As dicentra knows, her interlocutor’s “dialogue” is but a typical grad-level regurgitation of anti-foundationalism applied to politics in an effort to lazily and cleverly pull a PhD from the leftists who wish to see capitalism replaced by liberal fascism, which they will always claim is a stepping stone to egalitarian communism, but which never arrives there, given the necessity of the more clever pigs to manage the rest of the farm. Dicent was absolute right to identify the rhetoric and call it sophistry — and her interlocutor (like Stanley Fish) embraces that label, in a strange way– but what the interlocutor misses (or else brackets, knowing that a conscious acknowledgment of what is a rather obvious flaw in the “argument”) is that’s it’s sophistry that is itself elevated to dogma. Just a different dogma than the property / labor correlation that is a precondition of individual autonomy.
Ironically, I bet dicentra’s interlocutor would find the fruits of this banal and totally predictable PhD thesis very much his or hers. And thereby viscerally refute the cold and dispassionate “examination” of the building blocks of “truth” that refute the certainty of property/labor connectedness,
And besides, the answer to the posed non-problem discussed at length here is an easy one, and one I’ve discussed here before: You don’t need to believe in God, or nature, or whatever outside force MAN CLAIMS leads to certain truths being self evident.
All you have to do is agree to the man-made restriction on the power of men over other men — by creating a category of unalienable rights, and then agreeing as part of the social compact to accept those preconditions as a foundation plank in the political framework.
You don’t need proof, because “proof'” in this regard is metaphysical, and God and Nature both seem done with stone tablets or egret tracks spelling out scripture.
There is no final arbiter of metaphysical truth available to us — otherwise the certainty of God or something approaching that concept would be settled, and faith would be moot — because we are by nature separated from that category, whether you believe it to be real or whether you’ve agreed to accept it as the controlling part of our political system.
So. In the end, what dicentra’s interlocutor is saying is that without that agreement, codified and ratified in the Constitution after having been spelled out and signed in the Declaration, there is no actual provable basis for the central tenets of the agreement.
To which your perfect reply, doy, settled the matter. Because it is itself a tautology attempting to illuminate a supposed tautology that isn’t: because again, the fact of a God or Nature creating natural rights is secondary to the agreement that this is a fundamental truism in the social and political compact upon which this country was born and established.
Thesis person is falling back on again what is a very trivial postmodernist observation, namely, that things as they are and “truth” are different things (under their dogmatic formulation), because to posit “truths” you must have language, and language is the creation and tool of man (they assert). Therefore, it follows that all “truths” are man-made, while “things as they are” are not.
It’s Rorty and consensus — irony, contingency, solidarity — one on one. It’s Hayden White’s historicism reified.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. Whether you believe in the idea of natural rights being bestowed by God, or natural rights being identified and proffered by man as a way to keep the powerful from attempting to take on the role of God (that is, as a check on the very idea that, because metaphysical certainty can’t be reached, all other possibilities need be given equal weight) — the Statist agenda being just so, frustrated time and again by the compact that made our country — you are agreeing to the attendant corollaries as a form of evidence within the framework of the contract.
This person’s PhD can be boiled down to this: if America wasn’t founded the way it was, it might be different. So I believe we should challenge the way America was founded, beat it over the head with postmodernist cant, then do it my way.
Which cannot then be challenged, and is mine. All things being relative, except of course my argument, which finalizes and fixes as truth the certainty of relativism. Dogmatically.
It’s self-aggrandizement masquerading as sophisticated thinking. When what it really is is sophistic thinking.
Which is sadly what passes for knowledge these days — and as a political ideal, provided your pant crease is just so.
Has metaphysical, the term, become a mere descriptor of a contemporary incapacity? That is, we know reasonably well where the term got its start (without knowing at the same time what it’s about), and in another sense what that start consisted in superficially, but owing to quite dogmatic modern first principles has become — as an act [ergos], an action [en-ergeia] or a potential, a potency [dynamis] — nearly perfectly beyond our reach? Yet how strange is this, that we who think our physics an enormously worthwhile venture, possibly even the worthwhile venture for some men, should be utterly incapable of what comes next, but a bumpkin the like of Aristotle can establish a millennial political order by its means? We would mock ourselves.
