I'm not really sure what this reply is supposed to mean. Is the claim that Plato doesn't really buy into the psychology and means of self-determination he lays out across several dialogues (not just the Republic, but the chariot of the Phaedrus, the Golden Thread of the Laws, etc.)?

But even on a highly skeptical view Plato can still get you this far, because his psychology will apply even if we only asymptomatically approach the Good. The rule of reason is the ground for proper inquiry and the ability to transform knowledge or informed opinion into action (in turn allowing for better inquiry). It's a recurring theme that the sophists crash and burn in dialectic because they cannot reign in their passions, but are instead driven by them.

Indeed, later thinkers drawing on Plato would often present such an asymptotic view, e.g. St. Gregory of Nyssa's continual movement towards/into the Beatific Vision. Or they draw a distinction between the asymptotic approach of discursive reasoning and direct apprehension in the Beatific Vision (e.g. St. Maximus, St. Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysus, etc., and arguably St. Paul himself: "love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away." I Corinthians 13:8 —For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face 13:12).

Skepticism can only threaten the psychology if we cannot actually approach the Good (and the True) at all, or if we can never know if we have approached it. But I think such skepticism would need an understanding of appearances/images and their relation to the absolute quite at odds with Plato's. The appearance/reality distinction collapses if we only have access to appearances, and we lurch towards Protagoras.

But isn't it also possible that traditionalist interpretation of Plato - the mystical side of Plato, if you like - has been deprecated by secular culture?

That's certainly part of "creative" readings. Philosophers want to translate an older thinkers work into a form that will jive with modern intellectual trends, or sometimes they do it in service of an ideological end. You see this quite a bit with Hegel, in part because he can be very obscure. So, you have charges that folks like Pinkhard "deflate" Hegel, removing or playing down aspects that would be objectionable to contemporary secular audiences. And there is merit to this approach because it is a way to recover what might seem most valuable in the modern context. Or you have stuff like Bloom's commentary on the Logic which is more obviously a particularly Marxist reading looking to build up Marxist theory.

But then there is also just the drive for "novelty" and "creativity" in scholarship, which can sometimes have a pernicious effect. The path to pointless conflict often runs though moving to assert that one's new reading is the correct one, "what the author intended." Such claims can sometimes be litigated well, particularly if we have a lot of correspondence from an author discussing their own work, but in other cases they seem interminable. Aristotle is a good example here because the exact way in which the works were written, or even who set down certain parts, is up for debate.

My view would be that some readings are better than others regardless of the author's intent. It is sometimes useful to try to analyze how an author saw their own work, but it can also be either pointless (when good sources don't exist) or just an exercise in trying to appeal to a "great name" to boost one's argument.

So, Seth Rosen was mentioned above. Here is a case where most of the criticism points out that even if we think that the overall reading is implausible as "Plato's intent," it is nonetheless interesting and might still get at something in his intent/motivation that has been underdiscussed (e.g. ruminations on his own failed adventure in governance). We can take parts of this without having to go along with the idea that a core concern of Plato is the threat of rule by ideology, a problem that is highly relevant to us in the modern era, but which wouldn't really be relevant for centuries and centuries after Plato's death. Likewise, the account in question relies on "taking Socrates at his word," except when it doesn't as respects the whole purpose of introducing the city (and the psychology here is situated in many other dialogues without the social context anyhow).

It's also a reading where we can see what happens to Plato if we want to stick to a more modern notion of the Good. But the claim that "knowledge of the Good isn't actually useful for leaders and their practical concerns," is going to hinge on a more contemporary notion of the Good, one with more equivocal notions of goodness between different goods (and where knowledge of what is good doesn't necessitate right action).

But "everyone got Plato wrong for millennia, even Aristotle who worked with him for a decent part of his lifetime?" I suppose it wins for being more provocative. It also makes Plato into an extremely poor writer who badly miscommunicates, such that Aristotle, writing of "the Platonists," within living memory of Plato's teaching can ascribe to this group views entirely at odds with the "real view."

Anyhow, to your earlier point re science, I suppose the separation between science and philosophy depends on how one defines science. If science is a virtue, an intellectual habit and excellence, as in St. Thomas, then science is key to philosophy and also a pillar of freedom and self-governance/self-determination (which are themselves prerequisites for proper inquiry).

More narrow definitions of science will vary more from philosophy.

The effect issue is sort of ancillary. The issue is that 1 only follows from 2 given elements of logic that seem to be more a bug than a feature—that do not comport with common standards of "good reasoning."

As Priest says:

The notion of validity that comes out of the orthodox account is a strangely perverse one according to which any rule whose conclusion is a logical truth Is valid and, conversely, any rule whose premises contain a contradiction is valid. By a process that does not fall far short of indoctrination most logicians have now had their sensibilities dulled to these glaring anomalies. However, this is possible only because logicians have also forgotten that logic is a normative subject: it is supposed to provide an account of correct reasoning. When seen in this light the full force of these absurdities can be appreciated. Anyone who actually reasoned from an arbitrary premise to, e.g., the infinity of prime numbers, would not last long in an undergraduate mathematics course.

Now, what is now orthodox comes out of people being uncomfortable with where logic had been previously, fixing perceived problems, so if those moves were properly motivated, others attempts for satisfactory resultions seem like they should be too.

Right, appearances (as set against reality) are still really appearances. Radical skepticism sets in when one supposes that appearances can be completely disconnected from "reality," but this position has to suppose much about the "reality" of the "relationship between reality and appearance," to really get off the ground.

Radical skepticism collapses when it "goes all the way " into positing that there is "only appearance," and no reality. Yet, if there is only appearance, then the dichotomy collapses and appearances are reality.

But, in the modern context this distinction has become pernicious because instead of the more fundemental "reality versus appearance" distinction we get the "subjective versus objective" distinction, which often comes with a lot of extra baggage, the main one being the idea that we don't every experience anything directly, but rather "experience our experiences." So one doesn't experience an apple, but rather experiences the experience of experiencing an apple. And so who knows what the apple is really like? We don't even know the apple's appearance, but only our own experience of its experience. This extra regress is how you can start to slide towards appearances having an arbitrary and unknowable relationship with reality.

I asked a while back, but can anyone think of an example where at least one premise of an argument is necessarily false and yet the conclusion will not follow as an inference?

It seems like two definitions are often included in for validity, and often both are presented side by side:
1. An argument is valid when it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false; and
2a. The conclusion follows from the premises.
2b. The conclusion is contained in the premises.*

Normally, these overlap. If we accept our inconsistent premises as true we can move to the conclusion (but of course they aren't true). We can use disjunctive syllogism and disjunction introduction to move from our inconsistent premises to whatever we'd like. But this relies on a certain notion of implication and explosion, both of which have been controversial in the history of logic (if nonetheless mainstream), precisely because they seem counterintuitive and don't seem to capture natural language reasoning or notions of "good reasoning."

My thoughts were that a combination of relevance conditions for implication and changes to avoid explosion could perhaps get us to a case where an argument is valid under definition 1 but not 2? That is, we'd have inconsistent premises but no inferences connecting them to our conclusion even if we did affirm all the premises.

Can there be such a counter example where the two diverge?

I mentioned quia demonstrations vs. propter quid demonstrations earlier. Supposing that the two definitions do rightly overlap, it would seem like 1 would be a quia demonstration (going from effects backwards), while 2 actually gives us the "why." But in natural language, with our penchant for equivocal and analagous predication, fuzzy terms, and lack of clarity, I can see why people would like to hold to 2 over 1 even if they thought they properly overlapped. We might say, "1 is simply a consequence of 2."


*I am not sure how 2b works with explosion. I have seen Floridi and D'Agastino argue in the context of the "Scandal of Deduction," from an information theoretic lens that there is a certain sense in which some conclusions aren't contained in their premises, with some forms of inference injecting new information.

What's the reasoning here, that Putin would have been forced out of power but for the invasion?

I don't think I've ever heard any analysis along that lines and it seems implausible to me given how much power Putin already wielded in Russia. In terms of his thinking, I would guess the key factors would be:

-His role in history/legacy and the relative success of annexing Crimea and the intervention to save Assad in Syria
-The conviction that it would be something like the "three day special military operation," that would quickly topple the government.
-The fact that Belarus had just had a popular revolt, requiring Russian forces to be moved in, and that they also had to send troops into Kazakhstan just a month earlier (and similar events had played out across the old satellites).

Stuff like gas resources and pipelines seem ancillary based on everything written about him. The historical narrative and prestige also takes center stage in his own speeches and writings.

But the conviction that it would be easy and low consequence seems like the big one. I am pretty sure the thought process wasn't "well, there is a decent chance I'll have to flee the capital and go on air giving a dire warning about civil war as an armored column led by an ex-catering chef pushes towards Moscow without resistance in a year," or "1,000 days in we'll have lost the better part of a million men and be making frontal assaults with Chinese golf carts with steel plates welded to them and dirt bikes."

My guess is that when the history is all written Saddam's decision to invade Iran will be one of the closer parallels.

Edit: or Bush II's decision to invade Iraq for that matter!

Why do you think things broke down between the US and Russia? What went wrong?

