Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "andrew gold | heretics."
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From just the intro: its much worse than them people lying, the stuff Labour are blatantly saying they are gonna do, and why, and with what reasons is an outrage. In Prime Minister Keir Starmer's recent press presentation in the Number 10 Garden he reasons: that there's a black hole in the treasury, and so, for example, with the recent riots, and that the prisons are nearly full they are going to given some prisoners early release. But they caveat this with a modifier, that the decision on who will be for early release will be made by a "procedure". The procedure will asses, for each case, the possible or potential "risk" to the public of that prisoner, and uses this as the procedural foundation. It suggests to me then, that white collar middle class crime and criminals will have little or no jail time, because if they do some massive fraud in their high status, high station, high duty, job, then if they are just removed from office, they wont be a risk to the public. We see betrayal of station and duty, and malfeasance in public or private office, will only be punished by loss of job. The scale of damage to public trust and legitimacy is massive but impossible to present as a direct causal consequence; a metric. This announcement of course follows he public become aware of the asymmetry of treatments by class. The middle class criminals can hide and deny their malfeasance for decades, and if it comes to light we have those oh so respectful, enquiries, which also take years and are covered over by the endless news stream of events. At most the company or country apologise and pay some compensation from their audit. The culprits are reduced to one or two people who just loose their job.
The Labour government are of course replaying the Doctors and their unions for the politicised strikes at the end of the last conservative government by stuffing their picket brazier's with Gold...again.
The only answer at the moment seems to be irony; like have a typical low class criminal case defended with millions of pounds of fees for London lawyers, and conducted by delay and enquiry and deflection by all the rest of the middle-class institutions.
And have a Doctor or accountant tazered and bungeed into the back of police van and given a station state provided defender.
Contrast with the army of middleclass London lefty lawyers and human rights defenders for illegal migrants and asylum seekers.
I think one of the problems is that middle class crime just does not make a good movie: You know 2 hours of a guy sitting at a computer in a office, compared to a bank robbery. Anyway what London middleclass screen writer will do a job on his own kind his own class. He just wouldn't get the job anyway, there is no job. Instead its 24/7 anti racism and anti sexism with ever changing and expanding legal linguistic grammatical definitions, only the chattering class can hope to use competently.
No one will oppose this from many political angle cos basically the Right and what's left of the Conservatives are all for their middle class friends to. I realised long ago that the anti-anti-racist and anti-anti-sexist rhetoric was just an attractor for basically low tax liberalism. I guess some of them knew that Labour was now really like them, friends of the middle class as the highest lexographical principle.
I'm no strategist but the launch of Reform prior to the election was obviously going to split the right vote and let in Labour. I thought "Are these people stupid" then i applied Donald Davidson's "Principle of Charity" and thought no they just have a cleverer way of helping themselves and their middle class mates. You see i went behind the anti woke rhetoric and only found arguments for low taxation, coercive approaches to welfare, and even the old evil drugs rant. I guess that will be the next big HNS middleclass earner: everyone in drug or mental health therapy.
I've got to completely rethink everything and everybody.
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When Dr. Keszely talks about the contradictions and hypocrisies of reason being a "real" problem for the left ideology and for its adherents having to hold to two apparently conflicting identities he is assuming that: the ideology has to be applied deductively to any situation and not be in external public conflict due to consistency between cases different in time and/or spatial location. Bu this is not the case of course since, as many philosophers pointed out throughout the 20th century, there is always adequate degrees of freedom for those in charge and the media to describe events in many different ways with a free choice of concept to label and name the identity of the people in a situation. This means any apparent bias between ostensibly equal situations can be re-described in terms that hide the public asymmetry. Since politics as its happens is mostly reasoned in a positivist idem, ie an event connected in the present by association to some other event of choice and chosen description, is media and publicly adequate for the moment in time and place for rhetorical force. ie its governed or determined or constrained only by political tactical and strategic aims in the use of the case. When another possibly reticent case comes along, they just re define and re describe and re associate he case into a local positive constancy. If indeed such reticent cases make it appear into the public media sphere at all. So the limit here is just about freedom of choice of associations and of identity names in the associated and tactical affordance. This is neither deduction or rational constraint, but reason as excuse for tactical affordances. Anyway they Hegelians orientated to real as founded in world justice to come. But Hegel is clear that there will be contradictions on the journey and for Marx conflict, because any reasoning bellow the absolute real is inherently contradictory. Hegel and Marx didn't foresee that people would just make jokes out of it. Rorty saw it would require an ironic attitude to the present, but he saw this in late 20th century as the "end of philosophy", that followed the early 20th century end of metaphysics. There is nothing like a set of Categories of permanence and relation independent of freedom to describe the "given" either as case or principle or rule. There is no metaphysical identity connecting across time and space, that are required a priori as conditions for the possibility a foundation for their pragmatic use of empirical identities. The "I sovereign speech" then does not have to publicly accompany all its presentations as a private inner identity and unity condition. It is an imminent empty place like in the logical and ontology of a State of exception but without the sovereign needing to claim it as a single decision, Rather following the Conservative move in the pandemic they can just make ongoing and ever changing arguments based on empirical risk assessments with Bayesian algorithms which given the above is no constraint at all. Even Carl Schmitt didn't go that far.
