Quad: 3rd Party Commentary

Discussion in 'SF Open Government' started by Gustav, Nov 30, 2011.

  1. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Someone invariably does have to clean up the mess, don't they? Among my character flaws is that I self-nominate.

    Did you not read my post to Tiassa, above? Apply yourself to it with at least the diligence you gave Mawdudi's work (not knowing his first name was a one-off, I'm sure) and I promise revelation.
     
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  3. chimpkin C'mon, get happy! Registered Senior Member

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  5. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAcivilrights.htm

    I don't have time at the moment, if I get some free time, I'll trace the history of the activists. Superficially seen, it seems chimpkin is right. Anyway this is waaaay off topic but I am interested enough in the concept to look into it eventually
     
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  7. Gustav Banned Banned

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    response 1
    a poster, by definition is one that has access to the media. the essentials of the medium are easily validated by hitting the post button and observing the results. the packets have reached the intended destination

    are you assuming that posters here are insane?

    response 2
    assuming that media/medium refers to journalism presented thru print/tv/internet, asserting that posters have access is an idiotic truism at best. furthermore, it is also a given that access to this forum would necessarily imply access to other sites either directly or indirectly

    what are the essentials of journalism? accuracy by way of independence and impeccable sourcing. that however is never taken for granted.

    setting up a strawman where the media is alleged to have been dismissed as propaganda is ludicrous. we are a bit more sophisticated than that. some sources have more credibility than others

    and that, is where we come in. we ponder, in blogs, forums and comment sections, the significance of a speech or action, we dispute takes of events by talking heads in their opeds, think tanks and whatnot. others dispute our takes.

    doubt, whether in specific aspects or in "totality", of a news report, is precisely what allows us to be

    to assert otherwise is, imho, the province of the feeble mind
    are you making such an assertion, geoff?
     
  8. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    The issue is that some perceptions are more accurate, honest and good-faith than others. Perceptions that aren't meaningfully anchored in the relevant facts, tend to be projections. Not all "perceptions" are equally valid, useful or respectable.

    Sure, and the amount of intellectual/moral humility, good-faith and honor that go into establishing that perception have a direct effect on the validity of the perception, and so the relevance and salience of the resulting stance.

    The prototypical bad-faith (projection) works in the opposite way: one starts with the stance, works backwards to the appropriate perception, and discards whatever elements of intellectual humility and honor are required by that.

    The former is a good-faith scientific approach, the latter is a self-serving ideological approach. Does that sufficiently express the distinction in question?

    Not quite - the attempt to evaluate whether someone is projecting does indeed impose some such requirement, and a corresponding obligation to check your own assumptions in the process. But that's a side-issue from the basic observation that not all perceptions are good-faith scientific ones, as a simple matter of fact.

    And it remains a do-able thing, to so evaluate, in many cases. You needn't possess any general intellectual superiority to anyone to notice when someone is doing it - it isn't a matter of ranking people in some epistymological hierarchy, but noting the blind-spots that every individual exhibits, when they are getting filled with ideology in lieu of respectful investigation. One can likewise lessen the danger of arrogance in such a program by questioning the premises and perceptions in question, and seeing what response you get. People forming responses in good faith tend to respond substantively, and revise their perceptions when appropriate. People engaged in projection and ideological exercises tend to respond in bad faith.

    In instances wherein one perception is demonstrably perverse, such 'reflections' are valid cause for conflict and, if the perverse perceptions resist good-faith revision, silencing them.
     
  9. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    That's pretty good. How about a corollary: when in doubt, err on the side of respect.
     
  10. Gustav Banned Banned

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    samantha vice asked white s.africans to exhibit humility and shame in addition to guilt.
    would you agree, quad?
     
  11. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    "Could be?" That's exactly the point. Perspectives formed in bad faith are destructive, and so the primary objective of (defensible) political speech is to undermine and marginalize them. Such pursuit being an obvious, basic feature of, for example, your own program here. And most others. The point in this thread is that the scientific/projection axis is a useful one for identifying such perspectives.

