I find it ironic that Many Worlds has been used to justify materialism because the idea of reality as a Pleroma of all potential realities, infinitely branching out to encompass all potentialities sounds conceptually like something you'd read about in a idealist tract about being positing itself in sublation of non-being, resulting in a contingent becoming of all potentiality.

I take it from this that you subscribe to a pragmatic view of truth, "the truth is the end of inquiry?"

For hundreds of years, the simplest, best, and maximally sufficient explanation for our experiences, their continuities, and our consensus about them has been the existence of a single objective reality that obeys physical laws. Nothing has changed. Yes, there will always be little gaps to fit gods and dualism and idealism in, but these necessarily explain less and less as physicalism explains more and more. Quite likely, the less idealism could explain and the more physicalism does explain, the more enthusiastically idealists (or dualists or theists) must insist that science doesn't work but the unavoidable fact is that it does: we are drowning in an ocean of applications of physicalist assumptions to control our world, each one asking the question: If physicalism is false, why must I act as if it is true?

This isn't my understanding of the recent history of natural sciences. This may have been a fair sentiment circa the end of the 19th century, when positivism was riding high and a "unified theory of everything," seemed on the horizon. These hopes collapsed in spectacular fashion with the onslaught of new geometries, the Incompleteness Theorem, QM, the continual discovery of new elementary particles underlying the previously "elementary" ones, etc. Now there seems to be more room for the relevance of observers in physics than there was a century ago; the progress of physicalism you're describing has been creeping backwards if anything.

As to hit rates, something being useful doesn't make it true. Newtonian views of space and time work just fine for getting an automobile or airplane to work. That doesn't make its fundemental claims about the nature of space true; indeed some turned out to be demonstrably false. Further reversals and paradigm shifts will continue. Casual locality might be the next victim.

A "hit rate," that describes hits as being "predictive enough to be useful," doesn't seem to correspond to truth to me. From the coherence view, these are at best small progressions towards the truth, at worst misleading because we confuse usefulness with truth.

The problem for materialists, and I say this as one, is that you are essentially stuck making the claim that subjective experience, the world of ideas, the only world we have access to, the immanent and apparent world, is in fact dependant on and emergent from something else: material, which is something we can't define very well. What is this material? Where did it come from? Why does it behave the way it does? These are all very open questions, and if you're the one making the counter intuitive claim "the world isn't actually composed of what it seems to be made of, its nature is actually something completely different," it seems to me that you get stuck with the burden of proof. And, in terms of advancing this proof the line of "material is a thing, the only real thing, I know this with certainty but I can't define material for you," is a real weakness. You can start with Newtonian physics and get down to elementary particles, but as you keep peeling the onion the line of description suddenly disappears on you.

You say physics necissarily encompasses everything, but physics does not pretend to explain the origin of material objects, it only studies the relationships of material objects as they exist. In popular cosmology, there is a hard stop at the Big Bang. The claim isn't just that physics can't currently explain where matter came from, it's that physics as a field cannot examine that topic. It can't have anything to say about origins past the initial explosion of matter that left physical evidence or itself. It's entirely possible that it will also never have an explanation for why physical laws are what they are, it will only be able to describe how those laws work relationally. These are the gaps you mentioned, but to my mind they aren't small gaps, they are massive fissures that are opening not closing.

It's also worth noting that serious scientists doing work on panpsychism aren't doing it because they want to work out a place for "magic" in the gaps, they are doing it to keep materialism from collapsing.

Not trying to be pedantic. The claim that the ontological proof was the only surviving one was what made me think we were talking about deduction alone.

There are other decent(ish) arguments that don't rely on deduction. For example, the Anthropic Principal. Forces in the universe are seemingly arbitrary in their values (e.g. gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, the speed of light). However, tweak these a bit and intelligent life bearing any resemblance to us becomes impossible. Planets become impossible. We have a razor thin band of possibilities for these arbitrary values to take or the universe can't support multicellular life.

Since we have no observations of other universes to consider as data, this is merely an (IMO a decent) appeal by analogy. Things don't end up perfectly ordered elsewhere in nature, why should they at the fundemental level. It's like stumbling across a perfectly square copse of trees in the woods; sure it could be chance, but chance doesn't tend to create these sorts of things. Why should there be unchanging laws in the first place? These are all appeals to the idea of the universe being designed for life. If these constants don't all get set precisely, you don't get life, but they are all set precisely. However, this isn't deductive, and it's not based on an analysis of compatible data of multiple universes' laws, which we'll never have, but rather an inductive argument based on the chaos of most natural phenomenon, and the unchanging fixed nature of the fundemental laws. Still, it's a problem that theists and simulation theory advocates have a better answer to at the moment.

It's just a quip in response to one. I don't actually think the main motivation for idealism is to be special and have magic things, or that materialism is primarily motivated by the psychological desire to have answers where there are none.

Just pointing out that if you apply the same kind of dismissive reduction to materialism you have someone claiming they know better than the idealist, and what they know is that the essence of reality is material. Material which is...oh right, something we're quite in the dark on.

You really have to wonder about the people who choose skepticism; there is plenty, pretty much everything, still left to doubt on the materialist side without having to take that fence sitters position.

I'm sure someone could point out that we know tons about material. And we do, and they are useful things to know from a technological or scientific perspective. They just aren't very useful from an ontological perspective.

