Federal election law, administered by the Federal Election Commission, prohibits contributions, donations and other expenditures by “foreign nationals” in any federal, state or local election as well an exchange of any “thing of value.” ( Most recently, Section 303 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act, strengthened the ban on foreign money in U.S. electioneering.) — 3017amen

This eye-glazing legalease is hardly the stuff of mass mobilization.

I thought you were democracy-boy. What about rule of law? — frank

Hell yeah I am but this stuff is so anti-political that it has the real potential to sap democratic energies, not invigorate them.

Yeah but... to be blunter than blunt - does anybody at all give a flying hoot what Trump did in Ukraine? Like, really, in anyone's hearts of hearts, does anybody give a fuck? My god, the US can barely mobilize over concentration camps. A dodgy phone call to what - Ukraine? In a bid to dig up dirt against - who? Biden's son? Does anyone know his name without looking it up? Like, that's what yall are pinning your hopes on? I mean - good luck, but holy crap are those cards so totally shit.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/10/donald-trump-impeachment-democratic-republican-party

Nice convo on Jacobin between two lefties, one for, the other somewhat cautious on, impeachment. Sam Moyn, who is on the side of caution, shares my concerns:

"The impeachment hearings could become a kind of referendum on how to diminish the imperial presidency. But my sense is that that’s not going to happen, and it would be much better for the Left to put its claims about endless war and economic inequality to the people and try to figure out how to construct a majority for stopping those things — a majority that I think is out there in the country. Impeachment seems unrelated to that effort.

...The pathologies of the country that led to Trump ought to be the main focus, because Trump inherited a lot of things that the party elites on both sides had constructed, including an imperial presidency with powers at home and abroad, and rising economic inequality, which I think the majority of Americans are concerned about. For that reason, I actually think that the Democrats have a chance to appeal to precisely these issues, and I worry that impeachment will lead them astray."

This comes with it's own problems. For now, I'll only refer you to this piece:

"An embrace of unintelligibility ... of a rejection of meaning and stability might have presented a useful method of resistance, if gender operated merely at the level of ideals and ideology. If gender was nothing more than the belief in stable ontological identities, then perhaps a rejection of that belief might be enough. But gender is more than a belief. Gender represents a material reality which divides the world not just at the level of the ideal but at the level of labor, economics, and life itself. Gender divides the world into those who do specific types of labor and those who don’t, into those are financially independent subjects and those who are financially dependent. This division does not occur merely at the level of ideals but in the day to day material matter lives of individuals.

If gender operates not merely at the ideological or symbolic level, then a response which does operate only at that level is inadequate. As such, I am quite convinced that the model of resistance proposed in Gender [abolishionism] needs to rejected, and a new model developed on the basis of a material investigation into the material base which produces the ideologies of gender and difference".

Ah, so you're a gender abolitionist then?

We learn to use the word pain by observing the actions and reactions of people using the word. If we say "I'm in pain" every time we laugh, smile carelessly and skip about with joy, we are using the word incorrectly. Pain has to have external, publicly available signs for us to use it, otherwise it would be impossible to learn. It cannot be a private feeling alone. — Isaac

And exactly what do you think those asking to be called women are asking?

I think you're completely over-estimating the role that "I am a woman" or whatever plays in the social process of identifying as any gender. No one would sincerely say "I am a woman" as a statement of their identity solely because of 'private feelings', they would feel a certain way about social relations and social roles which leads them to reject them. Whether they are motivated by personal feelings is much different from whether they are somehow imagining an impossible language whereby feelings alone can vouchsafe the meaning of words. — fdrake

A hundred times this. And maybe we can be done with the regressive, transphobic misreadings of Wittgenstein now, passed off as innocent language philosophy.

So, with a use where 'woman' is a lebel based on a private feeling, how is anyone able to learn it's use in principle? — Isaac

It is no more a label based on a private feeling than the word 'pain' is a label based on a private feeling. And just as we learn to use the word 'pain', we learn to use the word 'woman' or 'man'. Or any other word for that matter. Words are not labels, this is literally the first lesson of the PI, literally the first thing broached in §1.

If people are using a word, they must expect that it has a public meaning — Isaac

A public meaning does not mean 'an already established meaning'. It refers to a meaning available to public use, or use by others. This could be the case if it is used by one person and not a single other soul on the planet. The 'community of language users' could all die in a fire and so long as a use is able to be learned in principle, then it is public. As I will never cease pointing out every time this misreading takes place, not even the very word 'community' appears even once in the PI. Frankly I think your use of Wittgenstein here is abominable, and does a mutilating disservice to both Wittgenstein and understandings of gender.

