Cool. I hadn't noticed any changes. The important thing is that we get the right info to anyone trying to understand this stuff. — Terrapin Station

I'm convinced that the three ways you outlined in your original post are appropriate. But I think they work in very different ways. It's extremely weird that one can conclude from a definition relating premises to a conclusion that sometimes the relation doesn't matter at all, even when it's true.

That's what I said at the start though. Validity obtains when it's impossible for premises to be true and(/or--I add or for reasons I detailed in my first post) (It's impossible for) the conclusion to be false. — Terrapin Station

Yeah I saw that and edited a post above to link to yours and the references, and included my explanation of why I was wrong.

A valid argument is an argument that preserves truth. To say that an argument is valid, therefore, is to say that it is impossible for its premises to be true while its conclusion is false. To say that an argument is invalid is to say that it is possible for its premises to be true while its conclusion is false. But if an argument has inconsistent premises, then, by definition (of “inconsistent”), it is impossible for
its premises to be true. Therefore, if an argument has inconsistent premises, it is impossible for its
remises to be true while its conclusion is false. This is the definition of “valid argument.” It follows that any argument with inconsistent premises is valid.

That makes more sense. A valid argument means 'true premises implies true conclusion', which means 'not true premises or true conclusion', contradictions are never true, so the implication always holds when the premises are contradictory, so the argument is valid. Sub in a tautology into the conclusion part of the disjunction defining validity and it is valid too.

This is funny.

What's the best way to reason? To say nonsense or nothing at all!

If you don't agree with it, I can give you a bunch of citations from academic phil sources for it. I can explain it to you, too, if you need me to explain it to you. — Terrapin Station

Ok! Do this for me please.

It's very simple. Contradictory premises are sufficient for a valid argument (in non-relevance logics) due to the definition of validity. — Terrapin Station

To anyone reading this, please to not listen to Terrapin, and instead look at this excellent account from a citable resource.

Edit: Terrapin was right! Look at his original post or here for some explanations.

A summary: a valid argument means 'true premises implies true conclusion', which means 'not true premises or true conclusion', contradictions are never true, so the implication always holds when the premises are contradictory, so the argument is valid. Sub in a tautology into the conclusion part of the disjunction defining validity and it is valid too.

It's as if you didn't read or couldn't comprehend what I wrote. You are giving misinformation if you're saying that under traditional (NOT relevance-logic) validity, contradictory premises do not produce a valid argument. — Terrapin Station

Just to be clear.

If you have P & ~P. Then you can instantiate to P. Then you can disjunction introduce to P or Q, then you can disjunctive syllogism to Q. So whatever the contradiction is, you can derive an arbitrary conclusion. The 'truth' assumed here is P and ~P, but unfortunately that is never true. The argument form of disjunctive syllogism is of course valid, assuming a contradiction lets you derive anything through the syllogism through a valid argument.

The reason this works is because you input a contradiction to an already valid argument structure, the contradiction does not make the argument valid. This can easily be seen from the conditional nature of validity - it is indifferent to the truth value of the premises! Whereas explosion works precisely by specifying the premises as a particular species of falsehood, a contradiction.

You're giving misinformation here. You're favoring a relevance logic interpretation, which is fine (I favor that, too), but that's a far more recent interpretation. The traditional interpretation is that validity can (also, in addition to a relevance interpretation) obtain when either it's impossible that the premises are true OR when it's impossible that the conclusion is false. — Terrapin Station

Unrestricted explosion is not a feature of relevance logics. I've no idea what you're talking about. The example "apples can't be red => Santa exists' is the kind of thing relevance logics are designed to block - so I'm explicitly not talking about relevance logic, and talking about standard propositional and predicate calculus.

For the notion of validity, what I'm saying is exactly what the IEP is saying on the topic:

A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. Otherwise, a deductive argument is said to be invalid.

A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true. Otherwise, a deductive argument is unsound.

If you're being incredibly pedantic, yes, the following argument is valid:

Things that are eggs are always made of cheese
My spoon is an egg
My spoon is made of cheese.

Validity doesn't care about the truth or falsity of the premises, it only cares whether the conclusions necessarily follow from the premises. This is precisely why the principle of explosion should not be seen as a consequence of the definition of validity, as we must stipulate a specific truth value of the premises.

Edit: yes, you demonstrate explosion through a valid argument, but the thing which is doing all the work is the assumption of falsehood or contradiction.

We are dealing with arguments that are deductive, or logical entailments between statements. The first thing you have to do is decide if an argument is deductive or not. Only deductive arguments can be valid in the usually discussed sense. With that in mind:

Validity is a property of deductive arguments. An argument is valid when and only when the truth of its premises ensures the truth of its conclusions. "P implies Q, P, therefore Q" is a valid argument. "P implies Q, Q, therefore P" is an invalid argument. Valid arguments connect truths or stipulations to their logical consequences.

