Barack Obama's homie, David Brooks

Alex Cockburn recently penned some thoughts on Obama's supposed shift to the right:

"...one of the New York Times’s extensive stable of neo-conservative columnists, David Brooks, was fretting that a statement Obama had made after Bush’s Knesset speech did indeed constitute “appeasement”, indicating he had drifted off into “Noam Chomskyland”. Obama’s sin had been to say that “it’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to build a new Lebanese consensus,” focusing on electoral reform, an end to a corrupt patronage system and the promotion of an equitable economy.

So anguished was Brooks by these dread prospects that he phoned Obama who promptly furnished answers resoundingly mollifying the columnist’s suspicions. According to Brooks, Obama said that “in some ways he’d be tougher than the Bush administration”, doing more, to take one specific example, to arm the Lebanese military. (This schedules a bloodbath in Lebanon in Year One or Two of the Obama administration.) Obama’s bottom line to Brooks was straight-up Caesarism: “The [U.S.] generals are light-years ahead of the civilians. They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.”

Representin', y'all

Those few dissenting anti-B.O. voices on KOS (now mostly moderated, banned, deleted) do not appear to be so off-the-mark after all. Obama's response to Bush's Knesset speech featured other interesting allusions which Cockburn neglected to mention, including a positive reference to those two GOP hepcats, Reagan and Nixon: "Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power - including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy - to pressure countries like Iran and Syria." Contingencies doesn't really trip on that, but it would seem that many an old-school Demo might.

Americans should expect General Obama to appear a few weeks after his electoral victory in 11/2008. (insta-qualification: though one might object to Cockburn's occasional Leninist aspects {tho' Cockburn seems une petite romantique for marxist orthodoxy), A.C. did, with assistance from quite a few respected scientists, point out corp-shill Al Gore's shoddy research in regards to global warming. Of course that hasn't stopped Obama from embracing Gore's pop-green agenda....(sponsored by Chevy, Chevron, Occi, and many others)

Oratory of Power


In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.
- Friedrich Nietzsche




Papal mass at Yankee stadium (the "cathedral").

And the underside of power, ala Jameson:

"Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship. It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project. Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror....."

Buchanan's thesis

Pat Buchanan--not one of Contingencies' fave pundits--recently produced a tome which has created a bit of a stir among the east coast literati. PJB suggests that WWII was an unnecessary exercise for the most part, and that the real culprit behind the tragedies of the 20th century was none other than Winston Churchill. To a certain degree, this is not, prima facie, such an outrageous claim. Tho' lacking the time (and energy) to engage in some lengthy quasi-Spenglerian analysis of the causal factors leading to the Sausage Grinder circa 1914 to 1945, I would advise the bright Biff and Bunny's out in ConsumerLand (budding history buffs, like most petite-booj-wah) to read between the lines of the official Boneheadburg Jr. College history text, and soon, yass, soon Biff will realize that the Brits were definitely aiding and abetting the wolf-packs of the Kaiser, and of the brownshirts, and finally those of Der Fuhrer (indeed, Contingencies includes the sinking of RMS Lusitania on the Conspiracy Inc. laundry list).

At the same time, any reasonable non-nihilist should take issue with the Buchanan sort of isolationism (or pop-isolationism. Even that much maligned do-gooder Woodrow Wilson took issue with isolationism back in the dark days of 1917-18). Blog-lands' favorite cynic du jour, Christopher Hitchens, takes issue with Buchanan's thesis. Hitch. vs PJB and we lean towards the oxford dweeb rather than that old Reaganite orator, PJB, tho' with some reservations. Here's some of PJB's sancto-speak:

PJB: Morality — Trotskyite vs. Christian
(by Patrick J. Buchanan)

"""""Did Hitler’s crimes justify the Allies’ terror-bombing of Germany?
Indeed they did, answers Christopher Hitchens in his Newsweek response to my new book, “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War“: “The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.”

Atheist, Trotskyite and newborn neocon, Hitchens embraces the morality of lex talionis: an eye for an eye. If Germans murdered women and children, the British were morally justified in killing German women and children.

According to British historians, however, Churchill ordered the initial bombing of German cities on his first day in office, the very first day of the Battle of France, on May 10, 1940.

After the fall of France, Churchill wrote Lord Beaverbrook, minister of air
production: “When I look round to see how we can win the war, I see that there is only one sure path … an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”

“Exterminating attack,” said Churchill. By late 1940, writes historian Paul Johnson, “British bombers were being used on a great and increasing scale to kill and frighten the German civilian population in their homes.” “The adoption of terror bombing was a measure of Britain’s desperation,” writes Johnson. “So far as air strategy was concerned,” adds British historian A.J.P. Taylor, “the British outdid German frightfulness first in theory, later in practice, and a nation which claimed to be fighting for a moral cause gloried in the extent of its immoral acts.”

The chronology is crucial to Hitchens’ case.

Late 1940 was a full year before the mass deportations from the Polish ghettos to Treblinka and Sobibor began. Churchill had ordered the indiscriminate bombing of German cities and civilians before the Nazis had begun to execute the Final Solution.
By Hitchens’ morality and logic, Germans at Nuremberg might have asserted a right to kill women and children because that is what the British were doing to their women and children.

After the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945, Churchill memoed his air chiefs: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.”

Churchill concedes here what the British had been about in Dresden. Under Christian and just-war theory, the deliberate killing of civilians in wartime is forbidden. Nazis were hanged for such war crimes.

Did the Allies commit acts of war for which we hanged Germans?

When we recall that Josef Stalin’s judges sat beside American and British judges at Nuremberg, and one of the prosecutors there was Andrei Vishinsky, chief prosecutor in Stalin’s show trails, the answer has to be yes.

While Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were surely guilty of waging aggressive war in September 1939, Stalin and his comrades had joined the Nazis in the rape of Poland, and had raped Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, as well. Scores of thousands of civilians in the three Baltic countries were murdered.
Yet, at Nuremberg, Soviets sat in judgment of their Nazi accomplices, and had the temerity to accuse the Nazis of the Katyn Forest massacre of the Polish officer corps that the Soviets themselves had committed.

