Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "No Such Thing as 'Institutional Racism'. Boris vs Parliament. Ramadan Lights in London." video.

  1. Part 3: at 17:00 mins i am remined of a topic in early 20th century analytical ethics that kicked of the whole subject of what's now called "metaethics" (from R. M. Hare). There's G.E. Moore that any definition of "The Good" (utilitarianism) we can always ask of a specific case "but is this Good? he called definitions to do ethics of the good a naturalistic fallacy. it has generated much discussion to say the least. some about the problem of the application of an empirical quantity as meaning Good is a problem about the complexities of a real situation a not metrizable. Also its hinted in Moore but in Pritchard that rules cannot determine what is right in a similar way. Pritchard held that what is important is a first look a prima facie interpretation, that we maybe can then reflect on (my memory!). for me the problem is not about the application of a single rule or a single utility measure. In this sense these are Wittgenstein's pseudo problems, problems that are not genuine needing a solution but due apparent problems based on initial mis descriptions. If we are scared of spiders we don't need as per4fect spider detector and computer and spend loads of money on a absolute spider killing machine: We need therapy to get over a confused irrational errored position. So the phenomenology is that like in Aristotle's virtues we are always really in the middle of all the virtues at once and virtue is the balance of all of them at once. there is no real problem of how to just get the virtue of Justice " right on it s own in abstraction from all the others. We need to discern in judgment open to experience what is significant essential from trivial. if we think its a problem from one measure or one rule we just go on and on without end trying to capture the whole world form one determination. its funny sometimes meeting people who have a very strict and defined sense of what is just and right and good. Anything as "Other" not covered by their definition is a free for all. strangely there very ethical moral view can give them the freedom to be completely what ever for what's not under the rule. some want a the freedom and then find a rule that is legitimate that does not include it, and then go on and on about the rule while doing what ever. Virtues are not separated in the same way as sets of different rules . and virtue and vice distinction is not the same as "in the law" and "outside the law". and acting to a rule for an end is not the same as acting within a rule (Wittgenstein and Kant or Good and bad). I'm getting ahead of the discussion but one good point in the Boris Johnson Evidence was by the Chair early on Boris said something like "acting to the rule where possible" and the Chair implied this was like. I'll have to check but like a turn around of view or sight a taking of possibility as itself is a principle. Like the making of a law creates a new view and a new set of possibilities not possible before the law. like banking regulations or the US Government in 1930's i think passing acts on Corporate ownership that made it possible for one of the super rich in America to take their wealth to a whole new level using complex creations from the new corporate regulations. its not the same problem as the awful fridge and camouflage jacket. That is an effect of one rule. its has no solution as it stands.
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  2. A nice point by Emma Webb 8:00 mins "Institutional racism/sexism etc implies that if you remove all the people from the institution, then there would still be something about it that was it is still racist sexist and so on". On a first look it seems like an abstract thought experiment, or what are called philosophers sci fi examples. It appears to invite bizarre images like an empty building. Perhaps it an image or archetype of a certain philosophical idea or project that is implicit and this image makes it explicit. For example the gradual but manifold ways humans a and human judgment is being removed from institutions and replaced by machines and an computer algorithms. This actually began thousands of years ago with tallys, written audits, records, registers, The Doomsday Book, double entry book keeping, Blackstone's Attempt to Codify and rationalise the common law, The French Republic's Census and Rights, in the sense of Philip Bobbitt these are technologies. Derrida describes writing after Plato's Pharmakon a cure in small doses and a poison in large doses. Also Foucault's discussion of the Archive. I think is was ready for Derrida and Foucault having seems James Burke's "Connections" and Brownoskie's "The Accent of Man" back in the day. I used to draw examples from those 70's documentaries in the seminars, from memory. After reading Foucault and Derrida, the Adam Curtis's documentaries nailed it for me. I guess the idea of an institution without people is behind John Searl's "Chinese Room" thought experiment against AI. That there is no understanding there, no reflective unity in the system, or in sci fi it has no consciousness or it might develop Self- consciousness. my mum has a computer tablet she can speak into. The other day as a joke she said a rambling kind of ordinary language question into the tablet. like: "I was talking to Jane the other day