When it comes to individual actors then they too can just re describe situations and themselves in a freedom of reason, in any way they want. In this they might break and make new tactical relations of course, this though usually is grounded above them in terms of the particular nexus claims to money and funding of its identity projects. Wat happens is though people change not due to tactical affordances of difficult events but they aren't bothered they claim the identity of those who will get political support and money. They have then ever changing acquaintances not trusted friends, and they appropriate partners not lovers. They don't know Aristotle on friendship or care either.
To illustrate them then a Rolling Stones song Ruby Tuesday.
For us its the movie "Memento" and the short scene with the prostitute. That is clear what i mean if seen with the movie "Closer".
For Science as freedom Feyband, science as mob rule Kuhn, for science as the hand maiden of collective instituional policy see Lakatos. Except instead of a charismatic leader there is the foundations of justice to come and tactical needs on the ground.
Maybe they are not following F Scot Fitzgerald "a genius can hold to contradictory views at the same time and remain sane", but rather a political actor can have no real views at all and if they go mad they can get metal therapy off their mates.
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yea around 11:00 mins in. The overarching theory of risk was inaugurated at a London University conference in 1990 on Bayesian Induction, i was there. People i talked to knew it was going to be the big thing for decades, they told me. This became a massive international Western Academic then practical technical project for widespread application and of course use. I kept my eye on it while studying Kant Wittgenstein and then 10 years of French post Marxism up to 2010. In the end I focused on Wilfred Sellers and the space of reasons, as the only philosopher who had attempted to work out how reason can survive the loss of the myth of the "given" foundations in empirical content and rules and principles. It seems though Sellers had not figured it out and his follower John McDowell, great on the problem of nature and the person, though had little to say about the rational given in politics and institutions eg justice and he international order. In 2011ish i went to a massive conference on Critical Legal Theory and practice and it was clear Derrida's work on law, that justice was now the new infinite horizon of all things.
So this looks like an origin story for the contemporary, a new mechanical technical image of reason in Bayesian risk rationality. But i don't think so. i think was built up so the middle class could make excuses and diversions and divisions. i think they knew the irrational unpayable sub prime metropolitan middle class housing mortgages and market would take down the banks. and then they would talk about finance risk, not class, and then from equivocating on the concepts of risk via Bayesian mathematical models, risk would be transferred from the risky middle class to risky lower class. This because all the lefty theories predict a class conflict from the austerity and injustice of the de-substantiation of their wealth. I knew this from 2008 and Yale lectures on the private debt in high end middle class housing market which repeated claims i i heard many years before in the late 1990's or early 2000's from a Harvard Lecture.
