I appreciate your detailed response. You have made me more skeptical about Weinstein's version of the events. Where I can't agree is that whether they were wrong or right is neither here nor there because Weinstein appeared on some show. I will say that Weistein's testimony in that video was a little offputting to me when he offered something like a conspiracy theory --as if the kids were the unwitting pawns of far more cynical agents.

But I find a different conspiracy theory here: https://www.thenation.com/article/white-men-have-good-reason-to-be-scared/

From the left to the right, we have for decades masked our disagreements with the paralyzing euphemisms of partisanship. We’ve told ourselves that our most bitter conflict is “conservative” versus “liberal,” “free enterprise” versus “big government.” Maybe now we are finally ready to be honest about the real point of contention: We are, as we have always been, a nation divided on the topic of white-male power. It’s easy to get confused by the crosscurrents of misogyny and racism and xenophobia, to think they’re discrete issues rather than the interlocking tools of white men’s minority rule. — The Nation

What do you make of this article?

I do get it. White men have largely been running things. But this seems like a crude simplification to me. And most white men aren't rich and aren't connected to power. Lemme guess, if we get rid of the white men in power, then the rich POC and women in power will sprinkle the poor with cash and reduce carbon emissions, since blackness and femaleness are magically good, just as whiteness + maleness is magically bad. I don't think so. We're all greedy monsters. Maybe we're all racists and sexists too. This article may want to demonize a small subset of rich white men. But only someone in the bubble will ignore the direction of this magical thinking. At the moment white men have enough power so that such articles are acceptable. But this anti-white and anti-male sentiment is only going to encourage white men to start thinking (even more) about which party has more to offer them. I mean those who might otherwise vote DNC but aren't sure if they can trust the kind of people that tolerate this attitude toward people with their combination of race and gender. Ain't it gonna be the po' white boy that gets it first? Or the dummy tryin' to pay off school debt? 'White men have reason to be scared.' Mitch McConnell approves this message. It's great way to cut down on violence too, literally telling the wingnuts with a basement full of ammo that yeah dude you should be scared, we're coming for you. (The NRA also approves this message.)

There is an issue with your expression of "sharing in the same reality", because one's reality cannot be otherwise from what is present within one's mind. If we want to make a generalization concerning "the reality", then the reality is that each of these animals has a different reality. It is only when human beings come to communicate, and agree, that there becomes such a thing as "the reality". — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a delicate issue. I see the value of the approach that starts within an individual brain/mind and works outward, and it's good for many purposes. But I think it might get in the way of contemplating language. In short, it's tempting but artificial. The background or framework that we are always already in seems to include an elusive sense of The World that is not theoretical. We are just always already in a world of objects that we can talk about, and our primary relationship to these objects is messing with them. And perhaps language in primarily about coordinating our messing with these objects. We don't stare at tools. We use them. And they exist differently for our use than they do for our staring. In short I'm saying that we apply this Heideggerian insight to language and get some of what I find anyway in Wittgenstein.

IMV the correspondence theory of truth, despite all its problems in the ether of speculation, is part of this automatic framework. It's so automatic that even its critics tend to use it as they criticize it. 'The correspondence theory of truth is wrong ---doesn't correspond to truth.'

"Our background", is artificial, created through language and agreement. This background of commonality is the mistaken assumption which we must dispense. — Metaphysician Undercover

For me it's the other way around. The automatic and therefore elusive background is genuine. The hammer in the hand that's being employed has a different kind of being than the hammer that's being stared at and described in terms of its density and shape. In the same way we use language automatically even as we construct artificial theories about what we are doing.

We tend to assume that this underlying agreement, this common background, "must" exist in order for language to work. But in reality, it's just not there, and that assumption just leads us to different forms of Platonism where the fundamental agreement, and commonality of opinion, precedes human existence. — Metaphysician Undercover

For me we don't even consciously assume this background. 'Assumption' is artificial here. The child learns to talk before she learns to talk about her talk philosophically. The stuff closest to us is to close for us to me without straining to notice it. Recall that a more mundane example of the background is just the ability to speak English --along with the largely unfathomed and perhaps unfathomable depths of all this means.

From my point of view, your ability to say 'it's just not there' depends precisely on its being there. You are intelligibly telling me that I am wrong about our shared world, that this background is a mirage or a superstition --- does not correspond to the way things really are. I'm claiming that we talk and act (without consciously assuming it) as if we share a world and can both understand and be understood. When we try to sort this out carefully, we find it hard to tell a consistent story. Our know-how won't fit inside our know-that. Our conscious models tend to run aground, hence the endless debates in philosophy, while the rest of the world just uses this framework that philosophers stubbornly insist on squeezing into a little system of knowing-that.

Words like 'truth' and 'know' are so easy to use when we aren't playing philosophy. They are the hammer driving a nail in a concrete situation. Pluck them out and just stare at them and a debate about these mundane things will rage for centuries. Yet within this same debate they'll be used in the ordinary-primary-easy way without anyone remembering that they don't yet know what they 'really' mean. If the joke wasn't misleading, we might say that what they 'really' mean is whatever philosophers don't mean by them, or when they use them without their thinking caps on.

The real background consists of isolated individuals with differing cognitions (disagreement), from which agreement is cultured through training etc.. — Metaphysician Undercover

I understand that approach too. It's a good model when dealing with certain issues. Certainly our collisions with others and objects shape our individual models of or perspectives on the world toward consensus. But we've been doing this a long time! Our species has been designed by the training you mentioned on the genetic level. So I'd say goodbye blank slate and goodbye isolated ego. Yes I can look at an individual human, but that's like looking at a wolf and ignoring to what degree the wolf is a 'cell' in the pack. So the individual wolf is real, but our thinking of the wolf is shallow when we ignore the pack (and then its environment, etc.) With humans the situation is seemingly even more extreme.

