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anonymous

Rand and Empirical Responsibility 6 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...mpirical-responsibility-6.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 21 Dec 10 - Cached
  • Rand's view is that the conscious mind serves as a kind of gate keeper for what gets into the unconscious mind.
  • the unconscious mind figures out which decks are bad before this awareness reaches the conscious mind. These findings are consistent with a large body of experimental research (see Timothy Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves).
  • The phrase "programmed by chance" means something along the lines of: not sufficiently focused.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • according to Objectivism, the ultimate choice is to focus or not.
  • Did Rand provide any evidence for this view? Nope. Nor did she explain why she believed it. Then what reason can any rational person have for believing it? None whatever.
  • The conscious not only processes knowledge, but makes decisions and organizes memory.
  • The relevant evidence (see the above mentioned Strangers to Ourselves) strongly suggests that the conscious mind neither is nor could be in control all the time.
  • Since most of one's "inner states" lie below the threshhold of consciousness, they cannot be introspected.
  • anonymous on 21 Dec 10
     
    "The conscious mind "programs" the subconscious mind. Rand's view is that the conscious mind serves as a kind of gate keeper for what gets into the unconscious mind. Again, we are faced with the question: How did she know this to be true? Where is her evidence? Is this merely a speculative conjecture? If so, why doesn't Rand make this clear?" By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on December 21, 2010.
anonymous

Revolution and the Muslim World - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...21-revolution-and-muslim-world

stratfor geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 23 Feb 11 - Cached
  • There have been moments in history where revolution spread in a region or around the world as if it were a wildfire.
  • Each had a basic theme.
  • But in the end, the reasons behind them could reasonably be condensed into a sentence or two.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • The key is that in each country where they took place, there were significant differences in the details — but they shared core principles at a time when other countries were open to those principles, at least to some extent.
  • The Muslim countries of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula have been the prime focus of these risings, and in particular North Africa where Egypt, Tunisia and now Libya have had profound crises.
  • The key principle that appears to be driving the risings is a feeling that the regimes, or a group of individuals within the regimes, has deprived the public of political and, more important, economic rights — in short, that they enriched themselves beyond what good taste permitted.
  • Why has it come together now?
  • One reason is that there was a tremendous amount of regime change in the region from the 1950s through the early 1970s, as the Muslim countries created regimes to replace foreign imperial powers and were buffeted by the Cold War.
  • More than anything, if we want to define this wave of unrest, particularly in North Africa, it is a rising against regimes — and particularly individuals — who have been in place for extraordinarily long periods of time.
  • In this case, the question of greatest importance is not why these revolutions are taking place, but who will take advantage of them.
  • In this case, whatever the cause of the risings, there is no question that radical Islamists will attempt to take advantage and control of them. Why wouldn’t they? It is a rational and logical course for them.
  • Whether they will be able to do so is a more complex and important question, but that they would want to and are trying to do so is obvious.
  • But while there is no question that Islamists would like to take control of the revolution, that does not mean that they will, nor does it mean that these revolutions will be successful. Recall that 1848 and 1968 were failures and those who tried to take advantage of them had no vehicle to ride. Also recall that taking control of a revolution is no easy thing. But as we saw in Russia in 1917, it is not necessarily the more popular group that wins, but the best organized. And you frequently don’t find out who is best organized until afterwards.
  • Democratic revolutions have two phases.
  • The first is the establishment of democracy. The second is the election of governments.
  • So there are three crosscurrents here.
  • The first is the reaction against corrupt regimes. The second is the election itself. And the third? The United States needs to remember, as it applauds the rise of democracy, that the elected government may not be what one expected.
  • pictures of peaceful demonstrators are not nearly as significant as the media will have you believe, but pictures of demonstrators continuing to hold their ground after being fired on is very significant.
  • This leads to the key event in the revolution. The revolutionaries cannot defeat armed men. But if those armed men, in whole or part, come over to the revolutionary side, victory is possible. And this is the key event.
  • In Libya, the military has split wide open.
  • If the split in the military is roughly equal and deep, this could lead to civil war.
  • Far more common is for the military to split. If the split creates an overwhelming anti-regime force, this leads to the revolution’s success.
  • It is this act, the military and police coming over to the side of the demonstrators, that makes or breaks a revolution.
  • Therefore, looking at the students on TV tells you little. Watching the soldiers tells you much more.
  • The danger is not radical Islam, but chaos, followed either by civil war, the military taking control simply to stabilize the situation or the emergence of a radical Islamic party to take control — simply because they are the only ones in the crowd with a plan and an organization. That’s how minorities take control of revolutions.
  • Only in the case of Eastern Europe do we see broad revolutionary success, but that was against an empire in collapse, so few lessons can be drawn from that for the Muslim world.
  • democracy and pro-Western political culture do not mean the same thing.
  • There are three possibilities.
  • One is that this is like 1848, a broad rising that will fail for lack of organization and coherence, but that will resonate for decades.
  • The second is 1968, a revolution that overthrew no regime even temporarily and left some cultural remnants of minimal historical importance.
  • The third is 1989, a revolution that overthrew the political order in an entire region, and created a new order in its place.
  • anonymous on 23 Feb 11
     
