In other words, using police brutality as an illustration, the solution to the police brutality in places like Ferguson, Missouri won't come from putting progressive elites in power in Washington, D.C., it will come from giving power and control to ordinary people at the local level.

I have no idea what you mean by progressive elites. Elites are politicians like Obama, Clinton, and Trump who work for elite corporations, banks, and rich people. Progressives working to help the people and not working to primarily serve those entities are not elites. And we do need them in office since they are the ones who pass the laws. Just a few weeks ago, an elite Centrist Democrat shelved the vote on Medicaid-For-All in California. If he had been a progressive, he would have let the vote go through. Representation matters.

And local people don't have any power over the elites. It's progressives in office like Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General who made a huge difference in the Civil Rights Movement and was a vital ally to it and its leaders like King. He was able to send down the national guard to make sure colleges were de-segregated. Local citizens can't come close to the needed power/authority in accomplishing such things.

We can either spin our wheels trying to stomp out weeds such as police brutality while other weeds grow or we can attack the whole system at its neo-liberal roots.

It's not an either/or. Working to address and diminish racist police brutality is a priority in itself, just like stopping Jim Crow laws and segregation was an issue in itself. If MLK and the Civil Rights movement had waited until they attacked the whole system, Blacks would still be drinking from separate water fountains and kept away from lunch counters.

I stand corrected. :D

It's a common misconception. I've been making that explanation for over a decade now to my less theoretically-inclined colleagues...:)

Ideas impose order on the realm of sensation

Ideas are as much a product of the realm of the sensation as they have a influence over it. They are not sovereign over it. What you claim about the nature of ideas reflects a gestalt of your biology/genes, socio/cultural/political upbringing, and your life experiences...and your ontological commitments are greatly a product of those, as well.

This is the deconstruction as I understand it, that we are conditioned by our social constructs to the extent that we cannot distinguish the real from the conditioned. And to pretend that we can - which is all of our discussion - is hubristic overreach.

No, neither Derrida nor any other prominent Postmodern/Poststructuralist philosopher says this. What he does say, building strongly from Heidegger's (the proto-Deconstructionist's) "always already" model, is that we can never fully distinguish the real from the conditioned, since our perceptions of both are already shaped by the language and culture we were "thrown" into. That doesn't mean we can't effectively recognize some things as "more real" (and more tied to material reality) and some as more "constructed," but we can never finalize those notions nor keep them from changing/deconstructing.

Another key part of this is Saussure's structural linguistics that reminds us that our processes of doing these things always inevitably occurs within language, with continual referrals to other words in the language, so the structures and dynamics of our language will always have their share of sovereignty too over any notion we have of fully recognizing the noumena, the-thing-itself.

Is it philosophy that is lacking here?

In America, yes. We are divided into three groups, and two of them--the Conservatives and the Centrists--support foreign colonialist wars, laissez-faire freedom for the corrupt damaging Banks, the ignoring of racist police brutality and pipelines over Native American land; and they are opposed to social advances such as Medicare-for-All, free college, and a living minimum wage.

So, the rest of us Progressive Humanists need to work harder to support the fight against the first group, the fight for the second, and the spread of the Progressive philosophy and its benefits to those centrists who are still likely or even possibly to embrace it.

Because of the way you incorrectly used it. I already made that clear.
— Thanatos Sand

How do you know I used it incorrectly though? It seems like anytime i've typed "race" you've just said "Aha! incorrect!"

No, I showed you multiple times how your usage was wrong. You are reading as poorly as you are using words.

If the way I use "race" is in line with your conception of what "ethnicity means" then I haven't used it incorrectly at all. You can at least try to acknowledge the intended meaning of my statements rather than to doggedly tell me I'm a problematic child...

No, your misuse of "race" is in line with what the standard English definition of "ethnicity" means. So, you have used it very incorrectly.

So, you and I are done; I won't be reading any more of your posts. I have no time to give you the English assistance you need.

↪Thanatos Sand

I think that racial categories are much more complex than just "black/white/asian/etc...". For instance, the Pygmy people are ethnically different from the Bantu people and the results of those genetic differences are stark and undeniable. Do you deny that there is an observable difference between the average characteristics of the Pygmy and Bantu people which stems from differences in their average genetic makeup?

And in the above quote is where you misused it when you said "racial categories" when you were discussing two different ethnic, not racial, groups.

So, use the word correctly or I'm moving on. I have no time for people who refuse to use words correctly.

How do you know the meaning I intended when I used the word race? (how do you ignore my intended use after I've clarified twice?)

Because of the way you incorrectly used it. I already made that clear.

