[DMB to Platt] Its kinda silly to complain just because we're staying on the topic. But more than that, its just not true.
[Arlo] It's not just "kinda silly", its the embarrassing type of bullshit talk-radio rhetoric we should be ashamed of here. I mean, I expected as much, every time a post is made that is not dripping with masturbatory glee about the Lone Wonderful Individual and condemning "those evil commie lib bastards and fascist academics" this is the sort of nonsense that's expected. But now that Waldorf and Statler have gone off on their perennial and ridiculously moronic "big bad bugaboo of multiculturalism destroying America" nonsense, I thought I'd answer this "sin-of-omission" accusation in brief. Here's part of what I wrote. For example, "major league baseball" is a social pattern of value, but this bird's eye view captures not some automatic or blindly collective pattern of value, but the sum total of willful, free, agenic activity of individuals (from players, to fans, to management, to park employees, to merchandising, to announcers, etc. who's personal value decisions lead them to mediate their behavior using a shared symbolic code. But make no mistake, intellectual patterns are no less about capturing the agenic collective symbolically-mediated behaviors of humans. "Mathematics" is an intellectual pattern of value, but this bird's eye view also capture the willful, free, agenic activiy of individuals whose personal value decisions lead them to mediate their behavior using a shared symbolic code. No "one individual" does math any more (or any less) than "one individual" does baseball. Now take the "moral codes" Platt accuses me (us) of omitting. Let's take "laws prohibiting murder" and "trial by jury" and plug them into these same two paragraphs. For example, "laws prohibiting murder" is a social pattern of value, but this bird's eye view captures not some automatic or blindly collective pattern of value, but the sum total of willful, free, agenic activity of individuals (from citizens, to police, to judges, to lawyers etc. who's personal value decisions lead them to mediate their behavior using a shared symbolic code. But make no mistake, intellectual patterns are no less about capturing the agenic collective symbolically-mediated behaviors of humans. "Trial by jury" is an intellectual pattern of value, but this bird's eye view also capture the willful, free, agenic activiy of individuals whose personal value decisions lead them to mediate their behavior using a shared symbolic code. No "one individual" does trial-by-jury any more (or any less) than "one individual" does laws prohibiting murder. Both of these "moral codes" are (go figure) patterns of value. And so everything I wrote applies exactly. I'll retype and add my next paragraph updated as well. Both "laws prohibiting murder" and "trial by jury" are rules that constrain (and enable!) participants, but in both systems the rules are flexible and change as challenges are made. Both evolve from the collective participation of many. Those who engage in negotiating criminal codes or doing thinking abstractly about the "law" and "rights" do so because they find Quality in such activity. That's right, both social and intellectual patterns result from human activity. They are both abstract ways of looking down and this activity and trying to mark boundaries around what distinguishes that activity from other activities. In the former case, we have the collective activity of agenic humans negotiating and constructing rules for social interactivity, in the latter case the collective activity of agenic humans negotiating and constructing the meaning of abstract understandings (and implications of those understandings) of the symbols used in the complex interactivity of social language. And that's about really all I want to say, since the only place for this to go is "big bad commie Arlo and his fascist anti-freedom multicultural anti-liberty, gulag loving America-hating puppy kicking beliefs and his 'moral relativity and multiculturalism that infects academe like a metastatic cancer' (gee, maybe if he only had talk radio to set him free from the evil clutches of the academy)". If anyone has any questions of substance about what I think or am saying, I am happy to answer. Another round of Limbaugh-brand stupidity, I'll pass. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
