... on a recent thread at Spiked!, contesting with a certain John Piggott.  Ted is probably a middling academic at one of the Cal universities.  He has a very nasty dose of liberal disease.

The discussion began four days ago, following a thread comment by Ted which concluded thus:

If we want to honor Marx and Nietzsche, we should recognize that they were savvy enough to see the ideals of 17th century liberalism sliding into dotage, falling prey to the kind of technological tribalism we see in colonialism, class capitalism, and Orwellian nationalism. They lit a fire to show us how we’d strayed from the path, and if foolish and venal followers took that fire and burned down half the world, Marx and Nietzsche are no more to blame than Christ is for the brutalities done in his name.

Well, writing off nationalism in that blanket way is the proverbial red rag, so:

John Piggott  Ted Wrigley • 4 days ago
Equality has its conceptual origin in the requisite condition for the gentile to facilitate a declaration of the Messianic Age. It was never and can never be a real human possibility for the simple reason that Nature harbours no equality, rather as she harbours no straight lines. The attempt to concretise it as a socio-economic reality does violence to the proverbial crooked timber of human being.

And the exchange proceeded thus:

Ted Wrigley  John Piggott • 4 days ago
You are confusing ‘nature’ and ‘human nature’; the former is a primitive function of ecosystems, the latter a philosophical construct that is both problematic and endlessly contested. Lots of people make that error in this era, so I’m not surprised by it, but it won’t fly in this conversation.

This has nothing to do with gentiles (I’m unaccustomed to hearing that term used, in fact), or with messianism. Equality properly understood is a philosophical (human) extrapolation of the concept of community, which is rooted in the primal (natural) social structures of primates. Belonging to a community means being assured of certain (un-enumerated) rights or privileges or entitlements or whatever word you would like to use; it means being able to make certain demands on the community, and accepting that the community can make certain demands on you. Equality is a condition where that right-of-demand is properly balanced across the entirety of individuals in the community. Extend that community so that it encompasses all of the individuals in humanity, and you have some grasp on the philosophical notion.

John Piggott  Ted Wrigley • 4 days ago
Ted, you ought to be a little more cautious before you jump in with assertions about my very simple but by no means simplistic statement. Human nature is Nature in Man. Nature does not create straight lines in Man, as she does not create them anywhere. In other worlds, there is no special Marx Factor in the brain carefully calibrating humankind across all the oceans and deserts and mountains, to ensure that everything above the neck is actually or even prospectively equal. The only metric is for fitness to environment, and environments differ.

So what, then, is the purpose of “a philosophical construct” other than to do violence against this natural dispensation? Well, if the philosophical construct concerned itself with the restoration of that (again natural) spirit of brotherhood and shared endeavour which died in this land in September 1066, on the spit of hard ground at the southern edge of what is now the Sussex town of Battle, we might at least be debating some feature which is desirable and was at one time real. Alas, we have before us the Judeo-Christian-liberal-marxoid abomination instead, reified today as an absolute equalness of all the smarties in the tube, all the de-sexed cyphers, all the exotic social personalities and their peccadilloes, bereft of all health and solid identity. It’s absurd. It’s obscene. It’s against Nature, obviously. It’s one step away from the rapture and its Judaic equivalent. It certainly has nothing to do with fairness or morality.

Ted Wrigley  John Piggott • 4 days ago
John, I don’t need to be more careful, anymore than you do. Read and respond to what you understand of my writing, as I do to what I understand of yours, and we’ll get on fine.

And with that in mind, I will say it again: you are confusing ‘nature’ with ‘human nature.’ Or maybe in this case you are confusing ‘human nature’ with ‘nature’; six is a half dozen and a half dozen is six, choose your preference… The confusion factor here, I think, is that you have bought into your own rhetoric so deeply — convinced yourself so thoroughly that your philosophical musings about human nature, and its relationship to the ‘non-straight-line-producing’ nature,’ is factual and scientific and evolutionary — that you fail to see that you are doing philosophy at all.

I mean seriously… Nature may not (in your conception) make straight lines, but human beings imagine them and use them on a daily basis. That capacity to imagine and use things that nature does not itself ‘naturally’ produce lies at the very heart of what it means to be human. Toss straight lines onto the garbage heap and you effectively erase most everything that occurred after the human line separated from the great apes.

I really don’t know what to make of your last paragraph, except to suggest that this ‘Judeo-Christian-liberal-marxoid abomination’ that concerns you so much is itself a philosophical construction, though from a philosophy so alien to my worldview that I’m having trouble following it. I get its sense of (cultural) emasculation; I get its sense of (societal) disease; but I can’t yet put it into a cohesive structure. But I feel confident in suggesting that it is not ‘real’ in the sense that you mean it, though it may be ‘valuable’ as a philosophical perspective once I learn to see what you’re pointing at.

John Piggott  Ted Wrigley • 4 days ago
There is no distinction between Nature and Nature in Man. Is there. Man does not author or nurture or socially construct his Nature, and he does not merely write theses alluding to it. It is a given in us all, including you. You have a nature according to your genotype. It covers your sex, race, ethnicity, and particulars of familial descent. It extends to the traits of Mind and behaviour. You cannot replace it or amend it. You can only entertain conceits in that respect.

Why are you persisting in this denial of who and what you most truly and definitively are? You can’t seriously expect to get away with it.

If men imagine straight lines and make them in wood or steel or concrete, they only do so because they harness what is in Nature. But imagine straight lines in humankind, and then attempt to engineer them with enough implacable determination, they will create a dystopia, or worse, a killing field. There is no equalness in living systems. You are making a category error.

Of course, there is a tendency to think in straight-lines about Man, but that is the heart of the matter: it is a product of a failure of relation within the subject, such that human being itself, because it is not known at first hand but is concealed in a certain sense, and is distant ... because of this, its meanings do not abide with the subject, and in their place dreams and ideologies take hold. We live in an age when, for a whole host of historical, religious, philosophical, technological, and socio-economic reasons, this estate has a much more powerful and telling grip than is good for us, or than we can really survive.

Of course, academic thinkers don’t like talk of return - even in the sense of re-turn. Many are ideologues themselves, caught up in the grand struggle between human artifice and authenticity, and all for artifice ... all for straight-lines ... all for the revolution. I think they are taking us over the edge, and I think some of them want to take us over the edge. I hope you are not one of those.

