Let's look at two claims.

(A) Perception is an active relationship between a body and its environment.
(B) Perception results from an active relationship between a body and its environment.

In a context outside this debate, we would maybe be able to agree that (A) and (B) are saying much the same thing. If people are really disagreeing over whether humans can see tables, that is extremely silly, and direct realists shouldn't be throwing "are you saying you can't see the table?" gotchas at indirect realists.

(B) admits of a minor modification that substantially changes the metaphysical intiutions associated with it.

(B1) A perception results from an instance of an active relationship between a body and its environment.

(A) and (B1) look compatible to me; (A) states that perception is a dynamic process between a body and its environment, (B1) splits the process into process components; minimally, distinct events of perception.

I think a direct realist and an indirect realist individuate perceptions very differently when arguing in this context. For a direct realist, it seems to me a perceptual event is an instance of the relationship between one's body and one's environment, for an indirect realist a perceptual event results from an instance of the relationship between one's body and one's environment.

Let's just grant that perception is model based, so what we're seeing is a subset of all the possible aspects of the environment, and we're seeing it in terms of our affordances - or in terms of proposed interventions for goals in other vocabulary (@Isaac Friston even approves of Gibson's theory of perception, which is a form of direct realism, so it's no so clear cut that indirect realism is the only way to be consistent with neuroscience). Our perceptions are samples from a model.

But that model itself is a direct relationship between our body and our environment; it is the medium of perception, and perception itself is a mediation of body and world. The samples from it are instances of a (filtered; yes, partial, yes; incomplete, yes; flawed, yes; predictive/inferential, yes) direct relation. (that model doesn't really care whether a state is internal or external to the body, it deals with both because predictive models of the effects of our actions are concerned with that which is external to our body but are still part of our perceptual events and even phenomenal content!)

Discussions like this on the forum rarely get off the ground because we individuate instances of perception differently, and people with intuitions that perception is model based have a habit of concluding that the representational varieties of indirect realism are the only way forward; even when the representation/modelling that constitutes perception itself is a direct relationship between body and environment

Well having widespread agreement is crucial. However, we must not forget that convention is not always right. — creativesoul

Widespread agreement forms the basis upon which we make appeals to distinguish true claims from false ones.

This makes no sense to me.

Regarding sources which do research being more reliable truth tellers:

Three factors:

A source which expends effort to find out what is true can be trusted to form opinions based on things which are more likely to be true.

A source which expends effort to find out what is true is less likely to form opinions based on falsehoods.

A source which researches a claim is more likely to put it in an appropriate context for its interpretation, and is thus less likely to give undue significance to irrelevant detail.

That there are well trusted sources, newspapers even, which do not care to do basic fact checking or contextualising claims is an indictment on discourse.

That's not true at all. A person who carefully arrives at whatever belief they hold strongly will be able to satisfy the above criterion, regardless of whether or not their belief is true. — creativesoul

It depends on how the source behaves. If a source carefully constructs their output to fit an established agenda, it is not a reliable teller of truths insofar as they relate to the agenda. If a source carefully researches a topic before publishing anything on it, they will report well contextualised truths more readily and fail to report falsehoods (unless explicitly highlighting them) more readily for the above reasons.

The problem is, once we open this particular route, who wouldn't fit in it? Medical researchers have pharmaceutical company ties, academic publishers have their citation rings, psychology has its replication crisis, what organisation doesn't have internal politics, economic pressures... And let's not forget, scientists are people too with in-group pressures, political biases and cultural prejudices. — Isaac

Edit - I guess what I'm saying is, similar to the point I made to Baden, is this extra consideration at risk of muddying the water? Your "If they are an authoritative source on X, they must know Y" seems like a strong and sufficient measure of validity on its own. Does it need the additional consideration of motive, or could that be an argument tangential to the validity of their authority? — Isaac

This isn't a particularly systematic reply. I don't know how to address the problem in general, so it's scattered thoughts with a common theme.

Everyone probably fits in to some degree. If you gave an expert an introductory course exam for their domain, they might fail if they were having a bad day, and so there's some ground for doubting basic competence.

