Why don't you follow up or is this just a virtue signal, (where the virtue in this case is intellectualism)?

You can start with Berlin if you want I've read that and disagree with him.

In which ways do you disagree with Berlin?

I wasn't hoping to start the discussion I thought maybe you'd have some thoughts as per posting it in this thread, unless you were just signalling your intellectualism?

I find the negative view of liberty lacking.

The negative view of liberty is broadly the one that has prevailed in our society. That seems to me to be a good thing.

Positive liberty asserts agency for a group but ends up oppressing the individual. It also often has disastrous consequences as per French Revolution, Iranian revolution, Arab Spring etc

I prefer the narrower individual sense of liberty (negative, freedom from) for this reason.

Okay are you familiar with Christman's criticism of Berlin? How about actually sketching out the concepts in the spirit of well named's OP?

'May as well give those people them rights they gonna have anyway.'

No, I have not read Christman, what is the nature of his criticism?

That's asking for some work, how about you read them, you have access through JStor right?

John Christman Constructing the Inner Citadel: Recent Work on the Concept of Autonomy Source: Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 1 (The University of Chicago Press Oct., 1988),
John Christman
 Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom
 Ethics, Vol. 101, No. 2 (The University of Chicago Press
Jan., 1991),

Like you've not actually explained Berlin's position yet.

Though the author I found most compelling not as a criticism of Berlin so much as for his perspective is;

Gerald C. MacCallum, Jr.
 Negative and Positive Freedom
 Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Jul., 1967), pp. 312-334

I'm busy right now and so cannot post at length.

Berlin is useful for these concepts:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/l...tive-negative/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-pluralism/

That site is good at explaining basic concepts.

I'm familiar with both but this is a book report thread I thought you might like to share your thoughts on the books you cited. There's no rush I'd prefer to engage your views but I understand being busy so whenever you're ready.

A synopsis of Chrisman's arguments from the Stanford link.

Sorry for being indisposed for a few days...

Anyway, I don't see how this is responsive to what I asked. Support for refugees is not support for ISIS, nor are appeals to not over-generalize about Muslims. You just changed the subject. I suppose you're backing up my earlier surmise that you're claim about ISIS was just a hyperbolized reference to a more general complaint, but the specific objection is that your claim that leftists refuse to condemn ISIS is false.

I enjoyed this post, but I'm going to chop it up since I only really want to respond to a few things.

I would go as far as to say that certain elements of Marxist thought are valuable, useful, and worth defending at least against the knee-jerk tendency to assume anything Marxist must be bad without actually trying to engage it or understand it. Of course, the parts I think are worthwhile have less to do with political economy or his political goals and more to do with social theory. That distinction often gets lost.

This is the part that made me smile, since this is the crux of the argument that we've had (especially with foldn) going back months now. It's not generally that anyone is interested in defending the goofiest practices of over-zealous students or internet activists, it's more like the "anti-anti-SJW" wing just thinks the story is over-blown. To the extent that the criticisms about SJWs are often aimed at students, uke_master summed this up for me like 10 months ago:

I could potentially agree with Lord that, theoretically, a social movement or trend in culture doesn't have to be organized to be important, but I also do think it's meaningful that (for example) if an "SJW" wants to complain about racist voter disenfranchisement, they will point towards a plethora of state laws actually being passed, and court cases, and statements from elected officials. To me that's clearly a different level of political power being exercised than students "no-platforming" a controversial speaker, even if I often disagree with the latter.

Thanks for posting this it's been a while since I read this page.

What's interesting is that just minutes prior to posting this link LordJvK admitted to not knowing Christman and asking me for the nature of his criticism. Which makes me question whether or not he's familiar with the sources he posts because if he was he'd have been able to challenge me on Christman's work rather than asking me for a summary.

You don't see to see that the machinery of state and institutional power is with both of them in both cases. This makes things problematic when all someone has to do in order to shut something down is to call the thing racist, even if it is not racist.

I mean, once the label is used, what was said no longer even matters.

A little bit like how it never mattered if witches were actually witches when they used to go hunting them.

I appreciate the honesty, but what confuses me is that you keep asserting this claim even so.

Fair enough.

My view is that the alt-right if anything hurt Trump's chances during the general election, but probably had no effect. During the primary, I don't know, we don't really understand primaries very well, especially this one, so I don't know how meaningful alt-right support was.

FWIW, I think you fundamentally misunderstand the dynamic here between the alt-right and SJWs. The alt-right refers to a group of thinkers/ideas that have been around for a couple decades at least - well before gamergate or anyone had come up with "SJW." It is a real (although still small) political movement, not just a social phenomenon. It has organizations, websites, books, political and intellectual leaders, and so on (although it is not centrally organizaed). It also has real power, with a sympathizer in Bannon being very close to the President.

I've also been thinking about your claim that SJWs caused the alt-right to become prominent and I have a different hypothesis for you to consider. Why do so many alt-right people focus on SJWs? Consider the complaint. They say that SJWs infest the progressive movement and the Democratic party. They say that SJWs claim that everyone is racist or sexist for silly reasons. Thus, they say, when Democrats or progressives claim someone is racist or sexist, you shouldn't believe them.

Why is this claim so useful for people on the alt-right? Think about the history of the conservative movement. One of the founding myths of the conservative movement is that it was able to gain mainstream credibility in part by William F. Buckley casting the extreme racist groups like the John Birch society out of the movement. Up until the last year or so, that was also true of the alt-right. However, if the alt-right can convince other conservatives that progressives shouldn't be believed about whether someone is racist, then they will no longer have much reason to keep the alt-right outcasts. If they convince other conservatives that progressives always claim all conservatives are racists, then why should ordinary conservatives continue blocking the alt-right from joining the party?