Ted Wrigley  John Piggott • 4 days ago
Lol… What I “most truly and definitively” am is in large part what I determine to be: what I will into existence in myself. There may be certain baseline tendencies involved — matters of gender and genetics, matters of early socialization and acculturation — but in the end I choose whether to put my effort into one thing or another. I choose whether I want to be a soldier or a bookkeeper or a musician; I choose whether I want to be a kind person or a cruel one; I choose whether I want to be gleeful or sober, impetuous or circumspect, honest and straightforward or devious and subtle. People can make bad choices, choices that come back to haunt them, and making choices can be an extraordinarily hard thing to do (worse than swimming upstream), but people constantly make choices nonetheless. Even those who believe they have no choice — that they are trapped in the webs of biology and/or culture, and cannot do otherwise than they do — are CHOOSING to be like mere animals. But that’s nothing more than a pretense among people who (for one reason or another) want to return to animalism…

Academics often talk about turnings and returnings; I’ve never met an academic who was not keenly aware of the cyclical nature of both individual and collective life. But academics are also keenly aware of the difference between returning and regressing. It’s one thing to try and recapture what was good in the past; it’s another (quite horrifying) thing to try to erase what’s good in the present in order to go back to the past. The human world should spiral up, not circle the drain or flush itself down.

I determine myself to be your equal; you should determine yourself to be mine. Any other determinations will cause unnecessary conflict. That is the root of dystopia, nothing else.

John Piggott  Ted Wrigley • 3 days ago
So here’s Ted, giving it the prissy self-deception of the Lockean individual stamping his little boy’s feet and insisting ... insisting, I tell you, that he self-authors himself. So there!

Ordinarily speaking, men do not and cannot self-author. Because there is no centre to author anything ... no Cartesian subject, no Lockean individual ... just personality ... the sum of the acquired living in the human basement. Indeed, this entity/nonentity functions as a mechanistic device over which the brain automatically pronounces the magically definitive “I” in the absence of the real thing. This is the state of ordinary waking consciousness of us all, and it is the state of absence which philosophers and wise men have understood for aeons.

Christianity possesses only a crude and tawdry mythical allusion to it, which crudity entered into the Western canon slowly and disastrously, with Man raised to the status of the creating god of self inveighing morally and politically against the deceiving cosmic beast in the Other. It is a Jewish fiction ... an engine of conflictualisation and confusion in the gentile. Accordingly, little one, you “determine” yourself to be “equal”. It’s pitiful.

Actually, decisions are taken elsewhere in the brain before “I”, seated in the little clear space of the most cumbersome and slowest of the cognitive systems, appropriates them as its own. This you call choice, and ascribe rationality to it; and in so doing completely miss the truly human principle concealed close by. For some reason of your own you talk of animalism, Ted, but who is talking?

The notion of regression is too thin even to take seriously. Why you would ever think that the estrangements and mechanicities of personality constitute progress? Has it never occurred to you and your academic friends that in the turn a man does not orient himself towards some new and exciting possibility for Cartesian subjecthood. All that is acquired falls away, and all that is left is what was always naturally in you. This is what authenticity means. Don’t ascribe liberalistic values to it. Don’t describe it at all. Don’t limit it thereby.

At this point Ted made his first bid for the high-ground.

Ted Wrigley  John Piggott • 

3 days ago

I presume that the temper tantrum in your first paragraph means that you’ve realized reason won’t help you win your argument? Or did something more private and personal set you off? Not my issue, I suppose, but I am curious…

It’s interesting, though: the more I push you on reasoning, the more you speak like a philosopher (which I mean as a compliment, though you’ll probably take it as an insult). I mean honestly: “the estrangements and mechanicities of personality” is such a wonderfully philosophical phrase that I might even steal it from you, though I disagree with the basic tenets behind it. You have a gift for declamation.

Unfortunately, a gift for declamation is not enough. Nothing that you’ve presented above has any ‘factual’ basis (and yes, I’m familiar enough with the current standards in neuroscience to know that they haven’t come close to addressing the things that you state as bald-faced facts), and if what you’ve said above fits within some well-defined, coherent and cohesive philosophical perspective, I can’t identify which it is. Perhaps a branch of nihilistic existentialism, or a modern version of ancient Greek cynicism, or one of the modern language-theoretical approaches that views thought as dominated by culturally-determined linguistic elements…? You seem too strident to be presenting Buddhist anatta, at any rate. You haven’t made your perspective clear enough for me to see it yet, except that you evince a strong distaste for ‘Cartesian subject-hood’ and ‘Lockean individualism.’ A lot has happened philosophically since the 17th century, and I could understand you better if you referenced it.

At any rate, all you ‘seem’ to be doing is chasing your own tail. You are adamantly trying to deny the existence of a self, which begs the question: why would a non-self be so adamant about anything? I take it from your fourth paragraph that you are trying to segregate the self-aware, intellectual aspect of the mind as though it were an unimportant afterthought (pun intended); you seem to have forgotten your own principle of ‘return’: in this case, that the mind feeds back on itself so that this self-aware, intellectual aspect serves to exert self-control and to redirect and rationalize the more primal aspects of cognition. Perhaps you’ve taken Freud’s metaphor too literally, and think that only the id is ‘real,’ while the conscious and superconscious are ‘artificial’? Or maybe not… As I’ve said, you haven’t explained your position much at all, you’ve merely indulged in rhetoric.

All I can really tell is that you’re annoyed: annoyed by ‘progress’ that you think is artificial; annoyed by civilizing factors that you think are oppressive; annoyed to the point of tantrum (perhaps) by being asked to use reason rather than impulse. My guess is that you don’t want to be seen as a self, because being seen as a self would mean that you have to take some responsibility for your actions and attitudes. That rejection of responsibility for the self is what I’m pointing at when I talk about a reversion to animalism. If that guess is wrong — if that’s not what you’re after — then make yourself clear.

John Piggott  Ted Wrigley • 3 days ago
I have at my back an account of Man which I can defend. The Cartesian and Lockean accounts cannot be defended. I suppose you need to present my disregard for these as anger in order to make some sort of reply, in the absence of any positive argument of your own. But it is a very weak hand to play. You do, however, play it for five paragraphs.

But let’s push on …

Where is the neurological evidence for the Cartesian subject? If there is none (there is, I believe, absolutely none), then where does that leave the reliance upon that model? Is it no more than “a self-evident truth” declared by the subject itself in contemplation of itself? In other words, are we not confronted with Cartesian self-referentialism as always ... the great bug-bear of cognitive verification in Descartes’ model?