Particularly common invalid argument patterns are given names as 'formal fallacies', particularly common valid arguments are given names as syllogisms. The invalid argument above is called affirming the consequent, the valid argument is called modus tollens.

A sound argument is a valid argument with true premises. A valid syllogism is a sound argument when and only when its premises are true.

This talk about contradictions in the premises of an argument ensuring validity is complete nonsense. Note that the definition of validity requires us only to consider cases where the argument's premises are true. When they are false, other concepts are in play.

Particularly, in the usual introductory logical systems of propositional and predicate logic, assuming a falsehood allows you to derive arbitrary conclusions. EG "apples can't be red, therefore Santa exists". The reason this works is that in these systems an implication turns out to be forced to be true when its premise is established as false - called the 'principle of explosion'.

If you pay attention to how people actually reason out in the wild, you'll find formal calculi and syllogisms provide rules of thumb and interpretive heuristics rather than good descriptions of argument. One reason for this is that most instances of reasoning are compositions of heuristics (see Kahnneman and Tversky for some good examples) which, strictly speaking, aren't even deductive nevermind valid. Another reason is that we are often in situations where formal argument from premises will not allow us to derive a good explanation; eg 'there is no smoke without fire' is not automatically true in a logic, it has to be encoded as the entailment "smoke => fire'. An even stranger example is the statement 'red things are coloured' - this isn't true by definition in logical calculi, and has to be stipulated or encoded in the logic to use it.

In this regard, formal calculi are only ever restricted models of human reasoning, and while no models are true some are useful.

The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics? My friends, it is only unreasonable that one forgets reason evolved with it.

I'm disappointed that no one made the connection that the will derives from Cotton Eye Joe.

:strong: great.

Find the words
To perturb
The dark unheard
A shared absurd
From here to there
And there to now
To wow and hide
When fear alights
He stares ashamed
then leper brained
He dozes down
Around the town
A fumbled frown
Paints the rose
Of midnight red
In the unsaid

He returns
And body burns
And buddy sighs
a sign on screen
laments the times
what could have been
apart from bliss
and failing this
he should’ve should
and would’ve could
to stitch the world
a fabric girl
to needle right
and hope the words
alone suffice

Good mission statement.

I like the irony. Hurrah for transformative conflict as a resolution strategy.

If the worries were cynically believed their content would not be so arresting. Maybe stoic was the wrong word, though. The worries are situation indifferent, is what I meant. Ever present and watchful.

Excessive? I suppose that means 'more than I want to defer'. And that depends, personally speaking, on how and who the other is. I call this being responsive. — unenlightened

Nah man. Deferring and conflict avoidance when appropriate is fine, deferring and conflict avoidance when inappropriate is not fine. Having one strategy, a single point of failure, isn't being responsive; it's a stoically held, maladaptive worry. The opposite of being radically vulnerable and responsive to the other.

May I enquire what's wrong with pleasing people? I think I'd like it if people spent more time pleasing each other and less time making each other miserable, by and large. — unenlightened

Excessive deference to other people's preferences, or compulsive anxious thought patterns of doing harm, make it much more difficult to enforce reasonable personal boundaries. People who get used to this style of thinking often end up in cycles of abusive relationships in the worst cases, or shutting themselves off from others due to a mismatch between how they feel they should behave and what is actually socially permissible for them to behave in accordance with their and everyone else's needs and wants. The excessive deference can greatly diminish autonomy, and the attendant thought processes which come along with that behaviour are debilitating by themselves.

Edit: how this can play out in terms of 'adverse childhood experiences' is that a person learns such excessive deference from the relationship model of their parental unit, as both a source of conflict avoidance/resolution and of the fear of that conflict. The necessary amount of self assertion is denied for reasons of guilt and fear, so guilt and fear become anticipatory responses to conflict, which reinforces the dynamic of deference/conflict avoidance through a feedback loop/constant habit. People might learn passive aggressive coping strategies to deal with the dissonance, which isn't pleasant for anyone involved.

Edit2: see also the origins of hypervigilance.

Can you explain that? I think that is the crux of your critique, but a lot of Heideggerese is lost on me- mainly because more specialized jargon is used to explain his specialized jargon. — schopenhauer1

Yes I know, it is frustrating. Basically what I'm saying is that Dasein describes the subjectivity of the everyman in a general situation; it's set up that way. Heidegger's analysis is aimed at revealing deeper and deeper 'grounding' structures of the everyman in every day situations.

Some things to note about this everyman; it's bodiless, it doesn't have contextual constraints like 'a person reflecting' or 'a person with chronic pain', it's sexless, genderless, mentally typical...

