PT Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima': http://t.co/iokwuRtzr5
— Maureen Murphy (@Maureen_70) August 30, 2013
Saul: "Moreover, reflecting approvingly on one’s own objectivity (as philosophers are wont to do)"
Another victory for perspectivism.
How can philosophy be claimed to be "technical" or to parallel the sciences when self-awareness (and that's what's called for here), cannot be taught? And the liberal PC reeducation programs that result from these fiascos are just creepy.
There will always in the future be another fiasco about another set of assumptions: heterosexual feminists were once horrified of lesbians; most leftists were sexist, or still are; racism was ubiquitous; anti-semitism was common, and the Palestinian experience is still discounted, for obvious, predictable, reasons but now, slowly, less and less.
How can you model this inevitable semi-awareness?
The point of technical knowledge is that it's text without subtext, and technicians have no need for second-order curiosity and the sense of irony that results. First-order curiosity is to be curious about a subject. Second-order curiosity is to be curious about why you're so interested in that subject.
"I love formal logic."
"Why do I love formal logic [and not something else]?
And desire is not logical.
McGinn's self-blindness is well documented, going back a long way. The categories he employs still follow the categories of his Catholic upbringing, though he calls himself an atheist; he thinks he's a good novelist, and people have given up trying to explain why he isn't.
We don't need a reeducation system to correct our thoughtcrimes, we need an education system that focuses on what we are more than on the tools we use. The sciences are tools nothing more, and tools by definition are amoral. But they don't remove our obligation to face moral or ethical questions. McGinn replaced God and the Church with technocracy and instrumental reason, but the same logic held: "To the pure all things are pure." He kept the authoritarianism too. Faith in gods or reason renders irony unnecessary, and the result always tragic, or comic, depending on your point of view.
Bigotry is not "technical" and is not just an "error" to be "fixed". Thinking otherwise limits not only your understanding of others but of yourselves.
A test for your sense of logic and political philosophy: "Liberal Zionism is an oxymoron."
Logically it can't be anything else (Likudniks are right about that). But would you ever try make the case in polite conversation among philosophers? If not, why not?
The logic of the now technical post-humanist academy says that only others live in glass houses. In fact we all do.
Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran
The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history -- and still gave him a hand.
The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders, by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity. By any standard it is inexcusable, and despite the excuses and equivocations that some have manufactured, it is undeniable.
Last summer, Yale-NUS president Pericles Lewis revealed that, in accordance with Singaporean law, students would not be allowed to hold political protests or form campus organizations affiliated with current political parties in Singapore. In response, Human Rights Watch chided Yale for “betraying the spirit of the university as a center of open debate and protest by giving away the rights of its students.” Faculty expressed vehement disapproval as well. Seyla Benhabib and Christopher Miller, Yale professors who have been vocal in their opposition to Yale-NUS, penned an op-ed in the Yale Daily News pointing out that “an institution bearing Yale’s name is [now officially] in the business of restricting the rights of students.”see previous,
"After all, I have to look out for the interests of the Institute—our old Institute, Herbert—and these interests would be directly endangered by such a circus, believe me: the prevailing tendency to block any subsidies coming to us would grow acutely.
...You object to Jürgen’s expression ‘left fascism’, calling it a contradictio in adjecto. But you are a dialectician, aren’t you? As if such contradictions did not exist—might not a movement, by the force of its immanent antinomies, transform itself into its opposite? I do not doubt for a moment that the student movement in its current form is heading towards that technocratization of the university that it claims it wants to prevent, indeed quite directly."
"Your letter does not give the slightest indication of the reasons for the students’ hostility towards the Institute. You wrote of the ‘interests of the Institute’, adding the emphatic reminder: ‘our old Institute, Herbert’. No Teddy, it is not our old Institute, into which the students have infiltrated. You know as well as I how essential the difference is between the work of the Institute in the thirties and its work in present-day Germany. The qualitative difference is not one that stems from the development of theory itself: the ‘subsidies’ that you mention so incidentally—are they really so incidental? You know that we are united in the rejection of any unmediated politicization of theory."
"I no longer regard the total complex of what has confronted me permanently over the past two months as an agglomeration of a few incidents. To re-use a word that made us both smile in days gone by, the whole forms a syndrome. Dialectics means, amongst other things, that ends are not indifferent to means; what is going on here drastically demonstrates, right down to the smallest details, such as the bureaucratic clinging to agendas, ‘binding decisions’, countless committees and suchlike, the features of just such a technocratization that they claim they want to oppose, and which we actually oppose."
Institute 1 a society or organization having a particular object or common factor, esp. a scientific, educational, or social one: the Institute for Advanced Studies | a research institute.
Institution1 a society or organization founded for a religious, educational, social, or similar purpose: acertificate from a professional institution.• an organization providing residential care for people with special needs: an institution for thementally ill.• an established official organization having an important role in the life of a country, such as a bank, church, or legislature: the institutions of democratic government.• a large company or other organization involved in financial trading: the interest rate financial institutions charge one another.Adorno was right about the students, but all of them were wrong about themselves.