Americans fought alongside British soldiers in a just and moral war from 1941 to 1945. But we had as allies a Bolshevik monster whose hands dripped with the blood of millions of innocents murdered in peacetime. And to have Stalin’s judges sit beside Americans at Nuremberg gave those trials an aspect of hypocrisy that can never be erased.

At Nuremberg, Adm. Erich Raeder was sentenced to prison for life for the invasion of neutral Norway. Yet Raeder’s ships arrived 24 hours before British ships and marines of an operation championed by Winston Churchill.

The British had planned to violate Norwegian neutrality first and seize Norwegian ports to deny Germany access to the Swedish iron ore being transshipped through them. For succeeding where Churchill failed, Raeder was condemned as a war criminal and sent to prison.

The London Charter of the International Military Tribunal decided that at Nuremberg only the crimes of Axis powers would be prosecuted and that among those crimes would be a newly invented “crimes against humanity.” This decree was issued Aug. 8, 1945, 48 hours after we dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima and 24 hours before we dropped the second on Nagasaki.

We and the British judiciously decided not to prosecute the Nazis for the bombing of London and Coventry.

It was an understandable decision, and one that surely Gen. Curtis LeMay concurred in, as LeMay had boasted at war’s end, “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

After the war, a lone Senate voice arose to decry what was taking place at Nuremberg as “victor’s justice.” Ten years later, a young colleague would declare the late Robert A. Taft “A Profile in Courage” for having spoken up against ex post facto justice. The young senator was John F. Kennedy.""""""

Hitchens may be a bit callous: Buchanan, on the other hand, tends to the absurd. It is rather absurd to suppose the Brits would not retaliate with, like, as heavy bombing and invasion as was feasible at the time (tho' yeah Dresden was probably not phunn. Nor was Nagasaki. C'est le guerre). So Hitch. at least scores by noting Buchanan's own myopia: PJB complains about the Allies' bombing while not bothering to mention the liquidation of jewish, polish, roma, czechs, russian, POWs, and even non-nazi germans. The drah-mah may be trite at this stage, yet at the same time, stare at some pics of the mass graves, and like , er, forward your packet of Ted Kacynski to PJB's addy.................

Freeman Dyson on The Dogma of Global Warming


Ah some clear-headed thinking from Doc Dyson guaran-f-n-teed to irk the faithful of the Church of Al-Gore-in-the-Field:

"""My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models."""""



Dyson

"All America is an asylum.""

Ez in da house ("with usura.....")

""""By the mid-1950's various influential figures and magazines were campaigning for Pound's release. After 13 years confinement, Pound's treason indictment was dismissed on 18 April 1958...On 30 June he set sail for Italy, giving the Fascist salute to journalists when he reached Naples, and declaring "all America is an asylum.""




"Exitus acta probat"

Evangelicals, Inc.


B.O. representin' for old-time religion:

""""" Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama promised a more active approach to faith-based social programs on Tuesday in a bid to bolster his support among evangelical and religious voters.

Obama visited a community ministry in a conservative region of the election battleground state of Ohio to unveil a plan to reinvigorate faith-based community programs first pioneered by President George W. Bush.

The Illinois senator, who will face Republican John McCain in November's presidential election, said he would put more money and emphasis on strengthening the link between government and community faith programs.


BILLY SUNDAY?

"The fact is, the challenges we face today -- from saving our planet to ending poverty -- are simply too big for government to solve alone," Obama said. "We need an all-hands-on-deck approach."

McCain and Obama are gearing up for a pitched battle for evangelical support in November's election. Neither candidate has inspired strong enthusiasm in the religious community, normally a core Republican bloc. """""


Americuns will be asked to decide on their choice of protestant Rapture, links oder rechts: Obama, and Reverend Wright, Phleger, Rev. Oprah, Jackson, Sharpton etc. OR McCain, and Rev. Hagee, and the rest of the GOP biblethumpers-- Or the Contingencies write-in, Senor N.O.T.A. Halle-loo-jah (see HL Mencken's prognostications regarding a calvinist regime for details).

Kant's 3rd

Few people who have made it through Kant's Critique of Pure Reason would deny that the 3rd Antinomy--in brief, the Freedom/Nature dialectic--possesses a certain Beethoven-like sublimity. Kant holds the strictly determined laws of nature (i.e. Newtonian mechanics--Einstein himself claimed he merely modified Newton's concepts, slightly--and a few supposed sub-atomic anomalies should be considered negligible), and freedom (i.e. human intentionality) to be irreconcilable and dependent on two separate concepts of causality. Some have gone as far as to argue that the Big 3rd really leads to Hegelian dialectic. There are reasons, however, to object to the 3rd Antinomy (and really to much of Kant--anyone care to provide a necessary argument for the synthetic a priori?), regardless of the continentalist philosophers' traditional reverence for the 3rd.

The freedom/nature dichotomy does seem to suggest a type of archaic dualism (and there are more than a few Cartesian aspects to the 1st critique, as in the Deduction of the Categories). Humans are economic creatures: not merely robots (nor primates--as even that talented clown Marx granted), yet nonetheless their acts are determined to a large extent (ie, like as determined as McBauerlumpen heading off to the lunch counter at noon). The abstraction of “Freedom” is also itself certainly questionable; does Kant mean human consciousness as a whole, or intention, or---some transcendent Geist, perhaps? We here at Contingencies suggest that by "Freedom" (Freiheit) Kant intended, er, something like “intention”, though hardly anyone, at least in psychology or cognitive science, would argue that intention stands apart from humans' biological and neurological endowment. Moreover, determinism has not ever really been refuted; if anything, genetics and bio-chemistry tend to confirm deterministic views---though the apparent "anomaly" of human consciousness remains an issue, at least for some (Jefferson sort of sums up the freedom/determinism issue thusly: "Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice." Rational, and with rights, maybe TJ, but animal nonetheless). Theists and theistically-inclined philosophers, or immaterialist-mystics of some sort, of course continue to make transcendental claims for intention and consciousness ("Free will" remains one of the favorite terms of biblethumpers). As model and metaphor, the 3rd has a definite power, but one could read that metaphorical power as somewhat deceptive, if not dangerous.


