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."

Hoo-yah for Hobbes



Hobbes' Leviathan functions as a great antidote to excessive postmod. bickering, conceptualization and to belle-lettrism of all sorts. His ideas of the sovereign were a bit draconian--but I think capable of progressive readings. And he's no friend of theocrats or aristocrats: more like a republican who felt a strong monarchy was the most effective strategy for maintaining order. His ideas on contracts, covenants, the state of nature, sovereignity, etc. are still worth reading closely and worth reading in the King's English--he's not that difficult a writer and indeed rather eloquent. Of course his materialism was very influential--not only to Locke and the sensationalists, but to Marx and utilitarians. His critique of Descartes and the res cogitans also very worthwhile. Hobbes anticipates Darwin, or at least understood territoriality and the problems of altruism, or lack thereof. He's at least as powerful a thinker as Hegel and Marx were; indeed I would venture to say rather more powerful. Descartes may have been his superior, at least mathematically; but in political terms there are few thinkers equal to his force.

An interesting and enigmatic character was Master Hobbes: he was a student of Bacon (that itself a bit scandalous) and acquainted with leading figures of the day such as Gallileo, Ben Jonson and of course the royalists. He probably knew "Shakespeare" (tho' Hobbes would have been rather young) and had most likely had some hushhush stuff on King Jimmy, Chas I, Cromwell, and the rest. Hobbes, expert latinist, may have had some hand in the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays as well. (I suspect Milton and the young Locke had a few run-ins with the elder royalist Hobbes as well). Hobbes was probably a scoundrel early on, as was his mentor Bacon (whose system Hobbes later rejected), but Leviathan shows quite a melancholy and even tragic aspect as well.


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One of Hobbes' "laws of nature"--that is, after men decide to leave the state of nature, form covenants and live peacefully--is that of the equality of distribution. In the first 10-15 chapters of Leviathan there's quite a bit of material which sounds rather socialist and egalitarian, though Hobbes admits his various covenants are more like "givens": he assumes that, for one, people are bound to carry out contracts/covenants they consent to (and that the King/Law exists to enforce that). Obviously most rational people would agree to that, and to most of Leviathan; that idea of rational contracting is similar to what Rawls continues as well: what sort of society will rational people decide on, if they themselves have to live in the society they choose? They would probably agree that covenants should be respected; and that seems like a fairly Scriptural course of action as well. There is no need of recourse to theology or idealism. Perhaps that's not Kant's imperative, but then I believe Kant's imperative ultimately turns on similar concerns (the actual effects of any maxims that people may decide on).



Hobbes admittedly is not a great continentalist philosopher or scientist like Galileo or even Descartes, and not exactly hospitable to platonic or cartesian metaphysics, but a pragmatic, politically oriented thinker. And what is the Marxist state if not sort of a Hobbesian sovereign? The difference being that Marx never bothers arguing for covenants and economic entitlement, as far as I can tell; he instead is taking on Adam Smith (who also has a Hobbesian side). And of course with Stalin and Mao one gets to see what sorts of covenants the statist despots enforce: prison camps, or liquidation. Of course I don't think Marx was so bellicose as to suggest the "liquidation of reactionaries," or, eh, was he.


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Which is to say, Hobbes anticipates much Marxist thinking, but one, he is aware of the cooperation/non-cooperation issue--the prisoner's dilemma--some people are not willingly going to participate in civil society, if it's not in their best interest to do so; so coercion is a factor (Marx realizes this in a different form maybe). Hobbesianism also is thankfully free of the grand Hegelian abstractions which Marxism is chock full of (ie the bizarre conceptualizations of the commodity/value, and the dialectic itself). Hobbesian economics is not yet to the level of Smith's supply and demand model perhaps, but Hobbes "given" of equality-- men should more or less aim for equality of distribution of goods and resources-- is nearly as close to socialist ideals as Marxism is.

Ever heard of Lysander Spooner? His tragic realization was that the Hobbesian/Lockean/ Jeffersonian contract was never really enacted, except for a lucky few; that since the great majority of citizens never participated in the social contracting (or Constitution) in reality, America was for the most part a state of anarchy and perpetual warfare with various constabularies as Hobbes had suggested: Blackbeardland, regardless of a few wealthy robber barons or mercantilists. Not to say marxism is preferable to that anarcho-capitalism, but I think in some sense Spooner's insights (sort of a reversed Hobbesianism if you will) still hold: for many of us, this is Blackbeardland. (Vegass, baybe)

A Colonel Kurtz Comedy Hour?

Interesting critique of the au courant hegelianism and what passes for online "philosophy."

"Bertrand Russell, writing his History of Western Philosophy in '43 or so (it's a bit glib and abridged but not such a bad overview of modern philosophy), did not have much positive to say about Hegel's history philosophy nor his metaphysics. He more or less dismissed Hegel's logic (a logic which takes the elements of logic themselves to be sort of constituents of all reality? hah. physics and the natural sciences don't work that way, Herr Hegel) , and argues that the Wehrmacht itself would have found ample support in Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History. And the nazis found some related ideas in Nietzsche ( who more and more appears like a materialist Hegel Jr. sans the great dialectic).

Throughout Russell's critique of Hegel one notes his objections to the irrational and to the militaristic aspects of Hegelianism. Russell does a fairly convincing job demonstrating that Hegel was more a prussian type of scholar-officer, with more than a hint of proto-fascism to his character and writing, than some Sorbonne- like cafe-filosophe or leftist intellectual. Yet the cafe-filosophes and marxists never tire of invoking all the old Hegelian jargon; indeed, the Hegelian militarism and heroics seems to form part of the irrational allure of postmodernism and of marxism. Who needs all those boring Englishmen going on about contracts, sensations and cause, fallibility, etc. when there is Der Geist to attend to. Hegelianism, even when attenuated by french aesthetes or orthodox marxists, is nothing if not romantic."





Kurtz