If you agree that the classical subject is in some trouble here, would we not be forced to at least consider that a site of cognition, including self-cognition (so a two-way process, going out and going in), might be closer to the cognitive reality; and might then allow us to ponder whether self and decision emerge thereon together (ie, still quite a hard Cartesian reading) or decision emerges from elsewhere in the brain and is then canonised by a subsequent necessarily automatic act ascription of self (a reading consonant with what I am saying above)?

We should not be afraid of either reading.

As to the questions of the grand dynamic of artifice and authenticity, and that of mechanicity and consciousness, these, while they are interesting and pregnant with meanings which steer the careful thinker towards the second reading, are perhaps a step too far for the unfamiliar conventional liberal thinker to properly process and posit accurately within the general scheme. Perhaps we can approach them later when either the Cartesian or Heidegerrian epistemological model finds greater favour.

Ted Wrigley  John Piggott • 3 days ago
John, I’m not arguing for the ‘Cartesian subject’ or the ‘Lockean individual.’ Those are strictly your bugbears: things that you’ve talked about without ever checking in with me to see what I thought about them (I don’t think much about them either way; my thoughts on the self stem mostly from post-WWII philosophy). I don’t present your disregard for them as anger; I present your anger (as evidenced in phrasing like “prissy self-deception”) as anger. Own it or don’t, but either way chill it out.

I do dislike the way you bitch-slap science (e.g., talking about where “decision emerges [..] in the brain” based on absolutely no credible research whatsoever), but in the end science is admirably capable of taking care of itself, so that’s not really much of a concern. I get that you don’t BELIEVE there is any neurological evidence for a Cartesian subject, sure. But since I don’t believe you are interested in promulgating your own religion, then there’s no reason for you to expect me to BELIEVE right along with you. If you don’t have evidence you can try to sell me on some solid reasoning; but if you don’t have evidence or solid reasoning, don’t try to sell me tripe.

I’m not interested in the classical subject (the problems of which were well-known by the end of the 19th century). I’m also not particularly interested in ramblings about brains (since our understanding of the relationship between the organic brain and the perception of consciousness is all but zero). You seem very eager to discount and discard our self-perceptions — our sense of self, our sense of identity, our sense of ‘thinking’ — even though these self-perceptions are the only direct and valid experience of our inner lives that we have. You’re talking like that old philosophical joke about the man who refuses to believe that the sky is blue until he measures its wavelength (“yeah but,” the philosopher says “how does the man know that wavelength is ‘blue’?”)

If you really have “an account of Man which [you] can defend,” out with it. All you’ve done thus far is bash the Cartesian straw-man and waffle on about ‘mechanicity and consciousness’ and such. Make a thesis, then defend it.

John Piggott  Ted Wrigley • 2 days ago
I am not going to set out an entire thesis now, just like that. But I will try to carry you along a little way, and we’ll see what happens. So …

It isn’t a question of belief but of perception. Either you perceive the mechanistic nature by which, say, that perception emerges at the seat of consciousness in the thinking faculty ... be it attended by the characteristics of belief or decision ... or you are with Descartes, for his model is the foundation of the entire Christo-liberal account. You say you believe ... you decide; and certainly we all have a very robust attachment to this. But this is self-referential: the representation you form is itself the verification for its own accuracy. The Heidegerrian notion of the site or clearing, however, strips away the representation and finds instead for the raw process.

On the question of what that process is, you might consider whether this subject (you claim exists, and which you rely upon to critique my commentary) can choose its emotional or sensate experience. Can you look at the face of your child and will yourself to hate, as proof of your subjecthood? Can you place your hand on a hard surface and will yourself to feel a yielding fabric? Can you even stop your thinking faculty from pursuing its life-long train of association? No, even serious thinking is not directed but is an emergent process driven by interest, curiosity, excitement.

The reality is that the processes of cognition will continue along their own sweet path, and will effective take or, at the very least, form the sole bases for decision long before anything resembling a subject can appropriate them. This is most obvious with the sensate function which operates at fabulous speed, and also with the emotional function which is only a little slower. These functions will have flooded the Mind with data about the circumstance of the organism and its best action long before the clunking thinking faculty has even got into gear. And it’s the thinking faculty you entirely rely upon for the narrative of the rational subject.

So, at the very least, there is something awry with that model. This last observation is only offensive because as emergent processes there is a requirement for another account of identity.

Ted Wrigley  John Piggott • 2 days ago
You are hung up on Descartes. I’m not working from a ‘Christian-liberal’ model (the way you imagine it), and you should have figured that out by now.

It is possible to hate one’s child (evidenced by the fact that some people do). It is possible to break a life-long chain of association (evidenced by the fact that some people do). The first we usually see as the result of trauma or psychological dysfunctions, the second is usually the outcome of psychotherapy, religious practices, or self-discipline, but it does happen, therefore it can happen. It is possible to still the emotions and biological urges and choose actions from a calm and quiet center. People do this all the time.

Yes, we have animal natures with simple biological/subconscious imperatives; no, those animal natures do not dominate our character except where we allow them to. People can go without sex (as they do when they choose to be celibate); they can go without food (as they do when they go on hunger strikes or diets); they can choose to put themselves in harm’s way to protect others… All of these things happen, they can be perceived in ourselves and the world around us; by itself, this perception should put to rest the kind of simplistic mechanistic ideology you are presenting.

Now, if you want to argue for some subtle, obscure, convoluted mechanism, that’s fine, but if so you’re stepping fully into the realm of faith. Nowhere in science (neuroscience, biology, or psychology) has anyone gotten a handle on the mechanism of human consciousness. Humans self-evidently do not behave like the human conception of machines; machines do tasks they are designed to do, but do not redesign themselves to do new tasks, and do not create other machines to make their own tasks easier. Humans don’t even have much of an idea of what we are designed to do (hence the constant worries people have about the meaning of life), but we have the idea that their ought to be a meaning to life (something that the human conception of ‘machine’ lacks entirely).

You keep saying that that some subtle process of human cognition has already processed things before the ‘clunky’ rational, discursive, egoic mind comes into play. I don’t think that’s in doubt, but what you fail to realize is that the ‘clunky’ rational, discursive, egoic mind has the last say in things. Faster is not better, cognitively speaking. Sure, when a ball gets thrown at us there is a whole lot of activity going on in the brain and body that has nothing to do with higher-order cognition, BUT… higher-order cognition tells us whether we are supposed to dodge that ball, or kick it, or catch it, or hit it with a stick. When we hear about (say) a pilot who lands a jet after one of the engines blows out, no doubt that the pilot wasn’t thinking much during the emergency, BUT… that pilot spent years training h’er mind to be calm, cool, and collected, to know without thinking how to control and save that plane. Learning — processing experience into useful cognitive structures; transforming the self into the right form for a particular task — is all higher-order cognition.

