Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Southport: EXPLOSIVE Mosque Allegations + Farage on Manchester Airport + Tommy Robinson" video.
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Part A1: Up to 7 mins: I certainly have the feeling of mainstream media not presenting a equal or balanced account of reality. On the one hand the idea of a prefect representation of the world, say as a time slice picture or the present, a single frame of a movie, a Dedicand cut (see Russell's "Principles of mathematics" and Deleuze on Cinema 1 and 2 ) can not be the criteria for equal treatment. Obviously un-equal treatment will usually involves comparisons between, not just of similar events at the same time, but similar events at different times and places. Much of Derrida's early work involved a deconstruction of "presence" as truth or criteria. in this he followed Heidegger and the temporality of Being. What this means is criteria have to involve time as constitutive of truth or equality claims. But now for us this means media have to present a narrative to events, which means the present involves the past and the future (this was also from Heidegger first in "Being and Time" and then in works on Kant after that. Heidegger it seems was influenced in focusing on Kant here by his student Hannah Arendt who was already very familiar with Kant prior to studying with Heidegger. The result was an attempted synthesis by Heidegger of Aristotle and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason the Transcendental Deduction A version.)
Now when we add time to the question of equality, what we are "doing" is shifting the ground from truth as presence representation, to notions of constancy over time. this has a long history concerning prior conditions such as in metaphysics and epistemology: "persistence in time, conservation over time, continuity, conservation, and in mathematics group theory symmetry, and in logic: modal terms like necessity. For example Quine who presents a kind of logically statics set, spent much of his time arguing against the need for such modal concepts. In terms from Hegel interpretation it can be a distinction between the metaphysical Hegel of Being and Nothing, and the so called epistemic view i consider from Wilfred Sellars's logic of inference that involves time as necessity and probability. indeed Deleuze's transcendental empiricism implies that a gradual, incremental, differential change in the inferential space over time, can take us form Nothing to Being, such that Hegel's process or becoming mediates between Nothing and Being. the thing is though Hegel is far too Aristotelian for this, in that he considers Being here as something of a closed end absolute Being as Actuality or Reason. Deleuze on the the hand considers that advance over time shifts necessity and possibility as each step forward means what is now possible has changed and what was impossible has changed. This then is not really Hegelian as it raises problems for notions of continuity over time. You may think of this as the metaphysics for the idea that norms values and laws change over time and place. For Deleuze these are not disconnected though but connected by differential continuity or accumulation of the past in the present. Social Justice though along with the on the ground lateral differential change model, has a kind of idea of an end, a purpose, in the future of equality and justice. This though is sort of a return to Hegel because human actions, interventions, in the detailed context are to be triangulated wrt to the idea of justice for the whole. eg in terms of pragmatics or practice knowledge and action then are not distinct.
A way to think about this is that rather than truth or coherence and consistency as the criteria of justification, we shift to the end or purpose as the criteria of legitimacy, its an advent and messianic metaphysics and cosmology. Some will see similarities here with liberal critiques of Marx in the 1950s and 1960s that its is a theology of communism as making a Garden of Eden or Heaven on Earth also a version of Kant's "hope": a Theological Time. But what is really significant politically is it means a turn to focus on people and institutional projects over time and their success as they are all meant to be immediately attuned to the absolute end of justice and equality. How this is evidenced is clear in the way they choose to conceptualise and use identities to refer to cases and people. So we are familiar with shifting chosen identities to describe events: "A man did x to a woman", "A person did x to anther person" and so on. What we might not realise is that its is not the absolute freedom of conceptual choice on how to describe events. This issue was taken up by Davidson as the underdetermination of concepts by events. But for the left the constraint (McDowell's image in Mind and World) is not from the world or the present or truth, but constraint in policy and law. That is when a left activist is choosing how to label and event, or whether to apprehend the event at all, they are thinking in terms of those chosen concepts as they would play out in law if made into or part of a legal ordinance. Pretty quickly this epistemology/practice order is reversed such that the left have ideas about short run and longer run ends, and then seek out cases to use in making laws for the furtherance of that end or ends. they have their enemy persons groups and institutions to deal with, deconstruct, in this. So what ever your issue or problem, if you go on TV you know they will just use it translated into terms "useful" to their political purposes, while maybe giving you some sympathy and getting you some compensation and someone sacked.
