Mike Phraudmann, CSUB Pangloss, cont.


Shakespeare's plays are not "true" as say historical writing is true or physical science is true (based on facts) ; it's debatable they should be taught in public schools or collges. Let's assume the plays should be taught in, say, elective courses.

The bad English professor, like F-mann, teaches them as representations of political, or worse, moral philosophy or "psychology." For the hack-pedant a play such as Macbeth functions not merely as rhetoric lesson, it's an ideological message--something like "excessive ambition leads to downfall." Obviously that "warrant" (in Toulminian sense; the warrant another word for a premise) is not at all true in all cases, or even more likely than not. (and yet the Machiavellian hick Phraudmann was at least as ambitious and conniving as the usual mafioso)

It's rhetoric and metaphor, perhaps powerful, yet also somewhat deceitful: Julius Caesar contains many historical inaccuracies for one: the assassination did not take place on the Ides of March. There are pre-Gallilean superstitions a plenty as well.

The somewhat obvious Orwellian point is that lit. often functions as a type of "doublespeak" for both left and right professor-ideologues, and that doublespeak element exists in Shakespeare as well: he's a spokesman for the Crown, as is F-mann, I believe, (though Shakespeare's is made of gold, and F-mann's is from Burger King). The authentic English professor attempts to avoid that sort of manipulation, common to both the right and leftist sorts of clowns of C-SUB English.


...the Lit. Biz depends on a type of ersatz Platonism: the works of the Lit. canon (like the catholic canon) are assumed to be timeless, transcedent, the great thoughts of great people. The F-manns are those types of professors who rely on Lit. as dogma: in the typical CSU or UC lit. indoctrination course, the student is not struggling to learn derivatives or integrals or UNIX or predicate logic which he then may use to solve problems of various sorts; he or she is being taught how to act, how to be a decent courtier-in-training, how to mind his or her manners.

THat sort of etiquette training may have been suitable in like 1750, or to theatrical narcissists; to students who care to succeed in the modern technocracy, Shakespeare if not Brit. Lit. as a whole is rather superfluous (indeed those gaseous tomes of the Victorians are in some sense worse).

Besides, life is far darker, brutal and animalistic than Shakespeare, even at his bleakest (like Macbeth) ever realized (Darwin and Malthus a better guide to reality than Shakespeare or Plato for that matter). But the Pangloss-like F-mann (or other C-SUB Panglosses and incompetents like Solomon the clown, Pawglovski, Vic. Laxative, Kartier, Klytmer, Andy Scoop, etc.) will do whatever he can to sort of create this Masterpiece Theatre sort of vibe which magically transports students away from the police state of Kern to the supposed pastoral bliss of Elizabethan England....

Yet some acquaintance with the facts of Tudorian history demonstrates it was only bliss for a few royals who could do whatever they wanted to--and that's another reason the Lit. Biz. remains au courant--it's sort of a de-sadean-lite phantasy camp for the bourgeois; and there are lots of sort of nauseating Brit. soft-porn aspects (Tempest, 12th Night, if you can stomach it). And tho' we may not care for puritans or fundies of whatever type (including muslims) one can perceive why many of the non-royals and "commoners" did not approve of the Tory theatre companies.

--------------

Even if one grants that there are profound and important messages contained in or expressed by literary works, those messages are hardly unequivocal. Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment seems as much a vindication of Raskalnikov as a condemnation; and many works of fiction display that equivocal and ironic nature. C & P is quite a moving and symphonic work of literature, but there is not some transcendent Platonic "essence"--ethical or aesthetic, really--which it points to which all would agree to: indeed, some might appove of Ras.'s actions.

Literature and literary "truths" are not verifiable, tho' hack professors (ie. the C-SUB cavalcade of Lit. clowns) often seem to think they are. Moby Dick did not happen, except perhaps in Melville's mind (and a rather troubled mind it was). The metaphor has no necessary meaning or implication; the figures are not real. Any meanings are constructed, inferred, concocted. We might find Moby Dick entertaining, and even conclude some "truisms" from it--say the absence of a loving, omnipotent Deity, for one--but it's neither a deductively necessary type of argument, nor really inductively "cogent," and
as "art qua art," in some sense quite less powerful than say Beethoven or Debussy.

O'Keefe Trial


The murder of Ms. O’Keefe (in Palmdale CA, a few years ago) was obviously a tragedy and a candlelight vigil is entirely proper, yet the guilt of Mr. Jennings has not been confirmed, and the sort of vigilante attitude shown towards Jennings here and in the AV Press and Daily News has hardly been equitable or indeed Constitutional. That Jennings made some inconsistent statements or even failed a polygraph is also not really proof of anything, except maybe to some greed-driven hypocrite such as Rex Pearass, and the stooges who work for him.

Jennings reported the crime for one. If he did do it (which is a possibility, however remote), then he is probably insane. And the weapon was never located. Those two facts should be grounds for at least some questioning of his guilt.

The genius reporters and crimefighters at the AV Press routinely overlook other important information: who dropped Ms O’Keefe off at the park-and-ride that evening? Were they questioned? Were any traces of gunpowder found on Mr. Jennings? Did he hide the gun, or did someone take it, and did the police thoroughly search the area? There is surely a possibility that an innocent person has been charged with a very serious crime.

Ethics for sale

During campaign time--whether at national, state, or local levels--many of us may note that the words "ethics," "values", and "morality" are continually bandied about, by both left and right, as if we all agreed on what they meant. None of the political moralists ask the meta-ethical question: Why should we be moral? And what does morality really consist of? Obviously, it is in some people's interest to be moral (and to have others be moral); it is in some people's interest to be "immoral" (and to have others be what we might term "immoral," or act immorally). The needs of the moralists and immoralists are certainly going to clash sometimes. Imagine the requirements and goals of the following groups: teetotalers vs. bar owners and brewery owners; vegetarians vs. cattlemen; schoolteachers vs. casino owners and pornographers, etc.


There is ethics at the personal level-"normative" the Golden Rule, etc.---and then ethics at a political level--distributive justice; distributive justice might be defined as creating an ethical society based on entitlement, on the notion that everyone--except perhaps for criminal psychopaths--has a right to participate in the economy, to the best of their abilities; the two concepts are not easily demarcated, however (the distributive being based really on individual rights). Nietzsche claimed over a hundred years ago that "Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality." This sort of somewhat amoral view--a view of morality based on humans as an animalic herd rather than as rational agents acting for the "Good," is quite more accuate than the usual sunday school versions of normative ethics. And Nietzsche is not far from Darwin in terms of ethics, both echoing Malthus's pessimistic naturalistic visions. Any number of extreme situations demonstrate the futility of ethics. What is the status of values and morality or distributive justice during a famine, or plague, or warfare? Little to no status, to be sure.

Expecting humans to all suddenly become ethical (or rational) is about equivalent to expecting the barons and baronesses on the Forbes 400 list to start doling out cash, with no strings attached, to the millions of needy and impoverished. It was Bertrand Russell, I believe, who said that teaching people to be "moral" is nearly impossible, but teaching logic and rationality is possible; therefore, we should focus on developing intelligence rather than simply do-goodism, and with that intelligence hopefully morality will increase as well. But someone like VI Lenin certainly had some pragmatic strategies for bringing about a more economically-just society. So did, say, John Dillinger....

Humans, even ones that can program computers, spin integrals, or compose symphonies, are far more animalistic (and acquisitive, hungry, greedy, lustful, etc.) than any traditional religious ethics or philosophy portrays them as, and any attempts at rational ethics are most likely doomed. The great liberal myth of the "rational man" is, alas, mostly a sentimental fiction, useful to justify capitalism and greed, and any number of machiavelli-like strategies.

"Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun." Mao

Ich vergaß

Das tägliche Gebet für CSUB-Englisch!


Willkommen zur Hölle--Lügner, Diebe, Schweine,
Bauern

The Narrative of Materialism

Postmodernists are fond of interpreting political and economic reality in terms of narratives; recently one of blogland's most esteemed comrades was suggesting (isn't suggestion tho a type of claim and sort of logocentric hegemony, mon ami?) that materialism is a type of narrrative. Is materialism a narrative, or rather narrative a manifestation of materialism? A story about starvation in the slums of Le Ciudad de Mexico is not at all equivalent to an actual person starving in the slums of La Ciudad . While narrative may be essential for conveying information about the starvation, literary narratives obviously are not necessarily connected to the facts and thus may distract or distance readers from the economic and biological contexts: and Marx himself, with all of his flaws and overgeneralizations, realized this, and was, I believe, quite the philistine in regards to matters literary, tho' making some exceptions for a few=--the Encyclopedists, Voltaire, etc .


Literary taxonomy, like Marxism itself, sort of comes pre-packaged with beaucoup ideological and ethical assumptions. Left connotes something positive to most of the blog readers; tho' what it denotes is perhaps not so easily defined--but the denotation of "leftism" would seemingly include as one of its attributes a emphasis on solidarity and proletarian unity which is perhaps ultimately more a matter of faith than reason. The rise of multiculturalism and of identity politics, perhaps extensions of marxist class struggle, show that other factos=--racial, socio-linguistic, sexual--might prevent any sort of prole bonding. Biology overtakes ideology (as it overtakes belle-lettres).