You seem to be implying that gut instinct is the be all and end all of human cognition. That’s ridiculous. Gut instinct is occasionally useful out-of-the-box, and gut instinct can be honed and trained by higher-order reasoning, But we don’t want the pilot of the 747 we’re in flying entirely by urge and impulse. That would be suicidal, right?

John Piggott  Ted Wrigley • 2 days ago
It wouldn’t make the slightest difference which model of the liberal individual - say, the one in libertarianism, either the classical or the Jewish variety - you are promulgating.  These are all still constructions on the Cartesian subject.

Have you really not grasped that?

I did not say it is impossible to hate one’s child. I asked you to will yourself to hate your child, on the assumption that you do not already do so! And don’t slide gracefully into talk of animal natures. You are not bright enough to get away with re-framing. Our nature is human. Clear? There isn’t some “humanitarian” betterness all full of wondrous compassion and lerve. If it’s healthy and not mere ego, it’s altruism, and actually animals practise it.

Why do you keep denying that neuroscience has no understanding of human cognition? I’m not appealing to science anyway, but at least let’s not make untrue claims. Which you are doing right there. Neurological evidence of the time-lapse between decision and thinking has been around for well over a decade.

That said, I am explaining how little comprehension you have of your own brain function. Take that on-board. It’s true, and it’s influential in the errors you are making here. For example, you have no conception of the wide range of cognitive performance of the same mind. Do you actually think that what Heideggerains refer to as dispersal, immersion, absence, and so forth has the same range of possibilities as gathering, detachment, presence? It is in this context that the dynamic of mechanicity and consciousness abides. Try to think it through. It is highly important.

The thinking capacity doesn’t “have the last say” over the other cognitive functions. It has virtually no say. But that’s still not the same as the question of whether there is a subject driving the whole discursive process. There isn’t in the assumed sense. That’s my point.

Pilots, by the way, or racing drivers, boxers, chefs, hunters, musicians, machine minders, et al do not much utilise the cumbersome thinking function. They operate for much the greater part by the sensate machinery (which includes that aspect of the brain which learns movement, and absorbs the secrets of speed, weight, angle, trajectory, and so forth, and applies those lessons in the instant), with some emotional colouring where appropriate.

I can’t say that you have grasped very much of what I am trying to provide for you. That’s doubtless because you don’t want to. It’s much more comforting to misapply or miunderstand what I would expect anyone who has actually thought these matters through would already know.

And here is Ted’s second attempt to play the gris eminence of the sociology dept.

Ted Wrigley  John Piggott • 21 hours ago
Sigh… First, I don’t have any children, so I can’t speak to your first point from practical experience. I can say that since it is possible to hate one’s offspring, it would be possible for me to hate my own offspring; is there some reason you think I’m incapable?

Second, Please stop second-guessing my philosophy. I do not follow Cartesian dualism, and I am annoyed by your constant insistence that I do. Sooner or later you are going to have to stop trying to tell me what I think and start trying to listen to what I say. If you don’t, you’re just babbling to yourself, and that’s flat-out boring.

Neurological evidence of a time lapse is not even close to being a neuroscientific explanation of human consciousness; nothing in neuroscience currently does. I understand that thinking takes time — more time than mere reaction, at any rate — but as I said before, faster is not better. Emotions motivate us, but it is up to the rational mind to filter, redirect, and refine our emotional urges into better and more sophisticated structures and actions.

Another place that you seemingly did not listen to what I’m saying… I acknowledge that pilots and race car drivers and such operate mainly on a sensate level (much as we do when we drive our cars). The point, though, is that those ‘sensate’ reactions need to be trained in by the rational mind. It takes time for a student driver to master the controls of a car, time in which the student has to actively tell h’self to check the mirror, turn on the signal, apply pressure to one pedal or another, look at signs… put a sixteen year old kid in a formula 1 car and enter h’er in the Indy 500, and s’he will probably die. It takes time and conscious effort for a pilot to learn all of the controls and dials of a plane, to learn the ‘feel’ of it, and until they make that conscious, rational effort, no one sane would put them in the pilot seat of a jet. That ‘learning’ time is the higher reasoning functions of the brain curbing, changing, structuring, and reorganizing the impulses and urges of the lower mind so that they behave and react in competent ways. If we act without that learning time we can only behave like bumbling fools.

The mere fact that we are having this discussion implies a tremendous amount of higher-order cognition. Without it we could do little more than grunt and snort and flap our arms at each other like monkeys.

I understand your position well (better, I suspect, than you do); the reference to Heidegger (immersion, presence) brings it home. You’re arguing for dynamism, the kind of fluid, graceful interaction with the world in which happens when one transcends the corruptions of moral authority (the intellectual restrictions laid on us when outside forces impose abstract, artificial rules). It would be admirable, except that one has to transcend the corruptions of authority first, otherwise this kind of dynamism de-evolves into the fits and furies and emotional susceptibilities of adolescence. This is precisely the misreading of Heidegger that the Nazi regime used: rather than encouraging their followers to think more clearly and transcend moral authority, they encouraged their followers to stop thinking entirely: to become vital, virile, dynamic ciphers blindly following Hitler (the way adolescents often act like vital, virile, dynamic ciphers blindly following their favorite rock star or instagram celebrity). You’re asking for the abnegation of higher thought in favor of lower impulse, where you should be asking for the integration of higher thought and lower impulse. Heidegger would be appalled.

You need to decide which mode you’re talking in. If you want to support your argument with material evidence then use the scientific evidence available, otherwise you’re just puffing out pseudoscience. If you want to talk philosophically, then make rational arguments of your own and respond to what I say earnestly, otherwise you’re just spewing rhetoric. I don’t mind either — I know how to deal with pseudoscience and rhetoric, civilly and graciously — but things will go better for you here if you do.

... which is too much to take.  So the nature of the exchange begins to morph into a deadly struggle for survival!

John Piggott  Ted Wrigley • 4 hours ago
1. I can say that since it is possible to hate one’s offspring, it would be possible for me to hate my own offspring; is there some reason you think I’m incapable?