Well, you don't, that's why they're not materialists. Principally, you don't get magical humans. Lots of people don't like being described as a the same sort of thing as rocks, rivers, or even trees, apes, and computers. They find that quite offensive. Bear in mind we're coming from a world that was taught that God made us bespoke, with His divine breath, and made the universe just for us: being ever so special is important to many.

I feel like a similar level of critique works against the materialist though. They want to think they are special. They want to be in the know. They are not like a toddler stumbling around a dinner party with only faint concepts of what is going on. Or maybe they are, but at least they know they are at a dinner party (they think). Meanwhile the skeptic is being carried off for changing because he couldn't make up his mind if he needed to take a shit or not, and the idealist is eating crayons in the corner.

Sure, they can't tell you why material behaves the way it does or where it came from. If you peel the onion too far you always end up at a dead end (to mix metaphors). But they have something real to posit as the basis of reality. It's material (whatever that means).

I suppose by "prove" you mean the formal sense, rather than just convincing someone? That does seem like an impossible bar to meet.

I mean, you can't prove the material world exists, however I feel plenty of solid arguments can be made to convince someone it does. Maybe that's what should be aimed for.

I think it's materialists who are subject to more unverifiable tosh. One of the more frustrating elements of reading through the philosophers of yore is dealing with endless discourses on absolute junk science that turned out to be hilariously wrong. What's worse is that success in creating technologies is taken as evidence that they are correct, as if it isn't possible to develop a useful tool while being totally mistaken about how it actually works. Thinking fire was a prime element of the world didn't stop Aristotle from cooking his fish.

An idealist or skeptic can at least hold the materialist model as a useful if often unreliable tool, without falling into traps like claiming qualia isn't real, based solely on data received as qualia, while transmitting said argument to others solely through means that they will experience as qualia.

In his lectures on the Phenomenology, Jay Berstein gets into this subject. He is talking about the logic of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac and a student points out that the logic is meaningless to an unbeliever.

His point was that philosophy can give us justification for our beliefs, and lead us to new beliefs, but it isn't going to tell us what to believe. I don't think philosophy is changing anyone's stance on abortion for instance. Rather, it's a tool for justifying that stance and testing the assumptions that underlie it.

The problem with peaceful redistribution from the top is that the people on the bottom don't see themselves as part of the same culture or nation, and really don't like or trust each other.

America was never quite as strong of a nation as places like Germany or France, although people overstate how cohesive those cultures were before the 19th century. That is, they both relied on a strong, intentional nation building projects and language standardization from above to merge many peoples into one, French as a uniform culture in 1750 is an anachronism. The US is now the first to experience becoming a post-nation globalized state, and it is unclear how that works. Europe will follow, whole Japan seems like it will be the first to try major demographic decline in lieu of the globalization of its populace.

Reading these responses, I feel like the anthropic principal is relveant:

All the laws of Nature have particular constants associated with them, the gravitational constant, the speed of light, the electric charge, the mass of the electron, Planck's constant from quantum mechanics. Some are derived from physical laws (the speed of light, for example, comes from Maxwell's equations). However, for most, their values are arbitrary. The laws would still operate if the constants had different values, although the resulting interactions would be radically different....

ll the above constants are critical to the formation of the basic building blocks of life. And, the range of possible values for these constants is very narrow, only about 1 to 5% for the combination of constants. Outside this range, and life (in particular, intelligent life) would be impossible.

All these conditions basically ask three questions 1) why is there any structure at all to the Universe, 2) why does this structure lead to the capability for life to exist, and 3) why does life lead to intelligence to understand this structure?.

The anthropic principle usually divides into two types, weak and strong. The weak anthropic principle simply states that the current Universe is of the form that allows intelligent observers. In other words, there is the right amount of complexity and time for intelligence to evolve. This is obviously true and few people disagree with this formulation of the anthropic principle.

The strong anthropic principle says the Universe has these conditions because it *must* have them in order to have intelligence life (us). Our existence is then end goal of a plan. The strong form of the anthropic principle goes against the Copernican principle by insisting the we are special, an intellectual center of the Universe (all intelligent species would be at their "center"), because we exist and think.

The strong form seems extreme and the weak form seems unsatisfying (if you heard of a man surviving a firing squad, would you not want to know why?). The key focus here is that a naturalistic stance for science requires that the Universe is causally closed. That science is complete and the forces of physics are the only forces in the Universe and everything can be explained by those forces. The anthropic principle is seen as a challenge to the naturalistic view and requires an "outside" force or guiding deity.

It seems like a corollary principal could be reached outside the physical sciences. That is, we know meaning exists, because we experience consciousness and understand meaning. If you take the argument that meaning is contingent on sublation, that is, you can only define a thing by what it is not, then you are forced to posit that any complete whole of being must, to have ever created understanding, have posited something outside itself as a means to understand itself. This is where you get Boehme's cosmology, or Hegel's contradiction of Being and Nothing, which forms Becoming.

In either case, the historical/physical, or the purely logical, idealist model, you end up with intellect being essential, pretty much definitionally. It's meaningless to talk about anything existing without the ability of something to posit the negative of that thing.

