Socialism, Kim Robinson style.

The do-gooder marxists have even made an entry into the realm of science fiction. Imagine RA Heinlein's response to some of the following words of wisdom from Comrade Kim:



"""A minimum share of 51% of the surplus value of one’s work should be returned to one, this value to be measured by objective and transparent accounting as defined by law.

The previous two points combined would tend to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, by distributing the wealth more equitably among those who have created it."""

Ah nice and subtle updating of Marx's Capital, Mr. Kim, with some hints of utilitarianism (always sure to impress a few stoner-frat boys who vaguely remember that cliffsnotes rant about the "greatest good for the greatest number"). And to be honest, not completely without merit. Those perfidious owners, managers, capitalists, bourgeois financiers! And the good proletariat (and for examples of the goodness of workers' revolution one should recall those supremely good 5 year plans of Stalin, or Mao's cultural revolution, etc. eh corpses serving the state as good manure). So are all of KS Robinson's fans out in Cyberia ready to lend a hand with say the Cali citrus or cotton harvest? Or like slaughter their own meat? Bake their own bread? UH, divy up their property holdings (the few well-to-do KSR fans)? Sew their own clothes??? Build their own CPUs? Help end the stock market? Ich denke nicht. And any would-be space-colonists face similar problems (i.e. consider the H20 and food needed to supply even a small mission to Mars: at least 6 months, and enough for time spent on Mars (any ice harvest also incredibly problematic), as well as for return trip...Take your extra tanker full of protein pills, and water, fuel, supplies, and what, pump your excrement into space ---)

And unlike Big Monkey Karl, Kim the little monkey doesn't bother discussing how that labor time translates into wealth: how does one quantify surplus labor, Comrade Kim? Oh wait it's an "objective and transparent accounting." A ditchdigger, con mucho trabajo, obviously works much harder, physically speaking, than a civil engineer. But Mr. Engineer, spinning a few integrals, does do a sort of work which Vato the Ditchdigger doesn't have a clue about. So who sets the value of that work, Mr. Kim? Perhaps the Peoples do.

Heinlein would have reached for his Luger. That said, KSR puts forth a few interesting if obvious political ideas: Pynchon he ain't. Funny that it's mostly a few sort of greenish libertarians who are drawn to his writing: most of them don't understand what the socialism entails (no cushy office jobs, McDweeb--even for PHP gurus)

""Population stabilization:

Human population stabilized at some level to be determined by carrying capacity studies and foundational axioms. Best results here so far have resulted from increase in women’s rights and education, also a goal in itself, thus a powerful positive feedback loop with chance for results within a single generation."""
Context/ultimate goal: Permaculture


Uh huh. Proof or data for those "results", comrade Kim? One big happy multicultural family. Heinlein now heads for the Bahnhof: Ansteigen an Den Zug, schweine....................

Don't let Snitches--whether Gestapo, KGB, or needing medication---ruin the Net



McCain, who on occasion tries to pass himself off as a moderate, has gone on record as being in favor of a censored Net (in other words, a Net comprised of only corporate sites). No wonder the New Worlds stoner fascists approve of him.

WTF? Oh it's Senator Carol on meds

According to numerous witnesses, California's favorite lesbian State Senator, Carol Midgen, drove erratically for 30 miles along Interstate 80, and then finally smashed into a car, causing serious injuries to numerous people. She later claimed her driving problems resulted from a "very powerful regimen of medication." Whoa.

The major networks barely mentioned the crash at all. Pourquoi? And why wasn't the hag arrested? One might offer various speculations, but the most reasonable explanation may be that the media is controlled by dyke-friendly stalinists who will do anything to keep their "side" from being cast in a poor light.

Homie David Hume


“
"""In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it shou'd be observ'd and explain'd; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. "" (From the Treatise of Human Nature).
”
As a secularist, Hume holds that values and virtues, however beneficial to society, are not at all necessary; they are conventions: one could just as easily be attracted to and stimulated by, say, witnessing the invasion of Basra, and define that as a good, as by giving a few shekels to Santa in front of K-mart. Hume's virtue ethics is based on self-interest and pleasure; and justice is not for Hume objective or a universal. ( most hysterical moralists of left and right--even so called "Darwinists"--- never quite grasped Hume's is-ought distinction). Ethics then for Humeans is constructive, stipulative, and alas somewhat subjective (most read him as a precursor to Bentham and Mill) . So how does what is termed "ethics"--or expanding the scope, even democracy--- work if large proportions of the population are criminals and sadists? What did an ethical person do in the Old West, or during the rise of the fascists or stalinists, or in 20s Chicago when Al Capon-ay ruled the city and the cops and judges were "in the pocket"? We here at Contingencies suggest bourgeois ethics (or Big Al Gore style corporate liberalism) depends on a faulty premise that people will, more often than not, do what is rational or proper in the conventional sense, and that is not at all a premise Hume would grant (or should), nor would Malthus or Darwin or BF Skinner, or William S. Burroughs for that matter. Ethics in Vegas might entail robbing casinos.

""Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities."

No to Grunt Rights

A few confused members of the Red Stoner Mafia (over at New Worlds) believe that Grunts (who voluntarily enlist in US Military) have the right to complain publicly about the war (one SPC Milo in Iraq has taken to voicing his complaints on a blog, and the Kos comrades are using that for their daily leftist Phun avec FiFi). Unless there were some outrageous, Ludendorffian sort of commander in charge or a My Lai sort of situtation, the enlisted man really does not have any grounds to complain, except for gross incompetence (though perhaps he later goes on to write a literary variation on "War is Hell," etc.).

The US soldier enlists voluntarily: and one doesn't need to read the Recruiter's fine print on the Fed. contract to realize that the enlistee agrees to obey orders--even if those orders call for the enlistee to participate in combat, or be involved in perilous situations, or fire at the enemy at will. Agreeing to military service does not entail joining the republican party, but those who do sign up should be aware they will be following orders from people who are most likely conservative ( a point lost on Private Milo). Following orders from his commanding officers, Sarge says to the greenhorns, "take Hamburger Hill," and SPC Greenhorn follows orders. If not, Sarge should (and indeed may have the right per code) to terminate SPC Greenhorn's employment for the USA via his .45 on grounds of insubordination.

Thumbs down, man

Logo for Ron Paul campaign (and supporters)

U.S. Constitution: First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Does that right to freedom of expression apply to blogs and websites? Hint: Yeah.
Until bloggers argue for real, democratic sites ACROSS THE ENTIRE NET (i.e. non-moderated, or at least group editorial policies,), Blogland will continue to resemble a J.Edgar Hoover report if not KGB policy manual.


Even a confused leftist such as Chomsky understands the necessity of free and open communication:

""Among people who have learned something from the 18th century (say, Voltaire) it is a truism, hardly deserving discussion, that the defense of the right of free expression is not restricted to ideas one approves of, and that it is precisely in the case of ideas found most offensive that these rights must be most vigorously defended.""" (Noam Chomsky)

Carnap (& Hume) for Cali Consumers

From "Philosophy and Logical Syntax":

""The opinion that metaphysical propositions have no sense because they do not concern any facts, has already been expressed by Hume. He writes in the last chapter of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (published in the year 1748) as follows: "It seems to me, that the only objects of the abstract sciences or of demonstration, are quantity and number ...All other enquiries of men regard only matter of fact and existence; and these are evidently incapable of demonstration ...When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." We agree with this view of Hume, which says - translated into our terminology - that only the propositions of mathematics and empirical science have sense, and that all other propositions are without sense.""

SO much for fundies, islamofascists---or moralist-leftists and apparatchiks common to the Kremlin.com's (aka DailyKos , DU, etc.)......................


Verstehen Sie Das?
Carnap

Bobby Rat




Altar boy who ushered in the teary-eyed, statist Left, RFK was a pal of J. Edgar, Nixon, and at least for a time, Joe McCarthy. Good riddance, carpetbagger. (and I wager Thomas Jefferson would have agreed). Ishallah, Sirhan.

Top 10 uses for the corpse of Jerry Falwell

10. Pin-yata
9. bowling pin
8. crash test dummy
7. Tele-tubbie grave party
6. Alpo processing plant
5. inexpensive fertilizer
4. catapult ammunition
3. parachute-less skydiver test
2. skull-mug harvest
1. shark bait


Hitchens as usual skewers the fundie rather effectively (a charlatan, a "Chaucerian fraud"). Aye Mr. Hitchens: the Pardoner

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkAPaEMwyKU

Cure for theocrats



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_%28book%29

Grotesque Disregard (How Not to Write, continued)

Righteous Indignation du jour

Imagine like a middle-aged Jim Morrison, stoned and not-so-immaculate, meets Jerry Falwell. Rightist moralists are bad enough: but when the rightist moralist sucks up a few too many bongs and takes side with the Mommycrats: a cyber-libertarian can only say, like, STFU, even if C.L. doesn't care for BushCO--certainly not GOP econ. policies (some libertarians actually make an exception for anti-statism and support higher taxes on ueber- wealthy)--- and agrees with a few of the yawps (it's not likely to interfere with "Aldous"s' hustle, but the Lancet people said only 1/3 of the estimated deaths (not verified, btw, McLizard-King) were attributable to US/Brit. forces).

