His argument did not carry the day, but it seemed quite reasonable, or at least far from foolish--and eminently conservative: On foxhunting.

I am actually curious - who do liberals view as key intellectual social conservative thinkers both past and present? — Agustino

In the present day, Roger Scruton.

Darwin rejected the idea of survival of fittest and claimed evolution was all about which species is more adaptable to the specific environment — wuliheron

To my knowledge, Darwin actually embraced the term "survival of the fittest". And "more adaptable to the specific environment" is what it means.

I managed to escape the impossible housing market in Edinburgh and go house-sitting, which is not so much a rejection of the property market as a kind of parasitism upon it. It's only possible because I can work from anywhere with an internet connection, and because I have no dependants. On the one hand, I'm a rootless itinerant, unsure of what "home" means, with no savings, completely relying on the success of my current venture to ensure a comfortable future. On the other hand, I get to live in great houses and places for free. I recommend it (but not as a solution to the housing crisis, of course).

wasn't aware of SW England — Hanover

Think of the pirates' accent in movies: Arrr! Why pirates must speak with a West Country accent, I'm not sure.

The British r is close to the plantation south. — Hanover

Not in Scotland or South West England.

Speaking of PF members who haven't properly made it over here, I don't get why @busy (busycuttingcrap) hasn't joined in, despite actually joining last year. I recall that he, along with several others, wasn't happy about the way the TPF faction abandoned ship, but none of that matters now.

EDIT: Maw, too, though I don't think he's joined this site at all yet.

Very even-handed. (Y)

I took him to be referring to himself among others, you pedantic lot.

I just want to echo Baden's and Sapientia's comments and say that I can't see anything objectionable in Un's comment.

I found Un's "I'm in charge and nobody gives a shit what you think" schtick to be unacceptable at the old forum. I'd rather not see it start up here. — Mongrel

And I don't recognize this description. I'm guessing you just have difficulty seeing through Un's unique style and tone to the soft-hearted teddy bear beneath.

Looks good. Kinda hot for a hike mind you. Lovely place anyway. I'll wave back from wherever I am on my bike trip to Bordeaux via the Canal Latéral de la Garonne.

Hike up Vesuvius while you're there.

That's another one ticked off the bucket list.

The slavery where the slave is brutalised and completely dehumanised is not Ancient slavery, but industrial age slavery. — Agustino

Not true. Conditions for the slaves in the Roman mines were famously brutal.

Yeah, I've heard Zizek talk about this, the denial to the right of the minority even to be morally wrong as a disguised form of racism. I tend to agree, and the NUS seem to have thought themselves into a hole on this one. On the other hand, the progressive attitude can have the positive effect of combating the creation in society of a group that it becomes socially acceptable to discriminate against. — Baden

Agreed, but I think there's a big difference between, on the one hand, the defence of a group by standing up for the rights of its members to be treated the same as everyone else (the Civil Rights Movement), and on the other hand, the attempt to protect a group's identity and culture (multiculturalism and identity politics). A person's particular identity and culture may be exactly what he or she wants to escape from.

Of course, when identity and culture are precisely what a person is attacked for, there is good reason to defend them, and to assert them. This has often been an aspect of protest and is not peculiar to modern identity politics as such. But it's a problem when this becomes the deep and not merely symbolic mode of protest, and the only one seen as legitimate by the most vocal activist groups, which people formerly on the same side must abide by or else suffer the wrath of the self-appointed guardians. (For examples of that, just look at the way Peter Tatchell and Germaine Greer have been attacked by LGBT activists and feminists, and the the way that Muslim and ex-Muslim opponents of Islamic fundamentalism have been attacked by the Left.)

Where previously it was quite common to protest with "no, I am not defined by that group or culture; I am a citizen just like you and I demand the same rights," now everything is being drowned out by "I am defined by my identity and my background, and it is sacrosanct". At least, this is the sanctioned script.

I agree with a lot of that Erik.

I also think an argument could be made that 'progressive' intellectuals who push things like multiculturalism and identity politics could be the cause of increased white racism, precisely because they purposely go out of their way to highlight differences amongst people based upon race and ethnicity and sexual orientation - black culture, Latino culture, LGBT culture - and then refuse to allow straight, white men to have any identity beyond perpetual racist or bigoted oppressor. — Erik

I think it's worse than this. I think these progressives are guilty of a kind of racism or racialism of their own, because they implicitly reject the dream in which people "will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Martin Luther King's vision is, to this way of thinking, a microaggressive denial of racial identity. (I think some conservatives have said what I'm saying here too, so I'll probably be accused of being a conservative, again).

It can also be seen in the European left-liberal attitude to Muslims, who become to them another monolithic group of victims with characteristic grievances. To these "progressives", the poor little Muslims can hardly be blamed for their rage against the West, and criticism of ISIS is deemed to be Islamophobic (an extreme example perhaps, but it did happen: NUS motion to condemn Isis fails amidst claims of islamophobia).

Surely it's because his philosophical work concerns things you think are important that you dislike him so much, no?

Tom Slater's take on it in Spiked is quite interesting:

On the one hand, the alt-righters are actually a product of political correctness. The politics of victimhood nurtures victimisers; the more people talk up their emotional and moral vulnerability – as a result of their gender, race or sexuality – the more saddos will try to have a pop. A culture of You Can’t Say That will inevitably embolden some people to Say That – again and again and again. So, the liberal journalists currently penning self-righteous takedowns of the alt-right need to have a word with themselves. By contributing to the cult of victimhood, they helped make these monsters.

