Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Telford Police Want Me Silent But I Am Speaking Out on Behalf of Grooming Victims" video.

  1. Part 2: My point is that most people see the problem here as about freedom of language use in description, and so they argue about language meaning seeking to exclude any competitor vocabulary. This is done in many ways of course, in conversation, on tv on the internet social media and by politicians I might go so far as to say Armatures talk and argue about language, professionals talk and argue about constructions of policy. From this though a number of aporia and antinomies are solved. so for example the intuited inequality and injustice of say a middle class woman talking as if, and being described as subordinate, next to a homeless man talked of and described as privileged. The paradox is not due to langue and lack of empirical constraint, or mental acts needing a friction, but the product of active policy aimed at generality, at a series of users under the same description. the problem of idealisms langue use in not to be found in cognition or knowledge and experience but in practicality that must function as a policy general over many cases and as needing an imaginative act of instituional construction. Concepts are tied to the opening the limits, the “quickening” of imaginative instituional possibility acts for action and not in trying to limit a purely cognitive imagination. So politics operates at the gap of how the world is and imaginative instituional possibility for how it ought to be. This cannot be cashed out at the cognitive or data level alone which is how our current political narratives’ operate as if this act problem were a cognitive problem. When we try to think of it as a cognitive or data selection problem we think only political deception and bias when in fact the problem is of political action of the ought, that it is only possible though institutional mediation by construction. This means the separation of cognition into is, and imagination as the cognitive “ought to” image, is wrong. Cognition is at once fecund for change the is implies an ought or several possible ought’s but the gap is not cognitive but cognitive/practical. This is a rearrangement and reworking of a piece on natural law I am still writing for a previous discussion you had last week. It is inspired obviously by McDowell’s Kant but also a paper by Donald Davidson on empirical under determination and ad verbs. Which to me implies that when we make a policy under a rule the policy, through the rule can capture much unintended or double effects cases. In fact it can be the double effect “accidents” hat can be the “real” aim of the policy. Cases under descriptions and definitions can spread not because of vagueness of the concepts but because of the openness and freedom in their instituional application. Also then institution can be added to parts taken away reorganised all of which changes the meaning of the original conceptual descriptions since its use now draws in much not originally present and constructed with the original policy and instruction. So for example you send the immigrants to some island cos they are illegal immigrants, and some extras policy and institutional rearranging later all criminals are classed as illegals. Or in fact a definition a refugee can come to mean anybody over time as the additional institutional changes mean its meaning as use application changes with wide institutional contexts eg in context with other concepts and institutional rules. We need t be very vigilant about the move to bring together different institutions and departments for say efficiency and cost cutting, even as they get people “in the studio” to come along and evidence problems of disconnected institutional actors like at the Manchester Area Bombing response. We already have enough police bias towards public and private institutions without formally tying them together.
