I count the ὄστρακον by each citizen and will leave of my own accord.

May fortune be yours.

If you are satisfied by your own efforts, what is the purpose of seeking validation from others?

I am glad that you focused upon exploitation and inequality because it points back to the centrality of lordship and bondage in Hegel's Phenomenology. That another existence can cancel a sense of that for oneself by simply being there is Hegel's 'state of nature' in contrast to Rousseau and Hobbes.

I would be happy to be proven wrong. — Truth Seeker

If you are the only one who could do that for yourself, what does it mean to appeal to others?

If you are satisfied that all is determined, why ask about it?

Would it change something?

I guess that one example of negativity being 'reified' points to Adorno objecting to the "material" as a reliable pole star in Marx and Lenin (and Lukács).

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno observes:

The corporeal moment registers the cognition, that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different. “Woe speaks: go.” That is why what is specifically materialistic converges with what is critical, with socially transforming praxis. The abolition of suffering, or its mitigation to a degree which is not to be theoretically assumed in advance, to which no limit can be set, is not up to the individual who endures suffering, but solely to the species that it belongs to, even where it has subjectively renounced the latter and is objectively forced into the absolute loneliness of the helpless object. All activities of the species make reference to its physical continued existence, even if they fail to recognize this, becoming organizationally autonomous and seeing to their business only as an afterthought. Even the institutions which society creates in order to exterminate itself are, as unleashed, absurd self-preservation, simultaneously their own unconscious actions against suffering. Narrowly restricted indeed by what is their own, their total particularity also turns against this. Confronted with them, the purpose which alone makes society into a society demands that it be so arranged, as what the relations of production here and there relentlessly prevent, and as what would be immediately possible to the productive forces right here and now. Such an arrangement would have its telos in the negation of physical suffering of even the least of its members, and of the innervated reflection-forms of that suffering. It is in the interest of all, at this point to be realized solely through a solidarity transparent to itself and to every living being.

MATERIALISM IMAGELESS
To those who wish that it not be realized, materialism has in the meantime done the favor of its self-degradation. The immaturity which caused this is not, as Kant thought, the fault of humanity itself. In the meantime at least it is reproduced according to plan by the powers that be. The objective Spirit, which they direct, because they require its chaining, adjusts itself to that consciousness, which was enchained for millennia. The materialism which achieved political power has devoted itself to such praxis no less than the world, which it once wanted to change; it continues to chain the consciousness, instead of comprehending it and for its part changing it. Terroristic state-machineries entrench themselves under the threadbare pretext of a soon to be fifty-year-old dictatorship of the long since administrated proletariat as permanent institutions, the mockery of the theory which they pay lip service to. They chain their underlings to their immediate interests and keep them narrow-minded. The depravation of theory meanwhile would not have been possible without the dregs of the apocryphal in it. By leaping summarily outside of culture, the functionaries who monopolize it would like to crudely feign that they would be beyond culture, and thus give sustenance to universal regression. What philosophy wished to liquidate, in the expectation of the immediately impending revolution, was, impatient with its claim, already at that moment lagging behind it. What is apocryphal in materialism reveals that of high philosophy, that which is untrue in the sovereignty of the Spirit, which the prevailing materialism disdains as cynically as bourgeois society had done in secret before. The idealistic sublime is the cognate of the apocryphal; the texts of Kafka and Beckett harshly illuminate this relationship.

Solely indefatigably reified consciousness imagines, or tries to persuade others into imagining, that it would possess photographs of objectivity. Its illusion crosses over into dogmatic immediacy. When Lenin, instead of entering into epistemology, compulsively and repeatedly asserted against this the being-in-itself of cognitive objects, he wanted to demonstrate the complicity of subjective positivism with the “powers that be” [in English]. His political need turned thereby against the theoretical cognitive goal. Transcendent argumentation finishes things off by means of the power-claim, and for ill: by being left unpenetrated, what is criticized remains undisturbed as it is, and is capable, as what has not been properly examined, of being resurrected in transformed power-constellations any which way.

