Have the Trivialists engineered our doom?
And other great things I found on the net — with special bonus cute puppies!
Despair anyone?
Branko Milanovic is rather wary of the state of the world, and not feeling good about how we got here:
That today’s world situation is the worst since the end of the Second World War is not an excessive, nor original, statement. As we teeter on the brink of a nuclear war, it does not require too many words to convince people that this is so.
The question is: how did we get here? And is there a way out?
To understand how we got here, we need to go to the end of the Cold War. That war, like the World War I, ended with the two sides understanding the end differently: the West understood the end of the Cold War as its comprehensive victory over Russia; Russia understood it as the end of the ideological competition between capitalism and communism: Russia jettisoned communism, and hence it was to be just another power alongside other capitalist powers.
The origin of today’s conflict lies in that misunderstanding. …
The trivialists succeeded in turning the progressiveness of the post-War on its head. Instead of development and progress meaning a combination of the best elements of market (capitalist) economy and socialism, elimination of power-politics in world affairs, and the adherence to the rules of the United Nations, progressiveness in their new reading of history meant unbridled market economics at home, “liberal international order” of unequal power abroad, and pensée unique in ideology.
Instead of a social-democratic capitalism with peace, to be progressive began to mean neo-liberalism with the permission to wage war on anyone who disagreed with it. Instead of mild and innocuous mixture of socialism and capitalism at home and equal power of all states internationally, we got served the power of the rich at home, and the power of big countries internationally. It was a weird return to the quasi-colonial hegemony, taking place—incongruously, at first—at the time of “liberal victory”.
A radical plan for Trump’s second term
Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his "America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios.
Why are so many philosophers bachelors?
This prepared this script for a talk on the BBC radio in the 1950s. The editor rejected it as a “trivial, irrelevant intrusion of domestic matters into intellectual life.” The text is published in a new philosophical magazine — Raven for the first time. I love it!
Practically all the great European philosophers have been bachelors. In case you doubt that, here are some figures
Unmarried: Plato, Plotinus, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant
Married: Socrates, Aristotle, Hegel
I may be wrong in these and fifty other details, but whatever you do to them, the figures will probably remain significant. The only question is, what of? …
It is commonplace today that [the theory of knowledge] branch of philosophy got into confusion by first artificially separating the Knower from the Known, and then sitting down to puzzle out how to connect them. Not-being-sure-whether-the-table-is-really-there is one of the best-known weaknesses of philosophers. Nor is there much doubt who started the trouble. It was Descartes. … We do not see Experience these days as a narrow shaky gangway between the two towers of the Knower and the Known, but as a rich countryside, containing and building both of them. Such a view is both more fruitful and closer to the facts.
The puzzle is, what gave Descartes’ vision its extraordinary force? Why do we still find his experiment so moving? The reason, I think, is that it appeals to the adolescent philosopher in all of us. Descartes tells us how he deliberately sought for perfect certainty; how he withdrew his belief systematically from everything he had taken on trust, and concentrated his thought on the search for a safe starting-point; a basis on which, like Archimedes, he could rest the Universe. … Criticism, panting after Descartes, points out that he can be sure of nothing but his momentary experience … But against the natural solipsism of adolescence, Criticism cuts no ice. At that time of life, one’s own ordered being is axiomatic. …
Philosophers have generally talked for instance as though it were obvious that one consciousness went to one body, as though each person were a closed system which could only signal to another by external behaviour, and that behaviour had to be interpreted from previous experience. I wonder whether they would have said the same if they had been frequently pregnant and suckling, if they had been constantly faced with questions like, “What have you been eating to make him ill?”
Helen Dale on Tories, trans and feminism
The context of Helen Dale’s analysis is rather forgettable — the skirmishing for leadership of the UK Conservative Party. Its the price of admission since this kind of thing can’t be said on the left, though what can be is a little unclear. Helen’s a proud member of the Conservative Party, so it’s all eminently sayable — perhaps even too sayable.
One of the great ironies of our time is that feminism has adopted the Victorian Cult of Womanhood: men are uncivilised brutes who women must morally tame. It is an unspoken assumption that the movement of women into, well, everything, is an unalloyed good.
Amateurs or experts: who should you trust?
How much should we defer to expertise, and how do we know who’s an expert and who’s not? How does ‘the system’ know that? How did Kaggle revolutionise not just the way data science was done, but how we recognise expertise in data science. And why does weather forecasting offer the epitome of what I call ‘Socratic expertise’?
As usual, this was a wide-ranging and exciting conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman.
The audio can be downloaded from this link.
The wreck of Bidenomics
Excellent summary of the woes of Biden’s attempts to steer the economy — a nasty mix of bad luck (we thought stimulus was needed when it wasn’t), bad faith (Joe Manchin) and bad values (Americans don’t care too much for saving the planet or even their kids. Some do of course, but many don’t).
It really pains me to have to write this post.
I had high hopes for Bidenomics. The combination of the Covid emergency, Chinese competition, and general American anger at long years of stagnation and inequality felt like they might motivate this country to get up off its butt and do something to improve the situation.
The idea was that because the expanded child allowance was quasi-universal, it would garner broad support like Social Security did. … Surprisingly, most Americans didn’t want to make the child benefit permanent.
Climate investment ran into a similar problem. Despite accelerating heat waves, wildfires, and floods, Americans place a pretty low priority on climate action
Meanwhile, back in the land of He-Said-She-Said journalism
The World as a Game
And endlessly snide and long hostile review of David J. Chalmers in his book, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. I thought a lot of the digs it took at analytic philosophy were well made — but couldn’t keep wading through the sniditude. Worth dipping into if you’re interested in that kind of thing though.
Philosophy, while in its most enduring expressions always stands apart from the era in which it emerges, also has a long history of subordinating itself to whatever appears in its day as the biggest game going, as the most dazzling center of concentrated power and influence. Once it was theology, then it was science, now it is Big Tech, whose ascendancy required the prior work of the scientists even as it now operates independently of any faithfulness to truth-seeking and has nothing other than capital accumulation as its logic and life-breath.
The real origins of the Electoral College
My recent post at Club Troppo
As part of my recent fascination with ‘de-competitive’ methods of merit selection — ways of choosing good people that don’t involve them in any competition with one another, I’ve been looking at the origins of both parliamentary and presidential elections. Intriguingly though we now associate elections with competition between candidates, in both the British parliamentary system and the American presidency, elections were not competitive. Indeed, contemporaries regarded the idea of competition for such an office with alarm for its tendency to encourage ‘faction’.
But isn’t an ‘election’ competitive by definition? Isn’t that the meaning of the word? Well no! That’s what the word implies today, but its root in Latin simply means “to pick” or “to choose”. The word ‘elect’ retains this sense in Christian theology when speaking of ‘the elect’ — those chosen, not in competition with each other but by God. One can circle back from this reference to observe that the electorate is the sovereign body when it comes to its being represented, and in this sense an ‘election’ is the choosing by the sovereign body — if you’re dealing with God, I’m reliably informed that He’s sovereign and so he elects the elect. And if you’re dealing with the electorate, it chooses who is the elect.
Click through to the post for chapter and verse on how English parliamentarians were ‘elected’ without competition and how the Electoral College was invented precisely to minimise undue competition in choosing a president.
On my clicking on the tweet above, Twitter decided more pet tweets
