Spinoza’s Psychological Theory
[Revised entry by Michael LeBuffe on November 21, 2024.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
In Part III of his Ethics, "On the Origin and Nature of the Affects," which is the subject of this article, Spinoza addresses two of the most serious challenges facing his thoroughgoing naturalism. First, he attempts to show that human beings follow the order of nature. Human beings, on Spinoza's view, have causal natures similar in kind to other ordinary objects, other "finite modes" in the technical language of the Ethics, so they ought to be analyzed and understood in the same way as the rest of...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza-psychological/
To Cancel or Not to Cancel? – Questioning the Russian Idea
This is a guest post by Professor George Pattison (University of Glasgow), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks. Nine months after the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin delivered a speech in which he argued that although Western leaders always claim to be the champions of freedom, Western liberalism was now engaged in the complete suppression of anything that contradicted its view of what was socially and culturally desirable. As he told his audience, “Fyodor Dostoyevsky prophetically foretold all this back in the 19th century”. Specifically, Putin cites Shigalev, one of the nihilistic conspirators in The Possessed (or Demons). Shigalev is a gloomy theorist who realizes that his plans for unlimited freedom will...
https://justice-everywhere.org/general/to-cancel-or-not-to-cancel-questioning-the-russian-idea/
Against group intentional action
Alice, Bob and Carl are triumvirate that unanimously votes for some
legislation, for the following reasons:
Alice thinks that hard work and religion are intrinsically bad
while entertainment is intrinsically good, and believes the legislation
will decrease the prevalence of hard work and religion and increase that
of entertainment.
Bob thinks that hard work and entertainment are intrinsically bad
while religion is intrinsically good, and believes the legislation will
decrease the prevalence of hard work and entertainment and increase that
of religion.
Carl thinks that religion and entertainment are intrinsically bad
while hard work is intrinsically good, and believes the legislation will
decrease the prevalence of religion and entertainment and increase that
of hard work.
If groups engage in intentional actions, it seems that passing
legislation is a paradigm of such intentional action. But what is the
intention behind the action here?
When I first thought about cases like this, I thought they were a
strong argument against group intentional action. But then I became less
sure. For we can imagine an intrapersonal version. Suppose Debbie the
dictator was given a card by a trustworthy expert that she was informed
contains a truth, with the expert departing at that point. Before she
could read it, however, she accidentally dropped the card in a garbage
can. Reaching into the garbage can, she found three cards in the
expert’s handwriting, two of them being mere handwriting exercises and
one being the advice card:
Hard work and religion are intrinsically bad while entertainment
is intrinsically good, and the legislation will decrease the prevalence
of hard work and religion and increase that of entertainment.
Hard work and entertainment are intrinsically bad while religion
is intrinsically good, and the legislation will decrease the prevalence
of hard work and entertainment and increase that of religion.
Religion and entertainment are intrinsically bad while hard work
is intrinsically good, and the legislation will decrease the prevalence
of religion and entertainment and increase that of hard work.
Oddly, Debbie’s own prior views are so undecided that she just sets
her credence to 1/3 for each of these propositions, and enacts the
legislation. What is her intention?
But now I think there is a plausible answer: Debbie’s intention is to
increase whichever one of the trio of entertainment, religion and hard
work is good and decrease whichever two of them are bad.
Could we thus say that that is what the triumvirate intends? I am not
sure. Nobody on the triumvirate has such an abstract intention.
So perhaps we still have an argument against group intentional
action, of the form:
If there is group intentional action, the triumvirate acts
intentionally.
Something only acts intentionally if it has an
intention.
The triumvirate has no intention.
So, there is no group intentional action.
https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/11/against-group-intentional-action.html
The Logic of Counterfactuals and the Epistemology of Causal Inference
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics recognized a theory of causal inference that warrants more attention from philosophers. To this end, I design a tutorial on that theory for philosophers and develop a dialectic that connects to a traditional debate in philosophy: the Lewis-Stalnaker debate on Conditional Excluded Middle (CEM). I first defend CEM, presenting a new Quine-Putnam indispensability argument based on the Nobel-winning application of the Rubin causal model (the potential outcome framework). Then, I switch sides to challenge this argument, introducing an updated version of the Rubin causal model that preserves the successful application while dispensing with CEM.
https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/24222
Eliminative Materialism
[Revised entry by William Ramsey on November 12, 2024.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist and have no role to play in a mature science of the mind. Descartes famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part, we can be confident about the content of our own minds. Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes on this point, since they...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/
When Publishers Want to License Your Book to Generative AI Firms
Is it part of your book contract that your publisher may license your book to the makers of ChatGPT or other large language models or forms of generative AI? If given the choice, should you go along with it?
<img src="https://dailynous.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/distribution-via-generative-ai-1024x688.png" alt="" width="671" height="451">
Those are the questions raised in a recent email from a philosophy professor. He writes:
Last year, I published a book with Cambridge University Press. Now, I have received an email from them requesting that I sign an addendum to my contract agreeing to them licensing my book to providers of generative AI. They note that such technologies “offer opportunities and risks.” I imagine other philosophers have been getting similar requests.
I see some of the potential opportunities here (remuneration; getting my arguments read by other philosophers in the form of supposedly original student essays), but I’m having a harder time thinking through the potential risks—in part because I have little familiarity with the work philosophers are doing on AI. Given this, I was thinking that more-informed Daily Nous readers might be able to weigh in on the ethics and prudence of permitting such licensing.
Discussion welcome, especially from those who’ve faced similar offers, as well as from readers with expertise in legal and ethical matters related to AI, intellectual property, and publication ethics.The post https://dailynous.com/2024/11/12/when-publishers-want-to-license-your-book-to-generative-ai-firms/
.
https://dailynous.com/2024/11/12/when-publishers-want-to-license-your-book-to-generative-ai-firms/
The hostile telepaths problem
Published on October 27, 2024 3:26 PM GMTEpistemic status: model-building based on observation, with a few successful unusual predictions. Anecdotal evidence has so far been consistent with the model. This puts it at risk of seeming more compelling than the evidence justifies just yet. Caveat emptor.Imagine you're a very young child. Around, say, three years old.You've just done something that really upsets your mother. Maybe you were playing and knocked her glasses off the table and they broke.Of course you find her reaction uncomfortable. Maybe scary. You're too young to have detailed metacognitive thoughts, but if you could reflect on why you're scared, you wouldn't be confused: you're scared of how she'll react.She tells you to say you're sorry.You utter the magic words, hoping that will placate her.And she narrows her eyes in suspicion."You sure don't look sorry. Say it and mean it."Now you have a serious problem. You don't have an internal "actually mean it" button. And yet here's Mom peering into your soul and demanding that you both have that button and press it. Trying to appease her didn't work. She needs you to be different — and she's checking.What can you do now?This is a template for what I've come to call "the hostile telepaths problem". I think it's a common feature of social problems. The hostile telepaths problem is when you're dealing with a being (a) who can kind of read your internal experiences and (b) whom you don't trust won't make your situation worse due to what they find in you.There are lots of solutions to the hostile telepaths problem. I don't claim to know all of them. But recognizing some common ones has helped clarify a lot of my thinking — particularly around self-deception and akrasia.And getting very clear on the nature of the problem makes identifying real solutions way easier. This fact produces some previously-surprising-to-me predictions, especially for trauma processing and for making emotionally difficult decisions.I'll try to spell out what I mean with some theory and a few examples. Newcomblike self-deceptionThere's one really tricky solution to the hostile telepaths problem. It deserves some special front-loaded attention before I name some other solutions.Here I'll try to spell out its logic with a modification of https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/newcomb-s-problemhttps://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5FAnfAStc7birapMx/the-hostile-telepaths-problem
Transitive closure in Goodman and Quine's system
In the <a href="https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/11/goodman-and-quine-and-shared-bits.html" rel="nofollow">previous
post</a>, I showed that <a href="https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/2023%20Sellars/Sellars%20texts/Goodman-StepsTowardConstructive-1947.pdf" rel="nofollow">Goodman
and Quine’s</a> counting method fails for objects that have too much
overlap. I think (though the technical parts here are more difficult)
that the same is true for their definition of the ancestral or
transitive closure of a relation.
GQ showed how to define ancestors in terms of offspring. We can try
to extend this definition to the transitive closure of any relation
R over a kind K of entities (say, organisms):
x stands in the transitive
closure of R to y iff x and y are K and x is a part of every object u that has y as a part and that is such that
whenever z is K and is a part of u then every K that has R to z is a part of u.
This works fine if the Ks
do not overlap. But if they do overlap, it can fail. For instance,
suppose we have three atoms a,
b and c, and a relation R that holds between a + b and a + b + c and
between a and a + b. Then any object
u that has a + b + c as a
part has c as a part, and so
(1) would imply that c stands
in the transitive closure of R
to a + b + c, which
is false.
Can we find some other definition of transitive closure using the
same theoretical resources (namely, mereology) that works for
overlapping objects?
No.
Let’s work in models with a countably infinite number of mereological
atoms and a successor relation between the mereological atoms that
satisfies the standard axioms for a successor relation. (E.g., these
models might correspond to worlds where the atoms pop into existence
sequentially.)
Say that an object y
stands in the one-plus relation to an object x iff x is a part of y and there is exactly one atom of
y that is not a part of x.
An object y is finite
iff there is an atom x such
that y stands in the
transitive closure of one-plus to x.
Given objects x and
y, let Kxy(z)
if and only if z is a fusion
of a part of x and a part of
y.
For nonoverlapping x
and y, let Rxyuv
just in case Kxy(u)
and Kxy(v),
and the overlap of v with
x stands in one-plus to the
overlap of u with x, while the overlap of v with y stands in one-plus to the overlap
of u with y.
Say that x is
equinumerous0 to y provided that x and y don’t overlap and are both finite
and an object consisting of two atoms is in the transitive closure of
Rxy to
the fusion of x and y.
Say that x is
equinumerous to y provided
that they are both infinite or they are both finite and there is a z that is equinumerous0 to each of x and y.
So, we now have equinumerosity defined for collections of atoms.
Given the correspondence between GQ’s system and monadic second-order
logic, if we can define equinumerosity in terms of parthood and the
successor relation, we have violated the result in the answer https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/619131/can-equinumerosity-by-defined-in-monadic-second-order-logic
.