Materialistic theory became not merely aesthetically defective in contrast to the hollowed-out sublime of bourgeois consciousness, but untrue. This is theoretically determinable. The dialectic is in the things, but it would not be without the consciousness which reflects it; no more than it could be dissolved into the latter. In the One pure and simple, undifferentiated, total matter, there would be no dialectic. The official materialistic one skipped over epistemology by decree. The latter’s revenge is epistemological: in the reflection-doctrine [Abbildlehre]. The thought is no reflection of the thing – it is made into this solely by
materialistic mythology in Epicurean style, which discovered that matter sends out little images – but aims at the thing itself. The enlightening intention of thought, demythologization, nullifies the image-character of consciousness. What clings to the image remains mythically ensnared, idolatry. The summation of images forms a wall before reality. Reflection-theory denies the spontaneity of the subject, a movens [Latin: what moves] of the objective dialectic of productive forces and relations of production. If the subject is bound to the stubborn mirror-image of the object, which necessarily lacks the object,
which discloses itself only to the subjective surplus in thought, then the result is the restless intellectual silence of integral administration. — Adorno, Negative Dialectics, page 224 ff, translated by Dennis Redmond

The way Adorno bounces what is imagined or not in particular schemes is interesting.

But most of all they are taking a moral stance. They refuse to rely on an instrument of exploitation and coercion to achieve cooperation with others. To do so, to me, is a sign of moral poverty. At any rate, it’s a sign that one doesn’t have much else to offer but his fealty to some class of politicians. — NOS4A2

How does that statement square with your years of defending a particular politician?

That reminds me of Thomas Paine saying:

The present time, likewise, is that peculiar time, which never happens to a nation but once, viz. the time of forming itself into a government. Most nations have let slip the opportunity, and by that means have been compelled to receive laws from their conquerors, instead of making laws for themselves. First, they had a king, and then a form of government; whereas, the articles or charter of government, should be formed first, and men delegated to execute them afterward: but from the errors of other nations, let us learn wisdom, and lay hold of the present opportunity— To begin government at the right end.

When William the Conqueror subdued England, he gave them law at the point of the sword; and until we consent, that the seat of government, in America, be legally and authoritatively occupied, we shall be in danger of having it filled by some fortunate ruffian, who may treat us in the same manner, and then, where will be our freedom? where our property? — Thomas Paine, Common Sense, just before the Appendix

4. If FDI does decline it will result in lower growth, weaker dollar, austerity or inflation and loss of global influence. It's not strategic at all. — Benkei

It does seem to be an element of the market that protectionist policies keep colliding with. None of the "balance of trade" talk performed so far by the Administration incorporates that as a factor.

Stanly and friends

I think the question of how quickly the merchants are hit depends on the amount of front-loading that has been done. There have been a number of reports upon how Mexican products have been brought in well before the usual dropship algorithm. The anticipation of unknowns has caused many to guess what to import early since the election results came out.

It is hard to see too far into what Amazon, Walmart, etcetera have done. I do a lot of buying from Lenovo commercially as a part of my work. They clearly have a pile that is in country which is being priced differently from the stuff still in the works.

This sort of thing is difficult to find out about since each industry will want to make the best of what they have without blabbing about any advantage.

Such accounts seem to head towards the mystical and the murky realm of ineffability. No doubt this idea of god's infinite, unknowable and divine essence could be said to overlap with other religious traditions such as Advaita Vedanta. — Tom Storm

A lot of mystics were focused upon what they should do upon the grounds they found themselves to stand upon. The rejection of magical techniques in many cases was a rule to not sneak around and do stuff behind people's backs. Hillel's "Do not do to others what you would not have done to yourself" does not speculate upon what is possible if one chooses to act in that way.

I look at the degrees of "effability" from a Walt Whitman point of view:

I send no agent or medium, offer no representative of value, but offer the value itself.

There is something that comes home to one now and perpetually;

It is not what is printed, preach'd, discussed-it eludes discussion and print;

It is not to be put in a book-it is not in this book;

It is for you, whoever you are-it is no farther from you than your hearing and sight are from you;

it is hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest'-it is ever provoked by them.

You may read in many languages, yet read nothing about it; You may read the President's Message, and read nothing about it there;

Nothing in the reports from the State department or Treasury department, or in the daily papers or the weekly papers, Or in the census or revenue returns, prices current, or any accounts of stock — Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Song of Occupations.

