Political Philosophy and Ethics discussion
Both Pol. and Ethical Philosophy
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Reason, Informal Logic, Evidence, and Critical Thinking
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" As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. . . .
. . . .
"The [third] mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.
"Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to 'abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.' Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler 'has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.'"
Synder, On Tyranny, 66-68.
This book may be fruitfully compared with a March 25, 2017 New York Times article entitled One Nation under Fox: 18 Hours with a Network That Shapes America and Masha Gessen's books about Putin and Pussy Riot .
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The words "rationalism," "empiricism," and "individualism" mean different things to different people, so it is difficult for me to give a simple answer to your question. There are, of course, different modern schools of thought regarding each of these concepts. My following discussion does not refer to any of these schools of thought.
I believe (and have always believed) that people should be as rational as possible. By this, I mean that they should proceed with both inductive (empirical) and deductive reasoning. I don't see any contradiction between inductive and deductive logic: they are both part of what it means to be a rational person.
If an "individualistic society" means a political society in which individuals are understood to have certain individual rights that government may not abrogate (absent, in the case of legitimate criminal prosecutions, due process of law), then such a society is, to that extent at least, both rational and empirical. To the extent that an "individualistic society" fosters irrationalism of the inductive and/or deductive kind, it is not, of course, compatible with reason. But the solution here is in the concept of free will (rejected both by many religionists and by many modern philosophical and scientific thinkers). A political society that recognizes individual rights does not attempt to force people to become philosophical or ethical. People are free to be as irrational as they like as long as they don't violate the rights of others. That said, I do recognize a proper role of government in regulating some economic and social matters. But government should not be in the business of establishing, promoting, or endorsing religion or quasi-religion.
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Every philosopher has followers who don't necessarily understand or agree with the original philosopher. The Greek word for this has become the English word "epigone." I don't know all that much about Stoicism or Neo-Platonism in general, but I doubt that these doctrines captured the essence of what Plato meant. I don't see rationalism and empiricism as being contradictory. For example, Aristotle was famously both rational and empirical, but that didn't stop his late medieval Scholastic successors from twisting his thought into absurdist deductive games.
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At my high school we learn about this "critical thinking" all the time. If you have ever heard of COSTA's levels of questions, then you are already familiar with this concept.
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Teachers in my high school had to respect families that didn't want their daughters to learn to think critically because these families just wanted the girls to grow up and to reproduce and not scare away eligible mates. The number of girls that agreed with this idea frightened me at the time.
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http://www.openculture.com/2013/05/ph..."
Thanks, Felix. If Dennett had followed Occam's Razor in Freedom Evolves, it might have been a more readable—and convincing—book. See posts 1-7 here. I would also say that there are many other rules for critical thinking than the seven listed in this article, e.g., the post hoc fallacy, which is one of the most common intellectual errors. Nevertheless, I have now put Dennett's Intuition Pumps on my "to read" list. In the spirit of open-mindedness, I'll give him another chance. By the way, my wife ("Mimi" in this group) and I were present at a speech given by Dennett last summer. Again, it would have helped me more if Dennett had followed Occam's Razor instead of meandering all over the place.
Alan wrote: "Feliks wrote: "Daniel Dennett Presents Seven Tools For Critical Thinkinghttp://www.openculture.com/2013/05/ph..."
Thanks, Feli..."
Speaking of straw men, you're saying there's such a thing as *an* academic style of writing? Straw man.
Academics write with a range of styles and voices, just as other authors do. Their writing varies with their intended audience and with their subject matter. Rawls, Nozick, and Cohen deal with similar subject matter, but no one could seriously suggest that they have the same style.
Straw man! Straw man!
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Interestingly, I had deleted the last two sentences of my post about ten minutes before your post arrived. After sleeping on it, I realized that those two sentences were ill-advised.
It is true, as you say, that "[a]cademics write with a range of styles and voices . . . ." However, it is also true that many academics are unnecessarily prolix and write with a lot of unnecessary jargon. Dennett is, in my view, unnecessarily prolix, though he does not, to my recollection of Freedom Evolves, use a lot of jargon. Of course, I exempt academic scientists from any suggestion that they use unnecessary jargon. The nature of their subject matter requires that they use technical terms as well as mathematical notation.