Marxism is a product of the Enlightenment and thus there are traces of a belief in a Reason, which seems (regardless of the attacks on idealism) still more transcendent than scientific and material. And like much Enlightenment lit., marxism still seems to hold to Rousseauian models of freedom (blog leftists are all about the "Act") that may no longer be applicable; that's not to say Skinner should be reanimated either, but behaviorism and determinism and their relation to agency, to decisions and econ. should obviously be a part of the program of dissent. It was the naive new left, perhaps as driven by Jefferson as by Marx, who contributed to a sort of libertarian hedonism which is now endemic to both corporate liberals and conservatives. I think even HS Thompson realized this: hippies created Vegas, or at least their cowboy cousins did, as they did to the building of the freeway-laced Malebolges of El Lay and SF.

To Hypostatize, or not to Hypostatize

Definition: to give ideas concrete existence: to treat something conceptual as if it were real

I suggest most of the Kantian schema (and those of his bastard sons Hegel and Marx) may be read as a type of hypostasis, starting with the synthetic a priori and the categories (at least viewed as transcendent), and the views on ethics and freedom based on the idealism. Tho' there exist some determinist and obviously materialist sorts of reflections in Marx, he still affirms a view of freedom closer to Kant than to, say, biological views of determinism (genetic, behavioral and cognitive). Of course theology as a whole would be closer to Kant.


Hypostasis is quite common among political writers and lit. people as well; political journalists routinely hypostatize the thinking processes of millions of people. Most people don't care for anyone interrupting their chants with some questions regarding verification, plausibility, proof; columnists and bloggers generally are content to make all sorts of generalizations about how American consumers think or the sort of mental states of both conservatives or liberals. It's like a type of conceptual intoxication, brought on by lots of social science or literary theory. But such pep rally speech or writing is preferred by both far right and leftist bloggers: once "by any means necessary" has been decided upon, vague generalizations and lies may be as effective as argumentation relying upon evidence and data.

Hitchens: The case for mocking religion.

Mr. Hitchens in the house again. He's is one of the few western journalists willing to fight the zealots, be they dixie Xtians, mafioso-like Catolicos, or wild-eyed muslim fanatics. Hitchens takes some getting used to, but for those few moderates who still value Enlightenment principles and a secular politics, he's generally correct. And he's the possessor of a fairly wicked Swiftian prose style as well.

"Therefore there is a strong case for saying that the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and those who have reprinted its efforts out of solidarity, are affirming the right to criticize not merely Islam but religion in general. And the Bush administration has no business at all expressing an opinion on that. If it is to say anything, it is constitutionally obliged to uphold the right and no more. You can be sure that the relevant European newspapers have also printed their share of cartoons making fun of nuns and popes and messianic Israeli settlers, and taunting child-raping priests. There was a time when this would not have been possible. But those taboos have been broken.

Which is what taboos are for. Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet—who was only another male mammal—is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. This current uneasy coexistence is only an interlude, he seems to say. For the moment, all I can do is claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism. But in the future, you will do what I say and you will do it on pain of death."

Hitchens

Aus der Anti-Kriegsschule des Lebens: Contra-Stupor Bowl


There exist quite a few decent reasons to detest the Stupor Bowl. First off, football is not some real profound type of activity. Even baseball requires a certain finesse and skill which foot, er, porkball lacks. That's not to say pro baseball is that much superior: like pork ball and bassetball, it's another type of popular hysteria as well. But a Dennis Eckersley or Will Clark are sort of athletic engineers compared to porkball thugs. Ok, an Elway or Montana type of quarterback, and the receivers, perhaps have some real skills, but on the whole it's far less of a skill sport than baseball or hockey (bassetball another thug- sport as well). Chess of course puts ball sports to shame in terms of cognitive skills, but a Karpov vs. Kasparov match does not provide much for the average non-chess playing spectator; for some reason it's hard to conceive of say Marv Alpert shouting, "He fianchettoed! He fianchettoed!." Motor sports also have a certain technological and modern thrill that the ball games sorely lack. That's not to say NASCAR, Le Grand Prix, or street bike racing are so superior to the Stupor Bowl, but the gear is a plus. There's a certain beauty to velocity and to horse-power.


The corporate-consumer feeding frenzy also contributes to the nausea. Stupor Bowl is, apart form the game, like one endless beer advertisements. Bud Bowl is not far from the truth. There may be some few humans out in TV land not enjoying a brew (or multiple brews) while watching the teams march up and down the gridiron, but be assured they are a very small percentage of the pork-ball audience. Beer is sort of like a requirement for the frat-boy Bowl ritual, accompanied with all sorts of junk foods and snacks that the American schports consumer needs. The Bowl is, let's face it, not very conducive to mental or physical health. The half-time show can be entertaining sometimes, at least if you leave the sound off--even the Tommy Trojan theme if not John Phillip Sousa hisself preferable to U2 or whatever rock/rap/pop noise featured this year--tho' maybe there will be some more nipple shots this time 'round, or guest appearance by the Al Jazeera press corps.

From Goethe's Faust


Verachte nur Vernunft und Wissenschaft,
des Menschen allerhöchste Kraft,
laß nur in Blend- und Zauberwerken
dich von dem Lügengeist bestärken,
so hab' ich dich schon unbedingt.

insta-translation:

"Scorn Reason and Science,
Humanity's highest craft;
permit yourself to be overcome
with the lying soul of magic and illusions,
and I have you absolutely"

Catholic Morons, Inc.

The late John Paul II appeared to have been a very decent, ethical, and erudite man. He spoke numerous languages, and was, as the obituary writers say, “an avid sportsman.” He fought against the nazis and later the stalinists: the catholic poles certainly did not have an easy existence from about 1938 to 1945 (nor did the polish jews or ukrainians either). Many died at both nazi and stalinist hands; the atrocity of Katyn, where thousands of polish officers were slaughtered at the hands of Stalin’s NKVD , may be one of the most brutal acts of the 20th century.

Yet it’s quite absurd—absurd in both ordinary and philosophical sense—that someone would, after surviving the terror of nazis and stalinists, decide to join a church that proclaims that a “God” exists who would allow such horrendous brutality. Not only is the concept of God itself quite indefensible (and more so after WWII), the catholic tradition continues to uphold irrational, unscientific and anti-humanist doctrines; Christopher Hitchens is not entirely incorrect in claiming that “the Roman Catholic Church has been responsible for the retarding of human development on a colossal scale.”

The mass itself is ludicrous, as are the attitudes toward birth control: for the real implications of Catholic family planning spend a few days in one of the massive slums of any Central or South American city. And yet the Catholics keep marching on. With Alito’s confirmation, there will be a catholic majority on the Supreme Court (so much for the First Amendment “wall” separating Church and State). Recently a monumental cathedral was finished in LA, courtesy of Roger O Mahoney, the Cardinal who has refused to turn over names in the priest sex scandals. And the cathedral, however beautiful (featuring works of art from leading LA artistes, such as Grahams’ massive, plebian Maria) is another Temple to Irrationality which does little to nothing to help solve real social and economic problems.

Harry Reid: Nevada Lawman

The media pundits have decided that Senator Reid is a bit too reserved for politics, celebrity style. No matter: Reid's about as near to an authentic Democrat since Bobby Kennedy. (Alright, Gary Hart was moving towards victory until the fundies and soccer mommies found out Gary actually consumed alcoholic beverages and had had sex with women)

Reid's political career was made in the 70s fighting Vegas mobsters as the Chairman of the Nevade Gaming Commission (a Reid-like character was featured in Scorcese's Casino--he denies a license to the mobster played by De Niro). That's a bit more significant a job history than most liberal polticos might claim: internship in an Ivy League or Bay Area non-profit agency not really adequate preparation for taking on the Mob or dixie fundamentalists.


"Reid may not be the most colorful figure in Washington, but his career is far more interesting than that of the average senator. In politics, Nevada is the next best thing to Louisiana. To take just one example, is there another U.S. senator who has been part of the inspiration for a character in a Martin Scorsese film? (A character played by Dick Smothers, no less.) In Casino, Robert DeNiro's character melts down in front of the Nevada Gaming Commission after the commission denies him a license to operate a casino. The scene is loosely based on a December 1978 hearing when Reid was the commission's chairman, and some of the dialogue spoken by Smothers is taken directly from Reid's words during the hearing. (The rest of the scenes involving Smothers, who plays a composite politician known only as "Senator," have nothing to do with Reid.) OK, it's lackluster Scorsese, but at least it's not Gangs of New York. And there are other Reid echoes in Casino: Joe Pesci's character refers to a "Mr. Cleanface," which gangster Joe Agosto said was his nickname for an in-his-pocket Reid, but a five-month investigation of Agosto's claims cleared Reid of wrongdoing.""


Reid

The Meaning of “Republican”, cont.

Each day across America, local newspapers feature the columns and letters of those who proclaim themselves “Republican” and upholders of “republican values.” In fact, a rough and ready definition of “republican”--at least the current American variety—can easily be derived: it is a person who is against “big government,” somewhat of a moralist, usually militaristic, opposed to taxation, and generally pro-business and a supporter of capitalism. Yet it is quite obvious to anyone who possesses a negligible amount of historical awareness that this colloquial American definition of “republican” is not in keeping with the traditional definition and use of the noun “republican.”