.

There's a developing philosophy to it, denying certain assumptions of the Enlightenment, for instance. — frank

If that is the banner they are sailing under, it is exquisitely anti-constitutional:

For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression. Predisposed, in any case, to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob, it conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption. The democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten. — Land, The Dark Enlightenment

And since the people carrying out this agenda are sworn to defend the Constitution, it is treasonous.

Why not?

You keep bringing it up.

I read that essay at your behest. It clarifies a lot of some people's thinking: Engineering social change.

Seems like you wouldn’t make these cuts if you were interested in revitalizing American industries. — praxis

I agree. One of the worst effects of the Neo-Liberalist shift to ever cheaper labor markets is that a huge reservoir of knowledge became suddenly unneeded by the body politic. A home-grown production revival is going to have to go the other way and develop new skills.

The withdrawal of regulation will mean the end of invention in many industries.

The whole thing is as dumb as a stick shoved into moist ground.

The two disputes you mentioned in your other thread have been going on for years. The place became a lemonade stand where the same points were repeated over and over again. Perhaps when such standing waves of argument emerge, they should be relocated to a thread devoted to the topic.

These singularities could inhabit a special form of the Lounge called Inferno, or perhaps Guantanamo Bay.

Any discussion of the present will require different understandings of the past. When the views differ to the point of collapsing into the same disagreement about what happened, a new room is opened so that the conflict does not tyrannize other places.

and one does not have to be attracted to one kind of explanation over against another to notice such a change.

but to pretend your 50 lawsuits are nothing more than the bureaucracy trying hold the tide against what the majority want is really silly. — philosch

How do you know what the "majority" wants?

Aristotle is interesting in that regard because his pupil, Alexander, was reported to have pissed off his fellow Macedonians by adopting some Persian customs and dress. As he conquered very different places, he often paid respect to their divinities.

Perhaps he displayed an interest in diversity and the cosmopolitan that his teacher would view as being too woke and disrespectful.

On the other hand, Aristotle was a bit of a stranger himself. He left Athens when a certain group who really did not like him gained power. The dude lost his Visa.

The capacity for partnership must be realized in this particular way, not just any form of partnership or cooperation. — J

Between the parties with actual interest in what will happen in the future.

Aristotle didn't think it was possible for a man to be either a lower animal or a god, right? — J

He recognized that many men live as beasts. He also recognized that a man benefited from seeking the highest life expressed in varying representations of the divine. We are also capable of not being good men:

but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state. — Aristotle, Politics, 1253a forward, translated by H Rackham

Well, he was aware of the Persian empire through the long struggle with them. Alexander was out on his horse conquering it around then. The issue here is that life of a city is said to be natural. The city
is the result of the partnership, not the other way around. The capacity for the activity has to be present. The whole thing is tits-up if the only humans around are "incapable of entering into partnership:

if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god. — Aristotle, Politics, 1253a forward, translated by H Rackham

What interests me is how the "divine" is also a disability from this point of view. The gods are really not fond of sharing stuff.

It is the executive branch that gets to decide the contracts and the staffing — NOS4A2

Within the limits marked out by the Legislature. Not all contracts are equally supported by law.

It was stated as a limit for man which some did (or could) not observe:

From these things therefore it is clear that the city-state is a natural growth, and that man is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune city-less is either low in the scale of humanity or above it (like the ‘clanless, lawless, hearthless ’ man reviled by Homer, for he is by nature city-less and also a lover of war) inasmuch as he resembles an isolated piece at draughts. And why man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech. The mere voice, it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well (for their nature has been developed so far as to have sensations of what is painful and pleasant and to signify those sensations to one another), but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.

Thus also the city-state is prior in nature to the The State prior in nature, household and to each of us individually. For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part; since when the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense, like the sense in which one speaks of a hand sculptured in stone as a hand; because a hand in those circumstances will be a hand spoiled, and all things are defined by their function and capacity, so that when they are no longer such as to perform their function they must not be said to be the same things, but to bear their names in an equivocal sense. It is clear therefore that the state is also prior by nature to the individual; for if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god. — Aristotle, Politics, 1253a forward, translated by H Rackham

Are you disagreeing with the statement that institutional collapse is eminent or saying that such an event will not change the course of future polity?

