Those transcripts are incredibly embarrassing. I can see why they are trying to avoid the debates.
I thought Bush was the historic low, but it seems not.
"I thought Bush was the historic low, but it seems not."
Only if McCain's elected. And dies.
What would happen if he dropped dead Nov 1?
What would happen if he dropped dead Nov 1?
A question I have been pondering, with variants, all summer.
One of the dudes at Balkinization did an in-depth legal analysis.
Here ...Levinson
Not quite to your point, and not so deep, but a little interesting.
Ok, my first guess:
1) Palin would be elected Vice-President, in those state where the slate won
2) The Republicans most like couldn't come up with a candidate in three days and get the name on the ballot. The electors would not be bound to a dead candidate, but I doubt many would allow them to be free.
3) So the state legislatures would come up with a second slate of electors bound to whomever the party chose before the counting, or just whomever.
4) Trying to remember 2000, and if there was a certainty of two slates of electors if Gore had won any recount (Because the Fla Legislature was going to pick their own) or if the state legislature can somehow unelect the previous slate. I think the former, the conflict between two slates to be decided by Congress.
But constitutionally, the election cannot be postponed.
I am also thinking on G.E.M. Anscombe (is that who this is?), if I have that book (I do), and the topic.
I have probably watched Hurlyburly three times in the last few months, and the apparent incoherence of one of the leads compared with the precision of the second lead is an important tool of the playwright, and challenge to the audience.
But usually I consider incoherence to be a sign of dissembling, of attempting to hide compelling thoughts.
Your political blogging continues to kick ass, Ben.
But constitutionally, the election cannot be postponed.
I thought that the date was set by Congress, and the Constitution just says the President serves for four years. Couldn't they push it back to the end of December, say? Not that I know how all that would interact with state laws.
Here's something that is not word salad, but a related species of bullshit. Every week, the administration sends everyone a single page newsletter from an organization called the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD). This week the headline is
COLLABORATION POWER: A RISING TIDE OF EXCELLENCEThe body of the article is an inspiring story of Hazard Community and Technical College and how they rose the tide of excellence by scheduling more frequent meetings and organizational development days. In describing a typical event, they mention that
The first 80% of the conversation focussed on answering the following exciting questions.etc etc. The word collaboration is used frequently, but no collaborations are described.
- Who are we as an organization
- What have we been that is excellent
The result
The senior leadership team responded with a progressive approach designed to maximize resources. Unwanted by necessary workforce reductions were tough on moral.Etc. Etc.
I posted the below (in two parts) at Little Green Men, but it's equally relevant here. Sue me if you wish:
A lot of life, especially small-town life, can be negotiated just be mediating personal relationships with truisms. It sounds to me that that's what Palin is good at.
This isn't exactly a criticism of Rorty's theory of truth, since purely interpersonal speech communities are always prey to speech communities with more realistic ways of seeing the world.
Unfortunately our tough-minded reality-creators have chosen to put Palin in a position where she might actually have to interact with the non-personal world.
*******************
To continue on Palin's small-town-truism local-consensus thought processes: in a face-to-face oral culture governed by consensus, arguments are validated by the persons making them, and there's very little criticism of the content of the ideas themselves. (Cf. "An Enemy of the People"). There's also no written memory, so no one necessarily remembers this year what someone said last year, or even last month or yesterday.
TV has made national politics increasingly about of persons, not ideas: reassuring elder statesmen like Brit Hume, truth-tellers like Rush Limbaugh, drinking buddies like Dubya, nice moms like Palin, war heroes like McCain. There's always been some of that, but increasingly popular and electoral politics is all that.
Much of the Republican Party core constituency has a hatred of critical and analytical thinking as such. Palin and Bush spoke to that part of the constituency. But there have always been rational George Will / Howard Baker types, completely contemptuous of the core, behind the scenes pulling the strings.
With Bush and now McCain and Palin, some of these elder statesmen types seem to be getting uneasy. I almost seems as though the Armageddonist Christians, influence peddlers and grafters and plunderers, non-ideological political operatives, whim voters, etc. are in complete "control", and that the nation's actual leaders might be oral, uncritical, unanalytic, intuitive, tribal thinkers of the Palin type.
I don't think that this was exactly what the hippies had in mind. Unintended consequences, etc.
You'll be getting a letter from my lawyer.
10 is really good.
Tangential, but important: This article does a good job of clarifying many details of the current mess on Wall Street.
Emerson@10 I googled Little Green Men and found nothing resembling a site where such a comment might make sense. What is this thing and why is it so well hidden?
Lawyers, Guns, and Money, I presume.
