I think preferential attachment and the Pareto process world that we live in, means, that its in the nature of wealth to accumulate in proportion to wealth. And the only way to make the world rich is to exploit that process effectively.
Dividing the wealth of nations between all, even if it could be done, would be ruinous to all our weatlh.
We are a species of ape to whom the fruits of our labour acrew in proportion to those fruits. And we operate that way because reality does so. So nature has prepared us well to have familial and ethnic feelings which do well to preserve our wealth, or else, we'd all be ruined.
You may well hate that, and hate the world and our species for it. But bankrupsy and fables for children arent state policies.
No one has claimed that. You're the only one claiming a border immigration policy needs to correctly quantify over the universal non-citizen class.
No state in the world today, nor in all of history, has that view. Nor is it, on the face of it, even really coherent. There is nothing to be said about the "All" of the others. Only that we don't owe them much.
Sure, i mean there's lots of highly credible polling. I didnt choose the hypothetical carelessly. Western states are by far and away the only places that maintain these liberal island of virtue, and even so, vanishing and small. The idea that eg., homophobia isn't omnipresent in the vast majority of the world is a level of head-in-the-sandism which, of course, must necessarily accompany the sentiment of "let's import massive amounts of homophobia"
Either way, it's a hypothetical to be taken literally. Suppose it, then what's your analysis? Is the coincidence of their race salient?
If citizenship isnt a line between two classes of people to which states owe obligations, then why isnt the USA obligated to pay for the healthcare of everyone in the world?
State policies do not operate in this fashion. See, for example, the reality of importing 1 million people.
The existence of a state pressuposes two "classes" of people: citizens and non-citizens.
Citizens are those who have lived and died, who have laboured and been taxed, and have made the very state which is constituted by them -- and they are owed, by that state, a society they wish to live in.
Non-citizens are everyone else. They are owed very little, at best, not to be killed elsewhere; but certaintly, not even to be aided. Unless you want to divide the wealth of every nation by 8bn and watch all of it disappear.
In any case, to non-citizens nothing is owed. Certainly not being carefully scruitnized under a microscope to see if a border agent can detect a lack of cultural or ethical fit.
And in any case, such a fit can be determined by citizens themsevles. And polled, overwhelming, citizens of western nations have spoken. And they have seen your dice rolling at the border, and havent appreciated its concequences.
THe presumption you have on the consent of your fellow citizens to give what you eblieve is owed to other citizens of other states -- this presumption is extraordinary, obniouxous, and short-lived. And much of your attitue here is shortening it.
Right, so what's the state policy you advocate here?
Import 1 million people, 800,000 of which are racist, sexist, homophobic and militantly conservative -- and you'll do that because the policy to prevent it is, as you say, "Racist" ?
You may think these imports are on your side for now, because of the cross you've nailed yourself to -- but be assured, as you see today in the US, their cultural conservatism comes out when their social position is safe.
You are importing the very people you claim to despise : racists, sexists, misoginsits, and the like. And you're doing it why?
I'll refer you to article 50 of the constitution of the USSR,
> Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations.
which is to say, "constitutions" as pieces of paper, do not matter. A constitution isnt a document, its literally, how power is constituted by the people.
Paper has no magical power to bring about anything in the world.
One day, decades or centuries or millenia from now -- there will be no USA SC: at one point they will have been arrested, or killed, or retired and not replaced. At once point democracy in the US will fail, and the US will fail, and something else will replace it. Sic transit gloria mundi. So it goes. History goes on.
The world isnt a program, words are not its code. History goes along because power as insittuitionalised by groups of apes, comes and goes.
So suppose there's a large group of people arriving into your country en mass, you poll them about eg., women's rights and you find that 80%+ of them hold highly regressive views that were rare and fringe in even in the last 100+ years of your own country. Indeed, women would be warned about them even in the antebellum south. Now suppose they're a different colour than the present inhabitants.
Which fact is most salient in your analysis of whether to retain their presence, or admit more?
If its the latter, then I think there's racism in play here, but not of the kind you imagine. Namely, it seems you'd think feminism is only for white people. Or perhaps that human rights are a white things. Others, of course, disagree.
