Lol US$33B to Ukraine.

Because keeping American Empire alive is far more important than helping shitty squalor-living, terrorized-by-cops, drowning-in-debt, unable-to-rent, American citizens.

It makes sense tho the American state exists to enrich its plutocrat masters so who cares about its citizens lol.

At this point Ukraine is literally an American vassal state.

I wonder when the last Ukrainian will drop dead so the US can achieve its geo-strategic aims. Seems like a fair trade. Anyone not horrified by American escalation does not give a single shit about Ukraine or Ukrainians and should probably stop pretending.

Collectively, every single war-mongerer and revanchist deserves to drop dead before a single Ukrainian does. Equally, American war dollars ought to fuck off home forever.

But I can just declare that a stone is a bishop by saying so and using it as such. That's the distinction between an institutional and non-institutional fact. — Michael

Maybe it can be put this way: the distinction between an institutional and non-institutional fact, is itself, an institutional fact.

Neither do I.

Which is of course to say that this speaks to nothing about all facts being institutional facts.

We can change what the word "gold" means but we can't change the nature of the chemical element. — Michael

But why would you expect the latter to follow from the former?

Calling dirt "food" isn't going to help a starving family. — Michael

And why would you expect it to?

That human institutions determine the meaning of the words "lead" and "gold" isn't that human institutions determine whether or not lead is gold. — Michael

This is yet another 'given'. Another begging of the question.

At the moment you're trying to argue that 1 + 1 = 3 because we can change the meaning of the symbols such that the equation would be satisfied. — Michael

This is what I find odd about your replies. If the meaning of words change, then the meaning of words change. You seem to want reply: if the meaning of words change, then it will not be compatible with the old meaning of words. To which one can only reply: yes.

These are alot of words to say that Searle begs the question.

"If you agree with me, then it follows that you will agree with me".

Given what we currently mean — Michael

Yes. Listen, if you have to begin each line with 'given X', then the whole point is that I will not give you X.

But I can disagree that that is [read: counts-as] rat poison, or that this constitues [read: counts-as] a killing.

Not that I would, but I can.

Yes.

And?

Because it's all counting-as, all facts, everywhere, all the time.

I guess I'm also just sad that a reader of Wittgenstein could read Searle and just... forget everything. A great disappointment. In language, it's all roles, all the way down. There is nothing that does not function in the mode of a role, and to think otherwise is just language in idle.

It's not (always) in our power to decide. A starving family can't just make food out of dirt by changing the meaning of the words "food" or "dirt" or thinking about the world differently or whatever. — Michael

That you think this constitutes an objection speaks to some kind of miscommunication here. Nothing about this contradicts the fact that how things count as things is entirely up to us. That you think it does leaves me puzzled. You clearly think I mean something other than I do. But what, I am not sure.

but given the meaning of these words we can just decide that a stone is a bishop but can't just decide that lead is gold, or alchemists could have just re-written the dictionary to create the philosophers' stone. — Michael

And that this is so, is entirely in our power to decide. Again: we let ourselves - or rather our concepts - be constained by how things are.

We can't just decide to use a non-magnetic material as a magnetic material. — Michael

But this has no bearing - none - on the fact that what counts as magnetic or not ultimately bears on human institutions. Once we fix our understanding of magnetic material as we have, it is of course the case that "we can't just decide to use a non-magnetic material as a magnetic material". But this is downstream from said (institutional) fixing.

Exactly! There are political stakes to this, and this 'not being very complicated' suddenly gets very complicated once say, transphobes decide that 'you can't just decide to be a woman' because you "can't argue with genes". Or in this case, protons.

All thanks to the genius of Vladimir Putin. — ssu

Tsk tsk, look at you taking away the agency of the poor poor Germans, who clearly had no choice but to send machines of death to Ukraine to mete out additional blood.

but the protons could not care less. That's the point. — Banno

And the uncaringness is mutual. We use words as we want to. Sometimes, we let (and want!) how things are guide our use of words. Sometimes we do not. In both cases, it is up to us. 'Us' as an institution, that is.

Come on, you know this. Think back to coloured squares.

That number of protons — Banno

And presumably what counts as a proton - the criteria by which we decide - can be seen under the same electron microscope that sees the protons?

Look, that's the trick. 'Non-institutional facts' look or seem non-institutional to the degree that we can continually put the 'institution' at one remove from the fact. But at some point you will always hit the bedrock of things-counting-as-things, whose only guarantee will be nothing other than human institutions. At some point, you will hit the bedrock of obligation, beyond which the spade can only be turned and say - "this doesn't satisfy what I meant"!

such that it goes from satisfying what we currently mean by "lead" to satisfying what we currently mean by "gold". — Michael

Mmhm.

Notice the deontic element here! The obligation that is attributed to 'institutional facts'.