Those few cynics (including some who read and understood Gulliver's Travels once in their life, unlike the McLizardKings of NW) with enough spine and intelligence to denounce such phonies are slowly being eliminated from both left and rightist sites--dissent now referred to, in 90s dweeb terms, as "trolling" by the over-grown adolescents, pansies and emotional wrecks who operate most blogs and websites at this point (typical leftist narcissists, like their fundie cousins, usually never quite realized what trolls really were--)

Hitchens on the politics of Hell-fire

Slate now offers, for the discriminating and non-sentimental sort of skeptic, excerpts from Christopher Hitchens' new book: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens/Slate/Xtians

"""We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow ..."""

Mahster Hitchens raises an important if somewhat obvious point (obvious to anyone who ever bothered with the cliffsnotes to Hume) in opposition to those religious conservatives who suggest that without threat of Hell-Fire, society falls into decay or anarchy (of course that never stopped centuries of warfare waged by xtians, muslims, jews, etc.). CH however arrogant does have a certain gift for putting forth skeptical arguments in a coherent fashion (and quoting some of Hitchens' bon mots will generally piss off both biblethumping idiots and whiny-ass liberals). And whether you agree with him or not (or his politics) one might respect his courage (he, like his pal Rushdie, also lives under threat from the muslim nuts, if not from some zealous Catholics or fundies).

Kurt Vonnegut on the death of eloquence



"""I'm writing about the death of eloquence. Eloquence was so ordinary back then, in the time of Shakespeare. In contrast to Shakespearean speech, I was watching one of those television talk shows the other night where people air their disagreements with other people. There is a scene in Othello where Iago wants to get Cassio drunk on alcohol and.... ......""

"So Iago says, "Come, lieutenant, I have a stoup of wine; and here without are a brace of Cyprus gallants that would fain have a measure to the health of black Othello." Cassio turns down the drink and says, "Not tonight, good Iago; I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking: I could well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment." And then we get back to what I saw the other guy say on tv — well, I read his lips actually, because we don't get anything real on our televisions. And this talk show guy said, "Fuck you — you know what I'm saying?" [Laughs] I just don't think people get off on language anymore. Language used to be an elevated art. It used to be for people what music can be. But people don't learn to do that anymore, so eloquence is merely a matter of waste now. Who needs a good vocabulary and proper English? Eloquence — it's dead and who needs it? We use shorthand nowadays. Fuck you — you know what I'm saying? [Laughs] """"

Indeed, Mr. V . As with the scrawlings of his literary ancestor Twain, Vonnegut's screeds have been approved by Contingencies: KVSpeak may not have been sufficiently posh-- or marxist--- for east coast lit. snobs, yet still, shall we say, Jeffersonian (and KV, Cornell guy, was fairly well read in sciences, reportedly). Better some yankee cynicism--- even bad, stoner yankee cynicism-- than English lit. melodrama, or space operas for that mattter (or Catholics, Inc.) . We don't care for all of his writing---Slaughterhouse 5 may have been overrated (the Dresden sections are pretty powerful)--- but Breakfast of Champions not a bad book (and possibly a parody of Updike?). Dwayne Hoover is alive and well, and defending Dick Cheney in some bar. JG Ballard approved of KV, apparently. A few years ago, Vonnegut also penned an interesting column on Nelson Algren, one of America's legends of the literary underground (as KV noted, Sinatra made far more from "Man with the Golden Arm" than Algren did). So it goes.

(and note, Vonnegut fans, how many so-called "liberal" bloggers didn't even bother to mention Kurt's death: that's par for the course for the new sort of cyber-apparatchik).

"Are we better off without religion?"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/audio_video/podcasts/article1583399.ece

Richard Dawkins, the delightfully fiendish Christopher Hitchens, and Grayling vs. Roger Scruton (a great windbag in the Kantian tradition) and some other pious tories. Reports indicate that the bad guys (D. & H.)) proved victorious.

"Christian: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor." (A. Bierce)

What is a lie to a Darwinian materialist?


Vincit omnia veritas

Lying could be quite useful, genetically speaking, for a mafioso, while on trial, to save himself (and his family, cronies, business etc.). Say Guido ordered his boys to off some nosy-detective, and they do so, and then Guido lies about his guilt ("plead the fifth, paysano") when on trial (as of course many people accused of crimes do) and then goes to trial, but is acquitted, and in effect gets away with Moider, returns to his warehouse, and continues with his business, advances the gene pool a bit more via kids with Velma, etc. What does the strict Darwinian say? Guido succeeded, in a sense, by lying (a "don't get caught" meme, in contemporary parlance), and many criminals who lie about their guilt (at least ones with the right defense attorneys) do succeed; thus lying could in many instances be a positive trait. We here at Contingencies (and we do not advocate Catholics, Inc. as an alternative to DarwinCorp.) assume that most rational humans would object to Guido's lie, but those who hold to purely Darwinist or genetic determinism would appear to have no grounds for any such objections.


What is a lie to a pragmatist?


Pragmatists, idealists (at least some), mystics, and postmodernists generally assert that truth is not a matter of confirming some alleged facts, "out there", in an objective, empirical world. There are various differences between these groups, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that they uphold some version of William James concept of pragmatism: that truth always has some relation to usefulness, whether in regards to sciences, social sciences, humanities, etc.

The Cash Value of Truth model, has of course been criticized, and not without reason. While in some contexts--say medicine--utility would seem to be critical (--testing the functionality of a drug, say)--in others, whether history or law, or various social sciences, any modifications of the actual facts to fit some ideology might conceivably result in highly unethical situations. Bertrand Russell noted this problem in regards to Dewey's pragmatist ideas. If the pragmatist's goal is to create a harmonious community, or even harmonious classroom, or well-integrated self, then it would seem the pragmatist might "shape" facts (say historical, or economic facts, or even literary narratives) to fit his pedagogy--making the students see the world through rose-tinted glasses, more or less (or perhaps red-tinted glasses, in marxist indoctrination centers). And if the end result was a harmonious community and well-balanced individuals (or even a supremely efficient proletarian State), then pragmatists would grant, it would seem, that the right thing had been done. And other sorts of similar absurdities, possibly Orwellian, resulting from pragmatism (or any ideology where truth is solely a matter of functionality) across the board could be realized.

Fritz Nietzsche on Dames

(Anglocized from the Deutsch)

"When a woman becomes a scholar there is usually something wrong with her sexual organs."

"You go to a woman? Carry thy whip"

"A woman does not want the truth; what is truth to women? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to women than the truth - her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty."

"God created woman. And boredom did indeed cease from that moment — but many other things ceased as well! Woman was God’s second mistake."

Das stimmt. Doc FN generally scores nearly as high on the Chuckleometer as half-hour of comedy from homie Mike Richards.

One amusing Americun flick

Leibniz for Dummies“ There are also two kinds of truths, those of reasoning and those of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible: truths of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible. When a truth is necessary, its reason can be found by analysis, resolving it into more simple ideas and truths, until we come to those which are primary."

Verstehen Sie das, Kerl? Ja f-n wohl

Stevie Schwenson, the Galifornian J-Edgar, Pink-slipped

Another little Moderatrix (with his new boy Friday Sperber) doing his best for the maoists at Ginger's Warehouse, Stevie Schwsenson would do well to, like, find a new job maybe back in Podunkville before the shite hits the fan.

Grotesque Disregard (How Not to Write, continued)

Righteous Indignation du jour

Sort of like Jim Morrison, stoned and not-so-immaculate, meets Jerry Falwell. Rightist moralists are bad enough: but when the rightist moralist sucks up a few too many bongs and takes side with the Mommycrats: a cyber-libertarian can only say, like, STFU, even if C.L. doesn't care for BushCO--certainly not GOP econ. policies (some libertarians actually make an exception for anti-statism and support higher taxes on ueber- wealthy)--- and agrees with a few of the yawps (it's not likely to interfere with "Aldous"s' hustle, but the Lancet people said only 1/3 of the estimated deaths (not verified, btw, McLizard-King) were attributable to US/Brit. forces).

