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I told her that “If a true lover of Sophia were to become queen, we should all benefit.”

My inner Athenian was inspired, what can I say?

Yesterday Arianna was in town and I got to meet her and hear her speak. Her presence is incredible, she’s definitely got that quality where you’re sort of hanging on her next word. She was in town to deliver her platform statement. She also autographed a copy of her book How To Overthrow the Government for me.

Unlike other candidates who’s web presence is a total joke (Arnold shows us he can photoshop a pic of he and Maria, but offers no substance - a bit like his candidacy), Arianna is willing to take a stand on the issues and post them. She’s also daring to talk about changing prop 13 - this is very politically risky - but risks are something you gain when you work outside of the broken two-party system.

Ironically, Schwarzenegger’s advisor Warren Buffet has recommended Arnold address gaps in the property tax code - as Arianna plans to do if elected. Arnold seems to balk at the Sage of Omaha’s recommendation. What’s the point in buying the best advisors if you won’t listen? Why would you not take the advice of a guy who’s personal worth is in the range where he could close most state’s budgetary gaps with a single check? I don’t see Schwarzenegger coming out of this political hole unless he starts tackling the issues. If that happens and Arianna is there she’ll run circles around him.

(continue to read about SF Supervisor Matt Gonzalez and my night out)

Am I becoming a political Junkie? Has this screwed up world with Bill Oreilly, Ann Coulter, and The Mullah of Austin pushed me to a new pursuit? (more…)

I love the character The Cheat, but I find his ancestor, The Sneak to be even better!

The Sneak and Cheat are part of the roll call of the Homestar Runner site. I have to be honest, i thought that the site was majorly stupid when i first started checking it out. Oddly, the more you get “in” on the self-referential in-jokes on the site the funnier it gets.

That and the dialog in my little corner of the cube farm frequently includes H*R-isms, Strong Bad one liners, and songlets. Check it out if you want to get lost in another geeky morass.

So I was talking to my former overseer Bailey about where managerial authority is legitimated from. We agreed that it is self sustaining on its own creation: “the myth of effectiveness.”

He arged that a bad manager will, however, eventually irritate his managed if he is bad, and he will then render himself ineffective.
good as something
I would like to think that but I think there are far too many bad managers to hope that the invisible hand of good management will take care of the issue for us.

We also pursued the question of why virtue ethics societies failed. It seems that as soon as you have a plurality of cultures you’re doomed to fail…

You see this tendency even with the Greek VE cultures. When a barbarian(that is, a non-Greek speaker) arrived they were handled with this very odd treatement as the Greek did not know if the outsider observed themis (a minimal hospitality of civilized peoples). If he did observe themis, then the question still remained as to what his roles were.

In light of not knowing his roles, he could not be determined to be good as something or bad as something. Bailey suggested that as soon as mingling of different cultures happened, the survivability of a virtue ethics culture decreases dramatically.

First, an offender to one (say) city-state’s code could leave to go find survival in another place. i.e. if I hacked off Athenian mores I could travel to Sparta or Thrace and live out my days. If i were bound to Athens, hacking off the community would engender this person is “bad”, this would affect my ability to get food, protection, and would certainly lead to my death. So, it is suggested that:

1. Access to travel
2. Access to other cultures

Weakens the survivability of a virtue ethics enclave.

I thien suggested that religion, it seems to me, is the willfull associating of oneself to a teleological end. If I am a Christian you can say “Steven, you are doing bad, as a Christian. If I claim no such affiliation your “Steven, you are doing bad” is subject to the Emotivist query of: “Why? By whose standards?”.

So this morning I got up early to pass out Arianna flyers at the newly refurbished San Francisco Ferry Buliding.

It was a lot of fun to stand out there and try to sped the message to as many people as would hear it. I always try to be nice to campaigners when I see them handing out leaflets and I discovered that most people are pretty nice about declining politely.

It was a bit hard because I’m not really that extroverted a person by nature, so this is a bit of a thing that’s outside of my comfort zone. I felt pretty good about this as one lady said that I was a good salesman, guess I emoted correctly. (more…)

I really enjoyed reading AV, although it took me quite a bit of time to work my way through it. A summation of the book would be this. We live in an era where we cannot rationally come to consensus about moral debate. We do this because we have symbols that relate to moral notions (‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘unjust’) but the moral concepts that give ‘gravity’ to these symbols have been lost. Instead we manipultae their symbolic ghosts, without the weight of true referents.