I find that academic historians often write better than academics in other fields of the social sciences and humanities. Some of the best books I have read are by academic historians. But, as you observe, one should not generalize.
Alan wrote: "That's very encouraging. We old fogies were never taught this in high school, and I haven't heard of COSTA. Could you describe it for us? Thanks."COSTA's levels of questions refers to an level of thinking. there is 3 levels. 1; merely fact based questions, regurgitating info (what is the square root of 100?, ect). the second level is connecting ideas (how could I use what I learn in algebra about mapping distances to connect to my geography class?), and the 3rd and most final: If I am learning algebra to solve for x, how can I use this in real life.
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Thank you for this information.
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"In the last lecture which I had the honor to give at Hillel House, which was some years ago, I had to plead that a hearing be given to a philosophy which is wholly alien to me, but by which I could not help being impressed. [Editorial note: "This may refer to a 'Conversation with Martin Buber,' which was introduced by Strauss . . . on 3 December, 1951."] My task tonight is entirely different. It is our duty as scholars and perhaps our duty as human beings to combine open-mindedness with intransigence. We must be able to resist temptations; for example, the temptation to accept the imaginative and alluring as true. No intransigence is required for rejecting the absurd, and yet it is not possible always to ignore the absurd. A great scholar of the past said, 'I despise almost nothing,' which means, among other things, we can learn something by examining the absurd, be it only this: that we are again overwhelmed by the transcendent beauty of the principle of contradiction."
Leo Strauss, "Freud on Moses and Monotheism," in Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York, 1997), 285 (emphasis added). The "great scholar of the past" who said "I despise almost nothing" was Leibniz, quoted in French by Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kauffmann (New York: Random House, 1966), 128 (aph. 207). Nietzsche added: "one should not overlook and underestimate that presque [almost]." Ibid.
Leo Strauss sometimes spoke in riddles. His reference to "the transcendent beauty of the principle of contradiction" may be, in the context of his sentence, one of those occasions.
U of Illinois professor claims 'algebra & geometry further white privilege':(
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10005
A University of Illinois math professor argues in a new book that algebra and geometry skills perpetuate “unearned privilege” among whites.
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:(
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10005
A University of Illinois math professor argues in a new book that algebra an..."
Wow! This a perfect example of what Shawn Lawrence Otto was talking about (see my review in the preceding post).
I myself have little training or aptitude in math. The subject has always been something of a terror for me. But how can this be, since I am a white male??? Where is my white privilege??? I only wish that I had had the foresight to claim it when I was in school. Additionally, I would venture to say that math also terrifies many other white males—very probably a vast majority of white males or at least a vast majority of American white males. However, I am not proud of my mathematical ignorance. If I happen to be reincarnated as a human being in some future human society (assuming the human race does not destroy this one in the meantime), I might become a mathematician and a scientist. But it's too late for me to claim my white privilege in this life, as I am beyond seventy years old and have too many other urgent projects that prevent me from spending my remaining days studying math and science.
Moreover, someone might be so contrarian as to observe that algebra was invented and/or substantially improved by Middle Easterners such as Babylonians and Muslim Arabs (see here). According to Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Online Dictionary, the very derivation of the word "algebra" is as follows: "Medieval Latin, algebra, bonesetting, fracture (whence Middle English, bonesetting, fracture), from Arabic al-jabr the algebra, the bonesetting, literally, the reduction." (Bold emphasis added.)
The subject of the article referenced by Feliks is a classic example of postmodernist relativism. As long as the Left makes itself look ridiculous with such views, people like Donald Trump will rule this country.
LOL @ #74! Now, that is sardony!
I picked up on the Arabic angle too. The question is, how does a math professor from U of Ilinois write a whole book which sidesteps the root origin of the word and how it undercuts her entire platform?
