Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Peter Hitchens on the Future for Britain's Youth. Is there any hope?" video.

  1. Part 1: 7:00 mins in. I'm sure I remember Peter Hitchens doing a piece on Fentanyl a medically prescribed pain killer in the US that was an over prescribed drug for the poor in pain by Doctors, which resulted in massive addiction and then for some moved over to Heroin use. The medical profession, politicians and criminal justice system can then jsut say the problem is Heroine use in a exculpatory move as if its sue generic. It puts me in mind of the death in early seventies of Jimi Hendrix which was described as consequence of drug misuse but was prescribed sleeping pills as I recall. On the other hand Brian Jones was hounded by the police and charged with Cannabis which he pleaded guilty to on bad legal advice. This as well as contributing to his exhaustion and difficult relationships with other members of the Stones, meant that he could not go on the American Tour as he could not get a visa with the conviction. He left the band or was sacked. In 1969 he drowned in his swimming pool and the story was drugs were the cause, but they were only prescribed drugs in his system for mental illness. There is a risk here that decriminalisation means medicalisation, which might be worse. They can always say the person was "on drugs" end of. Some one classed as mentally ill is basically homo sacure "bare life" without rights. Many prisoners, including some very infamous ones spent years trying to get out of the medical system and into normal prison eg with Rights and some privacy. when they say under "suicide watch" it means no privacy. Perhaps this is the fate of people and a population under various medical supervision transferred into the "Social and Community Care" system where there are "no cracks though which people can slip though". The medicalization of the population by probability and risk analysis on basis of care. Such anomic methods mean everybody is possibly disposed to all manner of evil action. Don't confuse associations with laws, probability binary relations can be misleading. Most theft is committed by criminals for money. Is this an empirical law or a conceptually necessary relation, like “rich people have money”? We can also ask of any appeal to "the drugs": is it "a priori" or "a posteriori" ie known before experience or only after experience. That is do people approach a body looking first for evidence of some spurious drug use. Anyone who has attempted suicide in a way cannot be murdered only killed. Well it would seem to be a priori in a pragmatically restricted sense but always possible within and along with other possible pre judgements on interpretations of "given" evidence. Here the a priori is a prejudice and or just a bit of blind mechanical “un-thinking”, imposed on the world and persons as evidence of lack of judgement, box ticking diagnosis and a higher policy direction that are repeated and over and over in the media too that together give the appearance of necessary law and necessary public accent. Similarly to the accusation and association of being Far Right or not Left and a Fascist. Maybe some people on the left and liberals do take drugs, more than people on the right and conservatives. But I think we should avoid thinking in terms of a strategy of finding something traditionally disingenuously selective a priori to attack them for. Cannabis and alcohol have different cultural histories and laws which made them factual illegal as an a priori event, and were later post facto re expressed in terms of harm and medical science to the person as disposition and society as population probabilities. These probabilities by binary two place sets of data propose to show empirical relations Drugs and crime. But these relations between members of a sets, and probabilities from them becomes tendentious and fated to people to be dealt with under and though the maximum end of extreme examples of evil and drug use. Problem is the logic of human action by agents and their dispositions are incongruent with pairs of binary set relations. Every action and disposition is not destined towards extreme cases, but the structure of binary sets as fate makes it look like this. The a priori shape of action here is the condition for set relation synthesis from priori abstractive analysis, but the analysis then appears to not require any of the shape of action. This means products of data analysis and statistical synthesis into apparent law would make it look like any one could be anything from moment to moment and have all kinds of incompatible properties appear as possible candidates for relations that make no sense in terms of human dispositions. We cannot learn anything from data, learning is in another level. Only the left think learning can be done with data and propositions and rules. In data the people have disappeared from their properties as functions, but without such shaped people before the data the data would be disordered, even though the data tries to omit this a prior moment. That is all empirical synthetic relations in judgement and proposition, must have operating within them a priori shape of action and disposition. Data is the shadow of the world and people, and like a shadow of someone in the evening that makes it look like everybody is on the way to the end of the street and over the horizon. Compare what a counterfactual can be like in terms of a person disposition to what it can look like from the point of view of data. There is a dispositional limit to counterfactually possible action that has no analogue in data and that data can even violate and make anything into possible anything. I could smoke some cannabis one evening, but I cannot imagine stepping out of my skin and skeleton to do some violence as the data would tendentious predict is possible probable even potential. Someone in the comments mentioned the guy in America in the sixties who was high and jumped off of a building. The then chief of police said in an interview he was a member of the military and was part of some kind of research into LSD. I wish I could do a better job of this but I need and am having a break soon. Data shows all work and no play makes Jack incoherent. I guess one thing data can’t show is radical incoherence. Evidence transcendent as Michael Dummett put it, and he got his student Marks off of a drug charge in the sixties. They were working on C.G. Hemple’s Paradox of confirmation or paradox of the Ravens at the time, a well-known book of the hippy counter culture. The problem I have outlined here manifests as an absurd paradox, that would seem plausible for data pairs and deductions.