Mac. traces our modern conundrum to a breakdown in the Enlightenment era. The question that he asks, via Nietzsche, is wether or not moral societies ever existed (Nietzsche thought not). Mac finds the ideal culmination in the Aristotelian model of Athens which reconciles the problem in the Heroc, Sophoclean, and Sophist models. Mac then traces Aristotelianism’s fall from fashion and then exposes its key premises. He then asserts the key principles that must be enacted to encourage an Aristotelian Renaissance.

He lastly says that knowing this will enable to carry the flame of moral discourse through the dark ages looming over us.

Here are some of my favorite notions:

• Library with incomplete knowledge analogy
• The failure of The Enlightenment
• The notion of a practice and acting for quality’s sake

Good book and thanks to Maureen for encouraging me to read it.

Well, the reason you’ve not seen updates in the Philolog or here is because the majority of my time for the last two days has been spent helping keep my company’s mail systems on-line while being hammered by yet another Windows virus.

Yet again (and again) due to the horrible security model underlying the inherently insecure operating systems, users all across the Internet have been forced to endure network latency, system slowdowns, mangled mail, and missing mail. Thanks for dicking us over, Microsoft.

I took a look at their security tips site which addresses how to maintain your PC / Systems (i.e. patch them, update their scan files) but what are we supposed to do when systems not under our control are leveraged against us? Answer: We can’t do a damn thing, we trust you bozos to do your job and write secure software.

See, this virus took unprotected computers, united them, and then directed them to repropagate themselves. Ever hear of SETI@Home - harnessing millions of computers to work on a problem (in this case processing files to see if there were signs of intelligent life)? Imagine the same style of distributed computing structure attacking a mailing address.

No amount of patching or firewalling could have fixed this - only Microsoft creating an operating system that uses a decent security model could have.

On the up side, no problems on my Mac or my Linux / Unix machines - well except they had to suffer many, many virus propagated / propagating messages. Then again, as they run on secure operating systems, it wasn’t an issue.

h3 class=”title”>Notes to Chapters 5-10 of AV

In chapters 5 Mac. addresses the inherent contradictions which assured that any project (Enlightenment Era) which sought to rationally justify morality was doomed to fail.

In Chapter 6 we talk about how the world view must look in light of these failings.

Chapters 7 and 8 talk about the failure of ‘social science’ to provide us a coherent explanation of human behavior.

Chapter nine servs as a bridge as we ask, in light of the failure of social science, ethics persists, where do we go?

Chapter ten starts charting the birth of the Classical (Aristotelian) ethical mode’s genesis with the heroic cultures (Illiad, Oddyssey).

Chapter 5: Why the Enlightenment Project of justifying Morality had to fail

I. The Kant / Kierkegaard / Hume arguments failed due to characteristics in their shared history

II.  Any project of the variety described in I.C. was doomed to fail. Conception of moral rules 

battles human nature.
III.  Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics serves as both in the Classical (pre-Enlightenment era)

IV.  This breaks at The Reformation (Protestantism and Jansenism)

V.  Signs of weak use of reason among KKH

VI.  With the telos gone, we cannot make any sense of the tripartite scheme.  Thus the Enlightenment authors inherited an insoluble scheme
VII.  Kant saw the criticality of the telos and his inherent failure.  Moral law cannot be derived from statements about human nature or God’s will.
VIII.  Kant’s statement instantiates the general:  No valid argument can move from entirely factual premises to evaluative conclusions

IX. The Watch Example

X.  Arguments following the form of IX are exempt VIII’s burden

XI.  “Man is not a functional object is a cataclysmic event.  This breaks classical morality and ruins Enlightenment projects.  There were essential human purposes

XII. Moral judgments as true/false continues today, but sans referent.  Once the truth about moral evaluations was spoken sensibly.

XIII.  Yet this move was praised.  This was a decisive change with two features

Chapter 6:  Consequences of the Enlightenment Projects’ failure

I. Status in the post-Enlightenment world

II.  Utilitarianism attempts to fix by utility as telos

III.  The Analytics could not buy into the Emotivist project because they were Theory of Meaning, not use.  Thus they tried to legitimate Practical Reason’s rules to save it from the precipice.

IV.  Both the utilitarians and neo-Kantians escape failure.  Emotivist discourse is the reward for unfettering the self; that same act ruined tho ability to rationally explain moral allegiances.

