2,226 karma · joined January 19, 2019
Also, keep in mind that Russian literature gained its reputation in the English speaking world via Garnett. Hemmingway read Garnett.
The company itself skews to the left because tech workers under 30 skew to the left. Facebook is in a funny situation where the employees are at odds with the users. Poor Mark Zuckerburg is caught in the middle.
I agree with her that there's a distinction to be made between, on one hand, a group of people agreeing to follow a set of rules to accomplish some goal and, on the other, a slave driver forcing his slaves to accomplish that goal.
The idea that there is no real distinction here, that all power is based on coercion, was popular when she wrote the linked essay and it's popular today (as evidenced by the replies here). I used to think that way but I no longer do and, I have to say, it's quite a relief.
I agree with you that she was wrong about integration though it's more complicated than you're letting on. She raises interesting points in the essay you linked. There is an inevitable conflict between freedom (of association) and equality -- she's just on the wrong side of that conflict in this specific case.
I'm not saying this necessarily makes you wrong, but this is explicitly not what she thinks. In the version of this essay published in Crises of the Republic, she writes:
> It is, I think, a rather sad reflection on the present state of political science that our terminology does not distinguish among such key words as power, strength, force, authority, and, finally, violence – all of which refer to distinct, different phenomena and would hardly exist unless they did.
In other words, power is not reducible to some combination of "force and deception". In the edited version of this essay, she even defines each of these categories:
> Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.
> Strength unequivocally designates something in the singular ...
> Force ... should be reserved, in terminological language, for the "forces of nature" or the "force of circumstances," that is, to indicate the energy released by physical or social movements.
> Authority can be vested in persons – there is such a thing as personal authority, as for instance, in the relation between parent and child, between teacher and pupil – or it can be vested in offices, as, for instance, in the Roman senate or in the hierarchical offices of the Church. (A priest can grant valid absolution even though he is drunk.) Its hallmark is unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey; neither coercion nor persuasion is needed.
> Violence, finally, as I have said, is distinguished by its instrumental character. Phenomenologically, it is close to strength, since the implements of violence, like all other tools, are designed and used for the purpose of multiplying natural strength...
Taken from http://www.fsmitha.com/review/arendt.html because I don't have a text version of this essay, but you can find it here https://monoskop.org/images/7/70/Arendt_Hannah_Crises_of_the... (154 of the pdf).
The point is that, for Arendt, power is not about coercion and it's not about deception or force. It's about consensus, shared opinions and judgements, and the proof of this consensus, which is a group of people's ability to act in concert.
I found it fascinating when I read it years ago and, since then, I've been slowly reading through everything else Hannah Arendt wrote. It's astonishing to me that something like this was published in print. These days I think you're better off scouring the internet for blogs if you want to read something interesting and provocative.
> Looking back at the rise of fascism and the Holocaust in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt focused on the use of propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.”
The author uses this quote to stand for "in other words, good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas". But that's not at all what Arendt was saying. She believed that, in the end, the truth will come out:
> Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle. This is one of the lessons that could be learned from the totalitarian experiments and the totalitarian rulers' frightening confidence in the power of lying--in their ability, for instance, to rewrite history again and again to adapt the past to the "political line" of the present moment or to eliminate data that did not fit their ideology. Thus, in a socialist economy, they would deny that unemployment existed, the unemployed person simply becoming a non-person
> The result of such experiments when undertaken by those in possession of the means of violence are terrible enough, but lasting deception is not among them.
The power required to eradicate the truth, she writes, "would amount to omnipotence". Hitler, Stalin, and other totalitarian leaders undermined their own governments in their attempt to destroy the truth and rule through terror. For Arendt, all political power flows from consensus. She believed, contrary to Mao's quip about "political power growing from the barrel of a gun," that violence and coercion cannot create political power but can only undermine it.
That sounds optimistic to me. By encouraging the citizenry to simultaneously believe everything and nothing, these regimes undermined themselves.
The article sees strong defense of free speech as naivete:
> It’s a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive.
I don't agree with this interpretation of modern liberalism. The modern liberal position on free speech is not optimistic, it's resigned. The argument is not "everything that rises must converge" but, rather, we are stupid, limited beings, so what right have we to interfere with other stupid, limited beings? This position amounts to a recognition of the limitations of human rationality, not a celebration of it.
