From where shall this anticipated efficiency emerge?

In addition to violating the separation of powers established by the Constitution, the DOGE introduces a plurality of agents where Hamilton argued there should only be one:

But one of the weightiest objections to a plurality in the Executive, and which lies as much against the last as the first plan, is, that it tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility.

Responsibility is of two kinds to censure and to punishment. The first is the more important of the two, especially in an elective office. Man, in public trust, will much oftener act in such a manner as to render him unworthy of being any longer trusted, than in such a manner as to make him obnoxious to legal punishment. But the multiplication of the Executive adds to the difficulty of detection in either case. It often becomes impossible, amidst mutual accusations, to determine on whom the blame or the punishment of a pernicious measure, or series of pernicious measures, ought really to fall. It is shifted from one to another with so much dexterity, and under such plausible appearances, that the public opinion is left in suspense about the real author. The circumstances which may have led to any national miscarriage or misfortune are sometimes so complicated that, where there are a number of actors who may have had different degrees and kinds of agency, though we may clearly see upon the whole that there has been mismanagement, yet it may be impracticable to pronounce to whose account the evil which may have been incurred is truly chargeable.

``I was overruled by my council. The council were so divided in their opinions that it was impossible to obtain any better resolution on the point.'' These and similar pretexts are constantly at hand, whether true or false. And who is there that will either take the trouble or incur the odium, of a strict scrutiny into the secret springs of the transaction? Should there be found a citizen zealous enough to undertake the unpromising task, if there happen to be collusion between the parties concerned, how easy it is to clothe the circumstances with so much ambiguity, as to render it uncertain what was the precise conduct of any of those parties? — Federalist Paper #70

This captures the peculiar way that Trump says "I, alone can fix it" while never being the cause of any problem. The "buck" of Truman is forever on a cruise ship, playing shuffleboard with the other retirees.

Yes, during corporate takeovers, eliminating duplicate functions and getting rid of unwanted functions is standard operating procedure. Firing FBI agents because they did their jobs is another matter. The decrease in regulatory function by simply removing personnel circumvents the role of Congress as a separate branch of government.

The culture of a professional civil service that curries favor to no party will not be improved by such measures. They will, instead, bring back the patronage system of Tammany Hall.

I am surprised by the number here who support monarchy.

The new executive is firing many people in the name of changing policy. Those mostly comprise of people who were doing what their job description required of them by established law. The idea that those job descriptions were a personal choice of the employee is stupid. That is the pervasive algorithm of the new administration.

Any private enterprise who behaved in the same way would disappear in a heartbeat.

The changes and movements of people from the early Bronze age are significant. We don't have to go back as far as the emergence of the species.

That's a bit of a strange thing to say. Aren't Germans indigenous to Germany, the Irish indigenous to Ireland, and the French indigenous to France? Etc. — Arcane Sandwich

Depends upon how far back you go.

I try to see through those lenses. But my personal and family quality of life will suffer if those changes occur. My workplace will change for the worse. My city will become more fearful and less diverse.

When you said that your old world had disappeared, you sounded excited by the prospect of a new one.

I feel like the USA I grew up in is gone. — frank

What was it like?

I think Trump's vision of securing Canada and Greenland is genius. — frank

Does this dream of Manifest Destiny promise to bring the old USA back?

The presence of Musk, Vance, and Vought signals that visionaries are gathering around Trump. — frank

Musk and Zuckerberg run global empires whose fortunes will increase after having fellated Trump. The control of the communication environment is shrinking to the needs of predatory capitalists. MAGA is their mascot now.

It is so cute when it sits up and begs.

It will be surprising if Canada puts together a rope-a-dope response to the tariffs of the kind that Mexico has done.

Each of the Provinces have been focused upon particular targets to boycott. The emphasis upon targeting states that support Trump is not a feature of the Mexican statements.

Edit to add: Canada buys 30 days.

As far as values go, Nietzsche drew a sharp distinction between Christianity and ancient philosophers:

To harm stupidity.- Surely, the faith preached so stubbornly and with so much conviction, that egoism is reprehensible, has on the whole harmed egoism (while benefiting, as I shall repeat a hundred times, the herd instincts!) -above all, by depriving egoism of its good conscience and bidding us to find in it the true source of all unhappiness. "Your selfishness is the misfortune of your life''-that was preached for thousands of years and harmed, as I have said, selfishness and deprived it of much spirit, much cheerfulness, much sensitivity, much beauty; it made selfishness stupid and ugly and poisoned it.

