Hitchens on Obama's Cairo speech.

(Slate)

".....Nothing prepared me for the way in which the authorities at the camp have allowed the most extreme religious cultists among the inmates to be the organizers of the prisoners' daily routine. Suppose that you were a secular or unfanatical person caught in the net by mistake; you would still find yourself being compelled to pray five times a day (the guards are not permitted to interrupt), to have a Quran in your cell, and to eat food prepared to halal (or Sharia) standards. I suppose you could ask to abstain, but, in such a case, I wouldn't much fancy your chances. The officers in charge were so pleased by this ability to show off their extreme broad-mindedness in respect of Islam that they looked almost hurt when I asked how they justified the use of taxpayers' money to create an institution dedicated to the fervent practice of the most extreme version of just one religion. To the huge list of reasons to close down Guantanamo, add this: It's a state-sponsored madrasah.

The same near-masochistic insistence on taking the extreme as the norm was also present in Obama's smoothly delivered speech in the Egyptian capital. Some of what he said was well-intentioned if ill-informed. The United States should not have overthrown the elected government of Iran in 1953, but when it did so, it used bribed mullahs and ayatollahs to whip up anti-Communist sentiment against a secular regime. The John Adams administration in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli did indeed proclaim that the United States had no quarrel with Islam as such (and, even more important, that the United States itself was in no sense a Christian nation), but the treaty failed to stop the Barbary states from invoking the Quran as permission to kidnap and enslave travelers on the high seas, and thus Thomas Jefferson was later compelled to send a fleet and the Marines to put down the trade. One hopes that Obama does not prefer Adams to Jefferson in this regard......"

At least Hitchens has the secular spine to remind us that Islam carries no more authority than christianity or judaism (which is to say, in terms of logic and science, no authority). As CH also noted, the blogocrats refused to address Obama's oversimplifications and verbal gaffes (like hajib, when the word is hijab). Had Bushco muttered hajib instead of hijab, the Kossacks would have indulged in their gonzo-lite jokes for weeks.

(Ah I forgot: Hitchens is on the Oppressor list, according to some in Linkspartei. Perhaps. He oppresses with a modicum of taste, and avoids the stalinist gambit "we can exploit religious hysteria to our benefit.")

Berlin calling



The lovely and talented Mildred Gillars, aka Axis Sally.

Honderichian humanity

"""""Do you anticipate an adverse judgement on American hierarchic democracy, more than implied already? Are you, maybe, superior in advance to any such judgements? Do you remember some first year philosophy and say that maybe there is no standard of right and wrong, no moral truth, only subjectivity? Does the weakness of so much political philosophy come back to mind?

Do you remember the social contract theory of justice of John Rawls of Harvard and that it sticks in its liberalism at the beginning, in something called the Original Position, and so is dead certain to get it out at the end? Do you remember that the neo-conservative Robert Nozick, also of Harvard, chose not to notice that a liberty is not any freedom, say a freedom to rape, but a freedom with justification, which latter justification he did not provide for the freedoms of his just society, where the starving have no right to food?""""

In the space of two paragraphs Ted Honderich sums up 500+ pages of Rawls' Theory of Justice, and reduces the Rawlsian social contract to the embodiment of futile and/or hypocritical liberalism. That's rather conclusionary, as legalists say. Rawls's shortcomings should be considered no worse than any academic theorizing about social and/or economic justice--and superior to the usual American bumper-sticker pathos. Indeed, Rawls' contractualism seems rather pragmatic, and substantially less visionary and utopian than Kant's grand vision of the categorical imperative (act as if your every act was a maxim binding on all? A rational person would not drive to work per the CI)--or the usual theological rhetoric. Rawls' "original position" does preserve a bit of the Kantian autonomy, however: a concept unknown to bolsheviks or brownshirts of whatever type (even demopublican types). Similar to Hobbes's Leviathan, Rawls's TOJ ranges closer to economic theory--like Galbraith, or Adam Smith for that matter (who had read his Leviathan)--than to metaphysics. Hobbes assumed that reasonable people, or most of them, in his hypothetical scenario of Leviathan (Rawls also making use of a hypothetical situation for the VoI) would choose a certain egalitarian, peaceful society, in hopes of avoiding the unpleasantness of a state of nature (or life under Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin etc).

Making use of a variation of the prisoner's dilemma, Rawls creates a situation where one's choices (political and economic choices at least) would most likely be in favor of egalitarianism, and also in favor of rights--reasonable people would presumably choose something like rights, and Due Process ( Rawls includes the Lockean/Nozickean minimal rights as well in his system). In fairly well-defined situationsa Rawlsian structure could apply-- such as citizens of a small village--Kropotkinville-- deciding on sharing certain responsibilities---. At a macro-level it might fly, but only with supremely ethical legislators working to put it into effect (so unlikely in Amerika), and some power of enforcement or coercion behind it.

The real objection to a Rawls comes not from the rather utopian Honderich, but, I would suggest, from a Blackbeard--one who has read some Hume, Malthus, Darwin, Nietzsche--the bad guys of Philosophia (include Marx too; no pal of liberal reformers, Rawlsian, or Honderichian). Blackbeard says, why should we choose to enter a Veil of Ignorance, or even bother being ethical or consistent whatsoever? Why not rob, rape, and pillage when you can get away wit' it (and the neo-Darwinists have no ready answer to that either): the Blackbeard meme, however obvious. Most humans, Blackbeards or not, would at the level of society (and not the ethicist's coffee house) likely choose to gamble, be pirates and select inegalitarianism, where they are counted among the aristos, and the majority are peasants and slaves. For that matter, the status quo--whether in terms of property relations, the free market, existing religious organizations, existing governments--may still favor many citizens, so by entering the VoI they would stand to lose (especially given a global context).So one may be forced to rely on a Kantian--or Dantean--argument ad infernalis.

With no govt. force or power to impose the system of ToJ (or H's principle of humanity)--say in terms of distribution of property, labor, and shekels--most humans will not bother with considering donning Rawls' hypothetical VoI, anymore than say many successful criminals--whether mobsters, vegas mafiosi, or chicago politicians--bother following the law; Exitus acta probat being the default "contract." Rawls does allude to this problem of the intelligent Rebel somewhere (re Nietzsche's "perfectionism")--as did Hobbes, rather more forcefully; Rawls, while he made a somewhat valiant effort, appears like an imbiber of wine-coolers compared to the rum-swilling Hobbesian secular hero. (Zizek doesn't care for Rawls either, but bases his objections on some lightweight Freudian "envy". And Zizek like most continentalists leftists would have all anglo-American thinkers who ever existed hanged). Like Marx, Hobbes indeed realized that many people (ie rebel knights, rogue nations, theocrats, pirates--piracy a real concern in Master Hobbes' day) will not likely submit to a social contract or commonwealth, except at the point of a gun (or gunship); Rawls doesn't seem to recognize the existence of guns.

Honderichthis idea of autonomy

All great literature

".....requires the rare and all but impossible combination of fiery emotion with an intellect capable of viewing it impersonally. Where the latter fails, you get mere Byron; where the former, mere preciosity. It is, I am quite sure, a mistake to suppose that without an intensity of feeling which would crush an ordinary mortal it is impossible to produce Shakespeare, Milton, or Carlyle. But when the feeling has been got, it is necessary to have the strength of a giant, so as to turn it into literature instead of mere lamentation.""""

[Bertrand Russell, reflecting on the work of his amigo Joseph Conrad]

Quid Pro Quo ala Jane Harman.

From CQ:

"""""Justice Department attorneys in the intelligence and public corruption units who read the transcripts decided that Harman had committed a crime, according to the national security and law enforcement sources.

The Justice Department attorneys were prepared to pursue a case against Harman, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court, the secret panel established by the 1979 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to hear government wiretap requests. First, however, they needed the certification of top intelligence officials that Harman’s wiretapped conversations justified a national security investigation.

Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss reviewed the Harman transcript and signed off on the Justice Department’s FISA application, two sources said. He also decided that, under a protocol involving the separation of powers, it was time to notify then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Minority Leader Pelosi of the FBI’s impending national security investigation of a member of Congress — to wit, Harman.

Goss, a former Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, deemed the matter particularly urgent because of the high rank of Harman, a Democrat, on the Intelligence panel.

But according to the two former national security officials, Gonzales said he “needed Jane” to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the Times. Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program."""""