    It should not come as a surprise that SciForums privileges a certain, specific types of intellectualism (scientific rationalism, specifically). SciForums is very clear about this, from Fraggle's periodic mission statements, to the rules/guidelines, to the name of the entire forum. There's a reason it isn't called "IntellectualRelativismForums," no?
     
  12. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    I'd take this opportunity to repeat that I have not suggested any set of rules or official sanctions be implemented to enforce such considerations - that stuff is all on Gustav, and I explicitly disclaim any support for such a program.

    What I'd like to see is a community that keeps this stuff in mind, and so marginalizes/silences bad-faith perspectives directly in discursive terms, without bans or censorship or whatever. People should be free to say objectionable things, and they should end up marginalized and ignored when they choose to do so.
     
  13. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    "Speaking for them" is when you arrogate the standing to tell us what other people's opinions and perceptions are. Simply "having an opinion" is when you tell us what your own opinions and perceptions are.

    The former is not an opinion. It is an issue of fact. One is making the factual claim that the views of whatever other people - not able to directly express themselves here - are of whatever nature.
     
  14. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    I guess you could in principle have some credible arbitrator empowered to do that. But practically speaking, and for Sci especially, it necessarily has to be a collective judgement. Members will read what people say, evaluate whether the standing matches the ambitions, and respond accordingly. "Accordingly," in the case of insufficient standing, being a response that will disincentivize such behavior and marginalize its results.

    Yeah, the point of my advocacy here is to get speakers to think more carefully about this before posting, and for readers to keep it in mind when evaluating posts. I judge the consciousness of such to be insufficient currently, as we seem to persistently display a lot of problems along these lines.
     
  15. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    You may recall that this entire thread was spawned by my expectation that adoucette (and others) refrain from voicing opinions on subjects they clearly do not understand on their own terms (as evidenced by, for example, their repeated use of the term "minorities" for blacks in South Africa, even after explicit correction).

    And that, moreover, the demand is not for an absence of perspective, but for the cultivation of an intellectually, scientifically defensible perspective, and the derrogation of views stemming from an absence of such. I do not ask that you refrain from forming a perspective on whoever or whatever. I demand that you do such in a good-faith way, rather than as an ideological exercise that reduces Others into tokens. I make similar demands of the myriad other offenders here, and note that a persecution complex is visible in your warped perception of being the sole, or even primary, target of such considerations.

    Indeed - it's that section of people pushing ideological, bad-faith narratives. I'm sure that you'll insist that this falls along cultural lines that victimize Islam or Asians or whoever, but that will just be more of your self-serving persecution complex. In point of fact, we're having this discussion because I'm applying this demand to right-wing Americans - the exact people who support the American policies you despise, and exhibit the worst instances of Othering discourse directed at Asians, Muslims, Arabs, etc.

    If you're referring to me, I'll assert that I've forgotten nothing of the sort.

    The observation that you frequently claim standing to speak for "Asians," "Muslims," etc. is in no way a statement that you are a valid spokesmen for them - quite the opposite - nor an assertion that you never claim to speak for any other groups. I want to be very clear that I reject your standing to speak for these big groups (I don't think anyone can speak for "Asians" in particular). If you want to tell us what, say, Mumbaikars think about something, that's a different story.

    Nobody has evinced any difficulty in understanding your perspective, that I can see.

    To the former: the reason that I observe you speaking for "Asians," "Muslims," etc. is because you frequently choose to do so. You post things like "Asians think X, westerners think Y" with some frequency. You are in no position to disclaim such speech as an outside imposition on you. You choose to do it, on your own.

    To the latter: that's a transparently self-serving premise. A projection, in fact: you're "the underdog" and everyone else is "the Empire," subjecting you to Orientalist misconceptions (which, I'll point out, you have no standing to complain about if you want to give force to your earlier relativist line in this thread).

    Again: classic projection. You're taking your own psychodrama, and overlaying it on US politics, and reducing the various peoples involved into tokens.