I think that this keeps coming up in the material sciences is evidence of the fact that the German idealists were on to something, although their impenetrably obscure systems makes it hard to say just what. Indeed, it keeps popping up in my news feeds that there are new papers on this idea, but I haven't even read the popsci interpretations yet: https://news.yahoo.com/scientists-believe-universe-conscious-134500165.html

I voted no. The US is becoming more polarized and partisans are more vocal in embracing authoritarianism on both sides, but this polarization itself undermines actual attempts at authoritarianism.

The extreme partisans have, to date, come nowhere close to having legislative majorities to get much done policy wise. For example, despite the portrayal of Trump as a fascist on immigration I believe his total deportations never matched Obama's, while illegal border crossings hit a 13 year high in 2019. Being an authoritarian means actually having the attention span to administer and get things done, something Trump lacked.

The Republicans could have removed the filibuster and redone election laws, overhauled immigration, even challenged birth right citizenship given their historic victory in 2016. in reality, they didn't even hold a vote on token legislation vis-a-vis immigration. They lacked the discipline and real support from within the party's center wing to touch the issue at all. To be sure, this also has to do with the fact that the upper class benefits from migration, which keeps wages lower and rents higher, but there is every indication Trump did have this issue in his focus more than any other issue, and still got fuck all done on it aside from alienating rhetoric, which we can all be thankful for since you can assume any policy overhaul led by the man would be a trainwreck.

The people who want to be authoritarian, the extremists, don't command the loyalty or respect of the institutions they'd have to wield to do so. The military leadership absolutely hated Trump and the officer corps were not fans either. The judiciary was also overwhelmingly not fans. If Ilhan Omar became President magically tomorrow she'd face a similar problem of resistance if she tried to advance policies without the weight of the legislature behind her, something neither party can achieve electorally.

The state was actually more authoritarian circa the mid-20th century. Things like COINTEL Pro could happen without leaking right away. Censorship and black listing of communists was supported by the state and huge swaths of the entertainment media and private sector. Orthodoxy was more rigidly commanded.

What we have now is a problem of polarization and lack of any semblance of professionalism in elected officials; we have the age of the reality TV official. It's a lack of discipline that leads to radical policy swings, but on the up side (depending on how you look at it) the policies also don't stay. Say what you will about Obamacare, it was crafted to last due to its incentives, which is why the GOP never mustered a repeal vote despite having both chambers.

Things like Federal prison staff snatching people off the street in Portland would be a counterpoint to my argument. Here would be my rejoinder: that lasted about two weeks, and the fact that the policy died a quick death shows the inability for the President to be authoritarian even when he wants to. Given America's developed civil society, a certain level of competence is required for successful authoritarianism, something the Orange Augustus lacked.

The risk of this breaking down going forward is that the radicals are:

A. Trying to enshrine new antidemocratic authorities in laws and norms (mostly the Right, vis challenges to elections)
B. Trying to tear down civil society and any faith (mostly the Left by claiming essentially every institution, including the ones keeping authoritarianism at bay are White Supremecist and must bend the knee to them)

Still, I'd diagnose the problem more as too little order and too much chaos, rather than an authoritarian surfeit of order. America is in need of a Solon (reformer and champion of order) far more than it is in need of a Bolivar (a revolutionary, or God forbid, a competent reactionary). Or frankly, 8 more years of Obama if he'd take the job.

How does pure majority rule protect the perogatives of minorities? How does it offload responsibility to a strong, independent beaurocracy (something that political science suggests is a prerequisite for good administration)? Probably most important in the US context, how does it interact with federalism?

As has been pointed out, policy preferences in the US lean to the left of current policy, but this is hardly a strong majority. The massive expansion of mail in voting appears to have been a far larger boon to Democrats than most recent voter restriction laws have been to Republicans, and yet they still lost seats in the House and only tied in the Senate. Public opinion against Trump was fairly strong, 7 million votes, but the balance of their majority in the popular vote in House races was 0.8%, not exactly an endorsement for major changes. Given that history suggest Republicans are likely to take a majority of House votes in 2022, are we ok with reversing course on those small margins? Such policy whiplash would be impossible to implement.

However, majorities for each party are much stronger at the state level, and local government tends to have a far larger effect on the daily lived of citizens than the federal one, which overwhelmingly focuses its resources on pensions, healthcare for seniors, and defense. State and local budgets are larger, by a decent margin, than federal programs outside transfer payments. Do we really want majorities there deciding things?

The US's problems are partly with its antiquated and undemocratic systems, but all its issues are hitting other Western nations. The problem is how to keep support for a welfare state while also having a liberal system of open borders. How to have strong property rights, but also equality, which is always a problem, but is even harder now given that globalization has let transnationals avoid redistribution, and has led to large scale migration from poorer countries, something that necissarily increases inequality. More majoritarian systems don't seem to be avoiding these problems.

"if you get high enough you can become a super strong wereape, but don't trip too hard or you'll become primordial goo"

At least that was what I took from it. Not going to lie, I don't think I ever watched it not stoned enough to consider seriously the risks that I could start de-evolving if I didn't watch out...

Yeah, evolutionary psychology is a field where hypothesis is substituted for theory. Whole books are just long series of hypothesis strung together and building off each other, but none are getting proved out to anywhere near satisfaction.

Nevertheless, my point was that biology could be structuring our reason in ways we do not understand and cannot understand because we have no means of comparison. That's where the aliens come in. If we bump into a different species that has comparable levels of technology and demonstrates a control of reason, but nonetheless has systems of logic that are incomprehensible to us, or fail to trigger the sense of certitude that our own logic does for us, that could suggest the involvement of more "hardwired" faculties in structuring systems we currently take as being built up from inviable first principals.

