Therefore, don't we have the two incompatible functions of language? — Number2018

No, because even such an expressive use of language is still a technique, it responds and is constituted by imperatives of communication - grammar key among them - that are social through and through. To quote Reza Negarestani (form Intelligence and Spirit):

"The capacity to know, believe, or mean something rests upon certain practical know-how (i.e., pragmatism), the practical mastery of inferential roles. ... the noises or behaviours of interlocutors can only count as saying or claiming something if said interlocutors know what to do—in accordance with rules and following some standards or norms—such that they can draw inferences from each other’s claims, using such inferences as the premises of their own claims and reasoning. Here, syntactic expressions as items of language assume semantic value or meaning when they are incorporated into the interaction of practitioners of discursive practices that give inferential roles to such utterances. These are practices that adopt or attribute normative statuses, commitments, and entitlements that stand in consequential relations to one another" - which is fancy way of saying that to know what is to know how: the first is a subset of the other. They are not two different functions of language.

Or as Daniel Dor puts it, the whole point of language is to bridge what he called the 'experiential gap' between people: "

"Our experiential communicative intents very rarely, if ever, emerge in our minds as digitally demarcated intents to either say or ask something, to order, or promise, or predict, or deny, and so on. They are multi-layered, variable, vague, dynamic, analogue. We wish to express something, and what we wish to express is as complex as the experience within which the communicative intent emerged. Coupled with the foundational fact of the experiential gap, this analogue complexity constitutes a major obstacle to communication: we very often find it difficult to understand what the person speaking to us is trying to do (“is this a promise or a threat”), and our experiential histories often lead us to the wrong conclusion.

Speech-acts, then, are socially negotiated, stereotypical communicative behaviors, highlighted and isolated from the experiential continuum of communication, which, when practiced according to a set of mutually identified conventions, allow for the successful mediation of the speaker’s intention across the experiential gap. When conventionalizing a speech-act, what the members of the community agree on is this: “from now on, when we behave this way—when, in these particular contexts, we use this intonation, this word order, this gesture—we mean to ask a question (or make a promise, or tell a story).” (The Instruction of the Imagination).

But the most important function of language is to understand others’ behaviour. as well as our own. — Joshs

But this is simply not true. Language is, first and foremost (although not only) a technology of social coordination; it's value is not (primarily) cognitive; it is above all facilitative and action-oriented: you warn, exclaim, command, promise, cajole, demand, insult, soothe, direct, cheat and so on. You understand what is said only to the extent that you understand what language does: it's role in action. The idea of language as a kind of expressive medium of 'inner states' is a narrow, ivory-tower view of language usually promulgated by people who, having never consulted a single work of linguistics in their life, model language on old dead white men transmitting thoughts via books to them.

Language is indeed used to sometimes 'understand', but this function of language is a tiny subset of its uses that are capricious beyond the wildest imaginations of armchair philosophing about it. I won't comment on either Heideggerian idle talk - which is too far off topic - nor the technicalities of pre-reflective self-awareness (which I am farmiliar with) other than to note that Derrida made an entire philosophical career attacking such notions, and I think he was exactly right to do so. "Pre-reflective self-awareness" is literally the ur-candidate of the metaphysics of presence which Derrida spent his whole life dismantling.

Again, you’re beginning from a presupposition of self and social as distinguishable entities — Joshs

No, this is exactly what I am not doing. Precisely because the self cannot be isolated in some pristine self-enclosed splendour, the idea that iteration only bears upon an 'individual' cannot hold. Your operation simply shunts the social 'into' the self and then shuts out and excludes the social on account of this. Your OP rigidifies a line between the self and the social in a stronger way than any possible metaphysical schema could ever do.