Miss Harman obviously had no problem working alongside the sinister AG Gonzales. Gonzo apparently valued Harman for her support of BushCo's plans for FISA/NSA Snitch-Tech--then most Demos agreed to that, a point KOS-zombies simply cannot grasp--and yet the Feds used the J-Edgar surveillance gear itself to catch Harman during one of her hush-hush chit-chats with an Israeli/AIPAC spy. Also note that the DOJ claimed a serious crime went down (as have even the muckraker-lites of TPM and a few moderate Dem sites), and decided to squelch, since Harman, like her soul-sistah Feinstein, generally followed the GOP partay-line. The evidence suggests KGB-like duplicity and deceit on the part of Harman, and yet the DOJ bagged the case--at least for now (as have the KOS-zombies and usual liberal blogocrats).

Justice Sotomayor--Business as usual

Cockburn:

......."""""The shock jock right-wing radio commentators furiously quote Sotomayor’s remark in a speech in Berkeley in 2001 that “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.” Sotomayor also took a direct potshot at WASP eugenicist hero, Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case.”

The right is trying to claim that Sotomayor is a reverse racist, but this, like almost everything the right says these days, this is not gaining any traction with the general population, though CNN is giving it relentless play. What the right can’t do is claim that Sotomayor is any sort of radical. She’s not. Her decisions have generally been pro-business and she owes her career on the federal bench to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who nominated her to the Appeals Court. Moynihan was of Irish descent, but he famously adhered to the WASP belief that an inherent “pathology” disfigured the black family in America....."""""

Ms. Sotomayor's Berkeley PC-rant--about as radical as Oprah show chitchat--needn't trouble us overly much. Her pro-business views and bureaucratic federalism, however, should be noted. Sotomayor's historic placement, like Obama's, may please Bovinecrats some sentimental liberals, yet the racial factors should not prevent an objective assessment of her specific decisions, which have tended to uphold moderate, centrist views.

Alexi Cockburn also raised a few interesting points regarding the Judicial business. Americans have for years been indoctrinated with the greatness of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Justice Cardozo and other supposed geniuses of the SCOTUS. The facts show otherwise. Holmes, like many a WASP intellectual of 19th and early 20th century--including Winston Churchill-- supported the eugenics movement. His decisions themselves tended to be extremely conservative. Yet few history texts, or text-enforcers (aka history professors) have presented Holmes or his jewish colleague Cardozo as one of the villains of US or world History. (that said, Holmes did at times, lend some support to the Boston sort of progressivism)

Instead of discussing some Holmes dicta--some of which resembles something Himmler might have barked--the usual liberal pedagogue focuses on the obvious: slavery, hypocrisy of Jefferson and Co, the Confederacy, poor treatment of natives, etc. (though US/Native America history not really popular either. How many Americans know of say the Bear River Massacre? The LDS and WASPs working together to rape and murder). A Holmes arguably had more impact on recent history than the hypocrites of the American Rev. did, yet the corrupt judicial noble--especially the yankee sort-- simply does not register in the 'Merican mind as Hannibal Lector-material.

Black Robe Posse kix, continued

One Susan Kennedy:

""""It just so happens that my congressional district is "served" by one totally useless turd named Howard Berman, who just happens to warm a seat (currently the Vice Chair) on the House Judiciary Committee. What better person to ask how federal judges are vetted for legibility and how this could happen?

I wrote a letter dated April, 2003. This was a polite request to Berman asking basically how judges are vetted and stating that my curiosity was piqued by my discovery of the two brothers sitting on the 8th Circuit bench. I cited the specific federal statute forbidding consanguinity on a federal bench.

It is now six years later, and I haven't even received the customary form letter that "our office is looking into it" or "our office referred it to the appropriate department"! Of course, Howard Berman has his own conflict-of- interest issues. After the census of 2000, in preparation for the constitutionally mandated redistricting that follows, Berman managed to get an appointment for one Michael Berman --- his brother --- to the commission that draws the district boundary lines.

As of result of Berman's nepotism, his district is so safe the Republicans couldn't even find one candidate to run against Berman in the 2008 primary. Unless some drastic changes are made after the 2010 census, we'll be stuck with this useless piece of crud until he dies in office.

As for the 8th CA, that problem was solved in 2004 when Richard Arnold died - as reported in the LA Daily Journal of the day. His brother, however, is still a senior circuit judge on the 8th Circuit bench.

If this is typical of the way judges (and candidates --- right up to the White House) are vetted for eligibility, then it is clear that those tasked to do so are not doing their jobs. And if virtually anonymous clerks are allowed to dispose of cases, particularly impeachment cases, then any hope for accountability is lost . . . .

Unless we can anger enough people that we can overcome an equal level of corruption in vote counting and pass some measure that puts accountability back into the hands of the people, such as JAIL4Judges!

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

The contemporary corporate media--KouricCO--tends to present any contra-judicial thinking as the work of hick libertarians or the dreaded "populist". That is unfortunate. The authentic progressive always opposes the judicial bureaucracy, notwithstanding a few somewhat progressive or anti-corporate decisions from the Black Robe posse. With the rise of the suburban "liberal" (not that closely related to the Democrat ala Truman or Woodrow Wilson), the image of the judiciary has been transformed--"spun"--: no longer stuffy, pompous latin-quoting solons, they are now considered the very bastion of civil liberties, regardless of the last few decades of conservative, if not very conservative justices--the Rehnquist Era. Those Californians who opposed the rabbling rousing, pro-8 herd (which Contingencies did (capiche, Calibanius?)) might reflect on the role of the CA judges, supposedly "liberal", who allowed Prop 8 on the ballot; prima facie, 8 appears to violate the Separation Clause, but that rarely stops the judiciary, whether at local, state or national level. The SCOTUS itself currently features at least five theocrats a bit to the right of Mussolini (Il Duce himself did not always bless the papacy --or capitalism--across the board)--and the new nominee--Sotomayor--apart from a few token liberal decisions, appears to be another Obama centrist.

Historically, one of the first orders of business of revolutionary Republicans (as in Res Publica, republicanos, IRA, etc. NOT American republicans) was to depose of the magistrates and court, along with the nobles, the clergy and king. That defines not only the jacobins' modus operandi--magistrates part of 2nd estate--or the bolsheviks, but the yankee revolutionaries as well (and arguably English ala Cromwell as well). Jefferson had issues--as did his mentor Locke--but like Locke, he never forgot the centuries of tyranny characterizing the anglo Inns of Court or European clerical courts. Locke had no love for monarchy, or magistrates:

"It cannot be supposed that they should intend, had they a power so to do, to give any one or more an absolute arbitrary power over their persons and estates, and put a force into the magistrate's hand to execute his unlimited will arbitrarily upon them; this were to put themselves into a worse condition than the state of Nature, wherein they had a liberty to defend their right against the injuries of others, and were upon equal terms of force to maintain it, whether invaded by a single man or many in combination.""


Jefferson understood the meaning of this, and even the potential problems, arguably. TJ struggled for years against the tory-Federalist Hamilton and Hamilton's hatchet man Marshall, who more or less singlehandedly transferred the English common law and the standing court (ie the King-law) to the new Republic, and in effect cut off the balls denied the power of the Congress from the start.

Torture: a Reconsideration

(Sam Harris/In-Defense-of-Torture):

""""Most readers will undoubtedly feel at this point that torture is evil and that we are wise not to practice it. Even if we can’t quite muster a retort to the ticking bomb case, most of us take refuge in the fact that the paradigmatic case will almost never arise. It seems, however, that this position is impossible to square with our willingness to wage modern war in the first place.
In modern warfare, “collateral damage”—the maiming and killing innocent noncombatants—is unavoidable. And it will remain unavoidable for the foreseeable future. Collateral damage would be a problem even if our bombs were far “smarter” than they are now. It would also be a problem even if we resolved to fight only defensive wars. There is no escaping the fact that whenever we drop bombs, we drop them with the knowledge that some number of children will be blinded, disemboweled, paralyzed, orphaned, and killed by them.

The only way to rule out collateral damage would be to refuse to fight wars under any circumstances. As a foreign policy, this would leave us with something like the absolute pacifism of Gandhi. While pacifism in this form can constitute a direct confrontation with injustice (and requires considerable bravery), it is only applicable to a limited range of human conflicts. Where it is not applicable, it is seems flagrantly immoral. We would do well to reflect on Gandhi’s remedy for the Holocaust: he believed that the Jews should have committed mass suicide, because this “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” We might wonder what a world full of pacifists would have done once it had grown “aroused”—commit suicide as well? There seems no question that if all the good people in the world adopted Gandhi’s ethics, the thugs would inherit the earth.