Since the one tool over and beyond parthood and successor relation we
used in the proof is transitive closure, it follows that that could not
have been definable in terms of parthood and the successor relation.
https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/11/transitive-closure-in-goodman-and.html
I sometimes watch Youtube movies made in 2020-2021 and hear people speak th…
I sometimes watch Youtube movies made in 2020-2021 and hear people speak there about the "schmandenic" because apparently YT demonetized accounts who mentioned covid or the pandemic.
https://bsky.app/profile/helendecruz.net/post/3lai4hihwhs2z
Still Spinning
I keep encountering the declaration that writing isn’t about jotting down thoughts that we’ve already had; rather, writing contains the act of thinking itself, of collecting and curating, then transforming ideas onto the page once they’ve been digested. To write, then, isn’t to merely transcribe what already exists in your mind; it isn’t the end state of an established inner-monologue. It’s the process that brings us from thinking to knowing to the physical act of inscription, often met with surprises along that journey.
I suspect there’s truth to that. This entry started as a small note I had written last night—just a single line—but it continues to radiate outward as I settle into these words. I frequently jot down such notes, but I don’t consider it writing. They’re small tokens, moments suffused with possibility for later consumption, when greater attention and pampering may direct deeper thought. That isn’t to claim that I’m a writer or that I’m deluded enough to consider my words profound; neither is true. But I know <a href="http://netigen.com/read/why-do-i-write" rel="nofollow">why I write</a>, at least in this space, and even with my <a href="http://netigen.com/read/time-is-money-friend" rel="nofollow">protracted absence</a>, what was true twenty years ago still echoes onward.
Writing is an act of mercy. Whether active or passive, pre-considered or post-processed, I write to revisit. I drop the little crumbs of self-indulgence to free myself from the burden of knowing that everything washes away in time. Moments captured endure. It’s the instant we cherish, the euphoria we live for, the <a href="http://netigen.com/read/square-roots" rel="nofollow">consequence</a> we regret. It’s those fractions of time that make seas swell and mountains fall within the landscape of our minds. It’s these fragments that make us whole as we find ourselves breaking apart. Collecting these moments is a gift to myself, years in the making.
Words are a time machine, drawing us back to those feelings of old. But they’re really only there for us. Technology pushes the new, the insistent stream, drawing us further and further away, ever more disconnected from the words we once shared. These are mine, capturing a moment, or a feeling. In all likelihood, these words are for me and me alone. Outside of the occasional novelty, these entries only shimmer briefly in online oceans, then vanish from sight. Who actually goes back to read personal journal entries, save for the author?
Loss is inevitable, but in this, we can reconnect with our past. There is comfort and torture in the return. Why do we do it? Why do we cling to memories scrawled in digital ink? We know the path is forward. We know utility surfaces in endurance, in taking one step after another, toward what lies ahead. And yet, at the end of everything, our memories are all that will remain. The memory of us, if we’re lucky, but only the fragments of what came before, as a testament to what was, wholly examined by few.
Retreading past steps is an exercise in reliving those moments as best as we can remember them. Reading engenders a reflection. Media is a window. Photos and videos allow us a look at the surface, but words can unlock memories deeper within, those not captured in the amber of portraits and places. Words are an infinite time machine that can transport you to a place you’ve never been, or back to a former revision of the self. It’s here that I like to visit sometimes, to sit with those ephemera of a past life, and dither about, questioning what was and what could have been. Happiness has never been a strong suit of mine, and introspection is a powerful tool, though often misused by the foolish spirit within. This isn’t to say that I’m unhappy or ungrateful for where I am today; my life, loved ones, and so on. But a wistfulness is inescapable, terminal velocity unavoidable; as I careen faster and faster toward an inexorable demise, I can’t help but look inward, then back.
There’s a trope that says you see your life replay before you as you shed the mortal coil. Well, we’ve all been on a march toward death, inevitable as ever; perhaps looking back at these past experiences is a slow death, a cascade of little cuts, with bits of flesh torn from us on account of time’s demanding hunger. More flesh for the feast. More dreams to the slaughter. More memories to forget, to remember, to forget, ever lurching onward toward oblivion.
Writing is a time machine that can take us back to moments of astonishing beauty, or pain, of terrible, hollow despair, but we can’t escape the machine. We’re bound to the march, and the best we can do is move forward, one step at a time, only tearing glances at where we once were, <a href="http://netigen.com/read/when-you-re-gone" rel="nofollow">who we were</a>, and occasionally, stealing a reminder of who we <a href="http://netigen.com/read/caught-in-the-infinite-blur" rel="nofollow">might have been</a>.
https://netigen.com/read/still-spinning
As duas faces da mesma moeda
XXXI Domingo Comum – Ano B | Mc 12, 28b-34
https://humbertins.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/andre-francois-mckenzie-q4w8gjjkjuw-unsplash.jpg
“Nobunaga, grande samurai japonês, decidiu atacar o inimigo. Estacou e disse: ‘Lançarei uma moeda. Se calhar cara venceremos; se calhar coroa perderemos. Estamos nas mãos do destino.’ Calhou cara e os seus soldados venceram a batalha. ‘Ninguém pode mudar o destino.’ Confirmou o seu escudeiro. ‘Na verdade, não’ – respondeu Nobunaga – mostrando-lhe a moeda que lançara… tinha cara nas duas faces.”https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/11/03/as-duas-faces-da-mesma-moeda/#_ftn1
Já antes, no evangelho de Marcos, Jesus lidou com a questão dos mandamentos. Um fulano qualquer veio ter com ele e lhe disse: “Mestre que preciso fazer para entrar na vida?” E Jesus perguntou-lhe: “Conheces os mandamentos?” E continuou elencando-os: “Não mates, não cometas adultério, não roubes, não levantes falso testemunho, não defraudes, honra teu pai e tua mãe.” (Mc 10,19).
E hoje veio ter com ele um escriba e perguntou-lhe qual é “o” mandamento. E Jesus apresentou-lhe dois, como se fossem as duas faces de uma mesma moeda. Porém, dá ideia que Jesus falou de um mandamento – amar a Deus – para chegar a um outro mandamento – e ao próximo como a ti mesmo, a ponto de a moeda, afinal, ter duas faces com a mesma imagem – amar o próximo!
Qual é o maior mandamento de todos? Ajuda-nos a regressar ao simples, ao princípio de tudo… A resposta começa com um verbo: amareis, no futuro, indicando uma história infinita, porque o amor é o futuro do mundo, porque sem amor não há futuro: amar-vos-eis uns aos outros, senão destruir-vos-eis. Ama a Deus e não ama os outros e destruir-vos-eis. Porque a balança em que se pesa a felicidade nesta vida é dar e receber amor. E não a Deus. Porque a Deus nunca ninguém o viu!
Amarás com todo o teu coração. Como se dissesse: com o vosso coração de luz e com o vosso coração de sombra, amar com o coração que crê e também com o coração que duvida; como puderdes, talvez com a vossa respiração, quando o sol brilha e quando escurece, e com os vossos olhos fechados quando tendes um pouco de medo, mesmo com lágrimas. Santa Teresa de Ávila, numa visão, recebeu esta confiança do Senhor: “Por uma pessoa que te ama, eu faria o universo de novo.” Estão a ver… tem pouco a ver com Deus… tem muito a ver connosco… Porque o nosso Deus é um Deus excêntrico…
Amar e conhecer Deus… palavras repetidas pelos místicos de todas as religiões, pelos buscadores de Deus de todas as crenças, durante milénios. Onde estaria então a novidade do Evangelho? Precisamente no acréscimo, que se torna totalidade, de um segundo mandamento, que é semelhante ao primeiro, que incarna o primeiro… O génio do cristianismo: amarás o homem é semelhante a amarás Deus. O próximo é semelhante a Deus. O próximo tem rosto e voz, fome de amor e beleza, semelhante a Deus. O céu e a terra não se opõem, abraçam-se.
Mas quem é o meu próximo? Perguntar-lhe-á outro médico. Há uma resposta que me fez crescer o coração, a de Gandhi: “o meu próximo é tudo o que vive comigo na terra”, a natureza, a água, o ar, as plantas, os animais. Ama, pois, a terra como a ti mesmo, ama-a como Deus a ama. Viver é coexistir, existir é coexistir. Não para obedecer a mandamentos ou celebrar liturgias, mas simplesmente, maravilhosamente, alegremente: para amar.
Há um aspeto interessante: Jesus cita o Deuteronómio, para responder ao escriba… mas não o cita textualmente… faz um acrescento – com toda a tua alma – dizendo-nos para sermos razoáveis no ato de fé, para cultivarmos o estudo, o aprofundamento das coisas de Deus. A fé sem razão é escriturística, fideísmo, superstição, devocionismo grosseiro. Mais… continua a citar… ajuntando outra página da Escritura… a do amor ao próximo…
Com este aditamento, Jesus quer evitar cair numa tentação muito difundida, tanto naquela época como atualmente, ou seja, a de que se pode amar a divindade de forma abrangente, através de cultos, rituais, sacrifícios, orações como um fim em si mesmo. Atualmente, inclusivamente, de costas viradas para as pessoas para deixar de as ver… para estarmo “só” para Deus…
É certo que Deus deve ser amado com todo o nosso ser, mas a modalidade é o amor aos outros! É este o mandamento: o amor de Deus invertido no amor do próximo. Aqueles que pensavam que o amor à divindade se esgotava num comércio de devoção com ela, Jesus tinha acabado de os expulsar do templo, chamando-lhes ladrões (cf. Mc 11,17).
A novidade do cristianismo é esta: o único caminho para Deus é através dos irmãos. E o Jesus de Marcos acaba por dizer: “não há mandamento (um) maior do que estes”, dizendo que o mandamento é único.https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/11/03/as-duas-faces-da-mesma-moeda/#_ftn2
No final, o escriba cede e elogia Jesus, fazendo uma passagem formidável em relação à religião comum: “O amor aos irmãos vale mais do que todos os holocaustos e sacrifícios” (v. 33), considerados então o fundamento da religião, a religião exterior e comercial, destinada apenas a extorquir da divindade um retorno pessoal com práticas devocionais.