You could go back and analyze a millions different variables, but IMO it really comes down to:
-the Russian invasion of Georgia (which didn't actually shift things as much as one might have expected, and wasn't a sea change)
-the Russian annexation of Crimea (where policy becomes overtly hostile but also pretty limpid, shying away from meaningful military aid)
-the Russian invasion of Ukraine (where US and EU policy becomes openly hostile)

I don't think these events are best explained by looking at US and EU policy. They're ancillary. Internal Russian politics, and Ukrainian politics are driving the bus. The mass uprisings in Belarus and in most of the Central Asian states that were once part of the USSR, and those Asian states' pivot into China's orbit also seen more relevant. US and EU policy is probably more relevant vis-á-vis Ukraine of course.

It's sort of like trying to analyze the Israel-Hamas war primarily in terms of US and Iranian policy. Are they relevant? Sure. Iran is probably significantly more relevant to Hamas' decision-making than the US is to Ukraine or Russia's, but the primary proximate decisions driving the current war seem to be very much out of Iran's hands.

Just for an example, the way the war was initially carried out, and what we now know about what was expected to occur, shows that the key variable driving decision-making on the pivotal event (the decision to invade) was a total disconnect between the Russian leadership's estimation of their military's capabilities and its actual capabilities, as well as the willingness of Ukrainians in general to resist, and specific Ukrainians' willingness to aid and abet them. The goal was a fait accompli with low loss of life, and Russian estimates for how the EU and US would have responded to that might have been over optimistic, but they probably weren't wildly off base. The real problem was an internal chasm between expectations and reality.

Ukraine potentially entering NATO is probably most relevant in that it would shut the door on reasserting control over Ukraine by force. If you read Putin's thoughts on the war and the history, I think it's really hard to come away with the idea that if NATO ceased to exist in say, 2020, the idea of reclaiming Ukraine would be a non-issue.

But the Socrates (or Plato) of the Republic is doing more than this. Here we specifically examine the difference between knowledge and "how it looks to us." Our modern talk about convergence etc. would be foreign to Plato, but I see him advocating a positive doctrine about knowledge that is meant to be independent of what Athenians, or anyone else, think of it.

Right, and this goes right along with the psychology presented in the Republic, the Phaedrus, etc. The rational part of the soul has proper authority because it can unify the soul, and move past what merely "appears to be good," (appetitive) or "is said to be good," (spirited/passions) in search of what is "truly good." There is here, on the one hand, the idea of self-transcendence, which we can find in much of the classical tradition and Hegel, Kierkegaard, etc., the move beyond the "given" and "what we already are." In the other, the idea of unity as the principle of self-determination and even the ground for beings (plural; the "One and the Many") that would become a cornerstone of the Aristotlean tradition, and much else.

But Plato's presentation flows from his thoughts on language and conception of images. The seventh letter is very helpful here because he "talks shop" about this directly, and explains why he doesn't present things in a sort of dissertation or set of doctrines, or even in the more constrained dialectical of how Aristotle develops his arguments.

An interesting thing here is Plato's appeal to "a long time spent living together," in a certain manner. One of the things that really sets modern philosophy apart from ancient and medieval philosophy (or from popular contemporary philosophy in the New Age movement or older religions) is that practice has largely dropped out of the picture. At least, I don't know of philosophy conferences where people go to fast, meditate, engage in group chanting, sit vigils, etc.

In a lot of ways, medieval philosophy seems most like contemporary philosophy (as opposed to ancient or early modern epochs) because it was also very academic and involved a great deal of rigorous training. Moreover, it has the heavy focus on commentary, the production of commentary, and its defense. But then when it comes to practice it's sort of the polar opposite, because in the earlier period a great deal of the thinkers are monastics whose entire lives revolve around practice.

I don't have any strong conclusions to draw from this, I just think it's an interesting difference, particularly because so much contemporary philosophy also seems to focus on similar ideas vis-á-vis the medievals, particularly phenomenology and semiotics.

have I completely mischaracterized Socrates, who swore up and down that he did not inquire into the heavens and the earth like some others, but only asked people questions?

Is this Socrates as variously encountered through Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes (probably not the latter I assume), and then "reconstructed?" Or the Socrates of the Platonic corpus?

Where does the Timaeus, etc. fit in such a view?

I've considered that even if the Clouds is farce and parody, it has to capture at least something of the man or else it wouldn't actually be funny to his fellow citizens.



Well, that's a broader academia problem, and I think it is often even worse in other fields. Provocative and "novel" arguments get citations, and there is a sense in which, particularly in the algorithm driven information era, "no press is bad press."

You see this fairly often in economics. Perhaps nowhere is it more obvious than in Biblical scholarship, where theses rise and fall without the underlying evidence shifting much. And the results for popular understanding are particularly dire there, as this forum can attest, because people will repeat with theses like Bart Ehrman's without understanding the massive amount of caveats introduced to allow them to pass the smell test, or that they are incredibly speculative. And if you are doing popular work and trying to sell it, this almost always gets worse, e.g. in interviews you get straightforward claims like "I have successfully psychoanalyzed the essentially anonymous authors of these Biblical texts and determined that they decided to 'make Jesus God' because of insecurities related to the deification of Roman emperors," or "I have successfully recovered what the Disciples really thought of Jesus before his death from the Gospel narratives," ("but also we don't have a single authentic scrap written by them.")

But large forces weren't needed because the great Rumsfeld said so

This is a fair critique. In particular, the widespread looting that occured during the second invasion poisoned public opinion against the US. The thought was "we tried to get rid of Saddam forever, the Kurds fought him, Iran fought him. The US can come in and effortlessly sweep him aside. Thus, if there is mass rioting and abuses, it is because the US wants it to happen."

But the idea wasn't entirely that you didn't need as many men. Certainly, you needed fewer in terms of the initial invasion, because Iraq's military had been badly battered by the Gulf War and sanctions and the US had already defacto partitioned the Kurdish third of the country. And so the idea was to use the Iraqi army for stabilizing unrest. That was the fatal flaw. There was a plan to have way more men involved, it just hinged on an extremely important factor that the US was powerless to guarantee.

Now, in their defense, militaries have often done this type of work after losing a war because order in defeat is still preferable to chaos (e.g. the French army being freed and rearmed to go fight the communards in Paris by Prussia). But they didn't in this case, and there was no backup plan. And the decision to stop paying the soldiers when they didn't show up (aimed at enticing them back) backfired monumentally.




Right, and by that point it was already becoming readily apparent that China would be the main rival the US had to contend with (whilst back in the 80s and 90s people did talk quite a bit about a reunified Germany and Japan's economic boom, something you still see in all the sci-fi of the era).

And this is precisely why a lot of foreign policy written at the time discusses what a wonderful ally a liberal, denocratic Russia would make, particularly if integrated into the EU. Such a move would:

—Put almost all the world's weapons production and knowledge base for weapons production, including nuclear delivery systems, into the liberal alliance.

—Offer a balance to Germany in the EU by adding another large economy/population (and recall that closer to unification and earlier in the EU the domination of Germany was a larger concern, although it is still a going concern, as it was in the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis).

—Russia, with the US, Canada, Mexico, etc. would represent a share of the world's energy resources to rival with OPEC, allowing for greater flexibility and insulation from instability in the Middle East.

—A Russia in NATO would give the NATO a giant land border with China, an absolutely massive asset in the current rivalry.

—The peace dividend from bringing Russia into the fold would be huge for Europe and even huge for the US given how expensive the nuclear deterrent is (on par with Russia's entire defense budget).

The idea that it was in US, or "Western" interests to pauperize or dominate Russia doesn't cash out. There was much to gain and the people making at policy at the time were extremely idealistic (and perhaps we can even say naive) vis-á-vis the ways in which they thought economic development would lead to liberalization and "win-win" situations for all.

For instance, China was never faced with something like Cold War containment doctrine as its meteoric rise really kicked off. The US (its firms and people) invested literally trillions in the Chinese economy, as did the EU. In particular, it moved the very heavy industry needed to wage wars over to China. What helped the US defeat Japan was its astounding ship building capacity. Today, the US makes about 0.1% of new tonnage. China makes almost more than the rest of the world combined. Commercial aircraft is another area where European and American investment and technology transfers have been very large.

Now, certainly generosity wasn't the main motivation here. This was done to exploit comparatively lower costs for production in China. And we might point out how this huge transfer of wealth and economic activity could actually have been said to hurt Western nations (while enriching some small segments of their population). But it also isn't the sort of policy one engages in if one is obsessed with preserving military advantage. And there is ample evidence to show that decision makers involved in this process really did believe that economic growth in China (and elsewhere) would result in liberalization and better relations.

People still make this sort of argument. "Take sanctions off Iran, they will develop a wealthy, educated middle class and liberalize." Whether one ought to believe such things given history is another question entirely.

NATO expansion happened in this sort of context, hope over an "End of History," and the idea that gradually all nations would liberalize.

Even W. Bush era policy contains a good deal of this idealism, which is why it made establishing liberal democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan war aims.

I didn't ignore it, I pointed out that your evidence to support your position is historically illiterate, listing colonial rebellions and literal staff work as "invasions." You then asked me to "do the homework," on if Russia has ever invaded Germany and France, which, given the relevance of the Napoleonic and World Wars, is frankly comic.

Also, arguing for "spheres of influence," what is this, 1938? You know who thinks Poland should be in Poland's sphere of influence? Poles. And the same sort of thing goes for Czechs, Finns, Ukrainians, etc.