Nothin' but Meat (Caliban)

Starting at least with Wm. James, consciousness was identified with the brain, instead of the metaphysicians' Mind, or Res Cogitans, Idea, etc. That’s not to say that James or the S-R people, and the behaviorists solved the problem of intention, but one doesn't simply toss the entire tradition of empirical psychology out the window (unless one is a renowned parisian postmodernist perhaps). Kantian or Cartesian views of the Ego/Mind/Self are not very prevalent except for a few philosophers, theologians or maybe people like Chomsky. But even Chomsky asserted that his language faculty forms part of the "biological endowment" of humans. The Chomster's rationalism is not equivalent to the Kantian or Cartesian ghost.

There can hardly be any doubt that consciousness is predicated on the biochemistry of the brain. Moreover, economic and biological reality conditions that consciousness: lobotomies, drugs, alcohol, sex, even food, demonstrate “external realism,” as Searle refers to it: nature has a causal relation to our thinking, to consciousness, regardless of metaphysicians' doubts (or the doubts of the Catholic church).

The 3rd Antinomy may work as a model, or explanatory hypothesis, or interesting conceptual poetry of some type. But the freedom/nature dichotomy is not a fact in the sense that, say, evolution is a fact, or hunger is a fact, or that gravity is fact, or the physics of electricity is fact. There are semantic problems with the very word "freedom." What does the word “freedom” really refer to in Kant’s 3rd Ant.? The freedom of humans to act in certain ways? Freedom is a quality or attribute; not an object in the sense the brain is an object. We say someone is free. But one could not really point to the freedom itself. Freedom is a strange word, and concept. It describes some situation, a state of a person, a state of affairs; it means something like, not bound, not encumbered, but those terms are not so definable either. (Maria has a sensation of hunger, and decides to go to lunch: her decision may seem freely chosen to some extent, but she certainly does not choose whether she is hungry or not.) And you’ll find, if you work at it, that much of Kantian metaphysics has that problem– the terminology does not point to anything that can be readily defined; it can be conceptually described but not really correlated with any existing thing. Even as a philosopher Kant offers few if any convincing arguments, even as weighty as say Descartes "cogito" (read as psychology (proto-cognitive science, perhaps) Kant's Critique has a certain power, as long as one modifies the jargon--"transcendental" and "noumenal", categories, intuition, the understanding, the "ideality" of space and time, etc. become brain functions. Old school metaphysicians would not care for that, but that may be the only way to salvage it).

Regardless of BF Skinner's faults and oversights, Skinner’s critique of “mentalism” (which he thought philosophers, theologians, and most belle-lettrists were generally guilty of) should at least be considered, until cognitivists and brain scientists begin to offer some convincing accounts of thinking, intention, language, perception and the knowledge-accumulation process itself (---and Skinner's crony WVO Quine also had problems with the Idea idea---as well as essences, abstract entities, a prioricity, etc.). Indeed, as BF realized, Freedom, and a naive Freedom-fetish (rather common to both right and left), lies at the root of many social, economic, and, one might argue, environmental problems.

Prevarication, Kossack style


Many Democrats routinely invoke the Constitution as the supreme Criteria that all Americans must agree to, and, yes, we should respect Constitutional and secular principles, it seems, at least on pragmatic grounds: we can't all be Nietzsches dreaming of the arrival of Uebermensch (and Uebermenschism, even of the watered down L-Ron sort, is not so conducive to mental health). That respect extends to the 4th Amendment, the stoner-leftists' favorite chant: they are generally worried about being busted for dope, and pot shakedowns do occasionally violate the 4th, unfortunately (When it comes to meth or crack, violate away Ossifers). We should not picture the Constitution as carved on marble slabs, however. Anyone who knows something about the modern Law business knows that the real maxim of American law (and arguably English common law) equates to something like "maxims (even Constitutional ones) can and should be broken when it is expedient or profitable to do so."

Here's a deeep thought regarding the sacred 4th from one of the DailyKOS teamsters:


"""""Your telephone number pops up several times on the call list of someone the FBI believe is involved with Al Qaeda. The FBI go to the FISC, and ask for a warrant to wiretap your telephone. The wiretap reveals nothing about terrorism - turns out they were wrong number calls - but the FBI do hear you talking about who will bring the weed to your backyard barbeque.

Based on that, the FBI get a warrant to raid your home on the day of the barbeque, and in they swoop, charging you with possession with intent to distribute. That's a felony.

"What gives you the right to storm into my back yard?" you ask. The FBI agent presents you with the warrant, and its affidavit, and you see that they've been wiretapping you. "What gives you the right to spy on my phone calls?" you demand.

"We have a FISA warrant," the agent answers. And off you go to trial.

At trial, your attorney moves to exclude the search warrant that let them into your backyard, on grounds that you're not a terrorist, there is no conceivable evidence to suggest otherwise, thus no FISA warrant should have been issued, thus the wiretap is illegal, and all information gained from it is "fruit of the poisoned tree." But there's a problem:

Not even your trial judge can see the FISA affidavit. It is classified, "sources and methods" information. The prosecutor can show the judge that a FISA warrant was indeed issued, but that's as far as it goes.

Because you can't see the factual allegations underlying the FISA warrant - not even the trial judge can see that - you cannot challenge the validity of that warrant. It's not reviewable. Not at trial. Not on appeal. Not ever.""""""





Heh. Note the well-placed pot reference: a deception tactic, and what I term the "bogus hypothetical" fallacy, typical of many Kossacks (and paranoiacs, links und rechts. Some call it the "what if" fallacy, and it's similar to "ignorantia elenchi" pseudo-arguments). Yes, the FBI, now armed with FISA, and the PatAct, will be cracking down on some suburban pot smokers, as well as Al Qaeda! Pure hyperbole. The point was that given extreme circumstances (i.e. muslim terrorism), some tweaking of the 4th might be justifiable, and the Dems agreed to that, as RF Kennedy had agreed to similar bendings of the rules back in the 50s (and one needn't love Annie Coulter to know that American leftists did tend to ignore the real dangers of Stalinism).