I think we may be running aground on our final vocabularies, and I'm not sure you have the story straight, especially since you didn't mention Weinstein.

That you ultimately don't object to the chant of 'black power' seems to confirm you as a defender of 'virtuous' racism. I'm not so sure about your psychoanalysis of my motives. To be sure, I'm no saint. Drogon wants out. Are you a saint?

Anyway, what I'm hearing is that it's cool if biologists are chased out of their institutions as long as they are white men who question an arguably racist policy. I though we on the left were down with science? Oh well. Here's his testimony before congress. I'd say decide whether even this guy is one of the baddies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRIKJCKWla4

Heidegger's Being isnt meant as a concept but as placing difference, activity, practice, transformation relation and becoming prior to subjects and objects. — Joshs

I understand that frameworks 'invisibly' determine entities as entities. It's as if we are convolutional neural networks that come pre-trained with features. I can't remember when the world wasn't a system of objects and people I could talk to about those objects.

For me this is part of Kant's point. We are thrown into an intelligible world, into nature that already makes a lot of sense for us. These frameworks offer us uncontroversial entities and a language in which we can talk about them. Without these frameworks, science would be impossible. So science depends on these frameworks. I like Mach's philosophy. Much of science looks like the discovery of functional relationships between uncontroversial entities. We can find a relationship between the use of the word 'red' and the readings on a scientific instrument. I'm not a Mach scholar (I only have so much time), but I remember thinking that he cut through lots of noise and confusion with his approach.

Don't you think there's a difference between theory in the metaphysical sense and what Nietzsche, Heidegger and the poststructalists were trying to do? — Joshs

Indeed, but I think it's easy to be so dazzled by insights that we actually forget to apply them to our own inquiry. It's one thing to grasp finitude abstractly, for instance, and another to feel and affirm it. You've mentioned lots of names, names, names. Many of them surely belong to thinkers I'd enjoy. And I could also mention names that you'll probably never get around to. As individual mortals we are condemned or privileged to make our way through our own brief lives with the torches we find along the way. Beyond that there's the recognition that know-how is prior to knowing-that. This is a profound insight, and it connects to Hegel's owl that always arrives to late.

Perhaps you've studied science yourself. For me it was of extreme value philosophically. The person working on post-quantum cryptography is up against some right-angled facts about algebraic structures and computational complexity. That's the sharp part of the work where Nietzsche would be useless. On the other hand, navigating the academic hierarchy via politics and the choice of what to research is something else. The philosophical problem of what we should value also melts away when their are clear metrics for performance. At work in that context, there is no substantial ambiguity about the goal or the standards.

On the cultural level, we are clearly on philosophical terrain, and then philosophy is something like high grade politics. Of course scientists can use philosophers for insight, just as Einstein used Mach (and then put him aside when he got in the way.) A society is something like an organism. Philosophers are an important kind of cell, but they never were the only brain cells. I don't deny that philosophy is important. I think it's less than obvious that it remains central. Figures who aren't philosophers proper (like Hinton) are going to think philosophically about their work. Look at Hinton's inspiration for using 'dropout' regularization. In short, I'm not against theory. I'm not just sold on its centrality. That theory has taught me its non-centrality. The true ground is successful application. Yes, we reflect on it. But sometimes we figure out how to do something before we figure out how we figured it out.

The meaning of empirical success, workablity, validation, truth are well on their way to becoming such evanescent entities, as Nietzsche envisioned. — Joshs

I don't find this plausible. To this attitude I reply: go try to master using some complicated software. Or fix your car by yourself the next time it breaks down. These mundane things are what theory likes to forget, but they are what non-theoretical life is largely made of.

This is not a loss with respect to the old Cartesian ways of thinking about empirical truth. The price the realists paid for their belief in a world of reductive causation was an even more profound sort of arbitrariness(a unified theory of physics to be run on a computer, but in which everything important to human culture is assigned to randomness) . — Joshs

As I read it, these 'realists' are just more philosophers. That indifferent-to-us nature has regularities which can be exploited is not so wild as all of that. IMV a good scientist knows that he mostly doesn't know. Look at the spiderweb of powerlines that keep our computers humming. Look into the codes that allow for the efficient, error free transmission of this very post. I don't pretend to profound truth about the thing-in-itself or 'the Real.' Am I authentic or worldless? That's a religious-spiritual-political question. I'm saying that non-theorists tend to use these words ('real', 'true', etc.) as a way to point to the stuff they depend on, the stuff they can't get away with ignoring, the stuff that will punish their ignorance-blindness --whatever it 'really' or metaphysically is.

Most of us/them don't have some metaphysical theory of our linguistic know-how. 'But what do you really mean by real?' 'But what is being?' These questions have their charm and maybe even great spiritual value, but leaving them unanswered in not a practical problem (not at that level of generality, anyway.) Any foundation that arrives after the fact is too late. The framework was already up and running for that artificial construction to be delivered in the first place. This is not to say that we can't learn more about how we are intelligible to one another. I do suggest that we'll favor theories about this that can themselves be applied to further this intelligibility.

Yeah Bennington is still a little cute for my taste, but the prose is clear. His book is crammed with ideas. I like summaries, even if they are difficult to do well. There is so much out there to read that's it good to be able to tell quickly whether a thinker is worth the time.

Instead of debating Kant vs Hegel, how about we compare Hinton with Dennett, Gallagher, Hutto, Thompson and Varela? — Joshs

I have read some Dennett but not the others. I'd probably like them, if I can get around to them. My real job is in science, which I often neglect for philosophy. I should be working on a dissertation (early stages). Much of my attitude is influenced by training in mathematics. The gap between pure math and its application is a nice metaphor for the gap between theory and practice in general. Intuition is decisive. Proofs are largely important as communicators of this intuition and to some degree as hygiene. Also successful application is IMV the actual ground of mathematics. This is of course a dark foundation, a framework that is not essentially made of thoughts.