The ancient philosophers taught that the main source of misfortune was something very different. Beginning with Socrates, these thinkers never wearied of preaching: "Your thoughtlessness and stupidity, the way you live according to the rule, your submission to your neighbor's opinion is the reason why you so rarely achieve happiness; we thinkers, as thinkers, are the
happiest of all.''

Let us not decide here whether this sermon against stupidity had better reasons on its side than did the sermon against selfishness. What is certain, however, is that it deprived stupidity
of its good conscience; these philosophers harmed stupidity. — Nietzsche, Gay Science, 328

The scope of the book, of which I am less than halfway through, is said by Rödl to address the validity of empirical judgements by the end of it. That suggests that more is required than the claim about what "anyone already knows".

But it is fair to say he claims his view is less deluded than others. I am not sure what I think about it, but that element was missing from the discussion here so far.

It was the day before tariffs and all through the house, not a creature was stirring,

unless you were one of the many nations planning their responses to every conceivable proposal.

What is being opposed by Rödl is the ground for thinking:

If Rodl is to subtly critique the various conceptions of thought on the basis of not properly capturing self-consciousness — Leontiskos

By speaking of how "objectivity and self-consciousness can be conjoined", Rödl is sounding a retreat from where "various conceptions of thought" are possible contenders of a true condition. His argument is the antithesis to a prolegomenon of any future metaphysics:

The science of judgment does not stake out a position, located in a space of positions structured by relations of exclusion or inclusion. It says only what anyone always already knows, knows insofar as she judges at all. — ibid. page 39

At the end of 3.1, a footnote compares the "the science without contrary" with a passage from Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 251, suggests that it is the defining mark of “grammatical sentences”, which are the province of philosophical reflection, to be without contrary. — ibid. Footnote 1

In regard to Rödl militating against the mind/not mind opposition, perhaps a closer example of concordance with Wittgenstein is in the Blue Book where solipsism is said not to be an opinion.

The Klima quote does demonstrate that he and Rödl are both addressing a shared understanding
of force/content propositions. 's description of second order judgement also bears that out. Perhaps the impending discussion of Aristotle will touch upon some of the distinctions between ancient and modern concepts that concern Klima. But those distinctions do not directly concern Rödl's effort here to completely defeat the force/content explanation for all time.

Rödl does not treat his opposition as an equal in a dispute such as Anselm or Aquinas would argue against. Rödl uses the term "reflection" in a consistent way in the book. An early example:

Therefore there is no such thing as a first-person proposition. There has been opposition to the idea that first-person thought is a propositional attitude. This is helpful, for it weakens the immunity to reflection enjoyed by the idea. Yet the opposition is limited; it limits itself by thinking of the first person as marking out a special class of thoughts. — ibid. page 34

To lose this immunity is to become exposed in a way that causes distress to the thinker. The isolation of immunity interferes with reflection. The question of epistemic agency is treated as an illusion:

I am doing something, I am active. It is not a point about the content. There is no notion that the I think is inside p, no notion that reflecting on the I think is reflecting on p. The self-consciousness of thought is not in view in the infatuation with agency — ibid. 35

.

The coup de grâce given to his proposed interlocutors:

But if what I say is true, then the demand for argument does not show intellectual acumen, but betrays a lack of understanding. An argument establishes that something is so by citing grounds for it. Embracing the argument involves affirming these grounds. An argument rests judgment on judgment. But if what I say is true, then the knowledge of it is contained in any judgment. There is no meaning in the idea that I might come to know it by turning to a further judgment. — ibid. page 39

Now that T company has had to retreat from the federal funding freeze fiasco, I wonder if they will carry out the promised tariff show on Feb 1. These guys are starting to cut into my budget.

You presume what you might conclude. If 'matter' is not a something we encounter in experience, then it has been shuttled off into another ward.

No need to speak ill of it or praise it.

