Corey Robin's confusion.

Why would a liberal opposed to the Hobbesian vision of absolute power resort to such a Hobbesian style of argument? Because Montesquieu, like Hobbes, lacked a positive conception of human ends, true for all people, in which to ground his political vision. Montesquieu’s liberalism was not the egalitarian liberalism of the century to come, nor was it the conscience-stricken protoliberalism of the century it had left behind. Unlike Locke, whose argument for toleration was powered by a vision of religious truth, and unlike later figures such as Rousseau or Mill, whose arguments for freedom were driven by secular visions of human flourishing, Montesquieu pursued no beckoning light. 

"...Montesquieu pursued no beckoning light." And we're supposed to see that as a weakness.

In the same way that journalists call high-level leakers in the executive branch “White House officials” and low-level guys like Snowden “narcissists” or “losers,” so do they dole out accolades like “Secretary of State” to mass murderers like Henry Kissinger while holding the Snowden-like epithets in reserve for Al Qaeda, Communists, the Militia Movement, and the Weather Underground.

So where does that leave us? I’m not sure. As Jim Naureckas put it on my FB page: “Is the problem treating the retailers of violence as if they were psychotic or regarding violence wholesalers as though they were sane?

“On Language and Violence: From Pathology to Politics,” [PDF]

In 1965, George Steiner asked, ‘Is there any science-fiction pornography?” Mostly rhetorical, the question was a typically Steinerian prompt to a typically Steinerian rumination on the relationship between sex and language. With its ability to alter "the co-ordinates of space and time," to “set effect before cause," science fiction would
seem the natural workshop of pornographic invention. But it wasn't. “Despite all the lyric or obsessed cant about the boundless varieties and dynamics of sex, the actual sum of possible gestures, consummations. and imaginings is drastically limited," Steiner wrote. "There just aren't that many orifices." These limits necessarily meant there was precious little, and certainly nothing new, to say about erotic arousal. "The mathematics of sex stop somewhere in the region of soixante-neuf; there are no transcendental series"—and thus there could be no science-fiction pornography, at least not in the sense of “something new, an invention by the human imagination of new sexual experience.” Yet, here we are, more than years later, swimming in porn...

Steiner was writing about porn, not sex. There will never be an end to love songs, but Robin's too stupid to notice.  Update:  I'm forgetting the history.  Steiner is to Robin as George Scialabba is to Henry Farrell.

Steiner

The simple yet appalling fact is that we have very little solid evidence that literary studies do very much to enrich or stabilize moral perception, that they humanize. We have little proof that a tradition of literary studies in fact makes a man more humane. What is worse — a certain body of evidence points the other way.

Scialabba

… Search [in Shakespeare] for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank verse.

Robin

It should be no surprise that violence, sex's Siamese twin, should inspire a similar performative contradiction from our leading intellectuals. How many times have we been told by writers that violence is a nullity about which there is nothing interesting or new to be said, only to discover, from these very same writers, that there is much that is both interesting and new to be said about it? Throughout her career, Hannah Arendt spoke at length, often imaginatively, about violence, without ever questioning her notion that "mute violence" was sheer redundancy. Elaine Scarry began The Body in Pain with the claim that pain's "resistance to language is not simply one of its incidental or accidental attributes but is essential to what it is"—and then spent more than three hundred pages demonstrating, sometimes inadvertently, that that was not the case.

...How can we square this notion of violence as a linguistic nullity with the riot of talk that surrounds it? The example of pornography might prove instructive. The sexually forbidden naturally provokes a sense of titillation and curiosity, which, when satisfied, is succeeded by feelings of mute depression—whether because it is only the taboo that makes the sexual act in question exciting or because a proper acquaintance with the act reveals that it is not all that one imagined it would be. Perhaps violence operates in a similar fashion: when we hurt or destroy a feared or hated object, we experience a sense of loss because the object that aroused such passion within us is now no more or is sufficiently subdued to claim our attention no longer. As Forster wrote in A Passage to India, "The aims of battle and the fruits of conquest are never the same; the latter have their value and only the saint rejects them, but their hint of immortality vanishes as soon as they are held in the hand." And so we drift—from dirty talk to silence, from violence to the void.

...Why is it that when confronted with extremist violence and its defenders, whether on the right or the left, analysts resort to the categories of psychology as opposed to politics, economics, or ideology?  ...If we are to go down the road of psychoanalyzing violence, why not put Henry Kissinger or the RAND Corporation on the couch too?

As if Kissinger's psychology had not been the a great subject for analysts and comedians. And Forster's observations likewise concern psychology, not actions themselves but actors' internal states: the waxing and waning of desire.  More than anything Robin seems to argue from a need to guarantee his own moral purity.  Why else be so blind?  Freud would have a good time with his elisions.

"With due respect to Arendt, it is difficult to accept her proposition that violence is mute when philosophers expend so many words trying to figure out what it is." Robin dreams of clarity. He likes his problems solved, in hand. He wants to replace experience with its description. repeat: Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain is a stupid book.

Robin

I was recently reminded of this bifurcated approach to violence by two articles in the same issue of The New Yorker: In one, a profile of Oriana Fallaci, Margaret Talbot tells how Fallaci's father inspired and encouraged his teenage daughter to work against the Fascists in Italy. Roused by her fathers example, a pig-tailed Fallaci “carried explosives and delivered messages‘ and led escaping American and British POWs across dangerous minefields. When Fallaci's mother later discovered what her daughter had been doing, she scolded her husband, "You would have sacrificed newly born children! You and your ideas." But then she softened: “Well, but I had a feeling you were doing something like that.” Talbot relates this story without comment, allowing it to serve as the capstone of a charming—and entirely political—tale of one family's idealistic rebellion against evil.

At the back of the magazine, David Denby takes a different tack with a vaguely similar story. This time the setting is the Middle East, and the topic is a new documentary, “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber," a dense political history of suicide bombing. Denby is not interested, however, in the politics of the bombers: “The real center of interest, for me, at least, lies in the families of the young men who died.” But his interest is frustrated by the refusal of these families to express their grief in public, leading him to wonder whether they have any grief at all. One Iranian mother says of her son, who died in battle (presumably on a suicide mission during the Iran-Iraq War), “He became a martyr for God.” Such statements lead Denby to conclude that the parents “speak as if the boys had attained a purely official identity, as if they were not their own dead children.’ (How
these comments are any different from a Midwestem father telling a reporter, twenty years after the fact, that his son died defending his country in Vietnam, Denby does not explain.) Denby is equally frustrated by the fact that the parents insist on seeing their sons’ destruction through a political or religious lens and that "any kind of psychological explanation is ignored.”