Gene Roddenberry, Snitch


Americans have for years been indoctrinated with the humanist and secularist vision of Gene Roddenberry; as the Vietnam war raged in the late 60s and students rioted in the streets of the US and Europe, Roddenberry was able to sell his optimistic pop sci-fi vision across the cathode ray tubes of the world. Kirk, Spock, Bones: American geeks have for years emulated them nearly as much as they emulated rock stars. Yet most Trekkies are probably unaware that their pulp guru Roddenberry was for years an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. And before Officer Gene managed to get Star Trek aloft, there was...Dragnet, and Highway Patrol (perhaps there are others who might prefer the occasionally noirish Highway Patrol to the NeverNeverLand of ST). Roddenberry also acted as technical consultant for the LA District Attorney while writing scripts and even passed the sergeant's exam in his first attempt. (and many of the ST plots are obvious lifts of greek myths, Shakespeare [probably at least 2-3 riffs from the Tempest] or other sci-fi ala Orwell or Huxley--one could fairly easily demonstrate how the Ho-wood sci-fi industry has turned a tidy profit on Aldous Huxley for decades).

Roddenberry also was a B-17 pilot during WWII, and not the worst of humans, but really closer to an L-Ron Hubbard huckster than to a great intellectual figure; even the pulp space operas of Heinlein, however gawky and occasionally rightist-militaristic, rather superior--certainly in terms of hard science--to the touchy-feely Star Trek spectacle; most Heinlein fans, however, don't really understand what the RAH code consists of (think a hick Nietzsche meets, oh, Oppenheimer). That many naive, middle of the road "liberals" view Roddenberry as some type of visionary should not be that surprising: he's the Good Cop (with the great LAPD squad car, the Starship Enterprise, tragic-hero lite Capn. Kirk and PC socialist Federation) that many liberals (and crimefighter conservatives) dream of being, either explicitly or not.

Les bons mots de Cactus Ed Abbey

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

“Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.”

“The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.”

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.”

“That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.”

“In the modern techno-industrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood”

“The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.”

“No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.”

Orwell on the real motives of pacifists

"The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …"

(from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism).

Das Stimmt, Mr. Orwell. The Pacifist may overtly claim to be opposing war in general, but he's all-too-often assisting the other side by his kvetching and resistance, or possibly (as Orwell suggests) he wishes to implement--re-implement, as it were--the great marxist state (and of course obtain for himself a Par-tay membership), and anything which lessens, say, the power of the US military, increases the likelihood of the success of the pacifist's real statist agenda: and rest assured that there are few if no Islamic pacifists.

How not to write



From one of the geniuses du jour of DemocraticUnderground:

"Suddenly, one of the arab kids stood up and held up his hands in an obvious gesture of truce. We held our fire; I walked out to meet him in the middle of the battlefield. As we approached each other, I could see that he was bleeding as badly as I was. We met in the middle, and just looked at each other for a few minutes, breathing heavily. He reached in his pocket, and pulled out a knife -- and then also pulled out some sort of desert fruit. To this day, I have no idea what it was. He swiftly peeled it, cut off a slice, and handed it to me. It was delicious."



This would not make it past the metro editor of the Tulsa Herald. This would not fly in a Hardy Boys story; this would not be accepted for publication at the most obscure e-zine or lit. rag to be found in cyberia. Not only that, there's no way to establish that the narrative is genuine; it could quite possibly be an invention, if not a lie. But dupes of the left (i.e. DU) and right (i.e. the right-wing coaches-on-acid of New Worlds ) take this to be some type of deep literary truth, when it's about the equivalent of "All we need iz Luv" (or as Walker Percy termed the motto of the opportunistic protestant turned New Ager--- "Love...or Die").


"The War ended immediately. All the other kids from both sides wandered out, took a slice of the strange fruit, and tried to communicate with each other somehow. Some of us spoke a rudimentary Arabic, but none of the arab kids spoke English -- we did our best. We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the desert together, all thoughts of conflict forgotten. I remember my mother's shock at seeing my blood-encrusted face and shirt -- I had completely forgotten about it by then."

Colloquial, arrogant, indulgent: CalibanSpeak---or, better, another Cyber-Caliban aspiring to sophistication. Michener's worst personal narrative trumps this sort of sentimental, egotistic prose. (Und der Klown versteht nicht ein Wort von Deutsch noch von Französisch). It's the writing of a thug who never bothered with Shakespeare nor Swift nor Bertrand Russell.


Those few cynics (including some who read and understood Gulliver's Travels once in their life, unlike Caliban of Araby here) with enough spine and intelligence to denounce such frauds are slowly being eliminated from both left and rightist sites--dissent now referred to in 90s dweeb terms as "trolling" by the over-grown adolescents, pansies and emotional wrecks who operate most blogs and websites at this point (of course, the typical leftist narcissist, like his fundie cuz, never quite realized what trolls really were--)



"The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts -- the less you know the hotter you get." Russell

New Pynchon




("Among other things, it deals with the four children of Webb Traverse, a bomb-throwing anarchist who's assassinated by mercenaries working for an evil plutocrat named Scarsdale Vibe...")


Looking forward to Maestro TP's latest fulgurescence.

Kripke's error


"Kripke's error is basically one that is symptomatic of all modern analytic philosophy...overattachment to modal considerations, trying get it to do the work that only Bayesian analysis can do properly. Bertrand Russell said it best--"There is only one world, the 'real' world." Philosophers should have listened. The meaning of (even non-literal) utterances reduces to the transmission of information, and everything you ever wanted to know about transmission of information can be found in conditional probabilities. The space you're forced to deal with is the space of ways the world might *be* (for all I or you know), not ways the world "might have been.""

Very astute observation--conditional probabilities are not places; contingent events-to-come are not worlds.

The Meme meme

"Pride, the never failing vice of fools" Pope

There is so much involved with Dawkins' claim: one, what really is a meme? For a scientific materialist, ultimately a meme is neurological (and I wager there ay even be lurkers about here who could ID the cognitive residence, so to speak). In regards to human consciousness (tho' memetics has been supposedly observed among other mammals), memetics has its shortcomings: Dawkins and his followers hardly
provide a worked-out account of perception, or of conceptualization--the Thought-formation (nor does anyone , really as of yet, though cognitive scientists have been attempting to do so for decades). Memetics, like naive Darwinism (tho' Dawkins and Dennett are not so naive) , thus tends to affirm rather reductive accounts of consciousness (tho' I am not asserting memetics is not true: simply that it takes much for granted--like cognition for one). And, putting aside questions regarding the cognitive assumptions of memetics (there may be some snooty cognitivist-behaviorists working on that issue somewhere) couldn't "machiavellian" memes (say, kill or be killed, or "by any means necessary") often be as functional as non-machiavellian (altruism, cooperation, etc.)? Indeed they are.

But what does the memeticist say? Like the pragmatist, the evo. psych's code of functionality--or, of adaptation-- is purely descriptive: this idea-strategy seems to work--this one doesn't. So in some (many) circumstances, machiavellianism will do as well as altruism--rather unpleasant news to all those dupes who thought Truth, Justice, benevolence were sort of universals, or at least, worthy ideals. Which is to say, lacking anything but evolutionary explanations, "social darwinism", will remain an issue, even for the most sophisticated of evo. psych types (or their remora-like followers in the humanities). I am not a worshipper of Chomsky's somewhat Cartesian rationalism--or all of his politics (9-11 changed much)-- but there may be worse programmes than Chomsky's anti-reductionist view of language and thought--whether in terms of opposing behaviorism, or his few comments contra-evo. psych. And there are also grounds to object to lumping together all ideas or concepts in the meme class, as well: a certain musical sound--say, Debussyan harmony--might have worked memetically for some time (from concerts, to film scores, advertisements, etc), but an integral or even Modus Ponens are not really similar to musical or architectural "pattern" memes--integrals and Modus Ponens are true (at least if calculated correctly), regardless of functionality (though they may function as well). Are aesthetics and knowledge both memetic? That seems a bit strange to say--tho' perhaps at some point, mathematics itself might be read as some type of evolutionary behavior--and those who uphold Quine's "Two Dogmas" view of all knowledge--including logic/math--as synthetic a posteriori might agree (reluctantly). Dennett makes some suggestions along those lines in Darwins' D.I.--which I am slowly reading--he's OK, but not the most eloquent of writers.

Starship Troopers, Inc.

Contrarian readings of literary classics--whether Hemingway or RA Heinlein--often may be more informative, or, at the very least, more entertaining than the usual hagiographic type of analysis common to the lit. professor. The literary contrarian, at least one of a skeptical rather than dogmatic nature, generally begins with the realization, as did that great contrarian Bertrand Russell, that literature is never to be mistaken for Truth itself, whether that flavor of Truth be historical, scientific, or logical; whatever "Hamlet" is, neither the play nor the character has the same, as they say, ontological status in reality as the facts pertaining to the life of a Nero or a Napoleon.

Since literature--specifically fiction--does not really point at facts as say a history --or biology-- text does, one might ask what precisely is a literary narrative. Of course many varied answers might be given: it's an art-form, akin to say a musical composition, with metaphors intended to demonstrate something about human existence, or the narrative suggests something about psychology, or it’s a tale about Oppression, or in the case of science fiction, the narrative concerns technology, and perhaps the political consequences of applied technology. Literary types indeed specialize in extracting codes from literary texts: whether they are obvious or not, and with a writer such as Robert Heinlein, the code seems fairly detectable--though that is not necessarily a fault in a writer.