How do you keep misusing a word when you know you're misusing it? It's bewildering.

↪Thanatos Sand I don't see how we can continue the discussion if every time I use a certain word even if just to reference it, even after clarifying my usage, you regress back to "that word is problematic".

That's a lie. I never did that. You were using the word "race" incorrectly and I pointed that out. I don't see how we can continue the discussion when you're dishonest and are using the word "race" incorrectly.

If you want to move past this you can roughly do so by assuming I mean "ethnicity" whenever I say "race" and then see if you still protest...

No, if you want to move past this you can stop misusing the word "race," and use the word "ethnicity" if you mean ethnicity. You're a grown-up now; you can start using words correctly.

I feel that society has a lot of problems that could be altered by philosophy. I feel we need to challenge norms and preconceptions still. I think we need a radical confrontational philosophy not one that delineates and attempts to justify the norms, nor just a dry fairly helpless theorising.

This sounds a lot like Leftist Post-structuralist philosophy like you find in:

Gilles Deleuze
Jacques Derrida
Michel Foucault
Julia Kristeva
Judith Butler
Edward Said
Jean-Francois Lyotard
Louis Althusser.

Their ideas would help in the matter.

If all you required was that I replace the word "race" with "ethnicity", I don't understand why you bothered to object in the first place. As soon as I clarified that my conception of race goes beyond white black and asian, you should have assented to my position. I guess we're also encountering one of the driving forces behind this post-modern angle: a lack of understanding.

That's a ridiculous statement since you were using the term "race," and you kept using it. Once I pointed out your incorrect usage, you should have admitted you were wrong and stopped saying "race." So, the only one doing the faux-Postmodern thing of rejecting actual meanings was you.

The American Anthropological Association had to release a statement focusing on race as socially constructed because they operate in a political world where anything more nuanced would allow ideologues who misunderstand the science to use it as nesting material. But while they (and you) state that "race" was invented to give perpetual low status to certain individuals, they both abandon the original topic of "race" and move purely into a world of political pandering and poor speculation.

That's completely your unfounded opinion. If you want it to mean anything, try backing it up with evidence and argument. Until you do; it's just your fantasy. And there you go using the word "race" again. I told you you were the problem there.

Slavery has existed for thousands of years, and generally, but not always, groups tended to enslave people who had different physical characteristics than themselves. They never needed the concept of different races to begin doing it, and even without slavery the concept of different races can be invented even by a child who experiences them.

And there you go and prove me right again by using "race" in the traditional way when you rejected that traditional usage. Again, you show you were the problem in our discussion. And while different races have used slavery, in America the slave owners and runners and writers of the slave-owning policies were almost exclusively White and the slaves were almost exclusively Black. That's a racial fact you can't change.

And what if we stop using the term "gravity" in our theories?

Gravity would still exist, and if we didn't replace it with a word or words describing the same ubiquitous phenomena, we would have substantially regressed as a people.

↪unenlightened
I would add: there's a difference between, say, fiction and human institutions. Telling a story doesn't make the story true. What is made, and what has effect in the world, is not the content of the story, but the story itself and the telling of it. With institutions, the content becomes real. If you christen a ship, it now has the name you gave it.

Except many institutions, such as religious myths and dogmas, and concepts such as human rights are fictions, since none of them can rely on material, scientific fact for proof of their existence. And you can't say everything is equally real then try and make a separation in degrees of reality between fictions and human institutions when discussing conceptions. You've just undermined your previous argument.

And while the contents of a constructed concept may become real, they do not actually become the concept, but take on the less-real concept as part of their more-real selves. A church building doesn't really become a "house of god" but it gets imbued with the concept by the artificial construction of the humans that affirm it is.

↪unenlightened
Gravity is found; human rights are fabricated. Both are quite real. When you make something, it's real, isn't it? The difference between gravity and human rights isn't that one is real; it's that we don't have the ability to change or abolish gravity, which we do with human rights.

Using that logic, unicorns are as real as Gravity and Santa Claus is as real as Hillary Clinton (some may argue moreso). And that just isn't the case. Gravity is both nearly fixed in definition and not rationally disputed in existence. Neither applies to human rights since there is debate on both whether or not human rights exists and on what exactly they are.

Why?

Because if you see no difference between what is real and what is constructed or elaborated, you couldn't see that human rights are a total fabrication and not real since you've eliminated the distinction between fabrication and real.

Are they? Human nature is claimed as a construct, but it is one founded on something real that is elaborated. Human rights might have the same foundation. I'm not sure that fabrications are ever 'total'.
— unenlightened

Perhaps, but I don't see any distinction between what is real and what is constructed or elaborated.