Denby's mediocrity is just that, and hardly worth the effort.  From Margaret Talbot's New Yorker piece on Fallaci

“They live at our expense, because they’ve got schools, hospitals, everything,” she said at one point, beginning to shout. “And they want to build damn mosques everywhere.” She spoke of a new mosque and Islamic center planned for Colle di Val d’Elsa, near Siena. She vowed that it would not remain standing. “If I’m alive, I will go to my friends in Carrara—you know, where there is the marble. They are all anarchists. With them, I take the explosives. I make you juuump in the air. I blow it up! With the anarchists of Carrara. I do not want to see this mosque—it’s very near my house in Tuscany. I do not want to see a twenty-four-metre minaret in the landscape of Giotto. When I cannot even wear a cross or carry a Bible in their country! So I BLOW IT UP! ”

The magnificently rebellious Oriana Fallaci now cultivates, it seems, the prejudices of the petite bourgeoisie. She is opposed to abortion, unless she “were raped and made pregnant by a bin Laden or a Zarqawi.” She is fiercely opposed to gay marriage (“In the same way that the Muslims would like us all to become Muslims, they would like us all to become homosexuals”), and suspicious of immigration in general. The demonstrations by immigrants in the United States these past few months “disgust” her, especially when protesters displayed the Mexican flag. “I don’t love the Mexicans,” Fallaci said, invoking her nasty treatment at the hands of Mexican police in 1968. “If you hold a gun and say, ‘Choose who is worse between the Muslims and the Mexicans,’ I have a moment of hesitation. Then I choose the Muslims, because they have broken my balls.”

Robin, in another article he links to

For whenever liberal intellectuals are confronted with political extremism, the knotty social intelligence that normally informs their work unravels. The radical is reduced to a true believer, his beliefs a litany of crazy proverbs, his personality an inscrutable paranoia. Whether the cause is communism or the Black Panthers, feminism or the abolitionists, the liberal resorts to a familiar ghost story - of the self, evacuated for the sake of an incoming ideology - where, as is true of all such tales, the main character is
never the ghost but always the teller.

In a recent post at CT, on Auschwitz, there's side discussion of Claude Lanzmann and his choice not to ask, "why?" [repeat: Adam Shatz on Lanzmann.] But Lanzmann's decision was based not on an opposition to psychology but a respect for it, and for what cannot be spoken: the specificity of events in individual lives. Robin refers to "sex's Siamese twin" but he doesn't understand either because he doesn't understand intimacy, at least as it can be made to manifest in language and in art.

Robin prefers ideas and generalizations.  It's true that whatever ideas we have of violence itself are bound to be repetition.  This was the point of the arguments he refers to, to rebut.  But questions revolve around context, justification and history. [update: Reflections on Violence, by Arendt, reposted on the main page this month in the NYRB]  And Robin ignores the value of testimony.  He says he's interested  in "positive conception[s] of human ends, true for all people",  and therefore can't be much interested in any individual voice.  The authors' caveats he denounces function as rhetorical statements of humility, made by people who have not themselves experienced the horror of violence but who have chosen to discuss it. Elaine Scarry has never been tortured and cannot claim to speak for those who have.  I'll give her credit for that.  Arendt was not a surviver of the camps.

Robin's not interested in individual voices, or even in his own voice; if he paid more attention he'd see its contradictions, flaws and frailties. Moralists are always hypocrites.

The reason I bring together Nietzsche and the Austrians (as opposed to other figures) is that a similar project animates their thinking: the effort to repulse the socialist challenge of the late 19th and 20th centuries and, behind socialism, the elevation of labor and the laborer as the centerpiece of modern civilization.

"Labor and the laborer" are ideas. They're a theme and object of study, a centerpiece on someone else's table.

More on psychology and politics in the next post

Manet in Venice

Koons. My reflection standing in for Parmigianino's. Pistoletto, for comparison. Koons is more Bronzino than Parmigianino: sharp and perverse.

Koons and Paul McCarthy in the NYT. Roberta Smith

McCarthy's work is shallow and derivative: boring, emotionally and visually unspecific, rehashing the work of every existentialist shock-jock artist from the generation that preceded him, in New York, California or Vienna,  50 years after Meat Joy and Flaming Creatures. And once the shock is gone, if it existed, there's little left other than the idea of inversion. It's an old idea, meaning more than 100 years, and the art of ideas doesn't age well, unless the art outlasts the ideas themselves and is seen now as specific to its place and time in a way that continues to stand out. And again McCarthy's work is unspecific. He can't even claim as Baldessari does to be a "closet" formalist. He's a lazy maker of objects dabbling in self-consciously "bad" movies in a time when John Waters has musicals on Broadway and David Lynch and Tim Burton are household names. Martin Landau won his oscar in 1995.  Koons by comparison has an eye, one that reminds me now of Kubrick. I'm surprised I hadn't thought of it before.

USA Today: 3 NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower: We told you so.
Josh Marshall, TPM:  Five Revelations From The Edward Snowden Live Chat
Marshall again:  FACEOFF: Obama and Snowdon "Debate"
repeat: Bertram

This potential disabling of insubordination strikes me as the real worry here, rather than concerns about “privacy” in and of itself. I guess that’s unlikely to worry journalists like Joshua Micah Marshall who “basically identify with the country and the state” and think of the state as “something you fundamentally believe in, identify with, think is working on your behalf.” For such people, the struggle against injustice is – perhaps with “notably rare exceptions” – something in the past.

Alexa

AA

Western media, since the Syrian uprising, has become so lazy: they feel that they now are on the same page with the Saudi and Qatari media so they simply copy from those media, even lies, fabrications and rumors. Many have reported that there is a big rift between Hamas and Hizbullah and that Hamas was kicked out of the southern suburbs of Beirut. This turned out to be untrue and the leaders of both parties have been holding secret meetings in the suburbs to reconcile differences. They formed a special committee for coordination.