If one takes historical subjugation to be a valid standard for wielding influence over one's neighbors that other countries should base their foreign policy around then China also should have a "sphere of influence," extending across virtually all its neighbors (including Eastern Russia). But then this cuts both ways because former German holdings in East Prussia overlap not only Poland, but the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, and indeed into the Baltics as well. And Poland has historically ruled directly over the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Russia, Moldova, and Romania. Austria has some shared overlap here as well. The Turks likewise, further south. Even if "historical control and influence," were a valid standard, NATO's core membership had just as much, and often more of a history in the expansion states when compared to Russia.

Out East this same exact sort of thing holds. Japan has historically held Korea, large swaths of China, and land controlled by Russia. But I have never seen anyone claim that the US military alliance with ROK should never have been formed because it is an affront to Japan and China's historical domination of their smaller neighbor, nor that a US alliance with Poland is troublesome because Austria and Germany dominated that area in the past and should get to in the future. Such facile arguments only ever appear in the context of Russia.

But then the next question. Why then thumb your noses at China?

Just then leave China alone. Why all the fuss about Taiwan? Why not have good relations with China? Is Taiwan a reason to have war with China? They have nuclear weapons too. A lot more than North Korea and are making more of them as we speak.

Good point. The expansion states are in the German and Turkish historical spheres of influence and conquest, same for Austria as a member of PFP embedded in NATO, so the historical claims thing only seems to be cutting one way in this reasoning.

Should the UK have a right to dictate India's military alliances and attack India to prevent new ones? No one says this but they have a longer history of continuous control and management than Russia does in some of the areas in question.

Well, sure, in the same sense that if you regularly drive black out drunk you might have a "justifiable fear of car crashes."

I'm not sure if the conclusion that "we blew it," flows from this though. Countries have lobbied hard to get into NATO because of a justifiable fear of Russian invasion and colonization. The counterfactual where NATO doesn't expand and Russia stops invading its neighbors is far from clear, it seems equally plausible that more countries might face invasion otherwise.

Anyhow, I get your point, and I think it's perfectly valid if it is framed in terms of the traumas of World War I and the Russian Civil War, and then the Second World War. That alone would be enough.

Yes, I'm painting with an extremely wide brush and vastly overgeneralizing. The article might not even be a particularly good example, I haven't read it in a bit. Obviously, a great deal of philosophy avoids these issues, runs counter to this claim, or is focused in such a way that it need not touch on them.

I am mostly thinking of advice I've personally received or complaints PhDs have written on the internet (some strongly discouraging anyone from considering a philosophy PhD). I don't think too many people would want to publish such a view, for obvious reasons. Might this just be the incredibly bad job market? I think that is probably the main driver. People often say as much. But then we might consider why the job market is so incredibly bad. Lots of "more unemployable" majors still draw in a lot of undergraduate students (generating jobs). NCES unhelpfully lumps philosophy in with religious studies, but given religious studies likely has more than half the numbers there, it's pretty slim (there is a more general slide in the liberal arts to consider as well here). I've worked with people who abandoned graduate programs in the social sciences who say somewhat similar things, so part of it is perhaps academia, but I don't think "how academia is" is totally separate from issues of philosophy.

Rather than digging, I'll just throw out something from "We Have Never Been Woke," which I just read:

I began my academic career as a philosopher. Many people are drawn to philosophy after encountering work by some great thinker who heroically tackled huge questions and tried to wrestle them to the ground as best they could. These works tend to be thrilling and mind opening— ambitious in their scope and argumentation. But when you become an academic philosopher in the United States, you quickly discover that producing work like this is not something you are practically permitted to do. Your readings will focus narrowly on secular, analytic, Western (white) liberals. The work that gets published tends to be extremely narrow in its focus— for example, here’s my interpretation of Martha Nussbaum’s response to Joseph Raz’s critique of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. I literally published a paper like that.10 It’s pretty good, as far as these things go. But it’s not the kind of work that anyone goes into philosophy to do, I suspect.

And of course al-Gharbi is an Ivy League graduate with a tenure track position writing for public consumption.

Is this more an academia problem? I could certainly see the case for that, because on many philosophical views the goal of a philosophy teacher is not going to be publication, but teaching (really more mentoring), which of course certainly happens, but in academia there is the whole "publish or perish" thing that can often backload this.

Is that true? I doubt it. I'll let you do the homework.

Sure, look up how WWI started and how WWII ended. If starting a war, losing it, and getting invaded counts as "being invaded," then Germany was certainly invaded by Russia (twice in the 20th century), not to mentioned partitioned by it and turned into a puppet state for half a century.

How do you think the war with Napoleon ended? And the Hundred Days? And it's not like Russia hadn't made it into France proper earlier for lack of trying.

With Germany, I suppose the question is "when do you count Germany as coming into existence?" If you're looking at the same time frame and the Thirty Years War on, it's easy to generate such a list. And since the list counts even foreign interventions in civil wars, the French Revolution and its aftermath alone create such a list (plus all of Germany and France's wars). Or just England's myriad attempts to conquer France. I mean if the Chechen War is an invasion then the Haitian rebellion, or the US wars with the Sioux, etc. would be too.

The Origen story is probably a smear by opponents. In his commentary on Matthew he considers an extremely literal interpretation of this advice to be idiotic.

He was, however, tortured to death and never renounced his faith, and the story about him as a teenager wanting to run out to join his father in martyrdom, only to be stopped by his mother hiding his clothes, is generally thought to be genuine.

If it wasn't for some of his more Platonist speculations and the Origenst Crises that came after his death he'd almost certainly be a saint, and likely a doctor of the church. It's hard to thing of a non-saint who has more influence on theology (and we'd have another probable universalist as a doctor).

Well, we can consider the counter-examples: the Gulf War, the US interventions in the Balkans, the US' first intervention in Lebanon under Eisenhower, or even Korea, etc.

What made these different?

Certainly not the comparative military strength of the opponents. Saddam had a million men under arms, a military with a wealth of relatively recent combat experience, and Iraq had spent lavishly on high the Soviet and French equipment (and this was before the huge technological/qualitative gap between NATO and Russian equipment widened). But the result was an out and out rout. 147 Coalition servicemen were killed while Iraqi casualties were somewhere between 200,000-300,000, with perhaps 50,000 killed in action.

A clear difference with the GWOT is the goal of state building and a transition to liberal democracy, but this wasn't the case in Vietnam (where the US backed a coup and the state was far from a liberal democracy) nor in Korea (an authoritarian dictatorship at the time of the war; also, militarily, a draw).



Ok, but several of those "invasions," are counter invasions in wars Russia started. Particularly, they are former colonies/conquests of Russia fighting for independence or fighting off Russian attempts to recolonize them, and in some cases Russia had carried out sizable genocides against those peoples in living memory. In WWI, Russia mobilized first (Germany last), and invaded Germany first, they just lost. The "Continuation War," is the continuation of the Russian attempt to reconquer Finland, as it reconquered Poland and other lands with its military ally... Nazi Germany. Crimean War? Also kicked off by Russia invading its neighbor.

Sometimes, if all your neighbors think your the asshole and start buying guns and making alliances against you, you might consider what the common denominator is.

Also, one of those isn't even an invasion, but contingency planning staff work where a single shot was never fired...

Second, you could probably generate lists of equal or
even longer length for Germany or France, on which Russia's name would appear as "invader."

I don't think it's a bad piece. Like I said, I initially liked it quite a bit because it seems to offer a salve to some of the harsher egocentrism that existentialism can slip into. Yet it falls into the common trap of: "wow, philosophy is hard and we don't get the same sort of certainty the early moderns decided should be the gold standard, thus nothing really matters."

Something along the lines of "A xor B, not-A, thus B," where the first premise seems pretty dubious (i.e., your standard false dichotomy).

Maybe it's just my sentiments having read it close to half a century after it was published, when a lot more writers have brought up the point: "maybe the frame developed in the early modern period is just wrongheaded?" For instance, a lot here (anything really meaning anything at all!) hinges on "objective meaning," and "objective value," the absolute as the objective, set over and against the non-substantial "subjective." But the absolute, to be properly "absolute," includes all appearances, and the transcendent is not absent from what it transcends, so in I would want to simply reject this distinction (which is historically quite recent, and the subject of fierce critique, e.g. Hegel).

And IIRC, Nagel only offers a cursory analysis of the appeal to the transcedent in terms of "the glory of God," which doesn't seem to actually get at how Neoplatonism, the Patristics, the Scholastics, Christian existentialists, Sufis, etc. actually think of this. (Reminds me a bit of Hume)

Anyhow, I find it hard to think that such sentiments don't have something to do with philosophy becoming largely irrelevant. I've seen academic philosophers, in their books, personal correspondence, blogs, etc. regularly decry how their field largely focuses on extremely narrow and often quite worthless (sometimes their word) analyses, or advice to potential graduate students that "being a true believer in philosophy," is a liability, while a "narrow technical focus" is what one should display in a good statement of purpose." "Sterile word games," is another phrase bandied about.

Now every field bitches about itself. City managers bitch about their city councils, their residents, and their unions, even if they actually like all three. Doctors joke about beating hospital administrators with the stacks of checklists they send their way. Mechanics decry the sadistic engineers who decided that changing regularly replaced parts should require hands the size of a toddler's. But they almost never remark that their field is useless (and not useless in the sense of "valuable for its own sake," but useless).

And I don't think this is just a more general problem for academia. Political scientists and economists might have some similar complaints, but they still see themselves as an integral part of a whole, not the equivalent of an appendix.

