While this might be interesting in a general sense, I continue to fail to see how this relates to Joe’s particular post and Carrol’s criticism of it. Joe is not “identifying with the sufferings of the most abused”. He is out in Palestine trying to combat it. Carrol tries to make the connection via this:
> It implies, whether you know it
> or not, that we should give up all attempts to change thee world if we
> live in the U.S. or EU -- we have it so good why should we bother.
Which seems to turn the term “implication” on it’s head. Nothing in what Joe wrote *implies* that people in the US/EU “should give up all attempts to change the world” because “we have it so good”. To achieve this sort of implication seems to require: (1) the elevation of the minor inconvenience caused by a natural event to “having it so good”, (2) the assumption of thorough-going self-interest, that people who have it good do not care about changing the world of others.
Feels like a tall order.
Shag gives a more concrete argument, writing in response to Joe:
>
> he’s [Carrol’s] saying that it sounds a bit like when western u.s. men chide western feminists: "oh, shut up. At least you're not wearing burkas and you can drive.”
But how can we go from “a bit like” to the sort of certainty that underwrote Carrol’s outburst? Wouldn’t you say this is the weakest form of implication, theoretically speaking, and no implication at all empirically speaking, for we all know and should know that Joe is not comparing oppressions at all, and therefore we should not worry about what he sounds like? In a follow up post, you (shag) mention that it is Joe’s method that is problematic; but again, as Joe says, he is mocking his Western friends about being wuzzes for whining about the minor effects of a natural calamity. While this might have similarities to the template of mocking based on hierarchies of oppressions, we in fact know it is not the same thing.
To explain myself: I agree with your hierarchy of oppressions argument, but I think that Joe is correct that there is only one oppression involved in the comparison he made. In fact, you could easily and without error substitute auto workers in Detroit for Gaza residents in his statement of annoyance, and leave his implicit argument intact. I do not agree with Carrol’s anti-moralism (and I think Joe is correct that Carrol and those on similar projects are trying to explain morality away via terminology, much like Russell, to his credit, and the logical positivists to their discredit, tried with intentionality/agency, metaphysics, etc).
> It creates a hiearchy of who is more oppressed because, underlying most western marxist and western marxish politics, there's the endless search for the subject of history - the "most oppressed" class which is supposed to truly understand how to struggle against capitalism and with whom we must align ourselves.
You seem to suggest two things here, correct me if I am wrong: (1) that the working class is just one class among many classes in which people can be sub-divided in terms of their condition and their actions (this also happens to be my own naive view of things), (2) the Marxist tradition is to identify this class - the working class - as the most oppressed. Am I right here? Also, how does all this jibe with your criticism of identity politics? Is your blog still online somewhere, so I can read that post of yours, saving you the trouble of repeating it?
—ravi
P.S: Also, I think the “implied” definition of “pleasure” are well addressed by Amartya Sen’s amusing Rational Fools paper, and Jerry Fodor’s quip in response to the strong EP/adaptationist programme, about the lawyer who was propositioned by a beautiful woman and responded “What’s in it for me?”. In other words, I suspect the use of the term “pleasure” (in Doug’s sentence), instead of the more common “empathy”, is the same line that leads to fMRI definitions of human thought and experience.