Who is this ‘one’ who puts the shopping list in ‘one’s’ pocket? Who is this ‘oneself’ who is interrupting ‘oneself’ by changing the very sense of the meaning that ‘one’ intends, even before other persons are involved? — Joshs

Sure, iterabiltiy is a general schema that bears upon a 'one' no less than literally anything else. Nothing in Derrida warrants some kind of 'exclusivity' to an individual. It's an utterly wrongheaded reading.

I interpret Derrida as saying here that the same (word) is the same differently WITHIN one person from moment to moment. — Joshs

Then you've misread him to a significant degree. Nothing in Derrida's texts - and certainly nothing in the quote you've provided - 'limits' iterability as function 'within' a person - whatever that could even mean.

Again, it's telling that you continually try to put up borders between 'inside' and 'outside' even as you claim to try and explode them.

Objectivity is an idealization resulting from interpersonal correlations. It’s a shared faith that turns ‘similar’ into ‘same’. But the same is the same differently from person to person. — Joshs

I have to admit that this is utterly bewildering to me coming from someone who claims Derrida to be an inspiration. Can you not see that you're trying to turn this idealization precisely into a 'supplement' that Derrida argued was everywhere originary? That the exclusion of this 'idealization' is precisely nothing other than the metaphysics of presence? Idealization is inherent to meaning as such, it is what makes meaning 'iterable'.The structure of the sign is what enables meaning at all - is what enables us to speak of 'the same' - or the different - at all:

"To the extent that the unity of the word— what makes it recognizable as a word, as the same word, the unity of a phonic complex and a sense— cannot be merged with the multiplicity of the sensible events of its employment nor does it depend on them, the sameness o f the word is ideal. It is the ideal possibility of repetition and it loses nothing with the reduction of any, and therefore of every empirical event marked by its appearance." (Voice and Phenomenon).

As for the post above this - what doe any of this have to do with language?

Yeah. It's kind of unfortunately named and that confusion is a really common one.

This is all well and good, but at stake here is how this bears upon language. You want to leverage this confusion - which I agree exists - to argue that as a result, language must be private in some sense. But as others have pointed out, the mess of the self is almost entirely irrelevant when it comes to the functioning of language, of which the index of understanding is, as it were, felicity and not 'interpretation': what does a language allow you to do? And can you do it successfully? If anything, it is precisely the notion that language must be 'interpreted' is that indeed, secondary and derivative. Understanding is exhibited (with all the public resonance 'exhibition' has), and not introspected or introcepted (except in a derivative way).

Hence: "There is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call 'obeying the rule' and 'going against it' in actual cases" (PI§201). Or again in Heideggerese: language is ready-to-hand long before it is present-to-hand.

So to simplify things, I will choose ‘interpersonal communication is secondary and derived'. — Joshs

In which case you fall back into the initial objection of imagining an 'intimacy' so intimate that it is indistinguishable from a solipsism. As for problems of 'observing the subjective state of another' - we can't even observe the subjective state of ourselves, let alone others. We are as inaccessible to ourselves as others are to us and vice versa. In this sense I take the primacy of relationality more seriously than you can possibly imagine (in terms you might be familiar with: this is what it means to reject the "metaphysics of "presence"). That's what it means to recognize the public in the private - not to shut-up the private so tightly as though a black box that can only be peered into through a glass darkly.

But it will never be understood in exactly the same way by each user of the language, so it is in fact not the ‘same’ language. — Joshs

This doesn't matter at all, and moreover, it is not clear what it even means to speak of people 'understanding in exactly the same way' or not - as if there was some transcendent index of 'understanding'. The publicity of a language is not measured by the degree to which people 'understand it in the exact same way'; rather, it has to do with the way in which it helps coordinate the actions and words of users among concrete circumstances engaged in concrete tasks. We don't 'understand language' so much as understand what a language does. Language does not exist in serene isolation from which we dip our toes in and out of willy nilly. It is always-already public otherwise it is not a language at all. To put it in overblown Heidggerese: all language with language-with.

