Are you in agreement with Putnam and Husserl, re: the representational human cognitive system, or are you using them just as some informational response to the OP? — Mww

I am in agreement with them. I was too lazy to write my own response.

Our minds are not able to create the existence of a naturally occurring objective fact, but our minds are able to interpret, in a variety of ways, the meaning of the existence and nature of a naturally occurring objective fact. — charles ferraro

A ‘naturally occurring objective fact’ implies certain consequences, properties and relations, and all of these only make sense i relation to a body that interacts with them. Put differently, it is impossible to think about a so-called objective fact about nature without that fact implying and specifying systems of interactions between us and the object. That in fact is what an ‘object’ is , a system of correlated interactions between us and it, both actual and anticipated. When we change our thinking about the object, we are producing a new system of actual and anticipated interactions. To say that it ‘exists’ independently of us is to say nothing at all.

“To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:

If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.”

Francisco Varela, Embodied Mind

I agree that the pace of cultural
change has accelerated. I disagree that one can lift out science from among all of the modalities of cultural
creativity ( the arts, poetry, politics, music , philosophy) and give it sole credit from this acceleration. All cultural
modes of an era are inseparably intertwined and thus all are equally , reciprocally responsible for intellectual development.

Is there a simple, reliable criterion one can use to isolate and identify precisely those characteristics the human mind contributes to the objects of experience? — charles ferraro

Here’s the problem. One can look at a printed word and perceive it only as a random series of physical shapes, one could recognize it as a string of letters, or one could perceive it only as its semantic meaning. Now, are we justified in saying that each perception is of an objective fact independent of what our perspective contributes to it? Or are the phenomenologists correct in claiming that it is incoherent to assume a world of facts outside of our apprehension of them? Is there instead in each case only what appears to me in the mode in which it appears to me and nothing behind it, no thing-in-itself?

People are thus what Metzinger calls naïve realists, who believe they are perceiving reality directly when in actuality they are only perceiving representations of reality. — Wikipedia

Here’s Husserl’s critique of Metzinger’s representationaliam, according to Zahavi:

Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external? On Husserl's anti-representationalist view, however, the fit and link between mind and world – between perception and reality – isn't merely external or coincidental: “consciousness (mental process) and real being are anything but coordinate kinds of being, which dwell peaceably side by side and occasionally become ‘related to' or ‘connected with' one another” (Husserl 1982: 111

“For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that
the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our
access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and
intersubjectivity. Indeed, rather than being the antipode of objectivity, rather than constituting an obstacle and hindrance to scientific knowledge, (inter)subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary enabling condition. “

Here’s a good argument from Hilary Putnam for why the subjective dimension of experience cannot be separated from our objective , empirical descriptions of the world , including our attempts to reduce consciousness to biological structures. Since subjectivity is inseparable
from consciousness , this is at the same time an argument for the irreducible character of 1st personal
experience, the impossibility of splitting it off from or reducing it to 3rd person accounts.

Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”.

Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes (Putnam 1992, 120). Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what w e cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices” (Putnam 1987, 33). We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two.

It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned (Putnam 1990, 28, 1981, 54, 1987, 77)

Lacan was a post-structuralist in the sense that his psychological philosophy proceeded after structuralism, but not in the sense that he had moved beyond it. — thewonder

Post-structuralism is a kind of amorphous label, but the group of mostly French philosophers who critiques the structuralist models of Levi-Straus and Althusser tended to critique the notion that structural linguistic representations could be assigned a truth value with respect to their meaning. Lacan did believe one could pair a structural signifier with a signified as a correspondence of truth.

Derrida certainly didn’t think he was a post-structuralist. His symbolic rendering of the unconscious seems to be a classic structuralist move.