and she was on about that film the one with Paul Neuman in where he's a con man with that other bloke". And the tablet brought up The Sting" Ha Ha Ha. I said it doesn't understand you. Like I would know if she was talking to Jane she was probably round these house on Friday having dinner. but i guess with algorithms and the internet tracking us for our location so the system is more efficient for our use it will be able to make that "inference". Maybe then Blackstone's failed project of codifying the Common Law will be done by these tracking and identity time and location devices in the internet of things. It won't really matter that no one can actually understand this even the machine, there are now lots of accepted mathematical proofs done my machines that no one understands. This is odd the process of removing people from institutions though policy and bit by bit all over the place, I don't think has some sinister group of people in charge, it doesn't need it. There's no one their. Its not a explicit aim or purpose there is no ordinary intention and responsibility and authority. The legitimacy, the reason if you will, is the explicit drives of utility efficiency and risk free perfection in action and minute context along with the legal technologies of equality and justice for all. The final synthesis of the dialectic of absolute particular and absolute totality. I'm not been hyperbolic or pretentious here, I think these technologies continue the European Enlightenment projects of Rationalism, but now without the need for consent or a vote "our" utility and justice metrics do it autonomously. in a way modern democracy's of economics and law never vote for the basic form of justice and the basic content of utility. The rationalisms of both are taken as givens, and posits. It actually goes back much further than the European Enlightenment to Plato's forms. Its height is traditionally seen as Hegel's dialectical instituional sublimation progressing to the Absolute idea. Certainly 1960's critics of totalitarianism like Popper, I. Berlin even Arendt thought the 20th century totalitarianism were manifestations of, or constructions from, the Western Tradition from Plato through Hegel to Fascism and Communism. It ironic that the tradition Berlin and Popper came from, eg Russell, Ayer, had constructed and developed functional logic and empirical science early in the 20th century to combat Hegel and form a basis for a kind of positivist and positing liberalism and technological development and utility. it ironic because it is this liberal orientation that seems to be leading us back to Hegel by other means. Institutions without people without responsibility, no one there. There no voting input for i don't want his machine and this destiny. they saw Star Trek too and so have an ad hoc schema to detect Gödel type questions "Grammatically incorrect". Another irony is in Europe during the Rationalist Enlightenment and Romanticism there was a "Counter Enlightenment that Critiqued it, all the way. Pascal, the bloke who Criticised Leibnitz "best of all possible worlds" in that novel? Kant, English writers and poets, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. Then it gets weird, because the 20th century Critics of this are all now classed in oeuvre of Critical Theory and Critical Continental Philosophy, Benjamine, Arendt, Adorno, right up to Donna Haraway I guess and cyborgs theory. lots of them began with a Critique of Hegel on his early paper "Difference" and the Totality, but they to have ended up in the same orientation to the Death of Man i guess you would say. There remains two other non leftist Counter Enlightenment European thinkers: Carl Schmidt and Heidegger but they were both committed active and unrepentant N**I's. Perhaps its back to Kant then but that leads us into a strange reversal of Emma Webb's point "imagine a person without an institution". Like Robinson Crusoe I used to watch in the morning during those long 70's summer holidays. Nostalgia aside there is a British Tradition that maintains that the "Disenchantment of the Enlightenment never happed it is a Myth. Hume, Burke, Oakshot. I've got a book on 20the century British Political Philosophy and Oakshot has half a page, and its not even in the index! The Wind is with Essex so we have to take the battle to those already there and on a field of their choosing. A good place to start then is Robert Pippin "Modernism as a Philosophical Problem" especially Chapter 3 on Kant and Hegel. Its right in there so a bit abstract, but as clear as you're ever going to get without making Kant look like a new version of liberal individualism. Sorry Emma's not going to be presenting these anymore. Looking forward very much to the Documentary tomorrow morning. Thank you Emma Peter and Philip.
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  3. A modern philosophical Critique of "a person without an institution" maybe can be Gotten from Hilary Putnam's "externalism" of meaning, and Hubert Dreyfus on AI. All these Pippin, Putnam Dreyfus debate these issues, individual social person and world with John McDowell. Also many from the left like Bernstein and Honneth debate these issues with McDowell recently. It's difficult stuff though, but there are books about the books now, and even books about the debates about the books now. But its a long game strategy i can tell you, and then to apply it to the real world.
