SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Trump Orders Feds to Seize Private Land, Break the Law
President Donald Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars' worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.
He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.
Mexico border wall: Trump orders aides to seize private land and disregard environmental rules
No, Virginia, "conservatism" is not the new counter-culture
First of all, by definition, conservatism cannot be "counterculture" because the very concept means to hold onto the status quo. Many self-described "conservatives" are actually reactionaries, which are the "let's blow up the observatory so no asteroid ever hits us!" types, and are either too dumb to know the difference or too evil to care and will use the word conservative to hide their actual intent. I am leaning toward the first. Nevertheless, a conservative by definition cannot be counterculture.
No, what we have here is reactionary backlash. It's another wave of the same kind of whiny crybaby temper tantrums people threw with the desegregation of public spaces, or the passage of Loving vs. Virginia, or the more recent passage of nationwide recognition of same-sex marriages: people who used to be the nation's punching bags now have (closer to...) equal rights in society, and the ones who used to be able to do anything from simply mocking them to discriminating against them for housing and jobs to outright killing them with few or no repercussions are asspained that they can't any longer.
And this reactionary backlash always follows a well-worn, drearily predictable pattern: demonizing twice as hard, insisting that equality under the law is actually special privilege, bitching and moaning that actually $GROUP are the bad guys and they (the complainers) are the real victims and the actual ones being discriminated against, all slathered with a heaping helping of pig-ignorant but incredibly loud wrongness about liberty and the First Amendment and family values and what have you.
The new demons-du-jour seem to be trans* people. I don't get it either, but Stonewall was barely 20 years before I was born, and even today there are people who will do anything from assault you to torture and kill you for being gay. For that reason, they have my support in general, even though I've had some really bad experiences with transwomen/MtFs and really only know transmen/FtMs (and all three of the ones I know are super-cool people and way less toxic as men than most cismen I know, somehow...).
Another thing I notice is that the specific pattern of accusations and charges leveled against the demonized group never changes: they're mentally ill, they're innately criminal and/or disordered, they're making society adapt to them instead of the other way around, they're loud and shrill, they're "shoving $DIFFERENCE down my throat," they're demanding special privileges, they're a tyrannical minority, and so on, and so forth. Crimes committed by any member of $GROUP are taken to be evidence that every member is the same way and, often, used to obscure or misdirect attention from the systematic injustices done to them. When they speak out, it's considered "troublemaking."
And at the heart of it all is, like I said above, plain ol' overprivileged resentment at not being able to divide the world into in-group and out-group and shit all over the out-group so easily any longer. It's not quite this simple of course; many people are "secondary racists" or "secondary gay/trans-haters," which is to say they have some very real economic or social grievances and have been convinced ("redpilled") that $GROUP is the cause of all their suffering by a few utter sociopaths who find their reactionary flailing useful (and perhaps amusing). Still, primary or secondary doesn't matter too much to the person whose life is made hell, or ended outright.
I don't know what to do about this. There are mind-disrupting memeplexes, "basilisks" as I've called them elsewhere, that seem able to permanently alter peoples' ability to relate to others different from them, and in many cases make them tacitly approve of if not outright participate in their ostracism, suffering, and deaths. As it is well-known that you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into, there are few options left and even fewer that don't have horrible side effects themselves.
US Deficit to Reach Highest Level Since World War II
America’s federal deficit will expand by about $800 billion more than previously expected over 10 years, primarily because of two legislative packages approved this year, pushing the nation further into levels of debt unseen since the end of World War II, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.
The CBO also said that the impact of higher trade barriers, primarily President Trump’s trade war, could hurt economic growth amid widespread fears of a recession.
The United States was already expected to hit about $1 trillion in annual deficits next year, an unusually high number, particularly given that deficits normally contract during sustained periods of economic growth.
U.S. deficit to expand by about $800 billion more than previously expected over 10 years, CBO says
Another of Trump's Terrorists sentenced: MAGA Bomber gets 20
“MAGA Bomber” Cesar Sayoc was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Monday for sending 16 mail bombs to 13 people around the United States last year, including leading critics of President Donald Trump such as former President Barack Obama, ex-Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actor Robert De Niro and financier George Soros.
“I am beyond so very sorry for what I did,” Sayoc said before he was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by Judge Jed Rakoff, according to the Courthouse News service.
“Now that I am a sober man, I know that I a very sick man,” Sayoc reportedly said. “I wish more than anything that I could turn back time and take back what I did ... I feel the pain and suffering of these victims.”
But Rakoff said, “The nature and cirumstances of the instant offenses are, by any measure, horrendous.”
“While none of the devices exploded ... at the very least they were intended to strike fear and terror into the minds of their victims and to intimidate those victims, mostly prominent political figures, from exercising their freedom.”
Scary Antifa violence!
Democrats Introduce Bill to Decriminalize Marijuana
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) are teaming up on legislation to reform the nation’s marijuana laws and help victims of the War on Drugs, which disproportionately hurts communities of color.