I think there's a pretty big club consisting of people like me who weren't big Clinton fans in the 90s,…repeats: "Big Dog"
Paul Krugman’s recent columns, responding in various ways to JM Keynes, Michal Kalecki and Mike Konczal have made interesting reading, signalling a marked shift to the left both on economic theory and on issues of political economy. ...A commenter on the post responds with a reference to "Cultural Cognition"
[T]his marks a striking shift in macroeconomics, where only five years ago, the leading figures were congratulating themselves on the convergence between saltwater and freshwater schools, under the banner of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. As I argued in Zombie Economics, it’s precisely the centre ground of convergence that has been rendered most thoroughly untenable by the crisis. Yet that is still where the majority of academic work being published in journals is grounded.
What Krugman is uncovering is NOT related to specific intellectual arguments or points. The reactions and recommendations within the economics profession over the economic crisis has revealed a profound split in “cultural cognition” among the economists themselves. It is the same type of split in cultural cognition that is to be found in the public acceptance/denial of climate change, as is being revealed in current studies by social psychologists of climate science communication.repeats:
This post mixes common sense with absurdity. You want to develop a science of communication when over and over again you demonstrate a need for an art. You argue for the fact/value distinction except when you deny it. You struggle to defend a notion of exceptionalism, but applied to whom? You're stuck making an anti-humanist argument for humanism (humanism in the older common meaning, through the Renaissance, not that of the Enlightenment, which has the relation to the original of contemporary Federalism to the Federalism of 18th century Virginia.
Your mistake begins in modeling of experts as engineers and not architects, in their relation to the public. Mathematicians are formalists. When the rubber meets the road, when physicists argue amongst themselves not about numbers but about the world, communication becomes storytelling. Arguments among experts are political, always. Architects like lawyers are orators first. We're all storytellers. You want a science of storytelling.
I'm not arguing against technical expertise, but all the same I'm not going to ask a designer of expressways his opinion of interstate railroads, any more than I'm going to ask Nobel winning Physicist Steven Weinberg about Palestine, about which he also claims expertise, while in that case knowing next to nothing.
Power corrupts. Experts talking only amongst themselves reduce their social world to a ghetto culture, where forms used to represent the world are no more than self-supporting formal systems. Mathematics is formalism; language is not. Language is intersubjective, mathematics is not. Language is politics, and is in flux because culture is in flux, and laws follow both. Formalism in language is scholasticism, whether in the 13th Century Catholic Church or contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, economics, et al. and Modernism itself, which has devolved into kitsch. Your arguments, again: for a science of storytelling, are modernist.
If you want to learn about law see Joe Jamail.
repeats: "Jamail"
That's legal realism, as legal theater. Its important to remember he's a lawyer not a judge. Google him.
Lawyers are the center of our legal system. Philosophers and scientists see themselves as judges because they imagine themselves at the top of an intellectual and moral pyramid. They're not.
The vast majority of climate scientists, experts in the specific and limited field of climate science, see anthropogenic climate change as real and a danger. The opinions of experts in other technical fields are secondary. If you want to understand why a large portion of the US population are skeptical of climate scientists look to the fixation on expertise in all things among the elite. Powerful conservatives show contempt for the majority, while elitist liberals manifest pity and earnest condescension, magnified by their own self-love. Social democrats in every other country on earth are left to cringe.
[I]n 1867 Congress passed a law providing relief for “freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia,” to be distributed under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Of particular importance in the late 1860s was the Bureau’s operation of schools for blacks, to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts. Opponents, including Johnson, raised the same arguments that would be marshaled against affirmative action programs a century later, but well more than the necessary two-thirds of Congress concluded that the 13th and 14th Amendments authorized race-conscious legislation to ameliorate the social condition of blacks."to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts."
The Islamic world has ample reasons for legitimate criticism. Anti-Semitism, sexism, lack of democracy, lack of opportunity, nurturing of terrorism… these are sad realities, not the hallucinations of right-wingers. Anger and criticism are appropriate, but our approach has to start with the assumption that Muslims are not going away. Short of deliberate genocide, there’s no way forward in the long run except for “hearts and minds.”"Veil of Ignorance" The post isn't as offensive as the title, but the comments are.
Today in Egypt, supporters of a deposed president who has not been seen or heard from in twenty-one days spend some of their time holding “parliamentary” sessions in a small mosque events hall, while the leader of the Armed Forces, in all his medaled glory, calls on the general public to hold protests to authorize the army to fight violence and terrorism.Sarah Carr, in Jadaliyya
Retributive penal policy, which has produced incarceration rates of unprecedented proportions in the United States, has been at the forefront of the boom. But enthusiasm for blame is not confined to punishment. Changes in public policy more broadly—the slow dismantling of the social safety net, the push to privatize social security, the deregulation of banking, the health care wars, the refusal to bail out homeowners in the wake of the 2008 housing meltdown—have all been fueled by our collective sense that if things go badly for you, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. Mortgage under water? You should have thought harder about whether you could really afford that house before you bought it. Trouble paying back your college loans? You should have looked more carefully at job prospects for sociology majors before you took out the loans. Unless of course “you” are “me,” in which case the situation tends to look a bit more complicated.repeat, this time in a comment at The Boston Review. So fucking obvious.