Right, but on what grounds do we draw this distinction? I mean, I understand the intuition. Presumably 'this is wood' is 'non-institutional' because there is a set of, call them, scientific grounds by which we can demarcate wood from not-wood and so on. But that we appeal to such grounds (and not others) is itself not a scientific fact. That is nowhere written in the Book of Nature, as per what @Issac said.

I can't see why that is confusing. — Banno

The point is that what you - and Searle - would like to restrict to a class of facts holds for all facts, in fact all language use, and that the distinction between 'intuitional' and 'non-institutional' is arbitrary and unrigorous.

Your objection is that you think this somehow threatens realism. As if realism turns even slightly on how we use words. You have forgotten your Devittian lesson. Such I suppose is what happens when one listens to someone like Searle. Realism has nothing to do with any of this and is in no way threatened by recognizing the institutional ground of all facts.

A realist would say that the bishop is made of wood, regardless of how we might present that using our social institutions. — Banno

I don't understand your position. You agree that word use is a human institution. And then you go on to exclude a class of said uses on the basis of a commitment to realism. One of these cannot hold. Which one is it?

Then how to parse the implication - and correct me if I am wrong - that the following are not 'institutional facts'?:

The bishop is made of wood
The laptop has a keyboard
Zelenskyy is human

They really should.

since at the base the bishop is a piece of wood — Banno

And you think what we call wood is a theological given? Or that the role of a bishop is too? Word use is a human institution. It cannot be otherwise.

it seems to me that you have grabbed hold of the least interesting part of the argument. — Banno

Of the existence of a class of facts called 'institutional facts' as distinct from not-institutional facts? Surely this would be the heart of the matter.

A piece of wood will be a piece of wood regardless of what we say about it. That is counts as "a piece of wood" - that we use those words to talk about it - I understand that Searle would agree indeed an institutional fact. So are you here just denying realism? — Banno

The point is that it's 'counting as' all the way down. This isn't denying realism because the world is quite indifferent to what we say about it, and nothing about how we speak about the world has any bearing on its being as it is (Devitt). But insofar as there is always a 'how', all facts are institutional facts. It is just the case that some things make those 'institutions' more keenly felt than others. But those 'some things' are totally contingent and do not lend themselves to the kind of (faux-)principled distinction that Searle would like to draw.

Prosaically, in the experience of pedagogy and learning (which includes both infants learning the powers of the body along with reason, as well as learning new skills as adults, which involves a learning of the self as much as the world), or in other limit experiences like madness, where our epistemic thread to ourselves is lost. In Kant knowledge is an achievement, and likewise, our mastery of ourselves is equally an achievement, and as such can always be undone or threatened.

I'm sorry if I missed any discussion on this but I'm not sure that the distinction drawn in the OP works - or at least, works in any way which is not somewhat arbitrary.

To take what I assume are 'non-institutional' facts:

The bishop is made of wood
The laptop has a keyboard
Zelenskyy is human — Banno

That that piece of wood is a bishop, or that that thing is a laptop, or that humans are these kinds of things - these are just as much 'institutional' as "This laptop belongs to me", etc, no? That is, for anything to count as something is to always introduce a degree of 'institution' that cannot be so easily set off from 'non-institutional' facts. To "count-as" (judgements) is simply always 'institutional' by virtue of being judgements at all.

But to the degree that there is something that seems to distinguish the first set of examples from the second, I don't think its the presence of absence of 'sociality'. It seems to me to be what we can take for granted or not, given the (relatively stable) forms of life which we have. That we don't (generally) put into question what is (read: "counts as") human, is because we are not under attack by shape-shifting aliens which make line hard to demarcate (for example). But this doesn't mean that such judgments cannot ever come into question, and which would rely on the explicit introduction of 'institutions' to adjudicate.

(Searle in general like to make these very dumb distinctions that basically turn empirical contingencies into transcendental distinctions. He is a very bad philosopher. He similarly fucked up Austin and it's not surprising to see this repeated here).

Cool question but surely this can't be answered a priori. Kant's oeuvre is such a sprawling, hulking beast that to be called "Kantian" could mean all the things you listed, or just some. And then you have positions like Zizek's for whom the only way to to hew close to the spirit of Kant is to break with the letter:

"Let us take a great philosopher like Kant. There are two modes to repeat him. Either one sticks to his letter and further elaborates or changes his system, as neo-Kantians (up to Habermas and Luc Ferry) are doing, or one tries to regain the creative impulse that Kant himself betrayed in the actualization of his system (i.e., to connect to what was already “in Kant more than Kant himself,” more than his explicit system, its excessive core). ...One should bring this paradox to its conclusion. It is not only that one can remain really faithful to an author by way of betraying him (the actual letter of his thought); at a more radical level, the inverse statement holds even more, namely, one can only truly betray an author by way of repeating him, by way of remaining faithful to the core of his thought". (Zizek, Organs Without Bodies)