The rousing rendition of the "4th Chant" in regards to the Patriot Act thus seems rather ironic if not pathetic. DailyKOS has a reputation for a sort of moderate leftism, and it was moderate leftists (Hillary, Pelosi, Kerry, Feinstein, etc etc) who joined forces with the GOP and supported the PatAct (and have continued to do so): FISA’s a Dem policy (brought about under James Carter, that snakey baptist do-gooder), hardly less J-Edgarish than Nixonism. Kid Obama hisself voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act.

We will grant this person is not entirely misguided. The PatAct sort of snooping does perhaps endanger liberty, as do warrantless searches (which we should reject). Moreover, when the authori-tays charge an ordinary citizen with a crime, he should know what the charges consist of, and what the evidence consists of, and what the warrant was based upon. Yet Al Qaeda and many terrorists are not ordinary citizens. The FISA warrants are used with suspected foreign criminals, not US citizens, unless they have some odd connection to the foreign suspects (and foreigners do not have same rights under 4th either--a point lost on the Sally Fields Union). Moreover precedent exists (as the Kossack legal-beagle should realize) for this type of scenario: when the Feds get a wiretap to bust the mafia for transportation of heroin or whores, and hear them plotting (or reminiscing about) the deaths of their rivals, they can move on the murder case[s].

Those of us who respect the 4th may not care for that, but better preventing brutal crimes and death via a bit of Constitution-tweaking--even snooping--instead of ranting about precious liberties while Sendero Luminoso or the Hezbollah or Doomsday baptists move in next door and start to plan for the revolution of the proletariat (or jihad, or rapture). There's no 4th Amendment in North Korea or Nigeria: be assured of that.

while you shop contingencies, enjoy "on green dolphin street" (getz ...). Don't fergit to put that Cont. Tee in the cart

The Ecclesiastix Gang (Jimmy Madison nostalgia hour, continued)


Father Madison's Sermon:

"""Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects. [James Madison, letter to William Bradford, Jr., January 1774]



What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not. [Pres. James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance, addressed to the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1785]



Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. [James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance, addressed to the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1785]""""

Res ipsa Loquitur. Few if any contemporary American politicians possess the spine (or the communication skills) which would allow them to proclaim such thoughts. (Unlike Demopublicans, the Founding Fathers were not "accommodators"). Secular, Madisonian principles (not to say the First Amendment) thus seem to permit civil unions of any type (heterosexual, same-sex, or otherwise), regardless of the Founding Fathers' own view of the "morality" of such unions (TJ and Madison, no Hucklebees, most likely had a taste of european decadence during their sojourns in Pre-Rev Paris: Ben Franklin (pal of Voltaire) certainly had, and rumor is Ben paid a visit to a brothel or two).


Can ah, ah get a witness? A men


The Founders love of liberty (not so great in all respects, like the economic) would seemingly take precedence over any supposed piety: better Ellen DeG. and her gal legally hitched than any imaginable Huckocracy--tho' that's not to say Ellen's not obnoxious as F, and part of the Ho-wood machine: a dyke with a gift for gab does not an Alan Turing make (Turing, father of the algorithm, cracked the nazi radar code (Enigma), and was queer, reportedly (as was his mad mentor Wittgenstein, reportedly)). However obnoxious a Turing might seem (and he does, in some ways) he prevented a great deal of damage: the crack of Enigma was arguably one of the key turning points in the allies' fortunes. British law even in 50's still contained a few quasi-theological statutes, and the authori-tays prosecuted Turing for "sodomy" more or less (later he ---reportedly---committed suicide via a cynanide-laced apple. We here at Contingencies suggest Moider as a possibility, perhaps with soviet (or Oxbridge-marxist) involvement).

The noun "Marriage" does traditionally have a theological meaning (and heterosexual meaning), however, and churches, whether one supports them or not, have the right to bless or not bless (or grant) a marriage. But theologians do not have the right to dictate civil law, nor is it simply a matter of a vote, taken mostly from baptist zombies (a point lost on some of the zealous anti-same-sex union crowd). Maybe eliminating the word "marriage" from all state and fed. documents might assist the forces of secularization.

Reading a bit of MadisonSpeak, however quaint, should remind us that opposition to ecclesiastical oppression and religious dogma (as JM and his pal TJ were so opposed) does not imply opposition to political order, and a traditional, secular sort of conservativism. By disliking preachers (or priests, imams, rabbis, etx.) one does not thereby join the sans-cullottes (or, in our day, the marxistas (and the Democrats have boo-coo marxist ties: they are the backroom boys (and gals) now (refer to UC professoriat for examples)). The cool reason and structure that characterizes Madisonian prose has obviously mostly vanished, whether in terms of mainstream journalism, academic writing, or blogland: calibans of links und rechts surround us (some even quote Nietzsche and Darwin).

Politics of Satire

“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.” (Swift)


American consumers obviously love their comedy. They are not much interested in the subtle satire and wit of Voltaire or Swift (or even say Vonnegut, sort of a stoned swift); they are interested in the Simpsons, SouthPark, Colbert, SNL. The stars of Friends, or Seinfeld, Cheers, etc--hardly Voltaires, they--all became millionaires owing to America's comedy addiction. In blogland, many ostensibly political blogs--DailyKOS, TPM, the Onion--specialize in a sort of biting humor--Hunter S Thompson meets Sandra Bernhardt or something. Satire, and comedy as a whole, offers escape to the Herd--they prefer a Feste du jour to some gloomy boor like Macbeth. Similarly, many cynics would rather watch Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin as Annie Oakley, instead of Ms Palin doing Annie Oakley (tho' Annie with a lot of back-up).