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  2. Part 1 just on the introduction: Human nature is such that in speech, we have the conceptual freedom to express a situation, through or under, many different concepts. This was clearly one of Kant's central incites on the human condition of freedom and responsibility towards and within the realm of nature. Such a freedom is determined or bounded and limited by thoughts categorical practices (acts) to maintain a constancy (symmetry structure, conservation, continuity, invariance) within experience that the world doe not furnish such constancy ready made for experience. Such a limit is grounded ultimately in the "transcendental unity of apperception" that "the "I think" must accompany all my representations" of nature in experience. That is this "Copernican Revolution" of placing the active human at the centre of the ground of experience of nature, it means for example thoughts directedness to objects is in the first instance a case of an act of looking on an object, as neither determined by causal nature (to be caused to see x is say a reflex a natural event happening to a passive agent not an active act by an agent as such), not to be the product of an absolutely free agent, free even to actively create it experience ex nilo sue generically (like an image of a creator God). the former is perhaps a direct realism the later perhaps a complete idealism. Kant is neither, rather an empirical realist and transcendental idealist (H. Alison). This interpretation owes much to McDowell's Mind and World. The problem of transcendental idealism is though, that the freedom of the conceptual in naming and categorising things through the subjects drawing on in conceptual freedom, is in McDowell's terms a kind if idealist risk that we can determine our experience in many ways. Description unconstrained and under determined by experiential data (not though a conceptual tradition) becomes a "spinning in a void". He means i think, the risk of a subjectivism and relativism of description with no external ground constraint to "force" or provide "friction": a normative limit to this conceptual possibility say in us arriving at agreement based in the way the world is or presents to us independently of our conceptual freedom. Politically, this means any event can be described as a type or token of many species genus possible conceptual general terms. The event or object as underdetermined in its self, in its essence, means we can describe and are apparently justified in so describing the even tin many ways. in the world we have a choice then to say here "men" "Muslims" "male Muslims", "humans", "male humans". In so doing we are compelled then to project this description to include all other members of the concepts with the concept case. ie a single judgement (though the categories) becomes judgment of placing many under the one event description as a series through a rule. thinking then bear down on the object but also the rest of the universe is draw into it. (We may contrast this then with a forced choice or judgement (as in Stoic rejection of force as an account of judgement Seneca, or God and Gods names as source) Now i believe this Kant of McDowell is addressing issues from 1. C.L. Stevenson, who saw a conceptual choice and so a free space for exercise of rhetoric and mesmeric language use not just in moral vocabulary but in description also; 2. R.M. Hare, who drawing on his experiences of decisions for a whole group of people, in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during world war two, of the triage of scarce food and medical resources, held that there was a freedom of policy choice but in the giving of reasons justifiers and legitimacy claims, the conceptualised decision policy became a rule of law: with demands of constancy and community mediated inclusion of the decider only under the concepts and policy already decided. This way of thinking had massive effects on pollical thought later informing Rawls and the later turn to discourse and communication pragmatics, into the later project everybody and their mates have had something to say. What i find interesting is that in thinking about conceptual freedom as a commitment, in rationality, to treat others the same way (a case "in intuition" means or demands a series of cases are abducted by a rule "through the understanding") has, it is known a relation to the rule of law, but i hold it links more directly to policy and policy possibility. but here, as policy is something acting on or with the world to change it , institutionally, what was thought of as an unconstrained freedom of mental acts though imagination, is now not unconstrained, as policy requires much effort to construct and needs to draw in may adherents on the way, not just through party voting but its workers. What was thought as an open idealism in need of constraint by the image of empirical friction on imaqginaiton, is now the constraint of practice in that the choice of concepts of description are limited by possible action of a form of worldly is to ought mediate by policy imagination. So the constraint is really present in the existing instituional policy possibilities and the future instituional policy possibilities. the imagination then is best thought of as practical imagination to create new institutions wit new policies and there general terms. So the constraint on conceptual freedom is not empirical reality or the "i think" alone but practical possibility and the imagination of instituional construction.
