:kiss:

Also obligatory wet blanket:

Hi, I deleted the post. We require the body of posts to hold the substance of the argument or topic, rather than being linked off-site (otherwise we just become a repository of links!). If you can perhaps provide a summary or some detail of what you're trying to argue for in the OP in the post itself, it would probably be fine.

At this point Joe ought to be thanking Hunter every day for providing an infinite energy sink into which Trump and sacks of manure like NOS can pound sand over.

I quite like the pathetic focus on Hunter Biden. At this point it's the biggest plank of Trump's campaign for, um, *checks notes*, president of the United States, and has been for a while. It's hilarious.

The only thing more pathetic than it are the supporters he's duped into pouring time and energy into puffing it up.

I just think if no one else is being harmed then it doesn't matter what folks believe. They don't need to challenge themselves if they are doing fine — Darkneos

Fine and dandy, but this is a philosophy forum, not a drum circle.

I often hear accusations that people don't want to engage or accept something because of reasons of comfort, but why is that such a bad thing? — Darkneos

It is a bad thing because 'comfort' is unreasoned. Philosophy is a practice of reason (among other things), and positions are meant to be held to account on the basis of their theoretical commitments and entitlements. 'Comfort' is, as it were, pathological - it does not belong to the order of reason - and is not open to critique. Consequently it is philosophically useless.

Belated birthday present to myself just arrived :grin:

Whatever makes you feel better about idpol dude.

Everything you've written to/about me recently has been about trying to triangulate me on some imaginary left spectrum somewhere. Have you really not noticed? Anyway I really don't give a damn, it's just free advice, can we go back to shitting on American leaders again.

Edit: try this as an exercise - get through 5 political posts without using the word 'left'. You might find it interesting.

Thanks I guess. It just really grates on me when people warble over who or what you are, rather than what you say, positive or negative.

And this on an anonymous forum!

But really also stop playing idpol all the time.

No no don't try make yourself feel better about it, you can't go one conversation in this thread without playing idpol. It's fine, it's what you do, but you should be aware it.

It just means that a particular group or institution unfairly racially discriminates for whatever reason. No conspiracy or nefarious plan required. — Mijin

:up: The key thing to add here is perpetuates; what makes systemic racism 'systemic' is the perpetuation of racial inequality, it's reproduction in time and space (rather than just some kind of sheer quantitative degree of discrimination - although these things go hand in hand). But yeah, the conspiracy stuff is nuts.

No, it was definitely a bunch of German theorists from multiple decades ago who BLM never cite that are most certainly responsible for BLM.

Ugh, there is literally no one here that plays more identity politics than you.

--

Anyway, because people have, I dunno, sub elementary school reading abilities or something, for like the 45th time, I ain't telling no one how to vote. Well. Except not for Trump because well obviously fuck you and die if you do.

In a world in which your every possibility of action is circumscribed from without (where what is 'up to you' is a given), Stoic ethics serves nothing less than an internalization of capitalist imperatives passed off as principled action. In any case, this is far off topic now.

Educate yourself on your own presidential candidate rather than asking a stranger on the internet.

Edit: here, buy it/pirate it, read it.

Hmm, what makes you think he's talking about Wittgenstein? It seems to me that his target here is rather structuralism (and phenomenology). I'll get to this. As for the bolded section - surely it's simply referring to the passage that just precedes what you quoted. Read together:

"Language, in its appearance and mode of being, is the statement; as such, it belongs to a description that is neither transcendental nor anthropological. ... The possibility of an enunciative analysis, if it is established, must make it possible to raise the transcendental obstacle that a certain form of philosophical discourse opposes to all analyses of language, in the name of the being of that language and of the ground from which it should derive its origin.

Thus: In the name of the statement [which 'is' language], the transcendental obstacle must be raised so that enunciative analysis can take place.