    "The Muslim world, from North Africa to Iran, has experienced a wave of instability in the last few weeks. No regimes have been overthrown yet, although as of this writing, Libya was teetering on the brink."
anonymous

Rand and Empirical Responsibility 13 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...pirical-responsibility-13.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 15 Feb 11 - Cached
  • How, for example, does she know that intellectual appeasement is merely an attempt to apologize for being concerned about intellectual matters? Where would she get such a notion? Where on earth does she come up with the idea that intellectual appeasement involves an "escape from loneliness"? What evidence does she have that such is the case?
  • “Tribalism is … a logical consequence of modern philosophy.” This is a specific application of Rand's theory of history. The trouble with such statements is that, because they are so broad and sweeping, they can neither be corroborated or refuted by empirical evidence.
  • it is far more plausible to suppose that tribalism is a hard-wired feature of human nature, prominent in many human beings, and only weaker or non-existent within the exceptional few.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Philosophy, as Nietzsche noticed more than hundred years ago and which cognitive science and experimental psychology continues to corroborate, often degenerates into a mere rationalization of the the desires, sentiments, and interests that afflict various strains of human nature.
  • anonymous on 15 Feb 11
     
    "Rand, despite her cluelessness about human nature, nevertheless couldn't help tossing off wildly speculative remarks about the more obscure motivations of the human animal."
anonymous

In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war - 1 views

www.salon.com/...libya

geopolitics libya

shared by anonymous on 13 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Why -- at a time when American political leaders feel compelled to advocate politically radioactive budget cuts to reduce the deficit and when polls show Americans solidly and increasingly opposed to the war -- would the U.S. Government continue to spend huge sums of money to fight this war?  Why is President Obama willing to endure self-evidently valid accusations -- even from his own Party -- that he's fighting an illegal war by brazenly flouting the requirements for Congressional approval?  Why would Defense Secretary Gates risk fissures by so angrily and publicly chiding NATO allies for failing to build more Freedom Bombs to devote to the war?  And why would we, to use the President's phrase, "stand idly by" while numerous other regimes -- including our close allies in Bahrain and Yemen and the one in Syria -- engage in attacks on their own people at least as heinous as those threatened by Gaddafi, yet be so devoted to targeting the Libyan leader?
  • I have two points to make about all this:
  • The reason -- the only reason -- we know about any of this is because WikiLeaks (and, allegedly, Bradley Manning) disclosed to the world the diplomatic cables which detail these conflicts. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Is there anyone -- anywhere -- who actually believes that these aren't the driving considerations in why we're waging this war in Libya?  After almost three months of fighting and bombing -- when we're so far from the original justifications and commitments that they're barely a distant memory -- is there anyone who still believes that humanitarian concerns are what brought us and other Western powers to the war in Libya?
  • Instead, what distinguished Gaddafi and made him a war target was that he had become insufficiently compliant -- an unreliable and unstable servant to the West.
  • Wars are typically caused by the interests of multiple factions and rarely have just one motive.  As Jim Webb explained in arguing that the U.S. has no vital interest in Libya, the French and British are far more reliant on Libyan oil than the U.S. is (and this reader offers a rational dissent and alternative explanation for the war).  But the U.S. has long made clear that it will not tolerate hostile or disobedient rulers in countries where it believes it has vital interests, and that's particularly true in oil rich nations (which is one reason for the American obsession with Iran).
  • anonymous on 13 Jun 11
     