Perhaps this is off base, but it seems like the areas of philosophy most bound by this problem are precisely those who can't get away from the aforementioned presuppositions. I'm not a huge fan of existentialism, but specialists here seem more apt to avoid this malaise. Robert Solomon speaks with fire in his belly for instance. And the same is true for pre-modern specialists. Now this could also have to do with the extremely poor job prospects philosophy PHDs face, but this also isn't unique to philosophy or even academia (e.g lawyers in the 2010s.)

You mentioned Matthew earlier, but might you be thinking about Mark 7:18-19?

"And He *said to them, “Are you so lacking in understanding as well? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the person from outside cannot defile him, because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and is eliminated?” (Thereby He declared all foods clean.)"

This is the stronger formulation, with the parenthetical, which as far as I know shows up in the early texts as such (or the ancient equivalent).

But in many cases outside the NT the spirit of the law seems elevated above the letter, and so Jesus is not unique in this. And this goes along with the claim of misunderstanding the Scriptures at John 5:39 — "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me." The spiritual interpretation gives life, the fleshly profits nothing (John 6). And or course in that Gospel Jesus also refers to himself as the temple itself, and at any rate it kicks off by introducing Jesus as the Divine Word through which "everything that has been created was created," so here is a claim to proper authority, "before Abraham was, I am."

But if you want a particularly strong violation of kosher dietary principles, look no further than: "Then Jesus said unto them, “Verily, verily I say unto you, unless ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you."

Yet the Prophets are full of distinctions such as "the circumcision of the heart," as opposed to mere fleshly circumcision and the elevation of justice over ritual.

E.g. Amos 5

“I hate, I reject your festivals,
Nor do I delight in your festive assemblies.
Even though you offer up to Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
And I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fattened oxen.
Take away from Me the noise of your songs;
I will not even listen to the sound of your harps.
But let justice roll out like waters,
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Or Psalm 51 (and plenty of others)

You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;
you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart
you, God, will not despise.

Or Hosea 6:6 "I desire mercy not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings."


Or the opening of Isaiah:

Hear the word of the Lord,
you rulers of Sodom;
listen to the instruction of our God,
you people of Gomorrah!
"The multitude of your sacrifices—
what are they to me?” says the Lord.
“I have more than enough of burnt offerings,
of rams and the fat of fattened animals;
I have no pleasure
in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.
When you come to appear before me,
who has asked this of you,
this trampling of my courts?
Stop bringing meaningless offerings!
Your incense is detestable to me.
New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—
I cannot bear your worthless assemblies.
Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals
I hate with all my being.
They have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.
When you spread out your hands in prayer,
I hide my eyes from you;
even when you offer many prayers,
I am not listening.

Your hands are full of blood!

Wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.

At any rate, Paul for his part sees Christ as fulfillment. The Gentiles are grafted onto the vine of Israel, rather than one vine replacing another.

Alright I will do you one better. According to both Torah law and rabbinic law, a seminal emission places one in a state of ritual impurity. Yet Jewish men are required to procreate. Thus, one can knowingly and voluntarily enter into a state of impurity yet it be a good, obligatory act.

And God directly demands that Ezekiel to cook his bread over human feces(4:9), which the prophet at least seems to think constitute a violation of the same dietary restrictions that forbid eating carion (Leviticus 22).

Well, the 60 vote threshold to remove the filibuster doesn't require a constitutional amendment. It can be done with a simple majority. It's a very long standing Senate rule, but the Senate can amend its own rules (with a 2/3rds vote; however through a convoluted process you can curtail the filibuster, Rule 22, by creating a new "precedent," with a majority).

The reason it isn't changed is because control of the Senate flips often, and each party knows that it will eventually be out of power and doesn't want to be steamrolled by a simple majority. Nor do they want to be forced to stand up to their own party to prevent stupid but popular votes from passing. For example, Republicans tried to force Democrats to actually take a vote on the wholesale abolishment of ICE (something more radical members had submitted). But obviously completely abolishing your immigrations and customs agency rather than reforming it is idiocy, and so the Democratic leadership was almost put in the position of having to vote down their own bill, angering their base.

And honestly, this isn't necessarily bad thinking when you consider some particularly dangerous policies that have been recommended, such as Trump's push to make almost all federal employees with any decision making authority political appointees who can be fired based purely on political loyalty. This would be an unmitigated disaster, easily the most damaging policy proposed in recent memory. Many Republicans know this is idiocy, and the filibuster keeps them from having to actively switch sides to vote against it.

I don't quite follow what you mean by "more radical". Do you mean politicians who promise public good but then don't deliver?

In order to be a candidate in a general election you need to win your party's primary. Primaries have much lower turnout. Many people don't even know they are going on. In many states, you need to have become a declared member of either party to vote in that party's primary. This means that the people who vote in primaries tend to be:

-older
-wealthier; and
-more ideologically motivated

than the general electorate. Think about it, who is going to get themselves to the polls in the spring or winter, long before the general election (particularly for off years when there is no presidential race and much less media buzz)? Who is going to want to actively declare themselves as a member of either party? On average, these people tend to be more ideologically motivated.

So, by the time the general electorate votes, they have already had their options picked by a group that tends to have different policy priorities. Add in gerrymandering and you tend to get representative who are both significantly more liberal and more conservative than the median voter. And this of course makes compromise more difficult.

The American people must somehow not want healthcare and social services.

A public option for healthcare polls decently well (i.e. modest majority support, and support amongst a sizable proportion of Republican voters as well). The problem is that the US electoral system is pretty much set up so as to result in the election of representatives who are significantly more radical than the median voter, while major reforms also must pass the Senate, where representation not proportional, and generally must pass with 60 votes.

This could be fixed of course, in a variety of ways (e.g. fixing gerrymandering, ranked choice voting, open primaries, making it easier to vote, particularly in primaries, abolishing the Senate, etc.). The problem is that the candidates who win in the current system are not the type of candidates who are likely to win in a system that more closely aligns to median preferences, so they have very little incentive to push for such changes. Not that this would fix everything, far from it, because people would still be invested in the "culture war" as a new sort of religion of sorts, but it might fix a lot of issues.

This is a strawman. For one thing, a major focus of Al-Ghabi is the way in which elites choose to personally identify as "oppressed and marginalized," and this seems much harder to explain in terms of systemic constraints, particularly because it is a relatively recent phenomenon.

This is also a strawman of my position, because of course I acknowledge that even elites are bound to and by the very systems that give them their status. I have been commenting on what the American urban system produces. Should people be morally outraged by such a system? Sure, just as reformers were rightfully outraged over the excesses of the Gilded Age, slavery, etc.

American slave owners were surely also part of a system; that doesn't eliminate all of their moral culpability. And at any rate, even if it did and no individual slave owner bore any responsibility for the practice of slavery, it would still be the case that the system of hereditary chattel slavery in the US was morally abhorrent and in need of dramatic change. Likewise too for the Holocaust or the Holodomor. One doesn't need to embrace "Sartrean bad faith" to think these sorts of systemic events have moral valance. And if the outliers have moral valance, so to do the less outrageous cases of the Gilded Age or our new Guilded Age.

You've set up a false dichotomy where one either acknowledges systematic constraints (something Al-Ghabi certainly does) or gives systematic issues moral weight, but never both. Yet both are relevant. Those who campaigned to end slavery, serfdom, child labor, Jim Crow, etc. did so specifically because they saw them as moral issues, and they were successful, at least in part, because they eventually convinced others that their moral stance was correct.

The strawman lies in trying to reduce the entire project to a "gotcha." It isn't. If the books and scholarship that helped develop the ground for the "Great Awokening," and what has become the mainstream consensus in urban elite circles (e.g. Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow") have value, then surely a study of, and reflection on, how this social movement has actually pursued its stated goals is just as worthwhile.

But that wasn't even my original point. My original point was that I wouldn't hold up America's urban centers as a shining example of what the future ought to be, precisely because they seem to generate a social structure more akin to Saudi Arabia or Qatar than the what the leadership class actually wants. Yet those states, despite their tremendous wealth, don't represent good models. They are inherently unstable (for instance, most of America's major urban centers erupted into widespread riots not all that long ago), so even if GDP growth and technological innovation were our sole criteria they would have notable flaws. And I would argue that these systems make even the elites in those societies less free. Nor are people entirely constrained by systems. Even a member of a ethnocentric, jingoistic bronze age priesthood could remark of his own ethnic group in the 6th century BC: "the people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the foreigner, denying them justice" (Ezekiel 22:29, and note that this is not "Enlightenment individualism," the blame and punishment falls on the corporate whole precisely because society acts as a whole)

No doubt, institutions can constrain people, but people can (and often do) also change institutions, which is why it is hardly off base to point out cases where goals and actual policy are completely at odds. In particular, it's relevant when discussing why establishment parties in the West keep losing elections, particularly in cases where the populist right fields candidates with glaring problems.

I've seen the theory that it's a loyalty check, but also a way to create cover for other appointments. The Senate can reject Gaetz and show they have "some backbone," and then bow on everything else with some credibility.

Given just how hated Gaetz is by his own party, I wouldn't be shocked if this one actually fails, although it might very well go through. If he is withdrawn, maybe Giuliani can go in!

Actually recent scholarship from Christiaan Kappes has shown that the NT is explicit that they are not Jesus' siblings. There have always been very good arguments for that position (even apart from tradition), but Kappes co-authored a book in which he shows that the syngeneusin of texts like Mark 6:4 literally means "relatives of some other womb" (link). In any case, the Magisterial Reformers are all in agreement that Mary was ever-virgin (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli).