But, on the other hand, the alt-right is the mirror image of political correctness, specifically the victimhood that underpins it. They don’t just want to have a pop at self-styled victims – they want to claim victim status for themselves. Their broadsides against feminists, Black Lives Matter or Islam are underpinned by the idea that straight, white males are an oppressed group – that ‘white culture’ is under attack. They may take up arms against weepy identitarians, but they share the same, deadening sense of victimhood – just with another set of dreamt-up grievances attached.

Source

Their rightism was once an ideology of the ruling class, but now it is just another identity. I like this criticism partly because it's the one that I imagine would annoy them the most.

Frank Zappa, Patrick O'Hearn and Terry Bozzio, just jamming.

I moved this one to the Lounge so maybe you'll be able to carry on your conspiracy nuttiness here without fear of deletion. But of course, I cannot speak for Them.

Marx on levelling down:

Crude communism is only the culmination of such envy and levelling-down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. How little this abolition of private property represents a genuine appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the whole world of culture and civilization, and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless individual who has not only not surpassed private property but has not yet even attained to it. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labor as a condition in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community. — Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

What are people's views on Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique? As I understand it, there is no home key in that form.
At the time (1920s) plenty of people protested that it was not music. I think the majority of musicians these days accept it as music. — andrewk

I like some twelve-tone music, such as Berio and Boulez. The claim that it's not music is not one I take seriously.

However, I think its important influence was an expansion of the tools available to composers in terms of technique and expressive range, so that composers now feel free to switch between tonality and atonality even within the same work. Examples might be Nørgård and Penderecki. Certainly, many contemporary composers make great use of atonality or unusual modal structures in a way that is deeply indebted to the twelve-tone movement.

I don't think the technique was all it was cracked up to be, and I can't imagine that music will ever dispense with tonal centres entirely, as some of those composers liked to imagine.

The fool!

Scrutiny here I guess would consist of looking at the practice and nature of atonal music to see if it has anything to do with that of music as such. And it obviously does. The only point of defining music more strictly that I can discern is to exclude music one doesn't like. The thing is, the concept of music will carry on regardless of personal pet definitions; it's not a matter of opinion.

It's a matter of opinion whether atonal music is good or bad music (I believe in objective standards), but to say that it is simply not music at all seems to be just a casual way of speaking. It's a figure of speech, as in, "Call that a sausage? No, this is a sausage."

If you don't even have a key signature, or harmony, then what you're producing isn't music. — Wayfarer

This is probably irrelevant to the discussion, but what you say here is not true, unless you want to say that atonal music and unpitched percussion music are not music and that you cannot play music with an unaccompanied non-chordal instrument.

EDIT: I see that you described "abstract modernism" as "just noise", so I guess you would indeed say that atonal music is not music. I don't think that withstands scrutiny, but I won't pursue it.

I agree. Forcing women to dress a particular way is no way to uphold the principle that nobody should force women to dress a particular way. Ridiculous, indeed. French secularism is getting rather unhinged.

I agree with all or very nearly all of that, but it's a more nuanced point than you were making before. In putting your case too strongly I think you went wrong.

EDIT: actually I don't agree that analytic-synthetic is a spectrum, although I'm sympathetic to the idea that a priori-empirical is a spectrum.

@John Actually, I do think it's important to understand that for something to be empirical does not imply the exclusion of language, symbolic meaning, concepts, and all that.

Okay, I get you, I think. I agree that knowledge is about more than bare sensation, but then I'm not sure there is such a thing anyway.

@John We find the reports of others in experience. I think you just have an eccentrically narrow notion of the empirical. Also we can look at this Kantianly: empirical knowledge may yet depend on a priori concepts of the understanding.

What is quasi-analytic? My first thought is that any sentence that is true only partly by definition is merely non, rather than quasi.

Maybe I wouldn't like it so much today. I hadn't read anything else at the time and it seemed like I'd found a genuinely new truth, or at least a stunning clarification.

That's cheating, John. Anyway, bachelors will always be unmarried men, even if "bachelor" changes meaning and refers to something else. Kripke sorts this out nicely.

N&N was actually the first real philosophy book I read. Odd place to start but I liked it.

What I have claimed is that I know that Paris must be the capital of France right now, and that it was the capital in the past, unless it is the case that there has been a massive deception about the historical capitalhood, and/or in regard to its present capitalhood another city has been designated as capital since I last heard. I have also claimed that I don't need to go out into the world to do any empirical checking to know these things, so they are, to that degree at least, analytical — John

If it's possible you could be deceived about it, as you admit it is, and it's possible that the capital of France might change in the future, as you also admit, then 'Paris is the capital of France' is not analytic to any degree at all--though I think I do see where you're coming from now.

Whereas if I said New York is the capital of France, you don't have to do any empirical checking to know that is wrong do you? — John

This is just because he already knows it's not true, not because it's analytic or a priori. If he didn't know, he could check.

"merely looking"? What does it matter?

Yes, butter too. I have a whole spreadsheet here exhaustively and comprehensively listing the essential and inessential properties of France.

Not only is that distinction quite slippery, but I don't quite see its relevance.

Paris as the capital is inessential, baguettes are essential. Simple.