All places in America, both Latin and North, are uninhabitable. The air there makes lazy. — Daniel Banyai

For two hundred years , from Leibnitz to Heidegger, Germany absolutely dominated philosophy. Then it destroyed its intellectual environment thanks to two world wars and the extermination of many of its best intellectuals. Most of the rest fled to the U.S. and elsewhere. For a brief period , from the 1940’s through the 1980’s ,France took up the slack as the default philosophical center of Europe( Sartre, Levinas, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bausrillard) but since then I would argue that Europe has not produced any philosophical ideas more notable than what is coming from Britain or the U.S. In my opinion. the U.S. has taken the baton from Europe as the new philosophical center of the world. I think it was helped in this regard by the wave of intellectual refugees from the Nazis who settled in places like NewYork and made the new school for social research a haven for cutting edge thought. And later on French thinkers like Derrida and Foucault spent much time in the U.S. and influenced American writers like Judith Butler.
Throughout the centuries , remarkable centers of philosophical talent have emerged , such as Athens , Alexandria, Florence, Amsterdam, Paris , Vienna and New York. But one should probably start by listing those living writers that mean the most to one and see if they happen to be clustered in a particular region. Or pick a single figure and see if you can find a way to study with them.

Do you think Streetlight is a happy person?

imagine someone replying that in such conversations "focusing on differences in perspective and worldview" instead of direct condemnation of slave-owners. — Maw

Condemnation is easy and doesn’t require thought so much as visceral reaction. You don’t do yourself a service by taking this easy route. The most difficult thing in the world to do is be open to the possibility that the one you are instinctively driven to hate , to condemn, to criminalize, construes the world though an entirely different lens than you do. You think all that separate us is our moral compass , but that is what binds us. What separates us is the almost impossible
difficulty of bridging alien systems of interpretation of fact.

And still you've got nothing but acquiescent silence for Isreali oppression & atrocities. Where's your fucking moral clarity, Joshs? — 180 Proof

Are you serious with this silly over the top rhetoric? Who talks like this? You sound like a walking cliche. You have no idea what my actual involvement or commitment has been to social causes or suffering individuals, because you never bothered to ask me. I don’t think you want to know , because that would threaten your ‘moral clarity’. With all your history of assured , theoretically grounded activism , you’re triggered to insecure belligerence over a few measly provocative paragraphs from a stranger on a philosophy forum? Have you learned nothing from these great thinkers you mention?

Your kind of passion and approach to politics was desperately needed 60’
years ago, when there really was something like moral clarity, and the methods you prefer were appropriate. Today almost every political situation the wokeness cultists attach themselves to is riddled with complexities and ambiguities, but the only tool the cultist has available is a bludgeon. The irony is that notions like CRT are intellectually complex , and so lend themselves best to environments like the workplace and academia, where they are having a real and positive effect.

here.

What on earth is an ‘oppressor’ and what could ‘Legitimate’ possibly mean? The answer depends of course on whether you’re a relativist TWAT and how far you’re willing to take that. For me, the belief that such notions can be defined in anything but a hopelessly partisan way is at the heart of most conflicts.
— Joshs
In any violent, vicious conflict, whom do you side with, Joshs: the weaker or the stronger? "David" or "Goliath"? Hint: The answer is fucking partisan. :shade: — 180 Proof

Your bullying hostility isnt motivated by a need to back the weaker against the stronger, it’s driven by your moralist judgement of the MOTIVES of the stronger. There’s a huge difference between a need to aid the weak out of pragmatic considerations and a thinking which labels the aggressors as immoral, evil, pathological, greedy, selfish. Demonizing your enemy can justify all kinds of ‘evil’ on your part, starting with something even as simple as bullying other commenters on a philosophy site.
I sense a perhaps hidden theological basis to your self-righteousness.

Most Japanese people actually really like foreigners in my experience. — khaled

Of course they do. They’re novelties. Only 2.3% of the country are foreigners. And of those, what’s percentage is non-Asian? Let’s see what happens when foreigners are more than a tiny percentage of the population.

More strawman bullshit. Mazel tov, Bitcon. Now go somewhere else and jerk yourself off. — 180 Proof

I think this writer is talking about you.

“Just as the overreach of the antiracism movement in the summer of 2020 was enforced on social media with ruthless dog-piling and public smearing and shaming, people whose statements have been insufficiently woke—who have failed to cast Palestinians as pure victims and Israelis as pure aggressors—have been subjected to shocking amounts of abuse online.”