Thanks for this. I suppose this might explain why the Greek Fathers tended to write off Mary having had other children.

I didn't find that book overly interesting, either, but what he is doing at the beginning is trying to establish the primordial nature of dominance hierarchies (which he will later relabel as "competence hierarchies"). The idea is that hierarchical competence generates self-confidence and health (which at that lobster-level is seen primarily through serotonin). A large part of his point is that, pace Feminism, hierarchical orderings have been around as long as lobsters, and are not going away anytime soon. I see Peterson as correcting important cultural errors, but at a relatively superficial level. "Make your bed, do the right thing, be an effective communicator, do not fall into feminist traps, etc."

Sure, brutes have their hierarchies. Man can form his hierarchies much as the beasts do, or he can order them according to proper authority, in accordance with what is "truly good for the whole." We need authority and social structures, and we need those structures to be engineered in line with a realistic picture of human nature, while nonetheless enabling us to transcend that nature, what we already are ("the given") for what is "truly best." This is the idea of authority in Plato for instance, why he elevates the authority of reason (only logos can unify a person, just as it is the Logos who resurrects St. Paul from a death of personhood and autonomy, lost to a "civil war in the soul" in Romans 7). I think a similar notion can be found in St. Augustine, Aristotle, St. Thomas, or even Kierkegaard and Hegel.

I suppose what bothers me is the general tendency of naturalistic explanations of human hierarchies to lose sight of the role of the transcedent in human freedom. A naturalistic understanding of man—man as the rational/political animal—need not supplant the role of the transcedent, but it often does without careful attention.

The "competence hierarchy" sort of captures this, but not really. And anyhow I think historically, it's hardly chiefly feminism that has allowed for incompetence at the top. This has been a pernicious problem throughout human history, Marcus Aurelius elevating his incompetent son to the purple and ending the era of the "Five Good Emperors," for instance, or Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero taking Octavian's place through inheritance and sheer inertia. Or there is Tsar Nicholas II or Hitler's disastrous interventions in military affairs, and the great multitudes of men with good names who have "failed upwards" through history. The current state of the Russian military is another example.

At any rate, the dominant form of feminism (and much "anti-racism") seems to be largely comfortable with current hierarchies and disparities, so long as more diversity is seen at the top.

However, I will add that much criticism of Peterson, "how dare anyone assert that hard work and discipline might be good," is entirely off base.

But I find the whole topic of "Christianism" interesting (a term that some use for cultural Christianity). Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, and even Richard Dawkins to a minor extent hold up Christian culture as an important value, yet without professing Christianity.

IDK, it seems very much in the mold of the "post-modernism" advocates of "cultural Christianity" tend to rail against. Its focus on instrumentalism (a sort of outgrowth of the Protestant "prosperity gospel" perhaps?) seems to put it further outside the realm of Christian belief than belief in the "God of the philosophers" of antiquity (seemingly returning to some degree). I don't see how a family hewing to "Christianity as principles for success in modern life," wouldn't want to have Saint Francis committed to a psychiatric institution, or how Saint Augustine giving up his promising career and dispensing with all his family's wealth wouldn't be seen as "taking things a bit too far." The definition of human flourishing that makes Boethius or St. Maximus torture/mutilation and death (or most of the Apostles') "worthwhile" and even "choiceworthy" needs to be dramatically different.

Now, Charles Taylor does paint a more sympathetic picture of people who might consider themselves to be "cultural Christians," as those who admire and sometimes desire to pursue spiritual goals, but find themselves too drawn in and busy with the world. So I suppose my objection is more to the narrower range of cases where "Christianity" is advanced as a sort of set of principles for temporal success, as generally defined by secular culture.

Thomas

https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Absurd%20-%20Thomas%20Nagel.pdf

I really liked this piece when I first read it, but I slowly began to think it was a (more palatable) example of all that is wrong with modern philosophy.

Pointing out that super-wealthy residents of New York are predominately of certain ethnic persuasions while their servants are of another, and that social mobility among immigrants is greater in South Dakota in the midst of an economic boom doesn’t explain very much. The question is whether and how you can tie such facts to a liberal-progressive social value system.

Sure, that's exactly what al-Gharbi and others have done. I don't think it is just some "unavoidable problem of urbanization," that the oh-so-progressive residents of the Upper West Side balked at unused hotels in their neighborhoods being used as shelters for Manhattan's homeless during the pandemic. It was the recurrent theme of "yes, progressivism... but not in my backyard." Instead, the homeless were concentrated in poorer, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Nor is it an accident of urbanization when urban school districts have effectively re-segregated their school systems. That was an intentional policy choice. Likewise, an expanding racial wealth gap that eclipses that under Jim Crown (and that between Arabs and Jews in Israel) didn't "just happen by accident."

Likewise, "university towns" (e.g. Chapel Hill) might be plenty progressive, but the residents still often fight tooth and nail against any high-density housing being put up in their communities. Chapel Hill is a great example because, despite being overwhelmingly progressive, it still remains the case that majority black Durham happens to have a county-line (and thus a school district) that neatly wraps around the city limits, so that its students remain segregated from the children of the progressive elite across the border.

What I’m saying is that the negatives you’ve been pointing out are not the direct result of the value systems I and other liberal urbanities embrace, but exist in spite of them, and are tangential to them.

I think there is ample evidence to show this is not the case. There is a wealth of empirical evidence and case studies on the "not in my backyard phenomenon."

You said you lived in New York, but I’m getting the impression you didn’t grow up in or near a big city.

No, I grew up in a rust belt city, so the wealthy had already largely fled the city and settled in the surrounding environs. They were welcoming of new arrivals, so long as they stayed compressed in the city limits. And what a great welcome it was, routinely one of the top 10 worst violent crime rates in the US, where freshman classes at the high schools would dwindle by 75+% by graduation day.

But that's precisely al-Gharbi's thesis (and I'm glad we have someone to be our Ezekiel) Of course the urban elite are sincere. Championing the cause of the marginalized is how they justify they own wealth and status to themselves and society. And of course they see a sort of comradery with what is essentially their servant class. The European nobility felt the same way, even as they had that class continue to pay them an indemnity for "giving up their serfs" (i.e. those workers' parents and grandparents) into the first World War (a policy only stopped by revolution). They're their "benefactors," just a Gilded Age industrialists were able to convince themselves that they were the benefactors of their workers (even after events like Johnstown).

It's the same sort of moral degeneracy that convinces a wealthy middle-aged man who (pre)dates young single mothers who are desperate for support that he is an irresistible casanova.

I think the threat of actual civil war is more wishful thinking than a likely possibility.

I was referring to the migrants who are often fleeing civil wars, state collapse, or major depressions in other countries, not the West. That is, offering people marginally better conditions than Syria and Venezuela isn't exactly a high bar. At any rate, I wouldn't call such an outcome as respects the US or EU "wishful." More "disastrous."

It suggests to me that the cities need to form alliances to support each other in the absence of political support coming from the rest of the country. People like myself who derive great value from this urban culture will continue to be loyal to its ways regardless of the economic challenges.

Alliance against what? Surely not military, since these places have been denuded of almost all heavy industry, not to mention that they rely on other parts of the country for food and other resources, while their populations are also by far and away the least likely to say they would fight for their state.

Although, assuredly, if it came to that, we know who would end up being press ganged into doing the fighting. And I'm sure some technocratic case could be made for why it wouldn't make sense to throw the well-educated, with so much investment poured into them, into the infantry.

To be sure, there is much valuable in these urban centers and universities, but I think it's entirely off base to think they are superior in everything. There is also a lot that is critically wrong with these areas. As Musa al-Gharbi puts it, in terms I can certainly relate to:

I cast my first presidential vote for John Kerry in 2004—and not begrudgingly. It’s humiliating to admit in retrospect, but I believed in John Kerry. At that time, I subscribed to what you might call the “banal liberal” understanding of who is responsible for various social evils: those damn Republicans! If only folks in places like podunk Arizona could be more like the enlightened denizens of New York, I thought, what a beautiful country this could be! What a beautiful world! I had already shed a lot of this in the years that followed—but the vestiges that remained got destroyed soon after I moved to the Upper West Side. One of the first things that stood out to me is that there’s something like a racialized caste system here that everyone takes as natural. You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you. If you need things from the store, someone else can go shopping for you and drop the goods off at your place. People will show up outside your door to to drive you wherever at the push of a button. It’s mostly minorities and immigrants from particular racial and ethnic backgrounds who fill these roles, while people from other racial and ethnic backgrounds are the ones being served. The former earn peanuts for their work, the latter are well off. And this is all basically taken for granted; it is assumed that this is the normal way society operates.

And yet, the way things are in places like New York City or Los Angeles— this is not how things are in many other parts of the country.

For instance, these locales are among the worst preformers in terms of helping immigrants and their children attain eventual parity in income and education with natives. Maine, the Mountain states, etc. do this significantly better. Notably, the places where both migrants and natives are most likely to go from the bottom of the income distribution to the top are North Dakota counties, where the petrol boom has led to a chronic "labor shortage," which has enticed businesses to raise wages and working conditions.

We might also recall exactly where unrest related to routine police abuses has centered.

They’ll keep coming until they are replaced by automation.

Ha, well at least: "they're welcome until a machine can do their job cheaper," is honest.

