The leap is from "repeal of second amendment" to "ban on all guns". — Michael

It wasn't even 'repeal', it was, 'hey, the constitution itself provides for a reading in which regulation is written into the very passage itself'. And as Ciceronianus pointed out all those pages ago, none of the constitutional rights are unconditional, and practically none are treated as such; the insistence that the 2nd is somehow special is itself a complete anomaly.

Projection? You literally can't get through more than a couple of posts without writhing over the boogyman that is 'the left'. Not only do you seem to mistake fantasy for reality but also reality for fantasy.

Not to mention the facile talk about "the left". — Sapientia

When you're unable to discuss substance, all that's left is to invoke ideological spectres to cover over argumentative inability. It's generally a good sign.

The leftist mod brigade has tried very hard, sometimes with sarcasm and sometimes with apparent seriousness, to paint me as a gun-loving and toting nutjob. Just look at the hyperventilation, condescension, and references to petri dishes earlier in this thread. — Thorongil

To be clear, my incredulity has nothing to do with your stance on guns as it was to your rhetorical strategy. Again, to move from a point about the constitution to a largely imagined - and entirely unrealistic - fear that all guns will be banned or made inaccessible is a rhetorical leap so wide as to be fantastic. It's the immediate argumentative instinct - to imagine and conjure up a thinly grounded fantasy mired in conspiracy theoretic language - that I think is so wild. It's as if, having suggested that perhaps dogs should be put on leashes in public, you were to immediately leap to the fear that the real, hidden and nefarious motive is to have all dogs everywhere put down or made unavailable for purchase. In-sane.

This sounds reasonable. Among my favorite ads from a while back:

It seems I was right about the persecution complex. — Thorongil

Hey I'm not the snowflake who can't write a sentence without crying about persecution. And like, do I need to /s everytime I'm being sarcastic? It's really no fun if I do.

Err, 'the last one' was about the threat of undergroud conspiratorial lefties, who are the real probelm according to your kind. I was agreeing with you! Although please don't make me spell out thr nature of that agreement, that'll ruin the fun. It's not all about you, you know.

Also, I hardly see this as a left or right issue. I see this as a uniquiely American issue, where the American attitude - so nicely distilled in the specimen that is Thoron - is basically pathological, as I think Baden put it. It can deal only in extremes, or else in invented scenarios, or conspiritorial paranoia, without any sense of proportion or reality. Again our exhibit is Thoron who repsonded to the suggestion that regulation is not infringement on constituional rights - perhaps the opposite - with the hysterical notion that this entails the banning of all guns or the 'intention' to make buying guns impossible. Apologies to those Americans here who think differently, but as far as I can tell you're essentially a minority with little to no political sway (except in the underground, conspiratorial way, which, y'know, has been so wildly sucessful thus far. You're the REAL problem we ought to prioritize in this debate, not real, disporportionate and actual deaths by gun - again a testament to the fantastic sense of priority and proportion that only Americans possess).

That's just what the lefty underground conspiracy biders-of-time would say wouldn't they, you lefty underground conspiratorial time bider.

Oh the things I'd do...

Oh Thoron I don't think you're evil, I think you're fascinating.

Yes, I'm playing dumb because I'm the one who thinks it's remotely feasible that the democratic party wants to - and can - ban all guns or make it impossible to own one. Yes, I'm the one not attuned to any remote sense of political reality here. Me.

/s

Oh look I make no secret about where I stand. I said it in the shoutbox but I think people thought I was joking. All gun carriers should be wearing blinking LED vests and matching hats that mark them as gun carriers. Perhaps a little automated sound loop which shouts I HAVE A GUN every 90 seconds or so. By all means, do this and don't ban a thing.

Yes, all those crazies, look at them, trying to do something - anything - about the extraordinary disproportion of gun related deaths in the US. Madness incarnate. Better watch out for that insidious threat than the actual threat of real life deaths!

Ah, the classic 'you can't defend the point you never brought up to begin with can you?' tactic. Really got me there! At least 12 squirms you got outta me.

Ah, wait till you hear about the invasion body snatchers. Maybe we're the last real humans Agu! The things you can imagine and fantasize about if only you put your mind to it...

I've never pretended I don't like monkeying around. But really, I've no serious response to Thorongil's posts other than incredulity. When recourse to the most extreme scenarios is the first instinct, there's no serious discussion to be had.

Yes, it is indeed sooooo bizarre that the reference to regulation refers to some manner of regulation. SOOOoOoOOo bizarre. Seriously, I'm done, I can't take the sophistry anymore.