My knowledge of economic and social history had taught me that with financial and middle class driven economic crisis, that the most poor and women usually suffer the greatest so i started in 2010 with that idea in mind as the immediate and proximate problem. 9eg Jack the Ripper London following the 19th century Bismarck driven silver crisis.
what i hadn't expected though was that the mass of women were all at heart either raging feminists or taciturn extreme feminists or just following self interest into hypergamy. I became physically and then mentally ill from mid 2013 up to late 2010's. and MeToo and BLM kicked in. it was clear this told its own origin narrative that gave the impression of progress and destiny a right side of history thing. But it was clear to me because of the over use of the technical Bayesian account of risk, that: a) MeToo and BLM had allowed the use of risk to slide from a Critique of the middleclass establishment, to a Criticism of the "dangerous" lower and working classes. There was no clever attempt to compare the contrasting substantive utilities in the set extensions of the concept between the 2008 middle class and women and minorities 2017. Rather the concept of identity and risk allowed them to place all members of an identity from the whole world into a set (A Quineian set without modality and identity and temporal comparisons and here without any geographical limit). So now the feminists can pretend to be on the left by attacking a couple of very rich and powerful men, but then take this as an archetype for all men backed up by years of silo contingently private peer group reviewed research. Yes suddenly breaking with 70 years work, by 2017 archetypes are good so long as its their archetypes that are used (Green and Grue?)
So in one stroke risk equivocation allowed the middleclass to steel the concept from its rich bailed out middleclass extension to women of the world and ethnic minorities in the Western countries as nominal for all world identities. i mean with endless stories of sexual assault linked to child abuse, and stories of the history of slavery and then wars fed by media film and everything else middle class controlled.
I didn't foresee the turn to absolute feminism and BLM. I did foresee wars approaching Europe though in 2010. Though i was completely mad in 2014 -15-16, so i missed that confirmation.
My contribution has mainly been to stop the reaction to all this as being expressed in there terms of justice rights equality eg the post facto 2010's middleclass reconstruction of risk from the risky middleclass to the myth of the risky racist sexist white working class. Personally i thought i may have helped in some small amount at stopping a white working class British English identity for justice project. cos that means the middleclass control it all. it took three years solid work of catch up in late 2010 early 2020's to find out how the middleclass work with their identity for justice cohort and its ugly. Of course key for the middleclass in identity politics is the Hegelian Marxist contradiction and conflict model of identity. I means you've got to admire the ugly beauty of how the concepts of risk now describes the relations between the nominal identities as one of conflict and civil war. This is straight out of European middle class and aristocratic response to the failed revolutions of 1848-9. ie Divide divide divide by space a by time and by person and within class. The French solution involves digging up the roads and boulevards and planting trees and staggering the shifts of different workers all good anti Kantian stuff designed to drive us all mad.
see the old 60's movie "The Swimmer"
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45:00 mins. In your discussion about debating with the other side you are assuming an already agreed, or, more usually, an: as if, tacit agreement is already in play, as the frame of the debate. Its an error of the British Enlightenment to think or make epistemological issues privileged. That as if it's a given that you are sitting down with someone in a debate the aim or criteria of which is to arrive at agreement in truth and reason. It begins most explicitly with John Locke on "Human understanding" as knowledge and the prior determinate of action.. ". It seems to be in Kant too: the First Critique must surly also be first ontologically? So Hegel replaces the Kantian epistemology of knowledge limited by practical reason that is, the "is" is under the horizon of the practical imagined "ought". but Hegel misread this as a distinction between knowledge and reality, and then set epistemology as a conflict relation between knower's knowledge and with Being. so already the contextual identity of the "knower" is constitutive of what is known and is in conflict with another Being, that really is of the absolute real seeking to work on the finite knower to bring them by rational sublimation out of their limited context to the absolute unlimited rationally real.
So with Hegel the identity of the knower and nature as potential towards the actual real is both the limiting context for the knower and so their knowledge, but, and here's the thing, this limited identity is to be transformed into the absolute identity with no limiting distinctions. Since this is all done with universal science and law the absolute identity here might be thought of as just that person in general that Kant talked about so its world persons that Hegel is talking about:. but no! Its absolute spirit in agreement without conflict spirt is not persons.
What this means is when you sit down with an Hegelian and do some epistemology type debate writing on a board say, they are writing on you and your limited knowledge due to your particular identity. So ad hominin argument is key for Hegelians.
In the early 20th century Russell and Moore returned analytic philosophy to epistemology and later ad hominin arguments were just stipulated as logical fallacies. Indeed Russell had a habit of just stipulating things out he couldn't deal with.