Maybe intrusive, but have you actually had personal experience with mental illness? I ask because generally I don't trust mental health advice unless it's personally battle-tested or from someone professionally trained in the field.

Heidegger talks about what it means to see something 'as' something: "In the first and authentic instance, this “as” is not the “as” of predication qua predication but is prior to it in such a way that it makes possible the very structure of predication at all. Predication has the as-structure, but in a derived way, and it has it only because the as-structure is predication within a [wider] experience. But why is it that this as-structure is already present in a direct act of dealing with something? The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act’s so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure. Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be — Joshs

Yes. There is a distinction in Heidegger between propositional/predicative/apophantic as-structures and primordial/hermeneutic as structures. I know why Heidegger wants to move from the propositional as-structure to the hermeneutic as-structure, because one is transcendentally prior to the other; in the sense of existential understanding. Taking the categories and applying them to an existentielle understanding; an actual self aware comportment rather than a formally indicated synthesis of the transcendental structure of the self aware comportment; I think you'll see that it whether it makes sense to emphasise the transcendental priority of the hermeneutic-as structure and thus treat the apophantic as structure as a degenerate case turns on whether one is considering the coupled operation of the two in a self aware (reflective) comportment; when the comportment itself is thematised; or whether the transcendental structure of Dasein is thematised. Transcendental hierarchies don't remove ontic feedback loops.

Or, prosaically, forum Heideggerians (sorry, you included in these posts) never learn to apply the methodology to other things. This is why everything ends up in a discussion of the transcendental constitution of the subject in Heidegger, rather than... y'know. Talking about reflection on its own terms.

You will say 'but I am talking about reflection on its own terms! Because the formal structure implicates...' - take off the Heidigoggles for a second and constrain the space of inquiry. Be inspired by his methodology and terms rather than his conclusions.

Another way of putting it; the present at hand has interesting ontical relations with the ready to hand. Instances of the apophantic-as relating to the hermeneutic-as can have much different ontic structures; they can be in a feedback loop, one can pivot from one to the other giving life to 'ossified flesh'; except it was never ossified to begin with. The emaciated skeletal structure of the subject Dasein is is not a full account of human being; it falls silent on the specifics by design.

I forgot to say, I found an interesting paper recently here. It's quite a comprehensive 4E behavioural theory of consciousness. Though I have a sneaking suspicion it was written by @apokrisis.

Edit: the discussion about the agent 'factoring out' in tool use is very similar to how Heidegger's notion of the equipmental totality being 'free' or having its being 'freed' through circumspective concern (or intentionality in the diffuse sense) undermines the subject object distinction. It's also an interesting phenomenological corrective to correlationism 'putting the transcendental subject in the way of the world', so to speak.

Calling the ready to hand 'autopilot' or flow implies suggests, even if you dont mean it that way, that objects 'in themselves' are there and we are simply not paying attention to them when we are focusing on a task. But this isn't how Heidegger understands the distinction between ready to hand and present to hand. The present to hand does not stand on equal ontological footing with the ready to hand. It's a derivative and impoverished mode of the ready to hand for Heidegger. . It s not that in pointing out an object we are attending to something extra, something we ignored during our labors. The opposite is the case. In moving from the ready to hand to the present to hand mode, we are ossifying, freezing , flattening and distorting the beings we are involved with. — Joshs

Well of course the objects in themselves are there. And in Heidegger's analysis the present at hand is a degenerate case of the ready to hand. For the average kind of being that Dasein is supposed to represent, it's an appropriate move. But when specifically you're talking about contemplative labour, requiring that:

The present to hand does not stand on equal ontological footing with the ready to hand.

Doesn't make much sense. The transcendental priority of the ready to hand is legitimised through an appeal to everyday Dasein, not to specific modes of comportment. Dasein is a poor description of someone staring at a screen, someone feeling lactic acid in their muscles, someone contemplating the mysteries of life.

My question to you is, how do you think Heidegger thinks we jump from ready-at-hand to present-at-hand thinking? — schopenhauer1

I think this was more systematically taken up, especially as it is relevant to cognition, by Merleau-Ponty in his reflective/pre-reflective distinction.

From Heidegger, you get the insight that the 'present at hand'; our mode of being when observing objects standing out from a background in cognised and cognisant engagement, usually emerges out of our ready-to-hand autopilot when something goes awry. Most of the time we're on auto-pilot. When we're on autopilot there doesn't seem to be much difference between myself and the tasks I'm doing in my environment, especially when you constrain it to practical labour.

For cognitive labour, or labour that often requires reflection, especially systematic thought, the present at hand/ready to hand distinction doesn't capture any of the oscillatory character between the readiness to hand of exegesis or understood intervention and stuck, problem solving thought. It doesn't get at how for this type of activity presence at hand and readiness to hand both superimpose, contradict, and behaviourally entail each other.

