(( I was planning on doing this one, when I could get a moment, but I'm glad you got to it before me because you did it better than I would have! )) — Srap Tasmaner

Thank you!



Though in context I am left with the impression that my response will raise the probability of @Ignoro ignoring medical advice. Which should only be done carefully.

Also, what is the formal definition of contributory cause? I can't find this anywhere. — Ignoro

Maybe there isn't one? I'd understand a contributory cause in one of two ways depending on context.

One of them is: a contributory cause of X is a member of a set of causes which are jointly a sufficient cause for X to occur. EG, if all of the set happens, then X happens. But if at least one of the elements of the set does not happen, then X does not have to happen (but it still might for other reasons).

One of them is: a contributory cause of an event X is a member v of a set of random variables V such that the probability of X happening given that v has happened is higher than if v did not happen and v has a causal relationship with X. In other words, when v is a risk factor for X that has a causal relationship with X.

I'm adding the causal relationship bit to the second because, well, no one's gonna say that being poor causes people to die in the same way that shooting someone in the head causes them to die.

That's consistent (I think) with the account given here.

Is there logical proof that if P ceases existing there can still be the possibility of Q existing? — Ignoro

I guess one way of approaching that would be to find a counter model. I read your assumptions as:

(1) P is not a necessary cause of Q. (Q happens only when P)
(2) P is not a sufficient cause of Q. (Q is forced by P)
(3) P is causally related to Q somehow.

Is there logical proof that if P ceases existing there can still be the possibility of Q existing? — Ignoro

I don't know precisely what you mean by "existing" there, but I'm going to interpret it in context as either:

(4a) P demonstrably having an effect on Q in some circumstance.
or
(4b) If P never existed regardless of its causal status and other relationships with Q, then Q would never occur.

Since (4a) is already implied by P (I think) being a contributory cause of Q (add the other contributing causes as part of the circumstance?), I'll deal with (4b) exclusively.

Which makes the whole argument of the form:

(1) P is not a necessary cause of Q. (Q happens only when P)
(2) P is not a sufficient cause of Q. (Q is forced by P)
(3) P is causally related to Q somehow.
to conclude
(4b) If P never existed regardless of its causal status and other relationships with Q, then Q could not occur.

So one plausible counter example is P=whether someone is a smoker and Q = whether someone has lung cancer. You can have lung cancer ( Q ) without being a smoker ( P ), so P is not necessary for Q. So that satisfies ( 1 ), similarly you can be a smoker without ever developing lung cancer, so that satisfies ( 2 ). ( 3 ) is obviously true too. But what about (4b)? This amounts to the claim that if there were no smokers, there would be no lung cancer - and surely that is false, cancer caused by anything can metastasise around the body, so Q can occur, so (4b) is false.

All the assumptions true, conclusion false. So yes, I think there is the possibility that Q "exists" if you somehow deleted P from existence.

@Zn0n @schopenhauer1

For the record, there isn't good evidence that Zn0n and Schop the same user.

but Google does a lot of business with the government and I'm sure they have access to data they shouldn't have. Or they could use AI to cross-reference my writing style, that would be doable with only publicly-obtained data. Writing style analysis is pretty advanced these days. — fishfry

Google Analytics, a product used to log visitors to websites that integrates with the company’s ad-targeting systems, was found on almost 70 percent of sites. DoubleClick, a dedicated ad-serving system from Google, was found on close to 50 percent of sites. The top five most common tracking tools were all Google-owned.

Google is practically Yog Sothoth at this point:

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread

Braiding fools into a whip!

There's something particularly Christian - Protestant - about the aversion to self-gratification. As if we should all be in an Opus Dei cult, whipping ourselves on the back by way of suffering every fool that ejaculates words on a screen. — StreetlightX

I feel like you are totes kink shaming here.

I don’t understand. — Pfhorrest

This is because of the principle of "to be is to do" / "to do is to be": things are what they do, every property of a thing is a propensity for it to behave in some way in response to something being done to it. — Pfhorrest

Doing something to a way of doing something to get a new way of doing something. Input = function 1, output = function 2. Objects are functions. Functions are functions mapping functions to functions.

Or it could merely be prone to [verb]ing or being-[verb]ed, i.e. it is [verb]y or [verb]able; your adjectives formulated in terms of verbs. — Pfhorrest

How does a verb prone into another verbing?

(Individuation of processes maybe?)

Just playing about.

No one doing science is ever just doing observation-hypothesis-prediction-observation. — Srap Tasmaner

The psychiatrist Meehl called it in 1967 (for studies on humans).

It would require considerable ingenuity to concoct experimental manipulations, except the most minimal and trivial (such as a very slight modification in the word order of instructions given a subject) where one could have confidence that the manipulation would be utterly without effect upon the subject's motivational level, attention, arousal, fear of failure, achievement drive, desire to please the experimenter, distraction, social fear, etc., etc. So that, for example, while there is no very "interesting" psychological theory that links hunger drive with color-naming ability, I myself would confidently predict a significant difference in color-naming ability between persons tested after a full meal and persons who had not eaten for 10 hours, provided the sample size were sufficiently large and the color-naming measurements sufficiently reliable, since one of the effects of the increased hunger drive is heightened "arousal," and anything which heightens arousal would be expected to affect a perceptual-cognitive performance like color-naming...

Suffice it to say that there are very good reasons for expecting at least some slight influence of almost any experimental manipulation which would differ sufficiently in its form and content from the manipulation imposed upon a control group to be included in an experiment in the first place. In what follows I shall therefore assume that the point-null hypothesis H0 is, in psychology, [quasi-] always false...

