Why Agnes Callard is always angry

In a paper titled 'The reason to be angry forever' Agnes Callard writes-  

We get angry for reasons—or, at any rate, for what we take to be reasons.

There may be a reason why we can be angry for no reason- e.g. we are drunk or have a brain tumour or something of that sort.  

If asked “why are you angry?” you will

head-butt the person asking you, at least you would if you lived on the Council Estate down the road.  

cite something (that you think) someone did or failed to do. That action or omission is what you are angry about. Getting angry is easy to understand:

for some people at some times but not for some others. Why get angry when what you really need to do is to get even? 

I wrong you, by, for example, betraying your trust; you find out and that makes you angry,

or you predicted I would do so and have a sanction already in place 

and now you are angry, at me, for having betrayed you. What is harder to understand is why you might cease to be angry.

Emotions are 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind'. They exist because they have survival value. By their nature, they are transitory though, no doubt, a particular person may be dysfunctional in this respect and thus be perpetually sad or perpetually angry or perpetually suspicious.  

Consider what I will call “the eternal anger argument”: P1: My betrayal of you at t1 is your reason for being angry with me at t2. P2: If it is true at t2 that I betrayed you at t1, then it will also be true at t3, t4, t5, and so on that I betrayed you at t1. Conclusion: If you have a reason to be angry with me, you will have a reason to be angry with me forever.

Consider the following- P1 My slapping you at t1 is your reason for feeling pain at t2. P2 If it is true at t2 that I slapped you at t1 and you felt pain at t2 then it will also be true that you will feel that pain at t3, t4 and even thirty years later.  Emotions are like physical sensations of pain or pleasure. You feel the pain of a slap for an hour or two. You feel the pleasant feeling of satiation for an hour or two after a meal. You don't feel them forever. 

What is wrong with P2? The answer is that the efficient cause of pain, or the feeling of pain, is internal to the body of the person in question. Callard is confusing the cause of a thing with a 'reason' people may give for what triggered that particular cause. I may say, x slapping you is the reason you to feel pain. Someone else might say the reason you feel pain is because you don't stand up for yourself. That is why your students keep slapping and punching you. A court of law, on the other hand, may come to the conclusion that the reason you suffered pain was because you pinched the bottom of a student who has a black belt in karate. You have only yourself to blame. 

The argument says that if I have generated a reason for you to be angry with me, then there is nothing I can now do to address that reason.

It is a stupid argument. You may apply a balm, real or metaphorical, to rid the other person of their anger or pain.  

For suppose that I offer compensation, apologize profusely, promise never to do it again, radically and convincingly transform my character. None of that seems to touch the thing you are angry about, which is that, at t1, I wronged you.

And at time t2 that wrong was righted. Consider what happens when a penis has a reason to become erect because entry into a nice vagina has become available to it. Will it remain perpetually erect because that reason continues to operate? In my case, sadly not. Similarly, if you say something I have reason to find funny and thus cause me to laugh aloud, it is not the case that I will keep laughing for all time even if my reason to find your remark funny continues to operate. 

It is still true that I did that, and it is still true that I shouldn’t have. Your reason for anger is eternal because I can’t change what you are angry about.

The reason may be eternal but the cause is ephemeral. Moreover, different people, or the same person at different times, may give a different reason for a physical or mental or emotional element. You slap me and say the reason is because I pinched your bum. I say the reason is coz you are a fucking Lesbian tramp. You remind me that you are the Headmaster of the school where I teach and, being of the male gender, could not possibly be Lesbian. I remind you that you supplied the drugs we have both been taking. We then agree that the true reason I got slapped was because of Neo-Liberalism.  

On one popular account of anger, the eternal anger argument is unsound because P1 is false.

It is false. Anger is an emotion which, by its nature, is ephemeral. What Callard is talking about is a grievance. One may be angry and yet have no grievance and vice versa. We may say that a grievance is unextinguished save by some act of forgiveness or equitable reparation.  

I will call this account the “problem-solving account.” The problem-solving account maintains that your reason for being angry with me is not simply the betrayal. Rather, your reason is constituted by some continuing problem generated by the betrayal, a problem your anger motivates you to resolve.

Callard is no longer talking about anger- which is an emotion. She is talking about 'being angry with'- which is an attitude- a hostile one- towards a particular person. That hostility may arise out of something the other person did or a problem they created which continues to vex you. But, for purely strategic reasons, one may choose to act in a hostile manner, or feign great anger towards, a class of people you have never interacted with. Equally, a schoolmaster who affects an irascible disposition and who perpetually appears about to blow this top may terrify his pupils into desisting from seeking to amend his ignorance concerning Pythagoras's theorem or other such shite.

On the problem-solving account, anger is desirelike:

Anger is more like sexual arousal. A sense of grievance is like the sense of desire. True, your grievance may end for the same reason that your desire may end- viz. that which provoked it is dying horribly of a disfiguring disease.  

It responds to reasons to make (what the agent perceives as) a positive change in the world.

What responds to such reasons is the desire to make positive changes in the world. Anger or grievance has nothing to do with it. 

If the reasons to be angry are reasons to, for example, take measures that prevent future violations of the relevant kind, then they will not be eternal.

No. They will still be reasons to be angry. It's just that there will be no further occasion for those reasons to come into operation. Thus if you find other people make you angry and you take steps to kill everybody, then the reason for your anger won't be other people. It may be something else- e.g. birds. Fuck you birds! Fuck you very much! 

Martha Nussbaum presents this as the correct account not of anger as such but of a species of anger she calls “transition anger.”

All emotions are transitory. A brief flare up of anger may leave one with a permanent sense of grievance and a persistent attitude of hostility. But anger is not the same thing as grievance or hostility. Both can arise without any experience of anger.  

Others have argued that anger is an attempt to protest a threatening message, to the effect that the victim is deserving of bad treatment; reverse the ongoing misbehavior of a wrongdoer who, in failing to apologize, acts as though the wrong were acceptable; get the wrongdoer to understand what he or she has done; be restored to the status from which the wrongdoing demoted one; and secure the wrongdoer’s commitment to the norm he or she violated.

Anger may certainly have these instrumental effects but so may shitting into your palms and flinging your faeces about. The problem with stupid shitheads seeking to philosophize anger is that anything proposition they advance can, salva veritate, also be applied to farting in a derisive and contemptuous manner or masturbating wistfully while gazing at a bowl of pomergranates. 

No doubt, Callard & Nussbaum's students are even now writing and publishing peer-reviewed papers on 'the reason to be forever farting noisily' or 'the reason to keep shitting into your palms and flinging your feces about'. 

On closer examination, Callard doesn't really has an argument. She is commenting on the fact that something which happened which didn't much matter and which doesn't much matter, nevertheless is something which happened. Thus, if a reason for something was given at time t and it was stupid and had no consequences whatsoever, then even fourteen thousand years later, it would still be the case that reason had been given. 

But, this really isn't a very interesting observation.

The argument doesn’t purport to establish that anger is eternal or even that it would be rational to be angry forever. Long-term anger is unpleasant, unattractive, and exhausting; one has many reasons for bringing it about that one’s anger cease. What the argument does try to show is that these reasons must leave the original reason to be angry in place.

Just as it must leave the fact that a chipmunk in Canada farted in 1922 or, if that is not the case, then I made a claim to that effect. Moreover, if you think the reason I did so was because I am Jennifer Aniston then that reason would also be 'left in place' by the entire destruction of the multiverse which I have a very foolish reason to believe occurred in 2013. Even if that isn't true, my foolish reason is left in place.  

If the argument works, it follows that a person gives up his or her anger

which is like giving up on peeing because there is nothing left in your bladder  

not because the issue has been resolved or even addressed in any way but merely because,

anger is ephemeral though a grievance may not be 

for example, he or she sees that he or she will be better off in a nonangry condition. Pragmatic reasons for ceasing to be angry have positive counterparts:

reasons aren't causes. You may have a very good reason for go to work but you may end up taking taking drugs and watching TV because you are a lazy sod.  

pragmatic reasons to get angry. (For example, I work myself into an angry state before entering the car dealership, in the belief that a menacing appearance will put me in an improved negotiating position.)

The cause of your doing this is the fact that you are as stupid as shit. No doubt stupid reasons to not shit yourself at the car dealership- e.g. thinking your Bank Manager will feel offended because you did not favour him in this way- have equally stupid positive counterparts- e.g. shitting yourself in the hope that the salesman mistakes you for Joe Biden and gives you a car for free. 

If the eternal anger argument is correct,

then, a reason, however stupid, is a cause. Thus if you can give the Andromeda Galaxy a reason- e.g. better feng shui- to move a few thousand light years to the right- this would cause it to do precisely that.  

The fact is we don't know the cause of anything or the reason for anything. We merely have reliable correlations and hypothesis which as yet have not been refuted. Callard is making a category mistake. She is confusing something epistemic- viz. reasons- with things which subsist in the material world- viz. causes. 

proper (i.e., nonpragmatic) reasons for anger—reasons akin to those cited in P1—have no negative counterparts.

Sure they do. One can just as easily say 'x was angry because y betrayed her' or 'x was sad because y betrayed her. That's why she showed no anger.' 

Callard invokes Aristotle- 

Anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one’s friends. . . .

Aristotle is wrong. Anger is an emotion, not an impulse. There is a separate impulse towards revenge but it may involve hilarity or boredom. True, the connotations of the word he used for anger “orgy” (ὀργή) were different and related to thymos as a specific type of orexis (ὄρεξις) which is the type of desire we regard as motivating action.

It must always be attended by a certain pleasure—that which arises from the expectation of revenge.

Aristotle had shit for brains. But, in his line of work, that was an advantage.  Still, I suppose his most famous pupil had a very bad temper. Perhaps this was because he was young and drank way too much. 

For since nobody aims at what he thinks he cannot attain, the angry man is aiming at what he can attain, and the belief that you will attain your aim is pleasant. Hence it has been well said about wrath, Sweeter it is by far than the honeycomb dripping with sweetness, And spreads through the hearts of men.

The Indians considered anger 'a small pleasure'. Still, as we get older we derive this small pleasure from reading the sort of shite Professors of useless subjects produce so as to bring further disgrace upon their disciplines.  

Anger, like other emotions, serve a signalling function. Mum has to pretend to be very angry you failed your Math exam when, secretly, she is pleased you didn't shit yourself the way you did in Remedial English. 

Angry people are, of course, motivated to seek revenge or apology or restitution, and they are sometimes moved to prevent future infractions.

I think anger is a signal that the course of action taken towards a specific person is not to be to be seen as a routine modus operandi. The gangster takes pains to differentiate between murders he commits because he has been dis-respected from those which are 'only business'.  

But anger does not, in the first instance, seem to be a response to the fact that some wrong action hasn’t yet been avenged, apologized for, or disavowed, or that it may recur in the future. Rather, it seems to be a way of concerning oneself with the (unchangeable) fact that some wrong was done.

That would be the case if anger persisted after revenge had been taken. Alexander killed Cleitus in a fit of anger. He then felt remorse. He did not continue to brood on the things Cleitus had said which offended him. His anger had abated and so had his sense of injury or grievance. What took its place was grief and regret. 

Simulated anger or indignation can serve a signalling function of the sort Callard mentions. Thus a person who had relatives who perished in the Shoah might say to his son, 'never stop being angry about what happened. Be ever vigilant to ensure it does not happen again. You may forgive. You must never forget.' 