It has been personally sad to me to witness the left turning on free speech. When I was a kid, it was the lefties who defended free speech. It was Chomsky who said "with regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards". Now that I'm a little older, I realize that, mostly, people just defend free speech when they stand to benefit from it (i.e. when they aren't in the position to censor).
These days the left has a lot of cultural power and many on the left are bowing to the temptation to use that power to censor the opposition.
I enjoyed it and I felt it improved my mood temporarily but I don't believe it changed me permanently in any way. As far as I can tell (which may not be that far), reading Chomsky as a teenager, Plato in college and Kant after that were much more significant events in terms of my political views.
What is tolerance? You can't tolerate something if you agree with it. Tolerance means putting up with things with which you disagree.
This is an encroachment on free speech (and it's intolerant). You may believe that it's necessary -- and perhaps you're right: maybe the country will fall apart unless we censor voices outside the mainstream. But to frame this issue as you have done is nonsensical, as if, through sheer power of righteous will, you can transmute censorship into something else.
I don't think this is true. I'm not a Christian and I loved his books as a kid. Tolkien and Madeleine L'Engle wrote novels in a similar vein (that are also excellent children's books). Some fiction is full of cliches and thin characters but, surprisingly, this ends up working in its favor as it takes on a mythical quality.
I also like moral ambiguity and morally complex characters but good luck getting a child to sit through The Brothers Karamazov.
The theory that the US "does not allow" the establishment of academic institutions in Islamic countries is equally wrong.
edit - There is a common attitude among Arabs (evident in this poster's comments in this thread) that everything bad in Arab countries is due to some combination of the US and Israel. One of my teachers, a Jordanian, told me how his father would poke fun at this attitude: when something in the house would break, his father would ironically blame Israel for it.
American foreign policy in the Arab world is complicated. It seems to me that many Arab countries oscillate between Islamist democracies and secular dictatorships. The US prefers the latter to the former. I think it's fair to criticize this stance but my sense is that the US would support a secular democracy, were it possible. The Obama administration supported the secular opposition to Assad...but it has turned out that the biggest faction of the Syrian opposition are Sunnis motivated by Islamism, hence America backing away from Syria.
I was referring to what I see as the silly, overly excited way this article (and others in this genre) is written.
In the battle between Facebook and journalists, I am increasingly on Facebook's side. The breathlessness of these articles is starting to resemble parody.
All human achievement is fundamentally agonistic.
The really bewildering thing is how so many people who clawed their way to the top apparently forgot about the competition it took to get there.
If this is how we come to view "higher education," we should be careful because that's not the ideal that gave birth to the university in the form that we recognize it. And so it's not clear to me whether universities as we recognize them will continue to exist if we continue to view them as a jobs programs.
> Actually, just people in general these days seem to believe it's their right to enforce their views on others...
Only a small number of people, who we used to call liberals, ever believed this.
Isiah Berlin:
> It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no sceptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions’, said an admirable writer of our time, ‘and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’ To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow such a need to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.
I hope we swing back the other way but it's worrying that so many people no longer see the value in pluralism of thought.
There's a line between being a journalist and engaging in a conspiracy. The quote you provided is an attempt to blur that line. But, as far as the law is concerned, that line exists...and it exists to protect journalists. There's a reason journalists have lawyers in the room when they make these kinds of decisions. It wouldn't be surprising if Julian Assange -- not known for his carefulness -- crossed that line.
Why can't it also be about the 5 years?
I'm sympathetic to Assange publishing leaks. If wikileaks was just an organization that published, fine. But the government's argument is that Assange was not a "journalist" in that he was actively involved in convincing people to leak, directing hackers to steal secrets, and providing direct assistance to Manning.
Those charges sound plausible to me, though not open-and-shut. It should go to trial. 175 years is absurd, but 5-10 seems fine.
I think the lying occurs higher up in the command structure where some intelligence is omitted from consideration because it doesn't fit the narrative the higher-ups are pursuing. I suppose there's a question here about who, exactly, is involved in this process of filtering out inconvenient information. Are those people part of the intelligence agency or not? This is a tricky question but, even if they are part of the intelligence agency, the pressure to omit comes from the executive branch. The NSA/CIA/etc aren't pursuing a pro-War policy...the executive branch is.