Imagine if this discussion was about slavery and someone responded in this manner. — Maw

We SHOULD imagine that this discussion was about slavery, or the holocaust , or serial killers, or Stalin or Pol Pot. That’s the whole point. The model is worthless if it skirts the most blatant examples of alleged oppression and inhumanity.

Textbook example of how many self-described philosophers end up kicking up so much dust just for the sake of it that everything becomes opaque. The result is as you see here: resorting to pseudo-intellectualism as apologia for colonial atrocities. Imagine if this discussion was about slavery and someone responded in this manner. — Maw

On the other hand, there are a group of commenters on this thread( perhaps you included , perhaps not) who seem to evince textbook characteristics of what I call ‘woke cultishness’ . They have been remarkably consistent: a tendency toward bullying ad hominems and an almost compete refusal to delve into moral nuance, ambiguity and complexity associated with the political
issue they are so passionate about. Why is this? I think that in many ways wokism takes the place of religious cults of years past. It shares many of the same characteristics. An intense desire to belong to a community of shared ideals combined with an unsteady or unscholaely grasp of the underlying ideas leads to a hectoring black and white us against them mentality. As Streetlight proclaimed ‘This Israeli-Palestinian conflict provides the ideal example of pure moral clarity’ Well, yes it does if you only see your politics in such rigid terms, which is the hallmark of woke cultishness. Every political conflict must reduce to moral clarity. If it doesn’t they will be compelled to force it into that mold.
These are not the intelllectuals behind the movement , they are the enforcers, the shock troops.

The thing is , I support the intellectual underpinnings of various forms of wokism and CRT. I think they are here to stay in one form or another, and I certainly prefer them to the conservative alternatives. But I think the bandwagon cultists who are not intellectually secure enough to question and reflect on their driving ethico-political assumptions in respectfuldebate are dangerous , because a bullying kind of verbal violence is their main recourse in discussion combined with an inability to actually DISCUSS.

“ If you've been paying attention to social media over the past week, you will have seen this same attempt to redefine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a racial power dynamic, casting Israel as infinitely powerful and Palestinians as completely without agency. And as in America, where antiracism has redefined racism and relocated the problem to a place where it costs little for white liberal elites to "do the work" combatting it, so has this happened in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where real and urgent civil rights abuses against the Palestinians have been obscured by a binary, maximalist view of the situation that's now fully mainstream.”

"Israelis are the OPPRESSORS and Palestinians are the OPPRESSED," one viral Instagram post reads. "There is no 'fighting', there is only Israeli colonisation, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and apartheid." This rhetoric is hardly new to the conflict, but it's become absolutely ubiquitous thanks to the binary of wokeness at play here: There is no "fighting" happening because one side, the Palestinian side, is subsumed by its victim status at the hands of Israeli "colonization." No weapon in the hands of a Palestinian is thus ever real—even, apparently, rockets that have killed Israelis—because Palestinians are the OPPRESSED in the situation, as the drawing would have it, and oppressed people cannot fight, apparently. It's wokeness 101: The oppressor has all the power, all the agency, and the Israelis are the oppressors. Case closed.“

Just as the overreach of the antiracism movement in the summer of 2020 was enforced on social media with ruthless dog-piling and public smearing and shaming, people whose statements have been insufficiently woke—who have failed to cast Palestinians as pure victims and Israelis as pure aggressors—have been subjected to shocking amounts of abuse online.”

i Palestinian suffering is real. Too many have been killed in Gaza. Too many have been brutalized by the police. For too long, Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank have been deprived of basic civil rights, like the right to vote for the government that exercises state power against them and freedom of movement. For too long, Gaza has been forgotten and left to languish under an unnecessarily brutal blockade, its young people and children deprived of any future. Israel has all too often penalized nonviolent resistance instead of bolstering civil society and supporting a new generation of Palestinian leadership. These all fall squarely on Israel's shoulders, and all nonviolent means of pressuring Israel to solve these problems are legitimate.”

BATYA UNGAR-SARGON , NEWSWEEK DEPUTY OPINION EDITOR

Do they live isolated the way Jews used to? — frank

They tend to live in highly concentrated neighborhoods like Willamsburg in New York City or Meah Shearim
in Israel. So they are isolated in this sense but in the midst of large metropolitan areas.

