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morwensteelsheen · 3 years ago

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I’m starting grad school this autumn and honestly I’m getting nervous. Like yes I am v excited about the whole prospect overall and I do miss being a student but am intimidated by 3 hr long seminars and thesis writing and massive amounts of reading… everyone keeps saying it’s gonna be very different from undergrad so okay, but how specifically? Is it the large amounts of reading? I already had insane amounts of reading (humanities degree hurrah) especially in my last two years but could you expound on your own experience and how you take notes/read quickly/summarize or just how to deal with first time grad students?

Oh, yeah for sure! A necessary disclaimer here is that I'm at a certain poncy English institution that is noted for being very bad at communicating with its students and very bad at treating its postgrad students like human beings, so a lot of these strategies I've picked up will be overkill for anyone who has the good sense to go somewhere not profoundly evil lol.

So I'll just preface this by saying that I am a very poor student in terms of doing what you're supposed to. I'm very bad at taking notes, I never learned how to do it properly, and I really, really struggle with reading dense literature. That said, I'm probably (hopefully?) going to get through this dumb degree just fine. Also — my programme is a research MPhil, not taught, so it's a teensy bit more airy-fairy in terms of structure. I had two classes in Michaelmas term, both were once a week for two hours each; two in Lent, one was two hours weekly, the other two hours biweekly; and no classes at all in Easter. I also have no exam component, I was/am assessed entirely on three essays (accounting for 30% of my overall mark) and my dissertation (the remaining 70%), which is, I think, a little different to how some other programmes are. I think even some of the other MPhils here are more strenuous than that, like Econ and Soc Hist is like 100% dissertation? Anyways, not super important, but knowing what you're getting marked on is important. I dedicated considerably less time than I did in undergrad to perfecting my coursework essays because they just don't hold as much weight now. The difference between a 68 and a 70 just wasn't worth the fuss for me, which helped keep me sane-ish.

The best advice anyone ever gave me was that, whereas an undergrad degree can kind of take over your life without it becoming a problem, you need to treat grad school like a job. That's not because it's more 'serious' or whatever, but because if you don't set a really strict schedule and keep to it, you'll burn yourself out and generally make your life miserable. Before I went back on my ADD meds at the end of Michaelmas term, I sat myself down at my desk and worked from 11sh to 1800ish every day. Now that I'm medicated, I do like 9:30-10ish to 1800-1900 (except for now that I'm crunching on my diss, where, because of my piss-poor time management skills I'm stuck doing, like, 9:30-22:30-23:00). If you do M-F 9-5, you'll be getting through an enormous amount of work and leaving yourself loads of time to still be a human being on the edges. That'll be the difference between becoming a postgrad zombie and a person who did postgrad. I am a postgrad zombie. You do not want to be like me.

The 'work' element of your days can really vary. It's not like I was actually consistently reading for all that time — my brain would have literally melted right out of my ears — but it was about setting the routine and the expectation of dedicating a certain, consistent and routinized period of time for focusing on the degree work every day. My attention span, even when I'm medicated, is garbage, so I would usually read for two or three hours, then either work on the more practical elements of essay planning, answer emails, or plot out the early stages of my research.

In the first term/semester/whatever, lots of people who are planning on going right into a PhD take the time to set up their applications and proposals. I fully intended on doing a PhD right after the MPhil, but the funding as an international student trying to deal with the pandemic proved super problematic, and I realised that the toll it was taking on my mental health was just so not worth it, so I've chosen to postpone a few years. You'll feel a big ol' amount of pressure to go into a PhD during your first time. Unless you're super committed to doing it, just try and tune it out as much as you can. There's absolutely nothing wrong with taking a year (or two, or three, or ten) out, especially given the insane conditions we're all operating under right now.

I'll be honest with you, I was a phenomenally lazy undergrad. It was only by the grace of god and being a hard-headed Marxist that I managed to pull out a first at the eleventh hour. So the difference between UG and PG has been quite stark for me. I've actually had to do the reading this year, not just because they're more specialised and relevant to my research or whatever, but because, unlike in UG, the people in the programme are here because they're genuinely interested (and not because it's an economic necessity) and they don't want to waste their time listening to people who haven't done the reading.

I am also a really bad reader. Maybe it's partially the ADD + dyslexia, but mostly it's because I just haven't practiced it and never put in the requisite effort to learn how to do it properly. My two big pointers here are learning how to skim, and learning how to prioritise your reading.

This OpenU primer on skimming is a bit condescending in its simplicity, but it gets the point across well. You're going to want to skim oh, say, 90% of the reading you're assigned. This is not me encouraging you to be lazy, it's me being honest. Not every word of every published article or book is worth reading. The vast majority of them aren't. That doesn't mean the things that those texts are arguing for aren't worth reading, it just means that every stupid rhetorical flourish included by bored academics hoping for job security and/or funding and/or awards isn't worth your precious and scarce time. Make sure you get the main thrust of each text, make sure you pull out and note down one or two case studies and move right the hell on. There will be some authors whose writing will be excellent, and who you will want to read all of. Everything else gets skimmed.

Prioritisation is the other big thing. You're going to have shitty weeks, you're probably going to have lots of them. First off, you're going to need to forgive yourself for those now — everybody has them, yes, even the people who graduated with distinctions and go on to get lovely £100,000 AHRC scholarships. Acknowledge that there will be horrible weeks, accept it now, and then strategise for how to get ahead of them. My personal strategy is to plan out what I'm trying to get out of each course I take, and then focus only on the readings that relate to that topic.

I took a course in Lent term that dealt with race and empire in Britain between 1607 and 1900; I'm a researcher of the Scottish far left from 1968-present, so the overlap wasn't significant. But I decided from the very first day of the course that I was there to get a better grasp about the racial theories of capitalism and the role of racial othering in Britain's subjugation of Ireland. Those things are helpful to me because white supremacist capitalism comes up hourly in my work on the far left, and because the relationship of the Scottish far left to Ireland is extremely important to its self definition. On weeks when I couldn't handle anything else, I just read the texts related to that. And it was fine, I did fine, I got my stupid 2:1 on the final essay, and I came out of it not too burnt out to work on my dissertation.

Here is where I encourage you to learn from my mistakes: get yourself a decent group of people who you can have in depth conversations about the material with. I was an asshole who decided I didn't need to do that with any posh C*mbr*dge twats, and I have now condemned myself to babbling incomprehensible nonsense at my partner because I don't have anyone on my course to work through my ideas with. These degrees are best experienced when they're experienced socially. In recent years (accelerated by the pandemic, ofc), universities have de-emphasised the social component of postgrad work, largely to do with stupid, long-winded stuff related to postgrad union organising etc. It's a real shame because postgrads end up feeling quite socially isolated, and because they're not having these fun and challenging conversations, their work actually suffers in the long term. This is, and I cannot stress this enough, the biggest departure from undergrad. Even the 'weak links' or whatever judgemental nonsense are there because they want to be. That is going to be your biggest asset. Talk, talk, talk. Listen, listen, listen. Offer to proofread people's papers so you get a sense of how people are thinking about things, what sort of style they're writing in, what sources they're referring to. Be a sponge and a copycat (but don't get done for plagiarism, copy like this.) Also: ask questions that seem dumb. For each of your classes, ask your tutors/lecturers who they think the most important names in their discipline are. It sounds silly, but it's really helpful to know the intellectual landscape you're dealing with, and it means you know whose work you can go running to if you get lost or tangled up during essay or dissertation writing!

You should also be really honest about everything — another piece of advice that I didn't follow and am now suffering for. The people on your courses and in your cohort are there for the same reasons as you, have more or less the same qualifications as you, and are probably going to have a lot of the same questions and insecurities as you. If you hear an unfamiliar term being used in a seminar, just speak up and ask about it, because there're going to be loads of other people wondering too. But you should also cultivate quite a transparent relationship with your supervisor. I was really cagey and guarded with mine because my hella imposter syndrome told me she was gonna throw my ass out of the programme if I admitted to my problems. Turns out no, she wouldn't, and that actually she's been a super good advocate for me. If you feel your motivation slipping or if you feel like you're facing challenges you could do with a little extra support on, go right to your supervisor. Not only is that what they're there to do, they've also done this exact experience before and are going to be way more sympathetic and aware of the realities of it than, say, the uni counselling service or whatever.

Yeah so I gotta circle back to the notes thing... I really do not take notes. It's my worst habit. Here's an example of the notes I took for my most recent meeting with my supervisor (revising a chapter draft).

No sane person would ever look at these and think this is a system worth replicating lol. But the reason they work for me is because I also record (with permission) absolutely everything. My mobile is like 90% audio recordings of meetings and seminars lol. So these notes aren't 'good' notes, but they're effective for recalling major points in the audio recording so I can listen to what was said when I need to.

Sorry none of this is remotely organised because it's like 2330 here and my brain is so soft and mushy. I'm literally just writing things as I remember them.

Right, so: theory is a big thing. Lots of people cheap out on this and it's to their own detriment. You say you're doing humanities, and tbh, most of the theory involved on the humanities side of the bridge is interdisciplinary anyways, so I'm just gonna give you some recommendations. The big thing is to read these things and try to apply them to what you're writing about. This sounds so fucking condescending but getting, like, one or two good theoretical frameworks in your papers will actually put you leaps and bounds beyond the students around you and really improve your research when the time comes. Also: don't read any of these recommendations without first watching, like an intro youtube video or listening to a podcast. The purists will tell you that's the wrong way to do it, but I am a lazy person and lazy people always find the efficient ways to do things, so I will tell the purists to go right to hell.

Check out these impenetrable motherfuckers (just one or two will take your work from great to excellent, so don't feel obliged to dig into them all):

Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels (I'm not just pushing my politics, but also, I totally am) — don't fucking read Capital unless you're committed to it. Oh my god don't put yourself through that unless you really have to. Try, like, the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon for the fun quotes, and Engels on the family.

Frantz Fanon — Wretched of the Earth. Black Skin White Masks also good, slightly more impossible to read

Benedict Anderson — Imagined Communities. It's about nationalism, but you will be surprised at how applicable it is to... so many other topics

Judith Butler — she really sucks to read. I love her. But she sucks to read. If you do manage to read her though, your profs will love you because like 90% of the people who say they've read her are lying

Bourdieu — Distinction is good for a lot of things, but especially for introducing the idea of social and cultural capital. There's basically no humanities sub-discipline that can't run for miles on that alone.

Crenshaw — the genesis of intersectionality. But, like, actually read her, not the ingrates who came after her and defanged intersectionality into, like, rainbow bombs dropped over Gaza.

The other thing is that you should read for fun. My programme director was absolutely insistent that we all continue to read for pleasure while we did this degree, not just because it's good for destressing, but because keeping your cultural horizons open actually makes your writing better and more interesting. I literally read LOTR for the first time in, like February, and the difference in my writing and thinking from before and after is tangible, because not only did it give me something fun to think about when I was getting stressy, but it also opened up lots of fun avenues for thought that weren't there before. I read LOTR and wanted to find out more about English Catholics in WWI, and lo and behold something I read about it totally changed how I did my dissertation work. Or, like, a girl on my course who read the Odyssey over Christmas Break and then started asking loads of questions about the role of narrative creation in the archival material she was using. It was seriously such a good edict from our director.

