Ok thanks. I've reported the bugs to support.

What kind of phone are you using: iPhone, Android, etc.?

I wonder if we're going to see a lot more of these: (Y)

So the software is updated now and I've disabled the reputation system. As I expected, there's no option to retain likes for posts--it's all or nothing. I'm going to ask for that feature next time I send a list of feature requests.

If enough people who voted for option 3 (which is not possible) would prefer the all to the nothing, kick up a fuss about it here.

Haven't got much time, but I saw this in the Guardian and thought of you guys. It's mainly a criticism of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party but it's relevant here.

The charge sheet against western policy dating back a generation is easily drafted. It takes moments to weave a tale of counterproductive geopolitical vandalism, starting from US support for the mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, via the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq, pausing to condemn blind eyes turned and arms sold to Saudi Arabia, whence the theology of infidel-murder pullulates.

But to stop there is lazy. Worse, it takes an effort of analytical obtuseness to make aggressive western governments the initiating agent of all that is sinister, void of good intent or positive consequence, and thus explain jihadism as a symptom, with the CIA and Tony Blair as the virus. As if the Taliban should have been left to rule Afghanistan; as if the insurgency against allied forces in Iraq were a national liberation front akin to anti-colonial movements against the British Empire; as if Isis presented negotiable terms of secular grievance that can be settled at a peace conference; as if the rhetoric against “Zionist-Crusaders”, the genocide of Yazidis and the systematic enslavement of women were all logical extrapolations from a dodgy strategy cooked up in the Pentagon: extreme, yes, but explicable by cross-reference to prior western offences. — Rafael Behr

I just want to note that I'm not the one going on about "Western values". This is an interpretation--a revealing one--of my mention of "secular values, freedom for women, reason and the diversity of cultural heritage, democracy, dissent, and religious difference".

@Baden, some good points, though I still think you're missing what's going on here. I'll reply later.

Just want to add too that what unites us on this thread is far more important than what divides us. No doubt all of us would like to see the end of ISIS, and no doubt all of us appreciate the fact that we don't live in the nightmare they have created in the Middle East and the one they want to spread across the world. Sickening stuff keeps happening here and over there and I think that's thrown us all off kilter. I think the most useful approach now would be to put our heads together and ask the difficult question as to what really would work not only to defeat ISIS militarily but to remove the fuel that fires these types of movements (as you're touching on in your second paragraph above). Continuing to bang our heads against each other because of our different political views isn't going to get us very far. — Baden

I don't think this is true. I think the differences in evidence here are exactly what are important, for reasons I've explained in this thread. I cannot "put my head together" with people who think the history of Western imperialism entitles them to say that Western society is not superior to the society that ISIS is building.

Just to repeat, the reason this is important is that there will never be a non-fundamentalist, non-violent, democratic alternative to motivate the young people who are drawn to Islamism unless people in the West stand up and fight for those values.

It is a problem that European liberals are divided roughly along the lines apparent in this thread, and we do need unity, but we can't just pretend these differences don't exist.

I would make a slogan: "ISIS wants you to hate Muslims" — ssu

Quite possibly, and we should continually challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric and victimization. But I have another slogan that's consistent with it: "ISIS wants you to think it represents all Muslims". The appeasement of Islamism, the fear of taking sides against Muslim reactionaries, the worry that such a position is "Islamophobic", the idea that a cartoon of the Prophet is an offence to all Muslims that unfailingly triggers their rage or hurts their feelings, and the idea that Islamic fundamentalism is an understandable and predictable if not legitimate form of resistance; these are rife among left-wingers, liberals and political elites, and they are just the other side of the xenophobic coin. Both the right and the left treat Muslims as a monolithic group of essential otherness. In so doing, both take the terrorist bait and read from the ISIS script.

I don't really know why you're treating me as the foil for your lengthy criticisms of the War on Terror. Is it because I endorsed photo's proposals? I am unsure about what will work, and how far bombing can be used without making the situation worse, although it seems to me indispensable at the moment, if used carefully. In any case, Cavacava's proposal is pretty much in line with how I have always envisioned the defeat of ISIS.