    "When the war in Libya began, the U.S. government convinced a large number of war supporters that we were there to achieve the very limited goal of creating a no-fly zone in Benghazi to protect civilians from air attacks, while President Obama specifically vowed that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake." This no-fly zone was created in the first week, yet now, almost three months later, the war drags on without any end in sight, and NATO is no longer even hiding what has long been obvious: that its real goal is exactly the one Obama vowed would not be pursued -- regime change through the use of military force. We're in Libya to forcibly remove Gaddafi from power and replace him with a regime that we like better, i.e., one that is more accommodating to the interests of the West. That's not even a debatable proposition at this point." - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
anonymous

The Debt Ceiling Deal: The Case for Caving - 0 views

www.businessweek.com/...-case-for-caving-08032011.html

gametheory economics u.s. politics

shared by anonymous on 09 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Failure to reach a deal threatened to bring on the economic equivalent of a nuclear winter. The leaders of the two parties, Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), appeared to grasp this, but a vocal band of “Tea Party hobbits,” as their fellow Republican, John McCain of Arizona, dubbed them, refused to go along.
  • Trapped in a classic game of “chicken”—a term game theorists use, too—in which both players entertain the option of killing everyone, the President did what game theory suggests a rational actor would do. He recognized his potential maximum losses were greater than his opponent’s. He caved.
  • for all the collective self-loathing that attended the debt ceiling talks, it’s important to remember that, like just about everything in human behavior, it was still reducible to a game. Looked at through the prism of game theory, it’s hard to see how the outcome could have turned out any other way.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Crucially, game theory assumes that no one is crazy, and it’s true in life that almost no one ever is. There’s also a pragmatic reason to treat your opponents as sane: You can’t make predictions about their behavior unless you do.
  • People act crazy, but they’re at their craziest when they want something. All you can do in response is to make your most honest estimate of what the crazies actually want, and respond as if they are methodically pursuing it.
  • There is no advantage to be gained, for example, in pointing out that Kim Jong Il is a potbellied nut job in a bad suit. Everything he’s done during his reign as North Korea’s leader suggests he’s an amoral, but sophisticated, negotiator. Unpredictability, says Brams, can be a smart strategy.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 09 Aug 11
       
      When I was a kid, I remember hearing that Saddam Hussein was 'crazy'. I suspect that it's the only conclusion if you can't see connections.
  • anonymous on 09 Aug 11
     
    "Game theory does not concern itself with good and evil. It seeks to predict not which strategies are just, but which are most effective. John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born polymath with a sideline in predicting the blast radius of an atomic bomb, co-authored the discipline's seminal work, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, in 1944."
anonymous

Are You A Rand Cultist? Take Our Simple Test. - 1 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...d-cultist-take-our-simple.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 11 - Cached
  • 0 points = Congratulations, you are an Ayn Rand fan who while rightly inspired by her vision of productivity, reason, and human achievement is nonetheless sensible enough to have avoided her various cultic incitements.
  • 1-6 points = Amber light: definite Randroid tendencies.
  • 7-12 points = Ultra-Randroid, and proud of it. You are welcome to debate with us here at the ARCHNblog (despite the fact you would be giving your sanction to our evil by doing so) but to be honest you'd be better off talking to a deprogrammer.
  • anonymous on 23 Jul 11
     
    "It's often hard to distinguish people who like Ayn Rand's books and find her work as a general inspiration from those who, at the other extreme, fit in with what Jeff Walker called the Ayn Rand Cult. So the ARCHNblog has created a simple litmus test to help tell the fans from the Randroids. The first three statements are from Nathaniel Branden's description of the original '60s cult, the rest are derived from Rand herself or various of her orthodox followers, such as Leonard Peikoff or Harry Binswanger, or from the ARCHNblog's own observations. Give yourself a point for every statement you agree with."
  • Erik Hanson on 23 Jul 11
     