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  3. Part 6: In respect of policy, or what i have said here in relation to praxis. there is a demand for a certain kind of simplicity. This usually means some all absorbing principle is required. A political philosophy is thought to be concluded by a final principle as its content what it means an instruction a statement on what to do. from this no one needs to worry so much about how it is arrived at and whether it is arrived a from its own presuppositions. This as in a proof of a natural law first principle is politically repaced by the political task of drawing people in. With the young who start without an attachment to alternative views or with little knowledge alternative views this seems appropriate politically. They are just "bilder-ed" into it. But politically it needs to persuade others who are already attached an informed, to convert them. In training sessions this is just to educate the principle and its application. there is no debate here its seen as just learning new technique like a science fact or or a health and safety protocol, or for a discourse efficiency app when working or making a deal with people from elsewhere. the conflation of a political principle with respect for the other and communication efficiency. people demand in the political an institutionally apt statement of intent or a "philosophy" or something for a banner. in this way the tradition is to begin from an alternative starting point to other political philosophies and then to argue it out a the level of attachment to the principle. and so it is the final principles that are argued about in context of specific cases, and the proofs as they are are drawn in form the principle at the start. the opposite of this is arrived at when one is first seeking to get the numbers and then works a principle for the numbers and any proof is secondary as is any argument. Now perhaps politics begins with a meme and technical devices of its dissemination. politicians becomes lazy, political argument descends into character abstraction of just the minister or prime minister, never the Milgram Security Trained Goons except as an extreme case for the argument of abstract character and principle. This is politics in the tradition of natural law, argument over what should be the first principle and even the excluding of any other principle at all. the principles though are all teleological, they are programs project operating in time and under a metric of measurement, as such they are infinite projects. as such these projects can continue long after the political party have left office ,they continue with habitual legitimacy and the continuation of the infinite project after even its political rejection. As such the contemporary world politics seeks to intervene in is already furnished with principles and projects in action already. Another feature of these natural law structures, with their infinity, is they claims to use technology as in science and law to apparently actualise our minds and action towards the whole towards transcendent equality or freedom. the idea is that to become mature, and so the purpose of education, is to become attached to technology as a sensible and motivational expanding devices. That maturity consist in our bodies becoming infinite in orientation. this would be bad enough for the presence of only one principle in operation in the world but there are many and in conflict and we are torn between them, in this body politic of legions of principles. Natural law then claims that scientific instruments actualise our sensible capacity to appropriate infinity in comprehending nature and human nature. All those documentaries I used to watch on Cosmology and Quantum Mechanics were really perhaps training me that my intuitions are all wrong. Phenomenological I was just interested in this stuff, but on meeting people at university who were really good at maths, I realised I was not going to be one of them, but maybe I also liked the fact that it gave me the impression I knew more about stuff than the man in the street. I could enjoy a certain status, perhaps philosophy even though I had great interst in it would also perhaps I thought extend my status and authority. Trouble is the philosophy I got into in the end set me on a project to undermine this vice myself *. Maybe true also of lawyers and Doctors. In law right that began as limit to the law or to what could become law or even how legal institution should function, has become a infinite project. Natural law as natural right as then positive right (capacity and obligation) is evolving and actualising our moral and ethical maturity. To grow up is to become orientated to science representation of the world and rights representation of human relations. Such a mature person ought to know and respect science and legal rights. in face to face talk they ought to talk about universals like wages institutions and tax. Not where they are from such anthropology is ok as a joke or a curiosity, but not a public attachment or obligation. [*Positive influences: Nagel “ The View From Nowhere”, Kant and Wittgenstein, Husserl “Crisis of European Science” Heidegger “his later work” Hanna Arendt “all of her stuff” McDowell “Mind and World” and his papers. Sellars “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” Moore and Pritchard on two faces of intuitionism. Bernard Williams “Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy”. and many more philosophies I disagree with but draw on constructively and its expanding to the vice of everybody ever! Just to either consciously bring the opponents in at the beginning at the level of metaphysics, not that is, to argue with them at the end at the level of propositions. But perhaps subconsciously to try and attain a status of knowing everything. The books as a commodity of property ownership and use, like people might buy a car. Or as middle class passport like people have a certain fashion style. Or to be heard and listened to at that level for it is the middle class this is obviously primarily addressed to. It’s them that have the symptoms of the illness. In Wittgenstein’s sense not in the sense of de humanising them.]