Also, oh my god, if you do nothing else, please take this bit seriously: forgive yourself for the bad days. The pressure in postgrad is fucking unreal. Nobody, nobody is operating at 100% 100% of the time. If you aim for 60% for 80% of the time and only actually achieve 40% for 60% of the time, you will still be doing really fucking well. Don't beat yourself up unnecessarily. Don't make yourself feel bad because you're not churning out publishable material every single day. Some days you just need to lie on the couch, order takeout, and watch 12 hours of Jeopardy or whatever, and I promise you that that is a good and worthwhile thing to do. You don't learn and grow without rest, so forgive yourself for the moments and days of unplanned rest, and forgive yourself for when you don't score as highly as you want to, and forgive yourself when you say stupid things in class or don't do all of (or any of) the class reading.

Uhhhh I think I'm starting to lose the plot a bit now. Honestly, just ping me whatever questions you have and I'm happy to answer them. There's a chance I'll be slower to respond over the next few days because my dissertation is due in a week (holy fuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) but I will definitely respond. And honestly, no question is too dumb lol. I wish I'd been able to ask someone about things like what citation management software is best or how to set up a desk for maximum efficiency or whatever, but I was a scaredy-cat about it and didn't. So yeah, ask away and I will totally answer.

#asks

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klysanderelias · 3 years ago

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sometimes I think a lot of the discourse around microlabels is dumb as hell and sometimes I think it's incredibly important because like, on one hand, someone who self-describes as an ecosocialist and someone who self-describes as an anarchocommunalist probably overlap so broadly that you're doing more work to differentiate them than it's probably worth for anyone who's not built their identity around being elitist, and 90% of the time you won't even know what the hell someone means when they call themselves a posadist unless you're already terminally involved, and even if you do know, it's like, there're already other identities that are inclusive of what you're describing and it feels like you're splitting hairs here for no reason

and on the other hand, if someone self-describes as a marxist-leninist-maoist, i IMMEDIATELY have some questions regarding their political and ethical stances that need to be resolved because hyperspecific portions of people who identify that way are batshit crazy and should be avoided on sight (shoutout to the austin/kansas red guards)

and this goes more or less the exact same for sexuality/gender microlabels as well (gotta love people who try to legislate new sexualities for the purpose of excluding trans folks, or to create distinctions that never existed originally and thus fracture the community as people try to figure out what the fuckin' difference actually is)

basically at the end of the day, it's frustrating because like, microlabels can be incredibly useful as a way to very quickly learn a lot about someone, both positive and negative, as I think they're intended to be, but also like, if you tell me you're an apothisexual demigirl, I'm gonna need so much of an explanation that you're probably doing more work to isolate yourself than you are to actually making your identity distinct

and generally you have to, again, be more or less terminally involved in order to know why the distinction matters or what niche idiots rest within each microlabel

#i don't blame people for wanting to find something that accurately describes themselves #but like. you can't expect people to know it offhand so it's almost not worth knowing the specific microlabel #and likely each microlabel has some shithead that gives it a bad name #most mlms are probably very reasonable people nowhere near the destructive stupidity of the red guards #but now I gotta fuckin' check

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evilelitest2 · 5 years ago

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Why were so many of the early Soviet Communists Jews?

I can’t tell this is a genuine historical question or an antisemitic conspiracy theory so i’m going to assume...both? If this was meant in good faith i’m sorry and if it was not, fuck off the Holocaust actually happened.

Ok so first off, their is a very long history of autocratic rulers linking people they don’t like to Jews, due to the wide spread antisemitic attitudes in Europe throughout history (including today). It actually provided an easy scapegoat for the regimes problems, especially monarchies, because it helped explain a flaw in their logic. Monarchs argue that the natural state of being is a triangle which involves god appointing a monarch who rule over the people, who are naturally happier being subservient. This gets worse with the Nazis, who worked very hard to link Communism with Judaism, since they blamed basically everything wrong with the modern world on the Jews

The ultimately example of this is in the Tsarist regime itself, because the Elders of Zion, the unholy grail of antisemitic conspiracy theories which is a supposed transcript of a meeting of Jews who secretly control the world. The book was written by the Tsarist secret service to try to discourse the people from revolution by blaming all of Russia’s problem not on the incompetence of the autocracy but instead on the Jews who people in Russia never liked anyways. In fact in the book there are some really ham handed bits where they are like “The only people who can stop our Jewish plot is the good Christian Tsar who is so cool and sexy and strong omg, I sure hope that the Russian people aren’t loyal to him”. So yet another reason to hate the Tsar.

So while there were many Jewish communists, the Communist movement as a whole was not Jewish, it was majority Gentile and as we see once they take power, had some pretty anti Jewish attitudes themselves. Even Marx, who was ethnically but not religiously/culturally jewish, had some pretty nasty views of Jewish, though not on racial lines. And be wary of anybody who works too hard to link Judaism and Communism, because they are likely influenced by some Neo Nazi ideas.

As to why Jews would want to be communists....well disclaimer a lot of Jews weren’t communists, in fact many of them were quite opposed to communism, either because they were traditionalists religious types, nationalist zionists types, or liberal capitalist types. Within the Russian Jewish community there were a wide variety of opinions and beliefs, as there have always been (insert obvious joke about Jewish family’s always arguing here).

However there are a few reasons why so many of the early Communists were Jewish, even if the majority were not.

1) Tsarist russia was extremely antisemitic and regularly targeted jews for harassment, discrimination, or death even when we don’t take the Pogroms into account, so it shouldn’t be surprisingly that many Jews were more than happy to see the Tsarist state collapse. In 1891, all Jews were expelled from Moscow, which lead to many Jewish families to become extremely (rightfully) embittered towards the Tsar. And for many Jews, communism seemed especially appealing since it offered to ignore any distinction based on race or background in favor of universal tolerance. This would largely prove to be untrue, as Soviet Russia had plenty of antisemitic attitudes such as the Doctor’s Plot, but certainly nothing on the scale of Tsarist russia and the Pogroms.

2) Many Jews were being blamed for revolutionary activities anyways. When Alexander II was assassinated, the Jews were blamed for the crime despite the assassins being of Catholic and Orthodox background. So for many Jews if you are going to be labeled as a Revolutionary no matter what you do..maybe become a revolutionary.

I mean the Tsarist state never really had the power to back this up, but their long term anti Jewish goals bordered on genocidal

"One third will die out, one third will leave the country and one third will be completely dissolved in the surrounding population" - Konstantin Petrovich Pebedonostsev,

3) The Jewish communities in Russia were fairly insular and self contained so they were actually somewhat protected from the Tsarist secret police. After all, it is a lot easier to plant spies or get informants if you don’t know anybody or how the culture works. And since the Tsarists secret police tended to be...really really antisemitic it should come as no surprise that these secret police didn’t really know to navigate Jewish culture

4) Similarly, the Jewish population largely spoke Yiddish and how many Tsarist secret police agents speak Yiddish. THe fact that they literally couldn’t spy on the Jewish communities meant that Communist Jews tended to do fairly well.

5) Also traditionally the Jewish community tended to be highly educated and that meant that many of them had access to Marxist writings and the training to understand them.

Again though, the Soviet Union was by no means controlled by Jewish leaders, you wouldn’t get antisemitic leaders like Stalin or Khrushchev if it had been.

#Ask EvilElitest #antisemitism #Russian History #tsarist russia #pogrom #Communism #russia #Jewish History #Okhrana #tsar nicholas ii #Tsar Alexander III #tsar Alexander II #Pale of Settlement #Nazism #Judeo-Bolshevism #Cultural Marxism #Racism

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the-cybersmith · 1 year ago

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Okay, I was content to just send this anonymously and leave it at that (for some reason, OP rarely answers my non-anonymous asks), but I feel I should respond here because you are being disingenuous.

I gave multiple examples of the hypothetical, and not all of them were fictional. Sam Harris is not an action movie character, neither is Dick Cheney. Torture is not something which is only discussed in action movies.

Also, OP is radically oversimplifying the issue. Torture DOES work, it's why it's so popular, including amongst certain socialist regimes (Saddsm Hussein was a type of socialist), there are only some specific scenarios where it doesn't work.

In order for torture to be ineffective, all of the following conditions have to be true:

1: you want specific, accurate information from the subject (if you want a confession, or sexual favours, or you just like hurting people, this doesn't apply).

2: you are uncertain if the subject actually knows that information (if you are torturing someone for the combination to his/her own safe, this doesn't apply).

3: you have no way to quickly verify that information in a non-costly fashion (if you want the password to a laptop and there's no maximum number of entries you can just remove another toe for every wrong answer, so this doesn't apply).

So, in most scenarios, torture works just fine. The majority of torturers don't want information, they want compliance and/or they just like torturing people. Those who DO want information can usually verify very quickly if what they are told is true or false.

"Torture doesn't work" is a moral cop out. It's an attempt to dodge the question and avoid confronting a genuine dilemma of right and wrong.

Also, don't try the ludicrous "private/personal" distinction. The human body is the most productive tool in history, it is the source of all other production, so even the (fake news baloney horsefeathers Marxist claptrap) definition based on "means of production" would not spare the human body. If Marxism had been instituted in Ancient Rome, gladiators wouldn't have been emancipated, they'd have been collectivised. Similarly to any slave society. The human body is not exempt from classification as a means of production, ergo it does not avoid socialist classification as private property, which socialists believe is no right at all.

Answer the question, OP. Torture works.

Why is it, from a socilist/communist/marxist-leninist perspective, WRONG?

As a Capitalist, as a Libertarian, as a Monarchist, I can tell you why it is wrong. I want YOUR answer.

Question: what is the communist position on torture? Since you tend to be materialists/relativists who don't believe in natural rights. What's the Marxist-Leninist response to the "ticking time bomb" scenario proposed by Sam Harris, Jack Bauer, and whatever the name of that character who Liam Neeson played in "Taken" was? You cannot appeal to absolute morality, because you don't believe in it. You cannot appeal to human rights, because that is private property, which you also don't believe in!!!