    Irish immigration had a big impact on the end of slavery, because the poor Irish immigrant made excellent conscripts to send to the front lines against the South. The influx of cheap labor also guaranteed that the industrial Northern economy would outcompete the Southern slave plantation economy. But I doubt you'll find much direct connection to the Civil Rights era, since the mass of Irish immigration preceded that by like a century.

    Moreover, if you contend that Irish identity in the USA represents underdog-consciousness, then you should re-appraise your general perception of Americans as basically lacking in underdog consciousness. Because Irish identity is widely suffused throughout the American polity. The overwhelming majority of Americans have identifiable Irish heritage, including every President going back to, what, JFK IIRC? It's a reasonable assumption that every American you interact with on SciForums has at least some amount of Irish heritage and some level of identification with the struggles and difficulties faced by Irish people. Many are likely to be of majority Irish descent, and it would not shock me to learn that some Americans here are of 100% Irish ancestry. The US population was always the primary source of funding for IRA terrorism against Britain, for example.

    There's also the small point that American national identity was formed through revolution against British imperialism in the first place.
     
  16. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    Admitting that you are clueless is admirable. Some people are too proud to do it, and this is the fundamental choice that determines whether a perspective will be good-faith and informed, or bad-faith and projected. This is why it's called intellectual humility.

    Of course, you have to also take the next step and undertake efforts to address the identified ignorance.

    Uh, the immigrants who fled the famine came in the 1800s. The Civil Rights Era was in the 1960's. There's like an entire century in between the two.

    The link is between Irish mass immigration and the Civil War, not the Civil Rights Movement.
     
  17. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    I'm not referring to the civil rights era, I'm referring to civil rights activism

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1866

    I think I've said this before so I will confine myself to just reiterating the fact that I am not confined by your view of issues
     
  18. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    So noted.

    This is an assumption?

    Yes yes yes, this is what I just alluded to somewhere up there. Single-source is never so reputable as multiple sources, and ideologically established parties never so reputable as independents. As quadra mentioned, some perspective by any group is in good faith, and some is not. Multiple-sourcing is probably the only way to establish a firm(er) narrative of a philosophy, idea, or development.

    I have always left such assertions to you, my dreary Gustav.

    Generally; but balanced against the dialectical imperative for action. I do no duck no good by pretending that she is a chicken.
     
  19. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    True, but this only works if the arbiter of the argument possesses good faith. I have found that intellectual capacity to arbitrate objectively is vulnerable to basic illusions of reality so that people have been known to abandon basic comprehension skills in lieu of emotional... hmm what can I call it...derangement?


    Frankly, I find that the scientific rationalism is secondary to personal bias. But as I am still here, I'll concede that, at the moment, its a close race
     
  20. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    All communication has elements of politics.



    In Tibetan Buddhism, they speak of the Six Confusions. Applied to communication, they are:

    1. Communication as drudgery
    2. Communication as war
    3. Communication as addiction
    4. Communication as entertainment
    5. Communication as inconvenience
    6. Communication as a problem


    Most human communication is "deranged" like that.
     
  21. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    In modern American discourse, the term "Civil Rights" refers to the activism around the 1960's. The stuff in the 1860s is referred to as "Civil War" or "Abolitionism" or "Reconstruction" etc. I, for one, had never heard of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 until reading your post there - it's not part of the lexicon. When Americans refer to "The Civil Rights Act" they are referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

    "Civil rights activism" generally would cover everything from the American Revolution (which was all about the civil right of voting) to the present (gay equality, etc.). I see no particular reason that anyone would understand "Civil Rights activism" (in America) to refer specifically to the Civil War era. Indeed, I strongly suspect that you turned up the 1866 Act as a post-hoc justification for your initial gaffe.
     
  22. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    I have been disillusioned by Buddhism ever since I realised that indifference was the goal of the enlightenment. I can't abide any philosophy that is so devoid of pragmatism
     
  23. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    Lol.

    I think Buddhism is the most pragmatic of all religions.


    That said - since it is supposedly the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it - you can still look at the six confusions and see how they are reflected in the communication here, and how they help to explain the usual "derangements."
     

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