Braised Chunks of Karl Popper Served in Heavy Sauce

There seems to be little correlation between a powerful intellect and the avoidance of juvenile political polemic. It is French intellectuals who seem to attain the greatest mismatches between massive intellectual wattage and the dimmest of political bulbs.

I have always been sympathetic to poor Camus, who had the temerity to apply common sense to the raging left/right food fights of his era and was scorned for it.

Scott really needs to stop being so mechanical and ritualistic.

But if we all know he’s a vacuous twat, why don’t the French? Will they really take any crap so long as it comes from a ‘philosopher’?

“In every other nation people who routinely trot out bullshit are instantly removed from public life.”

In France and the rest of Europe, intellectuals are still respected, so their political nonsense receives an attentive hearing. In America, political nonsense is respected only when it comes from ex-actors or charismatic crazies.

You just described the Republican Party’s presidential farm team.
As a bonus, many are rewarded with fellowships at Heritage and AM Broadcasting positions in Alaska.

In every other nation people who routinely trot out bullshit are instantly removed from public life.

Or rewarded with a presidency. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of middle ground, nations seem to either distrust bullshitters, or enshrine them in the bedrock of political process.

I don’t get the Popper reference in the review. Can someone explain?

This makes me considerably more sympathetic to Noël Godin’s point of view, I must say.

; culinary commentary follows.

Elegantly done. No discussion of BHL, however, is quite complete without an open-shirted visual.

For good or ill, the French punched well above their weight in the world of ideas until the end of the 70s. After that, you get guys like Bernard-Henri Lévy, i.e. middlebrow nonentitites.

Yes, with their armour dented and rusty, their swords bent and blunted, their limbs aching, their eyes dimmed and their ears straining for the sounds of the Internationale, it is only their faithful , but indeed weary, old warhorse that keeps the Quixotic left going.

From what I saw of the RNC protests, their line seemed to boil down to “Please don’t hit me, it’s against the Constitution”. They were undoubtedly young, some may have been energetic, but if the depth of their critique only goes as far as sticking up for the First Amendment, I would dispute the potential of their supposed “fundamental hostility to capitalism” to be, shall we say, operationalised.

Abb1: “Read about any of G8 or RNC protests”

Dave: “From what I saw of the RNC protests”

And here we have the pull-out quote at the start of the next “Chomsky for dummies” chapter.

F*ck. “Confine”.

Not that I care much for this BHL character, but does Scott Lemee not seem strangely indignant at his observations on the anaemic state of the American left? For instance, he holds out this statement by his thumb and index finger:

“I was told there has never been an authentic ‘left’ in the United States, in the European sense.”

What, precicesly is the problem with that? Is it the view itself or the fact that BHL says he was told about it? Because the view by itself seems quite uncontroversial to me.

I don’t know about much else, but, not being French, I’m finding ‘Fascislamism’ hard to pronounce.

Isn’t BHL sort of exactly the French counterpart to Thomas Friedman? With suitable national shifts in preferred discipline (pop pretension to philosophy vs. pop pretension to international economics), style of fatuousness, etc.

#39:
It has to do with Henri-Levy and Friedman, in an oblique, sort of undivulgable way.
It may be a microcosmic version of the larger question.
An artificially created vacuum of real and honest dissent, artificial in the sense of being created by force and coercion and overt media censoring and denial of access to venues, rather than simply a lack of vocal partisans, has left plenty of room for the media-sucking megalomania of Friedman and Henri-Levy and others in their affinity group.
It creates the illusion that there is no dissent because none is heard.
Abb1’s already been chagrined here, threatened with banishment, then banned, made to publicly apologize and reconfigure his online positions and concerns for palatability and a kind of political correctness that’s way more about force and power than it is about humanitarian concern.
What a lesson for us all that was.
First they came for abb1, then we all shut up about those things.

Why do some of you keep calling him “Lemee”?

It’s an expression of affection and familiarity, you know, like fans calling McHammer not “McHammer”, but lovingly just “Hammer”.

