Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Covid is a Battle Between World Views - Pro-Restrictions Lobby are Trying to Remove Johnson" video.

  1. I encountered one of Peter Hitchings big books once. Years ago I was in a pub round a table with a group of students discussing politics, all very nicely. A scary looking very drunk skinhead bulldozed his way into the group and said some incomprehensible stuff and slammed Peter Hitchings book onto the table. He kind of read a page out loud and said "what do you think of that then?" we all just looked at him. turned out the skinhead was a bar man in my local but i didn't recognise him. Either he lent me the book or i got a copy. My first encounter with a kind of new critical liberalism i guess. Great talk. Many thanks.
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  2. at 14:00 mins what about Cristobel Pankhurst's happy contribution of "white feathers" to the recruitment project for world war one. this program was stopped when her army of young girls started to give them to middle class essential workers at home.
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  3. On the point around 5:00 in on the courts and laws "failure" to hear and respond to criticism of the anti terror laws. there is a presupposition here of a real separation of powers, and autonomous legal system dependent on nothing, as if the written word and linguistic symbols haven meaning all on their own. without institutional mediation and projects of effection and affection on the ground. This is not true of course and is a kind of transcendent error, but not of a transcendent God or order of nature but of the integrity of a purely formal system to be of use. Even Hannah Arendt, no friend of totalitarianism, knew that rights needed institutions and even a state else just barelife Homo Sacur remains so just with symbols on paper. She must have learnt something from Schmitt work. that then means of course that civil liberties depend on the state at once and so cannot, on pain of creating another transcendent object (a stand alone person), be abstracted from the state. so freedom and the state are not really antagonistic opposites but presuppose each other if we add in consent. Consent that is, to that which holds the very idea of consent as a matter of action in play. no one thinks pure freedom comes from a complete state (some Hegelians might if they survive the subtraction), but neither is the state of nature a stand alone place. laws of nature and natural law as understood as absolutes create impossible conflict since they seek to eliminate each other and so mediately eliminate them selves since there are no transcendent positions here. we have to move beyond the Popper Berlin moves of the sixties since they were metaphysically unsound but did the job of distancing liberal capitalism against the totalitarianism of the cold war by conflation of N..I Germany with the Soviet Union. Clearly negative liberty then as a vacuous space is a space only by negation limits of law. but law is negation prohibition, and itself presupposes human relations not given as negative relations between people or indeed by further negative laws that is that negative negative laws are rights they are from institutions for institutions like equality and justice ordinance over legal procedure. right now the problem of rights has become an internal issue of institutions even an internecine one of parts and wholes. it like the person thinks rights as axioms but are put to use as legal ordinance between each other. This is the jurisprudential turn in politics and possibly then also the political turn in law. i read Aquinas on this in his ontological theological views of natural law and he unlike the moderns seems to realise the project of synthesis of the many and the one in a state is not the proper metaphysical framework. he doesn't solve it but knows its problematic ontology and cosmology. its in the old testament, the Ten Commandments are not just Gods word on eternal truth and law but God offer in a contract to the Israelites, who as yet do not exist as a people. the law requires much time and a journey of habit and custom to beginning to take on meaning. God and man are not ontologically distinct. thus rights as conceived as protection by the state of ourselves from each other (eg the state of nature as atomistic war is wrong. Hobbes describes the state of nature in Behemoth as internecine warfare of broken apart institutions and parts of civil society. Surly no one believes the middle class are neutrals in this as agents of either right justice or virtue even against the people as malformed unjust and vice ridden. the middle term of the cosmology the syllogism here of comitology rest on its hold on sciences as independent enterprises grasping transcendent (politically ethically morally socially psychologically culturally and of good taste, while they are its human mediators and interpretators. Science is as Hegelian speculative reason progressing as if humans were just observers and this places the middle class as those who can interpret its mathematical Latin grammar of the universe. the middle classes have intellectual privilege cultural privilege massive wealth privilege and power of dependence as Arendt realised ( I think Phillip Petit also). Politics looks like an internecine conflict within the middle class. We are bystanders waiting for them to apply behavioural science technology to get us to comply with them, but we ware already beholden and dependent. Ariel has nature and natural law as ever changing oscillating seas of onto-cosmological metaphysical creations, like the the movie "The Thing". Conservative and liberal thinkers need to stop fighting with cold war tools. Interesting discussion so far (5:00mins) thank you all.