Think about finding what is broken in a car by indicative sounds, or using a voltmeter to assess if an appliance is working correctly, or writing a line of code in a familiar programming language, or pausing to think how to articulate a concept. When you are reflecting, it usually pauses the autopilot until an opportunity to resolve it presents itself.

I think Heidegger is right to construe present at hand framings of concepts an their topics as easily assumed because reflective pauses typically engender a separation from a flow state, and reflection itself can easily take this as a framing device. It makes a lot of sense to populate your ontology with separated subjects and objects and activities as connections between the poles of the subject object relation; this is part of his critique of Descartes. But he does not, at least not to my knowledge, provide a detailed phenomenology of cognitive labour, or make comments that allow us to infer what it would be, at all.

Merleau-Ponty is much more critical of the importance of reflection in philosophy, and tries to point out limitations in uncritically framing things from a merely reflective and contemplative stance; with reference to the previous discussion of the importance of framing questions for Heidegger, treating philosophical issues as intellectual puzzles which will reveal their essence given sufficiently precise articulations/solutions is itself a type of rationalist bias to approaching the issues. A corresponding empiricist bias would be to insist upon the necessity of distinct units of objective evidence which must ultimately be synthesised into an understanding of a philosophical issue; rather than heuristic conceptual relation. Both of these approaches pay insufficient attention to the theory-ladened-ness of experience and the experiential/expressive character of theories upon their topics. Reading a reflective given illegitimately back into the world allies its analysis with one sided framings of the origins of that reflective given.

So I'm quite tempted to Mearlu-Ponty-ise Heidegger's present-at-hand/ready to hand distinction here, while the distinction was noticed through creative synthesis of descriptions of transcendental structure (existentialia) out of the experiences suggestive of it (existentielle), construing the 'present at hand' as merely an obstacle or aberration from all usual functioning in the world is precisely a framing error. In phenomenological/Heidegger terms the error is in taking how something is thematised within a particular reflection as constitutive of its essence rather than formally indicative of it! The present-at-hand gets downplayed because Heidegger needed it to for his account, in other phenomenological contexts it's incredibly important to attend to.

You might like Ray Brassier's 'Concepts and Objects' for an interesting corrective about how to think about conceptual, specifically philosophical, labour.

Edit: @StreetlightX in case they want to rip my limited understanding of Merleau-Ponty apart.

This is good advice, but it only works up to a point. When your opponent hits the rhetorical bottom of the barrel and has nothing left to offer but bad faith nonsense or ridicule, it's better to stay composed and to stick to substance. You might need to deflect verbal flak as they go down in flames, "destroyed" in the eyes of the audience, but in my experience it is worth the result. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, like with the intermittent Randroids here. So long as you're willing to see that this is confined to media contexts where shaping the audience's interpretation/ideological commitments is the goal we can come to some kind of consensus.

Then there'd be a different conversation about tactics 'in the wild'.

Unfortunately, they've immunized themselves against particular sources of shame. Getting called a racist is a badge of honor for them because to them it means "you're too stupid to understand the science". Their platform intrinsically frames itself as struggling against the progressive embrace of diversity and equality, which they fundamentally conceptualize and perceive as the source of all their problems. Calling an alt-righter a racist is like calling Adolf Hitler a Nazi. Shame might still play a role in their pathology, but it would have to derive from other sources. — VagabondSpectre

Rhetoric shouldn't be designed to capitulate to politics it despises; this literally sends mixed messages and is easy to co-opt - bad rhetoric. On the level of reactionary politics; or mobilisation by TweetStorm; memorable rhetoric is the identifiable content through the medium's constraints on the message.

EG: Even facts become rhetorically charged factoids. True or false, people remember things like "More Israeli citizens die per year from peanut allergies than from Hamas rockets' than any of the data analytic context which derives the claim. Or pick any dubious Murdoch statistic citing headline about Muslims for the 'other side'.

When you're sure you can sit down and have a discussion about it without issues, when everyone agrees the gloves are (mostly) on like here; for sure, skewer stupid ideologies with systemic reason and moral critique. Adapt the level of reliance on rhetorical (or out of the marketplace of ideas, violence and subterfuge) strategy to the amount of good faith (or violence and subterfuge) your opponent shows. Bad faith interlocutors don't care about your ideas, they care about your audience (which is why we made gurugeorge fuck off a while back). In the gloves on case, this goes both ways; @StreetlightX's approach is not likely to work for the rare intellectually honest person who sympathises sincerely with personally (rather than systemically) prejudicial or genocidal authoritarian politics; bigots through circumstance rather than studied conviction. They won't see the conceptual work done to get to that opinion, they (typically white adults eh?) can mistake the vitriol for nothing but the whining of another reactionary nincompoop; even though the union of good reason with precisely articulated contempt is a very potent perturber of belief. For the systemic case with the gloves on, intellectually honest debate about the relative importance of systemic vs personal prejudice and the propagation mechanisms for both is useful; pending good faith. Systemic critique is always a useful intellectual resource, but a poor promoter of itself by itself.