I am saying you are incapable of willing yourself to hate your children. We all are. But according to your model, we should all be able to author such hatred because, y’know, we are masters of our animal nature, right?

2. I do not follow Cartesian dualism

You have internalised the classical model of the subject. That is exactly what you are telling me. But so internalised is this model with you ... so automatic is your identification with it ... that you cannot even see it as a distinct philosophical/religious product. You call it “I” and think no further about it.

3. Emotions motivate us, but it is up to the rational mind to filter, redirect, and refine our emotional urges into better and more sophisticated structures and actions.

So will yourself to hate your child (when you get one) or to love the smell of rotting flesh. Will yourself to be bitten by a spider or a snake. Will yourself to be buggered by a gay boy and like it. Will yourself to like the facial features of black women. Will yourself to act against your emotions and sensate processes for one whole hour or one day or one year. Show that you, as the classical subject, have the motive power to act by your will alone.

You are utterly out of your psychological depth, and you cannot see it. You know nothing more than a child about your own constitution. Everything you think you own intellectually you have actually received as the thoughts of other men. None of it is yours. All you have is the conceit of the typical self-estranged liberal.

Neurology reports the fact of human function. The gap exists. It is a function of the structure of the cognitive mind. There is no will where there is only ordinary, operative waking consciousness. You are not at the turn. You simply don’t know what you are talking about.

4. It takes time for a student driver to master the controls of a car

Take a juggler. Learning to juggle is a process of the sensate or “movement” related cognitive function of the brain. It makes no difference in what the juggling actually comprises. It all belongs to that single part of the mind. As soon as thinking intervenes everything crashes to the floor. However, designing a juggling exercise cannot be undertaken by the sensate function. Intellectual function performs that task.

Assign correctly, and your confusions will disappear. Then perhaps we can have a useful conversation about what you assume to be the subject in your head.

5. The mere fact that we are having this discussion implies a tremendous amount of higher-order cognition.

Not higher order. Just intellectual function. There are higher functions within the cognitive centres (conscience is a higher order emotion than fear, and is associated with a different region of the brain), but one function is not higher than the other. Each is sovereign in its own domain.
Your tendency to make false comparisons and to assume for the “higher order” of thinking is typically part of the illusion of self which follows upon the ascription of same by the brain to wherever the attention is focussed. That is ordinarily in the thinking function.

6. You’re arguing for dynamism, the kind of fluid, graceful interaction with the world in which happens when one transcends the corruptions of moral authority ... when outside forces impose abstract, artificial rules

No, you are back in the Lockean model again!

Heideggerian ontology of human being posits a transit from absence to presence, in a world of absence into which human being is thrown. Its freedom is the freedom in presence to being, therefore, and not the positive and negative freedoms of the liberal thought-world.

Capiche?

7. This is precisely the misreading of Heidegger that the Nazi regime used …

And up pops the Hitlerum Ad Absurdum. Again. You guys just can’t leave it alone, can you? You have to keep returning to it because it’s simply inconceivable to you that the Original Sins of Nartzism and raycism aren’t really at the back of all European identity.

Anyway ...

There was no such reading of Heidegger. National Socialism had no formative connection at all to Heideggerian thought. It drew its ideas, values, and precepts from Volkishness, fascism, Neitzschean morality and Judaism. Heidegger tried to start a conversation when he joined the party in 1933. He genuinely believed that the historical process was shifting towards a philosophical age of being. But he quickly found that this was wrong. They threw him out of the party.

8. You’re asking for the abnegation of higher thought in favor of lower impulse

This is really a pathetically liberalistic reading. I am asking for a common, ethnic life flowing from an holistic and true philosophical model of human being, in and by which European Man may freely live his truth and destine accordingly.

If you think you can deconstruct what I have said here in its own terms, and not from an erroneous reading, then go ahead. But I know you can’t. No one tied to liberalistic thinking can do that.

Ted Wrigley  John Piggott • 5 days ago
I try not to over-quote in comments (it makes reading and responses difficult), but I’ll need to quote you a few times directly here, because… First is this:

I am saying you are incapable of willing yourself to hate your children. We all are. [add numerous similar comments from later in the post]
On what evidence do you base this assertion? Or is it simply aspirational (a statement of belief)? I’d like to think this were true, but I’ve seen enough examples to the contrary to take it on faith. If I had children I don’t believe I’d want to hate them (and there would be no reason to apply will without an underlying desire), but not wanting to do something is not the same as being unable do it. I don’t want to ride rollercoasters, either, but I could certainly will myself to with the correct incentives.

That last point is one you should reflect on more carefully. Emotional desires are visceral and sharp, which makes them seem more essential than they actually are. We’ve all, I suppose, had the urge punch someone in the face, to sleep with a neighbor’s wife, pig out on nachos, or otherwise indulge these visceral emotions when they arise. We all (for the most part) learn not to do it, if for no other reason than it’s often more trouble than it’s worth. People who cannot control and moderate their emotional urges at all generally end up incarcerated (either in a prison or a mental ward), because they are perceived as a threat to the rest of the population. These controls and moderations are all common and normal exercises of will; you do them, I do them, the people reading this do them… I’m not certain why you have a problem with that idea.

I’m also not sure ‘hating your own children’ is a good example for your argument. It is such a seemingly extreme mental state that I could easily argue it’s a straw-man. You need to find something less dramatic — e.g., that it’s impossible for me to eat a different breakfast cereal than the one I customarily eat — and demonstrate its truth; that would be strong evidence of biological mechanicity.

And then there’s this:

You have internalised the classical model of the subject. That is exactly what you are telling me. But so internalised is this model with you ... so automatic is your identification with it ... that you cannot even see it as a distinct philosophical/religious product. You call it “I” and think no further about it.

Again, you need to stop trying to tell me what and how I think, because you keep getting it wrong. This quote assumes that I’m Christian, or at least that I had a strong Judeo-Christian upbringing; it assumes that I’m incapable of self-reflection; it assumes that I’m a neophyte when it comes to the study or religion, philosophy, and psychology. All three of those assumptions are wrong, you don’t know what you’re talking about, and you are sure as hell not going to convince me of your point by fabricating nonsense about my mind. This is as bad in its way as those Marxists who try to explain away the failure to achieve Marxist revolutions by complaining about ‘false consciousness.’ It is a self-serving excuse, not a valid explanation of anything. All it does is make me question your intellect.

