The politics of agrarian tumult, redux

Nov. 17, 2023

Moody's turns negative on US credit rating, draws Washington ire | Reuters

The ratings agency Moody downgrades the United States’ credit rating, citing “continued political polarization” basically saying to stop the political infighting in Congress. A voice on the radio says, “the dysfunction is all that is going on right now.”

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Situationalism v. dispositionism

We must attain, interrogate, critique, and transform measures of attitude, perception, and belief, revealing conclusions about the nature of what someone knows. So I want to show you a modified Venn diagram — modified by me, so please be patient — and which describes two aspects of social psychology that influence policy, behavior, and belief through structures of law and the way we approach thinking about questions involving human disputes within institutional structures; so you can see that, roughly dividing this category of looking at people and their relationship to larger systems and how those systems in turn see people into two camps, you have situationalism, which means people‘s social context shapes choices, and you have dispositionism which basically pre-judges people on social characteristics leading to the notion that someone can be at fault for who they are. Of course, there’s some fuzzy areas in the middle. For instance, you can say that context and sense of self sha...

Answering some nagging philosophical questions

Structurally sound assumptions may be made by simply denying all assumptions that may be made until they prove themselves otherwise. This is why science is still so relevant because science is the purest natural expression of logic. However, such an important distinction and framing needs the further question: for what does logic serve human beings? The straightest answer I can give you is, while some will claim that a sound assumption denies its opposite, the truth is that a denial of the truth denies itself, and that’s why the truth is true, since Socrates. The establishment of truth has been difficult since then. Do you follow what I’m saying? Logically speaking, logic is truth, but truth is not logic. So we enter a dialectic. The distinction but not difference between facts and actualities is the difference in making sense of it here. The truth is a fact that became an actuality.

beyond necessary

In the future, we must cleave to a principle of liberation and follow the right of self-determination wherever it might lead. The old saw of “every thing in its right place” has been shown to turn on subjective and not upon truthful measures - whose idea of what is the “right place” prevails, and for whom is it the “right place”? Are questions that after long experience always revealed strength and power, not reason nor rational government, have been behind the propagation of such a saying. The “right place of everything” comes from an ancient time when the mechanism for discovering the truth was still mistaken for the truth itself. It is assuredly not the case that if every “thing” has a “right place” it isn’t constituted in some transparent organizational scheme; and, although the evolution of knowledge may not be at its bitter end, it seems more likely that the proper “place” for every thing will fill space like the thousand points of light in the night sky of the visible univ...

Ian Hoopingarner

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