Re: Shawn Lawrence Otto's book..I'm not a fan of science much myself; or perhaps I should say the uses to which science is put. The efficiency of it, the goals of the military-industrial complex which relies on it. But science for inquiry can be noble. Hopefully my concerns about the management of science falls outside the scope of the rebuttals provided by Otto. Anyway this Illinois business is simply preposterous. Should we abandon our intellectual heritage for the sake of affirmative action? Lower academic standards for the sake of a hysterical EOE? What kind of shoddy mediocrity would that yield? I'm not a fan of mathematics either, but this is misguided revisionism.
Remember that the Third Reich dismissed physics as 'a Jewish science'. It might have been this discrimination which sank those brownshirts; but it was certainly characteristic of them that they made such a deep-seated blunder. Why anyone in our 'modern' nation would commit themselves to the same flawed thinking, I'm sure I don't know.
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Shawn Lawrence Otto's book discusses all the things you mention in your post. When I was a teenager in the Sixties, I too identified science with technology, including harmful technology. When I thought about science, the figure of the "mad scientist" immediately sprang to mind. The popular media of the time contributed to this. The movie "Dr. Strangelove" confirmed my attitude. But science is so much more than this, as Otto's book (and other books) demonstrate. I have Neil deGrasse Tyson's latest book on my "to read" list. This book undoubtedly shows how beneficial science can be if conducted in a proper way. And the scientific method is a great advance in human critical thinking, though, in my view, it does not (at least in its usual formulations) exhaust the possibilities of human reason. Specifically, I don't think that everything must be "testable" in order to be rational.
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Now that I think of it, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is African American, would find the information in the article pretty incredible.
10/25/2021 NOTE: In reviewing this topic today, I noticed that at least one person deleted some of his earlier posts, thereby making some numerical cross-references to earlier posts inaccurate.
What I'm uneasy about is the swiftness today with which disinformation is disseminated. Increasingly, it feels as if any loony idea has a chance to seize hold of people. We're succumbing to a 'village square' type atmosphere; constant gabbing and yakking and the crowd swaying this-way-and-that. Ready to follow any banner, trumpet, hawker, or huckster. I could envision internet-addicted adolescents taking up this anti-math ballyhoo and adoring it; whereas if Guttierrez had emerged with these notions in almost any other decade, she would have been a laughingstock.
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Except that I remember very well the similar mass movements of the late 1960s: see my August 1967 essay "Hippies and Pioneers". This was long before the internet.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton..."
Thanks for posting this, Feliks. For some reason, I didn't see it until now.
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It's not clear to me whether the Overton Window relates simply to what people generally will find acceptable or what government legislates as being acceptable. Perhaps it's both. In any event, our current president and his alt-right supporters are currently testing the limits of what is acceptable. When Nazis are allowed to march while chanting Nazi slogans, we can see that the First Amendment is still operative to protect the extremes (or at least the extreme right). We can thank the ACLU (much hated by the right) for that. The ACLU represented the Nazis in the famous Skokie case in 1977.
While I still believe that the First Amendment should protect extremist language not immediately inciting to violence, I must say that public (as distinguished from governmental) acceptability of extreme right-wing marches and chants is disturbing. With the Trump administration and its supporters, we are abandoning long-established principles of rule of law into an abyss already occupied by the likes of Putin, Erdogan (Turkey), and Duterte (Philippines). Trump's trash-talk yesterday and this morning reminds me of Duterte's implementation of assassination squads against alleged drug dealers without any kind of due process. We are sliding into authoritarianism. In the process, the "politically correct" Constitution (including the amendments thereto) will be abandoned. In retrospect, the Twenty-Second Amendment (limiting a president to two terms) and the warnings in the 1787 Constitutional Convention and subsequent ratification debates about a president turning into a permanent king through successive elections are prescient, though two terms of Trump may be more than our democratic republic can take. And then what? Another Trumplike president?
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I voted for the wrong reason.
I consider myself a libertarian of sorts so..."
I hope that other people who voted for Trump will also reconsider and, assuming he runs again, will not vote for him in 2020.
I gather that you now understand that Trumpism and libertarianism are totally incompatible.
As for libertarianism generally, see the Classical Liberalism, Libertarianism, and Anarchocapitalism; Objectivism and the Government and the Economy; Property Rights topics in this Goodreads group.
