Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Post Office Scandal + Black Privilege? Harvard Crisis Exposes Danger of Unqualified Diversity Hires" video.

  1. Upto 11:00 mins. I put a question to some far left activists many years ago: A bit of background first: the advocacy, policy, capacity and capabilities were determined by and within union power and the slogan was a "for the workers" chant. I said what about the unemployed and the sic, and it opened up a long and interesting debate. Some even began reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit with me. We got through about the first 7 pages over several weeks. This was in the period after the 2010 financial crisis when praxis and action not theory and intellectualism was all the rage. I bumped into one of them a long time later and they said that they had gone to a political action conference and kind of joked to someone that they had spent a few weeks on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and only done 7 pages. but then told me that the person they were talking to said straight up serious "that's the way you have to do this stuff. By then I was following their advice, from Alex Callinicos, that Marx had used Hegel's logic as the method to do a Critique of political economy in real time with Marx's friend sending him day by day records of economic data and shares and stokes values. By contrast another pair, one of some ethnicity, got me when I was very tired after a long couple of days protesting, and suddenly started a surprising conversation on the philosophy of science, which quickly by their lead was framed around the Popper/Kuhn debate. What struck me was one kept saying "Kuhn" this and "Kuhn" that while the other stared at me intently. That kind of thing was new to me then and was a driver in me leaving a although the other guy was actually a nice guy who would discuss and argue back and fourth without these kinds of tactics. But as we now know, it was the shape of things to come for the left. I went to London a while ago and everybody seemed to be doing it now, but in a kind of ad hoc abstraction from the political added on to an individualist discourse: You need to buy this insurance mate it uses algorithms and heuristics from Kuhn. Anyway the left are still their now 15 years on and post Corbyn they talk about policies for "hard working people". Now that is a difficult class intension, but a Chinese Encyclopaedia class extension. That is the Chinese encyclopaedia referred to by Foucault and Ian Hacking "Why Does language matter to philosophy", goes back to Kojevie and Koyre and Hegel and up to Kuhn too. Why not as Conservatives back the unemployed and the sic instead of blaming them for all the economic problems created by the London rich and their "social justice " outreach programs for cheap outsourced labour to collapse wages and boost consumption. Certainly by policy extension the left now back the super rich and middle class woke while the unemployed and sic are the stuff left behind when they have taken out their preferred race and gender sets (Alan Badiou: a little bit of communism?). Is it not a policy because it would include lots of recent immigrants in its set, and also be a distorting and quickening incentive for more immigration? But then if that is the reason at least the left will have to come clean about this in debate, and I'm not sure the speech act "Kuhn's Relativisms" inserted anomalously into the discourse wills till have the C.L. Stevenson mesmeric effect of silencing it did 5 years ago. Anyway it would also disclose the truth that the influx of migration has had a terrible effect on the unemployed and the sic, both materially and in terms of what set extensions they are placed in. Not perhaps a material causal force, but It certainly might mean reason and reflection can persuade the minds of some of the middleclass woke to leave their offices and do time in the Seamans Missions like the Tory Minister did in the early 1960's. Am i naïve and should have listened more to the Marxist and thrown my Hegel away. Declared interest: I'm on long term sic and unemployed. P.s. When I lived on East London Essex boarder in late 80's early 90's. i was invited to the party of all parties in Elephant and Castle, by a friend of a friend i knew no one else. The weekend of the party was when they had the big freeze, and said only travail into London if absolutely necessary, in the previous days people had had to sleep min offices and stuff. Anyway i decided to got for it, and took trains and tubes and the whole of London on Saturday Night was completely empty except for the homeless, like in that 28 days movie later and Covid i imagine. Anyway i got the party and only ten people were there but it really was the party of all parties. I woke up and only the house owners who i didn't know were left. I said "what time is it?" they said "11 o'clock", "oh" i said they said "11o'clock at night" "oh" i said. they said "11:0'clock Monday night or Tuesday night". But that's nothing. I heard that some people had moved house a week or so before that weekend from East to West London a distance of 70 miles. Their cat had disappeared from their new house and turned up at their old house on that weekend of the big freeze.