Since you use the world "real," you clearly subscribe to it and its standard definition. Knowing that, you should be able to see that water is a real physical reality, despite it's linguistic framing within the word "water", and the concepts of "evil" or "human rights" are constructed since they have no specific connection to a clear material reality.

Human rights, for example, are a total fabrication,
— StreetlightX

Are they? Human nature is claimed as a construct, but it is one founded on something real that is elaborated. Human rights might have the same foundation. I'm not sure that fabrications are ever 'total'.

I wouldn't call human rights a total fabrication, since we are social animals and our societies came up with them. But they are definitely a construct since there is nothing in our genetics and biology necessitating rights as they do our need to breathe oxygen or drink water. And since our notions of human rights not only differ from culture to culture, but from person to person within each culture, it is impossible to establish what concept of "human rights" is correct. And that doesnt' even counter the hypocrisy of leaders like Obama or Dubya who talk about human rights while they're bombing innocents (and innocent children) in other countries...and with the support of Americans across the political spectrum.

Face it, deep inside your consciousness, you're that guy who thinks he's Napoleon. He was a fine military leader. Be proud of that thought and who you are...:)

Yes, when you hear the world "natural" used in discussing farming, human reproduction, rainstorms, humidity, evolution or any other natural phenomenon or dynamic, it should raise a red flag. Anti-scientism really is making a comeback.
— Thanatos Sand

Natural in such contexts is tantamount to God. It is a substitution word. Atheists can't use the word God so they rename it Natural. The scientific explanation becomes equivalent to the religious equivalent, that is no explanation at all other than some new supernatural force. It's a cute trick.Take note how often this transfer of power to Natural is used.

No, natural in such contexts is tantamount to "natural." Your use of the word "consciousness" is tantamount to God, if not quite as omnipotent. And the fact you call "natural" the supernatural force shows not only a failure to grasp those words' meanings, it shows a failure to grasp how words work.

Take note of how Rich makes the supernatural "consciousness" the "natural," and actually tries to make the "natural" the supernatural.

Whenever you notice the word natural in any scientific explanation (it is used all the time), it should raise a red flag - human consciousness is being transferred somewhere else.

Yes, when you hear the world "natural" used in discussing farming, human reproduction, rainstorms, humidity, evolution or any other natural phenomenon or dynamic, it should raise a red flag. Anti-scientism really is making a comeback.

I may very well be wrong here, but it seems like the liar believes in objective truth (even while misrepresenting it) while the bullshitter thinks that truth is completely subjective. I think of the debate in terms outlined way back in Plato's Protagoras, where Protagoras famously claims that "man is the measure of all things," which seems to imply an extreme form of relativism.

I got ya. I guess it would say that someone who actually freed themselves from the socio-cultural concept of "Truth" they grew up with would be a Platonic ideal that just doesnt' exist in humanity. Even Trump can see that Ivanka is (probably), as opposed to Bannon or Erik Jr, his daughter, and he knows the White House is in Washington, not Valhalla.

Charming retort.

↪Thanatos Sand Establishing a binary does not entail establishing a gradation.

Of course it does, unless you're claiming there's nothing between the two points of the binary and there were no directions implied by the binary, and both of those claims would be erroneous.

So, the only objection relying on a different use of words, and a triviality, is yours.

If you don't know what it means for anything to have more or less reality than anything else, than you should probably stop using the words "real" or "reality" since you have no definition for them and you refuse the standard ones:
— Thanatos Sand

As far as I can see, the very standard definition you've cited contrasts the real with the artificial or the illusory, and at no point does it invoke a scale or gradation of realness.

Of course it does, since it notes what the real is and what it isn't, therefore it implies a gradation from those things closest to what it established as real and those which are closest to what is not real. So, it didn't need to invoke that scale it already implied.

To argue for the reality of the social, is just to argue for the fact that the social is neither 'illusory, artificial, or fraudulent'. Or at least, no more or less so than gravity.

And based on the standard definitions of "real" I gave, that would be a bad argument, since what is "social" is much less fixed and permanent than Gravity.

I found this quote from Karl Rove interesting. Rove was one of GW Bush's advisors, I believe.

"...when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Yeah, that sounds like Rove's philosophy. He may have been a complete scumbag, but he was clearly as self-aware one.

Perhaps I'm being overly cynical but I don't think that has ever been the case, so the term "post-truth" should be replaced by something that more accurately captures the distinction Banno made in the OP between lying and bullshitting.