The urban-based economic engine of the 21st century will mainly benefit those with enough education and the right skills, which leaves out much of the urban poor, regardless of race, and most of those with the right skills and education still struggle with college costs, childcare and housing prices. I suspect most of the reason for the huge disparity in income in the cities is because, as the source of our economic engine, they just happen to be the places with the highest concentration of super-rich.

I don’t think either the left or the right has a fix for this.

Yes, this line has been pedalled by folks like Charles Murray for the better part of a half century now. Any day now the sci-fi technology will finally develop and there will be no work for the undereducated masses! They most be content with whatever the "cognitive elite," see fit to bestow upon them via the dole, just like the Latins who were replaced by the "economic innovation" of industrial scale slavery and the superior economies of scale of the latifundium.

And yet, strangely, whenever these segments of the population see their incomes rise the crisis of "llabor shortage!" is proclaimed. These folks are superfluous to the economy of the future, nonetheless, millions more must come lest we face a "labor shortage." Curious.

Now there’s a nice unbiased view for ya. I especially like the phrase “ruthlessly exploiting them”. That’s a nice touch. My 102 year old father has 24 hour caregivers , who tend to be Nigerian, Philippine or from a Slavic country. Are they naive souls being “ruthlessly exploited”? Most of his helpers have been in this country for decades, are savvy about their options in the economy and what they can do to improve their career situation. If they are willing to take jobs that native-born residents reject, who is being exploited?
When did your ancestors arrive in the U.S. and what jobs did they take that others didn’t want? Was Ellis Island a plot to exploit naive foreigners?

Just like the folks in Southeast Asia wouldn't make our clothes for a quarter a day unless it was better, an opportunity right? This is also a very old line. No doubt, they are savvy agents as well, so surely industrialists couldn't possibly be exploiting them.

The last time the US had immigration rates this high was the Guilded Age. Does this mean things were good then simply because desperate people kept being willing to come to the US?

Yet surely offering living conditions marginally preferable to being in the middle of a civil war doesn't amount to much. No?

:up:

Exactly. Trump is extremely incompetent and is hiring an entire clown car of other incompetents, so I imagine he will face another mid-term disaster. It's actually good that he won the popular vote, since he no longer has a personal incentive to try to further enshrine minority rule into our electoral system (nor do I think he cares too much about actually helping other "conservatives" win in the future).

Unfortunately, it's not prima facie clear that holding huge popularity contests is the best way to achieve good governance. Democracy is often held up as a "good in itself," and it well might be one to some extent, but it seems that its biggest benefit is that it gives leaders some incentive to make voters happy and removes particularly bad leaders on a regular basis. However, in the US case, the electoral system pretty much guarantees a two party system, which then leads to the possibility of voters continually shifting back and forth between parties to punish whoever is in control during any period of long term decline.

I don't think these analyses actually tend to differ that much, they just focus on different things. Your classical neoliberal advocates, along with your political liberals, tend to focus on immigrations effects on national level accounting. They do this because immigration looks overwhelmingly beneficial in this context.

Immigrants tend to be young so they lower your dependency ratio. This is a boon when transfer payments to seniors dominate your national budget. They might not fix the problem of a tsunami of retirees expecting to cash in on underfunded benefits, but at the very least they help to "kick the can down the road," (and we can also cynically appeal to the "benefit" of undocumented workers who are forced to pay in to benefits they cannot receive.) Defense is the other major national level expense, and it doesn't cost significantly more to run the US military if we add even tens of millions more people. If anything, it gives us additional manpower if a major war starts. Everything else at the national level is a pittance compared to these, so immigration comes out looking very good, and it boosts GDP growth.

However, if you shift to state and local budgets (which for the US is actually larger than federal spending, once entitlements are taken out), things look dramatically different. This is why nativists look here for their data. Immigrants sometimes represent a huge drain on the resources of local governments, particularly school districts. They bring a lot of new students into a district, generally with dramatically higher levels of special needs (which tends to mean dramatically higher per pupil expenses if you actually give them the support they need), while at the same time not offsetting this expense with higher property tax revenues, since they tend to be low income. And of course, immigrants tend to be crowded into already low income areas and low performing school districts. As liberal as elite suburbs might be, they are not going to take more than a token proportion of resettlement, so the costs overwhelmingly fall on the municipalities housing the very same people who are competing with new arrivals for jobs and housing.

In terms of inequality, the picture looks even worse. Obviously, adding millions of low net worth, low income (at the very least in the medium term) residents spikes inequality. And high immigration also seems to tank support for unionization and social welfare spending, even as an oversupply of labor reduces wages. I have written about this before: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10332/page/p1

In particular, immigrants impose congestion effects on other immigrants, meaning that prior immigrants have an economic incentive to see lower immigration in the future (something we seem to see at play in exit polling data).

So, I think the West absolutely could sustain much higher levels of immigration, if people didn't act like they actually do, particularly if the well-off didn't shift the costs primarily on to the lower classes while having most of the benefits accrue to them. But realistically, I don't think this sort of self-sacrifice is ever going to happen, which means ideal levels of migration are probably much lower. Particularly, I don't think it's at all beneficial for people in the developing world to have this issue leading to far-right regimes dominating the West.

Anyhow, we saw what happened when labor force growth was significantly constrained during the pandemic (in part due to a precipitous drop in migration, and also an exodus of older workers). Suddenly McDonald's was offering $18 an hour in rural areas, where that amount can actually make people homeowners. Real wage growth for the lower half of the income distribution was the best it had been in a half century. Meanwhile, in a radical reversal, inflation was actually making the top worse off.

And it's not surprise that during this period the NYT, WaPo, etc. were full of op-eds ringing the tocsin re inflation and bemoaning how the stimulus had "gone too far," and how we had a "massive labor shortage." Then, when things reversed to their usual trend, with the top capturing almost all real wage growth and the bottom half seeing their real wages actually fall again, you had op-eds bemoaning how "these stupid plebs don't get how good the Biden economy actually is and what a great soft landing we are experiencing." It's almost comic.

So of course people gravitate towards a dictator who claims to want to protect them from recalcitrant elites. This is how the monarchs gained their power in the early modern period, how the Roman Republic died, etc. It's a sort of historical cycle of sorts. And sometimes it even works out, e.g. it's hard to claim that Octavian wasn't a massive improvement over the self-serving nobility battling for their own prerogatives, but often it doesn't.

Edit: anyhow, my main point was simply that I wouldn't necessarily hold liberal cities up as shining examples of some "new 21st century economy." If America's largest cities are the model for that new economy, then Saudi Arabia or Qatar seem like they might be the paradigm for what that economy looks like writ large

The immaculate conception is a (relatively quite recent) Catholic doctrine that stems from their particular understanding of Original Sin. So, while "most Christians," might tend to affirm it, because Catholics are still a majority of all Christians, there would be a great many who don't. And, at any rate, for most of Catholic history it was not an explicit doctrine. People, even people who went to Catholic school, also seem to often misunderstand it at any rate, sometimes even taking it to mean that Mary also lacked a human father (it's actually about her being conceived without Original Sin as inherited guilt, which the Orthodox deny, leaving them with no need to posit such a conception).

As for Mary's perpetual virginity, the Gospels are ambiguous on this, and the Church Fathers, reading them in their native language, did not think the text indicated in undeniable terms that Mary gave birth to more children. That Jesus tells his disciple John to take his mother on as an adopted mother and to care for her is often taken to indicate that she did not have other children to take on this responsibility. It's possible that Joseph had children from a prior marriage (nothing is said about this), and also the term for "brother" is used frequently in the NT for people who do not share a biological relationship.





As an aside, I had a few people, particularly middle aged Christians, talk up Peterson to me in glowing terms. I picked up his book and was quickly disappointed. It just seemed like fairly generic self-help literature framed in standard materialist terms—not explicitly reductionist, but certainly leaning that way. Far from being a "voice of wisdom for young men," the book seemed to be telling young men exactly what they do not need to hear.

For instance, he opens with a narrative about lobsters. Male lobsters who are big and strong have more "feel good chemicals," in their nervous systems. With more feel good chemicals, lobsters act more assertive and aggressive. By doing this they get to consume more resources and have more sexual partners. Therefore, we should act to boost our feel good chemical levels, that we might consume more and sleep with more women. Such wisdom...

Leaving aside the number of wealthy celebrities who end up in misery, commiting suicide or engaging in suicidal drug abuse, this seems to leave off anything like the classical connection between the virtues and happiness, or development of the virtues and real freedom. You don't see anything like Boethius, who finds himself to be more free in prison, having lived for justice, or Socrates who points out that the mob can do "nothing bad to a good man."

It's particularly sad because I think our culture could certainly benefit from a modern Boethius or C.S. Lewis. There is certainly an interest in "tradition," particularly amongst young men, but unfortunately this tends to manifest as little more than watching films like 300, and reading garbage like "Bronze Age Mindset."

Well, I considered sharing this quote from D.C. Schindler in the thread on Christians who don't believe in Christ (aside from as a good role model and source of "practical wisdom;" one is free to believe whatever one likes after all, it's just that no one should take it too seriously).