Don't get the hate. Some level of bipartisanship and side switching is needed. Otherwise you have policy lurching drastically every time a different side gets a majority.

The problem for the US system is that a 2/3rds majority is needed to move the needle on anything, which in the current climate is too high of a bar.

I suppose I'm more on your side than Wayfarer's. There are myriad effective ways human societies could be organized but the range in which they are organized is much smaller. This to me denotes the strong influence of human nature on culture.

That said, the differences brought about by culture, such as levels of violence, toleration of out groups, etc. are probably things we tend to be more concerned with. That is, culture has a greater deal of influence on those aspects of life they we find most relevant, which makes sense since we should expect that most people would not desire to live in ways contrary to their nature, but rather to pick the optimum path that agrees with their nature.

However, it could certainly be the case that culture is more important when it comes to how we think about the external world. I suppose we'd need to find alien life with comparable intelligence, but a different evolutionary heritage to really know how much of perceptions are being bracketed by innate organs of thought. And this of course doesn't get into the still unresolved problems of Fichte's reading it Hegel: if all the accessible world is Self, how does something wholly other, the things in themselves, ever effect the Self. It's open to all the Berkleyian criticisms of dualism.

That's an interesting way of phrasing it. I think we're in agreement.


Yes, a definition probably is in order. By conciousness, I mean self awareness. That is, following BBT, information entering the recursive system. I realize now that the word can also mean sleep versus waking, or have other contexts, which is not what I meant.

I've read a number of his novels and those make the definition explicit on a very relatable level. It's about the difference between what you can analyze in self awareness and what is really going on, which he uses to good effect in crafting psychological horror.



I suppose it's not spooky if you don't go in assuming that you make a decision first, and then act. However, I certainly experience a sense of choosing in voluntary action. If I hold my fingers out I can snap them at the exact moment I want, or at least it feels like I can. The idea that my fingers begin moving and then I retroactively begin to experience the sensation of choosing seems backwards to me, and given the reaction to the paper, many other people as well. Taken to the extreme, it gives you a picture of yourself as a ghost, somewhere between existing and not, experiencing sensation and volition, but actually not involved in any of your actions.

I don't think this extreme example is a logical conclusion though. Self awareness could be an accident of evolution, but my strong guess is that it serves a function for long term planning. Certainly it is hard to explain how humans make such long term and complex plans without self reflection and recursive feedback acting to steer things at some level.

The problem with conciousness is that it's still so poorly defined by current science. I mean, we really don't know how anesthesia works, the best we have is a collection of correlates of conciousness.



Yeah, it's an interesting framing. I saw you were reading Neuropath, I feel like that was a pretty good way to work it into a plotline. His fantasy series deals with similar issues but is simultaneously less philosophical but much better written. Although, definitely not for everyone because it is fairly violent and dark.



Thanks, I'll have to check that out. It's definitely a prime interest of mine.

I've had very similar thoughts to your quote. It is really suprising how well some of Kant's intuitions have been borne out by modern neuroscience, and yet how ready we are to jettison them to hold on to an easier narrative.

I find this in moral philosophy even more. There doesn't seem to be enough consideration that moral issues don't come to us in a vacuum, but are instead filtered through a system of perception, including an inherited moral sense, that was shaped by natural selection and is contingent on the way those systems work.

I may have accidentally given that impression. I actually think these findings and BBT gives more room for theories like Jung. Archetypes could be the result of genetic predisposition for the ideas arising themselves although my guess is that they arise as a sort of convergent social evolution. That is, because humans of different groups are still very similar, their myths and symbols tend to converge on the same forms.

Jung's analysis for what these symbols mean to the psyche can still follow.

Anyhow as evidence of the convergence theory, rather than purely innate archetypes, I'd point to the similarities of Egyptian and Chinese culture. There are some pretty suprising similarities and this is less suprising when you consider that both societies relied on centralized agriculture that required greater than normal levels of cohesion. Meanwhile, people growing wheat or herding had less incentive for cooperation and more incentive for individual risk taking. This seems like an example of convergent cultural evolution based on climate, and who knows, there might be some convergent genetic evolution too considering how dependant humans became on their symbiotic relationships with agricultural plants and livestock. Certainly we left a very deep genetic mark on them, so it wouldn't be suprising if the traits of traditional staple crops shaped human evolution in turn.

Sounds fine to me. I like complex war games. Axis and Allies and Hearts of Iron are enjoyable, and generally more of a challenge playing as the Axis, so I like to take that on if there isn't a better player because otherwise the Allied steamroll to victory, but that doesn't mean I'm endorsing Nazis. At the end of the day it's a game of rules and chance (or just rules with Diplomacy), and the historical setting is just for form. You aren't supporting industrial warfare by playing IMO.

I'll add that, unfortunately, a lot of this has to be supposition since science is not able to pin point the origin of individual ideas in the brains. Indeed, one can find groups of neurons that seem to track with a given concrete concept (e.g. the smell of apples) but the actual neurons involved and network of connections changed pretty rapidly over time. The memory of a smell can seemingly migrate to totally new cells, involving none of the old ones over time. So good luck finding Plato's forms in a brain scan anytime soon.