    I was going to object to the "rightfully inspired by rational mind" stuff, but then you shared the aliens hand syndrome thing. Good. ;)
anonymous

Global Economic Downturn: A Crisis of Political Economy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nturn-crisis-political-economy

geopolitics criticalthinking politics economics u.s. crisis

shared by anonymous on 15 Aug 11 - Cached
  • For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics.
  • The use of the term “economy” by itself did not begin until the late 19th century.
  • For classical economists, the political and economic systems were intertwined, each dependent on the other for its existence.
  • ...54 more annotations...
  • The current economic crisis is best understood as a crisis of political economy.
  • Moreover, it has to be understood as a global crisis enveloping the United States, Europe and China that has different details but one overriding theme: the relationship between the political order and economic life.
  • the origin of the current financial crisis was the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States.
  • To be more precise, it originated in a financial system generating paper assets whose value depended on the price of housing.
  • From the standpoint of economics, this was essentially a financial crisis: who made or lost money and how much.
  • From the standpoint of political economy it raised a different question: the legitimacy of the financial elite.
  • Think of a national system as a series of subsystems — political, economic, military and so on.
  • Then think of the economic system as being divisible into subsystems — various corporate verticals with their own elites, with one of the verticals being the financial system.
  • A sense emerged that the financial elite was either stupid or dishonest or both.
  • Fair or not, this perception created a massive political crisis.
  • There was a crisis of confidence in the financial system and a crisis of confidence in the political system. The U.S. government’s actions in September 2008 were designed first to deal with the failures of the financial system. Many expected this would be followed by dealing with the failures of the financial elite, but this is perceived not to have happened.
  • This generated the second crisis — the crisis of the political elite.
  • The Tea Party movement emerged in part as critics of the political elite, focusing on the measures taken to stabilize the system and arguing that it had created a new financial crisis, this time in excessive sovereign debt.
  • Its argument was that the political elite used the financial crisis to dramatically increase the power of the state (health care reform was the poster child for this) while mismanaging the financial system through excessive sovereign debt.
  • The sovereign debt question also created both a financial crisis and then a political crisis in Europe.
  • What had been a minority view was strengthened by the recession.
  • The European crisis paralleled the American crisis in that financial institutions were bailed out. But the deeper crisis was that Europe did not act as a single unit to deal with all European banks
  • There are two narratives to the story.
  • One is the German version, which has become the common explanation. It holds that Greece wound up in a sovereign debt crisis because of the irresponsibility of the Greek government
  • The Greek narrative, which is less noted, was that the Germans rigged the European Union in their favor. Germany is the world’s third-largest exporter, after China and the United States (and closing rapidly on the No. 2 spot). By forming a free trade zone, the Germans created captive markets for their goods.
  • Moreover, the regulations generated by Brussels so enhanced the German position that Greece was helpless.
  • Which narrative is true is not the point.
  • The point is that Europe is facing two political crises generated by economics. One crisis is similar to the American one, which is the belief that Europe’s political elite protected the financial elite. The other is a distinctly European one, a regional crisis in which parts of Europe have come to distrust each other rather vocally. This could become an existential crisis for the European Union.
  • The American and European crises struck hard at China, which, as the world’s largest export economy, is a hostage to external demand, particularly from the United States and Europe.
  • The Chinese government had two responses.
  • The first was to keep factories going by encouraging price reductions to the point where profit margins on exports evaporated.
  • The second was to provide unprecedented amounts of credit to enterprises facing default on debts in order to keep them in business.
  • This led to a second crisis, where workers faced the contraction of already small incomes.
  • The response was to increase incomes, which in turn increased the cost of goods exported once again, making China’s wage rates less competitive, for example, than Mexico’s.
  • China had previously encouraged entrepreneurs. This was easy when Europe and the United States were booming. Now, the rational move by entrepreneurs was to go offshore or lay off workers, or both.
  • In the United States, the first impulse was to regulate the financial sector, stimulate the economy and increase control over sectors of the economy.
  • In Europe, where there were already substantial controls over the economy, the political elite started to parse how those controls would work and who would benefit more.
  • In China, where the political elite always retained implicit power over the economy, that power was increased.
  • In all three cases, the first impulse was to use political controls.
  • In the United States, the Tea Party was simply the most active and effective manifestation of that resistance.
  • In Europe, the resistance came from anti-Europeanists
  • It also came from political elites of countries like Ireland who were confronting the political elites of other countries.
  • In China, the resistance has come from those being hurt by inflation
  • Russia went through this crisis years ago and had already tilted toward the political elite’s control over the economy.
  • Brazil and India have not experienced the extremes of China, but then they haven’t had the extreme growth rates of China.
  • But when the United States, Europe and China go into a crisis of this sort, it can reasonably be said that the center of gravity of the world’s economy and most of its military power is in crisis. It is not a trivial moment.
  • Crisis does not mean collapse. The United States has substantial political legitimacy to draw on.
  • Europe has less but its constituent nations are strong.
  • China’s Communist Party is a formidable entity but it is no longer dealing with a financial crisis.
  • It is vital to understand that this is not an ideological challenge.
  • Left-wingers opposing globalization and right-wingers opposing immigration are engaged in the same process — challenging the legitimacy of the elites.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 Aug 11
       