I imagine that "they might fail if they were having a bad day" is quite important; if there are explanatory circumstances that localise the failure; say the WHO on face masks in the pandemic; it would be hasty and uncharitable to weigh that heavily when considering their track record outside of that context.

I do agree that it's difficult to demarcate contexts like that; how far should doubt in a source based on a dubious claim be propagated into our belief networks regarding them? If the WHO made a similar statement regarding hand washing with ethanol gel, it could be used to further undermine their authority in that context given the consonance of plausible motives. But I don't think it's right to transfer that doubt to their role in stopping the Ebola crisis, SARS and their work on measuring neonatal mortality. They haven't failed to live up to high standards frequently enough or over enough domains to cease being an authority. So a reasonable conclusion if both of those things happened seems to me to be the imperative: "Trust the WHO's statements regarding the benefits of public use of vital transmission reducing resources commonly used by professionals less than before".

A decent reason to block that transmission of doubt from face masks to other domains the WHO is an authority on strikes me as: the motive that plausibly explains their failure of authority regarding mask advice (acting to mitigate mask shortages for professionals) doesn't apply in Ebola or SARS or their neonatal mortality studies. If the motive can't be plausibly established to apply in a new domain, it should be dismissed. I realise how much work "plausibly" is doing there. It remains that the WHO's (alleged) use of motivated reasoning is a (possible) scandal for them precisely because they have a well earned reputation as a good source in their domains of expertise.

Another reason is a source endorsing a clam performatively or for rhetorical purposes, like say "You have nothing to lose but your chains!" in the Communist Manifesto, shouldn't be judged solely on its declarative content. That statement should not be judged based on the fact that in any plausible revolution, someone may lose something which is not a chain; they might drop their keys. The extent to which a source uses facts in that way probably scales with how much motivated reasoning it does. So we can easily dismiss politicians using racist tropes instead of data; when the performative aspects of the claim dominate its content; but we shouldn't dismiss a paper studying the effects of immigration on crime and the lowest income brackets for the same reasons we'd dismiss the politician.

If the source tends to only endorse claims or state facts in a domain when also doing motivated reasoning regarding it, that seems stronger ground to dismiss their authority in that domain. Like what we'd expect from the highly partisan sources on immigration in the UK of The Sun or The Mirror, but not from the UK's Office of National Statistics and the Oxford Migration Observatory.

I don't think it's fair to dismiss a source for using motivated reasoning regarding something if they've otherwise done work to establish the facts regarding it. If it really were true that immigration to the UK had caused the immiseration of low income workers in the UK, motivated reasoning regarding that makes a lot of sense.

If we're already at a stage where we can't in practice distinguish motivated reasoning using badly interpreted, overstated or false claims from well interpreted, well contextualised and well justified ones, public knowledge is in bad shape.

If you wanna read what Marx has to say about human nature, the term he uses is "species-being". Wiki has a page on it here. There's also some remarks on it on SEP's Marx page.

Do Marxists hold that human nature should be molded? — frank

I imagine that people on the left generally question attributing features of social systems to human nature to begin with. Let's grant that there is a human nature that's been the same since homo sapiens came about; it's a constant, how can it be used to explain the variations (including historical ones) associated with culture and society, versus nature acting more as a constraint on what is possible for us.

For me (and I'm probably some shoddy flavour of Marxist), human nature is stuff like: we have knees, we have language, we can solve problems, we use tools, we live in communities, we have social rituals associated with sex. Which tools, which communities, which language, which social rituals associated with sex? That's culture. Our propensity to organise ourselves in those ways? That might be nature; we all talk, but we don't all talk in English, even if there is a strong propensity to talk in English the world over. Our capacity to do those things? In some sense, it must be compatible with human nature since we do those things.

I think the leftist suspicion is to resist reading commonalities in social organisation into some underlying human nature as part of our nature's content; eg, like reading the propensity to speak English into human nature due to the world's current propensity to speak it.