You cannot appeal to human rights, because that is private property,

#truth #politics #principle #rape cw #philosophy

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zwischenstadt · 5 years ago

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'Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism ... perhaps we should say no more about it': Simone de Beauvoir, at the very beginning of The Second Sex (1949). 'The subject is irritating, especially to women.' Long before they were shouting 'Ban the Bunny' and dressing up as butchers, feminists were annoying people, not just misogynists and sexists, but the very people you'd think would like them best. It was true in suffragette days, as it was during Women's Liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, and it's very much a problem for what boosters have been calling 'the third wave' since the early 1990s. We know the angry squiggles that signify this irritation - the hairy-legged Millie Tant man-hater, Mrs Banks in the Disney Mary Poppins, a suffragette too busy to care for her children. And it's obvious how useful such stereotypes have been in neutralising the threat felt in the wider culture. But these caricatures obscure a real problem: a confusion between self and other, identity and difference, that you might charitably view as an unfortunate side-effect of being of and for and by women, all at once; or, less charitably, as narcissistic self-absorption. It's true that women, as a gender, have been systemically disadvantaged through history, but they aren't the only ones: economic exploitation is also systemic and coercive, and so is race. And feminists need to engage with all of this, with class and race, land enclosure and industrialisation, colonialism and the slave trade, if only out of solidarity with the less privileged sisters. And yet, the strange thing is how often they haven't: Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed votes for freedmen; Betty Friedan made the epoch-defining suggestion that middle-class American women should dump the housework on 'full-time help'. There are so many examples of this sort that it would be funny if it weren't such a waste. Not that the white middle-class brigade like being on the same side as one another. There's always a tension between all of us being sisterly, all equal under the sight of the patriarchal male oppressor, and the fact that we aren't really sisters, or equal, or even friends. We despise one another for being posh and privileged, we loathe one another for being stupid oiks. We hate the tall poppies for being show-offs, we can't bear the crabs in the bucket that pinch us back. All this produces the ineffable whiff so often sensed in feminist emanations, those anxious, jargon-filled, overpolite topnotes with their undertow of envy and rancour, that perpetual sharp-elbowed jostle for the moral high ground. Looked at one way - in the manner of Joan Didion, for example, in her harsh, oddly clouded but startlingly acute essay of 1972 on the Women's Movement - the idea of feminism is obviously Marxist, being about the 'invention', as Didion put it, 'of women as a "class"', a total transformation of all relationships, led by the group most exploited by relations in their current form. So why did the libbers so seldom say so? Well, some came to the movement as Marxists, and did. Sheila Rowbotham wrote that 'the so-called women's question is a whole-people question' in Women's Liberation and the New Politics (1969); then in 1976 Barbara Ehrenreich stressed that 'there is no way to understand sexism as it acts on our lives without putting it in the historical context of capitalism.' Others shoved the categories in great handfuls through the blender: 'sex-class' must 'in a temporary dictatorship' seize 'control of reproduction' according to Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex (1970). More prevalent, however, was what Didion called a 'studied resistance to the possibility of political ideas' - who, in any case, ever heard of a radical-feminist movement taking its understanding of historical change from a man? The entire Marxist tradition was repressed, leaving a weird sinkhole that quickly filled up with the most dreadful rubbish: wise wounds, herstory, nature goddesses, raped and defiled; sisters under the skin, flayed and joined, like the Human Centipede, in a single biomass; the fractal spread of male sexual violence, men f[***] women replicated at every level of interaction, as through a stick of rock. And so Women's Liberation started trying to build a man-free, women-only tradition of its own. Thus consciousness-raising, or what was sometimes called the 'rap group', groups of women sitting around, analysing the frustrations of their lives according to their new feminist principles, gradually systematising their discoveries. And thus that brilliant slogan, from the New York Radical Women in 1969, that the personal is political, an insight so caustic it burned through generations of mystical nonsense - a woman's place is in the home, she was obviously asking for it dressed like that. But it also corroded lots of useful boundaries and distinctions, between public life and personal burble, real questions and pop-quiz trivia, political demands and problems and individual whims. 'Psychic hardpan' was Didion's name for this. A movement that started out wanting complete transformation of all relations was floundering, up against the banality of what so many women actually seemed to want.

Jenny Turner. From “As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes” in the London Review of Books December 15th, 2011

NOTHING EXTREMELY RELEVANT FOR THE MODERN LEFT HERE NO NEED TO READ JUST KEEP SCROLLING :P

#feminism #marxism #social justice #jenny turner #london review of books #barbara ehrenreich #joan didion

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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It has been 50 years since Noam Chomsky first became a major public figure in the United States, after publishing his essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” which argued that American academics had failed in their core duty to responsibly inquire into truth. Over the past five decades, he has paradoxically been both one of the most well-known and influential thinkers in the world and almost completely absent from mainstream U.S. media.

Nobody has been more influential on my own intellectual development than Chomsky. But I recently realized that what I’ve learned from Chomsky’s work has had almost nothing to do with the subjects he is most known for writing about: linguistics, U.S. foreign policy, and Israel. Instead, where I feel Chomsky’s influence most strongly is in a particular kind of approach to thinking and writing about political, social, and moral questions. In other words, it’s not so much his conclusions as his method (though I also share most of his conclusions). From Chomsky’s writing and talks, I have drawn an underlying set of values and principles that I have found very useful. And I think it’s easy to miss those underlying values, because his books often either consist of technical discussions of the human language faculty or long and fact-heavy indictments of United States government policy. So I’d like to go through and explain what I’ve learned and why I think it’s important. The lessons I’ve learned from Chomsky have encouraged me to be more rational, compassionate, consistent, skeptical, and curious. Nearly everything I write is at least in part a restatement or application of something I picked up from Noam Chomsky, and it feels only fair to acknowledge the source.

1. Libertarian Socialism

In the United States, “libertarianism” is associated with the right and “socialism” with the left. The libertarians value “freedom” (or what they call freedom) while the socialists value “equality.” And many people accept this distinction as fair: After all, the right wants smaller government while the left wants a big redistributionist government. Even many leftists implicitly accept this “freedom versus equality” distinction as fair, suggesting that while freedom may be nice, fairness is more important.

Libertarian socialism, the political tradition in which Noam Chomsky operates, which is closely tied to anarchism, rejects this distinction as illusory. If the word “libertarianism” is taken to mean “a belief in freedom” and the word “socialism” is taken to mean “a belief in fairness,” then the two are not just “not opposites,” but they are necessary complements. That’s because if you have “freedom” from government intervention, but you don’t have a fair economy, your freedom becomes meaningless, because you will still be faced with a choice between working and starving. Freedom is only meaningful to the extent that it actually creates a capacity for you to act. If you’re poor, you don’t have much of an actual capacity to do much, so you’re not terribly free. Likewise, “socialism” without a conception of freedom is not actually fair and equal. Libertarian socialists have always been critical of Marxist states, because the libertarian socialist recognizes that “equality” enforced by a brutal and repressive state is not just “un-free,” but is also unequal, because there is a huge imbalance of power between the people and the state. The Soviet Union was obviously not free, but it was also not socialist, because “the people” didn’t actually control anything; the state did.

The libertarian socialist perspective is well-captured by a quote from the pioneering anarchist Mikhail Bakunin: “Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.” During the 1860s and ’70s, 50 years before the Soviet Union, Bakunin warned that Marxist socialism’s authoritarian currents would lead to hideous repression. In a Marxist regime, he said:

There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of ignorant ones!… You can see quite well that behind all the democratic and socialistic phrases and promises of Marx’s program, there is to be found in his State all that constitutes the true despotic and brutal nature of all States.

This, as we know, is precisely what happened. Unfortunately, however, the bloody history of 20th century Marxism-Leninism has convinced many people that socialism itself is discredited. They miss the voices of people in the libertarian socialist tradition, like Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Noam Chomsky, who have always stood for a kind of socialism that places a core value on freedom and deplores authoritarianism. It emphasizes true democracy; that is, people should get to participate in the decisions that affect their lives, whether those decisions are labeled “political” or “economic.” It detests capitalism because capitalist institutions are totalitarian (you don’t get to vote for who your boss is, and you get very little say in what your company does), but it also believes strongly in freedom of expression and civil liberties.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #current affairs #noam chomsky #libertarian socialism #progressive #progressive movement

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arcticdementor · 6 years ago

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Last week in the prison I asked a young man why he was there.

"Just normal burglaries," he replied.

"Normal for whom?" I asked.

"You know, just normal."

He meant, I think, that burglaries were like gray skies in an English winter: unavoidable and to be expected. In an actuarial sense, he was right: Britain is now the burglary capital of the world, as almost every householder here will attest. But there was also a deeper sense to his words, for statistical normality slides rapidly in our minds into moral normality. The wives of burglars often talk to me of their husband's "work," as if breaking into other people's homes were merely a late shift in a factory. Nor is only burglary "normal" in the estimation of its perpetrators. "Just a normal assault," is another frequent answer prisoners give to my question, the little word "just" emphasizing the innocuousness of the crime.

…

As usual, one must look first to the academy when tracing the origins of a change in the Zeitgeist. What starts out as a career-promoting academic hypothesis ends up as an idea so widely accepted that it becomes not only an unchallengeable orthodoxy but a cliche even among the untutored. Academics have used two closely linked arguments to establish the statistical and moral normality of crime and the consequent illegitimacy of the criminal justice system's sanctions. First, they claim, we are all criminal anyway; and when everyone is guilty, everyone is innocent. Their second argument, Marxist in inspiration, is that the law has no moral content, being merely the expression of the power of certain interest groups—of the rich against the poor, for example, or the capitalist against the worker. Since the law is an expression of raw power, there is no essential moral distinction between criminal and non-criminal behavior. It is simply a question of whose foot the boot is on.

Criminologists are the mirror image of Hamlet, who exclaimed that if each man received his deserts, none should escape whipping. On the contrary, say the criminologists, more liberal than the prince (no doubt because of their humbler social origins): none should be punished.

…

It is impossible to state precisely when the Zeitgeist changed and the criminal became a victim in the minds of intellectuals: not only history, but also the history of an idea, is a seamless robe. Let me quote one example, though, now more than a third of a century old. In 1966 (at about the time when Norman Mailer in America, and Jean-Paul Sartre in Europe, portrayed criminals as existential heroes in revolt against a heartless, inauthentic world), the psychiatrist Karl Menninger published a book with the revealing title The Crime of Punishment. It was based upon the Isaac Ray lectures he had given three years earlier—Isaac Ray having been the first American psychiatrist who concerned himself with the problems of crime. Menninger wrote: "Crime is everybody's temptation. It is easy to look with proud disdain upon ‘those people’ who get caught—the stupid ones, the unlucky ones, the blatant ones. But who does not get nervous when a police car follows closely? We squirm over our income tax statements and make some ‘adjustments.’ We tell the customs official we have nothing to declare—well, practically nothing. Some of us who have never been convicted of crime picked up over two billion dollars' worth of merchandise last year from the stores we patronize. Over a billion dollars was embezzled by employees last year."

The moral of the story is that those who go to court and to prison are victims of chance at best and of prejudice at worst: prejudice against the lowly, the unwashed, the uneducated, the poor—those whom literary critics portentously call the Other. This is precisely what many of my patients in the prison tell me. Even when they have been caught in flagrante, loot in hand or blood on fist, they believe the police are unfairly picking on them. Such an attitude, of course, prevents them from reflecting upon their own contribution to their predicament: for chance and prejudice are not forces over which an individual has much personal control. When I ask prisoners whether they'll be coming back after their release, a few say no with an entirely credible vehemence; they are the ones who make the mental connection between their conduct and their fate. But most say they don't know, that no one can foresee the future, that it's up to the courts, that it all depends—on others, never on themselves.

…

Since then, of course, our understanding of theft and other criminal activity has grown more complex, if not necessarily more accurate or realistic. It has been the effect, and quite possibly the intention, of criminologists to shed new obscurity on the matter of crime: the opacity of their writing sometimes leads one to wonder whether they have actually ever met a criminal or a crime victim. Certainly, it is in their professional interest that the wellsprings of crime should remain an unfathomed mystery, for how else is one to convince governments that what a crime-ridden country (such as Britain) needs is further research done by ever more criminologists?

…

In the process of transmission from academy to populace, ideas may change in subtle ways. When the well-known criminologist Jock Young wrote that "the normalization of drug use is paralleled by the normalization of crime," and, because of this normalization, criminal behavior in individuals no longer required special explanation, he surely didn't mean that he wouldn't mind if his own children started to shoot up heroin or rob old ladies in the street. Nor would he be indifferent to the intrusion of burglars into his own house, ascribing it merely to the temper of the times and regarding it as a morally neutral event. But that, of course, is precisely how "just" shoplifters, "just" burglars, "just" assaulters, "just" attempted murderers, taking their cue from him and others like him, would view (or at least say they viewed) their own actions: they have simply moved with the times and therefore done no wrong. And, not surprisingly, the crimes that now attract the deprecatory qualification "just" have escalated in seriousness even in the ten years I have attended the prison as a doctor, so that I have even heard a prisoner wave away "just a poxy little murder charge." The same is true of the drugs that prisoners use: where once they replied that they smoked "just" cannabis, they now say that they take "just" crack cocaine, as if by confining themselves thus they were paragons of self-denial and self-discipline.