So we can now ask, if we are willing to act in a way that guarantees the misery and death of some considerable number of innocent children, why spare the rod with known terrorists? I find it genuinely bizarre that while the torture of Osama bin Laden himself could be expected to provoke convulsions of conscience among our leaders, the perfectly foreseeable (and therefore accepted) slaughter of children does not. What is the difference between pursuing a course of action where we run the risk of inadvertently subjecting some innocent men to torture, and pursuing one in which we will inadvertently kill far greater numbers of innocent men, women, and children? Rather, it seems obvious that the misapplication of torture should be far less troubling to us than collateral damage: there are, after all, no infants interned at Guantanamo Bay. Torture need not even impose a significant risk of death or permanent injury on its victims; while the collaterally damaged are, almost by definition, crippled or killed. The ethical divide that seems to be opening up here suggests that those who are willing to drop bombs might want to abduct the nearest and dearest of suspected terrorists—their wives, mothers, and daughters—and torture them as well, assuming anything profitable to our side might come of it. Admittedly, this would be a ghastly result to have reached by logical argument, and we will want to find some way of escaping it. But there seems no question that accidentally torturing an innocent man is better than accidentally blowing him and his children to bits.

In this context, we should note that many variables influence our feelings about an act of physical violence. The philosopher Jonathan Glover points out that “in modern war, what is most shocking is a poor guide to what is most harmful.” To learn that one’s grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden in the Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls and their mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he would have killed many more women and girls by dropping bombs from pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally horrible deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. There is much to be said about the disparity here, but the relevance to the ethics of torture should be obvious. If you think that the equivalence between torture and collateral damage does not hold, because torture is up close and personal while stray bombs aren’t, you stand convicted of a failure of imagination on at least two counts: first, a moment’s reflection on the horrors that must have been visited upon innocent Afghanis and Iraqis by our bombs will reveal that they are on par with those of any dungeon. If our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of an aversion to how people generally behave while being tortured, we should note that this particular infelicity could be circumvented pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it unnecessary for screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen. We could easily devise methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of torture.

To demonstrate just how abstract the torments of the tortured can be made to seem, we need only imagine an ideal “torture pill”—a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a “truth pill” in the end? No, there is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears.""""""

Harris raises a legitimate point about proximity, and the argument for some limited uses of torture in extreme situations should be considered. Collateral damage due to torture is no different than collateral damage due to bombs, invasions, battles, so forth, and Justice would most likely be better served by torturing a few POWs in situations where that torture could prevent the deaths of thousands of innocents by bombs, invasions, battles, etc.--that is, assuming that torture “works”, and that the testimony produced is reliable (an issue which Harris doesn’t really address in much depth).

Harris’ essay was a topic for a few months, but his secular pragmatism did not produce much of an effect on the fratboy moralists and the PC soccer mommies who make up the ranks of the big DNCocrat sites like KOS, Salon, DU, CT, so forth, and who routinely overlook the fact that most leading Demos, like DiDI Feinstein, signed off on the same enhanced interrogation techniques the GOP yokels agreed to. They’re still invoking their righteous indignation over torture, 24/7 and still forgetting that their Demo heroes all waved the flags along with the GOP until about 2005, when it appeared the herd no longer backed the IWE.

Trustbusting Google

Rumors abound regarding the Obama Administration’s new chief antitrust enforcer, Christine Varney, who appears ready to file anti-trust against Eric Schmidt and GoogleCo:

"""Google’s corporate behavior is already being closely monitored. Last year, Google abandoned a planned search advertising partnership with Yahoo after the Justice Department said it intended to file suit to block the agreement on antitrust grounds. Google has 64 percent of the Web search market in America, while Yahoo has 21 percent and Microsoft 8 percent, according to comScore, a research firm.

In recent weeks, antitrust officials have opened two inquiries. The Justice Department is looking into Google’s settlement with authors and publishers for its book-search service to see if it violates antitrust laws. And the Federal Trade Commission is examining whether Google’s sharing two board members with Apple reduces competition, because both companies offer Web browsers and phone operating systems.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said this month that the close scrutiny was not surprising. “Information is incredibly important, and we should expect governments around the world to pay attention to what we do,” he said.

Google’s power is a cause of worry in many industries — media, advertising, telecommunications and software. Yet being large, successful and ambitious is not an antitrust violation. “You’ve got to be big, and you have to be bad,” observed Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. “You have to be both.”


Google corporation certainly rates as sufficiently Big and Bad (as does yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, HP, et al). Eric Schmidt, the JP Morgan of the search engine biz, "works" as CEO of Google AND as one of Apple’s Board of Oligarchs Directors. Most of the online scuttlebutt specialists (i.e. the usual academic economists advising against it) claim it won’t go. The Clayton Act-–passed under Woody Wilson I believe, and quite a progressive piece of legislation–-supposedly prevents execs from sitting on BODs of multiple companies, yet be assured Google has some ueber-attorneys who will weasel out of it, assuming Miss Varney or whoever decides to push the issue.

Der Luegen-Geist


"Buddy Holly": """"The US before WWII was 95% anti-Semitic, and just barely beginning to reject the KKK.""""

Du bist voll von scheisse. Sie habe für FDR und "New Deal", und FDR war Freunde mit den Juden.

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.

(from Faust)

Beware the Hate Crimes Bill.

Paul Craig Roberts/Counterpunch:

""""Since the passage of the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act in 2004, the US Department of State is required to monitor anti-semitism world wide. The State Department is not required to monitor anti-Americanism or sentiments against Christians, Muslims or Arabs. Thus, the act created a specially protected class worthy of careful monitoring by the US Department of State of negative sentiments expressed against Jews.

In order to monitor anti-semitism, the term must be defined. The definition is subjective and will be widely, rather than narrowly, interpreted. The State Department has come up with its attempt. The State Department’s approach could include any truthful statements about Israel and its behavior toward the Palestinians that the Israeli government or AIPAC or the Anti-Defamation League would deny or contest.

Anti-semitic speech can be interpreted as inciting hatred. Inciting hatred can be interpreted to be a violent act. “Excessive” criticism of Israel is a subjective, undefinable concept that can be used to determine anti-semitic speech. It is easy to conflate “excessive” with “strong.” Thus, demands that Israel be held accountable for war crimes committed in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, or elsewhere become acts of the hate crime of anti-semitism."""""

The type of PC-language-paranoia embodied by the GASRA has been on the increase. Reasonable humans should object to racial epithets of all types--including subtle regional ones--ah to be expected--he's from Texas..etc--yet words, even ugly insulting and obscene words, do not bring about bodily harm, and are not literally weapons. In some circumstances, such as the shouting fire in a theatre cliche, trash talkers in bars, or outright threats, speech might be dangerous, may even incite hatred, though establishing the specifics of that hatred-inciting process seems about as subjective as any decision made by the geniuses of the Black Robe posse.

Mere epithets, however, do not equate to a pistol pointed to the head, much less the pistol fired. Making a joke about a Kissinger or Elliot Abrams or DiDi Feinstein does not imply that one has put Mein Kampf to memory. Zappa singing Jewish Princess-- with titanic titz and sand-blasted zits--did not mean to deny the reality of Dachau, I don't think. The big liberal sites--DailyKOS, Salon, DU, Fray--also engage in the PC-speech enforcement, and those who step out of line are troll-rated, banned, given the roadkill recipe.

Revisionism

""""In the sphere of philosophy revisionism followed in the wake of bourgeois professorial “science”. The professors went “back to Kant"—and revisionism dragged along after the neo-Kantians. The professors repeated the platitudes that priests have uttered a thousand times against philosophical materialism—and the revisionists, smiling indulgently, mumbled (word for word after the latest Handbuch) that materialism had been “refuted” long ago. The professors treated Hegel as a “dead dog”,[2] and while themselves preaching idealism, only an idealism a thousand times more petty and banal than Hegel’s, contemptuously shrugged their shoulders at dialectics—and the revisionists floundered after them into the swamp of philosophical vulgarisation of science, replacing “artful” (and revolutionary) dialectics by “simple" (and tranquil) “evolution”. The professors earned their official salaries by adjusting both their idealist and their “critical” systems to the dominant medieval “philosophy” (i.e., to theology)—and the revisionists drew close to them, trying to make religion a “private affair”, not in relation to the modern state, but in relation to the party of the advanced class."""