10 was good, but I'm a little short on cash. You'll be receiving a letter on fancy-looking letterhead.
John, don't read this paragraph. Can anyone think of a really scary lawyer-sounding name I can use? For no reason; I'm just making conversation.
arguments are validated by the persons making them
This is a really good point, all of 10 is indeed nice. Many intelligent but inarticulate people use cliche, and use it wisely, because they know all the context. Interpersonal communication like this is both a style of expression and a style of perception. Inarticulateness is a flaw, but one less serious than seeing only faction and loyalty.
Christ, doesn't anyone understand the concept of Googleproofing? If those fuckers at LGM find out we read their blog, we'll never be rid of them.
I want to know what the aphasics think of Palin
14: Thanks. Makes sense.
17: As google's AI improves eventually it will be able to carry out searches such as "googleproofed references to Walt Someguy." That point is about 18 months away. Your only hope is surgical alteration of your body and assumption of a whole new identity. That should hold them off for at least another couple of years.
I don't know the original context of 10 (I just looked over at the site and didn't see it), but it applies to the Republican bailout proposal. When I read that one of the proposals is a two-year moratorium on the capital gains tax to encourage companies to sell unwanted assets, I laughed for two minutes straight. This is the cargo cult version of conservative economics.
I've taken out several LGM commenters in a knife fight. Don't worry.
To go on:
"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions". One very prevalent kind of contemporary rationality grants that goals cannot be discussed, but that means can, so that rationality consists of finding the most efficient means of attaining given ends. (Economics makes this a defining principle: "Take needs / wants /demand as given".)
In the present Republican party, the technicians are Reason. They deliver the vote, get the donations, deliver the graft, shape the message, lobby Congress, ram bills through Congress, etc. In theory, Palin represent the passions: need, desire, want, goals, ends, the Id, the common people, brute humanity, formless matter, the body, etc. It would be senseless to criticize her thought processes. Palin is a given, the decider, the hand guiding the neutral machine and inputting the specific goals. (I'm assuming that Palin will be President use reason to judge her: she's the transcendent purpose and standard of the whole machine, the iridium bar in Paris.
In reality, of course, here's a principle-agent problem. The Republican Party, like the State, dissolves into the component desires of its rational technicians, and Palin really is just a means. (Abramoff and his clients, for example, never did the Republicans any good at all, or intended to. But he was a big player in the Republican Party).
This is, of course, a stupid, insane, evil kind of rationality. It's unfortunate that it has come to dominate the whole world. Putting a major component of every issue entirely out of discussion is imbecile. But that's how the modern world works.
Amartya Sen and Hilary Putnam have argued that ends and values should be discussible too. I'm not sure that either realizes the degree to which their "thick" concepts require rejecting much of the last 70 years of philosophy and economics and starting from scratch. The clear analytic distinction between ends and means has an enormous down side, and analytic philosophy and neoclassical economics have done a lot of damage. (Hi, Parsi!)
John Holbo thinks I'm a paranoid idiot on these questions, BTW. So it goes. He has actually bothered to find out what I think.
I've taken out several LGM commenters in a knife fight. Don't worry.
You think they'd know to bring a gun to a knife fight. Some people never learn.
OT: Is it just me, or do the Little Green Men posters tend to regress to the mean? They seem to like to take as mainstream centrist a position as is remotely plausible.
he clear analytic distinction between ends and means has an enormous down side, and analytic philosophy and neoclassical economics have done a lot of damage.
I know this is your personal obsession John, but neither the means/ends distinction or classical/neoclassical economics is a product of analytic philosophy. Except in the sense that everything somehow must be blamed on analytic philosophy.
Neoclassical economics and analytic philsophy are definitely in synch. Robbins' behaviorism, Friedman's positivism, Samuelson's mathematicism. Analytic philosophy and neoclassical economics accepted and perfected the pre-existing ends-means distinction, more or less absolutizing it.
Putnam and Sen have proposed de-distinguishing the two, and I applaud that. Before Putnam and Sen, as far as I know, the philosophers who de-distinguished ends and means were not analytic philosophers. Proposed exceptions will be taken into consideration.
Distinctions do good and they do harm, and this distinction, as institutionalized, has done harm.
I don't feel like looking through LGM comment threads right now, is 10 supposed to answer a question like, "How could Palin be a competent mayor and governor, assuming those things are actually the case, and yet offer up the kind of gibberish which Ben links to in this post?"