It is not unusual that (e) this ad hoc challenging of auxiliary hypotheses is repeated in the course of a series of related experiments, in which the auxiliary hypothesis involved in Experiment 1 (and challenged ad hoc in order to avoid the latter's modus tollens impact on the theory) becomes the focus of interest in Experiment 2, which in turn utilizes further plausible but easily challenged auxiliary hypotheses, and so forth. In this fashion a zealous and clever investigator can slowly wend his way through a tenuous nomological network, performing a long series of related experiments which appear to the uncritical reader as a fine example of "an integrated research program," without ever ,once refuting or corroborating so much as a single strand of the network

(Edit: for why Meehl thinks this doesn't work on physical theories, their point null hypotheses are actually predictions from theory; you'd do a hypothesis test to see if there was significant deviation from F=ma in the lab in physics, you'd do a hypothesis test to see if there was significant deviation from "no effect" regardless of mechanism in human sciences - constructs in physical sciences don't have the same kind of measurement issues as the ones in human sciences either, eg; mass is mass, hesitation is multifaceted)

Who knows what we'll be able to retain and what will be lost (beyond the obvious things which depend entirely on fossil fuel use)? Will medical science and technology be able to continue to develop for example? — Janus

The extremely annoying thing is that greening production of electricity works - solar and wind are just as efficient now, electric trains and buses and cars are a thing (though large passenger aeroplanes still look a while off); stuff of that size being feasible makes it agriculture at scale feasible I think. Most petrochemicals are recyclable - though under 10% are recycled by our current production strategies.

One estimate I have come across is that organic framing (which must return and completely displace industrial framing if we, and many other species and habitats are to survive) can sustain only about 200,000,000 people. If this is right then there must be a drastic reduction of population over the next 50 years if we are to avoid total collapse of our ecosystems. — Janus

Sustainable agriculture looks workable at scale? Long term resources except electricity are finite, though.

Personally I don't see how civilization, as it currently exists (or until recently has existed; global and prosperous for many with prosperity growing) is possible to sustain, given that it has been a one-off bonanza of growth enabled by fossil fuels. De-growth now seems inevitable as resources wane. — Janus

I don't think it's inevitable, it's a question of coordination and those with power taking the problem seriously (or being forced to take it seriously :P). Or rather, taking it seriously and realising the consequences, the story of Margaret Thatcher is instructive here. A passionate advocate for climate change transformation on a global scale in the 1990's based on her understanding of chemistry , she switched to a climate change denier based on the partisan output of free-market think tanks. She's a microcosm of the pattern. Our liberty now, your death later!

Edit: I want to clarify that I can imagine a capitalism that is actually green, it just seems unlikely to emerge.

I think what fdrake had in mind with his comment is something like 'you have to work within the system to live a successful life' where "successful life" means something like contributing to the overall betterment of human life. — Janus

As with any suggestive one liner, I meant a few things by it. In the context of the plausible threat of collapse of our civilisation in the next 100 years, and the by-and-large institutional indifference to that risk.

(1) If you're a reasonable human being like Greta Thunberg, and you're simultaneously attuned to the severity the risk and the indifference towards it (and the fact that indifference makes it worse), you'll feel like you're strapped to tracks and there's an oncoming train in the distance. Worse, people around you act like the train doesn't exist despite driving it. Worse still, the more responsibility someone has to mitigate the risk, the more they seem invested in pretending it doesn't exist. If that doesn't make you extremely uncomfortable, if not peaking in moments of outright despair, then I dunno who taught you how to feel things. That's a lot of cognitive dissonance to shoulder.

(2) People feel on a gut level that it's really a risk but don't wanna feel helpless and complicit at the same time, so they turn the climate issue into an act of emotional homeostasis. Making it about their feelings rather than the facts. This is an avoidance of cognitive dissonance through either replacing the enormity of the problem with a smaller one (an alluring cognitive bias accentuated by individual centric ideology), externalising the threat (climate change "doomsayers", "apocalypse cult" blah blah you know the drill). Be that through dissonance reducing individual level consumption strategies (which are benign but largely as effective as prayer), or treating those who have it on their mind like dirt, or forgetting it ever exists and going on with life.

So you can adapt to the threat by absolving yourself of responsibility through heavy emotional investment in largely ineffective strategies and Kantian prayers, or minimising the threat by shooting its messengers, or you can ignore it. All three bottom out in adjusted coping strategies for the emotional impact of the problem that let you live as normal, but are completely unadjusted for mitigating the risk of collapse. If you can behave as if everything is normal and shut yourself off from the burning skylines, rising tides, floods, record weather every year and the beginning of climate change induced diaspora... It doesn't exist. Clap your hands if you believe!

But indeed, that is what is required of you to behave normally in response to the threat. To live life as if it doesn't exist. And if you're unfortunate enough of an individual to take systemic risks seriously - sucks for you I guess? See you at the next largely ineffective collective symbolic-political act.

Top left of the screen, below your profile picture.

I read you excitedly whenever I see your name. I just don't respond most of the time because I find your posts very unobjectionable.

I wonder if the ratio of these two - mentions divided by comments - could be a proxy for that poster's contribution to forum growth. — Banno

...or might encourage trolling. — Banno

A song for the bad side of having more reactions than actions on TFP.

