Henry saying it should be otherwise?

With Wilkinson as with Orin Kerr, Farrell make an argument for personal civility as morality. That's valid to a point: the point where due process undermines moral substance. And that point is a one of contention: it only exists as a floating place for argument, landing temporarily at one point or another. The linked post is an example.
Agree or disagree with Henry, his stance/bias/point of view is fundamentally conservative. And he doesn't see, or can't imagine, any point other than his own. To him, implicitly if not always explicitly, his view is not a "perspective" originating from a point in space, but a consciousness spread out over every inch of an open field, as a disembodied presence. [We've been here before] He argues one side -for sincerity and civility- without seeing the other. He condescends to simple anger. But am I ready to assume that Lindsey feels the full weight of the the deaths of Iraqis on his conscience? That Wilkinson is fully cognizant of the place of racism in American culture? That any of them understand the Palestinian reality? And to understand the "the Palestinian reality" is to understand a subjective reality, like his own. Subjectivity is a given. But discounting his own he is able to discount others'.

Henry argues about ideas, that's true for all of them; but you have to intuit the relation of ideas to bodies. Late in the discussion of Greenwald and Kerr he seems to begin to understand

Orin – as Belle suggests in the post I linked, one can create a hypothetical in which the sound utilitarian thing to do is to torture an innocent three year old to death. Does this tell us anything useful about whether it is right or wrong to torture three year olds to death? Are we merely negotiating over the circumstances under which torturing three year olds is OK and not OK...?

But they all exhibit a kind of blindness more offensive than simple racism. It's the moral cowardice of a certain kind of intellectual: the innocence of childhood maintained into adulthood.

Farrell believes while claiming not to: that's the lie. He defends Wilkinson and Lindsey because he likes them, because they have something in common; the defense of principle is secondary. He's acting out of preference without being able to admit it. He exhibits a youthful lack of irony, and more importantly for an intellectual he doesn't understand why irony is necessary.

Doing these cases,” he wrote, “I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended."

Naturalist epistemology, language without irony [without politics], in imitation [as allegory] of the hard or formal sciences, as reason not without but in denial of subjectivity [the view of the subject], ends in failure.

Aber etwas fehlt

Sitting in a bar reading Limited Inc.. One table away a young couple were facing a crisis. It would be hard to count the layers of falseness and dissembling, of performing for and lying to each other and themselves, of false confidence, feigned indifference, contempt and self-abasement, all as reflex. It was a less sophisticated version of Derrida and Searle. Ressentiment

A work of art is both fundamentally a thing unto itself -though affected by others and events- and a communicative act. The same was true of the couple's actions, as self-directed formalism and outward-directed performance. And most of the communication was in subtext. The spoken "I love you" was secondary to the unspoken, "I can walk away". And beneath that were all the communicated subtleties, if communicated is the right word, in gestures read by the audience but most likely not by the performers.

A novel is a thing crafted out of a plot, and judged as that. It's less an essay than a house. Language, as event and communication is an aspect of life. Philosophy and theology are parasitic on that. Literature, art, is both descriptive and formal. History, describing both art and the world, is observational and secular.

Derrida wants to replace the historian of art with the philosopher of art. Searle represents those who oppose history itself.
And we're suppose to choose one or the other.

“We prefer division and no elections to reconciliation and elections.”

The Economist

Western policymakers, now straining to get direct talks to resume between Israel and the PA, with luck in the next few weeks, seem in no mood to promote a new round of elections that could lead to another triumph for Hamas. Fatah, the faction they favour, is fractious and disorganised. Faced with Egypt’s proposal for a new caretaker government to succeed the rival governments in the West Bank and Gaza and to prepare for elections there, the American administration and the European Union have both balked. “The last thing many in Europe want is for Hamas to regain an executive role in the West Bank,” says a European official. “We prefer division and no elections to reconciliation and elections.”

F.F.

