Cheers, same to you~

The fact that existence isn't a property makes this a fairly straightforward point, no? Allowing for at least a minimally charitable reading of @John here.

According to Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks @ArguingWAristotleTiff (see below), Paul Ryan just recently blocked legislation aimed at preventing those on the terrorist watch list owning guns. Presumably you would agree that a) the sole reason he made that move was probably because he is in the pay of the gun lobbyists and that b) it was a very bad move.



The fact that your politicians and their gun lobbyists are happy to have suspected terrorists owning guns as long as they can make money out of the situation should seriously disturb you. I can't think of any other developed country where politicians could get away with that level and type of corruption.

Perhaps more of your free time could be spent reading philosophy rather than posting about it here. They're both valuable and interesting, but the former vastly more so than the latter (at least for me). — Thorongil

Don't know about this. I find I learn a lot more by posting than by reading alone, or posting requires more reading and so on. I tend to forget what I read fairly quickly unless I process it somehow. And writing is a good way to do that (in whatever field - I'm not just talking about philosophy here). Of course, posting off the top of your head without having read isn't good either. But I'd give reading and using (in whatever form including posting) equal weight.

Also, time spent doing Real Things has increased
Meh. It's all Goats, anyway. — Banno

I can relate, but a dose or two of your caprine wisdom would be appreciated anyway. Do indulge when you get the time. (Y)

When I first saw Brassier's quote a while back, it did kind of bug me, but on reflection I have to say the elitism of university academics is to an extent justified. Doing a PhD and devoting your life to research/teaching/writing in a subject is a huge and ongoing commitment that most of us here don't have to (and wouldn't want to) make. So, I don't really begrudge them their elitism and I think it's fair to say that serious progress in philosophy as in the sciences will continue to be made through the tough mental grind that academics put in. Good luck to them, I say. I see our task on forums like this as primarily one of edifying ourselves and each other rather than pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge. Not that I see that as impossible (we have some really high quality posters here) but just not what we're about generally. And we don't have to be.

Edit: (Wrote this while @The Great Whatever was posting. Kind of saying the same thing, I guess.)

We all have our ups and downs with internet forums, but you've made a really important contribution to the growing community here, and it's appreciated, so I hope at some point you'll consider posting here again regularly. Cheers.

Yeah, it's a pity the system says "cancelled" instead of "expired". Makes us all look bad :). Anyway, I'll let @jamalrob take care of this one.

Brassier it is. (Don't want to interrupt your discussion @TheWillowOfDarkness, @Pneumenon and @Ciceronianus the White but in order to close the poll, it looks like I have to close the thread. If you want to open a new thread on the same issue and have your previous comments transferred over there, let me know by PM).

Close at the front. I'll leave this open for another 24 hours. If nothing changes, it's Brassier.

We're all still in the babbling stage in a certain sense. We've just learned to internalize our babble into what we call internal monologue. Children have to gradually socialize themselves into doing that, and as they do so they internalize culture, consciousness, self identity and all the things we normally associate with being a person. Interesting thread anyhow @StreetlightX. I'll try to post more on it later.

@StreetlightX - It reminds of a video I saw of Judith Butler talking where she mentioned she regularly gets insults thrown at her about her appearance. Gratuitous and unpleasant. Not worthy of further comment.

Hopefully something for everyone there.

I've disabled the reputation system — jamalrob

(Y)

there's no option to retain likes for posts--it's all or nothing — jamalrob

No great loss.

After writing the above, I came across another article in the Guardian by Mehdi Hasan, one that makes just the point I was making above.

We accept that Russian bombs can provoke a terror backlash. Ours can too.

That there is a link, a connection, between the west’s military interventions in the Middle East and terrorist attacks against the west, that violence begets violence, is “glaringly evident” to anyone with open eyes, if not open minds.

Yet over the past 14 years, too many of us have “decided not to see”. From New York to Madrid to London, any public utterance of the words “foreign” and “policy” in the aftermath of a terrorist attack has evoked paroxysms of outrage from politicians and pundits alike. — Mehdi Hasan

It's worth quoting more of this:

Isn’t it odd, then, that in the case of Russia, western governments have been keen to link Vladimir Putin’s – and only Vladimir Putin’s – foreign policy to terrorist violence? On 1 October the US government and its allies issued a joint statement declaring that the Russian president’s decision to intervene in Syria would “only fuel more extremism and radicalisation”. Yes, you heard them: it’ll “fuel” it.