--

As for what this 'transcendental obstacle' is - again, I think it's structuralism. Read the posed Q&A in the conclusion. Foucault there continually associates transcendental inquiry with strucutrualism, and continually works to distance himself from it: "For me, the problem was certainly not how to structuralize [the history of thought], by applying to the development of knowledge or to the genesis of the sciences categories that had proved themselves in the domain of language (langue). ... My aim was to cleanse it of all transcendental narcissism; it had to be freed from that circle of the lost origin, and rediscovered where it was imprisoned; it had to be shown that the history of thought could not have this role of revealing the transcendental moment that rational mechanics has not possessed since Kant..." (p.203).

My impression is that many people use the term "fascist" inappropriately. What they're trying to convey is someone is conveying a point of view that is similar to that of the guy who wrote these words — Relativist

Maybe. I just really mean fascism. As for Trump's dog Rudy:

In other news, there was a small debate a while back about how when the fash comes to America, it will do so not by blood and violence but by means of its cherished institutions. This is what I meant - via Corey Robin:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/10/21/the-gonzo-constitutionalism-of-the-american-right/

"Over the last several years, liberals and Democrats have characterized the power (and the threat) of the GOP in a particular way: Trump and the Republicans are seen as lawless enemies of the Constitution who rely on a combination of rabid rhetoric and mobilized masses to wreak havoc upon established institutions. It’s true that Trump’s tweets are toxic; the thrum of his rallies is ominous; the violence and possibility of more violence are unnerving. But that’s not, in the main, where Trump’s power, or the Republican Party’s, lies. The unsettling fact of the current regime is that it depends, ultimately, not upon these bogeymen of democracy—not on demagoguery, populism, or the masses—but upon the constitutional mainstays we learned about in high-school civics. The most potent source of the GOP’s power is neither fascism nor authoritarianism; it is gonzo constitutionalism.

...Two thirds of Trump’s [judicial] appointees are white men. Sixty-nine percent of them are graduates of elite law schools (a higher proportion than for any other president in the last forty years). Their median net worth is $2 million; their median age is four to six years younger than the judges appointed by the previous two presidents. Trump’s judges are rich, white, and built to last.

...However dubious their democratic credentials, the Electoral College, the Senate, and the judiciary are impeccably constitutional institutions. In the American mind, the Constitution is associated with all things good and democratic, but a central purpose of the document is to check majoritarian government, giving a small group of elites the power to thwart the will of the democratic majority. That is precisely what the Republicans now are doing."

"Blood on our hands" casting an anti-fascist vote for Biden? — 180 Proof

Yes, blood on your hands whatever you do. There's blood on you because you're fucking breathing in 2020. This isn't anyone's fault, this is not about ressentiment, it's about recognizing your objective situation for what it is. Principled courage? Absolutely. But there's nothing about that that's antithetical to recognizing the wretched creatures you - and frankly, everyone on the planet - has been turned into. And how that should make you fucking mad.

I don't know why you think I'm blaming anyone. One thing is right: you sure as hell are fucking victims - apparently too traumatized by continual failure to recognize yourself as such. You are people in a hostage situation - but you've been handed a gun, forced to kill others to let yet more survive. I don't blame you. I feel immensely sorry for you.

I don't see how one can disagree with the electoral position that an anti-fascist vote is not an endorsement of the Democratic Party. — 180 Proof

Because you don't get to pick and choose which bits of reality are most soothing for you. The whole sthick about "voting for Biden is only a rejection of Trump" is feel-good Left panacea that pretends it can have recto without verso. Like I said, I get that people need a little cuddling right now because voting for a mass incarcerator and corporatist war hawk is the only actual alternative to the next domestic genocide in the US, but the self-denial does no one any good. 'Out there', the Cornel Wests and the Chomskys have a duty to do what can be done to get the message out, but in here, we're allowed to look reality in the face without pretending that blood isn't on the hands of those who vote for Biden too.