VILenin

We have no love for VI Lenin and bolsheviki, but VIL described the philosophical situation of his time fairly accurately (and dare we say Kultur situation); and indeed his remarks still seem applicable to the postmodernists (including Zizek, who praises idealisms of various sorts, including the psychoanalytical sort, ad nauseum), to the rise of religious fundamentalism, and even to a certain type of liberal mysticism which follows the latest pronouncements of the "professiorial class", say the Swineford Physics Department, regarding "possible/alternative worlds". In his contempt for the professoriat, VIL's quite close to Marx's own thinking. At the same time marxist dialectical materialism should not be mistaken for Darwinism as a political model; however ugly, nauseating, or terrifying the average 'Merican might find marxism, humans are still human --not merely the Darwinian primate*--and allowed to think, plan, create as they obtain their economic and biological necessaries. It's make friends with your inner Bolshevik day here on Contingencies!

(*though evolution does hold, and Darwinists performed a service to humanity in terms of revising the dogma of monotheism. Marx himself in fact praised Darwin, at least initially (and for that matter, quoted Hume once in a while, generally not in agreement, but acknowledging his influence). As a psychological model for humans, however, Darwinian determinism has shortcomings, and has been put to nefarious uses by "social darwinists." ).

PrisonCo

Counterpunch/Cockburn

""""It’s expensive running an ever-expanding gulag. State after state is finding that herding the dangerous classes into prison with tools such as the Rockefeller drug laws and throwing away the key for decades or forever by nonnegotiable mandatory minimum sentencing costs too much. But then there’s a problem: what to do about the prison unions and the towns (like many in New York) that survive economically only because of prison jobs, where the prison population is greater than the population of free people, and the free people love it because, apart from the jobs keeping their kids from fleeing the post-industrial or post-ag wasteland, the prisoners count in the census, giving these towns and regions more representation in statehouses, hence more political power, than they deserve.

Shades of Gogol, who was born 200 years ago this year. The motor of his great novel is the economic use of “dead souls”—deceased serfs listed by the state as assets of the landlords. The novel’s central character, Chichikov, goes around buying them up. New York State could take Gogol’s hint and start auctioning its “living dead” as income generators to other states in need. Looking at our criminal justice system here, Gogol would surely use the line carved on his gravestone: “And I shall laugh my bitter laugh.”"""

Better than another episode of Star Trek, Police academy-in-space (Sarge Roddenberry, ex LAPD, founder)

Hume, cont.

Fred Wilson:

""""Given Hume’s general argument against objective necessary connections, there is no logical necessity attaching to any causal judgement; it is always possible that events will be contrary to any causal law. The human mind can therefore never achieve the level of absolute certainty that Cartesians and Aristotelians demand; all causal judgments are fallible. This amounts to scepticism provided that one thinks that such standards as those of the Cartesian are reasonable. However, given the argument against objective necessities, and therefore against the possibility of absolute certainty, it is not reasonable, Hume holds, to
adopt the Cartesian standard. Hence, given the Humean argument his position
cannot reasonably be characterized as sceptical.

This means in particular that Hume’s pragmatic justification or vindication of the norms of empirical science as the defining standards of human reason is itself empirical and fallible. This does not imply, however, that Hume is a sceptic about science or about causal inferen- ces. For, if a sceptic is one who holds that no causal judgement is ever reasonable or that all are equally reasonable, then Hume is no sceptic. Now, the basic evidence for a causal judgement that all A’s are B’s is
the fact that all observed A’s are Bs. Often enough, however, we observe a
certain contrariety in effects; that is, A’s are sometimes followed by B s and
sometimes by C’s.2’ We do not in such cases, at least we do not if we are
philosophers, simply conclude that there is no causality here, that here it is
chance and not causation that is opera-tive. Rather, we infer that there is a
hitherto unknown factor, call it D*, such that an A is B just in case that it is
D* and is C just in case that it is not D*. We make this inference on the basis
of our past successes in discovering previously unknown causal factors which can explain the contrariety of events. The vulgar, of curse, often do explain by appeal to chance the observed contrariety of effects; to use Hume's example, that my watch sometimes does not work properly is due to chance. But to the artisan such an explanation will not do: he knows better. What stops the watch is not chance but a hidden - unknown but not unknowable cause -for example, a speck of dust?' Science, or what is the same for Hume, philosophy, has systematically extended the watchmaker's experience to many other cases, and has been systematically successful in discovering causes for contrary ef-fects. It is just this fact of experience,
that science has been successful in discovering causes, that leads us to affirm
the proposition, the law about laws to use Mill's phrase:' that for every event
there is a cause, that is, the proposition that for every event there is a
causal law under which it can be subsumed..."

(the naive sunday schooler reads a few sentences about Hume and skepticism, and thinks the old reprobate denied knowledge via experience, induction, probability, if not science itself. Nyet. As Wilson notes, Hume is not a ultra-skeptic, except in the sense that he points out that causal "laws" are matters of habit and observation, not necessary or axiomatic (that said, I might agree with mechanists that Hume overstated the case for subjectivity, as did the early Popper). Newtonian mechanics were thought absolute, until Einstein arrived. That said, Hume does provide fairly convincing arguments why miracles should not be accepted as legitimate--the uniformity of experience precludes people rising from the dead, or jezebels riding on the back of 10 headed beasts--and a fortiori, why scripture has no authority...While perhaps not quite a Newton, Hume served human liberty.

Even some cheese-eating surrender monkeys french postmodernists, like Deleuze, have expressed an admiration for Hume:

""Deleuze insists that one of Hume's greatest contributions to modern philosophy is his insistence that all relations are external to their terms: this is the essence of Hume's anti-transcendental stance. Human nature cannot unite itself, there is no 'I' which stands before experience, but only moments of experience themselves, unattached and meaningless without any necessary relation to each other. A flash of red, a movement, a gust of wind, these elements must be externally related to each other to create the sensation of a tree in autumn. In the social world, this externality attests to the always-already interested nature of life: no relation is necessary, or governed by neutral laws, so every relation has a localised and passional motive. The ways in which habits are formed attests to the desires at the heart of our social milieu."""""

Contingencies also notes a rather unsettling, anti-essentialist aspect to Hume-- psychological, perhaps, rather than logical. Deleuze's writing also should be considered a type of conceptual psychology, and not philosophy per se--a point overlooked by the PoMo bashers (CS Peirce had claimed Hume as an early pragmatist). Reality is ostensive; knowledge is ostensive. Wittgenstein himself had read Hume, and understands Ostension (Deleuze however referred to Wittgenstein as an assassin of philosophy, or something).

There is a fourth planet-object. Westerners call it "Mars," after Ares.. Egyptians referred to it as eye of Horus. Hindus called it something else. The Mars-object could be named, Sram, or anything, really. Like other planets, Mars follows an elliptical orbit. That's not likely to change, at least until the sun explodes (you think I jest? read the guesstimates of "experts"regarding solaric activity). Hume, however, would remind us that the supposed "laws" of elliptical orbits--or solar physics--while for all intensive purposes permanent (at least they appear so to mere mortals), are themselves not necessary.

There are no comforting, stable eternal truths, whether in terms of human experience, religion, science, or politics, yet the "process" for Hume--or Deleuze, presumably--lacks the mystical or heroic aspects ala Hegel. In that sense, Hume does seem akin to the ancient stoics, who also concerned themselves with chance, fortune, the fates, and hardening themselves against ....Contingencies.