Heinlein's fictional code is not so innovative; RAH himself admitted he wrote for money (he was, granted, fairly qualified to write on scientific topics, given his experience in the Navy, and his studies in mathematics--for a semester or two, at least--at UCLA). One might term the
Heinleinian code militaristic-stoical, but there is more to it than that--a valuing of science
and mathematics, along with the Semper Fidelis trumpet blast: imagine a Marcus
Aurelius who spins partial differentials, and also pilots spacecraft, and leads a platoon against "The Bugs." (Lucas's Hans Solo a rather Heinleinian sort of icon as well, tho' perhaps a bit too capricious compared to the iron-willed Heinleinian officer).

Starship Troopers, both the novel and the film adaptation, reveals much of the Heinleinian code (tho' one might grant RAH softened a bit later, with say Time Enough for Love--yet RAH's anti-pacifist address to the cadets in Annapolis in '73, as well as comments in favor of the US
presence in the Vietnam War and in support of Reagan’s Star Wars dreams might indicate otherwise). ST features a fairly complicated if somewhat pulpish plot; the movie sort of ramped up the original pulp vision (some might say improved upon it). Apart from the narrative details, the pronouncements of one-armed Lieutenant Colonel Jean V. Dubois are often read as Heinlein himself speaking. Dubois is the protagonist Johnny Rico's high school instructor in History and Moral Philosophy. Indeed, compared to some action-packed sci-fi, the novel ST features quite a bit of dialogue concerning moral and political themes, and the shortcomings of democracy; and there are some who have interpreted Starship Troopers as somewhat fascistic, which is certainly not an impossible reading. Like many conservative writers attacking democracy, Dubois-Heinlein insists on the necessity of individual sacrifice--and the masses are generally held to be of quite less importance than the heroic officer-scientist. The novel--though it's been some years since last perusal--though hardly reaches a Mein Kampf level of exterminator prayer: Rico himself is a Filipino--there is a somewhat Americanist-like suggestion of meritocracy; that is, if Johnny Rico himself masters those partial derivatives and his flight training, as well as, presumably, his Latin Gradus Ad Parnassum via Marcus Aurelius, he too will join the elite. But the Terran Federation of ST is a police state of sorts, or at least a society ruled by the military: only those citizens willing to serve their society by enlisting for two years of Federal Service are really "free."

This sort of Grunt-worship is a common enough theme in sci-fi and popular culture: the Soldier as Everyman--and the non-soldier as schlemiel, more or less. For Heinlein the soldier of course is not merely a grunt (as he is say for most Hollywood war epics, or say Hemingway's stories--tho' Krebs in Soldier’s Home is a fairly bright if shell-shocked chap); Grunt is a
quantum physicist, expert pilot AND soldier: a yankee Uebermensch of
sorts--and RAH's one-time pal and partner in El Lay diablerie, L-Ron, Big Daddy of Scientology, also not far from that "Social Darwinism with integrals" perspective.

The popular success of both RAH's novel and the film adaptation years
later should not surprise us. (there are, of course, more than a few Heinlein fans who have objected to Verhoeven's Starship Troopers Movie ) The code appeals to most Americans--old or young; and the film version demonstrates that the cast can be made more multicultural and sexxay (perhaps there are others who might agree the high point of the flick was Denise Richards showing her tits), and the code remains intact--and of perennial interest and marketability.

Neither Republican nor Democrat

Kid Galilee at the University of Chi-town? Say it ain't so

Ipsa quidem virtus pretium sibi

Rawls if not Hobbes and the utilitarians begin with an acknowledgment of ethical relativism; or, shall we say, instead of theology or Platonism (or the Marxist state), utilitarians and contractualists proceed from a secular and naturalist perspective based on individual needs and desires. The point is to overcome the relativism by something other than making obvious "pragmaticist" points such as "Ethical principles vary from society to society," or "the law of gravity seems substantially different than a statement about ethics."

There are problems with the utilitarian tradition, of course: if 25% of the population of the state of, er, Gonzalopolis were illegal immigrants from Tazmania, and they were committing the great majority of crimes (and say getting away with it, usually), liquidating the Tazmanians as a whole would produce a greater good for the rest of the State (and perhaps would be lent support by an Off the Tasmanian proposition on the Gonzalopolis Ballot), yet that would hardly be considered Just. That'a bit obvious, but anyone arguing for a non-objective, ethics-by-consensus (or say ethics as Wittgensteinian language game, multiculturalism etc.) perspective runs into that problem. Nonetheless, utilitarian considerations--consequentialism, in other words--apply to most political or ethical decisions, especially at the macro level. Who would deny that in many if not most circumstances that a possible act or policy decision--at either personal level or political -- must be assessed in regards to the possible effects entailed by implementing the proposed policy? ( environmental concerns--say regarding cattle , or petroleum---would hardly seem capable of being put into a pure "deontological" framework). But consequentialism doesn't appear to work in ALL circumstances (i.e. Justice), and consequentialism could possibly be injust in certain situations (a tyranny of the majority etc.). And justifying egalitarianism, or perhaps denying it--does not seem to be purely a matter of consequentialism (Hobbes assumes some degree of egalitarianism as a given, and Rawls seems to suggest that is the rational choice).


Consider this situation: Somebody has raped Mrs. Higginsbottham at the mall--. The town is up in arms. Vigilante squads form: and yet no one is found matching her description. After a few months, the cops locate a bum, X, who vaguely looks like the suspect, but who is in fact innocent (say he has a criminal record as well). They arrest X and the DA files charges against him, and put him up for trial; X doesn't have much cash, and he takes the public defender and the jury finds him guilty. (Or imagine more sinister scenarios--falsified evidence, etc.--not uncommon). The townspeople are relieved; the newpaper features the bum as Hannibal Lector du jour etc. X's off to Pelican Bay.


What can the ethical relativist/hedonist or anti-foundationalist really say about this? More pleasure was provided to the community by not upholding justice; the "facts" of the matter it could be argued were shaped for a good purpose; it was more useful to deny the truth (doesn't "use" have something to do with effects, and effects with pleasure/satisfaction, yada yada yada), put away the innocent, then it was to allow the evil to go unpunished. Regardless of the amount of pleasure or satisfaction provided, however, the injustice of the DA's actions is not simply a matter of what a majority of people would say about it (in other words, if the majority of a town voted in a rule in effect claiming that "it's ok to put away the innocent when it's good for the community," that would still be injust--thus a Justice "universal" seems to hold apart from individual opinion/choice).

Related to the problems of ethical relativism is Hume's celebrated dictum that one cannot derive an "ought from an is." (the fact/value distinction). There have been arguments offered against Hume's skeptical chestnut. One of Rorty's mentors, Gewirth, argued for a rationalist ethics which he felt was sufficient to overturn the Humean/util./hedonist school. Gewirth's argument is quite convincing, though it's probably not so appealing to literary hepcats, nor to Starship Troopers of the USA, nor to postmods: his argument is based on what sorts of rights (or a freedom from being constrained) any rational agent claims--and values-- simply by being an agent. Most normal humans value a "right" of some sort--or at least the absence of constraints and limitations--to pursue and attain their economic/biological/social needs and requirements (say, like, education, employment, a mate etc). Thus it's reasonable to assume other normal human agents value their own freedom to attain their ends as well; indeed, Gewirth argues that's its necessary for people to do so (though one could imagine various Malthusian/anarchistic scenarios where that identity is erased). There may be ways to counter Gewirth, but there does seem to be a "moral fact" involved in an agent's own pursuit of the goods and resources needed to sustain his own life, and his own valuing of his freedom to act--and it's not a great stretch to see that other agents also need (and value) the same freedom to pursue their own ends, and that agent X is obligated to recognize agent Y's own entitlement as it were, given a sort of human-identity criteria--and Gewirth's rational ethics are not too distant from Kant's imperative (though Kant's arguments leave something to be desired), nor so different from J.C. AKA Kid Galilee's injunction, in that old collection of poesy, the Beatitudes: "do unto others as you would have them do unto you, man." During a war-- or a Katrina--or for a Pol Pot or Nuremberg trial, it might be difficult to uphold such a view, and marxists or mafiosi would probably object; at the very least, Gewirth put Master Hume in check.

Rawls offers another method for getting around the fact/value issue, related to Hobbes: asked to choose a society (and with a high probability of living in the world he chooses), one would probably choose various policies (or Hobbes' covenants) which are more or less "just" in conventional terms (say, to honor contracts/promises): that one should honor the contracts one consents to does seem to be a "fact" of civil society (and justifiable on utilitarian grounds as well)--most rational humans would choose to live in a society where their contracts were honored (that's a simplication, but will suffice for a blog post).