A religião não se resolve numa relação com o Alto, é preciso ir ao encontro do outro, cuidar dos irmãos. Afinal, o Escriba conhece muito bem a Escritura, de facto cita duas passagens dela:
“Praticar a justiça e a equidade para o Senhor vale mais do que um sacrifício” (Pr 21,3)
https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/11/03/as-duas-faces-da-mesma-moeda/#_ftnref1
101 Histórias Zen (Adelphi)
https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/11/03/as-duas-faces-da-mesma-moeda/#_ftnref2
Mateus (22,39) dirá que “o segundo é semelhante a este (o Shemah); Lucas chega mesmo a fundir os dois preceitos (10,27). Em João, Jesus vai ainda mais longe: “Dou-vos um (único) mandamento novo: que vos ameis uns aos outros” (13,34).
https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/11/03/as-duas-faces-da-mesma-moeda/
[OP.1] Eleições nos EUA: esquerda e direita centradas em Trump
Na semana que passou, os jornais portugueses publicaram 126 colunas de opinião. As análises dos colunistas centraram-se nos seguintes três temas, cujos factos vamos recordar, apresentando em seguida as opiniões dominantes à esquerda e à direita:Eleições nos EUA: Trump favorito. A poucos dias das eleições presidenciais nos EUA, Donald Trump surge como favorito, com Kamala Harris a perder terreno em estados-chave. Tumultos em Lisboa. A morte de Odair Moniz pela polícia gerou tumultos em bairros da Grande Lisboa, com reações extremadas do Chega e Bloco de Esquerda. Orçamento do Estado para 2025 aprovado na generalidade. Como se previa, chegaram os votos a favor do PSD e CDS e a abstenção do PS.👉 Este é o primeiro número de uma nova série VamoLáVer, que é identificada pela sigla Op, de opinião. O objetivo é recordar os temas recentes vistos pelos colunistas e descodificar as atitudes dominantes à esquerda e à direita, para melhorar a nossa dieta informativa.A série Op está prevista para sair aos sábados, mas sempre que os acontecimentos o justifiquem poderei emitir noutro dia.Por outro lado, é uma série de valor acrescentado, com o conteúdo integral reservado em exclusivo aos apoiantes. Os assinantes da newsletter regular terão um vislumbre parcial, como já se tornou tradicional neste formato.Espero que agrade e sobretudo que seja útil. As caixas de comentários, bem como o e-mail, estão à disposição, como sempre, para críticas, elogios e sugestões. Basta responder a este e-mail ou, se a leitura acontecer na Web, usar a caixa de comentários abaixo. Todas as mensagens serão bem recebidas e respondidas.https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5af4632f-ef13-475d-9fb0-40ec15693fb0_1219x695.png
<a href="https://vamolaver.substack.com/p/op1-eleicoes-nos-eua-esquerda-e-direita" rel="nofollow">
Read more
</a>
https://vamolaver.substack.com/p/op1-eleicoes-nos-eua-esquerda-e-direita
O romance dos Fontaines D.C. no Campo Pequeno: quando milhares de corações batem ao mesmo tempo
Pouco mais de dois meses após uma magnífica atuação no festival de Paredes de Coura, os Fontaines D.C. voltaram a Portugal para apresentar os temas de “Romance”, disco editado no verão e que é dono de uma ambição desmedida. Olhamos em volta e vemos, nesta noite de sexta-feira no Campo Pequeno, em Lisboa, bancadas cheias e uma plateia em pé a clamar por libertação. Esta banda quer ser a maior do mundo: milhares de corações vão ajudá-la a chegar lá
https://expresso.pt/blitz/2024-11-02-o-romance-dos-fontaines-d.c.-no-campo-pequeno-quando-milhares-de-coracoes-batem-ao-mesmo-tempo-db184048
"The characteristic mark of minds of the first rank is the immediacy of all…
"The characteristic mark of minds of the first rank is the immediacy of all their judgements. Everything they produce is the result of thinking for themselves and already in the way it is spoken everywhere announces itself as such. He who truly thinks for himself is like a monarch, in that he recognizes no one over him. His judgements, like the decisions of a monarch, arise directly from his own absolute power."— https://writing.exchange/tags/Schopenhauerhttps://writing.exchange/@bryankam/113412822714382076
Já posso adicionar "Sobreviver a um concerto de Andre Rieu" à minha lista d…
Já posso adicionar "Sobreviver a um concerto de Andre Rieu" à minha lista de feitos. Excedeu as minhas expectativas, foi bem pior do que imaginava, entre o assassinar de peças clássicas, castafioradas dos cantores, sentimentalismo oco e a falta de verve da orquestra. Mas acabei o concerto a simpatizar com eles. São kitsch assumido e despretencioso, querem entreter e divertir, nada mais que isso.A minha mãe divertia-se, batia palmas ao ritmo, sorria. Estava feliz e isso é o que interessa.
https://masto.pt/@arturcoelho/113412372154611216
It’s been seven years since my father passed, taken from us far too soon at…
It’s been seven years since my father passed, taken from us far too soon at the age of 51. I was only 18 then, and while time has softened some of the pain, his influence remains a constant part of me. He was a person full of curiosity and passion, qualities I feel he passed down to me in his own way.
In many ways, he showed me paths that I still walk today, inspiring me to pursue what I value and to keep learning. Though he’s no longer here, his spirit continues to guide me. Thank you, Dad, for everything you taught me. I carry your legacy forward, always.
https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2024/11/2024-11-02-jdkvz#interactionshttps://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2024/11/2024-11-02-jdkvz
Apple revela novos Mac Mini com processador M4 e M4 Pro
A Apple tem vindo a revelar algumas novidades nos últimos tempos para o mercado, e depois do novo iPad Mini com o processador A17 Pro, agora a empresa conta com duas novidades. A empresa revelou os novos Mac Mini com o processador M4 e M4 Pro. Estes contam com os mais recentes processadores dedicados da empresa, que devem oferecer o melhor desempenho possível, mas também contam com mudanças a nível do design, e claro, suporte para as tecnologias da Apple Intelligence. No modelo com o M4, a Apple ...
https://tugatech.com.pt/t63058-apple-revela-novos-mac-mini-com-processador-m4-e-m4-pro
Condóminos e AL: em defesa da propriedade privada
O Supremo considerou que bastava um condómino interpor um processo para impedir o AL num edifício residencial. O governo anterior encontrou uma solução moderada, exigindo que a decisão fosse maioritária, mas dispensando a via judicial. Montenegro volta a atirar para os tribunais o que devia resultar do bom-senso do legislador, obrigando a provar que estes estabelecimentos hoteleiros causam perturbação reiterada. Para esta direita, o direito à propriedade acaba quando há hipótese de outros investidores lucrarem com ela
https://expresso.pt/opiniao/2024-10-30-condominos-e-al-em-defesa-da-propriedade-privada-31284ed6
Overleaf Workshop not compiling in VS Code?
So I'm using Overleaf Workshop in VS Code, and works as advertised, it's a great local alternative to Overleaf and links the two of them very well, but I have one problem, whenever I try to compile, it tries, but always stops like fifteen seconds in. There aren't any errors in the code, although the project is quite long (about 130 pages). I use Windows 11, anything I can provide I will be glad to. Thanks for any help! submitted by https://www.reddit.com/user/MasterAvocado42https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/1gfdwbb/overleaf_workshop_not_compiling_in_vs_code/
Articles and blog posts found on 29 October 2024
Anish Seal: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24117/1/0EDB507C-9365-11EF-B383-858C99831876.pdf
(pdf, 9698 words) The practice of science appears to involve “model-talk”. Scientists, one thinks, are in the business of giving accounts of reality. Scientists, in the process of furnishing such accounts, talk about what they call “models”. Philosophers of science have inspected what this talk of models suggests about how scientific theories manage to represent reality. There are, it seems, at least three distinct philosophical views on the role of scientific models in science’s portrayal of reality: the abstractionist view, the indirect fictionalist view, and the direct fictionalist view. In this essay, I try to articulate a question about what makes a scientific model more or less appropriate for a specific domain of reality. More precisely, I ask, “What accounts for the fact that given a determinate target domain, some scientific models, but not others, are thought to be “appropriate” for that domain?” I then consider whether and the degree to which each of the mentioned views on scientific models institutes a satisfactory response to this question. I conclude that, amongst those views, the direct fictionalist view seems to have the most promising response. I then utilize this argument to develop a more precise account of the problem of differential importability, and ultimately offer a more general and less presumptive argument that the problem seems to be optimally solved by justifying comparative evaluation of model-importabilities solely in terms of comparative evaluations of what I characterize as models’ “holistic” predictive success.
Justin Holder: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24128/1/Holder%20-%20The%20Structure%20of%20an%20Unknowable%20System.pdf
(pdf, 11730 words) One may demarcate at least three major forms of philosophical antirealism: scientific, sceptical, and transcendental. Each regards certain systems as unknowable. And for each, it has been argued that even if the nature of a system is unknowable, its structure may still be known. Structuralism in this sense is as yet ununified: even though structure is supposed to solve a similar problem in each case, proposals tend to be formulated in ways that make them specific to their respective contexts. Here I present a unified framework for making claims about only the structure of a target system which are not undermined by any of the three forms of antirealism. The framework may therefore provide a baseline for our knowledge of the world which is safe from most philosophical antirealism. The defining characteristic of my approach is how it leverages the role that an unknowable system plays in underlying experiences. I develop a formula for sentences making claims about the structures of target systems and I account for the representation of systems by mathematical structures as well.
Lorenzo Sartori: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24127/1/LSartori-psa_paper_submission.pdf
(pdf, 5052 words) Paper accepted to the 2024 edition of the Philosophy of Science Association (New Orleans) and for publication in the related special issue in Philosophy of science. This version of the article has been accepted for publication after peer review but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections.
Mario Villalobos: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24118/2/Exoautopoietic%20bodies%20the%20quest%20for%20the%20theoretical%20identity%20of%20living%20beings.pdf
(pdf, 8653 words) Despite all the encyclopedic knowledge that biological sciences have accumulated regarding living beings, their physiology and behaviour, their molecular bases, their development and evolution, it is still frustratingly elusive to find a neat and uncontroversial answer to the (apparently) simple question “What are living beings?” The traditional approach to answering this question has been by means of definitions. Many have been proposed in the literature over the years (each one emphasising different aspects of living beings, such as biochemical composition, metabolism, thermodynamics, evolution, or self-organisation), but none have achieved transversal acceptance in the community (Sagan 1970; Pályi, Zucchi and Caglioti 2002; Tsokolov 2009; Bedau and Cleland 2010; Trifonov 2011; Kolb 2018). So much is the case that some have declared, with resignation, that it is impossible to find such a definition and that we should better forget the whole question (Machery 2012).