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  4. Part 5: My point about the apprehension of an object as involving, in the fist instance a already "in relation" between a subject and object is from McDowell's use of Kant and Hegel particularly in relation to realism and conflict respectively, and so to make a space in modern discourse for the Aristotelian understanding of experience as an already fitting of subject and object through essence and as such not though law understood as "rules to infinity" but as actualisations of its proper use. This understood then as truth not as a correspondence but a certain correct appropriate character and legitimacy with the object. The relation then is neither causal conflictual series redundant, but one of being in common ground. common ground not just being the rule of law and the subject as law maker also subject under the law, rather in the way that a sculpture and chisel are not antagonistic to their object , or that before we can sculpture something we are to know it pre theoretically, that is substance and constancy in a process of sculpting or manufacturing begins with the objects already appropriate showing of its dispositions naturality common sense wise before a formal structure that presupposes this sense of the object is drawn. I get this from the failure of robots to deal with unfired clay in a pottery factory. the robots were form a car factory used to working with steel. Even a destructive test begins with an object already fitted to its framework of measurement. The loss of this sense of substance subject is revelled as forgotten by the fact of institutional infinite functions. the infinity rest on and with the object thought of as a zero but that exists. the idea of another institution rights constructing the object negativity to some other institution say as a limit, cannot be right since it claims this substance subject is ontologically dependent on it rule, not that it is prior as acquaintance to those rules. Arendt held that rights presuppose a state and legal institutions for their use in practice, which implies without the institutions there are no natural rights as such. Something like openness to the human in acquaintance before the law is then presupposed by the law. in Heideggerian terms perhaps its the notion of "ontic rights" presuppose acquaintance. And this is what here erased and forgotten and neglected in that real face to face encounter of subject and beaurocrat. even the so called human interface training just produces another level of more myopic rule following "blinded by the rule of respect". but worse the human rights paradym supposedly about us or us against the institution is a way another institution abducts us to its rules. we get this form the sense that a claim of face to face indignity, becomes a legal relation of conflict between two institutions. Also to claim a right of equality through this institution demands of us that we recognise their other uses and applications of this right for others. quickly we get that sense we are also on trial or that it is not a free right but a legal political right with obligations. In fact i have noticed in recent years a new way the left get you to agree to some right is to fist interpret that right in some alternative but coherent context and content and then to apply a ordinance on the subject that makes the subject claim a right to get them to stop. familiar tactic now i imagine. The upshot is the creation of system of integrated dependency (as I think Philip Petit puts it), but as well as integrated also internecine conflict between them. the current thinking of policy instutions rules and laws as belonging to familiar modern logic, language and metaphysics of the modern world 20th century world has been over run by instituional events. the problem of institutions is one of responsibility, the new institutions with the old logic cannot make sense of responsibility. But his lack of fit with the central idea of democracy as responsibility, also allows those in those instutiosn to claim to be also subjects like the rest of us and to data themselves sin by the same metrics as us, and hide that they as instutional actors are of a different categorical disposition and constitution. different in power scope and exculpation. from here they can use language and logic and policy to divide us to distract us, to gradually work their own private class interests into systems of our dependency. let alone the normal uses of corruption here status ad power grants them, and the physicality of their wealth aspartate allows them to avoid the effects of large scope laws direct at particulars. hey avoid the effects of the coming austerity while claiming to be on the side of the poor as institutional social actors, and as business people for employment. Our modern world has legal reasons argued as policy and claims about human nature gotten form medial science and social science, and integrates them in many possible and politically selective ways. It looks like natural law, but it is a simulacra. the gap between the langue and thinking of policy by the agents and the langue us of ordinary people has upended the social contract. All we get is every five years a month where the poltititions have the humiliation of trying to get our vote. what happens after is for us unclear and anything goes wrong at this level we get a five years enquiry that forgets the subjects at both ends and a conclusion o five minutes. its just a control and distraction tactic. the disruption of any sense of right action in response at he time. Neither, voting, nor rights, nor enquiries is going to mediate the social contract. at least we still have a country cos if that goes to the international beurocratcs then its over. Ended up a bit of a rant I'm afraid but i hope it has relevant connection to your discussion. thank you Samantha Smith and Peter Whittle and NCF for the discussion.