Bones have been discovered in a villa on Ile Verte, near Grenoble, belonging--she admits it--to the clandestine offspring of Mme. P.

A neighbor who Nasruddin didn't like very much came over to his compound one day. The neighbor asked Nasruddin if he could borrow his donkey. Nasruddin not wanting to lend his donkey to the neighbor he didn't like told him, "I would love to loan you my donkey but only yesterday my brother came from the next town to use it to carry his wheat to the mill to be ground. The donkey sadly is not here."

The neighbor was disappointed. But he thanked Nasruddin and began to walk away. Just as he got a few steps away, Mullah Nasruddin's donkey, which was in the back of his compound all the time, let out a big bray. The neighbor turned to Nasruddin and said, "Mullah Sahib, I thought you told me that your donkey was not here. Mullah Nasruddin turned to the neighbor and said, "My friend, who are you going to believe? Me or the donkey?

Feisal Abdul Rauf of The Cordoba initiative is a new age Sufi.

Unfortunately at some point sticking to principle can become counterproductive. Politics is messy, and those opposed to messiness on principle are opposed to politics. A reader writes to Brian Leiter

I thought you and your readership might find the video at the following link quite interesting. It's by the marginally sentient folks at KeepAmericaSafe.com and it might be the finest example of a genuine ad misericordiam fallacy presently in captivity (a rare species one would think). Warning: it might make you physically ill, if you've recently eaten.

I fear for the future not only of our country, but of intelligent discourse, and the human race.

Whatever else you can call it, a video of people who lost family members on 9-11 speaking in opposition to Cordoba House is no more founded on a logical fallacy than a video of holocaust survivors protesting a Catholic convent within the perimeter of Auschwitz. The question is whether the analogy between the two is strong enough to warrant the comparison. I think it isn't and that the entire episode was ginned up by the right, but at some point that's irrelevant.

Remember that Brian Leiter is in favor of regulating hate speech, and examples like the challenges to Cordoba are where such restrictions lead. The construction of the mosque is being called an insult, and who's to say it isn't for some people. Should we care? I assume Leiter would have argued against the Nazis' right to march in Skokie, but the ACLU defended them. The Nazis were trying to cause trouble and the backers of Cordoba House were not, but it found them.

In politics prudence is a valid principle, and the fact that other principles conflict with it does not invalidate it or them. Politics comes down to cases.

Both the letter writer and Brian Leiter ignore the most obvious example of the ad misericordiam fallacy in contemporary culture: the argument that European Jews, having suffered greatly at the hands of Europeans, had the right to expel non-Europeans from their lands.

"I fear for the future not only of our country, but of intelligent discourse, and the human race." You fear for the future while knowing nothing about the past.
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Josh Marshall argues that the defense should also argue from strategy. But he doesn't argue the case with any force and in any event it's too late.

The Secret Killers: Assassination in Afghanistan and Task Force 373

From The Economist
Via AA.

I harp on Israel partly because as a subject it's the best example -most consistently in the public eye- of avoidance, elision, misreading and mislabeling among those who would see consciousness as unified: the technocratic "reality based community" in academia and politics. American left-liberals are unified in their opposition to recent economic policies and mostly so on our various wars, but they don't engage actively in mapping out the history of their transformations. People don't move to the left any more than to the right, by and large if not absolutely, they're moved.

Chris Bertram again tries to justify engaged neutrality.
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Duncan Black comments on the Cook Report downgrading the chances of 10 House Democrats, 8 of whom are conservative "Blue Dogs" and therefore, though he doesn't mention it, from districts populated by constituents divided both amongst and within themselves on issues of liberalism and conservatism, economics and social policy.

I admit it's quite nice feeling that for the first time in forever I can actually root for a few bad Dems to lose their seats.

Inevitably the beltway gas bags will tell us that when they lose it's because Obama is too liberal and we're a center right nation blah blah blah. It's the same story they've been telling since I've paid attention.

