Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

"rights...may have a limited universality"

what is limited universality?

xp sorry, should have said, group of societies': idea being, we uphold what we take to be (the) rights, but that doesn't commit us in any determinate way to thinking that everyone will come around to agreeing with us in the end.

universal 'for us' ?

Rights are inalienable for most of us, as long as certain things aren't happening.

The concept of rights only makes sense to me as description of a government's most fundamental relationship to its citizens. The assertion that a right is inalienable or God-given strikes me as an assertion about where a given society locates the boundary between legitimate governance and illegitimate governance.

If one goes Kantian and says that the deeming of rights is a consequence of rationality, then one can evade rights by choosing irrationality

I am one of those, like Nietzsche I suppose, who thinks the theistic position is as good as it gets, for anything like an "objective" conception of rights. What to conclude from thatree,, should one agree, is rather open, of course.

Reading my blogs today I came across the following article https://nyupress.org/webchapters/Knight&Schwartzberg_intro.pdf by Ingrid Robbins. She defends the following view:

limitarianism advocates that it is not morally permissible to have more resources than are needed to fully flourish in life

She distinguishes between intrinsic limitarianism, which says it's morally wrong in itself to have too much, and non-intrinsic limitarianism, which says it's morally wrong to have too much because having too much has bad consequences. She defends in this article a version of non-intrinsic limitarianism, on which having too much violates political equality (since the rich can dominate the public sphere where democratic deliberation is supposed to take place, e.g.).

I think that I am a limitarianism! My breed is intrinsic, and I wonder how the policy differences between intrinsic and non-intrinsic versions would shake out.

what should society do with surplus?

how deep does your intrinsicness go?

it's morally wrong in itself to have too much, and non-intrinsic limitarianism, which says it's morally wrong to have too much because having too much has bad consequences

you don't need having too much to have a bad consequence to dislike it, fine, but what if limitarianism has bad consequences? what if there were a class of peasants who only produced a luxury good, that society bans under limitarianism, and the class of peasants wages fall below subsistence. still good?

Surplus should be redistributed.

The small group of workers you mention will have to change work. Luxury good here might include hedge fund secretaries.

you're being non-intrinsic by attributing some negative connotation to the luxury good (hedge fund, something bad rich people do that has bad consequences) it could be something banal. if the people go work in something else they drive down the wages of the other people doing it, below the level of 'what's needed to flourish in life'

but what if the surplus brings us over the threshold in 'what's needed to flourish in life'? then everyone is in sin. seems the limitarian thing to do is burn it

isn't it more important that everyone should have the 'what's needed to flourish in life' minimum, rather than no one should have more? would you prefer a society where everyone is at or above the 'what's needed to flourish in life' threshold, or a society where no one is above but some are below? limitarianism seems to put hatred of the rich before love of the poor

There's already lots of work on sufficientarianism, making sure everyone gets the minimal to flourish. This is a different concern. For the author, the claim is that political inequality is a consequence of some having too much, and that political inequality is a moral wrong.

to fully flourish

i mean

sufficientarianism + limitarianism is absolute egalitarianism: no one can be above and nor below the 'minimum amount needed to fully flourish' (accounting for compensating differentials)

there could still be political inequality in a materially egalitarian society

another thing is invention. we are fortunate to live after the invention of many wonderful products. but let's say you invented Limitarianism before the printing press (spread by word of mouth), or the development of film or recorded music. surely people were able to live 'fully flourished' lives before these inventions, and many inventions would be initially costly, so it seems the limitarian thing to do would be to discourage invention. doesn't that much us all much poorer in the long run?

How does limiting how rich a person can get, limit invention? In printing press days it was institutions not individuals who were buying books.

Is there a limitarianist position that allows for some inequality? It seems like for many rich, above a certain $ amount it's more about competition and status than additional material well being, so you could hypothetically have a world with inequality and competition to indulge those impulses but just a much narrower range of wealth/poverty.

It's all gonna ride on what counts as full flourishing of course. If some money competition is part of a fully flourishing life, then sure, there's room for it as a limitarian.