Because if the critique of the force/content distinction is ultimately that it is dualistic, then I'm not sure where else there is to go. — Leontiskos

From what I have gathered so far, that is not Rödl's interest. It is in 2.7 that the objection to the force/content distinction comes to a head:

The force-content distinction enables us to describe and understand all these phenomena. Thus it has great explanatory power. Giving it up is costly. Unless we are being given assurance that we will be able to understand all this without that distinction, we do well to keep it.

This would make sense if the force-content distinction did. But it does not. What is confused in itself does not provide understanding. As the force-content distinction makes no sense, it has no explanatory power. There is no cost to abandoning it. On the contrary. It costs to retain it. Using the distinction, we will be certain not to understand what we seek to understand; we will be certain to distort it and impede its comprehension. — ibid. 2.7, page 37

Whether one follows this reasoning or not, the argument is not collapsing a duality but asking for a different kind of distinction unobserved by the force/content advocates:

Thus it may seem that c-propositions are the main topic; they are what the semantic theory is about. Yet, the concept of a c-proposition can claim to be a semantic concept only if c-propositions can be shown to inform the use of language. And they can inform this use only by figuring in the thoughts of those who use the language, as these think how to use it and how it is correct to use it. Thus the soundness of the concept of a c-proposition depends on there being this structure to the thought of someone who uses a sentence to make an assertion: thinking it correct to use the sentence in the way that she does, she thinks that a c-proposition is true at the context in which she uses it. — ibid. page 30

The question becomes, on what basis does that "structure of thought" involve verification from what is presumed to exist outside of it. At that point, I do not see it as a matter of how "Pat" or "Quenton" choose what is happening.

The Federal Grant Freeze announced today has already started to draw lawsuits.

The broad sweep is a thumb in the eye of the Legislative Branch as they involve appropriated funds.

Since the order is so immediate, efforts are being made to get a restraining order to stop it.

T administration has their best people on it.

When Brooke Rollins was asked who would work on farms if the labor force was deported, she said she would address any ‘hypothetical issues that turn out to be real. — Investigate Midwest

The broad sweep of the federal raids has already prompted many workers to stay home in California.

Fair enough.

Rödl says that the I think accompanies all my thoughts, or at the very least he wants to place a very strong emphasis on self-consciousness in thinking and judging. It seems overboard. What is the context that would account for this sort of emphasis? Thanks. — Leontiskos

What is a self in the thesis is not a given. The critique of the Fregean sets of references moves away from the self who affirms stuff (or not) in all situations. Rödl's beginning point of rejecting mind versus not-mind as the ground of possible experience in the Kant fashion is either a benefit or not. I am trying to hear him out on that basis.

I decided to follow this question at least as far as of how Aristotle is read by Rödl.

Have you not settled all possible readings to be useless?

While I appreciate many of your observations, the arrogance of this remark is not a benefit.

There is no such thing as a “Public Weal” — NOS4A2

That is odd to hear after your years of arguing for a particular vision of that above others.

I was not predicting who came out on top. Just pointing to a paradox to accepting trump's conditions for those interested in doing a particular job.

As the matter involves the balance of power between the executive and the legislative branches, even the most hard core trumpsters may not kiss the ring for this.

Since the IGs are a crucial element of Congressional oversight, it will be interesting to see if the GOP will let this go forward. At the very least, having to seat this many new officers is not how the legislators were imagining their Spring.

Are you saying this in response to actually reading the book or stating an opinion in general about such attempts?

But it relates to his later point from Thomas Nagel about 'thoughts we can't get outside of'. Nagel emphasizes that there are perspectives—like the validity of reason or the unity of thought—that we cannot evaluate "from the outside" because they form the very framework within which all thinking and evaluation occur. — Wayfarer

So, what do you make of Rödl's statement that Nagel is making a similar mistake? (as pointed to previously}.

