Please maul my essay

comelately

Wild Horses
Erm.....I wrote a thing. It will probably make Luka vom.

It probably means reading the essay it responds to, but that was called an 'important piece' by Nina Power so the Dissensus dots connect.

In all seriousness, if it suits please do tell me everything I did wrong with some accompanying sugarcoating. The feedback would be appreciated.

 

luka

Well-known member
You're right that it's not my cup of tea. I don't believe in principles or rational thought or philosophy. I don't think thinking works.

If you want to make it a better essay then remove all references to yourself, all the apologies, begging for indulgence and special consideration. Find a ruthlessly impersonal, cold, hard edged style and everyone will agree with what you say, regardless of what it is you're saying because it will have force and intensity and focus. That's my advice.
 

comelately

Wild Horses
Thanks.

In many ways, the essay agrees with you. Pretending that you can just respond to the far-right with 'reason and evidence' is bollocks.

I don't really believe in principles either, and that's another way you could critique Collins potentially. But it would be dense meta-ethics and nah.

I just edited out the apologies. Discussion of word count is deliberate and speaks to the point. If someone Gish Gallops you, then it will take several minutes or thousands of words to respond.
 
Last edited:

luka

Well-known member
I couldn't read the thing you were responding to though. I did try but it gave me a physical feeling of revulsion. It felt very unclean, a contaminant I didn't want getting inside me.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Now it seems to me there is a problem here. Is it wrong to restrict the exercise of linguistic capacity or another — or to seek to? Which is it? And how does he arrive at intention in the first place — it’s not very clear to me.

If a single act of exogenous restriction is sufficient to “undermine” their “capacity to be a rational and moral agent” then there pretty obviously couldn’t be anyone with such a capacity intact.

A well aimed response and critique, in my mind. Its a tough matter to discuss, and I think, honestly, it was discussed well on both accounts. That said, I can certainly align myself with some of the issues you take with Collins.

And indeed whilst I accept that the coercion of speech does *potentially* have the ability to cause a restriction of thought or rather a restriction in the development of thought, it isn’t ultimately clear that one necessarily follows the other

As I understand it, the "restriction of thought" and the "restriction in the development of thought" differ more in articulation than they do in signification - which is a matter largely confined to semantics. Although I think I understand, in that "thought" can refer to the product of the development of thought, and can thus be said to follow from it. However, is not the more important sequence that of expression following from thought? In any case, is our thought not restricted on an almost constant basis by negative feedback? How, then, should this negative feedback be expressed as censorship? Is that a good way of phrasing one of the central debates here?

edit: by constant negative feedback, I mean general environmental signals/cues, the bulk of which perhaps not even being received consciously.

Would you want to get into how exogenous coercion can potentially restrict speech by way of injecting a code of conduct, a code that the would-be speaker mulls over and may or may not feel obliged to uphold? That is, this coercion can manage to preclude certain expressions, but this preclusion needs the consent of the speaker? If they don't consent, they disregard the censorship, no? Or perhaps this consent isn't consent proper, but is some kind of superego mandate?

In any case, It seems like this coercion/censorship (if I understand you correctly) enters into the atmosphere of the mind of the speaker, in which there is being formulated a message to express, and this censorship manages to effect/alter this message in its formulation stage. However, this revisory code is received and ruminated to some degree, no? So successfully censoring someone requires that you successfully get them to censor themselves, seeing as you cannot implement such a censorship beyond their will. Maybe I'm dwelling on an inconsequential point, but it could be important.
 

comelately

Wild Horses
Thanks for all of that!

There's definitely a lot you could write about the model of thought development he outlines in his philosophising.

I've just had sex, so it will be at least another 24 hours before I'm smart enough to respond to that. I suspect the gf and I chilling it out and moving to once a week dates was probably behind me having the intellectual capacity to write.

Broadly I now think 'oh I should have written x rather than y', but I knew that would happen and that it would be all part of the process.

Probably the thing I am pondering now is to what extent he has considered the effects of the very thing he is expressing on the free speech of others. He does not appear to have so in his essay, which makes him look a little guilty under his own rules. His own definition of 'absolute' gives him no obvious room for maneuver here. He could try to refine his definitions, perhaps, but I think that's going to make his arguments look pretty ad hoc.

Obviously I don't expect a reply, but he probably wasn't expecting one either :ROFLMAO:
 

comelately

Wild Horses
I was riffing on a Seinfeld joke tbh, but obviously that's way too middlebrow for dissensus.

I actually learnt the word middlebrow from Reynolds. He was talking about music I liked lol.
 

luka

Well-known member
dont worry woebot our founding father has been going all out to recuperate middlebrow for years now. it's his pet project.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
suggest we promote Tea to mod for posting what is objectively a hilarious and apposite link
 
Top