To me: what is human nature? The constants associated with humanity. And explaining huge variation in social forms by appealing to something which is the stipulated to be the same on those historical timescales is a fool's game.

So in that regard; it's not so much that "human nature" needs to be "molded" to fit more communitarian, democratic and egalitarian ideas, it's that the social form needs to be changed to be more like that. Hence all that harping on about politics; politics/community organising is how our social forms change, brick by brick.

I think you give way too much charity in interpreting a president whose public statements include:

"When Mexico sends it people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people," he said.

You are not supposed to say that as a presidential candidate appealing to racist, you are supposed to talk about job security and national sovereignty.

Retweeting stuff from white supremacists and neonazis - which you and I both know would get you fired from an entry level position in an office, but apparently not being the POTUS.

On some level you are right though; people hate on Trump the symbol when they should be criticising based on his administration's policies. People hate on Trump the symbol rather than criticising the ludicrous theater of American politics. People also hate on Trump's public persona for the wrong reasons; he functions as a valuable hate sink for symbolic political action.

At the same time, his supporters are just as bad if not worse; they love love love Trump the symbol because he trolls decorum and the dens, because he makes a joke of the theater of American politics while being a seamless part of it, and because he absolutely positively is shining light of racist nationalism.

Being anti-anti Trump in the way you are is a really neat way of showing support to everything he stands for while retaining some veneer of intellectual decorum.

@NOS4A2 @StreetlightX

If you're going to flame each other, make sure it has decent content to back it up.

I was thinking a bit about the idea of basic competence and an appeal to authority. Mostly about establishing the failure of an appeal to authority.

The situations under which we should trust an authority on an issue are when we have no good reasons to doubt their competence on an issue. Reliably producing true, relevant and well contextualised statements regarding an issue is necessary for a source to be regarded as an authority on that issue.

Since we don't have access, or even time, to check a source's whole track record, we need heuristics to judge whether a source is an authority on an issue or not.

Moreover, considering that no one is a domain expert in all domains, we can't assume that our knowledge of the issue is sufficient to judge whether a source is an authority on the issue based off of our knowledge; we should not assume that we know what is true, relevant or well contextualised for the issue in question when dealing with a context in which appeal to authority is appropriate.

Because in the general case we are not domain experts in the domain the source is allegedly an authority in, and we do not know enough to comprehensively assess their authority, what seems efficient are heuristics based on indicators of whether a necessary condition for that source to be an authority holds.

Efficient in the sense that if indicators that a source is not an authority on an issue are present, they are grounds for dismissing the source as an authority on the issue. Logically, if a necessary condition for a source to be an authority does not hold, then the source cannot be an authority. The purpose of that is to block, defeat or dismiss an appeal to authority, not to disprove the claims being supported by that appeal to authority.

Therefore, an efficient indicator for whether a source is an authority on an issue is then a statement which the source must agree with if they are plausible to hold as an authority on the relevant issue. Rendering it implausible that the appeal to authority vouchsafes the truth of the claim( s ) it regards is as good as we can do.

Statements of the form "If they are an authoritative source on X, they must know Y" seem to be such indicators. The domain of expertise in X must be sufficiently similar to the domain of expertise in Y to count as a good indicator. Commonly believed truths in the domain of X are good candidates for Y, why?

It is much easier to assess whether someone has basic training in a domain than whether they are an expert in it; while no one is an expert on all domains, we can expect experts to know the low hanging fruit that even lay people have regarding the discipline.

An authoritative source must have basic training in the domain, if they make false statements which they are extremely unlikely to make if they have received basic training in the domain, they are very likely to be acting in disaccord with their basic training in it or simply have not done it. Which requires a good explanation from the person appealing to the authority why the authority they cite believes such a contradiction of lay knowledge and basic domain training when they are also being touted as an authority in that domain. Giving well justified reasons why the source is acting in disaccord with the claim (partisanship, motivated reasoning, funding conflicts etc) strengthens the argument that seeks to defeat the appeal to authority.

This shifts the burden of demonstration to the person making the appeal to authority in the first place; if they cannot provide a good explanation for why their cited authority demonstrably does not believe things they would believe if they had received basic training (which we have lay knowledge of), their argument should be dismissed.