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  4. Part 2: Additional note: The age old problem of the individual verse the social or the instituional, if we go to far the other way from the institution we get the myth of Robinson Crusoe (something like The Myth of Jones in Sellars 1955 1969). one way of Critique is my note to my earlier post: "A modern philosophical Critique of "a person without an institution" maybe can be Gotten from Hilary Putnam's "externalism" of meaning, and Hubert Dreyfus on AI. All these Pippin, Putnam Dreyfus debate these issues, individual social person and world with John McDowell. Also many from the left like Bernstein and Honneth debate these issues with McDowell recently. It's difficult stuff though, but there are books about the books now, and even books about the debates about the books now. But its a long game strategy i can tell you, and then to apply it to the real world." One thing is it gives the impression of developing the virtues and judgement alone. Without social context Criteria and teachers and history and culture. Absolute responsibility for all that is not nature or even was possibility within ones control of nature. This leads to the agent treating other as if they were mere parts of causal, nature only. as either risks or tools to avoid risk and so become instrumental for justice and utility and risk reduction. It leads back to what we were trying to escape. One point from Philip Kiszely that the controls and regulations and training not to be bad, don't work: it puts me in mind of St. Augustine steeling apples not for pleasure but because it wrong. its about freedom, that law as negative re-presents us and our freedom in a radically new way. From Wittgenstein virtue and rule judgment body environment are not separable in being. Negative laws are not phenomenologically the same as rules for humans. maybe this is the deep error the myth of separation of rules and virtue and conflation of rules and laws. I'm working on this in discussing the Boris Johnson Privileges Committee.
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  5. Part 4(A): On the Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the Privileges Committee Evidence Session. So I agree with your analysis that it is an event of distraction from many other contemporary events, and it attracts our interest as a ostensibly Human narrative in part lie a soap opera and in part like the increasing use of Courts and Legal system to pass judgement as the new public ethics and morality stage. That is probably from America in many movies supposedly about justice, and in endless live courts cases lasting many weeks, the law and the courts have taken on, and being given, the role of a Public ethics committee. The reason in part is due to the ethical and moral philosophical scepticism through out much of the 20th century. That is coming from very early on Moore and Russell were interpreted as having a scepticism of any hope of obtaining a purely objective ethics and morality in the traditional sense. This was interpreted by Ayer (and in part in Russell) that ethics and morality, were mere Subjective expressions, in part contrast to scientific statements. Science was at least making claims that could be tested by others even if its itself was no claim to be a real account of nature (Logical Positivist Empiricism was a phenomenalism but could be practically repeated "Verified" by others). So for Ayer ethics and morality are subjective expression of emotional reaction, with no basis in verifiably. But less well known, is that he also thought then the content of these emotions could becomes an object of the sciences of psychology and sociology as to "causes of why people feel and say the things they do. This was developed in America by C.L. Stevenson, who went on the argue that ethical and moral statements were not just the "expression" of subjective emotion's by a subject speaker, but were the the "use" of such "mesmeric" ethical and moral terms to incite or cause an emotional response in anther person. He also thought that even description of such apparent "neutral" facts which the ethical language used and turned on were not neutral either and already loaded with emotional and pragmatic aims. Following this in mid 20th century was a return to utilitarianism for content and the law for objective structure. in then kind of follows that court cases take the place of ethics and morality as objective since anybody else speaking is just emoting or try to influence surreptitiously. the sciences of harm and risk become content and the courts judgement. this "public" setting hen contrast with a private morality with no real legitimacy but only an object of interest to science and the courts. To do ethics and morality then becomes an object study of psychological and sociological science, and a practice of studying and learning to operate the legal system. Which increasingly now has sole legitimacy in the public domain. This obviously shifted some what with the turn by the Left to the veracity of "victims experiences and stories". but what people miss here is that this turn was a long time coming, with much psychological and sociology studies of mostly female and ethnic minority subjects. Its basis was not as is though just a turn to subjective truth but was ground laying by 40 years of feminist and leftist motivated work in psychology and sociology, drawing on samples from emerging feminist and minority groups in the 1970's. So that is part of the reason science and the courts have become the public arbiters of ethics and morality. But obviously this turn in role of science and law as "protection", is also at the same time a political turn, in which such science and law is a tool for political change and use (the political turn in science and jurisprudence) As such the public "spectacle" of the trial is a political tool of "use" for political purposes. As such it also has the role of "public shaming" in order not to punish but as a tool like a "medieval touring theatre" to show the private sphere what they should and should not do. law is not just about justice but a spectral eminence to change norms behaviour by a narrative of "sin" alone the negative. a story of the social and psychological world of people as just all the bad stuff. (See Roger Scruton "Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey"(1994) Especially Chapter 20: Morality and Chapters 28: Objective Spirit and 29: Subjective Spirit. (chapters 3 and 16)
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  6. This is great discussion. I wanted to finish it before tomorrow but it's nearly 11:00 Saturday night and I want to write notes too as its inspiring. So I'll be back to finish listening and writing, after tomorrow. Many thanks.