If indeed the social begins at a more intimate site than what you’re calling the public, then there is no society in your sense to enclose the individual away from, and your ‘actual’ public is a derived abstraction. — Joshs

From this vantage , interpersonal communication is secondary and derived. — Joshs

You cannot consistently make these two claims. Either there is no public ("derived abstraction"), or 'interpersonal communication is secondary and derived'. Pick one.

Consider for a thought experiment a writer along the lines of Tolkien, who invents a language for fictional characters to speak. Before he tells anyone else about this invented language, can it really be called a public language? It exists only within the writer's mind, even though in that mind it's imagined to be used in discourse between different characters. — Pfhorrest

In Wittgenstein's use of the term, the answer is an emphatic yes: this is absolutely a public language. What makes a public language public is it's availability, in principle of being understood and mastered by another. In a mantra: a public language is public-izable. Whether or not the language is, in fact, in use among more than one person is irrelevant.

But it is ‘public’ in the sense that the individual is already a community unto itself, sequentially transforming itself. — Joshs

I have a great deal to say about the OP, against which I profoundly disagree, but I'll settle for now for making just this one remark: this 'deconstructive' move of finding the public in the individual is all very good, but what is puzzling is that this attempt at breaching the categorical distinctions is employed to all the more enforce the 'enclosure' of the individual from society: no need the public, because the private is always-already public: so much the worse for the actual public. The cost of 'publicizing the private' is at the expense of a radical and splendid isolationism of the individual that, far from abolishing the borders between the public and the private, institutes it at the most egregious possible way at another level. A reworked Cartesian solipsism wearing phenomenological dress. This alone is unacceptable, to say nothing of the OP being mired in the myth of the given, which itself is a concequence of erasing entirely any consideration of the specificity of language.

:up: To take it seriously - to even argue against it - is already to concede that one is speaking to someone with any standing whatsoever. These fuckwits deserve to be ridiculed and trodden on - that's all.

On my feed...



(Bit generous about the fact that Clinton actively angled to have Trump as her opponent because she thought she was not as utter shite as she in fact was).

Also not sure what's more pathetic - Trump's begging or watching a sniveling lapdog like NOS pretend like this is fine. Probably the latter. At least Trump's a fuckin loser on his own terms. NOS is a fucking loser on someone else's.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jan/04/julian-assange-cannot-be-extradited-to-us-british-judge-rules

Good news! You can report on American war crimes and only have your life 3/4s destroyed by it, so long as you're on the verge of suicide, so as to not be thrown into an inhumane prison system!*

*pending appeal.

https://eand.co/why-freedom-became-free-dumb-in-america-4947e39663f2

This article is childish and understates by far the shallow, callous, conservatism of Europeans, but in the main it is exactly right:

"America became obsessed with free-dumb: the idea of freedom as the removal of all restraint, the right to harm others, the ability to do anything you please, no matter how destructive, toxic, foolish, or inane. Covid’s a jaw-dropping example of it ... The logic of why Canada and Europe provide basics to all goes like — it’s about freedom, but in a much, much deeper, more elegant, thoughtful, sophisticated, and beautiful way than Americans understand. If I am fighting for the basics — bitterly battling everyone else for the food, water, money, medicine, to survive, what does that make of me? I become embittered, hostile, angry, resentful. I grow callous and cruel. I become suspicious and distrustful and isolated and alone. I don’t grow as a person — I shrink and wither into my worst self. The Greeks would have said: I grow weak, morally, intellectually, socially, culturally. And people weak like that are not capable of sustaining a democracy.

What happens, on the other hand, if I do have the basics? Then I’m free. Not just free in the superficial, narrow American way: free to have stuff. I’m free in an existential, social, emotional, cultural, human way. I’m free to cultivate, develop, nurture higher values and virtues. I can be trusting, kind, generous, empathic. I can be thoughtful, critical, reflective. I can be humble and warm and appreciate beauty and truth. I am free to be a genuinely good person. Human goodness has been freed in me.