And I can imagine Jesus riding a dinosaur with lazers shooting out of it's eyes. But that, like your point, would be entirely irrelevant to pointing out that the US constitution speaks of arms in the context of regulation. I mean I don't know how else to make you understand how insane you sound to me: you responded to a post about the US constitution with another post conjuring the most extreme scenario(s) of gun control, based off an ambiguous remark made by a single US representative the other day, and you did this as though this had anything to do with what I wrote, or, for that matter, political reality. You literally had to make-up/project a fake, impossible scenario as though this had anything to do political reality (which you know as well as I do will never happen), in order to respond to a factual point regarding the US constitution. And I'm overreacting. Yeah, okay.

You're purposely overreacting to make me appear crazy. — Thorongil

Says the dude who responded to a point about the constitution with 'they're planning to take away all our guns - look what Pelosi said the other day'. That's not the appearance of crazy, that is crazy.

I mean it though. I think your response is so wild as to be something that honestly needs to be a case study in human communication. Along with most of the pro-gun discourse in the US in general. To move from, 'hey look at what the constitution says' to 'Yeah well, Pelosi wants to ban all our guns because she mentioned something about a slippery slope'. The one just isn't a response to the other - it's incongruent to the point of the fantastic. Plato could rewrite the Sophist on these terms, and the crazy part is that the entire US gun debate so often trades along exactly the kinds of lines you're traced out.

Ah, Pelosi's reference to a 'slippery slope' unequivocally translating to the "banning all guns or passing regulations that make it nearly impossible to own one". Yes, I see how you got from A to B, I don't know how I missed the all so obvious unpacking of it.

Amazing. Honestly, people like you need to be put in a Petri dish and studied. I mean, how do you get from - 'the constitution allows for regulation' to OMG THEY'RE GOING TO TAKE AWAY ALL OUR GUNS FOR EVER AND EVER. What kind of response is that? It's paranoid delusional.

I suppose it's the same person who said that we ought to be "banning all guns or passing regulations that make it nearly impossible to own one". The point being that I can play this stupid game of hypotheticals and intention projection too. An entirely irrelevant, idiotic game.

And I have genuine concerns about the intentions of those who would prefer that the current murderous state of affairs stays as it is. So what? What a bizarre response.

Let's recall that the constitutional right to bear arms is embedded in a passage regarding a well regulated militia. Here it is: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

So I put it that the lack of regulation on firearm use is what is unconstitutional, and not the other way around.

"Time, time: the step not beyond that is not accomplished in time would lead outside of time, without this outside being intemporal, but there where time would fall, fragile fall, according to this "outside of time in time" towards which writing would attract us, were we allowed, having disappeared from ourselves, to write within the secret of the ancient fear."

"Why these names so heavy, too charged with themselves, as charged with all the surcharge of language, over which they are called to stand? God is thus a name, pure materiality, naming nothing, not even himself. Whence the perversion, magical, mystical, literal, of the name, the opacity of God to any idea of God. And still, like fear, like madness, it disappears, if only as a messenger of another language, of which such a disappearance could not take the place of a beginning. The "death of God" is perhaps only the help that historical language vainly brings to allow a word to fall outside of language without another announcing itself there: absolute slip".

"Friendship: fraternity without law".

"To die: as if we only died in the infinitive".

- Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond.

I could read this book forever.

Yep. The more politicization the better, until America's ridiculous death-by-gun stats come down. Would prefer it politic'd to death than, uh, actual deaths.

Exactly. It's just a crazy, incomprehensible response.

Oh good America's gun problem is not horrific it's only disgustingly awful. How consoling.

I have to admit, I have a kind of sick fascination with the rationalizations offered in the face of gun attacks in the US. Fascination because they are so impossible to take seriously that the only way to approach them are as anthropological exhibits of the powers of human self-delusion. It would be funny if it wasn't so incredibly horrific. After all, the fact is that the US has a problem with guns. And it is specifically a gun problem, specific to the US:



source



source

The US is literally in a class of it's own. You have to extend every chart just to fit the US in when it comes to death by gun. Yet at every point will you find attempts to diffuse, deny, disperse or downplay the specificity of the problem. One will find it assimilated to 'human nature', or 'deaths in general' or 'we don't know what the problem really is'. Anything to deny that this is a problem whose scale is exclusive to the US, and is specifically to do with gun deaths which cannot be simply assimilated other other kinds of death, violent or otherwise.

Oh this is my favorite answer.