But it's as appropriate in this context:

Why might this neutralizing of truth claims be desirable? The point seems to be, above all, not to deny any particular truth claim outright, in the sense of taking a definitive position on the matter (“It is absolutely not the case that leaves are green, and anyone who says that they are is therefore wrong.”), but, just the opposite, to avoid taking an inflexible stand on one side of the question or the other. We want to allow a particular claim to be true, but only “as far as it goes,” and as long as this does not exclude the possibility of someone else taking a different view of the matter.13 Gianni Vattimo, the Italian philosopher-cum-politician, has advocated irony as the proper stance of citizens in the modern world: democracy works, he believes (ironically?), if we are sufficiently detached from our convictions to be capable of genuine tolerance of others,whose convictions may be different from our own.14 Such a stance is what Charles Péguy took a century ago to be the essence of modernity. According to him, to be modern means “not to believe what one believes.”15 Along these lines, we might think of the status of truth claims in terms of the so-called “right to privacy,” as analogous, that is, to private opinions. A thing is permitted to be true, as true as it wants to be, as long as that truth does not impose itself on others. Its truth is its own, as it were, and may not bear on anything beyond itself, may not transgress its particular boundaries. It is a self-contained truth,and, so contained, it is free to be perfectly “absolute.”


Let us call this a “bourgeois metaphysics." 6“Bourgeois” is an adjective meant to describe any form of existence, pattern of life, set of “values,” and so forth, that is founded on the principle of self-interest, which is posited as most basic. To speak of a “bourgeois metaphysics” is to observe that such an interest,such forms, patterns, and values, are themselves an expression of an underlying vision of the nature of reality, namely, a view that absolutizes individuals, that holds that things “mean only themselves”; it does not recognize things as belonging in some essential manner to something greater, as being members of some encompassing whole, and thus pointing beyond themselves in their being to what is other, but instead considers them first and foremost discrete realities.On the basis of such metaphysics, it is perfectly natural to make self-interest the basic reference point for meaning, the primary principle of social organization.17 In fact, given such a view of the nature of reality, nothing else would make any sense. This principle of social organization does not in the least exclude the possibility of what is called “altruism.”18 Quite to the contrary, we just articulated an expression of the “bourgeois metaphysics” precisely as a kind of concern for others: we are willing to affirm something as true only on the condition that we leave open the possibility for others to take a different position. We thus seek to give others a special respect. Toleration is, at least in our postmodern era, essential to this view of reality. In a certain respect, then, there is nothing preventing our judging that the “bourgeois metaphysics” is radically altruistic or other-centered.

Nevertheless, this judgment demands two qualifications. First, insofar as it is founded on a “bourgeois metaphysics,” it follows necessarily that any altruistic act will be equally explicable in purely self-centered terms. In this case, altruism will always be vulnerable to the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” such as we find,for example, in Friedrich Nietzsche: there can be no rational disputing the charge that what appears to be done for altruistic reasons is “really” motivated by the prospect of selfish gain.19 Second, the affirmation of the other inside of a"bourgeois metaphysics” is inevitably an affirmation of the other specifically as a self-interested individual. Altruism is not in the least an “overcoming” of egoism, but rather the multiplication of it. This is the essence of toleration: “live and let live” means, “let us agree to be self-centered individuals; we will give space to each other so that each may do and be what he likes, and will transgress our separateness only to confirm each other in our own individuality, that is, to reinforce each other’s selfishness.” One thinks here of Rilke’s famous definition of love, which may indeed have a deep meaning in itself, but not so much when it appears on a refrigerator magnet: “Love consists in the mutual guarding,bordering, and saluting of two solitudes.”20

Or we might consider here Nagel's ironic response to absurdity, one response to the post-modern era (and one can consider the hyper-irony of most far-right discourse too; nothing really matters or is really serious), and alongside this the more technocratic responses, which deflate every question in philosophy and life into a sort of bland "pragmatism." One can still call out social and economic elites for hypocrisy when these intellectual trends prevail, yet elites are hardly being inconsistent if they simply don't care about being hypocritical. Particularly, if nothing is really good or bad, then they are already saints of a sort simply for being even halfway decent while being under absolutely no obligation to be so. (And this is precisely the reasoning Bertrand Russell, who led a fairly odious personal life, used to elevate himself in moral standing over actual saints).

Anyhow, I do think it is fair to question if people who deny the reality of wisdom might rightly be said to deserve the mantle of "lovers of wisdom."

Anyhow, liberal parties world wide have a wider "male problem," that cuts across other demographic categories. This seems to be a particularly pernicious problem because of how it seems to be effecting family formation (and in turn, civic engagement).

I think the Democratic Party would find this essentially impossible. First, because the primary system in the US, where candidates are selected by relatively quite small numbers of older/wealthier/more radical voters invariably pushes both parties away from the views of the median voter and towards the fringes.

But also because the Democrats core wealthy urban constituency, who make up most of its leadership class, have come to frame almost all of its core issues as continuations of the US Civil Rights movement (similarly, in Europe decolonization is the mold). There is no compromise here. Opponents are simply on the wrong side of history. Unpopularity is sort of irrelevant if you think your issue is a replay of allowing black citizens to vote in the 1950s. The Civil Rights Movement was also initially unpopular, although it was still the right thing to do.

The problem is that it isn't clear that issues like migration fit this mold, at least not in the wider public's view. Increasing migration currently polls worse for the US as a whole then Harris fared in many rural, overwhelmingly white Southern counties... yet elite opinion is at total variance here, and this is the common thread of success for the far-right across the Western world.

Anyhow, I can't help but think that feelings on these issues are sometimes extremely self-serving. Migration can only ever directly benefit a vanishingly small percentage of the population in the developing world. Remittances, people sending money back to their home countries, do more (they absolutely dwarf aid flows), but realistically something like defense level spending on aid (or what defense spending should be, a meaningful % of GDP) which helps people in their home countries is the only way to benefit the vast majority. Yet elite opinion has gravitated towards the option for helping the world's poor that just so happens to help a small select few while also giving them an endless pool of exploitable labor, continued upwards pressure on rents in urban areas, and continued downward pressure on prices for people with the excess wealth to consume.

And sometimes this cynicism is right out in the open. People will praise immigration for all the great restaurants they get to eat at regularly, while ignoring that the food services industry is particularly brutal and wages there totally unable to provide a decent standard of living in urban locales with high rents. Or they will point out how illegal immigrants are such a boon because they pay into Social Security and Medicare without being eligible for benefits, which is the very height of cynicism (and at any rate, it will certainly hurt society to have millions of mostly low wealth seniors who are ineligible for benefits in the long run, with the costs simply falling on their children).

Depends on what you mean by "make an economy thrive." Liberal urban enclaves in the US certainly thrive in terms of aggregate GDP figures. In terms of inequality they are the worst places in the US or Europe. In terms of social mobility they are matched only by the abysmal showing of the Old South. In terms of having a "racial caste system," they are in many ways even worse than the Old South. In Alabama or Kentucky, one might at least find white citizens driving an Uber, selling shoes, etc., and the largest inequality tends to be between the marginally employed and the small town dentist or car dealership owner, not between the similarly poor and billionaires.

I am always reminded of this when I have to travel to major cities or recall my time living in Manhattan, and consider how virtually 100% of the people who worked menial jobs there (which pay absolutely abysmally compared to the cost of living, comparatively far worse than in poor rural areas even) are immigrants from the developing world. During the height of the 2008 recession I worked as a dog walker in Brooklyn's affluent Park Slope neighborhood and encountered the bizarre world of "the help," in these neighborhoods, all the nannies being women from the Caribbean taking care of other people's children 14+ hours a day and leaving their own in publicly funded, overcrowded childcare facilities; all the cleaners and drivers, and my fellow co-workers from various parts of the globe, many without a leg to stand on for fighting back against rampant wage theft because they weren't citizens.

It's like Musa al-Gharbi says in his new book, the urban elite simultaneously like positioning themselves as saviors of the world's poor while ruthlessly exploiting them. For a long time I pushed back on conservative claims that urban elites favored foreigners to the native poor, but I'm starting to think it's absolutely true. They constantly draw flattering parallels between the "hard working," (i.e., appropriately desperate and pliable) new arrivals versus those pesky natives who refuse to "get with the 21st century" (the century where their wages and life expectancy have stagnated, or as often declined, for half a century straight.) And now that Trump has won a majority of male Latinos a predictable distinction between "deserving new arrivals" and those recalcitrant second and third generation Latinos is being drawn.

Of course, the people who see migration as something of a black and white "human rights issue," are also never going to house said migrants in their communities or schools in meaningful numbers. "Not in my backyard."

I could say more, but I think the best summary is that the "economy of the future," of places like NYC, Boston, LA, San Francisco, etc. starts to look a lot like the Gulf states and much of Latin America.

E.g.,



At the same time, Ukraine has given me grave doubts about these economies ability to defend themselves. They are far more a Carthage than a Rome. Surveys show a marked decline in their citizens' willingness to countenance fighting for their country and the service economy doesn't produce the prerequisites for defense. We can see this in the absolutely gigantic GDP disparity between Russia and the EU, and the fact that EU arms production remains absolutely anemic despite this advantage. North Korea seems better able to ramp up production than some of the world's largest economies.





By way of contrast, in most of the world, which offers far less by way of standard of living or political freedom, and where large minority populations that want to break away from their government are fairly common, the norm is still on more like 2/3rds to 3/4ths. The map sort of undersells the gap as well, because in the urban hubs of the "new economy," willingness to make personal sacrifices to defend that wealth is dramatically lower than outside the cities.