...Why are Americans so violent, cruel, ignorant, destructive, thoughtless, selfish, careless? Because Americans are not free to be the kinds of people Europeans and Canadians are. Europeans and Canadians are free to be thoughtful, kind, gentle, wise, loving, concerned, considerate people because they enjoy the basics of life. Therefore, they are not consumed with the desperate battle for survival. But American do not enjoy the basics. For them, life is a constant, perpetual battle for self-preservation and survival. Not just for the poor, but for more or less everyone now, because America is effectively a poor society, made of one giant underclass. ... In short, we’d expect people to become violent, stupid, selfish, as they grow poor — not because they are such things, but because that is what poverty does and is. Intellectual poverty is ignorance and superstition. Social poverty is mistrust and hostility. Cultural poverty is cruelty and aggression. Americans are poor in all these ways now".

Gotta say, I'm surprised at the outpouring of coverage over the recordings. Like - did anyone expect anything different? I keep saying - the only morons are those who are continually surprised at the depth to which Trump will sink.

What struck me most was the pleading tone in Trump's voice. This was not a man confident at wielding power. This was a sore loser begging for help. It was pleading and pathetic.

Gosh he really sounds like a pathetic pleading dog.

Via Corey Robin:

"On the "Trump completely controls the GOP" claims...

So I've been closely following Congress's overriding Trump's veto on the defense bill. I've pointed out that previous presidents have vetoed these bills, and they've extracted concessions, whereas Trump got overridden by his own party.

I've also pointed out that one of the reasons Trump vetoed the bill is that Congress had required military bases to no longer name themselves after Confederate generals. Which is an interesting issue to confront Trump over.

But here are two new elements of the bill that I didn't know about.

First, it restricts the ability of the president to divert military funds for emergency construction purposes. This is a major rebuke of Trump's diversion of military funds for the purpose of building the wall.

Second, it puts restrictions on the military's sending of equipment to local police forces (thereby limiting certain federal attempts to militarize the police) AND it requires federal officers to display their insignia (in order to avoid a repeat of the Portland fiasco).

These are among the issues that the Republicans not only overwhelmingly put in the law but also overrode a Trump veto on."

+

More relevant for Trump, the NDAA attacks his business model. It “includes a measure known as the Corporate Transparency Act, which undercuts shell companies and money laundering in America. The act requires the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, goes to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The measure also increases penalties for money laundering “.

https://billmoyers.com/story/reading-the-fine-print-what-trump-didnt-sign

Yeah but you gotta dangle bait. Tease. Seduce.

You gotta quote this stuff man:

"But if focus is primarily placed on name calling Trump or other luminaries of the current anti-liberal backlash, the focus is shifted to “them” and conveniently deflects attention from the heart of the problem – our own societies and beliefs. We frame the challenge as coming from some sort of extremism that is extraneous and alien to us. This is to obsess over the upshot rather than the cause ... Whatever they are, these people confront us with the failings of our political system and the numerous contradictions in our mainstream societies that get so often ignored or airbrushed. They must be stopped – but only by addressing the deeper social causes of what makes their message appealing to so many others: growing distrust in politics, resentment at the fast pace of change, hardship in everyday life."

Found a copy of Strayer's On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, — darthbarracuda

It's an OK read. It surprisingly comes off as a history of... bureaucracy. Which I suppose is not all that different from the state.

Trump will not be held to account, ever. Unless you fuck kids, the rich and powerful do not turn their backs on their own. Class solidarity 101.

Besides, he was good for them. They owe him.

bought Anti-Oedipus while in college 11 years ago and haven't managed to get past a handful of pages. Need to get through it at some point... Your BLM reading list is quite inspiring as is your History of Capitalism, and to that end I would recommend How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney and Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano — Maw

Having spent so long on Anti-Oedipus i can honestly say that unless you're interested in the minutiae of psychoanalysis, it's honestly not worth it. The third chapter, which offers a kind of idiosyncratic typology of human social development, is the best thing there, but everything else is hyper narrowly focused on some very obscure debates within psychoanalytic theory. You're far better off reading Fanon. It really dismays me that it's Deleuze's most well known work.