Whether one becomes a follower of Wittgenstein or Jaspers, Heidegger or Carnap, Thomas, Kierkegaard, or Hegel is almost accidental in some cases: what all such followers have in common is that after their initial great expenditure no capital remains for a second, third, or fourth investment of comparable magnitude, let alone a novel enterprise.

For sure, I am currently working my way through J.M. Bernstein's two semester series on Hegel and reading reading Hackett's 1,700 page line by line commentary on PoS, after having had to brush up on Kant and Boehme to get started. I can't imagine taking on a similar project for many years.

The part of me that preferred Plato to Aristotle had to fight of the temptation to go after Boehme and the Hermetics instead of continuing with old Georg.

As to Aristotle being so boring, I believe classical sources point to "delightful" dialogues by him with his mature thought included. They have just all been destroyed. What we have left is quite possibly not even written wholly or at all by Aristotle, but is a later compilation to save his insights, so he can't totally be faulted for that, just like how PoS is full of grammatical train wrecks, but we have to cut Hegel some slack since Napoleon was bearing down on him as he wrote it.

I suppose for a better, and much more widespread instance of leftist hysteria, one need only look to "Bush did 9/11," and "the Iraq War was primarily done to help US oil companies and raise Haliburton shares." These ran the gambit of the simply highly uncharitable (Move On running a full page ad in the New York Times calling General Petraeus "General Betray Us") to the batshit conspiratorial (the Bush Admin had primarily started the Iraq War to enrich themselves).

Whole volumes can, and have been filled with the details of the mismanagement and hubris of the Bush Administration as regards their wars. There was no need to reach out into conspiracy theories and make them cartoon villains, dispersing death to give their shares a bump in value, and yet this impulse certainly got the better of the Left wing of politics for at least half a decade, right down to opening the door on Congress challenging election outcomes.

Interesting question. I do not believe moral philosophy offers a good solution to the question of defining communities.

To my mind, a challenge for moral philosophy is that it sits out in the ether, untethered from material reality. Kant attempted to base all religion upon the moral sense, seeing it as a transcendental light in the human soul.

We now see the moral sense as an evolutionary adaptation, and yet moral philosophy has done little with this revelation. There needs to be a turn somewhere. Something similar to Kant's recognition that the mind isn't a passive piece of wax receiving sensation, but something with structure that actively constructs perception. This appears to be true of the moral sense as well. Humans have developed structures for making sense of moral judgements in the same sense we have a visual cortex for making complex meaning out of light waves. Animals like dogs show a similar, less mature sense of fairness.

Moral philosophers, at least the ones I've read, and I'll admit I had some graduate work in ethics and have done some reading but am by no means an expert, seem to ignore the role human nature plays in morality. A system that doesn't take account of the fact that people are more likely to sacrifice for others the more genetic material they have in common is a system doomed to faliure. Altruism tracks across cultures with proximity of relationship, with parents willing to sacrifice the most for their children, cousins being more likely to sacrifice themselves for each other than friends, and phenotypically different people less likely to show altruism altogether.

Raising children in creches might work fine in a system built up from first principals, but runs head long into human nature. For all the problems with how tedious I've found his recent books, I think Steven Pinker does a great job exploring this problem in his The Blank Slate. Unfortunately, he doesn't have any great solutions.

I suppose another problem is that the moral sense is harder to measure than sight, less developed in animals making experiment harder, and more tied up with the recursive system of conciousness. It makes it hard to analyze from a biological perspective.

Communities obviously can be constructed from a morality based on reciprocal altruist (the other plausible antecedent for the evolutionary origin of the moral sense aside from shared genetic material). Identity is something that is highly malleable.

The problem I see with modern pluralistic Western states (no longer nation states) is that the forces advocating for the dissolution of national borders are also trying to dissolve group identity, and advocate for multiculturalism. It's hard to see what ties citizens together in the ideal borderless state aside from the fact that they pay taxes to, and recieve services from the same entity. Assimilation is now frowned upon. Redistribution is argued for in more ethereal terms, which I'd argue makes people resist it more.

National borders are an interesting case because they represent hard physical borders that also reflect identity. They're also interesting because support for them has flipped in the last 30 years. The Right used to champion the free movement of capital and labor and oversaw a massive, demographic transforming surge of migration from 1970-1990 across the West. Then the sides flipped. The Left had fought mass migration as undermining labor, but now became its chief champion, while the Right has totally soured on the free movement of labor if not capital.

Fukayama's chapters on identity construction in Political Order and Political Decay are instructive I think. I can't posit a solution because the nature of the moral sense is still fairly nebulous, something neuroscience and psychology have not teased out, but I think any advance in moral philosophy to make it more relevant needs a Kantian turn.

However, as political division accelerates across the West and Liberalism is beset by the greatest internal challenges since the early 20th Century, both right wing and left wing intellectuals seem to be intent on destroying shared national identity. Shared identity, the "moral circles" of neuroscience and psychology vis-a-vis altruism are being dissolved to take advantage of grievance.

If only that were true. I started off philosophy with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Later Plato.

I was absolutely delighted like many students reading these authors. It would have been great to have been able to fully commit to Plato there, to reject Aristotle's critiques. Because, of course, Aristotle is not as fun to read. Instead of a series of polished dialogues we mostly have cluttered, meandering lecture notes stapled together. It would be preferable to get to ignore him, if he wasn't right. Nietzsche is like a thunderstorm, pouring down vigorous prose and ideas, Aristotle is dry like a desert, and only the thirst his burning sun creates keeps one going onward. It's his sound analysis that draws people to him.