Can isolated pockets of vast wealth survive in a world dominated by scarcity while their citizens are unwilling to fight and while also being reliant on a steady stream of outside goods for the basic necessities of life? Maybe, such mercantile societies have existed before, and while they are often targets of conquest they sometimes managed to last for long periods. Can such societies survive long term in a modern context while continuing to have ever higher levels of inequality and ever lower levels of social mobility? Perhaps. Automation is changing warfare and security in the same way the stirrup did at the dawn of the Middle Ages, such that small elite cadres of well-equipped soldiers are more effective than mass mobilization. But most of the masses' rights were won precisely because they had leverage due to how their buy-in was essential to winning wars. What happens when they are increasingly irrelevant?

I am left thinking the "economy of the future," is more a sort of globalized neo-fedualism, although lacking religious checks on elite behavior, rather than anything admirable.

Well, on one view critiques of philosophy along the lines that it is "useless," might be taken as a complement. It is among the few pursuits that is rightfully "pursued for its own sake, making it "higher" in another sense.

Well, I suppose it's sort of like asking: "can I be a 'Marxist' while rejecting dialectical materialism and the workers' ownership of the means of production, and while embracing neoliberal economic policies, voting for Donald Trump, and idolizing Reagan and Thatcher?"

I mean, sure, you can call yourself a Marxist, but you shouldn't be surprised if 99+% of Marxist and all the mainline Marxist authorities/institutions in the world reject your claim to be a Marxist.

I've been to a lot of Evangelical churches over the years (Baptist and non-denominational), regularly attending some. Also some Methodist and Presbyterian. I have regularly attended Catholic services, went to a Catholic university/seminary, and spent time at retreats at their monasteries. I currently attend an Antiochian Orthodox Church. In any of these disparate venues, I am confident that the denial of the Resurrection would be considered the gravest of heresies. This is going to hold true for my Mormon and Amish neighbors as well.

No doubt, there are people who call themselves "Christians" who have deflated the faith into some sort of allegorical/philosophical/cultural complex of sorts. This was a "thing" in early 20th century Anglican intellectual circles for instance (C.S. Lewis has a bit of fun with this trend in "The Great Divorce.") There are certainly people who embrace such positions today. Jordan Peterson seems to be suggesting something like this, although I haven't paid too much attention to him. People advocating "cultural Christianity," (e.g. Elon Musk now, lol) seem to be in the vein.

But such "Christians" certainly can't affirm the Nicene or Apostles' Creed, nor any of the Ecumenical Councils. And they clearly fall outside even the broadest definitions of Christianity that most Christians themselves would recognize.

There are similar issues with any popular lable of course.

2. The boundary between mental & extra-mental objects is blurry even if we accept this distinction. Pick any object X you regard as extra mental with following features a,b,c..etc. Its conceivable that I can alter all the features you perceive of X by changing your brain chemistry or neural structuring. In which case, the object X would just be some empty "thing in itself" with no inherent features to it, If we still establish an identity across change. Apply this argument to all objects in the world and you will end up reducing the entire world to one substance, which is neither mental nor extra-mental, since it cannot be grasped via concepts or experience. We have arrived at a contradiction. The boundary between extra mental and mental objects belongs to neither camps. Kant ran into this problem and there hasn't really been any satisfactory response to it.

Your post seems to be assuming something like representationalism, then knocking it down to prove an "anti-metaphysical" position. This sort of argument has been done a lot. I think the realist counterpoint is generally going to be to point out that we are under no obligation to accept representationalism, let alone the idea of "objective knowledge," as a "view from nowhere," or modern subject/object dualism for that matter.

Particularly, the account of perception above is going to be rejected. No doubt, if we were radically different, we would experience differently. As the old Scholastic adage goes, "everything is received in the manner of the receiver." But you are elevating potency over act in your analysis, such that hypothetical science fiction brain manipulation technology bordering on magic is being used to make a blanket pronouncement about perception, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Yet how we experience the world isn't arbitrary. And, on any scientific account of perception, the content on the senses isn't arbitrarily related to what we perceive (Matrix-style science fiction examples notwithstanding). No human has ever perceived anything in a vacuum. A human being in a vacuum will be a corpse, as will a human being placed in the vast majority environments that prevail in the universe (e.g. the bottom of the sea, inside the Earth's mantel, on the surface of a star, etc.). Experience occurs in a very narrow range of environments. The environment is not irrelevant to perception such that we can speak simply of "neurons" in a vacuum.

Thus , a weakness in the claim here is that it relies on an inappropriate reduction and separation. Of course if we say "perception is just neurons," then we can vary the environment as much as we want in our thought experiments, allowing perception to drift arbitrarily far from whatever is perceived. But show me the evidence of anyone having experiences once their brain has been removed from their body, or in a vacuum.

Sense awareness is the result of a physical system whose locus is the body of the perceiver, but that body is not an isolated system cut off from the world, the system responsible for any meaningful interval of perception extends outside the body of the perceiver. It takes a constant exchange of energy and causation across the boundary of the body to sustain conciousness and life.





Right, moral realism seems like another very obvious example.

Certainly that's one example, although I am mostly aware of the via negativa in terms of apophatic theology. I would say the entire Thomistic idea of limiting essence, the generally anti-reductive bent of classical metaphysics, the way things exist in "web of relations" and, as Deeley puts it while drawing on John of St. Thomas, a "semiotic web," etc. Also the way particulars are "virtually contained" in their principles (e.g. Scholastic commentaries on Diophantus of Alexandria)—which reminds me of discussions of Kolmogorov Complexity and the interplay of information and algorithmic entropy, or the notion of "virtual quantity" in Aristotle and Aquinas as being a "measure" of the degree of participation, possession, or perfection vis-á-vis some qualitative trait/generating principles.

IDK, maybe I am just seeing connections that might turn out to look superficial upon rigorous inspection, but there seems to be a lot of conceptual overlap. And in the whole "self-organization" literature space, which I've read a decent amount of, people very much seem to be reinventing the Aristotlean wheel, which is funny given the focus on semiotics (Deacon included) and that this is an area largely developed in the medieval period until interest kicked back up again recently through Peirce (although sources will sometimes present it as if he or Sausser invented the notion, and a similar thing happens with phenomenology).

I have noticed an unfortunate trend though, that the folks who tend to want to do more "scientific philosophy," tend not to look backwards as much for ideas.

I read this awhile back. Good book. Thought it just sort of begged the question when it came to "what constitutes computation/information?" by assuming that any folks arguing for the independent existence of information must be assuming some sort of Cartesian homunculus. Not that I necessarily disagree with Deacon, I just didn't think he really argued the point in terms his critics might agree with as representing stronger versions of their own pancomputationalist positions.

I read Etienne Gilson's book on natural selection later, and I wonder if, going back to this, how I might reappraise this.

I find a ton of overlap between the "classical metaphysics" (i.e. the (neo)-Platonic/Aristotlean/Stoic synthesis of the Patristics and Scholastics) and the whole semiotic, information theoretic, and complexity studies approaches to the natural sciences/natural philosophy (the semiotic connection is more obvious because C.S. Peirce was working right off the Scholastics).

Politically, Poland may be safe for the moment, but those antisemitic, anti-Muslim sentiments haven't gone that far underground - and the refugees keep on coming. Of course, if Putin picks them off one by one - a possibility of which they are all keenly aware, the question of elections becomes moot

Demagogues might often use xenophobic rhetoric to take advantage of the fact that the West's migration policies are deeply unpopular, even among many minority communities at this point. However, the key reason the center and the left's efforts to push back on the ascendent far-right have failed is an absolute inability to countenance major changes or compromises on migration.

First, because the current policies disproportionately benefit the elite, keeping wages low, rents high, and unions out, but probably moreso because elite opinion has shifted such that any opposition to high levels of immigrant is necessarily racist.

I think Musa al-Gharbi's "We Were Never Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of the New Elite," does a pretty good job explaining how this happened. “Why is it that the ‘winners’ in the prevailing order seem so eager to associate themselves with the marginalized and disadvantaged in society?” is its key question. The main thesis is that, in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis, faced with surging inequality, elites (in both status and wealth) felt the need to justify their own success to themselves and others. They did this by framing themselves as defenders of the oppressed—of minorities of all sorts. Long gone are the days where Clinton ran to the right of Bush on immigration, to the applause of labor unions (and long gone is the relevance of unions to national elections in the US).

I find this eminently plausible (and the book itself is well argued). It also explains why virtually every issue for the elite tends to get framed as a sort of rehash of the American Civil Rights Movement or the decolonization efforts of the mid-20th century vis-á-vis Europe. One need not worry too much about public opinion if one is on the "right side of history." After all, the Civil Rights Movement was initially very unpopular as well.

The problem here is that it's unclear if immigration is appropriately thought of as a "civil right" of sorts. Nor is it clear what the potential scale of the consequences will be if migration continues to undermine public support for the modern welfare states that underpin the success of liberal democracies.

At any rate, it isn't good for winning elections. While Biden's border policies might still seem racist, oppressive, and far from just for elites, they are deeply unpopular with the public for the opposite reasons. Increasing migration is less popular in the United States than Kamala Harris was in rural Kentucky counties this election. Support for a meaningful constriction of migrant flows is the majority position and the highest it has been in a quarter century.

But could Democrats even pivot on this? I sort of doubt it. Already the finger pointing has started for their latest disgraceful showing and, on seeing that Trump won a majority of Latino men, "toxic masculinity" seems to be getting identified as the main problem, not a disconnect on priorities.