However, in this case, we are no longer speaking of an emotion. We are speaking of having a reason to cultivate an emotion in a specific context.  The problem is that it is strategic. If you cultivate a grievance, others may cultivate an equal and opposite grievance. The thing is like a 'threat point' and there can be an arms-race between threat points. But, this is 'wasteful competition'. One can outsource anger or grievance. Some other sap may be accorded the onerous duty of anger, grievance and hostility. If wrongs exist and are immutable, they concern only those who fall below the threshold of recompense. I suppose this is Callard's argument for eternal anger. Since those who teach philosophy are thralls to the most sub-human of the Humanities, let them perpetually seethe in their own impotent fury. 

Punkass Mishra on Teutonic philosemitism vs Socialist Corpophagy

 After the Second World War, Germany was shorn of much territory and was partitioned and occupied. The East was under Soviet control. Since Stalin was initially supportive of Israel, East Germany was initially positive in its attitude to Israel but became hostile from about 1956 onward because of the Suez crisis when Israel allied with Britain and France to attack Nasser's Egypt. Since West Germany was under American control, it was anxious to appease the Israelis though the latter country only agreed to exchange Ambassadors in 1965. The East never had diplomatic relations with Israel. 

Nazi Germany was not the only country which persecuted Jews. However, countries like Romania, whose War-time regime was even more unhinged than that of Germany, were quick to establish diplomatic relations with the newly created Israel. The Czechs were particularly important in supplying weapons during its first war in 1948. However, like Poland and other Warsaw pact countries it severed relations with Israel in 1967. Romania was the exception because Ceaucescu wanted to be seen as taking an independent line.

Pankaj Mishra has an article, taken from his latest book, in the Guardian on

Israel and the delusions of Germany’s ‘memory culture’

Since there is no such thing as a 'memory culture', the article is deluded. West Germany had to do what its occupiers wanted it to do while East Germany had to do what the Soviets told it to do. The only memory that counted was the memory of being defeated twice. What reinforced this memory was the presence of occupying Armies on German soil. 

Germany embraced Israel to atone for its wartime guilt. But was this in part a way to avoid truly confronting its past?

West Germany sucked up to the Israelis because that's what the Allied occupying armies wanted. Indeed France was a bigger supplier of arms (and probably cooperated with Israel to gain nuclear weapons) to Israel than America till the mid Sixties. Still, I suppose it is true to say that it was Israel's victory in 1967 which put an end to old fashioned anti-Semitism. Clearly the Jews were a martial people. However, attitudes to Israel were a function of Cold War politics. Nobody gives a fuck about 'atoning' for or 'confronting' the past. 

After the second world war, Germany’s

West Germany's 

contrition and radical self-cleansing, under allied supervision, as the chief tormentor of European Jews ought to have been straightforward.

It was.  The Americans had plenty of money of their own and thus let the West Germans off lightly when it came to reparations. Germany made a one-off payment to Israel which, with hindsight, was cheap at the price. Thanks to the Cold War, 'de-Nazification' was halted or reversed. Still, the intelligentsia in the West were fearful of the supposed attractions of the Communist ideology. After the Russians gave up on Nasser, East Germany stepped in as the biggest supporter of the Palestinian terrorists and this spilled over into their recruitment of nutters like the Baader Meinhoff gang. Thankfully, the young lost interest in that type of stupidity. There was sympathy for the Israelis athletes killed in Munich. More importantly, Israel's policy of reprisals was admired. Nevertheless, most West Germans were not greatly concerned with the Shoah till the Holocaust TV series (starring Meryl Streep) was broadcast there in 1979. Since Germans had become 'materialistic' rather than 'martial', they felt themselves to be the new Jews. Nothing wrong with that. After all, Christ was a Jew- rejected by the Jews- and thus appropriable by Aryans. 

No country, however, matches its convoluted journey from ground zero in 1945 to Gaza today.

Nonsense! West Germany followed a consistent line. East Germany, like other Warsaw Pact countries, did not. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, everybody was on the same page. America, from time to time, was bound to bomb the fuck out of A-rabs. The same goes for Israel. If we are on America's side, we are on Israel's side.  

In recent decades, solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the very foundation of its collective identity.

Fuck off! Germans are proud- or were proud- of their cars and capital goods.  The foundation of Germany's collective identity has to do with economics, not talking bollocks. 

Particularly since German reunification, a Shoah-centred memory has been comprehensively institutionalised.

So as to civilize those knuckle-draggers in the East. The West Germans eagerly bought into AJP Taylor's theory that the good German was the Rhinelander. It was the Junkers from agricultural East Prussia who had started both wars and been responsible for any beastliness. 

School curriculums and calendars emphasise anniversaries such as 27 January (the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz)

Auschwitz is in the East. German Schools had to teach the Holocaust from 1992 onward. Why? Reunification.  

and 8 May (the final surrender of the Nazis). Monuments, memorials and museums across the country commemorate the victims of German crimes. A resonant symbol of this memory culture is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate in the capital, Berlin, probably the only major national monument to commemorate the victims of a nation rather than the nation itself.

It must be said, it was a great stroke of Germanic wit to give a big contract, in this connection, to the firm which produced Zyklon-B. Still, in a certain sense, the Memorial was timely. Its concrete soon started to crack. The message was clear. German infrastructure was failing. Thankfully, the politicians were able to ignore this completely. 

In 2008, the then German chancellor, Angela Merkel, claimed before the Knesset that ensuring Israel’s security was part of Germany’s Staatsräson, or raison d’état.

She was a deeply silly person.  Still, she was from the East and so people were grateful she didn't try to kill and eat the American ambassador. 

The phrase was repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders after 7 October 2023. Less than two months before the Hamas offensive, Israel had secured, with American blessing, its largest ever arms deal with Germany. German arms sales to Israel surged tenfold in 2023; the vast majority of sales were approved after 7 October, and fast-tracked by German officials who insisted that permits for arms exports to Israel would receive special consideration.

Biden, it must be said, had been very quick off the mark air-lifting weapons to Israel. Mishra is puzzled as to why a NATO country would follow suit. Perhaps it is because of something Robert Musil said to Hannah's Aunt.  

As Israel began to bomb homes, refugee camps, schools, hospitals, mosques and churches in Gaza, and Israeli cabinet ministers promoted their schemes for ethnic cleansing,

NO! Israel is roasting and eating Palestinian babies! Did you know that 80 percent of all falafels sold in Tel Aviv are actually LGBTQ Palestinian dissidents who are screaming loudly even as heartless Islamophobes dip them in ketchup and munch upon them?  

the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, reiterated the national orthodoxy: “Israel is a country that is committed to human rights and international law and acts accordingly.”

Compared to Hamas, the IDF truly are angels. Still, maybe angels aren't the need of the hour.  

As Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign of indiscriminate murder and destruction

not to mention the indiscriminate sale of LGBTQ disabled Palestinian dissidents to hungry people who eat them, despite their vociferous protests, under the impression that they are falafel.  

intensified, Ingo Gerhartz, the head of the German air force, or Luftwaffe, arrived in Tel Aviv hailing the “accuracy” of Israeli pilots; he also had himself photographed, in uniform, donating blood for Israeli soldiers.

I suppose he bombed plenty of Muslims in Afghanistan and thus looks upon the Israelis with a fond eye.  

The German health minister, Karl Lauterbach, approvingly retweeted a video in which an English far-right agitator claims that the Nazis were more decent than Hamas. Die Welt claimed that “Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler” and Die Zeit alerted German readers to the apparently outrageous fact that “Greta Thunberg openly sympathises with the Palestinians”.

Nothing wrong in any of that. Mishra's own people are strong supporters of Israel. Genocidal Islamists aren't greatly liked by kaffirs.  

Visiting Germany after the war, the philosopher Hannah Arendt

who was as stupid as shit 

confessed to being “oppressed by a kind of pervasive public stupidity

it was called being German and having studied stupid shite at Uni 

which cannot be trusted to judge correctly the most elementary events ... A great number of Germans,” she wrote, “especially among the more educated, apparently are no longer capable of telling the truth even if they want to.”

She was incapable of telling the truth- which was that she liked dollars and would publish any old shite to get more of them.  

Witnessing the German public sphere in recent months,

Mishra is a public urinal in Berlin and thus has been witnessing a lot 

it was hard to resist a similarly damning conclusion:

Those who come to such conclusions are damned indeed.  

that self-righteous hypocrisy had been normalised enough to turn into a mode of governance and thought.

When has this not been the case? Mishra himself is self-righteous. He does not say 'I escaped from India- which Socialism had turned into a shithole- so as to thrive in Thatcher's England. 

As hypocrisy lapsed into self-deception,

The Germans have woken up to their parlous economic position and have reversed course on migration 

and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) led a dramatic reshaping of the country’s politics and culture,

the country has no alternative but to change course. 

it was also hard not to think about Germany’s past and to fear for the political future of Europe’s most important country.

Mishra is incapable of thought.  

“In less than six years,” Arendt marvelled, “Germany laid waste the moral structure of western society, committing crimes that nobody would have believed possible.”

Arendt liked the 'moral structure' of Jim Crow America. This is because America was rich. 

With the intimacy and bluntness of a former insider,

she ran away when Hitler came to power. She may have been stupid but she had a great survival instinct. 

she recorded that a “general lack of emotion, at any rate this apparent heartlessness, sometimes covered over with cheap sentimentality, is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened”.

What really happened was that Germany tried to conquer a lot of territory so as to get rich. It failed. Boo fucking hoo.  

Such mentalities were partly manifest in German treatment of the Jewish displaced persons. They were still languishing in West Germany in 1952, when the Bavarian customs police launched a raid on a displaced persons camp.

This was the Fohrenwald camp which had recently come under the control of the FRG. Most of the Jews there were from Russia or East Europe. They feared being sent back behind the Iron Curtain- where they would swiftly be killed. Also, they had heard things weren't really very comfortable in Israel. Still, there was little sympathy for them. The feeling was that the Allies had taken their pick of those capable of manual work and only the dregs remained.  

The assault had, according to the Manchester Guardian, “all the trademarks of Nazi descents on the ghettos of Berlin and Frankfurt in the past”.

The Brits knew their own soldiers had used anti-Semitic language when beating the shit out of Jewish rioters in Palestine. Soldiers will be soldiers. As for the police- don't get me started.  

As the newspaper reported, quoting the camp committee, “policemen yelled such slogans as: ‘The crematoria are still there’, ‘The gas chambers are waiting for you’, and: ‘This time you really will get it in the neck, you damned Jews.’” In communist-run East Germany, antisemitism was more subtle,

Fuck off! Erich Nelhans, the leader of the East German Jews, was sentenced to 25 years hard labour for allegedly helping Jewish Red Army soldiers to escape to the West. Still, one might say that there was a brief period- ending with the Slansky trial in Prague in 1952- when it appeared that East German Jews might be coopted by the Communist regime. After Stalin's death, official anti-semitism was moderated but, by then, Jews in the East had no illusions as to their fate if they tried to gain a political voice. However, there were some Communist intellectuals and artists who did well in the GDR. 

if not less lethal, closely mimicking Stalin’s campaign against “cosmopolitans”, which assumed that most Jews were potential spies.

 Some were spies- for the Soviets- e.g. Jurgen Kuczysnski who, while serving in the US military, recruited Karl Fuchs.

At the same time, as an American military officer told the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, many Germans were acting “as though the Nazis were a strange race of Eskimos who came down from the north pole and somehow invaded Germany”.

Whereas Americans acted as though the indigenous people were some strange race illegally occupying territory God had destined for the WASP.  

Bourke-White herself remarked: “I have yet to find a German who will admit to being a Nazi.”

Because De-Nazification was a real thing back then.  