…

Recently, biological theories of crime have come back into fashion. Such theories go way back: nineteenth-century Italian and French criminologists and forensic psychiatrists elaborated a theory of hereditary degeneration to account for the criminal's inability to conform to the law. But until recently, biological theories of crime—usually spiced with a strong dose of bogus genetics—were the province of the illiberal right, leading directly to forced sterilization and other eugenic measures.

The latest biological theories of crime, however, stress that criminals cannot help what they do: it is all in their genes, their neurochemistry, or their temporal lobes. Such factors provide no answer to why the mere increase in recorded crime in Britain between 1990 and 1991 was greater than the total of all recorded crime in 1950 (to say nothing of the accelerating increases since 1991), but that failure does not deter researchers in the least. Scholarly books with titles such as Genetics of Criminal and Antisocial Behavior proliferate and do not evoke the outrage among intellectuals that greeted the publication of H. J. Eysenck's Crime and Personality in 1964, a book suggesting that criminality is an hereditary trait. For many years, liberals viewed Eysenck, professor of psychology at London University, as virtually a fascist for suggesting the heritability of almost every human characteristic, but they have since realized that genetic explanations of crime can just as readily be grist for their exculpatory and all-forgiving mills as they can be for the mills of conservatives.

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The idea that prison is principally a therapeutic institution is now virtually ineradicable. The emphasis on recidivism rates as a measure of its success or failure in the press coverage of prison ("Research by criminologists shows . . . " etc.) reinforces this view, as does the theory put forward by criminologists that crime is a mental disorder. The Psychopathology of Crime by Adrian Raine of the University of Southern California claims that recidivism is a mental disorder like any other, often accompanied by cerebral dysfunction. Addicted to Crime?, a volume edited by psychologists working in one of Britain's few institutions for the criminally insane, contains the work of eight academics. The answer to the question of their title is, of course, yes; addiction being—falsely—conceived as a compulsion that it is futile to expect anyone to resist. (If there is a second edition of the book, the question mark will no doubt disappear from its title, just as it vanished from the second edition of Beatrice and Sidney Webb's book about the Soviet Union, The Soviet Union: A New Civilisation?—which included everything about Russia except the truth.)

Is it surprising that recidivist burglars and car thieves now ask for therapy for their addiction, secure in the knowledge that no such therapy can or will be forthcoming, thereby justifying the continuation of their habit? "I asked for help," they often complain to me, "but didn't get none." One young man aged 21, serving a sentence of six months (three months with time off for good behavior) for having stolen 60 cars, told me that in reality he had stolen over 500 and had made some $160,000 doing so. It is surely an unnecessary mystification to construct an elaborate neuropsychological explanation of his conduct. Burglars who tell me that they are addicted to their craft, thereby implying that the fault will be mine for not having treated them successfully if they continue to burgle after their release, always react in the same way when I ask them how many burglaries they committed for which they were not caught: with a happy but not (from the householder's point of view) an altogether reassuring smile, as if they were recalling the happiest times of their life—soon to return.

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Since criminologists and sociologists can no longer plausibly attribute crime to raw poverty, they now look to "relative deprivation" to explain its rise in times of prosperity. In this light, they see crime as a quasi-political protest against an unjust distribution of the goods of the world. Several criminological commentators have lamented the apparently contradictory fact that it is the poor who suffer most, including loss of property, from criminals, implying that it would be more acceptable if the criminals robbed the rich. (In a radio discussion about the seasonal riots that break out in poor areas of British cities, a left-wing academic, now a cabinet minister in the present government, said that one of the tragic aspects of these riots is that they caused damage in the rioters' own neighborhood. She didn't answer my question whether she'd prefer the riots to take place in her neighborhood.)

…

Moreover, the very term "dispossessed" carries its own emotional and ideological connotations. The poor have not failed to earn, the term implies, but instead have been robbed of what is rightfully theirs. Crime is thus the expropriation of the expropriators—and so not crime at all, in the moral sense. And this is an attitude I have encountered many times among burglars and car thieves. They believe that anyone who possesses something can, ipso facto, afford to lose it, while someone who does not possess it is, ipso facto, justified in taking it. Crime is but a form of redistributive taxation from below.

Or—when committed by women—crime could be seen "as a way, perhaps of celebrating women as independent of men," to quote Elizabeth Stanko, an American feminist criminologist teaching in a British university. Here we are paddling in the murky waters of Frantz Fanon, the West Indian psychiatrist who believed that a little murder did wonders for the psyche of the downtrodden, and who achieved iconic status precisely at the time of criminology's great expansion as a university discipline.

…

No one gains kudos in the criminological fraternity by suggesting that police and punishment are necessary in a civilized society. To do so would be to appear illiberal and lacking faith in man's primordial goodness. It is much better for one's reputation, for example, to refer to the large number of American prisoners as "the American gulag," as if there were no relevant differences between the former Soviet Union and the United States.

#city journal #theodore dalrymple #blast from the past #read the whole thing #crime #law enforcement #criminology

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simplesynopsis-blog · 6 years ago

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Clearing up Some Misconceptions

Scandinavia is not socialist. Simple. Neat. Why is this important? Well, because there is a common misconception that most countries in Scandinavia: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, etc., are indeed socialist. And why is this misconception important to address you ask? Because definitions matter.

Do you remember people calling Obama a socialist (or heck, even a Marxist by some, which is depressingly entertaining)? I mean sure, he stood behind the Affordable Care Act, minorly taxing the rich and other mildly socialistically sounding policies. But, wait a second, isn’t that Venezuelan guy Nicolás Maduro also supposed to be a socialist? And so was Bernie? Even our father Stalin, wasn’t he’s socialist??

Oh I get it. Yeah I think I get it now. It’s opposing the status quo, that’s it isn’t it? That’s what makes you a socialist? Yeah that sounds right. If you’re not with Trump you’re with the socialists.

No, nuno. That’s not right, that doesn’t sound right. Let’s take a step back here. I think it’s safe to assume there is a difference between the claim that a person is socialist and that a country or society is socialist. Surely, the former is someone that wants to create conditions present in the latter. So, by the sound of it we should start with defining what a socialism entails for a society? Yes, let’s start there.

But, quickly so I’m not taken out of context, no, I’m not implying here that Obama was nesesaarily opposing the status quo. Sure, within the American political sphere he might have seemed moderately radical, but only radical insofar as a Granny Smith is radical compared to a Gala. Apples will be apples. Also, this is not a normative piece of writing, I am simply clarifying definitions here. Sure, my own political opinions might be getting more and more clear to some readers of my blog. But this entry isn’t trying to advocate a particular ideological stance. That does not mean I am sitting on the fence though. I’m just easing you into it. Entries taking a normative stance are up next.

So, socialism, what is it? Well, it’s got to do with who controls the means of production. What are the means of production? In a nutshell, they are: the means that are employed to produce things (both things essential to our survival and things not). Examples include: factories, businesses, resources used, technologies, the list goes on. In capitalist societies, the means of production are privately owned, that is by private individuals who own factories, businesses, etc. They are referred to as capitalists. They employ people who do not own the means of production, who can only sell their own labour power. They are referred to as the proletariat. In contrast, in socialist societies the means of production are owned collectively. That is to say by the people. Put into practice, this can include worker cooperatives, state industry and public ownership. It does not necessarily consider the all-powerful state as a bad thing (except by anarchists or anarcho-communists who believe the state actually upholds capitalist society by existing alongside it and enforcing a class structure). This is because, necessarily under this system, governments are run by the people and therefore all state assets are public assets.

In essence, socialism means abolishing private property. ‘Oh no!’ You might be saying. ‘I don’t want to share my house with strangers. I don’t want the state to take all my stuff and control my life! You remember what happened in Doctor Zhivago, don’t you?? Don’t you??’... Fret not. This is years of Cold War propaganda talking. Something I see over and over again is this mis-definition of private property. Private property does not mean your fancy clothes, your TV, your knick-knacks, your house or your car. These are personal property. Private property refers specifically to privately owned means of production. See the misunderstanding? It’s not really that surprising that this is confusing, as in our capitalist society this distinction is necessarily nonexistent. So, in other words, in a socialist society you’re still free to keep all your nice things, you just can’t use these things to employ others to create more things. Why can’t you do this? Because private ownership of the means of production is seen as oppressive (the reasons for this will be discussed further, in a future post).

Now, I should say, it would be naïve to suggest that no one would have to give up some of their stuff/personal property. But unlike your average right wing libertarian would argue, socialism doesn’t mean that it is the average person (99.9999999% of the people reading this article) who would be giving up their stuff. Instead it is the people who we already know have waaaay to much. Yes, you know, those guys with super yachts (and yes I am generalising here). Basically those who we already know have faaar too much stuff to be able to be consumed by a single individual. Also, even if someone who has 15 houses, 10 cars and five yachts says this property is merely recreational, i.e. used only as though it were personal property. Well, then I implore you to ask them how they made the all the money that allowed them to buy all said personal property. You guessed it: private property. In other words, they will own a factory and/or business that allowed them to create the excessive wealth needed, through worker exploitation, to buy all their stuff. Anyway, who’s saying it might not be kinda good to foster a slightly less materialistic mentality?

So, under this definition, is Scandinavia socialist? NO! Heck no. In Scandinavia, the means of production are privately owned. Case closed. Sure, they might have a social democracy, but this is different. This just advocates some state invervention in order to help in questions of social justice and the like, but it still presupposes the capitalist mode of production (i.e. privately owned means of production). Also, some industry might be state owned, but the mere existence of private property is incompatible with a socialist definition of these countries. And yes, this also means that Obama is not a socialist, and (this gets to me a little) that Venezuela is not a socialist country, regardless of the rubbish our media is trying to shove down our throats.

Some other points: socialism is not the same as communism and social democracy is not the same as democratic socialism. And these are also different from Marxism and anarchism. Some overlap, some do not. If you’re more interested in the distinctions between these, watch this video.

Also, a final small point. I did joke (sarcastically) earlier that socialism was defined as opposing the status quo. Whilst this is not true, it’s important to point out that, ironically, if you are indeed a socialist, you will most likely be opposing the current status quo. And if you don’t, then you’re probably not a socialist.

Anyway, I hope this helped clarify things. Now, don’t go accusing people of being socialists without good reason. And if you do call someone a socialist who actually is a socialist, they’ll probably appreciate you took the time to understand what this claim in fact entails.

#socialism #communism #capitalism #marxism #means of production #private property #personal property #left wing #politics

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thecounterplan · 6 years ago

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You Can’t Change the Mind of Steven Crowder, and It’s Not Worth Trying

by Brice Ezell

If you know Steven Crowder, it’s likely for the meme seen above, derived from his “Change My Mind” series on his YouTube channel and CRTV show, Louder with Crowder. In this series, Crowder places himself in various locales — typically university campuses, though he also took the streets of my own Austin, TX for one installment — and invites people to challenge him on his deeply held views, which thus far have included, to name a few: “There are Only Two Genders,” “Hate Speech Doesn’t Exist,” “I’m Pro-Life,” and “Trump is Not a Fascist.” Each one of these “Change My Minds” is equal part provocation and, ostensibly, invitation to debate: rather than sit in his CRTV studio 24/7, addressing a paying audience who largely shares his views, Crowder does attempt to get his viewpoints out into the public, subject the scrutiny of any passersby.