The bill, titled the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act, would decriminalize cannabis and require expungement of prior marijuana-based convictions on the federal level. Such proposals have been floated in the past and are supported by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Kamala Harris, Jerry Nadler Introduce Bill To Decriminalize Marijuana
Trump Directly Involved in Illegal Pornstar Payoff
Donald Trump and his press secretary were directly involved in discussions that led to an illegal hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election campaign, according to the FBI.
A court filing unsealed on Thursday said Trump and Hope Hicks spoke repeatedly with Michael Cohen, Trump’s longterm legal fixer, in October 2016 as Daniels – also known as Stephanie Clifford – threatened to sell her story of an affair with Trump.
“I believe that at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent Clifford from going public,” an FBI agent wrote, in an application for a search warrant.
Cohen later admitted to making payments totalling $280,000 through a shell company to buy the silence of Daniels and the former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also alleged she had an affair with Trump.
The new disclosures raise the possibility that Hicks lied to the FBI. Hicks told an agent in an interview that “she did not learn about the allegations made by Clifford until early November 2016”, the new filings said. Hicks, who is now a senior executive at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation, has denied wrongdoing.
The filings were released at the federal court in Manhattan, where Cohen pleaded guilty last year to campaign finance and personal financial crimes. Cohen began a three-year sentence in federal prison in May this year.
Trump directly involved in talks that led to Stormy Daniels payment, FBI says
Logic Wars
Over at a blog entitled The Sooty Empiric, the author The Last Positivist has an interesting explanation of the uses and abuses of logic, on the internet. It is interesting, first, because it is interesting ("But aristarchus", you might say, "that is a tautology!" To which I reply, "Yes, it is, and therefore logically true!"), and secondly because the misconception he adresses is rampant here on SoylentNews, as it is elsewhere on the Internets. And thirdly, because it highlights one of the essentials of philosophy: Humility; humility and Socratic ignorance. I'm sure many have noticed my humble attempts to exemplify philosophic humility right here on the pages of SN. But this is not about me. On to the Blog.
Boundless Ocean of Unlimited Possibilities
Sometimes (e.g.) on the internet we angst about the kind of person who likes to DESTROY his enemies with FACTS AND LOGIC AND REASON. Ben Shapiro has become the iconic figurehead of this sort, and not without cause - but that is at least somewhat misleading. Shapiro is prominently a fairly traditional conservative in his politics, but that is not an essential property of the sort. It is not tied to any particular political position so much as a self-characterisation and an aesthetic. The self-characterisation is that of an unbiased objective person who calmly follows (to the best of their abilities, accepting human frailty etc) good principles of rationality to reach conclusions. The aesthetic is that of being very impressed by displays of logical acumen, and very persuaded that one's ideological opponents (whoever they may be) can be set aside with relative ease once the tools of reason are brought to bear against them. This post is my contribution to that genre.
The aesthetic of displays of logical acumen, and a faith in victory! I mean, if not for this, conservatives would avoid logic like they do climate science. But let's see where The Last Positivist is going with this.
Now, I am a fan of fairly orthodox notions of logical argumentation. I do in fact think it is a good thing to offer arguments which are perspicuously such that there is no way for their premises to be true while their conclusion is false. All the better if you begin from true premises! Just on this blog I have tried to clarify clarity all the better to achieve it, and put a name to an under-recognised fallacy.
Philosophy vs. Rhetoric
There is a long history of antagonism between reason and argumentation. Plato assigned his protege, Aristotle, to show how the teachers of rhetoric played tricks upon the rest of us. This led to the creation of the discipline of logic. Plato, through his character Socrates in the dialogue "The Symposium", held that "philosophers" were "lovers of wisdom", from the greek φιλος and της σοφίας for "love of" and " of wisdom". But the wise woman Diotima ("honored by the gods") taught Socrates about love, namely, that love is not having what you desire.
Thus, philosophers are "lovers of wisdom" precisely because they do not possess it. And wisdom minimally should contain the truth, and logic (correct reasoning) is a tool for arriving at the truth? Thus one ought to be able to use logic to compel one's misguided and erring opponents to agree with you, using what Jürgen Habermas calls "the forceless force of reason". Of course, if we "other direct" or weaponize logic in this way, we are using logic to win arguments, not to discover truth, and that is rhetoric and not philosophy. And so, our noble blogger's point:
So, after all that set up, and for all my sympathy and similarity to this group, what spurs this post is that I typically find myself totally opposed to the logic fans in aesthetic and self-presentation. Why should this be?
My guess is it comes from a very different idea of what it is that a general improvement in logical acumen would achieve. The internet logic fan imagines that it would often lead to us agreeing on what is true - by contrast, I imagine it would lead to us agreeing on how much we don't know. They imagine it would knock out possibilities, I imagine it would open them up. The rest of this post is just a quick explanation of what I mean here and why I think that.