Etymologically, "republican" is from Latin, lit. res publica: "public interest, the state." This basic Latin meaning seems to counter the current American usage of the word— associating say a Reagan or Bush with “public interest” or even the “the state” is difficult. In political science, a republican is defined as one who is opposed to monarchical governments: i.e., the Irish Republican Army and its offshoots are opposed to the British monarchy, and earlier the Spanish republicans were opposed to the monarchy led by the dictator Franco. I doubt that many American “republicans” would care to be associated with either the Irish or Spanish variety of republican, who often might be a bit closer in ideology to what the American republican would term an anarchist, and indeed the Spanish republicans were allied with anarchist and left-wing groups. It is certain then that the European republicans bear little or no resemblance to the American variety, and in many ways are diametrically opposed.


Limiting the discussion to American history, an assertion can be made that the current type of republican bears little resemblance to his historical predecessor. Republicans like to proclaim that Abe Lincoln is the father of their party, and yet Lincoln was in many ways quite opposed in mind state and political policies to what is known as a republican today.

There are many examples of Lincoln’s liberalism: the Emancipation Proclamation being perhaps the most clear example. Lincoln wrote poetry and was in no way a fundamentalist Christian, being closer in mind and outlook to, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Additionally, Lincoln favored a national banking system and worked towards creating a more stable currency based not on gold or silver as many conservatives would like. Indeed some of Lincoln’s comments on economics sound surprisingly like current liberal if not leftist rhetoric, as in this following passage following the National Banking Act of 1863:

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until the wealth of the nation is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed.”

When has a current Republican stated his fear that the wealth of the nation would be “aggregated” in the hands of a few? The current “republican” has no problem with wealth and capital being so divided and in fact argues for policies that support this disparity—such as Bush’s recent tax cut for the super rich.

Therefore, not only is the current American usage of the term “Republican” etymologically not consistent with traditional usage of the word (assuming, perhaps naively, that political semantics should be consistent), but in ideology, the current American republican bears little similarity in outlook or philosophy to at least one of his putative political idols, Abe Lincoln.

Ray Jennings, Innocent (Michael Blake, DA, guilty)

[From the Eastside trenches]

The murder of Ms. O’Keefe (in a Palmdale CA park and ride, 2/2000) obviously counts as a tragedy, yet no conclusive evidence exists which would convict Sergeant Ray Jennings of the murder (he is now involved in his THIRD re-trial for 187, having been acquitted by two LA juries). The vigilante attitude shown towards Jennings in the Valley Press and Daily News (and LA Times, at least initially) has hardly been equitable or indeed Constitutional; he was found Guilty by Journalists as soon as he appeared in the papers (probably because Ms O'Keefe's daddy, an aerospace engineer has plenty of pull with the locals, including Mayor Rex "Puerco" Parris). Jennings may have made some inconsistent statements or even failed a polygraph, yet that does not prove anything, whatsoever.

No weapon was never located, and NO gunshot residue was detected on Jennings' hands or clothing. Any real detective or ballistic guy will tell you they ALWAYS get GSR on a perp's hands, or clothes after heavy shooting. Jennings was questioned probably within an hour of the shooting (9mm, 5 shots---that be gangsta-work, says Contingencies). He had no time to clean up with alcohol, or shower (which also would have been detected). Furthermore, it was Jennings' SECOND DAY AT WORK as a security guard, and he was shuttling cars to get to the park and ride. He's a family man, his second day at work, bonded, forbidden by law to carry a firearm,and his supervisor told him he was subject to inspection at all times (including his vehicle).

No one saw him with a gun; and he insists he did not have one. It's nearly IMPOSSIBLE that he had a gun to start with , yet the DA Blake continues to make the ludicrous claim Jennings had a gun. It is a near certainty, that JENNINGS DID NOT HAVE A FIREARM. That also explains why a gun was not found, since he called in the shooting within 20 minutes or so (he did pass by Ms O'Keefe minutes after she was shot, as he should have. He may have dawdled. Oh well. That does not show 187 at all.) Jennings did not have time to dispose of a gun; it's nearly certain the gun disappeared in the car with the gangster who killed Ms O'Keefe (and Ms O'Keefe also was dropped off by a friend. Did they search her car, or polygraph her??)

The lack of proof that Jennings had a firearm also should provides sufficient reasons for acquittal, though Blake has managed to bring in Jennings military record in (Sgt. Jennings served in Iraq with distinction, and his CO and fellow soldiers say he was innocent. Yet Blake the Crimefighter wants to use Jennings' own markmaship skills as evidence. BS, like all of Blake's pseudo-arguments. Blake's the one who should be on trial, facing obstruction of justice charges for insisting that Jennings did have a gun, when there is no evidence to establish that claim.


Though LA County residents have reason to be concerned about violent crime, crimefighters should never overlook the importance of the presumption of innocence clause. Obviously, that a person has been arrested does not imply that he has been found guilty of any charges, though reporters, including those of the AV Press, often seem a bit unclear on this concept. Raymond Jennings’ arrest demonstrates this type of justice, media-style, which often verges on a violation of Due Process rights that all citizens—even those charged with serious felonies—are entitled to according to the 14th Amendment.

Readers of newspapers are not provided with the same evidence that the police and courts are provided with, and any information that makes it into the paper is second hand; additionally, reporters often omit details that may be quite relevant—such as whether the person or persons who dropped Ms. O’Keefe off at the park and ride were ever considered suspects in the case. The papers also neglected to mention (at least until like the second trial) the results of the ballistics tests, or that it was Jennings' second day at work, or the car shuttling.

(And the rich defense attorneys in Northern LA County (and Kern as well) who read about this case and did nothing while Jennings' rights to a fair trial were mocked by the press and pigs are themselves guilty. )

Don Tony Scalia, Supreme Court Seditionist


Not that many notice or seem to mind, but Antonio Scalia, Supreme Court Justice-for-life, routinely contradicts the principles of the Constitution with nearly each court opinion he hands down. Commenting on a case involving the legitimacy of having the Ten Commandments displayed outside a Texas courthouse, Scalia recently asserted that political authority does not derive from the people, claiming that the displaying of the Ten Commandments “is a symbol of the fact that government comes — derives its authority from God.”

Justice Scalia must have missed out on his Constitution course, for a quick reading of the opening Preamble reveals that it begins with “We the people.” References to “God” or Judeo-Christian scripture are nowhere to be found. Indeed, Founding Fathers of both the right (such as Hamilton) and left (Jefferson), influenced by Locke’s concepts of individual rights, rejected theological authority as well as monarchical authority. The FFs were essentially secularists (though not the sort of hysterical pagan common to the current Democratic party); it is highly unlikely they would have approved of the current Supreme Court, which features a majority of practicing catholics, including Scalio.

Those people who do value a secular society—e.g., one based on reason and democratic politics instead of religious dogma—might ask themselves whether Justice Scalia should be held accountable for such un-American comments and behavior.

Res Publica

"Jefferson's beliefs in property and limited govt. helped him form the "Democratic-Republican" party and these beliefs were passed on to the gop."


Not exactly. Republican in those days meant anti-monarchist and really anti-theocracy--the American revolutionaries, like the French, fought against the King and the state churches, whether English or catholic. It is only later that the American "republican" means conservative fundamentalist and believer in capitalism. While I agree Jefferson did support the right to private property to some extent, he was not some Reaganite conservative. He objected to Hamilton's ideas on finance (the re-creation of the British models), as well as to Hamilton's arguments for the British models of Law and the courts. I think Jefferson was sort of anti-capitalist and secular, though not exactly socialist--perhaps one could call that frontier mercantilism. Were TJ to have witnessed the 20th century I believe he would have been an Orwellian type--skeptical of both right-wing Capitalism and fascism, and statist marxism.

Here's to furthering Jeffersonian ideals in 2006, and defeating fundies, whether Catholic, prot., or marxist.

Melville on "Design"

The Shark Massacre (from Moby Dick)

Chapter LXVI

"Then in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a'lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well. But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod's sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it. nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other's disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw. Queequeg no care what god made him shark, said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin."

From Hegel's "Philosophy of Right":

"The Eumenides sleep, but crime awakens them, and hence it is the very act of crime itself which vindicates itself. — Now although requital cannot simply be made specifically equal to the crime, the case is otherwise with murder, which is of necessity liable to the death penalty; the reason is that since life is the full compass of a man’s existence, the punishment here cannot simply consist in a ‘value’, for none is great enough, but can consist only in taking away a second life."

Hegel makes it clear that retribution is not merely revenge of a feudal sort, but a type of universalized morality which the criminal's act made possible: the state in some sense acknowledges the rational maxim of the criminal--i.e. "felonies are permissible"--and applies it to the criminal himself.

