Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Labour’s Authoritarian Crack Down: Respect Orders to Non-Crime Hate Incidents + BBC Verify Bias" video.

  1. Part 1: 5 mins: notes Topic PW: BBC Verify: "Aim" impartial independent analysis and information to audiences using range of sources. PW "Its just what a good journalist should be doing anyway". I will take this to mean something like the following: That the practice of journalism already contains, intrinsically, its own appropriate Criteria and standards. That means notions of good practice, and the use of ethical evaluative terms within this practice do not stand outside the practice. Why say this? Well we live "under" a paradigm that approaches the problem of criteria primarily as fact tracking on the one hand, and sees the validity of such facts, in terms of the application to the practice of an "external" regulative structure like a legal structure of natural law to that practice and the actors. The pseudo legal schema is meant to correct limit bias and error, within the practice. This schema though treats error bias, primarily through taking the world as whole as the base of facts. This then might seem what Saussure called the "synchronic" structure. Then facts, to be (or already are) interpreted or described, reported out of the manifold of possible in terms of an image of a selection of facts from all possible. We have already seen (in my work on the recent NCF Deprogramed) that the facts do not speak for themselves, that there is a "human" act of apprehension of what is seen as important in any manifold, fact. thus a degree of freedom and error and habit are in play with actors. At the first stage then this freedom of interpretation is taken to involve bias selection in terms such as personal preference and interest eg the parochial, this is seen as a kind of natural error where we select in accord with habit culture and practices. It is the error of "privileging" the local over the global (eg Descartes discussion of distance and Foucault and Ian Hacking on the Chinese Encyclopaedia.) The standard then appears to be to measure any story and fact by the standard of its relation to the whole world. Then bias can be schematised in terms of whole world concepts in apprehension. That then means only the most dramatic facts in the world get a say. It might be said to be a metric of facts in relations to other facts and so differentiated by pain difference. But the global scope of justice and equality puts this in terms of a prior synchronic structure that is analogised as a quasi legal or internal law model. This provides the structure for utility pain difference. This structural legal model then off setts parochial bias in terms of distance bias correction. More recently this has changed, or distance has been schematised as race and gender. This change was simultaneously a turn to the historical, or what Sassuere called the "diachronic". So bias is not just with respect to "now" in the whole world but the whole world past. if we stick with the image that journalism is just about facts though we misunderstand the practice, journalism is about projections of possible futures and so is linked then to possible and actual projects in the world, and as such journalism is a practice of projects too. But then now the initial simple "now" standard involves past and future bias correction and so it seems consistent that certain political projects in the world who give themselves the name justice equality correction, must have a privileged place in importance for journalist. Quickly the whole, of journalism can turn into support for any political group that claims to be for universal rights and justice, and expresses their projects in these terms. In a way then the accusations of not just bias but of promoting certain political interests, might miss a critique since they can argue that the practice of journalism is about practice in the world and its larger scale political projects, which are evaluated in terms of project risks and rewards. Thus its not just a case that the practice of journalism is biased towards certain political ideology and groups and their projects, on the one hand they can claim such privileging of projects is really just their version of bias correction wrt the the schemas and projects in the world whole. Journalism is not, a never was, about representation. Now such a correction project has to deal with correcting the actual journalists activities in their practice. They might well use kind of informally various character and personality critics in evaluation this can be informal or cultural between people and within the hierarchy, but the strange new ethical virtue and vice language they might use is really second or downstream to a external legal model of correction. It’s unfortunate that we think this in terms of legal orders and punishments, but then the meaning and use of the ethical evaluative terms wrt to a person are mediated and source in terms of law justice and maybe harms going forward consequences. The normal intrapersonal or traditional use of ethical terms has been displaced by legal negations of nots or “conformity to the legal function” as they put it. The meaning of the downstream ethical terms then is actually drawn from a legal origin of justice and equality as the non biased.
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  2. Part 2: For example, if some one of the left, makes personal and character attacks, they double speak, on the on one hand, the source of apparent legitimacy of content here, is from mediating law and institutions, and then is transposed into a pseudo ethical vocabulary usually it feels like an attempt to shame you in at once the old Victorian look of disapproval, calls of inappropriate and rude ect., and ostrisigation but such people also bring with them a kind of spectral or virtual legal institution. They seem to speak simultaneously as if in an internal private relation of ethical terms, and as if they are public officials dispositions their duties and moral legitimacy. This is the structure and process of the personal is political the political is personal. It has amazed me how women in particular have so quickly and easily accommodated and used this double role. So what is wrong? The legal and project and history orientation, actually means a significant philosophical shift. Ethical terms of evaluation misused in this legal origin way, make its seem that the practice requires external laws, and that this architecture is isomorphic with character. That is being within the legal function is virtue and not being in conformity to the legal function is vice. Hence the vice accusations of parochialism is drawn from legal justice and equality and no bias of the proximate wrt the world. I got a funny “shaming” once when I went to get my gas card replaced and when I said to the guy in the shop it was “British Gas” he looked “disgusted” and gave me a “shaming” No! The issue is then the attempt to make the whole world and eternity the Criteria and this as a legal just criteria that is to regulate journalism to this standard. Its odd because then not following this transcendent schema would means this parochial project is illegal and a vice. Bit vice and virtue are not like a schematic structure overlaying from outside evaluations in accord with some external or Platonic standard. It’s a mis analogy between law and character: morality and ethics. There is not a practice as such that then can be evaluated from outside by virtue and vice of the actors. A practice that would have to be described as a practice “in vice” or though “vice”, would really be no recognisable practice at all. Not just saying it would collapse in the long run, or fail when rolled out in scope, rather virtue and vice are related internally immediately within the practice such that the idea of a completely vice ridden practice is a contradiction in terms. People may think this because they