Moscow’s bombing campaign will “lead to further radicalisation and increased terrorism”, claimed David Cameron on 4 October. Note the words “lead to”... — Mehdi Hasan

This is the same David Cameron who wholeheartedly embraced the following statement directed at him from across the aisle in the House of Commons:

...any attempt, by any organization, somehow to blame the West or France's military intervention is not only wrong, disgraceful, but should be condemned — Emma Reynolds, Labour MP

Is the hypocrisy glaringly obvious enough yet?

- It's more of a personal attack on Jeremy Corbyn than the Labour party who have largely turned on their own leader (as Behr makes clear elsewhere in the article). There's a political lockdown in the UK on the idea that ISIS's actions could be in response to anything that the West has done, and Corbyn, true to his principles, has refused to play ball. But the attack is really an attack on a caricature of his position than on the reality of it. There is some middle ground between saying the West is the root of all evil in the world and that they bear no responsibility at all for any reactions to their foreign policy. Behr's confused approach obscures this. He concedes that:

He is right that it is still unclear how British airstrikes in Syria would make a practical difference against terrorism. The memory of Jean Charles de Menezes, mistakenly gunned down by police in 2005, is reason to weigh gravely the implications of authorising a shoot-to-kill policy. Justice would have been better served if Mohammed “Jihadi John” Emwazi had been put on trial. — Rafael Behr

Well, these are the statements that Corbyn is actually being attacked for. This is what he said. Yet Behr complains of:

This undercurrent of moral relativism [contaminating] the valid points in Corbyn’s argument. — Rafael Behr

Somehow Corbyn's right but it's this vague undercurrent of moral relativism that makes him a villain? Well, I'm not buying that. The idea that you can't speak the truth because it might have overtones considered politically inexpedient is not an attitude to be admired. It reminds me of the hysteria after 911 when Bill Maher got fired for saying that the hijackers weren't cowards. Context was ignored. You just can't say that. And now you just can't say that the West bears any responsibility at all for the recent attacks or you are consigned to the loony bin of conspiracy theorists that think the CIA invented jihadism.

So, I would reject the idea that it is the people trying to shut down debate and impose a kind of populist censorship on the issue that are standing up for the values we keep talking about on this thread. They're not. They're simply trying to protect Western interests in a much more mundane and less laudable way.

I agree a lot of the things we do are as morally abhorrent as a lot of the things they do. If agent A deliberately targets innocent civilians, it doesn't matter who agent A is. The action is wrong. What you also have to look at too though is the level of systematicity of such atrocities and the checks in balances in society to prevent them. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, I think these checks and balances are largely failing and the military have gotten away with way too much. But I don't see ISIS having any such checks and balances in place at all. Has any ISIS combatant ever been tried and convicted for abusing an infidel? I doubt it. And that difference in context can't be ignored.

Maybe. — Bitter Crank

Well, apart from the recent furore over the surprisingly emotive topic of water charges not much in the way of menacing going on that I know of. The exception would be if you are a woman who wants an abortion...

I cannot "put my head together" with people who think the history of Western imperialism entitles them to say that Western society is not superior to the society that ISIS is building. — jamalrob

I don't see anyone here claiming that (except maybe discoii). Certainly, Western imperialism undermines attempts to take the high moral ground against ISIS, but that doesn't equate to a claim of moral equivalence nor does it suggest that we aren't far better off living in Western societies.

Just to repeat, the reason this is important is that there will never be a non-fundamentalist, non-violent, democratic alternative to motivate the young people who are drawn to Islamism unless people in the West stand up and fight for those values — jamalrob

I totally agree we need to support enlightenment values but we don't do that by rushing into war and/or supporting or ignoring injustices against Muslims. There was nothing enlightened about the last war in Iraq and there is nothing enlightened about the continuing war in Afghanistan or the treatment of Palestinians by Israel and so on. We stand up for enlightenment values by acting in a way that reflects those values not by fighting militarily those who disagree with us about them (though in this case there are other reasons to fight under debate).