In the new AI paradigm, it's looking to me like our best models are going to be black boxes. We'll have tools that work that don't really make sense to us. I haven't studied QM closely, but I get the impression that that's the situation there, too. If I object to metaphysics, it perhaps because I think that systems often exist to cover over a darkness. We mostly push buttons that have tended to give us what we want. Our ignorance of final things looks fundamental to me, as if the mind wasn't built to address such questions with any kind of consistency or clarity. So there's a humility in empiricism (as I intend it). At the same time there's bravery and pride that is biased against whatever inspires fear and poverty. While indulgent language is sometimes justified, I also think a suspicion against anything foggy is also justified. When pomo gets a little too eager to through out the notion of objectivity, the pushback is sensible.

How much context do you need for a gang of students chanting 'black power'? Or a mob of students gathered threateningly around a small female professor? Or 'whiteness is the most violent fucking system to ever breathe' being yelled out for a mob's applause? Would you need the same context for chants of 'white power' ? It just seems reasonable to me for us all to encourage a society where race and gender aren't such a big deal. If blacks are justified in chanting 'black power' because they are viewed as currently less powerful, then at some point 'white power' politics will be justified. Some obviously already think so. But if whites become a smaller part of the population and lose political power, they'll have a precedent for thinking racially. Perhaps they already do, but it doesn't seem like something we'd want to encourage by tolerating divisive rhetoric.

That said, I also see something like the futility of this reasonable talk. It's more exciting to be unreasonable. The reasonable people end up depending on the extremists to cancel one another out. In the meantime the rich can get richer and the oceans can get warmer. The world was always on fire and always will be. I'd hate to live without any distance from all this political hysteria. It's serious and yet it's not, not while most people just go the grocery store without shooting one another.

I actually like Bennington's Derrida. He writes strong English. Sheehan also writes strong English. I respect what both writers were trying to do. Sheehan had the proper arrogance. Better to be wrong than unclear. I'm not saying he's wrong, if we can even talk of wrong or right in the interpretation of difficult texts. I agree that we want a strong reading, even if it's a misreading. Kojeve is great on Hegel, though it's really Kojeve presenting Kojeve through the voice of a hero, just as Plato often used Socrates. Bloom's translation is also first rate. To me that's one of the great books 20th century philosophy that isn't much talked about.

I've dabbled with Lacan and Deleuze and it didn't take. Zizek does some fascinating stuff with Lacan, and I think he's pretty readable. And then Zizek's live persona is great. Heidegger and Lacan in the few videos available come off pretty humorless and square. Derrida is likable on video. Some of his ideas are impressive. A less cutesy and more focused book than Bennington's could really sell Derrida to skeptics, I think. Pomophobia is largely a rejection of a certain tiresome cuteness or tendency toward mystification and exaggeration. The style is decadent, late, precious. The purple velvet jacket says it all.

I don't think we can really do justice to Heidegger without first delving more deeply into your comment that a" fact/value distinction is useful".
If what you are saying is that you don't quite agree with the arguments of Putnam-Quine-Rorty-Goodman , then perhaps you identify more with the 'pre-Hegelian' branches of analytic philosophy, cognitive science and philosophy of science — Joshs

I don't think we have to drag in all the academic heroes to tackle the issue of how the fact-value distinction is useful. I've read some of those guys closey, others not all. Other thinkers not mentioned have also been important to me. But I don't see the value in parading these ghosts when we could just discuss the issue. Indeed, it may be that all the academic hustle and bustle actually obscures precisely the point I'd want to make.

The fact-value distinction is utterly familiar to us. Yes we can question it theoretically, but we shouldn't ignore its ordinary function. We know how to use it, and it exists differently in use than in the books of philosophers. Language itself is the hammer. That's where Heidegger and Wittgenstein meet. Philosophers tend to just stare at language and ignore what they 'know' in their everydayness. From my point of view, as I said before, Heidegger enriches something I've been calling empiricism. There is something 'anti-intellectual' in this empiricism, and a move toward the 'authenticity' of being in the world.

My favorite readers of Heidegger are the poststructuralists, particularly Derrida. — Joshs

Well at least Derrida is crystal clear. (Not really.) I've read some Derrida too. Some of it is great, but I found it overall less relevant than what I like in Heidegger. To put it bluntly, at worst we have the philosophical tradition crawling up its own ass, exaggerating its importance to those who aren't tuned in.

I also thought there were many pointless blocks of text. I'd also still recommend it to others as worth looking at, but I'd be upfront about what I don't like about it.

Ah, but is the inauthentic for Heidegger a matter of being phony? That sounds like an existentialist reading of him. Beware of secondary sources. — Joshs

I've read plenty of the man himself. I still don't think it's clear. Of course you can give me your interpretation, but you'd be one more secondary source.

We're creating schisms in societies by setting up every difference as irreconcilable, with us vs them, winner-takes-all, while we still need to live together. It's all pretty toxic. — Benkei

Well said.

I don't think you can see it, but you are misreading me. It's not just the quasi-religious pseudo-scientific nonsense going on in gender studies. It's stuff like this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO1agIlLlhg

Chants of 'black power' and the demonization of whiteness are racist, at least in the view of many people whose votes the DNC should seek. Is Bret Weinstein the devil? If even he is the enemy, then the PC left is doomed. If that guy is your boogeyman, you're an extremest, a New Age religious fanatic --or so it seems to me.