Judaism is a dying religion isn't it? — frank

It is except among the orthodox and ultra-orthodox , whose number have grown wildly. At their current growth rate, they may become a majority of NYC Jews soon.

Well put. I do think the political character of the country has changed as a result of the massive influx of conservatively oriented immigrants from North Africa and Russia. What was once a strong liberal community in Israel has shrunk to a small minority, leaving theocratic and nationalist elements to run amok. Of course these are trends we’re seeing elsewhere in the Mideast as well as in the West.

Yes I understand that you don't want to appear incapable of human sympathy and require half-brained excuses. — Maw

Where do sympathy and empathy come from? Are they simple ‘capacities’ or do they depend on our ability , rather than desire, to understand worldviews alien to our own? Are ‘oppressors’ and ‘evil-doers’ lacking in the intent to care, or so they misinterpret those they ‘oppress’?

Is it threatening for you to contemplate the possibility that there is nothing that distinguishes from you those you condemn for subjugation, prejudice or even atrocity in moral terms? That they believe passionately, as you do, that they are behaving according to the highest standards of morality? And that the root of our conflicts is precisely what you are doing here, questioning moral intent and will to sympathy of the other rather than focusing on differences in perspective and worldview?

Thanks for that from Zizek.
It’s a powerful analysis

Do you get the sense that some of the more strident critics of Israel on this thread are using the Palestinians more as symbolic props than as real people? Kind of like Hollywood movies where the set-up involves an ‘other’ ( black, native american, fill in the blank) victimized and oppressed by the imperialist Western white man. This oppressed other can do no wrong since they are just empty symbols.
— Joshs

What Joshs is actually saying here is that he is so incapable of basic human sympathy that he cannot fathom how others can be capable of it. — Maw

Numbers2018 sees through that self-serving interpretation.

the ideological operative system here is similar to the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology in Zizek's sense. The grounding desire, an aspiration to immediately achieve the ultimate peace and justice, presupposes the evil ('sublime') object, invested with negativity and monstrosity. As a result, an ideological figure of 'Israel' has been constructed. 'Israel' has been labelled, demonized, and removed from civil discourse and the historical context. As Zizek points out, 'a pathological, paranoid construction' rejects objective facts and arguments. It employs them just for rationalizations and self-affirmations." — Number2018

don't know why the world, or at least the Western world seems to care about this conflict so much more than larger ones. It seems to me that it is becoming just a proxy for the culture wars wracking America, and I can't say that I think that bodes well for the US or European powers being able to act as an arbiter for peace. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Don’t know if you saw my previous post:

Israel has become a flashpoint for the left not just because of its subjugation of palestinians
but because its form of nationalistic democracy exemplifies the Enlightenment era liberal political self-identity that the West is trying to distance itself from via brutal self-critique. There is nothing quite so threatening to a person than witnessing a way of thinking in an other that they have themselves only recently struggled to free themselves from. This is a thread common to the intensity of. BLM, #Metoo and anti-Israel sentiment. Israel is us Westerners, the way we used to be, the way many of us still are ( Trump , Brexit supporters) .

wonder if Israel is turning itself into Satan. That would be so ironic. — frank

It does get hot as hell there in summer

This is why I hate these political discussions. What on earth is an ‘oppressor’ and what could ‘Legitimate’ possibly mean? The answer depends of course on whether you’re a relativist and how far you’re willing to take that. For me, the belief that such notions can be defined in anything but a hopelessly partisan way is at the heart of most conflicts.

I will say this. Israel has become a flashpoint for the left not just because of its subjugation of palestinians
but because its form of nationalistic democracy exemplifies the Enlightenment era liberal political self-identity that the West is trying to distance itself from via brutal self-critique. There is nothing quite so threatening to a person than witnessing a way of thinking in an other that they have themselves only recently struggled to free themselves from. This is a thread common to the intensity of. BLM, #Metoo and anti-Israel sentiment. Israel is us black , Chinese or white Westerners , the way we used to be, the way many of us still are ( Trump , Brexit supporters) .