Although New York City largely tilts 'liberal' or 'democrat' (whatever these absurd terms mean anymore) my particular neighborhood has a high proportion of retirees who hang on to their properties rather than flee to Florida. It's a conservative, Republican bastion, a 'Fort Apache' if you will. There's a lot of resentment against the steady influx of immigrants: 1/4th of this neighborhood is now a "Little Tehran" in appearance. I'm surprised we don't make the headlines more often. There's a lot of NYPD cameras monitoring us, maybe that's the reason. Eh. I don't want to divert this discussion with this post about my locale but when we talk of a 'slide into authoritarianism' I can tell you there's a lot of like-minded people in the vicinity where I reside who are seemingly, all for it. In taprooms and pubs I can overhear grown men, taxpaying American citizens --many with relatives in the military--openly musing that "Jews brought the Holocaust onto themselves". Rot and ruin like this still permeates modern minds. Even in the 'modern', "information age". :(
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Yes, we are far from an enlightened society. Some politicians have been giving "dog whistles" to racists for a long time. Perhaps the difference now is that the Neo-Nazis have crawled out from under their rocks and are now visible for all to see.
Can someone please tell me what to say to people obsessed with the perfidious hobgoblin of 'liberal media'? This mental malady lurks in one's dearest friends and unexpectedly rears its head like vampirisim. And equally as hard to root out. Cripes almighty...every single rational point you care to raise, "oh that idea was put in your head by the liberal media..." Gimme a break :( !
Have any of you tried grappling with this deep-seated notion when it appears in your family and friends? #1 most malignant theory. 'Liberal free-spending, bleeding heart, irrationality, poor spending' ....just an agenda of free-spending gays, homosexuals, lesbians, and Jews? (Oh my!)
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This is a serious albeit perhaps unanswerable question, but I'll give it my best shot, as they say.
Somewhere, Plato or Aristotle (perhaps in the Nicomachean Ethics) said something like "friends have in common a view of what is just." I'm recalling this from reading it some fifty years ago, so it may be inexact. But minds have been known to change, as I can testify from my own experience. It happens that I have had a few conservative or libertarian friends for several decades. Fortunately, these people are thoughtful and would never make a statement like those you describe. Yet, as this country has become more and more polarized, maintaining these friendships has become more difficult.
The kind of scenario you mention happened repeatedly to me at one workplace for a number of years. Although most of my coworkers knew to avoid discussing politics and religion (and most of them were of a conservative persuasion), one young man in particular (younger than my own son) would listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio and then "rush" into my office spouting whatever he had just heard from the oracle. This was not in response to anything I had said but rather what he assumed to be my views. Almost all of the time I would tell him that I didn't want to discuss politics or religion, and, when he would persist, I would tell him that I had to get back to my billable hours (we were both attorneys in a law firm). Occasionally, my boss, who was quite conservative but in a more thoughtful way, was present, and he would reprimand this young man for his remarks that had nothing to do with work. My general rule in the workplace was to avoid discussions of politics and religion. Since my successive bosses were always much more conservative than I, this was the only safe course for me to take, and I recommend it. Somehow, I survived those decades. Even now, during retirement, I maintain a cordial relationship with my former boss, and I have actually presented a couple of CLE (Continuing Legal Education) seminars at my former firm during my retirement.
Family: Aye, there's the rub, as Hamlet would say. Although some of my more immediate family members are conservative, they generally avoid discussing politics and religion. The problem is with some of my more distant relatives, who are of the mentality you describe. I let my sister argue with these relatives on Facebook etc. Fortunately, they live quite a distance from me, and I do not have to interact with them in family gatherings.
If discussion of politics or religion is unavoidable, perhaps you could "dialogue" with them somewhat as follows. "Is your argument based on reason and evidence or just emotion?" If the latter, tell them that there is no point in discussing it further. If they claim to be operating on the basis of reason and evidence, you could proceed: "To what liberal media are you specifically referring?" "Have you actually read or watched those media sources?" (My guess is that most of them have not.) "Are you talking about facts or opinions or both?" "Give me some actual examples of what you claim is liberal bias." Plato's dialogues are full of such conversational scenarios. See, for example, the way that Socrates dealt with Thrasymachus in Book I of Plato's Republic.