And then there’s things like this:

Not higher order. Just intellectual function. There are higher functions within the cognitive centres (conscience is a higher order emotion than fear, and is associated with a different region of the brain), but one function is not higher than the other. Each is sovereign in its own domain. {one of several problematic snippets in your post]

You seem to be agreeing with me even as you try to disagree with me, which I find confusing. I'm not sure what you were trying to accomplish with this vague shuffle of words, but whatever it was, you failed.

And finally, not every reference to the Nazi regime is reductio ad Hitlerum. The Nazis really did misinterpret Heidegger in the same manner that you do. That's a caution to you about misusing philosophy, not a personal insult. Address the point and ignore the nonsense, please.

So now let's get to the only substantive paragraphs in your post:

No, you are back in the Lockean model again!

Heideggerian ontology of human being posits a transit from absence to presence, in a world of absence into which human being is thrown. Its freedom is the freedom in presence to being, therefore, and not the positive and negative freedoms of the liberal thought-world.

[...]

This is really a [ad hominem deleted] liberalistic reading. I am asking for a common, ethnic life flowing from an holistic and true philosophical model of human being, in and by which European Man may freely live his truth and destine accordingly.

I'm not sure why you think I would disagree with the first part of that. I get Heidegger, and the trajectory up from Nietzsche to Husserl to Heidegger's phenomenology. I understand the nature of Dasein (at least as well as anyone does, I suppose, and far better than most people do). But again (to steal a beat from Gadamer), once most be careful not to mistake erlebnis for erfahrung: not to mistake personal (sensate) experience for the kind of lifeworld experience that produces social and personal relationships, culture, artistry, and then like. Both are necessary, and the relationship between them (like the intrinsic relationship between public and private) is complex at best. You might like Gadamer's "Truth and Method": He espouses the same kind of 'mechanicity' you do, except from a linguistic (erfahrung) perspective rather than a sensate (erlebnis) one.

With respect to the last paragraph, I'm a little confused by the sudden introduction of the terms 'ethnic' and 'European man,' particularly with the way you used 'human being' in the middle. Are you suggesting that other ethnic groups have different truths and destinies, or that other ethnic groups are not actually human beings? In case you're suggesting the latter, I'll point out that 'ethnicity' is a purely social construct, with no scientific (biological, genetic) meaning whatsoever; I'll also mock you for complaining about Nazi comparisons moments before you dive headlong into their worldview; if you're suggesting the former, however, I'm not sure I can follow you without more explanation. In what way do differing 'ethnicities' have differing truths or destinies? Gadamer (again) makes some claims in that direction, but I don't want to impose a Gadamerian philosophy on you without your consent.

I don't necessarily disagree with the 'life flow' ideation, mind you, but the White Nationalist riff throws me off a bit.

John Piggott Ted Wrigley • 5 days ago
1. It is not against your nature to ride a roller-coaster, or to want, or not want, to ride one. It is manifestly against your nature, or would be, to will hatred for your children where there is Nature's love.

But this is the test you have set for the existence of the subject in your head. You think it ... you ... can will thoughts (you can't, at least not in ordinary waking consciousness). You think you can will thoughts powerful enough to turn back the tide of your own natural emotions. You can't. No one can, with or without "the correct incentives". A gun to your head will not do it. Parental love is the most powerful force in the world. The Cartesian subject is an illusion. Lockean individualism is an illusion.

Resisting the urge to punch someone in the head? How do you know that the resistance is not fear or cowardice or guilt or love? How do you know it is "the subject" asserting its cool, rational will? You don't. You are just presuming for it ... making it up to suit your liberal narrative? How do I know that? Because emotions are not invested in breakfast cereal, idiot! And because "biological mechanicity" is not even the mechanicity we are discussing. Typically, you are caught up in Cartesian dualism. QED.

2. You write "This quote assumes that I'm Christian, or at least that I had a strong Judeo-Christian upbringing". No, it doesn't. It states that you are unaware of the world into which you are thrown, and that is how you have internalised its manifold subtle dicta. You mentioned Gadamer. He gets this.

3. You write of "problematic snippets" without comprehending the content. If you do not understand something, ask about it.

4. National Socialism had no reading of Heidegger. Existentialism is the polar opposite of palingeneticism, although in all fairness, tucked away in your humanities dept you will not have encountered many people who have a living understanding of the nationalist axiality. I doubt if it has even occurred to you that there is a nationalist axiality. Liberal thinkers invariably presume for the liberal axiality as the totius mundi.

While we are on the subject, Nazism had a fairly limited reading of Schmitt, actually - so much so that, like Heidegger, he was not prosecuted by his American interrogators after the war, and didn't face the rope like Rosenberg.

5. My interpretation of Heidegger is substantially the same as Sloterdijk's in his essay The Plunge and the Turn. Read it before you repeat your calumny about my personal vision of human being again.

6. You write, "one must be careful not to mistake erlebnis for erfahrung: not to mistake personal (sensate) experience for the kind of lifeworld experience". No, nature is not what Gadamer referred to as wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein, and what I would term the sum of the acquired ... human personality. In that moment of the turn or transit it falls away, and the great object of Heidegger's quest unconceals itself. At this point, however, Gadamer had already turned to epistemology. Sloterdijk remains ontologically focused. He is worth your time.

That moment, by the way, was no use to NSDAP, because the qualities in men which it sought for the purposes of its own adventurism (for example, heroism, devotion, arrogance, racial pride, a certain ahistorical intoxication) were also things of the personality.

7. Ethnicity is biological, which is why today we have population genetics, gene maps, and genotyping generally. After all, ethnic groups are descent or kinship groups in which the four modes of genetic variation apply, generating specificity as well as overlap ... cluster as well as cline.

Let's not waste time over the lie that human beings are the same, or even very much alike outside their own races. The Jew is nothing like the Han, the European is nothing like the African. We don't need to waste our time killing the boring pee-cee dictate. Neither do we have to bow down to the sinister belief that human bio-diversity ... human group difference, with superiority and inferiority technically present at every measure ... is a "Nazi" philosophy. Enough with that.

8. As an expression of white American ethnocentrism, btw, WN is exactly as moral and healthy as Jewish ethnocentrism, African-American ethnocentrism, Hispanic ethnocentrism ... whatever. Either you disdain the natural need for belonging and group preference among all peoples (which would be highly repressive) or among none. But don't get "thrown" just by WN. That speaks volumes about you, not it.

And now we're down, finally, to the customary nitty-gritty.