NYT (op-ed)

For nearly two years, the Obama administration has described the Syrian regime as having “lost all legitimacy” and “clinging to power.” And yet, it has surprisingly endured. That’s because neither assertion is really accurate. Mr. Assad still has strong support from many Syrians, including members of the Sunni urban class.

And yet we hear the again and again about the Alawites, Hezbollah and Iran.

Bertram

Responding to concern about PRISM and the issue of whether intelligence collaboration with the US enabled British agencies to circumvent legal restrictions, Foreign Secretary William Hague told us that “law-abiding citizens” have nothing to fear. Not only do I not wish to be the kind of person Hague thinks of as “law abiding”, more generally it is social movements that willfully break the law that are most likely to bring about change and to threaten established power and privilege. And it is just such movements, and their leaders, who are at risk from pervasive state surveillance of our communications.

My brief, but unscientific reactions to the whole project. First, I’m sympathetic, I really am, to the idea that people should work and consume less and that we should attend more to real life quality. But this doesn’t seem very realistic in my own life for two reasons: first, even if my employer were sympathetic (unlikely) I feel very hard pressed now to produce the level of research output necessary for me to stay competitive with other academics (not just in the UK, but elsewhere). I suspect this generalizes to many people in professional jobs: we couldn’t achieve the kinds of things we want to in our careers on those kinds of hours. This isn’t necessarily a problem, so long as there isn’t compulsion. Some (many) people have shitty jobs with low intrinsic rewards: removing the burden of work for them would be an unqualified good thing. Second, it is all very well Juliet Schor telling us to transition to a low hours/lower consumption economy. I’m cool with consuming less. The problem is that I, and just about everyone else, has taken out huge mortgages and bank loans to pay (in part) for the consumption we’ve already had. Hard to reduce the hours unless (or until) the debt goes away. Third, there was distressingly little discussion of the politics of this. Whatever the real social and economic benefits, the French 35-hour week wasn’t a political success (perhaps because it was watered-down) and Sarkozy was able to campaign effectively on behalf of the “France qui se lève tôt”. Some kind of post-mortem on this experience would have been helpful, albeit that it took place in a different, pre-crisis, environment.

I'm not going to moralize about levels of moral and political responsibility. Every example of language use, spoken or written, is made of text and subtext/s. Moral and political philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition pretend their words are exempt, that subtext is for others. It isn't.

Bertram's "scientific" imagination licenses his own mediocrity. Assume the mediocrity of all, and you get what you wish for.

Robin: "Arbeit Mach Frei"

Taking workplace feudalism up a notch

A New York-based real estate firm Rapid Realty has offered its 800 employees a 15% pay raise if they tattoo the company’s logo onto their bodies, and the offer is snowballing, according to CBS New York. So far, nearly 40 employees accepted the challenge, AOL Jobs reported.

Employees who agreed to get inked said getting a substantially larger paycheck was motivation enough to get a tattoo. In a video, Brooklyn-based broker Adam Altman said the ink would be a reminder to work harder.  “I don’t see myself going anywhere, and if I have it on my arm, it’ll force me to keep going and working hard [sic],” Altman said.

repeats: "Technocrats don't know what cosmopolitanism is, they only know what they want it to be."

---
Graham Harman was in town a few weeks ago.  A spiel then some beer, with a few people. Interesting that he defends art as such.  He mocked analytic philosophy, and said Jerry Fodor had written an op-ed somewhere complaining that more people read Shakespeare than philosophy, when philosophers, using himself as an example, were much better writers. I haven't found the op-ed and it's hard to imagine Fodor being so stupid, but Harman used that to defend literature as philosophy not philosophy as literature, to defend Shakespeare not Derrida.

Still, as a philosopher and therefore defending philosophers and their ideas as models, he's forced to make two moves, both following an anthropocentric or biocentric fallacy.  He extends experience and sense to a description of the material world [from memory]: "Fire cannot know the texture or the smell of cotton, it only knows that cotton burns." Art is our happy doomed attempt to describe every aspect of cotton as we experience it and relate to it in any context: as wet or dry, in war and peace. But the infinite multiplicity of our experience of objects then becomes the impossibility of objects as such; Harman's arguments become religious.  And this is only because for Harman, as the biologist Richard Lewontin would say, words and not objects are the matter.  Novelists use stories to describe the world; philosophers make worlds out of wordplay. The world is not wordplay.

Secondly, even if perspectivism is our reality, he needs some way for us as philosophical beings to have access to the universal, so even if fiction writing is philosophically valid it remains secondary to philosophy as designs in the mind of designers take precedence over experience.  Philosophers look for first causes because they need to identify with them. Harman can't escape the desire to identify with the maker of the master plan.  Most novelists, actors,  legal advocates (if not legal philosophers), and many scientists are happy playing in the muck, avoiding -again referring to Lewontin- “idel specoolations”. And artists even as designers are designers among designers, arguing superiority first and foremost as craftsmen.

Harman's a great fan of Latour, whom he described as "a very serious Catholic".  I told him he was a humanist; he was nonplussed. I said not by the 18th century definition, which is almost anti-humanism, but the original, Renaissance, definition. I said "Erasmus". He said "Thomas More" and smiled. "I never thought of that".

I told one of his fanboys it was all nothing new, but that it was good. It's necessary to balance commitment and irony, and it's a hard thing to do. To my surprise his eyes widened a bit and he agreed. Call it progress.

But philosophers fantasize a unified consciousness, and that's the mistake. Harman's recent book is on Lovecraft, less a literary artist than a literary illustrator, and as a friend said, Harman's not a great writer.
Still, he's a writer.

repeats.  Zadie Smith: "But to live variously cannot simply be a gift, endowed by an accident of birth; it has to be a continual effort, continually renewed."

On Latour and David Chalmers etc. repeats of repeats, recently and linking back.

Bertram remembers some things, and not others.

But he's good on Josh Marshall; read the comments as well.

As with Zionism, events and/or increased knowledge force people to choose. Still, he links to James Scott: the same romantic fixation on ideas.