From Boswell's The Life of Johnson

"""""I mentioned to Dr. Johnson, that David Hume's persisting in his infidelity, when he was dying, shocked me much. JOHNSON. "Why should it shock you, Sir? Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention. Here then was a man who had been at no pains to enquire into the truth of religion, and had continually turned his mind the other way. It was not to be expected that the prospect of death would alter his way of thinking, unless GOD should send an angel to set him right." I said, I had reason to believe that the thought of annihilation gave Hume no pain. JOHNSON. "It was not so, Sir. He had a vanity in being thought easy. It is more probable that he should assume an appearance of ease, than so very improbable a thing should be, as a man not afraid of going (as, in spite of his delusive theory, he cannot be sure but he may go), into an unknown state, and not being uneasy at leaving all he knew. And you are to consider, that upon his own principle of annihilation he had no motive to speak the truth." The horrour of death, which I had always observed in Dr. Johnson, appeared strong to-night. I ventured to tell him, that I had been, for moments in my life, not afraid of death; therefore I could suppose another man in that state of mind for a considerable space of time. He said, "he never had a moment in which death was not terrible to him." He added, that it had been observed, that scarce any man dies in publick, but with apparent resolution from that desire of praise which never quits us. I said, Dr. Dodd seemed to be willing to die, and full of hopes of happiness. "Sir, (said he,) Dr. Dodd would have given both his hands and both his legs to have lived. The better a man is, the more afraid is he of death, having a clearer view of infinite purity." He owned, that our being in an unhappy uncertainty as to our salvation, was mysterious; and said, "Ah! we must wait till we are in another state of being, to have many things explained to us." Even the powerful mind of Johnson seemed foiled by futurity. But I thought, that the gloom of uncertainty in solemn religious speculation, being mingled with hope, was yet more consolatory than the emptiness of infidelity. A man can live in thick air, but perishes in an exhausted receiver.""""""

Which is to say, the real test of faith--or ~(faith)--starts on one's deathbed.

Swine-flu Hysteria 101

"""Clearly the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic is nothing to sneeze at but I think it’s also clear that the 24 hour news and even the CDC - perhaps practicing for a real threat -have hyped this event out of proportion to the real threat. If that’s because the threat really, really cannot be known I supposed it’s fine, but if it’s because this type of thing keeps people focused in ways that are profitable to TV News or grant and funding producing for CDC I hope we take a close look at all this when it’s over. Although epidemiologists are probably going to say “better safe than sorry” with Pandemic alerts it’s also true that overhyped events can lead to a lax future response from a public that becomes too used to “crying wolf” when the threat is actually quite low."""

Well-stated. Also note comment by one "horatiox" regarding vichy-liberal hispanic-bashing, a typical trait of the KOS/DU/Salon crowd generally, now brought out in living color by the flu alarmism. The Demo McMinutemen appear to be as excited as MittRomneyoids are at the prospect of shutting down the border and invading mexico, and/or banning pork products across the US.

how Grosz (united front, ich denke)

"""Putting the Bush years on trial""

Cockburn/Counterpunch:

"""'The notion of putting the Bush years on trial has never held allure for President Obama; even less so that of putting Wall Street in the dock. From his lips has always dropped the catechism of uplift and forgiveness, of “moving forward”. He and his advisors had supposed that closing down Guantanamo and issuing a stern denunciation of torture would be sufficient advertisement of the new era; that a few terse reprimands for excessive bonuses for executives would slake the public appetite for retribution on the bankers and tycoons.

On torture, as he approaches the 100-day benchmark, Obama has been forced to change step, in response to public outrage at the chilling stream of memoranda documenting the savageries, and legal justifications for same, ordered and subsequently monitored in minute detail by the Bush high command. Obama's continuing aversion to any serious calling to account of the sponsors of torture has been evident in his almost daily shifts in position. At the start of this last week he indicated that yes, those okaying the tortures might be legally answerable, that a “Truth Commission” might be the way forward. By Thursday he was backing into that, saying that a commission would “open the door to a protracted, backward-looking discussion” and in the language of his press secretary, "the president determined the concept didn't seem altogether workable in this case" because of the intense partisan atmosphere built around the issue.

So it’s still not clear whether Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their subordinates will have to endure the soft option of a bipartisan commission of enquiry, or face a special prosecutor, or sit back and watch political momentum flag as the issue devolves into lengthy and possibly closed hearings by the Senate Intelligence Committee. As Republicans have not been slow in pointing out, senior Democrats in Congress were certainly complicit in sanctioning torture as early as 2002. They say House Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed waterboarding. She says she did not.

As always, former vice president Cheney has usefully raised the stakes. Did the various tortures, the hundreds of waterboarding sessions, the exposure of naked captives to weeks of intense cold in small concrete boxes, actually make America safer? Cheney snarls on television that they did, thus inviting documented ripostes that this is far from clear, and indeed they contributed nothing of advantage to the national interest.""""

Cockburnspeak: peligroso pero divertido.. Given that senior Democrats in Congress were, as Cockburn points out, "complicit in sanctioning torture," a bipartisan investigation would probably not amount to much. A non-partisan, special prosecutor--or tribunal, even non-American--would likely carry a bit more weight. Take it to Barry Spinoza's alma mater, the Hague.

DiFi the Enhancer

""""Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California pointedly noted that her Intelligence Committee already is investigating the Bush administration's legal underpinnings for the interrogation program and the value of information gained from it. And several Democratic leaders appeared to favor using that panel for any hearings.

I think that's a great idea. Sen. Feinstein can call herself as the first witness and explain why she enthusiastically endorsed waterboarding and other "enhanced" interrogation techniques back in the days before the Bush administration devastated al Qaeda, and we were all worried about being blown up.""""

That's not to bless the powerline hick--Contingencies favors an investigation into possible war crimes on the part of BushCo--but Powerline at least understands something like Due Process. The BO-bots have been stalling on the "Truth Commission" (paging Eric Blair) probably because the smarter Dems realize that any serious investigation will implicate most if not all leading Donkeycrats, including DiFi, Pelosi (who apparently approved of "enhanced" interrogation techniques as well), Hillarity, Kerry, Emanuel, Biden and the rest. The Torture party, say some in Bubbaland--that would be the Demopublican par-tay aka US Govt., though consistency rarely bothers a D-pub. Of course, prosecutors, whether real or wannabe, generally approve of torture as a tactic. As Nietzsche realized--not to say the ancient greeks-- most plebes crave retributive justice; the Erinyes brawl and byatch for a few dozen centuries until Apollo arrives with the Reason-light .

The vengeance craze also raises another problem: that some politician (of whatever party) approves of enhanced interrogation techniques does not therefore exculpate (google 'er Bubba) the officers and soldiers who have chosen to use such techniques, though many sentimental liberals seem to think otherwise. We might call this the My Lai meme. The grunt agrees to shoot enemy soldiers. He does not agree to My Lai-like devastation, and when he does follow a Lt. Calley's sinister commands to rape pillage and murder he has himself become party to the crime (and atrocity). Similarly, when soldiers agree to use torture they have themselves become party to the crimes of their COs (whether that's a colonel, or commander in chief). To think otherwise--to insist the underlings had to follow orders, and are therefore innocent--seems, like, tantamount to seriously sick mierda.

Down on Rue Morgue Avenue

Music fans have for years offered their assessment of the Bob Dylan phenomena: brooding, Rimbaud-like genius of rock, OR overrated, vain opportunist and wheezing musical primitive? As with the knuckles-dichotomy of Love and Hate, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground with Dylan/Zimmerman. I tend to side with the skeptics, like Jack Marx, who claims that Dylan invented "the arrogant, faux-cerebral posturing" typical of many rock stars and celebrities (tho' BD might have taken lessons from Brando). Some Dylan musick--from say late 60s, the Highway 61 Revisited/Blonde on Blonde stuff (the tasty organ riffs, from Al Kooper I believe, and Bloomsfield licks made the sound)-- still packs a bit of a punch, yet I find his voice wearisome, his music simplistic and the faux-cerebral schtick tiresome (then most 60s muzak produces that effect at this stage, including those psycho-delic musical hall jingles of the Beatless).

At some point in the 70s, after he recuperated from his mysterious motorcycle crash (he never entered a hospital), Dylan morphed into a businessman and "celebrity", though the folky 70s sound verges on nauseating really, especially compared to some of the creative music of the time--say Hendrix, Corea, early Steely Dan, the ECM crowd, Bill Evans or Getz's final works, minimalism, Zappa. Peaches in Regalia may sound a bit trite or phreaky now, but the freaks got to have some chops to play it, and other FZ works. Then compared to an interesting Chopin etude played competently, most rock, like Brown shoes, doesn't make it ...