Yet it’s not long into any one of these “Change My Mind” segments — to say nothing of his other YouTube videos — that the veneer of respectable debate, well, starts looking a lot less respectable. Like Nathan J. Robinson, I hold the view that debates between the political left and right, when done well, are important and can advance civil discourse in helpful ways. So when I first heard about Crowder and saw that, unlike a cheap shock jock, he actually invited anyone to debate him, I thought for a (fleeting) moment that he might be someone invested in actually facilitating substantive debate on the important issues of our divisive political times.

Crowder, it turns out, is not that person. Above all else, he occupies the role of comedian/pundit for the right wing, so his primary responsibility is to entertain and, as a result of the directive to entertain, sensationalize. His YouTube video titles include things like “OMG GENDER POLITICS GAP!” and “TOP 5 Reasons Elizabeth Warren’s a RACIST FRAUD!” The seeming invitation into debate that is the “Change My Mind” title quickly morphs into a presumptuous imperative when you read video titles like “Why the Left HATES Successful People.” (The latter is a curious notion, given that Crowder, like many right-wingers, calls out “SJW” corporations in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for their supposed “identity politics,” and those companies are nothing if not successful.) As a pundit, Crowder’s mandate is to make arguments, but not really to debate. Debate requires fairness, some mutual understanding, and above all else clash, i.e. arguments which interact in some kind of competing form. Crowder has a segment on his channel called “Devil’s Advocate” in which he, playing a quasi-hipster character called “Skyler Turden,” performs the classical fallacy known as the straw man, which a textbook example of bad debating, where no real clash exists.

The appeal of a segment like “Change My Mind” hinges on the very possibility hinted at by the title: that the person making that request is actually open to having their mind changed. On his show, Crowder gives little impression he is open to a serious challenge to his political views. Normally it would be just enough to say that Crowder is a pundit, not a politician or a researcher, i.e. people who make discursive arguments as a big part of their living. As a pundit, Crowder need only say his opinions and successfully monetize them by building an audience, and that he has done. But with “Change My Mind” and other segments on Louder with Crowder — for instance, his trotting out of the oft-repeated right wing claim that lefties can’t handle debate, which is why they shut right-wing speakers out of universities — Crowder appears to show great concern for debate and discourse. To those unfamiliar with his history or his style, then, Crowder seems to be someone who actually cares about discursively defending right-wing views, rather than simply being, well, louder about them.

This rhetorical move on the part of Crowder, as I undoubtedly have already made clear, is thoroughly disingenuous. However, instead of merely calling Crowder a pundit and moving on, I want to analyze an example of his argumentative style, through which I will show that Crowder is not interested in debate, and has no meaningful argumentative strategy that would actually produce a debate worth having.

The example I’ve selected is a video response by Crowder to a Vox video entitled, “Admit it. Republicans have broken politics,” presented by Carlos Maza. I chose this video because I think Maza’s argument is a strong one — one I happen to agree with, though like any argument it is of course debatable — and therefore affords Crowder an opportunity to have a serious debate, rather than a pundit vs. pundit war where the only metric is who can shout their opinions the loudest and most creatively. What we get with Crowder, unfortunately, is punditry, not real debate, and it doesn’t take long for his “rebuttals” to Maza to start wearing thin.

Before I get into the specifics of this Crowder/Vox debate, an overview. It is important to know that there is a single failure of political thinking – one many of Crowder’s fellow conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro also commit – which muddles Crowder’s argumentation throughout all of his videos: he equates the terms “Democrat” and “leftist.” In this rather interesting video, Crowder answers a letter from a fan asking, “Should I marry a Crazy Democrat?” The fan writes in the letter that a newfound paramour is a Democrat, and worries “she might be a leftist.” To this, Crowder and his co-hosts reply, “She’s a Democrat, of course she is.” This is pure nonsense.

Plenty of folks – from the aforementioned Robinson to Elizabeth Bruenig – have effectively demonstrated the distinctions between Democrats and actual leftists, and those between liberals and leftists. But one doesn’t even need to wade into the theory in order to see the distinction between Democrats and leftists: one need only look to the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, in which the competition between a garden-variety leftist (Bernie Sanders, who ran for the Democratic nod despite being an independent) and an elite Democrat (Hillary Clinton) further widened the significant rift in the Democratic party between its center/center-right wing (i.e. Clinton) and leftists who actually want to make the Democrats a left-wing party. Even now, establishment Democrats are doing everything they can to prevent Bernie from becoming a name in the 2020 presidential election. Keep in mind that in most Western liberal democracies, Bernie would be little more than a boring social democrat; it’s only in the US, where the political compass is skewed far to the right, that he appears to be some Marxist ideologue to commentators like Crowder. For Crowder’s characterization of the Democrats as “leftists” to hang together at all, his definition of “leftism” would have to incorporate people – like most of the leading Democratic politicians – who without fail vote for every single increase in the military budget, think capitalism is good and fixable, and are more than happy to let major corporations like Apple and Amazon take over major cities. It doesn’t require much else to demonstrate the absurdity of such a definition.

If the Democratic party truly was “leftist,” Sanders wouldn’t have been perceived as some radical shock, and those at the heart of the party wouldn’t be doing everything they can to ensure that Sanders’ coalition doesn’t take over or gain prominence in the party leading up to 2020. What does this mean for Crowder’s argumentation? It means that when he attempts to argue against Democrats and “leftists,” he commits error after error in conflating the two. A good deal of his rebuttal to Maza’s Vox argument falls into this trap, and rather than parse out every single instance of this happening, I’ll note this broad issue here to further clarify why his rebuttal to Maza is deeply insufficient.

With that said: in going through Crowder’s video, I’ll break down the arguments as he presents them, where he shows a clip from Maza’s video and then replies to it.

Maza Claim 1: Based on research done by political scientists at UCLA, we can graph the political ideology of members of Congress. With this data, we can see that over time, both parties have moved away from the center, but Republicans have moved much further away than Democrats. Similarly, if you compare Republican and Democratic presidents since Truman, you find that Republican presidents have become more conservative, while Democrats have remained roughly level.

Crowder Responses: (1) “Uh, Bush is more conservative than Reagan? Obama is more conservative than Clinton?”; (2) Insinuates that Vox just made up the graphs itself; (3) Argues against extrapolating this data to suggest that polarization is bad, because if you’re moving in a non-polar direction toward “success” and “truth,” that is preferable; (4) Points out that “just days” before the release of this video, “noted Democratic activist Julia Louis-Dreyfuss” compared Trump to the Holocaust.

(1) These questions are meant to undermine the data, but it’s not obviously clear why either of these claims of the data – that Reagan can be understood as less conservative than Bush II, or that Obama was less liberal than Bill Clinton – are so absurd as to deserve the mocking tone with which Crowder delivers them. Off the top of my head, I can point out that Reagan’s decision to give amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants would get him expelled from the post-2000s GOP, and Obama deported more people than anyone in recent US history. I could go on, but the point is: Crowder gives us little reason to question the charts.

(2) The graphs were not made up by Vox, and come from an extensive series of data gathering by the University of California at Los Angeles political science department. Not hard to figure this out.

(3) This is a point, actually, that Crowder and the left would be in agreement on: namely, that “centrism” or “meeting in the middle” is not an inherent virtue. Unfortunately for Crowder’s argumentation, this is a view where the Democrats and the left diverge, as Democrats trip over themselves to find ways to reach across the aisle. Hillary Clinton proudly owned the label of “centrist” (or “moderate”) in the run-up to the 2016 election. But this is skipping ahead to a later part of the argument; Crowder just flags this here briefly – more on that later.

(4) Julia Louis-Dreyfuss is a celebrity. She may speak out for Democratic-backed causes from time to time, but she is far from an activist, or anyone that could be said to speak for the majority of the party. But, most importantly, even if Crowder’s interpretation of the Louis-Dreyfuss video he quotes is accurate – and I don’t think it is – Crowder responds to meticulously gathered data by… pointing to one example, as if a single celebrity video proves that the Democrats are actually as far left as Republicans are far right. One example does not an argument make.

Maza Claim 2: Being a “queer, tree-hugging atheist with immigrant parents,” Maza knows that he’s a bit obvious in criticizing Republicans. So rather than just rely on his own argumentation, he turns to Norman Orenstein of the American Enterprise Institute to further establish the claims about polarization.

Crowder Responses: (1) Orenstein is a “token independent conservative who makes his living bashing the GOP”; (2) The use of Orenstein is a “lie” to hide the “subjective” opinion of Maza, and is the equivalent of saying “I have a black friend” to prove you aren’t racist; (3) Mitch McConnell “called Orenstein out” for being an “old fashioned far-left guy.”

I’ll group all of these together here, as they all in the same way signal Crowder’s unwillingness to engage the substance of the debate. Nowhere does Crowder actually show why Orenstein is a non-credible source; his tactic is essentially to just undermine the idea that Orenstein is actually conservative. We’re to trust the opinion of Mitch McConnell – one of the most ghoulish living politicians (here, here, and here are good places to start reading why that’s true) – in calling Orenstein “far left” because, uh, reasons? Crowder doesn’t give any, except to call McConnell “cocaine Mitch,” a name only true in that, like cocaine, McConnell should be illegal.

Maza’s use of Orenstein isn’t “hiding” subjective opinion; he’s using another expert to back up his own opinion. Debate should operate in this way, and invoking an expert doesn’t necessarily mean saying, “I am right because this expert is infallible,” but because all of us should look to people who have extensively researched issues to back up our viewpoints. That’s all Maza is doing. Bringing Orenstein onboard doesn’t mask his argument, for it is part of his argument. The fact that Crowder first chooses to attempt to rubbish Maza’s source, instead of directly addressing the matter of Orenstein’s research, puts him on argumentatively thin ice from the outset.

Lastly: the words “far-left” and “American Enterprise Institute” are mutually incompatible. The Institute is widely regarded as a right-wing think tank, an experience I can confirm firsthand, having attended a conference there as an undergraduate. Just about every single proposal and speech I heard that weekend would not have made a single member of the current GOP bristle in the slightest. Nor would this description from AEI’s “About” page have anything in it with which Crowder would disagree: “We are committed to making the intellectual, moral, and practical case for expanding freedom, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening the free enterprise system in America and around the world.” AEI is nonpartisan, but its aims and research agendas are undeniably conservative – far from a place where a far lefty would find employment, let alone want to work.

Maza Claim 3: “There is no question” that the GOP’s goals have become more extreme over the past decade. George W. Bush talked about a “rational middle ground” for immigration policy, whereas Donald Trump is a hardliner who talks about “deportation forces.”

Crowder’s Response: Why compare Bush to Trump? Why not compare Obama to Trump, when we see in a pre-2008 election clip that Obama said that “those who entry the country illegally and those who employ them disrespect the rule of law?” Trump’s policy is just Obama’s policy put into full effect “for the betterment of the country!”