As for the cause, I think it's a combination of things, and I wouldn't want to put the blame for the success of ISIS entirely on Benkei's shoulders. You're right that the Western intervention has been in many ways counterproductive, has eroded trust in the West among the people of the region, alienated many ordinary non-fundamentalist Muslims, and left a power vacuum that led to the rise of ISIS. But the question is why this sort of outcome. Why ISIS? Whence the international appeal of this kind of organization? And it's here that I think you have to look at the lack of alternatives, both the lack of secular alternatives in the Middle East--which discoii has already described--and the lack of strong liberal voices in the West arguing for values opposed to those of ISIS, i.e., the reluctance to stand up for the principles that used to be fundamental among liberals and the left. And this goes back to my post above about radicalization.

you have no qualms with Westerners bombing hospitals — discoii

Where do you get this from? Don't take my refusal to engage with your post as an endorsement of the American military's bombing of a hospital.

The General Question

Section 4

Is metaphysics possible at all?

If Hume was right, the answer to this is no. And there wasn't much evidence to the contrary, as Kant notes:

One can point to no single book, as for instance one presents a Euclid, and say: this is metaphysics, here you will find the highest aim of this science, knowledge of a supreme being and a future life, proven from principles of pure reason.

The crucial point of this section is toward the end. Although he cannot yet answer whether metaphysics as a science* is possible, he can say with confidence that synthetic a priori knowledge is at least possible in mathematics and physics. The basic laws of physics, as I discussed in my last post, are synthetic a priori because they are ampliative, necessary and universal, and not strictly determined by empirical discoveries.

*Again note that "science" in Kant's day meant a systematic body of knowledge and the practices that contribute to it.

Since metaphysics aims at informative knowledge established with the use of pure reason, it aims at synthetic a priori knowledge. And since synthetic a priori is possible, we need to find out how it is possible...

...in order to be able to derive, from the principle of the possibility of the given cognition, the possibility of all other synthetic cognition a priori.

Section 5

The heading of this section is How is cognition from pure reason possible? Kant calls this the popular version of the central question, How are synthetic propositions a priori possible?. ("Cognition", by the way, is the currently favoured translation of Erkenntnis, also sometimes translated as "knowledge". There are many cases where I suspect "knowledge" is a better translation, but that's mainly a gut feeling.)

He restates the main point:

...synthetic but pure rational cognition is actual; but we must nonetheless next investigate the ground of this possibility, and ask: how this cognition is possible, so that we put ourselves in a position to determine, from the principles of its possibility, the conditions of its use and the extent and boundaries of the same. Expressed with scholastic precision, the exact problem on which everything hinges is therefore:

How are synthetic propositions a priori possible?

Some other ways of putting the question:

In short, how can there be ampliative or informative judgments that are nevertheless necessarily true? This is the technical problem driving the critical philosophy — Jill Vance Buroker

When Kant asks the question “how are synthetic a priori judgements possible?” he is asking “how is it possible for thought to generate something new?” — Levi Bryant

Kant brings up the threat of Hume again to emphasize the importance of the question:

For how is it possible, asked the acute man, that when I am given one concept I can go beyond it and connect another one to it that is not contained in it, and can indeed do so, as though the latter necessarily belonged to the former? Only experience can provide us with such connections (so he concluded from this difficulty, which he took for an impossibility), and all of this supposed necessity – or, what is the same – this cognition taken for a priori, is nothing but a long-standing habit of finding something to be true and consequently of taking subjective necessity to be objective.

In my first post I wondered about the status of Kant's own critical philosophy with respect to metaphysics. Although he has described what he is doing as a new science, here in this section is the first explicit mention and description of transcendental philosophy:

It can be said that the whole of transcendental philosophy, which necessarily precedes all of metaphysics, is itself nothing other than simply the complete solution of the question presented here, but in systematic order and detail, and that until now there has therefore been no transcendental philosophy; for what goes under this name is really a part of metaphysics, but this science is to settle the possibility of metaphysics in the first place, and therefore must precede all metaphysics.

He thus reserves a very special place for his own philosophy. This is not just a competing theory of reality; it is an account of the very conditions of the possibility of philosophy and all other knowledge. In a letter to Marcus Herz he called it a “metaphysics of metaphysics”.

But hasn't he already said that before attempting metaphysics you have heed the doctrine of transcendental philosophy? So how could he have legitimately carried through a “metaphysics of metaphysics”? If transcendental philosophy is a kind of metaphysics, how can he guarantee that, being originally ignorant of what he finally discovered, he happened upon the right method and the right answers?

The answer is that most of the time he is talking about traditional ontology, which theorizes about the nature of reality as it is outside of the conditions under which human beings can know it. In contrast, his metaphysics is something very special, something nobody had attempted before. In transcendental philosophy one works back to uncover the conditions that must hold for knowledge to be possible:

I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori. A system of such concepts would be called transcendental philosophy.

