Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

Tone.

It is an interesting combination. I'd compare it to FOX News's strategy of claiming underdog status, when in fact it's the most-watched cable news station and represents the viewing tendencies of very large percentage of Americans (FOX also purports to clear things up - "fair and balanced," after all). The Great Contrarian's emphasis on his own contrariness is itself a rhetorical strategy.

Ultimately, he doth protest too much. In today's public sphere, it's really hard to develop an honestly contrarian position since the internet and social media almost instantly appropriates any and every potentially radical perspective; so claiming a nonconformist position places more burden on the claimer to demonstrate said nonconformity. In some cases, like Outside In, these demonstrations hold water, and so the host doesn't need to rely on rhetorical posturing. Then there are the Great Contrarians, who rely heavily on rhetorical posturing.

 

[Dak]

Tone.

It is an interesting combination. I'd compare it to FOX News's strategy of claiming underdog status, when in fact it's the most-watched cable news station and represents the viewing tendencies of very large percentage of Americans (FOX also purports to clear things up - "fair and balanced," after all). The Great Contrarian's emphasis on his own contrariness is itself a rhetorical strategy.

Ultimately, he doth protest too much. In today's public sphere, it's really hard to develop an honestly contrarian position since the internet and social media almost instantly appropriates any and every potentially radical perspective; so claiming a nonconformist position places more burden on the claimer to demonstrate said nonconformity. In some cases, like Outside In, these demonstrations hold water, and so the host doesn't need to rely on rhetorical posturing. Then there are the Great Contrarians, who rely heavily on rhetorical posturing.

Seems like a pretty accurate assessment and analogy (although Fox doesn't match the combined viewing of all the left-leaning media. They just have a "rightwing" monopoly). I was thinking of Land and some similar bloggers as a comparison. SSC is also more contrarian than this blogger, and yet SSC projects as being "reasonable and centered", even when being relatively radical in if nothing else, willing to tolerate considering a position held by "deplorables", etc.

 

[Dak]

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/return-europe-s-nation-states

Interesting shift in perspective.

 

[Einherjar86]

Seems interesting. Unfortunately, I only get the first couple paragraphs...

Came across this earlier today. Somehow, it feels right - like I've been waiting for it. I've definitely had similar impressions of Derrida's work (i.e. as it lines up with neuroscience), but was excited to see Bakker finally tackle it. He's not alone in his disenchantment of the French tradition, but I really appreciate his resistance to the typical bullshit American pragmatist take, which doesn't even bother to treat the material at the level of content.

Bakker also makes a crucial point that many critics often fail to realize when reading Derrida: namely, that Derrida isn't interested in epistemology, as Foucault is, but in ontology, despite his enormous influence on constructivist and linguistic theories.

https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/derrida-as-neurophenomenologist/

One way to put Derrida’s point is that there is always some occluded context, always some integral part of the background, driving phenomenology. From an Anglo-American, pragmatic viewpoint, his point is obvious, yet abstrusely and extravagantly made: Nothing is given, least of all meaning and experience. What Derrida is doing, however, is making this point within the phenomenological idiom, ‘reproducing’ it, as he says in the quote. The phenomenology itself reveals its discursive impossibility. His argument is ontological, not epistemic, and so requires speculative commitments regarding what is, rather than critical commitments regarding what can be known. Derrida is providing what might be called a ‘hyper-phenomenology,’ or even better, what David Roden terms dark phenomenology, showing how the apparently originary, self-sustaining, character of experience is a product of its derivative nature. The keyhole of the phenomenological attitude only appears theoretically decisive, discursively sufficient, because experience possesses horizons without a far side, meta-horizons—limits that cannot appear as such, and so appears otherwise, as something unlimited. Apodictic.

 

[Dak]

Seems interesting. Unfortunately, I only get the first couple paragraphs...

Consciously or not, the European politicians advocating open borders have failed to prioritize their own citizens over foreigners. These leaders’ intentions may be noble, but if a state fails to limit its protection to a particular group of people—its nationals—its government risks losing legitimacy. Indeed, the main measure of a country’s success is how well it can secure its people and borders from external threats, be they hostile neighbors, terrorism, or mass migration. On this score, the EU and its proponents are failing. And voters have noticed. The British people issued a strong rebuke to the bloc in June when they voted to leave the EU by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent, ignoring warnings from the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of England, and the United Kingdom’s Treasury that doing so would wreak economic disaster. In France, according to a recent Pew survey, 61 percent of the population holds unfavorable views of the EU; in Greece, 71 percent of the population shares these views.

Back when Europe faced no pressing security threats—as was the case for most of the last two decades—EU members could afford to pursue more high-minded objectives, such as dissolving borders within the union. Now that dangers have returned, however, and the EU has shown that it is incapable of dealing with them, Europe’s national leaders must fulfill their most basic duty: defending their own.

This is from the middle, it's too long to be quoting the whole thing. I can't believe I'm reading it in a CFR publication.