That's what I mean by the PC-left, a cult of race, gender, and sexual orientation that pretty much inverts a more familiar cult of race, gender, and sexual orientation --as if repeating a mistake in the opposite direction is progress rather than excess.

I defy pomophone to effectively summarize Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time. — Joshs

I have been slapped with a glove, sir.

pomophone has exclusively quoted from Heidegger's post 1920's writing. — Joshs

My first quote was from Being and Time (1927) and I praised it. I've mostly read 20s Heidegger and mostly not read post-20s Heidegger. I've also read some great secondary sources, including all of Kisiel's Genesis, Steiner, Polt, Sheehan, others. For a few months he was my favorite philosopher. At the moment I might pick History of the Concept of Time as my favorite. I like Kisiel's English. Another favorite is Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity. van Buren also writes well.

While the authenticity theme is flattering to us who aren't phony and crumby, it hasn't aged well for me. But I could never much get into Kierkegaard, except I did like Fear and Trembling. But then that's a dark book. Abraham is a monster for God, and that's the point. 'If you phonies we're actually religious,...' And maybe this connects to this letter from Heidegger to his brother.

18th of December, 1931

Dear Fritz, dear Liesl, dear boys,

We would like to wish you a very merry Christmas. It is probably snowing where you are, inspiring the hope that Christmas will once again reveal its true magic. I often think back to the days before Christmas back at home in our little town, and I wish for the artistic energy to truly capture the mood, the splendor, the excitement and anticipation of this time.

[…]

It would appear that Germany is finally awakening, understanding and seizing its destiny.

I hope that you will read Hitler’s book; its first few autobiographical chapters are weak. This man has a remarkable and sure political instinct, and he had it even while all of us were still in a haze, there is no way of denying that. The National Socialist movement will soon gain a wholly different force. It is not about mere party politics—it’s about the redemption or fall of Europe and western civilization. Anyone who does not get it deserves to be crushed by the chaos. Thinking about these things is no hindrance to the spirit of Christmas, but marks our return to the character and task of the Germans, which is to say to the place where this beautiful celebration originates.
— Heidegger

'It’s about the redemption or fall of Europe and western civilization. Anyone who does not get it deserves to be crushed by the chaos.' I'm not even trying to shame or judge Heidegger here. But perhaps you can see why a fact/value distinction is useful. I think Heidegger had some insights of independent value from his grandiose cultural concerns. For my money Being and Time is already contaminated with something not quite 'scientific.' Is the forgetfulness of Being an essentially political-spiritual point? Is authenticity really a technical term? What's with all the talk of death? Does he make himself clear? How much of Being and Time is better expressed in earlier works that were not yet available when his big book was published -- without the shakier elements?

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/10/18/in-his-own-words/

Do you mean the reading the sentences backwards? Or?

lol the whole sokal squared thing was a dud. — Maw

It may have been silly, but they scored a hit with the dog park rape culture paper. The journal didn't just publish it. They celebrated it. They lapped it up. And this is how your debunking link responds to that:

How absurd was it for such work to get an airing? It may sound silly to investigate the rates at which dog owners intervene in public humping incidents, but that doesn’t mean it’s a total waste of time (as psychologist Daniel Lakens pointed out on Twitter). If the findings had been real, they would have some value irrespective of the pablum that surrounds them in the paper’s introduction and discussion sections. — link

That's pretty weak. And the issue is bigger than that paper in any case. It doesn't keep me up night, but it moves the needle a little bit at the voting booth --not that that matters much either, but talking about politics is a nice way for us all to twist up our intellectual panties. At the moment I'm remembering to laugh at all of this again, all the drama that serious people are supposed to take seriously. So 'lol' indeed.

So do you distance yourself at all from any PC stuff? I ask sincerely.

It is for this reason I hold to radical inner change and destruction over such destruction manifested in society. — I like sushi

I like this.

Non-destructive radical change only seems possible to me if the radical change is taken on in numerous individuals and spread as a paradigm change. To put such change into outward action directly seems foolhardy to me where a passive outward attitude holds dear what is existent whilst the active inner rebellion drip-feeds society and ushers in long lasting progressive change - be it at dire personal cost rather than some naive policy thrown out experimentally into the political sphere where the cost becomes the burden of the innocent bystander. — I like sushi

Indeed. Holding dear what is existent especially stands out for me. One of the things that keeps people from violence is the sense that all the nice things in life (like the daily routine of a mostly happy marriage) can be washed away beyond recall. And let's see: I buy lots of healthy food from the grocery store. I ride my bike not expecting to be murdered. Above someone stressed the shittiness of the world, but I don't think it's all that shitty. Now I know a homeless addict who's not enjoying the ride, but it's anything but clear what to do with/for him. So it goes.

Some of it is a contempt for the college kids for being such pussies. But I think Shapiro is a joke too. Zizek I like, since he knows he's never quite telling the truth about himself, and he knows I know.

Paglia is whiny these days, but Sexual Personae was good stuff. When the PC kids interrupted her talk, it was like a team of cliches interrupting someone who might be saying something interesting with predictable noise. Sexist. Racist. Fascist. Something-phobe. These words have been milked dry. They were used like wide-spectrum antibiotics. Yet just about everyone roots for the blue people when they watch Avatar. Few people embrace racism consciously, though maybe everyone (like it or not) is racist on some level --even the white people who like to shame other white people on this issue. After all, bringing it up and crying 'racist' constantly keeps us all well aware of what team we're on.

That's a good point. Personally I'm not that worried about it. I was already dying before I started paying attention to politics, in the usual sense of just being mortal. 'War is god.' I relate to John Gray's dark view. Maybe history is a merry-go-round. I don't see why something like WWII won't happen again, including another genocide. We're the same old monkey after all. And it'll happen because part of us wants it too. It's fun watching Drogon annihilate King's Landing.