Satire, however, functions as a type of deception more often than not. Fey may effectively caricature Palin, as Ackroyd caricatured Nixon and many others back in the day, but the comic mockery does not really address any specific policies or ideas. The comic actor's merely a speaking cartoon, in effect: the comedian-cartoonist often produces powerful reactions and responses, especially among the tribe of the Gullible. That satire is not "true"--in the sense that a historical record is true--does not imply a need for censoring satirical writing or broadcasting, but at some point cartoon politics often verge on a type of nihilism: the jokes and wit-contests--or "snark" as some of the wannabe Voltaires now term it--replace any sort of serious or even semi-serious discussion. Much easier it is for hicks or college-boy hipsters to crack jokes about the bailout and depict the Demopublicans as corrupt buffoons than to discuss credit default swaps.

Students could do worse than read Candide or Cat's Cradle (at least after their history and science lessons), or Cela, the spanish Voltaire (nearly). The great satirist does reveal the nasty business in a way the historian does not (or the preacher). But the Onion is no Candide, or at best it's like endless mini-Candide episodes. Neither is SNL. Everything is parodied and ridiculed (parody sort of the stock in trade of satire, though again parody falls in the set of satire, and satire in the set of comedy....verstehen sie??). One sees this parody-mania on the DNCocrat sites such as DailyKOS as well, where it takes a more gonzo form. Why discuss the very troubling problem of misrepresentation in regards to WMDs, when Cheney or Lieberman can be put in a dress and made to dance across the boards, or McCain stampted with 666 on his forehead??

Facts, evidence, rational analysis are pushed aside, and the insta-Voltaires take aim (and they are assisted with squads of cartoonists, or video-spinners armed with powerful graphix arsenals, quite beyond that of any berlin dadaists). The cartoon itself will work as a weapon, and a weapon of misinformation (Freud had some interesting if typically vague thoughts on comedy as a type of weapon, and jokes in particular). Pop-culture as a whole--including pop-satire and irony, endless comedy, pop-musical noise, movies, schports, fads, etc.--tends to demolish empirical accuracy and rational political discussion, whether in the comments boxes of KOS or the Fray, or prime-time. That may be what the Producers want--comedy moves their product.

"Liberal Fascism"

"""Youth politics—like populism generally—is the politics of the tantrum and the hissy fit."" (Goldberg).

Goldberg's tome, "Liberal Fascism," has created a stir in some quarters of blog-land. Most reviews have been negative (not surprisingly, since more reviewers tend to be liberal). Goldberg makes the bold claim that modern liberalism follows as much from Mussolini and Hitler as from, say, the Founding Fathers, Locke, etc. That's not an entirely new or innovative thesis: some economists of the "Austrian school" had suggested as much after WWII (fascism and communism are both statist religions: totalitarianism manifests itself in a sort of Janus-faced Hegelianism, according to the Hayekian sorts).

Goldberg does make a few interesting points, however obvious. One point concerns free speech. Fascists, like their ideological cousins in the Bolsheviks, started things rolling by controlling the press, and in effect eliminating dissent (and it might be recalled that Lenin and the Bolsheviki had no problems cutting deals with the most militaristic prussians). That's sort of an obvious, run-of-the-mill Orwellian theme some might aver. And it is. Few topics are as boring as citizens arguing about free speech, rights to free expression, the First Amendment, dissent, yada yada yada. At the same time, perhaps few topics remain as critical as communication rights (some of the blogocheks now call that "transparency").



Other important rights depend on that foundation-stone of free speech (and a free press). Democracy it might argued, relies on open communication, whether in terms of letters to the editor, academic writing, or blogs. In Blogland that freedom to speak one's mind is continually under attack, and as Goldberg rightly notes, it is "liberals" who now do most of the attacking. Attacks on free speech now assume various forms in blogland, from being troll-rated, moderated, or banned for say making a few comments in support of a Hillary or McCain, or taking issue with some rabid Darwinian (especially ones incapable of perceiving the rather unsavory implications of strict Darwinism) Simply proclaim that you will NOT cast a vote for Barack Obama, and you are no longer welcome at many sites, and/or have a swastika (virtual or real) posted next to your link. That said, free speech and communication rights should not be confused with a right to shriek pop-marxist slogans or punk-rock-like defamation at all times (the usual bad-blog fare: tho' hick-conservative often is as guilty as the zombiecrat in that regard).

""""This is one of the main reasons I’ve written this book: to puncture the smug self-confidence that simply by virtue of being liberal one is also virtuous. At the same time, I need to repeat that I am not playing the movie backward. Today’s liberals aren’t the authors of past generations’ mistakes any more than I’m responsible for the callousness of some conservative who championed states’ rights for the wrong reason well before I was born. No, the problems with liberalism today reside in liberalism today. The relevance of the past is that unlike the conservative who has wrestled with his history to make sure he does not repeat it, liberals see no need to do anything of the sort."""" (pg.317)

One needn't agree with Goldberg's terms or exact argument (for one, I do not think "liberal" adequately describes the zany paranoids of DailyKOS or DU. "Insane" seems a bit more appropriate--as with this stooge's daily drivel). Goldberg's criticism of Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt seems a bit unwarranted, really. He's not so wrong-headed, however, about some of the scummier, violent radicals of the 60s New left, whether Weather Underground or Black Panthers (sober protests of the Vietnam war carried on the American tradition of free speech. Blowing up Brinks trucks in the name of Revolution didn't: there's a great difference between Bertrand Russell and Abbie Hoffman). A mob is a mob, whether it's for Mussolini, or Barack Obama.

Apart from the many generalizations (and occasional religious tone), Goldberg's essential point relates to that time-honored political theme of hypocrisy. The Kossack at once insists on liberal principles--Due Process, transparency, dissent, communication rights, etc.---yet when challenged he turns around and denies them to anyone who disagrees with him, or anyone who is not a par-tay member (that is the related theme of ID politics). Like some wannabe-KGB or Cheka-man, the liberal blogochek remains convinced he does the right thing--the virtuous thing--as he eliminates freedom, rational debate, and dissent, and sends the troublemakers (Trolls!) off to the gulags of the iggy bin. DailyKOS, and its countless spinoffs: that is the new McCarthyism, a cyber-McCarthyism.

Stan da Man.