The Blue Dogs are no or less more ahead of the pack in their districts than Anthony Weiner is in his. With the opposition offering firm leadership in retreat from the responsibilities of democracy, Democrats without a clear mandate from their constituents are in a holding pattern, which is seen correctly as weakness.

Most politicians don't have the intelligence or strength to lead. When leadership is required in the defense of principle, or even the defense of what they themselves may think the best course of action, they hedge.

This goes back to the of the myth of objectivity and its relation to political passivity. It's as important to fight as to have something to fight for; adversarialism is mandated engagement. Maybe it would be better to have elected representatives be more like lawyers: have them draw lots to pick the sides of an issue with the winner obliged by law to act on the platform he was given whether he agrees with it or not.

AA

The Mosque in Ground Zero
The controversy continues. The original idea is lousy: a kitsch of sorts but why should religious kitsch be denied to Muslims when it is a habit among all religious groups in this country. Of course, the debate is more than filled with much more than a tinge of racism and bigotry that you expect when the debate is about Muslims in the US. Support for the Palestinians becomes evidence of terrorist inclinations and sympathy. It is really ironic that when Muslims try to appease the country in which they live in and they try to win popular sympathy they get slapped on the face. This is one example. By the way, according to the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence, mosques should not be constructed adjacent to one another because the idea of the mosque was to congregate as many Muslims as possible, and there are already two mosques only blocks from the site. But the ADL is clear: they dont mind if a mosque is constructed provided it is on the moon.

Originally here, but I've come across a lot of related discussions recently. It seemed appropriate for other reasons as well, having to do with the philosophy of expertise: Timothy Williamson telling just so stories about why we tell stories, and Joshua Marshall trying to avoid or elide the fact that Palestinians are Muslims, and that he's a Zionist. "We grew up in America where Islam, as a domestic social or cultural reality, was close to invisible." And this from someone who's called the founding of Israel "a necessary crime".

There's no understanding of consciousness without acknowledging that it's multilayered and conflicted, that our actions often contradict our words and each other. No amount of expertise will change that.

-What is consciousness?
-What is pain, as an aspect of consciousness?

Pain evolved as a way to make us aware of damage or disease, and as a mechanism by which our bodies make it difficult for us to engage in things that make that damage worse. If I'm working and strain a muscle, the pain tells me not to use the muscle so that it will heal more quickly, or it allows me to gauge the degree to which the muscle is or is not capable of doing its job. But pain is not a simple signal or transfer of data, it is a kind of gestalt, the result of a bombardment of data which we "experience" as a specific form of "qualia".

Imagine that I'm out hunting and am attacked by a lion, who claws me leaving a deep gash in my leg. I run away but the pain slows me down. If I run I increase the injury, but if I stay I'll be killed. The choice is obvious yet my body continues to experience a division. Endorphins and adrenaline are partial overrides but they're autonomic, and very rarely if ever does the pain or the division go away completely. Pain has a regulating function that has nothing to do with decision-making itself. It's not subject to rational controls and yet it's part of what we call consciousness.

We rely both on rationality and instinct. If we react habitually in a given way to a specific range of situations, but now face a problem that fits largely in that range but logically demands an alternate response, something has to give way to allow us to break the pattern. But it doesn't give way easily. We can't turn off instinct any more than we can turn off pain. Habit is reflex and reflexes have a purpose. A neurotic activity is one that the mind has been conditioned to perform because at some unconscious level it facilitates psychic continuity and by logical extension physical survival. Neuroses continue patterns learned in childhood, affecting our relations with people and experiences that have little to do with those of the past except in terms of structure. We never stop being influenced by this sort of learned response, or by others more benign; everybody is neurotic.

