Marshall Sahlins - Stone Age Economics
Marshall Sahlins - Islands of History

...continuing my anthropology kick.

Well sure, bureaucrats have power.

American military strategists with the existential crisis they are sure to now develop because of that they lost to a decentralized insurgency in a country whose only real natural resource is opium. — thewonder

This is very cute assuming that said strategists had any say in the matter. The American miltary is a private militia for private interests masquerading as a public institution. Their role is to die when needed, that's all.

The most naive thing is to think that Afghanistan was a failure. It was a tremendous success that helped transfer billions of tax dollars straight into the pockets of American weapons manufacturers. Which in turn, kept the wheels spinning in the backwater of rural America in which their plants and factories are located. The only failure is that it has come to an end. Dead American soldiers and hundreds and thousands of Afghan dead and maimed were - and will continue to be - the simple collateral for the price of business.

:cheer:

I keep coming back to that one, over and over.

Thanks for your sympathy and perspicuity. — Leghorn

No worries. I'm glad your demands and claims over other people's highly trained performing bodies gets your fragile, armchair rocks off.

I am so entitled: I have no job, no money, am horrendously ugly, no status, no position, no prospect of furtherance in the affairs of man. — Leghorn

Ah, no wonder you feel the need to whine extensively about someone not performing tricks for your entertainment. You've little else.

Back in the good old days we used to whine about good stuff. Now we're overly sensitive, easily triggered snowflakes who get mad because some young woman who means nothing to me and who I will forget about in a week didn't do the flippy zippy do dah.

Yeah that's probably not entirely fair.

Although holy shit your entitlement fucking reeks. And it's most certainly a vast and snowflaky oversensitivity, and certainly not an insensitiviry.

She chose to be the show pony — Leghorn

And you chose to write 7 paragraphs about it.

Imagine writing 7 paragraphs because someome treated like a show pony didn't do some tricks for them.

If you say, the origin of knowledge is the sensory organs, then it would be like saying, the origin of photographic images are the lens of cameras, which may sounds not wrong, but not meaningful either. — Corvus

Just to be clear, to say that the 'origin of knowledge' is the sensory organs, is to distinguish it from other possible ways of coming to know things (specifically, again, rationalism). To use your metaphor, it's to say that the origin of photos are cameras and not tape recorders (the sensory, and not the intellect). This is why it is meaningful. In each case it's the relation between the knowing subject and what is to be known that is at stake. If you're talking about the relata - as you are in your response - you've missed the point. Empiricism answers the question of how we come to know the world, not what the world is. It is an issue of epistemology, not ontology.

Empirical means from out in the material world — Corvus

Not at all. Empiricism is a claim about the source of knowledge as primarily sensory (as distinct from say, first principles a la Descartes). It does not necessarily entail the existence of a 'material world'. Only that, whatever there 'is' - ideal or otherwise - we come to know it though the experience of our senses. It is about the relation between a knowing being, and that which is to be known, and not the relata themselves. In the SEP for example:

The Empiricism Thesis: We have no source of knowledge in S or for the concepts we use in S other than sense experience.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/#Empi

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Also, great thread.

No point discussing words that are no use, right? — TheMadFool

Your thread is one such instance and apparently it's gone on for two pages, so you tell me. Figuratively speaking.

Wittgenstein's theory of language games makes sense only if 2 (above) doesn't count as misuse — TheMadFool

You're so obsessed with this notion of 'misuse' that you completely overlook the fact of no use: language which has no language-game at all, or an employment of language which, although mistaken for a use, does not have one. Your convoluted rambling misses the mark.

If there were such a thing as misuse of language, the word "game" (Wittgenstein's favorite) couldn't be applies to chess, battle simulations (war games) and sports — TheMadFool

Misuse happens precisely when one treats the word 'game' as univocal across all these cases. 'Misuse' is what happens when you transplant words from one language-game into another without paying attention to the specificity of each. Use and misuse are comparative notions. Of course Wittgenstein did not speak of 'misuse', but simply, a lack of use tout court. The idling engine of language.

They are, FYI, precisely what I refer to when I say anything goes. — TheMadFool

Then you have no idea what you are talking about.

Kindly read my post just above. Thanks. — TheMadFool

Sure - it involves the same misreading you've been peddling everytime you talk about Wittgenstein, and every time someone corrects you, you ignore it and peddle it again. To wit:

If "meaning is use", the concept of misuse is N/A and anything goes — TheMadFool

That 'anything goes' does not follow. The full expression of 'meaning is use' is 'meaning is use in a language-game'. "Misuse" is what follows when meaning is not used in a language-game. This is Wittgenstein 101.

You must understand what it must be like as a philosopher which Wittgenstein was to come to the realization, discover, that people have been misusing, some would even go so far as to say abusing, language in ways that makes philosophy hard and even sometimes impossible (no essence, no philosophy :grin: ).

Attempting a bit of psychology since it seems to be a hot topic on the forum lately, Wittgenstein was actually complaining about the misuse/abuse of language rather than anything fundamentally important about the connection between language and philosophy. He wasn't aware of it of course. A pity.