"I shall not vote for Sen. Obama" (Christopher Hitchens on ID Politics)

A few months ago, Master Hitchens offered some fairly sound reasons to question B.O.'s candidacy. Agreeing with CH on this (ie. not voting for B.O.) does not imply, however, that one signs on with McMaverick and the GOPers at the Scottsdale Country Club of the Mind (the usual zombie-crat indoctrinated with the "bubblegum liberalism" of HuffPo or KOS of course insists it does imply that). Were the scheisse to hit the fan, though, most rational wights would definitely prefer Commander McCain at the helm than Kid Obama.

While respecting and sharing Hitchens' secular perspective, we are not that enamored with HitchensSpeak (his Carlyle-esque justifications for the Iraqi War effort on occasion seemed a bit too breezy). Hitchens has a grasp of Jeffersonian principles, however: and unlike most zombie-crats (or GOPers) he realizes that Jefferson, Madison, & Co were not just some country-boy fiddlers and farm-boys but filosophes on a par with Voltaire and Hume (HuffPo gals don't know Hume from their hairdressers, of course). Hitchens also reminds us that authentic politics transcends the identity concerns and endless frat-boy food fights common to left and right blogs: it's not about race. It's about BO's record and experience, at least partially.

""" Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets . . . what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified "white" candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?

I shall not vote for Sen. Obama and it will not be because he -- like me and like all of us -- carries African genes. And I shall not be voting for Mrs. Clinton, who has the gall to inform me after a career of overweening entitlement that there is "a double standard" at work for women in politics; and I assure you now that this decision of mine has only to do with the content of her character. We will know that we have put this behind us when -- as with the vowel -- we have outgrown and forgotten the original prejudice."""""

'Nuff said.

Holy Moral-Assay-Processes Batman (24/7 Stuckey's, cont.)

Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
(Ambrose Bierce)


Most everyone in Consumerland has an opinion on "ethics", or what they take to be ethics. A biblethumper has an opinion, as does the anti-biblethumper. Most arm-chair ethicists, however, overlook one crucial starting point: language. Actions (say robbing an old lady in the street) are not words, or sentences. That robbery looks "unethical" (and certainly illegal) to some, yet maybe not to others (say the robber's cronies). When someone offers a moral or ethical assessment of the action in words ("robbing that old lady was wrong/evil/unethical"), problems arise. Yes, let's grant "an old woman was robbed" works as a factual statement. The meaning (or at least event being pointed to) seems fairly obvious. When someone also predicates "Evil" (or wrong, or unethical) to that fact statement "A woman was robbed, and that was "evil"--the meaning is no longer so obvious. What does the sentence "robbing an old lady is evil" point to? It is not a factual statement (if a fact at all) in the way "an old lady was robbed" is a fact statement. That's the starting point of ethical analysis (or what philosophers call second order ethics rather than first order ethics [ie sunday school exclamations--that is so wrong!]).

The positivist tradition (starting with say Hume--tho' also implied by Darwinian views, and arguably by Nietzsche) holds that moral statements ("Robbing old ladies is evil") do not point to facts, or verifiable truths, and thus are meaningless (that's Carnap's updating of Hume). AS Hume pointed out, there are no contradictions involved in conflicting moral statements: i.e. X says the robbery was wrong. Y, however, knows the lady (say she's the widow of a mafia don), and says, she deserved it, whether considered illegal or not. Or say the robber has a family to feed, etc.--the Valjean meme. "Good" (say wife and kids fed, given new clothes, etc) could conceivably come out of a robbery, as many a novelist knows). There is a contradiction, however, in saying that the lady was robbed and not robbed. So it seems Hume is correct in pointing out that moral statements (normative statements) are not truth functional: they are expressions, and more akin to evaluative preferences (though of course the Law does seem to suggest the act is wrong, at least according to the social consensus, or opinions of judges---yet morality has never been a matter of consensus, or judicial opinion).

Moralistic Bubbas of all types often interpret Hume's questioning of ethics (including the famed denial of obligation or duty--"you cannot extract an ought from an is") as a type of nihilism. It is not. It is actually a rather profound insight into the nature of language, and dare one say Reality. (Someone who reads Hume as saying something like "intellectuals must reject morality" begs the question of what the word "morality" means, and misses the entire point of Hume's analysis: that's about like Jerry Falwell on crack).


The usual Bubba (whether links oder rechts) thus generally forgets that his moral-belch (Karl Rove is Evil!) involves all sorts of assumptions which he could not establish. (Had Moron read like even the cliffsnotes to Bentham he would have realized that.) Does that suggestion of Evil mean, just not according to one's own taste, or Evil in objective sense? Is it a matter of a vote? No. The Kossack wants to say Rove is Evil, regardless of what vox populi says (since Rove might be considered a hero, like in Texass). Really, Rove's actions--even the IWE--could conceivably result in the furthering of good in the long run (ah doubt it): a rather complex "consequentialist" point that most naive arm-chair philosophasters also overlook (Chris Hitchens, sort of Hume-lite, has noted that at times in regards to IWE: liberals can't really prove things would have been better if the USA had not gone into Iraq).

The usual Kossack judgement-belch relies on some Idea of justice or fairness which obviously doesn’t appear on say the periodic table: it’s intuitive, not observable or axiomatic (perhaps some would-be Platonist would say Justice is axiomatic. Yet they cannot generally prove that. There is, admittedly, an issue related to Justice regarding "rights": let's hear any necessary argument for "rights"). First order ethical statements are expressions: of emotion, of subjective desire, of taste. (though even that raises problems--related as much to psychology as to logic and language. Are humans even free? Or to what extent. Maybe the robber was driven, biologically and genetically, to rob the old lady).

Any time someone offers moral assessments (as apart from say just legal definitions) he will run into the Humean fact-value problem again (of course the Catholic church, or Plato, offers an alternative to Hume, or utilitarianism, or Darwin. But that's all a bit murky and difficult and Bubba wouldn't care for the implications). Bubba, at least a Demo one, wants to suggest that values (say, BO is “better” or superior, or nicer than McCain) are somehow factual, or objective, but he could not prove it whatsoever (as Darwin hisself suggested as well). The best Bubba could get is Obama will serve his purposes and further his own subjective goals (hardly shared by all) better than McCain will--or so he believes. Taking it one step further, the arm-chair moralist insists that his own quasi-religious realm of moral Truths be viewed as absolute when he can't define the word "moral" (or Truth for that matter).