Additionally, the examples you cite undoubtedly fall within the purview of one or more logical fallacies, perhaps especially the fallacy of ad hominem argument. See the books on practical logic cited elsewhere in this thread.
Now, I hesitate to make the following admission, but it is necessary. There are occasions when the New York Times or Washington Post, for example, get the facts wrong. There are more occasions when, say, the Huffington Post or MSNBC (the evening progressives), for example, are clearly argumentative in their expression of opinion. Although the latter sometimes find facts that are not reported elsewhere, they also tend to subject facts to an obvious interpretive framework. I have recently found Politico to be a good source, though, of course, each writer has some interpretive point of view. But these "liberal" media are not anywhere nearly as bad as such right-wing propaganda outlets as Fox News, Breitbart, Infowars, etc., which sometimes, if not often, deliberately engage in fake or significantly distorted news.
Finally, I recommend E. J. Dionne, Jr., Norman J. Ornstein, and Thomas E. Mann, One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017), which I recently read. One of the authors, Norman Ornstein, cannot be accused of liberal bias, as he has a longstanding association with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Although a conservative, Ornstein appears to have given up on the Republican Party, which is also evident from some of his earlier publications. This book is written in a sane and factual manner. Although I don't agree with all of the authors' recommendations, they have a kind of objective perspective that is sorely wanting in today's political discourse.
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I apologize for my fuming late friday night. Pure frustration. I'd been out pub-crawling with a co-worker and he's very much into divisive, confrontational style American politics; simplistic, two-party, 'us vs them' thinking. I'm always unprepared for it; I'm out to relax and forget my cares and woes and this camrade of mine constantly drags me into remedial-level fog. We always run aground on his assumptions about 'liberal media' (and whatever other rubrics he subscribes to based on talk-radio, pundits, front-groups, and led-by-the-nose websites).It's difficult to give someone a historical perspective on power in a dive bar over a plate of Buffalo wings. I learned friday that he had never heard of terms like 'straw man' or 'ad hominem', (so I had to explain them on-the-fly) nor had he any idea that there had been a Roman republic, etc. It's news to him that big business & govt have ever been in bed together or that they have a terrible record on human rights or that this country has any other goal other than supremacy in business efficiency vs the rest of the world.
I was groaning inside, just wishing for some kind of magic wand. Sorry.
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No problem. Your account immediately above reminds me of the guy to whom I referred in the third paragraph of my post 90, above. On one of the rare occasions in which I responded to him, I mentioned the "New Deal" in my argument. He interrupted me by asking "What's that?" I then realized that he was hopeless.
I gather that civics, American history, and world history are no longer required subjects in many American states for secondary education. Ironically, this may have been due in substantial part to left-wing postmodernism. The Right pays lip service to such courses, but what they want is civics, American history, and world history shorn of anything negative like slavery, Manifest Destiny, and so forth. History must, in their minds, celebrate American exceptionalism, and anything to the contrary must be purged. "He who controls the past controls the future." Orwell, 1984 (quoting from memory, which may be inexact). Exhibit A: the textbooks approved for use by the Texas school board. In any event, most people on the Right, especially the Tea Partiers and the Trumpkins, are woefully ignorant of such matters. I had hoped, a couple of decades ago, that the internet would educate people where their schools did not. Little did I anticipate at that time that fake news and misleading history would maintain such a presence on the internet and that the Right would find its home in that cesspool. Properly used, however, the internet can be a powerful engine of knowledge, and I use it all the time for such purposes.
You live and work in a city in which there are many intelligent, well-educated people of mostly liberal, but also conservative and libertarian, persuasions. Although some of them may disagree with your own point of view, they are at least capable of rational, evidence-based discussion. People like the guy you described are probably beyond redemption. It may be a waste of time to try to make them rational.
Well said. I admit that I'm loathe to lose a good pal over politics... who am I to try to disabuse this individual of his life-long prejudices? It's just sad and wearying for me, that's the upshot.