I'm now relieved to learn though that Sap and Baden are rational and tempered, despite their functional illiteracy. — Hanover

*giggles*

That seems an inevitable consequence of economic rationalism and biological determinism. Somewhere in Aristotle's writings, there is a reference to the 'noble uselessness' of metaphysics - the idea that contemplation of the first philosophy serves no practical purpose, but ought never to be thought of in those terms. Perhaps that is the dimension that is being lost. Perhaps the founders of the liberal tradition took for granted those metaphysical elements that had been part of Western culture for millenia, without realising how they might be lost, and what would happen if they were. — Wayfarer

For someone like Arendt, the vita contemplativa (the life of contemplation) was the diametric opposite of the vita activia (the life of action), and it was only in the latter that politics proper could be located. Or put otherwise, the imperative to return to 'the contemplative life' stands as another effort of depoliticization, insofar as it stands against making changes to the world and instead withdraws into the life of the mind. She even traces this devalorization of of politics back to it's roots in the Christian tradition, whose lasting legacy has been nothing but damaging to the life of politics:

"The reason why life asserted itself as the ultimate point of reference in the modern age and has remained the highest good of modern society is that the modern reversal operated within the fabric of a Christian society whose fundamental belief in the sacredness of life has survived, and has even remained completely unshaken by, secularization and the general decline of the Christian faith ... For the Christian "glad tidings" of the immortality of individual human life had reversed the ancient relationship between man and world and promoted the most mortal thing, human life, to the position of immortality, which up to then the cosmos had held

... Historically, it is more than probable that the victory of the Christian faith in the ancient world was largely due to this reversal, which brought hope to those who knew that their world was doomed, indeed a hope beyond hope, since the new message promised an immortality they never had dared to hope for. This reversal could not but be disastrous for the esteem and the dignity of politics. Political activity ... now sank to the low level of an activity subject to necessity, destined to remedy the consequences of human sinfulness on one hand and to cater to the legitimate wants and interests of earthly life on the other". (Arednt, The Human Condition).

On this I think she is largely correct - that 'contemplation' is complicit in the forces of depolitization, and cannot serve as a bulwark against it.

I don't know why the struggle for food should be excluded from politics, it seems an odd notion. — unenlightened

I agree, it shouldn't be. But the point remains that if one's battle for food takes on a political tenor, it becomes a matter of, as it were, changing the world in some small way, rather than simply trying to align with a world already given. So yeah, I think Arendt's notion of the political ought to be expanded - that's exactly why I mentioned the counterexample of food in the thread - in a way that doesn't, for all that, throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Again, to make political life impossible is a process of disempowerment; the attack on organisations representative of identities - trade unions, for example, combined with distraction "look at these terrible people disrespecting your flag". Again it seems odd to call a process of disempowerment and subjugation 'depoliticisation', as though a one-party state is non-political.

I almost feel that the entire discussion of politicisation and depoliticisation is a deliberate distraction and disempowerment technique in action intended to delegitimise opposition and justify the entrenchment of the power of vested interests. — unenlightened

I think this is coming at cross-purposes here. In some sense it's true, I think a one-party state isn't 'political' in the sense I mean it: a one party state is one in which the possibility of politics - of contesting claims, of taking part in the process of world-building, of dictating the course of one's own life - is indeed foreclosed. One party states are precisely states that eliminate the space of the political in order to claim it entirely as it's own.

A distinction might help: Claude Lefort famously made the distinction between 'politics' and 'the political', where 'politics' accorded to the realm of the party-room and instruments of the state, while 'the political' encompassed actions in the everyday life of people, protest, words, and so on, up to and including the official mechanisms of the state. When I speak of depoliticization, I mean it in the second sense, and not the first. Politics in the second sense - as 'the political' - is something I understand that can well affirm the need for empowerment and so on. One can act politically in order to empower. I don't see, or intend there to be, any zero-sum game here.

No more confidence than I'd have with literally any other writer in any other field. I mean legit, I don't understand high-order physics papers but that's a function of my own lack of training in that field. If someone doesn't understand German idealism or phenomenological existentialism, the default assumption ought to be that probably, you need to put in a bit of legwork. It's not a confidence thing so much as a this-is-how-you-learn-anything-whatsoever thing. Just assume you're the idiot and things generally work out quite nicely. It has for me!

Deleuze is one of the very few authors for whom beginning with secondary readings is, I think, pretty appropriate (I wouldn't suggest it with alot of others). My go to list is generally this:

Gilbert Simondon - "The Genesis of the Individual" (article - *Must* Read, can be found online)
Levi Bryant - Difference and Givenness
Miguel de Beistegui - Truth and Genesis (Beistegui is a Heidegger scholar and half his book is on Heidegger, so this might be up your alley)
Manuel Delanda - Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
Daniel Smith - Essays on Deleuze

A working knowledge of Bergson, Kant, and Leibniz would be useful too.

THEN you can try reading Difference and Repeition, and even then it's a good idea to read Henry Somers-Hall's Guide along with it.

Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are, despite their popularity, the worst places to start IMO!