What's the relationship between race and immigration status?
It's not entirely clear what the argument which unites them is supposed to be. This unification is always in the mind of the white matry not the person opposing immigration. In the UK polish immigration was opposed, en mass, poles are white.
SUPPOSE there are large numbers of poorly assimilated people in a country, whose culture of origin is very different than that of the host country. What does the minor coincidence of their common lack of european ancestry show, other than to prove the point, they lack such ancestry?
White skin evolved in europe, with the peoples of europe, as with european culture -- that whiteness tracks this culture is a conincidence. (There's less-and-less european diaspora in america -- which, if imported en mass, might also enrange europeans).
The refusal to treat large scale immigration as a cultural and economic phenomneon, to try and insult opponents of this position with a slander of racism -- this tactic doesnt work any more.
All you are doing is driving those people to say, "OK, so its racism. We'll vote for that then." And the result is real racists are elected.
Do you have any analysis of the issues people opposed to large scale immigartion, from non-western cultures, and who would reverse at least some of it -- do you have any arguments that engage the issues they actually raise?
The CJ decides who writes the opinion of the majority if in the majority, and the dissent if in the dissent. Its the job of the CJ to bring sides together in clear oppositions, and "horse trade" between bits and pieces of a decision so that its clear where a majority/minority lie.
The CJ's foremost political role is to ensure the judicial branch of government is seen as a politically legitimate institution which wields its power against the other branches in a constitutionally and poltiically legitimate way. If that slips, congress can start hiring/firing; and the executive, in the end, controls the guns -- they can be arrested.
To avoid being arrested or fired, the court has to keep all sides believing the rules they set are fair.
They have no power, in the end, but the power they are allowed to have. They govern by consent of the other branches, and that's trivial to take away
If we take the video game example literally, we establish a fictional context for the language in question, so we read all questions as in-game.. the answer to the character's question is: the world the character is in. A skyrim NPC character who asks that question, is (fictionally) correct to say 'skyrim', and so on.
Now, dropping that fictional context, we have to ask: what context is giving the words meaning now? If we take a physical/material context, then the answer is 'nothing' in virtue of there being no such person, no such space, etc. because by 'here' in the material context, we know 'here' refers to a point in space and time that the character does not exist at.
When I ask, "what was here before me?" you have to give me how you're assigning meanings to words. To tell me I'm operating in a fictional context when i say, "the earth" -- is fine, so be it, materialism is a kind of fiction which preserves the ordinary meaning of words.
But for that to be plausible, there has to be a context in which those meanings make sense at all.
Kant, and similar idealists, tried to give them a "categorical context" such that "here" refers to something like an implied geometrical aspect of perception; and "before" an implied temporal aspect; and so on, which constitute the fixed law-liuke background of perception.
So that this background treats materialist meanings as fictional, and idealist meanings as the literal ones -- OK, but that's still a meaningful question -- because "me" in the idealist context doesnt refer to the transcendental ego, it refers to the apparent body in apparent space and time. And the right answer is the fictional one, because in the literal context, there is no "me". In any case, this fictional context in which the question still makes complete sense, we call "materalist".
The onus is on you to make plausible why the insanity of a "fixed law-like perceptual background of the generation of perceptions as-if materialism were true" is the principle literal context vs., it being the fictional one.
everything is explained if the law-like features of fixed perceptiosn are derivative fictions that give rise to a fictional mental space of pretend objects, and their actual apparent structure is just in the world. Nothign is explained if its the reverse, indeed, you now have a very very veyr large number of problems on your hand explaining anything at all.
The only reason we find it plausible to treat an NPC as operating in a fictional context is because we have the material context to langauge to give the words literal meanings, and literaly, we find them false. There really isnt any such idealist context for ordinary langauge.
"What was here before me?" becomes meaningless in a pathological way: we cannot even say what it oculd me, if it were true.
For an NPC, we can say very easily, this is how we know its fictional: we know what it would mean for skyrim to exist, and it does not.