Contra-Marx

"One who believes as I do, that free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism as much as to the Church of Rome. The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm."
— Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, 1920


I understand the marxist and utopian impulse but feel it's ultimately naive and futile, especially in regards to the economy of America. In Europe perhaps a leisure economy might eventually come about--in England or US unlikely (except for the wealthy or the heirs and heiresses of the wealthy--who already do live that life). Besides, the vindictive and retributive aspects of leftism are driving the engine as much as the utopian do. And there are so many other problems which Marxism really never addressed-- basic pathopsychology for one. Bosses and capitalists enjoy power and even sadism. So do lots of people. Prostitutes won't be eliminated in the near future either, no will soldiers or criminals. Marxism again seems very close in ways to the sort of, well, nearly Blakean visions--or perhaps zionist-- of pastoral bliss which poets and preachers always refer to, and as much a sentimental and a-historical fairy tale as is protestantism.

Additionally, the blogger left has little interest in say the specifics of socialist agriculture or technology: their hatred of "capitalism" is more akin to lower-management's resentment for executives at the top: they don't really envision some pastoral-Maoist communism, they envision themselves with a management niche, which they cannot presently obtain with their English or philosophy degree or whatever. In the dreamt-of Marxist pleasure-dome, they will have that management job (tho paid for by the Peoples) an office and some real power


Marxism, whatever it once may have been--and we would do well to recall the disdain for Marxism and the so-called "class sruggle" shown by Keynes, a far better economist and thinker than Marx, as well as the trenchant criticisms of Lenin and the bolsheviks raised by Russell, who visited Russia in the 20s---now functions primarily as ideological support for black nationalism and Islam. There is this incredibly hostile attitude to any traces of Western rationalism or culture; a complete rejection of not only capitalism but of the entire tradition of European intellectual life. And really even if you were to join forces with say some of these groups--the WSWS--you put on your gulag rags as you do it; i.e. your race is guilty of historical crimes, even though they may have fought in WWII against the fascists.

People act out of their self-interest: if someone is marginalized, or victim of prejucice, poor, so forth, Marxism might appeal; if not, or stands to lose were the Revolution to be enacted, it probably won't. To demonstrate that this imagined statist utopia is Good (however you define that today) across the board is an issue rarely taken up. Most of the marxist "theorists" continually neglect this basic situationalism: they in effect ask the European or American "bourgeois" to sort of admit that he is part of the oligarchy and a problem to be eliminated.


Having said that, I think there is a valid Marxist point regarding the injustice of the division of labor , yet most of these literary-leftist types don't acknowledge it. There may be something fundamentally wrong with a society which permits one group of people to be teachers, professionals, technicians, etc. while another group must do the dirty work--mechanics, food, assembly, custodial, etc.. Marx's rather abstract approach doesn't really address the potential injustice of the division of labor in much detail, and I feel that without some fundamental notion of entitlement attacks on the division of labor are meaningless. I empathize with the type of old-school social realist who desired to rip lawyers out of their offices and put them in overalls and into the fields--and the same for priests, financiers, bureaucrats of all types-- perhaps humanities professors also could join them in the tractor mechanic job re-hab workshop. Furthermore, who does the maintenance, food service or, egads, custodial work at the shop? Revolving duties it would seem if some egalitarianism is assumed across the board.

Smoke the Perp'

Convicted of multiple murders, the death row inmate known as "Tookie" Williams now faces execution, unless King Arnold decides, maybe after some persuasion from his limousine liberal-spouse Maria, to spare his life. The evidence appears rather convincing that Williams committed the murders--and the jury was not all white, as Williams later falsely claimed. That he continued to lie about his innocence--a lie which the liberals all seem to believe, as naive do-gooders are wont to--annoys nearly as much as do his claims to have been reformed by writing children's books while in stir.

There are arguments against the death penalty: some have argued against executions since the justice of preventing a possibly innocent, or mostly innocent person, from being executed may outweigh the good and the sense of Justice, whatever it is, that the actual execution brings about. That is not a bad argument, per se (though crime victims' family members would unlikely agree with it); and this would imply that all executions --including the execution of human monsters such as a John Wayne Gacy, Bundy, or Larry Bittaker --be prevented, so as to eliminate the possibility of a wrongly convicted person from being killed (and this has occured, possibly in the Chessman case in the 60s). Yet the anti-death penalty crowd, the celebrity sentimentalists and associated cry-babies protesting Williams' impending death are not really arguing that; or if they are, then they should also be working to prevent the death of Larry Bittaker (Free Pliers!) or Scotty Peterson. This will not likely occur.




Though one could do the Sociology 101 research project and argue for death penalty as deterrent (or not as deterrent) etc., my own sense is that the execution functions in a far more primordial fashion than as a preventive measure- -it is a ritual of sorts, a sort of enactment of Justice, which brings a certain sesne of satisfaction, even of pleasure to the victims, or family of the victims. Perhaps it's primitive, as primitive as the Old Testament or Koran, but then not nearly as primitive as the condemned man's murderous acts themselves.

The photos of Old West hangings, or of executions in Europe and the Middle East (the muslim Imams would never permit this sort of debate) provide evidence of this ritual character: in the frontier town a hanging was an event attended by all, and not without a certain glee. I suspect it is a similiar type of festive occasion in Muslim cities. Perhaps some clever opportunists might rally the state to allow public viewing and allow vendors (to have witnessed Aileen Wuornos' death would have been quite delightful); hell, broadcast it on the web.

Scooter Libby, Writer of GOP Erotica

Mr. Libby, Yale-educated attorney and Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, presently faces up to 30 years in prison for lying to the FBI and to reporters. Many Americans are probably unaware that "Scooter" Libby also was a writer of some talent; in fact, some of his writing has appeared online and is presently being subjected to critical scrutiny.

It's unlikely that Scooter's spicy writing will be featured in the family-oriented pages of America's newspapers, however; pornographic stories about Japanese brothels and child prostitutes being raped by bears would probably not fit on the Podunkville Lifestyle page.

Though the Republican party makes a point of proclaming itself the party of "traditional family values", Mr. Libby, liar and porno writer, is not doing much for their moral crusade. Perhaps some decent fundamentalists may be able to reach him in Leavenworth, bring him a Good Book, and teach him to see the errors of his ways.

Pynchon's Vineland as Political Novel


Vineland may be a great political novel, but it’s also about a statewide madness, and about cops: Brock Vonds and Karl Bopp (some read Bopp as a premonition of Ahh-nuld); it’s about malls swarming with Thanatoids (are they mad, or ghosts, or zombies? their ontological status so to speak seems to fluctuate) and burnt-outs who never questioned that someday California, or at least Marin north, would blossom into an outsider’s ecotopia with a Department of Cannabis and maybe Bobby Weir as The Guv.

As with Crying of Lot 49 (or Gravity's Rainbow, though I have yet to finish my ascent to the peak of that massive chaotic heap) there is plenty of cartoony phunn, but no shortage of melancholy, of the stories of the “preterite,” and of betrayal (Frenesi might be said to embody a certain sort of female californian Betrayer, i.e., Rat as the Reds used to call 'em). I think many current PC leftists (including those who haunt various UC campuses) generally fall in the ‘Toid category, more often than not as do the great majority of Cali suburbanites: the Net and blogopolis itself becoming some sort of gloomy Orwellian zone where simple jokes or insults cause some so-called liberals to start calling the FBI.

The Internet of course does provide lots of possibilities for a Snitch, of either Fed or state or corporate type (Malware itself sort of a type of snitching). A good Snitch respects no party lines, and indeed reading YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO PERFORM THIS FUNCTION in your face enough times and you might begin to wonder if the Feds are administrating the servers of the world. Pynchon, the cyber-Wobblie, has a decent Orwellian fear of the state and the Law, wielded either by neo-con paraquat sprayers or by state- funded Dr. Deeplys. And I think Sir Pynchon was sort of correct (also basing this on other non-fiction stuff of his--intro to 1984, the “Luddite” essay) in that all the dreamed-of freedoms of the Net and computing have generated a great deal of fear and paranoia and if anything provided more opportunities for J.Edgarism. TP certainly was also aware of the possibility for a Reagan-like rightwing populism developing into a virus at any time; in some sense the CA recall was a Pynchonian tragi-comedic affair.

There are worse contemporary writers one might serve up to the current crop of academic Thanatoids and Oedipa Maas replicants strolling about the quads of Cali in hiphuggies with I-Pods stuffed in their brain and their $3000 laptops in their pack.

Herr Doktor Mike Von Fleichmann: Judo Coach, Shakespearean, and CrimeFighter

Perhaps you’ve heard of C-SUB Professor Mike Fleichmann. A Shakespeare Instructor and Judo coach (no kidding) on the Cal State dole, Fleichmann also considers Ed Jagels (the notorious Kern DA slammed in Rolling Stone a few months ago) a close friend. Mike, like Jagels and any decent California neo-fascist, works real hard at his job and has been rewarded for his service to Truth and Judo with awards from the John Birch Society or something—-he's also been a recipient of the prestigious Cal State Bootlicker of the Year award numerous times.

Mike somehow got it in his head, back at the University of Skokie or whereever he purchased his PhD, that Literature might be profitably implemented for right-wing ideological ends; thus he makes a living passing off his Shakespeare/Himmler pep rallies to those gullible Kern citizens who flock to lit. classes in search of Culture. Kernoids, however, don't receive much Culture in Mike's classes--though they do get Fleichmann’s lectures in "How To Be A Terrific Salesman", with the MikeMeister often using Antonio from the Tempest as his machiavellian role model, though Mike does have some problems with the Bard's polysyllabic syntax.