People often change their philosophy over time. However, just as often they either feel they have resolved, or fail to resolve major issues, such as the existence of God and grow weary of retreading the old steps. The paths they travel over and over become calcified. People don't choose philosophies, they have philosophies carved into them over time.

It's a big country, so there is a constant crop of lefty wacko events to find, but when the other side is refusing to admit defeat in elections they lost, or claiming the other side is Moloch worshiping pedos, I feel like there is a warranted shift in focus.

There is, of course, a third option from a culture war of annihilation between radicals, some sort of boring centrist reforms along the line of Solon. I'd never thought I'd say this, but rule by neoliberal technocrats seems preferable at this point. Maybe Plato was right.

Pretty bummed. I got the stupid shot and have not noticed any increase in my 5G signal.

Republicans don't need to "steal" elections. The system already favors them and Biden won on quite thin margins. Without the shock of the pandemic, it seems unlikely that he would have won. These bills are restrictive but only on the margins, in the same way wide spread mail in ballots helped Democrats at the margins. That is, the only way these policy changes let Republicans win is that they are already quite close to winning anyhow. They wouldn't help them overcome large deficits, but when states are decided by 20,000 votes, the margins are crucial.

The Democrats went back to back running an incredibly unpopular candidate, and then a geriatric one who lacked the verbal mobility to navigate tough issues like showing support for police reform while condemning rioting and murder. I suppose the Biden campaign will go down in history as a success, but beating a candidate like Trump, with so many liabilities and a tanking economy, on razor thin margins doesn't seem like a huge success to me.

Despite a more intense focus on race, the Democrats failed to pick up support with minorities. Trump improved the Republicans showing with Hispanics. There is definitely something wrong with the messaging.

The Republicans can play to their base because it is large and has reliable turn out. The Democrats playing to their ideological stalwarts is playing to a much smaller group, mostly compressed in safe Democratic states. It's a garbage strategy and I see no signs it will change. Given the likelihood of a recession due to the massive corporate debt burden out there (an issue that could become catastrophic if even moderate inflation makes the real yields on the mountain of cov lite CLO garbage out there go negative), and the likelihood of Biden running again at 82, I would not be shocked if we have another Trump nightmare for four years.

Cancel culture might have been around before, but the internet has given it the ability to amplify its signal and spread out of control.

Take for example the Jeopardy! incident, which showed an audience of highly educated leftists going into almost Q Anon level rabbit hole over "secret Nazi hand gestures."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/business/media/jeopardy-hand-gesture-maga-conspiracy.html

Defining "Wokeness," is a project in itself. However, one negative aspect of the Culture Wars on American intellectual life that ties in is the argument that "if people feel they are being oppressed/mistreated, then whoever is responsible for that feeling has a duty to act to alleviate that feeling."

This is simply nonsense. A group feeling threatened or offended should not be, in and of itself, evidence that such feelings are warranted.

Before the first Q posts and the conspiracy that Democrats were child abducting Moloch worshipers, liberals went down a similar rabbit hole. Black and brown girls were going missing in DC since Trump was elected. Trump and his ilk, powerful white racists, were abducting girls and no one was doing anything to stop them.

Was there a surge in abductions? No. Activists on social media had started reposting a Twitter feed of missing persons alerts. They continued to plaster the internet with pictures of run away girls who had long returned home, implying that there was a surge in abductions, and that it was tied to the new crowd in Washington. It was based on nothing. I recall the New York Times covering it with "well, abductions do happen some places, and are bad, so the feelings are warranted," which is completely beside the point. The point is that it was a fake conspiracy crisis.

A similar trend happened after Dylan Roof's massacre. People set up news reports for incidents at Black churches. Next thing you knew, media outlets were reporting on an epidemic of Black churches burning down. Later reporting would show no change in the rates at which churches caught fire and no greater likelyhood of a Black church burning versus any other. However, this revelation didn't lead to the dismissal of the issue. Charles Blow released an op-ed to the effect of "well, some people were worried about a wave of attacks on churches, and the fact that they were worried shows there is an issue, and the fear itself is evidence of oppression." In the worst cases it amounts to "I tried to get my side riled up, and they are riled up, which is evidence that I am right." The Left can add to the argument "denying I am right is denying the lived experience of marginalized groups, which is racist."

Well, of course people are scared of a wave of attacks, media outlets just spent a month telling people they were under attack and implying a cover up. The logic of "people are scared/offended, so that is evidence of wrong doing," cuts both ways. This is the argument for Trump's "Big Lie." "See, 71% of Republicans think the election was stolen, that shows there is a lack of faith in the electoral system we need to address!" It's an unsound argument.

The peak of this absurdity was when a story about a Black second grader in Philadelphia having their hair cut by White classmates became national news for a week. All sorts of racial dynamics were read into the actions of 7 year olds. Then it turned out the girl had actually cut her own hair and had used the classmates as an excuse. The media response was to still publish op-eds on the issue, seeing it as still a "teachable moment." This is to my mind, insanity. You don't need to drag a seven year old and their family into the national news over the not uncommon instance of kids cutting their own hair, not to mention making them into pawns in the culture war.