This is of course an epistemological question, but this surely isn't just epistemology, because in answering it he does much more than describe how we access a given, assumed reality; rather, he assigns new, original status to reality, objects, space and time, and human consciousness.

Back to the central question, what he now begins to call the "main transcendental question". Since we know that synthetic a priori knowledge is possible in mathematics (setting aside objections for now) and physics, he is going to deal with those first before proceeding on to metaphysics. Thus he breaks down the question like this:

1. How is pure mathematics possible?
2. How is pure natural science possible?
3. How is metaphysics in general possible?
4. How is metaphysics as science possible?

But what exactly is "pure natural science"? If we read this in line with everything that's gone before, it must be the a priori component of physics, roughly corresponding with fundamental mathematical physics as opposed to experimental physics.

But I am still a bit confused about this. Is pure natural science to be identified with immanent metaphysics, i.e., the metaphysics of experience, or is that the legitimate separate discipline of metaphysics? Where does physics end and metaphysics begin? Is that the wrong question? Looking ahead to the section itself, he says the following:

pure natural science, which, a priori and with all of the necessity required for apodictic propositions, propounds laws to which nature is subject.

Perhaps we should remember that the rift between physics and philosophy was not then so wide as it is now, and the thought that physicists were engaging in metaphysics as part of their work was not unusual.

Next, things get tricky.

It might make the discussion less acrimonious if we look at the findings of anthropologist Scott Atran, who has investigated radicalization. Aside from all the stuff I vociferously disagree with in what you've said @Benkei, you did have some interesting things to say about radicalization. Scott Atran suggests three conditions necessary to prevent the radicalization of the young:

1. The first condition: Offer youth something that makes them dream of a life of significance through struggle and sacrifice in comradeship.

2. The second condition: Offer youth a positive personal dream, with a concrete chance of realization.

3. A third condition: Offer youth the chance to create their own local initiatives.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-atran/violent-extremism-social-science_b_7142604.html

ISIS is winning in this area because it has a supreme confidence and idealism that is currently lacking amongst the liberal defenders of cultural diversity, freedom of speech, democracy, equality for women and gay people. That lack of confidence, if not outright scepticism and equivocation, is very apparent in this thread.

But then you make there in between the accusation of the moral bankruptcy in the West of those who don't show solidarity to those "in the Middle East who are fighting them".

OK, show then your moral support and solidarity to Hezbollah and Iran and Shiite militias loyal to it, the Assad regime and the Al Nusra front for starters then. — ssu

When I criticized Western liberals for failing to show solidarity with those who are fighting ISIS, I had in mind not only those who are actually fighting them but also those who are too scared to fight them and those who are suffering at their hand. I had in mind the Muslims of Europe who struggle to challenge the Islamists in their midst; the Kurds, who have mostly been unsupported by the Western left (as an example take the UK National Union of Students voting against a motion to condemn ISIS and support the Kurds, because it would be "Islamophobic"); and the Sunnis of Iraq who refused to swear allegiance to ISIS or who have been forced to live under its regime; and especially now, the significantly pro-French people of Raqqa in Syria, where ISIS is being targeted by the French air strikes. Against the reports posted by the anti-ISIS campaigners of Raqqa, European leftists are eager to spread pro-ISIS fabrications about civilian deaths. I urge you to read the Twitter feed to get an idea of what's been going on in the territories where ISIS holds power.

Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently is a campaign launched by a group of non-violent activists in Raqqa to expose the atrocities committed by The regime of Bashar Al-Assad and terrorist extremist group ” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ISIS toward the civilian populations if the city. We shed light on the overlooking of these atrocities by all parties. We are a nonpartisan and independent news page. — raqqa-sl.com

Against this, @Benkei says: "You blindly assume that Western values are wanted there".

But no, I'm not a fan of Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, or Assad.

And one has to be either simply ignorant or in possession of a broken moral compass to say this:

So, why doesn't France invade America too, for bombing a hospital just days before the Paris incident? This is double standard nonsense people are spouting here. The reaction to American atrocities is: oh, please stop. But they never stop. Yet when brown people do it, you are so quick to support dropping freedom from the skies! Come on now, go sign that invade America petition. — discoii

This is interesting, from anthropologist Scott Atran:

Mindless terrorists? The truth about Isis is much worse

Again, I literally do not know where to begin. What are you talking about?

Your narrative — Benkei

What narrative?

Just by talking about it? — Benkei

Yes, because there is a battle of ideas.