What Rodl is claiming, using the synonymy of "thought" and "judgment," is that thinking that things are so is not different from being conscious or aware of so thinking. So the million-dollar question is, When I think about my judgment, which we know is a thought1 (a mental event), is my new thought about that judgment also a thought1? I think much of Rodl's thesis rests on denying this. Self-consciousness has got to be a thought2 item, something "accompanying" any thought1, not an additional simultaneous thought1 (mental event). — J

I think the problem of talking about what is a new 'thought' has to first pass through the issue of the first person being the one making the judgement:

The Fregean account conceives the first-person pronoun as a variety of reference, which singles out an object in a special way, indicated by the phrase, as the one who is affirming the proposition.This alleged manner of singling out an object explodes the conception of thought that it brings to first-person thought: a thought that is of her who affirms it as affirming it contains the subject’s affirmation of it. It is not a proposition. The first-person pronoun is no variety of reference, but an expression of self-consciousness: it signifies the internality to what is thought of its being thought. The Fregean attempts to represent self-consciousness, which dissolves the force-content distinction, as a special content. If we are to understand the first-person pronoun, we must understand self-consciousness. The first step to this is abandoning the force-content distinction. — ibid. page 25

The problem of one thought and then another is a product of the view of propositions Rödl is militating against.

As I think this in the first person, I represent that substance as thinking that she is a human being. That she thinks this is one thing, that she is what she thinks herself to be, another. As we shall see, the semantic framework deriving from Kaplan and Lewis in effect imposes this articulation on first-person thought: she who thinks a first-person thought thinks something of a certain substance, which substance, in a separate thought, she thinks to be herself. — ibid. 27

The isolation of the "private thinker" on page 23 culminates in this rejection of the "affirming subject":

In this sense, all propositions will be related to the one who thinks them, and thus in this sense, it may be said that all propositions are first-person propositions. This is a technical ploy; it has no philosophical significance. In the same way, all sentences may be treated as bearing a tense, even if they are tenseless. They will turn out to be true at all times if they are true at one. — ibid. page 28

The discussion at this point reminds me of a passage in the Theaetetus where true and false opinions are compared:

Soc Excellent. And do you define thought as I do?

Theaet. How do you define it?

Soc: As the talk which the soul has with itself about any subjects which it considers. You must not suppose that I know this that I am declaring to you. But the soul, as the image presents itself to me, when it thinks, is merely conversing with itself, asking itself questions and answering, affirming and denying. When it has arrived at a decision, whether slowly or with a sudden bound, and is at last agreed, and is not in doubt, we call that its opinion; and so I define forming opinion as talking and opinion as talk which has been held, not with someone else, nor yet aloud, but in silence with oneself. How do you define it? — Plato, Theaetetus, 189e4, translated by Fowler

Rödl is speaking more strictly about what Plato also recognizes as a limit to description.

The non-discriminating pardon of 1/6 criminals is bad for the rule of law. It specifically empowers those who see themselves as executors of T's will outside of what T can perform as official acts. The recent expansion of executive privilege means T cannot be associated with such behavior when excrement hits whirling objects.

The withdrawal from WHO is a strategic mistake apart from the idiocy of not engaging with public health problems as they emerge.

I get that you do not desire retribution. But there are others who do.

What to do with them? Will they have power in the coming days?

You seem confident that this question has nothing to do with your circumstances.

Is your condition bereft of any differences that choices made will affect outcomes? Your laughter is like that of the gods.

Why comment when so satisfied with your superior position?

There is an ambiguity in your delight. You are above the fray.

Said like a true adult.

The latest T proposals speak of sending U.S. military down to the border before figuring out how that fits in with the other federal, state, and county jurisdictions.

As a citizen here, that promotes the expansion of federal power above that of local communities. It hurts the brain to have self-identified Libertarians support such measures.

More important than that is the proposed abandonment of regulation in all its forms. The efficacy of the anti-regulation movement will produce the most immediate outcomes for life in our nation. The environment, levels of education, standards of police behavior, acceptance of chosen forms of identity, equal rights under the law, national responses to health threats, etcetera.

Whatever bad and good we may have done for others, the dissolution of our infrastructure is what will consume the next decade.

So is the idea that he follows Hegel in disagreeing with Kant about noumena but he does not disagree with respect to his interpretation that, "The I think accompanies all my thoughts"? — Leontiskos

I need to read and think more about it but perhaps Rödl may not want to accept all of Hegel either. Mww's account of the 'thinking substance' underscores some of the problems with distinguishing first person thought and objective judgement. The way Rödl separates them is that first person thoughts do not raise the problem of validation that objective judgements do. That preserves some of the isolation expressed in Kant's version of given objects. I think Rödl is inept in getting rid of Kant's "can accompany each thought". The region of "self-consciousness" is neither expanded nor reduced by the formulation.