V. 3 Uniquely modern moral appeal concepts exist in this strange moral simulation we inhabit

VI.  Emotivism gave us 3 characters, all of which trade in moral fictions,.  To the end, we model off them and we are damned

VII.  We can provide social reality of the character, but not have a value for it (is this manager character fiction any good?).  Like Carnap and Ayer’s God, this manager is a social entity that serves a function, but not not have a genuine objective existence.
VIII.  Summation of current status

IX.  The manager claims law-like knowledge by which social institutions can be modeled

X.  Changes

Chapter Seven:  Fact, Explanation, and Expertise

I. Fact is a folk concept

II.  Ex planation

III.  We attempt to explain human nature in mechanistic terms

IV.  Something odd happens for the human scientist when he manipulates.  He excludes himself, suddenly he is imprinting his own will - something incoherent is inherent in this model
V.  Our false belief in the panacea of this science was to drive expertise in the bureaucratic realm

Chapter 8:  Character of Generalizations in Social Science and their lack of predictive power

I.  Status of social science

II.  4 maxims produced by SS statements

III.  Science comes from philosophy, where does SS come from?  It is ancestral to Machiavelli’s writings

IV.  This endeavor is failed from the get go as there are p4 sources for unpredictability in human affairs that cannot be overcome

V.  Summation:  We cannot determine human action meaningfully, no science of human behavior is possible, the manager is a social fiction with no explicable strength
VI.  Counter to the 4 sources of unpredictability

VII.  There are 4 predictable elements in social life

VIII.  Problem:

IX.  Back to Machiavelli

X. The bureaucratic manager expert is bunk

Chapter 9:  Nietzsche or Aristotle

Synopsis:  Nietzsche destroyed the Enlightenment project first, although he mistook the scope of his critique to be “all morality” versus “the Enlightenment’s account of morality”.  As Nietzsche did not suggest a replacement moral scheme, could we not reject the Enlightenment’s rejection and go back to Classicism, that is, Aristotelian ism?

I.  Morality has only became available for a certain kind of use.  Marxist questions are irrelevant is they ultimately demand: who wields the systems of control.  Ultimately, in this discussion that is always the Emotivist characters.
II.  moral utterance is too vulgar, to accessible, as Nietzsche predicted.
III.  Nietzsche saw that moral language usage is like ‘taboo’ when Cook encountered the Polynesians.  It is inexplicable, powerful, illogical.  We must supersede with an act of Will to “create new tables of good.”

IV.  Nietzsche has no coherent replacement in mind
V.  Weberianism is Nietzsche rooted as we must arbitrarily assert moral tables

VI.  Nietzsche and MacIntyre ask what sort of man am I to become

Chapter 10:  The Virtues in Heroic Societies

Synopsis:  Virtues and Virtue Ethics exist in heroic societies where ought is clearly defined within a heroic teleology and sense of obligation

I.  Values are predetermined

II.  Contrast to Emotivism, existence in society is essential to selfhood

III.  The narrative can tell us what characters therein cannot: i.e. Homer asks can you win, yet lose?
IV.  Two key moral claims

V.  Nietzsche’s characterization of heroic society was self serving to his argument (129)

VI.  We cannot escape our historical forebears
VII.  Epic era’s ties to modernity

Chapters 3 and 4 of AV

On the up side, this gets us out of the relentless discussion of Emotivism. I am not entirely sure that I understand why Chapter 3 was written. I assume that this will be used as a target to attack later, but I think that we got all the value out of this discussion in chapter II.

The argument goes:

“We have lost the ability to takel about morality, incommensurate (Ch I).”
No this has always been the case, I am an Emotivist
“OK, the Emotivist world looks like this”
OK, so what

Is MacI trying to say that this is proof that the Emotivist society is NOT something that always was? It seems like chapter 3 is a lot of overkill to make that fairly easily granted point.

I hope that he is going to use the paradigms set up in this chapter to pick out qualities of older moralities that had it together(?) or what our new goal should be (?).

Chapter 4 was pretty good. A lot tighter / faster moving. It basically gives the specific instances in Kant, Kierkergaard, and Hume of how the Enlightenment project of answering rationally “Why should I be moral” failed. He also asserts a close similarity between the Enlightenment (which asked the same question we ask, but they did it first) and today. They asked the question that we, 300 years later, still have not addressed.

Chapter 5 promises the essential flaw that guaranteed failure, but I’m still reading it. — steven

Chapter 3:  Emotivism:  Social Content and Social Context

Synopsis: Do we live in an
Emotivism-infected culture



I.  Since G.E. Moore, the moral philosopher has not had the
obligation to expalin the social implementation of his proposition (p.
23).

II.  Emotivism’s social content obliterates the difference between
social minipulation versus genuine (non-manipulative) relations.

The choice between ethical and asthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice to choose in terms of good and evil.

Alasdair MacIntyre