What astonishes me most about the kind of people who write this kind of thesis (the collective is great, down with capitalism) is they are completely unwilling to admit that if it were not for capitalism, and the attendant wealth created by capitalism, they could not afford the luxury of writing such drivel.
…..they could not afford the luxury of writing such drivel.
– Intellectuals tend to suffer from a morbid facination with their own enslavement.
Sophist Jeebus on a scholarship, that Twitter exchange had me rolling my eyes so far that they fell down the back of my hair shirt. What a perfect illustration of a tedious, willfully obtuse pseudo intellectual leftard keyboard warrior. Don’t know how dicentra had the patience to put up with such nonsense. I started thinking of the Monty Python sketch where the Michael Palin pays John Cleese to have an argument.
BBH, I always amuse myself by imagining such a person trying to compete for patronage during the Renaissance.
I started thinking of the Monty Python sketch where the Michael Palin pays John Cleese to have an argument.
– ….and as pointless as the “Dead Parrot pet shop”.
During the Renaissance, anyone with an attitude like this guy wouldn’t have made it out of early childhood.
It’s neat that it is so easy to recapitulate the argument between the city and philosophy . . . and all the more so without the hemlock having to stand in the central place of honor — but then we might start wondering what the heck was the need of hemlock in the first place, if philosophy is utterly silly?
George, I have no doubt a guy like this would find lots of company in a potter’s field.
Very frightening thing is these arguments are in fact not pointless. These arguments have shaped an entire generation of liberal fascists who now run the nation below Canada.
Say what you like about Ayn Rand, but she was correct when she asserted that the realm of ideas is where freedom and tyranny begin their struggle.
– I don’t believe theres anything enherently silly about philosophical thought, as long as the thinker avoids the fatal mistake of taking its musings seriously.
That’s silly too BigBangHunter. But the attitude certainly isn’t new.
George, both “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and “Atlas Shrugged” contain a complete blueprint of where we are and are headed.
Forget Heinlein and his “The Past Through Tomorrow” series. Piker.
– Depends on how fearful one is of being “unmoored” I suppose. The Dogmatic stakes we drive into the ground (we even speak to them as “grounding” interestingly enough) are expediant and neccessary, else theres nowhere to start.
– People seem to fall into two camps. Those that are comfortable with free form and those that aren’t. I think that group struggle even precedes the freedom/tyranny struggle. YMMV
The argument made by the tweeter however does resemble a Heinlein story. “All You Zombies.”
Sure seems like he was pretty close with the “Crazy Years”.
Also, Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” was written as a cautionary tale, but it keeps sounding more like prophecy.
…In other news, I know its just about impossible to believe, but has something gone wrong with the Golden Ekles foreign policy?
I see The Argument Sketch has already been brought up (it’s the very first thing I thought of when reading dicentra’s exchange with the Sophist-in-training), but Jeff’s description of the kid’s PhD reminds me just as much of Anne Elk’s “Theory about the Brontosaurus”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM10y4XgTG0
Blake@1248
It also ignores human behavior. Which has shown time and again that the collective is a failure.
Again. economics isn’t so much about money, but what people do with money. Behavior.
All successful human societies have shared certain assumptions based on observed behavior; ownership through creation is one of those assumptions — in part because those who take something someone else has created, might as well be biting off and eating part of that person, and the person they’re robbing will tend to react as if that’s what is happening.
I don’t need to explain it philosophically, only in practical terms: if you want a successful human society, you don’t eat the creators of value — not even metaphorically.
Capitalism isn’t an ideology. It’s what people do when they are left to their own devices. “I’ll give you this in exchange for that”, and both parties feel like they got the best end of the deal. And if you do not own your own life, and the results of your efforts, then who does?
That way lies slavery and tyranny.
McGehee, to paraphrase the late Margaret Thatcher, “At some point, you run out of creative people to eat.”
The late Ric Locke said “you don’t eat the seed corn”, but that’s exactly what the Occutards want to do.
The problem with Leftist thought is that it plugs so well into the biases programmed into our genes by millennia of living in a tribal, hunt/gather social organization.
The idea that someone’s intelligence and effort can cause something to exist where it did not before is not on their mental radar.
Agriculture feeds roughly 30x the population density of hunting and gathering, but to do so requires thinking beyond the range of the moment, aka “delayed gratification”. To the mindset with which we’re all born, taking crops ripe for harvest or fattened livestock is just the same as gathering or hunting, with no recognition of the sacrifices made by the farmer/herdsman in producing it.