For the sake of argument, if Putnam and Sen were the first to do that, when did they first propose it? I don't know the answer but if I had to make a wild assed guess I'd go with sometime in the 1970's.
re: 26
The problem isn't the distinguishing of means from ends, the problem is that this is in then transformed into unquestioning support for a particular set of ends.
re: 27
I presume it's the lobotomy they now carry out on prospective candidates for high office. Remember the videos of Bush in debates when he was running for Governor and the contrast with the videos of him in debates when running for president?
John, you're doing that thing again, where everyone counts as an analytic philosopher when you need to argue that analytic philosophy runs academic philosophy, but all the reasonable people get excluded from analytic philosophy when you need to argue that analytic philosophy is wrong.
People are free to tell me who the good analytic philosophers would be, from my point of view.
As far as I know, Sen has been doing this stuff for some time, but Putnam came along recently.
I don't believe that I've ever read anything by an analytic philosopher that I would recommend to anyone but another analytic philosopher. In ethics, social theory, history, and politics it seems null or harmful to me. And a lot of the philosophy of science, too.
You claimed to like both Ethics without Philosophy and Unprincipled Virtue.
In any case, perhaps we can not have another go-round of this argument now.
re: 33
And a lot of the philosophy of science, too.
I meant to ask, what did you think of the Laudan article?
perhaps we can not have another go-round of this argument now.
Yes, it will mess up the schedule. We're supposed to be having another go-round of a different argument right now.
Yes, these are two very recent books where Putnam calls a lot of the past seventy years of philosophy into question.
I liked Putnam's two books at first, but then I came to think that he was only trying to get philosophers to accept a pretty sensible idea that no one except philosophers had ever denied, and undo the damage of 70 years of positivism, behaviorism, and they're avrious descendant tendencies.
Putnam isn't the author of those books.
Oh, sorry. They were sort of OK, I guess.
OK, ignore the last two paragraphs of 22. You people are really touchy.
OK, ignore the last two paragraphs of 22. You people are really touchy.
I have to applaud the textbook trolling technique here.
I call it ethnomethodology. I used skilled devices to tease out people's real opinions.
IF ANYO)NE THINKS JOHN HOLBO IS A GOOD THINKER, I AGREE. HE IS A GOOD THINKER. FOR ME TO POOP ON!
I KEED, I KEED
I think a sexism argument is next on the schedule, since we've just had an Apocalypse Bob argument.
For Emerson, some quotes from different parts of David Wiggins, "Deliberation and Practical Reason" (1975-1976):
If this is right so far, then I think another step is taken...to dissociate Aristotle's whole theory of deliberation from that pseudorationalistic irrationalism, insidiously propagated nowadays by technocratic persons, which holds that reason has nothing to do with the ends of human life, its only sphere being the efficient realization of specific goals in whose determination or modification argument plays no substantive part. [There follows a footnote in which he cites Friedman: "Differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different predictions...rather than from fundamental differences in basic values, differences about which men can only fight."]
A man may think it is clear to him in a certain situation what is the relevant concern, yet find himself discontent with every practical syllogism promoting that concern...He may resile from the concern when he sees what it leads to, or what it costs, and start all over again. It is not necessarily true that he who wills the end must will the means. (The same would have to apply to public rationality, if we had that. In a bureaucracy, where action is not constantly referred back to what originally motivated it, the acute theoretical and practical problem is to make room for some such stepping back, and for the constant remaking and reevaluation of concerns. Also for the distinction that individual citizens make effortlessly for themselves between projects on the one hand and concerns of another sort, which define and delimit the space within which deliberation operated unconstrained. In the difficulty of this referring back, and in the chronic inability of public agencies to render transitive between situations reviewed and/or brought about by planning the relation is found better than, lies one of the conceptual foundations for a reasoned hatred of bureaucracy, and for the demand for "public participation" in planning. If one dislikes the last, or has no stomach for the expenditure of time and effort that it entails, then one should go back to the beginning, defy certain demands often represented as imperatives, and reexamine the ends for which a bureaucracy of such a size was taken to be needed, or at least the means chosen to realize the said ends.
I entertain the unfriendly suspicion that those who feel they must seek more than all this provides want a scientific theory of rationality not so much from a passion for science, even where there can be no science, but because they hope and desire, by some conceptual alchemy, to turn such a theory into a regulative or normative discipline, or into a system of rules by which to spare themselves of some of the agony of thinking and all the torment of feeling and understanding that is actually involved in reasoned deliberation.
Ah! Resile! A guy who came to Stanford and several of whose papers I've read uses "resile" frequently; he studied with Wiggins and now I know where he got it.
As I was typing it in, I realized that I must have figured out its meaning from context when I read the paper last spring, but without its even registering at the time that I didn't know the word.