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  7. Part 4(B) So the Boris Johnson "Trial" can be seen as a public shaming, pretty much everyone joins in on, without realising that the strict rule of law applied to him, means all the applauders are quasi consenting to become under the strict rule of law themselves. In this sense it is super-political or Transcendently Political as a general form of feart and control. its to establish in peoples souls the sense of fear and being under observation for every detail in a priori sin. This last bit is a very Foucauldian interpretation by me, i have to say, from his "Crime and Punishment". Given all that the Privileges committee case itself raises or brings into view in one event extremely complex and interesting paradoxes and issues around science and the law and the person the pubic the private and the state of emergency. pretty much the entire cosmos in all its paradoxes can come to understanding here. i am working on a piece about this at the moment and its going to be challenging to read as well as to write. In my judgment Boris got the big things right. Some weeks before lockdown I had discussions with a friend who knows about micro biology who told me of the health seriousness of the virus and that it enjoyed a long period of transmission by a carrier before they were symptomatic. I had already, following 911 and 2008, studied the "State of Emergency" particularly in Philip Bobbitt, Carl Schmitt, and Georgiou Agamben. i already knew about the influenza epidemic of 1918 with tens of millions of deaths. About 20 years ago, maybe longer, I had been teaching mathematics to trainee nurses. I had used this data over and over again in examples to try and get the contemporary seriousness of this possible over to them then. I knew the problem was that they would need to close all the schools and even business to deal with it some two weeks before it became a major news issue. i was actually working on Derridean on the Law at the time so my correspondences were all in Derridean terms and distinctions between a geometric series and a exponential function, a distinction the scientists and mathematical modelers seemed unaware of and conflated. Also they seems to have to model it on homogenous population distribution relations which was clearly wrong but i thought the models required this assumption to preserve symmetry conditions for the model. So i was totally pro lock down two weeks before i just didn't think it was possible and so they would let lots of old people die and maybe save lots of money post 2008. I was then greatly impressed that Boris did it especially since no one would be gratefully for this and in the long run would be massively politically damaging, and look like a self inflicted wound. I didn't think they would use this in what appears to be an anti-Brexit multi strategy. But this is brutal and unforgiving real politic "it is what it is" i guess. I was then in radical support for Lock down it's not the way to make friends I can tell you. But early on in the Vaccine role out i discovered a report (only mentioned in a tiny news piece) that the Heath Care Staff in one hospital had been surveyed as to who had and would have the vaccine. The very low level even sub medical staff had and would have it but the higher up the hierarchy you went the less likely they were to have had it or indeed intended to have it. I went on a one man mission to confront them in many institutions over and over again, and man, were they upset. The arrogance, conceit, and privilege was incredible from everybody, nurses doctors, the lot. I was hauled off premises by usually ethnic minority security staff (a nice trick for compliance). The anger of the heath care workers was matched by the security guards laughing at me. I had the report and Onora O'Neil's book on heath care and trust (Reith Lectures 2003 too online)one of them filmed me explaining the issue and then hauled me off the premises. They called the police several times too, but strangely, although they had to defend the heath care workers, the many police who handcuffed me and held me in vans and cars were very sympathetic and one policeman sat and read the entire thing and then discussed it with me. i was apprehended but but never arrested or charged. they treated me much better than any of the Health Carers. I've got to say watching the Heath Care people striking for better pay and the police having endless criticism has not been much fun given my experiences. Look, for those who are celebrating Boris's "trial" , enjoy it while you can because its purpose and use is really directed to you. For example with the banking collapse and probably another social bailout (but I think more clandestine now) the politicians are going after teenagers and so on for using laughing gas, because its a public nuance and littering. For the shape of thing s to come watch Keir Stammers Port Vale FC speech on their radical crime program. He says it requires a "sharp intake of breath" but not laughing gas else they'll be after you as the legally and scientifically established source of all the ills of the world the new social virus and emergency.
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