For example, imagine someone in the CIA is asked to provide a report about the likelihood of Iraq having radioactive material that could be weaponized. This person performs diligent research and produces, to the best of their abilities, a factual report. The executive branch presents this report as a "slam dunk" which shows that Iraq has radioactive material. Who lied?
Toward the end of your post, you blur the distinction between "lying" and "having a duty to contradict false claims". I'm only talking about lying although I agree that people do have an imperfect duty to contradict false claims.
This is exactly what I said.
> Hanyok further argues that Agency officials had "mishandled" SIGINT concerning the events of August 4 and provided top level officials with "skewed" intelligence supporting claims of an August 4 attack. "The overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred." Key pieces of evidence are missing from the Agency's archives, such as the original decrypted Vietnamese text of a document that played an important role in the White House's case. Hanyok has not found a "smoking gun" to demonstrate a cover-up but believes that the evidence suggests "an active effort to make SIGINT fit the claim of what happened during the evening of 4 August in the Gulf of Tonkin." Senior officials at the Agency, the Pentagon, and the White House were none the wiser about the gaps in the intelligence. Hanyok's conclusions have sparked controversy among old Agency hands but his research confirms the insight of journalist I.F. Stone, who questioned the second attack only weeks after the events. Hanyok's article is part of a larger study on the National Security Agency and the Vietnam War, "Spartans in Darkness," which is the subject of a pending FOIA request by the National Security Archive.
To figure out who the liars are we need to know who engaged in a cover-up. Who manipulated, withheld information, or lied. You already know my opinion: I don't think it was the NSA.
For example "The overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred" suggests that the NSA's information was, in fact, good. It just was ignored, manipulated, omitted, etc.
The CIA would be no good to anyone if they were in the business of lying.
There is no such thing as history without a political philosophy. Herodotus had one, Thucydides had one and Zinn has one. This is all fine and good. The issue is when people come along and say "He tells the truth, a truth not often told".
It's not the truth. It's a contribution. In the medium-to-long run, parts of Zinn's writings will be accepted and other parts will be rejected. In fact, this has already happened. The problem is people selling Zinn as "the last word," as if we can all stop thinking about history now because Zinn finished the job. In reality, history is a never-ending process. Historical theses can be more right than others but none of them are "the truth".
I'll just repeat that I think it's a significant mistake to make analogies to Nazis or Maoists.
I don't think this rioting, violence, and general unrest should be compared to the Brown Shirts. Groups engaging in "antagonism and murder towards people they perceived as evil" are not uncommon in history. An analogy to the Nazis in the 30s seems out of place because, as you say, of everything that the Nazis did after the 30s.
If you want to talk to about ideologues, people for whom the ends justify the means, people who are willing to engage in violence and destruction for ideological goals, then you can make a comparison here. You can put the Brown Shirts in this category, you can put current rioters in this category, you can put a large number of historical groups in this category, and I think this categorization is fair. (Note that sometimes this violence may even be justified).
But why pick the Nazis in particular for your comparison? Comparing this group or that group to the Nazis is almost always rhetorical trick precisely because of the Holocaust. Why not pick some other group in history that used violence to pursue its ideological goals but didn't boil over into a genocide? The answer is that, if you picked another group, the rhetorical power of the comparison would be lost. But it would be a more honest comparison.
Also, there's plenty of Christian existentialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_existentialism
Per https://www.replicationmarkets.com/index.php/rules, volunteers are predicting whether 3000 social science papers are replicable. According to the rules, of those 3000 papers, ~5% will be resolved (i.e. attempts will be made to replicate). According to the article, 175 will be resolved. It's unclear to me who exactly will do that work but I would guess it's people behind replications markets dot com (they are funded by DARPA). The rules say that no one knows ahead of time which papers will be resolved so I assume the ~5% (or 175) will be chosen by random.
The data in the article seems to be based on what the forecasters predicted, not which papers actually replicated (that work hasn't been done yet...or at least hasn't been made public). The author of the article is assuming that the forecasters are accurate. To back up this assumption, he cites previous studies showing that markets are good at this kind of thing.
The tone is ranty but, by participating in the markets, the author is putting his money where his mouth is.
It seems unlikely to be due to these factors since there's a gradient from black to white as you move away from the equator.