Pissing on parades and constant sarcasm
Fly paper comments and repudiation
Crap metaphysics gone out on a limb
These are a few of my favourite things

White coloured snowflakes and endless religion
More bloated red/blacks with no precision
Dog whistles, dodges and dead OLP
These are a few of my favourite things

Pretension, delusions and misinterpretations
Bruised ego bollocks and self flagellation
Theories of everything found in the bin
These are a few of my favourite things

When the troll posts
When critique stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember TPF things
Then I don't feel so bad

I don't think they forge them either. You don't need to forge anything to get true statistics that can spin to what you like. The overall number of cases in the UK is going down in general, BUT since easing the lockdown there's obviously been an uptick in the growth of new cases since the lockdowns were eased. When it was the apocalypse the same newspapers alternatively underplayed it or mined coronavirus for doomy clickbait while presenting it as a force of nature, now it's not the apocalypse everything is fine. — fdrake

Guess we're in for another round of mismanagement and downplaying.

Mine, sadly, comes out at 0.93. Someone with a ratio greater than 1.0 would be encouraging more replies than posts, and hence more conversation. — Banno

Just over 0.9 for me.

Testing something: @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake@fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake @fdrake

Edit: Nope, can't rig it like that!

For me? Think it's a good idea. Whether I think it would be good for Scotland depends on how it's handled.

:sad:

Oh who could've possibly seen Bojo favouring no-deal coming at some point over the last few years. Not sarcasm at you, it's simply extremely frustrating to watch the almost inevitable unfold.

@Banno

You gotta be adapted to the unreality that is killing us all to live a successful life.

Awareness of race isn't going to address systemic racism either it seems to me, at least not on it's own. — ChatteringMonkey

Aye. That's why I said it was a requirement, rather than a solution.

Many people make the mistake of analysing these issues in terms of intention towards a skin colour, deliberately granting or harming people is some way because they have one skin colour or another. This is only one aspect of racism. Much of it is just a relation of how a body exists or is treated. A black body does not need someone to deliberately act upon it because it is black, the general systems of society can act to produce an unjust relation without any mention of skin colour-- e.g. a capitalism in which the black bodies are overwhelming in poverty compared to others, a justice system in which black bodies are overwhelming incarcerated, etc.

Just because these systems might act with reasons of employment/profit or in response to crimes, rather than because someone has a skin colour, it doesn't change the impact upon the bodies. Certain bodies, the black ones, are still overwhelming poor, incarcerated, etc. For us to forget concepts of race entirely doesn't alter these circumstances. — TheWillowOfDarkness

:up:

In the UK, people talk about race less, but there's still all kinds of racial discrimination. EG, during corona, people currently on limited leave to remain don't have access to any benefits whatsoever. That's about 1.4 mil people suddenly made destitute. Add that to illegal deportations. and the usual racial distribution of poverty, disproportionate rates of state sanctioned violence, and the historical sacking of black neighbourhoods by white supremacists (white working class brits elevating themselves symbolically by "punching down" - hashtag union politics) and it's same shit different smell.

Instead of talking about race, the UK talks about immigration. Racism is always close to the surface in that kind of discussion, and it shows when it boils over into hate crimes.

The critical tradition in the US regarding systemic racism is something very much to be admired, it's a massive achievement of activism and scholarship that it's so publicised and well understood. Not quite the same for the UK, in which approx 30% of the people believe the UK's former colonies were better off when they were colonised. Combine that with racism in the UK being to a large part colonialism brought home... And yeah. UK's got a long way to go on the consciousness of systemic racism front.

Edit: in case the context isn't clear, awareness of how racism works requires an understanding of race and its categories. It just isn't plausible that stopping being aware of race is going to address systemic racism, precisely it requires a critical awareness of race.

From later in the book:

Behind the imagery of most postmodernism is really nothing but the ideology of the market: not even the reality of the market, since actually existing markets are always regulated in the interests of the powerful, but the way market ideologists would like us to imagine the marketplace should work.

Maybe it's an intersectional one? I'm not sure. — BitconnectCarlos

Intersectionality refers to the fact that one and the same person can belong to several distinct groups, each of whose members are victimized by widespread discrimination. This overlapping membership can generate experiences of discrimination that are very different from those of persons who belong to just one, or the other, of the groups — from SEP's article on discrimination

Originally introduced to highlight that "being black" and "being a woman" interact together to produce different issues for black women than black people regardless of gender and women regardless of race.

So you'll have white privilege in some regards, be discriminated against for being a Jew in some regards.

On the left/far left the Jews get victimized often due to our apparent whiteness and its association with oppression/colonization. In Israel we're often described in left-wing circles as white colonizers brutally suppressing an indigenous population despite the fact that Jews consider themselves the indigenous population and many Jews are not white. — BitconnectCarlos

:up:

Wherever you'll find criticism of Israel by many people, you'll find anti-semitic bollocks spouted by some.

I understand society might largely see me as white, but this really isn't an adequate descriptor of my racial/ethnic identity (I'm an Ashkenazi Jew). — BitconnectCarlos

:up:

Also keep in mind that these labels: white, black, etc. are political. They're not simple descriptors. Whether we like it or not whiteness has certain associations. — BitconnectCarlos

:up:

I guess that insight is ultimately an intersectional one, no? You've got enough white signifiers to count as white in most contexts, you'll live absent systemic discrimination in some ways; you're not gonna get racial profiled like a black man will in the US. But you're gonna be lumped in with a global conspiracy that motivates white supremacist terrorists. Being racialised as white doesn't exempt you from being racialised as Jewish and vice versa.

B: "If so, it's not because they are black, so what's the real reason?" — Pro Hominem

But like... social facts are causal too. People drive on the side of the road they drive on because it's a norm. If you're happy to disentangle race from science, and you know the history of the concepts, that doesn't mean disentangling race from causality, no? People really are treated differently because of their race, that's the very essence of racism - be it a personal prejudice, an implicit stereotype, an apartheid system or systemic effects. If someone's racial profiled - yeah, it's because of their race. If someone avoids all of that horrible bollocks; yeah, it's also because of their race.