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  2. At 22:00 mins the problem of including all the P.O. workers in the squashing of verdicts and trying to reverse time for those harmed but not imprisoned using money, is not so much that this blanket annulment rewards the guilty too, but that there will forever be the suspicion that the genuine innocent are included in the guilty in the publics mind if not in their own mind and conscience. It could be put in terms of the Kant Hegel distinction between an inner good will and intention verses the public recognition of this respectively. Also perhaps it sets a very dangerous forward precedent that if someone does something illegal, but then can work it that innocent people are convicted by the same system, and later have their whole blanket pardons, the guilty then walk free. We might say this legal device then produces undesirable incentives , or its rule will create a new form of life and make a new world for new practices of crime. I image the Kant view might be that the moral argument for God freedom and immortality means in the after life inner virtue is rewarded and inner vice punished. For Hegel this is perhaps more about the kind of public world it constructs is contrary to public law and reason in a community. indeed it might mean the collapse of public legal reasoning all together. or practically the recognition for the legitimacy of law authority and force. That rather than the problem of de-legitimacy by exposure of judicial errors, it is de-legitimacy in the law to punish illegality at all. In a way it might mean life run not against the law, without triangulation of the law in the form of life, becomes recognised as possibility or potentially a complete space of not yet found guilty until by the measure of eternity. If we think for his backwards or retrospectively, it could be used, cynically in my opinion, to exonerate all past wrongs on the basis of some of the people in the past were innocent under the generalisation of say British Empire collective guilt. It might be an attractive implication for those whishing to put a limit on post colonial restorative justice or post patriarchal collective guilt. But because that guy was imprisoned wrongly for 25 years for rape and murder, do we really want to pardon Brady and Hindley and put them all in the same set. This is a first possible look at the situation for me without consulting texts.
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  3. At around 30 mins. Before we pile on the American higher Education institutions for falling standards i must say i found an undergraduate essay on John McDowell's ethical intuitionism(?) on line. Put me in mind of those 14 year old German students of Kant writing essays on his metaphysics course as they slowly run out of money and had to dilute their ink.
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  4. Yes I do think in terms of place and where I'm from, but I'm not going to join the Anti Nowhere League.
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  5. 35:00 mins there is a risk that the plagiarism device will be used to silence and force only very micro detailed public writing. You know like the internet informal academic public discourse will have to meet the referencing standards of a PhD and in be in Harvard Style, else its deleted by peer groups from graduate courses. Also they could use this like McDonalds seemed to try and do back in the day when they took those counter culture protesters though a 2 year self representing torture in the courts with the threat of massive fines for consequential damages over misinformation. the judge found the two guilty but fined them i think £400, and made McDonalds pay their own massive 2 year barrister and court costs, because he said they were in risk of using or creating a prescient in the form of the threat of suing and bankruptcy. (That's from memory of a docudrama and a bit of research years ago) Also i have noticed some academic papers now require the permission of and and even payment to the author(s) i guess because its the production of private property. indeed i remember debates years ago over authorship and ownership and property rights for academic writings. Not to be confused with the blocking of academic work on military strategy and how to build a nuclear weapon. I guess they might want us to only talk about cat video's but even then could we be sued. A court battle over the legal distinction of domestic and feral cats. Or even the cat brought to judgment in a French court. I love teasing the French on stuff its a foible of mine, probably a general British or English foible, and defiantly reciprocated.
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  6. 36:00 mins Rafe, the tyranny of publish or perish in academia is a leftist construction to swamp the world with industrial scale infinite reference demands. Silence and quantity. its great for detail work and one to one relations, probably forces academic work into the public domain but out of use due to the vast amounts. Let's see, which example to choose...Wittgenstein published his PhD thesis and that had to have Russell's introduction. he also did a couple of pages on ethics. the rest was accidentally burned by his cleaner, and what was left published posthumously.
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  7. 38:00 mins We used to say we'll all be footnotes to footnotes to footnotes ..." PhD f=n to infinity. Someone down the pub one night started a metaphysical infinite regress argument, might have been me. Needs a Kantian synthesis of the dialectic to stop the Hegelian regress to absolute footnote, or infinite multiple diversity in the whole, and the loss of ground and meaning. Book tile "Between Anaximander and the Mind of the Viva God(s)" by everybody who has, or ever will live... and their cats.
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  8. Great discussion. OK Rafe I'll try and write a proper essay on the the collection "State of Emergency" but don't go after me for plagiarism if i miss a reference. the references in your book have many sources going to the ever changing shifting sands of internet. This did not exist in my academic days, indeed when i began you wrote them essays in pen and then sent the scrawl to some poor typist in my case a friend, to de cypher. Doctors hand writing but no PhD in my case.