Dylan's a competent tunesmith, a poet of sorts, and he rocks at times, though his best vamps, once he got over the boring Guthrie imitations, were blues variations for most part (From a Buick 6, etc.). His recent music sounds rather traditional as well: country-blues sounds, with a few rock like numbers, biblical hints, a certain social-realist aspect to the writing, with highways, trains, rivers, the lonesome belle, and so forth (more Steinbeck than surrealist, really). Some of his recent musick at times leans towards jazz--like "Bye and Bye," a few others on Love and Theft--- but not much different than the average bar band blasting out Muddy Waters (the jam on High Water not bad--what was up with Chas. Darwin reference?). It's a free country and all---no one forces you to buy a Dylan or Dead CD, or tickets to their hootenanny---yet the infatuation shown by some for Dylanianna seems on the whole misplaced and irrational.

Not approving of Dylan does not mean one thereby sides with the hawks or the squares, and so forth: I imagine Theodore Adorno (not a guru, but had interesting insight on pop muzak) felt the same about Zimmerman's music as he did about Joanie Baez; which is to say, Dylan's hymns uphold conservatism really, regardless of the radical chic, and PC politics. Americans are better off reading Chomsky's thoughts on 'Nam (not necessarily always agreeing) than unravelling Dylan lyrics (or joining the rock bacchanalia as a whole, really). Dylan's move towards Christianity (and recently Judaism, supposedly) should not have surprised us overly much, either (John Lennon was not completely down with Dylan's conversion, and wrote "Serve Yourself" a few months before being murdered).

Other Dylan skeptics, such as the aforementioned Jack Marx,have pointed out a certain shallowness to Dylan's persona and sound:

"....Dylan pulled off the most prestigious magic trick in modern music's history: he created a persona full of charisma and intelligence both real and affected, then repeatedly disowned it, disappearing into a notional bunker of vagueness before the questions got too tricky, the silence leaving fans gasping for explanations that, beyond some very engaging show-business chutzpah, probably were never there. "Anybody can be specific and obvious," Dylan told Playboy in 1966. "That's always been the easy way. It's not that it's so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it's just that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about." How phoney, and yet how true."""

No, Dylan's not completely phony--Positively 4th street rings fairly true, even now. The situation seems more akin to that of the washed-up bullfighter Belmonte in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, who competes against the young gallant Pedro Romero. Senor Belmonte, El Viejo Torero, was great once, as far as bullfighters go, though way past his prime, he appears like an old clown when in the ring. El Viejo Dylan may have been great, as far as troubadours go (and Zimmy hisself said he wrote "just songs"). Now, past his prime, he's entered the Belmonte zone.

Casino Feinstein

From Harper's:

"""On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband’s real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.

Mrs. Feinstein’s intervention on behalf of the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn’t a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments—not direct federal dollars.

Documents reviewed by The Washington Times show Mrs. Feinstein first offered on Oct. 30 to help the FDIC secure money for its effort to stem the rise of home foreclosures. Her letter was sent just days before the agency determined that CB Richard Ellis Group (CBRE)—the commercial real estate firm that her husband Richard Blum heads as board chairman—had won the competitive
bidding for a contract to sell foreclosed properties that FDIC had inherited
from failed banks.""""

Dame DiFi's now expanded her bunko operation from war profiteering to mortgage scams. As many DiFi-watchers probably realize, this isn't the first time that DiDi has awarded sweet deals to her Bay-area sugar-daddy Blum--just the first time some VIP has seemed to mind (DiFi's now spinning the "we didn't know" meme, which seems to work fine for politicians--not for homies in cellblock B). It's probably Buh-bye to gubernational dreams, and back to Bayberg for DF--though with Blum/CB Ellis' deep pockets funding her, she could conceivably hire some Ueber-Attorney to cook the books, and soon return to mishandling assault rifles in front of Demopublicans.

J.G. Ballard, RIP

From the JGB-Death-Tribute-show:

"JG Ballard is gone, wheels-up from the abandoned airstrip of our imaginations, but his coiled brilliance will lie in waiting for just the right unsuspecting teenager — and there’s always one, in every suburb — who opens Crash to read the unforgettable lines, “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash. During our friendship, he had rehearsed his death in many car crashes, but this was his only true accident.” She will read those lines, and 224 pages later, close the book dazedly, firm in the knowledge that her worldview has been shattered and wired back together, and for the darker better.

The sci-fi novelist William Gibson was one such teenager.

“I was so young when I first discovered Ballard’s work,” he told me, in an interview for my L.A. Weekly review of Ballard’s memoir, Miracles of Life. (The interview ended up on the cutting-room floor.) “Thirteen, fourteen. I probably read him before I read Burroughs, but only by a few months. I seem to remember Burroughs baffling me at first, too many moving parts, but Ballard seemed to have the keys to the kingdom. In retrospect it was like a lot of great foreign cinema that I hadn’t seen yet. Long pans without actors. I remember finding it all enormously welcoming, and calming somehow. He became a literary hero of mine without my ever having to think about it.

[...] Most ‘influence’ questions just cause me to shrug, but Ballard? Huge. And durable. More than anyone else, really.

My first work of fiction, ever, consisted of a single faux-Ballardian sentence: ‘Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, [ ] came to perceive the targeted numerals of the academy leader as hypnagogic sigils preceding the dream state of film.’ I worked on that for so long, months, that I’ve never forgotten it.”

Gibson’s unindicted co-conspirator in the cyberpunk insurgency, Bruce Sterling, offered his thoughts.

“He’s truly a great science fiction writer,” he told me, by e-mail. “One of the few. Lovecraft is also a great science fiction writer, and creates the same intensely visionary world, the same kind of lasting, all-devouring, even bewildering appeal. But Ballard certainly writes much better than Lovecraft. He’s a better artist.” Even so, noted Sterling, he remains a cult figure — ”globally notorious,” a “persistent critics’ darling” with a swelling following, but a cult figure nonetheless. “Ballard’s intelligence and surreal worldview simply intimidate readers,” said Sterling. “Most people who might read Ballard pick up one of his books, forge 30 pages in, become baffled and obscurely terrified, and never dare to open another one. Of course he’s a good writer, but he’s the strong stuff; nobody picks up six-packs of Laphroaig.”

(Mark Dery)

.........

"""It is also a drily funny score-settling with Little England, whose rattletrap cars he described as “coal scuttles,” on first seeing them after moving back to Britain from China, and whose morose, “putty-faced” people had won the war but acted, he thought, as if they’d lost it. Ballard was perversely fond of America in the way that, say, Kafka or Baudrillard were; he regarded the U.S.A. with a kind of horrified delight, and loved best all that is worst about our theme-parked nightmare, which he reimagined in Hello America as a post-apocalyptic disaster zone, presided over by a President Charles Manson. And he cordially detested the class-conscious, parochial England of Prince Charles’s Poundbury and the Boy’s Own Paper, refusing Commander of the British Empire honors in 1993 with the withering quip that such “Ruritanian charade[s]” help “prop up our top-heavy monarchy.”


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

Bruce Sterling described BallardSpeak fairly effectively. To reiterate: “Ballard’s intelligence and surreal worldview simply intimidate readers,” said Sterling. “Most people who might read Ballard pick up one of his books, forge 30 pages in, become baffled and obscurely terrified, and never dare to open another one. Of course he’s a good writer, but he’s the strong stuff; nobody picks up six-packs of Laphroaig.”

Ballard's Vermillion Sands presented an odd, organic sort of sci-fi, quite different than the space operas and heroics of a Heinlein or Asimov. With Ballard, we did not need to be transported to Mars, or galaxy Andromeda, but could contemplate futuristic colonies in the Sonoran desert, with aria-singing orchids, and holographic gardens....His later books grew darker, yet remained eloquent and "British"--perhaps too eloquent, though Brit writers, sci-fi, or trad., generally creep out 'Mericans. Really, the nightmare of Hello America with President Manson, or the auto-dystopia of Crash do not seem that "surreal" in this day of Cho's, supercarriers, and LAPD GPS-guided paramilitary ops.

PK Dick--not to say Orwell--understood dystopia, yet at times PK Dick lacked what film dweebs call verisimilitude (though PKD's police state hallucinations ala A Scanner Darkly were generally entertaining). Ballard had more of an objective vision, similar to Orwell in ways--though as Sterling hinted at, with a Lovecraftian vibe. JGB understood dystopia, or maybe it's psychopathology (though not necessarily the Parisian marxist sort), and depicts it authentically--scaring the phuck out of those in Consumerland who manage to crawl through his labyrinthes.

The Power that Made the Body Heals the Body, Brruthrr (Chiro-quacks, cont.)