Came across this earlier today. Somehow, it feels right - like I've been waiting for it. I've definitely had similar impressions of Derrida's work (i.e. as it lines up with neuroscience), but was excited to see Bakker finally tackle it. He's not alone in his disenchantment of the French tradition, but I really appreciate his resistance to the typical bullshit American pragmatist take, which doesn't even bother to treat the material at the level of content.

Bakker also makes a crucial point that many critics often fail to realize when reading Derrida: namely, that Derrida isn't interested in epistemology, as Foucault is, but in ontology, despite his enormous influence on constructivist and linguistic theories.

https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/derrida-as-neurophenomenologist/

I'm afraid I don't understand the significance here, you might need to parse it a bit for me.

 

[Einherjar86]

This is from the middle, it's too long to be quoting the whole thing. I can't believe I'm reading it in a CFR publication.

Ah, thanks.

Reading about its history, it seems like it's entertained a host of right-wing contributors, including Fukuyama. It is kind of ironic though to find this position being promoted by the Council on Foreign Relations.

I'm afraid I don't understand the significance here, you might need to parse it a bit for me.

There are a few things, some more significant than others.

First, most Western philosophy criticized Derrida when he first came onto the scene. He was famously criticized by American philosophers in the 1960s when he delivered a now-canonical lecture titled "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." At that time, American philosophy was dominated by pragmatism, and they saw Derrida's remarks as unnecessarily obscurantist (a fair criticism), but also as not really saying anything new or revealing. As Bakker suggests, to pragmatists Derrida's point was "obvious": "Nothing is given, least of all meaning and experience." And this is true, Wittgenstein already made basically the same argument far more convincingly in his Investigations, if not in a roundabout way in the conclusion of the Tractatus (from 1922).

Bakker's point, and what I appreciate his post for, is his perceptiveness regarding the language in which Derrida makes his argument. As Bakker says, Derrida makes his point "within the phenomenological idiom" - he's "reproducing" the phenomenological argument in order to expose its internal contradictions from within. At the time Derrida was coming onto the scene, phenomenology was still a ragingly popular philosophical model, namely because Martin Heidegger was still alive and had published the monumental Being and Time in the 1920s. There are still plenty of phenomenologists today, albeit mostly across the Channel; but phenomenology also manifests in disciplines beyond philosophy - even in the rudiments of thought itself. Bakker has a problem with the phenomenological method, so Derrida's work has value for him.

For Bakker, phenomenology embodies something very literal about what he's calling the "horizons" of thought, or the methodological oversight of "keyhole neglect." These are material issues for current neuro-scientific inquiries (neuropsychology, neurophysiology, neurophenomenology, etc.), and Bakker is suggesting that Derrida's theory of "the trace" and other deconstructionist concepts can help us identify and understand these issues when they crop up.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

More people with college degrees = a slightly more "cosmopolitan" group of people, but I don't know that that has actually proven beneficial in any measurable way.

Here's your proof:
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/a...tion-level-sharply-divides-clinton-trump-race

"Clinton wins the college-educated segment by 25 percentage points, 59 percent to 34 percent. ... That’s vastly different from what was recorded in the 2012 presidential election, where exit polling showed 47 percent of voters were college graduates. In that contest, President Barack Obama only narrowly beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney among college graduates, 50 percent to 48 percent."

 

[Dak]

Here's your proof:
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/a...tion-level-sharply-divides-clinton-trump-race

"Clinton wins the college-educated segment by 25 percentage points, 59 percent to 34 percent. ... That’s vastly different from what was recorded in the 2012 presidential election, where exit polling showed 47 percent of voters were college graduates. In that contest, President Barack Obama only narrowly beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney among college graduates, 50 percent to 48 percent."

I'm not sure what you're arguing in relation to the quote from me. Are you saying voting for Hillary is a measurable benefit of being more cosmopolitan?

 

[arg]

College graduates today are fucking stupid. They have been brainwashed by liberalism and their degrees are worth jack shit. Fuck the college vote; doesn't mean anything.

I'd value a redneck tractor driver's vote over a sheltered left-wing college loony any day because the former knows what the real world is like.

 

[Einherjar86]

I'd value a redneck tractor driver's vote over a sheltered left-wing college loony any day because the former knows what the real world is like.

If the real world is driving a tractor in the fucking boondocks, then please give me the fake world. It sounds way better.

 

[Dak]

If the real world is driving a tractor in the fucking boondocks, then please give me the fake world. It sounds way better.

Having "driven a truck in the boondocks", I'd say many alternatives are better. However, it is important to note that truck driving is a large sector of the economy, and supports nearly all economic activity. The voice of truck drivers shouldn't be denigrated.

 

[Einherjar86]

Fair point. But arg said "tractor driver." I assume he was talking about plowing fields, since the extent of arg's "real world" appears to revolve for the most part around the opportunity to plow fields.

Except instead of making money by plowing fields, he pays for the privilege.

 

[Dak]

Fair point. But arg said "tractor driver." I assume he was talking about plowing fields, since the extent of arg's "real world" appears to revolve for the most part around the opportunity to plow fields.