That's so cool that you're getting into Levinas. His star seems to have faded a bit of late, even among continental circles. As far as suggestions go, I think you might appreciate the work of Alphonso Lingis, who translated both of the Levinas books you're currently reading. He's my favourite phenomenologist, and while inspired by Levinas, breaks with him in some really interesting ways (you can find his paper Six Problems in Levinas's Philosophy, here). Deathbound Subjectivity, Phenomenological Explanations, and The Imperative are all some of my favorite reads by Lingis.

As for me, Deleuze remains the philosopher I can't turn away from, but not necessarily because of 'his philosophy' per se, but because he's the one philosopher who seems to asks all the right questions. Deleuze inspires me to read and explore subjects way beyond philosophy, from evolution to art, anthropology to math. It's the kinds of questions he asks, moreso than the 'answers' he gives, that really inspires me.

Take for example, how Heidegger and Hegel speak about nothing could be seen as problematic by analytic philosophers? It might have a use-value, or say something interesting, but for a lot of people it ends up being incoherent, and then it to be repudiated for a better system. Not accepted as a system among other systems that all work in their own light. — Marty

I don't think those sorts of objections are worth much. They arise from a lack of understanding, and a failure to appreciate the conceptual work that those terms do. They speak more to the incomprehension of the objector than what it is they object to, imo.

multiple different ways of interpreting being. — Marty

To be clear again, what I'm speaking of is multiple ways of talking about multiple things which just so happened to be named 'being'.

I'm not one of those people, but certainly what's at stake in any philosophical debate isn't going to be accepting that any system works according to its own intrinsic system... — Marty

Not according to it's 'own intrinsic system' no, but according to how well an approach allows us to see things in a new and productive light - what kind of new inferences we can make on it's basis, what new things it tells us about the phenomena it claims to investigate. Deleuze, as usual, gets to the heart of it: "Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure. ... We will not say of many books of philosophy that they are false, for that is to say nothing, but rather that they lack importance or interest, precisely because they do not create any concept or contribute an image of thought." (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?).

Like, just advocating for a form of pluralism? — Marty

Depends what you mean by pluralism of course! Perhaps I can put it this way: different conceptions of 'existence/being/etc' ought to shed light on different aspects of whatever it is that's under investigation. So when Heidegger's conception of Being differs from Aristotle's - to use a completely arbitrary example - it's not that Heidegger would be simply 'improving' on Aristotle's definition, it's that his conception would responding to different concerns and different motivations from Aristotle. He's trying to understand or work through a different set of problems than Aristotle was.

There's a post by Levi Bryant on his Larval Subjects blog that touches on some of this, worth reading in full, but here's a snippet:

"What philosophy interrogates or investigates is not what appears in the frame, but rather the frame which allows something to manifest at all. And in this respect, philosophy will be a battle of the frames, not a battle of truths. The great debates among philosophers are about something that precedes truthful or veridical statements. The great debates of philosophy are questions of how existence should be framed. See the issue is that existence is overwhelming. Frames make a selection from the infinity of existence, and in doing so draw attention to these features of being rather than those features of being. A frame is an imperative that says attend to or notice this type of existence." (in the context of this post, I'd amend the language here so that when Bryant says 'existence', I would replace that word with 'problems' or 'issues').

Differing understandings of being/existence, etc, are meant to do just this: draw attention to different things (even while they share the same 'name').

So, why didn't QE lead to much higher inflation rates? Or more simply, why is inflation so low in the US? — Posty McPostface

Heh, this is the $64 million (trillion?) dollar question isn't it? As far as I know, there's no real consensus on this, but I'm very partial to the views laid out by Claudio Borio, as detailed in this FT article [possible paywall]. A snippet:

• "First, he believes that the Phillips Curve relationship has largely broken down, which implies that the decline in unemployment currently underway in many economies will not necessarily have the same effect on inflation that it has in earlier decades.
• Second, he thinks that inflation may have been permanently reduced by structural changes, including the entry of low paid workers in emerging markets into the global economy, the importance of global value chains in production, and (in future) the role of technology in increasing price transparency and reducing pricing power. He sees these factors as leading to a long lasting and benign decline in inflation, which should be broadly accepted by the central banks.
• Third, he argues that the central banks have misinterpreted some of these structural factors, and that low inflation has mistakenly led to a long standing bias towards monetary policy that is overly easy. This, in turn, leads to excess debt accumulation and destabilisation of the real economy when monetary policy is finally tightened. He thinks that the central banks should try to exit this destructive merry-go-round as soon as they can.
• Fourth, he believes that the standard approach to the definition of r*, the equilibrium real interest rate, may be wrong."

My bolding.