Thus there are various ways to get around Hume (and utilitarianism, instrumentalism--which may owe something to Hume--and amoralism), however quaint or moralistic or tendentious they appear. (and one might say there is a determinist--naturalist ala Darwin--if not Nietzsche and BF Skinner--perspective denying ethics of any sort--or at least those based on agency or choice). If one simply takes the Humean dictum--or say a pure egoism-- as faith (and many humans--even ones in philosophy departments--obviously do take amoral hedonism or machiavellianism as an item of faith) then, well, it is as pointless to discuss the issue, as it would be to discuss religion with a fundamentalist Xtian or mooslim. Of course, the Machiavellian-Aristotelian school (and Nietzsche also not far from a sort of updating of the Nichomachean Ethics) cares little for any sort of axiomatic ethics, deontological, contractural or otherwise; and in a very real sense, most American institutions--whether education, business, bureaucracy, journalism--uphold that vaguely stoical and nationalistic "force-policy" to some degree, and one doesn't have to empathize with some fancy French deconstructionists to perceive that. And even a hip Stanford-like pragmatist--or literatteur-- probably prefers some flavor of Machiavelli to, like, Kant's imperative, "Act as if every act was a maxim to be applied to all."

Master Thespian


JW Booth



Lincoln's Assassination

Ouchie




(Hint Hint, Texass Red)

Mommyopolis/Giger

Victor "Doc" Laxateur: Royal Nonesuch, Emeritus

Cal Skank, in conjunction with La Iglesia Catolica de Kern, Inc. is proud to announce that this year's Lifetime MENDACITY Award has gone to Victor "Doc" Laxateur, a Cal Skank English professor and lay priest who has, in the words of Dr. Hector Cabronando, director of the CSU Ad Hoc Committee on CA Literature and Bureaucratic Support Services, "done good work in furthering the cause of Catholic bureaucracy and Truth at CSUK, the Peoples' College of Kern." Doc Laxateur was especially known for his ability to teach the masterpieces of American literature from a Catholic perspective: indeed, as one former Cal Skank student, LaSheequa Johnson, claims, "Doc Laxateur showed me that a writer like Mark Twain was not just another dead cracker, and Doc L. also took the time to explain the details of the ROYAL NONESUCH to me. He keeps it real for the peeps." Doc Laxateur's lifetime companion, Steven "Canberra" Cartier, was awarded the ROYAL NONESUCH in 1998 for his contributions to California bureaucracy.

A celebration of Doc Laxateur's lifetime MENDACITY achievement award is scheduled for May 23 at Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe Banquet Hall and Bingo Parlor, with notable CSUK Professors Mike and Kim Assclown also scheduled guests.

Hitchens on the flawed reasoning of the Lancet Report

"Make the assumption that some percentage of those killed by the coalition are the sort of people who have been blowing up mosques, beheading captives on video, detonating rush-hour car bombs, destroying pipelines, murdering aid workers, bombing the headquarters of the United Nations, and inciting ethnic and sectarian warfare. Make the allowance for the number of bystanders and innocents who lost their lives in the combat against these fanatics (one or two, alas, in the single case of the precision bombing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, just to take one instance). But who is to say how many people were saved from being murdered by the fact that the murderers were killed first?"

Hitchens/Lancet

Hitchens raises an important point about the Lancet report, a point typically disregarded by the Mommycrats of blogland: only about 1/3 of the casualties estimated (but not proven) by the Lancet crew are attributable to US/Brit. forces. Hitchens also alludes to the fact that Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet magazine, is "a full-throated speaker at rallies of the Islamist-Leftist alliance that makes up the British Stop the War Coalition." That a marxist-muslim might have an interest in exaggerating (or "skewing" the data, as the stats people say) the number of deaths and showing the US/Brit. forces in a poor light should not be surprising: like fundamentalists of all types (Islamic or Christian), most marxists have no problem bending the truth when necessary to suit their needs. The Lancet "methodology" was based not on verified deaths, anyway; instead the researchers counted the deaths in a few urban areas in Iraq, and then, merely by analogy, extended the death ratio to other areas, where they did not perform any research. This is known as "cluster" sampling, and there are more than a few researchers who have expressed doubts about the accuracy of the results.

Dem Bones

An Awesome Ossuary

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.

There is a difference-- fairly important difference--between working towards a deductive truth via equations, functions, reductio ad absurdum, etc., and, on the other hand, establishing "truth" via empirical confirmation, whether in a chemistry lab or economics research paper. But specifying the cash value of analyticity is not so easy. 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, we are 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 (observation, really)? 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" (analytic) may be, eventually, as synthetic as say a "lawyers are corrupt."

Humiliation Incorporated

"Democrats" who make use of the same cutthroat tactics that the right-wing GOPers do--character attacks, scandal mongering, the usual snickering sexual insinuations, etc.--in effect defeat their own cause. Foleygate amply demonstrated that machiavellian aspect of new-school liberals who will do nearly anything to tarnish the other side. Instead of hammering on BushCo for, say, possible lies or misrepresentations about intelligence regarding WMDs or the "safe haven", many liberals now seem preoccupied with getting the dirt on someone from the opposing side. That sort of ID politics is not merely juvenile but an inverted sunday school morality itself--one might call it Norma Raeism. Marxists themselves are often as capable of a sort of do-gooder morality as nauseating as that of dixie biblethumpers.



Foleygate was mostly a non-issue, except for the hysterical sort of soccer mommy common to Kos or DU or TeeVee (or this clown's site ). OK Yeah he's slimy etc. but Foley wasn't even charged with a crime. However unsavory, he could have done what he allegedly did in Toronto legally. Whether Bush and Co. lied about or greatly misrepresented intelligence data regarding Iraqi WMDs or the "safe haven" idea: that's a f-n issue. Whether Lay and Enron or other energy powerbrokers met with Schwarzenegger and somehow arranged the Recall: another case. Some of the more bizarre aspects of 9-11--the crash into the Pentagon especially: that's a case. Possible vote fraud in Florida 2000: a case.


In the Brave New World of Media, Inc. anyone suspected of a crime or moral failing is found guilty as soon as his face appears online or on TeeVee: bada bing, Public Enemy #1. And Mommycrat hypocrites deny the presumption of innocence clause to suspects nearly as often as conservatives do....even fundie morons such as the Colorado preacher Haggard have a right to a fair trial. And Haggardgate has the makings of another pseudo-scandal which will play well with liberal pundits and populist muckrakers who have yet to realize that a Feinstein or Hillary are to the right of most hick conservatives.

All-American Mobster

More than a few reporters and journalists have suggested that many celebrated pro athletes–including All-American heroes such as Joe DiMaggio–had dealings with the Mafia which were unknown to the public at large. In 2000 Richard Ben Cramer published a book in which he claimed that DiMaggio, the "Yankee Clipper" and one-time husband of Marilyn Monroe (herself suspected of Mob ties), had a connection to the Mafia via Frank Costello, a mobster fairly well-known to anyone who has read a bit about the real history of La Cosa Nostra (and the Five-Points gang, specifically). Costello at one time apparently functioned as Dimaggio's "financial advisor": "Dimaggio was able to walk away from baseball and his $100,000-a-year salary with the Yankees in 1951 because mobster Frank Costello had set up a "trust fund" at the Bowery Bank for him."



To some sentimental fans of pro baseball, this information might be troubling –in fact, Ben Cramer was subject to numerous personal insults and attacks when his book on DiMaggio appeared; yet to other, more cynical sports connoissieurs–say those familiar with the facts surrounding the mobster-rigged World Series of 1919 (John Sayles' film "Eight Men Out" does a decent job in presenting the broad details of the "thrown" series)–evidence suggesting that the Yankee Clipper associated with a big-time mobster such as Frank Costello–AKA "the Prime Minister" of Murder, Inc.–was probably not too alarming or unexpected.




Indeed, it could be argued quite convincingly that an athlete's shadowy associations to organized crime figures, to mobsters or gangster mollies- –or the contemporary athlete's association to drugs, drug dealers, or prostitutes–may provide part of the allure of the game for many consumers of the athletic spectacle. Pro athletes are not merely superb specimens of physical conditioning and discipline; they are America's official par-tay boys, with high-powered actors and actresses watching them at bat, running up and down the gridiron, shooting hoops; and various corporations (the corporate execs themselves sort of the sugar-daddies behind the scenes) paying millions to sell beer or razors during the ad-breaks of the Gladiator-fests. Baseball, or Beer; bimbos or organized crime: it's all part of the Sports, Inc. show.

Zizek, perhaps

"Zizek explores how an ideological edifice is sustained by underground transgressions: "Law can be sustained only by a sovereign power which reserves for itself the right... to suspend the rule of law(s) on behalf of the Law itself.""