You’re damn right I’m being evasive. I d rather poke needles into my eyes than be drawn into this ego-fueled bitch slapping contest. You philosophical posts are always thoughtful. I would think you’d appreciate that nothing constructive can come from throwing the political equivalent of bible quotes at each other. Just help me get a little perspective is all i’m asking.

Do you get the sense that some of the more strident critics of Israel on this thread are using the Palestinians more as symbolic props than as real people? Kind of like Hollywood movies where the set-up involves an ‘other’ ( black, native american, fill in the blank) victimized and oppressed by the imperialist Western white man. This oppressed other can do no wrong since they are just empty symbols. The point is to display the heroism and moral purity of the Western rescuer who can pat themselves on the back for defying their own heritage and upbringing , and maybe flip
their own parents the bird for good measure (it’s been said that Chomsky has a Daddy complex).

Any moral ambiguity to this plot set-up cannot be permitted, lest it spoil the illusion of moral superiority on the part of the self-critical Western activist.

Where did you get this from? It sounds vaguely familiar. What specific political writing does it plug into?

I think cognition and perception are normatively , anticipatingly structured . We perceive the world in relation to what we expect to see, which is why even that which surprises us is familiar to us in some way. In that sense the ought organizes the ‘is’.

Matter is what there is. Things.

Information is patterns. Facts.

The relation is that of choosing. Pointing out. — bongo fury

Perhaps things are only there in an interaction between subject and object pole. More specifically , perhaps what is there directly for us isn’t a thing but a sense. We don’t see things directly. A thing is a higher level construction. As far as sense is concerned, because it only appears to us as an intentional act, it isn’t simply there independently of us , so that is a patterned or formal aspect to sense.

Intersubjectivity is quite a going research concern in psychology and philosophy. It has to do with trying to make sense of the differences between ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’, first person subjective experience , 2nd pesos I-Thou interactions and 3rd person objectivity as well as socially normative structures. Their arguments range from the claim that the primordial sense of self is mediated by interpersonal influences (Ratcliffe 2017) to the more radical view that the self is entirely constructed by interpersonal dynamics (Maclaren 2008, (McGann, and De Jaegher 2009).
It has been argued in favor of the first view that in normative contexts where there seems to be a shared worldview, subjectivity must still be operative, otherwise the ’we’ wouldn’t make sense, since it presupppses a collectivity.

Begin gets elected after the atrocities were committed. Obviously he was more "moderate" after that, the deed was already done. So your comment was either stupid or a deliberate attempt to obfuscate. It says something about Israeli politics that they are fine to elect a fascist and war criminal and then decades later still have morons defending it. You'd think 70+ years would give some perspective but can't fight tribalism I suppose. — Benkei

When you engage in a discussion with someone you have never met , have no background context on , and especially when the topic is something as complex and personal as politics , you might want to examine what it is that makes you inclined to use worlds like ‘moron’ , ‘stupid’ , ‘deliberate obfuscation’. I understand my sarcasm irritated you, but it was intended
as a gentle prodding for you to explore more than just what initially seems to you to be the obvious and correct interpretation of my comments. Especially since the reality is I could care less about Israeli politics , I just jotted off my comments in an offhand way, and I am not wedded to any of the assertions I made. Apparently my sarcasm had the opposite effect, making you feel threatened and causing you to double down on your initial
construal of my post.

I’ll tell you what I am wedded to, and that’s a way of understanding human behavior and belief systems that rejects the concept of ‘evil’, which I’ve noticed you like to use. To me , ‘evil’ is what we accuse other people of when we fail to make sense of their thinking from their own perspective. The paradox is that it is this well intended accusation of evil or immorality leveled at individuals or groups that is the root of the sorts of violence and conflict that our concepts or morality are supposed to attach themselves to.

For me your response to my comment is a textbook case of a well intentioned attempt to defend a righteous moral view. But what it shows at a deeper level is that righteous moralism , and along with it the use of terms like ‘stupid’ and ‘moron’ , is a failure of insight, an inability to recognize that we all view the world from
within what in many cases are profoundly different perspectives, all of which can righteously justify themselves in equal measure.