Edit: when discussing garden variety liberalism or conservatism's inherent weaknesses to fascism, the gloves will almost never be on. It's way too emotionally charged. Though, this metagame of rhetorically motivated exchange makes the marginal strategy of good faith engagement on the topic especially useful to those who are unaware of the arguments or are intellectually honest to a fault.

In this sense, data always comes too late: by necessity it must take certain conditions as fixed for the sake of comparison and conclusion at all. But changing conditions just is the sine qua non of political action. There's a nice passge by the political philosopher Byung Chul-Han on data and politics, where he writes that: — StreetlightX

It reminds me of the kerfuffle that's happened with 'predictive policing' in statistical modelling. You make a model of where the crimes are, distribute police in accordance with crime rate weighted by a measure of police intervention effectiveness per crime type per unit area. Unfortunately, you have a finite number of police officers, and without careful control of the model's time based updates you end up with increasing concentration of police in poor black areas and less in the white areas. Why? Because crime rate is measured as observed crime rate, the more police you have in an area generating reports, the more crimes will be reported in that area.

Anyway, biased as I am, political arguments and programs are never purely conceptual, and should be evidence based where possible; a good statistical workflow can generate a lot of insights and condense information usefully; and the ideal model of 'evidence based policy' has data analysis feeding into every step and assessing the policies.

What I'd like to draw attention to here is the poverty of mathematics for extrapolation in complex systems; even if you know the weather now, if you add or subtract 10^-32 to the measurements being fed into a dynamical climate model, the simulations still produce different results after a relatively short (sub month) period of time. 10^-32 is millions of times more precise than the most precise measurements physics has ever made. If we need to 'know the future' to produce guides for action, and 'knowing the future' must be evidence based in the long sense, this is a good excuse for the indefinite suspension of any intervention.

Conceptual and historical arguments can aggregate the phenomena into readily understandable qualitative chunks with fuzzy boundaries of relevance, providing heuristics for action rather than quantified expectations of the results. Political interventions can only be imposed under the guidance of heuristics due to the social's infinite statistical complexity but relative qualitative simplicity. This isn't to say political thought is easy; it's fraught with framing issues and the difficulty of inferring causal chains from historical data (rather than confounded causal chains of disjunctive events); but it's definitely possible to do well. The role statistics should play here is in the operationalisation of conceptual-historical heuristics for assessment and study, rather than the driving conceptual machinery of justification for any intervention.

If we shame people to stay quiet about beliefs they hold, there's exactly 0 chance of them changing their minds. Considering the alternative (social) media and communications channels available I suspect it inevitably leads to reinforcing existing bubbles, which just takes us farther away from constructive political debate. — Benkei

I'm quite pro shame here. If the worst excesses of political opinion are shameful to express in public and in private, it's a much better deterrent than reason. Even if in some cases you might get ressentiment backlash and 'X DESTROYS Y' porn on social media and Youtube as a reaction. If xenophobia and racism are shameful that's a lot stronger an imposed sanction than being merely wrong.

Edit; for distinctions between personal and systemic injustices, though, I think it's still quite helpful to be exploratory and gentle. It's hard to get your head around 'it's not about you' for systemic issues, especially when there are reactionary fuckwads everywhere claiming that it is.

'm on the fence as to deplatforming but mostly because I worry about what it does to political engagement in general. If we shame people to stay quiet about beliefs they hold, there's exactly 0 chance of them changing their minds — Benkei

This is one reason why long form discussion forums are useful, as it's explicitly a place to 'talk' with the gloves on. The way I look at it is the right (even the regular grade conservatives, at least in UK and US) plays dirty when it counts most, so it makes sense to play dirty too. If they can do it for what you see as terrible immoral reasons, you can do it for just ones.

Not really. If you think that to be a vigilante is totally OK or that the police cannot handle some small fringe cabal of neonazis, then I have to disagree. — ssu

Antifa don't punish crimes, this is a false analogy. They're in the business of frustrating the political machinations of far right projects, they're usually seasoned protestors or brave members of effected communities responding to real need. They are not vigilantes, and they do not resort to violence unless provoked. They know precisely how their self defence will be sold, so they're reluctant to raise their fists most of the time.

Why they do what they do is to remove real threats to effected communities and society at large. And don't rely on the police to protest the far right or mitigate its threats, is that the police; rightly; are always working to stop illegitimate violence. So, the police themselves will never be able to defend against the tangible threats right projects like these, and themselves are slaves to the acceptable boundaries of discourse and direct action (the Overton window). Of course, their edict for violence is a bit broader than the margins of acceptable opinion, but there is a reason why alleged terrorist sympathisers can be detained (for the UK, indefinitely without a trial).