More old Bertram 

Farrell is an ass

An anthropologist takes the time to remind us of the obvious.

Belief Is the Least Part of Faith

In a charismatic evangelical church I studied, people often made comments that suggested they had complicated ideas about God’s realness. One devout woman said in a prayer group one evening: “I don’t believe it, but I’m sticking to it. That’s my definition of faith.”

It was a flippant, off-the-cuff remark, but also a modern-day version of Pascal’s wager: in the face of her uncertainty about God’s existence, she decided that she was better off behaving as if God were real. She chose to foreground the practical issue of how to experience the world as if she was loved by a loving God and to put to one side her intellectual puzzling over whether and in what way the invisible agent was really there.

The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science, argued that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups. He thought that when people experienced themselves in social groups they felt bigger than themselves, better, more alive — and that they identified that aliveness as something supernatural. Religious ideas arose to make sense of this experience of being part of something greater. Durkheim thought that belief was more like a flag than a philosophical position: You don’t go to church because you believe in God; rather, you believe in God because you go to church.

Sad that she has to explain this to American "secular liberals", but she does. Though she wouldn't have to explain it to secularists in most other countries.
And she didn't add that faith becomes ideologized when the culture it supports becomes seen as threatened.

Duncan Black

Apparently Some Stuff Happened This Weekend 

Haven't had a chance to dive into it fully, but my basic belief is that aside from civil liberties issues, the security/surveillance state industry is just a giant grift, a big scam there to enrich certain communities in Northern Virginia. That it is a net good is bullshit, that it makes us "safe" is bullshit, and that "making us safe," as opposed to perpetuating its own existence and fattening the wallets of its members and those that play along, has much to with anything that goes on is bullshit. 

I'm sure the Men in Black could pay me a visit and convince me otherwise. What do I know? There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and I can't claim knowledge of any of them. Much of what is "intelligence work" is boring, and stuff produced from that work is probably useful and the people who do it are probably doing good work for good reasons. But the unholy alliances with big businesses and third party contractors and the empire of well-paid informants and agents is just bullshit in which everyone takes their cut of your money. 

...from someone I'm not exactly a fan of.

I love DC; at Little League game, dads are talking about catastrophic consequences of Snowden on contractors they work for

You do the hokey pokey
and you turn yourself around
That's what it's all about.

And one down:

Stuff To Do 

I don't think Pennsylvania is exactly known for its natural beauty. Like just about anywhere it has some, of course, but it's certainly not what it's known for. A bit surprised Ricketts Glen State Park doesn't get a bit more wider notice. Been a few times in my life, and the Falls Trail is one of the nicer hikes I've been on.

The photo on the left is from the Falls Trail. The image on the right is from Fairmount Park. At that link you'll find another.


Poor people don't have cars. I'm not going to link to his comments on gentrification again.

Atrios is pathologically anti-intellectual. Even when he's right he dumbs down the issues. Dictatorship in itself a not grift; it's one form of laziness and cowardice, and laziness, cowardice, and corruption are always hand in glove. When Atrios is wrong, lazy and blind to the self-serving origins of his own arguments it's just embarrassing.

"I know and have friends and acquaintances who are African-American..."
"David Duke, president of Americans in Support of Palestinian Freedom."

It's not embarrassing; it's worse than that.

I haver two bets with myself: one about Atrios, that his father-in-law was in the South Korean military;  and another about Corey Robin, that he owns the building he lives in.

Greenwald/The Guardian

Edward Snowden: "I do not expect to see home again."

In Dulles UAL lounge listening to 4 US intel officials saying loudly leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should be disappearedrecorded a bit
— Steve Clemons (@SCClemons) June 8, 2013

repeat.
Rick Perlstein:

"...Philip Agee was never part of any solution, just another facet of the shadow world’s ever proliferating strangeness."

Disengagement is passivity. American liberals are becoming engaged; the culture of American liberalism is changing.
The academy is changing; intellectual academicism is not.

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

Dan Nexon 06.07.13 at 2:45 am
Weber. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McGinn contra Judt.
And I'd forgotten about Bertram

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

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

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

It's all there. Idiots.

Any state has to allow for the distinction between insiders and outsiders, which is why arguments that "no one is illegal" are more romance than viable policy.  But democracies and republics are built on laws that descend from principles of universal civil and political rights, and if the divide between citizen and foreigner becomes too broad, if foreign and domestic policy are not just separate but contradictory, there's no way for one not to affect the other. You cannot support freedom at home while opposing it abroad; the inconsistency itself is a recipe for disaster.  The right and the left both understand this. Liberals don't.

The sudden howls of indignation are pathetic.

Niamh Hardiman at CT

Who will bring about political reform, and what are the political incentives for doing it? The question comes from an earlier post. Is there a road-map for exiting from a sub-optimal equilibrium in the way political institutions function? I don’t know the answer. 

In Ireland, parties in opposition seem to agree that the lack of accountability of the executive to parliament is a problem. But why would they voluntarily cede the advantages of executive autonomy when in power themselves?

If you build your logic around the lowest common denominator it becomes hard to imagine anything higher. To say that politicians "should" value something more than their own short term interests is to no longer make arguments that can be defined as "value free". Republicans see their duty to the party now as more important than their duty to the state. Yet it's difficult for liberals to criticism them specifically for that because demanding more is accepted tacitly if not openly as unreasonable.

I've read the same arguments for years about presidential power. It's seen as illogical to think that Obama should choose to cede power back to congress. Naturalism of this sort leads to moral passivity.

obvious. repeats. etc.

A couple of days old

The military is an extremely important actor in Turkish politics. Traditionally, there has been a faustian pact between Turkish society and its armed forces to ensure the government could not endanger Turkey’s sacrosanct secularism. But over the past decade, the military has been unprecedentedly co-opted into supporting the AKP party. A series of high-profile sackings of generals set the stage for a neutered military leadership, despite the fact that many below top level may feel differently.

Over the course of the past day though, they have been quietly supporting the protesters. They have refused to cooperate with Police requests to use military zones for transportation. At a military hospital in Istanbul they refused to treat police officers, instead handing out gas masks to dissidents. As this exchange between a policeman and soldier attests, relations between the two armed groups are indeed frosty at present. Part of the dialogue translates as:  

Policeman: “Next time we should also throw gas bombs here [a military zone].”