As late as 1949, the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote to Thomas Mann that aside from a “couple of total and touching puppet-like villains”, he hadn’t met a Nazi yet, “not simply in the ironic sense that people will not admit to having been Nazis, but in the far more disturbing sense that they believe they never were Nazis”.

They only joined the Party because they were drunk and lost a bet.  

In his 2002 book Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, Norbert Frei painstakingly measures the depth and the breadth in the early postwar years of popular German sentiment against prosecuting criminals of the Nazi era or ejecting tainted elites out of positions of power.

Send Uncle Willi to jail? No! He used to bring us chocolates.  

In West Germany, according to the British historian Mary Fulbrook, of the nearly 1 million people who “were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians” (the number of enablers was much higher), “only 6,656 were convicted of Nazi crimes” – “fewer even than the number of people who had been employed at Auschwitz alone”. By the end of the 20th century, only 164 individuals had been sentenced for the crime of murder – of 6 million Jews.

So what? There was a collective punishment. Germany lost territory.  

In a March 2024 article for Dissent, the historian Hans Kundnani wrote: “By the mid-1950s, the elite in the civil service, judiciary, and academia had largely reverted to that of the Third Reich.

The same thing happened in Japan. Why? The answer is- the Cold War.  

Many young people growing up in west Germany felt they were ‘surrounded by Nazis’, as one person I interviewed put it.

Also the neighbour's cat was keeping them under surveillance. Did it report to Mossad or was it the CIA?  

By the mid-1960s, they had begun to see not just personal continuities but structural ones: the federal republic was a fascist, or at least ‘pre-fascist’, state. The student movement emerged as a protest against these real and imagined continuities.”

It truly was shit. Fuck off to the GDR if you hate Fascism so much. I suppose Brandt's 'Ostpolitik' and the suspicion that Barzel's bid to bring him down was defeated thanks to bribes paid by the Stasi, defused Student radicalism. No root and branch reform was possible. Indeed, it might not be desirable.  

When in March 1960, the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York, he had not only been presiding over a systematic reversal of the denazification process decreed by the country’s western occupiers in 1945,

those Western occupiers changed tack as the Iron curtain came down. 

he had also been aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust.

Nobody gave a fuck about it. What India's partition showed the world was that genocide was more cheaply done with agricultural implements.  

The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had “joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could”.

Also, most Germans under Nazi rule spoke Chinese as their mother tongue. 

In September 1952, Adenauer had agreed to a deal that would compensate the state of Israel to the extent of some 3.5bn Deutschmarks. The deal was not popular: in 1951, only 5% of Germans had admitted to guilt over the fate of the Jews, and 21% thought that “the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich”. More embarrassingly, some in Adenauer’s own party voted against the deal.

It was pushed through only because the SDs were unanimous in supporting it. The truth is, it was a good deal for both sides. Still, it was America which decided the issue.  

Nevertheless, Adenauer’s language at his meeting with Ben-Gurion was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a “fortress of the west”, adding: “I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.”

Jews wanted to be left alone. Still, I suppose a German Chancellor can't help sounding sinister even if he is trying to be friendly.  

The German chancellor possessed the typical worldview of a western colonialist:

as opposed to Eastern colonialists who believe you should hand over cash and territory to anybody who wants it. 

as vice president of the German Colonial Society

which was big in Cologne because Catholic Missionaries from there kept going off to Africa. Sadly, few were eaten by the natives. In dietary matters, Africans can be a little too fastidious. By contrast, Israelis eagerly devour LGBTQ Palestinian dissidents claiming them to be falafel. Mishra Sahib is remiss in not pointing this out. It is ILLEGAL to eat Lesbian Muslims! Kindly desist from this loathsome practice! As Robert Musil said to Hannah's Aunt 'Stop chowing down on the Begum of Bhopal! Kant would so not have approved.'  

he had urged the German reich to possess colonies in order to create more living space for the German people. But, as the cold war intensified, he was also convinced that Germany’s “long road west” – the title of historian Heinrich Winkler’s bestselling book about German history – lay through Israel. “The power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated,” he said after his retirement. West Germany moved quickly along that road west after 1960, becoming a major supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation.

The Arab League threatened to boycott the Germans. They they realized they would be cutting off their own nose to spite their face.  

The postwar German-Israeli symbiosis was at the centre of the “unprincipled political gamesmanship”, in Primo Levi’s bitter words, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known.

Fuck off! The FRG, like Japan, was rehabilitated by the Cold War. So was Franco's Spain. 

By the mid-1960s, when the Jewish Austrian writer Jean Améry travelled through Germany, the country was savouring its so-called economic miracle,

West Germany had been quicker off the mark in getting back to a market economy.  

partly due to the American loans that were also sparking a broader European recovery.

Marshall plan assistance ended in 1953. Adenauer's reparation payment to Israel meant the Americans were willing to take a bigger haircut on those loans.

In “the industrial paradise of the New Europe”, Améry found himself unexpectedly discussing the latest European and American novels with Germany’s “refined” intellectuals.

As opposed to illiterate hobos.  

Yet the survivor of Auschwitz could not expunge from his memory the “stony faces” of Germans before a pile of corpses at a railway platform or of the Flemish SS man who beat him on the head with a shovel handle whenever he didn’t work fast enough.

Sadly, Mishra has no such memories.  

And he would discover that in this “thriving land”, he bore a new “grudge” against Germans and their exalted place in the “majestic halls of the west”.

The Soviets had decided that they were losing money on their bit of Austria and thus permitted its reunification. It too did well materially and, thankfully, remained as xenophobic as ever.  

The flip side of west Germany’s accommodation of Nazis was what Améry called an “obtrusive philosemitism”.

Unlike good old-fashioned Jew baiting in Vienna. 

Why did anti-Semitism in Europe get replaced by admiration for Jews? The answer is obvious. Jews were smart and talented. The more education you get, the more likely it is that your intellectual or artistic heroes will disproportionately feature Jews. We might say 'philosemitism is highly income elastic as is education.' Mishra won't accept this obvious point. 

As the historian Frank Stern unsparingly diagnosed in 1992 in The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge, German philosemitism is primarily a “political instrument”, used not only to “justify options in foreign policy”, but also “to evoke and project a moral stance in times when domestic tranquillity is threatened by antisemitic, anti-democratic and rightwing extremist phenomena”.

This is nonsense. Support for Jews and Homosexuals and women who want to go to school rather than sit at home behind a 'purdah' has to do with

1) raising productivity rather than doing stupid shit

2) opposing Islamic nutters who might want to chop our heads off.  

Thus, German Israelphilia and philosemitism is peaking just as there is again a recrudescence in Germany of far-right furies.

By 'far-right' Mishra means people like Rishi Sunak who supported Brexit. 

This perverse dialectic helps explain why, while commemorating the Shoah and proclaiming its undying support for Israel, Germany ignores the atrocities Germans inflicted on Asians and Africans during the brief rampages of German colonialism.

It also ignores Mishra. Surely, that is the biggest atrocity here? 

The political and moral deformations and intellectual helplessness of

Mishra. He is as stupid as shit. 

Germany today are more dangerous than at any other time since 1945.

Germany wasn't dangerous in 1945. It was as weak as a kitten. 

The AfD is no aberration;

Priti Patel is worse. 

it benefits from a broadening lurch to the extreme right among mainstream politicians and journalists.

Rishi Sunak was so 'extreme right' he practiced 'Hinduism'. Did you know that it is an 'Aryan' religion? Swastika is a Sanskrit word.  

The likely next German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats, has recently broken the German mainstream’s “firewall” against the AfD, promising to work with politicians overfond of Nazi slogans and salutes.

So what? Kiesinger was a member of the Nazi Party. He served as Chancellor from '66 to '69. There has never been any fucking 'firewall'. What happened, after reunification, was that there was a fear the East Germans, unused as they were to Democracy, would go astray. That's one reason Merkel was made Chancellor. Then, she fucked up. There has been a political back-lash against refugees because of the horrific actions of a small number of them. Still, Europe has to seal its borders one way or the other. All we can hope is that it is done in a legal and responsible manner and there is no more virtue signalling on what- for desperate people- really is a matter of life or death. 

Meanwhile, German courts are trying a far-right group for plotting the violent overthrow of the government.

Some Germans be kray kray. Who knew? 

The country that laid waste the moral structure of western society looks feeble again

to Mishra's feeble intellect 

before the economic crises and social breakdowns of capitalism that first produced fascism.

There we have it. First we must bring down Capitalism and then build up Socialism by eating only our own shit.  

Worse: Germany’s long road west now leads straight to Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

No. America's road led to them.  

Germany’s pre-eminent philosopher

which is like saying 'The Taliban's foremost Feminist'  

Jürgen Habermas

who had shit for brains 

once hailed the “unconditional opening of the federal republic to the political culture of the west” as the most important achievement of postwar Germany.

Actually, reunification was an achievement as was going into the Euro under-valued.  

According to this argument, Germans had strayed too far off the road to the west and ended up committing monstrous crimes.

Crimes don't matter. Losing wars does.  

Thus Habermas lauded an exemplary “western civilisation” from which Germans had unwisely dissociated themselves.

Nonsense! Even under the Nazis, they were part of 'Western Civilization'. Israelis felt a bit foolish for banning Karajan & the Berlin Philharmonic.  

Germans could become part of a superior west again by putting the Shoah and undying commitment to Israel at the centre of their collective identity and by renouncing ethnonationalism.

Also they should eat only their own shit. Only thus can true Socialism be achieved.  

But this entire framework for understanding the world, and Germany’s place in it,

is as stupid as shit. Economics matters. Military and Diplomatic strategy matters. Saying everybody should feel deep remorse for stuff that happened long ago is mere virtue signalling of a type we have grown tired of.  

has been tottering in recent years. Habermas and others have convinced themselves their country safely converted to liberalism on its high road to the west through Israel; they don’t, however, seem to ponder the fact that the old idea of the west has never seemed more incoherent and unconvincing.

Says a guy who lost little time in getting the fuck out of Socialist India and settling in the West.  

Refined during the cold war, this conception of the west had a large, self-flattering Anglo-American component, signifying electoral democracy, free markets and individual freedoms, in contrast to totalitarian regimes. But the US has lurched in the last decade from calamitously failed wars to far-right demagoguery, and Britain, deceived by blustery rogues into Brexit, is unlikely to recover soon from an extreme act of self-harm. The “political culture of the west” does not inspire great admiration even within the west today.

Which is why Mishra is packing his bags to return to a UP ruled by Yogiji.  

 As Günter Grass wrote in his 2002 novel Crabwalk: “History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.”

This is why German peeps should kindly listen to Mishraji. He is telling you to abandon Capitalism and establish TRUE Socialism by eating only your own shit. That way, you won't need toilets. Guess who keeps building toilets? Narendra Modi! That proves toilets are totes Fascist.  

Agnes Callard & the Mexican Donkey.

If there is no further frontier for Metaphysical 'Realism' (which means the opposite of what a lay-person would think. Ideas are real. Reality isn't.) than Plato, then, equally, there is no further frontier to 'critical' philosophy of a Nominalist type than Kant. But Kant in his last days (this is the Opus Postumum) was trying to 'transition from metaphysics to physics'. It is in these 'fascicles' where we find, by a series of redefinitions the notion that, in the final analysis, Transcendental Philosophy is "galvanism" (AA XXI, 133, 135) and its principle is "Zoroaster".

 Interestingly, the first volume of Nietzsche's 'Thus spake ' appeared about a year after the first publication of the fascicles. 