Because he deeply resents gays and Jewry so much, (they all equal 'liberal bogeymen' in his mind), it's something I can't even adequately fight with verbal explanations. Whatever I say which is 'unshakeable' might make him modify his assertions only very slightly; he will then double-back and re-hone his spearpoints to a different angle. But nothing I say is going to alter his root-scorn for these people who are 'different' from him.
These are stagnant mental waters I have no interest in clearing up for anyone. I just occasionally wish there were 'dumbed down examples' instead of complicated academic responses which I could lay on the table as easily as he does his brevets. For him, FAE errors are nonexistent. He will say something like, "I heard that most of the owners are homosexual (the big six media owners), so naturally they're promulgating an LGBT agenda into our media, and..." --and I visibly wince and he doesn't know why I'm making a face. Then I start to splutter something out and I realize I'm about to get very animated about something I don't even care about, the sham of electoral politics, this pretense of a democratic process....faugh..
Anyway I thank you for your indulgence to all this.
Just wondering: are there any really child-like, basic, 'primers' on the historic alliance between wealth, power, and oppression? Some kind of timeline showing authoritarian governments down throughout the ages, and their economic systems at the same time vis a' vis quality of life for ordinary citizens, serfs, proles, plebians? My buddy doesn't even recognize that a vast income gap between rich and poor has ever been ...bad for poor people. He will label this merely a current-day stereotype (but then reply with one of his own " bleeding-hearts always throw away money at the poor",) etc etc etc.
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I'm not aware of such a timeline. Perhaps someone else in the group is--or has other suggestions.
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Found some decent material at one of my favorite sites, www.mediaed.org. They sell academic documentaries to school systems and universities. Usually around $200 per DVD, you can view any title free on the site @ low-resolution, and there's pdf transcripts of each film also free. So I just did a search on the phrase 'myth liberal media' for the 'mediaed' domain and found 3-4 study guides and discussion sheets which might be simplistic enough for my erstwhile crony. One of them authored by Noam Chomsky.
Rich Media, Poor Democracy
http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Ri...
Constructing Public Opinion
http://www.mediaed.org/discussion-gui...
http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Co...
War Made Easy
http://www.mediaed.org/discussion-gui...
The Propaganda Model of News
http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/My...
all transcripts
http://www.mediaed.org/resources/tran...
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Ugh. Latest incongruities dropped on me by my pal:~"CNN is obviously liberal"
~Fox news is "the only balanced news network out there, the only network which has actual debate"
~"Academic circles are dominated by liberals, conservative professors are not allowed to teach in universities therefore nothing from academics is valid in any debate"
~"Liberals are afraid of honest debate; they also never debate from facts but always from emotion instead of facts"
~Businessmen 'who get things done' are better suited to run the government than career politicians, businessmen are less prone to corruption
~"the definition of corruption itself needs to go away. Paying for a service is in our psychology and in our national interest"
Wince!
At least I am making him narrow down his opinion to specific points. There were a number of things I could have said but I wanted to get him to acknowledge this:
~Sen. Bill Frist attempted to dismantle the filibuster rule to allow that conservative Congress to appoint more conservative judges to Federal benches around the country
(he hadn't heard of this, I tried to explain to him what it demonstrated at the time--how the Founders were worried about majority rule--but when I did get the gist across he didn't even agree that the filibuster even needed saving or that majority rule is a danger)
(Does anyone have any links which might help counteract such gross misassumptions?)
I also pointed out to him that slavery was a highly efficient economic system (as Chomsky states in one of his lectures) but that simple business efficiency is not what this nation is supposed to be about so therefore, we don't ever plan to return to it.
And I explained the principle of 'public choice' to him. No effect.
What else was covered..ah yes the principles of socialism vs capitalism. First I had to explain that socialist theory is actually pretty noble in its aims; (which he had never heard of). I also explained the principle of the exploitation of labor. Nevertheless in his view, the free market is still the best system because it gives everyone an incentive to climb.
I pointed out that most people never get anywhere and that the 'land of opportunity' is a myth; that capitalism creates an income gap and cycles of instability...and then I forget how we got onto it but it seemed to me he was defending slavery by pointing out to me that it was Democrats who owned slaves. I had to remind him that in the 1800s the party names were reversed. He still insisted that poor Southerners who fought in the Rebellion did not themselves own slaves.