Without even touching the whole gender thing, Issac is badly misemploying the 'private language argument'. The PIA doesn't say that 'a private language has no meaning', as though there are private languages and that, where they exist, they have no meaning. The PIA is an argument that the very idea of a private language is incoherent - that there could be no such thing, in principle, let alone in fact, as a private language. To say 'X use of language is a private language' misudnerstands the fact that if you're using language at all, it's not private - that's 'analytically' entailed by the very idea of a use of language. The idea of a 'private rule' is an oxymoron: if there is a rule, then is it not private, by definition.

Yes, and they seem to have done quite well. One thing to be said about Trump and co. is that they tend to know how to play politics far better and with far more savvy than the democrats, who are largely a bunch of waffling incompetents.

Eh. I care less about the rules than I do a better outcome for society as a whole. I'm a well heeled Machiavellian when it comes to politics. The first thing we ought to do is learn how not to be good.

Sure, congressional oversight is important, as is investigating potential executive criminality. But that this kind of thing has dominated the conversation (not 'this' conversation here on PF, but in wider political life) to the extent that it has seems to me symptomatic of a failure of political imagination. Impeachment should really be seen as the worst possible option, the one that would do the most lasting damage to political life in the US, and not the magic happy celebratory bullet that certain opponents of Trump tend to think it is.

Couldn't agree more. While I've no doubt that Trump is dirty in multiple ways, the insistent calls for impeachment are just shitty politics. It's relying on a deus ex machina to try and address serious social, political and institutional problems that would be far better served by coalition building, policy overhaul, and the hard fucking work of building a political vision for the future. Impeachment is anti-poltical in the extreme, a blunt tool with high-vis spectacle value that ensures that things can continue the way they are without having to address big, structural issues at the heart of what's going on in the States.

I couldn't breathe and I began seeing stars, and I thought I was going to die, but I managed to squeeze out with just a broken hand and three broken ribs, as I found out later from the x-rays. — jamalrob

Glad you're still with us.

Enjoyed the rest of the telling too.

On the list!

Heh, where's this from?

Wendy Brown - In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West

Probably the most acute diagnostic of politics in the West that I know. Punchy and readable too - highly reccomended.

As I indicated in another post, the primary mechanism of evolution, natural selection, acts only on individuals. — T Clark

This is not really the case, although it is often thought to be. Natural selection acts on any entity or entities which exhibit variation, reproduction and heritability. Although individual organisms fit this bill nicely, these constraints are broad enough to be applicable to genes, populations, and even species. That this is the case is captured in the idea that natural selection operates at various levels of selection. Thus for a long time it was argued that genes were the only units of natural selection, and not organisms at all. This has changed in recent times with the acknowledgement that all aspects in a developmental system can be subject to selection, up to and including the entire system itself. The unit of natural selection doesn't even have to be alive. You can use natural selection principles to come up with new circuit boards or even architecture.

'Fitness' is a species-level designation in evolutionary theory, and not an individual one (or species-in-an-ecological-niche if one is being strict). If you're asking about the 'fitness' of individuals, one is no longer talking about evolutionary theory, but something else. Per that theory, if the species is not fit, it is extinct, or on its way to extinction. That's it.

How many takes does it take to get the most out of a book. And is it better if you have someone else reading along with you - or at the end of a reading ? — Amity

I churn through books at a fairly high rate, and rarely return to books in their entirity. What I tend to find myself returning to are parts of books, relavent to whatever I'm interested in at the time. In this sense I treat books more like resources that I can go back to when there's something in one that I'm after.

I also tend to read clusters of books with similar themes or authors, so I can cross-relate readings as I go. Helps to build a more robust picture of whatever it is that you're reading on. Like, I plan to do a bunch of Spinoza study soon, and have a whole series of Spinoza related books lined up.

Occasionally I'll start a thread here in order to pursue a theme that I want to articulate better. I think the absolute best way to demonstrate understanding to yourself is to put arguments or points of view in your own words. Trying to respond to criticisms also helps to really show yourself that you grasp a point of view. The most fun is in connecting different topics that you wouldn't have considered 'connectible' had you not discussed it.

Anyways, a rag tag collection of thoughts to respond to your query.

:waves:

:up: The whole effort of Spinoza's metaphysics - the very essence of its radicality - consists of contesting the subject-predicate Aristotelian model of relations that the OP is working with. Perhaps the best way I've heard it put is that the modes have an adverbial nature, rather than a substantival one - they expresses not “what” but “how” being is.

The temerity of women withholding sex from men. Impetulant feminists! The gall of it.

Ah, but the OP marks an advance on the play - now you can get it from other women, so no need to cave.

