"I hate Obama no matter what he says or does. I hate Obama no matter what he says or does. I hate Obama no matter what he says or does. I hate Obama no matter what he says or does. Etc."
I find it hard to take the argument that he's killed enough Americans to die a violent death seriously, as a pragmatic argument, when the Americans were killed some time ago. It's a revenge argument.
Those arguments are neither cynical nor pragmatic. Instead, they seem pretty idealistic.
Well, maybe 3 is a bit pragmatic, but it seems to be a pragmatic case for nonintervention -- if they can do it, why the hell do we need to get involved?
Bob, yeah, it's racist. You can pretend it's not, but I doubt you're fooling anyone.
And the French and Native Americans would take issue with the idea that isolationism was the only, or fundamental, or even dominant position of early America.
False on the first count, misleading on the second. Egypt's turned violent, though not "tanks and artillery violent," pretty quickly. Libya's turned violent when the pro-Qaddafi troops began firing on protesters with anti-aircraft guns, artillery, tanks, planes, and helicopters.
Tom, but it's not just a partisan issue. There are fundamental reasons why liberals -- which is not to say Democratic politicians, necessarily -- favor labor over capital in many if not most situations. It has to do with values. You know, those things you're always harping on? It's become a partisan issue of late largely because the right made it one (as Governor Walker made quite explicit).
Tom, as I've said previously on this blog, public sector unions are a difficult case. One of the main reasons it's become a big issue for liberals (not necessarily Democrats, as some obviously don’t care) is that they see public sector unions as the only remaining prominent salient of organized labor. It’s a battle ground less because public sector unions make sense from a labor perspective than because the right has so undercut private sector unions in favor of capital (and that means in favor of corporations) that liberals have to hold onto whatever they can, union-wise.
That doesn’t mean that public sector unions aren’t justified, and that they aren’t justified on broadly similar grounds to private sector unions, it’s just that the case is less straightforward since there’s not a direct, or at least transparent, relationship between the government and capital.
It may be true that there are politicians who support unions because they get money from them, but pretending that’s surprising is like pretending that it’s surprising Republicans support the oil industry because they get money from it. In both cases, it has little or nothing to do with why people who aren’t receiving money from whichever interest group we’re talking about support those groups. But you know, for you, everything is about bias: lioberals/Democrats are biased, and Tom (and those who think like him) is right, so none of this will matter to you.
Tom, whether you realize it or not, and I'm quite sure you don't, unions have always been about serving as a balance to capital, which in our time is often in the form of corporations. That's what unions were created for, as the industrial revolution created an imbalance, not, as the guest poster so oddly put it a week or two ago, insuring a minimum level of something or other. This isn't a partisan thing, or at least it doesn't have to be. It's the very nature of unions to balance against capital. The fact that it's become a partisan thing shows little more than on which side one of the player's in the partisan game's bread is buttered. Of course, Democrats are equally in bed with "evil corporations" (which aren't evil, they're just amoral), but at least they make a pretense of thinking about the balance. Of course, the fact that unions have been dying in this country for the last 30 years shows that it's little more than a pretense. Democrats ultimately know on which side their bread is buttered, too.
Can someone tell me what the hell Tom's talking about? Is he just injecting an only loosely related (in that it's about unions) political gotchya into the thread, or have his biases become so pervasive that he reads them into everything?
Except a "fair" outcome isn't a single outcome, it is in fact a procedural one. It's about justice and fairness, not about a minimum or some particular standard. This is why the difference matters (as I tried to point out below). Your entire post hinges on your characterization of the liberal position, and since you've gotten it completely wrong, the rest of the post falls apart, or at least fails to address, as Tom says below, reality.
Tom, I've pointed out above how he's mischaracterized the justification of unions. It has nothing to do with "minimum standards," or any single outcome. The only outcome in question is fairness. So whatever reality he's discussing, it ain't the liberal position on unions, much less the leftist one.
Since it may be difficult to see the connection between my earlier point -- that Kowal's grossly mischaracterizes the liberal justification for unions -- and Kowal's general point about process vs. outcomes, I'll lay it out more directly, without getting into public sector unions specifically (in short, I think the liberal support of public sector unions, while partly principled, is largely pragmatic -- with the erosion of private sector unions, it's really the last remaining salient occupied by powerful labor).