If you need twist yourself in knots arguing for your own peace of mind that supporting Biden won't translate into supporting Biden for anyone and everyone who matters - i.e. outside of a left who find themselves in a double-bind of trauma so debilitating they feel the need to continually lie to themselves, then so be it. Whatever it takes I guess.

I think one of my favourite things I've seen said about Trump is that if he really wanted to lock Hillary up, he should have just hired her.

Yeah, the immiseration and effective murder of millions. Just things I'm 'spouting about'. No biggies.

And you don't care about those, it's all emotional for you. — Saphsin

I care about the fact that you think you get to pick and choose what matters at your convenience.

Personally I don't believe in sin or the necessity of shame or essentialist nature of actions or anything like that. I'm a virtue consequentialist, and I adapt my moral actions to what's most effective for myself and their predictable effects on others in the world. — Saphsin

Frankly the left could learn some lessons from the evangelists, given that the Christian crazies have far more sway and power than these so-called 'effective' left actions.

If I’m pushing a button that chooses which President I want to fight, then that’s what I’m doing. Not endorsement. Your shouting doesn’t change the intent or nature of the action. — Saphsin

Dress it up all you like. What you 'intend' is irrelevant. People measure political time in the States in presidencies and movements, and the latter doesn't exist and the former is a neoliberal shitsthick who you make excuses for while putting an oh-so-convenient distance between. If the left doesn't get that it may as well have been in the same room that Biden felt-up Tara Rede in, or nodded as Biden locked millions of students and blacks into poverty and stochastic early death, or gave him the pen as he let communities in the Middle East be ripped apart by bombs on the behalf of oil barons and agriculturalists - because what, it makes you feel icky? - then the left doesn't deserve its name.

Isn't this just the central dogma? Just because we call it a "dogma" doesn't mean there's any idolatry or superstition here. — Srap Tasmaner

It's the dogma, but it's what Dawkins draws from the dogma - what he thinks it entails - that's quite literally unscientific. Actually theological. To put the problem as starkly as can be: genes don't exist. Or, less provocatively, the individuation of genes can only be processual, not structural. Here's Evelyn Fox Keller:

"One gene can be employed to make many different proteins, and indeed the expression “one gene–many proteins” has become fairly common in the literature. The problem with this formulation is that the gene has lost a good deal of both its specificity and its agency. Which protein should a gene make, and under what circumstances? And how does it choose? In fact, it doesn’t. Responsibility for this decision lies elsewhere, in the complex regulatory dynamics of the cell as a whole. It is from these regulatory dynamics, and not from the gene itself, that the signal (or signals) determining the specific pattern in which the final transcript is to be formed actually comes" (The Century of the Gene)

And once you take these environmental dynamics into account, the dogma loses much of it's explanatory power. In fact Derrida - who, hey, you invoked - is pretty bloody apropos here. The Derridian geneticist says: there is no outside the cellular environment (or, more accurately, the developmental system). Il n'y a pas de hors environnement cellulaire. Fox Keller again:

"Fifteen years ago, the historian and philosopher of biology Richard Burian observed, “There is a fact of the matter about the structure of DNA, but there is no single fact of the matter about what the gene is.” In the interim, things have only gotten worse ... As Peter Portin observes, “Our knowledge of the structure and function of the genetic material has outgrown the terminology traditionally used to describe it. It is arguable that the old term gene, essential at an earlier stage of the analysis, is no longer useful.” William Gelbart, working at the forefront of molecular genetics, concurs in suggesting that the gene might be “a concept past its time.” “Unlike chromosomes,” Gelbart writes, “genes are not physical objects but are merely concepts that have acquired a great deal of historic baggage over the past decades.”

I know this is just a bunch of quotes, but in lieu of actually detailing the complexities of gene expression, the point is that the problem with Dawkins lies at the level of the individuation of gene, let alone all the rubbish about 'it' being 'selfish'.