There will be cases, many cases, where an assessment of basic competence using lay knowledge is highly flawed; an example might be criticising a dietician treating an iron deficiency in a patient but not prescribing the readily available spinach: "If they know their shit they'd be telling me to eat spinach!", despite the exemplary iron content of spinach ultimately being a myth with many supporting citations and (erroneous) common knowledge. (Edit: an interesting corollary; a commonly held falsehood can function as the death of trust in an authority)

If the failure of the source to function as an authority regarding the claim in question can be strengthened to a demonstration that the the source often makes such dubious claims, or that they have a representative agent which makes such dubious claims, by the above that is sufficient grounds for dismissing the source as an authority on the domain until very strong evidence otherwise is presented. Physicsists were in part right to dismiss Einstein's theory of relativity until Eddison gave extremely compelling evidence for it; why trust a patent clerk doing weird new math vs the weight of common knowledge buttressed by experiment?

The extension of a property is the collection of objects which satisfies the property. "is an object on my table" has extension "my laptop, a half litre coffee mug, a heat mat, a candle holder, a plastic water jug, a 2 factor id device, an unplugged microphone, a computer mouse and 2 boxes of oral nicotine pouches/snus".

https://www.britannica.com/topic/intension

In terms of your discussion with @Banno, extension and intension are different ideas in general than referent, except maybe in the case where you're already dealing with a word or phrase which is being used to refer, like the proper noun "frank", with my intension you.

I'm tempted to go back and quote all of the mental gymnastics you used to defend Trump regarding the Ukraine thing, so that we can do the thing where you're arguing with your own quotes.

Yes, I think this is the case too, but (stop me if I'm getting too psychoanalytical) there's an advantage there - in terms of game theory - to a person wishing to avoid cognitive dissonance but with low confidence in their belief. If they clearly present the nature of the disagreement and the terms of the argument (the mode it will take) then if they eventually have to admit they were wrong, they know the other person will know that earlier than they themselves would feel comfortable changing their belief. Muddy the waters regarding terms of the discussion and you buy yourself time to change a belief if necessary without it being clear to all that you're wrong. — Isaac

Vulnerability is exactly the right idea, I think. One discovers that one was wrong, that one was not good, or logical or clever, or honest or whatever virtue one had awarded oneself by way of identity, and one is wounded. A good friend, or a good lover, is not afraid to wound one the way a surgeon does, and a good friend can be trusted to do so when necessary. We fight; we are wounded; and if our egos are well pruned, they will bear more fruit. — unenlightened

So these two threads of the discussion strike me as two sides of the same thing. I don't know what they're two sides of, but I'm very convinced they're the same thing.

Side (1): Setting out one's claims defeasibly; paying attention to what would make you wrong, not just what makes you right. Writing so that the link between your claims and your motivation for having them is clear.

Side (2): Putting one's beliefs and identity at risk when arguing. Being not just open to, but enthusiastically pursuing, sites of tension in one's beliefs and identity as revealed in communication with the other.

It strikes me that writing in manner (1) requires willingness to engage in manner (2).

It also strikes me that it's easier to cultivate side (1) habits than side (2) habits. I base that on there being some general principles which can be written down, and some heuristics, like:

Being able to state what it would take for me to be wrong.
Being able to describe the connections between my claims in a somewhat neutral manner; why does x follow from y, and in what way does it follow?
Being able to describe the motivating context for my engagement.

that are relatively easy to understand in the context of side (1).

But, that "being able to describe the motivating context for my engagement" looks to me to be bleeding into side (2), often when I post on here I'm bringing baggage; intellectual and emotional; to the discussion. The things that motivate me to respond aren't just intellectual; they're aesthetic and emotional. Like when I correct someone who's doing mathematics really badly but being obstinate about their correctness; it strikes me as wrong cognitively, but also it's somehow a violation of my identity.