The Zizekian bon mot regarding sovereignity does not seem entirely off-topic in regards to the present torture bill: the sovereign as Law-enforcer, whether judicial or clerical (i.e. the Catholic Church, Inc.), assumes for itself the monarchical right to enforce laws and codes (which were never agreed to via an egalitarian, social contract), but grant itself whatever exemptions it needs, at least in potentia--the judge or priest pedophile/adulterer; a Scalia enforcing theocracy [state approved displays of Decalogue, etc.], and then watching porno. (An undergraduate yippie-in-training shrieks "Hypocrisy", but Z. suggests the judicial/clerical sovereign's Janus face is a bit more subtle and detailed than the sentimental liberal might believe). The legal sovereign may also at any time view any code as provisional, regardless of possible infringement of presumed contractural rights: at once upholding the liberal's feel-good concept of "due process" and then modifying/denying its "scope" when necessary. (Zizek, like many a empirically-minded Hegelian, really addressing issues similar to those raised by Hobbes in Leviathan--if not a Platonic dialogue somewhere).

One might ask, though, how the Marxist-statist argues in favor of retaining Habeas Corpus laws at all: from a purely statist viewpoint, the ruling would be (if Congress were comprised of hip leftists) thought to be quite acceptable, HC being the remnants of a liberal entitlement based on decadent views of the individual. The statists and Zizekians objecting to the torture bill (and it should be objected to) are showing their own janus-face: Lenin had no problem ending due process not merely for the aristos but for anyone who posed a threat to bolshevik power: the bipolarity of the sovereign reveals itself either in fascist/monarchy or communism.

New Worlds Gals

A group of untalented, mediocre clowns who have yet to figure out that there's more to life than Pink Floyd lyrics, bud, and NASA fantasies, the New Worlds posse may be, hopefully, like, cerrados. (More to follow)

The "Creeping Threat of Jihadism"

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 he's generally correct, and the representative of a moderate secularism based , one might say, on Enlightenment principles. And he's the possessor of a fairly wicked Swiftian prose style as well.

"As a journalist Mr. Hitchens extensively covered the Bosnian war and the Gulf War, yet describes 9/11 as "an exhilarating moment" because it crystallized his views. "Everything I hate is on one side, and everything I love is on the other. I'm never going to get bored with this."

What does he hate?

"Religion. I quite simply identify it with barbarism and backwardness and human stupidity. The methods of theocracy in action are a cult of death." The jihadists, he says, "say they love death more than we love life, and we have to prove that wrong. They're right on the first; they love murder, in which they exult, and suicide, in which they take pride." Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, he says, want to turn the Islamic world back to the seventh century and take the West with them. "Opposed to these and hated by them is scientific inquiry and philosophical inquiry, the emancipation of women, the secular state, and other very hard-won achievements of civilization. And it's good to be reminded they are fragile, they can be destroyed. We can be pushed back into the childhood of our species again."

Turning back clocks doesn't interest Mr. Hitchens, who began his political life as a member of the British Labor Party and joined a Marxist faction even before arriving at Oxford to push revolution in the turmoil of 1968. "The promises of the '60s came true in 1989—in exactly the way we would not have imagined," he notes. The Cold War and leftist politics left him drained, he says, by the mid-'70s, and by the fall of the Berlin Wall he was ready for something "kind of banal, like how to bring together a market economy and democratic society." When the Cold War ended, he wanted to go back to writing about literature, not dreaming that the so-called peace dividend, by his calculation, was to last "only about 150 days."

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic tried to annex all of Yugoslavia into a greater Serbia, Mr. Hitchens says, "I found myself in Sarajevo. And I found myself in northern Iraq in Kurdistan. Seeing people who'd been gassed, people who were still dying from Saddam's brutality . . . some I met were old comrades, but it was a pretty plain new enemy we had." The reality that totalitarian dictatorships like those in Iraq and Serbia could continue into the post--Cold War era hit him hard. "You may think you can give up politics but you can't, it won't give you up. Politics will come and find you." And the trials, at the same time, of his close friend, author Salman Rushdie, made him aware of the creeping threat of jihadism."

Ethical ruminations

How may ethics be justified given a non-theological, naturalist ontology? That sounds fairly obvious, but I suggest it is more problematic than many realize; and I tend to share the views of the later Freud in so far as he suggests violence, sadism, "thanatos" and unethical acts are really the norm (even within civilized society--ie. WWI and WWII), and that ethics/morality are generally exceptions, and typically done in furtherance of "eros." It's more complex than that, but a text such as Civ. and its Discontents in some way as valuable to "meta-ethics" as are the traditional ethics texts. It would be swell if everyone performed the Kantian imperative routine, consider their potential act in context (as a rule binding on all) and then do the right thing, but they don't: one of the great failures of ethics is assuming that at some point rationality and ethics will coincide. Like Hume, Freud realizes that's mostly unfeasible (as do various machiavellians of left and right).


I would not claim there are any innate ethical tendencies: there are instincts, desires, passions, as Hume says--and Hume not so far from biological determinism and Freudian desire of some sort- and there are thoughts, concepts, ethical beliefs or actions based on, or at least having some relation to those instincts and passions.

In contrast to Humean hedonism, the late ethicist Alan Gewirth attempted to construct an axiomatic formulation of ethics which transcends the mere subjective "desire-based" ethics of Hume and the utilitarians (and Hobbes as well in that school). Gewirth understands that utilitarianism (or simply giving up on rational ethics altogether) in all of its forms easily leads to saying whatever the majority decides on is correct. So there must be some other basis for ethics (or objective rights' claims), than consensus, and for Gewrtih it's a matter of viewing yourself and other human-agents as more or less equals in terms of rights claims: you claim, or at least require, some degree of freedom to pursue your goals and economic necessities; thus you must acknowledge other normal human-agents have the same need for some degree of freedom. Gewirths' Reason and Morality is quite a bit more complex than that, but Gewirth does offer a way out of Hume/utilitarianism, hedonism, and the problems of the cat. Imperative.

That said, the most Gewirth can say then is that selfishness, greed, conservativism, monarchy etc. are inconsistent or possibly irrational; so when you refuse to help the starving family (say in a jungle or forest when they have no other means of support) you are acting irrationally.

Gewirth is arguing for a rational right (yet secular) prior to the construction of society (where Hobbes would say in nature there are no rights or laws or ethics at all). Yes, if measuring socities by that sort of natural right, human history may appear to be a record of various murderous factions which never acknowledged that rational right to economic/social entitlement, but then even catholics often say the same, or postmodernists for that matter. Which is to say, if you yourself claim a right to self-sufficiency (if not requiring economic/biological resources), don't you have to grant that other normal human-agents have the same, or nearly equal right to self-sufficiency and economic/biological resources? It would seem so. I am not sure it is necessary , but quite a cogent argument.

Without clearly defined economic rights and social contracts which are enforced by the sovereign, we are more or less in a Hobbesian state of nature; tho some people do succeed and so forth. Yet Hobbes does hold that once people agree to form covenants and seek peace instead of living in anarchy, participation in the economy is a given: thus I would say Hobbes agrees with Gewirth's agent-identity idea for most part ( tho not completely), once social contracts/covenants have been established--citizens are entitled to more or less equal distribution of resources one of his givens, and indeed one that the Royalists did not admire. Which is to say Leviathan is quite a radical text and not so far from some socialist or marxist theory.

Where or when does this covenant-construction occur Master Hobbes? He's not really suggesting it had occurred: but that it should; that people should, for their own interests, form social contracts and seek peace. Of course that may not happen, and indeed Hobbes raises the spectre of the powerful baron (with his own army, say) who refuses to form any covenants. Yes the other people might have to force him to join, or presumably, eliminate him.

Obviously a marxist (or fascist or Nietzschean for that matter) simply gives up on rights-speak or contracts and suggests the proles revolt, create a non-democratic State and then implement various economic policies. Yet Stalin (or nazi statism) shows what sorts of results are produced from politics which have no basis in rights. That said I do think there may be pragmatic reasons to oppose pure democracy ( or Hobbesianism), but more along the line of neo-behaviorism, if not Plato's Republic, than marx or fascism.

There are ample reasons to object to the Frankfurt School, but Adorno, on occasion, put forth some interesting ideas (however speculative) in regards to commodification, consumerism, and the entertainment business.

"There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism baulked at. Everything derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the production team. Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come. The average length of the short story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the setting in which they are placed. They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it easy for them to be apportioned in the office."

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm

Philosophy

It's questionable whether any particular type of thinking could be said to be peculiar to philosophy, or Philosophy with a big P. Even as far back as Leibniz there was an urge to end the demarcation between philosophy and science. Frege's task consisted of trimming up the language to make it more suitable for physical sciences, mathematics, and scholarly work, retro-fitting the outdated syllogistic forms with quantifiers and predicates. Aristotelian cat. syllogisms updated with quantifiers and predicates more or less defines modern formal logic.