It is a problem that European liberals are divided roughly along the lines apparent in this thread, and we do need unity, but we can't just pretend these differences don't exist. — jamalrob

I don't think the lines are really drawn the way you're drawing them. I agree with a lot of what you said about the need to protect our values, but I also agree with a lot of the analysis of benkei and ssu concerning the difficulties and complexities involved in trying to export them, particularly militarily. So, maybe there are extreme liberals out there who are absolute cultural relativists and think we have no responsibility to do anything anywhere that would interfere with others' ways of life, and would see no way to morally distinguish between ISIS's practices and ours. But what I'm hearing on this thread from most of those opposing your arguments is much more nuanced than that.

Ireland. Mostly harmless.

Sadly unsurprising to see the most "Christian" red states turn out to be among the first to give the red light those in need.

I am unsure about what will work, and how far bombing can be used without making the situation worse, although it seems to me indispensable at the moment, if used carefully — jamalrob

You don't know what to do and, unfortunately, the governments doing things don't know what to do either. But they're still doing them because like you they feel the need to do something. That's understandable but it's a very questionable ethical position. Much more effective would be to make an argument that showed how such actions would cause more good than harm, and that argument needs to address the political complexities that posters like @Benkei and @ssu have raised rather than just gloss over them. I don't see that being done here. I see the aspiration that ISIS be punished for what they did and that's an aspiration we all share but a retributive form of justice isn't enough here. If immediate military punishment of ISIS is more likely to cause more attacks like the one in Paris then it's probably not the best option. I don't know for sure that that is the case but as things stand right now I personally would not want to risk that kind of outcome just to kill some madmen for whom death is little more than a path to paradise.

Just want to add too that what unites us on this thread is far more important than what divides us. No doubt all of us would like to see the end of ISIS, and no doubt all of us appreciate the fact that we don't live in the nightmare they have created in the Middle East and the one they want to spread across the world. Sickening stuff keeps happening here and over there and I think that's thrown us all off kilter. I think the most useful approach now would be to put our heads together and ask the difficult question as to what really would work not only to defeat ISIS militarily but to remove the fuel that fires these types of movements (as you're touching on in your second paragraph above). Continuing to bang our heads against each other because of our different political views isn't going to get us very far.

@shmik - (Typed manually)

@shmik - (Using auto system)

the meaning of words is determined by linguistic convention; i.e. the definitions that are based on long-term linguistic practice, whereas the meaning of sentences is much more open to novelty, to the influences that come from extra-linguistic contexts. — John

I don't really object to that as you put it here, John.

It would seem that is why "Tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq" counts as a word (even though it is not identifiable as any of our conventional word types): because it is always used in a linguistically defined context in that culture, whereas the English equivalent sentence is not.

Consider, for example, how we would determine the meaning of the following sentence: 'I wouldn't mind if the lights were turned off for good'. There is no way to know what that sentence means absent an extra-linguistic context. — John

I think it's counted as a word just for grammatical reasons. I imagine the same type of contextual cues would be needed to fully interpret its meaning as are required in English. Ambiguous syntactical structures would seem to be a better candidate for differences in interpretative difficulty across languages. So, for example, in English a sentence like "I like her cooking" regardless of extralinguistic context has built in semantic ambiguity (which I'm sure a little imagination quickly reveals) attributable to its syntax alone. It's quite probable that this disappears in translation to many other languages.

Anyway, if I haven't addressed your point here, feel free to reiterate.

For me if "Tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq" counts logically and semantically as a word then it follows that its English translation must also, since they share the same logical and semantic form — John

You can translate even within English among synonyms from those of one word to those of more than one and vice versa. I "give in", mentioned before, means I "surrender". You go from (verb + preposition) to (verb). There is no requirement either within or between languages that semantic units retain the form of a word and its associated word class(es). Words are strings of letters that happen to have come together over time and in translation they can be broken up and combined in sometimes unpredictable ways. They don't have a guaranteed structural integrity. A polysynthetic language like Yupik demonstrates that. So, from a linguistic point of view, "Tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq" does count as a word and its translation in English does count as several words. That shouldn't be a matter of dispute.