It worse that that: every single victory was won by attacking what seems to be counted as "free speech."

Each time we make a change of policy or culture, the very idea of the former is discarded. Not in the "Let's respect each other's differing opinion" either, but in the substantial "Our society ought not do this. This idea is not respectable or worth considering", such that the latter then holds dominance in culture. — TheWillowOfDarkness

When I think of moral progress, I think of an expansion of rights. Free speech was used to criticize slavery and argue for female suffrage. It was used to argue for gay marriage. Maybe it'll be used to remove 'male' and 'female' from government documents. Fine with me. The point is to protect the individual from the mob --including the mob acting through the government.

Now we have something like equality before the law in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation.Still some would like to push further in the direction of 'progress.' This article links to some examples of what many of us otherwise 'left wing' people find troubling.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2017/04/04/its-time-us-left-wingers-stood-up-to-pc/

And some of us are keeping an eye on this.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Sokal-Squared-Is-Huge/244714

There is no background required for disagreement, it is simple difference. — Metaphysician Undercover

IMV, the complete absence of a shared background between people wouldn't even be called disagreement. They wouldn't have anything to disagree about. It seems to me that sharing in the same reality and at least one language is presupposed in an argument. How can I disagree with Snorf from a trans-human dimension when he says

Dalk fadlka454df acdmlk(%df dfokmsdfbl)#$kmdsfv mldkfvmlkdfvmdfvlkdfvm )(*342 — Snorf

And what would I disagree about? When humans disagree, it's not usually an idle question. How best to do things and what should be done in the first place come to mind.

If you were to ask, what good is agreement, for what purpose do we agree, someone might say that it is required for Knowledge-that. But how is knowledge-that better than knowledge-how? And if this can't be shown what's the point to agreeing? Then unless we agree simply for agreement sake, agreement cannot be automatic. — Metaphysician Undercover

It seems to be that the coordination of action is at least one reason agreement is so important. Humans are the supreme team-player among mammals, even or especially when it comes to literally destroying some other team. I agree non-automatically that agreement is not (always) automatic. It's as if consciousness or attention is summoned to wherever habit finds itself in a jam. The jam that gets our attention has a background of smoothly functioning nonjam. To disagree with you on the issue at hand is still to agree with you about the linguistic conventions that make this disagreement intelligible. Along these lines, I can try to question myself radically, but I can't question that same radical questioning as it pours out of me. I can't get ahead of my knowing-how. I depend on it as I try without success to get a final, superior perspective on it.

The background is disagreement. It is always there, everywhere, in the background. But what drives us is agreement so most disagreement goes unnoticed. Then it appears like agreement is the background and disagreement springs from agreement. That is, until it strikes you that the real background is disagreement, difference, and this is what is most striking and powerful. — Metaphysician Undercover

I have a vague sense of agreeing with you, but for me you have turned the page here in a way that I can't follow. In the context that I take for our background, the background is ours. We are on the same stage in front of the same cardboard scenery, hence the metaphor. What you say above reminds me of 'war is god' and other important insights (that conflict/chaos is the mother of order, etc.)

Well, both like authoritarianism and actually aren't so excited about liberal tolerance. Radicals always hate the present that we have and want real change, something totally else. — ssu

Indeed. I'm suspicious of this 'totally else.' What I see is various groups dreaming up a future that...ignores the problem of the existence of other groups. Of course it sucks when people won't behave how I'd like them to. It sucks even more when they try to control me. The boring old compromise is of course individual freedom. But I'm no libertarian on property rights. That might work on an infinite frontier, but we are stuck together on a crowded boat, and it's not ultra cool that the boat is largely owned by a tiny minority.

What we probably don't want is hysteria on a crowded boat. Unfortunately folks tend to glob up and demonize and I'm not above that myself. There's an ecstasy in dissolving into the angry mob. And yet it's also the slime of hell itself for the individual as individual.

Empiricism is not necessarily anti-metaphysical. — Joshs

I basically agree with you, but I don't like the word 'metaphysics.'

Do we assume that our constructions are a mirror or correspondence with an independent reality, and that we assymptotically approach truth through sequential , incremental revision? — Joshs

Must we commit to a position here? How has our species accomplished so much already without settling this issue? We mostly get by just fine without top-down theories. We mostly use 'truth' effectively. For me it's part of the empiricist attitude to not get lost in the spiderwebs of theory. Which kind of theory is worth our attention is one more thing we can put to the test.

On the other other question, Popper and Kuhn are both great. If we are wrong, we were right, because we tried something specific enough to recognize its failure. But none of this is possible in the first place without some paradigm that makes the situation intelligible. Paradigms come and go.

Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. — Joshs

On this issue I'd say look to politics. The distinction between fact and opinion isn't some random mistake. Nor is the distinction between mind and matter. These distinctions have their limits. Their utility can blind us to what they cover up. This is what I like in Heidegger. Being-in-the-world, the hammer being used versus the hammer just being stared at, etc. I think know-how is utterly prior to know-that. For me this insight adds to empiricism. Practice makes perfect. Knowledge is largely embodied which is to say not made of thought in the first place. Hinton makes some fascinating points on machine translation. He calls the vectors of floating point numbers 'thoughts.' The input is sentences and the output is sentences, but what goes on in the middle has nothing to do with words. It's a mesh of millions or billions of floats, each of which is meaningless in isolation. And these are our best machines for translation, inspired by what's in our own skulls.

this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world." — Joshs

I agree that if commonsense realism is vacuumed up into the ether so that it becomes metaphysics that it indeed breaks down. But isn't this spiders eating spiders? The bees are out there, perhaps in different departments and perhaps outside of academia altogether. And maybe someone like Hinton who gets his hands dirty with cutting edge science/invention is even preferable to yet another exegesis of Wittgenstein. If the distance from facts and concrete challenges is what empiricism criticizes, then perhaps the best empiricists are too busy practicing what they don't have time to preach.