Unions are meant to be a merger of outcome and process, but by misrepresenting the justification and purpose of unions, Kowal misses this. Unions are not about a single outcome (the "minimum level" in Kowal's characterization), but about fairness. The way unions are supposed to operate -- and I think many if not most liberals would admit that they don't always work this way -- is by setting the compensation of workers relative to the value of the product they are producing. When the value of the product, or the company, goes up, their fair share goes up, and when the value goes down, their fair share goes down. This is why labor unions, when they're functioning well, make concessions in rough economic times (or just rough times for their particular market), for example.
I find it interesting that there's a lot of talk of the compensation of public vs. private employees. This is largely dependent on the industry, of course, and public employees generally work for the back end (pensions and retirement benefits), while private employees generally work for the front end, so in some ways we end up comparing apples to oranges. But you'd be hard pressed to find a supporter of unionization who won't point out a simple fact to you: a large part of why private employees have been basically getting screwed for the last couple decades, whereas public employees, where they're allowed to collectively bargain, have not, is that private unions have all but dropped off the face of the Earth in this country. While there may be other reasons (related to the source of public employees' compensation) for being against public unions, the fact that private employees are getting screwed, by and large, is a pretty crappy anti-public union argument, from either a process or outcome perspective. Wherever labor is able to share power with capital, or management, labor will do better than in sectors where it is unable to.
Oh, I think there's a very, very big difference. Implying that a minimum standard of living and a fair or equable wage. A minimum standard of living, again, is what the welfare state is supposed to provide. We can quibble about what this entails, but it will differ very much from an equitable or fair standard of living in all but the direst of economic climates. A fair or equitable standard of living for workers is going to vary with the economy/market, and in good times, will be well above the minimum standard of living. The idea of unions is not to make sure employees eat, but to make sure they’re not exploited by people living high on the hog as a result of their labor. Unions are there to insure that labor gets its fair share of the pie. Of course, if workers aren’t making enough to eat or clothe themselves, or put a roof over their heads, unions are going to have something to say about that, but unions came into being because the balance of power between capital and labor changed in favor of capital with industrialization, and unions were supposed to balance things out a bit. That’s just not what you’re saying, or really all that close to it.
As a matter of first principles, all Americans are entitled to a minimum standard of living.
As a matter of observed fact, impersonal market forces sometimes do not result in compensation that comports with that preconceived standard of living.
Therefore, the market is an unsatisfactory mechanism for assigning economic values to labor.
This is a strange argument for the existence of labor unions, today or ever. I’ve never heard it before. I wonder where you’ve seen it, or something like it.
To me, it looks like you’ve produced some positions that the left definitely adheres to, connected them (in the case of 1 and 2 connecting to 3, connected them very loosely), left out the premises behind both these positions and the support for labor unions that are doing all the work, and sold it as an argument of your ideological opponents. Instead, you’d do well to start from the actual position(s) that the left starts from, if you want to do this sort of analysis.As Adam Smith put it:
"It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerable well fed, clothed and lodged."
You’ll notice the difference between your position and this one. You’re arguing that the left starts from the position that all people are entitled to a minimum standard of living. Smith, and like him labor for most of the last 2 centuries, was starting from the premise that as an integral part of the production process, labor deserves a fair, or equitable (not minimum!) share of the profits – enough that they can live quality lives. This is not to say that the left doesn’t believe in a minimum standard of living – this is what the welfare state is for, though, not labor unions.
As stated, this is a strange argument for the existence of unions, and certainly not one I've ever heard. At the very least, it leaves out a bunch of connecting premises that are actually doing the bulk of the work.
The idea behind unions was quite simple: not that people simply deserve a minimum living standard, but that those who produce the goods and services that produce profit deserve their fair share of that profit.
Tom, that's patent nonsense. Just because Chomsky doesn't have a PhD in political science, or philosophy, doesn't mean he can't be an expert in it those areas. And the fact that he's been writing and doing extensive research on politics and society for more than four decades, and that his writings and research in that area have been widely studied and very influential, certainly suggests that he is, in fact, an expert in those areas. You may disagree with him, I know that I do most of the time, but that doesn't mean he's no more qualified than you or I to talk about these things.
Frankly, I find it a bit odd, coming from someone who's so down on the academy, that you would treat academic credentials as the one and only sign of expertise.
Chomsky, and most linguists (though not all) are not looking for the Universal Language, but the universal building blocks of language. They're nativists; they think that these building blocks are part of our makeup, part of what is it is to be human. If you read Chomsky's limited work on the evolution of language (the work is limited, and his contribution to it even more limited still), you'll get an idea of what he's all about. Or read Pinker's The Language Instinct, which lays out the program in much less technical terms than Chomsky ever has or will or is capable of, even if Pinker disagrees with Chomsky on where language came from.