Sorry, my blockquote was left out:

“Lévy wants to lay claim to the legacy of antitotalitarian radicalism. He treats it almost like a family heirloom. But he avoids embracing that tradition’s hostility to capitalism–the fundamental sense that there is something deranged and profoundly intolerable about a system in which grain is dumped into the ocean to sustain high prices on the international market while people around the world are rioting for food or finding themselves obliged to eat cakes made of mud. “

John, I’ll read the thread (and make notes with my Milton Friedman pencil). My main point in this thread is re: delusions of anti-totalitarianism and hostility to capitalism as the leitmotif of the Left.

Roy, there are people who have the right to restrict the discussion here. That does not have to be a bad thing. There can be value in taking a line of thought to its logical conclusions without being constantly disrupted by hecklers who are opposed to the idea being elaborated in the first place.

I can imagine for example an open wiki-like approach to building open software, and in that context the people who’re doing the work wouldn’t want to be continually interrupted by outsiders who say the project isn’t worth doing at all. Even if those outsiders are right, the time and place to discuss whether to do it is not in the middle of the work being done.

What I would like to see is links to other sites where people disagree. If the blog moderators don’t like what you’re saying, there could be some chance to say “I disagree and here’s a link to my argument”. Short and sweet, and you don’t get very much in the way doing that. I don’t know how much that’s allowed here, but I sort of remember I’ve seen it at least once.

So anyway, this sort of thing happens. I thought it was silly when I got banned from Obsidian Wings, but I was saying things they didn’t want to hear. If they had tried to argue with me it would have revealed their own internal contradictions, and it was easier for everybody to avoid it all. So they noted that I quoted somebody verbatim and claimed I was insulting that person by doing so.

Similarly when I was banned at Overcoming Bias. I had made arguments that they couldn’t refute, and so I got one warning because one post was too long and then banned when, on a slow night, four out of six comments were from me. I was a bit disappointed but it was no big deal.

The central rule is: If you want to write things that are likely to annoy people, do it on your own blog or on that of somebody you think won’t mind you offending his readers.

Fuck it, I’m not reading this site anymore. I love Crooked Timber; it’s been my first stop on the Internet for years. I don’t want to defend abb1, who is a crazy person. But a site that bans abb1 but tolerates stupid little shits like Slocum, Sebastian, and now this drooling moron Order of Magnitude is not for me.

Walt, my point is clear: the Left is NOT anti-totalitarian. If you have smth substantive to say, pls do so.

OM, your point is extremely murky.

How would you feel if I tried to tell you what The Bankers believe? Or maybe The Right? The Republicans? The Jews? The Californians? The Government Workers? The Christians?

You are making up stories about a whole large poorly-defined group of people. You have no justification to do that. You are A Troll.

So tell us what The Trolls think. You’re far more qualified to tell us about that than about The Left, a poorly-defined group you are not a member of.