'Pure' democracy is mob rule. Individual rights like free speech exists to protect the individual from mob rule. These rights become important exactly when the individual does not conform to the mob. One might expect intellectuals to be especially attached to this protection. But in this context maybe there are two stripes of intellectuals, ringleaders and outsiders.

Ringleaders feel themselves as leaders of a mob of the similarly virtuous. They see individual rights as giving comfort to enemy. Since they see themselves as intellectual leaders of the good guys, they don't worry about their speech being curtailed. If/when their side wins, they expect to do just fine. They don't want to say anything that they don't want anybody to say.

Outsiders, though, see fanatics on both sides of them. The alt-right and the PC-left are perhaps equally eager to reduce their freedom. At the moment, the alt right and the center makes use of the rhetoric of free speech. The center is sincere (as I intend the 'center'), but surely their are crazies in the red states who would vote for laws against blasphemy, etc.

It's in the outsiders interest to keep the fight between the maniacs close. (Of course it's also in the interest of the very rich to keep the culture war close, so that the working people don't get together and tax the rich.) As an outsider, I voted against Trump as the greater threat but consoled myself with his victory by interpreting it as a check on the PC-left and its digital mobs. I'm down with democracy, but more important than democracy are the rule of law and individual rights, with free speech as perhaps the essential right (as Spinoza saw.)

I agree that the empiricists sometimes tried to bolster their spirit or attitude with an obsolete metaphysics. That's where the footnotes to the empiricists become valuable. But this spirit or attitude is anti-metaphysical and directed toward engagement with the world and experience. Their style is part of that. It's aimed at active personalities who take life or experience as the primary authority. It expects revision. So I agree with James against Hume on that point. James is taking the empirical attitude and giving a better description of experience. Still, he's ultimately on my team.

There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method. Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means.

Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.
— James

Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.
...
Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.
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It is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech … that are the true ends of knowledge … but it is a restitution and reinvesting, in great part, of man to the sovereignty and power, for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names, he shall again command them. — Bacon

The 'true names' are those that command --ideas that work and don't only make promises. The 'general root of superstition' is 'that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.' When I look at Heidegger on technology, the general feel seems to be a kind of hippy rejection of Bacon's pragmatism. To be clear, I do understand that the world is indeed in some trouble. All I'm saying is that Heidegger looks pretty vague and spiritualist on these matters. 'Only a god can save us.' OK, then. Thanks for playing.

Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that it is itself not technological. — Heidegger

While this is far too fuzzy initially to either hit or miss, my suspicion is that it's a maximally pretentious way to say something pretty simple. These days we look at reality as a resource. If we were more religious, we'd be standing in God's beautiful garden. We'd stop using one another and raping nature. Only a 'god' or explosive shift in our understanding of Being can wake us up from our nihilism. Something more like this:

Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don't know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] -- the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today. Recently I had a long [209] dialogue in Provence with Rene Char -- a poet and resistance fighter, as you know. In Provence now, launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion. This poet, who certainly is open to no suspicion of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of man that is now taking place is the end [of everything human], unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power.
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As far as my own orientation goes, in any case, I know that, according to our human experience and history, everything essential and of great magnitude has arisen only out of the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition.
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If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor.
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The essence of technicity I see in what I call "pos-ure" (Ge-Sull), an often ridiculed and perhaps awkward expression.28 To say that pos-ure holds sway means that man is posed, enjoined and challenged by a power that becomes manifest in the essence of technicity -- a power that man himself does not control. Thought asks no more than this: that it help us achieve this insight. Philosophy is at an end. — Heidegger

On the importance of tradition he sounds like Jordan Peterson. I think he's right on that point, but also that the point is obvious. We're all embedded in a culture. The uprooting of man reminds me of the Romantics and Marx. Again I agree, but it's fairly standard stuff. Our technology is running away with us. Our power is increasing faster than our wisdom, etc. The fatalism is 'only a god can save us' is also familiar. I sure don't see any obvious solution. Our species may just not be able to deal with running out of frontier to exploit. The spooky 'thought' that's supposed to help us see this looks like a pretentious faculty that's just philosophy with a new green coat of paint. In short, this is all reasonable but not profound. Take away the ghastly prose style of

Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that it is itself not technological. — Heidegger

and apparently there's nothing profound. I venture that most of us these days share the hippy complaint while also seeing that some return to tradition is not going to work. I like the Green New Deal. It seems like a start. But it's not metaphysical. Reducing carbon emissions and rethinking energy policies are concrete proposals. We will want to quantify the success of our experiments, and our goal will be the Baconion power over an environment that we must obey in order to control. Critics might say that this attitude will subvert the project, but then why should they mind unless they share the project and ultimately want to control nature --however greenly they want to phrase it.

I understand your concerns. Still, I read Wittgenstein as pointing to a mostly unnoticed background that makes such disagreements possible/intelligible. Were it not for this background, the debate could not continue. It looks to me that knowledge-how is deeper and prior to the knowledge-that which would like to assimilate it but can't.

I do agree that phenomenology is intrinsically controversial. If some phenomena are mostly too automatic to notice, then those who claim to notice such things can always be accused of describing something merely idiosyncratic. All one can do is point. If Wittgenstein is ultimately pointing out something elusive but mundane, then getting tangled up in the thousand arrows/reminders as they were supposed to form a system is the wrong way to go. Does he offer a system? Or is he pointing at the impossibility of a system but pointing at all the rough edges that make such a system impossible? I'm in the second camp. The conditions of intelligibility look stubbornly opaque to me. The paradigm shift in AI encourages me in this position.