That is how I read the idea of not being a pilot in Meditations:

Nature also teaches me by these feelings of pain, hunger, thirst, and so on that I am not only residing in my body, as a pilot in his ship, but furthermore, that I am intimately connected with it, and that the mixture is so blended, as it were, that something like a single whole is produced. For if that were not the case, when my body is wounded I would not therefore feel pain, I, who am only a thinking being; but I would perceive that wound by the understanding alone, as a pilot perceives by sight if something in his vessel is broken. And when my body needs food or drink, I would simply know the fact itself, instead of receiving notice of it by having confused feelings of hunger and thirst. For actually all these feelings of hunger, thirst, pain, and so on are nothing else but certain confused modes of thinking, which have their origin in and depend upon the union and apparent fusion of the mind with the body. — Descartes, Meditation 6, pg 81, translated by L.J Lefleur

Are you saying the reason he was included in that group chat has something to do with what he has said in the past?

Now the question is how Jeffry Goldberg was added to Waltz’s contact list, and subsequently the chat. — NOS4A2

Indeed. That has nothing to do with the motives you assign to Goldberg.

It was rhetorical — AmadeusD

I thought you were asking me how I knew, not what might convince others.

If that's all you need to make you 'sure' of a generational speculation, I'm unsure where to take this.. — AmadeusD

The observation that a generational crisis is at hand comes from a life of work. When an outfit fires the Old Salts and the Rookies at the same time, the game is over. There is no way to reproduce the enterprise.

Are you sure this is what's happening? — AmadeusD

Yes, from the reports from my friends and family, many of whom are public servants, inside and outside of the government per se.

There are two vectors.
The push to have experienced people leave as soon as possible.
The reduction of "probationary" employees who are typically the ones who do the work after their teachers leave.

I am human:

Our civil service is being dismantled on a level that the means of transferring skills and knowledge from one generation to the next is under attack (who knows if ultimately successful).

The Reagan years did put those services under stress but did not attempt to disappear them, as such, outside of Congress, who was assigned the job of designing Government by the Constitution.

Yes. I think of the cogito as what I can never get away from. Gangster stuff.

However with 'spirit' he indicates that substance is not dead matter, but living, as in a 'spirited individual'. — Tobias

Hegel also distinguished between "natural" and "spirited" to demark what is actually human. Alexandre Kojève quotes from a helpful essay of Hegel in his Introduction To The Reading Of Hegel:

In the act-of-recognizing (Anerkennen) the Self ceases to be this isolated-particular (Einzelne) here; it exists (ist) juridically [that is, universally or as absolute value] in the act-of-recognizing, that is, it is no longer in its immediate [or natural] empirical-existence (Dasein).....
Man is necessarily recognized, and he is necessarily recognizing. This necessity is his own, not that of our thought in opposition to the content. As act-of-recognizing, Man himself is the [dialectical] movement, and it is precisely this movement that dialectically-overcomes (hebt auf) his state of nature: he is [the] act-of-recognizing;
the natural-entity (Naturaliche) only exists (ist); it is not [a] spiritual-entity (Geistiges)
-Jena lectures, 1805-1806. — Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, page 236, translated by Nichols Jr.

Well, if it is as you say, the changes of present polity will have no effect upon some greater economy that will emerge in the future,

Why are you so confident that the past will continue into the future?

The thing in itself is a consequence of Kant's formality. — Tobias

Hegel seems to reenlist a lot of these terms for his own purposes.

Why are our thoughts different from our senses in that the content of thoughts cannot be doubted? — Kranky

The way they are different is not essentially about comparable states of doubt. Doubt is the product of thought. The activity of thinking is different from the activity of perception. There is no second doubter who needs to be satisfied if the first one is okay.

A distinction is needed between the problems of input and those of thinking as what is happening. Aristotle noted that the two modes cannot be reduced into one because they are active and/or passive in different ways. It is obvious that the two modes must have something to do with each other. Aristotle pretty much left it there.