Previously, even if a canonical text was posthumous or fragmentary, it had a school, or schools of a factional type, of interpretation and transmission. This, the Opus Postumum lacked. To carry forward Kant's project would involve seeking 'galvanism' or a 'daimon' or 'tutelary genius' of one's own- except it could not be, as the daimon of Socrates was, parochial or confined to one self-destined to be a qurban, pharmakos, scape-goat sacrifice carrying off the sins of a particular Polis to which the author was natal. It had to be something vaguer, perhaps, more mischievous. 

Christ, of course, is also a pharmakos but his Ascension is the bridge between Metaphysics and Physics and, moreover, the imitation of Christ requires no further scapegoat because it is in essence non-rival. Salva veritate, we may say that Girardian mimetic, only applies to Athens not Jerusalem. As Nietzsche remarked- it was purely Hellenic to say, as did the Ephesians at the banning of Hermodor-  ‘Amongst us, nobody should be the best; but if somebody is, let him be somewhere else, with other people.’ Here, the merely mathematical economics of Tardean emulation demands a homo sacer who, Rene Girard tells us, must be killed again and again so as to prevent the Metropole, like Canetti's anthill, burning itself down in the universal conflagration of its own constitutive mimetic desire. 

For working class people in Europe, including illiterate Hindutva nutjobs like me, Socrates is redeemed by Christ as indeed was Greece and many other great Nations. There is a great chain of Being linking the daimon of Desdemona and the qareen of Suqrat and Kant's Zoroaster and Nietzsche's Syphilis and even my own hooligan Socioproctology. 

I'm lying. The truth is, it is the bride of Christ- the Church- which does, or did till it got 'woke', the heavy lifting. 

I suppose one may say hierogamy- e.g. the ever fractal or else mise en abyme marriage between Cupid & Psyche- is epistemic and 'aspirational'. Sadly, that knowledge is unavailing and those aspirations a but primrose path to pompous vacuity.

As a case in point, consider this New Statesman interview with Agnes Callard, who, having married her student, considers conjugal life in reality to, by some magic, or arbitrary assertion, become univocal with the 'conjugacy class' of some particularly bulimic or coprophagous stripe of Psilosophy. 

In the acknowledgements at the end of her new book, Open Socrates, the philosopher Agnes Callard writes: “Socrates compares writing down one’s ideas to planting seeds in barren soil from which nothing can grow: pointless.”

The context is that writing things down is not enough. You must ensure there is a chain of interpretation, exposition or criticism such that the thing remains intelligible and is used for its proper purpose. Plato has an obvious interest in making this argument because he had set up an Academy. More generally, along with a revealed or otherwise canonical text- e.g. Euclid- there is a class of people eligible to expound or explain it.  

“Socrates says in a couple of places in late dialogues: thinking is like having a conversation with yourself,”

Even Socrates wasn't foolish enough to say this to himself. He said it to somebody else. Why? He was explaining that he wasn't just chatting with his interlocutor as a way to pass the time. He was speaking aloud about some internal cogitation of his own which was not connected to the fact that he was talking to an attractive boy rather than some elderly bore with a long beard.  

Callard told me when we met at her hotel in London’s Marylebone. “Fundamentally there’s conversation, and then thinking is an imitation of that.

No. Socratic dialogues aren't conversations. They are more like soliloquies or lectures on an abstract topic. The form of that thinking might be dialogic or dialectical- i.e. featuring thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis- and there was an open question as to whether geometry and jurisprudence were what we would call 'natural' deductive systems.  What isn't the case is that people think in the manner that they chat with people. Chatting often involves suppressing or dissimulating thinking or the appearance of thinking. 

And we can get some way through that imitation.” Writing, too, is an (ultimately inadequate) imitation of conversation.

No. There was a style of writing which was conversational or thrown into the mould of a dialogue. But there were other styles- e.g. the lyric, the epic, the oracular, the mystic, the satirical, the fantastic and the wholly nonsensical. 

When it comes to a dogma, it is important that there is both a text and a class of expositors or elucidators of that text. The fear was that 'infidels' or the 'uninitiated' might use the text we hold to be sacred or canonical for their own, very different, purposes. Furthermore, there was often an esoteric doctrine- or the claim that such a thing existed- alongside the exoteric aspect of the text. Thus, it was believed in medieval times that Plato and Socrates had super-natural powers.  

It is idiosyncratic to acknowledge, at the very end of a book, that you believe it to be such a limited medium.

No. Agnes is saying that if you spend a lot of money taking her courses at Uni, you will gain something which the mere Amazon customer will not. Agnes is lying.  

But Callard is an idiosyncratic thinker.

She is an imbecile.  

She began her answer to my first question – about why she chose to be a public philosopher

as opposed to one who could make technical advances and thus gain the esteem of her colleagues.  

– with the caveat that “whenever you explain yourself, you’re just giving a theory among many theories”.

No. When you explain why you did something, you are giving a 'privileged' account which can rely on your own knowledge of your internal states and motivations. True, your 'privileged' account may be inconsistent or stretch our credulity. In a Court of Law, a Judge may substitute a more reasonable theory for the one offered by the defendant so as to establish motive.  

She described history as her “Achilles’ heel” because it “is not in the right order, it’s just in the order that things happened” –

This isn't a big problem. You can have a notion of the underlying configuration space and specific 'frictions' or 'singularities' with it so as to explain why things did not proceed in their logical order- e.g.  abolition of slavery in Indian territory came after its end in the Confederacy even though the Indian Tribes were militarily much weaker. 

perhaps the logical order to most. Yet she is frustrated that “it’s not in the order of importance or in the logical order of ideas”.

It seems illogical that Ceylon gave women the vote 14 years before the French did or that Ottoman Turkey was more progressive in its attitude to Homosexuality than 'Liberal' Britain or the USA. However, if we have a grasp of the political configuration space, we can easily understand why such seeming anomalies arose. 

Open Socrates is Callard’s second book, but she is perhaps better known

as the tenured Professor with lots of babies who is as stupid as shit. Maybe she is neurologically diverse or was molested as a child. 

for her popular essays on topics such as parenting, infidelity and why travel is a very poor means of self-discovery, and for being the subject of a 2023 New Yorker profile. In it, the philosopher allowed a considerable level of access to her private life, detailing how she fell in love with, married and had a baby with one of her students, divorcing her first husband and the father of her two eldest children in the process. Eventually, they all moved in together, and Callard and her second husband opened up their marriage.

That's perfectly sensible. People should have lots of babies and Dads should stay close to their kids. That way we won't keep having to import people from faraway countries who look down on us because we are lazy, stupid, and have the morals of an alley cat. Vivek Ramaswamy, this means you. Fuck off back to Palghat instead of lecturing us on our terrible work ethic.  

When I asked why she had agreed to do the profile,

publicity. That means selling more books. Money comes in handy when you have lots of kids. We admire Callard for having babies and keeping the Dads around while bringing more and more money into the household. True, she is a cretin but since she teaches a worthless subject, there is no 'opportunity cost' here.  

Callard posed a secondary question: “Why didn’t I, when [the journalist, Rachel Aviv] came to questions about my personal life, say: ‘I won’t answer those things?’

The answer is obvious. If you don't talk to journalists they will talk to people who know you. Mums, in particular, tend to dwell on your problems with toilet training even though, nowadays, it is perfectly acceptable to skip that soi disant 'pediatric development goal' and just wear adult diapers all your life. Also, there's no law saying you have to learn how tie your own shoe-laces. I sometimes wonder why I am not a tenured professor of Philosophy. Is it coz iz bleck? 

One part of the answer is the questions were interesting, so I was interested to hear what I was going to say. I think that I am probably less inclined to shield my personal life from my interlocutors:

This suggests Agnes doesn't have a lot of skeletons in her cupboard. Even if this isn't the case, she did the right thing. The fact is, she has had babies. We like babies. She has ensured the Daddies are in the picture- indeed, they are in the house. That's great. Kids need parents who get on well with each other. Nobody cares who is fucking who provided the kids get to skool with nutritious packed lunches.  

if that’s what they want to talk about then there’s probably something interesting there, something worth investigating.”

That is perfectly sensible. I recall being interviewed by a lady doing a thesis on the impact of 'Art Therapy' on people who had been diagnosed with Depression. It turned out that she wasn't interested in how often I had suicidal ideation and whether this causes me to masturbate while weeping and watching documentaries about large aquatic mammals. Instead, she asked me a very interesting question 'Was I depressed?'. I discovered I wasn't. It's just that I find people cheer up when I tell them I am planning to top myself soon. The general attitude seems to be that it can't be soon enough. As for the stuff about large aquatic mammals, I threw that in just to add a touch of verisimilitude. 

This approach to inquiry is at the heart of the Socratic method.

No it isn't. Socrates sets the agenda and manipulates things so as to get to where he wants the dialogue to go. True, smart peeps, like Parmenides, get the better of him but that suited Plato's purpose.  

We tend to consider thought a private, insular activity, but, Callard writes, Socrates found that “the key to getting unstuck” is to relocate thought “from its usual home inside one person’s head into the shared space of the conversation that passes between two people”.

No. For Socrates, what was crucial was the 'palinode'. You start of going in one direction, but then find, thanks to the prompting of your daimonion or peculiar genius, that you must reverse course. One can think of this as rowing in one direction because there is no wind, but then, when the wind springs up, you unfurl your sail and though your direction is now different, you are upon an arc which gets to where you want to go faster and with less effort. Socrates says rowing is like categorical thinking. It is sub-optimal but it may be your best option when there is no wind to belly out your sails.  

Together, we can answer questions that we could never examine on our own.

No. We can examine things on our own and, if we have one piece of a possible solution and a guy working in some other field appears to have the other part of it, maybe we can answer the question together. Socrates never says that his own 'synoida' is something he gained in conversation. This is similar to but different from Stoic synedeisis and later Christian notions of synderesis or the still small voice of the conscience. It is something inborn or Divinely implanted, or has to do with a particular daemon or tutelary genius, though the realization of it may be catalysed by the right type of cross-examination (elenchus).  

To Socrates, there was no shame in being wrong, because being wrong leads to the discovery of what is right.

It is true that discovering you are wrong may involve gaining new information. This does not necessarily mean you know what is right. On the other hand, there is shame in being wrong about a thing on which you claim special knowledge or expertise. Socrates said his own expertise lay in the field of 'love'. Since he was as ugly as shit, this was very funny. 

“What kind of person am I?” he asks in Plato’s Gorgias.

This is a rhetorical question. He supplies the answer himself. This shows that he has thought about the matter before he engaged in any conversation.  

“One of those who would be pleased to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and who would be pleased to refute anyone who says anything untrue.”

But, he also says that Philosophical questions are ones where as good an argument for a proposition as against it can be made. The problem is that conjectures are many, refutations are few and themselves prone to refutation. 

“One part of my willingness to answer Rachel’s questions [for the New Yorker],” Callard told me, “is that if you think as I think, that you really can’t think by yourself, then

you are against Socrates. You may be a Social Constructivist who believes 'language thinks us' or some such shite. But, in that case, you have to gas on about Witlesstein.  

whenever anyone asks you a question, that’s an opportunity…

for me to quickly mention weeping while masturbating to documentaries about manatees. For some reason, I thought this would enable me to come across as as 'deep'. But people think I'm not just an insufferable bore, I am also weird in a repulsive manner. The truth is, I don't watch documentaries and my sexual tastes are vanilla. The problem with boring people is that they become even more boring and repulsive when they try to make themselves interesting. 

Socrates gets that: he gets that we can’t really think by ourselves, and that we’re thrown on other people of intellectual necessity.”