Henry, since I’m constrained by the inability to speak directly and succinctly to the real cause of what we’re discussing, it’s an exercise in agility to get anything down about this.
I’m not addressing abb1’s trollish indulgences, or his response to being banned, but where they began in my reading here. The banning itself being an endpoint and not particularly important except as consequence.
Saying things that kicked off storms of vituperative response, and a set of sabotoging techniques that have proven effective all over the place, not just here. Accusations of a quite specific form of bigotry for expressing dissenting opinion, and defending it against attack.
I’m aware and appreciative in the main for the “intellectual party”. Obviously not disappointed to the degree of abandoning the venue.
But it’s not about rights, it’s about right.
A party has its essence from the gathering itself, the rules of comportment are there to bring that gathering to its optimum of mix and exchange. A good time had by mostly all. The center of the party’s the party, but the center of intellectual debate is the subject, and, in this context, the world.
The US is a glamorous vacuum when it comes to intellectual debate, especially around certain topics. There’s a need for engagement that won’t be shoved into the virtual censorship of Free Speech Zones. The FOXNews logic being these things aren’t discussed because they’re not popular concerns. Though really they’re not popular concerns because they aren’t discussed, and as a result the facts of them are mostly unknown.
Obviously here the rationale is whatever positive good may result can’t outweigh the risk of much harm to the providers, harm that is distinctly real and evidenced elsewhere in academia.
Whether you have a responsibility to provide that intellectual party, more accurately debate, or having provided something that’s morphed into that, is your decision. I’m making no claim about your, or anyone else’s, responsibilities.
Asking someone to leave a party for espousing a cause, or arguing a side that is unpopular with most of the guests is pretty sketchy, if it’s a gathering of disparate intellectuals with a range of affinities, especially if its an open house. You would expect some volatility around passionately held beliefs.
If it’s being held in a free society, where surveillance and repression aren’t real immediate concerns you’d expect, even want, differing opinions, and expect to have them spoken and defended. That’s the risk and gain of those affairs. Whether we live in a free society is kind of up in the air at the moment, I guess.
What I remember of the process, not its details and timeline, but the cumulative image, was egregiously one-sided, where the codes of behavior abb1 was charged with violating were violated repeatedly and with much stronger emphasis and strikingly lower standards of politesse by the other side. And that’s really the crux isn’t it?
We’re functioning under a kind of soft despotism, possibly, and the comebacks for violating the rules, not yours, not CT’s, but those of that larger nameless cohort, whose force and power I was referring to, are a very real threat to those of you with career issues and concerns.
I don’t fault you for that, honestly. Under similar circumstances I’d be reacting the same, probably. I’m not there though, and I think the real issue, whose volatility led to this, is crucial to this moment and to all of us. And it was and is most disheartening to see it disappear entirely here.
Again I understand why, and make no personal accusation, but it is disheartening, and I can’t condone it, or simply accept it and move on.
I’ll defend abb1 where it seems appropriate, trying to contort that defense into configurations that should pass the filter.
I distinctly remember vicious uncalled-for nastiness toward him from other commentors going unchecked, here and in other posters’ threads, clearly because they were partisans of the dominant position, whose force and power, again not yours as moderator, has led to the dangerous illusion that “there is no dissent because none is heard.”

The voice I really miss is Chun the Unavoidable’s.

Roy, I’m sympathetic to your point of view but it doesn’t work.

The marketplace of ideas is not a bazaar where everybody yells in your ear at the same time. People who find out they want to talk together sometimes find quiet places to do it.

If somebody had a physics blog where they did a lot of pop science, bilyuns and bilyuns stuff, they might be irritated if real physicists came in and started having long abstruse arguments about subtle points of actual quantum mechanics. A little bit of that would be nice window dressing but too much would get in the way.

On the other hand, if some serious physicists had a blog where they looked at serious quantum mechanics problems, they might be irritated at the bilyuns people and also quite irritated at people who cut-and-paste snippets of real QM and blather about it with no understanding. Somebody who could pass as a real irritating physicist among the pop science guys would be even more bothersome with the real thing, and the more seconds it took people to look at his stuff and see it was worthless the more irritating he’d be.

Conversations happen among people who’re reasonably congenial. They don’t want to be around people who bother them. When it’s arguments that make them think in unaccustomed ways, they don’t like it. When it’s arguments that they see are obviously bogus, likewise. The difference between those might be just in how quick they are to dismiss the claims….

If what you care about is Abb1, maybe the best thing you could do would be to set up a blog where his ideas are welcome. Hard to say who else would show up. I expect I would, and Chun the Unavoidable might appear too.

Henry, it’s obvious that Crooked Timber has a double standard. While being a center-left blog, attacks from the right are tolerated much more than attacks from the left. David Kane, Brett Bellmore, and Dan Simon befouled this blog for years before they got the boot. Deb Frisch got banned after like a week.

CT has a horrible comment section, and it’s sucking the life out of the blog. You have nothing like the vibrant community that Making Light has. You were right to ban abb1 from posting to I/P threads, because her comments would disrupt the thread. Otherwise, she’s rarely abusive, usually on topic, and ignored by almost everybody. Instead, you have some dumb-ass right-winger (Order of Magnitude in this thread can serve as exemplar) who shows up without comprehending the simplest facts about the world, and successfully diverts the thread into a discussion of whatever weird cognitive distortion is bouncing around the wingnut brain these days.

The most interesting discussion you had this month was the one-thousandth repetition of John-Emerson-versus-analytic-philosophy. You have a terrific array of front-page posters, so that’s a really bad sign.