To speak soley for myself, the Kantian in me is defined by a few of Kant's innovations: his recognition that our epistemic relation to the world is no different to the epistemic relation to one's own self (I am as much a 'noumenon' as things 'out there'); his understanding that thought generates its own (transcendental) illusions, and that error is not just an 'empirical' problem; his conception of human nature as, effectively, 'second nature', a matter of enculturation that makes of human nature an ongoing process, rather than something 'given', once and for all. And of course his discovery and invention of the transcendental, as set off from the empirical, making time and space themselves not merely givens, but subject to a genesis of their own. Lots of very cool stuff that Kant did.

So when do we think Biden will award Putin the presidential medal of freedom for allowing the US empire to keep its head above water for a few more years? Two months? Three?

The actual consequence of speech are physical in nature: the expelling of breath, the subtle vibration of the air, the marking of pencil on a paper, and so on. All benign stuff and not worthy of suppression. ... Considering this, the phrase “freedom of speech but not freedom from consequences” is a goofy one at best, — NOS4A2

Ahahaha.

Seems like the fascists are not sending their best.

Ukraine is being destroyed? — Olivier5

?

Are you ok?

Free speech is a fake problem. It is literally not a problem. A total distraction. "Free speech" what plutocrats would like plebs to continually bicker about to distract from the fact that the only relevant question in this day and age is that of who controls the expression of speech. Spoiler: it's capital.

The richest guy on the 2021 Forbes 400 owns the Washington Post. Number 2 now owns Twitter. Number 3 owns Facebook. Numbers 5 and 6 started Google. Numbers 4 and 9 started Microsoft. Number 10 owns Bloomberg. Free speech? You decide. Combine this w/the Citizens United formula that money equals speech & so those w/the most money are entitled to the most speech, lack of campaign finance regulation & pols who depend on $ to hold power & you've got a country sinking ever deeper into the quicksand of corruption.

So, if you're just an average American who thinks somehow Musk or some other billionaire is going to enhance the voice of the little guy on the Internet, you are a hopeless sucker who's not paying attention. And if you think that the trend toward control of public forums by billionaires is not linked to growing inequality and will not produce more of it, more division, more reshaping the narrative to suit those holding the purse strings, you deserve what's coming.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1518670485202128898.html

Anyone who tries to speak about 'free speech' but has nothing to say about capitalism has nothing worth saying about free speech and can be ignored forever.

It's fun how when you push even the slightest bit, these people don't give one itoa of a shit about Ukraine, but only about defeating the Big Bad that is Russia. If it takes a couple of cities' worth of dead Ukrainians to do it, so be it.

But of course you would. A Russian official could say "We will never use nuclear weapons ever", and you would read it as a veiled threat. You may not even be wrong, but I think any alternative reading is a priori foreclosed to you from the beginning.

In any case the omission of context from Western media and it's regurgitation by those here is yet another instance of propaganda in operation.

Lavrov literally said: "Nuclear war is unacceptable, this is Moscow's principled position ... I would very much not like that now, when the risks [of nuclear war] are really very, very significant, I would very much not like these risks to be artificially inflated, and there are many who want them. The danger is serious, it is real, it cannot be underestimated”.

And the Western media reported that he said: "the risks [of nuclear war] are really very, very significant."

Utterly hilarious.

It may of course be the case that Lavrov is full of shit but the people who unhesitatingly regurgitate Western propaganda as per the above are verifiably full of shit.

Just as Biden serves as a bulwark against the left and an enabler of fascism, so too is the pattern repeated in France, where the fascist-enabler Macron similarly feeds into the long-game entrenchment of fascism in the West:



Unsurprisingly, the same political phenomenon in the UK labor party as well.The fact that these patterns repeat themselves across such diverse spaces is all the more reason to be reminded that capitalism will kill us all, in the long run.

Peter Dutton is a national security threat.

Clowns with bricks for brains: "AmErIcA IsNt ReAlLY InVoLvED"

Lol yeah Eastern Europe being turned into a shoe and tyre factory for the rest of Western Europe while demolishing workers rights has been really great for it.

As an aside it's great to watch has Ukraine has now become a giant money laundering op for the US arms manufacturers and nothing else.

As yet another aside it's funny to watch Australians shit themselves about Chinese "expansionism" in the Solomons while also pretending that NATO is an innocent snowflake. The West is basically a giant joke at the expense of their own populations and everyone elses.

Edit: Americans shitting themselves is fun too. Again: anyone who think the US gives even the slightest bit of a flying fuck about "sovereignty" can go jump into an infinite hole.