Stephanie Collins: https://stephaniecollins.xyz/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/care-ethics-and-structural-injustice.pdf
(pdf, 9791 words) Philosophical interest in structural injustice has risen sharply since the publication of Iris Marion Young’s Responsibility for Justice (Young 2011). In short, a structural injustice occurs when social, economic, or political processes operate to produce an unjust outcome, where those processes cannot be reduced to identifiable wrongs perpetrated by isolatable agents (regardless of whether those agents are individuals or collectives, such as governments or corporations). Paradigm examples of structural injustices include widespread homelessness and exploitative labour practices—both of which are examples analysed by Young.
Zvi Hasnes Beninson, Ehud Lamm: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24124/1/Two%20rights%20can%20make%20a%20wrong_1-1.pdf
(pdf, 1244 words) Scientists are once again worried about ideologically driven bad science. We explain that this problem results from the conjunction of two worthy values that make science susceptible to recurrence of such situations. The solution is to acknowledge the social, political, economic, and ideological frameworks in which science is embedded.
D. G. Mayo's blog: https://errorstatistics.com/2024/10/28/excursion-1-tour-ii-4th-stop-error-probing-tools-versus-logics-of-evidence-excerpt/
(html, 1225 words) We are starting on Tour II of Excursion 1 (4th stop). The 3rd stop is in an earlier blog post. As I promised, this cruise of SIST is leisurely. I have not yet shared new reflections in the comments–but I will! …
http://www.philosophicalprogress.org/
Mr Big police stings: true crime that reads like crime fiction
A police method of prosecuting people suspected of being responsible for committing a serious crime, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-28/calls-for-safeguards-on-australian-use-of-mr-big-technique/104523694
:
Police manufacture a chance meeting with the suspect, then offer them paid work of a non-criminal nature before introducing jobs that appear to break the law. Through a series of interactions over several months, the sting makes the suspect believe they are being adopted into an organised crime gang with powerful connections to corrupt police, government officials and even judges.
Long story short, police — undercover officers — go about extracting a confession, or admission of guilt, from a suspect they believe committed a crime, but do not have sufficient evidence to place charges. The so-called “Mr Big” technique, which originated in Canada, has resulted in numerous convictions. Legal experts however are concerned some people may be wrongly convicted, as a certain pressure is put on would-be suspects to confess.
https://disassociated.com/mr-big-police-stings-true-crime-fiction/
I recieve an advert about Hounded "an unflinching account of the gender war…
I recieve an advert about Hounded "an unflinching account of the gender wars" ... sadly the days when an identity, an identity politics could define itself and thus others outside of their 'identity' are over... https://mastodon.online/tags/politicshttps://mastodon.online/@sz_duras/113390840506160865
Validação da Reclamação da candidatura ao Concurso Externo Extraordinário 2024/2025
Aplicação eletrónica disponível entre o dia 29 de outubro e as 18:00 horas de 30 de outubro de 2024 (hora de Portugal continental) para efetuar a Validação da Reclamação da Candidatura ao Concurso Externo Extraordinário 2024/2025. Nota Informativa – Validação da Reclamação das candidaturas ao Concurso Externo Extraordinário 2024/2025 SIGRHE – Validação da Reclamação
https://www.arlindovsky.net/2024/10/validacao-da-reclamacao-da-candidatura-ao-concurso-externo-extraordinario-2024-2025/
Progressive Catholics and capital punishment
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGE_eWmyFbhOodWUEOAmTbmxoK68qkTBBxm3jTU5GzVMic-4VwgCS8BU9yS2WPbugqzhW1qgGgfq7gCVpo7GSpxoE5JiBwVV8HAhbgKxLAZH-Hqd3JPA3k86CsisptgXHhn2vUFzBldegIsNJnAZcVVdc8XXNutaiJAxzpw9KsMhOlzZiNCf4MYCz-1Hup/s418/0023.JPG
The debate
over capital punishment between conservative and progressive Catholics
typically exhibits the following dialectic.
The conservative will set out a case from natural law, scripture and
tradition, and social science for the thesis that capital punishment is at
least in principle licit and in practice still needed in some circumstances –
as Joseph Bessette and I do at length in our book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Man-Shall-His-Blood-Shed/dp/1621641260/ref=pd_sim_14_6?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1621641260&pd_rd_r=9SQGPQ0HAX9Y392GRR12&pd_rd_w=yz0mr&pd_rd_wg=zFiiQ&psc=1&refRID=9SQGPQ0HAX9Y392GRR12" rel="nofollow">By
Man Shall His Blood Be Shed</a>.
The progressive will reply with an impassioned but vague appeal to human
dignity, a cherry-picked statement from the recent magisterium, and a
tendentious empirical claim (for example, that capital punishment does not
deter, or is implemented in a racist manner), and top things off with in an ad hominem attack (such as accusing the
conservative of being bloodthirsty or having a political motive). The conservative will then complain that the
progressive has attacked a straw man and simply ignored rather than answered
his key points. The progressive will at
this point either ignore the conservative or simply repeat his original,
question-begging reply at higher volume.
The latest
iteration of the progressive’s routine is Jack Hanson’s <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/10/20/last-rites-death-penalty-catholic-church/" rel="nofollow">article
on Catholicism and capital punishment</a> in The New York Review of Books.
A recent execution provides the occasion for the article, but there is
otherwise nothing new in it. And though
it cites me as the Exhibit A “hard-liner” among Catholic academics who defend
capital punishment, it offers no response to the key arguments Bessette and I
develop in our book.
The conservative’s case
Because so
many of our critics ignore rather than respond to those arguments, we’ve had to
reiterate them many times in the seven years since our book appeared. It is tiresome to have to do so yet again,
but at least a brief summary is necessary for context. There are three relevant sets of
considerations, deriving from natural law, scripture and tradition, and social
science.
The
traditional natural law rationale for the death penalty is straightforward. Wrongdoers deserve punishment, and what they
deserve, specifically, is a punishment that is proportional to the
offense. And governmental authorities
have the right to inflict such punishments.
Now, some offenses are so extremely grave that nothing less than
execution would be a proportional punishment.
So, such offenders deserve the death penalty, and the state has a right
to inflict it on them.
This is not
to say that the state must inflict
the death penalty whenever it is deserved, only that it may do so, at least in principle.
And there may in some cases be good reasons why it should not do
so. As Aquinas teaches, perfect justice
is not attainable in this life, and when inflicting punishments, governments
need to focus primarily on what is essential to preserving public order. But though considerations of retributive
justice are not sufficient to
determine what punishments should be inflicted, they are necessary. An offender can
deserve death as a matter of retributive justice, so that if the state inflicts
death on him, it does no injustice –
even in cases where there are considerations other than justice that should
lead it to refrain from inflicting this penalty.
The point is
that the death penalty cannot be regarded as intrinsically wrong. It does
not amount to murder, any more than arresting and imprisoning a bank robber
amounts to kidnapping, or any more than fining someone caught speeding amounts
to stealing. A murderer has forfeited
his right to life, just as a robber has forfeited his freedom and someone who
violates traffic laws has forfeited the money that goes to paying the
fine. If the death penalty is ever
wrong, it can only be wrong because of the circumstances
under which it is inflicted, and in particular because there is insufficient
reason under the circumstances to give the offender what he deserves.
What, then,
of the circumstances that prevail in a country like the United States? Is there sufficient reason to inflict on some
offenders the penalty of death? Bessette
and I argue in our book that there is.
We argue that some offenders remain so dangerous even when locked up for
life that governing authorities ought to retain the option of execution. For example, without the prospect of capital
punishment, some offenders facing life imprisonment have no incentive not to
murder fellow prisoners or prison guards.
Or, if they escape, they will have no incentive not to murder innocent
people in the course of trying to evade police, if the worst they face is a
return to life imprisonment. In general,
we argue, capital punishment does have significant deterrent effect. It is necessary for governments to keep it on
the books and utilize it at least in the case of the very worst offenders, in
order to protect society from them.
This is just
a summary in a few paragraphs of a natural law line of reasoning that Bessette and
I develop and defend in detail in the book.
As we argue, in order to deny that the death penalty can be licit at
least in principle, one would have to give up the principle that offenders
deserve punishments proportional to the offense. One problem with doing so is that divorcing
punishment from desert has implications that by anyone’s lights would be
unjust. Another problem is that there is
no way to give up the principles of desert and proportionality consistently with
Catholic orthodoxy. For these principles
are deeply embedded in scripture and tradition, informing both the Church’s
understanding of punishment and her teaching on salvation and damnation.
This brings
us to the second set of considerations in favor of capital punishment, which
have to do with the teaching of scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the
Church, the popes prior to Francis, and tradition in general. As Bessette and I show in detail, there are
many passages in scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments, that sanction
the death penalty, and that have always been understood by the Church (and
indeed by everyone else, such as Jewish interpreters) to sanction the death
penalty. This includes the Fathers of
the Church, some of whom pleaded for clemency and thought it better for the
state not to exercise its right to inflict the death penalty, but none of whom
denied that scripture did indeed give the state that right. The Church teaches that neither the Fathers
nor the tradition of the Church can be mistaken when they agree on some matter
of scriptural interpretation. Since the
Fathers and the Church have always agreed that scripture allows for capital
punishment at least in principle, there is no way to interpret scripture any
other way consistent with orthodoxy. A
Catholic is free to hold (as some of the Fathers did) that it is better in
practice not to utilize capital punishment.
But a Catholic is not free to deny that scripture teaches that the death
penalty can at least in principle be just.
This has for
2,000 years been the consistent teaching of the Church and of the popes who
have addressed the issue. Popes such as
St. Innocent I, Innocent III, Leo X, St. Pius V, St. Pius X, and Pius XII not
only upheld the legitimacy of the death penalty, but in some cases (such as
Innocent I, Innocent III, and Leo X) condemned as heterodox the view that
capital punishment is always wrong. St.
John Paul II too explicitly taught that the death penalty can in some cases be
justifiable, and held only that it is the taking of innocent life that is inherently
wrong. Here too, Bessette and I back up
our claims with a detailed presentation and analysis of the relevant texts.
The main
reason Pope Francis’s change to the Catechism and his other many remarks on the
death penalty have been so controversial is not because of his opposition to
it, but because of the way he has
expressed his opposition to it – namely, in a manner that seems to imply that
capital punishment is intrinsically
or of its very nature wrong. The language of the change to the Catechism,
which states flatly that the death penalty “is an attack on the inviolability
and dignity of the person,” implies this, certainly on a natural reading. The recent CDF document Dignitas Infinita condemns capital punishment <a href="http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/04/two-problems-with-dignitas-infinita.html" rel="nofollow">in
even stronger terms</a>, claiming that it “violates the inalienable
dignity of every person, regardless of
the circumstances” (emphasis added). This clearly implies that it something about
the act of execution in itself, and
not just its circumstances, that makes it immoral.