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Part A2: So the lefts criteria here is pragmatic and end determined but open to triangulation with changing political friends and enemies over time and space. Of course political opponents might well do the same kind of activity but obviously with a different end, or aim, and different even opposing friends and enemies. The problem of constancy and equality in media then is not in their terms about constancy between cases events and their descriptions and derived laws, but rather constancy in being directed towards the chosen end. This of course will mean internal conflicts in the left as they veer for their particular groups short run ends and even conflicting aims and values and principals as seen as along the way stations to heaven. Stations without rails though and some will not be visited at all.
So it strikes me that the mainstream media really over egg the perception of bias. Like goading, sneering, and shaming by association the non politically affiliated viewer. So much so that i think the purpose here is to trigger non affiliated people so as they complain about unequal treatment and so demand or force a government enquiry and then make laws and rules the media have to abide by. Of course it will be the legal savey establishment who take control of such enquiries and law making, and of course they will do this from the standpoint of making laws useful to their own political purposes. Thus in the case of holding the media to account you must think in terms of this being a trap to get you to set left wing biased rules for mainstream media, and then to be transposed to on line social media. You see people on the political left were by far the first to see the possibilities of social media, and to utilise it politically. but now they might well think a) they have assended into the institutions and strict logic of Being and Nothing is their prime mover. So they recognise that after some 10-20 year delay their enemies have now learnt how to use social media for political purposes, and social media less marginally differentially useful to them in their time line, but is very marginally useful to their opponents just joining in. Thus there are massive internal marginal differential differences in the usefulness of social media to both, but the real difference is the marginal differences between there friends and enemies, so they will now want to close it down limit it by laws made by and for them. ie they will pull up the draw bridge after entering the castle or blow the bridge after crossing it.
So while your question is about truth consistency fairness in mainstream media, their question is “how can we close down and censor social media”. While you point out media biases they will be starting with a program of we must protect the children, since now in the project of “controlling the education of the young is done though mainstream institutions for the left, social media as indoctrination I guess has served its purpose and will only give them diminished returns while giving you increasing returns for some time to come. This is how Marx approached his Critique of the Hegelian middle term mediation of journalism proposed by Hegel as civic society.
So firstly then understand what the different Criteria in play are here over bias. Then understand that post Kantian philosophy has deflated British and Kantian, personal knowledge, epistemology and judgment and agreement in legitimacy, for Hegel/Marx ever chaining friend/enemy conflicts, in with the social institutions of journalism and media and the political conflict over them (Marx on Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”).
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Part A3: While the French left have been doing this stuff since at least 1968, Analytical Philosophers attempted to fix conditions for constancy with linking logic language and epistemology, and then action intention and events. For example to try and deal with “I see that an “s is a p”” but “social psychological data accounts means “s is not p”” c.f. I see young men homeless in the streets” but “look at the wars and famines in Africa”. The personal judgement of the media is not legitimised by easy appeal to the felt and witnessed reality of first person reports of course because the media are not really in a representation-reality relation to the world at all. There are the times of the world and the times of the media and the time of its narrative purpose and construction conditions. A “personal basis” for knowledge justification, was taken over by Bayesians and turned into a technology for a Deleuze style transcendental empiricism, wherein a harm utility risk function can be made that apparently allows the “connecting into a continuum” all, manner of different kinds of misery and pain and harms. Like the Chinese Encyclopaedia of Foucault and Ian Hacking (Why does language matter to Philosophy”) This means they can appear to place all risk and harm on a continuum without real categorically different in kind, domains. I can only find Wittgenstein and McDowell as anywhere near working out how to think about bias in judgement and in judgement of the media’s decisions. One thing from Wittgenstein challenging to both the left and analytical philosophy of science and utilitarianism and right is that different type of human activities with different but related forms of life have very different Criteria and standards. These Standards cannot be placed on one scale or continuum and so both the utility harm continuity cannot be made as Cardinal or Ordinal differences and the left incremental projects in some sense requires this conflation. One way of doing the conflation and hegemony is too take one realm as a standards for all or many more. So we might make protect the children from all harm as the criteria and metric for adults too. It allows a small differential harm for children to be the measure and standard of all else. It is very politically powerful rhetoric, and it allows a kind of forced isomorphism between harm measure and legal conceptual orders. But mostly it allows them to treat all humans as if they were children. Mill realised these problems and struggled a great deal with how to compare harms of different quality and whether children were to be in the same category as adults with respect to freedom and harm.
