merjet

"If he [Trump] wins a second term, whatever latent conservatism remains in the Republican Party will be extinguished." So Wehner marked his scorecard for even beyond 2024: 100% for Doom, 0% for Hope Springs Eternal.

Goodyear incoherence

The Primary-Secondary Quality Distinction

It's mostly obvious. You could have saved a lot of space by pointing to your earlier post rather than fully repeating it.

Excellent. The British anti-slavery movement is covered starting at about 47:00. At 43:50 it says Adam Smith and Montesquieu were very opposed to slavery. There is a lot about Quakers opposing slavery.

Aristotle on the Common Sense

Nancy Fraser made racism prominent in her criticism of capitalism and sided with Black Marxism. The New York Times August 14 edition included this: A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury. The following quotes are from the article. Adolph Reed, professor emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, "acquired the conviction, controversial today, that the left is too focused on race and not enough on class." "His chosen topic was unsparing: He planned to argue that the left’s intense focus on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black people undermined multiracial organizing, which he sees as key to health and economic justice." “Notices went up. Anger built. How could we invite a man to speak, members asked, who downplays racism in a time of plague and protest? To let him talk, the organization’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus stated, was “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.” “We cannot be afraid to discuss race and racism because it could get mishandled by racists,” the caucus stated. “That’s cowardly and cedes power to the racial [racist?] capitalists.” “Amid murmurs that opponents might crash his Zoom talk, Professor Reed and D.S.A. [Democratic Socialists of America] leaders agreed to cancel it, a striking moment as perhaps the nation’s most powerful Socialist organization rejected a Black Marxist professor’s talk because of his views on race.”

The title of Fraser's essay is "Is Capitalism Necessarily Racist?" That and more -- such as "Everything depends on what exactly is meant by capitalism" -- at least suggests that her essay's goal is the essence of capitalism. Do racism, exchange, exploitation, and expropriation capture the essence of capitalism? To me no more so than having opposable thumbs captures the essence of man.

Physiocracy The page has links to Quesnay and Marquis de Mirabeau (1715-1789). The latter includes the following. Mirabeau joined the army. "He took keenly to campaigning, but never rose above the rank of captain, owing to his being unable to get leave at court to buy a regiment." Buy a regiment? Wow. Manchester Liberalism ""It expounded the social and economic implications of free trade and laissez-faire capitalism. ... It also promoted pacifism, anti-slavery, freedom of the press and separation of church and state."

Fraser gives three perspectives on capitalism: exchange, exploitation, expropriation. That implicitly sweeps production under a rug or reduces it to exploitation and/or expropriation. She says nothing about using reason, how markets form or change, the role of knowledge and information (such as described by F. Hayek), entrepreneurship, innovation, supply and demand, prices, goal setting, resources, and organization or management. All these are subsumed under exploitation or expropriation. She remarks that using the exchange perspective, others could say that capitalism is indifferent to color, but she says this delinks capitalism from racism by definitional fiat. She similarly delinks production from capitalism by definitional fiat. Fraser uses “power” a few times. The first four times are “labor power.” The rest are in the sense of the power to coerce or subjugate. None are really about the power to create. The term “labor power” was coined by Karl Marx and plays a large role in his view and critique of capitalism. It basically views laborers as “tools” for doing what’s demanded by capitalists.

The stock market and the economy

Boydstun invited “feedback on the specifics as advanced in this paper”. There is near nothing in the paper about what kind of political economy or society that Nancy Fraser advocates or endorses. She asks some questions about capitalism/racism that “form the heart of a profound but under-appreciated stream of critical theorizing, known as Black Marxism.” Here is a clue to what that is. Thus she merely hints at what she advocates or endorses, which is at least very Marxist. It’s much easier to be a critic than to construct and propose a better alternative. To answer her title question, she makes an assault on what she regards as the history of capitalism, which is obviously and negatively biased. Thus it should be as fair to describe a little of the history of Marxism. Consider that of the Soviet Union and China, where Marxism has been most put into practice. That history is filled with exploitation, expropriation, and causing death to many millions of people. Yet Fraser is completely silent about that.

From here: - Crowd of Applicants outside Highland Park Plant after Five Dollar Day Announcement, January 1914 - Newspaper Article, "Henry Ford Gives $10,000,000 in 1914 Profits to His Employes" These are headlines. Reading the articles is optional. Similarly, thousands of people flocked to become Microsoft employees in the 1980’s and 1990’s and were hired. Later thousands of people flocked to become Apple, Google, and Amazon employees and were hired. Yet according to Nancy Fraser and like-minded others these people qua employees were nothing but exploited and expropriated, and the capitalist executives and managers at these companies hiring all these people didn’t even recognize their own racist origins and behavior.

I assume LTV = labor theory of value. What is NHC?

Coronavirus - how much infected?

George Floyd was handcuffed. That is visible in some of the photos in the Daily Mail article. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8576371/Police-bodycam-footage-shows-moment-moment-arrest-George-Floyd-time.html

Website about Wokeness I posted about the two New Discourse articles named in the above in another thread on this forum. I am posting this to make this thread more complete.

There is another pretty good article on New Discourses. No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why. Much of it is about the philosophical mindset of a typical "Woke" person. It includes the Woke view of racism, oppression, and truth.

Coronavirus – clinical trials #3 Coronavirus – clinical trials #4

You guys talked about the philosophical motivations of the protesters. This article is about that. It is written by one of the authors of the soon-to-be-released book Critical Theories.

Coronavirus – clinical trials #1 Coronavirus – clinical trials #2

Coronavirus - drug news

Coronavirus – a safety analogy

Coronavirus - how deadly? Coronavirus -- about the numbers

Coronavirus -- drugs