Barack Obama: I've chosen La Gran Puta de Babilon to help find a VEEP




The Kantian gambit: "Skepticism, in a word, is not a resting place; it is a propaedeutic. It has a cathartic function: It purges the mind of delusions of grandeur; it brings men down from the clouds and sets them firmly on their feet ... Far from inhibiting action, it frees men from the metaphysical mazes in which they have been wandering and enables them to contemplate w/out distress 'the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe; though they are not able, by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them..."

Rome vs Israel (Nietzsche, continued)


Following the current PC fashion, cafe-Nietzscheans insist that Nietzsche was not anti-semitic. This is not entirely accurate. Nietzsche may have balked at the extreme right of Bismarck's era (unlike Wagner, who did sign on---one hopes both FN and RW would have objected to a Himmler sort of final solution, but that is not entirely clear), yet anti-semitic passages can be found a plenty in Nietzsche's writing. This section from "The Genealogy of Morals" indicates quite clearly that Nietzsche was not only attacking Christianity but the Jews as well, "the priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence":

"""How, on the other hand, did the Jews feel about Rome? A thousand signs tell us; but it suffices to recall the Apocalypse of John, the most wanton of all literary outbursts that vengefulness has on its conscience. (One should not underestimate the profound consistency of the Christian instinct when it signed this book of hate with the name of the disciple of love, the same disciple to whom it attributed that amorous-enthusiastic Gospel: there is a piece of truth in this, however much literary counterfeiting might have been required to provide it.) For the Romans were the strong and noble, and nobody stronger and nobler has yet existed on earth or even been dreamed of: every remnant of them, every inscription gives delight, if only one divines what it was that was there at work. The Jews, on the contrary, were the priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence, in whom there dwelt an unequalled popular-moral genius: one only has to compare similarly gifted nations—the Chinese or the Germans, for instance—with the Jews, to sense which is of the first and which of the fifth rank. [4]

Which of them has won for the present, Rome or Judea? There can be no doubt: consider to whom one bows down in Rome itself today, as if they were the epitome of all the highest values [5]—and not only in Rome but over almost half the earth, everywhere that man has become tame or desires to become tame: three Jews, as is known, and one Jewess (Jesus of Nazareth, the fisherman Peter, the rug weaver Paul, and the mother of the aforementioned Jesus, named Mary). This is very remarkable: Rome has been defeated beyond all doubt. [6]

There was, to be sure, in the Renaissance an uncanny and glittering reawakening of the classical ideal, of the noble mode of evaluating all things; Rome itself, oppressed by the new superimposed Judaized Rome that presented the aspect of an ecumenical synagogue and was called the "church," stirred like one awakened from seeming death: but Judea immediately triumphed again, thanks to that thoroughly plebeian (German and English) ressentiment movement called the Reformation, and to that which was bound to arise from it, the restoration of the church—the restoration too of the ancient sepulchral repose of classical Rome.[7]. . ."""

Really one tires of the grand generalizations. Notwithstanding the typical bombast, we should note the attack on the Book of Revelation. That's the somewhat rational side of Nietzsche creeping out (a rarity). Jefferson, hardly the machiavellian that Nietzsche was, considered the Book of Rev. "merely the ravings of a maniac." (both were most likely fond of Voltaire's writings)

One might question whether identifying the Book of Rev. with jewish tradition is correct: for one, some biblical scholars suggest that the Revelator was a Roman, or at least converted gentile of some sort. Who cares, really. AS both Nietzsche and Jefferson realized, the Book of Rev. reveals the madness of Scripture as a whole (though that's not to yawp, Hitchens style, that it's all BS. The Beatitudes will do for beat poesy--so will the book of Psalms. FN might have agreed). For Nietzsche the madness speaks of Judea, and the ressentiment of the jewish and then jew-Christian scribes. One can hardly fail to term that a type of anti-semitism, and anti-zionism--not quite Himmler, but a profound dislike for judeo-christian tradition and culture (and we might also recall that roman historians such as Tacitus took Xtians to be a jewish sect). That hardly implies that one should toss TGOM or Nietzsche as a whole. That is the raw honest power, the wolf-sublimity of Nietzsche that must be acknowledged, however much it offends the regs at Cafe-Gauche.

And there's another somewhat rational point (one that TJ himself might respect). Nietzsche indicates the essential paradox (even dangerous paradox) of Scripture, and of the New Testament, that supposed Gospel of Luv: as Nietzsche says, "one should not underestimate the profound consistency of the Christian instinct when it signed this book of hate with the name of the disciple of love, the same disciple to whom it attributed that amorous-enthusiastic Gospel." Das stimmt! That same hysteria and irrational faith characteristic of the Revelator (that both Nietzsche and Jefferson attack) exists today, mainly in the protestant churches, whether that of a Hagee (McCain's pastor-general) or Wright (Obama's pastor-panderer (at least until a few weeks ago).

Holy Hohenstaufen Batman! Frederick II (Nietzsche, cont).

Some dweebs in blogland still catch Nietzsche-fever on occasion. Usually they are failed engineer types, wannabe Jack Parsons, OR, just as pernicious, they are lapsed marxists--suburban Che Guevaras who have lost their faith in La Gente, and turn to Nietzsche for some type of anti-democratic guidance, or something. The Genealogy of Morals is one of the favorite texts (though other texts, even "Thus Spake Zarathustra" however bizarre (Kahil Gibran meets Himmler??) offer a rawer Nietzsche--by the time of his "Antichrist," Nietzsche has his howitzers blazing (and it's sort of sublime--as sublime as like a gyrfalcon attacking a dove).