I'm not really sure where anything you're saying is in conflict with what others (including myself) are saying. — Michael

I don't think so either. I haven't been arguing against voting for Biden. At best and I've been grasping my way at trying to show what a vote for Biden entails, and taking that seriously.

One has to wonder where these phantom people talking about 'not voting' are, because they aren't in this thread. Look, I get it, people need a bit of warming affirmation for the fact that they're voting for a dude covered in blood and stench of drone death, and need a bit of a group therapy where they can be stroked gently by some comfort-figure telling them that it's all OK because they're doing it for the greater good. Well sorry but there is no comfort. Every option is the worse option (which does not mean "Trump and Biden are the same"), and every option involves your direct contribution and complicity in it. Voting, for Biden, for Trump, not voting, whatever.

And none of this is an attribution of blame. The reduction to the state of wretchedness in which one is complicit in the installing a cockroach into power is all the worse because yeah, you really don't have much choice do you? The choice is obvious because that's all you get - it's what you've been reduced to. Justify it all one likes with haughty discussions of social contracts and institutions or whatnot. The whataboutism (but what about the alternative???) is just that - whataboutism. My remarks are not a commentary on people, individuals, who vote - they are about the situation in which these people find themselves in.

That's the lesser evil, and I fail to see anything problematic. Any serious tactical struggle for power that doesn’t reduce harm (save soldiers, choosing the right enemies) is normative stupidity. Nothing regretful or abstract about that. What's abstract are all these notions you're bringing it up. It's honestly the kind of characteristic centrist liberals are infected with rather than those interested in realist notions like power and advantage. — Saphsin

At what point does this kind of logic lead one to preferring Gobbels because he's not a Hitler? Or a Beria because he's not a Stalin? At what point does the boiled frog think, well, it's just one more degree rather than five, and that's a pretty substantive difference so despite the fact that I'm boiling to death, well, I'll take what I can get?

I get that this is election is a referendum on Trump and that it is his to lose. What I don't buy is the feel-good bullshit that a Biden win is not an endorsement of the democrats. It is. It absolutely is, and anyone who wants to pretend to think otherwise is lying to themselves in the name of a pseudo-realism that disregards reality. You vote for Biden, you endorse him, you endorse what he's done, you endorse what he's going to do, and you endorse the corporatist ecology that he'll extend, expand, and entrench. Fucking own it.

If Biden wins, you're going to hear endless platitudes about 'mandates' and 'the rejection of hate' and how it's time for 'a new beginning' and so on. And people are going to eat it up, and the people will actually think that this is some kind of victory and not in fact a major loss whose counterfactual was nothing other than an even bigger one. Again, I'm not saying don't vote for Biden. I'm just saying to recognize it for the failure it is, and will be, if he wins - and the contribution to that failure of anyone involved in bringing it about. This shit:

This is no time to focus on the shortcomings of Biden or Harris or the Democrats. — Old Master

is poison. People need to get that crisis is the norm, not the exception. There will never be 'enough time'. It will always be 'too early' or 'too late'. Always some 'other year' in which one is meant to save criticism for.

The voting thing is indicative. It's symptomatic, nothing more.

This is the easy and quick. — Saphsin

I haven't argued otherwise.

Perhaps you're right. I suppose I just want anyone who votes for Biden to feel like they ought to need crawl out of their own skin or slit their own throats in shame after the fact, is all. Perhaps there's just a disconnect between how much pain and suffering I see Biden has put people through, and how much others just want to live their lives without thinking about it too much. Biden's just some abstract 'lesser evil' for you. I guess he is to most people.