This
position flatly contradicts the consistent teaching of scripture and
tradition. If Pope Francis is right,
every previous pope who has spoken on the matter is wrong – wrong about capital
punishment, wrong about scriptural interpretation, wrong about the nature and
implications of human dignity. On the
other hand, if all those previous popes were right, then it is Pope Francis who
is wrong. Either way, we are in a
situation where some pope or other has
erred. Catholic theology leaves open the
possibility that this can happen when a pope is not speaking ex cathedra. And since, as the Church teaches, the main
job of a pope is faithfully to hand on traditional teaching, the most obvious
way this might happen is if he were to contradict traditional teaching.
Now, the
very idea that scripture could be mistaken about a matter of faith or morals,
or that the Church could for two millennia have consistently been
misinterpreting scripture and teaching a grave moral error, is flatly
incompatible with the Church’s claims about her own indefectibility. But a single pope teaching error in some of
his non-ex cathedra pronouncements it
is not contrary to those claims –
indeed, it has happened before, albeit only very rarely (as in the cases of
Pope Honorius and Pope John XXII). The
logically unavoidable implication of this is that IF Pope Francis really does
mean to teach that the death penalty is intrinsically
wrong, then he is in error. There is
simply no other possible conclusion, consistent with the Catholic Church’s
claims about her own indefectibility.
The third
set of considerations relevant to the debate about Catholicism and capital
punishment derives from social science.
Catholic opponents of the death penalty routinely make a series of
empirical claims, to the effect that modern prison systems suffice to protect
society without ever having to resort to execution, that the death penalty has
no deterrence value, that it is applied in a racially discriminatory way, that
there is a significant risk of innocent people being executed, and so on. Usually these claims are just asserted, without supporting
argument. And usually, the
counterarguments are simply ignored rather than rebutted.
But in our
book, Joseph Bessette and I address these arguments too, systematically and in
depth. We show that there is in fact
strong evidence that the death penalty has deterrence value, that there are
cases where life imprisonment is not sufficient to protect others from the
offender, that the death penalty is not in fact implemented in a racially discriminatory
way in the U.S., that there is not in fact a significant risk of innocent
people being executed, and so on. (As it
happens, the claim that there is such a risk of executing the innocent is one
that Bessette has rebutted also in https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/10/96181/
.)
The key
questions in the debate over Catholicism and capital punishment, then, are
these: Can the view that capital punishment is always and intrinsically immoral
be reconciled with a sound philosophical theory of punishment? Can it be reconciled with scripture, the
Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and two thousand years of consistent
magisterial teaching? Are there strong
social scientific arguments for the judgment that capital punishment is never
necessary today in order to protect society?
In our book, Bessette and I present a detailed case that the correct
answer to each of these questions is No.
Hanson’s case
Now, Hanson,
as I have said, cites me as representative of Catholic academics who defend
capital punishment. So, what does he
have to say in response to the arguments Bessette and I develop in our
book? Nothing. He tells his readers only that those
arguments have been “refuted by more capable theologians like David Bentley
Hart and Paul J. Griffiths.” Hanson does
not tell us what makes Hart and Griffiths more capable. (One suspects that “agreeing with Jack Hanson”
has something to do with it.) He also
does not tell his readers that <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/11/28/hot-air-versus-capital-punishment-a-reply-to-paul-griffiths-and-david-bentley-hart/" rel="nofollow">I
have replied to Hart’s and Griffith’s objections</a>, and demonstrated
that in fact those objections are intellectually dishonest and notable more for
their vituperative excess than for scholarly rigor.
Hanson does
have some arguments of his own. First,
he suggests that there is a significant risk of executing innocent people. In fact there is not, as Bessette, who is a
social scientist with special expertise in these matters, shows in <a href="https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/10/96181/" rel="nofollow">the
Public Discourse article</a>
referred to above (which addresses, among other cases, the specific one Hanson
puts special emphasis on).
Second, Hanson
suggests that given “the notion of the ‘sanctity of life,’ which guides [the
Church’s] hard-line stance against abortion,” it is “hypocrisy” for a Catholic
to oppose abortion but support capital punishment. Though this sort of objection is common, the
problem with it is so obvious that I am continually amazed that death penalty
opponents need it pointed out to them.
The problem is that there is (as everyone acknowledges in every other
context) a crucial difference between the innocent
and the guilty. Is it hypocrisy or an assault on human
freedom to condemn kidnapping while supporting the imprisonment of
kidnappers? Is it hypocrisy or an
assault on private property to condemn theft while supporting the imposition of
fines for certain offenses? Of course
not. The reason is that the kidnapper
takes away the freedom of an innocent person,
whereas imprisonment is about taking away the freedom of a guilty person. Similarly, the
thief takes the property of an innocent
person, whereas an offender who is forced to pay a fine is a guilty person. Punishments like imprisonment and fines uphold rather than undermine freedom and
private property, because they protect the freedom and private property rights
of innocent people from those who would violate those rights.
For exactly
the same reason, there is no hypocrisy whatsoever in opposing abortion while
supporting capital punishment, because abortion involves taking the lives of
the innocent while capital punishment
involves taking the lives of the guilty. And insofar as the death penalty protects society
from those who have murdered before, and deters others from committing murders,
it upholds the sanctity of life. This is a point the Church herself has
emphasized in the past. The Roman
Catechism promulgated by Pope St. Pius V teaches that for the state to
implement the death penalty is precisely for it to obey the commandment against murder:
Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil
authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and
judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent.
The just use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act
of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder. The end of
the Commandment is the preservation and security of human life. Now the
punishments inflicted by the civil authority, which is the legitimate avenger
of crime, naturally tend to this end, since they give security to life by
repressing outrage and violence.
Third, Hanson
argues that “by sanctioning the taking of a life, we prevent any possibility
that the condemned might someday reconcile with the world and with God.” As Bessette and I discuss in our book, this
is an objection Aquinas considers in Summa
Contra Gentiles III.146, and he dismisses it as “frivolous,” for two
reasons. For one thing, says Aquinas, we
have to balance the potential repentance of the offender against the very real
harm the innocent may suffer if we do not protect them from evildoers by means
of capital punishment. For another thing,
the prospect of execution in fact often prompts
evildoers to repent and get themselves right with God while there is still
time. If an offender is so hardened in
evil that even knowledge of his imminent death will not lead him to repent, then,
Aquinas argues, it is likely that he would never repent anyway.
In a fourth
line of argument, commenting on Genesis 9:6 (which famously states that
“whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed”), Hanson
writes:
For one thing, the Genesis passage stands in some tension
with the Gospel’s teachings on sin and casting stones. For another, Roman
Catholicism typically emphasizes allegorical, rational, and, above all,
ecclesial interpretations of the Bible; direct appeals to the literal inerrancy
of Biblical texts are rather a hallmark of Protestant theology in general and
Reformation polemics against the Roman Magisterium in particular.
There are
many problems with this, starting with the fact that Hanson does not explain
exactly how Genesis is in “tension” with what the Gospel says about sin and
casting stones. Is he saying that we
should never punish criminals, since none of us is without sin? Presumably not. But in that case, if we can punish them with
fines or imprisonment, why not with execution, if that is necessary to protect
society? There is also the fact that
Genesis 9:6 is by no means the only scriptural passage that sanctions capital
punishment. Many other such texts can be
found, not only in Old Testament books such as Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
Deuteronomy, and Psalms, but also in New Testament passages such as Romans
13:4, which tells us that the governing authority “does not bear the sword in
vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” Obviously, then, the New Testament writers,
who were in the best position to know, did not regard capital punishment as at
odds with the Gospel.
Theologian E.
Christian Brugger, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Punishment-Catholic-Tradition-Second/dp/0268022410/ref=sr_1_3?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.dx-DyO4YdAGjcsMCEPhWHvxf1GuwKIt7Uyifm5zgtAjm4-DqF6UI6C2k6acIqzSd53o5yaYTlVDgaPat56NM7pIq-doh2IYDl1dFaOoxYhV9owYX3HHcNDo1bKGAgDufWNcVujxvyNRZ7QJWsewn2KTN46cBknJyrsZtogcsuy5p8zcwh41KK54VIMyOEwFhdocIvVVgztRHSS4msV7bYMByLC-8aBYljno686ulRbw.AJg1Sg2FjL-kwmaLXmRK1dx1ZmFqxjR7AkWozVWPJlA&dib_tag=se&keywords=christian+brugger&qid=1730070054&sr=8-3" rel="nofollow">the
most systematic Catholic critique of capital punishment</a>, concedes
that Genesis 9:6 is a “problem” for his side, and that there was a “consensus” among
the Fathers of the Church that scriptural passages like Romans 13:4 teach that
civil authorities have the right to inflict capital punishment for sufficiently
grave crimes. Now, the Council of Trent
and the First Vatican Council teach that where the Fathers are united on some
matter of scriptural interpretation, no Catholic is at liberty to disagree with
them. Even if there were no other
problems with attempts to reinterpret the relevant scriptural passages (and as
Bessette and I show in our book, there are in fact many such problems), the consensus
of the Fathers would suffice to show that these reinterpretations cannot be
accepted.
Nor is
Hanson correct to dismiss scriptural inerrancy as somehow a Protestant rather
than Catholic notion. On the contrary, popes
such as Leo XIII and Pius XII emphasized that it is central to Catholic
orthodoxy to hold that scripture is divinely inspired and thus free of
error. The First Vatican Council teaches
that the scriptures “contain revelation without error…being written under the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit,” and pronounces an anathema on anyone who would
deny that they are divinely inspired.
The Second Vatican Council teaches that since they are divinely
inspired, “the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly,
faithfully and without error,” and the Catechism
of the Catholic Church incorporates this passage into its own teaching on
scriptural authority (107).
Hanson’s
position on scripture is also self-defeating.
In order to get around scriptural teaching on capital punishment, he
suggests that such teaching is not free of error, or is incompatible with other
scriptural teaching, or has been misinterpreted. Yet he also appeals to scripture when it suits
him, as when he refers to Christ’s remark about not casting the first
stone. But if we are free to reject
scriptural teaching and its traditional interpretation in the one case, then
why not also in the other? How can
Hanson’s appeal to scripture carry any more weight than the appeals made by
more conservative Catholics? Here we see
a problem that, <a href="https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/11/geachs-argument-against-modernism.html" rel="nofollow">as
Peter Geach pointed out</a>, inevitably undermines modernist
theologies. They claim to preserve the
core of divinely revealed teaching while jettisoning only what is inessential,
but by means of arguments which if followed out consistently would make the whole of the purported revelation
suspect.