Beating the crap out of a protestor with a truncheon is fine, a friend attacking the police officer who did it is not. There are huge asymmetries in the justifications for violence, and this is based on learned trust of the police. You have to have rather a lot of faith that the police's violence is in your interest or the interest of society at large to uncritically give them this edict. What usually happens at large protests (at least in the UK) is that (1) the police creates subgroups of the mass of people that are protesting (2) the management strategies they use to keep the subgroups separate are incredibly inhumane (eg, no water for 12 hours, less than a square meter of personal space per person, this is called 'kettling') (3) eventually people in the group get pissed off and violent since they're being treated like shit even when they've not been violent. You know why it's got the nickname of kettling? Kettles fucking boil.

Counter-activism often comes into violent contact with the police, this isn't because it's atypically violent or riotous, it's because the police usually demarcate lines between the original demonstration, say a white nationalist march, and forbid counter protestors to get near the original demonstration. When those lines are drawn, the police beating the shit out of left activists in protest is a matter of geometry on the ground, and of the monopoly of force handed over to the government and its representatives. The government's agents, paradoxically, can be very violent because what constitutes violence is politically prefigured in their favour.

Say you have a far right group who wants to 'send (most brown people) back' having a march through a London community that's mostly African and Middle-Eastern. The police show up to defend these people's free speech right to shout thinly veiled hate speech, threats and dogwhistles at the crowd. Are the police serving the interests of that community? Does their violence frustrate or support the disenfranchisement of and violence towards the people in that community? I know this has happened, but I can't remember the date.

Suppose, like a good minded liberal, you do what you do best and entertain the idea that violence is part of all political action. How would you justify the police's violence towards the community defending their rights to live where they do with dignity and without prejudice? Presumably through appealing to the moral neutrality of police violence; or that it is legal.

Suppose you can suspend the equation of moral with legal for a moment, how then would you justify the police's violence against the counter protesting community? The police beat the shit out of far more non-whites in the community than fascists that day - even when the majority of scuffles were started, predictably, by violent xenophobic racists. Is the police serving your community? Consider one of the rallying cries of protest in Charlottesville in the US: "Who do you protect?". Often, people who are outright enemies of democracy and have literally genocidal intent, and this is moral. Whereas some Iranian nurse punching a goose stepping EDL member to defend his family from what normalising that group's politics would mean? Now that's where we draw the line. It's political correctness *cough left politics cough* gone mad!

It simply isn't subverted as it was in the 20th Century. Especially when focusing on the West, the idea that democracy is in peril is simply an overblown idea typically used to agitate your own side. One really has to have the perspective here: totalitarian ideologies as Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism aren't coming back after the catastrophic 20th Century. — ssu

Sorry for two double posts. I'm kind of frothing at my keyboard here.

I don't buy that antifa like strategies are only justified when we already have a fascist state. Their entire schtick is preventative. If you think they 'need' fascists with real power to justify their actions, you're completely missing why they do what they do.

But they don't reject violence. As I've said, both neonazis and the antifa need each other. — ssu

Without better context, this is like saying penicillin needs the existence of bacteria to work as an antibiotic. Which is true, but also really misses the point.

Having gloves on is basically what a representational democracy and justice state is about. Discussion does matter. Belief in elections does matter. — ssu

And if your opponent takes their gloves off?

Your fellow citizen who has a totally different political world-view, ideology and political agenda about everything is not at all your enemy, but an opponent with whom you make the best democracy you can. — ssu

Should have touched on this. Why aren't things like deplatforming, institutional subterfuge, and counter protest legitimate moves again? If you and your opponent both have the gloves on, the discussion usually does not matter, direct action about it is elsewhere.

Oh that's like an ardent breeze from the 1930's quite in tone with those delirious überlosers hallucinating in their dreams that they are now living in similar time as Weimar Germany and resisting rising Hitlerism and hence picking fights with similar losers with grandiose out of this World pipe dreams. I simply don't get those crowds who want to pick a fight with each other. It's like this perverse love relationship the antifa and the neonazis have: they desperately need each other. — ssu

I love the antifa super soldiers meme, and will use it whenever I can.

You're making the antifa out of straw here. What they actually do is counterprotest far right groups and dangerous ideologues, disrupt their organisations however possible (usually without violence). I'm kind of baffled that you don't see how fragile democracy is and how persistently it is subverted. I'm most familiar with the UK, so let's go with that. The left more broadly protests for climate change action, they protest the humanitarian crisis in Palestine, they protest the terrible atrocities that come from the alliance between BAE systems, the British government and the Saudi government. They protest the privitisation of our health care system (and have been doing so for a long time), they're protesting for the survivors of Grenfell tower and the austerity politics that allowed the disaster in the first place and the corrupt legal system that continues to allow the owners to walk free. They're doing what they can to support (like through parda schemes and Patreon) education initiatives in poor areas like E15 in London and Drumchapel and Parkhead in Glasgow.