If you have read Ellison’s Invisible Man you remember the cynical and corrupt college administrator Bledsoe. Like the usual Cal State professorial hack, Fleichmann IS another Bledsoe, but lacking Bledsoe’s irony and verbal sophistication. CSUB has plenty of other Bledsoes, other incompetent hatchetmen and women, some of them quite pathological if not psychotic in character, such as Big Mama Plugowski. Big Mama P. (a feminist member of the politically correct Kern Vichy French, contrasted but not opposed to Fleichmann's Wehrmacht), could not divide fractions correctly, but she does know some French and has read lots of Ginny Woolfe, and manages, in a very consistent manner, to consistently distort the Deep Thinkers in the name of “post-structuralism” or “hermeneutics” or some crap. Confronting Big Mama P. with a syllogism would most likely cause her to have a nervous breakdown, but better some entertainment from the resident Crazy Circus Lady of C-SUB than to suffer through a Seminar in Drama of the 3rd Reich with Herr Fleichmann. As with most CSU apparatchiks, both of them should be brought up on racketeering charges.

C-SUB: They earn money the old-fashioned way: They Swindle it

Frog Doc

An eccentric neo-positivist David Stove, an Australian, produced some great writing attacking western idealism (e.g. Plato and Kant) as well as the more egregious absurdities of marxism. Stove was a bit conservative (supposedly he was leftist in his youth), but seems materialist, more or less; his scathingly humorous attacks on postmod., marxism, feminism, etc. are sort of Jonathan Swift-like, but a bit more philosophically informed.

Stove

Dr. Johnson on the Female Cleric

"Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Sick of Sports Hysteria, Redux

It’s Fall again and that means Football, sports fans. Er, well, baseball is not quite over though. And basketball and hockey are just around the corner. In the spectator democracy of the USA, fans are provided with some form of “Ball” each and every season of the year. Of course, the newpapers and media are promoting this season’s gridiron “prospects” as usual. Beer is being sold. Coaches are giving pep rallies. Cheerleaders are working up fight songs for their heroes! And the local public high schools have new gangs of thugs ready to WIN. The private “Christian” high schools are contenders as well. Rah rah shish boom bah for Jee-sus, the greatest pro of ‘em all.

Coaches may sentimentally claim that “the important thing is that you do your best,” but what really counts to them is winning. That’s what sports at all levels teaches: Victory at any cost--useful training for creating obedient, robotic soldiers as well as go-getter alpha males. The celebrity athletes make the big bucks by being the baddest, most violent players on the field. It's rather questionable that's an attribute we should be instilling in our youth.

More respect should be given to the student who wins the science fair, or to the chess club champion, or the math or French honors student. Solving trigonometry problems requires more skills and is more useful to both society and to the individual than being a great free throw shooter or running back. I, for one, have much greater respect for say an Anatoly Karpov or Bertrand Russell than for Mark MacGuire or Deion Sanders.

Corporation


"An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility."

Ambrose Bierce

Literary agents and particulars

For part of what being an agent is (always) like, apparently, is being caught up in an irreducible oscillation between typicality and particularity: between (on one side) the forms of action that an agent must understand in order to make sense of herself as the possible performer of certain actions, and (on the other side) the concrete history without which the agent could not distinguish herself from those who might, otherwise, just as well replace her.

A Raskolnikov does not neatly fit into any such categories as “agent” or “type”: the character determines the type; the existential situation with which he’s confronted--i.e. Raskolnikov feverish, brooding on his couch, “should I whack and rob this wretched crone and landlady or not"--is not easily specified as some jungian or freudian myth, “coming of age” crap--a literary crisis of this type is more individual specific, as is our own life. One could call it ethics, mention “intentionality,” free will, et al.--or, ala Watson/Skinner, inquire as to whether Raskolnikov (a poorly conditioned lad) was perhaps reacting naturally (or not) to some stimulus--yet there are no outside frames of reference that the character (or agent) can extract from a realm of right actions, some platonic realm of “goodness” or obligation, which Raskalnikov can insert into his mind---Raskalnikov until his imprisonment does not realize or acknowledge a Kantian imperative, and he’s refusing any sort of liberal social contract--neither rationalist or empiricist, he more or less refuses to make the liberal association--the “identity function” that precedes an ethics discussion or any putative social contract--that he has some characteristics in common with his fellow humans: you could perhaps refer to him as a sort of uebermensch and he is--Die Raubtiere--one who cares little for helping either the starving or the bourgeois: he chooses to subvert all “normal” bourgeois values (and any imagined marxist ones as well really)), though still beset with some anxiety, and whack the hag, content that his reality is a subjective and solipsistic construct.

Russell vs. Shakespeare

Huemer quotes Russell on Hamlet: “the propositions in the play are false because there was no such man.”

Bravo! Here Lord Russell not only rejects the idylls of the bourgeois, but provides a brief primer on definite descriptions. Study this, gals & goys, and you may come to realize that English PhD holders are a bit lower in the food chain than the average RN.

H.L. Mencken on Lawyers

"All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half."
–H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), "Breathing Space", The Baltimore Evening Sun, 1924 Aug 4.



Spike!

Frau Marilee Shrider of the Californian

Although Annie Coulter does a decent job holding down the current American media's position of shrieking right-wing hag-pundit, there exist perhaps a few freaks (like moi) who might miss old-school conservative warrior women such as Phyllis Schafly or Marilyn Quayle. So imagine my pleasure when perusing a few of the Bakersfield Californian blogs and encountering "Right Thinking," featuring the wit and wisdom of one Marilyn Shrider (rightwing gals always have such cool Teutonic names). Predictably, she's lambasting Hanoi Jane Fonda--one of the rightwing's most beloved pastimes. Though Frau Shrider does the Phyllis Schafly schtick quite well she's not too informed about the Vietnam war--"Hanoi Jane" was not some isolated individual protesting it; nor was it only drug-crazed hippies or other "morally irresponsible" humans.

Nobel prize winners were included among the 'Nam protesters--including famed British philosopher and writer Bertrand Russell (as well as Chomsky and Sartre). But I doubt Lord Russell would impress the likes of Frau Shrider: she appears to be another flagwaving Walmartian--a bootlicker, in old-left parlance--who believes the US Military and veterans can do no wrong, an all-too-common sentiment in Kern.
(Frau Shrider also has some dittoheads posting to her blog entries, such as one "fatboy" who, like many hawkish sentimentalists, hasn't quite realized that wars involve the deaths of thousands of innocents.) Perhaps if she or her fans were to take the time to do some research and perform a body count of say the combined North Vietnamese military and civilian casualites, she might begin to get a glimpse of what it was about (conservative estimates are around 3 NV million deaths, which implies about 50 of them dead for every one of ours).

I am still waiting for all those conservatives (many upstanding "Xtians" as well) who supported the liberation of Iraq to start discussing and justifying the deaths of at least 30,000 iraqi civilians which occured during the "liberation." ("cut their people a check, maynard"). Granting that Saddam was a bloody-handed tyrant, that doesn't imply that the US was required to play world cop and take him and the Baathists out. The premise of Blair and Bush's actions were the existence of WMDs and that Saddam was connected to Al Qaida. That was not conclusively proven in the least. Going into Afghanistan after 9-11 may have been justified to some degree, but Iraq was a different issue; the Baathists were tyrants, but that probably was a UN issue. Second guessing at this stage is sort of pointless, but the US will be dealing with the consequences--and the resentment and rage of the middle east and muslims--for decades.

Let's hope that Frau Shrider, She-Wolf of the Gingerfornian, provides some more yuks with more rightwing-whack job essays, maybe something on "precious bodily fluids" or why she worships Ayn Rand, or denying the holocaust: all the sorts of topics dear to Kern County's ranks of rabid conservatives.

Inheritance Taxes: Not the greatest but preferable to Maoism

Though the American yahoo typically views taxation as part of some communist plot, arguments in favor of estate taxes and inheritance taxes are not far from the premises of the American revolution. Stripping away the grammar school myths and yankee nationalist gloss, the intelligent observer may perceive that the Founding Fathers were quite similiar, at least in motivations, to the "red republican" Jacobins agitating in the Paris streets: both collectively rejected hereditary aristocracy and the absurd inequalities of wealth that characterized pre-Revolutionary France and Britain. Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America in the early 19th century, asserted "The American experiment presupposes a rejection of inherited privilege." The exorbitant wealth of a Bill Gates or Paris Hilton or other billionaires is in a very real sense a return to the aristocratic privilege and dynasties which the Founders overthrew.

That is not to say that the moderately successful small-town businessman should not be able to hand down a large portion of his estate to his child or to whomever he deems fit. But the children of Bill Gates or Conrad Hilton are not simply obtaining some college funds and a nice car—they are obtaining, through no efforts of their own, a financial or corporate empire. (ironically, Bill Gates himself has argued in favor of the estate tax). Those economists and citizens who argue in favor of progressive estate taxes (and against aristocratic or corporate dynasties) are therefore following the Jeffersonian tradition, more or less, which is opposed to the finance and property schemes which led to the gross disparities of wealth and property of pre-Revolutionary Europe. The American yahoo might unthinkingly refer to Jeffersonian egalitarianism as “socialism,” but more correctly would be to refer to the Paris Hiltons of the world as decadent, idle aristocrats, if not seditionists.