My interepretation of Wittgenstein is that yes, he was onto something - that 1. words lack an essence and 2. many issues that philosophers are racking their brains over are pseudo-problems.

1 is undeniably true but not necessarily because something's wrong with either the tool (language) or with the material (philosophy). Our beloved Wittgenstein seems to have completely missed another likelier culprit, us, the end user of language (human error) - misuse/abuse of lingo/tongue/language.

2 is also true because language has been so poorly wielded that people have f**ked up and f**ked up bad.

So, ultimately, in the finaly analysis, Wittgenstein detected the problem (words seem to lack an essence) alright but he then goes on to claim that (some) philosophical problems aren't real which, to my reckoning, is a grave error because it presupposes people aren't misusing/abusing language which they are.

Think of it, every time Wittgenstein dismisses a philosophical problem as a pseudo-problem, we can respond by saying that people have used the relevant words in the wrong way and since Wittgenstein's entire theory of language games is predicated on that being false we have successfully demonstrated that there are real philosophical problems not pseudo-problems. — TheMadFool

None of this has anything to do with your made up assertions about family resemblance or ideal languages.

I bet he would've said the family resemblance shouldn't figure in it i.e. it's preferrable that language isn't a game in which a given word's meaning alters with context (form of life). — TheMadFool

He literally says that this is exactly what we shouldn't do. But sure, continue making shit up.

It's a common misunderstanding that Witty is an advocate for 'vagueness' or somesuch. Rather, he reckons that we continually or often look for 'exactitude' in the wrong place. My favoute example he gives is of someone saying 'wait for me roughly there'. And then he has some hypothetical idiot trying to specify exactly where 'there' is: its boundary, how far 'roughly' should extend from the point that is specified and so on. But of course, the non-idiot will know very well that when someone says 'wait for me roughly there', the idea is that one waits where they can be found again without too much hassle. The idiot here is the philosopher (or a particular kind of philosopher, I'd rather say). As Witty puts it, there's nothing vague about it. It's only when we have a false idea of 'the exact' that his take on language seems to brook the 'vague'.

PI §87: "The signpost is in order a if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose"; §88. "If I tell someone “Stay roughly here” - may this explanation not work perfectly?"; §98: "On the one hand, it is clear that every sentence in our language ‘is in order as it is’. That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal, as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable sense, and a perfect language still had to be constructed by us. - On the other hand, it seems clear that where there is sense, there must be perfect order. —– So there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence".

There's a mathematical analogy to be drawn here. The idea is that language does not function as a well-ordered set. Every use of language is a matter of partial ordering: §97: "We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound and essential to us in our investigation resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, inference, truth, experience, and so forth. This order is a super-order between - so to speak - super-concepts". But concepts and words are singular. they respond to, and arise from, particular lived situations. And words and meanings cannot be mapped onto some trans-historical order that could be clarified once and for all. In every case it must be asked: does that word fulfil its purpose? And if so, it's exact as it can be.

But he hasn't noticed the open ended nature of family resemblance; that a given CNF will not be able to account for additions to the family. — Banno

Nor that thinking in terms of 'properties' is the exact thing that the PI was pitched against, no matter how much one rejigs one's concepts of "properties". The entire emphasis on action and 'doing' is missed. Which only someone who has not read a single word of the PI could possibly do.

You haven't changed a bit! — TheMadFool

Neither have you. You still haven't read a word of Wittgenstein yet persist in posting threads about him.

Have you ever considered actually reading Wittgenstein instead of creating innumerable treads on him based on your quarter baked wiki-gleaned understanding of him?

The reduction of 'family resemblance' down to a series of propositional clauses is so far away from what Witty had in mind the only thing to say about the OP is that, as with every thread you've made on Witty, you've simply made shit up and pretended like what you've said has anything at all to do with him.

This discussion was merged into Coronavirus

This discussion was merged into Coronavirus

It's fascinating to me just how terrified Israel are of a boycott by an ice cream maker. They clearly see it as the tip of an possible iceberg (no pun intended) - that iceberg being the world treating Israel for the international pariah it is, in the mode of apartheid South Africa. Ben and Jerry's today, Nestle, Unilever, and Microsoft tomorrow, one hopes.

Presumably the influence of Murdoch is the capacity to form popular opinion. — Banno

Yeah, exactly. 'Popular opinion' ought not to be treated as a given: it is itself formed, the result of a process. The report talks of the need for sustained efforts to forge consensus, but I think a good, hard look at our primary means of that consensus making - corporate owned media with vested interests! - is needed.

It was very good. But I was dissatisfied in that they did not attempt - and this was in truth likely beyond the scope of the report which they were discussing - to diagnose why this institutional timidity has set in. They discuss that it has set in - significant and important in itself, and the major conclusion of the study - and propose policy changes to reign in some of the most egregious aspects of what's going on - ICAC, donation transparency, more independence to the bureaucracy and so on. I really liked the bit where they talk about where possibilities of change might come from: independent parties forcing the hands of the majors (although our selection of independents is not particularly inspiring...).