Non-kantian idealists who deny the meaningfulness of these questions arent saying "we know what it would mean for there to be a place before you existed, and its false" -- theyre saying the veyr words youre using never had, nor could even have, any meaning at all. This is plainly false. We know very well what it would mean for the proposition to be true: that space and time exist, that physical objects exist, that you are one, and you are located at some time in some point in space, and prior to that, something else was.
This is very simple, ordinary, obvious, language which is meaningful. Even if its meanignful in a fictional context, ie., it is all literally false, it is still meanignful. This means that this kind of radical anti-meaningfulness idealism is false, because there is a coherent system of meaning in which these propositions could be true, even if they arent.
What remains is to decide whether they are true. And given their truth explains everything, by abduction, we suppose -- as a category -- they are true.
Yes, so your semantics of langauge make such questions incomprhensible.
It's like if someone said, "what's the radius of this circle?" and you had defined "circle" and "radius" such that circles could never possess such a property, so the quesiton itslef is incherent, just as, "what's the flavour of this circle?"
But my confidence that the question, "what was here before i existed?" has meaning, is greater than my confidence that it is completely incoherent. It plainly and obviously has meaning. Thus anyone selling a semantics for language which makes this question incomprehensible, despite it being perfectly comprehensible, is selling a defective system.
The issue is even more severe for idealists, because it isnt that question alone which becomes incoherent, but vast swathes of language that implicate even idealism itself. Meaninglessness is a kind of virus, which in the end, makes even idealism itself incoherent (since even to state the very terms it is stated in presuppose an objective background for these terms to refer to).
In any case, teenagers of the 1910s/20s thought it was a great thing to go around telling people ordinary questions with obvious meaninings were, in the end, completely meaningless and we were fooled by them all along. This didnt go well for them, as above, these positions themselves by their own critirea ended up meanignless too.
And in any case, the idea that it is a good thing that propositions whose meanings we readily understand should turn out to be meaningless is now correctly seen as a defect of any system proposed.
The obligations on these grand philosophical system are to answer to the meaningful, to take as a given the wide variety of propositions which are obbviously meaningful. Systems which "answer to nothing", and instead, in an adolescent way, delete knowledge and understanding in order to save themselves, are philosophically bankrupt.
Philosophy explains and answers the meaningful. It is only a technnique of analysis and argument, it has no power to determine what is true; only why, in some very narrow cases, what is true, could be so.
Yip, but once you have to explain law-following fixed perceptual fields (ie., that it always seems as if my fixed visual perceptions follow the laws of physics, and so on; that my audial/touch/visual percetions follow geometry exacvtly; that my actions to intervene on the world are causally deterministic; ...) --- then you've a real difficulty.
The mind doesnt have the right kind of properties to explain that. If you modify "consiousness" to include those properties then it's no longer consiousness at all.
Whatever generates law-like fixed perceptions of the objective has to be as if all of material reality exists in its law-like way.
Yes, P(Material Reality Does Not Exist) > 0 BUT whatever confidence you give to that, say p_illusion,
P(Material Reality Exists as it seems to | the fixed background of law-like perceptions) >>>>> p_illusion
You dont escape the need for the objective, the law-like, the fixed, the external.. just because you locate what generates this in "the mind" (redefined to include this). At that point the "mental origin" of this background is material. You arent making any difference to call it mental or physical.
It doesnt perceive the image of a camera, it's sensor is that image. What it means to perceive is for that image to form. This is the second great fallacies of idealism: (1) the genetic fallacy above that the origin/product of a process must share properties and (2) this fallacy of ambiguity on the word 'see'/perceive (between the mental act of drawing attention to an aspect of a perception, and the physiological act of forming that perception).
When I open my eye, light hits it, striking off the object which I am seeing. What it means to see is for that object to cause my perception. I am NOT seeing my perception, that doesn't make any sense -- it's incoherent because it's an infinite regress.
When I open my eyes and see the coffee, my body changes to have the perception of that coffee as part of my structure -- I am the photographic plate. Just as the photographic plate isnt taking a picture of itself, neither is my eye or mind.
To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it. You do not see seeing, you see objects.