"""Exemption clauses instead of chiro laws by all means, and LET THAT EXEMPTION BE THE RIGHT TO PRACTICE OUR RELIGION. But we must have a religious head, one who is the founder, as did Christ, Mohamed, Jo. Smith, Mrs. Eddy, Martin Luther and others who have founded religions. I am the fountain head. I am the founder of chiropractic in its science, in its art, in its philosophy and in its religious phase. Now, if chiropractors desire to claim me as their head, their leader, the way is clear. My writings have been gradually steering in that direction until now it is time to assume that we have the same right to as have Christian Scientists."""" (DD Palmer, founder of "Chiropractics")

Palmer's "subluxation" was a quack idea and hustle from the start and motivated by religious, if not racial factors. The early chiros played on fears of vaccination--vaccines devised by foreigners, frenchmen, "zionists," and so forth. Keep the American Christian blood of your children untainted by the pollution of modern medicine, pilgrim, and instead use the natural chiropractic cure! (Note "Jo. Smith"--the founder of Mormonism, who supposedly saw the Golden Plates--listed among the Visionaries in Palmer's rant). Palmer, a "magnetic healer", and grocer or something--and not qualified in medicine whatsoever--insisted that vaccines and modern medicine were superfluous; instead, the Spine held the secrets to Health: "A subluxated vertebra, a vertebral bone, is the cause of 95 percent of all diseases."

Physicians opposed Palmer's Chiropractic from its commencement. As one skeptic of chiropractic,Dr. Jarvis states, "Palmer contrived the notion that "subluxations" of the spine impinge nerves, interfering with nerve flow, which he dubbed the Innate Life Force, and that all a practitioner had to do was to adjust the spine -- the healing powers of nature would do the rest. Neither Palmer nor any other chiropractor has ever been able to reliably demonstrate the existence of "subluxations," much less validate their importance to health and disease." The AMA rightfully listed Chiropractic as quack medicine starting in the 20s, and that lasted until 70s, when they re-classified it as "alternative medicine", along with like herbal remedies and acupuncture--Chiropractic still in the class of Bogus for most reasonable humans.



Doc Palmer, founder of Chiropractic

Chiropractors have attempted to reconcile their quasi-metaphysical "subluxation" concept with modern medical science, but experiments have consistently revealed no empirical support for subluxation (not surprising, since Palmer claimed the spinal column was more or less the meeting place between the immortal soul and the human body) . A few chiros may be skilled enough to offer a type of physical therapy for spinal injuries (that is, when they read the X-rays correctly), yet any competent physician--if not RN--possesses that skill. The treatments of back injuries are better left to the physician.

The chiro. biz also depends upon misleading and fraudulent advertising and marketing and that involves not only the DCs (not MDs or Dr.s), but the businesses which cater to DCs and the offices. Bunko artists market supposedly "ergonomic" pens and keyboards which will sooth and alleviate back injuries (if not anything which ails ye) because of some mysterious "subluxational" realignment (as one Sacramento chiro-bunko artist claims of his gimcracker pens, "Drop off a bundle at your community’s welcome wagon, and automatically introduce yourself to every new family in the area!""). Often the advertising goes beyond mere misrepresentation and verges on a type of medical malpractice: some gullible elderly persons with back injuries could conceivably see these bent pens or "ergonomic" keypads and think they will eliminate their back pains or spinal injuries merely by using the bentpen or asymmetrical keypad. The false claims and misleading advertising of the Chiro-quacks have, in fact, been subjected to litigation, and the chiropractor business has declined by over 25% in the last decade. Hopefully that will be 100% in the next few years: and the hucksters and bunko artists will return to flipping 'cakes at the IHOP, methodist-mormon preaching, tire-busting.

Buh Bye, Bubba the Subluxanator.

How not to Read a Wiki (Chiro-quacktics, cont.)

One McDyslexic writes ""A reader- just a tad off topic- writes:
“subluxation”–his selling point for his gimcrackery ballpoints– has been debunked as pseudo-science (the spiritual substance of yr spine!)"""
I was curious so I consulted wikipedia, which says nothing of the kind. Presumably that’s why there was no link."""

In fact, McDyslexic didn't even bother to read the entire Wiki (or can't): check the link again, Einstein. From the last paragraph:

"""Although research into the significance of the chiropractic
vertebral subluxation is ongoing in chiropractic circles, the concept is rejected by mainstream medicine and progressive chiropractors.""""

and from the cited article:

"""""Campbell JB, Busse JW, Injeyan HS (2000). "Chiropractors and vaccination: a historical perspective". Pediatrics 105 (4): e43. doi:10.1542/peds.105.4.e43. PMID 10742364. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/105/4/e43.
"... considered disease the result of spinal nerve dysfunction caused by misplaced (subluxated) vertebrae. Although rejected by medical
science, this concept is still accepted by a minority of chiropractors....
Indeed, many progressive chiropractors have rejected the historical concept of the chiropractic subluxation in favor of ones that more accurately describe the nature of the complex joint disfunctions they treat.""""""""

Hmmm, to Reiterate: ""rejected by medical science."" Sort of like debunked? In fact, mo' better. Let's say it again, Subluxation....rejected by medical science. Bada bing, bada boom. Back to Houston, Reverend Fraudonius (now, let's hear Fraud-Ron's usual Ad Hominems, lies, verbal belches, character attacks. Mansonite, nnnneo-con queer nazis!).

More info. (from McDyslexic's own LINK via Wiki):

""""By using spinal manipulation therapy for the removal of subluxations,
[Palmer] believed he was influencing a life force within the body which he named
"innate intelligence," the unimpeded presence of which was essential for good
health. When he later equated innate intelligence with a personified part of
universal intelligence (God), the religious overtones of chiropractic became
manifest.""""

Holy Subluxational Intelligence Batman!

More on Chiro-quacktics:

""""Building on the concepts of his father, B. J. promulgated a form of health care incompatible with that provided by practitioners of orthodox medicine. He emphasized that chiropractic did not cure or heal, but instead removed interference with the normal functioning of the innate intelligence, thereby allowing the body to heal itself. This concept resulted in a conflict with the germ theory of disease, which was gaining acceptance at the time. Although B. J. did not dispute the existence of germs, he rejected the proposition that they were the causes of infectious disease.

"""" Morris Fishbein, secretary of the American Medical Association (AMA) and editor of its journal from 1924 to 1949, was 1 of the most influential of the antichiropractic forces, grouping chiropractic along with antivivisectionism and osteopathy as "nonmedical cults," and referring to the profession as "chiroquactic.""""""

Ah those poisonous, evil.......Vaccinations, from the Zionist Lamanites: Into the fiery flames!

Can ah, ah get a witness?

Pascal's wager, redux

Cat-eyes:

"""Actually it is better known as Pascal’s Wager. However, the argument is not really sound. For example, substitute some other entity that cannot be shown to exist for God. Moreover, if it is only the placebo effect of belief in God that affects one’s actions, isn’t it a little reminiscent of a coercive act (or at the least a deceptive act but it is a moot point) because in either case it lacks the free-will autonomous basis for moral action."""

Actually, Miss Cat doesn't quite understand Pascal's Wager, which is, as the name indicates, a wager--not a deductive argument at all; really PW's an early example of a decision matrix. Pascal admits God's existence cannot be proven (or disproven) by Reason alone, yet Pascal asserts that the safe bet, spiritually speaking, involves living as if a God existed, since the chance--however slight--of an afterlife means not living as if God existed could result in, like, eternal damnation (supposedly). Moreover, Cat eyes begs the question on the "the placebo effect of belief in God": assuming He exists, it's not a placebo effect, is it; if He doesn't, we won't know, presumably. The "coercive act" bit a bit vague: though if God does exist, He knows all, commands all, so in a sense we would be His subjects (one of the absurdities of calvinist variety of determinism).

As the Wiki puts it, ""Pascal's Wager (or Pascal's Gambit) is a suggestion posed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should "wager" as though God exists, because so living has everything to gain, and nothing to lose." Sort of like a Win-win situation, but a bit more subtle; french subtleties tend to scare WASPs, of course (or WASPettes).

One X describes Pascal's Wager:

""It’s a wager: i.e. sort of like decision matrix–not an argument. Pascal’s wager doesn’t prove anything, Cat Lies. It sets up a scenario with various outcomes: something like “If G*d of the Bible does not exist, a mafioso doesn’t lose anything by being a mafiosi. If G*d of the Bible does exist, mafioso roasts in the malebolgia.”