Ted Wrigley John Piggott • 3 days ago
For some reason my reply to this did not go through (Disqus seemed to think it was spam?) so I'm reposting it. Apologies if it duplicates…

So, this is particularly curious. You say:

It is not against your nature to ride a roller-coaster, or to want, or not want, to ride one. It is manifestly against your nature, or would be, to will hatred for your children where there is Nature's love.

But that implies there are some behaviors which are not subject to will, and others (a much larger range of behaviors) which are subject to will. Which is fine by me: I'll just shrug off the ones you think are not subject to will as irrelevant to the discussion, and refocus the conversation on those that are. Even though I think you're wrong, there's honestly no sense arguing over a few outliers (like the parent/child relationship) when the vast majority of human action is subject to will. You agree that we can will ourselves to ride rollercoasters, eat broccoli, become accountants, and whatnot, that is more than enough to prove my point.

However, you made a bigger error here, where you said:

Resisting the urge to punch someone in the head? How do you know that the resistance is not fear or cowardice or guilt or love? How do you know it is "the subject" asserting its cool, rational will? You don't.

You've undercut your own argument in your effort to undercut mine, by trying to reduce the conversation to pure subjectivity. In fact, I have far better grounds for asserting that people know this than you have for asserting that people cannot hate their children. As I said earlier, some people do actually hate their children, which makes your claim that one cannot do so difficult to swallow. On the other hand, people are usually quite aware of their own emotions; they know when they are acting out of fear or guilt, as opposed to when they are acting from high moral principles. If we're just going to measure this on pure opinion, my opinion holds up to life experience much better than yours does.

At any rate, my claim isn't about any particular instance. My claim is that it is possible for one to resist acting on an emotion like anger, sexual desire, hunger, or etc simply by choosing not to act on it, or by contrast to act in spite of an inhibitive emotion like fear or shame. That is will, and anyone can find some number of cases where they defied their biological or emotional impulses in that way. Even you can, and have.

Case closed, right? Probably not…

I'm just going to slide over most of the contrarian nonsense in the middle of your post. You're simply wrong about the Nazis and Heidegger; research it. I've read Gadamer and understood him, so I am quite aware of the world I've been thrown into; please try not to contradict yourself in adjacent sentences. I'll look up Sloterdijk, assuming there are English translations available; do you recommend "The Plunge and the Turn" as seminal? And I think you are misreading Gadamer if you neglect the socio-historical aspect of erfahrung; Gadamer wants to find a bridge between personal history and cultural history (perhaps think of it as a kind of semiotic bridge, where cultural symbols and private symbols merge). But again, I'm not advocating Gadamer's worldview, which I find useful and interesting, but ultimately misguided.

Now…

There is no legitimate biological or genetic definition of race or ethnicity. While there are genetic traits that vary within the human population — cluster and cline, as you will — the human genome as a whole is extremely restricted, and the variation between individual members of the population is small. There is, for instance, far more genetic variation between individual members of your favorite species of bird (I'm partial to house wrens) then you will ever find across members of the different 'ethnicities' of humans. Without social controls (cultural, class, and religious restrictions, prejudices, geographical restrictions, etc), human 'ethnicities' would disappear completely inside of four generations, with no harm done.

We don't need to waste our time with dull-witted nationalist tripe, either. I share Nietzsche's opinion of nationalists — that nationalism is an emotion for weak, lower people, who desperately cry that ‘someone must be to blame for the fact that I do not feel well’ — and I don't really care if we're talking about white nationalism, zionism, antisemitism, Africanism, Chinese nationalism, or whatever. Hatred makes weak-willed people feel strong; I have no use for it. I do get that many people need some group to cling to, which is why I don't usually object to ethnocentrism, religiosity, family clans, bowling leagues, or other 'clubs': if 'belonging' helps people keep life's miseries at bay, how could I object to that? But when it starts to bubble over into nationalism — when that 'belonging' urge turns into pride of place and disdain for others — it should be nipped in the bud, if not actively stomped on.

Nationalism is not healthy; it is the sociopolitical equivalent of a cancer. Don't inflict it on yourself or others.

John Piggott Ted Wrigley • 2 days ago
By the way, the claim that:

There is no legitimate biological or genetic definition of race or ethnicity ...

... does not gell with this from Xing et al 2011:

Xing’s 2011 study, like his 2009 study, is aimed at developing a more accurate understanding of first, “the distribution of human genetic diversity” and second, “human demographic history”. Now, these are conflicting aims in so much as genetic markers used to provide a time clock of a population’s history tend to be selectively neutral and, therefore, selectively less important, ie, because such markers change (by mutation) at a predictable rate. So it is reasonable to infer that either Xing’s results on distribution will be somewhat underplayed, or his historical story will be somewhat under-played. There will, one suspects, be a compromise.

Still, there is absolutely clear evidence for population diversity in Xing, the geographic separation of which was addressed a year later by Wang et al, thus:

http://journals.plos.org/pl...

We consider examples in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, East Asia, and Central/South Asia, as well as in a worldwide sample, finding that significant similarity between genes and geography exists in general at different geographic levels. The similarity is highest in our examples for Asia and, once highly distinctive populations have been removed, Sub-Saharan Africa. Our results provide a quantitative assessment of the geographic structure of human genetic variation worldwide, supporting the view that geography plays a strong role in giving rise to human population structure.

That word “structure” has a further relevance, namely in genetic correlation structure which, together with population stratification and assortative mating, fills in the blanks left by pure quantitative exercises. Lewontin’s “variation within” argument might never have seen the light of day if Edwards’ comments on correlation structure had preceded his statement in 1972. Or maybe not, given that Lewontin was a Marxist ideologue and a Jewish race-denier.

Cavilli-Sforza came down on both sides, thus:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/20...

Edwards and Lewontin are both right. Lewontin said that the between populations fraction of variance is very small in humans, and this is true, as it should be on the basis of present knowledge from archeology and genetics alike, that the human species is very young. It has in fact been shown later that it is one of the smallest among mammals. Lewontin probably hoped, for political reasons, that it is TRIVIALLY small, and he has never shown to my knowledge any interest for evolutionary trees, at least of humans, so he did not care about their reconstruction. In essence, Edwards has objected that it is NOT trivially small, because it is enough for reconstructing the tree of human evolution, as we did, and he is obviously right.

John Piggott  Ted Wrigley • 2 days ago
But that implies there are some behaviors which are not subject to will, and others (a much larger range of behaviors) which are subject to will.