Racial categorisation isn't rooted in science or an accurate history of how peoples moved about the planet, that doesn't stop racism from causing stuff to happen.

If we're happy to say that people get racially profiled because they're black; it's an act of racism and implicit stereotyping. Then we should be happy to say that people aren't exposed to some risks, or have relative advantages, because they are white. And that's white privilege. And yes, it is racist - a relative benefit, positive discrimination etc etc...

If you want the causal chain spelled out:

skin colour -racial signification> assigned attributes+treatments

I mostly agree with you, questions of when and how remain.

Once you've done that, don't be afraid to counter people using race-based language - make a point to say that "race doesn't really exist". Learn the science and history to support that statement. Truly adopt that belief. Realize that change takes time, but remain persistent. After all, if you aren't willing to do any of this, how can you expect anyone else to? — Pro Hominem

We could go around the discussion again; my view is that so long as race based discrimination exists, we'll need to be aware of racialisation and keep race around as a critical category. We could go into whether being aware of racialisation is the same thing as racialising people again, but I don't really feel the need.

Consider these two dialogues:

A: "Black children are 5 times more likely to drown in swimming pools"
B: "You are aware race doesn't really exist, right?"

vs

A: (car fails to start) "These parts are Jewish!"
B: "You are aware race doesn't really exist, right?"

I imagine you imagine you are doing the latter. From my perspective, it looks like you are doing the former. I draw that conclusion because you are being hostile to the concept of race (and that people are racialised) in a discussion regarding a critical concept used to highlight racial disparities rooted in discrimination. Surely the difference between the two is obvious to you.

It's really not that simple. If someone is 1/8 black are they black or white? Who is society to deny their blackness? Who is society to tell, say, Ashkenazi Jews, that they are "really" white? — BitconnectCarlos

See this post. Racialisation doesn't have to hold together as a logically coherent story. That misses the nature and history of the phenomenon. When people study race with a historical eye, it's shown to be nonsense, when people study race with with a scientific one, it's shown to be nonsense on stilts. Still, racialisation happens. People are put into racial bins and treated differently depending on what bin they're in. Absent historical and scientific validation, but it still happens. That leaves the messy world of social norms.

Effectively, you're putting me in a position where I have to give you a check list of who counts as what and for what reasons - but the process by which people are put into racial bins just doesn't work like a logical definition of anything. From my position, the question you ask is loaded.

Racialisation works through norms; it's a societal process, a social fact; and it works associatively rather than logically.

This is, in simple point of fact, racism. The conjuring of race as a concept, followed by the distribution of all people according to this manufactured set of categories. — Pro Hominem

This looks like a deflection. You seem to fully understand racialisation as a societal mechanism (people are sorted into racial categories by skin colour blah blah blah) and now apparently me pointing out that this happens regardless of individuals' choices to identify as a race member is a racist act.

But yes, indeed, racialisation is part of systemic discrimination. If only I could end it with my own will.

I denounce this. It is not necessary to view the world in this way. I can acknowledge that people do hold this view, but I reject it and I push for everyone else to reject it as well. — Pro Hominem

I still think it's a social fact that people are racialised. That's what I'm pointing out. The lack of scientific basis for sorting people into races biologically and blah blah is something much different.

Thus, you may ascribe "white membership" to me, but I do not accept it, nor do I wish to define myself or anyone else this way. — Pro Hominem

If you're white or black, you're white or black whether you accept it or not. Those are the breaks. That is the social fact of racialisation. If you are uncomfortable with being seen as your race... Welcome to the racial binning process, please enjoy your stay.

3. "membership" - this is semantic, I'll grant, but doesn't this word imply awareness? Do we typically describe people as being members of something without their knowledge? Is it even appropriately applied in a circumstance where one cannot opt out of membership? I feel that there are problems of attribution here arising from oversimplifying something complex. — Pro Hominem

Can you opt out of how your clothes look once you're in them? No.

You can't opt out of your skin colour, you're born in it. The idea is that by having a skin colour; something you have no control over , you will be racialised as non-white and be exposed to more risks - racial profiling etc. There are less direct signifiers of non-whiteness - names, voices, clothing...

If you want an awareness neutral concept of membership, think of it is set membership - you belong in a group whether you like it or not.

With regard to how one is racialised - what racial class you end up in and why - you don't have a choice in it. It's not like "becoming a goth", or much to do with self identification at all. Babies are racialised before they're born!

the terms of economics, which are far more 'controllable', far more amenable to intellectual grappling than the sheer irrationality of being treated like a subhuman - and conversely, a proper human - because of a contingency of melanin. — StreetlightX

"No, it doesn't have to make any sense, it's simply a norm. Norms are what make sense" - the economic aspects of systemic racism are a gateway drug to realising the following contradiction:

(1) It's completely unjustifiable (rationally and morally) to discriminate based on race - one's race should not influence the extent to which one is treated well or badly.
(2) It routinely does.

If the mechanisms of racism seem illogical, it's ultimately because they are. They're more norm than reason.

No, I'm from Scotland. Why did you bring that up?