Soldier: “If you do it, we will find something to throw to you as well, rest assured.”

From Arabist

Erdogan's won every election.

Atrios

Repetition
What Daniel Hallin (via Jay Rosen) called the Sphere of Legitimate Controversy seems to be changing. Since Serious People don't acknowledge dirty hippies, it's hard to know whether we've had anything to do with that.

yes, repetition.

Atrios again

Merit  
Ezra picks some highlights of a speech by Helicopter Ben to Princeton graduates. 

The concept of success leads me to consider so-called meritocracies and their implications. We have been taught that meritocratic institutions and societies are fair. Putting aside the reality that no system, including our own, is really entirely meritocratic, meritocracies may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives. But fair in an absolute sense? Think about it. A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate–these are the folks who reap the largest rewards.

As if Duncan Black or Ezra Klein would have defended that argument 12 years ago.

And Bertram likes Robert Hughes.

"So what Brasilia became in less than 20 years wasn't the city of tomorrow at all. It was yesterday's science fiction. Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future.
This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent and talented men start thinking in terms of space, rather than place, and about single, rather than multiple meanings."

Always the anger of the committed, even as the commitment changes.
Consistently unaware of what and where they were in the past; unable to understand themselves, or change.

An article in the Times on changing museum policies and downloading.
The Rijksmuseum

“We’re a public institution, and so the art and objects we have are, in a way, everyone’s property,” Mr. Dibbits said in an interview. “With the Internet, it’s so difficult to control your copyright or use of images that we decided we’d rather people use a very good high-resolution image of the ‘Milkmaid’ from the Rijksmuseum rather than using a very bad reproduction,” he said, referring to that Vermeer painting from around 1660.

It's not mentioned in the article, but the Met now allows downloads, not high quality but enough for the web. The original file of the Hals I posted recently is 3.1mb.
When you go to the page for a painting, click on "full screen" and a download link appears on the lower right.

Aaron Swartz was too good for this world

"Aaron wasn't built for a world of red lines and strict rules," Wikler says. "He moved in and out of institutions, he didn't fit into boxes and that was OK be cause he was also obsessed with never hurting anyone. He was monk-like. And the prosecution, all the way through, showed no hint of remorse or recognition of what might have been wrong, even in his death. There's just something wrong with a system where people have power to do that to someone like Aaron."

There is a particular tragedy, too, in realising that Aaron Swartz was one of the few people equipped with the skills and idealism to want to change that system for the better. In the end, says Stinebrickner-Kauffman, there is no explanation that could possibly make sense of his suicide. "He just… " she breaks off, searching for the right words. "It was just too hard." She crosses her arms loosely on the table. The sentence floats between us. It seems like the only thing there is left to say.

"I took the children with me, for they are too good for the life that would follow, and a merciful God will understand me when I will give them the salvation ... The children are wonderful ... there never is a word of complaint nor crying. The impacts are shaking the bunker. The elder kids cover the younger ones, their presence is a blessing and they are making the Führer smile once in a while. May God help that I have the strength to perform the last and hardest. We only have one goal left: loyalty to the Führer even in death. Harald, my dear son — I want to give you what I learned in life: be loyal! Loyal to yourself, loyal to the people and loyal to your country ... Be proud of us and try to keep us in dear memory …"

Since his death, his family and closest friends have tried to hone his story into a message, in order to direct the public sadness and anger aroused by his suicide to political purposes. They have done this because it is what he would have wanted, and because it is a way to extract some good from the event. They tell people that the experience of being prosecuted is annihilatingly brutal, and that prosecutors can pursue with terrible weapons defendants who have caused little harm. One of the corollaries of this message is that Swartz did not kill himself; he was murdered by the government. But this claim is for public consumption, and the people closest to him do not really believe it. They believe that he would not have killed himself without the prosecutors, but they feel that there is something missing from this account—some further fact, a key, that will make sense of what he did.

Despite his public presence, he was small and frail and shy and often sick, and people wanted to protect him. He was loved intensely, as a child is loved.

An indulged and indulgent narcissist.

"Aaron Swartz was one of the few people equipped with the skills and idealism to want to change that system for the better." Bullshit.

Rick Perlstein on Aaron Swartz:

I remember a creature who seemed at first almost to be made up of pure data, disembodied—a millionaire, I had to have guessed, given his early success building a company sold to Condé Nast, but one who seemed to live on other people’s couches. (Am I misremembering that someone told me he crashed in his apartment for a while, curling up to sleep under a sink?)
Only slowly, it seems, did he come to learn that he possessed a body.

earlier here

posted (by me) in comments elsewhere. mostly repeats.

Old conservatives went from "is" to an acceptance of a world of indulgence laced with shame. Modern liberals, following science, go from "is" to passive acceptance, laced with guilt (you're right about that).

Neoliberals, as modern liberals, lose the guilt.
Brad DeLong: "For those humans who live in the city and are not really rich, rubber tomatoes provide a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience."
After hurricane Katrina Tyler Cowen proposed letting swaths of New Orleans rebuilt as shantytowns, to foster a cultural rebirth, on the model of the corrupt and violent but vibrant New Orleans of 100 years ago. As another example he cited Kingston Jamaica, and the birth of Reggae. Interestingly enough he didn't mention the South Bronx and Hip Hop.  There's no accounting for taste.

Robert Reich goes from "is" to "ought".
Tony Judt argues against nature.

The woman who talked down killer last week in London was asked why she approached him. Her response was immediate and regarding the question itself, incredulous. "Better me than a child".
The woman has a strong and ingrained sense of moral responsibility. If she'd been more objective and less knee-jerk she might have realized that over the course of her career she would be able to instill that sense of responsibility in perhaps as much as 20% of her students, but that the odds of any children in the vicinity of the killer growing up to become like her meant that it would be better for society in the long run if she did not get involved.  But science lost out to morality. Reflex trumped reason.

"Scientific" and "disinterested" reason has shown that disinterested reason is in fact impossible in any engagements with the world.  That's your point, right?  We search for laws to govern our inevitably shallow self-interested behavior. And in our passivity we become even shallower. Delong attacks Alex Cockburn and William Safire in extremes of high dudgeon, but eulogizes Jeanne Kirkpatrick, closer to a war criminal than either of the others, as an old family friend.  Power corrupts. He can't even conceive of himself as a jackass.