No. Socrates claims knowledge of only thing- love. But this is what in Christianity we term agape, not eros. Solitude may be an 'intellectual necessity'. But Love of a Socratic type can't flourish in isolation. The vital question was, did such Love involve asebia (impiety)? Did it imperil the Polis? Perhaps. Periclean Athens was doomed and maybe Socrates was part of the problem. The fact is 'philia' or affiliation is all very well, but what really matters is fiscal policy. 

Agnes Callard was born in 1976 in Budapest, Hungary, where she lived until the age of five,

Hungarian 'Martians' enjoyed a certain intellectual pre-eminence back in the Fifties. Callard is right to play up this aspect of her heritage.  

after which the family moved to Rome and then New York. Her mother was a haematologist; her father studied law in Hungary but in America worked as a carpet salesman. Callard considers her love for school “an early manifestation of my love for philosophy”;

which would have been killed off had she studied in France where Philosophy is taught at High School.  

she once had a German teacher who called her frage frau, “question lady”, because she asked so many.

Frauen frage, means 'the woman question'- i.e. Feminism. I suppose Callard must have studied German as an adult.  

Callard was diagnosed with autism in her thirties, but has not yet fully discerned what contribution the condition might have made to her philosophy:

Kant & Parfit may have been on the spectrum. But Kant was smart.  

“When you’re at the beginning of thinking about something,

do some research. Separate out what are 'open' questions and in what manner previously open questions were closed by other, more empirical, disciplines.  

all you can produce for other people is clichés,

don't produce for other people. Do it for yourself. Alternatively, just tell them about your period or how your addiction to manatee porn wrecked your marriage.  

and so I feel like when I try to talk about it… I’m not contributing much.”

If you are teaching nonsense to imbeciles, that is going to be the case even if you are able to prove that only manatee porn can subvert Neo-Liberalism.  

She completed her PhD in philosophy at Berkeley, California, and is now an associate professor at the University of Chicago, where she leads the undergraduate programme.

There are young people stupider than Callard. That's a very depressing thought. Maybe Vivek Ramaswamy has a point.  

It was this, she theorises, that began her interest in public philosophy, as it led her to consider how the department could appeal to students for whom it was not their major.

The answer is spread the word it is an 'Easy A'. Also, you can get credit for watching manatee porn.  

Callard refuted my suggestion that public philosophy is inherently controversial because

it is inherently boring and stupid 

it requires the philosopher to openly pose contentious questions,

like- why Neo-Liberalism so adamantly opposes compulsory gender reassignment surgery for heterosexual males?  

on the grounds that “almost all speech right now is inherently controversial,

because dicks haven't been banned. Its totes triggering to me that people keep talking while dicks are prowling around raping the environment.  

and so it might not be that peculiar to philosophy”.

In Open Socrates, Callard identifies the “political fictions” of our age as being the “liberalism triad” of freedom of speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice.

Free speech is part of Classical Liberalism. Some people pretended Rawls had smuggled the other two things onto the Liberal Agenda, but he hadn't really. Economic non-convexities means 'Justice as Fairness' is 'anything goes'.  

It is not that these are not genuine ideals to be aimed for,

They aren't. There are prudential reasons for paying attention to them. But, there are also prudential reasons for ensuring that attention is entirely hypocritical.  

but that the systems we have designed to achieve them are insufficient.

We have designed shit to achieve them. There is a Hohfeldian immunity for 'free speech' but it is defeasible. Due process or 'equal dignity' is purely formal or procedural and has no substantive content. Social Justice is an oxymoron.  

Callard considers free speech to be that which is truly inquisitive,

e.g. guys who want to know your Bank account number and password and so forth.  

and none of the structures by which we distribute and enshrine it – such as the First Amendment – truly render it free.

We don't distribute or enshrine it. We tolerate it though we may also bring an action in law for libel or defamation.  

Free speech is “an intellectual ideal, and we’ve misconceived it as being a political ideal,

No. Relevant speech may be an intellectual ideal. A Math Professor may respond positively to a hostile speech by one of his students who accuses him of having made a mistake in presenting a particular proof. He will not respond to inquisitive questions about which particular photo of a curvaceous manatee he would most consider masturbating to. 

There can be a 'political ideal' of 'parrhesia' and laws can be enacted to protect whistle-blowers or those who have been forced to sign unconscionable non-disclosure agreements etc. But Callard is too stupid to discuss such things.

about like restrictions we place on one another”.

I suppose Callard is getting at her University cracking down on cancel culture. 

Our work towards equality is flawed because

Callard is doing no such work.  

“we’ve failed to reconcile our love of equality with our love of status”.

Which is like saying 'we've failed to reconcile our love of Putin with our love of Ukrainians his troops are killing'. The fact is, either you love equality or you love status and hierarchy. It is a different matter that you may have to pretend to love equality so as to keep your status. But that is hypocrisy merely.  

The fight against injustice is more enlightened than it once was: today, we understand that killing a person – a Russian soldier, for instance – does not kill the idea (such as Ukraine isn’t a sovereign country) we are really taking aim at.

If we are killing Russian soldiers in the present war, we are helping kill the idea that Ukraine isn't sovereign. Why? A country which defeats and repels invaders is de facto sovereign.

Even supplying Ukrainians with guns, because we are too lazy or cowardly to fight Russians ourselves, is part of an attempt to kill the idea that the place can be conquered and thus lose its sovereignty. 

“That’s a big human achievement, because through a lot of human history, people were, like: fighting wars is how you, like, fight for ideas.”

What this silly woman means is that when the US and the UK guaranteed the sovereignty of Ukraine, the hope was that we wouldn't have to put our own, treasure, if not blood, on the line. We were wrong. The Ukrainians were fools to give up their nukes. They lost territory in 2014 and, it may be, they will have to concede yet more territory if the Donald pulls the financial plug.  

But Callard believes that when, “instead of killing someone, what you’re doing is humiliating your political opponent or denying them a platform, that’s the same thing.

The Rabbis condemn the inflicting of 'social death' on others. But 'social death' isn't the same thing as actually dying.  

It’s just a little bit of a gentler stab,

as is shitting yourself whenever you hear mention of that person. True, this may be self-defeating. People may give you a wide berth and flock to the person you despise.  

but you haven’t achieved anything idea-wise in lowering the status of your opponents.”

Not if you focus entirely on shitting yourself. On the other hand, if by the use of forensic accounting, you show your opponent is a fucking swindler and this gets him arrested and sent to jail, then you have lowered the fuck out of the status of your opponent. 

Protest, too, can fail in its attempt to correct injustice.

More particularly if it involves shitting yourself.  

Callard thinks about protest as “a kind of complaint”, and “agree[s] with Simone Weil that the fundamental form of thought inside of a complaint is, ‘Why am I being hurt?’

Nonsense! If I protest against Police inaction in cases of rape, no one thinks I am myself being raped. This is because I am a fat, elderly, black man. Still, everybody understands that my life will be better if rapists are locked up. This is because though I am not in danger of rape, people I depend on or whom I care about are at such risk.  

But you could pose that in a couple of different ways. One way you could do it is… ‘I’ve decided ahead of time that there’s no good reason, and you’re my enemy. And what we’re going do is say this as loud as possible to cause you certain kinds of pain, so that we then get certain kinds of benefits.’ What you’ve done, if you see it that way, is you’ve sapped the protest of its potential philosophical import,

Nonsense! There are philosophers, or potential philosophers, who will seize upon the thing in order to write stupid shite. On the other hand, it is true that if you keep shitting yourself, even if is under the rubric of 'dirty protest', philosophers will not scoop your shit out of your pants with their own delicate hands. But this is because philosophers are of no fucking use to man or beast.  

because the only way to really ask why you’re being hurt is [to be] open to an answer.”

Nonsense! When Mummy wails 'why are you hurting me by failing your Accountancy exams? Do you really want to drive me to suicide? Will nothing less make you happy?' she is not 'open to an answer' because the reason you failed your Accountancy exam is because you thought 'double entry' meant something pornographic. If you mention this, she will slap the black off you. All in all it is better to put up with a Mum who screeches at you because you don't bring her naches, rather than get beaten to a pulp and have parental controls put on your laptop. 

In failing to see protest as a dialogue, rather than a one-sided attempt to air grievances, Callard believes, the possibility of progress is lost.

Negotiation is a dialogue. Protest isn't unless it leads to negotiation. The possibility of progress is predicated on positive sum games which raise productivity.  

In Open Socrates Callard defines politicised speech as when a disagreement becomes not an attempt between two people to discover together what is right,

it may have that quality. Reading Hansard shows how 'politicized speech' can yield a consensus on what is right. Consider the Parliamentary debate on Brigadier Dyer- the infamous 'Butcher of Amritsar'. Churchill was on a sticky wicket because he needed the support of Ulster MPs who were pro-Dyer. He diffused their animosity and then asked a practical question- was there any British General willing to give Dyer an appointment? The answer was no. The fact is the Military Johnnies were angry about 'Geddes axe' and were pretending that Dyer had been treated unfairly by the 'frocks' (civilians in frock-coats). But they themselves knew that if Dyer came onto their staff, some crazy Lieutenant would take it as a signal to start shooting striking miners or what have you. As the Chief of the Imperial General Staff had said, Britain did not have the troops to hold England in the event of a Bolshevik uprising. Once Churchill had made this point- which he did subtly and without spelling things out- he could then display his oratorial fireworks condemning Dyer without appearing to do so. The House was then able to put the matter behind it. It was clear that Churchill had done his homework. He had talked to the Generals. He had talked to the Ulstermen. He was even ready to talk to Michael Collins. He had the situation under control. There had been some popular feeling that Montague and, maybe, Isaacs (both of whom were Jewish) had stabbed an Anglo-Irish soldier in the back. But, once it was clear that Montague was getting the chop while Isaacs, who was a brilliant lawyer, had gotten the better of Gandhi, Westminster could turn the page on the issue.  

but “a zero-sum context where if one party wins, the other loses”:

Nothing wrong with that. Churchill was making it clear that there was no alternative to Geddes axe. But that also meant 'Butchers of Amritsar' were unemployable. Why? If Dyer was re-employed, there would be 'Butchers of Aberdeen' or 'Butchers of Alberta'. Consider the son of a mill-owner who is a Captain in the Territorials. His father's mill hands are on strike. He turns up with a squad of machine gunner and mows them down. He thinks he has personally defeated Bolshevism and Sinn Fein and the machinations of the fucking Elders of Zion. If he is handsome and spends money freely, there may be those in his regiment who idolize him. But what would be the consequence? A labour problem might snowball into an outright insurrection. The King Emperor might go the way of the Kaiser- if not the Tzar. 

Some games are 'zero-sum'. It is important that the loser accept the verdict of the umpire. 'Politicized speech' is the speech used by politicians, some of whom have great expertise in making that verdict compelling and binding on all players. In this case, Churchill had appeased the Military Johnnies and the crazy Ulstermen. He had poured oil on troubled waters. True, he did end with a rhetorical fireworks display which, when quoted in India, won back the loyalty of many who had wavered after Jallianwallah Bagh. But, those sitting in the House, felt that this was 'mere puffery'. Churchill didn't really like beastly niggers. He was merely praising Britain for having the bestest Empire ever. 

an observer who is not invested in the argument

is not an observer. He is a guy who is thinking about other things 

might conclude that “the debaters are not really talking about what they claim they are talking about”.

Whereas, if you are 'invested', you can ask around and soon find out what is really happening. Thus, I am invested in Jallianwallah Bagh and can properly decipher the relevant debate in Hansard by asking around and looking things up. 

Does she think discourse can survive the culture wars?

If cockroaches can survive a nuclear winter- sure, why not?  

The problem, Callard believes, is that often we’re having conversations in the wrong medium.

This is not the case with important conversations.  