But I feel like there's a changed media and communication environment that actually accounts for the timidity of governments insofar as they are alot more reactive (in a short term, polls-driven way) to next-day press releases and 24 hour news cycles in a way that they weren't before. I don't know that this is the only reason, but isolating reasons why governments have become so leadership averse would be the next important step in examining this phenomenon. Old mate Kevin is definitely on to something, I think, when he blames Murdoch for absolutely ruining the feedback process of governments and their constituents. dk, maybe the actual report does have more on that and they just didn't have time to get into it in the podcast.

Typically 'differential' is used in the context of processes or verbs, rather than static things. This apple is different from that pear. But there is a such and such legal process that leads to differential outcomes among such and such.

I don't know why this is the case, but I always like to relate it back to the mechanical device, the differential gear, which transmits the same force in different ways depending on how it couples with other gears. It creates a different, or rather differential, distribution of forces.

Fair enough. Am listening to the podcast now.

The lack of capacity at Federal level is having real, deleterious results at a local level. — Banno

Would it be that this were a bug, rather than a feature, of liberal rule.

I couldn't stop reading it. — darthbarracuda

I'm just past the first chapter and it's absolutely absorbing. He writes with such momentum!

James C. Scott - Against The Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
James C. Scott - Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

@darthbarracuda I remember you reading the first - how did you find it?

:up:

"One wages war to acquire ..." - that is Desire.
"threats, real or imagined" - that is Fear. — Amity

Wrong. One is not blown to pieces by 'Desire'. It's not 'Fear' that drops bombs that decimates populations. This shamanisation of war into capitalized psychological categories (capitalised to give it some affectation of "depth") is the stupidest possible take on war. It's telling that war becomes so sanitized in your discussion that PTSD and "interpersonal relationships" are where the bulk of the emphasis lies. This is subject matter for Oprah and Dr Phil, not 'the philosophy of war'. The neoliberal drive to psychologize every possible phenomenon including war - the most impersonal of human phenomena - is a real discursive cancer, and it really needs to stop. Not only is it incredibly lazy - any reference to history, sociology, or power dynamics is mute - a phenomenon that is primarily historical, sociological, and related to power becomes medicalized and introspective. Want to discuss war? Well, open the DSM-V; search your 'feelings'. It's hard to imagine a more ass-backward way of approaching war.

'Huh?' - what is that supposed to mean. It sounds dismissive. Why did you feel you had to start off with that, huh ? — Amity

Because the OP seems to barely have anything to do with war. It reads like how someone who has spent too much time reading books treats war - as an issue of 'beliefs' and 'justifications' and 'ideologies' or else negative feelings. Your other posts speak of 'fear' and 'desire' and 'inner wars' and so on. It's like a 12 year old's view of war. War is material first and foremost. It involves arms, metal, wood and stone. It involves bodies and their destruction, the logistics of moving men and supplies across treacherous lines, the conquering of lands and the negotiation of geography. It involves production at home and the organization of economies for the sake of sustaining troops on battefronts longs distances away, along with defense infrastructure, among other things.The OP reads like an academic whose notion of war was formed by watching too many Hollywood war movies and reflecting not on war, but on how those movies made them feel.

If your thread on war begins with a discussion of feelings, it's probably not a thread on war, but some librarian's bookish take on it from the comfort of a cozy chair somewhere pontificating about war as a matter of ideas and feelings and erasing almost the entirety of what war has ever meant for human beings both today and throughout history. 'Inner war'? What a pathetic notion. The appropriation of the horror of one of the most destructive things that humans do to each other to be twisted into some New Age hippie kumbaya 'find yourself' nonsense. It's hard to imagine anything that makes more of a mockery of war and those who have suffered from it than this kind of spiritualization of it.

Huh? One wages war to acquire territory, resources, people, trade routes, prestige, or buffer zones. Or else to eliminate or subjugate rivals who pose threats, real or imagined, to those things.

I've been so put off by so much of the wider discourse putting down the recent lockdown protests here as just being a bunch of idiots. They were idiots, but they were not just that. This guy really articulates it well:



So much utterly misdirected anger at those protests.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/25/israel-halves-gaza-fishing-zone-over-incendiary-balloon-fires

More war crimes by the Israeli regime, just casually flying under the radar.

Idk, the anti-pomo cottage industry is as much a cottage-industry as all the actual industry that people like to also whine about. If I had to guess a ratio of people whining about pomo to people actually espousing pomo ideas I'd say the ratio runs about 1000:1. Not even exaggerating. It clearly serves some kind of ideology, or at least satisfies some kind of desperate need, and I'd wager its the same one that recoils in the face of any avant-garde that threatens, even marginally, the status quo. This even if every one of the 'critics' is correct on every count.

For realsies though, the only people with anything interesting to say about postmodernism seem to the be Marxists (Jameson, Anderson, Eagleton, Callinicos, Wood) insofar as they actually have a sense of history, while everyone else just kind of drools on about style and hoaxes and Lyotard as though they aren't reiterating verbatim stale complaints made since the 80s (i.e from 4 decades). The only thing more dreary than postmodernism are people who complain about postmodernism because at least the former had 5 minutes in spotlight before shutting up forever while the latter can whine about it interminably.