The German Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, 1933, was an immoral law, no?

That reminds me of what a wizened Tasmanian told my father, years ago ... — csalisbury

Love it.

I have a theory on this — csalisbury

Nice analysis.

I voted yes, but it's paradoxical. In saying "we hold these Truths to be self-evident", we're making a choice. Natural rights are stipulated or asserted under certain social conditions, and we thereby create them, according to how we want to live in those conditions. We say, in an effort to respect human beings universally, that these are the basic rights that every human being has, by nature. But if we create them, and only in certain conditions, then how can they be natural and universal?

Building on what @Pfhorrest says, it's as if we cannot conceive of universal rights unless we conceive of them as features of the natural world. The idea of moral objectivity without naturalism is a difficult one for us to handle. Incidentally, this is also clear in the effort to describe homosexuality as entirely biological, as if gay rights must depend on nature.

But I voted yes because I want to say that humans don't only find what is so, but make it so. That is, what is natural for us can change.

Just ordered War and Peace.

Also, I heard some strange things that there are still places in the world with 0 cases. Where are these places? Why are there 0 cases and what can we learn from them? — Julia

Yeah, one of the first things they did in Antarctica was close all the bars and restaurants.

As far as I can tell there's the untrustworthy authoritarian regimes of Turkmenistan and North Korea, and some isolated Pacific islands. I don't know if there's much to learn there. We should look at countries that have had a substantial number of cases but have managed to control it.

Too much aussie pride on the forums lately; I think its incumbent on the rest of us to stem this before it goes too far. — csalisbury

They're outnumbered by Americans here and that seems to frustrate them. It's like when you corner a Tasmanian devil: even if you don't mean any harm, it attacks anyway.

It does grab me, because I've had the same thoughts, and my post was almost a reproach to my own tendency towards essentialism.

This might be an unwelcome spanner in the works, but I feel like asking, why is this about listening? The complete appreciation or absorption in a piece of music is just as often represented by dancing. Thinking of it like that puts a different light on the question, I think. Unless we want to restrict the discussion to art music.

Then it might seem like the whole idea of the "entire piece" is a historical artifact of the development of music alongside visual art since the Renaissance: the work of art as a neatly delimited thing of special value. Maybe a great piece of music can be a living, changing thing, hardly just a thing at all.

EDIT: And of course, improvisation and jazz are significant here too. John Coltrane may give the writing credit to Rodgers and Hammerstein, but his "My Favourite Things" is his, or at least as much his as theirs.

EDIT: RIP McCoy Tyner

What if you drift off for half a second during the piece? What if you're at a classical concert and you're occasionally distracted by someone coughing such that you lose concentration for a few seconds. What if the performance you're listening to contains a non-obvious mistake by one of the musicians, like a wrong note? Would anyone then say it's not actually the piece it claims to be? — jamalrob

Taking this to its natural conclusion: we never listen to the entire piece. What then?

Well put.

Did you hear the entire piece? — Moliere

The obvious question is: why is this important? What if you didn't hear the entire piece, and yet you loved it, you were able to analyze it and understand it and be inspired by it and other good things? I'd say in that case that you did appreciate the piece aesthetically.

What if you drift off for half a second during the piece? What if you're at a classical concert and you're occasionally distracted by someone coughing such that you lose concentration for a few seconds. What if the performance you're listening to contains a non-obvious mistake by one of the musicians, like a wrong note? Would anyone then say it's not actually the piece it claims to be?

A listening experience broken by a pause might even heighten your appreciation, because it may give you time to bring to mind motifs and whatever from earlier in the piece, things that help you to make sense of what is to come. The composer may have an ideal listening experience in mind, but people are so different that I don't know if this ideal, from the listener's perspective, is always the main thing to strive for.

It's interesting though to compare it with the split painting. I think there's more to be said here about the essential temporality of music, and how that makes it different from the painting.