I'm really not sure about what the West should do, and I entered this discussion not to argue for Western intervention but to criticize the views of Western leftish liberals, which I believe contribute to a political, intellectual and moral climate that increasingly makes it more likely that similar terrorist attacks will take place, or at least makes it more difficult to fight against the most ambitious and viciously reactionary movement the world has seen for a long time. In other words, I think the Western left-liberal Islamophilic denigration of Enlightenment values is opening the space for fundamentalism and radicalization; it is the other side of the coin of the right-wing xenophobes.

That said, I think I would support photographer's proposals, despite having opposed all Western intervention for the past few decades:

1. Declare war on the caliphate and treat citizens who have dealings with it under the good old statutes of treason, etc..

2. As the caliphate depends on holding territory, give maximum aid to alternative claimants to the territories they have a legitimate claim to and can control.

3. Selectively destroy munitions, military infrastructure, administrative centers etc. as we would do with any conventional enemy.

4. Above all avoid any rash changes in foreign policy. I see no need to change our policies on Syria, for instance. Assad needs to go, the refugees need help. — photographer

Jamalrob, perhaps you don't see the excessive simplicity you argue for. What you describe above is the typical "Islamo-Fascists that hate our freedoms" -jargon back from the Dubya days. — ssu

No, I described what ISIS are doing and what their motivations are. Again, it is frustrating to discuss this with people who want to think I'm saying something I am not. Do not try to fit everything into your ready-made templates.

By the way, most Kurds are extremely conservative regarding women (which is reflected to their homophobia as well), it's mostly the Ocalan branch of Kurds that are pro-women and it was precisely this pervasive gender conservatism that turned Ocalan to feminism in the first place. — Πετροκότσυφας

This is a good point. I did not mean to suggest that women had gained emancipation throughout Kurdish society.

I answered the question you keep saying I haven't answered:

The problem is that there is a bunch of dicks with power and territory who plan to kill millions of people in the Middle East and destroy any traces there of secular values, freedom for women, reason and the diversity of cultural heritage, democracy, dissent, and religious difference, and who are sometimes willing to take that war overseas, making this not just a problem for the Middle East. If people in the West, who benefit from the freedoms that ISIS is trying to eradicate, do not show solidarity with those in the Middle East who are fighting them, then they are morally bankrupt. — jamalrob

Otherwise your post is so confused I wouldn't know where to start.

There is a romance, slick and cool factor that is attracting these kids to find purpose within the ranks of ISIS. It is very similar to the gang codes of inner cities or out here in the West with the Hell's Angels and the Dirty Dozen where the initiation often involves taking out another from the rival gang. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

I think there is a lot of truth in this. I don't know what can be done about it.

Yes, I pretty much agree, except for the "precisely why Paris got attacked" bit.

You're privy to their plans? You know what they want to accomplish? — Benkei

What I said about them is based on what they have said they want to do and what they say motivates their actions, which are in turn consistent with those motivations. Maybe you should read Wood's article again.

I'm not even certain they want our support. You blindly assume that Western values are wanted there. There are more ways to social justice than Western democracy and imposing Western-style institutions. Imposing our values, our narrative of modernity isn't working and we need to open ourselves up to solutions that are specific to the area. Whatever intervention on our side, even if it were successful in eliminating IS, would be oppression in itself and therefore not solve the underlying problem. — Benkei

Frankly Benkei, this is rancid. I mentioned "secular values, freedom for women, reason and the diversity of cultural heritage, democracy, dissent, and religious difference". Are you suggesting that these are just our values? This reveals, more than anything I have said, a patronizing and essentializing "us and them" attitude to people in the Middle East. Are Kurdish women equal to men because this was imposed on them by the West? Did the Iranian people build an innovative music scene in the 1970s because they were agents of Western Imperialism? Did the people in Tahrir square demonstrate in favour of democracy because they were told to do it by the CIA? Are the women in the Middle East who bravely campaign for women's rights merely imposing an alien culture on a naturally barbaric people? Have Shias and Sunnis lived in peace together for many decades in many places only because they were brainwashed by Americans?

I did not call those values Western. You did, and that two-faced imperialism underlies everything you say. They are values that are up for grabs for anyone who wants to grab them, and people around the world have grabbed them and continue to want them. They are universal.

You might want to read the article instead of imposing your readymade cartoon narratives on to what I'm saying. I'm not making it about us and them, if by that you mean Westerners against Muslims. It is you and Benkei who are doing that. They (ISIS) hate not only ordinary Westerners for their freedoms--and they explicitly do; just read their statements claiming responsibility--but anyone in the Middle East who is more free than their pure brand of Islam allows, e.g., the Kurds with their sexual equality, the Alawites with their syncretism, the Lebanese with their cosmopolitanism, etc. And really any Muslim in the Middle East and throughout the world who doesn't abide by their strict version of Sharia law, which is nearly all of them.