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  5. Part 7: I propose the opposite. That is I begin with what is present or potentially present, the operation principles their history and arguments and context from the past they emerged into our present and through what present context or genesis. As such my approach is hermeneutic and seeks to place the various different versions of natural law or indeed its modern deformed versions, in proper relation to each other. This is how I read Kant: backwards as emerging out of his philosophical long historical and logic content. The centre of this method is that the various conflicting principles in operation seek to ground unities under them. Each has its own desired unity in mind as an infinite “end” point maturity. Thus I begin with Kant’s dialectic and arrive at the position from out of them as opposed to devising an apriority position and then after the fact arguing against other philosophies. Central is the error in the notion of unity is dialectical natural laws. For them the unity comes by virtue and through the duty of the principle. They have different unites in mind under different principles. My view is these principles rather than being constitutive of unites, are the secondary post factual abstractions form the original unity. The task is to see how they fall together when de abstracted through reference to and implication of each to the other as relations. It comes from a reading of Kant on the unity of apperception “is” the unity of the object. The unity of the proposition and the unity in the syllogism. It is to take a stand on things like modesty in understanding meaning, that here is pre inferential pre theoretical understanding of the world, that is finite and deals with contextual particulars. The cost of each natural law principle is that each seeks to eliminate its other. In the world at this moment in time it is the local the contextual that is to be eliminated for the planet. But maybe in the future as a natural law reaction will have the principle of the local as the new master. Clearly the idea of the local (found in Foucault’s and Ian Hacker’s discussion of the Chinese Encyclopaedia) seems the antithesis of natural law. What is local cannot be natural in this sense only immature in need of widening of horizons. Natural law seems to demand in all its forms leaving the family the community friends for a job in a city office with other dislocated internationalists. Who are the homeless here? What this means is ethical relations are increasingly mediated and measured in value as legal or possibly legal expressions. I find this in Ibu Khaldun ,also in one tradition of Chinese thought and legal thought and in the difference of city and country etc. Common law and common sense and a jury of peers then would seem to be the antithesis of legal reason and right. They bolt on somewhat like a Frankenstein monster such things as Indigenous rights, community rights family rights. But only under a universal concept of these. And as such for the left and the right these are problematic for equality and problematic for efficiency respectively. As such the idea of a country the original body of law and the basis of legitimacy in democracy is being replaced by country transcendent law and international institutions. International local rights are not immediately local but only local after mediation though international recognition. Here reflection and speculative science and right has upended the proper specificity and uniqueness relations here. I cannot express my family relations as in terms and logic of international law. As such migration is not a particular case or example for the conflicts of natural law rather it is the central constitutive issue all others turn on. People viewed from space as having international rights the capacity to move and work where the wages are highest and to consume in the hope that all there activities will be moneterised eventually. With the international movement of people then will go the social construction of international housing, and any local practice not commercialised will be restructured as such eliminated or to pay for. The left I remember from the 1980s were against the homogenisation of people though international corporations like McDonnalds as the example. It sees to me the new left are all for this. Everywhere will be like an Airport lounge as someone once said. Post Modern Architecture is just the mediation between the village pub and the Airport. To paraphrase Wittgenstein: “[Natural law philosophers are like absent international] landlords and it’s my job to [draw a limit to their] business”.