Though I can't help but think in reply something along the lines of, it's not how much you have, it's how you use it.

Do you have another link the paper? This link isn't working for me.

Doesthis work?

old one worked fine for me

It's all gonna ride on what counts as full flourishing of course.

There are clear physical limits to personal consumption, no matter if it is a diet consisting exclusively of hummingbird tongues and an education incorporating daily personal tutorials from Nobel laureates. And if you're Elon Musk, you get to have your own rocket ships, too.

just sounding like the bad guys in an ayn rand book isn't enough to make your ideas right, i'm afraid.

there's a truism that republicans are willing to hold their noses and vote for their candidates more consistently than democrats are.

two recent data points along those lines:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a55768/why-ossoff-lost/

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/238157/what-the-alt-right-understands-about-winning-elections-that-some-progressives-do-not

assuming this is true i had an idea about possibly why. maybe it's bc republican voters are more likely to have strong affiliations outside of politics - communal, familial, religious (particularly), and so that sittlichtkeit is transmissive to politics where they can draw on their other tribal identities to constitute their political tribal identity. when democratic politics were most successful it was when union politics were particularly successful - so they could draw on that tribal identity in their political life. are non-political affiliative cultures predictive of political loyalty? does experiencing sublimation in a group teach repression of individuated desire? and if so, is the solution for the left to start building more widespread affiliative groups?

Finished reading "The H-Word" by Perry Anderson, which is interesting as a genealogy of the concept of hegemony, tracing its different usages and inflections across time and in different places/historical and political contexts. Some seemingly notable omissions from it but he's clear about how he takes up the concept and surveys its use across history. It does take you to some interesting and unexpected places (Tokugawa Japan, for example!) and sheds interesting light on the historical ambivalence between the terms of hegemony and empire (and their local and historical variations).

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2439-the-h-word

reading the democratic paradox by chantal mouffe which is so extremely my shit and that i agree with so much that i feel like for the sake of fairness i should actually read habermas and rawls on democratic theory to counter-balance my confirmation bias

via HOOS

oscar wilde was so ahead of the timehttps://t.co/aiJsX1MGCH pic.twitter.com/HyQ9dO2oed

— DSA Queer Socialists (@QueerDSA) July 23, 2017

Word

As a set of generalities, Wilde's remarks are fine. Once you start to implement them, they are much too vague to be of any use whatsoever.

The literature, however, remains unsettled as to exactly when and how misperceptions can be corrected. In addition, the role of the “backfire effect,” where corrective information can actually make false beliefs more prevalent, in these processes remains unclear. For example, Weeks and Garrett (2014) do not find evidence for the backfire effect in a study about correcting rumors in the 2008 presidential campaign. Similarly, Ecker et al.’s (2014) study of racial attitudes finds those attitudes do not change the effectiveness of discounting information. Looking at similar attitudes, Garrett et al. (2013) find no evidence of these backfire effects in a study about a proposed Islamic cultural center in New York City. By contrast, Nyhan and Reifler (2010, 2015) find evidence for a backfire effect in a vaccines context as well as in the case of being correctly informed about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

This research note reports a replication of Nyhan and Reifler’s (2015) flu vaccines study embedded within a larger experimental study of flu vaccine intentions and attitudes. Data generated in the experiment do not replicate the backfire effect or the finding that corrections reduce misperceptions about vaccine safety. This suggests that more work is needed to validate the backfire effect, establishing the conditions under which it occurs and the size of its effect.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053168017716547

interesting interview:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/sigmar-gabriel-we-are-seeing-what-happens-when-the-u-s-pulls-back-a-1186181.html

feel like i should try and use this thread more this year

it's def a better thread than the regular politics one, which is mostly just media talk

I want to read your link, will do so a bit later I think.

it speaks to a lot of the issues that i opened this thread w/ - Europe, the US, the military guarantee of sovereignty, national interest vs. national values, etc.