First off: congrats, Steven, you found another place where you and the left are in agreement! The left consistently called out Obama for his immigration rhetoric, and his hardline deportation policies. The Democrats undercut a good deal of their argumentation against Trump’s immigration views by the actions they undertook during Obama’s eight year term as president. That is true.

But Crowder’s move here is the classic “whataboutist” strategy that animates most right-wing punditry: “You don’t like this? Well the Democrats did something similar!” It’s a form of argument that doesn’t engage with the substance of the claim (i.e. the rightness or wrongness of a particular action) and instead diverts to hypocrisy gaming that advances the conversation very little. Additionally, it’s a strategy typically accompanied by false equivalency, as is the case here: Obama did not propose a giant wall on the US/Mexico border, nor did Obama enact a widespread policy of family separation (see here and here), though some family separations did occur under previous administrations, albeit never in the formalized way enacted by Trump.

In this case, Crowder ducks Maza’s claim: his point is that there is a marked difference between how Bush and Trump, both Republican, handled immigration. Pointing to Obama in between them does not disprove that. All it does is prove the opposite of a point Crowder tried to make earlier: that the Democrats, far from being left-wing, have moved to the center and even to the right on some issues, immigration being one of them.

And I question anyone calling the abhorrent family separation and detention camp policy on the border a “betterment for the country.” A sane person would call it a stain on this country’s history. Even if you’re an absolute hardliner on immigration, the logical thing would be to send illegal immigrants back to their country of origin, not to separate their families as a needless act of cruelty on top of it. (Not that mass deportation, a policy not justified by Crowder here, would be a better solution.)

Maza Claim 4: Richard Nixon, a Republican president, founded the EPA; now, Republicans campaign on abolishing it.

Crowder Responses: (1) So what? The EPA had a purpose, now it doesn’t. (2) The Democrats used to the party of the KKK, which brings out a contradiction between Maza’s video and another Vox video about the “southern strategy” in the mid-20th century: how could the Democrats have changed so much, if as Maza claimed earlier in the video that the Democrats have “stayed the same” while the Republicans have moved further to the right?

(1) For a conservative like Crowder, obviously anti-EPA is a fairly orthodox position. But Maza’s point is about the rightness or wrongness of the EPA primarily: it’s about Republican attitudes toward environmental protection. His point is that just about half a century ago, Republicans founded a major agency to enshrine environmental protections; now, with climate change-related externalities more pressing than they were in Nixon’s administrations, Republicans want to scale back environmental projections. That is, objectively, a more extreme, more right-wing view. People can debate the legitimacy of those views, of course, but Maza’s video isn’t about debating climate policy; it’s about charting the intellectual color of a party, and the EPA example is a fine one to illustrate the further rightward swing of the GOP.

(2) Crowder here willfully distorts and mishandles the comparison between the illustration of the Southern Strategy in the other Vox video and the graphs presented at the start of Maza’s piece. Maza himself said the Democrats have changed, and have drifted further from the center to the left (albeit not as far as the Republicans have drifted to the right, per his argument). Note that the graph Maza shows at the beginning of the video starts at 1960, right around the time that the Southern Strategy was being put into place; were the graph extended back to the 1900s, it would show a dramatic shift in the Democratic party.

For more on the Southern Strategy, and why despite Crowder’s skepticism it is definitely a thing, historian Kevin M. Kruse (Princeton University) assembled a useful Twitter breakdown of the Southern Strategy and how it manifested in the Republican/Democratic shifts in the mid-20th century.

Maza 5: The governing methods of Republicans have become more extreme and anti-compromise over time. Data shows that Republicans have used more filibusters than any other party when they are not in power.

Crowder Responses: There are two factors to consider in the filibuster graph: (1) Opposition parties are more likely to use the filibuster (2) Use of the filibuster correlates with a “sharp rise” in executive orders and “power grabs” unprecedented in modern history.

(1) Okay, well, even if it is true that opposition parties are more likely to use the filibuster, this does not take away from the fact that the two highest peaks – without any nearby competition – on the filibuster graph are Obama’s first two years, when he hadn’t even proposed much of his legislation yet. The point of Maza’s use of the graph is, “The Republicans excessively use the filibuster.” Crowder’s first response does not challenge that in any way.

(2) This argument, a popular one amongst the post-2008 GOP, is complete garbage. Have a gander at the graph below, which lists the number of executive orders (Eos) by president since Truman:

Obama has the lowest EO-per-year average of any president since Truman, and the lowest total for a two-term president in the post-Truman era. Having not completed his first (and perhaps only) term, Trump hasn’t built a fully representative sample size of EOs, but already his per annum average is 12 points more than Obama’s. Frankly, given the relentless obstruction Obama faced following the 2010 midterms, it’s amazing he didn’t use more EOs.

Crowder’s only evidence for the “unprecedented executive power” is the widely-disproven talking point (see here and here) that Obamacare was “rammed through” Congress, and several out-of-context soundbites where Obama talks about “using his pen” if Congress didn’t act. As the graph above shows, that was most likely a rhetorical move on Obama’s part, not a marker of policy, and at worst it was an empty threat. (And I find Crowder’s belief in “executive overreach” on this point a bit inconsistent, since I didn’t see any red alerts raised when Trump announced that he intended to repeal birthright citizenship through EO, a far more ludicrous and baldly unconstitutional than anything Obama ever did.) So even if it was true that the filibuster was necessary to counter a power-hungry executive, the facts of Obama’s administration do not square with Crowder’s claims about Republican use of the filibuster. His “argument” is just a talking point with no substance, a hallmark of punditry.

Maza Point 6: Some Republican procedure has not even been for intellectual disagreement; Republicans refused to vote on Obama’s 2016 budget proposal before they even saw it, for example.

Crowder Responses: (1) “No for the sake of no is sometimes okay; as in, 2 trillion more dollars? NOPE!” (2) Republicans refused to look at Obama’s 2016 budget because he failed to submit it on time, and in fact Obama followed budgetary procedure throughout his presidency “ZERO” times.”

(1) This amounts to little more than assertion, and it’s one I know about which Crowder is inconsistent. As far as I can tell, Crowder has never once railed against the US’s largest expenditure, its ginormous military, which is increased just about every year (it should be noted, with near-unanimous bipartisan consensus), nor has he weighed the enormous structural costs of increasing tax cuts for the upper strata of society. From what I can gather of Crowder’s view of government from this point and his previous claim that “polarization isn’t bad so long as you’re going in the direction of the truth,” Crowder’s political view seems to be: “If you’re right, you get to do whatever you want.” That sure doesn’t sound like the deliberative republic set up by the founding fathers so revered by Crowder and his ilk. Generally speaking, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that major issues in government should be debated between respectable adults who are willing to hear the other side out – or, if you rather, “have their mind changed.” Crowder’s vision of the Republican party in this video is a party that is always of the correct opinion, so anything it does must be correct. Seems to me a pretty untenable thesis.

For more on what is called “the deficit troll,” which Crowder uses here to depict Obama as exceptionally spendthrifty, this excellent piece by Adam Johnson shows its absurdity.

(2) Crowder responds to Maza’s claim about the 2016 budget by pulling up a fact about… Obama’s 2012 budget. The timestamp is right there on the screen: this is either a willful misreading or distortion of evidence.

Now, Obama did in his first and second terms submit late budgets. That obviously is a concern, though it’s worth noting that doing so was not unique amongst modern presidents, which further rubbishes Crowder’s claim that Obama was so problematic a president that Republican intransigence was required to keep him in check. Furthermore, while it is fair to point out Obama’s missed budget deadlines, discursively defending the claim that Republicans were therefore justified in rejecting a budget proposal before reading it is an entirely separate claim. “He broke the rules, so we get to do whatever we want” is not a legitimate standard of governance, particularly not for the rule-abiding “constitutionalists” that Crowder and his co-hosts christen themselves in this video and elsewhere.

Maza Point 7: Republicans claimed they would hold the late Antonin Scalia’s vacant Supreme Court seat open even if Clinton won the presidency. For Orenstein, this is not “normal behavior,” and it is rather attributable to a party “attempting to hold the levers of power” as it loses a majority nationwide.

Crowder Responses: (1) In 1960, Senate Democrats passed a resolution against election-year recess appointments; (2) Obama was a “lame duck” president when he appointed Merrick Garland to fill Scalia’s seat; (3) Democrats “initiated the behavior” of refusing to hold confirmation hearings with Robert Bork in the ‘80s.

(1) and (2) can be grouped together here, as they’re part of a similar line of argument used by conservatives about the behavior of the GOP toward Garland: Democrats would happily do the same in the GOP’s position (“Biden rule!”), and that Obama was basically on his way out.

There are several problems with this line of reasoning. First and foremost, the Senate did pass a resolution against election-year recess appointments in 1960, but Obama’s appointment of Garland was not a recess appointment. A recess appointment occurs when a president appoints someone to a federal office while the Senate is in recess, hence the name. The Senate was not in recess when Obama appointed Garland, nor was Obama a “lame duck,” as that refers to an elected official who is in office while their successor has been elected, and Trump had not been elected when Obama recommended Garland to the Court. Obama, like all presidents, gets elected to four-year terms, and 2016 was his fourth year, meaning he was acting within his legitimately elected powers as president. (And lest anyone say “the Biden rule” proves Crowder’s point: Biden never followed his 1992 suggestion, and later even said “there is no Biden rule.”)

So, yes, Orenstein is correct to say there is no precedent for this behavior, and it is clearly motivated by power. One little detail Crowder leaves out is that his friend “cocaine Mitch” said that the purpose of leaving the seat open was “so the American people could have a say” in the seat – despite the Constitutional structure of the Supreme Court, which is designed to insulate the justices from popular opinion – yet McConnell and other colleagues of his, like “reasonable Republican” John McCain, then said that if Clinton was elected, the GOP would stonewall any of her nominees. That’s about as brazen a declaration of “we don’t care what you think” as there has been in recent memory.

(3) I’m not sure Crowder should stake his case defending the legitimacy of GOP behavior in blocking Merrick Garland’s nomination on Robert Bork, who was rightly denounced for his racist, anti-civil rights political views, and his involvement in the Watergate Scandal, where he was doing Nixon’s bidding. Just a thought. Crowder thinks it’s okay to say “no for no’s sake” irrationally; I think it’s better that people say no when it’s right, and denying Bork a court seat was the right thing to do.

Maza Point 8: When in Obama’s second term Republicans refused to even hear out Obama’s lower-court appointees, Democrats made the “bad but necessary move” to lower the threshold to break a filibuster – the so-called “nuclear option” – from 60 votes to 51 votes. This was an ad hoc response to a problem “created by Republicans.”

Crowder Response: If the Democrats ended the filibuster, it’s their fault, and they have to own up to it.

This response is inadequate for at least two reasons. First, nowhere has Crowder made a positive defense for the Republican-led obstruction of Obama, nor has even attempted at a discursive rationale – apart from a bogus claim about Obama being an executive overreacher – as to why obstruction in general is a good idea. The tone of his view of the Republican party in this video is simple: they’re right, so they get to do whatever they want. Without a positive defense of Republican obstruction, Crowder can’t reasonably claim that lowering the vote threshold (which, to be sure, is a questionable strategic move that requires justification itself) is only the Democrats’ fault. A simple counterfactual: imagine the roles are flipped from 2008-2016, and Democrats are obstructing Republicans. Can anyone imagine Crowder saying, “Well, they’re obstructing, but that’s their right?” I sure can’t.