It's common now for people to talk about mental activity in biological terms. There are studies of behavior that link social activities to chemicals and genetics. Yet there are also studies showing that an infant’s brain constructs itself by reinforcing the most often used neural pathways. We're born with an immense number of connections and in the act of living we program ourselves, experiencing not only psychological but also biological adaptation. And once such adaptation is complete it can't be erased. This seems to me to be a more interesting explanation for our linguistic capabilities than Chomsky’s LAD or innate universal grammar. Rather than specific tools that allow us to create and acquire language, and that apparently wither away within a few years if not used, why not imagine a network that may or may not be constructed? If we think of the mind as a glass that can be filled with different sorts of liquids, that blend together each time we add more, then this doesn't fit what we know. But if we think not in terms of liquids but solids this explanation makes sense. If we fill a glass first with sand, then with gravel, and then with dirt, how can we reverse or rearrange the order? Adding more sand at the top will change the ratio of sand to gravel, but the same amount of sand is at the bottom of the glass. A 14 year old without language would have great difficulty picking it up because the synaptic pathways, the foundation of her psyche, will have been constructed without it. It would be interesting to think that in some instances mental disorders which we now associate with chemical imbalances could be reattributed, chemicals included, to learned responses.

We call living creatures sentient, conscious, or aware, but these words only describe the sensations of our experience of ‘consciousness’. We slide quickly into tautology. What separates us from computers is not consciousness, which we have had such a bad time trying to define, but the unconscious. Desire and fear, reflexes and pain stay with us even when they're inappropriate. If we don't follow them we still sense their shadow. Our desires/instincts/neuroses may also be contradictory, or even self-destructive. But all of them are sensory before they're intellectual. Consciousness is the state produced by the body/brain's negotiation of the conflict between conditioned response and reason. That is its beauty and why we find it so difficult to understand. We experience consciousness as one thing, but only can define it as the space between two. We experience it a as a thing ‘being’, but can only define it as the place where it exists.

The first moment of indecision is the first act of consciousness. Any creature capable of indecision is conscious.

11/09 Consciousness in machines

...Biological machines are capable of reason but are programmed also by conditioning, and reason and reflex can produce contradictory imperatives. If there's a "choice" to be made, which mechanism is it that "makes" the choice?

Consciousness is not complex calculation it's indecision. Create an indecisive computer, a neurotic computer, torn (having been given the imperative to survive) between the heuristics of conditioned response and calculation, and you'll have a conscious non-biological machine.

Mary the color scientist, seeing -sensing- color for the first time, will learn nothing new about color itself but will now give it a place among the trillions of sense impressions over the course of her life which she has compartmentalized, characterized, and like as not narrativized into her personal logic. She will have a new understanding of color not as independent but in relation to herself as a form of experience within the totality of her imagined and imagining life.
Mary will see, construct, and experience her red.

...What exactly are qualitative states? In its definition of qualia at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy begs the question. Perception is physical: experience, sandpaper etc. When animals sense we categorize things in the history of our perceptions (patterning as comfort). Our history is foggy, and facts and values are confused from the start. The machines we make do not have this complex conflicted relation to the world; they’re not desirous or anxious. They have no sense of telos, even a blind drive for survival.

It seems easier to want to ascribe qualitative states to man-made machines than to describe the mechanics of qualitative “experience” and “perception.” To a machine the blueprint for a building and the building itself are identical, while animals require the presence of the building to understand the thing. And as with the color red we’re not understanding the building but our categorization of it, and all the details that we analogize in relation to what we’ve already stored away. We’re bombarded by perceptions and evocations resulting from perceptions. But all of that can be described in quantitative terms. What’s private -as experience- is that each of us contextualize the data according to our own history. Every animal has his or her own filing system and her own adaptive conditioning. Animals are drunken machines, each of us drunk in our own way.

The limits of conceptualism it seems to me are in the unwillingness to mark the distinction between blueprints and buildings, between ideas and experience, because ideas are universally available and one’s experience of a building is private and therefore considered secondary. But what this means is that the ability to communicate always private experience atrophies, while experience is still our primary relation to the world. This conversation above seems more about desire than the world we will always only know as experience, while shying away from real questions regarding our biological machinery.

note taking
Posted elsewhere in response to a post and a comment. The reference to the "egalitarian ideology' of US students is just sad.