The point of politics to improve the world and end suffering, that's why I bother spending time on it rather than plenty of other more pleasurable activities I'd rather do. The way to alleviate suffering in this case is to end oppression of the Palestinians. That is morality, and you are not to the Left of me for lacking it. — Saphsin

The foundation of politics is philosophy, also the name of this site, and I’ve heard nothing about it from you so far.
As far as being beyond good and evil , I don’t mind being in the company of phenomenologists , Nietzsche, Derrida, Gergen , post-steuxturalists, radical
constructivists and many other philosophical
positions that recognize the limitations of a moralistic thinking.

Since the beginning you've been giving nothing but defensive excuses. Oh they're racist and do bad things, but I have all these things to add to it while you naive guys voice your opposition to what they're doing.

Oh yeah? Wouldn't be surprised if you turn out to defend that — Saphsin

This is ostensibly a philosophy site. I’m aware
that political philosophy and straight out political fights are also a part of what goes on here. I tend to avoid the political discussions because they tend to be muddled and over generalizating. This inclines participants toward a mentality of us against them , of who’s right and who’s wrong, without bothering to examine the context of arguments or the worldview through which they’re filtered.

For the record , I don’t give defensive excuses. I’m a post modernist who rejects moralistic approaches to understanding social value systems and political actions. I don’t give excuses because I have never met a side in a political dispute who couldn’t give legitimate s sincere moral justification for their acts and positions. So I don’t defend any side against their opponents. I defend all sides. This doesn’t mean that I dont prefer certain ways of thinking , certain worldviews to others, but I don’t blame others for falling short of that thinking. I attempt to move with them from within their perspective to a more effective thinking that they can endorse.

From a philosophical vantage, you could say I am positioned well to the left of you, if you maintain a moralistic politics.

I’m more than happy to relate my comments on Israel to this larger philosophical approach, because I am eager to define the philosophical position that grounds your stridently felt moral indignation.

For starters, I identify with Ken Gergen’s social constructionist approach:

By and large identity politics has depended on a rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent). In western culture we essentially inherit two conversational responses to such forms of chastisement - incorporation or antagonism. The incorporative mode ("Yes, now I see the error of my ways") requires an extended forestructure of understandings (i.e. a history which legitimates the critic's authority and judgment, and which renders the target of critique answerable). However, because in the case of identity politics, there is no preestablished context to situate the target in just these ways, the invited response to critique is more typically one of hostility, defense and counter-charge.

In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation. Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)

There was nothing ambiguous about it, you made your attitude very clear throughout this thread ( — Saphsin

You say it’s unambiguous and I say it’s ambiguous. How ever are we to get to the bottom of this? Perhaps by actually having a discussion about it? No, then you’d have to dismount your high horse and put your brain to work. But I know you can do it. I’ve read some
of your posts. There’s real promise there. So my first suggestion is that you attempt to summarize my
‘unambiguous position’ and we’ll see if it bears any resemblance to what I intended.

" You clearly haven't evolved past grade school. — Saphsin

Actually I learned everything I need to know in kindergarten.

Apologist's crap. A moderate fascist is still a fascist. — Benkei

You have to excuse me. I’ll need to know the secret handshake before I can join the authentic political radical’s club, where self-righteousness flows like water and real psychological insight is in perennial drought.

but your attempt to provoke "why should?" really shows which side you are on that question, with the racist shitheads. — Saphsin

It really does? It really really truly does?Indubitably and forever more ? Are you sure? Will you send me a candy bar if you’re wrong?
Can I guess which side you’re on? Ready? Ok, here goes; you’re on the side of ‘reads a few lines of ambiguous text and , rather than asking a question or two to get clarification, simply goes with their first impression’.
How’d I do? Oh wait, you’d have to ask a question or two to know the answer to that.

The writing was on the wall in 1948 that Israel was turning into a racist sithole: — Benkei

Its early leadership didn’t go the direction of terrorist Begin. When he was elected , he moderated somewhat.
The right in Israel now is unquestionably dominated by racist shitheads, but why should Israel
be different from Russia, Hungary, Poland,Sweden, Germany or the U.S.? It’s today’s fashion.