This leads to the second reason: based on the behavior of Republicans since Trump’s election, can anyone credibly claim that, in the same situation, they would have just lied down and taken it? The post-2010 GOP couldn’t reason with Obama, a boring centrist whose “tyrannical” healthcare plan was invented by Republicans in the ‘90s, and implemented in Massachusetts by a conservative governor and later GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney; a president who deported more immigrants than any other president in history; a president whose drone warfare in the Middle East should have made him a beloved member of the DC circles bent on spreading US imperialism by violence. In other words, Obama offered the GOP quite a lot of common ground. On strategic grounds, one can debate the choice to lower the vote threshold in the Senate from 60 to 51; an intelligent debate can be had there. But how we got to that point was not by the Democrats being hellbent on crushing norms; if that fact were true, they’d have lowered the vote threshold right after their crushing 2010 midterms defeat, rather than attempt to reach across the aisle for three years until the “break glass in case of emergency” option starts to sound plausible.

Maza and Orenstein’s main point is that situation was caused by Republican obstinance, and they are correct. Maza thinks the nuclear option was right; others can respectfully disagree. But no evidence can plausibly paint the picture that Democratic disregard for normal procedure got us to the stalemate that led to the nuclear option. Just to give two recent examples: many Democrats continued to vote for lower-court Trump nominees, even though in the senate they don’t have enough votes to block any nominees. That is to say, rather than signal opposition without costing them any political capital, Democrats continue to play ball with a party that is openly contemptuous of the will of the people. And what were some of Nancy Pelosi’s first words when the Democrats won back the House in the 2018 elections? Not, “We will deny the Democrats anything they want.” Once again, the “bipartisan” buzzword was trotted out, a fool’s errand in the face of a ruling party whose mantra is not the Constitution, but “our way or the high way.”

Crowder then ends the video with a litany of spurious claims, ones largely rendered incoherent by the prenominate collapsing of “Democrats” with “progressives” and “leftists”, including:

(1) The claim that Kavanaugh’s accusers were all liars; this, despite the fact that most commentators agreed Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony was credible (and if you’re going to care about “truth,” maybe don’t back an unrepentant liar like Kavanaugh himself – see here and here).

(2) The Democrats “have always been the party of the KKK and segregation”; the Democrats were this for much of their existence, but, yes, since the Southern Strategy, things have changed, and last I checked it wasn’t a Democratic president who said that a group of Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville who eventually killed a woman “were very nice people.”

(3) The Democrats have become “radically left and gone for power-grabs”; despite the fact that, for much of the past 20 years, Republicans have controlled most branches of government and most state houses across the United States; and that, as I said earlier, any party that consistently votes for more military spending, bank bailouts, and corporate takeovers of major cities and urban areas cannot be in any sane universe called “left.” Talk to an actual leftist, Steven: most of them do not like or outright loathe the Democratic party, and only vote for it when they feel it is strategically necessary.

(4) The Democrats have become “anti-free speech” and want to do away with private firearms ownership; this, despite that there is not a single policy proposed by Democrats remotely approaching this, and Obama famously received an “F” grade from pro-gun control groups. This is such transparent fearmongering it deserves no more response than that.

(5) The Democrats have gone from advocating “safe, legal, and rare” abortions to “abortion on demand”; this is again another warrantless claim, and one that doesn’t really square with the evidence, given that Hillary Clinton said she would be open to constitutional restrictions on late abortions so long as they included exceptions for the life and health of the mother.

(6) The Democrats “enable Antifa,” even though most majority Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi openly condemned Antifa and violent protestors, and even Vox – which Crowder wants to paint as some kind of far-left, progressive outlet (when in fact it’s a favorite of centrist wonks) – ran a piece expressly making a case against Antifa.

Crowder then argues that the right is only “polarized” in the sense that it is aligning itself with the truth against the open falsehoods of “the left”/Democrats/progressives, a nebulous group he clearly ill understands. Given how incapable Crowder is of articulating the basic beliefs of the Democrats and the left, and of owning up to the anti-governance of the GOP post-2010, I’m going to go ahead and give the win to Maza, who at least doesn’t misrepresent sources, make wild claims without any evidence, and seriously mishandle the evidence he uses to advance his own side.

So at the end of all of this, I find it hard to come to any other conclusion than this: if you see Crowder filming a “Change My Mind” segment near you, don’t go expecting a real debate. When presented with a reasonable (but, of course, completely debatable) video, Crowder does everything but directly clash with the argument at hand. Just because someone proclaims themselves to be invested in debate doesn’t mean that they’re worth engaging. Based on how Crowder characterizes the GOP in this video – ahistorical and evidence-deficient as it is – and his own argumentative methodologies, Crowder thinks that he and fellow conservatives know all the answers, and that presenting arguments against them necessarily means falling into the “false” side of a “true/false” binary. If that’s Crowder’s view of the world, there’s no debate, no changing of mind, no reasoned discourse. It’s the all-too-familiar mantra of “you’re with us or you’re against us.” Facing that worldview, you might as well debate the brick wall in front of which Crowder sits.

#Steven Crowder #politics #Vox #Carlos Maza #Republicans #Democrats #Change My Mind #Louder with Crowder

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roguelike-theory-blog · 6 years ago

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Pure waste of bandwidth

A few Girard-inspired, mathematical-theological stories for my friends.

Voting for itself. Girard dismisses the Hilbert’s programme, comparing the attempt to prove mathematics using mathematics to “the parliament voting for itself”. It is a correct comparison, yet its value as a criticism is ambiguous. As a french logician, Girard might actually know that the French Republic – and arguably the modern politics – has actually been founded with the parliament voting for itself. In 1789, the new-founded National Assembly of France was concerned with the question, whether it actually does represent the general will? This question was resolved affirmatively by the notorious Abbé Sieyès, who took the structure of his argument from the catholic thinker Nicolas Malebranche.

Malebranche was concerned with proving prothestants wrong, as catholics usually are. The problem was, whether the Catholic Church, that is, its body of cardinals was the one, unique representation (in the yet religious sense, from which we will later found the legal concept of representation) of God on Earth – as opposed to the possibility of the multiple, partial, conflicting representations of his will favored by the protestants. His thought experiment was simple: “Say we gather all of the cardinals together and let them take a vote, whether they, together, do or do not represent the god’s will. The ones who say ‘no’ are obviously not real cardinals: you can’t be a cardinal if you don’t believe in the institution. So everyone who is a real cardial will say ‘yes’, thus determining by unanimous vote that the Catholic Church is indeed the one and unique representant of God”.

Now let us postpone the matter of the obvious begging-the-question; let us also not indulge for now in the beautiful ways with which Malebranche tries to fix it; let’s focus on how this argument is still at work in our very lives. Abbé Sieyès used this very same argument to prove that the Assembly is the real representative: if your particular will is against it, you’re just not of the Republic and your will doesn’t count. The whole seeming ridiculousness of the argument pales in comparison with its incredible effectiveness: the modern politics was born with all its representative-democratic weirdness. There’re likely philosophical ways to ground this idea onto something more fundamental, yet the notoriousness of such an ouroboric event is clear, and the break that happened here is on the level of a new self-supporting thought from which, however, the ‘real things’ are being created on a daily basis.

Can’t we say that Hilbert’s programme is the same type of event, just imposed kind of retrospectively onto the history of mathematics? The mathematics voting for itself, let the naysayers be damned into luddistic hell? In this case we can go on living with its theological form while embracing the fruitful mathematical content it gave us. And then our next move, the move of the ones who dares to respect and use mathematics without believing in it, should obviously be to look for the heretics and the heretical thoughts. We should not be content with those who just dismisses mathematics altogether (the boring, impotent atheists) – the real heretic is the one who is of the mathematical practice, but questions its belief structure. How do you call the hagiography but about heretics? Heretography?

Hysterizing the computer. Now one of those heretics is Brouwer, whose whole project was about questioning the givenness of the a priori. Insane idea, completely against Kant, of course, as it questions the very distinction between thinking and praxis. A priori as something completely given assumes some kind of a collapse of the process of thinking in time, with all of the theorems already there somewhere, indeed nothing more than Anselm’s ontological argument, but about mathematics. Brouwer scouted this a priori and found his own fixed point theorem, which states that there’s something that exists but can’t be found. Now that’s unsettling for Brouwer who is, by the way, of a Schopenhauer’s persuasion. To question the whole thing, Brouwer looks for the most extreme point of this a priori givenness, and it’s nothing else but the law of the excluded-middle: it’s only there if you can always do the anselmnian jump to the farthest conclusion. Brouwer slows down this seemingly instantaneous jump by denying it, inventing the intuitionistic logic, and actually somehow manages to get pretty far with it, reformulating even a part of topology in this new light. However this heresy was not approved by his holiness Hilbert, already too influential on the continent – isolated Brouwer loses his mind and dies, never seeing any hope of his work being useful.

A different development was up at the same, however, concerned a piece of metal to be called computer. There were a few of those machines already, and it was obvious that there’s going to be more. On the other hand, it didn’t actually take very long for people to notice how incredibly useful the intuitionistic logic was for this machine: much more than the ‘classical one’. The computer became the redeeming object of Brouwer’s logic – he never saw one, never even thought of one, yet turned out to provide the most important concept for its study. The depth of Brouwer’s premature contribution to Computer Science is beyond the wariness of tertium non datur: his work predicted the notorious problems with the floating-point numbers, and his topology turned out to be a weird tool to study computable functions, which is a cross-sub-disciplinary link of strange awesomeness for the easily excitable people like me.

So if we’re desperately looking for any escape from the horrible weight of the Kantian-Hilbertian mathematical theology, shouldn’t we look into the computer? One of the weird things about the computers is how easily we all were persuaded, not so long ago, that everything in the computer is “virtual” (not in the sense in which philosophers use the epithet, but in the sense the marketers use it), that is, not exactly material… Which is nonsense, a structure of disavowal, which has to be thoroughly contradicted on all the levels, starting on the level of primitive processor instructions which, according to the simplest laws of thermodynamics, can’t perform any destructive operation – can’t forget any value of any variable – without wasting some energy, emanating some heat. This kind of thought is as material as it can be.

Right here, right now, I can show you how the materiality of computer affects our everyday life in a very noticeable, annoying fashion. Let us recall that to study the whole population of computers a special concept was invented, ‘the Turing machine’. It was a strange abstraction, seeking to provide an ideal type for those machines, a link between their real bodies and the computable functions which are performed by them. It is used in science, yes, but it is also used too much in the arguments between the adolescent programmers, if you ever dared to talk to them – “C and Lisp are the same thing because of the Turing machine”... But let’s leave them be. Where’s the Turing machine’s fault?

Turing machine is imagined to have an infinite time and an infinite memory space. That’s what we can sometimes believe about our computers. When our computers run out of time – that is, we subjectively feel that they are slow – we’re annoyed and happy to fix it. The existence of the computer as a time-consuming device is obvious and we’re perfectly equipped to notice it; every second it’s slowing down we’re feeling it, I think, already at the level of our bodies; yet there’s no realistic limit to how long a computer can run. What is harder to notice, yet much more objective, is the limit of its memory: the computer runs just happily, using as much memory as it can, until there’s no more memory at all. Then strange things begin to happen.