No, functionalism is a type of computationalism. It essentially says that a mental state is its function, not its constituents. This means, among other things, that the same mental state can be realized in multiple mediums, which is why strong AI is possible, to a functionalist.
Well, Chomsky rarely concerns himself with semantics, and in fact frequently reminds us that he’s not talking about semantics. What’s more, when he does talk about semantics, and uses the word, he means something very different from what we, and even from what other linguists, usually mean by semantics (to be honest, I’m still not quite sure what the hell he means by it, but I’m not a linguist, so in the end I don’t have to care). He would readily admit that there are untranslatable words in different languages, or at least I assume he would, since it’s neither here nor there for the focus of his work. I’m quite certain he’d read Word and Object by the time he did the bulk of his post-dissertation research, anyway. He simply (haha, “simply” is funny in this sentence) argues that the structure of language is, at a certain level, universal (what that level is for him has changed over time), and that this universality is necessary because if it weren’t universal and innate, then computationally the syntactic structure of language, the rules that govern its organization, would be impossible to learn given the input available. Nothing about untranslatable words, or even the indeterminacy of translation, affects that argument.
Christopher, do you mean his speech acts stuff? If so, I find it interesting and useful from a psychological and representational perspective. On his critiques of Dennett and functionalism, I’m not sure what you mean specifically. His critiques of functionalism and computationalism stemming from his Chinese Room paper are important but antiquated, given advances in cognitive science over the last 30 years. As for Dennett, I can’t stand him, and I think that in most of their debates Searle got the better of him.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “A reed in the wind”
Here's what I just read:
"I hate Obama no matter what he says or does. I hate Obama no matter what he says or does. I hate Obama no matter what he says or does. I hate Obama no matter what he says or does. Etc."
On “No country for old dictators”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution
On “Leo Strauss, Meet John Stuart Mill”
Everyone is biased but Tom (and those who think like him). Tom has told us so in comment thread after comment thread. Plus, Tom's winning, duh!
On “On Libya and the Moral Case Against Intervention”
I find it hard to take the argument that he's killed enough Americans to die a violent death seriously, as a pragmatic argument, when the Americans were killed some time ago. It's a revenge argument.
"
Those arguments are neither cynical nor pragmatic. Instead, they seem pretty idealistic.
Well, maybe 3 is a bit pragmatic, but it seems to be a pragmatic case for nonintervention -- if they can do it, why the hell do we need to get involved?
"
Bob, yeah, it's racist. You can pretend it's not, but I doubt you're fooling anyone.
And the French and Native Americans would take issue with the idea that isolationism was the only, or fundamental, or even dominant position of early America.
"
Bob, you can always be counted on for the racist and historically inaccurate perspective.
On “Free Market as Forest”
Yeah, that's not quite what "they" are doing. But hey, why quibble about little things like what they actually say?
On “Toward a norm of humanitarian intervention”
—Egypt’s was nonviolent. Libya’s is not.
False on the first count, misleading on the second. Egypt's turned violent, though not "tanks and artillery violent," pretty quickly. Libya's turned violent when the pro-Qaddafi troops began firing on protesters with anti-aircraft guns, artillery, tanks, planes, and helicopters.
On “Free Market as Forest”
Tom, but it's not just a partisan issue. There are fundamental reasons why liberals -- which is not to say Democratic politicians, necessarily -- favor labor over capital in many if not most situations. It has to do with values. You know, those things you're always harping on? It's become a partisan issue of late largely because the right made it one (as Governor Walker made quite explicit).
"
Tom, as I've said previously on this blog, public sector unions are a difficult case. One of the main reasons it's become a big issue for liberals (not necessarily Democrats, as some obviously don’t care) is that they see public sector unions as the only remaining prominent salient of organized labor. It’s a battle ground less because public sector unions make sense from a labor perspective than because the right has so undercut private sector unions in favor of capital (and that means in favor of corporations) that liberals have to hold onto whatever they can, union-wise.
That doesn’t mean that public sector unions aren’t justified, and that they aren’t justified on broadly similar grounds to private sector unions, it’s just that the case is less straightforward since there’s not a direct, or at least transparent, relationship between the government and capital.