We all have a habit of responding to the style content is performed in, not just its content. How things are said matters; it invests both the sayer and the audience with emotional significance. If it has come to matter "who gets the last word" or "who wins" or "who has done wrong" or "who is most right" in a dialogue among equals, its participants have forgotten the content for the performance. Or alternatively, revealed that the performance was more important for those involved than the content to begin with! The emotional inflections of performance are also a kind of intellectual data; grist for the analytic mill. I believe it's much more important to be able to recognise when and how you are inspired to action by these non-substantive (emotional, style based) aspects than to avoid getting involved in them entirely. (Unless, for you, such allegedly "contentless performances" are dealbreakers!)

"I'm right"
"No, I'm right"

What personal investments are at stake in the discussion?

@jamalrob @StreetlightX

Been reading Graeber more intensively since I found out he died, I've got a better idea of where he was directing the remark based on it.

Graeber's "Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value" looks to show what the comment regarding the "selfish gene" is rooted in. There's an extended argument against some themes of structuralism inspired critical theory at the start of the book, and some of the "totality" comments also show up in the Fragments essay. As I see it there are three aspects to it, the first two aspects are given a rich context in the history of anthropology and neoliberalisation since the 1960's, which I won't try and replicate here. The third largely speaks for itself and gives a critical focus to the others.

(1) Part of it does seem to be the idea of totality as I conjectured - seeing all individual desires and intentions as largely irrelevant subjective detail compared to the individual's function in a society. He references Bourdieu's analysis of gift giving in the Kabyle, alleging (paraphrasing with my interpretive mutilation) that gifts function to elicit gifts of higher value through social customs, so they're individual maximising behaviours relative to a form of social ("symbolic") capital. Graeber wonders why the community forming-maintaining aspects of it (and other behaviours) are under-emphasised - if individual maximising behaviour is everywhere, then so are other oriented desire complexes -. He places that pointed question in the context of a theoretical negligence regarding desire's role in community-society maintaining mechanisms; the desires people have and the concrete behaviours they do and institutions they form to work toward them. He calls the trope being suspicions of mere "subjectivism" (he puts quotes around it in text) in analysing society. A conception of a society as a moral project; what are we striving for together? What ought we want?; is inarticulable under this conception - what we ought to want and what we are striving for are given in the structure of the society.

(2) Linked to (1), the trope that individual acts are given their meaning with reference to some whole of interpretation; be that a structuralist signifying system that distributes meaning through negation, a societal mechanism of homeostasis or reproduction; when over emphasised results in a stultifying vision of expressive behaviour. If individual acts are only ever given meaning/significance/value by the totality which they serve a signifying/reproductive/homeostatic role in, how can anything new be made?

(3) The third aspect concerns the structure of the academic discourse of critical theory- an infinitely meta comment. A condemnation in the form of an analogy of two caricatures, which I'll quote verbatim:

1. We now live in a Postmodern Age. The world has changed; no one is responsible, it simply happened as a result of inexorable processes; neither can we do anything about it, but we must simply adopt ourselves to new conditions.

2. One result of our postmodern condition is that schemes to change the world or human society through collective political action are no longer viable. Everything is broken up and fragmented; anyway, such schemes will inevitably either prove impossible, or produce totalitarian nightmares.

3. While this might seem to leave little room for human agency in history, one need not despair completely. Legitimate political action can take place, provided it is on a personal level: through the fashioning of subversive identities, forms of creative consumption and the like. Such action is itself political and potentially liberatory.

It's a broad caricature, with elements pointed in the direction of Lyotard (incommensurable narrative binds/incompossible conditions of articulation), Deleuze (the project of writing self help to create fresh desires under capitalism), Foucault (the relativisation of all knowledge to an episteme, the genealogy of the individual) - the overall picture is of a person as a moth being buffeted around narrative planes with their own internal logics, mutually irreconcilable but inter-related, where not even the animating spirits of people or planes can ever hope to make sense on their own terms. The kind of picture of humanity that led Rick Roderick to title his courses on postmodernity and its progenitors as: "The Masters of Suspicion" (on progenitors) and "The Self Under Siege" (on theorists of postmodernity).

To the extent capital plays a coordinating role on the logic (and genesis) of those planes, people will be seen as undifferentiated capital replicators - the abstract structure and internal logic of context will "do all the work" an agent does and for different reasons. For reasons are properties of those internal logics, and not the agents or collectives that merely participate in them.

Graeber compares those theses of postmodernity to three characteristic themes regarding globalisation - largely a neoliberal vision of it. I will quote them verbatim.

1. We now live in the age of the Global Market. The world has changed; no one is responsible, it simply happened as a result of inexorable processes; neither can we do anything about it, but we must simply adopt ourselves to new conditions.

2. One result is that schemes aiming to change society through collective political action are no longer viable. Dreams of revolution have been proven impossible or, worse, bound to produce totalitarian nightmares; even any idea of changing society through electoral politics must now be abandoneed in the name of "competitiveness".

3. If this might seem to leave little room for democracy, one need not despair: market behaviour, and particularly individual consumption decisions are democracy; indeed, they are all the democracy we'll ever really need.

The contrast between the two positions largely turns on a moral judgement; is the totality a good thing? A theorist of postmodernity is frightened of its possibilities - how it will hollow out and subjugate people to structurally binding roles. An advocate of the market believes it sets the subject free of restraint-freedom and hollowness falling along the lines of the moral judgement, and for the same reasons.

Both of these lists treat (1) as a premise, "we now live in the age of ... ", and Graeber's theoretical posture is to doubt this - have we ever really been modern? Did we ever need to do away with collective desire - the vision of a collective as a moral project (grasping for how things ought to be) in the face of an only allegedly discontinuous rupture between modernity and postmodernity?