What does exactly happen when the computer is out of memory? Of course, it can just kill the hungry program: it’s not part of the algorithm’s mathematical abstraction, but at least predictable. Usually, however, stranger things happen. One of the ways the computer pretends to have more memory than it actually does is by “swapping”: using the HDD instead of the RAM to store whatever is to be stored in memory. HDD is 10k times slower than RAM: when it’s used for memory too much, nothing crashes, but everything is suddenly very slow. We hear strange noises. The computer starts misbehaving. Random things crash because of the timing issues brought by the lack of speed.

Now we can allow ourselves to see this “lack of memory” in the aristotelian-lacanian light, as something that is material by being actively opposed to the (mathematical) form, not-reducible to it (if only to escape the attempt to inscribe the whole OS, other programs and the hardware into one big ad hoc mathematical structure making any mathematical study of the algorithms pretty much useless). I say “lacanian”, faithfully to Lacan (his Real was Aristotle’s matter), because this is indeed the very point where the subjectivity of computer in the lacanian sense is obvious: it lacks memory (desire) – it acts out (hysteria). If we consider how hackers use a similar problem, the buffer overflow, to do whatever they want to the computer, the analogy becomes rich enough.

The materiality of the neural network. In 1892, one W. E. Johnson described “symbolic calculus” as “an instrument for economizing the exertion of intelligence” (btw, Johnson is described by Wikipedia as “a famous procrastinator”). Far from enabling new types of intelligence by itself, the thing was to save on the wasted expenditure of the old ones. With this I want to introduce another dimension of the materiality of the computer: the one which I’ll describe from a paranoid-marxist perspective, following the Adorno’s belief in the truth of the exaggerations.

Neural network is an amazing shiny new thing, it economizes our exertion of intelligence all right, yet the weirdest part of it all is that we kinda have no idea how it works. We can describe the output (in our terms which we impose on it), and we can describe the inner structure (it’s all matrix multiplication), but there’s no translation between the output and the inner structure except for the one that is by running the neural network themselves. The neural network’s thinking, in general, lacks the conceptual content we’re so much used to, it doesn’t exactly distinguish the parts of bodies and stuff like that. It operates on a belated, not-yet-conceptual level. We can actually through pain identify some general things that it actually notices on the images and stuff like that, but only partially and constantly recognising that it’s we who’s pulling the vague ideas of the NN to this conceptual level.

To illustrate how the NN works there’s no better example than the notorious network which draws cats upon sketches of cats: http://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/index.html . Try it out, you can do it online. Now, what are the concepts with which the neural network thinks about cats? It’s… well, it knows an eye, but that’s more-or-less it. Everything else is more like a texture of a cat, in a very weird sense of a texture, the one available to us after we discovered the 3D rendering.

So there’s knowledge of things in the NN, yet it’s either not on the human level, or it’s somehow hidden. To explain this, Schopenhauer comes to mind: “an entirely pure and objective picture of things is not reached in the normal mind, because its power of perception at once becomes tired and inactive, as soon as this is not spurred on and set in motion by the will. For it has not enough energy to apprehend the world purely objectively from its own elasticity and without a purpose”. That is to say: NN understands cats exactly as much as it needs to (with the need imposed by its operators, most of the time the Capital), and no more.

Now the paranoid-marxist intervention: what is this lack of knowledge? Who has it? Is it not the proletariat? If we have a training set of thousands of pictures, on which a neural network is trained to recognize dozes of features, those features had to be tagged beforehand by some pure workers (most likely from India, am i right?), who themselves were likely constructed through a cheap-labor marketplace such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (the name familiar from Walter Benjamin), pretending to be machines to create a neural network which pretends to do the human work. Can’t we say, exaggerating, that the neural network is a labyrinth of numbers in which anyone looking for the human [labor] is to lose his track?

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everettaddamsmacleod-blog · 7 years ago

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Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals - A review

The most important lesson for public policy analysis derived from the intellectual journey I have outlined here is that humans have a more complex motivational structure and more capability to solve social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory. Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans. We need to ask how diverse polycentric institutions help or hinder the innovativeness, learning, adapting, trustworthiness, levels of cooperation of participants, and the achievement of more effective, equitable, and sustainable outcomes at multiple scales.1

This is a quote from the lecture Elinor Ostrom gave when accepting the not-actually-Nobel Prize in Economics. It’s a good thing, you should read it. But I’m not reviewing that today - instead, today I review this:

At the start of it, the author Derek Wall explains why he’s writing it. Elinor Ostrom’s work is eccentric, off the beaten path, and full of ideas he sees as useful for those of us on the left - despite her work often being classed as liberal and/or conservative. So, he argues, there needs to be an accessible introductory text from a left learning perspective in order to popularize her ideas, put them to use, and continue the discussion she meant to have.

Wall frequently sums up the core of Ostrom’s work as dealing with the structure of institutions, the problem of how to encourage participation and cooperation between people, and the management of shared resources in ways not necessarily attached to market forces or top down state action. If this is so, I wholeheartedly agree that we would do well to dig into her work further.

In the last year or so, I, like many other people, have taken up political activism and organizing. I’ve worked with (or at least attended events from) a number of different organizations, and while doing so I’ve been examining the major shared themes that are traversing through the extended activist circles I’m in.

After the election of 45, the major themes were about clarifying vision and storytelling. Proposed actions were about mission statements, communicating the stories of people impacted by policies, and coming up with clear, concise ways of articulating ‘our message’. There has been a distinct shift to how to build and/or revitalize institutions, how to actively work together, how to keep people engaged, and understanding and seizing power. Actual answers to these questions are...complex, if they exist at all.

While writing this review, even, an issue of The Jacobin belatedly2 arrived at my door, included in which was a poster/article titled “Our Road to Power”3 with the question “How should we understand a socialist party’s internal structure, its relation to its base, and its strategic vision?”

So Derek Wall may be on to something here, that we have a lot to learn from the work of Elinor Ostrom, who usually focused on approaches to the management of shared resources, deep democracy, and institutions to enable such. A digestible and popularizing book on that work would be of good use to leftist movements. This isn’t exactly that book. It comes close, and it has certainly piqued my interest in Ostrom’s work, but I can’t recommend it as an engaging and energizing read.

Wall does a serviceable job of explaining who Elinor Ostrom was and what she cared about, but never seems to go into the depth required to make any of those concepts really fleshed out. He has an annoying trend of finally building to some deeper ideas only to cut off abruptly to say “but we’ll cover that more in Chapter 9”. His tone is bone dry and boring, only getting to some amount of conviction and spirit in the final chapter of the book, where he brings in the Marxist critique he’s been itching to since the first pages.

However the book isn’t completely ineffective, as I’m still intrigued.

Here’s my main takeaway:

There is hope.

Commons - shared resources like the grazing fields, the environment, Wikipedia, civic structures themselves - can be managed by the people that depend on them without being doomed to tragedy. However, this requires the active participation of those people in the democratic institutions that carry out that management. Therefore, a main challenge to policy makers and institution builders is how to shape systems to encourage cooperation, engagement and trust between people.

There are other parts of Wall’s writing that I found useful and enlightening outside of that main point-

For instance, he does make clear that the Ostrom’s work can be part of a strong refutation of lifeboat ethics, and in so doing lays out what exactly ‘lifeboat ethics’ means, where it comes from, and where you can poke holes in it.4 This is incredibly relevant and useful, as I see the lifeboat ethics argument frequently in crypto-fascist spaces as a white nationalist talking point. Solid refutations of it are vital.

He also covers some of the discussion around humans as selfish, rational actors - a key assumption of many economic models. It has been challenged by many people, Ostrom among them, but it still seeps into the thought of many mainstream economists. Tracing the more complex motivations of human beings is especially important when considering how to get those humans to cooperate, and this is a theme that underpins a decent amount of Ostrom’s work.

Ostrom’s problem-solving approach is also interesting to see, and is a mentality I would like to see more of in the world. Many movements/people like to start with grand-seeming ideals, and insist that every part of a system should conform to these beautiful simplistic ideals. This rarely works out well and tends to blind us to reality when it does not conform to the model. While we on the left can see this when it comes to the fundamental models of simple economics, we often forget it can happen to us, too. Starting from problems that need solving and pursuing different solutions by context can allow more flexibility and consequently more robust systems than starting with an ideal and building systems to conform to that.

The chapter on feminist economics5 was a highlight of the book as well, as it documents a lot of refutations of the core principles of market and capital based economic-political theory, and how a lot of those refutations are made clear just by using female/outsider perspectives. Wall also makes an interesting connection between Elinor Ostrom’s emphasis on polycentric approaches to problem-solving - approaches that depend on different people in different places trying different things - to intersectionality and the need for and value of diversity.6 She did not believe it was possible for any one person, any one authority, any one researcher, etc - to know all the answers or have enough experience to make decisions for a whole group, and so stressed the importance of both deep democracy and a diversity of experience and viewpoint.

But I still want to know more about her institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, as I really didn’t see its function and shape in Wall’s writing on the topic. He builds it up as an important part of Elinor Ostrom’s work, and stresses the importance of institutions to democratic governance. However, when he got to explaining her thoughts around institutional analysis and the IAD framework/diagramming, I was a little disappointed. I really don’t know how Wall thought it a good idea to talk about a diagramming technique and not show an example of one of these diagrams.

I did find a general overview of the IAD online7, and I would try to sum it up here, though a) I’m not sure I have a full grasp of it yet and b)I’m still not sure if this particular method of analysis is any more important than just the idea that some kind of institutional analysis is an important tool in solving the overarching problem of building systems to ‘bring out the best in humans’. To quote roughly 80% of scientific studies, more research is needed.

Much of the book alluded to the need for well structured institutions that encourage and incentivize cooperation and trust, but I am left feeling like ideas for how to make that happen were lacking. If the central problem we need to solve is how to grow social trust and participation, then that is largely unanswered here.

In the start of the text, Wall pulls out some major themes of Ostrom’s work as “rules for radicals”. I think if he had tried to center these and pull in supporting text from Ostrom’s work, then I think the book would have been more compelling, as these are important lessons that we should take to heart. As it stands, he mentions these in the beginning but never references them again, so they’re easily lost and not clearly defined. On a re-read, you can find all of these hiding within what he writes, but he rarely crystallizes anything into a clear point on this list.

Think about institutions

Pose social change as problem solving

Embrace diversity

Be specific

Listen to the people

Self-government is possible

Everything changes

Map power

Collective ownership can work

Human beings are part of nature too

All institutions are constructed and so can be constructed differently

No panaceas

Complexity does not mean chaos

I like these. I’m not sure why Wall didn’t focus on them, as I think the text supports them and they get closer to the answer of ‘what do we need to do’. It’s just all a bit muddled in this text.

But, at the very least, the book does make me want more Elinor Ostrom in my life, so thank you for that, Mr. Wall.

Elinor Ostrom, Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems, Prize Lecture, December 8 2009, available https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2009/ostrom_lecture.pdf, p. 435

It's a quarterly mag and somehow I got two in one month.

Chibber, Vivek, Our Road to Power, Jacobin, Issue 27 Fall 2017

Wall, Derek. Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals: Cooperative Alternatives beyond Markets and States. PlutoPress, 2017. p. 24

Ibid, Chapter 6

Ibid, p.71

McGinnis, Micheal D, Updated Guide to IAD and the Language of the Ostrom Workshop: A Simplified Overview of a Complex Framework for the Analysis of Institutions and their Development, http://php.indiana.edu/~mcginnis/iad_guide.pdf

#books #book reviews #elinor ostrom

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