Okay, here.
I was disemvowelled, in the very earlymost days of disemvowelling, at Making Light, in my view for suggesting that the Iraq war was being prosecuted in the interest of Israel. Theresa herself chastised me with a kind of reserved patronizing, based on her assumption of my youth and inexperience.
It began with my saying relatively overtly that it looked like Israeli interests and Israeli partisans had had a lot to do with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And then defending that position, then defending the right to express that position, then defending the right to express the right to express that position.
This was in I think 2004 or 5.
My memory is severely challenged but I feel pretty confident saying there hasn’t been a thread here in the last couple years on Walt & Mearsheimer’s book, certainly no ongoing series of threads, so my stance going in is something’s up. Conspicuous in its absence.
When you say “That is the kind of behaviour that is liable to get you a general ban” I think it’s important to keep a clear sense of what led to that threat. Not just the triggering action but the series that produced it. And what’s being conserved or protected there.
If abb1 is arguing that the Palestinian side is never considered in American media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and his defense of that opinion in the face of vituperation and contempt leads to a firestorm of unpleasant at best back and forth, banning him will likely suppress that fire, but it goes a way toward confirming his point.
I’m not asking you to solve any of that, or even commit yourself to a side in it, I’m saying I recognize some of the subtleties there.
Also the almost binary inversion of the consensus view.
Most of us, as writers and readers, if we felt that we were treated unfairly around something we’d written, would react at least initially with resentment and resistance of some kind to further censure of our writing.
In this case abb1’s aberrant behaviour has to be significantly related to his treatment in response to what he’d written and in response to what was written back to him, and the outcome of that escalating conflict.
That you’ve banned Dan Simon as long as you’re banning abb1 is to your credit as moderator, and I herewith make no compunction that this is an understandable and acceptable method for dealing with the conflagrations pursuant.
It doesn’t change the essential dynamic.
We’re discussing a topic that if entered too deeply will self-destruct, or seem to, enough that hobbyist-level bloggers mostly find it not worthwhile to pursue.
I don’t mean hobbyist in any demeaning sense.

My fault as a a writer for allowing the ambiguity of “force and power” to influence your response unnecessarily.

JThomas, thank you for providing me these opportunities to experience for myself my own maturity and patience.

Henry, Contrary to your claim, I did NOT post “as obvious attempts to troll for outraged responses”.

I did read the Nation article you referred in the OP, I have been familiar with BHL’s work for many years, including his regular feature in Le Point and his short-lived blog. I do think the Nation article is invoking a straw man argument about how grains are dumped in the sea because of capitalism and McLemee’s reference to the alleged antitotalitarianism of the left is weak.

I write to the OP and I have been consistently civil with those hurling abuse at me.

If, after all this, you think I crossed a line, fine.

Wait – abb1 is a _man_?

John Quiggin @ 66:

the trouble involved in dealing with a discussion of this kind outweighs any enlightenment that is produced

In what way does ‘the trouble involved in dealing with a discussion of this kind’ differ from ‘the number and vehemence of accusations of racism / anti-Semitism posted in response, and the embarrassment accruing as a result of being casually labelled a racist /anti-semite on forums that may well be read by or drawn to the attention of colleagues and superiors’?

Since posting it seems someone noticed Asher. Good work.

I truly liked abb1 as a commenter, and I thought his way of expressing himself was actually helpful and added something. What he usually did was simply point out some very real and very common sense issues with the standard liberal Western consensus. In the examples Henry linked, these were beliefs like the U.S. is automatically better than a country like China, the creation of the state of Israel is a reasonable response to the Holocaust but the desire for Israel to cease to exist as a Jewish state is an unreasonable response to the dispossession of the Palestinians, etc. He never cursed, never made it personal, never hectored people, just made his points.

I think his posts were offensive to many because his positions attack the core of a mainstream liberal-left consensus that is very emotionally meaningful to people. Including me — I frequently disagreed with him. But his points weren’t radical or off-the-wall outside of the particular mainstream Western liberalism that forms the dominant discourse here. For example, I think his perspectives on China would have been quite mainstream in many parts of Asia and his perspective on Israel would have been mainstream throughout the Islamic world. His posts helped you make the imaginative shift to seeing those non-Western perspectives.

I think the fact that some people were *so* offended by him is indicative of a certain level of self-righteousness.