It's an epistemological nightmare. The sciences can't be trusted because they are influenced by power relations. This is a fair critique, and indeed something every field needs to take more seriously. However, the follow up, "peoples feelings on policy issues should be taken at face value," does not follow. Bias and the threats of manipulation occur in the court of public opinion, and it indeed far more susceptible to those threats than discourse in the sciences.

I highly doubt there will be evidence to sufficiently prove that the virus came from a lab. The Chinese government has a vested interest in not letting the truth come to light and control of all the documentary evidence.

Even if it was the result of a lab leak, and China was aware of it and said nothing, I don't see long term changes. At the end of the day, people are still going to pick the cheaper plastic item at the store, and that means the supply chains of the world will still be hopelessly dependant on China.

If the much greater threat of global warming couldn't mobilize support for shorter supply chains, I doubt this would.

Also, that Guardian article... WTF happened over the past decade? Weren't Right wingers supposed to be tough guys, celebrating strength. You know, 300, "this is Sparta!" The incredible victim complex they've all put on is totally off brand. I feel like I'm reading the work of hysteronic Chomsky addled teen activists half the time.

Better grab them soon. I hear Trump is coming back "in two more weeks," or "by August."

Anyhow, surely this is the best outcome. Now his influence can be stretched out over 12 years.

It's hard to think of a group that Westerners care more about being killed than the Palestinians actually, aside from other Westerners in wealthy nations. It's a high profile conflict that has been given the weight of the Culture War.

The recent war in Armenia and the ongoing war in Ukraine is killing more people, and white people at that, and it isn't particularly interesting to Western audiences.

Is it the case that all isms are essentially nothing-but-isms

Do you mean, all isms are nothing but nothing-but-isms?

I don't agree, that seems reductive. For example, take nominalism vs idealism. While nominalism generally has to reduce names of things (i.e. forms) to "nothing but" a name, idealists don't necessarily have to reject the reality of the material. You can be an idealist and not hold that reality is "nothing but" ideas. Hylomorphism is a "yes, and..." ism.

I am offended by this as a Christian. Surely the Crusader States existed for longer than the US, or many established nations. That's long enough to be a people. They were removed through violence and conquest, thus Jerusalem is rightful Norman clay and should be ceded to Norway.

Meanwhile, Constantinople was ruled by the Latin Empire for many a year, by the Holy Catholic Church as opposed to the (less than) Holy Orthodox Church. It must thus be annexed by Venice, which as we all know, is Austrian.

I am willing to consider other claims though. The Levant may be part of Iran or Italy, however I find these claims doubtful. Ideally the whole region, to Hungary, would be ceded to Mongolia.

I read the Khalidi article when it came out, but the 1993 one was new to me. It doesn't support your first quote, although the introductory paragraph might appear to. It's written from an Marxist prospective and explicitly states that Israeli power (i.e. the bourgeoisie) have abandoned colonization with the Oslo accords and are going for a NAFTA model (NAFTA being framed in the dire terms of the 190s) of exploitation. A neoliberal neocolonialism, which explicitly intends Palestinian autonomy and statehood. Maybe from a Marxist perspective they aren't different in the grand scheme, but with 20 years of hindsight, a US-Mexico relationship looks like something to aspire to.

Everything I've read suggests Rabin was serious about peace. He sacrificed considerable political capital, and eventually his life advocating for it.

Sure, if the analysis of a partisan in the fight, writing 20 years later, through the lens of later shifts is to be taken as the final word...

Did the Israelis also know ahead of time that Arafat would walk out on the offer of statehood? Clearly the must have, since they were a unified bloc with a hidden agenda, commuted enough that some of those who advocated for peace have continued to keep the act up for three decades.

Wouldn't a move towards peace necissarily mean the removal of repressive restrictions of movements on Palestinians?

I agree with you on the relative threat of rockets. When militants weren't cut off from Israel they didn't use rockets, and they killed a considerable number of Israeli civilians. The border wall and onerous restrictions did indeed seriously cut down on deaths on the Israeli side, just as the occupation cut down significantly on larger scale raids and more fatalities across the 1950s. The year after the signing of Declaration of Principles, 1993, saw a terror attack every 7 days, and the guns and bombs used were significantly more deadly than today's rockets.

There is a lesson in that period, in that the violence was in some sense less about Israeli actions, which were moving towards peace and statehood, than about intra-Palestinian struggles over peace and spoiling attempts. That is, it was giving space to peace that in turn created the security situation that turned the Israeli public away from peace in the long term (although demographics are a larger issue).

Unwinding those security measures while maintaining public support for peace is going to be a challenge for earnest peace makers (if they ever get power). Dynamics today are not all that different. If the West Bank was moving towards statehood and relaxing of border controls, it's not hard to imagine Hamas carrying out attacks with the goal of stopping the process. The more veto players (agents able to carry on violence unilaterally) in a civil war, the more likely it is to continue and the less likely it is to stay settled after a peace. That's why I've never felt it was in Israels long term interested (peace) to atone infighting. Now they have riots on their streets and rockets coming in across the border and no one on the other side to talk to who can control things (they're also, in at least some videos, unwilling to put down their own mobs, something they had a stomach for in the 1990s).