Frege/Russell are also in an important sense semanticists, as much as philosophers or logicians. Given the advances of the physical sciences, the positivists desired to sort of reduce language and statements to pure symbolism; and with both Frege and Russell there was an impulse to view all language as comprised of propositions, functions, quantifiers, variables, predicates, and the needed mathematics. Witt. of the Tractatus, and then later Quine continue this reductionism, for better or worse. Verification of course was another key analytical issue, as is probability; in strictly logical terms, the Tractatus demonstrates deductive logic reduces to tautologies and contradictions, tho there are a few paradoxes (which however are generally not an issue except for a very limited set of self-referential expressions. Your OS works fine: Goedel be damned).

So that propositional aspect is not really so philosophical as much as about eliminating ambiguity of ordinary language and creating semantic efficiency: the symbolic language then may be used for different purposes, whether philosophy of science, or programming or inductive endeavors.

The Big P philosophy, Der Weltanschauung-- conceptualization, system building, philosophy of science, phil. of history/time/process, ethics, even theology or whatever it is Heideggerians do-- is affected by the move to the symbolic language; once the positivists decide on permitting only synthetic/analytic truths, a lot of metaphysical baggage was eliminated as well. Ethics becomes in some sense closer to psychology and sociology. Political philosophy ala Hobbes or Rousseau, Marx, more akin to Econ. or poli sci. But these disciplines hardly deny the positivist advances; indeed behaviorism depended on positivism and pragmatism for a lot of its core doctrine.

You seem like you are suggesting a sort of thoroughly inductive political and educational philosophy, which would encompass other disciplines. I do not think that is likely to occur; indeed it could be argued that ethics and political philosophy have mostly been absorbed into various social sciences: doesn't Dewey sort of suggest that as well? Cognitive studies and lingustics (tho I'm not so sure what linguistics is anymore, except a sort of ultra-grammar) absorb philosophy of mind and epistemology, really. Philosophy of science remains, but scientists are generally more suited to those investigations than traditional philosophers: tho a critique of the economics, methods, and ethics of Big Science, especially academic science, remains important, and a Feyerbend should be taught along with Popper and Kuhn. Of course with the rise of PostMod Inc. a lot of metaphysics, or quasi-metaphysics is back, with plenty of aesthetics and the perennial marxism, but I would hold Russellianism to be more authentically progressive than most postmod. The Big P philosophy is dead (if it wasn't in 1885 when the Cambridge people began to trash on Hegel and Kant), and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

-- Ich gebrauchte das Wort "Staat": es versteht sich von selbst, wer damit gemeint ist—irgendein Rudel blonder Raubtiere, eine Eroberer- und Herren-Rasse, weiche, kriegerisch organisiert und mit der Kraft, zu organisieren, unbedenklich ihre furchtbaren Tatzen auf eine der Zahl nach vielleicht ungeheuer überlegene, aber noch gestaltlose, noch schweifende Bevölkerung legt. Dergestalt beginnt ja der "Staat" auf Erden: ich denke, jene Schwärmerei ist abgetan, welche ihn mit einem "Vertrage" beginnen liess.--

Cheap anglo translation:

I used the word "State"—it is self-evident who is meant by that term—some pack of blond predatory animals, a race of conquerors and masters, which, organized for war and with the power to organize, without thinking about it, sets its terrifying paws on a subordinate population which may perhaps be vast in numbers but is still without any shape, is still wandering about. That's surely the way the "State" begins on earth. I believe that that fantasy has been done away with which sees the beginning of the state in some "contract."....

from 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.

PZ's translation into Englische:

"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..."

Der LuegenGeist: sort of California's official spiritual Entity

Literary pseudo-objects


"Similarly, to maintain that Hamlet, for example, exists in his own world, namely, in the world of Shakespeare's imagination, just as truly as (say) Napoleon existed in the ordinary world, is to say something deliberately confusing, or else confused to a degree which is scarcely credible. There is only one world, the 'real' world: Shakespeare's imagination is part of it, and the thoughts that he had in writing Hamlet are real. So are the thoughts that we have in reading the play. But it is of the very essence of fiction that only the thoughts, feelings, etc., in Shakespeare and his readers are real, and that there is not, in addition to them, an objective Hamlet. When you have taken account of all the feelings roused by Napoleon in writers and readers of history, you have not touched the actual man; but in the case of Hamlet you have come to the end of him. If no one thought about Hamlet, there would be nothing left of him; if no one had thought about Napoleon, he would have soon seen to it that some one did. The sense of reality is vital in logic, and whoever juggles with it by pretending that Hamlet has another kind of reality is doing a disservice to thought. A robust sense of reality is very necessary in framing a correct analysis of propositions about unicorns, golden mountains, round squares, and other pseudo-objects"

(from Russell, Bertrand. Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. London: Allen and Unwin, 1919)

Room with 50 umbrellas


Erik Satie was beat before beat was born. A pianist as well as humorist–at his death friends rushed in his apartment and found a stash of dozens of unused umbrellas, along with velvet suits and unknown compositions and writings—Satie was a crony of Debussy as well as the young Stravinsky and most of the other parisian freaks who partied in the cafes and brothels of Montparnasse prior to the Great War: legend has it that Satie’s protege Claude Debussy died a few minutes after hearing some of the prussian shells landing in Pa-ree. Most know some of the story: the lost generation, James Joyce trying to get his massive Aquinas-meets-Dante-in-a-Dublin ho-house Ulysses published, Einstein informing the world about the dilation of time, Freud barking about desire, Andre Breton, at least after WWI, asking real surrealists to run into the street and shoot people at random.






The world was definitely coming to an end in 1914, if not a few years before. VI Lenin, at least in early 1900s, lurked in bistro corners of Montparnasse and Montmartre, looking disapprovingly at the absinthe swilling libertines, the chess players, the artists, the hucksters. There was a lot of fluff. But the best music of Satie and of his friends Debussy and Ravel (Ravel orchestrated Satie’s 3 Gymnopedies early on) remains, and was an important influence on many 20th century composers and artists–including minimalists, jazz players and Frank Zappa.

Ogive/ES



The music of Satie is deceptively simple. Most of his pieces begin with a fairly uncomplicated theme–”without sauerkraut” he would say; i.e. free of the Germanic and Wagnerian bombast–and one might think it might be a Chopin sort of piffle, but the harmonies are then subtlely altered, inverted, 9ths and 11ths appear on top of the major and minor chords, and there are strange modulations (tho not so strange now after modern jazz): from D maj. to D dorian. Most Satie music sounds vaguely chant-like, but I suggest Satie, like Debussy is profoundly secular and agnostic and not at all some lapsed-catholic like many composers (or worse, lasped Lutherans), though there are hints of the mystical or exotic in many Satie compositions: odd modes, some from ancient Greek or oriental music appear, 5ths are flattened, one is no longer in a Paris cafe, but on some windy mongolian plain….or in an ancient pagan temple. Generally he works back towards the head, almost jazzman like , but not after going through many strange, unexpected twists

Are there rational grounds for religious belief?

"If we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? …Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.”
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814

There's no point in arguing with a person who assumes a religious perspective may be justified merely by dogma–the tradition of Scripture and religious institutions; yet the religious person who does hold that his dogma and religious concepts can be justified rationally (as the Jesuits used to assert) runs up against the Theology 101 "Top 10 of Skepticism" very quickly: the problem of evil, immateriality, status of other faiths, fallibility of Scripture, evolution, etc. as well as the basic epistemological issue of why anyone should accept any religion as a true account of reality, rather than say a common-sense physico-logico account. That may not be very subtle, or appealing to those who work for Christendom Inc., but theists continually assume that those issues have been settled in their favor, when of course they haven’t been.

Kant himself rejected all the classical arguments for a Deity (including the Design argument, which has sort of made a comeback as Intelligent Design Theory--), and there are I think far more philosophers and scientists arranged on the skeptic side (e..g, that there are no convincing, rational grounds for religious truth, or for an omniscient and just God) than there are rational theists. There does not seem to be a shortage of irrational theists however.

* * *

Is the existence of miracles used to confirm the truth of Scripture? If it is, then obviously other religions and cults claim miraculous events (though I assert wrongly), so the mere presence of claims that a miracle occurred doesn’t really prove anything: that water was instantly converted to wine is about like saying the Buddha levitated. One can believe that, I guess, just as people believe in astrology. But most theists believe that there’s more to the plausibility of Scripture than the presence of miracles; if not, it would be a situation of which cult features the best miracles.

In fact the catholic church routinely confirms miracles, yet as Chris Hitchens recently pointed out in a great essay on Mother Theresa’s death, the confirmaton is in no way scientific or objective: it’s usually based on flimsy, anecdotal evidence (and an incredibly sentimental process as well). It may be thought such claims of miracles are amusing or charming, but as Hitchens points out, the belief in miracles acutally does great damage to rationality as a whole.