      This is why so much of American life seems like that proverbial puppet show. Politicians, at their basest, have a vested interest in portraying this as a problem between us-vs-them. It reflects heat.
  • The real problem is that, while the challenge to the elites goes on, the profound differences in the challengers make an alternative political elite difficult to imagine.
  • This, then, is the third crisis that can emerge: that the elites become delegitimized and all that there is to replace them is a deeply divided and hostile force, united in hostility to the elites but without any coherent ideology of its own.
  • In the United States this would lead to paralysis. In Europe it would lead to a devolution to the nation-state. In China it would lead to regional fragmentation and conflict.
  • These are all extreme outcomes and there are many arrestors.
  • But we cannot understand what is going on without understanding two things.
  • The first is that the political economic crisis, if not global, is at least widespread, and uprisings elsewhere have their own roots but are linked in some ways to this crisis.
  • The second is that the crisis is an economic problem that has triggered a political problem, which in turn is making the economic problem worse.
  • The followers of Adam Smith may believe in an autonomous economic sphere disengaged from politics, but Adam Smith was far more subtle. That’s why he called his greatest book the Wealth of Nations. It was about wealth, but it was also about nations. It was a work of political economy that teaches us a great deal about the moment we are in.
  • anonymous on 15 Aug 11
     
    Classical political economists like Adam Smith or David Ricardo never used the term "economy" by itself. They always used the term "political economy." For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics. The two fields are certainly different but they are also intimately linked.
anonymous

P.J. O'Rourke: Atlas Shrugged. And So Did I. - Ideas Market - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...atlas-shrugged-and-so-did-i

shared by anonymous on 11 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • It’s the plain folks, not a Taggart/Rearden elite, whose prospects and opportunities are stolen by corrupt school systems, health-care rationing, public employee union extortions, carbon-emissions payola and deficit-debt burden graft.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Apr 11
       
      Ha ha ha. PJ is a hoot. Sure, he dabbles in ignoramosity (is that a word), but he's still a goddamn hoot.
  • anonymous on 11 Apr 11
     
    "Atlas shrugged. And so did I. The movie version of Ayn Rand's novel treats its source material with such formal, reverent ceremoniousness that the uninitiated will feel they've wandered without a guide into the midst of the elaborate and interminable rituals of some obscure exotic tribe."
anonymous

Three arguments against the singularity - 1 views

www.antipope.org/...reality-check-1.html

singularity sf criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 22 Jun 11 - Cached
  • economic libertarianism is based on the same reductionist view of human beings as rational economic actors as 19th century classical economics — a drastic over-simplification of human behaviour. Like Communism, Libertarianism is a superficially comprehensive theory of human behaviour that is based on flawed axioms and, if acted upon, would result in either failure or a hellishly unpleasant state of post-industrial feudalism.
  • I am not an extropian
  • I'm definitely not a libertarian:
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely. The reason it's unlikely is that human intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of human physiology, and it only survived the filtering effect of evolution by enhancing human survival fitness in some way.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 22 Jun 11
       