She has been reading about sociolinguistics and “what happens mechanically in a conversation”. For instance, she points out that I respond to her in 0.2 seconds; “if you wait longer… that’s an awkward pause”.

Or a pause for effect in an important conversation.  Awkward pauses are one's where the 'common knowledge' expected response- e.g. 'You're not ugly! Anyone who thinks so must be...BLIND!'- is long in coming and is accompanied by a furtive averting of the eyes. 

But this is less time than it takes for my brain to process the signal that comes at the end of a sentence, which means I am predicting when Callard will stop speaking.

Whereas I am thinking about manatees.  I suppose women really do have a different type of brain from men.

Humans are “incredibly sophisticated in how we manage conversational signals and how we navigate tensions inside of a conversation – like, you were having to navigate the tension: do I ask her about autism?”

Do I have to listen to her reply? This is what inhibits our natural inquisitiveness.  

But when we move conversations into writing, all that vital information is stripped away.

Unless you are good at writing- which Plato was, at least in places.  

“I think it’s a deep, deep problem about Twitter.

No. That's what makes it useful. Trump could take down rivals with a mean tweet. Biden just kept talking and talking.  

If you want to know my current theory [about] why things go wrong, [it] is just we don’t understand each other; we’re literally not following what other people are saying. Because human beings are not that good at communicating using written text.

Sadly, the kids are right to prefer texting to talking. It's faster and less ambiguous. Also, you can use poop emojis.  

We are, in every way, trained to communicate using spoken language…

This is an American thing. In England, we were trained to keep our mouths firmly shit in the class-room. I recall, during my first week at the LSE, being amazed by the marvellous flow of words that every American exchange student seemed capable of. Then I realized they were as thick as shit. Within a week or two these American students were told, politely but firmly, by other American students of longer standing, not to ask questions or seek to make any sort of contribution. Why? They were making their parent Institution back in the States look bad. On the other hand, the Brits were sometimes wrong about loquacious Americans. I recall an elderly Professor telling me about Baumol, a City College grad, who, at his first appearance in the LSE struck everybody as a cretin. He was denied entry to the Doctoral program. But his performance at Seminars was so stellar that the Brits had to admit their mistake. The man was a genius who made fundamental contributions in almost every subject area. But this was because he wrote even more clearly than he spoke. There were plenty of British academics who were a delight to listen to but who scarcely produced anything worth reading. In the case of Econ or Philosophy, we know why. They were stupid. They just didn't sound stupid because they had been to the right schools and Colleges.  

In written text… people immediately jump to bad motives and hostility.”

Not if the written text is up to snuff.  

Still, Callard believes the culture wars can be positive in that they “manifest the fact that stuff matters to us and we want to engage with other people on topics that we care about.”

But if all that matters is 'affiliation'- being part of a mob- then the stuff we talk about does not matter to us.  

Crucially, she thinks we need to “unearth the question that’s at the heart of a dispute and address it”.

In Academia, that question is tenure and who gets Einstein's office and other such petty stuff. This is Sayre's Law- Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. 

The penultimate chapter of Open Socrates is about love. An earlier draft did not touch on the subject, but Callard was prompted by the response to the New Yorker profile to consider it more deeply. In the book, she portrays romantic love as an aspirational, intellectual pursuit: meeting a partner is not the end goal, but the beginning of a collaboration through which you prompt and encourage each other towards further discovery.

That's not romantic love. It is the attempt to endow with a glow of romance something which is merely mundane and utilitarian. Still, it may be there was a time when Hilary and Bill were 'in love'. They certainly had aspirations and encouraged each other to rise as high up the greasy pole as they were able. But this really isn't a love-story for the ages. 

The extent to which each couple pushes this aspiration is, Callard told me, so personal that it is impossible to say what exactly we should be aiming for.

The Clintons knew what they were aiming for. That's why they are still together.  

“The interesting thing about romance is: how big is the project?

Getting to the White House is a big project. Eight years for Hilary as first lady and eight years for Bill as first horn-dog was what they aimed at.  

What kind of or how much perfection are you aspiring to with your partner? I think that is going to be particular to [each] relationship.”

It is also the reason more and more people are giving up on marriage. It's not the sex they object to. It's the couple's counselling.  

That question – “How big is the size of the project?” – sometimes causes conflict within Callard’s marriage. She is Socratic; her second husband is Aristotelian.

She has tenure. He doesn't. Gassing on about Kant & Aristotle is a safe enough way to stay employed. Sadly, the lad is venturing into Hegel who, while Napoleon was still cock of the walk wrote a short piece titled 'He who thinks abstractly' which praises egalitarian France and condemns the stupidity and brutality of the German speaking peoples who were groaning under the lash of a vast aristo-bureaucratic class of parasites. This causes the proles to class a murderer as simply a murderer without regard to any other qualities he might have had. (Napoleon was certainly the kidnapper and murderer of the Duke of Enghien). Hegel allows that 'polite society' does not 'abstract' away every detail except the salient one in pronouncing judgment. But the common people do. Why? Because they have been brutalized. The problem is that the 'beautiful world' runs away from metaphysics as much as it does from abstraction. Hegel's predicament is that he is like the German prole but moves in better circles. He ends by recommending the example of the French gentleman who listens to and seeks to persuade his servant rather than the German master who will beat the shit out of his servant because the fellow belongs to the beatable class. 

 Callard's young spouse says of this essay ' it’s not the philosophers who think abstractly, it’s everyday people who think abstractly'. That is not what Hegel said. He too, when worst comes to the worst, thinks abstractly. Napoleon is a murderer but there are things we must learn from France. It isn't that the abstract thesis or its anti-thesis (viz. Napoleon is a reformer and killed the Duke for a political reason) are wrong. It's just that there is a 'concrete universal' which is a synthesis of a superior type. What that is, the 'beautiful world' is not interested in. It prefers fine sentiments and striking poses. Sadly, there were and are no 'concrete universals' or 'World Historical Personalities' who incarnate the Weltgeist or any such nonsense. That's why the abstraction associated with murder is actually a ramified type theory which distinguishes between unlawful killing, justified homicide, manslaughter, premeditated murder, diminished capacity, etc., etc. The proles knew this well enough as did the 'beautiful world'. Even philosophers grasped this. But, at that time, Hegel was part and parcel of a particular political movement or tendency and, to his brutish, Teutonic, brain, Napoleon might still have been a 'concrete universal'. It is best not to inquire too much into the workings of the German mind because its apotheosis, or Himmelfart, is nothing but that fart which, Martin Luther assures us, drives the devil away. Indeed, German political philosophers worked hard to render Satan otiose. 

The difference is that “Socrates thinks: aspire forever, out to infinity – not really infinity, until knowledge, but it’s going to be more than one lifetime.

We don't know that. The guy wasn't Pythagorean. I think he did see himself as a pharmakos- at least that is Plato's account.  

Aristotle thinks: aspire until you’re around 35 or something, and then enough is enough; now it’s time to take the character that you have and… exercise it.”

Had Alexander, Aristotle's pupil, drank less and lived longer, he might have permanently changed Iranian history in the manner that Hellenization permanently changed Judaism.  

Callard often finds herself thinking “we need to be doing more aspiring; we shouldn’t be happy where we are. My husband’s more, like, the point of life is… to be happy, to exercise the knowledge and wisdom that you have, and to enjoy [it].”

Quit nagging me till I've at least got tenure. 

Though other, non-philosopher couples might not put it in such terms – Socratic vs Aristotelian –

Platonic vs Aristotelian. It may be that Socrates understood the third man argument in Parmenides. On the other hand, the simplest explanation is best. He was part of the Periclean circle and his care was for his native City.  

she believes the divide between wanting more and being content with what we have is common in relationships.

Nagging your husband may be common in relationships but let the boy get tenure first.  

In Open Socrates, she mounts an argument that “Socratic love is radically non-exclusive”.

There is nothing 'radical' about such love- unless you think tom-cats are subverting Patriarchy and Neo-Liberalism.  

Socrates does not differentiate between eros – romantic love – and philia – friendship love.

Yes he does. That's why he uses different words for the two things.  

“In that respect, Socrates isn’t so different from us. In this day and age, most people would say that they are friends with their spouse.”

Socrates doesn't say he was a friend of his shrewish wife.  

Socratic polyamory, she writes, “doesn’t distinguish between having many lovers, and having many friends.”

But he wasn't incessantly bumming everybody that he met. Also there was no fucking polyamory back then. Alcibiades had a lot of affairs but the consent of previous or subsequent partners was neither sought nor received. 

The “proper activity” for lovers is not sex but philosophy.

Philosophers who fuck their students are engaged in an improper activity. On the other hand, lovers above a certain age might settle for tea and sympathy and give both sex and philosophy a wide berth.  

This seems a rather sexless idea of polyamory?

“In the Phaedrus, [Socrates] describes the best relationship as just philosophical, but [in] the second best one, there’s sex,” Callard said. He allows for “some amount of deference to the savage commands of our body”, but he believes that “sometimes the desire for sex is a manifestation of wanting something more, something that sex couldn’t possibly give you… I think that Socrates wants us to reflect on the oddity of our sexual practices and the kind of hopes we pin on sex, and the way it seems like larger than the activity itself.” But this “isn’t the same thing as saying you should never have sex”.

In the Parmenides, Zeno- a handsome middle aged man- has a relationship with the elderly sage which, hopefully, has transcended sodomy. In any case, pederasts tend to prefer beardless youths. Once they are stronger and smellier than you, their charm has worn off. You try to keep them from buggering you senseless by talking metaphysics.  

The study of Socrates is well-suited to

philologists.  

public philosophy because

the public knows ancient Greek 

it makes clear the stakes of philosophical thinking to the average life:

They are zero. The thing is a waste of time.  

“If I think about the problems I have in my own life, they don’t look like trolley problems,”

Because 'trolley problems' are silly. If you kill a guy to save some other bunch of guys you will still go to jail unless you were legally obligated to make that decision.  

she said, referring to the thought experiments that explore the ethical dilemma of whether to sacrifice one life to save many others. Instead, the “practical upshots” of Socrates are: “How do you conduct your romance?

By doing romantic things not by talking pederastic bollocks.  

How do you think about your own death?

The slightly less ancient Greeks decided that Christianity was the way to go.  

How do you be political?

By imitating the most successful politicians.  

These are real problems that show up for me all the time that I need help thinking through in a concrete way.”

The answer is always 'do what smart peeps are doing even if you aren't smart and are stuck teaching stupid shite.' 

What, for those who are not willing to open their relationship in the pursuit of a higher intellectual plane, is the practical application of Socrates’ beliefs about love?

They can lead you to Christianity. Sadly, the Church isn't that keen on 'open relationships'. This is perfectly sensible. There will be tears before bedtime for Callard and the youth she has seduced.  

The answer brings us back to the quality of our conversations. “Most of what you’re going to do with your partner over the course of your life is talk to them,” said Agnes Callard.

Which is why nobody wants to get married any more. Melania has the right idea. If your husband is in Washington, don't stray from New York.  

“And so, yes, pick someone you can have good sex with, but pick someone you can talk to…

Mexican donkeys are poor interlocutors. Also, they insist on wearing a sombrero in bed.  

I think when we think things are going well, it’s because we’re talking well.”

Fair point. It is when you are stabbing each other well that you need to think about calling a Divorce attorney.  

Graciella Chichilnisky's stupid Quantum Theory

 

 Von Neumann's first axiom for Q.M is that the state of a quantum system is completely described by a vector in a complex Hilbert space.

However, if there is 'entanglement', then the axiom is false. 

Graciella Chichilnisky ignores this.