Operation Mindf*ck: Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard and Uncle Al Crowley

This shit is just too weird to even believe. Cal Tech and JPL, founding member Aleister Crowley? And Tommy Cruise and Scientology, brought to you by black magician L Ron Hubbard.


L Ron the Magus

Jefferson Day Rant: Enthusiasm

Following some blog-duels with various seminarians and preachers-in-training, I have noted that there is an issue which many religious people overlook, which the English writers formerly referred to as Enthusiasm. If religious faith is purely a matter of personal conscience and subjective belief, what is to prevent a Manson or Koresh (someone like Locke would have termed them Enthusiasts of the most virulent type) from thinking that his own "visions"--which may or may not be madness--are not the Word of Gott on high? Madison optimistically asserted that "the Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man," yet if one person's religion--say Koresh's-- involves inflicting his own views and irrationalism on other non-believers or gentiles or "liberals", and endangering their health if not actually killing them in accord with some subjective madness, then perhaps his religious rights should be limited (and most would agree it would have been good had Koresh's religious rights been curtailed and his church been closed early on).

When some biblethumping conservative begins discussing the Book of Revelation and assuming that it is his duty to help bring it about (since his "God" told him to) anyone who values the secular principles of the Constitution has reason to be concerned, just as we might be concerned if muslims were to become more powerful in US politics and began to try to institute some Koranic laws as public policy, or if new-age types were to try to attempt to institute some pagan holidays. There are many sound secular reasons--reasons based on logical and scientific principles, not dogma--to limit or at least question religious freedoms and institutions, as Madison's more skeptical colleague Jefferson well realized.

Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism

Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism appears on my reading list about once every 6 months. I admit to my dilettante status in regards to these matters, but Quine seems so concerned with semantic issues that he overlooks other analytical issues. Those regular consumers of Contingencies who care about such things might recall that the analytic/synthetic divide originates with Kant:

"Either (1) the predicate B belongs to the subject A as something that is (covertly) contained in this concept A; or (2) B lies entirely outside the concept A, though to be sure it stands in connection with it. In the first case, I call the judgment analytic, in the second synthetic."

Two examples which show the difference to some degree:

"Lawyers are attorneys" is 1 (analytic--synonymous in broad sense)
"Lawyers are professionals" is 2 (synthetic--or empirical in broad sense)

Quine denied the distinction. But there's more to it, it would seem. For instance, are logical connectives to be defined synthetically--Is the premise of an argument no different than the conclusion? Obviously the end result of a derivation or deductive argument is not the same as confirming a premise: and defining a variable is not the same as say putting some variable into a function and getting a result. Is the answer to a calculus problem done the way one traces the presence of toxins out in a grove of pine trees above LA? I think not.

As I am not a mystic or idealist, I agree with "physicalism" (and with Quine's arguments in TDOE for most part) usually, yet I do think there is a difference between truth via equations and functions and truth via empirical confirmation. But specifying the cash value of analyticity is not so easy; however, even a hard-core materialist or behaviorist, say like Skinner, needs to establish his own ontology, and thus needs to know what he is attacking. If you do deny analyticity and really platonic realism and "mind" it does seem that a Darwinian meat popsicle view of human nature follows, or at least is much more plausible.

So, in effect, I am not completely sure what Quine's removal of the analytical/syntheic divide "entails" as the good Panglosses say. Is it just semantic and linguistic--that "meaning" (or reference) must proceed by synthetic means? I follow his linguistics to a degree: the definitions of words are always changing (if not ostensible in many cases), thus it is not impossible that "lawyers are attorneys" may be, eventually, as synthetic as say a "lawyers are corrupt."

Additionally, given the Quinean emphasis on variables, predication, and statements instead of ordinary language--"to be is to be the value of a variable"--the move away from analytical statements might be read as affirming a view of nouns and names as variables. At least he's suggesting that--the language (any language) may evolve to where "oh X, he's a married bachelor" is acceptable semantically; though "oh X, he's a bachelor and he's not a bachelor" will not likely be acceptable. The claim that terms and thus sentences have no inherent or stable meaning also seems a bit Wittgensteinian--a sort of colder version of the language game.

Economic equity and conservatism

If conservatism is at least tangentially concerned with justice and proportion, then conservatives might themselves have reasons to criticize laissez-faire economics and "big business." The shortcomings if not absurdities of a pure laissez-faire economy are fairly clearly indicated in the California housing market and development business; with their man Ahhnuld at the reins, the contractors and brokers of LA and the Bay Area are presently raking it in. Yet teachers, engineers, and technical people are not faring so well, at least in California--I will leave it to devoted readers of Contingencies to locate the stats. Laborers and construction guys earn 30 bucks an hour while quite a few people with master's degrees in math or comp. science or history work as tutors for half that much.

Should conservatives simply applaud as housing prices soar and a few contractors and realtors make it big and the state educational and technological infrastructure collapses? Privatization--and the real estate racket is in some sense the epitome of privatization--in and of itself is not just or equitable; and that may be one reason why those children of conservative parents, after moving from the 'burbs to Westwood or Palo Alto or Berkeley, often join with the liberals and socialists--they realize that it is unlikely they ever will be able to afford the $500,000+ villa in the hills of Hollywood or Saratoga. Joining up with the marxists would, I agree, be a mistake, but the impulse to introduce some reason and planning into the market economy--say in regards to employment and rational development-- is not entirely misguided.

Feds crack down on medical pot

The Baronial Masters of the US Supreme court have delivered the Truth on Pot. Pot Puffin' is, if not Evil Incarnate, damn near, regardless if you have no other drugs to alleviate the pain from glaucoma or cancer treatment. Millions of humans--not all hippies or freaks either--voted in med. pot; a few months later the Courtly powers simply reverse that popular decision with a few waves of their corpulent hands and send out their Fed boys to bust some ma and pa head shops in California. That the Court would so blithely dismiss the will of the people should be a bit alarming to anyone who values the concept formerly known as democracy.

Although libertarianism might not be so great across-the-board, there are quite a few decent reasons to legalize drugs, or at least cannabis: eliminating the black market on drugs and offering addicts/drug abusers treatment instead of prison are two such reasons. Alcohol obviously is generally a far more dangerous drug than is pot, and yet society and courts have no problem letting fools buy a gallon of whiskey prior to some wifebeating and a wrong-way drive on the Interstate. Pot is illegal, I believe, due to judges or prosecutors' petty, fratboy-like desires to control other people's lives (and access to relaxants)--the judges are not so concerned with justice (much less human psychology), or with preserving Jeffersonian concepts of individual freedom, but with affirming their own Authori-TAY.


(Of course, most of the various cowards and frauds who call themselves California "democrats" could care less about another infringement on individual liberty.)

Ay Laddy

Contingencies is not usually one for the sportin' life, but here's to Kevin McBride, the Clones Collosus, for jacking Tyson.

On Power, Russell

"The orthodox economists, as well as Marx, who in this respect agreed with them, were mistaken in supposing that economic self-interest could be taken as the fundamental motive in the social sciences. The desire for commodities, when separated from power and glory, is finite, and can be fully satisfied by a moderate competence. The really expensive desires are not dictated by a love of material comfort. Such commodities as a legislature rendered subservient by corruption, or a private picture gallery of Old Masters selected by experts, are sought for the sake of power or glory, not as affording comfortable places in which to sit. When a moderate degree of comfort is assured, both individuals and communities will pursue power rather than wealth: they may seek wealth as a means to power, or they may forgo an increase of wealth in order to secure an increase of power, but in the former case as in the latter their fundamental motive is not economic.

This error in orthodox and Marxist economics is not merely theoretical, but is of the greatest practical importance, and has caused some of the principal events of recent times to be misunderstood. It is only by realizing that love of power is the cause of the activities that are important in social affairs that history, whether ancient or modern, can be rightly interpreted."

Russell, On Power

The Jacko the Chester Show

Another episode in the Cali cartoon court system comes to a close. We may not care for Jacko or his cheap pop product-- I don't-- but when putting Jacko's actions in context, you realize the conservative "media" (tho neo-cons continually proclaim it's the "liberal media") have in effect tarred and feathered the freak.

Minds more acute than mine might speculate on whether these show trials are some sort of duplicitous, deceptive right-wing stunt that keeps the plebes from contemplating, say, the sight of Iraqi cities turned to rubble and decorated with human hamburger. The show trial has become some group ritual akin to cyber-stoning, wherein the selected chi chi celeb is put on display for the excoriation process; the Cali court as much a prime-time Reality Show as it is a form of due process.

As any one who has spent some time in the hands of the Black Gown Gang realizes, justice is about as dependent on a judge's or prosecutor's hangover status--or his whore's "complicity" status--as it is on the Constitution. Indeed were some magic lantern available--the old Twilight Zone truth serum, say-- to reveal the presence of Chesterness among various human-primates, one suspects most Judges and prosecutors would rate "Certifiable Chester," if not "Canberra-bound."