An agreement that creates a Palestinian state, a functioning state with a future, will necissarily open up those avenues of attack by loosening border controls. Indeed, if gross inequality isn't to keep the fires alive even after independence, the Palestinians need access to the Israeli economy (as well as reparations to invest in development). It's a necessary change, but one that doesn't come without risks.

Agree 100%. My point was merely that the culture war paradigm works to retard meaningful change in US policy. Likewise, no negotiations are going to work without acknowledging that Israel has legitimate security concerns, oppressor or not.

Good post. You can't separate groups into large boxes like oppressor and oppressed and expect to get a full understanding of conflicts. It's a useful lens, but hardly the only one.

To be sure, the Pashto of the AfPak border area are beset by a number of oppressors, but when the TTP butchers 150 school children, it's not wrong for the Pakistani special forces to go in an kill them. Israel has the technological and material measures to absorb rocket attacks, and should be less aggressive in hitting civilian launch sites. That doesn't mean they aren't justified in going all out against attempts at tunnel raids aimed at butchering civilians. "Any means," is not justifiable. Nor does the logic of the stronger group being able to disarm necissarily have much meaning for individual encounters. Israel might have a modern army for defense of the country, but it's meaningless for the Jew (or random person mistaken for a Jew) being dragged out of his car and beaten to death by a mob. You have to have a distinction, otherwise the mob is being justified resistors if they happened to beat a real Jew, but oppressors if they happened to beat a Palestinian Christian, which is ridiculous.

We know from militants own communiques and planning that attacks that producing backlash against their own people often is a goal of violence. The goal is to kick off the cycle, knowing that in group preference will help them come out ahead. That's what the Israeli mob was doing marching around Jerusalem, trying to provoke attacks.

To be sure, every side has its true believers and fantatics, but seasoned militants aren't thinking in those terms, and we shouldn't project that sort of heroic lens on to them. Half the time their more concerned with protecting their turf within their own in group. For example, as soon as the US gave the Kurds breathing room in the 1990s, they fell to civil war.

The other problem is that the roles and power relationships are rarely as clear as they are in Israel. Did Islamists go from oppressed under Mubarak, and thus justified in their resistance by any means, then to oppressors as they tried to solidify total control over the country, thus justifying Sisi's coup?

Palestinian violence makes sense when it is forcing Israel into concessions. Violence helped them get closer to a state in the late 80s and 90s, but then too much violence, violence by partisans more concerned with ousting other Palestinians' control in Gaza rather than in fighting Israel, helped them lose that chance.

I don't know why the world, or at least the Western world seems to care about this conflict so much more than larger ones. It seems to me that it is becoming just a proxy for the culture wars wracking America, and I can't say that I think that bodes well for the US or European powers being able to act as an arbiter for peace.

Both articles mention non-European majorities in the UK based on government statistics, the more recent in the subtitle.

We're off track and I'm done with the:" I'll implying every last fact you put out is highly questionable and needs a citation," game. I've provided numerous sources, but I'm not going to bother if your method of argument is claiming I'm being disingenuous on every last fact claim, when I've demonstrated that I'm not by following up on the first several, particularly if they're just going to be dismissed anyhow.

is prima facie absurd

Didn't say it was.

This doesn't necissarily mean starting with the assumption that you're correct, but it's certainly not welcoming of the same kind of skepticism that scientific inquiry has at its heart. This is, to my mind, a pretty major flaw for a theory that wants to shape public policy, given how counter intuitively the externalities of many policies tend to do the exact opposite of what policymakers were intending to accomplish.

To use an example that's unrelated to race: The idea that the basic structure of the universe ought to "make sense" and be "aesthetically pleasing" has arguably had a large influence over basic research in physics. Critics say this has lead to one-sided interpretations of data and contributed to the stagnation in the field.

Right, and said bias is to be sought out, and quantified. This is a fairly common target for publication, an analysis of the field and its biases themselves.

It's funny that you use that example, because projecting such purpose on to research findings is an explicit aim of critical theory. In science, it is, as you rightly describe, a bug, in critical theory it is a feature.

Critical Theory
First published Tue Mar 8, 2005
Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and in the history of the social sciences. “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery”, acts as a “liberating … influence”, and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of” human beings (Horkheimer 1972b [1992, 246])

Once reason was thoroughly socialized and made historical, historicist skepticism emerged at the same time, attempting to relativize philosophical claims about norms and reason to historically and culturally variable forms of life. Critical Theory developed a nonskeptical version of this conception, linking philosophy closely to the human and social sciences. In so doing, it can link empirical and interpretive social science to normative claims of truth, morality and justice, traditionally the purview of philosophy.

Or to take their own definition of methods:

By reversal, crits interpret history as a process that creates power as the construction of a powerful elite.

This is the definition of beginning an inquiry looking for something that "makes sense," and is "politically pleasing."

This is the methodological equivalent of pointing out the speck in your neighbor's eye and ignoring the plank in yours.

Yeah, but to be fair, some of the Arab states have fallen behind the occupied territories on economic metrics, so they aren't particularly in strong positions to act as benefactors. That, and you have to question the leadership classes' commitment to human rights in general when they don't particularly treat their own minority communities any better than Israel. They might appeal to Muslim solidarity when it suits them, but they probably see kindred spirits in Israel.

However, they're populace at least has the excuse of being downtrodden and without political freedoms. The Israelis have all the benefits of a a developed state and continue to act as one of the worst authoritarian regimes.