In what
seems intended as a separate, fifth line of argument, Hanson appeals to the
standard progressive Catholic narrative about how a purportedly arid and
abstract Neo-Scholastic theology gave way, after Vatican II and under the
influence of ressourcement thinkers
like Congar and de Lubac, to a more enlightened and humane modern
theology. Neo-Scholasticism, he
suggests, is in some vague way linked to capitalism, Vichy France,
fundamentalism, and other things sure to generate a Pavlovian response among
the bien-pensant. Exactly what all this has to do with whether
capital punishment is intrinsically wrong or still needed today is never made
clear. The point, though, is obviously
to insinuate that Catholic defenders of capital punishment derive their
arguments from suspect sources and are motivated by a suspect political
agenda.
Rhetorically, this will no doubt be effective
with some readers, at least those who already agree with Hanson. Logically,
of course, it is completely worthless, being a crude deployment of fallacies
such as Appeal to Motive and the Genetic Fallacy. If someone is going to show that the
arguments from natural law, scripture and tradition, and social science that I
summarized above are wrong, then he needs to demonstrate either that they rest
on false premises, or that the conclusions don’t follow from the premises. The sources
of and motivations behind the
arguments are completely irrelevant, even if they were as Hanson claims they
are (which they are not, since there are, after all, lots of people who support
capital punishment but have no sympathy with or even knowledge of
Neo-Scholasticism).
A sixth and
final objection raised by Hanson is also of a fallaciously ad hominem nature. Those who
have criticized Pope Francis’s statements on capital punishment, Hanson alleges,
show “evident bad faith” and are really guided by “political preferences”
rather than theological concerns. The
first thing to say about this is that once again, Hanson is simply diverting
attention from what matters, which is whether the arguments given by Catholic
defenders of capital punishment are cogent.
The motives they may have for
giving these arguments are irrelevant, even if they were the motives Hanson
attributes to them (which they are not).
The second
thing to say is that here again, Hanson’s position is self-defeating. For the weapon he deploys against
conservatives can be turned against him.
That is to say, conservatives could with no less justice (indeed, with
greater justice, I would argue) suggest that it is politics rather than
theology that fundamentally motivates the thinking of progressive Catholics
like Hanson. In particular, they allow
their progressive political preferences to trump what scripture, the Fathers
and Doctors of the Church, and two thousand years of consistent magisterial
teaching say about the topic of capital punishment. They praise Pope Francis’s change to the
Catechism, not out of any sincere respect for papal authority, but precisely
because they think it finally undoes the teaching of earlier popes whom they
disliked and had no qualms about criticizing.
To be sure,
I am not presenting this as an argument
against the progressive Catholic position on capital punishment. That position is easily refutable on other
grounds, namely the arguments I summarized above. And an Appeal to Motive would be a fallacy
whoever deploys it, conservative or progressive. The point is rather that if Hanson wants to raise this sort of objection, then it could with
equal justice be flung back at him. And
if he would object to having it flung at him, then to be consistent he ought
not to fling it at conservatives.
The final
thing to say is that the pope’s critics have in fact been very clear and
consistent about their motives, and they have nothing to do with politics. They have to do instead with the worry that
in appearing directly to contradict the teaching of scripture, tradition, and
all of his predecessors, Pope Francis is doing grave harm to the credibility of
the Church’s magisterial authority. The
critics are concerned that the pope is giving aid and comfort to Protestant,
atheist, and other critics of the Church, who allege that her claim to preserve
intact the deposit of faith has been falsified.
They are concerned that he gives similar aid and comfort to heretics
within the Church who would like to use the change in teaching on the death
penalty as a stalking horse for other and even more radical doctrinal changes.
Hanson is
free to argue that these concerns are overblown, and to rebut the arguments of
the pope’s critics. But he has no right
to pretend that those concerns and arguments do not exist. Catholic critics of capital punishment say
that they are moved by respect for human dignity. But it does not respect the dignity of those
one disagrees with to ignore what they actually say, or unjustly and
uncharitably to attribute bad motives to them.
https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/10/progressive-catholics-and-capital.html
The super rich are different to you and me. They’re full of crap
“So, you’re off? You’re going, are you?” The words hung in the air for a second before the answer came back that yes, that’s what he – and indeed many other wealthy people like him – planned to do if Labour increased their taxes. Then he was interrupted with another question: “But are you really going?”
This was a year or so ago at one of the fabled London dinner parties where Labour’s shadow front team were busy reassuring business leaders about how Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves would provide a stable environment for long-term investment. It had all been friendly enough until an executive from a private equity firm warned how he was ready to move to Milan or somewhere else abroad if a loophole benefitting his corner of financial services was closed.
It’s not often that the metaphor “his blood is up” takes a literal form, but on the other side of the table, a flush rose steadily from under the collar of an individual who is now a senior minister. It might not have been red-raw socialism, but it was definitely pinkish in hue.
And right now, the questions asked that night are more pertinent than ever. Although we don’t know exactly what will be in the first Labour Budget for 14 years, it would still be a shock if some extremely rich people are not outraged next Wednesday.
There have been heavy hints over the past few weeks that the list of losers will not be confined to private equity bosses and so-called “non-dom” tax avoiders who have been lobbying against plans to tighten their gilt-edged loopholes. If media speculation is correct, they will be joined by at least some of those who have previously paid less tax on inheriting or monetising wealth through “capital gains” than people do when earning their money from work.
All of which has triggered multiple warnings that the “broadest shoulders” will be used to haul big bags of money out of the country altogether, rather than to bear a fairer share of the load needed to rebuild it. Right wing newspapers froth over findings from right wing think tanks predicting the number of UK millionaires will “https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/number-millionaires-uk-fall-fifth-q98l3cpx3#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20millionaires%20in,into%20a%20UK%20bank%20account
.
To lots of Labour’s old lags, it’s been reminiscent of the 1990s when threats to leave made by rich celebrities largely came to nothing. The TV magician Paul Daniels, boxer Frank Bruno and snooker player Stephen Hendry allhttps://www.ft.com/content/0ed558be-35b8-11de-a997-00144feabdc0
in the UK despite apparently promising to emigrate if Tony Blair came to power.
The popstar Phil Collins seemed to have followed through on a threat to quit Britain over tax when he moved to Switzerland, but laterhttps://amp.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/11/phil-collins-interview-take-a-look-at-me-now-remastered-albums-rerelease-2016
that he had only left because he wanted to spend more time on the shores of Lake Geneva with his wife (who then left him and moved to Miami).
It prompted Noel Gallagher to urge people to vote Labour in 2005, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/frontpage/4464557.stm" rel="nofollow">saying</a>: “If you don’t and the Tories get in, Phil Collins is threatening to come back and live here. And let’s face it, none of us want that.” Even the alleged comedian Jim Davidson, who had fled the then Labour government a year earlier, eventually returned from Dubai after being <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5153936.stm" rel="nofollow">made bankrupt</a> for unpaid tax bills.
It turns out that rich and famous people are not that different from the rest of our species, 96% of whom live in the country where they were born. And such “remainers” include, well, Remainers. For all the prophecies that lots of them would leave Britain because of Brexit, few did, perhaps because it’s now harder to uproot and live elsewhere.
Although the novelist Rachel Cusk made it out to Paris where she still lives and the actor Emma Thompson got herself made a citizen of Venice, the latter returned to what she calls this https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/01/emma-thompson-left-new-home-venice-self-isolate-mums-house-scotland/
he’d to “go and live abroad” if Brexit turned out to be a disaster, he still seems to be a permanent resident on our TV screens and inside the heads of Conservative leadership candidates, if not his Clacton constituency.
At this point, the kind of tax adviser who writes articles in the Daily Telegraph will tell you that Charlie Mullins, the Reform-supporting plumbing magnate who’s just announced he’s moving to live in Spain and Dubai, is untypical because many of the multi-millionaires getting ready to leave are not even British. Instead, they’re part of that rootless set of super-rich cosmopolitans once described by Theresa May as “citizens of nowhere” who move their money fast and rarely settle.
For every Philip Green who has been accused of dividing his time between “asset-stripping” businesses from a London hotel and self-imposed exile in the tax haven of Monaco, there are said to be dozens of foreign tech entrepreneurs, bankers, sheiks and oligarchs who only came here because they would pay less tax than those to whom bits of their wealth supposedly “trickles down”.
A much-quoted if largely unscientifichttps://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/assets/FIFB%20Oxford%20Economics%20report.pdf
.
Even so, the Treasury is understood to have taken such warnings seriously enough to rejig planned tax reforms so that they don’t damage its revenues or the investment needed for economic growth. “We can’t ignore them entirely,” one source told me, “and we won’t do anything that costs us money.”
But there are lots of reasons why more rich people might take their wealth or themselves out of this country which have nothing to do with the Budget. These include Brexit, sanctions on Russians, bad weather and, apparently, fear of crime.
More importantly, there is proper academic research showing previous cuts in tax relief for the richest succeeded in raising revenues. A https://docs.iza.org/dp16432.pdf
by Arun Advani, David Burgherr and Andy Summers found that barely one in 20 non-doms left Britain, and these were the ones paying the least tax.
Another piece ofhttps://eprints.lse.ac.uk/121396/1/III_Working_Paper_131_Tax_Flight.pdf
by the LSE into the ultra-wealthy shows they also have good cause to stay. The administrative and familial upheaval caused by moving is substantial, and people tend to develop strong attachments to the place where they live.
As well as this, there’s also the “reputational risk” of being seen as a tax avoider. The report added that some of those surveyed “expressed a snobbery about tax-advantageous destinations as boring and culturally barren”.
Too right. As has been pointed out before, what sort of mega-rich tax avoider wants to move to the Channel Islands where speed limits for all cars, including their Ferraris, is set at 40mph? Why would you spend your last decades on earth wandering around the gigantic airport shopping malls of Dubai? Perhaps Milan sounds more tempting at this time of year, but that’s where they’ve just doubled taxes on the recent influx of billionaires, who have raised property prices so high that the locals are furious.
Will they stay or will they go? We’ll find out after next week. Not all wealthy people are rich idiots of course, but those who think their money means they can live anywhere may be about to discover they really have no life at all.
