What I always find striking about this is that it's not actually a difficult question to answer. It's an answer that frequently requires nuanced and complex responses appealing to historical or regional contexts, standards, etc, but it's not HARD to give that first answer, whatever it might be.

Ok, if the thesis of the paper is that we should grant animals a right against being killed and eaten *because* (ex ante) killing and eating animals seriously and wrongfully harms them, then I entirely agree with you. You've read the paper and I have not, so apologies if I was being obtuse!

I'm thinking of analogous (?) cases where someone argues that an activity they partake in should be banned. E.g. I think it would be consistent for a smoker to argue for a ban on smoking in a place where they themselves currently smoke. And I suspect there are even more analogous cases.

I see of course why you would think this is a weird position, but I wonder whether it's actually defensible (so long as they would in fact comply the the right if enacted). E.g. one might think that there are good consequentialist grounds for granting a right that isn't already a moral right.

Ok I admit that I liked the bit where when you went out for your permitted exercise walk you would find foxes calmly hanging out on the streets as if they owned the place. Everything else sucked though.

If catharsis was the ultimate goal, maybe it worked out ok.

I see (and I apologise for misunderstanding) - so the point is that Starmer/his advisers were convinced in advance that they couldn't rely on a career diplomat to manage the relationship, whoever the President. I obviously find it hard to get my head around that!

The theory that Mandelson's "dark arts" (not possessed by the professional diplomat) would be useful with Trump may have been extremely misguided, but it does still seem likely that this was the reasoning of Starmer/No10.

I think this possibly confuses two issues. First, using the appointment itself to placate Trump - as you say, it seems that Trump (or his people) wanted to keep Pierce, so this is indeed incorrect. But second, the intention could have been to use Mandelson to handle Trump in ways Pierce wouldn't.

Whether or not anyone in No10 or the Cabinet Office was informed at the time that Mandelson had failed vetting, Starmer clearly allowed people (McSweeney?) to rely on his authority to make decisions affecting national security without informing him personally. That is bad enough without lying.

Then Starmer leaves McSweeney (or someone else "trusted" in the No10 or Cabinet Office) to communicate this decision to FCDO. They communicate it in a forceful enough way that Robbins is left in no doubt that it is decided and no further objections will be heard.

Clearly this whole process was run in an unacceptable way, and Starmer is ultimately responsible. Take the most plausible version of this story where Starmer is telling the truth. McSweeney persuades him, against FCDO advice (and his own instincts), to replace Pierce with Mandelson.

We are now years deep in a self-reinforcing loop where people see that there is a mismatch between consumer confidence and what the institutions say about the economy, and many respond to this by trusting the institutions less!

When there is high trust in institutions, consumers' confidence in the economy is shaped by what the institutions say. This means that consumer confidence will track with official statistics, at least if those statistics aren't obviously inconsistent with what people see, hence no vibe-cessions.

I don't think it's reasonable to think that there was an abrupt change in political consciousness. More plausible is that there was an abrupt increase in paranoia and decrease in trust.

badissimo

have British politics nerds properly absorbed the fact that Steve Hilton is going to be the Republican nominee for Governor of California? like, David Cameron's Steve Hilton. Steve "what if we didn't wear shoes to cabinet meetings" Hilton. anyway he's a full-on ethnofascist now. and also Californian

Not all! I don't think I would disagree with you about that many cases.

I just think that dialogues make it less clear what the author thinks, but don't make the arguments themselves less clear, which is why they aren't so problematic.

What grates in the bad cases of obscure writing is the sense that the difficulty is an artificial obstacle designed to keep out those not prepared to put in the time to become initiates. I prefer writing that doesn't want there to be insiders and outsiders.

It does not seem to me that the authors of high Theory could have Nietzsche's excuse. His writing is fun to read - it may make it hard to follow a line of argument, but it isn't like he is trying to make the reader solve a puzzle to figure out what he is getting at.

A better case is writing that is poetic or aphoristic, e.g. Nietzsche. That's a tricky case, because maybe he thought that some of his ideas could not be separated from that form. So I guess I agree that more tricksy forms of writing might be ok.

I mean I agree about dialogues being fine - I don't think that analytic philosophers have ever had a problem with the dialogue form. (The characters in the dialogue might be arguing in an analytically-approved way!)

I think the students struggle enough with texts that are not written in a modern vernacular, or which convey difficult ideas, without making their lives harder by assigning writing that is deliberately obscure.

No doubt many of these authors are difficult or unclear, but not I think *wilfully* obscure. That's a higher bar (and of course I'm not saying that every "Continental" author is wilfully obscure - but I think some of them are).

This all seems very sensible. But on the point that writing which is lacking in clarity and/or rigour may still contain interesting ideas - that's obviously true, and yet... We might resist reading or teaching stuff that is wilfully unclear as a way of enforcing high standards. Is that so unwise?

This has prize essay competition written all over it.

Maybe the crucial thing here is that many of the take-makers who grew up in the 90s and 00s do not have this experience and so have higher expectations for what normal looks like. They expect to be able to afford what seems equivalent (in social position) to what they had growing up.

I feel as though there are a lot, but maybe they don't call it socialism (because socialism has a lot of conflicting definitions). But there's definitely a reasonable definition of socialism on which it just follows from utilitarianism.

If the thought is that propositional attitudes must involve some kind of relation to a proposition, but not just any way of being so related counts as an attitude, then maybe the common core of attitudes is the mental representation of a proposition?