Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a racist

Yes, it's a bold claim. So what's the evidence? Per Rachel Maddow's usual fine reporting I learned Scalia said that the Voting Rights Act, which is now before the Supreme Court, is some kind of "racial entitlement." People in the Court actually gasped and for good reason. The right of a black person to vote is an entitlement? I thought the right to vote was a right for everyone, not some special entitlement. So let's follow Maddow's historical journey on why the Act was created.

Did you hear about the new movie?

It's called GI Joe: Not Ready for Battle starring Sequester Stallone. Opening this Friday in a theater of operations near you.

Lakoff on why ultra-conservatives like the sequester

Here's why he thinks so, mixed with my take. They actually believe the Ayn Rand bullshit that succeeding is a rat race and the best (white) man (not woman) wins in some Darwinian jungle of the fittest. It is their moral belief that this is right and true, that everyone is responsible for themselves and if they have trouble well then damn it it's their own damned fault. So don't help them out; let the suffer and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. If they don't then they should die to make room for those fit enough for survival.

Congressional Progressive Caucus losing its nerve?

I signed Alan Grayson's petition for no cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, and posted a link for it on the blog. But according to this story 75% of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) have yet to sign a letter pledging not to cut these vital programs. What's up with that? The list of the cowards is here. I've championed the CPC as an example of how true progressives represent the people and not special interests. But on this one there is no excuse. Please consider contacting these deadbeats if they represent you and let them know your opinion. Thanks.

More on Gazzaniga

A few comments on the last post, then some new information. He is making a clear distinction between brains and minds. Brains are determined, people with minds are not, at least completely. This is in part because the mind is emergent and exerts downward causation on the brain and body. While constrained by the body and brain it is not reducible to it, i.e., the parts cannot fully explain the whole, which has emergent properties. Yes, there is still upward causation but there is also downward causation. Hence he thinks causation, still very much alive, goes both ways and it is in trying to see how so that is his main concern.

Michael Gazzaniga on consciousness, top-down causation, responsibility

Some excerpts from this article:

Quoting The Ethical Brain: "Should we abandon the concept of personal responsibility? I don't think so. We need to distinguish among brains, minds, and personhood. People are free and therefore responsible for their actions; brains are not responsible" (pp.88-89).

On his latest book, Who's In Charge: "Michael Gazzaniga reviews the extraordinary discoveries of neuroscience that explain the mind as something embodied in the brain, but also as software to the brain’s hardware, a kind of abstract non-physical information that is nevertheless capable of exerting 'downward causation' on the physical world. We live in a determined universe, he says, and the mind is not free from the causal laws of nature. But he finds the kind of freedom needed for moral responsibility is not some indeterminism inside the brain but in our social interactions.

How awareness changes...human decision making

Stanislas Dehaene was one of the researchers in the paper "How awareness changes the relative weights of evidence during human decision-making." Excerpts of the abstract follow:

"Human decisions are based on accumulating evidence over time for different options. Here we ask a simple question: How is the accumulation of evidence affected by the level of awareness of the information?... Our results indicate that the level of awareness of information changes decision-making: while accumulation of evidence already exists under low visibility conditions, high visibility allows evidence to be accumulated up to a higher level, leading to important strategical top-down changes in decision-making. Our results therefore suggest a potential role of awareness in deploying flexible strategies for biasing information acquisition in line with one’s expectations and goals."

And from the discussion:

Colbert on the "Friends of Hamas" hoax

Colbert exposes yet another regressive fantasy, of which there have been many, and will no doubt continue to be. Just the latest hoax in a never-ending cavalcade is that Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel is associated with the terrorist organization "Friends of Hamas." The story "broke" at breitbart.com and quickly spread throughout the regressive echo chamber like a wildfire during last summer's hottest on record due to climate change. Or to a regressive, just a bit warmer due to natural cycles or sun spots or perhaps even God Almighty punishing us for allowing them queer folk to marry. Anyway...

Aufhebung and Differance, or what difference does differance make?

Earlier in the OOO thread in this post Balder responded to my statement “Differance does not include ontotheology but rather refutes it” with this Derrida quote:

"Différance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological--ontotheological-- reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology--philosophy--produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return." (Derrida, "Différance," Margins of Philosophy, p.6.)

In my research today on Derrida's response to Hegel's dialectic I came upon this book made available electronically, Hegel After Derrida (Taylor and Francis, 2001). Chapter 10 is of relevance here, “Hegelian Dialectic and the Quasi-Transcendental in Glas” by Kevin Thompson, starting at p. 239. An excerpt relevant to Balder's quote with initial commentary follows.

Norris on Badiou on Derrida

Along the lines of  the the last post and its referenced thread (intra- and intertext intertwining...), I just read an article by Christopher Norris in the Speculations III, “Diagonals: Truth procedures in Derrida and Badiou.” Therein he explores Badiou's reading of Derrida, and how they are akin yet different. A few excerpts follow of relevance to the referenced discussion above.

“Badiou exempts Derrida from his otherwise sweeping condemnation of the linguistic turn in its sundry current guises as merely an update on old sophistical or cultural-relativist themes.... What is crucially different about Derrida’s commentaries on canonical texts from Plato to Husserl is his relentless teasing-out of aporetic or contradictory chains of logical implication” (157).

“Badiou is attracted not only by the rigour of Derrida’s work but also...by its quest for alternative, less sharply polarised terms of address or some means to shift argumentative ground from a downright clash of contradictory logics (within the text or amongst its commentators) to a 'space of flight,' as Badiou describes it, beyond all those vexing antinomies” (158).