This link is nice because it addresses the issue in another lingo.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-how/

We may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something a because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck them. a And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. — W

FWIW, this reminds me of phenomenology. The stuff that is usually too close for us to notice is uncontroversial, but only after someone manages to see it and point it out. And maybe it can only be pointed out a little bit here and there. ('Form of life' is something like 'by means of a faculty.')

We mostly just do it, and doing it well has been far more important for our species than knowing how we do it so well. The way Google is currently doing machine translation suggests that we'll never get a exhaustive, intelligible model of our language use. Symbolic AI isn't used for this, for example. Instead it's a big black box of numbers learned from lots of examples as the parameters in a brain-mimicking neural network --as opaque as we are. For me this connects to the spirit of empiricism. We see that mastery comes from practice and exposure, but perhaps that mastery is distributed like those millions of parameters. In isolation they mean nothing. Their meaning is entirely relational.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JO1Pcr5rYA&fbclid=IwAR2TigXYwtjGbOtTVpGEqPWYWEK4GD_XBwtM_SMTOIiVhNvhSuil-Yo_K8E

'Pomophobe' is just a word that amused me when I chanced on it. If I seem a little aggressive toward a certain style, then that's yet another style (one that Heidegger himself sometimes used.) I'd never try to censor anyone. I might just ask who's calling when I hear being, being, being, being, being. Turns out that Eckhart Tolle uses 'Being' in The Power of Now. I opened the book expecting to annoyed and was not disappointed.

In the first chapter, Tolle introduces readers to enlightenment and its natural enemy, the mind. He awakens readers to their role as a creator of pain and shows them how to have a pain-free identity by living fully in the present. The journey is thrilling, and along the way, the author shows how to connect to the indestructible essence of our Being, "the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death." — Amazon

Lots of fun.

Thus four ways of owing hold sway in the sacrificial vessel that lies ready before us. They differ from one another, yet they belong together. ... The four ways of being responsible bring something into appearance. They let it come forth into presencing. They set it free to that place and so start it on its way, namely into its complete arrival. — Heidegger

The problem might be translation, since

The German language speaks being, while all other languages merely speak of being. — Heidegger

OK then. Maybe I'll justify my preference for Hume and the gang in terms of English being the one true language of philosophy.

Basically he's a shady guy who still really nailed it at times. Given some of his indulgences, I'm surprised that his fans are surprised that he and his ilk inspire some humor at their expense. Science doesn't think. Reason is the stiff-necked enemy of thought. Them's fightin' words. (Not really. But let's not pity poor earnest pomo.)

But this obscurity in the profound and abstract philosophy, is objected to, not only as painful and fatiguing, but as the inevitable source of uncertainty and error. Here indeed lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not properly a science; but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these intangling brambles to cover and protect their weakness. Chaced from the open country, these robbers fly into the forest, and lie in wait to break in upon every unguarded avenue of the mind, and overwhelm it with religious fears and prejudices. The stoutest antagonist, if he remit his watch a moment, is oppressed. And many, through cowardice and folly, open the gates to the enemies, and willingly receive them with reverence and submission, as their legal sovereigns. — Hume

Intentionality can't be unconscious. — Terrapin Station

That's matter of how you want to play 'intentionality.' If I trip and start to fall, I don't consciously decide to put my arms out between my face and the ground. Yet my hands find the ground.

I don't buy unconscious mental content in general, but even if someone did, it wouldn't make any sense to posit unconscious intentionality. — Terrapin Station

As you seem to use the words, I don't buy unconscious mental content either. If mental == conscious, then of course unconscious mental content is absurd. I get that Heideggerized gobbledegookers tend to wonder around in the fog on their 'profundity.' I think we both object to that style. I notice on your profile that you like Mach. So do I. That said, one piece of Heidegger continues to ring true for me.

[The] less we stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is -- as equipment … If we look at things just ‘theoretically’, we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific thing character …

The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort of thing that circumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme. The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in order to be ready-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work – that which is to be produced at the time. — Heidegger

What I also like here is that to grok what's great about the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations we need only think of language as the hammer. All of that said, I think these insights are a footnote to thinkers like Hume, Hobbes, and Bacon.

I haven't interacted much, but I've followed this thread closely. There's been talk of ostracizing the baddies, but then Shapiro is somehow a viable boogeyman. Shapiro? Really? I watched the interview in which he himself was 'DESTROYED' and pitied him his earnestness and his shrill presentation.

Contrast Shapiro's shrill delivery with Hitchens here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY

Now that's charisma, whatever you think of his points. If he was still around, some 20-year-olds would probably be trying to silence him.

Paglia is a far more interesting individual than Shapiro and an even less plausible cartoon villain. My sense is that those who think Shapiro and Paglia are beyond the pale are themselves in a pretty small group, which is to say beyond the pale for yet another and perhaps larger group. And it's not the cartoon fascists. It's people largely in the middle and who haven't thought about the issues as much as intellectuals who really don't like being told what they can say and hear. Sorry, geniuses, you'll have to win those hearts and minds despite your obvious superiority.

Consider also that those who bother to watch Shapiro are still at least identified with 'REASON' and 'FACTS.' They are willing to talk. Shutting them down just puts the censors in question. If I'm young and my mind isn't made up yet, I'll probably go with the group that isn't directly interfering with my most taken-for-granted freedom. Isn't socialism scary to many people precisely in terms of its threat to freedom? And if those who would censor others really have reason on their side, then what do they have to hide? I identify with the left, but personally I'd like to trade the PC-left (the 'safe space' left) for some of the people in the center. And I think it would have to be a trade. Our crazies make the family look bad.