I though his separation between European values and European interests was interesting but cloudy. Here's what I made of "European interests": financial interests, connected with soft power interests like being admired, but distinguished from mere "output". So it's not *just* cash, but how the cash is made: by workers and corporates acting in line with democratic values, in order to insure that democratic and free countries can continue to exist and prosper.

It's also interesting that while he speaks a great deal of Europe, on foreign policy he speaks as much of Germany as Europe. He notes that France is a nuclear power, but that "Europe could not defend itself without the U.S., even if European structures were strengthened." I gather he means a land invasion by Russia, since France's nuclear arsenal is sufficient to destroy the metropolises of any invaders, but presumably not Russian tanks across the Curzon line.

He seems to judge the USA to not longer count as a democratic and free nation, so that Europe stands alone against the authoritarian states of the USA, Russia, and China. An interesting new Axis I suppose. He mentions Chinese intervention in Africa and wonders why Europe isn't working harder there; of course France does work hard there but the colonial legacy is still playing out and it's not a pretty one. Africa is Europe's future, I think; but how to do so in a non-colonial way, when we begin with such inequalities, is hard to think about. The Chinese have no such problem (and obviously the Americans don't care).

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/critique-and-tradition-a-conversation-with-susan-buck-morss/

You have described your thinking as close “to what Bert Brecht described (and admired) as plumpes denken — non-elegant thinking.” Plumpes denken would be a kind of vulgar or inelegant thinking that has the agility to respond to the demands of our historical present. Fredric Jameson has described this kind of thinking as not a “position” that stands alone but a “demystification of some prior position from which it derives its acquired momentum.” This seems to fit in well with what you have termed a boundary question.

Yes, my colleague Irving Wohlfarth was the first to describe my work as a form of plumpes denken, and I take that to be a compliment! You have mentioned the element of unfaithfulness or a kind of promiscuity to my method. I would also add that it offers a critique of received tradition. In 1992, I was in Berlin, and it was some anniversary of Hegel. A lot of new books came out on Hegel’s Jena Writings that offered variants of his lectures recorded in student notes. Reading those, I noticed that it was exactly in 1804/1805 that the dialectic was spoken about by Hegel in terms of master/slave. I thought that was curious: this year was the culmination of the Haitian Revolution. So I asked some scholars in Germany, but they all said, “No, no. The master/slave dialectic is a reference to the revolt of Spartacus in ancient Rome.” I thought, “Well, wait a minute. Hegel’s economic theory is about Adam Smith, and his political theory is about Rousseau and the French Revolution, so how is it that he goes back to Spartacus for the theme of master and slave?” That struck me as bizarre. So I began to read about the Haitian Revolution, but it took me almost nine years to bring Hegel and Haiti together. Eventually, I found the microfiche of the journal Minerva, which Hegel read religiously, and in it I found many pages on the Haitian Revolution.

I remember when I first gave the lecture, “Hegel and Haiti,” in W. J. T. Mitchell’s seminar at the University of Chicago, someone in the audience asked me, “Why are you so angry when you give this lecture?” I was angry at the thought that my education had completely overlooked this connection between Hegel and Haiti. So there is also a kind of rebelliousness or anger at received traditions. It taught me, “Don’t be too respectful of authority — if it doesn’t make sense, maybe it’s wrong.”

https://thepointmag.com/dialogue/control-groups-william-davies-nervous-states/

TH: Would you say that a relatively modest economic decline has more political impact than long-suffered misery?

WD: This is an interpretation you could draw from the data. But in any case, we live in a political world today where questions of suffering, disease and mortality have reentered the center of the political scene. Not only in the U.S., but also in Britain, the trends of life expectancy are pointing downwards. On the other end of the age spectrum, political activism has become much more existential in nature—think about things like Black Lives Matter or the Extinction Rebellion movement. Politics has become about questions of life and death again in a way that blows a hole in a key aspect of the Hobbesian liberal project, which is that unless you declare war, politics would not be shaped by mortal concerns. Over the past two decades in America, orders of magnitude more people have died due to opium overdoses than in the Vietnam War. Capitalism is generating problems that impact people’s bodies and mortality. This is a phenomenon that rationalist social sciences of economics or behavioral psychology are not equipped to deal with. It’s another reason why a more psychoanalytically informed approach to subjectivity is necessary.