Here’s the dilemma then: If we want to compare two things we have to place them in a continuum space of some kind. Indeed we might say what we class as claiming enough sameness between two things for a comparison just means being able to place them in one continuum. In some sense this continuum now takes the place of the old identity definitional essence. The continuum makes them the same, means they are the same with only accidental differences like where on the continuum or with disconnected from the continuum difference and accidents. So a continuum of mass is a function that captures many different objects in the universe a stone and a person together and comparable w.r.t to mass. In a way a raw old school Marxist materialism did this. Newer are attempts at comparing functions, so an ellipse is a kind of circle or vice versa, and gradual topological transformations will allow many other geometric shapes to be placed together into a single group. But really functions on paper as graphs are not comparable as continuum equations and defiantly not, if we think of them as instantiated into mechanical devices. You can’t slide gradually between types of functional mechanism as the middle point “pseudo device” would not be functional at all. Categorical distinctions are kind of like this. Indeed the idea of black box technology might be that all things are configurations of a small number of inter changeables. This is like a structural attempted solution. Now all forms of life contain movements that can be represented, but in part only, by a function. The functions might be continuous but they do not sit together in another higher continuity. And certainly movement of the form of life is not at all like movement of any function in one space. They have different degrees of freedom and error and these error spaces are not isomorphic with what an error would be in a function they are radically incongruent spaces. An error in a form of life has no analogue in a function. i.e. it’s not an anomaly off the function, for example. There just is no place for the error of life in the space of functional representations. This has to be the way to go for a conservative contrary to the liberals and the left.
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Note: I thought to have a days pause on this argument, before racing to the explicit conclusion. Which any way quickly becomes, in its use, a mere abstract proposition or assertion, that is its leaves its metaphysical or critical empirical ground, and is treated as a premise in a: a) general logic deduction, or as a: b) "reductum ad absurdum" for process eg slippery slope. That is, in a) it becomes another proposition treated as binary yes/no for all other propositions (General logic deduction like natural law). in which case it operates naively as if it can stop the process of traversing yes/no, when of course it is derived from this process of category blending, or b) that it is used naively to forward slippery slope arguments that also it was meant to limit.
I mean as a conclusion from dilemmas of metaphysics meeting with radical empiricism, it is then ironically "used" in arguments who's structure is either attempting a non critical metaphysics or a accounting in radical empiricism. Let me illustrate this with a real example: Long ago in the 1990's, when i began working on Heidegger, people who thought they were Heideggerian, would basically think with respect to themselves, in terms of Descartes self cashed out as a radical individualism. that is they took it as a radical freedom past even Sartre to a kind of Ann Rand individualism. That was the Us and UK view of existentialism from the 1950's to 1980's i would say. But Heidegger had already transformed the metaphysical basis of Cartesians' "I think" so this is naïve and contradictory. Also when Drayfus visited Heidegger, Heidegger made it clear that Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" was alien to Heidegger's views in "Being and Time" and after. How later Heideggerian's would deal with this equivocating error was to emphasise that Dasein: "human- Being-in-the-world" was not the Cartesian self or liberal "person". it is not then easily treated appropriately in terms of law Rights Natural Law and so on. I did though get a return response to this criticism from, if you will, "Heideggerian Cartesians" with the claim that Descartes remained well within the pre modern medieval metaphysics and so the error was by modernist enlightenment successors that Descartes had radically left pre enlightenment metaphysics.
On the other hand in the 1990's an early "process philosopher" following Deleuze (I knew them and it was before most Deleuze work had been translated into English) would think and act in terms of anti metaphysical bodily process, but make their statements and political divisions, as if they could decree themselves real metaphysical distinctions as it suited purposes. For example having a "definition" of process anti metaphysical "Feminism", or 20 years later another process political actor demanding that i ought to define "racism".
Anyway this problem of the use of a propositional conclusion, today is otiose as it is evidenced by events now. i had two great, if risky, examples, but both are there now in reality.