And that interfaces with the anarchist maxim - building a new society in the shell of the old, growing elements of it through activism. A role anthropology can play is providing visions of alternate societies and their means of organisation as strategic+imaginative input for collective projects - especially when it emphasises society as a collective moral project; what do we want out of our collectives? Not just what to negate ("critique"), but what we're aiming for.

I think it's a problem in all the Nordic countries. — ssu

Live in Norway, in the city I live in I've heard reports of racist hostility or violence against:

Two Somali men, one Nigerian man, at least three Eritreans, two Ethiopian men, one Sudanese woman, two Congolese men, two Kurdish men, an Iraqi man and an Iranian man.

Since a couple of years ago, I've seen quite a few people wearing far right signifiers in bars - including a young man with a fucking cobweb on his eye. More of them recently.

The impression I get is that they came out of the woodwork after the Syrian civil war, the "threat of Islamisation" seems to be their animating bugbear at the minute - so I imagine it's continuous with anti-Middle-Eastern racist populism across Europe.

If someone is talking about the empty domain they're either doing it wrong, or they're doing something in the neighbourhood of mathematical logic.

:up:

We could have an argument about event as a process of semiotic restructuring and precisely how much material stuff "needs to change/go" for that semiotic restructuring to take place - there's a certain uneasiness with propagating systemic discrimination/hierarchy generating mechanisms into semiotic processes (like racialisation, gendering...) and then thinking "not much needs to change".

Like drawing a few extra lines to make an aspect shift on what's already there, emphasising the two shapes (totalities).




vs interpreting the extra lines as improvisational repurposing of the shape that's already there - emphasising the arrow between them. Discontinuous change showing up only in retrospect (so practically useless). "how to make the event?" vs "how am I/we embodying the "post evental" world now?"

But that's probably a thread that'll take us away from Graeber.

Whenever I've read or watched Graeber (a book, a few essays and lectures), I'm left with an impression that some way I had previously conceived of the world was entirely pointless, wrongheaded and useless. Reading the Fragments essay @StreetlightX posted has, reliably, had that effect again:

Excerpt from essay:

In fact, the world is under no obligation to live up to our expectations, and insofar as “reality” refers to anything, it refers to precisely that which can never be entirely encompassed by our imaginative constructions. Totalities, in particular, are always creatures of the imagination. Nations, societies, ideologies, closed systems... none of these really exist. Reality is always infinitely messier than that—even if the belief that they exist is an undeniable social force. For one thing, the habit of thought which defines the world, or society, as a totalizing system (in which every element takes on its significance only in relation to the others) tends to lead almost inevitably to a view of revolutions as cataclysmic ruptures. Since, after all, how else could one totalizing system be replaced by a completely different one than by a cataclysmic rupture? Human history thus becomes a series of revolutions: the Neolithic revolution, the Industrial revolution, the Information revolution, etc., and the political dream becomes to somehow take control of the process; to get to the point where we can cause a rupture of this sort, a momentous breakthrough that will not just happen but result directly from some kind of collective will. “The revolution,” properly speaking. — Graeber

Effect: Welp, guess all that time spent learning about the Theory concept of "the event" was fucking useless - somewhere between a Leninist fantasy and a blindness to historical continuity in the middle of all that "historical materialist" theory.

I'm going to miss the guy. :worry:

@Maw probably has a good idea of what's going on.

Given that this prefaces a book on mutual aid - which is something to 'stand for', rather than against, as it were - I suspect the critique slings at all those analyses of capitalism and the present that show, again and again, what the problem(s) are, without offering models or enactable principles for a resolution to them. Less standing against, more standing for. Probably pretty much 90% of left academic writing falls under this rubric tbh. — StreetlightX

I think there's an interplay between the two ideas. The more of your conception of humanity you throw into the circuit of capital for analytic purposes - in its extreme form only the analysis of capitalist totality has revolutionary potency since only it is of critical relevance - the less vision of humanity you have as being already outside of capital. That exterior is simultaneously a positive vision of humanity ("we do this too!" community, mutualism, reciprocity blah blah) and a thing to fight for - "gaps" in totality as politically relevant.

I wish they'd named names. Does anyone know what kind of academic analyses they're talking about? StreetlightX @fdrake — jamalrob

I can take a guess at the Left trope Graeber's aiming at? There's a thing we do where we treat capital like an agent; capital does this, neoliberalism does that, capital makes people do blah. It's quite reductive and goes against Graeber's anthropological focus on the every day. Maybe one way to bring out the tension pointed to in the criticism is contrasting Street's OP quote from Graeber:

"Communism is not an abstract, distant ideal, impossible to maintain, but a lived practical reality we all engage in daily, to different degrees, and that even factories could not operate without it—even if much of it operates on the sly, between the cracks, or shifts, or informally, or in what’s not said, or entirely subversively. It’s become fashionable lately to say that capitalism has entered a new phase in which it has become parasitical of forms of creative cooperation, largely on the internet. This is nonsense. It has always been so". — StreetlightX

To the concept of totality (originally from Lukacs? Dunno the history):

IT is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science. The capitalist separation of the producer from the total process of production, the division of the process of labour into parts at the cost of the individual humanity of the worker, the atomisation of society into individuals who simply go on producing without rhyme or reason, must all have a profound influence on the thought, the science and the philosophy of capitalism. Proletarian science is revolutionary not just by virtue of its revolutionary ideas which it opposes to bourgeois society, but above all because of its method. The primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science.

If People = Capitalist (or neoliberal) subjectivity for all practical purposes, why tf is it that people behave in a community caring-creating manner all the time? Construing people as undifferentiated capital replicators ("selfish genes") vs looking at how people behave in a richer social/anthropological context.

I have no idea on the names Graeber would like to name but won't though!