Quantum Theory uses infinite dimensional complex Hilbert Spaces which are important to represent certain notions such as wave particle duality. Here, we focus instead on topological issues, and for those, in view of Bohr’s and von Neumann’s axioms, it suffices to focus on finite dimensional real spaces. The reason is that “observables” in quantum theory are by definition self-adjoint operators, this is von Neumann’s first axiom of quantum theory (see Gudder [5]) and it explains the focus on (a) finite dimensions and (b) real spaces.

Sadly, because of 'entanglement', the axiom fails.  

This is because quantum theory’s operators are self-adjoint (observables) and an operator is self-adjoint if and only if it is unitarily equivalent to a real valued multiplication operator (see Gudder [5]).

But entanglement is at the level of the quantum state not the operator which, in any case, isn't 'real'. It is a mathematical artefact or 'intension'. Quantum events, however, are real. An 'intensional fallacy' is committed when an intension of an epistemic type is given a real extension. One might say 'Idealism is the correct ontology. Reality is merely the shadow of what is mental or epistemic'. But that is a philosophical, not a scientific, position. 

As in Arrow's Theorem, which is a cascading intensional fallacy, there can be a useless and stupid sort of QMT which is based on the intensional fallacy briefly outlined above. 

Chichilnisky's claim is as follows

Based on the axioms of quantum theory we identify a class of topological singularities that separates classic from quantum probability,

They are already separate because the latter features 'superposition', the latter does not. That's why the latter's 'amplitude' is a complex number.  

and explains many quantum theoryís puzzles and phenomena in simple mathematical terms so they are no longer quantum pardoxes.

As opposed to intensional fallacies. But quantum paradoxes are real and very useful. Logical fallacies are useless or mischievous.  

The singularities

there are classical (e.g. when two particles collide and the system is undefined) as well as quantum singularities (e.g. black holes). 

provide new experimental insights and predictions that are presented in this article and establish surprising new connections between the physical and social sciences.

People who commit intensional fallacies in Social Sciences can do the same in Physics. But they are ignored by actual Physicists.  

The key is the topology of spaces of quantum events

Topological quantum field theories exist and quantum events are considered as fluctuations or interactions within them. But these fields aren't real. They are mathematical constructs. 

and of the frameworks postulated by these axioms. These are quite different from their counterparts in classic probability

they are similar to phase transitions except, in the quantum field, the transition is in information.  

and explain mathematically the interference between quantum experiments and the existence of several frameworks or violation of unicity that characterizes quantum physics.

Because of superposition. But that is a fact about the world.  

They also explain entanglement, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, order dependence of observations, the conjunction fallacy and geometric phenomena such as Pancharatnam-Berry phases.

Pancharatnam is in classical optics. There is a similar result in molecular physics. The problem with a theory which explains phenomena in both the classical and the quantum realm is that it is either part of a Grand Unified Theory or it is nonsense. If the former is the case, there would already be a crucial experiment to confirm or reject it. If the latter is the case, nobody will bother with it. 

Somewhat surprisingly we find that the same topological singularities explain the impossibility of selecting a social preference among different individual preferences: which is Arrow ís social choice paradox:

We don't that. It is possible that everybody will prefer to prefer some particular SWF if they knew about it. Preferences are epistemic and do not correspond to any set and can't give rise to a relation algebra. They violate Liebniz's laws. Thus nothing mathematical or logical can be said about them. One might say there is 'superposition' in Social Choice Theory. If we had enough information, we all might choose the same thing. Consider what happened between 1938 and 1939 in England. There was a 'phase transition' such that 'appeasers' (peace at any cost!) turned into belligerents (we must win this war at any cost!). What had changed was information about the nature of the Nazi regime and its plan for Europe as a whole. Suddenly, Hitler (the little Corporal) was seen not as a little man with a genuine grievance but rather as the incarnation of the genocidal 'Hun' determined to crush Christendom. 

the foundations of social choice and of quantum theory are therefore mathematically equivalent.

No. The nature of quantum information is different from the nature of information for Social Choice. The former arises from a 'game against nature'. The latter is wholly strategic and features coordination and discoordination games of a volitional type.  

We identify necessary and sufficient conditions on how to restrict experiments to avoid these singularities and recover unicity,

I can identify such a condition. Don't spend any money on doing experiments. Give me the money and I will order Pizzas and beer. We can then say 'The Great Spaghetti Monster has uniquely determined everything. All hail the Great Spaghetti Monster!'  

avoiding possible interference between experiments and also quantum paradoxes; the same topological restriction is shown to provide a resolution to the social choice impossibility theorem of Chichilnisky (1980)

Social Choice features no sets and thus no topology. Saying the Great Spaghetti Monster is the sole efficient cause of everything in the Universe resolves all the problems which make our tiny brains hurt. 

Events are physical phenomena that either occur or don't occur. They are central to any probabilistic theory.

Probability density functions or cumulative distribution functions do without them.  

In classic probability all experiments are part of one large experiment and events are described within one sample space with a single basis of coordinates or framework : this is the unicity assumption of classic physics (Griffiths, 2003 [10]).

This is a useful enough simplification but isn't true. The fact is, in General Relativity, there is no global inertial frame. But since it is easier to work in inertial frames, we just go ahead and do say anyway. Moreover, it is possible that there are experiments outside our 'light cone' which can never be part on 'one large experiment' within our light cone. 

In quantum probability, instead, quantum events are projections maps on a Hilbert space.

a complex Hilbert space. But we are welcome to do the same thing with classical events. Suppose two things are indiscernibly identical from one point of view but may not be from some other point of view. Then we can use a Hermitian.  

Quantum theory considers all possible experiments on a physical system and breaks tradition by explicitly accepting that there may be no universal experiment and no single framework to describe all observed events

The same thing can be done in molecular physics or classical optics or when considering phase transitions which are multiply realizable.  

. The multiplicity of frameworks in quantum theory violates unicity: there may be no unique basis of coordinates to describe the results of all possible experiments on a physical system.

The same may be true in chemistry. Superposition is like multiple realizability.  

When two frameworks or coordinate systems fail to be orthogonal to each other they give rise to so called interaction or interference among experiments that is at the heart of quantum theory and distinguishes it from classic physics

But something similar can arise in Crystallography which is why it evolved into Quantum Crystallography. But there are plenty of other macroscopic physical systems which are non-deterministic or chaotic. What distinguishes QMT is the importance of information. Non-locality does not mean the exchange of 'real' information but there appears to be 'phase transition' in how information is shared between things. 

We show that the topological structure of the spaces of quantum events

i.e. the invariants postulated by a topological quantum field theory 

- which are also the propositions of quantum logic

they may be or they may not be. You could have a category theoretical approach which is not topological though it features an 'internal logic' and has ambient toposes. No doubt, this can be translated into a topology for some specific purpose. My point is that the  Birkhoff / von Neumann approach isn't the only option on the menu. 

- explains why experiments interfere,

An explanation is an interpretation. We have many such.  

why we typically have no common frameworks, and why quantum logic is more complex and richer than the binary logic of classic physics

Yet it is a lot less complex than 'natural deduction' though, the latter can use an "orthomodular lattice" structure to capture the non-distributive nature of quantum measurements. The problem here is that an arbitrary lattice of this sort which captures a particular Von Neumann algebra may not have many of the desirable properties of lattices of projections. But this is just another way of saying logic isn't magic. It does not enable you to discover things about reality without ever getting out of your armchair. 

Chichilnisky's fundamental error in this paper is to think unicity is a feature of classical systems. It isn't. Consider the weather. That's a chaotic system which may or may not be deterministic. It has no unique solution. The fact is QMT postulates unicity at the macroscopic scale. There is no such postulate for Classical theory. What we are speaking off is merely an ad hoc 'working assumption'. 

Why Unicity fails:

there are too many degrees of freedom or path dependence is too complex to calculate 

impossibility theorems for selecting frameworks

There is no way to show that a non-deterministic way of selecting frameworks with particular properties is impossible. This is because an algorithm can't do what a non-algorithmic process or lawless choice sequence can do. Such impossibility theorems are only possible because of an obvious intensional fallacy- like Arrow's. 

The next step is to define restricted domains of experiments within which one can recover unicity, and show why the recovery cannot be obtained in general.

Why restrict what experimenters are doing more particularly if they are smarter than you and can help bring into existence cool new tech- e.g. Quantum Computers? 

Chichilnisky's theorem is trivial- 

A necessary and sufficient restriction on the experiments of a quantum system with n degrees of freedom

Sadly, smart peeps keep discovering new quantum degrees of freedom. What is cool is that they can exploit this to develop new functional materials or circumvent performance bottlenecks in existing materials. 

to satisfy unicity, is that the corresponding space of frameworks F n is topologically trivial or contractible

Field Expansion and Group Contraction fallacies, as I have explained elsewhere, vitiate Arrow's theorem. Essentially, by arbitrarily stipulating that a space is contractible, you are saying there is a 'fixed point'. But such a beastie means there is 'naturality' or even a punctum Archimedes. It is like saying 'there is an atomic proposition' or 'there is an absolute proof' or 'there is a 'natural' proof that P is not equal to NP.' You may as well say 'The Great Spaghetti Monster has ordained all that is! All hail the Great Spaghetti Monster!' 

I have previously pointed out that if you think Arrow's theorem isn't nonsense, you must also believe Godel's proof of God. 

Chichilnisky summarizes her own contribution to this stupidity- 

. In 1980 social choice theory was redefined as follows: one seeks to define a map that assigns a social preference to any two or more individual preferences.

Sadly, preferences are epistemic (based on existing knowledge)  and 'impredicative' ( e.g. 'I'll have what she's having!' as in 'Whey Harry met Sally'. The intensional fallacy arises when a fixed, well-defined, extension is supplied to an epistemic or impredicative 'intension'. True, for any practical purpose, we may arbitrarily do so in an ad hoc manner- e.g. looking at available data on 'Revealed Preference' or Opinion Polls or 'Focus Groups' etc. But this is an ideographic procedure. Nothing nomothetic can be said about it. 

Reasonable conditions are that map must be continuous and symmetric, depending on individuals preferences but not on the order of the individuals, and that respect unanimity so that if both individuals have the same preferences, the social preference is the same.

This is wholly unreasonable. We may all want Mr. Garrison to become POTUS and fuck all the immigrants to death. But we are relieved that there are Constitutional Checks and Balances preventing this horrific outcome. We don't want only our preferences to be taken account of. We would rather outsource decisions to experts- even foreign experts though we ourselves are xenophobic.  We definitely don't want 'continuous mappings'- e.g. deciding in 1939 to use only one quarter of our army to fight Hitler because in 1938 we didn't want more than ten percent of it to be used in any such way. Symmetric mappings preserve values under permutation of arguments. This means ignoring the fact that we are at war with Germany so as to increase welfare payments rather than spend that money on the Armed Forces. 

Continuity means that it is possible to approximate the social preference by taking sufficiently accurate measurements of the individual preference

This can't be done because of impredicativity. Smart peeps face a 'Keynesian Beauty contest' problem- they can't opt for something the hoi polloi won't understand. Stupid people do want to outsource decisions to the smart but are worried smart peeps will place a disproportionate burden on them. The solution is to get a leader- e.g. Churchill- who will listen to smart peeps but who has a soft spot for the ordinary people. 

Theorem 31 The existence of common preferences is equivalent to

saying that those concerned are indiscernibly identical in a particular respect.  Suppose all cats like 'Whiskas', then any cat will be happy to be fed that brand of pet food. This may be true if the guys who run 'Whiskas' are super-smart and know everything there is to be known about cats. 

the existence of common frameworks, or unicity.