Michael E. Smith: The problem is with U.S. students who are used to an egalitarian ideology and want to be pals with the Mexican workers. So they use the familiar terms of address in Spanaish (tu), which makes the workers think that either the students are being overly familiar (with attractive US female students and young male workers this can lead to various awkward encounters), or else that the students are being hierarchical and dominant (since the familar form is also used by people in a dominant position to show their superiority over people in a lower position).

Anyway, I’ve figured out a lot of this kind of thing over the years, but I have never seen any papers or written discussions that might help orient unsophisticated US students to the social realities of life and work in Mexico the social realities of life and work in Mexico.
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As opposed to the realities of class relations everywhere.

I've been a construction worker with a crew of immigrants, the white guy among latinos. I've worked as a carpenter/supervisor with an assistant, a 21 year old street kid from the Caribbean, and gang member. We negotiated a friendship based on the knowledge that we both had responsibilities to higher-ups, but also that I had advantages due to education, technical ability and race. But he came to understand that I would not knowingly take advantage of my position. I didn't proclaim that, I only tried to demonstrate it. I would very specifically not render him invisible in the presence of others, coworkers, my "equals", clients etc. who would otherwise be happy to ignore him. I told him if he ever caught me locking him out in that way, he should make that clear to me in no uncertain terms; but not for both our sakes when clients were around. I taught him skills, he told me stories.

I know a couple, heirs to a large fortune, who'd lived the bohemian life in their 20's. In their mid 30's they decided to go back to their roots, and bought a sprawling apartment in midtown and hired a staff of servants. 6 months later they fired them all and hired a new set. They learned the hard way: your servants can't be your friends. Your friends become offended when you ask them to clean your bathroom.

On Zuckerberg-
His fondness for the Potlatch as he imagines it ties into the new billionaire class's even newer fondness for gift-giving. First power comes from taking, then from giving away. It's always annoyed me that only conservatives and not liberals were bothered by George Soros, whose intelligence is that of the speculative sociopath, now buying adoration where where he once bought fear. For what it's worth, I've known people who worked with him, and also servants.

"It can actually be tremendously rewarding to buy a honkin’ big piece of meat from someone who you will never meet again, take it back to your hotel room, and eat the entire thing by yourself, completely alone."

That strikes me both as a perfect description of the model -as opposed to the reality- of American ritualized exchange (and all exchange: from academia to wall street is ritual exchange) and therefore as a reaction -a reflex- against imagined collectivism. That is it's part of the American frontier now suburban imagination of individualism. I realize the language included irony but maybe not enough to cover the depth of the root.

And all of this ties into Kerim's "research bleg" for discussions of collaboration vs ethnography, which I would call needs to be seen as less a dichotomy than an ongoing responsibility. Hence my suggestion that he look up Joe McGinniss and Janet Malcolm. Should intellectuals, taking that title as seriously as it's often imagined, give first loyalty to ritual exchange among their own kind -class, race, profession (the academy-JSTOR)- or should they feel obliged more than others to balance and ironize their native relations with an equally strong set of relations with, students, cab drivers, dish washers, the women who clean up the faculty lounge, as well as in some fields officially designated "informants"?
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Thomas Strong: “That strikes me both as a perfect description of the model -as opposed to the reality- of American ritualized exchange (and all exchange: from academia to wall street is ritual exchange) and therefore as a reaction -a reflex- against imagined collectivism.”…

Maybe though it’s a fantasy that animates all cultural systems. I’m probably with Levi-Strauss here: ‘eating by oneself’ (or not) is a problem at the cusp of what it means to be ‘social’. I’m probably also, however, with Sartre, and whatever it was he said about ‘l’enfer’…
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If hell is other people, then language is hell.