And yeah, both Rodney and Galeano are definitely on my list to to-reads - if I keep up the historical bent of reading that I'm planning for next year, they'll be there for sure. Ironically, despite my dislike of AO, it's that third chapter that kinda reawakened by interest in history.

Capitalists lining up to get rich off Biden corruption.

The argument is irrelevant because you're arguing against nothing.

I'm sorry to contradict you here — TheMadFool

You're not contradicting me. You're just making clear that you've never read a word of Descartes in your life. Which is par for the course with you.

And those are? — khaled

To establish the existence of the self, as every first year philosophy student knows. The 'nature' of the self in question is simply irrelevant for that purpose. Descartes answer to the OP would simply be: who cares?

Did you get my eye analogy? — TheMadFool

It was irrelevant, like the rest of the OP. Descartes does not set out to establish that the self is what thinks. Only that there is a self at all.

The point is if there are thought waves of the kind I described in the OP, no one, including Descartes, is thinking. — TheMadFool

Again, irrelevant.

The same way that the radio plays music is different from the radio station playing music. But it really doesn't matter. The point is that for Descartes' purposes, it is a distinction without a difference.

This is irrelevant because Descartes 'proof' does not depend on the self being the source of thought. That it thinks is enough.

:up: On my last books too. This year was really interesting. 56 books. Probably among my most diverse list in terms of authors and subject matter. Slightly more female authored booked this year compared to last, and definitely less dead white men, although there's alot of that too. Much of the reading influenced by current events. Got a ebook reader late in the year which allowed me to read even more than usual - although I'm reserving that for books <150 pages or so. Biggest acheivement was probably getting through both A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari. Those have been a long-time coming - working my way 'up' to them for a couple of years. ATP really inspired me to do alot of reading outside of traditional philosophy, which I'm very grateful for. 2021 is probably going to start off with alot of historical reading. Anyway, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year all. Asterisks indicates favourites:

Deleuze and Guattari:

Eugene Holland - Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus': A Readers Guide
Eugene Holland - Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus': Introduction to Schizoanalysis
Brent Adkins - Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
Ian Buchanan - Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus': A Reader's Guide
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus (Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 2)*
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - Anti-Oedipus (Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 1)
David Lapoujade - Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze*
Samantha Bankston - Deleuze and Becoming
Joe Hughes - Philosophy After Deleuze
Joe Hughes - Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation*
Ronald Bogue - Deleuze on Literature
Michael James Bennett - Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics: the Image of Nature

BLM inspired:

Frank B. Wilderson III (ed.) - Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction
Frank B. Wilderson III - Afropessimism
Achille Mbembe - Necropolitics
Achille Mbembe - Critique of Black Reason
Achille Mbembe - On the Postcolony
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney - The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks
Paolo Freire - Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Aime Cesaire - Discourse on Colonialism

History of Capitalism:

Perry Anderson - Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism
Perry Anderson - Lineages of the Absolutist State*
Perry Anderson - Considerations on Western Marxism
Perry Anderson - In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu - How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism*
Ellen Meiksins Wood - Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism*
Ellen Meiksins Wood - The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View*
Ellen Meiksins Wood - The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States
Silvia Federici - Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation

Anthropology:

David Graeber - Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination
David Graeber - Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
Pierre Clastres - Archaeology of Violence
Pierre Clastres - Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology
Bruno Latour - We Have Never Been Modern
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro - Cannibal Metaphysics

Political Economy:

Mariana Mazzucato - The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
Mariana Mazzucato - The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy
Ann Pettifor - The Production on Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers
Jereome Roos - Why Not Default?: The Political Economy of Sovereign Debt*