Because we already know everything about quantum entities or events.  

Proof. The equivalence can be seen formally by considering the necessary and sufficient conditions

there are no such conditions.  

for the existence of a selection of a single framework in restricted domains of experiments.

this is a purely arbitrary matter.  

It is equally arbitrary to say that anything is impossible for either Social Choice or QMT. As the knowledge base changes, both change. Both represent 'intensions' whose 'extensions' defy the law of identity. No logical or mathematical result can be proved about them. 

Consider the following

Example 32 The conjunction fallacy Tversky & Kahneman, [16]1983 defined an important and common probability judgment error, called the conjunction fallacy, that is based on the lack of common frameworks.

Nope. It was based on guys who weren't probability theorists jumping to an unwarranted conclusion.  

It is the famous Linda problem. Judges are provided a brief story of a woman named Linda who used to be a philosophy student at a liberal university and was active in the anti-nuclear movement. The judges are asked to rank the likelihood of the following events: that Linda is now (a) active in the feminist movement, (b) a bank teller, (c) active in the feminist movement and a bank teller, (d) active in the feminist movement and not a bank teller, and (e) active in the feminist movement and a bank teller. The conjunction fallacy occurs when option (c) is judged to be more likely that option (b) (even though the latter contains the former).

There is no fallacy here. People think Lindia is stupid because she studied nonsense in a 'safe space'. She is an obese cat-lady who has a low IQ job- e.g. Bank Teller or DMV clerk. 'Active in the feminist movement' just means she likes moaning about her period and the great injustice perpetrated on Wimmin by Neo-Liberalism in that they have to sit down to pee. In other words, in responding to this question, people are expressing their bigoted views derived, no doubt, from TV shows or bar-room chit-chat. Incidentally, any woman who does not want to have sex with me is ipso facto a Lesbian.  

Chichilnisky doesn't get this. She

 uses a geometric approach to quantum theory taken from Busemeyer and Bruza

Authors of ' Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision Making' which is Deepak Chopra level silly. 

They argue that 'underlying mathematical structures from quantum theory provide a much better account of human thinking than traditional models.'

If this were true, QMT mavens would be billionaires because they would be better at predicting outcomes in financial markets or choosing between different marketing strategies. Moreover, a small cabal of such brain boxes would be deciding the outcomes of elections. 

 'They introduce the foundations for modeling probabilistic-dynamic systems using two aspects of quantum theory. The first, 'contextuality', 

No statistical work is done outside a context though no doubt there may be lunatics who, when tasked with doing market research, include trees and clouds and cats in their sample population because they are too stupid to understand the context in which the exercise is being carried out. 

i's a way to understand interference effects found with inferences and decisions under conditions of uncertainty.'

Under Knightian Uncertainty, there will be 'regret minimization' and Tardean mimetic effects. You will feel remorse if you didn't do what the smart peeps were doing. You won't if you, like everybody else, ended up worse off. After all, you acted prudently. How were you supposed to know the 'smart people' were actually as thick as shit? 

'The second, 'quantum entanglement', allows cognitive phenomena to be modeled in non-reductionist ways. 

We do that anyway. In the Social Sciences, Market Research etc., all we have is correlation, not causation. This is called Granger causality. Granger won a fucking Nobel Prize for Econ. 

Employing these principles drawn from quantum theory allows us to view human cognition and decision in a totally new light. 

A shitty light. Still maybe these two dudes will sell some books and the current Bernie Madoff will pay them a little money to explain why his Ponzi scheme isn't a crock of shit. 

. First we represent two answers to the feminism question by two different frameworks or basis of coordinates for euclidean space .

Nothing wrong with Feminism. Make things better for women and men too greatly benefit. I may be a misogynist (coz Beyonce didn't come for my Birthday party even though I sent her a 'best friends for ever and ever' bracelet. Mummy promised to speak to Beyonce's parents because it broke her heart to see me cry my little eyes out. Anyway, that's the reason my sixtieth birthday party was such a wash-out.  

Each framework is given by two orthogonal rays that span a two dimensional space. The answer yes to feminism is represented in Figure 1 by the ray labeled F and the answer no to the feminism question is represented by an orthogonal ray labeled F.

The lady went to a liberal university and must have studied Feminist philosophers. It would have been odd if she wasn't a Feminist unless, obviously, she had converted to Islam or married JD Vance or something of that sort.  

Our answer to the Bank Teller question has to do with our belief that Philosophy Degrees are not prized by employers. But 'Bank Teller' is a proxy for 'ill-paid, monotonous, work'. 

 and it means that being a feminist and not being a bank teller are close in this belief space.

Nonsense! We think of Feminists as independent people. This lady has a job and does it conscientiously. Shame she studied Philosophy rather than Accountancy.  

What nobody who answers these questions is doing is making probability calculations. No mathematical axioms of any type are being used. True, had I been asked these questions and had access to my smart phone, I might have made 'frequentist' calculations based on asking questions to a Generative AI. 

In this second framework, and according to the axioms of quantum theory, the square amplitude equals the probability of saying yes to the bank teller question starting from the initial state and this equals j< B j S >j 2= 0:0245 in the Figure.

Nonsense! If we interviewed the respondents we would find they said 'yes' to the Bank teller question because they thought Philosophy Majors find it difficult to get high paid jobs.  

Now consider the sequence of answers in which the person says yes to the feminism question and then says yes to the bank teller question in that order.

Actually, if the order of question had been reversed, we might say no to the 'Feminism' question. We imagine Bank Tellers as returning home to their cat and eating chocolates while reading Romance Novels. Because we have already committed to the 'Feminism' answer, we modify our views. The lady may indulge in Romance Novels as a 'guilty pleasure', but feels it incumbent on herself to keep up some semblance of Feminist commitment.  

The order that questions are processed is critical in quantum theory, and here we are assuming that the more likely event is evaluated first.

I think it is likely that a Philosophy Major from a liberal college would be Feminist, anti-Racist, etc.  

Chichilnisky indulges in some mathsy masturbation to conclude that a simple geometric model reproduces the basic facts of the conjunction fallacy. If this were the case, then Quantum probability would accord higher probability to an event which, on a frequentist basis, is less probable. Such is not the case. What is true is that once an observation has been made then there is something like a Monty Hall problem. But this isn't the case when speaking of Linda. There, the 'conjunction fallacy' arises for a purely psychological reason which has to do with the way 'confabulation' fleshes out a hypothetical person to make them more 'real' and interesting to us.  Thus, if you are telling me about a lady you think I might hit it off with, my imagination starts adding details out of my own imagination. I think of Linda as fat- like me- and liking chocolates and cats and RomComs. She might prove sympathetic if I tell her about how Beyonce cruelly refused to attend my birthday party because she was afraid of what the 'mean girls' would say. Still, if I meet Linda and she is slim and athletic and enjoys hearing me tear holes in Amia Srinivasan, I will be yet more delighted. True, Linda will brusquely tell me that she doesn't date fat losers, but still, the one occasion when we met at Starbucks will remain golden in my memory. On the other hand, I will definitely report her to the FBI because she revealed she was using her job as a Bank Teller to sabotage the SWIFT system and thus bring down Neo-Liberalism, Patriarchy and the manifest injustice that women have to sit down to pee. Hopefully, I will get a reward of some sort. 

Busemeyer and Bruza state that, given that the two questions are treated as incompatible, we must also be violating unicity.

In Social situations there is always superposition- i.e. no unicity. Indiscernibly identical things aren't in fact identical. A Feminist Bank Teller may not want to bring down the SWIFT system. Indeed, she may vote for Trump. Alas, what is unlikely is that she will want to have sex with me.  

Indeed, they say, we are assuming that the person is unable to form a single description (i.e. a single sample space) containing all the possible conjunctions

Indeed. The truth is many of our interactions, under Yoneda lemma, are ontologically dysphoric- they are not at home in the world.  

: What they do not explain is why this is assumed. This article shows that, for topological reasons that are akin to those of the social choice paradox, this assumption is unavoidable.

The reverse is the case. The assumption is silly. In the Social World we only have intensions with unknowable, perhaps ontologically dysphoric, extensions.  

In other words, it is unavoidable that the person will be unable to form a single description for some basis of coordinates, or frameworks.

Any yet the thing can be done easily enough even without the invocation of the Great Spaghetti Monster.  

The results presented here explain the violation of unicity. This implies that necessarily in some cases, the person would have never thought about conjunctions - for example those involving feminism and bank tellers - sufficiently to assign probabilities to all these conjunctions.

Nonsense! People play betting games of this type in pubs all the time. I recall a pretty girl from Newcastle approaching me at a bar in Gloucester Road near the Coach Station. She wanted to know if I was an Accountant. I admitted as much. She then said 'are you Gay and do you live with a hair-dresser'. I denied it. The girl was upset. She had lost her bet. Still I bought drinks for her and her fat friend. Had I thrown in a packet of chips, they would have felt obliged to have sex with me. 

Incidentally, the reason they thought my boy-friend was a hairdresser was because I cut my hair myself using an electric hair clipper. This meant that portions of my scalp were bare. The girls assumed this was some avant garde hair style used by submissive homosexuals to signal their willingness to participate in highly degrading sex acts of a type, the two Geordie lasses firmly believed, were widespread in the West End. 

If we did assume unicity in this example, then we could not explain the conjunction fallacy because the joint probabilities can be defined under unicity, and they will always be less than (or equal to) the marginal probabilities.

Unless, there is an observer effect. In the example I gave above, it is possible that when the Geordie lasses suggested I was a homosexual who enjoyed being sodomized and then shat upon, that I suddenly realized this is exactly what I wanted to be.  

Therefore as stated by Busemeyer and Bruza, to explain the experimental result requires the violation of unicity.

It is possible that we have a Society in which, if the public assigns a higher probability to Linda being a Feminist Bank teller than to her being a Bank Teller, then, immediately this becomes common knowledge, any non-Feminist Bank Teller immediately quits her job.  If 'Expectations create Reality' you have impredicativity and thus no unicity. 

The results of this article go further: they explain why the violation of unicity is a necessary logical implication when considering all possible experiments of a given physical system - as is the goal of quantum theory.

This is not an explanation. It could be an interpretation of QMT which would be falsified once a GUT is found. But, as presented here, it is merely nonsense. 

And they illustrate why violation of unicity is, at its core, the same as the paradox of social choice. 

In other words, if there is a sole efficient cause or a 'slingshot' proposition such that all true statements are equivalent to it, then, for sure, there is unicity and determinism. But we can't be sure both arise in any given field of enquiry because there is as yet unsuspected 'naturality' or a way to 'carve reality along its joints'. 

Chichilnisky ends her paper with the following enigmatic remark=

  It can be shown that the topological problem posed by Jules Verne (viz that if you around the world, you gain a day) is the same as in the Pancharatnam Berry phases. 

No. Phineas Fogg, travelling East, loses about 16 minutes a day. This adds up to the 24 hours he 'gains' on returning. There is no singularity or 'phase transition' because day and date are locally determined. You have to adjust your watch and calendar as you travel. This is not an adiabatic process acquired over the course of a cycle, which is why a real life, nineteenth century, Phineas Fogg would not have made a mistake attributed to Magellan's sailors who had journeyed over vast spaces where the locals had no calendars or clocks. 

It is well accepted that Barry phases arises from the existence of a singularity,

i.e. a place where a function is undefined. But it can be defined well enough for practical purposes. 

which is the same origin that is postulated here for the basic properties of quantum theory that are described above, a topic that to be discussed in further writings.

Yet crazier nonsense. I've said it before and I will say it again, Arrow's theorem is stoooopid. Obsessing over it will drive you nuts.