When I first heard the terms "emics" and "etics" I thought of poemics [sic] and poetics, of poets and critics. Sartre was a critic [who wrote plays]. For better or worse -and even if I’m a bad one- I’m a poet. My question as always is this: what are the po-emics of criticism? What were they in Elizabethan England, inter-war and post-war France? And what are they now in the US?

The reference to demonstration and proclamation above is important since the academy is based on shared assumptions, and though demonstration is primary to all communication it's elided in a social world centered around the discussion of abstraction. In the larger world, in interaction among groups, there's less assumption because less trust. My relations with my assistant were openly political, I couldn't take for granted that he would see me as I saw myself and I couldn't take for granted that his perceptions would be mistaken.

We interact by judging and being judged. Communication is layered, in text and subtext, word and gesture. Others' judgments of ourselves are the equal of our own, and when we die they're more than that. The ideology, or again poemics, of Smith's students wasn't egalitarian it was self-absorbed. Though the people I argue with refuse to recognize subtext in their own actions, they operate by them -acting on reflex- just as much as the people they're paid to study.

Three by Tony Judt.
Bush’s Useful Idiots
Israel: The Alternative.
The Wrecking Ball of Innovation

He was a serious conservative. Liberals waste time debating idiots at The National Review; to his credit, he did his best to ignore them. He was an arch sexist, with a gentleman's condescension towards the fairer sex, and his view of history was simplistic- "The historian’s first responsibility is to get it right-to find out what happened in the past, think of some way to convey it which is both effective and true, and do it. "- but he wasn't dumb. He praised Leszek Kołakowski for his interest in "spiritual values" while being too lazy to say what that phrase was supposed to mean; he became a critic of Zionism late. But he was an adult in a world without many of them.
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As'ad AbuKhalil and Elias Muhanna on Nasrallah.

August 6 1945

No contradiction. As I say, even granting everything else, it seems to me entirely wrong to think that I am entitled to what I would have under justice.

So one is obliged [by objective justice?] to use normative means [objectively just or not?] in this objectively unjust society to obtain outcomes that would be normative in an objectively just society.

Is justice a process or a result? Is it a wave or a particle?

This is where idealist liberalism falls apart. Idealism demands action, so is in effect authoritarian. Liberalism accepts that some things can't be known, demanding only a close reading of cases and continuing debate [Again, this leads to another contradiction that can't be avoided: the role of the military in a democracy.] Liberalism as a form of realism, defined as humanism before the 18th century, doesn't try to solve every problem but tries to foster the ability in people to think clearly and perceptively, not to demand clarity where there is none, but to engage ambiguity without fear.

Seeking the ‘Eye’ for Art.
The article ignores the fact that being able to read and intuit situations and gestures is foundational to social life. Most fans are critics, and good diagnosticians, of any sort, are connoisseurs. The article would be better written without the defense of elitism but the subject is fine art so it's limited to that; no one would ever attack the 'elitism' of the NBA players association.

The problem arises for democracy when there's only one measure of success, when there's only one elite and they alone are claimed to represent a universal value called "truth." It does us all a disservice when assumptions trump perception, but these days schools teach the former more than the latter, teaching what to think not how.

Democracy is founded in structured forms of public argument; justice is due process, not result. Questions of substantive due process come down not to truth or falsity but what we value, and value is a form of high preference. In describing our preferences we describe our relations to one another and the world as we experience it; the external world is something else entirely.

Expertise without connoisseurship is knowledge without understanding, intellectually passive, and passivity in any form undermines democracy.

[As always for the history of the graph click on the "make it idiot-proof" tag.]

Eye-opening?

The most eye-opening sections of “The Korean War” detail America’s saturation bombing of Korea’s north. “What hardly any Americans know or remember,” Mr. Cumings writes, “is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.” The United States dropped more bombs in Korea (635,000 tons, as well as 32,557 tons of napalm) than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. Our logic seemed to be, he says, that “they are savages, so that gives us the right to shower napalm on innocents.”

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