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  4. It would be good to talk to Anne Widecombe on the origins of positive rights capability and social justice since as far as i can tell she was a major player when this stuff was first in academic circles of philosophers in the early 70's. My question would be is there also a problem of perfection and infinity in communitarian and virtue politics. is there not an even worse hierarchy of ethical value and moral worth, that authority based in degrees of moral ethical interpersonal comparisons. Moral rational ethical good taste middle class and those who just work with their hands. all trying to be the most right the most good as a basis for authority and legitimate shaming. Rocking, rolling, riding all along the way, All bound for moral perfection many shaming's away.
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  5. at 11:00mins the left "collectivism" and "strong state" is a program not of negative liberty but positive liberty (not just Berlin's notion of positive but they do this as well. its articulated via as far as i can tell by Bernard Williams and Tom Nagel then Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and from capability (Aristotle in part) to Social Justice a reworking of Rawls operating though data organised around traditional classes of prejudice then the move of retroactively justifying with data the original intuition. this then inaugurates comitology and projects of correction of body and soul. they too don't like the Deleuzian subliminal habits behind the data if they are traditions not manufactured (or both really)and call them.. "micro aggressions". In person to person discourse you get the old puzzles answer "the answer is the surgeon was a woman , you sexist". Since rights as freedom from are negative laws over negative laws positivist rights are not mere opposites or just "positive laws" they are from the conservative traditions also of rights presuppose duties, Baroness Onora O'Neill and others. even in a libertarian contract tradition a contract is not valid if under duress. this is the ground also for "sexual assault" if it is understood as merely a contractual violation or a infelicitous contract. The problem with this seemingly even libertarian notion of positive capability rights is when under legal/economic notions of projects of equality actualisation, it becomes an infinite task of the macro whole but also down to every subliminal deviation from that idea of justice. the totalitarianism is form the logical "function" version of the proposition and data support. the function requires omniscience omnipotence and cosmological reach to eternity. the problem with the public is that they don't see that: the propositions we would agree with based on data and projections, are quite different from committed institutional functional ordinances with infinite aims. These aims in the end have the capacity and ground of consent by us to then treat us, if we decide we don't like it now, as hypocritical and in need of training and therapy to get us to agree to the functional institutional version of the original proposition. its beautiful in its own way. So example: the left get you to agree to human rights and equality and justice projects. first on the basis of data, with stories and if need be shame to inaugurate guilt (an odd monstrosity of law and virtue). if this doesn't work then they pick a property of you and are prejudice (deliberately though?) against you on this. if you still disagree with the program it gets to the point where you are forced to go to their social justice department to get them to stop. Nice. the key solution to the infinite functional tasks is that they are all thought mutually exclusive (no intersectionality can once and for all settle this) even mutuality incompatible. ity is the abstraction in mind alone of each separate functions as genuinely autonomous and not originally in unity with the other projects. this original unity means there can be n o transcendent of other functions, infinite projects. their epistemology and its contradictions are due to the error of abstraction of separate function, the transcendent objects of perfections and the myth of a given equality data set. This error of abstractions and infinite single function projects means everybody sees the other institutional projects as their first enemy to deflate eliminate or reduce. by scare tactics and TV horror stories (all factually true) of increasing quantity and quality to buttress their own project in the hope of making others redundant. in institutions its all about money but on the ground its turns people against each other at the level of propositions and determinisations of them. it also the has the nice double effect of dividing people against each other implying we need more control form the middle classes. it also divides any possible unity of the working classes widely against the real middle classes debt laden £10:00 bottle of wine soaked mob. perhaps following Derrida we could say the secondary effect might well be the first aim and social justice is a tool for this middle class divide and control tactic. like in France following the 1848 failed revolutions.
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