I have a feeling that many Europeans are wilfully blind to the internal fault lines within the EU. Europeans like to be led , it's in their nature, the British however are naturally suspicious and doubtful of politicians ...we tend to think they couldn't organise a fuck in a whorehouse , so why would we want more of them, but hey-ho. — Chester

This is rubbish. Not only that but it weakens the case against the EU, as if the EU is only bad for the English, or that they're the only ones who can see it. The fact is that there is a lot of opposition to the EU in Europe outwith England, in e.g., France, Italy, and obviously Greece.

(Cue a rant about lazy Greeks and French or something)

I haven't see it, but I heard about it recently when I saw this review by "ecomodernist" environmentalist Mark Lynas on Facebook:

So last night I sat down with my wife Maria and did something I have dreaded for over a week: we forced ourselves to watch Planet of the Humans. This is the much talked-about film, executive produced by Michael Moore, which purports to take down renewable energy and expose leading environmental campaigners as self-serving capitalists. It's now had nearly 6m plays on YouTube.

Man it was hard going! That's two hours of my life I'll never get back. It has to be one of the worst documentary films I have ever seen, and I've sat through a few. It was slow, badly organized, voiced in a dull monotone and fundamentally dishonest. The cinematography was dreadful, with long black screens, no obvious narrative and strange old sequences that looked like VHS video from the 1980s. By the end we were just desperate for the credits to roll, to end the pain and misery.

And the content? It starts with a flawed premise, supported by misleading arguments and incorrect data, and reaches a conclusion that is - surprise, surprise - utterly wrong on almost every count. The most obvious reason is that it's all just REALLY OUT OF DATE! All the sequences about how bad wind and solar are have a dated feel about them - and for good reason, as it turns out most of the footage is a decade or more old.

Those solar cells that are 8% efficient? They were installed in 2008. The industry standard is now 20%, and rising all the time. Those picturesquely rusty dead wind turbines? First generation. The electric car run from a coal grid? Shot 10 years ago. (The UK grid is now almost entirely coal-free - back when this film was made it was at 40% coal.) The arguments about needing fossil backup to intermittent renewables? Not borne out by any experience, with renewables now comprising far higher proportions of grids than was ever imagined possible when this film was conceived a decade and a half ago. The only thing it gets right is that burning trees for biofuels is really bad, but anyone with a brain has been saying that for years already.

So what's the truth about renewables? Crunch the figures, and it turns out that with current technology an area of solar PV the size of 8% of Western Australia (or a quarter of Namibia or an equivalent area of hot desert) can supply sufficient energy to replace the entire world's oil industry, all 90 million barrels/day of it. So don't let any attention-seeking film-maker tell you the clean energy transition isn't possible. If they do, they're lying, and you need to ask why.

And who are these people who are set up as environmental 'leaders'? RFK Jr! A man who has so far lost his mental marbles that he's now become a full-time anti-vaccination campaigner. Nothing he says should be taken seriously by anyone, especially in a pandemic. The man is a dangerous lunatic. Who else? Vandana Shiva? She's an Indian eco-guru who has long opposed science. The only genuine leader featured is Bill McKibben, who is framed to look as if he's taking money from bad people - this also is untrue, as is obvious from the flimsiness of the evidence provided.

Now I would count Bill as a friend, but even so I would say this: take down McKibben if you have some evidence of bad faith or foul play, but doorstepping him at a rally and showing out-of-context gotchas about 350.org’s funding is not going to convince me. No wonder the right-wing climate denial lobby is having a ball. Michael Moore, the celebrated lefty, has done their dirty work for them!

It all leads up to a gloomy catastrophist fantasy where various elderly white Americans (and they are all old and white, and mostly male) muse misanthropically about how how the "elephant in the room" - that tired old cliché - is population. I mean degrowthers like Richard Heinberg et al, who are presented as prophets whereas in actual fact they are just lifelong professional pessimists who are as wrong now as they have always been (where's your peak oil now Richard?).