Free will’s a separate matter, but obviously religious tradition holds that humans are free, and have “moral autonomy,” at least from their own perspective.""""

Then, Cat-eyes wrote,

Weak and generally fallacious attempt at a rebuttal as characterized by the need to resort to an ad hominem."""

Wrong. Not only does she not understand Pascal's wager or X's point (like, Malebolgia, Dante? etc? Fuggetabout it), she doesn't know what Ad Hominem or fallacious reasoning consists of. There's NO Ad Hom (except in her mind): If one were to say "we don't have to pay attention to Cat Lies' points because she has a silly name, or because she's musically incompetent, a friend of biblethumping chiropractors and frauds," etc. THAT would be Ad Hominem. That has not occurred, whatsoever. A slight attempt at humor (Cat Lies) in the midst of serious writing does not suffice for Ad Hom, and really to object to that trivial level of parody is itself paranoia, nearly J-Edgar like. And since Pascal's Wager is NOT a deductive argument, her point on rebuttal was mistaken and silly. X describes Pascal's Wager quite adequately.

Menschliches, Allzumenschliches.

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Pascal's wager does not lack a certain pragmatic force. Regardless, thinkers have criticized it for the last few centuries--Richard Dawkins' points contra-Pascal some of the most recent criticism. Dawkins may have a point that the scenario of belief and no-God may not result only in "nothing lost": all the time and energy spent going to church, participating, taking mass or communion, praying (especially if one prays to Nada) could be a loss, assuming there is ~God. That hints at another issue--the status of other faiths---which Cat-eyes may have hinted at (as did Dawkins, I believe), though did not really flesh it out. Yes, the choice of faiths would also be part of the Wager, or expanded Wager (Osiris forbid the faithful xtian/jew/muslim--or atheist---reaches the gates of Nirvana, and well, connect the dots).

At the same time, Dawkins seems to overlook the somewhat ethical point: Pascal was not just asserting that faith might be prudent, but that the best bet, spiritually speaking, was to act as if God existed (and he meant the God of Christianity, Roman Catholicism, in particular). That seems a bit different than merely making appearances, coughing up some shekels onto the plate, having faith, shaking the preacher or Padre's hands; though defining what those acts would consist of--catholicism, or calvin? etc.--presents another problem--perhaps slightly Kantian. A witness might believe "do not bear false witness" to be correct action, until her refusal to lie (say during testimony) means the mob kills the people she ratted out, or her family, and so forth.

* * *

Evidentialists present another defense to Pascal's gambit: shouldn't humans base their decisions--whether in terms of ordinary life, scientific research, legal matters, or religion--on evidence, and withhold assent (not to say actions based on belief) when the evidence does not support a particular belief?? An obscure British mathematician and philosopher William Clifford suggested as much. We cannot really determine how God might or might not reward our decisions, first off. Bertrand Russell (aware of Clifford both in terms of his skepticism and work in mathematics)also suggested as much: a rational Being would seemingly prefer reasonable inquiry into religion, perhaps even doubt, rather than blind faith, even of the Pascalian pragmatist sort. Thus, asked whether he feared meeting a living God, Russell claimed he would answer the Almighty by saying He had not provided sufficient evidence of His existence, and thus should be admitted into Heaven for relying on reason (evidentiary, and logical) instead of the blind faith of zealots.

Evidentialists thus suggest that it's "absolutely wicked" for humans to base any belief on decision-theoretic self-interests. Pascalians have various answers to this, but I believe this criticism also shows that a pragmatic, utilitarian belief may be missing the point: one doesn't calculate the odds of the Almighty vis a vis a theological cost-benefit analysis and then decide to believe, or "do the right thing"; one believes and acts virtuously, because it is the right thing to do (whatever that is--even Kant hisself could not prove obligations).

Pascal did, of course, grant the lack of evidence of God, and arguably anticipated the evidentialist's tactics. Pascal himself belonged to the experimentalist school--he not only worked in mathematics and probability, but in physics and engineering (his work in hydraulics quite important--he demonstrated a substance-less vacuum, startling all the old aristotelian mechanists and the rationalist, Cartesian sorts. He also devised early adding machines, and........the roulette table). While taken to be a catholic, Pascal actually opposed church dogma in many instances (and catholics still have not quite blessed him). The Wager does not merely relate to belief, to evidence, and faith, but to actions. A skeptic who, after deciding that no compelling evidence supports the religious hypothesis, engages in a murder spree would not likely be rewarded in the afterlife were he to LOSE the wager, and discover that God exists---whether he possessed a Russell-like mind or not; in some cases taking an atheist viewpoint could conceivably result in immoral or criminal actions (or totalitarian). Indeed, Contingencies suggests that Pascal's Wager really concerns objective ethics, and moral realism as much as it does decision theory, the problems of evidentialism, or theological wrangling. Pascal wants to suggest that a chance exists that a theological moral realm holds: he does not, however, assign probabilities.

Baseball, Inc


"""Our country, as you may have heard, is tits-deep in a pretty frightening recession. It’s so bad that some have compared it to the Big D—you know, the Great Depression. Our current president, God bless him, has already demonstrated shades of F.D.R., promising to lead us through dark times with nothing more than an unwavering confidence and belief in our potential. But who’s going to buoy our national spirit when we get down in the recession dumps? Well, if the Great Depression is our best barometer, it’s probably going to be baseball.


""""Back in the 1930s, when the U.S. economy was fodder for John Steinbeck novels, baseball was experiencing a golden age. Players like Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio became icons, even among people who wouldn’t go to a ball game on a dare. The sport essentially became our national panacea. The world may have seemed hopeless and scary, but baseball offered the huddled masses a chance to escape and lose themselves in the exploits of larger-than-life sports heroes. So I have to wonder, will our national pastime once again become the diversion a rattled and recession-weary country needs? Will modern baseball shed its controversial reputation, ruined by years of steroids, scandals, and bloated salaries, and resume its rightful place as a proud American tradition, right up there with mom and apple pie?

There are plenty of fans in Clearwater willing to explain why the answer is a resounding “no.” Their reasons aren’t surprising: the players, even the good ones, are overpaid, egomaniacal babies who are probably all lying about steroids. Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez, baseball’s latest black sheep, is a favorite target of derision among fans looking for proof that baseball is a corrupt institution, somewhere on the ethical scale between A.I.G. and the Mafia.""""

Closer to mafia, probably, says Contingencies--though pro-ball and organized crime go way back, before Pete Rose gambling scams, or DiMaggio parties at Frank Costello's night-clubs, to like Ring Lardner- days and the Black sox scandal (games are still fixed, with the outcome known in advance for the right homies at the right casinos, but the baseball racket's far more professional, smooth, inpenetrable than it was in Ring's day).

Manny Ramirez may swat as well as Ruth or McGuire, but nada mas que Mobster-in- dreadlocks (check out stats for a few of Ramirez's HRs during playoffs: that one HR in Chavez Ravine--itself Mob-built, and Brooklyn-Mob-owned--400+ ft. still rising when it smacked into upper decks). Natural talent? 'Roids? Crack? Hottie ho in Dodgerios clubhouse? Or combination, thereof.

Pharisäer

"Also aber rathe ich euch, meine Freunde: misstraut Allen, in welchen der Trieb, zu strafen, mächtig ist! Das ist Volk schlechter Art und Abkunft; aus ihren Gesichtern blickt der Henker und der Spürhund. Misstraut allen Denen, die viel von ihrer Gerechtigkeit reden! Wahrlich, ihren Seelen fehlt es nicht nur an Honig. Und wenn sie sich selber 'die Guten und Gerechten' nennen, so vergesst nicht, dass ihnen zum Pharisäer Nichts fehlt als — Macht!"

(The Tarantulas, from Nietzsche's Zarathustra)

Adorno on Joan Baez (with anglo subtitles for AdornoSprach)




My Deutsch not so wunderbar, but "Eine wie Adorno hatte das sofort durchschaut" something like, "a dude such as Adorno saw through all that bullshit immediately." Teddy A, love-man...and schweeet lovahs luv the Schpring.*

"""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."""""

To reiterate: "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.""

Sehr gut. One-size-Fits-All-ocracy.

(*: from one of Jacques' Songs from S-speare's As You Like it. In medias res of a 5 act comedy, Bard tossed off a few of the most copacetic lines of anglo poesy ever tossed. A few centuries ante-mass deception).

culture-industry