The antifa specifically organise direct action in communities in a rather non-hierarchical way (which often gets called 'sleeper cells' through this stupid narrative that they're the same as far right or Middle-Eastern terrorists) to undermine the influence of racist political groups like the EDL and BNP (remember, the leaders of the BNP have been playing footsies with the literal KKK for years). They counter-demonstrate when people who support these ideologies or want to destroy the fundaments of progressive ideals are stupidly given invited talks at universities and public halls.

They're fully aware that most of the time, they're actually fighting the results of government policy, not the Nazis from the Wiemar republic. If you want to engage in reductive analogies, perhaps if the Wiemar republic had more violent and better organised anti-fascists, there would not have been a need to fight WW2. If half the city shows up to counter protest, handcuffs themselves to government buildings, occupies the homes of political decision maybe the government would actually fucking listen. It's a damn sight more likely to have any effect than civil conversation with your friends; actually engaging the relevant political groups that is, engaging the driving forces of the political machines they, rightly, dislike.

We too often forget that liberals and conservatives, genuine liberals and conservatives, actually agree in spirit with what the radical left activists are doing. They just stopped spitballing and got out their damn chairs.

With regard to the Vampire Castle @jamalrob presciently brought up:

The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups – the more ‘marginal’ the better – into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering – those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.

We have to be ultra careful not to address ourselves to the academy in our hearts; so what we do isn't to confuse the actionable insights of critique for the actions they embody. I'm a hypocrite in this regard, perhaps a necessary one due to political alienation. So I imagine that the only role I can play is an academic one; writing about this kind of stuff. What we definitely shouldn't do is to turn academic critique into a placebo politics; in essence on this site leftists posting are doing what TED talks do, making a complicated issue an advert for further talk.

It's probably true that people everywhere are turning left in response to the increasingly evident impossibility of nationstates acting in the interests of their people everywhere. That this is essentially a symptom of the alienation of workers from politics, and the PR role nation states play for global capital, isn't a coincidence; the rise of the populist right (and Blair and Obama rhetorically) in Europe and America which addressed the concerns of the working class with racist just so stories was also an opportunity the left squandered. Sanders, Corbyn and before them Syriza and Las Podemos have seized the opportunity to articulate the alienation of the working class, let's hope we make use of the shift in the Overton window and the at least in principle sympathetic ears to overcome our tendencies to self purge with academic precision.

Edit: Trump too, we have a role to play in doing what we can to resist the shift in the Overton window to the right.

The simple problem here is to see nazis everywhere, just as for the right it is this quite odd fixation about there being these postmodernist cultural marxists undermining the society in the academia. — ssu

It's less about calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi, and more about seeing threats to democracy and social justice. Let's indulge a far right, but quite insightful, understanding of politics for a second and reference Schmitt; there are political friends and enemies on any issue. Friends are those who act, consciously or unconsciously, to bring about your political desires. Enemies are those who act, consciously or unconsciously, to frustrate your political desires.

When people see good intentioned 'free speech absolutists' making the same arguments as clever transphobes about that Canadian hate speech law, we can see sides drawn. When people defend homophobia through the guise of 'states rights' on gay marriage, you can see sides drawn. When people lambast the antifa for the free speech rights of white nationalists, you can see sides drawn.

The question you have to ask yourself is; why do the far right see centrists like this. People that have not inoculated themselves against fascist rhetoric are willing vectors for political disease; normalising what should never be normal. In most circumstances, the toxic propaganda is elevated by giving it any public platform; you end up with people who wouldn't believe it not believing it, and people who have far right sympathies see their beliefs (in the ethnostate, in the invasion of whatever brown country...) as a subject for reasoned debate. The engineers of discourse see you lot as easy dupes and design their arguments, propaganda and behaviour along easily accepted tropes (like freedom of speech in deplatforming, or 'Zionism for whites') for you. It isn't just the far right that get in on the act, it's organisations like Soros, Murdoch and the Kochs and every government. And why do so many centrists fall for it?

It's all a sham, really. Antifa super soldiers care a lot more about democracy and free speech than the lipservice most people pay to it. When Antifa counter protest and frustrate threats and horrible organisations, they're being an immune response to fascism, racism, transphobia, nationalism - people who would rather see Mexican children in cages than playing happily with their kids. They care so much about democracy and social justice they organise to stop threats to both.