It says quite clearly that a meaningful test of the intellectual function’s suzerainty over the emotional function must be conducted in respect to genuine emotional dictate - something absolute which actually demonstrates command over the emotional and sensate functions. As it is, you set yourself a spoof test, from which no useful conclusions can be drawn.

Perhaps we also need to refine the relationship of will, as a quality of a subject, to thought, as the language of intellectual function. My contention is that in the ordinary state of waking consciousness thought proceeds via an initiating, external shock and then association, much as it does in the sleep state. This has a mechanicity to it. In the same way, the subject in this state is ascribed from within the brain exactly as it is in the sleep state, even though the qualitative state of the whole is characterised by dispersal and immersion.

A turn or orientation towards something more implies a certain focusing of the attention (a focused attention is the beginning of will). Whether a permanent self attends and organises this is a nice question. Heideggerians avoid the matter altogether, as you know, and think in terms of detachment and Dasein’s locational action of unconcealing. I am content with that interpretation, and find for a subsequent emergence into an identification not with function, be it intellectual, emotional or sensate, but with an holistic and natural, intensely familiar and immediate sense of being-in or before the world, ie, before its meanings are processed by the cognitive functions. This is a formulation I prefer to “Dasein”.

If the intensity of this moment is sufficient, the automatic ascription of self in the brain is transcended and stops.

Of course, for the coarse purposes of ordinary life we have to joust with other beings in the world on the basis that we all possess a “self” and have “will”. But when two intelligent beings encounter and recognise one another there is some possibility, at least, that “reality” beckons for both, and something useful may be explored. That won’t include the Cartesian concept of subjecthood which still underpins our received thinking today.

You agree that we can will ourselves to ride rollercoasters, eat broccoli, become accountants, and whatnot, that is more than enough to prove my point.

Sensation and emotional response (rollercoasters), appetite (broccoli), a talent for numeracy (accountancy), and whatnot, do not demonstrate the steely will of a subject. They demonstrate the functioning of the mechanism. You must conduct your test on the basis of a pure exercise of the will over the dictates of the machine.

You’ve undercut your own argument in your effort to undercut mine, by trying to reduce the conversation to pure subjectivity.

You argument is that a permanent subject exists. I am arguing for subtlety and complexity, differential consciousness, and the singularity of human presence.

My claim is that it is possible for one to resist acting on an emotion like anger, sexual desire, hunger, or etc simply by choosing not to act on it, or by contrast to act in spite of an inhibitive emotion like fear or shame.

You are thinking far too simplistically. Come on, you are not a simple man. Apply yourself.

I am not really very interested in Gadamer as such. I am puzzled why (presumably) you would find my statement that he took his own work into the “how” of texts and meanings, or worked in such a way that is what happened to it anyway, to be problematic. To me, that’s simply, fact. If I was a communicationist I would doubtless value him much more. Sloterdijk’s Plunge is a good way to become acquainted with the transitionality of Heidegger’s model of the thrown being. He’s good on our existential engagement with spaciality, too - something that is widely ignored in consequence of Heidegger’s temporal analysis. That said, I don’t “follow” Sloterdijk but quote him sometimes because, generally, intellectuals like a few cites and appeals to authority. It softens the blow that some uncouth nationalist has got there and can parlay. That’s not supposed to happen.

the human genome as a whole is extremely restricted, and the variation between individual members of the population is small.

Ted, this is not true. It’s a statement from the days of simple blood analysis, when genetic complexity and structure was completely unknown. We can now identify and assign “subjects” with great precision ... down to within a handful of miles of a given village if all four grandparents were born there. We can also state that the genetic distances between the great racial clusters are determined and clear, and in fact the distance between Sub-Saharan Africans and the rest of humanity is greater than the distance between some apes.

That said, universalism does not issue from pre-genomic genetic science. It is a religious idea, and its origin is in Judaism - not as an idea for internalisation by Jews of course, but by the rest of humanity, among whom difference and boundaries are impediments to the realisation of the messianic age. Universalism came down to you from the Pauline and Augustinian dispensation. It is, in fact, an abuse ... a grotesque and unnatural attenuation of the human trait of within-group altruism. We have had it dinned at us for a thousand years and more. It is a menace, not an ultimate moral principle that somehow gives warrant to a total disvaluation and existential attack on Europeans in the interests of the non-European.

Without social controls (cultural, class, and religious restrictions, prejudices, geographical restrictions, etc), human ‘ethnicities’ would disappear completely inside of four generations, with no harm done.

We in the West already have social controls, namely mass replacement immigration, humanistic liberal propaganda allied to anti-fa/anti-racist bullying and violence, the former dinned at our children from nursery age, the latter from high school age, terrorising anti-racism and political correctness, assaults on our freedom of speech and association, police action against all forms of social and political dissent, and so forth. The result is a vast, quiet anger among the people, white flight on a huge scale, and rising nationalism all across Europe. In Britain, we had the vote for Brexit, which was, in large part, a rejection of all that we are suffering.

We are the victim here, Ted, not the foreign populations who are replacing us on our own beloved land. They are merely the tools of other interest groups who strive for particular but congruent visions of the world of the future. Those visions exclude the European racial kind, which is the creator of the modern world and the only true hope of all Mankind for a life of freedom. As you clearly cannot express your own truth, identity, belonging and peoplehood, being instead overwhelmed by the moral dictate of the world into which you have been thrown, and lost to yourself and your people in consequence ... as that is clearly your estate, at least understand through your attachment to universalism that what Europeans understand as decency and freedom can only colour the world of the future if we survive. You are arguing instead for enslavement to The Globality or Olam Ha-ba or the neo-Marxist post-racial utopia, and for the death of the European genius, and of gracile European female beauty ... the death of wonderful and precious peoples, damn it. You would never argue for the death of any non-white people - not a single one. You would never argue for the death of Jewry. What has got inside your head that such self-hatred can possess and exercise you in this way?

Nationalism in the ethnic sense is that quiet engine of identity and kind which hums away in the background of every polity and every human age, moderating the hand of the powerful and giving love and brotherhood its domain. It is not extremist. It is life-giving. If you want to understand ask an ordinary nationalist about it. Don’t ask the blind man standing beside you in the lecture hall. Like you, he knows nothing about it and understands less.

At this point a lengthy and somewhat emotional response from Ted appears - and disappears - on the thread.  More Disqus trouble.  No matter, I took a copy and bide my time.  Things go quiet, so I post an enquiry after Ted’s mental health:
(continued 1s