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  9. Computer crashed for two days then jsut started working again. Rafe I'm not at all sure I'm going to be able to honour my promise to do a full on academic type paper on "The State of Emergency" any time soon, with all the multiple things going on at the moment. Indeed my view of the state of emergency turns on the problem of when there are so many significant events and process going on a at the same time, even if, as they say in the Continental Philosophical tradition these all have different temporalities. It has many of features of real emergency and revolutions in that the shear number of events make then all reflectively and critically transcendent. That is no finite human time can critique any of them let alone see how they fit together, and what they might mean in terms of the kind of world being constructed. In a way the subsequent loss of the conditions of the the possibility of scrutiny justification and synoptic vision has many of the features of the darker side of the "exception". in a way a multitude of subliminal exceptions run together to create a exception of the many not the one. Here is a piece of a comment i did to Neil Andersons NCF interview on Mass Migration from 9 days ago. "Maybe it's just an analogy but, back in a past life I worked on nuclear radiation detection and measurement, specifically on scintillation and photomultiplier tubes for counting gamma ray events. There is an inherent problem with this method that really manifests as problematic when the total number of events over time, not the energy of each event, becomes large: its called Dead Time (Wikipedia), not to be confused with the event energy problem of full scale deflection limit. In a totally unrelated conversation years later I was told something that seemed analogous to this problem was a very general problem with alarm systems that can be exploited by people wanting to defeat the alarm systems. I suppose there might be an Hegelian logic interpretation that goes something like the apparent Kantian difference between the categories of Quantity and Quality run into each other eg intensity or rate of one will effect the other. In Hegelian logic this to deal with this anti Kantian claim is the role of Hegel's "notion" and "sublimation" and process and later differential change. In left thinkers like Deleuze, who claim not to be Hegelian or dialectic, it the idea of gradual increase in numbers in one category changes what was thought to be a entirely separate metaphysical category. An analogy or example, would be to think: if i have £3 i can buy a pint. if i have £30 i can go a night club, or restaurant too, or get dead drunk or buy a pint also for 9 mates, if i have £300 i can go on holiday, £3,000 take my mates on holiday too. But also if i have £300,000 i could maybe buy a pub and if i had £3,000.000 i could buy a brewery. With the former examples the quantity of money allows me to include others, but with the later my quantity of wealth can mean i can set the price of the pint myself. But with £30,000,000 i can begin to influence government policy. thus what were thought of as distinct categories of public and private, and subject and sovereign, and so notions of legitimacy and consent then run into each other. I think this informed Marx's analysis of capitalism and how quantities of private free use of capital become to effect the public realm. Obviously this logic can be the basis for the interpretation of how demographic change is not jsut changes in private content in a fixed formal constitution, but the demographic quantity can change the formal constitution over time. Other Marxist between Marx and Deleuze, like Walter Benjamin began to think of this in terms of the apparent distinct categories of humans and technology particularly with the arrival of the private car in Paris changing the social relations. After Deleuze i think post modernists explored this as blurring the apparent categorial distinctions between humans and animals too and the human as cyborg. Even in analytical philosophy with Wittgenstein and later pragmatists like Putnam and Dreyfus the apparent distinctions of persons and the world breaks down. Wittgenstein captures the lot with a nice phenomenological example something like: if i use a pen to push a cup on a table do i feel i am pushing the cup or the pen. Going back to my original discussion of Dead Time then i would have to take a look at what this might mean for demographic data and public/private construction of time time, but one thing is for sure: that the distinction between government data on an apparently passive population, becomes representationally transcendent, when the population self consciously realise, as a whole, that they are being represented by data and so can then adjust their behaviour deliberately as a large quantity of people acting as a whole to intentionally and actively "distort" the data and so the representation. But now the distinction between a representor and passive "represented" breaks down. any ordinary view of objectivity and truth and science and fact then breaks down. This should be a very deep and foundational problem for the left who rely on data being objective fact of a passive population. it changes also notions of what a trust and consent relation is between agent and patent can mean since this distinction breaks down too. Real life examples are: in a budget some of the treasury changes have to be immediate to stop people from exploiting knowledge of the future new temporal norm and modalities. The notions of time here start to look like the Hegelain MacTaggert’s A and B series paradox of “subjective” aim and person orientated notions of time eg before and after, with “objective” Gods eye view of time as a sub specie aeternitious view a time series. A non Hegelian view of energy intensity is just the problem of a limit of bellow detection threshold and Full Scale Deflection threshold. The place of the real as opposed to the representation distinction here is one kind of demarcation, but the place of the real as opposed to the representation distinction with dead time is not the same kind of distinction. In the former FSD problem the real can effect bellow the conscious representation as subliminal, maybe in the later there is a kind of Dead Time sublimity too. Maybe we might say black market transactions and so on relation to the legal market are not really distinct categories maybe Dead Time is the public blind to number of transactions velocity of money in the black market: a “shadow” market people smuggling and so on. Its now ten to eight I might have a go at exploring this some more after lunch or Breakfast in America. Couldn’t resist that sorry I've gone all 1979 after the death of David Soul and watching Salem's Lot again!" (my comment on Neil Anderson interview NCF 9 days ago.) p.s. In 6-7 years on a part time PhD i think i only handed in one essay piece and did one half decent conference paper.
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