The reason Kenosha Kid here is willing to die on Dawkins hill is purely religious: Dawkins was an aggressive atheist, while his chief contradictor Gould was a benevolent agnostic who did not fancy attacking religion. And since the Kid is also an atheist, he sees Gould as a "bad guy" who dared to criticize his Atheist hero Dawkins. So he busies himself painting Gould as religious. A " Creationist", he called him, against all evidence. — Olivier5

The irony of course is that if one takes Dawkins' seriously, one would have to subscribe to what amounts to a theological conception of evolutionary theory. From Evan Thompson's Mind in Life:

"Despite its modern scientific garb, the informational dualism expressed in these passages [of Dawkins and Daniel Dennett] is philosophically less sophisticated than the ancient form of dualism. In the ancient dualism of soul and body—as expressed, for example, in Plato's Phaedo—the soul (psyche) and the body (soma) interpenetrate and influence each other in the life led by the self. An impure body corrupts the soul; a pure one frees the soul. In contrast, in the new dualism [Dawkins writes], "information passes through bodies and affects them, but it is not affected by them on its way through." This notion of information as something that preexists its own expression in the cell, and that is not affected by the developmental matrix of the organism and environment, is a reification that has no explanatory value. It is informational idolatry and superstition, not science".

Dawkins is on the side of theology, not science.

This is the limit of my political horizon? What are you talking about, there aren’t any centrists in this discussion. I supported Bernie, and then the anti-police Black Lives Matter protests this summer. Maybe you didn’t know that, but I made my politics explicit a couple of pages back in what the Left should do. You’re seriously in denial by leaving out convenient points. — Saphsin

Great, wonderful, what do you want, praise? You're still dirty, you're compromised , and everything is still awful, and will remain awful even if Biden wins. There are no clean hands, and we're all flith. This is not personal. This is structural flith.

It's curious that criticism of Biden is met with a chorous of "yes but here's why I'm going to vote for him". It's like people need to assurage their guilty consciences. Like Freud's dude on the couch who feels the need to proclaim that the dream is definately NOT about his mother.

I still have good reasons to vote for Biden. — Relativist

I don't doubt it, and I haven't argued otherwise.

If you’re responsible for pushing for the less worse option between two available options, it doesn’t make sense to say there is additional political debt, to keep it simple — Saphsin

You keep charactering Biden as simply a 'less worse option'. Perhaps he is that. But he is not only that. He is also a terrible human being who is responsible for the immeseration of millions of not hundreds of millions. If the fact that he is 'less bad' is the limit of your political horizon and imagination then so be it. You vote for abstractions and nothing I say will change that.

Okay, cool. TSG is forty years old, and even at that time one-sided and misses some important stuff. Sounds good. It's not my field but I could imagine this is all true. And if Pigliucci is right to characterize Dawkins as dug-in and dismissive of alternative views then that's interesting, but it's mainly consumers of popular science books who would need to be wary, as working scientists aren't taking their cues from such stuff anyway. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, this was my original point: that Dawkins set scientific literacy back by an order of decades. Perhaps I ought to have said 'popular' literacy or somesuch. And as I said somewhere back there, science has indeed gone on chugging quite in spite of Dawkins' antiquated views. But of course everything you quoted from Pigluicci is exactly right: the reality of multi-level selection alone should make everything written by Dawkins a waste of anything but good fire kindling. Plasticity, evolvability, epigenetics - if you know any of this you know how laughable and unscientific the view set out in TSG is.

And I don't think the comparison to Quine is fair. Science doesn't work like philosophy. You don't study geocentrism in order to get a more rigorous sense of heliocentrism. You acknowledge that it once existed as a superfluous view, now ridiculously outdated, and you do the work of calculating the orbits without caring one iota for pre-copernican science. To the degree that Dawkins bothers me, it's no different from someone citing Ptolemy regularly and having it taken seriously as a 'strong setting out of a position to engage with, even if just to dispense with'. No. That's not how science works. You dump the old shit and forget about it.

If there is no alternative 3rd option where there is no responsibility for the existence of the current political state of affairs, there is no additional political debt. — Saphsin

Pfft, and you complain about abstract. My point's not complicated: Biden's a fucking monster, and if you vote for him, you'd have to do everything you can to undo it after. No more no less.