The paperback version of Keir Starmer: the biography by Tom Baldwin, was published 24 October by William Collins
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/tom-baldwin-rachel-reeves-tax-the-super-rich-labour-budget/
Been jet lagged all day after returning home from Korea. I've been aimlessl…
Been jet lagged all day after returning home from Korea. I've been aimlessly meandering around on the web like the times of old, and it's really inspiring seeing all the great indie stuff that is out there.https://fosstodon.org/tags/indiewebhttps://fosstodon.org/@dvshkn/113377856563823567
Launch vs. Maintenance Culture
Let me preface what I’m about to write by noting that I actually feel blessed to be gainfully employed and that any criticism I levy is not absolute. I am also writing from a particular vantage point that may not be fully representative.
One of the most frustrating aspects of my current employer is what’s commonly referred to as a launch culture; it’s what happens when you over-index on developing the new and exciting, sometimes at the expense of maintaining what already exists. During some moments of a product life cycle, this can be an absolute boon, but there’s risk when that focus becomes institutionalized.
Our ever-evolving internal processes, particularly those focused on employee recognition and reward, continue to, by and large, be fixated on the notion of impact. On the surface, that makes sense. The more impactful your work, the more valuable it’s likely to have been. The question that arises is how do you calibrate around a nebulous term like impact? Ideally, there’s a basis in measurable effects, but in reality, there isn’t always a readily quantifiable valuation—more loosely, measuring everything accurately is hard.
In a large organization, there’s unlikely to be a universal methodology anyway. In my experience, one of the easiest ways to define impact is to look for a few basic indicators. These can be simply directional; coming up with actual numbers isn’t even wholly important. We can focus on hypotheticals, the wargaming of possible scenarios where your work is held up against other prospective deliverables. I imagine most people would assume that impact boils down to revenue. How much money did this make or how much could it make over some period of time? While it’s a reasonable expectation, I’d argue that the leading factor is often something much harder to quantify.
Tell me a fable
A launch culture fixates on delivering new and shiny things. It focuses on the delivery of a new feature, a new product, a new process; anything that you can look at as being a transformative multiplier of the metrics you care about. The shinier, the better, and the easier to sell the story to leadership. “Leadership” of course refers to the people who are in turn responsible for repackaging your deliverables, impactful or not, and pitching them to their leadership. Who in turn package all of their reports’ impact into an ever larger story of impact and value-added. Each layer adds further and further need for scale and reach.
Zooming all the way out, you might see why the contributions of an individual feel like they matter less and less the further up the chain, but altogether, they’re leveraged to tell a grand story of all of the delightful impact that everyone has worked toward. Put another way, leadership generally values stories of wide scope and reach. That isn’t inherently a bad thing. Certainly, I have to imagine that most people would prefer to contribute to projects that are both interesting and meaningful. Unfortunately, it’s in the attempt to decipher relevancy and meaning that we can run into difficulty.
Launching something new is appealing because of all the fan-fare that generally goes along with it. There’s the immediate buzz associated with providing some kind of new experience. There’s a performative piece as documentation evangelizing the new delivery is written, the sales people get to pitching and selling, and finally, customers have a new thing to explore. All of this is good and incredibly valuable; expanding the capabilities of existing products, venturing into new untapped product areas—these are a boon to continued success.
But there’s another kind of work that can get lost in the weeds. Maintenance.
Maintenance matters
This work is equally important, if not more so. It’s the sort of effort that keeps operations flowing smoothly. Identifying and fixing bugs, streamlining processes, or more holistically, it’s the kind of work that keeps our previous launches generating all of that incredible impact I alluded to earlier. Otherwise, cracks can quickly emerge. Technical debt accretes further and further pain, oftentimes to the detriment of customers.
However, maintenance work provides a less fun story to tell. Of course, if you’re fixing a bug that winds up unblocking millions of dollars, then that’s a great and easy win to notch. But not every bug can tell that story, not every act of maintenance can be readily reduced to an enthusiastic pitch. And therein lies the rub. As engineers are often disconnected from customers, they rely on other teams to help understand where opportunities exist. Members of those other teams have their own considerations to worry about and their own stories to weave. In a world where impact is everything, it’s all too easy to devalue the time investment required to just keep the engine oiled, the wheels greased, and to make sure that the lights are kept on, so people can actually see a damn thing.
When you incentivize launches over maintenance, you establish a culture where the latter is not equally valued. Taken to the extreme conclusion, many people will follow the unspoken directive and prioritize delivering new launches over investing time in service. That’s how you wind up in a situation where everybody is fixated on the next new thing, instead of anyone worrying about the current thing. This sounds like an engineering problem, but really it’s a leadership failure. There needs to be an acknowledgement that maintenance matters, that solving existing problems is just as important as creating new things to solve other challenges.
Admittedly this seems like a function of human nature, where we’re so quick to try flashy new things, yet we’re loath to put the hard work in. It’s the same sort of attitude that sees a person try all the latest fad diets but refuse to commit to one, or to any other kind of more foundational life change to reach their goals. One of the common truisms in engineering is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule
rule. Loosely translated, it means that getting a project to 90% complete is generally the easier part. It’s the last 10% that takes substantially more time and effort. Now couple that with a launch culture where we’re also looking to move fast and break things.
Not all launches are easy. Not all maintenance is hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise is misleading you. The reason that the first 90% of a launch might feel easier is because oftentimes that’s the part where builders are allowed the most freedom to, well, build. It’s often in that last 10% where the less glamorous work hides; are there tests and documentation to write? Both of those will pay dividends to future consumers, including you or your teammates. The easiest bugs get fixed during initial development, and often the most obscure and challenging bugs get resolved in that final sprint.
Speaking in absolutes is foolish and the following certainly isn’t universal, but consider the refrain: “Let’s launch this as is and we’ll fix those bugs or add those missing features in the next version.” It’s more common than you might think, and how often do you actually get to work toward that second iteration? When leadership fixates on story-telling, it’s often the initial launch that’s most meaningful anyway. That’s got the most bang, the most immediate impact to the story. So fire off a launch and then move onto the next one, because there’s more impact readily available elsewhere.
To be clear, I’m conflating several aspects of product development here; fixing bugs is different from adding features. But from a maintenance perspective, I don’t think they’re completely separate. At a baseline, as a customer, I expect that a product will work. If there’s a missing feature that was promised, I expect it to be delivered. If there’s a requested feature, I expect it to be considered. And I expect bugs to be resolved in a reasonable amount of time. But what if leadership doesn’t see the value proposition in fixing a bug when there isn’t an obvious revenue component? What if the bug results in requiring an awkward, yet feasible workaround? Can you put a price on user satisfaction in those terms? Absolutely, but how does that stack up against adding a new feature entirely? Not well, I’d argue, at least not to a launch-driven culture.
Do all the things
The fact of the matter is that all of this work is valuable. The new features, the bug fixes, core optimizations, and new product launches. Leadership should recognize this, and work to incentivize all kinds of efforts, as we work both to meet customers where they are, as well as get ahead so we can meet them where they’d like to go. Otherwise, you may wind up in a situation where there’s a trail of poorly maintained launches, relying on the superhuman effort of heroic employees who go above and beyond to do work that is seemingly unappreciated. That simply isn’t sustainable. It leads to frustration, burn-out, and the abandonment of those efforts.
Launch culture focuses on the excitement of new features or products, while maintenance culture emphasizes the importance of ongoing service and improvement. Both are critical to long term success and perfect equilibrium is impossible. Skew too hard in either direction and you wind up over-indexing on either the novel or the existing, when ideally you want to excel at both. The key to navigating this impossibility is to recognize the value of both perspectives, and to invest in both as much as feasible. Even if the results are less dazzling at times, maintenance matters. It should be valued and incentivized by leadership too.
https://netigen.com/read/launch-vs-maintenance-culture
Anyone using AI for note-taking on Mac? Looking for experiences and recommendations
I recently started using AI Notebook, an AI-powered note-taking app, and it's changed how I organize and retain information on my Mac. You can capture everything, images, audio, PDFs, even web links, and the AI organizes it all. It’s like Obsidian or Logseq Has anyone else tried it, or are there other AI-based note-taking apps you’d recommend? submitted by https://www.reddit.com/user/OutrageousRoof2994https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1gckmw1/anyone_using_ai_for_notetaking_on_mac_looking_for/
Atirar a Matar?
Penso sempre num dono de um supermercado, de uma grande empresa de construção civil, que paga o ordenado mínimo e está na TV a ver trabalhadores negros com o salário mínimo de um lado, seus trabalhadores, polícias, com pouco mais do mínimo, do outro. E manda vir um whisky, para acabar de ver a cena. O sofá de couro, e uma luz suave, indirecta. Na TV grita-se, e as imagens movem-se como peças de xadrez.
Ando há uns anos a defender três ideias. São conhecidas dos historiadores, agora são a realidade dia a dia. O fascismo não é um Partido, é uma milícia. Não são, como dizem os media, “partidos de extrema direita”, são, historicamente, associações criminosas, eleitas. Temos um século de estudos do fascismo na história. Segunda ideia, não crescem como cogumelos, com propaganda, crescem no Estado. Terceira, derrota-se não no Estado, mas cívica e socialmente. Quarta, é uma pergunta, sincera, o que é hoje a polícia portuguesa?
A segunda ideia. No sul da Europa estes partidos-milícias não têm base social como nos países ricos, na pequena burguesia. Nascem do Estado e dos media, nascem e crescem nas forças armadas e polícias, e são apoiados pelos media, onde se constroem como estruturas eleitorais que manipulam os sentimentos mais desesperados de camadas das populações fartas de retrocesso de vida e trabalho. O objectivo não é só meter medo às populações mais empobrecidas, mas a todos os trabalhadores e às suas greves. O fascismo é uma forma de governo das classes dominantes para o fim do pacto social. É a força contra todos os que vivem do trabalho, é a guerra social. E sobretudo contra os trabalhadores organizados. O seu maior temor não são “desacatos” na periferia, as classes dirigentes não andam de autocarro nem sabem onde fica a Amadora. O seu medo são as greves na cidade, que param o lucro das suas empresas. A sua maior força, destas milícias-partidos, é “atirar a matar”, negros, e depois, grevistas. Temos 100 anos de conhecimento histórico de como estas milícias se organizam. Foi assim na Itália nos anos 20, e em dezenas de países nos anos 30 e 60.