Hence Talleyrand: "A diplomat who says "yes" means "maybe", a diplomat who says "maybe" means "no", and a diplomat who says "no" is no diplomat". (Wikiquote)
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Note: The problem for me here then is i have presented accounts of various uses of "reason" here. The earlier ones are what i call white board presentations. That is they are presented as models apart from us personally, and as models of the world. particularly the worlds of law and science. So this is familiar to us: we are presented with legal scientific models, that we the audience are then meant to think by and use. But the models have metaphysical or anti metaphysical interpretations of the world and so they must include an account of us the viewer, even if we might be unaware of this or we think we are an exceptions a cartesian outsider or that really the model means the observer does not exist as such. The former Cartesian's reasons they give then will be incongruent to the model, and the later mealy a kind of material natural reflex of a part of a machine. This can be a version of idealism subjectivism verses a material mechanical view logical organised around a transcendent but imminent aim. Neither of these is coherent.
The question is then how does a subject of knowledge action and responsibility exist in the model used. It is the questions of human first person reasons in context and categories verses legal and scientific representations of that person that person themselves use. its Sellers different spaces of reasons his manifest verse scientific legal image of man, and also in Bernard Williams first person reasons and anonymous reasons. That person cannot be a Cartesian self detached from the world, an abstract liberal individual, but once we see that person as in a context categorially or otherwise then, they easily becomes subject to external accounts that disappear them, by process, as rational subjects from the picture. This problem though not in these terms haunts the whole history of philosophy, and the philosophy of the 20 the century in many different areas.
One obvious way is in agents contradictory or hypocritical reasons when they try to make laws and policy that will in the end capture them because the polices are legally and scientifically expressed though concepts that will include them. this is a kind of interpretation of Kant's legitimacy in justification, the categorical imperative means the policy returns. its spreads out from the original reference, by science and the rule of law.
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Watching to near the end: A couple of corrections: I believe, the female police officer injured in the Airport was sent to hospital not prison; I think many people are not, loosing faith in the system, they have lost faith in it. So shifting a 180 degrees to Nigel Farage's claim that this makes some people scared and silenced, it also (in a kind of a priori metaphysical tautology) means this will mean the opposite for others, that is they will feel a quickening of a sense of freedom to use this against the silenced and fearful. For example: don't ever get into an argument with a female shop worker, because the police will always back them against a male customer. No matter how rude, condescending, and difficult they are towards you. They are trying to trigger you now for an imaginative dispositional synthesis of furthering the feminist political agenda against men, with a bit of Lacanian excess subjective enjoyment. Remember what I told you, much of the feminist education in say triggering seems to have been a teaching of a "personal is political" methodology of how to trigger men. I've experienced this many time in many institutions, going back even to the 1990's.
Principle of real a priori metaphysical opposition: Where there is people in fear, there will be symmetrically people empowered without fear to use this fear system for what ever.
I was even in a radical feminist seminar years ago where, when they started discussing something like sexual assault, the seminar leader actually pointed out to the women that the two men (including me) fall silent on these kinds of issues.
Now, to link to my point above in sections A, I have shown that the relations or opposition of fear for some and power for others is a priori connected. The thing is all your examples in this show appear to be arbitrary comparisons. That is for any example A, you seems free to choose a counter example B from a vast manifold of examples {E,F,G,H, I, ...}. Of course any one can do the same even just making their own {Q} as the contrary to your A. Kant realised this problem early on with mere empirical oppositional relations early on and so he talked not of empirical dialectics and opposition but metaphysical transcendental dialectic and oppositions. The a priori relations has to be established as a genuine connected pair of events. The way to do this is through the structures the institutions that frame the two. This would not be a million miles away from the lefts talk of instituional and structural bias. though they just drew on anthropology and the concepts of Patriarchy to do this. So what must be done and how?
Of course you could view the whole thing as just a political conflict, in which case its just a matter of using examples and comparisons, that will have the most desired effect on an audience. Hunt down the most horrific examples and choose your favourite comparison form protected characteristics. You will need media power to do this and an overriding sense of purpose and friend and enemy.
The consequences if you succeed though will just be a doubling up of fear and empowerment. that is you wont deflate the lefts use of these methods on you, you will just add your own symmetric method on them. Now everybody is empowered and in fear. Thus it means the expansion of the totalitarian system to the... well, totality.
Remember when women in an institution claimed they were getting less pay for the same job as the men. the company just cut the men's pays down to women's. who wins in this equality project then?
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