Misc.:

Jospeh Strayer - On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State
Raymond Geuss - The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School
Quentin Skinner - Liberty Before Liberalism
Reza Negarestani - Intelligence and Spirit*
Catherine Malabou - Morphing Intelligence: From IQ to Brain Measurement
Kojin Karatani - Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy
Giorgio Agamben - Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism
Giorgio Agamben - What Is Philosophy?* (reread)
German Eduardo Primera - The Political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben: Signatures of Life and Power
Jean Piaget - Structuralism
Bernard Cache - Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories
Judith Butler - Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
Judith Butler - Precarious Life
Judith Butler - Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly
Isabell Lorey - State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious

Currently Reading:

Ellen Meiksins Wood - Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy
Albert O. Hirschman - The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph

Perfect time to remind everyone that Joe Biden was directly responsible for ensuring that students remain trapped in debt and promoting the birth of a predatory, life-destroying industry.

"In 1978, Biden supported the Middle Income Student Assistance Act, which eliminated income restrictions on federal loans to expand eligibility to all students. Biden helped write a separate bill that year blocking students from seeking bankruptcy protections on those loans after graduation. (The income restrictions on federal loans were reinstated in 1981.) Then he went on to vote to create the Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students, or PLUS, program in 1980 and the Auxiliary Loans to Assist Students, or ALAS, program in 1981, which extended loan eligibility to students with no parental financial support. ...Years later, as a senator from Delaware, Biden was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the disastrous 2005 bankruptcy bill that made it nearly impossible for borrowers to reduce their student loan debt."

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/07/joe-biden-student-loans/

The plague is not (only) student loan debt. The plague is rats like Joe Biden who ensure the persistence of such recurrent plagues. May that old man drop dead in writhing pain.

As for the OP: the possibility of higher education simply should not be pegged to your economic status, at all. The university is not - should not be - some vocational institute preparing people to 'contribute' to 'the economy'. It is a place of higher learning, a space where education and research can be pursued to the complete indifference of market demands. The 'solution' is not to 'cease offering' majors that are not 'job ready': it is either to make higher education entirely free, or peg fees to income-contingent loans which enable millions to access universities who would otherwise be totally unable to.

Also fuck Joe Biden, just as a reminder.

The vindictive part of me wants Biden to win the nomination, and then watch with glee as he loses the presidency - as he obviously will - and watch democrats wonder HOW THIS COULD HAVE POSSIBLY HAPPENED. — StreetlightX

Ha, I remember that. 11 months ago, before Trump allowed ~250k Americans - at the time of the election - to die of Covid. A gift for Biden. The democrats traded their victory for a quarter of a million dead Americans. I can shamelessly say I missed that calculation.

I do like how committing war crimes is just kind of a joke to people like Hippy.

But is there anyone you wouldn't shorten by a head? — tim wood

This is a stupid, irrelevant question, designed to deflect.

No, I think I will continue calling you out for being an apologist and propagandist for power and its abuse.

Ah yes, those 'accidental' extrajudicial drone strikes, those 'chance' deportations, the 'bad luck' of aggressively trying to crush whistleblowers. Your nose couldn't be more brown if you tried. Maybe use a bit of tongue next time.

So many words, so much nothing. Obama slaughtered hundreds and thousands overseas, deported about as many people domestically, persecuted whistleblowers, precipitated ISIS, shovelled trillions in taxpayer money towards corporations while leaving people to die homeless, and compromised at every point with the utter crazy of the Republican party when he did not need to, and was effectively responsible for Trump, and now the shitstain that is Biden - among other things. Your whataboutism is sophist trash and can go fuck itself. Obama was a visionless, spineless waste of space, and nothing but a vessel for corporate and military interests. And he was these things regardless of anyone or anything else.

Obama was arguably the single most powerful man in the world. If you think he needs some kind of kid-glove treatment, you don't understand what 'proportionality' means.