1. "the category" here means "all white people, everywhere, all the time". If you say yes, I think it's ludicrously overbroad. If you say no, then you are going to have to limit its compass somehow and there's a whole mess of considerations to doing that. Either way, just throwing out "white" here seems a bit lazy. — Pro Hominem

I guess this bottoms out in a question of who is white. And the kind of definition appropriate for white-ness. I think we're going to have to take the following features as premises:

(1) The colonial expansions that prefigured the modern world were more-or-less white skinned peoples invading more-or-less black skinned peoples.
(2) Even within the colonial powers, the category of whiteness is time varying - whether the Greeks, Italians and Irish counted as part of the white race was an issue. (can find citations if you want)
(3) The colonial expansions that prefigured the modern world still define power differentials today.
(4) Whether Jewish people (treated as an ethnicity) are white depends on who you ask and when for obvious reasons.

So "Who is white?" is answered differently depending on the historical period. There's also the question of how the idea of the white race entered discourse. It was a convenient strategic fiction for social control over "slave races" and consent laundering among the un-enslaved for that social control.

I think that complex of ambiguous status, historical variation and strategic convenience of whiteness is very well exemplified by the status of whether the Irish (celts who stereotypically have pale skin) are "really" white!

This fact was brought home to me recently in the aftermath of the Brick Lane bombing, at a time when there was widespread speculation that the Irish would be the next community attacked. I was discussing race relations with a friend who was telling me why, as an Asian, she found it "difficult to trust white people". When I pointed out that I was white, she exclaimed: "You're not white, you're Irish".

See also the context of the slur for white nigger - I believe what made the Irish white but not really white was their ambiguous status as embodying racial signifiers (Celtic pale skin stereotype) but being associated with a colonial diaspora and immigrant (mostly underclass) stereotypes.

In that regard whiteness has always been a strategic fiction to enable and justify exploitation and colonialism. So that's a potted history of it.

So in that context, asking for necessary and sufficient conditions as part of a definition for being white doesn't make too much sense; the concept is too fuzzy and was designed/emerged from a justification apparatus designed to create a fuzzy out group on the receiving end of exploitation. Whiteness as a concept annihilates historical differences for that purpose; it doesn't matter if your ancestors were Pharaohs, Moors or the citizens of the Iroquois League, what unites those is being a colonised out group.

These narratives have doubtlessly softened over time, but is still a big problem. Racial bias in hiring based on the racialisation of names on CVs (even when there's no other bias involved!) is sufficiently strong to show up in the aggregate. I'm sure you don't need convincing that this is a thing, but perhaps I can suggest that the kind of bias it highlights and the mechanisms consistent with it are commensurate with the privilege concept.

If all you need is a name to influence a decision like that, and since it is extremely implausible that such bias is a unique feature of names (skin, clothing - loads of racial signifiers) and also extremely implausible that the bias is learned immediately upon being made to make hiring decisions - what is a plausible explanation of these things? What renders them probable? What operates on an individual level, influences mental acts, and differentiates outcomes of judgements based on racial categories?

To me that seems to very much resemble the privilege construct. Negative outcomes of judgements and negative judgements being distributed preferentially along race lines. Perhaps you will balk at "preferentially" there for the same reason as @NOS4A2 does. And for that reason, in the context of hiring, I invite you to consider a game. There is only one winner of this game - one person can be hired for a position. You have two identical CVs, one is labelled with a name that engenders a higher evaluation of risks due to an implicit stereotype, one does not. If you want to make the rational choice there, you want to maximise the chances of having a good candidate based on your information. It does not matter that your information is biased; one person has a minor disadvantage the other person does not have, the dominant strategy there based on the information is to choose the one with the best creds and no other risks. That's the one that the biased information sides with; the one who is not racilized as non-white. Frankie Boyle made a joke with essentially the same premise a decade or so ago regarding the LHC - very paraphrased: "If your child came to you and asked for a bike, you would consider it, if your child came to you and asked for a bike with a negligible chance of destroying the world by creating a black hole, you would not consider it at all". And indeed, that is the rational thing to do given that framing of the decision.

You might want to say - you can choose another framing for the decision, and with the LHC there was a risk analysis involved and the DESTROY THE WORLD WITH BLACK HOLE theory was bollocks IIRC, but consider that the only difference between the two CVs is the name. That's already a frame, you are not free to choose the frame in the setting above!

We could get into a discussion here about racial signifiers, but I will assume that what they are and how they work is pretty obvious; "they've got olive skin, can't be a native Brit!", do-rags, white voice, accents... Is Latisha or Samantha more likely to have black skin, ask your gut? What about Matthew or Muhammed? Gut says...

Regardless, racialising bullshit in place, you cannot get extra information at that stage. The biased data+interpretation process changes what the rational agent would conclude to maximise their business' expected gains from hiring.


Now imagine the same thing applied more generally; pick your life model. You have two choices, in both choices you can get the same outcomes, but in one choice the chances of the better outcomes is lowered by a higher exposure to costly scenarios. If you chose wrongly, I'd be more likely to beat you. We don't need to say which choice corresponds to which racial bin, it is obvious.