Prospect Theory 101 and the Irrational Man Standard

Roger, the guy at Limited, Inc., has been lately engaged in a discussion of Prospect Theory (PT). Figures associated with PT, such as Kahneman and Tversky, assessed data from psychological testing in attempts to demonstrate patterns in human decisions relating to a person's perspective of probabilities, or imagined probabilities; the results from such testing altered the way economists and other social scientists think of the Rational Man Standard as it formerly was known. (Keynes, I believe, also addressed this issue somewhere--or at least questioned the objectivity of the standard.}

Paraphrasing Mr. Roger's paraphrase of Kahneman and Tversky, K & T discovered that certain patterns of error occured across groups, and that responses to certain questions seemed dependent on the wording or "framing" of the question, as some semanticists call it. As Mr. Roger said, "given a constant probability of a course of action, one can manipulate responses to that course [of action] by framing it in terms of gain or loss. K and T developed what is called the Asian disease problem. Using students and professors as their pool of respondents, they posed this problem:

"Imagine that the US is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows:

If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.

If Program B is adopted, there is 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probability that no people will be saved.

72 percent chose A, 28 B.

Then K & T proposed this problem:

Problem 2
If Program C is adopted 400 people will die.
If Program D is adopted there is 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and 2/3 probability that 600 people will die.
Which of the two programs would you favor?”
22 percent went for C, and 78 percent went for D."

Note that the programs offer the same probability of people being killed or saved, yet it appears that a majority of people prefer the frame of 200 people being saved to the frame of 400 being killed. Andre Breton might have applauded.

Here's more of Roger's analysis of the results of K & T's investigation: "The first question was framed in such a way that it brought out risk averseness: “the prospect of certainly saving 200 lives is more attractive than a risky prospect of equal expected value, that is, a one-in-three chance of saving 600 lives.” The second question brought out risk taking: “the certain death of 400 people is less acceptable than the two ­in­ three chance that 600 will die.”"

Any semi-awake undergraduate social-studies type would ask to review the sample and the distribution of the data--including the number of people questioned, their education, race, gender, and geographic location--but the research may at the very least provide more anecdotal evidence of the pathological status of your fellow primates.

The McSynthetic A Priori and Fries please

Here's a big issue with Kant, that I, low-rent Voltairean inductivist, discover when skimming through the 1st Critique: apart from the use of the categories from Aristotle's Physics (perhaps themselves sufficient grounds for Kant's inclusion into the Historical Interest Only category), the synthetic a priori argument is, as men more qualified than I have pointed out, resting on some rather flimsy support.

This is synthetic a priori according to Kant: "Every event must have a cause." Kant seems to be saying that the subject "Event" has within it the necessary predicate of causality, and that this is not something we learn by looking at the world. Yet as he says knowledge starts in experience. How do children learn this fact? THey learn the word and understand causality? It would seem the child does not undertand causality until he perceives it working in the world: he sticks a knife into the outlet and gets a nasty shock. Ouch--avoid it. Not all learning is like this, perhaps, but most is. And learning the meaning of the word "event" means looking at something--actions in the world as well as definitions, synonyms.

It is also unclear whether Kant means the fact of causality as it is in our brains, vs. the fact of causality in the world. If he simply means there are physical laws independent of our brains which are a priori, that seems an obvious empirical point and anyone (apart from extreme mystics or platonists) would agree. If he is saying a human's understanding of this fact--every event must have cause--is a priori and known without reference to the world, a type of innateness, then I think Herr Kant is to be rejected. There may be innateness--genetic and biochemical--but epistemological innateness of the sort Kant proposes seems implausible.

Mathematical terminology does not just appear in our brain, and it is not unrelated to physical events. At the very least Kant's definition seems as much linguistic as ontological. Consider any basic truth of classical physics--say Newton's equation stating weight as inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the center of the earth--it is synthetic a posteriori , derived from facts about matter and force, gravity etc. And if this is the case--that physical "laws" of nature come to be known to humans by inference, experience, and testing, it seems the edifice of the Critique is substantially ruined. Persons with more expertise in quantum physics than myself might advance some arguments in support of Kant's "noumena," but it should be remembered that Werner Heisenberg himself was rather critical of Kant, apres-Copenhagen.

One of Kant's favorite targets was the skeptic Hume; Hume held to a material causality though with reservations; he's Newtonian, I think, but would have said Newton's laws were not necessarily true but more a matter of probability. Nonetheless the general methods of Humean inductivism, refined by statisticians and figures such as Popper or Kuhn, are far more relevant to biology and economics--any sort of empirical endeavor--than is Kant's ghost architecture.

Falsification 101 and the Frauds of the Left

This rant was prompted after some futile attempts at dialogue with another cadre of academic opportunist-aesthetes at http://www.long-sunday.net. Skimming the site I note not only the longwinded, dull, proustian-marxist laments (which make ol Karl's prose seem witty by comparison), but also the numerous messages blocked and censored and altered. The leftist aesthetes, such as the cowards and frauds found at Long Sunday, are not so fond of anarchic libertarianism or freedom of expression as were most liberals until the 80s and 90s: finally attaining his authentic Bukharin-like soul, the Young Hegelian Clown is all about control and censorship and Authori-TAY (as Cartman said once); if he were able to detect the right State Official to snitch to, he'd attempt to find some way (probably by licking, in good lit. poodle fashion, the boots of a lesbian department chair) to put you in Gulag for informing him of the obvious; e.g. he's a worthless, sycophantic bag of irrational shit on his way to the lower levels of Tartarus.

This new type of onanistic leftist blogger, having attentively sat for years at the feet of his marxist, psychoanalytical, or feminist mistresses and masters, has been repeatedly conditioned with the idea that the bad guys were not Stalin or even Hitler (the obscure, dense writings of the one-time nazi Heidegger being a current post-mod. fave); the bad guys were really English and American scientists, Cambridge logicians (notwithstanding that someone such as Turing helped defeat the Germans), behaviorists, Enlightenment thinkers (whether religious or not) and anyone who naively thought reason, inductive or deductive, was a reliable guide to attaining truth.

The rationally-challenged clowns such as those found at Long Sunday or The Weblog or any number of other sites seem to have nothing better to do than to spew pages and pages of unverifiable, quasi-freudian drivel in hopes of demonstrating that rational writing and argument is itself an oppressive discourse. The hip leftist blogger (such as Lacanian stooges RI Pope or Adam Kotkso) is always ready with some cheap bon mot, and ready to take on politics as well as psychology and art--anything "cultural". Like older aesthetes such as Wilde or Gide, he's only nominally leftist (while avoiding any real discussion of employment issues or money or housing or other concerns of the poor); he generally whines and bitches his way to some smarmy and instantly dismissable conceptual excretion (the beats and existentialists, at least the saner ones, would have detested such opportunistic freaks as well). He relishes an attack on GOP economic policies yet knows nothing about stats or demographics or economics at all (having been taught the lie that Marx was some sort of metaphysician), and thus his feeble attempts at political journalism or economic analysis are as futile and laughable as are his examinations of the "political unconscious." Many people are now aware of this; a few years ago a physics professor, Sokal, in fact wrote a brilliant parody of post-modernist leftist jargon which many major post mod. leftists fell for.

-----------------------------------------------

After the frustration of trying to argue with people who both do and don't believe in reason as a means to truth (since any recognizable statement is itself a truth claim), it's really somewhat amusing to witness the harmless, though animalic attacks (sort of like a bunch of rabid shrews) by postmodernists and marxists on moderate analytical types (or those brave or foolish enough to advocate such positions), who are regarded as more obnoxious and threatening than are the right wing fundamentalists or conservatives. THe current academic marxist would seem to feel more in common with Heidegger (if not Goering)- than he would with a Jefferson or a Bobby Kennedy (Or Russell, etc. etc.)

Who are the enemies of tolerance and open debate and, as the liberals used to say, the spirit of disinterested inquiry? It is academic leftists as much as the biblethumping right. The hysteria and zealotry of the American protestant echoes the more sophisticated hysteria and zealotry of the postmodernist communist; to the naive, marxism is, as so many have noted, as much a sort of religious ideology as is methodism or catholicism; it replaces the sunday-school of the gullible American liberal arts student-types.

Popper's insistence on falsifiability and falliblism (though his programme is not without errors) would, if implemented, cure this enthusiasm on both sides.

Uncle Bertie Died for your Sins

'Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?' - Bertrand Russell, 'Why I am not a Christian', 1927

Incommensurable realities: PK Dick and George Lucas

Summer's nearly arrived, as has the summer's space spectacle, provided by George Lucas. After a few weeks of watching the Star Wars Inc. images infiltrate the Net, burger stands, Walmarts, etc. I was reminded of an older essay on simulation by Ho-wood's favorite dead cyberpunk, P.K. Dick: “How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later.” Here is a brief excerpt from the essay:

“So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe— and I am dead serious when I say this— do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things are born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves will begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”

The Dick universe is obviously entropic, and thus unpredictable and disruptive. The Lucas universe is not. It is at best Gene Roddenbury-like, with cute fuzzy aliens and heroic star pilots and evil nazi-like villains. A Dick story such as "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (barely recognizable in Blade Runner, nonetheless not a bad flick) offers chaos and plenty of it: Deckard, a hyperspace Philip Marlow, wanders among the heaps of "kipple" searching for the replicants, unable to determine what is or is not human, and some of the replicants, such as Rachel, appear more human and less schizoid than humans themselves. Lucasworld does not present such ambiguities; kipple is rare (though the rusting hulks of the ships and so forth as in The Empire Strikes Back are at least visually pleasing). The EFX may be great and it's safe for the parents and their kiddies, yet regardless of the EFX the Lucas narratives are simplistic and melodramatic, the characters as wooden as those in a John Ford western.