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  2. Listening on from 7:00 mins, in discussing the possible future of conservativism, you contrast it with neo-liberalism of the 1980's and 90's. But I view this as an economic strategy to win the Cold War. indeed some early on saw the more modest aim of retaining the Balance of Power only. One problem was once the Soviet Union collapsed the neo liberalism continued on, perhaps in abstraction from communism then without it and I guess without its limits. So for example i heard that without the fear of the Soviet Union and threat of internal revolution in the West in the 20th century inequality would have risen massively, and the poor would have been driven down and down without fear of any organisation, to the limit of utility use efficiency, because of the expansion of the consumer base over seas. Kind of what happened after the 1990's party. Its odd that when you think about how to rebuild conservativism, the cultural base of which, you argue, has been erased through education by the 1960's and 70's left entryism, you are approaching "it" as a Socialist might. That is "the people" are viewed and so treated as if they are objects with some accidental cultural properties that need reorganisation. I imagine re-educational programs and the creation of mass movement of conservativism, and a praxis of Machevalien politics on opponents. It seems to me that you have or are yourselves, too much under the influence of the praxis of the New Revolutionary Left. I mean its like different propositions and principles aimed at but the method and really the aim is the same mass re-education for those under the influence of Left Socialist Ideology. This draws with it all the vices of no responsibility for the agents and the treating of the "the people" as objects ie as only "potentially" conservative proposition holders that need actualisation or causation to the transcendent aim. I mean Marx was anti religious but took images from it. I don't think we need to be anti communist but take materialist causal methods from them. This has been my one of my major theoretical problems: if conservativism is at least about the tradition; and thinks of human beings as agents not as mere objects of science institutions and their forces; then there is must be a incongruence between conservative values and the manifest image of man on the open hand and a scientific causal image of man under political praxis of techne to create and manufacture a people who would only then be mediately knowing a historical tradition, rather than being in it. This might mean a "conservative politics" is a contradiction in terms as traditionally understood or that we need to escape the realist causal image of political praxis of force on others and our potentially own. If the left in the 1970's could leave the old Soviet image and method behind in politics for more subtle force then conservativism has to rethink its mode of action and relations to the people. Derrida talking about literary theory in the 1970s must have sounded anodyne in the extreme to the Communists who were thinking militarily of armed struggle. Imagine a politics that does not try to use kinds of forces and tricks and deceit on its own people. I cannot imagine what this could be like because i think in terms of clearing away or pushing back the political machines, bearing down on pole from all sides, and, letting them be, in trust. Secondly we need to be able to say something about inequality also in a new way, beyond the left and liberal causal images and methods. Thank you again Harrison Pitt, Evan Riggs and Peter Hitchens. I'm going to have a bit of a break from this for a while and then I've a lot of your conference talks to listen too and the sessions on Roger Scruton and a few books on Conservativism to read. For this i will have to go ghost for a while i think. Laters
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  3. The references to the Manifest and Scientific image of man is from Wilfred Sellars. p.s. I don't think the conservative answer to "Of Grammatology" is "Of Cannabis".
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