This has also been a boom time for blame in moral and political philosophy, partially in reaction to John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), which is widely credited with reviving these fields. Rawls focused not on personal responsibility but on ensuring fair conditions that would create opportunities for everyone to pursue their aims. Within a decade, however, Rawls’s theory was under attack from the left and right for giving insufficient attention to personal responsibility and associated attitudes toward blame. On the right, Robert Nozick’s 1974 Anarchy, State, and Utopia heralded a major libertarian revival, centered on individual rights and individual responsibility. On the left, Ronald Dworkin proposed an alternative to Rawls’s vision of liberal egalitarianism, one that brought personal responsibility into the egalitarian fold. On the one hand, Dworkin argued, our fate should not be shaped by “brute luck”—circumstances, whether social or biological, not subject to our control. But as to anything that results from our choices, blame away. As the philosopher G. A. Cohen said of Dworkin’s argument, it has “performed for egalitarianism the considerable service of incorporating within it the most powerful idea in the arsenal of the anti-egalitarian right: the idea of choice and responsibility.”
Why exactly are we trying so hard to make the world safe for blame? What have we gained and what have we lost in the effort? And is there an alternative?
More evidence that philosophy qua philosophy -feigning distance from the world it contemplates- is a waste of time.
Moral responsibility and drug dealers, bankers, politicians, and college professors: if we remove it from one group we remove it from all. But as usual in arguments such as the one above, the free will of the managerial class of philosophers and technocrats is somehow beyond biology: "Determinism for thee but not for me" is still the rule.
GA Cohen in If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? found two arguments that he found "reasonable" for a wealthy person not to give away much of his money, both involving the pain of loss, which would be greater for a rich man than a poor man who had nothing to lose, and the fact that it would be unfair to his children to be pulled away from the friendships they'd formed among their peers. Cohen is making the argument for prep schools.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/nyregion/foreign-parents-in-new-york-p... Affluent, Born Abroad and Choosing New York’s Public Schools
Miriam and Christian Rengier, a German couple moving to New York, visited some private elementary schools in Manhattan last spring in search of a place for their son. They immediately noticed the absence of ethnic diversity, and the chauffeurs ferrying children to the door.And then, at one school, their guide showed them the cafeteria.“The kids were able to choose between seven different lunches: sushi and macrobiotics and whatever,” Ms. Rengier recalled. “And I said, ‘What if I don’t want my son to choose from seven different lunches?’ And she looked at me like I was an idiot.”For the Rengiers, the decision was clear: Their son would go to public school.“It was not the question if we could afford it or not,” said Ms. Rengier, whose husband was transferred to the city because of his job as a lawyer and tax consultant. “It was a question of whether it was real life or not.”
What is it that allows German bankers in NY have a better understanding of moral philosophy than Oxbridge Marxists?
If you want to develop a "technology" to manage human affairs (the term is Cohen's) you're looking for a "Colossus" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/ or a "Skynet" (I won't bother with that link) to manage our affairs. The argument's absurd, and in the meantime we've ended up with the moral mediocrity of our contemporary class of scholastic philosophers, fixated on their own terminology of judging and judgement, seeing themselves as judges, that they can't see that their own self-interest is what drives them. Again: determinism for one means determinism for all.
Corey Robin, far from a favorite, at Crooked Timber (ditto)
Several people have emailed me to ask why no one at CT has posted on the George Zimmerman verdict. It’s a good question. I can’t speak for anyone else; as Chris said, we’re a loose-knit crew. I know that I’ve simply not felt up to the challenge. And not able to say anything as cogent as I’ve read elsewhere.
But this clip from 1968 of James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show seems apposite. (The Milton Friedman lookalike trying to get a word in edgewise is the Yale philosopher Paul Weiss.)
"Yale philosopher Paul Weiss." Most college educated people and most academics have no idea who Paul Weiss is, but almost all know the name James Baldwin. That fact is important in any discussion not of philosophy but of philosophers, even in serious discussion of the subjects they claim to deal in.Originally I'd written, "Among other things, Cohen is making the argument for prep schools." The way it's written now implies that his broader arguments aren't equally pathetic. He had the time and money to make himself a better man. Others have done more with less, and with more. Cohen took responsibility for his ideas, and we have the right to judge his actions.
I'm fine with seeing the vast majority of animal behavior ruled by determinism but then the answer is as old as Aristotle and as new as Skinner: training and conditioned response. Raise your children to be better than you are.
My dear anti-Brotherhood liberal, allow me to remind you that just a few weeks ago you were desperately complaining about how grim the future looked, but now that you have been “relieved” of them you have become a carbon copy of their fascism and discrimination. You could respond by saying that they deserve it; that they supported the security forces and used them to overpower you, to cheat and spread rumors and widen sectarian strife. But is that really your argument? Have you made of their lowly ways a better alternative for you than abiding by the principles you have stood by for so long? They lost their moral compass a long time ago- do you want to follow suit?He's good.