In order for an agricultural (much less industrial) society to exist, that society must lay down some software into the peoples’ brains that recognizes the rights of the person who tends fields and/or flocks to the product of his own work are greater than those of a person who has not done so. Di’s correspondent implicitly rejects this “made up fact” of the rights of the creators of abundance, pretending that because those rights were codified by the Finger of YHVH inscribing stone tablets, they are the arbitrary whim of Moses’ buddy, and we’re way more sophisticated than him and we don’t need any steenking gods.
In doing so, he fails to notice that every written legal system from the Code of Hammurabi forward has some provision recognizing these rights. Now, there’s no reason to believe that other societies arbitrarily chose other rights to recognize, but they didn’t leave any lasting artifacts. And that should tell him what he needs to know, if he really were interested in knowing, about which theories of rights work and which don’t.
I like Paul Atreides as well: “Whoever can destroy a thing, controls a thing”. You want me to work for you for less than I think I am worth? I won’t.
Damn straight. The survivors either kill the eaters, or they leave.
Or they go on strike, also known in some circles as “going Galt.”
Don’t know how dicentra had the patience to put up with such nonsense.
I enjoy grinding my canines on these kinds of conversations: when you omit the name-calling and sarcasm, it’s fascinating what you can elicit.
It also defies their caricature of conservatives as knuckle-draggers. I kept up with him blow-by-blow, because I was able to query him on the categories he was using. I’ll be damned if someone like him leaves a conversation with ME with his smugness intact.
Besides, I was upgrading a server and four virtual machines, so I had a bit of downtime.
The late Ric Locke said “you don’t eat the seed corn”, but that’s exactly what the Occutards want to do.
What else are they gonna eat? They don’t produce anything of their own selves.
Also, dude denied that he was negating the very concept of ownership, but if you keep “ownership,” then how do you determine it? Through your own labor, by being the strongest, or…
…or by having the least. To each according to his need.
Well, there he is: Baal, Molech, Xipe Totec—the bloodthirsty god whose relentless demands must be sated or the rains won’t come and the crops will blight and the ewes and cows throw their young.
A prophet or philosopher or creed or even a fad or silly belief in the evolutionary progress of a generation will do in place of a god as far as authorizing the right to judge all assertions. The trick of revolutionary deconstruction is to make sure that everyone drinks the poison but you. Otherwise you end up with hallucinations and nihilism. After all, you have miraculously (or providentially or progressively and historiagraphically found your truth (after trashing the competition) so we don’t need people who fell the temerity to question it around. They have outlived their usefulness. And the assertions are suddenly mysteriously perhaps even suspiciously fungible.
I think (IIRC) it has been shown that, at least for the Cuneiform writing, that it developed as a way to keep track of ownership, of grain I believe. And that it was improved to make that job easier and more efficient to do.
So Cain was the first agriculturalist — and first murderer — who is also the first founder of cities, from which sprang the arts, the techne. This business seems to have happened much prior to any divine fingerwriting on tablets of stone, at least in the chronology presented on its own terms.
You couldn’t spray paint “fuck the police” on a bridge if there were no writing. AMIRITE?
Animal husbandry is a form of agriculture. And coming soon, in a frighteningly literal form, probably a civil right.
Woah! What is this?
http://twitchy.com/2013/08/10/bad-boy-male-feminist-melts-down-i-used-sex-and-charm-and-whiteness-to-scam-you-all/
Some nut male feminism professor did a wild brain dump on Twitter. I never heard of the bastard but he seems to have the whole build a cult of personality thing down.
He claims he coerced female students into sleeping with him.
How does that even work? I not a woman but I’ll be DAMNED before I fuck someone I don’t fancy for a grade when I’m ALREADY PAYING $800 or so just to take the class. I don’t screw the people who change my tires either in case they decide not to let me know my breaks needs work and the right front axle bearing looks worn. I had a professor talk shit about not grading my work back in 93 because he arbitrarily didn’t like certain things and topics and I went to the dean and said “I want my paper graded by someone or something according to course guidelines or I want my tuition back. I’m not paying a professional instructor money just to get frivolously pushed around and mau maued. ” and the professor got sternly told not to rock the boat because juniors were not dumb 18 year olds who still thought they were in High School II the sequel. This was before e-mail was common and when the web really sucked (mosaic! Wooh!) and we did internet searches of research databases for cash up front in a room at the back of the library because student fees didn’t get you all you can eat internet access on campus.
