Title: Re: [PEN-L:20521] Jerks, was Re: Peter Dorman and RobinHahnel
Greetings Economists,
Carrol Cox brings up my wanting a definition about Jerk,
Carrol,
Actually, Doyle, the current popularity of the term jerk (which used to
be a rather mild epithet but has become a rather sharp one) is because of
the partially successful effort to eliminate sexist, racist, heterosexist, etc. language. Jerk is one of the few nasty names left to use. So I would not advise objecting to it. We do need to call each other names at times, and we can't eliminate all the candidates for that sort of usage.
Doyle
The point is not to worry about a name like jerk. If I get mad and intensely feel something any word will do. I could just as well say Christian blah blah. I am not roping off jerks because I want to make the world safe for jerks. I am trying to get across the point about the content of the word used by Jim Devine.
It is perfectly obvious (in some ways) what people mean by dogmatism. Where Jim Devine is saying well jerks are evenly distributed throughout all the political spectrum is valid and therefore using that very assertion from Jim the common assumption that what makes dogmatism dogmatism is dogmatic behavior confuses what we are really talking about. I mean they are everywhere how are we going to keep them from making dogmatic sects. What is unstable and with no political content is the description, dogmatist. It rests upon the idea that kinds of cognition don't socially interact as well as others. But if you look at for example, the origin in the Church of dogma, and sectarianism it was a means of power for the Church. It was and is a successful form of social groups practice in many circumstances. It is not clear in a scientific sense what makes someone behave that way thought there are certainly many theories of how to deal with compulsive behavior. And using the word jerk is simply trying to make the point that it isn't a disabled person. But the issue is still the same, what is a dogmatism. And that is a serious question rather than something to sling about casually as if it was obvious that it meant something. And the use of the word jerk does not make it any more clear what constitutes a dogmatic group.
One cannot say jerks participate throughout the social spectrum and that jerks are what a sectarian groups are constituted by, because it is like saying that something is a jerk quality and that contaminates the group. Any group will have jerks, but dogmatism must be about something besides the sprinkling of jerks. Furthermore within that, the main thrust of the charge is anti-disabled, because the cognitive behavior of people who are most likely to be what people mean by dogmatists is obsessive and compulsive. You cannot be for disabled rights without then understanding that disabled people have a right to access. If that is so then what makes a group not dogmatism is not about keeping the disabled under control, but what makes the structure of a group dogmatic. That is an important question. It goes to the heart of what and why people feel close to each other and not. To the question of inside and outside.
If you look at the structure of Christian religious orders, it is telling us that kinds of behavior are being cultivated as a group process. Those individuals who felt the religious calling were not everyone, and that by regulating and using that mind process the Church was expanding the social horizon of brain work in church social structure. Once that process was set in motion as a successful means of social order, no amount of condemnation of such dynamics can effectively deal with the force of such a group. Except to understand what it is that is actually happening within a group to make a dogmatic process happen. I mean to grasp what it is that is actually happening rather than condemning things in a mindless contentless way.
In my opinion, what is going on is that a vast underground of emotions (conscious as feelings but not easily articulated in speech) is what is being managed within dogmatic groups. By taking advantage of these forces, kinds of brain work can be approached that would not be possible otherwise in groups more generally constituted by able bodied people since that sort of groups dampens the emergence of kinds of unusual cognitive patterns of consciousness. The way to understand that is to think about a theory of the mind. That is in my opinion again, that what one sees in obsessive and compulsive disorders is kinds of intense feelings that go beyond the usual range of intensity or perhaps last longer in duration whose qualities can be imagined as more extreme than normal, and therefore point at frontiers of thinking boundaries. Managing these feelings has to be different for those individuals, and at the expense of their social lives because they obviously can't fit in the norms, but is in other ways like the ability to work on the tallest buildings in construction a