"To the pure, all things are pure." From science to Saint Paul, from arrogance to stupidity. Technocracy expands and democracy fades.

"Reflex trumped reason" even if reason would defend the actions themselves as ideal.
"Tony Judt argues against nature." I shouldn't have to telegraph the irony.
Liberal idealism ends in perversity.

Bring on the Thirty Years War

AA

There is no mystery at all about the triggers to the clashes of Tripoli.  You can even tell by two factors: 1) the clashes ALWAYS occur when the Salafites of Tripoli are upset over one reason or another (and this week they were upset upon the news of the offensive against Qusayr).  2) `Alawites in Tripoli are a mere 5% of the population and they are surrounded from all sides, and it is just impossible that they would instigate a fight, especially that they have been evicted from Tripoli and their businesses all stolen and set on fire.  But Anne Barnard does not note any of that:

"Maj. Gen. Ashraf Rifi, a retired senior security official from Tripoli, said Hezbollah, through Mr. Eid, started the fight to keep Sunnis from flocking to Qusayr after it realized its hope of taking the city in 24 hours was “delusional.”

She did not say the rest of the talk of Mr. Rifi, and did not say that he is a functionary of Hariri who started his career as a bodyguard for Rafiq Hariri, and who sits on the board of the Prince Nayif University for Security Studies.  She made him sound like a neutral observer.  She said that both sides in Tripoli blame the other, but only offered one side's account, without even mentioning that he represents one side.  Of course, the dominant view in Lebanon is that when the news of the offensive reached Tripoli, the Salafite thugs there started doing what they always do when they are angry: they started shelling Jabal Muhsin.  Even the official Hariri mouthpiece website reported that Tripoli was shelling Jabal Muhsin (see citation below). And the theory of Rifi is dumb: as if Tripoli is the only place that supplies Salafite fighters for Syrian armed movement.
"استمرار الاشتباكات والقذائف الصاروخية من باب التبانة باتجاه جبل محسن"

The US is backing Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda against Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah, Sunni against Shia, supporting a reactionary monarchy where minorities face harsh discrimination and Christians and Jews are not allowed to live, and once again backing fundamentalist militias, and terrorists, who view all non-adherents to their beliefs with disgust. We're supporting both against a secular dictatorship, and one we've worked with in the past, which is centered in a minority community but broadens its support by guaranteeing the safety of other minorities. This dictatorship is allied to a country governed as a Shia "guided democracy" where minorities, including Christians and Jews, are discriminated against but safe in their homes, a government that was formed following the overthrow of a ruler installed by the US, which had overthrown in turn a secular democracy.  Both these states are allied to a Shia militia and political party from a third country with long-standing allegiances across sectarian lines.  Our actions are made in defense of "US interests" and those of our closest ally in the region, a Jewish sectarian state founded 65 years ago by immigrant refugees, scarred survivors of a European holocaust, on land captured after the expulsion of three quarters of a million people from their homes, an act which created a new group of refugees whose descendants live in nearby countries, including those listed above, many still in refugee camps, while almost 6 million more are under either direct or indirect rule of the new state built on their land.

We're backing the Spanish monarchy and the Inquisition against Calvinism and Lutheranism, on the belief that it's good for America and good for the Jews. A multi-ethnic democracy is defending its greatest enemies in defense of the prerogatives it claims for itself.

An old post from Syria Comment on the Jews of Syria.

The extra effort above because someone, somewhere, mentioned Harry fucking Frankfurt.

Frans Hals, No Worries, ca.1623-25, Metropolitan Museum,  NY

see previous

Started from the bottom now we here


Jews III
II, and  I

What is the role of science in a democracy? Leaving aside arguments over the fact/value distinction, the choice between cancer research and astronomy is a choice based on preference, and preference is value. But the research imperative ends in Stalinism; so what's to do?

The woman interviewed in the first video responded reflexively, unthinkingly, to a situation. It's safe to assume the values behind her choice were instilled in childhood.  The two men in the second video are, respectively, an empiricist, comedian, trickster, con-man, and a rationalist, rube and fool.

Greenwald is good.

forward and back

note taking my comments elsewhere.

"a class of people who are better than the rest of us, on whom we depend for our salvation and prosperity"

That sentence is a hoot. We're left to choose between the elitism of the rich or of economists and technocrats. Philosophy professors refer to "the folk". Somehow I doubt James Kwak and Mark Thoma would consider themselves folk. And DeLong?

It drives me nuts that our technocratic elite, with their fixation on ideas are so willfully ignorant of their own complexities, simply as people.

Logicians and moralists divide the world in twos, but the law of non-contradiction doesn't apply to books any more than people.  Nietzsche connects to fascism; a lot of people did and do. The problem he faced as we do is how to come to terms with the modern desires for "equality" and "liberty".  Hayek and Rand are secondary and minor figures facing the same questions.

The old aristocracy and the intellectuals around it were both anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist, and in their contempt for mediocrity in bourgeois culture they had a point, which is why so much of the cultural left over the past 200 years has been intellectually aristocratic.  Foucault learned from the Surrealists and Symbolists, Baudelaire, Stendhal and Tocqueville.  The flaneur is aristocratic observer. Technocracy qua technocracy, in service to itself, gets us this:

"Italian rules allowing candy makers to label their products as “pure chocolate” breach European Union law, the region’s highest court said.
Permitting chocolate made from pure cocoa butter to be called “cioccolato puro,” or “pure chocolate,” clashes with EU-wide measures which allow chocolate laced with vegetable fats to be marketed as chocolate, the tribunal in Luxembourg said."

That's not an important example but it's part for whole.
A focus on the mean puts downward pressure on the mean.

Robin mocks [links below]: “The ancients sought virtue, a life of excellence lived in and through the polis; the moderns (Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke) perpetrate ‘a lowering of aims.’ ”

If everyone is equal then its just a small shift to say we can refer only to averages: the average man becomes the benchmark for analysis by the new elite. And there is a new elite. What do you think it means every time Krugman says "it's a bit technical". Equality? No.  And of course experts can make stupid mistakes, and who's the first to get hurt? Any engineer can lecture you on efficiency, redundancy and stability, but somehow efficiency makes economics take on the character of a morality play. If I were less of a determinist I'd be shocked.