If translation is possible then the sense must be retained, which means that the logic of the semantic units is more or less equivalent. From this it follows that if "tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq" semantically counts as a word then its English equivalent must also. — John

This argument would lead by reductio ad absurdum to the conclusion that if the Irish "dúinn" is counted as a word then the English "for us" must also be counted as a word because they mean the same thing.

If anyone's wondering why that didn't get deleted, it's because it's in Feedback. Viewer discretion is advised.

Welcome, Andrew. 8-)

- You can upload it on a third party site for free and link if you like.

I can see both sides to this. But whatever happens, as I said, will at least likely end up pleasing more people than the present system does.

Yes, as the situation develops there may be more for us to debate but as we both seem to agree that there shouldn't be a knee-jerk military response, our positions are not all that polarized for now.

- My interpretation of our exchange obviously differed from yours but your comments on that are welcome.

You seem to have implied that you would be open to military action were proper planning in place. Is that correct? — Thorongil

I am open to whatever causes the minimum loss of innocent life both in the short and long term. That will require a combination of alliance-making, diplomacy and possibly some form of military action. I am against any knee-jerk military response.

I doubt you marched against the war. In all probability, you marched against the handling of the post-war occupation. — Thorongil

I. Marched. Against. The. War. Before it started. In London. Can I make it any clearer?

But now in retrospect, I do support, or would have supported, the war itself — Thorongil

You would have supported it and yet you have the audacity to call me callous and uncaring. You should be more circumspect in your personal judgments of people you know little or nothing about.

- It's not being a callous defeatist to demand an intelligent strategy in the Middle East for a change. I marched against the Iraq war. If I and others like me had been successful, we wouldn't be in this situation. And believe me, we were labelled callous defeatists by the likes of you then too. But we didn't march because we were callous and didn't care about the troubles of others. We marched because we didn't want to see innocent people getting killed and because we knew the whole endeavour would end in disaster. And we were right. Unlike the people who supported the war, I don't consider myself responsible for the murder and mayhem that has occurred since. What about you, Thorongil? Were you out marching against the war in Iraq or were you one of those who supported it? And if the latter, how are you taking responsibility for your mistake?

Well, you have to put your mouse over a post to know how many likes it has, or if you're on a mobile device tap the post. So, there seems to be an element of choice there that isn't present with the accrued likes next to the icons, and, again, I think that's a reasonable balance. Anyhow, we staff will go along with whatever the community as a whole wants. There'll never be full agreement but I think we'll get closer to the ideal than we're at now.

Like? — Thorongil

I don't know and neither do you. The difference between us seems to be that I am the one suggesting we wait until we do know.

And there is more nuance to simply advocating "bombing them." You can't merely assert that this is all we have been doing in Afghanistan and that the "bombing" solution therefore hasn't worked. I can quite easily make the case that we need to "bomb them" better rather than not at all. There were really stupid military mistakes made in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The management of both wars was truly inep — Thorongil

Yes, it was inept, not least because the wars were started for the wrong reasons and without proper planning. It seems to me that you are advocating we repeat the same mistake. I am not in principle against bombing ISIS, but I don't see any evidence it's going to work. Quite the contrary. Every similar attempt in recent years has been a failure. The onus is on those who want to take military action to provide a proper justification for it. The desire for revenge isn't enough, particularly because of the possibility it might end up backfiring and cause more attacks like the recent one in Paris.

I'm cherry picking? So, your claim is that the situation in Nazi Germany pre-WWII is just as analogous to the situation of ISIS in Iraq as that of the forerunners of ISIS in Iraq during the Iraq war is? Really? Don't you think we should stick to analogies that have some relationship to the present realities we are describing in terms of culture, religion, location, military strength, tactics and so on? Look to Afghanistan. Have the Taliban been defeated? How many years have we been bombing them now? What we need in Iraq is a sophisticated and intelligent response to the threat ISIS pose. "Bomb them" is not that response.

Thanks for that link, Tiff.

And how do we destroy them? The more we kill, the more we create. That's the lesson of the Iraq war. Unless you want to carpet bomb the entire region and kill every man, woman and child there - which would make us no better than ISIS morally - then the exercise is probably futile.

(Incidentally, they don't need a military. All they need is a follower in one of our countries with a gun or with a home-made bomb strapped to them. How do you destroy that capability?)