are in the habit of thinking in legal terms and then treat practices as if vice and virtue, were mapped onto illegal and legal. So it’s possible to create an architectural mechanism that dos something over time as a process a policy a project. We may then want to “add to” the evaluations of targets efficiencies, say laws about secondary effects, impact on the local population or even contribution to global equality and zero carbon. Here we have though the idea that the non wide scope project is against the law, but the standard project would have to be the idea of an activity that simultaneous had the whole world in its scope. This though is an image of only a God like actor. Projects are particular, and there is no universal project it’s a contraction in terms. Clearly then this ideal standard is not a possible finite human standard. It probably comes from Plato, who developed top down legal systems but from the image of total knowledge. By this standard all action is unjust. This is the image though. We can think of ethical terms as adverbial add “on’s” to an activity that is there anyway (inspired by Donald Davidson) . We imagine an actor can do something where in there is a complete absence of ethical terms ie they have no role at all. It would begin to look like the agent would have to be a machine, or even less. It seems that all actions and descriptions, contain “implicitly” ethical terms in play. We are in a practice where when things mostly go well the ethical terms are just not used. We rarely say “you showed good character in how you did that. It can seem patronising and as if the person commenting is like assuming the role of teacher or lawyer. The recipient might think what if I had got it wrong. We can confuse the internal use of ethical language, with the use by that person of legalistic language. Indeed the left celebrate and praise as good virtue and justice the shuffle of impersonal extrinsic legal practises and architecture into what are personal intrinsic evaluations. I saw this happening gradually throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s. It was of the left, but done mostly by women, who though began by assuming kind of medical risk model of critique of practices but ended up being quasi legal instituional. Kind of similar to the split roles in the original series of “Oneedon Line”, split by gender.
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  3. Part 3: So far I have described the moral orientation as a legal schema overlaying the practice, but of course it is not. It is a practice also, just one that tries to think itself as schema like knowledge and its representation. The legal mythically presents itself as a schema and akin to structuralism, but it is a nexus of institutions, with particular legislated projects. In such institutions the practice of the application of the law in projects is its self apparently regulated by laws or another body of practices. Can we think of a legal machine then that can function with itself having no legal limits. Well its odd, No legal limits we might say a case where the whole practice is against already framing laws of laws. That is we might think about a legal system with its laws of laws in play and then ask; what if we now abstract the laws of laws from the process, what happens. Or we might imagine just doing the legal process in accord with breaking all the laws of laws. This though is a thought experiment based on a bad analogy. Legal regulations of laws, maybe called rights, grew up with the legal projects not after it as an external add on. The image of abstracting out or subtracting (Zizek Badiu) the law of laws form the law then is really based in a wrong understating in a similar way that we think we can really subtract virtue ethic language from an activity because it is usually tacit. Anyway there are more named vices than named virtues. The classic error conservatives make then is to copy the legal architecture and analogy of externality and that ethical and moral terms are to function in this image. Then we have the idea of family and community “politics” as something to be introduced from outside of practices like laws and regulations. Then the disruption that would be caused to the practice if long standing laws were removed is projected onto an image of that practice as if before the external rules are imposed. You know the degeneration of country in civil war is not isomorphic to how that country came to be. The time line is asymmetric. (Note: I came to this view many years ago from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his later work. This is also the case for Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison “Word and World”. They sue this sort of idea to get beyond the dichotomy of relativism and direct referential realism. This is a closer common starting point to address PK’s point about “woke don’t believe in facts. The work involves abandoning the framing of the problem as this kind of freedom and contingency of rules and concepts verses reality. They place Derrida, Sausaaure, Strauss, Barthes, Kristeva in the relativism camp here. What was embarrassing for the analytical philosophers was that Frege’s distinction and priority of sense over reference and truth, seemed to be the same point. i this this allowed the space for relativisms like Kuhn. Again though they imagine with an external representation they can abstract some field out from a practice ie subtract it and leave something behind. A conceptual field is organised with its own criteria like axioms and symmetries, coherence constancy closure that it has to conform to to remain a structure when taken out of the practice ie remains a practical or actable schema when taken from its original practice. So for example an art of stability in a practice as involving both architectural arrangements and feelings (eg Galileo’s Inclined Plane experiment) is schematised as a structural symmetry and set of axioms. Then since these are modelled symbolically as axioms, it seems we can take them away and directly applied them over say another practice. Indeed justice might appear to demand this exchange and sharing of abstracted and re structured art into axioms. Then the architectures and the feeling so the new are incongruous to the axioms system laid over them after. Of course the new practice that this is over laid on would also have “already” have its own art of stability within it. This needs work i know, Just to add that journalists have to write for their readers and so already there is a kind of natural proximate reader bias. It sets an kind of limit by demand as opposed to structural supply. But they always think it is for the reader to expand their horizons. I think the more university educated have taste for the international the wars dictators and famines and so on. they think there is more than a right of freedom, rather a demand of justice to introduce the distant and obscure into a conversation. there is a strange hierarchy there with the international at the top. and modified covert ethical evacuations added on and in some cases surpassing all other considerations. To counter this they have have embraced the near in terms that seem to belong or originate in far away events. They equivocated all by race and gender international terms drawn from the most horrifying far away cases mediated by race inclusion. they took the laws approach for a post civil war country and transposed them here.
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  4. Note: you know with the left i don't think the intellectuals of the 1980-90s ever believed multiculturalism would work or the tolerance of difference would include those against them in the 1990s 2000. what they indeed to be a part of was for whole other reasons for themselves. On the other hand in 2010 I imagined there must have been and were, lots of sophisticated arguments against it by now.
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