This is like a modern twist on the Lysistrata. I love it. As with the plot of the great play, no doubt it will drive men mad.

E1D3: "By substance I understand that which exists in itself and is conceived through, or by means of, itself; i.e. the conception of which does not require for its formation the conception of anything else."

Feminism as practiced is not intersectional? Or feminism as ideal is not intersectional? Not clear from the OP.

Man this season of Brexit is so good. So many plot twists.

Although the timeline is a bit fuzzy the Chinese knew about fractions which can be less than one. If they defined negative numbers simply as less than one they wouldn't have been able to distinguish fractions from negative numbers and they were clearly able to do that. — TheMadFool

Fair enough. You still don't need zero to distinguish between positive and negative numbers though. What matters is use, application. You use positive numbers when you collect stuff, you use negative numbers when you remove stuff, or try to consider how much more stuff you need to meet your requirements. Or somesuch. Definitions are a mathematicians plaything.

If you don't have zero than a negative number is simply a number less than one. No contradiction there.

Thread has now devolved into yet another mudfight among spoilt brats, so it will be closed and I will leave Jamalrob to deal with the OP by PM. Grow up, all of you.

How to ask the right questions; and maybe more importantly, how to recognize bad ones - the combat against transcendental stupidity.

Newtonian mechanics or laws determine what objects do — TheMadFool

There's no reason to treat this 'determination' in a different way than laws: whatever objects do, their behaviour must abide by such and such inviolable dictates (e.g. Newton's first law of inertia: any object in motion or at rest will continue to be in motion or at rest unless impinged upon by an external force), without this 'determination' exhaustively determining the behaviour of the object.

A popular term that captures how to think about all this is the language of constraints. Laws and mechanics function as constraints on what is possible. The important and interesting thing about constraints that they are not merely negative, but also positive: the appearance of constraints make things possible that were not there before. A six sided die can only land in six ways, compared to a sphere, but this limitation makes the die alot more useful. The constraints placed on the sounds we make allow us to speak language, rather than just make inchoate noises.

Actually language is a useful model here: everything we say is bound by the ‘rules of language’, but this doesn’t mean that ‘language determines what we say’. You can study the rules of language till you’re decomposing, and nothing there will account for what people speak (although it might account for certain aspects of how they speak). The same holds true, mutatis mutandis, for physical law. Everything abides it, it is universal in scope, and it determines everything that happens. But not all of it.

Samuel Moyn, historian and critic of human rights:

"The mere fact of Christian universalism is no argument for awarding credit to the religion for the conceptual or political possibility of human rights. ... Though its egalitarianism is famous, the cultural and political implications of Christianity from age to age and place to place were simply too different, in need of too much drastic transformation, to approach modern conceptions on their own.

The premise of accounts that try to claim more, after all, is that there is only one move from particular cultures to universal morality to be made - and Christianity is it. But once it is acknowledged that there were, are, and could be many universalisms, the fact that one or another movement or culture is universalistic - even floridly so, as Christianity is - lends it no necessary role in the prehistory of human
rights". (Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights In History).

The OP misunderstands the nature of universality at play in the 'laws of nature'. The so-called laws must be understood negatively, as limits which cannot be crossed. To dumb it down, they say something like: "you can do almost whatever you want, but you can't do this". The 2nd law of thermodynamics is exemplary: in a closed system, entropy can never decrease. All well and good. But this says nothing about what actually happens in those systems: it just says that whatever does happen, it can't happen such that entropy decreases. The philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright puts it best:

"Covering-law theorists tend to think that nature is well-regulated; in the extreme, that there is a law to cover every case. [Instead,] natural objects are much like people in societies. Their behaviour is constrained by some specific laws and by a handful of general principles, but it is not determined in detail, even statistically [by those laws]. What happens on most occasions is dictated by no law at all. ... God may have written just a few laws and grown tired". (Cartwright, How The Laws of Physics Lie)

'Universality' simply means that nothing can contravene those laws, not that the laws determine "everything". A stop sign must always be obeyed: but not everything you do is governed by the stop sign.

Does the study capture etiology? Does it attribute the mental issues to any particular range of factors, or factors in combination with each other?

If Reason were to prescribe rape, that would make it moral — Bartricks

@Janus - this is what I meant by incongruence. Is this 'wrong', an error in reasoning? One wants to say - reason departed long ago. This is a different game.

I ask one question - what is wrong with my argument? Is it invalid? No. Are any of its premises false? Well, I can't see any reason to doubt any of them and plenty to think they're all true. — Bartricks

The problem is not with your argument; it is with its relevance (to morality). Irrelevance is much worse than error. One can correct an error. Relevance requires reengineering one's assumptions from the ground up.