In terms of privilege, I'd like to draw a distinction between cost imposing behaviours and non-cost imposing behaviours. Within cost imposing behaviours, distinguish between direct cost imposing behaviours and indirect cost imposing behaviours. The hiring decision above is a cost imposing behaviour, in it an agent associates a cost with being non-white -it's also directly causal, one agent's state imposes a cost on another. If you buy into system-justification as a system perpetuating behaviour an individual can do, and if you buy into systemic racism's distributing risks unevenly over races, then any behaviour you do that perpetuates systemic racism takes part in imposing its risks - a small part, but a small part can be a big deal. It's an empirical and contextual matter there though; "how much does it really change?" will always be a difficult question. It could be a matter of alienating non-white students in a class, it could be a matter of beating an unarmed teenager to death - if you behave in ways that propagate into either of those phenomena, perhaps a small part of the cost is attributable to your influence. A behaviour which doesn't impose costs at all is probably quite hard to find; there's sin in the agricultural production that enables every loud bean fart. That's hyperbolic, the costs have completed themselves before the fart takes place, but you get what I mean, you don't have too look too far back in the enabling/productive mechanisms of farts to find systemic feedbacks that propagate into systemic discrimination.

This is where the idea of someone's responsibility (the morally obligatory amount) for self checking scaling to their power comes in - power here being understood as the ability to influence the average state of members of a population (institutional leverage, policy, law, codes of conduct...) - the degree to which someone's individual biases are risky to others depends upon the influence they have over others. Highlighting police - that's every neighbourhood they work in and the power over life and death. How much work here is obligatory looks to depend upon the severity of costs imposed, the number of people effected etc etc...

The minimal "amount" of such checking is probably much higher than none, if you want to live in a world without systemic discrimination, aiming to think the kind of thoughts and treat people as they would be in that utopia is probably a good goal. But I'd rather be a racist grandpa in heaven than hyperwoke in hell.

If we then look at loans to white applicants as a proportion of loans approved (or of applicants, or of the population at large), we'll find that as a group whites get a bigger slice of the loan pie than they should. There is a "group benefit" even if each individual applicant is only receiving fair and not in any way special treatment. By comparing relative advantage at the group level to the aggregate of absolute advantage at the individual level (stipulated to be none), we get a result that is mildly paradoxical -- but no more than a racist system with no racists in it. — Srap Tasmaner

Spitballing here.

I think that's a pretty nice framing of it. I think there are a two interacting layers to the phenomenon. Say we're dealing with a situation in which privilege operates where a person X has some judgement of a person Y.

Layer 1:

(1) How is Y assigned to a be a member of a demographic class based on X's interaction with Y? I think there're three components:
(1a) The population level expectations (norms) that classify Y into their demographic class based on their relevant characteristics to demographic classes.
(1b) The population level assignment mechanisms (also norms) that associate those relevant characteristics to the demographic classes.
(1c) The individual level inheritance-with-modification of the population level expectations (implicit biases), mediating the relationships with the (1a) and (1b) mechanisms based on exposure + personal experience+history.

I don't think it's the case that individuals regurgitate population level norms and codes of conduct without change, I rather think that the norms in (1a) and (1b) form a prior that influence people's observed behaviour by reference to expected/normal conduct. A prior that can be reinforced through exposure to it. In a flowchart form - "society presents me with these associations" -> "I modify them through my personal experience and level of engagement with the norms" -> "I behave in some way".

To me Layer 1 is racialisation, how Y gets put into a racial category based on X's background and the history of construction of racial classes. I think (1a) and (1b) are typified by population level conflict over narrative in news, law and policy. All an arbitrary individual has access to at all times are control of their exposure, personal experience and what they do with their time. I could do as much mental judo and research as I like before grading, could it ever counterbalance Katie Hopkins calling the refugees dying in the Mediterranean "cockroaches" in a major news outlet? Doubt it, it's a question of reach and scope. That raises obvious tactical questions.

Layer 2:

(2) How are the demographic classes associated with negative characteristics? I think there are three components:
(2a) The socio-economic-legal mechanisms that stratify advantage and disadvantage in a way that distribute over the demographic classes.
(2b) The mechanisms that broadcast the stratification in (2a).
(2c) The narrative devices that are re/produced that engender interpreting the outcomes of these population level disadvantages (conviction rates, hiring differences...) in a manner that occludes their systemic character ("Anyone can make it if they try hard enough", "black people are lazy", "the disabled just don't want to work", "everyone has felt sad sometimes", "just lean in"...). Blame narratives, over emphasising the individual, being convinced that "your experiences" are in fact universal... These can be present in any (2b) broadcast or Layer 1 racialisation phenomenon.

To me Layer 2 is a base-superstructure dynamic in (2a) and (2b) - though (2b) can be critical, mere reporting, system justification or attempt to amplify prejudices; so the necessity of systemic criticism will persist as long as systemic discrimination does. (2b) and (2c) form a complex with (1a) and (1b), tying system justification and its narrative devices together with process of racialisation - unsurprising, as that was a strong strategic purpose of racialisation for Empire. I think the overall function of the complex between (2c) and Layer 1 is the continual manufacture of consent.

More obvious tactical questions; of special note here I think is that challenging system justifying devices intellectually is one way diminishing the impact of (2c) in that scheme in an attempt to resist the complex. As a corollary of the scheme, being super convinced intellectual acts that highlight race are ultimately racist confuses critical exposure and resisting the narrative devices in (2c) with being negatively influenced by the complex of norms in Layer 1. Between a psychic act that resists racial prejudice in general and one that embodies it in specific.

I think to be privileged, in terms of the above scheme, is not characterised by acting negatively to the unprivileged; that reproduces privilege and is a component part of systemic racism; to be privileged in some way is to be a member of the category that receives advantages and avoids disadvantages associated with that membership. It can't be 'denounced', it can only 'fail to apply', but you can try and mitigate how much you reproduce the conditions that perpetuate the advantage - through personal effort and activism.

@Pro Hominem, maybe this addresses your accusations too.