Now, this doesn't mean that some progressives aren't in fact doing exactly this. But, when you see such a strong incentive for a political movement (the alt-right) to exaggerate the size and power of an opposing political phenomena (SJWs), and the evidence for this claim is mostly anecdote rather than data and susceptible to confirmation bias - you should be suspicious of that claim.

I read this long ago but remember quite liking it, what is your critique?
edit: Wiki page for people curious for an overview of the text.

Meh. Marx is historically important and worth understanding for that purpose, but communism is one of the most evil ideologies ever created. I think his social theory (eg such as in "On the Jewish Question"), with its claim that legal rights are not important is implicated in this as well.

That being said, I do find think the G.A. Cohen/Jon Elster wing of analytical Marxism has useful criticisms of of other leftist, liberal and libertarian viewpoints.

I think you might find this column by Noah Millman interesting on this topic. I think he makes a solid criticism of Obama and the version of progressive patriotism that is ascendent in the Democratic Party right now:

This is where I disagree with progressives who bully conservatives. I think domestic tranquility is a social good, and while it is worth disrupting for important changes, a constant state of disruption requires giving up domestic tranquility. That is a real harm to society. It might be justified if the ends are sufficiently positive, but nonetheless is a harm. I see many of my non-political friends getting involved and caring about politics now, and I think they are right to do so, but I don't celebrate this like Shame Trolly does. This is the result of a society on edge, of one where more and more people feel like their most important values are under attack.

The entire purpose of distinguishing between Marx as social theorist and Marx as political economist or revolutionary was so I could disavow communism, more or less :P

I agree that domestic tranquility is a social good. I've thought about that some in the past. I think I've mused at some point that I could understand people's nostalgia for the 50s at least insofar as it was nostalgia for domestic tranquility in their perception. The problem is the people for whom it was not so tranquil. If I share Trolly's enthusiasm, it's because I think there are still many people who have a valid complaint against those who prefer tranquility even when it's at other people's expense. But I agree at least in theory that the balance is something worth contemplating, and so I'm not really very radical in my politics. It's more like I'm sympathetic to the complaints of some radicals.

My critique of it is long and is spread over my first two books. Cliffs version:

I think Foucault fetishes soft power to the point where he forgets about the repressive state apparatus.

He imagines power to work perfectly, but it doesn't always.

Remember in Game of Thrones when Littlefinger says "knowledge is power" and Cerci just has him arrested and says "power is power"?

That's as damning a critique of Foucault as I've seen.

If Althusser asserts some primacy for the superstructure over the economic base, he still insists that "in the last instance" the base determines things.

Foucault, it seems to me, just does away with the base.

Chez can the last 80 posts or so be moved to one of the other threads. There's plenty of available topics to discuss the whole shaming thing and anti_SJW thing given this thread was started to discuss the literature I reckon the off topic stuff would probably be best elsewhere. Lord's SJW thread probably.

I'm interested in what it is about Marxism that you consider evil as an ideology, whether it's possible to evaluate it in ideological terms without referencing it's real world manifestations. I know Marxists do the No True Scotsman thing a lot with regard to Marxist societies but I'm interested in what it is about it as an ideology that you consider evil.

Cohen's criticism of Rawls I found particularly interesting only irritating in that I discovered it after I'd already submitted a paper on the difference principle, which I'm now ambivalent towards.

I'm not sure how you would evaluate an ideology without appeal to the real world. Sometimes the ideology is speculative, so we have to project what its effects will be. Marx himself projected the effects of his ideas would be to cause world utopia. When his ideas were actually put in place, they largely led to misery and suffering. He had too narrow a view of the world, placing too much emphasis on economic relations, and so permitting his adherents to ignore non-economic social relations as of no value beyond their impact on economic class struggle (many people still struggle to distinguish economic from non-economic aspects of social class). Since his view of how economies should work was also disastrously wrong, this meant a common path from his ideas to oppression. Some political group gains control of the means of production, puts into place socialist economics, which harms the economy, then uses oppression to maintain power.

Some people think you should evaluate the morality of an ideology by how altruistic, universal, or well-meaning its goals are. I think capitalism proves this is false. The goals of capitalism are not particularly altruistic, but the effects of capitalism have been immensely positive on people's quality of life.

How so?

When I became a Marxist in the 80's almost all Marxist activists were Trotskyist and none I met would want to launch a defence of communism in practice. Trotskyists in particular, and with some justification given his fate, are fond of the No True Scotsman defence, the USSR was a deformed/degenerated workers state or state capitalist, the US ruined Cuba, Mao wasn't a Marxist, etc. I now believe these views to be wrong and there is in all failed communist states a direct link to Marxist theory. I guess I still want to consider it in terms of the intended goals rather than the actual goals so I'd differentiate those theories were the intended goals I find abhorrent from those whose stated goals I am somewhat sympathetic to.

Interestingly there's a philosophy blog I occasionally read who makes a point of stressing Adam Smith's ethical economics but I guess we're bound to disagree on capitalism's positive reach.

The idea that inequality is only justified where the worst off do better than they would under a more equal distribution I still find intuitively powerful and I think if inequality can be justified it will be via this principle. Where I am unsure of it is that I am not convinced that inequality can be justified.

Dereds, the long capitalism vs communism debates between Birdman and me might be of some interest to you.