But later Analytical philosophers Wittgenstein, and Quine and Sellers and Austin and Ryle all Critiqued the primacy and privilege and independence of epistemology. They are not Hegelians (even though there are lots of books Like Wittgenstein and Hegel, Quine and Hegel) but with them the Kantian and epistemology issues are radically reoriented or even de privileged.
The lefts identity focus from mid century was claimed to be anti Hegelian but drew its influence from Heidegger and the project of the "destruction of Western Metaphysics.". In this identity is seen as privileging the same over difference and they sought then to reverse this and privilege difference over identity. This is what destruction of Western metaphysic means here difference over identity and the deconstruction of the same.
Now the Marxist Critique of Hegel comes in, as identity and sameness at the material and psychological level is habit repetition, what was the elite tradition’s view of reproductive workers blind and soulless and atomised and domestic life as akin to animal nurture bellow reason? Or at least reasons self awareness self consciousness. Now the task is to break habitual blind workers from their blind repetitious thoughtless habits by the introduction or imposition or immigration of difference. This is not to create a self conscious working person though, its to get them up to the self conscious absolute via new and different formations of identity that are not natural or local or proximate but diverse networks that can change and be called an identiy temporally if praxis demands it.
Central to this project though is not the old school unions but psychologists and community workers and medical institutions and the law . Because obviously to make new identities requires the “just trauma” of the intervention and the disruption to the blind habit and finite individual self and their natural historical communities. So the social conflict and mental disarray that follows needs to be controlled and focused into the “correct” direction by psychologists and community social workers etc. So with mental health interventions you also have later anti-racist and anti-sexist sessions as part of a general back to work human capital resources. The later people though were quite ordinary type people (not typical university PhD types.) and this was not like a big ordinance in the “back to work” program, but that was maybe 2016, definitely before all the MeToo and BLM kicked off.
So, it’s a revolution not a picnic, and identities broken by imposing difference with new networked identities is both an advance on those blind and unthought habitual natural relations, but it is not the end its just a step on the global story to the universal absolute without distinction and limit. But now debating with real Marxists is more than an epistemological search for agreement in truth, or an Hegelian ad hominine argument, now there is no principled reason why they wouldn’t spike your tea or beer in the debate or send you electronic mind effecting rays or just not debate or silence you.
What was happening in the 2000’s was the left had embraced some of the Critical epistemology ideas from analytical philosophy e.g. feminist epistemology and so on, but they have no real skin in this game its just tactical. By the time I left in 2010 the feminists had begun to see Kant as a useful ally after decades of Kant hating. That I think was because they knew the deconstruction marginal politics might attain a catastrophic victory and pout them and their ideas into top traditional State political power. They will need to learn a new tune for a bit and Kant is a good teacher even for those bent on the deconstruction of the state. In my long exchanges with the left the last few years on YouTube one even said to me, in a moment of charity and honesty, look mate you’ve got no chance taking us down with epistemology.