This Malthusian bilge I think is probably the most egregious part of the movie, and has received too little pushback - there are plenty of people out there quite rightly calling out the lies about renewables and defending Bill McKibben, but we need to look carefully at what these population de-growthers are actually saying. Where is population growth highest? Africa, of course. They won't tell you this outright, but basically this comes down to a white nationalist fantasy about stopping black people from breeding. I could correct them on points of fact and tell them how the best way to reduce population fertility rate is actually to lower rates of infant mortality and empower women, but what's the point? There's not a single African voice given airtime in the movie either, not surprisingly.

I guess Heinberg and the population-crash fantasists should be cock-a-hoop right now thanks to the pandemic. Here at last there's a good chance that millions of people will die quickly, in Africa most of all due to its poor healthcare systems and high rates of malnutrition. Yay! It's an ugly vision, and it makes me shudder for the darkness of these peoples' hearts. This is not just a bad film, it's morally repellent. Watch it if you must, but be prepared to feel sick as well as bored by the end. — Mark Lynas

https://www.facebook.com/mark.lynas.71/posts/3770369539644440

Any time.

No problem. But I'm going to stand by my analysis until proven wrong :razz:

I wouldn't necessarily be against a "What Are You Into?" thread in the Lounge. Could be interesting (not that I'll be taking part).

Im into both by the way. — ttjordy

Nobody cares, except for your sexual partners, and maybe some of your friends. This is what Baden was talking about: it's a sign of self-obsession that you think we're interested. In fact, my first reaction to your OP was that you were here just to talk about your sex life, and disguised this with a discussion about ethics. And now that, disappointingly, nobody has asked you about it, you've begun to tell us anyway.

That's the cynical interpretation, anyway.

On the other hand, I have felt the urge to talk a lot about sex during those periods when my sex life has been particularly good, and maybe that's what is going on with you now. When I felt that urge, it didn't feel like self-obsession, but more like an innocent enthusiasm: isn't sex great!

I think that's okay, but best among friends who you know are going to enjoy the conversation.

Sure, but it doesn't follow that the way to persuade them is to follow the quoted advice, i.e., to use disclaimers and clarifications to remove all ambiguities.

A "persuasive text", one that could even persuade mean readers, might not be one that is written with them in mind. And maybe you don't persuade by pandering to nitpickers, but by showing them the way, strongly and confidently.

Maybe I'm being too charitable.

:lol: :up:

However, I am not implying that Pfhorrest wants to do this, only pointing out that academia puts people on such a path with the certainly harmless "mnemonics" of thinking of people as "stupid, lazy and mean" as a hapless luck-charm to remember to be "simple, concise and disambiguate" for the purposes of institutional writing. — boethius

You may be right, and I agree that aiming for clarity, concision, and logical comprehensiveness is not the recipe for a great work of philosophy. But it is at least good to write like that sometimes in philosophy, say in academia; or here on the forum, as you obviously attempt to do yourself; or when writing for non-specialists.

Although, like I said, I think it's counterproductive and a waste of time to write for "mean" readers.

With all due respect, your comments and advice seem to be part of the problem and not the solution — 3017amen

What's the problem?

In other words, you seem to be saying "keep those things in the closet; that's good for society". — 3017amen

No, I don't think that's implied by what I said. But I don't really know what you mean. You're being too vague. Should we openly explore sexual matters so as to help people achieve satisfying sex lives free of anxiety and difficulty? Yes, that's why I excepted education and therapy. I took the OP to be referring to being open about your own personal sex life, and there I think intimacy is important, because respecting the intimacy of sex, the privacy of your partners, and so on, is important.

I think we should be just as open about sex as discussing politics. — 3017amen

Politics is public, sex is private (most of the time).

The less private and sacred sex becomes, the less we are reticent to talk about it openly in public. Twenty years ago nobody talked about masturbation at dinner parties. Now people never shut up about it. I'm not sure if that's good or bad or neither. As I'm slightly old-fashioned I think that aside from education and therapy, it seems proper that sex talk is for intimate conversations or whispering behind others' backs.