Back onto some point about how 'socialism demeans workers' to which I pointed out how factory automation under capitalism demeaned workers even worse, by eliminating jobs. His reply was that losing jobs means workers naturally "climb to the next higher position". I reminded him that this did not happen in for example, the shift from mainframe computers to PCs.
I was pointing out to him that libertarianism and classical liberalism were intertwined in their beginnings. No effect.
Oh--and I proposed Ronaldo's idea for privatization to see how he would imagine it would work. 'Would capitalists take good care of health/welfare if we turned it over to them in exchange for tax breaks?" Yes, he thinks so.
And then our second plate of wings arrived...
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~"CNN is obviously liberal"
~Fox news is "the only balanced news network out there, the only network which has actual debate"
~"Academic circles ..."
With regard to his accusations against "liberals" (which, for the benefit of our members outside the US, means something like "social democrat," "progressive," or even "socialist," and not, as it means everywhere else, economic libertarians), his attacks are a quintessential example of the psychological phenomenon of projection.
Actually, neither the word nor the concept of a filibuster is anywhere in the US Constitution. The practice was not invented until decades later. The Republicans so misused the filibuster when Obama was president and the Democrats controlled the Senate that former Senate majority leader Harry Reid abolished the filibuster rule for presidential nominations of judges (other than Supreme Court justices) and for executive branch presidential nominations. Earlier this year, Senate majority leader McConnell abolished the filibuster rule for judicial nominations to the Supreme Court in order to clear the way for Neil Gorsuch to be appointed to the Supreme Court. The filibuster rule still applies to regular legislation, but that may change before the end of Trump's term as president. Trump has demanded such a repeal of the filibuster rule, but McConnell has resisted it. In any event, this is just a Senate rule and not a constitutional principle. And, of course, it does not apply to the House of Representatives.
It sounds like your pal has been thoroughly brainwashed by the likes of Fox News, Breitbart, Rush, and/or Hannity. Probably nothing you say will dissuade him. He reads/hears only things that support his narrow point of view. The experts call it "confirmation bias."
What wearies me is his repeating (to my ears) the constant finger-pointing about 'which party spins facts worse'. To him, it still seems as if its fresh and crisp --and to the red-faced embarrassment of the Dem Party. Not only do I remember this battle strongly going against Conservatives from ages ago--I think it was at its height during the hunt for WMDs-- but just the circularity of these accusations itself seems as stale as an opened bag of Cheet-ohs to me. I mean, I remember that endless kind of bickering going on when I entered college. Still exactly the same, still the same petty party antipathy, word-for-word. Believing there is a winner or a loser of this froth is very plebian and naive (to me).I finally asked him what really disturbs him about contemporary liberalism and he said he feels it divides the country into too many special-interest groups; too many strata and too much granularity. This weakens the country, according to him. He feels these new population segments could change the country irreparably via their votes.
I agreed with him wherever I could; this was one of those junctures. But even when I point out that historically, Americans participate in the electoral process only around 50% anyway, clearly the American people do not wield the power to affect change; politicians answer to Big Business first.
No dent or a ding in his armour even with this simple logic.
Mod
Personally, I try to avoid people like him. There are, believe it or not, intelligent conservatives (mostly neverTrumpers) who can carry on a conversation without committing a logical fallacy in every sentence. One of them told me that one of the reasons he opposes Trump is that The Donald is just fomenting another interest group (white male devotees of the radical right). But the hoi polloi are filled with what (I understand) Rush calls his "dittoheads."
Political Philosophy and Ethics
Books mentioned in this topic
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (other topics)Mythical Thought (other topics)
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (other topics)
Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (other topics)
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Arthur Koestler (other topics)Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (other topics)
Edward R. Tufte (other topics)
Richard Saul Wurman (other topics)
"The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination."
Adam Gopnik, "The Illiberal Imagination: Are Liberals on the Wrong Side of History?", The New Yorker, March 20, 2017, p. 92.