Another element that makes me wonder about Rödl's relationship with Hegel is the impending chapters that incorporate Aristotle's' view of the thinker coming into being. I haven't gotten that far.

Or perhaps you are claiming that Rodl mildly disagrees with the idea that he attributes to Kant? — Leontiskos

I think Rödl is greatly influenced by Hegel's criticism of Kant. The expression of common ground can be found here:

This bears repeating: there is no meaning in saying that, in an act of thinking, two things are thought, pu and I think p. Kant said: the I think accompanies all my thoughts.3 Hegel calls this way of putting it “inept”. However, in defense of Kant, we note that he hastened to add that the I think cannot in turn be accompanied by any representation. Thus he sought to make it plain that the I think is not something thought alongside the thought that it accompanies, but internal to what is thought as such. When I say, the I think is contained in what is thought, this may with equal justice be called inept. It suggests that there are two things, one containing the other. Perhaps we should say, what is thought is suffused with the I think. But here, too, if we undertake to think through the metaphor, we come to grief before long. — ibid. page 6

Where Rödl diverges from Kant relates to Hegel's objections to the role of 'intuition' giving us objects to understand or not:

S]ince an object can appear to us only by means of … pure forms of sensibility, i.e., be an object of empirical intuition, space and time are thus pure intuitions that contain a priori the conditions of the possibility of appearances, and the synthesis in them has objective validity. The categories of the understanding, on the contrary, do not represent to us the conditions under which objects are given in intuition at all, hence objects can indeed appear to us without necessarily having to be related to functions of the understanding, and therefore without the understanding containing their a priori conditions. Thus a difficulty is revealed here that we did not encounter in the field of sensibility, namely how subjective conditions of thinking should have objective validity, i.e., yield conditions of the possibility of objects; for appearances can certainly be given in intuition without functions of the understanding. … [T]hat objects of sensible intuition must accord with the formal conditions of sensibility that lie in the mind a priori is clear from the fact that otherwise they would not be objects for us; but that they must also accord with the conditions that the understanding requires for the synthetic unity of thinking is a conclusion that is not so easily seen. For appearances could after all be so constituted that the understanding would not find them in accord with the conditions of its unity, and everything would then lie in such confusion that, e.g., in the succession of appearances nothing would offer itself that would furnish a rule of synthesis and thus correspond to the concept of cause and effect, so that this concept would be entirely empty, nugatory, and without significance. Appearances would nonetheless offer objects to our intuition, for intuition by no means requires the functions of thinking. — Kant, CPR A89-91/B122-123

I read Rödl's rejection of the mind/world opposition to include the unknowable "things in themselves". That is more than a mild disagreement.

On the eve of the new executive, it is impossible to know which part of the rhetoric was bluster and what was not.

Will there be trade wars, the removal of the Department of Education funding, the weaponization of the DOJ and the FBI, camps of stateless people, and a new colonial ambition to signal our withdrawal from the alliances built over decades of shared adversity?

The matter of duality is not dissolved but framed in way outside of contending dependencies — Paine

Could you explain that a little further? A passage that I highlighted, adjacent to the one you quoted, is:

The aim of this essay, as an introduction to absolute idealism, is to make plain that it is impossible to think judgment through this opposition: mind here, world there, two things in relation or not. To dismantle this opposition is not to propose that the world is mind dependent. Nor is it to propose that the mind is world-dependent. These ways of speaking solidify the opposition; they are an impediment to comprehension. — Wayfarer

This says to me that the problem is not an unnecessary division. Rödl objects to Nagel and Moore in this way:

They hold fast to the notion that the objectivity of judgment resides in its being of something other, something that is as it is independently of being thought to be so. In consequence, their result is an ultimate incomprehensibility of our thought of ourselves as judging and knowing. — ibid. page 14

The proposed solution is not to find a register where the two terms are one but to preserve the dynamic of 'first person thinking' over against 'objectivity' that does not have them jockeying against one another as possible grounds of experience. Rödl is saying we have valid reasons for thinking the former differences exist that we have projected into the idea of the latter.