“When a man with Kant, meets a man with Hegel, the man with Kant is an egg-man”
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46:00 mins. So quickly my position is not epistemological, but rather influenced by Husserl and intentionality. One way to express this is to de-privilege the tradition that, implicitly for the most part (ie unreflectively and led by a project aim really), dealt with the role of language as primarily concerned with truth or facts. Now, in Russell for example we see epistemology as a catch all domain, cf with the critique of john Locke where the mind is populated with all kinds of content and activities as to be what Foucault and others like Ian Hacking describes a Chinese encyclopaedia. an aggregate or patchwork of unconnected pieces eg subjectively ordered stuff this is important. So for example "epistemology" contained both logic and empirical content, and this was pseudo "united" by the idea of the propositions. So proposition can be true or false, so empirical propositions and logical connections are on the same pseudo kind of level. eg "the cat is on the mat", "if p then q, p therefore q", and "1+2=3". Of course a proposition like "p is p" is odd since it seems it cannot possibly be false. So "All bachelor's and unmarried men". is that possibly true or false? Well i might imagine gay marriage was banned, or a gay guy might himself not consider marriage as appropriate given its historical meaning, or through a life style choice avoid it. I guess then the claim that a gay guy is unmarried is odd if it is not on the table or in their world by choice or institutional possibility. Its like: i wont go to see Oasis at Glastonbury, but since they aren't going to play there anyway. I can't "not see Oasis at Glastonbury, if they aren't playing there anyway. Compare to a proposition like "Jill is innocent of pushing Jack". this already create a space of meaning or sense, of possibility and logical connections, a space of reasons that are prior to the particular question of fact or truth or falsity.eg "Jill "is" that person who did not push jack" or really now its "Jill is that person for which there is not enough evidence to be certain they did not push Jack". "Jill "is" the one for which there is just not enough evidence against them". "is" here is not original but seen first though the logical semantic sense, in the space of reasons, of evidence. In law for example a investigation has already began "intentionality" is in play but via legal representation schema. The ontological problem here is meant to be solved by "innocent until proven guilty" eg not ad hominin". But the "not ad hominon" is already a "Jill not yet proven to be guilty". Intentionality then asserts we are always already within a space of logic and reasons that is subordinate to an act, even though that act is determined by and with the space of reasons, that space of reasons is not neutral with respect to content and intention but it is in an original bias that cannot then be expressed as a true or false propositions, after the fact, and with the space of reason. verses is due to the prior genesis act. Its similar, in structure at least, to asking if there is a move in a constitutional legal space of rights to "legally" undo or change that constitution to make the original signing event as if it is now a mere fact that can be negated made false in the system.
This open up profound and deep challenges and revisions to a simple understand of epistemology and science. It means nature is not just facts here, and logic is really structured around first person but an already instituional intentionality. So a person cannot possibly be an aggregate of false propositions, which would have to “be” at least meaningful to be faithful to the logic here. It starts to move into the wider sematic territory of vice and virtue for example. Logic must involve a wider semantics of “public duty v private acts”.
So because traditional epistemology allows apparently a possibility that all propositions about a subject are false, it is shown to be fundamentally “not “not false”” but also “not false”.
(This I glean from Wittgenstein early work on logic, where he claims logic does not represent but rather is the form of representation or picturing. I take this to mean you can’t step outside of logic, and when we say logic is expressed as propositions like “if p then q”, or “p therefore p” we imagine these as true in all cases, but really there is no representational ability to access content that is not structured already by logic that must not consider p and not p” as even meaningful ie it’s not that we cannot picture the negation of logical propositions rather there can’t be a picture at all. It like adverb for the verb to picture”. In fact ad verbs must be there for verbs which must be there for a propositions sense. there was discussion by Anscombe that claimed Wittgenstein starts off from real propositions to form not just from form, and so future sue is underdetermined formally, but not then necessarily if we being with a real content laden proposition. He did much of this work while fighting in the trenches of the Eastern Front of World War One)
Now those problems aside for a moment, there is also the Critique from Austin and in Husserl I think, that in our language there is lot more going on other than just making truth claims, particularly we “do thing with words” or we get other people to do thing by our use of words. And now a whole new architecture is brought in like conditions of possibility are now felicity conditions and so on. From there it was a short step then to claim that what we think are propositions and truth claims about the world arte really just actions to get people to do stuff, or can be or at least interpreted as a doing a prescribing, not a describing. “The philosophy professor is a very good administrator”.
This produced a split in philosophy just after the war, which Strawson described as a Homeric struggle over language between primacy and possible elimination between truth and use. But what kind of description is this is it a truth claim or a bit of rhetoric to get students excited about the importance of his logic classes.
I am saving up to buy the Cambridge History of Philosophy book that deals with post world war two philosophy to get enough knowledge of these developments but its over 100 pounds! A known unknown then. Well kind of I hope to find unknown unknowns for over £100.
Its hard to quickly show the relations between intentionality and speech acts. But Derrida changed the reduction of an priority of fact and use, by claiming that linguistic structures found in writing and literary criticism can be applied equally to speech acts. That is: what we say can be structural Critiqued in just the same way as a book. it is hear that the real issue over free speech and the law and rights turns, and not within the structural view of legal texts and meanings or harms or Rights. The issues now of harm and right then are too late in the story, are a problem and debate space that takes the legal and harm framework as the domain of the space of reasons.
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