But only a dweeb would take the time to address the narrative structure, one-dimensional characters, or overall Newtonian shortcomings of Star Wars movies. The Lucas spectacle does dazzle yankee consumers with its EFX, but more importantly the Star Wars buzz itself is on display--it's not only a movie, but a marketing campaign, suburbanite "mall mythology" (as William Gibson said somewhere), and consumer bonding session bundled together into one tasty product, as Ho-wood execs say; one that sells millions of movie tickets as well as hamburgers, t-shirts, and lunch pails.

Images associated with this fabricated product, the Lucasburger, gradually overpower and replace current political reality; the puppy-dog aliens and Darth Vaders and space princes are now enforced on all. (some French post.mod. figure such as Baudrillard most likely wrote about this issue, and snooty lit.crit people would surely roll their eyes at my admittedly dilettantish analysis). America's most beloved cyber-melodrama subsumes the tragedies of the Iraqi war and terrorism, the catholic church scandals and dead pope, the tsunami (a disaster far more horrific than Voltaire's Lisbon quake), and the takeover of LA by a nearly maoist mayor. A Bay area wunderkind's jungian bongdream obliterates each pulp scandal and political outrage currently in progress.

Belle-lettrist


The Lovely Chucky McLucky

Reichmarshall



Da Chief of AVC, Jackie Swischer

The Consolations of Skepticism.

Supposition: there exists an all-powerful entity x (God), who causes and controls all natural events.

1. If x is an all-powerful God (G), x kills (K) thousands of innocents (by way of natural disasters, plagues, famines)

2. If (x) kills (K) thousands of innocents, then (x)is a mass-murderer and identical to Evil (E) (at least according to any commonly accepted legal or moral codes).

3, Thus, if x is God, then x is Evil
------------------
I think there would need to be a way to single out such a supposed omniscient entity (monotheistic too as Xtians/muslims/jews claim) x, perhaps like this: there exists an (x), such that x is God, and for any other (V) supposed entity y (thought also to be God), such an entity equals x. E(x) = "there exists": E(x)(Gx & V(y)( Gy -> y = x).

The universal ((x), for any x) is more suited to the hypothetical syllogism:

(x)(G(x)->K(x))
(x)(K(x)->E(x))
thus (x)(G(x) -> E(x))


Q. E. D.

Kern Boy in the Big To-mah-toe--Re-run



(I posted this back during the DNC convention--anyone remember John Kerry?--yet I feel it remains relevant given Schwarzenegger and his bitch McCarthy's new plans to gut the state infrastructure and further punish the non-wealthy of CA)

Kern representative of greed and pollution, Kevin McCarthy (as in "Joe"), thinks the efficiency-minded Repugnicans could have already settled the economic issue: sure, just cut all the programs, slash education budgets, eliminate state jobs, no more unemployment offices, etc. That's the official GOP line, which, as so many liberals have pointed out ad nauseum, is pretty much in direct contradiction to the principles of the Good Book (i.e., the Bible, if anyone still reads that useless "old book" as Hank Thoreau once said) which quite a few conservative hypocrites like to think that they uphold....

The simple solution of raising taxes on the very wealthy--on income, wealth, and luxury--seems to not have crossed the minds of anyone lately, including the overly placating democrats, who more and more seem just like Republicans with a few sentimental attitudes held towards gays and unions...At least Cruz Bustamente had the cajones and modicum of intelligence to suggest that the CA budget could be repaired with a few adjustments to the income tax brackets (increases in both federal and state income taxes and capital gains on wealthiest brackets would be most prudent)..........


Note also that the DNC and Kerry are sort of skirting the tax cut issue---Kerry in fact supported Bush's tax cut, to Kerry's disgrace. The only dem to have really mentioned it was Billy Clinton in his preacher-like rant on Monday night (July 2004), to his credit. Although he was too conservative in many aspects, liberals and leftists should not just dismiss Billy Clinton's record, which was (apart from the one rather large faux pas with a pretty jewess's mouth) successful in many basic, measurable ways: i.e. solving the deficit and creating jobs.....

Kern Law's new motto


Yee haw. At least los puercos del Kern are honest. Perhaps they should have added,
"We'll kick your ass, whether you are guilty or not."

Hitchens on Dead Pope

Hitchens' politics are a bit strange: he professes to be leftist and anti-religious, but he did support the Iraqi war, though more as a supporter of Blair than of Bush. I think he should have rallied for Kerry a bit more. My feelings towards Mr. Hitchens are a bit ambivalent, yet one cannot deny the power and style of his somewhat Swiftian prose.

"Without, it seems, quite noticing what they are saying, the partisans of the late pope have been praising him for his many apologies. He apologized to the Jewish people for the Vatican's glacial coldness during the Final Solution, and for historic filiations between the church and anti-Semitism. He apologized to the Eastern Orthodox Christians, and to the Muslims, for the appalling damage done to civilization by papal advocacy of the Crusades, and by forced conversion and massacre in the Balkans during the church's open alliance with fascism during World War II. He apologized to the world of science and reason by admitting that Galileo should not have been condemned by the Inquisition. These are not small climb-downs, and they do not apply just to the past. They are and were admissions that the Roman Catholic Church has been responsible for the retarding of human development on a colossal scale."


Dead Pope

End Democracy Now

The assumption that voting somehow is innately equitable or democratic is one of the greatest farces of American politics: not only does Chimpy McBushCo's re-election show that, so does the CA recall and the ascendency of Schwarzenegger, California's cartoon King. Education requirements, poll tests, etc. however un-populist they may seem, might be in dems and 3rd party interests. A poll test would not play well with poor urban minorities but might keep large numbers of uneducated, redneck bible-thumpers out of the voting booth.

Establishing some criteria to insure voter intelligence/fitness is no more absurd than say a college professor giving tests to insure student intelligence/fitness. Is the right answer to dy/dx sin (Pi*x) a matter of raising hands in the math classroom?

Yes, it certainly could be dangerous--i.e. if fundamentalists or organized criminals got in control of voting process (oh that's right they already have)--but not so much more dangerous than thinking a popular vote leads to equitable politics. Plato himself disparaged democracy and a popular vote in the Republic; majorities supported Hitler and Mussolini. What if say Larry Flynt (who garnered over 200 thousand votes in CA recall) had actually triumphed in California recall? Flyntville would hardly seem an acceptable democracy.

I brought this up on a blog and some of the resident academic liberals were a bit irked. But what is really irksome is the sentimental liberal's trust in the masses, the naive hope that the underclasses will all perceive the great truths of democracy and eventually start voting in qualified, rational candidates and propositions.

Remember the California propositions in the last election? 64 for instance. Thanks to some high-priced ads paid for by the corporate deep pockets, the corporate boys got out the message that this law would be like a Prop 13 reform, and keep attorneys from making excess profits etc. But what it really did is protect corporations from lawsuits and in effect reverse decades of decent environmental policies that allowed people and groups to sue corporations. So an injust or at least oligarchic prop. was put into effect. It would be easy to think of many other examples of unpleasant policies and laws put into effect by popular mandate, or by politicians put into office by popular vote. And in addition to voter intelligence tests, requiring some modicum of education for aspiring candidates--economic and historical education if not scientific--would be a prudent course. I think people should be aware of whether the Governator really knows what say present and future value is. Or something like that.

John Paul II does seem to have been a very decent, ethical, and erudite man. He spoke numerous languages, and was, as the obituary writers say, "an avid sportsman." He fought against the nazis and later the stalinists: the catholic poles certainly did not have an easy existence from about 1938 to 1945 (nor did the polish jews or ukrainians either). Many died at both nazi and stalinist hands; the atrocity of Katyn, where thousands of polish officers were slaughtered at the hands of Stalin's NKVD , may be one of the most brutal acts of the 20th century.

Yet Catholicism was and is not the answer. In fact it's quite absurd--absurd in both ordinary and philosophical sense-- that someone would, after surviving the terror of nazis and stalinists, decide to join a church that proclaims that a "God" exists who would allow such horrendous brutality. Not only is the concept of God itself quite indefensible ( and more so after WWII), the catholic tradition is rife with irrational, unscientific and anti-humanist doctrines. The mass itself is ludicrous, as are the attitudes toward birth control: for the real implications of Catholic family planning spend a few days in one of the massive slums of any Central or South American city. And yet the Catholics keep marching on. Recently a monumental cathedral was finished in LA, courtesy of Roger O Mahoney, the Cardinal who has refused to turn over names in the priest sex scandals. And the cathedral, however beautiful (featuring works of art from leading LA artistes, such as Grahams' massive, plebian Maria) is another Temple to Irrationality which does little to nothing to help solve real social and economic problems.