@boethius Could it be that you have misunderstood this topic? It looks like it. The advice to assume your readers are stupid, lazy, and mean, is merely an arresting, memorable way of saying you should write clearly, concisely, and should argue carefully. The argument of the OP is that you can't do all three. What does this have to do with commercial writing?

Any audience that is none of those things will be unreachable no matter how much you try, and the more effort you put into fortifying against one kind of vice, the more you sacrifice toward your defense against at least one of the other two. — Pfhorrest

I think you're right. And in particular, fortifying your writing against mean readers can result in verbosity, with, as you say, "a fortress of disclaimers and clarifications". Scruton said that "philosophers have become so nervous of their nit-picking colleagues, that they dot every i and cross every t, lest they should be accused of slap-dash thinking".

I can see the point of the triangle, but writing for the mean, while it might encourage you to anticipate objections and so on, mostly just promotes ponderous prose. So my solution is: be clear (for the stupid) and concise (for the lazy), and forget about those who don't apply the principle of charity, the meanies. Like this:

You can write for a stupid and lazy audience, with clear, concise explanations, only if you can assume they’re charitable enough to look for your intended meaning without lengthy disclaimers and clarifications. — Pfhorrest

I think that's a reasonable assumption, unless you and your readers are doing philosophy as some kind of battle of wits.

As we all discover on a forum like this, people will very often be mean, that is, they will pick on easy targets and argue against the weakest version of your argument. I've found those people not to be worth the time, and one's writing suffers from all the disclaimers and hedging.

Why are we here, again? — Professor Death

Because your benevolent overseers allow it.

In an unprecedented move, the staff has decided to unban @Pfhorrest after communicating with him by email. We're confident that the flaming was out of character and won't happen again.

All right, I'm closing this now. Until the next time...

I see what you're saying, but I haven't seen flaming as bad as this for a very long time, perhaps never on this forum. The guidelines make it clear that racism and homophobia are not tolerated.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/480/site-guidelines

His language was grounds for an instant ban, and I was initially pretty lenient in applying the rules.

Yes, it was about those comments. It was me who deleted them. And I did in fact give him a chance by first opting to warn him instead of banning instantly, on the basis that it was totally out of character, but he seemed to have no remorse about it even many hours later, and couldn't bring himself to give a strong assurance that it wouldn't happen again, and that's why I finally banned him.

@Pfhorrest was banned for some particularly deplorable flaming.

Objective truth should be contrasted with subjective truth. Objective truths are quite mind-independent. For example, the Earth has one moon reflects a state-of-affairs that exists apart from any mind. In other words, one could eliminate all minds, and the fact would still obtain. There might not be anyone around to apprehend the objective truth, but the fact would still exist.

Subjective truths, on the other hand, are mind-dependent. For example, "Tim likes apples," is dependent on Tim for its truth or falsity, i.e., it is either the case that Tim does or does not like apples. The truth of the statement, for Tim, is subjective, dependent on the subject, his taste, likes or dislikes, etc. Eliminate all minds and you eliminate all subjective truths. — Sam26

I'm never convinced by this way of using the terms "subjective" and "objective".

"Tim likes apples" is not objectively true? Isn't it a fact that Tim likes apples? Are you saying there are subjective facts?

And if "Tim likes apples" is subjectively true because it's "dependent on Tim for its truth or falsity", then "Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher" is also subjectively true, because it's similarly dependent on Slavoj Zizek.

I imagine you might go on to say that subjective truths are only about a person's "taste, likes or dislikes, etc", as if those were something private and inaccessible. But those things are expressed in a person's behaviour: Tim's taste for apples can be seen in his excessive consumption of apples, and Zizek's taste for thinking about Hegel is expressed in the fact that he's a philosopher who writes about Hegel.