mordy:

series of moishe postone lectures on marx

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUzGFXPJAZ6qq7rI8GhPJ6gi7fH9cfUnI

thx i will watch. i almost bumped this thread this week actually w/ a long post but self-censored oops.

reading thucydides - it's cool.

thought about posting this to right-wing drift. seems v hostile to ilx: https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/on-strasserism-and-the-decay-of-the-left/

goddamn. that should be required reading with a competency exam before one is allowed to post on the 'smart socialists explain conservatism' etc. threads

it's a repetitive mess, a mixture of things a lot of ppl are saying abt the difficulty of building a broad leftist coalition/the contradictions within, a bunch of bitter attempts at score settling, some flattery for conservatives, the occasional baseless assertion and a whole lot of hubris. the real split is between ppl who find this sort of bravado impressive and those who roll their eyes

wow that was boring. maybe one or two good points somewhere in there but people keep writing this same fucking article like they’re saying something new

beyond sick of people tossing around lazy received crap like “identity politics scares away workers” without bothering to specify either term. since the writer is moaning about the “cancellation” of Angela Nagle due to her “class-based, materialist perspective” on why ethnic cleansing is necessary (another fucker who thinks nationalist workerism is class analysis and identities aren’t material) it’s pretty clear which workers are supposed to matter here. vampire castle bollocks

I looked at that but boy is it long, without any definition of what they take "strasserism" to be.

guys I think we should all pay attention to one of the most compelling, straight-talking political philosophers of modern times who isn't afraid to pierce the bubble of delusions of the bourgeois left: paul embery

the debate caused by the nathan robinson thing about the utility of marx in 2020 is actually interesting tho

it's a lot of shite tbh. strasserite is obviously an insult and isn't to be taken literally when applied to the likes of la nagle - though pace the article strasserism is still influential in far-right circles. but nagle's politics is a mixture of right-wing populism on social issues, and left-wing populism on the economy, and for some of us anti-immigration rhetoric is a personal attack so I'm happy to think she's an arsehole and this useless cunt writing the article can away and lie in his pish.

people - including piketty - have written well on the "brahmin left" and the hemorrhaging of support of "the left" from the white working-class. a trend that - in the uk, France, and the US - has been a constant since the 1960s and is not particular to the contemporary "left"

he points out in that piece something i've mentioned a few times to leftists debating the robinson thing which is that there are egalitarian and even radical egalitarian movements that long predate marxism the idea that marxism is the only ideology fit to serve as the vehicle for our egal aspirations is ahistorical and robinson isn't a reactionary to note that it might not even be the most productive vehicle.

They seem to be railing against tumblr dorks who called them names rather than any specific left ideas (other than Corbyn’s promise of free broadband). The Fight for 15 in the US, for example, seems like exactly the kind of thing they ought to support, but since that doesn’t suit the tenor of the rant, it isn’t mentioned.

xp. yes, trad marxism is bad and people being like "let's just do bolshevism again" as if we don't already know how that turns out, and it's not very good

cares way too much, despite above-it-all posturing, about electoral prospects for “the left”

is “actually existing socialism” is being used unironically?

zizek cited without a fart noise

big reveal that “stasserism” isn’t a thing as such... wow my mind is blown. still more than enough fascist and authoritarian collaboration on/from the left

cool thing about the vampire castle genre is no one can call you racist/sexist/reactionary/whatever without proving your point. I’m cancelling the writer by calling them a dickhead thus demonstrating how correct they are in their analysis of everything wrong with the left these days

no he's trying to answer a bigger question which is why is the hemorrhaging of support of "the left" from the white working-class. a trend that - in the uk, France, and the US - has been a constant since the 1960s and is not particular to the contemporary "left" is so. the tumblr dorks are just symptomatic if anything. xxp