A terceira ideia. Não se derrota esta hidra com petições e queixas. Parabéns aos que, no PS e outros partidos, apresentaram a queixa-crime, que eu assinei. Mas o fascismo derrota-se com movimentos cívicos de massas, a partir de greves e manifestações de rua. Nunca, em momento algum da história, o fascismo foi derrotado sem movimentos sociais. O PS, se quer derrotar o fascismo, chame, como Partido, apoio à manifestação de hoje pela justiça e contra a repressão.
Quarta e última ideia. Que é mais uma pergunta. Não sei o que é hoje a polícia portuguesa, conheci gente muito decente na polícia, mas em 2021 conheci um polícia que estava a estudar para ser professor porque o “clima de medo interno” era “insuportável”, referindo-se ao Movimento Zero, segundo jornais de direita, como o Expresso,” movimento ligado ao Chega que tomou conta dos protestos nas forças armadas”.
Troquei, não uma, mas várias conversas com polícias sobre as suas deploráveis condições de trabalho, com quem me solidarizei, até 2019, quando surgiu o Movimento Zero e André Ventura, com um deputado, era levado ao colo pelos jornalistas “isentos”. Nunca vi um comunicado dos jornalistas condenando a legalização do Chega e denunciando a náusea que é serem obrigados a entrevistar tal organização. O Estado legalizou o Chega, mas os jornalistas não são o Estado. Só há jornalismo, assim nasceu essa profissão, se é do público, contra as decisões do Estado e do Mercado.
Vi polícias anti-racistas serem publicamente arrasados nas páginas dos jornais por outros polícias. Numa manifestação de professores um polícia chamou-me para me dizer que não podia pronunciar-se mas concordava com tudo o que defendíamos. Outro, numa esquadra, apertou-me a mão e disse-me que se sentia representado pela defesa que fiz dos direitos de quem trabalha. Sorri-lhe, com sinceridade, feliz, pensando que há esperança nesse sector.
Ainda é assim? Ainda existem? Quando são os relatórios oficiais a dizer que a extrema-direita está dentro da polícia, estamos em perigo, porque defendem “atirar a matar”, têm armas. Nós não temos nem as sabemos usar, eu pessoalmente não quero ter nem saber usar. Nem vou aprender artes marciais. Por isso, quando eu ou qualquer cidadão vamos a uma esquadra pedir ajuda, ficamos a pensar: a pessoa que nos atende subscreve declarações análogas a uma milícia partidária fascista? Esta pessoa vai “atirar a matar”? Quando um bêbado lhe chamar nomes, um carro não parar, um jovem lhe atirar uma pedra, e outro agarrar nele e bater-lhe, vai “atirar a matar”? Quem são estas pessoas que hoje estão na polícia e têm armas na mão?
Gostava de ter visto movimentos de polícias, sindicatos, a responder às declarações do Chega que lhes pediram para eles atirarem a matar, fazendo dos polícias carne para canhão, também. Não vi.
Oxalá veja-os hoje na manifestação cívica contra “atirar a matar”. E se tiverem medo, que o percam, anda toda a gente a escudar-se no “medo” para não agir, professores, médicos, policias, a coragem desapareceu como valor? O medo não se combate com ioga ou psicólogo, nem pode ser uma desculpa para a resignação. Que se organizem, que defendam uma polícia justa, decente, desculpem se estou a ser naife. Os polícias estão entre as profissões com mais problemas de saúde mental, e más condições de trabalho, “atirar a matar” não só não vai resolver estes problemas como vai agigantá-los.
O Sr. do whisky, que nunca se mete em política, levanta-se, tem um jantar. Vai estar lá o Presidente da Câmara, dois deputados e um chefe de gabinete, e o assessor de comunicação do CEO. A mulher chama-o, “Querido, vamos chegar atrasados”.
A empregada “preta, mas honesta e asseada” espera que eles saiam, e levanta o copo, com o gelo ainda a boiar.
Um dia só me restará a dramaturgia, que ela possa iluminar o caminho para sair desta loucura, em que a realidade e o medo nos colocaram.
https://raquelcardeiravarela.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/atirar-a-matar/
A falta que os olhos nos fazem!
XXX Domingo Comum – Ano B | Mc 10, 46-52
https://humbertins.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/alexandru-zdrobau-4bmtmxguvqo-unsplash-1.jpg
Lou Little era o treinador de futebol americano na Universidade da Columbia. Lou lembra-se de um rapaz que tentou entrar na equipa e que não era lá grande jogador. Contudo, o rapaz tinha uma forte determinação e um contagiante entusiasmo. E Lou viu nisso algo positivo para o espírito de equipa.
“Nunca será um grande jogador” – pensava para si mesmo – “mas pelo menos estará no banco encorajando os outros.” O treinador gradualmente passou a admirar e a simpatizar com o jovem. Recorda-se de o ver frequentemente a passear com o seu pai pelo parque; GUIANDO-O, para ser mais correto, pois o pai do jovem era cego. O rapaz nunca teve vergonha de seu pai, nem de andar com ele; falavam, riam como se não soubessem que havia alguém que os observa com pena. Outras vezes, passeavam sem dizer palavra alguma um ao outro.
Um dia, porém, Lou recebeu um telefonema informando-lhe que o pai do rapaz havia falecido.
Cerca de uma semana depois, o jovem regressou aos treinos, mesmo antes do grande jogo da temporada. Lou dirigiu-lhe a palavra: “Posso fazer alguma coisa por ti? Em que é que te posso ajudar? Pede, tudo o que quiseres…” Para grande embaraço do treinador o rapaz pediu-lhe “Quero entrar neste jogo.” Lou não sabia que fazer. O rapaz nunca tinha pedido para entrar num jogo, mas tinha prometido. E este que era um jogo decisivo para o campeonato… Mas promessas são promessas… O treinador colocou-o de início, se depois precisasse de o retirar.
Para grande surpresa de todos, não só jogou bem como foi uma peça fundamental na vitória da equipa! Ele entrou no jogo como se tivesse uma energia interior do outro mundo. Lou deixou-o jogar até ao fim. Quando o jogo acabou, o treinador Little e os outros jogadores perguntaram-lhe: “o que é que se passou naquele campo hoje?”. O rapaz simplesmente respondeu: “HOJE FOI A PRIMEIRA VEZ QUE O MEU PAI TEVE A OPORTUNIDADE DE ME VER JOGAR.”https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/a-falta-que-os-olhos-nos-fazem/#_ftn1
Esperar que uma pessoa chegue ao outro lado da vida para VER parece pouco para Bartimeu. Deixar assuntos por resolver deste lado da vida para os resolver do outro lado do véu… não o deixa conformado.
É curioso o que pode acontecer-nos diante de um cego que pede… É ele o cego, mas somos nós que fazemos que não o vemos… a pedir. “É uma grande verdade aquela que diz que o pior cego é aquele que não quer ver.”https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/a-falta-que-os-olhos-nos-fazem/#_ftn2
Ponho-me na pele desse cego… Para aqueles que te evitam, não tens passado nem futuro. Estendes a tua mão enquanto eles passam com medo e desprezo. Por detrás dos teus olhos, sentes a dor; conheces a crueldade dos outros; compreendes o que é ser evitado, como se a cegueira se pegasse, e tu, envergonhado e acorrentado pela culpa. As moedas tilintam no copo. Eles sussurram: “nada vai mudar”.
Bartimeu pode não ter os olhos da cara… Mas que importa os olhos da cara? Não são os olhos da cara aquilo que em nós vê! Dizia o médico do romance de Saramago: “na verdade, os olhos não são mais do que umas lentes, umas objetivas, o cérebro é que realmente vê.” E eu acrescento: e o coração.
E são os olhos do coração de Bartimeu que ainda estão iluminados pela esperança. Ansiava ver como dantes.
Por agora, és uma pessoa de fora, a olhar para dentro. Ainda assim, há esperança dentro de ti.
Sabes o que queres. Mais do que qualquer outra coisa no mundo, queres ver. Soubéssemos nós querer como queres tu! Nós, nisso, somos muito cegos: nem sempre sabemos bem o que queremos. “A cegueira também é isto, viver num mundo onde se tenha acabado a esperança”.https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/a-falta-que-os-olhos-nos-fazem/#_ftn3
E, nisto, tu vês mais do que muitos de nós!
Há em ti uma certa clareza de visão que vem do conhecimento da verdadeira condição de ser humano: a fragilidade. O facto de saberes quem és verdadeiramente, por baixo da superfície das coisas, onde vives com as tuas mágoas e medos, angústias e esperanças, coloca-te numa posição que te permite clamar honestamente, com fé arriscada, por aquilo que realmente precisas: “que eu volte a ver!”
Quando a multidão desce a estrada, Bartimeu sabe que Jesus está com eles. Bartimeu conhece a sua verdadeira condição e tu também. Não sabes? Sabes o que é sofrer. Sabes o que é ser envergonhado e evitado. Acima de tudo, porém, sabes o que é ver e, oh, como queres esse dom outra vez. Acreditaste que Aquele que caminha na tua direção, sem O ver, é o único que pode mudar a tua vida. Aquele que te pode tornar completo. Aquele que pode dar-te a visão. Aquele que pode trazer-te luz. Quando Ele se aproxima, só há uma coisa que podes fazer. Corres para Ele, apesar dos gritos daqueles que te pedem para ficares quieto. E gritas: “Tem piedade de mim!” Os que pensam que são donos de Jesus mandam-te calar… que não atrases o Mestre que está com pressa… Esses que pensam que são donos de Jesus – e da sua agenda – e que não te acolhem nos seus santuários, nem te convidam a sentares-te à mesa com eles. Dão-te, isso sim, umas moedinhas para estares quieto; eles com a sua “caridadezinha” de descarga de consciência…
Eles não sabem que, de todo o evangelho de Marcos, és o único a seguir Jesus “pelo caminho” (v. 52). És o único discípulo! Um só! Tu! Tu que, a primeira coisa que (re)viste na vida, e a que realmente importa, foi o Seu rosto!
LEITOR 1 (em modo de oração)
“A tua face eu procuro, Senhor. Não escondas de mim o Teu rosto!” (Salmo 26,8)
https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/a-falta-que-os-olhos-nos-fazem/#_ftnref1
Lonni COLLINS PRATT – Daniel HOMAN, Here I Am, Lord: A Prayer Journal for Teens (Our Sunday Visitor, 1998)
https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/a-falta-que-os-olhos-nos-fazem/#_ftnref2
José SARAMAGO, Ensaio sobre a cegueira.
https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/a-falta-que-os-olhos-nos-fazem/#_ftnref3
Ibidem.
https://humbertins.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/a-falta-que-os-olhos-nos-fazem/
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