I'll take that as a "no", at least to the first question.

The problem is that there is a bunch of bloodthirsty genocidal dickheads with power and territory who plan to kill millions of people in the Middle East and destroy any traces there of secular values, freedom for women, reason and the diversity of cultural heritage, democracy, dissent, and religious difference, and who are sometimes willing to take that war overseas, making this not just a problem for the Middle East. If people in the West, who benefit from the freedoms that ISIS is trying to eradicate, do not show solidarity with those in the Middle East who are fighting them or who are too scared to fight them, then they are morally bankrupt.

Have you read the article?

Also, are you suggesting that the defeat of ISIS is not a worthy goal?

Thanks, got it.

@ArguingWAristotleTiff Okay now mention me.

Your characterization of my position does not follow from the words I quoted from Kenan Malik.

certainly isn't anti-diversity and pluralism — discoii

You're joking, right?

Yes, and? What does that have to do with your characterization of my position--the one I objected to?

you are so quick to try to place a complete moral blame on Muslims and would like to frame ISIS as some sort of group that just came to be in a vacuum because they hate laughter and puppy dogs. — discoii

Just a note to point out that I did not say anything remotely like this, nor would I.

But ISIS is not a group whose immediate targets are Western states, and they are not motivated primarily by anti-imperialism, and they are not made up primarily of people who have suffered so much at the hands of the West that they burn with the desire for revenge. I think this is a fantasy, and I don't know how anyone with some knowledge of what ISIS is and what it has done could be taken in by it.

My limited understanding of ISIS was challenged by this article in the Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ . Graeme Wood has done some careful research and challenges some commonly held beliefs. After reading this I'm convinced that the West should:

1. Declare war on the caliphate and treat citizens who have dealings with it under the good old statutes of treason, etc..

2. As the caliphate depends on holding territory, give maximum aid to alternative claimants to the territories they have a legitimate claim to and can control.

3. Selectively destroy munitions, military infrastructure, administrative centers etc. as we would do with any conventional enemy.

4. Above all avoid any rash changes in foreign policy. I see no need to change our policies on Syria, for instance. Assad needs to go, the refugees need help. — photographer

Yes, that article was an education for me too. It casts doubt on the oft-heard opinion, expressed already in this thread, that military action is useless because the ISIS fighters will just melt away into obscurity for a while to bide their time, i.e. that ISIS is just like al-Qaeda. If Wood is right, everything hinges on their holding of territory. And that is something that can be taken from them.

Once again, many lefties and liberals rush to characterize this attack as an understandable response to Western militarism. It seems like a willful blindness. ISIS no doubt benefited from the incompetence of the Western intervention, but there is a barely repressed urge among left liberal commentators to go further, to say "what do we expect?" But contrary to what is implied in these sentiments, ISIS are not heroic freedom-fighters struggling against oppression, pushed to violence by the military actions of the West--as Kenan Malik points out:

The terrorists did not target symbols of the French state, or of French militarism. They did not even target tourist spots. They targeted, rather, the areas and the places where mainly young, anti-racist, multiethnic Parisians hang out. The cafes, restaurants, bars and music venue that were attacked – Le Carillon, La Belle Equipe, Le Petit Cambodge, and the Jewish-owned Bataclan – are in the 10th and 11th arrondisements, areas that, though increasingly gentrified, remain ethnically and culturally mixed and still with a working class presence.

[...]

What the terrorists despised, what they tried to eliminate, were ordinary people, drinking, eating, laughing, mixing. That is what they hated – not so much the French state as the values of diversity and pluralism. — Kenan Malik

https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2015/11/15/after-paris/

And if left liberals really do want to halt the "clash of civilizations" narrative and to stand up for the rights of ordinary Muslims, then they must stop reacting to attacks like these by saying, in effect, "look what happens when you push a Muslim to breaking point." It doesn't take a genius to see how racist this attitude is.

As long as certain versions of creationism willfully distort established scientific facts, then it might be seen as the duty of a state to protect its citizens from fraud, the same way it ought to do it for products, such as power balance bracelets, which make fraudulent claims. — Πετροκότσυφας

I can hardly imagine a sentiment further from the spirit of science and free enquiry.

I am willing to sacrifice my reputation for the good of the community. O:)

Thanks for the like :D

I think I agree.

Quick question: wouldn't "Hello!" be treated as a sentence in linguistics?