I speculate that there are motivational/emotional analogues of hinge propositions; statements and motivating contexts which are archetypical of my identity, and my attachment to those statements is very strong and very hard to revise. A hinge proposition is (roughly) an epistemic device that must be believed in order to have a discussion, but phrased as a statement; like "There is a world outside my mind". It is not something which can be doubted without doing considerable violence to how one makes sense of the world.

It seems to me that there are analogues to that regarding my identity insofar as it intersects with intellectual commitments; there are things I must believe to make sense of the world in the way I do. Someone who appears not to operate under those assumptions will simultaneously be judged by me to be wrong intellectually, but I'll condemn the belief to distance myself from it to save myself doing emotional work or to otherwise preserve my belief structure as it is.

That condemning might occur when a core belief; something strongly connected in my network of beliefs; is being challenged. Challenged in the manner that if I were to accept it, I wouldn't just have to change my mind or admit that I believed something falsely, I would also have to change how I think and thus what I believe about myself.

Is that consonant with what you're both saying?

It didn't work that way with the original example. A bad call on one illness undermined other advice on another illness. — unenlightened

Hmmm. I suppose that's possible. I'd guess it's a matter of degree, and of expectations of basic competence. I'd say that knowing HIV causes AIDS is a matter of basic medical competence, and if there is any factor that would make a supposed authority not display basic competence in its supposed field of expertise, that is a good reason to mistrust the organisation. I think maybe that works for mistrusting that medical institution about medical stuff.

I'd be hesitant to say that historical examples of failure and lack of basic competence; eg regarding homosexuality being a pathology, and mental illness being used to make labour camps; are a sufficient reason to dismiss an entire field of study when there are other reasons for those failures; societal prejudice promoting it as a diagnosis and societal prejudice resulting in a way above average rate of mental illness on gays.

"Medicine is wrong because doctors used to prescribe bloodletting to get the humors circulating better" doesn't sound right to me. So "Mental health treatment is wrong because of its horrible history" seems wrong too.

Though I do think there's a few good points to be made about "basic competence in mental health treatment" not being well established yet, considering that the etiological structure and symptoms of mental health disorders are still debated.

So on the basis of a long long history of officially sanctioned invented mental illnesses, (hysteria, Drapetomania, homosexuality, etc etc, along with a whole range of frankly sadistic and obviously highly damaging "treatments", no medical professionals can be regarded as deriving any authority at all from their professional qualifications. Do I have that about right? — unenlightened

Someone's authority is contextual/domain specific. Even within discipline. That there are treatments that have been shown to be effective for some disorders in some situations, though usually not proved beyond some reasonable doubts, can coexist quite peacefully with the horrible histories; and sometimes the still horrible present; of mental health treatment. And those coexist peacefully with the borders of mental health diagnoses being fuzzy, and also mental health institutions being at times an organ of public discipline (or fronts for selling drugs too readily).

Well, not necessarily peacefully, but business as usual.

hat's essentially what I mean by suggesting we avoid many of the more vague 'rules of engagement'. They're simply too tempting at that fragile stage. Also your interlocutor knows you should know you're wrong ("that should have worked!") and are sometimes frustrated at the delay. I certainly learnt that one with my children, don't push for the admission of wrongness... just wait. — Isaac

The thing about the interlocutor knowing they're wrong; I think that applies mostly when two people have implicitly accepted the same background rules for the discussion (or part of the discussion). If two people involved in the discussion disagree on what the matter they're discussing is, or what's especially significant about it (cognitively/factually or emotionally), in my experience I and my hypothetical interlocutors find that place of mutual understanding, even if the disagreement persists, much harder to reach.

But I think what you're saying's otherwise very true. To check if we're on the same page, I think a paradigmatic instance of it that we see on the internet a lot is those one line fisking posts that just say the name of a fallacy. It's little more than gainsaying with Latin spices.

Yes indeed. One of my very early suggestions was that to resolve a conflict we have to establish the conflict. — unenlightened

Which I think is consonant with what un's saying above.

I think I understand what you're saying here, that, like a partner's anger, we can interpret the expression as "I'm not having that kind of discussion" like realising that when your partner is having a discussion about your not having done the dishes, it is not appropriate to ask for supporting evidence (learnt that one the hard way). — Isaac

I actually had a similar conversation with an ex!