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  6. Part 4: Note: Ordinary finite human action is teleological, it has an end point. Instituional action is rarely a one off almost by definition and structure. but as action though laws and rules, as a series, it is endless, or if an aim like "equality" is also without end. Its a kind of infinite action a kind of God. This alone is enough for us to question its fidelity to the case immediately in front of. It thinks and acts sub specie aeternitus and out self preservation as is the mythical ground of legitimacy itself it leaves behind. institution are of a different kind to people often in conflict with each other or in networked visible or invisible relations they work together. they are categories' of constructed passivity creation, for policy outsider of categories of responsibility. They frame voting, they are not voted for as such. They are a kind of "value free space" as your previous commentator put it in another context. They transcend the categories of responsibility while exculpating there actors. In the old natural law tradition they cannot be dismantled due to their categorical status regardless of serial effects on subjects with agent then escape. i will expand on this in my discussion of your previous guests fecund (hope that the right word I've no dictionary no internet) concept of "vale free space". the point is the hierarchical structural systems of instituional law rules reason logic and language, to fall under one concept of unification and coherence (first principle) probably never was how these institutions actually worked with each other and in the world, but it definitely is not like this now. in an endless task there is no infinite actuality, rather actuality and potentiality only applies to finite things. Modern institutions are rules system that mimic the modern rule law series basis of our scientific view of nature as law. it is a myth that such institutions are really able to be infinite projects. not the finite of nature as a whole but the finite of human nature. once we disavow ourselves of a single principle of reason, a myth of a supreme single a priori natural law of the relation of reason to nature, we escape the infinitely for mutuality of finite series having constraint between each other not as an external determination in logic of a kind of tautologies empirical natural fact or proposition. and the role of essence here is that there can be no real abstraction of anything from anything else in this. see Aristotle's view of action cognition as essence and a relation at once of subject and object of cognition, no real separation is possible as meaning straggles these abstracted pseudo ontological dualisms. We see it everywhere in politics when they talk of "us" verses the "power of the "market"", when in fact they are not distinct separable domains except if we mistake bounded definitions for being.
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  7. Part 3: from my argument below we can diagnose some problems of contemporary legitimacy. So Schumpeter held that democracy was really only good at getting rid of the bad guys. To make it good at getting in the good guys in he felt that the relation between the voters and the government should be like the relation of consumers and producers, we "buy" policies. i think his image became powerful among the people working out of Pareto choice though R. M. Hare. it is very interesting to run and critique this analogy and prescription metaphysically, but i think it explains some of the problems and conflicts of current debate and looks forward to the age where policy is determined (if aggregately) by unintentional clicks on social media mapped by algorithms data. To feed into policy without a shape an aesthetic a unity. Can we or ought we to think of policy under supply demand logic. consumption is not in the first instance a disunity consumed goods have mutual relations of a kind of necessity (tv settee coffee table etc). perhaps we could ask if policy is or ought to be, chosen as utilities as taste desire determined as self interest, but maybe we ca ask if the conceptual structure of consumption is really so devoid of features and nuance, a unity and agent responsibility for the shape of consumed goods as a subjective whole. I was informed years ago by a professional sales man of the advertising turn from thinking of good brought for desire satisfaction, to the idea of a set of goods brought together aesthetical by the consumer what he called the "buying of a life style" revolution in advertising. in this is a aspect of aesthete coordination that projects or abducts to a responsible agent in a way a single good does not Single goods captured only by desire and lack: no space or time continuity no notion of buying what becomes a mere passive frame for other the goods really. perhaps something like a unity of apperception is present in a life style not present in the case of a single good brought a used as if on its own. we need food water shelter, any one on its own is sub life abstraction and so not real referring to an agent as such. It is then as policy about the series supply of individua goods by a company in contrast with Anscombe's shopping basket and surveillances etc. buying to form a unity a shape of things to live with has responsibility in a way a single consumption does not. (c.f. Kant and Arendt on Evil) Our problem is that at the level of policy series creation there is no one responsible in the ever changing aggregate of subjects and the diversified and disseminated loss of responsibility. a policy set to make the world anew, can be silent on the new image as a whole and talk of different series of data. we consumers are then held as responsible for the aesthetic whole we only brought as taste desires of disconnected parts. The key problem of evil now, is here, where policy is anoyminious, the policy production structure is aimed at exculpation evil is not the act as such but the structured doing of an act that as double effect at once exculpates the author a priori. Rarely is the policy creator the minister who inaugurates it and rarely still that they stay in post throughout its role out. An exception would be Ian Duncan Smith at the DWP. we are generally left with that most Satanic of beurocratic speak "the institution apologises" which is worse than nothing as the old notion of evil had to claim to fall below ordinary capturable bad acts.
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