It may be true that there are politicians who support unions because they get money from them, but pretending that’s surprising is like pretending that it’s surprising Republicans support the oil industry because they get money from it. In both cases, it has little or nothing to do with why people who aren’t receiving money from whichever interest group we’re talking about support those groups. But you know, for you, everything is about bias: lioberals/Democrats are biased, and Tom (and those who think like him) is right, so none of this will matter to you.
"
Tom, whether you realize it or not, and I'm quite sure you don't, unions have always been about serving as a balance to capital, which in our time is often in the form of corporations. That's what unions were created for, as the industrial revolution created an imbalance, not, as the guest poster so oddly put it a week or two ago, insuring a minimum level of something or other. This isn't a partisan thing, or at least it doesn't have to be. It's the very nature of unions to balance against capital. The fact that it's become a partisan thing shows little more than on which side one of the player's in the partisan game's bread is buttered. Of course, Democrats are equally in bed with "evil corporations" (which aren't evil, they're just amoral), but at least they make a pretense of thinking about the balance. Of course, the fact that unions have been dying in this country for the last 30 years shows that it's little more than a pretense. Democrats ultimately know on which side their bread is buttered, too.
"
Can someone tell me what the hell Tom's talking about? Is he just injecting an only loosely related (in that it's about unions) political gotchya into the thread, or have his biases become so pervasive that he reads them into everything?
On “Labor Roundtable: The Labor Movement, Redistributive Justice, and Procedural Fairness”
Ricci v. DeStefano?
"
Except a "fair" outcome isn't a single outcome, it is in fact a procedural one. It's about justice and fairness, not about a minimum or some particular standard. This is why the difference matters (as I tried to point out below). Your entire post hinges on your characterization of the liberal position, and since you've gotten it completely wrong, the rest of the post falls apart, or at least fails to address, as Tom says below, reality.
"
Tom, I've pointed out above how he's mischaracterized the justification of unions. It has nothing to do with "minimum standards," or any single outcome. The only outcome in question is fairness. So whatever reality he's discussing, it ain't the liberal position on unions, much less the leftist one.
"
Since it may be difficult to see the connection between my earlier point -- that Kowal's grossly mischaracterizes the liberal justification for unions -- and Kowal's general point about process vs. outcomes, I'll lay it out more directly, without getting into public sector unions specifically (in short, I think the liberal support of public sector unions, while partly principled, is largely pragmatic -- with the erosion of private sector unions, it's really the last remaining salient occupied by powerful labor).
Unions are meant to be a merger of outcome and process, but by misrepresenting the justification and purpose of unions, Kowal misses this. Unions are not about a single outcome (the "minimum level" in Kowal's characterization), but about fairness. The way unions are supposed to operate -- and I think many if not most liberals would admit that they don't always work this way -- is by setting the compensation of workers relative to the value of the product they are producing. When the value of the product, or the company, goes up, their fair share goes up, and when the value goes down, their fair share goes down. This is why labor unions, when they're functioning well, make concessions in rough economic times (or just rough times for their particular market), for example.
I find it interesting that there's a lot of talk of the compensation of public vs. private employees. This is largely dependent on the industry, of course, and public employees generally work for the back end (pensions and retirement benefits), while private employees generally work for the front end, so in some ways we end up comparing apples to oranges. But you'd be hard pressed to find a supporter of unionization who won't point out a simple fact to you: a large part of why private employees have been basically getting screwed for the last couple decades, whereas public employees, where they're allowed to collectively bargain, have not, is that private unions have all but dropped off the face of the Earth in this country. While there may be other reasons (related to the source of public employees' compensation) for being against public unions, the fact that private employees are getting screwed, by and large, is a pretty crappy anti-public union argument, from either a process or outcome perspective. Wherever labor is able to share power with capital, or management, labor will do better than in sectors where it is unable to.
"
Oh, I think there's a very, very big difference. Implying that a minimum standard of living and a fair or equable wage. A minimum standard of living, again, is what the welfare state is supposed to provide. We can quibble about what this entails, but it will differ very much from an equitable or fair standard of living in all but the direst of economic climates. A fair or equitable standard of living for workers is going to vary with the economy/market, and in good times, will be well above the minimum standard of living. The idea of unions is not to make sure employees eat, but to make sure they’re not exploited by people living high on the hog as a result of their labor. Unions are there to insure that labor gets its fair share of the pie. Of course, if workers aren’t making enough to eat or clothe themselves, or put a roof over their heads, unions are going to have something to say about that, but unions came into being because the balance of power between capital and labor changed in favor of capital with industrialization, and unions were supposed to balance things out a bit. That’s just not what you’re saying, or really all that close to it.