I guess maybe the intersection of all these things is the problem: what strategies can be used to ensure that people cultivate being responsive to their interlocutors? Maybe it's a question of intellectual sensitivity; how can I make my thought formation process sensitive and relevant to yours, and vice versa?

Great post.

Yesterday I was feeling a bit better and managed a half mile walk, and today is about the same. I seem to be recovering fingers crossed and apart from an occasional cough and a general weakness and headache, I feel almost human. Mrs un is a bit more pathetic than me still but even she has made it to the end of the road today. She has lost about 6kg, but I haven't because I have been eating. So if you want to come by and infect yourselves, you'd better get it together soon. — unenlightened

I hope you get well soon.

Ad hom. — Hanover

A health organisation that believes that HIV doesn't cause AIDS and is demonstrably politically partisan is a less reliable provider of health news. I'm even more suspicious because it's a health organisation advising on economic matters!

I see 'the rules' being far more often used as ready means of dismissing uncomfortable arguments than as the intellectual hygiene fdrake rightly advises. — Isaac

Happens in arguments all the time. We get hung up on flaws in our opponent's position and for some reason heuristically treat that as confirmation of our own. Critique for its own sake is always valuable, critique to bolster what remains unarticulated can sometimes be stifling or dangerous.

(11) Do not hang back and simply ask questions; if you position yourself always as the critic and the cynic, you can bolster your own beliefs simply by rejecting all others - and it is much easier to show a flaw or falsify than to get a good picture of something or confirm. Do not let the asymmetry in difficulty between justification and falsification be a reason your beliefs never change; all doubt is done within a motivating context - a frame - which can, itself, be more or less occlusive or productive to generating well justified beliefs regarding the matter at hand.

But if we are to dismiss people from our discursive environment on the grounds of rule-breaking behaviour, some of them must be wrong about that. Is their wrongness something we can stand on (like the fact that the earth is round), or their wrongness just another disagreement we have, in which case identifying it hasn't helped us resolve the conflict at all. — Isaac

If we resolve our conflicts, have we produced an echo chamber? — unenlightened

There's a certain amount of vulnerability involved in discussions that actually change how people think. I mean, we have them with our partners (or, ideally, should be able to); I've realised I've been an arse for reasons that were hitherto that moment beyond my comprehension due to a strong emotional reaction or castigation a lot. A performative demonstration of the effects of my commitments or lack of care. I've had that a lot when seriously studying something; like, reading a book, taking notes, finding secondary literature; but a lot less in debates and discussions.

I think there's quite a lot of value in hearing "you're not playing by my rules", or such frustrations, as an invitation; in the same way we'd (I'd?) treat a partner's anger. That requires rather a lot of emotional and cognitive work to do so though, and even then isn't always worth the effort.

That's your value judgement. Millions of sports fans disagree. I wonder if you feel the same way about music. — Marchesk

I saw this in the Daily Mirror the other day: Hooligans STARVING after season tickets CANCELLED.

I didn't really see it. But it's the kind of thing they'd write.

My bet is that there will be another independence referendum in the near future. And that it will be very close, but edge on leave. Scotland is very very pro-EU.

I either have an egg in my house, or I have some chocolate fondant in my house.
The principle of indifference gives both 50% odds.
I actually have neither.
So I have a 0% chance of having either.

You can't just throw probabilities out like that, you end up with absolute nonsense. If you want to apply the principle of indifference, it should make sense; not be applied over an arbitrary outcome set, you have to be super careful with it.

Collective bargaining, I think, has superseded socialism. It can meet the needs of workers without having to violently overthrow this or that “class” (fellow citizens) and seize mob rule. — NOS4A2

How much collective bargaining from workers can do is in a reciprocal relationship with the relative power of capital and labour.