I agree with what you said in your first paragraph, but the distinction between lying and bullshitting is unclear since "lying" denotes a multitude of different ways to tell untruths or strategic half-truths, or strategic manipulation of spinning of the truth, and bullshitting is just one of them.

If you could make clear what you see as the substantial difference between the terms, that would be helpful.

[quote↪Thanatos Sand I'm not sure what it means for anything to have 'more' - or 'less' - reality than anything else.][/quote]

If you don't know what it means for anything to have more or less reality than anything else, than you should probably stop using the words "real" or "reality" since you have no definition for them and you refuse the standard ones:

"Definition of real
1
:  of or relating to fixed, permanent, or immovable things (such as lands or tenements)
2
a :  not artificial, fraudulent, or illusory :  genuine real gold; also :  being precisely what the name implies a real professional
c :  having objective independent existence unable to believe that what he saw was real"

Therefore, non-artificial things or non-illusory things like the Empire State Building are more real than the Easter Bunny. There is no point of the word "real" if some things aren't more real than others. It's definition shows they are.

I simply mean to complicate the distinction in the OP between that which is 'found' and that which is 'constructed'. To put it in it's terms, that which is 'constructed' may well also be 'found'; even if found as constructed.

I don't know what you mean by these terms. But something can't be found unless it was real, so again, you embrace the notions of more or less real, even when you erroneously reject them.

The point being that anything 'socially constructed' has no less reality than anything not. That race is 'socially constructed' does not mean, for example, that the institutional or cultural reality of race is any less felt than the force of gravity. Reality is on the side of the social, not set against or beside it.

Of course Gravity has more reality than the socially constructed notion of race. The laws of Gravity have been confirmed through testing and retesting as real outside our perception of the universe. So, while the term "gravity" is a construct and, as Godel showed, our math is still a constructed language, Gravity is tied to a definition extremely more static and rigorous than that of "race. And what is felt is irrelevant here, since reality isn't solely predicated on subjective perception. And no, reality is not on the side of the social, it is on the side of the real, even when the concept "real" is a construct itself.

No, you don't seem to get the discussion bit. I ended the discussion we had by correcting your incorrect notion.

As to the Postmodernists, there are many of them with different views. Which one gave you the idea that "anything goes" when it comes to Truth?

I just did. I told you none said that when you had incorrectly said they did.

↪Thanatos Sand Suggestion (and please take this as a compliment), if you ever need evidence that humans are computer bots, use yourself as an example. Almost irrefutable.

That was weak, Rich. And it didn't come close to clearing you as the super-dense one.

So, what is it, Richie? Are there waves or not? Your wee brain is clearly confused on the matter...:)

The only super-dense one is clearly you, and I just showed that in my last post...:)

↪CasKev This gets a bit tricky to explain but if you look around, there are many levels of intelligence working with each other and individually? It can be imagined as waves within an ocean where the individual waves can be perceived independently or as an ocean.

It's amazing, one day Rich is saying there are waves within an ocean when just days before he said the ocean was just ocean, and waves were mere human perception:

It's profoundly obvious, that the ocean does have waves, and not vise versa.
— Metaphysician Undercover

The ocean is the ocean. It is continuous. We make the distinctions, when viewing the ocean from a given perspective. One can turn it upside down and say all the waves contain the ocean. There are and there isn't one or the other or both.

If inconsistency were a virtue, Rich would be a saint.

↪Thanatos Sand

The topic in general. As is this next comment.

I think people are being hopelessly naive if they think words are simply transparent and not power tools intended to defend ones own ideology. I don't think classification and conceptual division are neutral.

In terms of the word animal you can say things like.

"You were an animal in bed"
"You're worse than an animal"
"We are just animals"
"She was a party animal"
"He likes animals"
"Men are animals"

There are even more sophisticated uses of language in rhetoric, polemic and persuasion

This is all irrelevant to the discussion. I was solely talking about the scientific classification "animal" meaning: "a living organism that feeds on organic matter, typically having specialized sense organs and nervous system and able to respond rapidly to stimuli."

Humans fit that definition and are part of that classification.

That assumes Postmodern theorists say anything goes when it comes to Truth, and they don't. You're free to name one if you can. It also incorrectly assumes Trump is our first mendacious president and he isn't. Obama straight up lied to the American people about unconstitutionallly monitoring our phones and Bush' WMD lies have cost over a million lives.

To whom was that addressed?

Because you didn't read very well, and you're lost in a fantasy world.

It certainly was a waste of time for me.

Then go look up the accepted scientific explanation. I've been going with that one the whole time.

No, you asked for a scientific explanation, and I showed you why I don't need to give one.