I don't see the utility of saying that a truth is in a special class of truths if the subject of the statement happens to have a mind.

In my view, the terms "subjective" and "objective" make better sense as: from only one point of view and not from only one point of view. Under this scheme, though, we can't really talk about subjective and objective truths at all, unless we want to follow the popular mode of "it's my truth", or, "Tim's truth is that apples are delicious".

Not really. You're referenced inefficiencies that could result in fewer jobs if eliminated. The corporate America I worked for measured every move until we all became efficient mindless robots devoid of personal authority because that would de-systemetize the machine. The bullshit was that people were treated as cogs. It was dehumanizing and tragic if one ponders these are people who are dedicating their lives to this.

Finding and eliminating inefficiencies is corporate speak for creating a dystopia. It won't result in shorter days, just more tasks during the day monitoring efficiencies and chasing away inefficiencies. The reason for squeezing the most from the worker is because people want more bullshit products and there's no way to predictably get people to do what you need them to than by endless forms, datasets, and numeric monitoring. — Hanover

I think this gives too much credit to corporations. In my experience of corporations, they're more like badly run local government: bureaucratic and stupid. I think Graeber's idea is that corporations are not, in fact, particularly good at capitalism, at least according to how it is imagined by its advocates, i.e., as the most efficient and productive economic system possible.

He thinks that (1) "financial services or telemarketing", "corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations", are pointless and unproductive, and (2) that their existence doesn't have an economic basis, but a moral and political one.

It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don't really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets. — Graeber

The Soviet Union hasn't been around for a while, but since I've been living in Moscow I've been struck by the number of workers doing jobs that could be done by fewer people. Apartment buildings with six security guards, small shops staffed by four people, that kind of thing. The explanation can't be strong trade unions fighting for full employment, because the unions are weak (or effectively part of the state). And the Russians, or a class of them, embraced a predatory capitalism in the nineties that still largely exists, though now combined with authoritarian government. The underlying explanation might be cultural, which is similar to part of Graeber's diagnosis when he explains the moral and political reasons for the growth of bullshit jobs:

... the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing — Graeber

And this is convenient for a ruling class that won't share its wealth.

If you can work from home, there's a good chance yours is a bullshit job. — Banno

My case might be interesting. I work from home, I'm the co-founder of a very small company, and everyone who works for the company is working very productively. I'm a software developer and my work isn't bullshit. Or, it certainly doesn't feel like it. On the other hand, Graeber might argue that the thing we're working on, the web application we're running, is bullshit, because it's not in itself productive, but merely makes the lives of our customers easier in some ways. So, unlike the paper-pushers, I'm actually making something, it's just that what I'm making might be bullshit.

:cool:

She straight up says I should ignore you — Pfhorrest

I second that.

One of my favourites.

EDIT: this is the best performance and recording I've seen of it online. Thanks.

Not the same thing but I enjoyed this one:



https://www.facebook.com/arsgratiartismutatismutandis.25/posts/1602738313206550

Ah, I see you've done your homework while in Russia :) It's an iconic image, but somehow perhaps due to the historic remoteness or to its fastidious realist execution, it doesn't seem to have the same emotional impact as, say, the Guernica. — SophistiCat

Yes, I know what you mean. When I first saw it, at the Tretyakov Gallery, I was unmoved as I wandered past staring at it vacantly. Only later I realized, oh, wait a minute, that was a pile of human skulls being picked clean by crows, and I should have experienced it as a stunning indictment of war.

:blush:

That comment is so fucking nuts...that anyone attempting to comment on it further than what I am saying right here, is also fucking nuts. — Frank Apisa

:lol:

I guess I'll have to refrain from commenting to the effect that Street and Baden are right.

The painting of the pile of skulls is called "The Apotheosis of War" by Vasily Vereshchagin, sarcastically dedicated "to all great conquerors, past, present and to come". Recreating it with frozen dumplings for skulls is either sick or brilliant, or perhaps both.