I think the relative power of labour and capital largely comes down to how steep the costs labour can practically impose through collective action are. It's in the interest of every employer to lessen what costs employees can impose; so you want big reserves of workers to hire from, and make it easy to fire people for organizing. Or in business speak; you want talent acquisition to have a big pool to scout and you want lean and responsive command chains.

The degree to which a society's politics will reflect its working class's interests scales with how much the working class can leverage their positions and what they value. If returns on capital investment dwarf returns on labour; and that's generally a thing; wealth concentrates. Wealth buys influence, wealth lets you do landscaping in the terrain of ideas, wealth gets to decide what is common sense and what is ideological blinker. Economic power and political influence tend to consolidate under state capitalism; and the two are essentially equivalent under hypothetical stateless capitalism.

So I see socialism as something like a point of no return in the trajectory of the political power (read: self determination) of the working class. Up until it's reached, the counterveiling tendencies of capital's self consolidating power will undermine worker's efforts to organize; either structurally through economic mechanisms, softly through media and education, or with outright warfare like installing preferred dictators and selectively neutering or subjugating leftist political agents or groups (even when they've got mainstream support). Capitalism places pretty steep costs on worker's organisation whenever it can and however it can get away with.

You know, I completely forgot that happened, God damn, thank you for the reminder.

Have an example.

An element of this set: {1,2,3}

Specify the condition "is an element of this set which is not equal to 1 or 2"

Determines the set {3}.

So there are determinations which are not causes. Though mathematicians will say things like "it causes the only element left to be three".

I hope socialists don't believe anything like that, but I worry that is the outcome, at least for the sort of Marxist revolutions we've seen. Theres is no such thing as 100% agreement, even among socialists. There are always people in the community who disagree. Either we respect their rights or we coerce them. Problem is that some communities don't value the right to disagree. Religious groups have certainly had this issue in the past. — Marchesk

Is it so difficult to imagine that in a burgeoning organised working class, when they have political institutions and alliances, that they will be able to argue with eachother and come to compromises? And that they will be able to argue with capitalists and come to compromises? I mean, it doesn't always end in gulags. FDR was not the "gulags and firing lines" president, even though he was strongly supported by and strongly supported worker organisation involving outright socialists and communists.

I already gave you this:

I don't think it's too obscure to think of power and freedom as interlinked.

You can only do a thing if you have the ability to do so. It can be more or less hard to do a thing, given the societal circumstances you find yourself in, and which you do not choose. Someone raised in a palace is going to find themselves having more opportunities than some kid thrown out on the street. Someone born in a country where criticising the state will land you in the gulag is going to have less ability to express their political opinions. Someone born without the ability to walk will have less mobility in a society where wheelchairs are not available. Someone born into poverty will have to choose crime to get by more often than someone raised in a palace. Someone born into a rich household with massive social opportunities, like David Cameron, will find themselves in positions of power with much less work; their choices are linked to levers of opportunity just not available for the hoi polloi.

A political idea of freedom that doesn't link to one's ability to exercise choice; regarding what actions they may choose, what effects their actions are likely to have; is one that sees freedom as irrelevant to the likely effects of a person's actions and opportunities. If you are more powerful, your abilities make more waves.

A homeless guy excluded from most opportunities because they can't get a job, so money stops them from doing anything; that guy's powerless. A society that makes that situation likely for some and not for others is one with big power asymmetries; big asymmetries in what people can choose. — fdrake

TLDR; freedom is in part freedom to exercise one's powers, and freedom from preventable sufferings that limit them. If powers are denied people by structural stuff, they would become more free by gaining those. You know, like being able to vote on more stuff, or being able to rely on a healthcare system and education system.

You already chose to respond with a one liner conjuring the fears of gulags and firing lines, then you responded to my frustrated remark that accompanied another substantive post with another one line dismissal (saying that I'm practicing doublethink), now you're saying I'm not engaging in good faith.

Two one line dismissals based off hackneyed crap, another one line dismissal that I'm a dupe, in response to the above and another substantive point. And you've got the nerve to accuse me of engaging in bad faith?