They're never going to be seen as the heroic, sound-minded people they are as long as political action is sanitised speech 'respecting everyones rights'. This right there, that belief in sanitised politics and its reduction to inferential chatter, is the biggest namby pamby PC scam there is. Anyone who thinks PC is killing political freedom needs to take a good look in the mirror, their smiling reflection knows what side the sophisticated marionette of their body is on.

Axioms are relatively fragile compared to the things which usually get declared as a-priori. You can chop and change them, replace them as you like, and you end up with different formal systems.

Two easy examples of axiomatic systems are propositional logic and predicate logic. Propositional logic consists of an alphabet of propositional symbols standing for sentences, a family of logical connectives, and specified ways of combining them. "A and A"? That's fine. "And and"? Not fine.

Predicate logic is propositional logic augmented with a new structure, quantification, which lets you express things like "All men are mortal" and "Some things are red". Only constants and variables, like the propositional symbols above - names of elements of the alphabet for the language - can be quantified over in the most common ("first order") one.

Why does propositional logic not contain quantifiers? Why can't you quantify over logical relationships of symbols in first order logic? The axioms say so.

Axioms set out rules for manipulating symbols, at a minimum. Mathematical structures can have different axiomatisations which are equivalent (like the usual version of set theory + the axiom of choice and the usual version of set theory + zorn's lemma) in the sense that they prove the same things.

For most of its history and in most of its content (even after Euclid, the father of axiomatic systems), math was done without much reference to axioms. What this reveals is that axioms are something which can be posited or rejected, they are not necessarily 'there', in the sense of 'always applying'.

What is interesting about them, really interesting, is that they don't seem to be arbitrary for the structures we care about. While axioms at a minimum just set out rules for pushing symbols around, you can set up axioms to 'capture' some behaviour., to make the system of rules they engender reflect some useful or elegant things about something else - even if that something else is math itself.

For an example of the latter, setting out axioms to study math itself, there's a notion in logic called compactness. A logic (yes, an entire way of formal reasoning!) is compact whenever a collection of sentences the logic can produce (like "A and A" or "Not (~A or B ) xor (A implies C)", collecting different syllogisms together) can be satisfied so can every finite subcollection of syllogisms. There's a notion in a field of math which used to be distinct, called topology, that calls a space (like 3d space we live in) 'compact' if every way of throwing circles over elements of it (a cover) can be achieved by throwing a finite subcollection of elements over it (a finite subcover). That these two things are so similar, the compactness of a logic and the compactness of a topological space, turned out not to be a coincidence - and there are ways of studying systems of logic using intuitions we developed about notions of space. Setting up axioms like that allows you to penetrate structures which seem to be there, blurring the lines between creation and discovery.

For the a-priori? Things which are true without relying on experience. Things like 'all bachelors are unmarried men' or "red objects are coloured". We can't seem to play about with those things except in fiction or in acts of the imagination, they seem to hold in virtue of the conventions of language, or of logical relationships between facts that can't help but be true, or false in some cases. Necessarily true or necessarily false. This part of of the a-priori, called the analytic a priori, are things that hold by virtue of their meaning alone; they are self evident if understood. One thing is contained in the concept of the other, as it was originally put.

Then there's the 'synthetic' part of it, these are things which are necessarily true not by virtue of one thing simply meaning the other, but of an idea reflecting the essential nature of its topic. For example, "the angles of a triangle sum to the sum of 2 right angles". That's something necessary about triangles which doesn't seem to be inherent in our idea of it, but something we worked out after the fact.

It is popular to conceive of mathematics and logic as being disciplines devoted to the exposition of a priori truths, geometry was even the original paradigmatic example of synthetic a priori in Kant. Whether this is true, whether the distinction between a priori and a posteriori actually holds, whether the distinction between analytic and synthetic actually holds, is all debatable. These are just the basics from a biased commentator.

An many go with the leftist line that anything beyond this or that and the people have to be white supremacist nazi bigots. — ssu

I don't know where you got that conclusion from in thread. The topic's slid from left propagandising liberals *cough* I mean reasoned debate with them to countering the influence of the far right on discourse.

I don't think it's fair to attribute blurring the lines between the two to the posters here. Especially when many of the comments have been about the weaknesses of the liberal interpretation of freedom of speech to cooption by the far right. Garden variety conservatives (though maybe not the US conservative party, they play real rough internal politics) and liberals both have this marketplace of ideas = the court of reason perspective on the issue.

:up:

Stop burning effigies like you're not made of fire.

I was only joking. It amused me that you'd managed to summarise everyone else's position, as if you'd read mine and just shook your head slowly. There's nothing needs doing about it, I didn't mean for you to take that impression. — Isaac

Reviews should summarise everything relevant that goes on. I don't care if it was a joke.

And I'm just shouting into the void...? — Isaac

I forgot you because I've not read your exchanges with Vagabond. I'll put it in my post. :)