      In other words: what we call 'consciousness' is a bundle of physiological responses, not some tightly designed status.
  • it's possible that just as destructive research on human embryos is tightly regulated and restricted, we may find it socially desirable to restrict destructive research on borderline autonomous intelligences ... lest we inadvertently open the door to inhumane uses of human beings as well.
  • whether we want them to be conscious and volitional is another question entirely. I don't want my self-driving car to argue with me about where we want to go today. I don't want my robot housekeeper to spend all its time in front of the TV watching contact sports or music videos. And I certainly don't want to be sued for maintenance by an abandoned software development project.
  • Consciousness seems to be a mechanism for recursively modeling internal states within a body.
  • Uploading ... is not obviously impossible unless you are a crude mind/body dualist. However, if it becomes plausible in the near future we can expect extensive theological arguments over it. If you thought the abortion debate was heated, wait until you have people trying to become immortal via the wire.
  • Our form of conscious intelligence emerged from our evolutionary heritage, which in turn was shaped by our biological environment. We are not evolved for existence as disembodied intelligences, as "brains in a vat", and we ignore E. O. Wilson's Biophilia Hypothesis at our peril
  • Moving on to the Simulation Argument: I can't disprove that, either. And it has a deeper-than-superficial appeal, insofar as it offers a deity-free afterlife, as long as the ethical issues involved in creating ancestor simulations are ignored.
  • This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to see is increasingly solicitous machines defining our environment — machines that sense and respond to our needs "intelligently". But it will be the intelligence of the serving hand rather than the commanding brain, and we're only at risk of disaster if we harbour self-destructive impulses.
  • We may eventually see mind uploading, but there'll be a holy war to end holy wars before it becomes widespread: it will literally overturn religions.
  • our hard-wired biophilia will keep dragging us back to the real world, or to simulations indistinguishable from it.
  • Therefore I conclude that, while not ruling them out, it's unwise to live on the assumption that they're coming down the pipeline within my lifetime.
  • anonymous on 22 Jun 11
     
    Over at Charlie's Diary, Mr. Stross articulates why he's not super-enamored of the Singularity. He begins: "I periodically get email from folks who, having read "Accelerando", assume I am some kind of fire-breathing extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the singularity, the uploading of the libertarians, and the rapture of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it's time to set the record straight and say what I really think. Short version: Santa Claus doesn't exist." The Long version commences...here are excerpts.
anonymous

Rationally Speaking: Is Stanley Fish smarter than Richard Dawkins? - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...fish-smarter-than-richard.html

shared by anonymous on 21 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Was Darwin a fool who had not understood the Foucaultian implications of his own realization of the complex relationship between facts and theories? No, the problem lies with Fish’s cheap rhetorical trick: Stanley seems to think that once one has refuted the naive logical positivist view that human beings can adopt a purely objective viewpoint and grasp reality for what it actually is (a position that in philosophy has been abandoned since the 1950s, by the way), voilà, all knowledge has ultimately been shown to be a matter of faith.
  • This is an almost comical example of a well known logical fallacy known as the false dichotomy, very popular in politics (remember “you are either with us or against us”?), but which Fish should really know how to avoid.
  • But the framework and the assumptions don’t need to be arbitrary. In science, they are not (contrary to postmodern literary criticism). Science and reason are not like edifices built on a foundation, whereby one only has to show that the foundation is shaky for the whole edifice to come down.
  • anonymous on 21 Dec 13
     
    "I could write a book refuting the nonsense regularly expounded by New York Time's columnist Stanley Fish. Oh, wait, I almost have written a book about it! I already commented on this blog regarding Stanley's thoughts concerning academic freedom, deconstructionism, and the New Atheism (part 1 and part 2). I was going to leave Fish alone for a while, but today three friends independently sent me his latest column and asked me to write about it, so here we go, again..."
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