I doubt that most people doing something like playing guitar typically have anywhere near all of that stuff in mind when they're playing. I certainly don't when I'm playing. — Terrapin Station

That's the point. So much of what we 'know' is not consciously known. At the same time such skill is fundamental to our success or failure at a task. From this point of view, Socrates (in Plato) is misguided when he tries to humiliate poets or others who are skilled by revealing their inability to give an explicit account or justification of that skill. To be sure, this kind of insight is already in Nietzsche, and I think it's implicit in the empiricists.

For example, with π, it's irrational so it can never be fully defined - it's impossible to know all the digits, so saying an expression tends to π rather than is equal to π is actually more accurate. We can never know π exactly. — Devans99

Pi is computable and therefore has a finite description. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number

'Most' irrational numbers are not computable, since the computable numbers (being countable) have measure zero. There are indeed some rich philosophical issues here. Personally I'm an anti-foundationalist when it comes to math. I think we learn to use it just as we learn to use English. A few people concern themselves with the formalities of set theory. Most just use it as an economical language.

The danger of worrying too much about the metaphysics of infinity is in repeating the 'Wittgenstein' mistake (not his so much as those in the grip of his charisma)--the 'cure' is assimilated by the disease. The finitist who rails against infinity is charging at his own shadow, the infinitist. Both are minority figures with an obsession in common.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO1agIlLlhg

Whiteness is the most violent fucking system to ever breath!

And where exactly does such an idea lead to in practice? The articulate members of the PC Left will surely make excuses for these excessive statements. Conservative thinkers are in the same situation. Some of their fans surely say things that are just as brutal and irrational. It's also not surprising that white men often resent anti-white talk and favor 'representatives' who object to this talk.

Another theme: some posters implied above that they could easily OWN or DESTROY Shapiro. That may be correct. But here we all are in the dark like anonymous rats. I'm not a big fan of Shapiro (or of Peterson), but it occurs to me how much more difficult it must be to actually wear one's ideas in public. It's a big deal these days. It almost has to be a career. Any sufficiently exciting opinions are going to offend or scare employers.

This reminds me of my last theme.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. — Marx

The PC Left seems to envision a new, global human being that is beyond race, gender, and sexuality. To do this, however, it needs to obsess over race, gender, and sexuality...until utopia arrives.

I agree that conflict is crucial. We read to expose ourselves to other perspectives. The point is to be surprised, challenged, offended, and thereby illuminated. We enjoy becoming something that is less like the typical flipper-clapper, the default position of a human brought up this way as opposed to that way.

I think you get Paglia's attitude right. I understand both where Paglia is coming from and why some find her tactless presentation offensive (she's crankier these days in videos.) Is this not to goal, to understand the complexity of the issue and what each perspective gets right? What's disturbing to me is the attitude that those who hurt our feelings with their perspective forfeit their right to share that perspective. Some gang of college kids decides to become the thought police and purge their institution of anyone who questions their recently acquired final vocabulary.

My concern, to the degree that I've not just accepted it as the way of the world, is not that would-be censors will succeed in their attempted censorship but that the culture war will continue to clog our minds and keep working people from voting in unison on issues that they actually agree on. I like Andrew Yang's persona. My current perspective is that there tends to be insight on both sides of a division, along with a monstrousness that both sides accurately diagnose only in the other.

It's just ridiculous bullshit that the university ought to condemn. — frank

I'm open to that point, but are we talking condemnation or censorship? Free speech only matters when it offends someone, when someone thinks it's ridiculous bullshit.

Personally I'm not sure that the university should deal with accusations of rape. Why don't we just use the criminal justice system? And is not plausibly a goal of feminism that victims of crime like rape report such crimes immediately when they are easier to prosecute? To be sure, Paglia is tactless on this issue during the interview, but I think her insights have value. Even if I didn't, I'd still defend her right to think against the grain of her peers. The alternative seems to be the reduction of the university to a joke or a seminary for PC theology (inasmuch as it bothers with these kinds of issues.)

Latest privileged white academic in the firing line for having incorrect views is Camille Paglia. It was only a matter of time I guess. — jamalrob

From that article:

There are, finally, political costs of illiberal activism. By targeting Paglia’s job, student activists may alienate people who are open to substantive critiques of her ideas, yet insistent on the absolute necessity of safeguarding a culture of free speech, regardless of whether the speech in question is “correct” or “incorrect.”

This is how I feel. Activating fire alarms when there is no fire is especially indefensible. Requesting that tenured professors be de-platformed is within their rights but also an attack on the essence of the university. It reminds me of book burning. Note that other professors at Paglia's institution were mostly afraid to speak on the record. Generally attacks on the individual as opposed to attacks on ideas drives dissent to an anonymous underground. And then the voting booth is a private place.

I didn't vote for you-know-who (his name is too much with us), but I understand his appeal on the PC issue. In our new world where an offhand comment or a moment of hyperbole can summon the digital mob, a person like you-know-how who refuses to apologize for linguistic sins starts to look heroic. Lately Bill Mahr used the terms 'SJW' and 'crybully,' and his liberal guests laughed. Are other people on the left getting fed up? Maybe the left can focus on the central-for-me issue that almost everyone can get behind: money.

It seems to me that every effect has a cause, but is that simply because I was raised to think that way? — Pattern-chaser

Hi, Pattern-chaser. Have you looked at this?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/

It seems to me that we look for causes because they are useful. In practical terms they help with prediction and control. They also ameliorate our fear of the dark, metaphorically speaking. I personally see no reason to embrace the PSR as anything more than a description of what we tend to do. Maybe some things 'just happen.' Indeed, assuming that every event has a cause leads to its own problems.