I shall let Mr. Hitchens speak for himself (and for rationality), since he does it much better than I:

“Those of us who are against miraculous claims for the more obvious reasons–that the laws of nature do not respond to petitions and that what can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof–have a tendency to forget that this vulgarity and hysteria also increases the sum of misery on Earth, without at all diminishing it in the false promise of the afterlife.”

* * *

Quote (from Christian blogger):

“in order to do that without actually investigating each miracle- or religious experience-claim, you’d need to give arguments for why we shouldn’t believe in miracles or see religious experience as evidentially weighty”

In other words, prove to you that pigs don’t fly. I have never seen a flying pig in person or photos. I don’t know anyone that has, and never read any history indicating that pigs do fly. I did see a drawing of one with wings on a website. But it was not flying.

You are right, though to some degree: all the laws and rules of physical science could be overturned tomorrow and pigs might fly, just as Hume said tomorrow his billard table might obey different physical laws–I would agree there is no logically necessary reason why physical laws could not be overturned. But I’d wager the probability of the pig flying ( or billard balls flying backwards after the break of the table) is about the same as Jesus out strolling on the waves or the Virgin of Guadalupe making her annual appearance in the reflection of some campesino’s windshield or whatever. I think Bayes theorem shows this too: each day a miracle has not been confirmed increases the unlikeliness of the original anomaly having occurred.

Mystical experiences are another thing. I don’t doubt many people have those experiences, but they in no way demonstrate or confirm theological concepts. Recently some experiments have shown that the mental state produced by monks and nuns meditating or praying can be electrically stimulated in various brain lobes. So what was thought to be a calm “oneness with god” or satori was in fact some biochemical process in the corpus callosum.

* * *

Ivan in Dostoyevsky’s Brother Karamazov doesn’t believe in God. Ivan (who I think we can imagine has read some Voltaire [as had Jefferson] and other French or English skeptics and scientists) claims, if such a “God” existed, he allows wars, Napoleons, plagues, all sorts of injustices anyways: so He kills the innocent, while commanding us not to do it. And by definition God would both have commanded the deaths of innocents and known about it. Ivan thus rejects “God” (Nietzsche also enjoyed reading some FD) , but I don’t think he is saying everything is permissable, merely that theological concepts of justice are absurd. (Of course some nut like Kierkegaard chooses to believe anyways, as do most fundies and catholics: tsunami wipes 300,000 people off the earth and yet the fundies goes to Church and says it was a sign of Gott).

Mac Haters of the World, Unite!

My name is P******* and I am a Windows XP user. And I use, and appreciate to some extent, IE, and lots of other Microsoft products, including MS-SQL, and Windows 2000 Server with the Active Directory, which, after tweaking a bit, works fine. Yes, XP has fluff, unneeded services, service packs, security issues ( at least until Saint Spybot showed up–send the dude a check) and, well, minor problems, at least for the newbies who aren’t aware of a few tricks to get XP–even Home– purring.

And, yes, count me as one who detests Macs. Not only the old drag and drop, and go-out-for-a -burger- while-the- file-downloads Apples and Macs, with screens about the size of a wallet, and a little blinking cursor moving like worm across the page, but the supposedly new, fast OS/X or Tiger OS, or Cobra OS/XII or whatever lame Silicon Wally brand name has been given to the latest Mac sled.

The Mac sled does appeal to some degree: it certainly costs a lot more than some PC with the generic Windows XP, so it must be fast and high-end, right. Cool kids with Ipods who drink frappiccinos in like Palo Alto use Macs. One would thus think the new Macs rock. But that isn’t the case.

They are big, and they are slow (at least the ones that cost like $2500.00 are slow–at 4 grand I wager its up to like my $600.00 PC Athlon speed). The browser, if you can locate it (somewhere near “Dock” I think) is, horrors, Netscape or Godzilla or something unfamiliar (the ‘zilla things generally come up as viruses in my spy -ware detection app.) Where the heck is IE? Who knows. Maybe the slowness is due to all the perfidious “graphics” apps and so forth: and that is part of the problem. Mac management seems to think anyone using a box is like some online Picasso working on his newest Mahster-piece: No. We are at work, or in offices, not in ateliers, Mr. Jobs.

And Mac people (some of them are tolerable, but thankfully are mostly centered around Mt. View and downtown SF) are not so easy to deal with. First they hate a Windoze people–even those few who might read Kerouac, listen to the Grateful Dead, and never vote GOP–even more than the corp. Windows bottom-line guys hate them. They are mostly, as they say in El Lay, “creatives.” Generally creatives are not doing much with networking, or protocols, or data-bases, UNIX or DOS, or security or code of any sort (I always thought Maccies were all javaheads, but later find out that they hate java too, for some unknown reason): they are working with Photoshop or maybe javascript or some open source freak code They are animating things: maybe putting together a groovalicious South Park-like episode or video for the office reggae band.

Mac creatives are not hacking or cracking like decent LA sharkie types might (yes Windows is probably the preferred choice for southside scum); instead they sort of work for much nobler ideals: implementing a type of Mt. View-o-polis where everyone works as graphix or web designers in small, soon-to-fail corps (upstarts, as they say) and plays in some rock band in penisula cafes at night while hot bi-sexual divorcees gaze at them in the cool evening--On second thought, that doesn't sound so bad, if one could afford a house anywhere within 20 miles of Stanford.

Steely Dan -

Black Friday


black friday on youtube: way tight groove. herr. on 6 string

---catch the great men as they fall from the 14th flo'--

butt-rockin'........

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zO3wBfpCFs

Exxon, IG Farben, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

To whom are you giving your shekels when you fill your tank at an Exxon or Chevron station ? (both built from the ashes of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly). Most American consumers who fill their tanks at an Exxon station are probably not aware that they are, at least by proxy, handing their money over to a company which at one time had close ties to IG Farben, the german chemical corporation which provided Zyklon B, among other chemical wonders, to the nazis.

”During the 1930s when Walter C. Teagle was head of Standard Oil, the company forged close ties with I.G. Farben, a firm that supported the Nazis and used concentration camp labour. Charles Higham (a former New York Times writer and biographer) writes in his book Trading With the Enemy: ‘From the 1920s on Teagle showed a marked admiration for Germany’s enterprise in overcoming the destructive terms of the Versaille Treaty. His lumbering stride, booming tones, and clouds of cigar smoke became widely and affectionately known in the circles that helped support the rising Nazi Party’ [7]. Exxon Mobil’s website prefers to describe how ‘Each company [Jersey Standard and Socony-Vacuum] beefed up refining output to supply the Allied war effort [8].’”

Exxon/IG Farben



* * *

Thomas Pynchon, international man of literary mystery, included a great deal of material about IG Farben in his massive “postmodernist” novel Gravity’s Rainbow. GR’s not an easy read–I have been attempting to master Gravity’s Rainbow for a few years, following the enjoyment of reading Crying of Lot 49 (a sort of decent introduction to Pynchon and groundwork for GR) and his “California dystopia” novel Vineland–but there are quite a few accurate historical references in GR demonstrating the connection of many American businesses to the nazis. Indeed not only was Standard connected to IG Farben , but George W. Bush’s granddaddy, Preston Bush, had some ties to IG Farben as well.

”The big scandal around IG Farben this week is the unlucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are about to be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design proposal for a new airborne ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind. An IG review board caught the scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped their collective mind what such a weapon would do to the dye market after the next war.” 163

Maybe when Tom makes another voice-over appearance on the Simpsons (as he did in what 2003 and 2005) he will like offer some explanations of the knottier sections of GR and the IG Farben scandals.



Pynchon/gravity

A Reason to blog again: the Tragic Flight of Dr. Dyke


One Denice Denton, Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, recently leapt to her death from the top of the Paramount, a 42 story luxury apartment building in downtown San Francisco. Her lesbian lover and fellow UC crony-engineer had a room at the apartment.


Bravo.

Samuel Johnson on Americans—

“I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.”

“Sir, they are a race of convicts,” Johnson stated in 1769, “and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” (Quoted in Boswell, Life of Dr. Johnson, March 21, 1775).)

“Slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.”

“We have now, for more than two centuries, ruled large tracts of the American continent, by a claim which, perhaps, is valid only upon this consideration, that no power can produce a better; by the right of discovery, and prior settlement. And by such titles almost all the dominions of the earth are holden, except that their original is beyond memory, and greater obscurity gives them greater veneration.”

A. Bierce on German metaphysics

monad, n.

"The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. (See Molecule.) According to Leibnitz, as nearly as he seems willing to be understood, the monad has body without bulk, and mind without manifestation -- Leibnitz knows him by the innate power of considering. He has founded upon him a theory of the universe, which the creature bears without resentment, for the monad is a gentlmean. Small as he is, the monad contains all the powers and possibilities needful to his evolution into a German philosopher of the first class -- altogether a very capable little fellow. He is not to be confounded with the microbe, or bacillus; by its inability to discern him, a good microscope shows him to be of an entirely distinct species."