You really want to fuck me? In a cheap “no strings” as seen on TV sort of way? No! A miserable ass ‘A’ won’t do at all. That’s worthless bullshit. Fly me to Cabo and buy a bottle of wine I can’t afford to go with the Lobster Augustino and behave yourself like someone who is quasi-fuckable, you cheap stupid creepy asshole! At least offer to pay some of my bills. Earn it jackwagon!
What the hell is this world coming to?
brakes
Pretty soon dudes like this won’t even be able to fall back on flipping burgers when they run out of post-post-post-grad money.
360 burgers an hour is not that great. I could do that fairly easily at McDonald’s. You could cook (going from memory, here) 4 dozen patties at a time. You’d need another person to help out with the buns and wrapping, but 2 people could easily sustain 360 burgers an hour.
A restaurant only has certain hours that it needs to generate food at that rate, and usually it needs to have some surge capacity to generate more food even faster. The McDonald’s I worked at could (I think) peak at about 1000 per hour, if we fired up the grill that was used to cook pancakes on. Same grill; it was just usually only used at breakfast. If we’re talking quarter-pound hamburgers, though, there’s no way we could make that many.
Capitalism isn’t an ideology. It’s what people do when they are left to their own devices. “I’ll give you this in exchange for that”, and both parties feel like they got the best end of the deal.
It also requires that one value freedom above all things. One is free to lay about all day but must accept the consequences of that decision. Navel-gazers like dicentra’s opponent want to engineer outcomes above all and see freedom as a barrier to that engineering. Of course, they always see 1) themselves as the divine engineer and/or 2) assume the ongoing guaranteed benevolence of the engineer. History has demonstrated time and again that it never works that way.
360 burgers an hour is not that great. I could do that fairly easily at McDonald’s.
Yes, but you weren’t demanding $15 an hour to do it. I’m pretty sure McDonald’s will happily consider the option that requires no training, no time off, no performance review, no uniform, no attitude problems, no pot-smoking breaks in the trash enclosure…
At some point, it became more cost-effective to have robots build cars. I think we’re at a similar point with respect to fast food. Well, maybe not yet, but if this $15/hr nonsense continues, it won’t be long.
$15/hr to make burgers, no way. $15/hr to maintain/repair the burger-making robot, more reasonable.
It having been a time nearly lost in the mists of antiquity, I was getting paid the then-minimum wage of $2.90/hr, which is of course equivalent to about $10/hr today.
I am not making this up.
burgerbot 2.0 will do 1,000 burgers easy-peasy
I started reading that mess, but I can’t believe that that dude is actually writing a phd thesis based on that freshman year seminar shit.
There are always natural rights, and property is one of them. Governments exist to limit the scope of human liberty. You need agreement for government to exist, not rights. God or no God, government or no governent, agreement or no agreement, Kant or no Kant, what’s mine is mine.
It always suprises me how much the goddam French Revolution managed to totally fuck up the entire human race.
Remember when people used to learn to read in the first grade? By the time I was finally finishing up my B.A. in the late ’80s my college was not only offering remedial reading classes, but requiring graduating seniors to prove they didn’t still need to take them.
I expect “See Spot run” to be dissertation material by the 2040s.
That’s why I said you should have called his bluff by asking HIM to define “ownership” and see how he responded.
I own my stuff because by this guy’s logic, no one else can logically assert ownership of it. Being a dipshit, I can violate his notion of logical consistency and validity all day long, and not even break a sweat. Nor care.
By his logic, I should be able to assert ownership of the entire universe, which means you all owe me back rent.
Use the Paypal link on my site to pay up.
Well they say “possession is 9/10ths of the law”, and this PhD guy sure seems possessed…
I seem to recall reading somewhere that endless discussions about whether or not “the cat is on the mat” or is “the mat on the cat” was a staple of college freshmen at some point in time. Or maybe I’m thinking of drug induced philosophical musings. Either way, it’s getting hard to tell the difference between a college thesis and drug induced prattle.
But but I read “The Dispossessed” by Ursula K. LeGuin and “Those who walk away from Omelas”. And that proves that there is no property. Everybody like owns what they need dude.