An exchange with Chris Bertram:

SE: "Arguments for the nobility of greed are a recent development."Bertram: "If, by “recent” you mean 1705, you may be right."

I wasn't raised to think of greed as noble. Yet somehow in the minds of technocratic liberals, facts became ideals, and actions became secondary, so we get elitists preaching equality, meaning the equivalence of everyone in the majority to each other, while taking their own superiority for granted. Technocracy is not democracy.

Democracy is founded on obligations before freedoms.  Libertarians are finally open in their dislike for democracy; maybe it's time defenders of democracy should develop a healthy skepticism regarding freedom defined as individualism. Freedom of speech serves the health of the polis.  And maybe compulsory education should extend over the course of a life.

If you pay attention to the culture that produced you, you'll understand your contradictions. If you think you're not contradictory, you're wrong. Too many liberals think saying "I'm a nice guy" makes it so. And of course, if I am what I say I am, others are what I say they are too.  According to Cory Robin, Nietzsche and Burke are bad guys.  Robin's arguments are based in simplistic assumptions about history, historical figures, and himself. His writing is shallow and obvious.  His primary politics is self-promotion.

US mythology includes puritans and drunks, Carry Nation and John Wayne; individualized self-righteousness is the only universal. Scandinavian mythology includes Janteloven. Social democracy wasn't the product of an idea; the ideas were the product of a culture.  If you want to debate social democracy, as I've it would make sense to read Henning Mankell before John Rawls, and read for contradictions and questions not ideas.
---

Responding to two comments:

1-"The wealthy are not better than the rest of us. The 1% have taken the opportunity of the past 40 years and managed all the gains in production…"

The US has 4.5% of the population of the planet. Think, just for a minute.

2-"I'm not particularly a Hayek fan, but bald statements like this are pitiful.
'Hayek cared about liberty for ultimately elitist reasons: liberty is not an end in itself, but a condition that enables the select few to make the world a better place'
How about a citation that doesn't require starting with an assumption of corrupt motives?"

Technocrats left and right refer to the need to foster "progress" and "innovation". What percentage of the population does that directly refer to? The majority are supposed to benefit from these policies only because as employees they've been given jobs. Pundits demand increased funding for education in science and technology for a new generation of leaders not for teaching all 5th graders, brilliant or not, the foundations of the Bill of Rights. A popular econ blogger (or at least one with a PhD in economics) says: 

"I'm not sure why people are surprised and even upset that some teenagers don't know who the hell bin Laden is." 

I won't even ask if they know anything about the Vietnam war, or any one before it.
But I'm sure his friends kids know something. They're the educated elite.

Another blogger, an academic whom I doubt any of you would read says:

"Yesterday, I asked 130 students in my American Government class: who has never ever heard of a country called Lebanon? Some 40 students raised their hands."

Leave it to someone born in another country to make the point a native born American would not. It's safe to say I won't be able to talk to most of you about economics for the same reason I won't be able to talk to you about foreign policy. One is no more or less based on science than the other.

The American Dream has done more damage to the world than born again Christianity, but American liberals defend one while being horrified by the other, as if they had no relation.

"They have the power. Look around and see what they have done with it."
Yes we do. And power corrupts.
---

Read the Krugman link above. It's not just wrong it's stupid. Krugman is fond of saying the economics is not a morality play, but the his defense of free trade is founded on cheap moralism.

Dean Baker complains that proposals to eliminate SS income for billionaires would be unfair. That's an argument from normative American morality, not logic.

The debate on blogs like this one is part of a debate among the elite in and out of power.
DeLong:

"R.I.P. JEANE J. 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."

"Efrain Rios Montt." The three words you need to know this week.

Dani Rodrik's defense of his father in law, a Turkish General.

"The military has long set the ground rules of Turkish politics. Its hard line defending secularism has resulted in frequent clashes with political movements it views as "soft" on Islam, such as the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has governed the country since November 2002. Periodically, the military has intervened, bringing down governments and, on occasion, establishing periods of military rule, most recently from 1980 to 1983."

Kwak: "Corey Robin's fascinating article on nineteenth-century European culture".
That sentence is bizarre. It's written from the logic of an elite happily unaware of its place as an elite. "Oh, I don't know anything about power, I only deal in numbers and logic".

The logical foundation to any argument by American liberals is that other people are the problem. Just as American individualist liberalism is the product of American culture, "the Scandinavian anomaly" in economics is the product of Scandinavian culture. There is nothing new in Robin's article. What he adds is moralism.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal". DeLong doesn't believe that; Krugman doesn't believe that; Rodrik doesn't believe that; I don't believe that; and neither do you. Robin wants to pretend he does, so he needs to describe a Manichean world. He writes for a journal published by graduates of Phillips Exeter and Harvard and named for 18th century revolutionary terrorists. In 200 years another crew will name their journal "Hamas". It's safe to say I won't be able to talk to most of you about economics for the same reason I won't be able to talk to you about foreign policy, because that obvious point, a cheap observation about cheap politics, is lost on you.

"I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty." George Santayana

Santayana was not a liberal. I am. But I learn from him as I learn from Burke. I learn from Nietzsche. I learn as much from Robin as I learn from Ayn Rand, or Hayek, or Likudniks and Salafists. I learn about fear and pathology.
---

Libertarianism isn't an idea it's an ideology, extended from ideas most of you share; that why you go over it as much as you do. Hayek is debated in American academia the way Islamic scholars in other countries argue over Sayyid Qutb. The myopia is the same.
In the end, all simply product of the times.

and forward, and back

For Joseph Massad
a repeat:

Haaretz

Meanwhile on Sunday, Israeli daily Maariv published an interview with Interior Minister Eli Yishai, in which he stated that most of the "Muslims that arrive here do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man."

"I will continue the struggle until the end of my term, with no compramises [sic]," Yishai continued, stating that he would use "all the tools to expel the foreigners, until not one infiltrator remains."

"...the white man." Words of a self-hating Jew.