But I was talking really about leadership: the ability to lead, to coordinate, to get other nations to follow your agenda. To get various countries to go along with your policies even if not close allies (or those in need of help). That is what I mean by leadership. — ssu

You might not understand just how much Trump just has done and how different it was, well, like when George Bush senior formed an alliance with Muslims countries like Pakistan, Egypt and Syria to fight against Saddam Hussein and got the green light to go ahead from the dying Soviet Union. — ssu

Eh, I guess we'll see what happens. Trump's insistence on screwing over the country's diplomats has been pretty stupid.

Ah. It seems we cannot even think without doublespeak. — Snakes Alive

It was an invitation, I'd've hoped you'd responded to the substantive bit rather than playing the "I'm not playing that game but really I'm still playing that game" game.

I'd prefer if people just specify who they want to tax, kill, etc., instead of doing the whole "X is actually not X" thing. — Snakes Alive

This is an excellent way to hedge your position and avoid thinking. It seems you've already decided that a socialist worker's movement ends in gulags and firing lines. Even though it was a socialist worker's movement that facilitated FDR's reforms that oversaw the longest period of the growth of people's livelihoods ever. With no gulags, no firing lines, just a heavily unionised and politically involved working class using their collective bargaining power.

In some respects they are exemplars of cooperative ownership. But their existence is fully consistent with the usual hierarchical mode of organising a business, obv. There's nothing ensuring that all businesses empower their workers that way.

But socialism is an economic system, not a business model. — NOS4A2

Something apparently lost on @Chester, why correct me when it's his mistake?

Socialism is the concept that the workers own the economy — Chester

So like... you see a supermarket like the Co-op or that company Mondragon and immediately put it in the same box as Stalin?

What do you think socialism is defined as?

Counterarguments? — ssu

- As the US has already basically lost it's leadership position in the world thanks to Trump, it will also lose it's clout in fighting pandemics and in the health care sector as everybody now understands how US institutions like the CDC or NIH are totally open to the whims and delusions of totally ignorant ideological politicians. — ssu

Think that's an overstatement regarding the leadership position I think. The US's military position has not been weakened due to the coronavirus, they will still have all the economic influence the dollar brings so long as international trade relies upon it, and they're almost certainly not going to lose their veto in the UN.

The US losing its dominance in politics would probably require a big restructuring of the global economy , rather than everyone being in the shit and still having international trade depend on the US.

Trump's not really a global geopolitical disaster for America, despite his ineptness.

- The majority of Americans will draw the correct conclusions from this and if possible, will stay home and continue social distancing. A minority won't and this will keep the pandemic strong. — ssu

I suspect that most people are tired of the social distancing measures, and that a majority will skirt and resist the guidelines as much as they feel they can. EG: bars opened in the evening here in Norway this week, and the group size guidelines did little to stem how packed it was. It was the national day today, and the streets were pretty packed, even though most of the displays were cancelled. We're talking crowds of 20 people meeting each other when the rules mandate groups of 5.

If Norway, who by and large have been following the social distancing measures to the letter and have not had a sustained political and media effort to promote ignoring the guidelines are going to ignore them when it's socially acceptable to do so, the US, which has had those efforts, will have more.

There's an added incentive for the US that the furlough payments haven't been as good here; people's livelihoods are more at stake there than here.

I would be extremely surprised if the US's relaxed mitigation measures didn't result in a majority ignoring them for various reasons quite soon.

Ok, so you know what they mean but have no idea how they apply, or the connection between long term health conditions, comorbidity and chronic illness on the deaths. And you've decided that instead of trusting a medical worker's correction of your use of the term, you doubled down and insisted you were right by changing the discussion to more vague terms. Get a grip, learn to know when you don't know, and admit when you are wrong.

The left is so dominant in UK politics that a right populist movement sets policy, an old trade unionist that stood for old left values in Labour was vilified and sabotaged by his own party...

You do not care whether the things you write are true. You just assume they are without checking. Talking with you is a waste of time.

I don't think you know, or care, what acute or chronic mean.

One other thing. The UK was still paying out its extant slave owner recompensation until 2015.

Aye. And the majority of them do not see the majority of the profits their labour facilitates.