[MD] Straw Men and the Primacy of Trust

[Ian Glendinning]

Matt, DMB,

DMB, clearly I'm nobody you need care about, you can dismiss me with
your defensive repartee anytime you like, but can you not see a
problem when you find yourself even hinting that Matt espouses phoney
and hypocritical behaviour ?

Ian

On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 9:54 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> DMB said:
> Anyway, I think merit and means can be talked about separately in
> the abstract but as a practical matter they are all tangled up in each
> other. If your means are bogus then merit goes out the window and
> if you have no merit but still insist on scoring points, then you have
> to resort to bogus means.
>
> Matt:
> Yeah, our disagreement appears to go down pretty far about the
> ethics of inquiry and the kinds of allowable psychological profiles
> and what maturity looks like.  You should check out the Trilling book:
> the moral stance you're taking has a history, and a very interesting
> one, one that continues to evolve.
>
> The slim piece of your response I've pulled out above was just to
> make clear on my part that my discussion of a kind of
> Machiavellianism and that "means do matter in the long approach
> to just ends" was intended to articulate just that point, that merit
> and means are "all tangled up in each other."  What you see as
> my attempt to get you to act hypocritical, "phony" as you say, is
> my attempt to give a better ethics of inquiry once one realizes that
> they are tangled up.  (Not at all, of course, conceding that the
> behavior you described as being phony, e.g. to "preface the
> criticism with some kindness or follow the accusation with
> expressions of love," is really at all the kinds of behavior I was
> commending.  A better description is in my first post in this thread.
> (See "Pirsig Institutionalized" for a few negative comments about
> another "phony" behavior, the "just my opinion" qualifier.))
>
> Matt
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