Massad's piece, now here

NYT "Rights Group Says It Finds Proof of Torture in Syria"

No shit

65 years.

Degas

Young Woman with Field Glasses, 1866-68 (circa), British Museum

Woman with Binoculars, 1875,  Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden

Deux jockeys - Femme à la lorgnette, 1868-70 (circa) Private Collection

Manet at the Races, 1870, Metropolitan Museum

New York Could Be America's First City To Let Non-Citizens Vote

Please. Yes.

Josh Marshall

What New York is proposing isn’t unprecedented. And to the extent that large numbers of people who’ve basically become Americans and are making their life here cannot participate in our politics, I understand some of the motivation. Indeed, this is why keeping the doors open to citizenship is so important. But I don’t really want anything that blurs the lines of the political community we all (those of us who are American citizens) participate in. And to me, this does that.

 "I'm not asking Israel to be Utopian"

International cities should be international, and immigrants to understand America more than Americans do.  But immigrants in NY socialize with each other, across ethnicities, while avoiding Americans.

New York Could Be America's First City To Let Non-Citizens Vote

Please. Yes.

"Hamas" takes on the Palestine question.

"Why now?"

Because almost without anyone noticing, the movement in solidarity with Palestinian rights — with all its solipsisms and ultra-leftist foibles, its quarrels and magnetic attraction for eccentrics, opportunists, and, yes, the occasional antisemite — has grown to become one of the most important, inspiring, and fast-growing social movements in the country.

"Why now?" Because enough people have become involved that now it's safe for the best and brightest young American intellectuals to follow along.  Long live the academic avant-garde, always ready to play catch-up.

More credit to Hawking; he doesn't pretend to lead.

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case

3D-printable guns are just the start, says Cody Wilson
A self-described child of the internet age, Wilson is an admirer of Julian Assange and Kim Dotcom. "I number myself among them, at least in spirit," he says. "I think the future is openness to the point of the eradication of government. The state shouldn't have a monopoly on violence; governments should live in fear of their citizenry."

There are two options for human society: government of the people and of law, or the rule of the strong. "The eradication of government" guarantees the latter.

Technocracy is not democracy, and the knee-jerk, mirror-image, rebellion against technocracy is not a democratic movement. The decay of technocracy is something else; it produces another social order.


The bow-tied college professor, Jerry Herron, like Borges and his gauchos, idealizes a culture built from necessity. For the whites, including white DJs, in from the suburbs, the music was a discovery, but the men who invented the music have a richer more complex understanding. They were trying to preserve the humane in an inhumane world, using a language they as products of that world understood. There's a connection that runs through Herron to both Borges and Lawrence Lessig, and also Graeber and to Cody Wilson: a fundamental misunderstanding of culture. The knowing irony on all sides that connected Detroit techno and hip-hop to Kraftwerk and hip-hop to the gay clubs in the 70's is lost on followers of simple, otherworldly individualist, liberalism. Culture is conservative: it conserves.

Ideological liberals don't understand culture, seeing it as a choice rather than something constitutive of what they are. But libertarian culture like fascist and Stalinist culture could be called almost an oxymoron.

Leiter:

Bayesian epistemology...

...in The Guardian.

It doesn't begin well...

The late Margaret "Tina" Thatcher claimed that "there is no alternative" to economic liberalism, and our own iron Frau Angela Merkel has defended her controversial fiscal policies for Europe with the very same slogan. It is not surprising that politicians use such thought-terminating cliches to push through their agenda, but remarkably the "there is no alternative" argument also plays a vital role in science. 

so it can't end well.

It fails, however, if we are certain that the number of alternative theories is infinite.

The number of alternative policies in England and Germany were/are finite.

Spot the disconnect:

Stupid Plan B Rule
Basically anything having to do with teenage girls and sex freaks people out.Whether or not 13-year-old girls should be having sex, plenty of them are. If the drug is safe then it's safe.

What Could Go Wrong
I'm not a parent, but I do know that young children only have a vague understanding of the potential consequences of their actions. Teenagers only have a vague understanding of the potential consequences of their actions. So, you know, don't give them guns.

"I'm not sure why people are surprised and even upset that some teenagers don't know who the hell bin Laden is."

"The kids are alright"
---
more:

Paternalism
It all just boils down to "I must know what my teenage girl is doing." Which I get, and if you have a healthy open relationship with your teenage daughter (good luck!), good for you. But uncle or daddy might also be raping her, or planning to beat the shit out of her for daring to make Jesus cry.

WP: "Obama considers direct aid to Al Qaeda in Syria"
NYT: "Nasrallah annoyed"

Tens of thousands of low-paid workers took to the streets on May Day to demand higher wages, better benefits and improved working conditions a week after a building collapse in Bangladesh became a grim reminder of the dangers of lax safety regulations in poor countries...

Thousands of garment factory workers in Bangladesh also paraded through the streets calling for safeguards to be put in place and for the owner of the collapsed building to be sentenced to death.

In Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous country, tens of thousands of workers rallied... 

In the Philippines, an estimated 8,000 workers marched in Manila to also demand better pay and regular jobs instead of contractual work...

Some workers rallied outside the U.S. Embassy, torching a wooden painting stamped with the words "low wages" and "union busting" that depicted Philippine President Benigno Aquino III as a lackey of President Barack Obama...

Several thousand people in Hong Kong protested, including dockworkers who have been on strike for a month. They want better working conditions and a pay raise to make up for cuts in previous years.

And an estimated 3,000 people demonstrated in Singapore, where any form of public protest is rare,...

Violent clashes erupted in Turkey when May Day demonstrators tried to break through police barriers to reach Istanbul's main hub, Taksim Square...

More than 10,000 Taiwanese protested a government plan to cut pension payouts...

In Cambodia, more than 5,000 garment workers marched in Phnom Penh,...

The garment industry globally has come under fire since an illegally built eight-story building collapsed last week in Bangladesh, bringing down five garment factories inside it and killing more than 400 people. The collapse followed a garment factory fire there in November when 112 people died. 

A loud procession of workers wound through central Dhaka, waving the national flag and chanting "direct action!" and "death penalty!" while one participant vowed the workers' deaths would not be in vain.

"My brother has died. My sister has died. Their blood will not be valueless."