Except instead of making money by plowing fields, he pays for the privilege.

Oops. read it on my phone and saw tractor driver and mentally inserted trailer in the middle. Yeah, farmers are critical but farming has been requiring fewer and fewer humans to do the work.

 

[Dak]

I'm gonna post this here instead of the Mort thread because I think it's on the level of more serious discussion:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-thorny-economics-of-illegal-immigration-1454984443

Gordon Hanson, a University of California at San Diego economist who has studied the issue for the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations, has detailed how large-scale immigration undermines wages for low-skilled workers. In Arizona’s case, he thinks the state is paying an economic price for its decision. “As the U.S. economy continues to recover, the Arizona economy will be weighed down by slower growth and by less export production in traditional industries” such as agriculture where illegal immigrants play a big role, he says.

Proponents of doing more to curb illegal immigration say the mass departures helped the state economically in several ways. Government spending on health care and education for illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born children dropped. Wages for plasterers, landscapers, farmworkers and other low-skilled laborers jumped because of scarcity, according to employers and federal data.

“Even if the size of the state’s GDP decreased, the decrease in immigration redistributed income from employers to employees, particularly at the bottom end of the labor market,” says Steven Camarota, research director of the Center for Immigration Studies, in Washington, which favors reduced illegal immigration. “That’s a good deal.”

In other words, locally (or locally in national terms), free migration feeds inequality.

 

[rms]

Didn't even think that had to be disputed anymore

 

[zabu of nΩd]

I'm not sure what you're arguing in relation to the quote from me. Are you saying voting for Hillary is a measurable benefit of being more cosmopolitan?

As boring as this argument is by now, yes. I think a Trump presidency is far riskier than a Clinton one, and there's ample evidence that education level is uniquely relevant in this election compared to traditional partisan ideology.

 

[Dak]

As boring as this argument is by now, yes. I think a Trump presidency is far riskier than a Clinton one, and there's ample evidence that education level is uniquely relevant in this election compared to traditional partisan ideology.

You aren't making any argument, and suggesting that placing a vote for an outcome undetermined is a benefit in itself requires some serious leaps of imagination.

You are also apparently guilty of this immediatism or presentism or whatever that has been discussed. Somehow you think this election more important that the last election. Yet they are always the most important of course.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

I wouldn't call it a "serious leap of imagination" to say it's beneficial to have an educated voter base who understands that the kinds of things Trump has proposed (i.e. banning Muslims from entering the US, encouraging more countries to acquire nuclear weapons, and adding over $5 trillion to our debt via tax cuts) are bad ideas.

Yes, this election is more important than others, and your generalization does not apply. No other Presidential nominee up to this point has been nearly as radical, unpredictable, or dishonest as Trump, and no other to my knowledge has received such widespread condemnation within his own party.

 

[tagradh]

I think the most worrrying thing about the current election process, like the Brexit business, isn't that the outcomes will be terrible (though Trump seems like he'd be an awful PONTUS and I believe 'brexit' is a mistake, albeit for reasons most that voted don't care about) but that such a large proportion of people are basically waving flags saying 'fuck the facts'. It makes more sense to put faith in the educated, the experts, today than it did in the 20s and yet they're practically vilified by the people that most need to hear what they're saying.

 

[Dak]

I wouldn't call it a "serious leap of imagination" to say it's beneficial to have an educated voter base who understands that the kinds of things Trump has proposed (i.e. banning Muslims from entering the US, encouraging more countries to acquire nuclear weapons, and adding over $5 trillion to our debt via tax cuts) are bad ideas.

Yes, this election is more important than others, and your generalization does not apply. No other Presidential nominee up to this point has been nearly as radical, unpredictable, or dishonest as Trump, and no other to my knowledge has received such widespread condemnation within his own party.

Well to begin with I said that cosmopolitanism hasn't provided a demonstrable benefit. Trump is as cosmopolitan as Hillary, if not more so. Placing a vote isn't a demonstrable benefit of cosmopolitanism. Theoretically education affects voting patterns, but that doesn't mean there's a benefit in the actual election outcomes. Hillary is a tax and spend chicken hawk. At worst, Trump is the same. There's no indication from Clinton that she'd address the national debt, and her hawkishness acts as a natural impetus for countries to acquire nuclear weapons, even if she doesn't explicitly support it. As far as Muslims entering the US, I'm not sure what the benefit to the US is in allowing them in, particularly from shitty sharia law nations, so again, where's the benefit from cosmopolitanism - even assuming that simply placing a vote in a certain way is a "benefit" (which is amusing to me).

As to your second paragraph, Trump is not any more radical than various candidates or presidents. He does have a level of unpredictability, or as SSC would say more technically, "a higher level of variance". He is certainly not more dishonest than Hillary. You're showing your emotions in stating that he is. In all, this election is no more or less important.

It makes more sense to put faith in the educated, the experts, today than it did in the 20s and yet they're practically vilified by the people that most need to hear what they're saying.

Uh, can you please provide an explanation of who the "experts" are, and in what ways they have demonstrated that they deserve reverence and deference?