"
As a matter of first principles, all Americans are entitled to a minimum standard of living.
As a matter of observed fact, impersonal market forces sometimes do not result in compensation that comports with that preconceived standard of living.
Therefore, the market is an unsatisfactory mechanism for assigning economic values to labor.
This is a strange argument for the existence of labor unions, today or ever. I’ve never heard it before. I wonder where you’ve seen it, or something like it.
To me, it looks like you’ve produced some positions that the left definitely adheres to, connected them (in the case of 1 and 2 connecting to 3, connected them very loosely), left out the premises behind both these positions and the support for labor unions that are doing all the work, and sold it as an argument of your ideological opponents. Instead, you’d do well to start from the actual position(s) that the left starts from, if you want to do this sort of analysis.As Adam Smith put it:
"It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerable well fed, clothed and lodged."
You’ll notice the difference between your position and this one. You’re arguing that the left starts from the position that all people are entitled to a minimum standard of living. Smith, and like him labor for most of the last 2 centuries, was starting from the premise that as an integral part of the production process, labor deserves a fair, or equitable (not minimum!) share of the profits – enough that they can live quality lives. This is not to say that the left doesn’t believe in a minimum standard of living – this is what the welfare state is for, though, not labor unions.
As stated, this is a strange argument for the existence of unions, and certainly not one I've ever heard. At the very least, it leaves out a bunch of connecting premises that are actually doing the bulk of the work.
The idea behind unions was quite simple: not that people simply deserve a minimum living standard, but that those who produce the goods and services that produce profit deserve their fair share of that profit.
On “On Civil Society”
Tom, that's patent nonsense. Just because Chomsky doesn't have a PhD in political science, or philosophy, doesn't mean he can't be an expert in it those areas. And the fact that he's been writing and doing extensive research on politics and society for more than four decades, and that his writings and research in that area have been widely studied and very influential, certainly suggests that he is, in fact, an expert in those areas. You may disagree with him, I know that I do most of the time, but that doesn't mean he's no more qualified than you or I to talk about these things.
Frankly, I find it a bit odd, coming from someone who's so down on the academy, that you would treat academic credentials as the one and only sign of expertise.
"
Blaise, I can't say that I have ever heard of Daniel Pinker, but it's good to know that you've corresponded with him.
"
Chomsky, and most linguists (though not all) are not looking for the Universal Language, but the universal building blocks of language. They're nativists; they think that these building blocks are part of our makeup, part of what is it is to be human. If you read Chomsky's limited work on the evolution of language (the work is limited, and his contribution to it even more limited still), you'll get an idea of what he's all about. Or read Pinker's The Language Instinct, which lays out the program in much less technical terms than Chomsky ever has or will or is capable of, even if Pinker disagrees with Chomsky on where language came from.
"
Big C communists were, at least in practice, all about the State.
"
No, functionalism is a type of computationalism. It essentially says that a mental state is its function, not its constituents. This means, among other things, that the same mental state can be realized in multiple mediums, which is why strong AI is possible, to a functionalist.
"
Well, Chomsky rarely concerns himself with semantics, and in fact frequently reminds us that he’s not talking about semantics. What’s more, when he does talk about semantics, and uses the word, he means something very different from what we, and even from what other linguists, usually mean by semantics (to be honest, I’m still not quite sure what the hell he means by it, but I’m not a linguist, so in the end I don’t have to care). He would readily admit that there are untranslatable words in different languages, or at least I assume he would, since it’s neither here nor there for the focus of his work. I’m quite certain he’d read Word and Object by the time he did the bulk of his post-dissertation research, anyway. He simply (haha, “simply” is funny in this sentence) argues that the structure of language is, at a certain level, universal (what that level is for him has changed over time), and that this universality is necessary because if it weren’t universal and innate, then computationally the syntactic structure of language, the rules that govern its organization, would be impossible to learn given the input available. Nothing about untranslatable words, or even the indeterminacy of translation, affects that argument.
Christopher, do you mean his speech acts stuff? If so, I find it interesting and useful from a psychological and representational perspective. On his critiques of Dennett and functionalism, I’m not sure what you mean specifically. His critiques of functionalism and computationalism stemming from his Chinese Room paper are important but antiquated, given advances in cognitive science over the last 30 years. As for Dennett, I can’t stand him, and I think that in most of their debates Searle got the better of him.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.