If we possessed at least some truth, and were able to identify valid deductive arguments, no doubt we could, and indeed be forced to on pain of being irrational, agree on some things being true.
Logic is, among other things, the study of truth preservation. It gives us tools for discerning when it is that some premises being jointly accepted a conclusion cannot be consistently denied. When an argument has this property of its premises ensuring the truth of its conclusion we say it is valid.
But this is not sufficient.
I think the root of the logic fans' vision for logic DESTROYING their enemies is that with it they shall be making arguments that are valid in this sense. In fact there is usually two sides to this. First, their opponents are shown to be not in the business of arguing at all - what "arguments" they offer are little more than emotive pleas (on that contrast see here). And after that these people are sharply contrasted with the airtight reasoning of a scientifically informed and logically precise debater. They thus envision securing agreement by brushing aside their opponents own perspective, then trapping their enemies in the iron grip of a valid argument, and squeezing conclusions out of them whether they like it or not.
A bit more forceful use of reason, aimed not at laying bare the reasoning for our conclusions, but rather at seeking unilateral cause for dismissing our opponents. This is not agreement, it is "victory"!
But validity is only the beginning of wisdom, not its end. For evidently mere validity by itself is not very interesting - we should like to know not just this relationship between the premises and the conclusion, but also whether or not the premises are in fact true. (An argument which is valid and has true premises is known as a sound argument - by their nature, sound arguments must have true conclusions.) In fact, even that is not enough - for logic to really be dialectically effective in this sort of way, it must offer us not just sound arguments, but sound arguments with premises that are known or sufficiently well established to be true that one's opponents cannot very well reasonably deny them.
This is an interesting point, that logic is not agonistic, it is not a battle for the truth. Instead it is a communal search for truth, for agreement, and that means for an argument to be effective, it must be agreed to at the beginning, with the agreement on premises. In other words, διαλεκτική, Dialectic But, then,
And here is where I think the rub lies - I think it is extremely difficult, vanishingly rare in fact, to have arguments which are (i) interesting, (ii) valid, and (iii) possessing premises that are true and established to be so. By (i) I just mean - on the sort of topics that actually concern us in political and social discussion, coming to contentious conclusions about how we should live or arrange our institutions etc. And by (iii) I mean - having premises that are not only true (hard and rare enough in itself in many cases), but are sufficiently well evidenced such that disputants cannot just as reasonably doubt this premise as accept the conclusion.
What, then, is our valiant blogger's alternative?
So to me the more salient tool in the logician's kit is the counter-model. This is the imaginative skill (also taught in intro logic) of coming up with ways the world could be that would satisfy all of the premises while rendering the conclusion false. This shows us possibilities left open by what is established in our premises, sometimes these are ways the world might be that we may not have been inclined to think about were we not set the task of generating a counter-model. When I envision the world wherein logic is better respected, it is a world wherein this skill is more often deployed.
American Philosopher John Rawls once wrote on the situation where there is no forceful argument in favor of liberal democracy and international law:
Some may find this fact hard to accept. That is because it is often thought that the task of philosophy is to uncover a form of argument that will always prove convincing against all other arguments. There is, however, no such argument.
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples", p. 123
The absence of such arguments is not cause for fear, or rampant relativism. It only means that the force of reason is not what the fanbois of logic on the internet imagine it to be. Logic is not a rhetorical weapon, it is not something that can be used without the consent, agreement, and cooperation of opponents. Which means, ultimately, that we can dismiss Ben Shapiro as a raving emo guy, right?
Charlottesville Nazi sentenced to life for car attack/murder
Nearly two years after James A. Fields Jr. rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, the avowed neo-Nazi and convicted murderer was sentenced to life in prison Friday for 29 federal hate crimes.
Fields, 22, whose vehicular attack killed one woman and injured 35 other people, pleaded guilty to the 29 counts in April in a deal with prosecutors, who agreed to drop an additional charge that carries a possible death sentence. In a separate case stemming from the deadly incident, Fields was convicted of first-degree murder and other crimes in December by a Virginia jury that voted for a life term plus 419 years in state prison.
James A. Fields Jr., avowed neo-Nazi in Charlottesville car attack, sentenced to life in prison
(I like how it's posted in the Public Safety department)
NY Post Deletes Trump Rape Allegation Story
An allegation that President Trump raped a journalist in the 1990s was too much for a Trump-loving editor at the New York Post, it was reported Monday.
Col Allan — a former Post editor-in-chief and top Rupert Murdoch lieutenant who has returned to the paper in an effort to make it even more friendly to the president — ordered stories about E. Jean Carroll’s rape claim scrubbed from the Post’s website, CNN said.
The Post published a staff-written story about the alleged attack on its website after Carroll’s allegation emerged on Friday in New York magazine.
People who clicked on search engine links pointing to the Post’s story landed at an error page with the message: “DID YOU GET LOST?”