Nietzsche admired the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and called him "the FIRST of Europeans according to my taste, the Hohenstaufen, Frederick the Second". Who the F izz that, inquiring minds want to know--at least a few might. (Here's the Wiki.). There are, we suggest, various curious reasons for Nietzsche's fondness for Fred II. One, he was a Northerner who had moved south. He also battled against the Pope and papal states. AS the Wiki makes clear, Fred. II also had allies among the Muslims--a rather radical (and heretical) policy at the time. Fred. II. supposedly was a bit of a freethinker, skilled in numerous languages, ladies' man, a patron of scientists of the time, and artists--though also a Crusader. He was, circa 1200, a very powerful man. Dante put him in a rather nasty section of the Inferno--near Dis-- with other heretics (though not nearly as nasty as Mohammed's abode). He then represents a type of aggressive Renaissance man for Nietzsche, it would seem--one not bound to ecclesiastical tradition. Politically, Fred. II probably represented a German ruler who could (and did) conquer southern Europe and establish a German, or at least teutonic presence in the Mediterranean.



Die Will Zur Macht!!!

Nietzsche's fondness for Fred. II also indicates his relationship to, shall we say "military totalitarianism". Some might term it fascism, though Nietzsche seems more akin in his political strategies to prussian Junkers, who were monarchist, and mostly evangelical (starting at least with the Hohenzollern, a later development from the Hohenstaufen. The Hohenzollern of course often ruled over brutal, militaristic regimes, as was that of the crusader and proto-prussian Fred II, who had muslim mercenaries in his army). Regardless if Hohenzollern or outright fascist, Nietzsche's certainly supportive of the prussian militarism (and those who read the Antichrist might have note his near-Ode to the prussian army).

Nietzsche's praise of Alcibiades in TGOM--a despotic greek general, whose reckless campaigns destroyed Athens--- also provides evidence of Nietzsche's political thinking, as Bertrand Russell well knew (and Plato had criticized military oligarchies, so, like maybe McX can connect the dots). Of course Russell was British, and a lil' guy--Untermensch-- so probably suspect according to Nietzschean macho-men, regardless of his mastery of mathematical logic, metaphysics, modern science, history, etc.

Max Weber on Ben Franklin ("the spirit of capitalism")

Weber tends to generalize about religious character, but his analysis of capitalism as puritanism should not be rejected out of hand. Weber understood what Calvin's strange doctrine had accomplished: it had created legions of pious, greedy robots ( Ben F. symptomatic of the type). American protestants carry on the tradition of the Xtian Zombie, for the most part. Somewhat surprisingly, Herr Weber had words for zionist finance as well. The nazis might have arrested him, but then so might have the bolsheviks (allies with prussians until about 1939), who would not have approved of his non-orthodox leftism (perhaps socialistic, but not marxism). At the very least, Weber's "conceptual empiricism" will irritate romantics, links oder rechts.

""""Thus, if we try to determine the object, the analysis and historical explanation of which we are attempting, it cannot be in the form of a conceptual definition, but at least in the beginning only a provisional description of what is here meant by the spirit of capitalism. Such a description is, however, indispensable in order clearly to understand the object of the investigation. For this purpose we turn to a document of that spirit which contains what we are looking for in almost classical purity, and at the same time has the advantage of being free from all direct relationship to religion, being thus, for our purposes, free of preconceptions.

..............

"Remember this saying, The good paymaster is lord of another man's purse. He that is known to pay punctually and exactly to the time he promises, may at any time, and on any occasion, raise all the money his friends can spare. This is sometimes of great use. After industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man in the world than punctuality and justice in all his dealings; therefore never keep borrowed money an hour beyond the time you promised, lest a disappointment shut up your friend's purse for ever.



La Reina de las putas


"The most trifling actions that affect a man's credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a billiard-table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day; demands it, before he can receive it, in a lump.

"It shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you owe; it makes you appear a careful as well as an honest man, and that still increases your credit.

"Beware of thinking all your own that you possess, and of living accordingly. It is a mistake that many people who have credit fall into. To prevent this, keep an exact account for some time both of your expenses and your income. If you take the pains at first to mention particulars, it will have this good effect: you will discover how wonderfully small, trifling expenses mount up to large sums, and will discern what might have been, and may for the future be saved, without occasioning any great inconvenience."

..........

It is Benjamin Franklin who preaches to us in these sentences, the same which Ferdinand Kürnberger satirizes in his clever and malicious "Picture of American Culture" as the supposed confession of faith of the Yankee. That it is the spirit of capitalism which here speaks in characteristic fashion, no one will doubt, however little we may wish to claim that everything which could be understood as pertaining to that spirit is contained in it. Let us pause a moment to consider this passage, the philosophy of which Kürnberger sums up in the words, "They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men". The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one's way in the world, but a peculiar ethic. The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty. That is the essence of the matter. It is not mere business astuteness, that sort of thing is common enough, it is an ethos. This is the quality which interests us."""


Weber

Give Hillary her MI and FL delegates


"""""There’s been a lot of talk about what your campaign would do should it get to the convention. Would you commit today to honoring the agreement made earlier not to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations?

Let’s talk about the agreement. The only agreement I entered into was not to campaign in Michigan and Florida. It had nothing to do with not seating the delegates. I think that’s an important distinction. I did not campaign--

The press seems to have missed the distinction if that’s the case. The talk is that you agreed not to seat the delegation.

That’s not the case at all. I signed an agreement not to campaign in Michigan and Florida. Now, the DNC made the determination that they would not seat the delegates, but I was not party to that. I think it’s important for the DNC to ask itself, Is this really in the best interest of our eventual nominee? We do not want to be disenfranchising Michigan and Florida. We have to try to carry both of those states. I’d love to carry Texas, but it’s usually not in the electoral calculation for the Democratic nominee. Florida and Michigan are. Therefore, the people of those two states disregarded adamantly the DNC’s decision that they would not seat the delegates. They came out and voted. If they had been influenced by the DNC, despite the fact that there was very little campaigning, if any, they would have stayed home. But they wanted their voices heard. More than 2 million people came out. I mean, it was record turnout for a primary. Florida, in particular, is sensitive to being disenfranchised because of what happened to them in the last elections. I have said that I would ask my delegates to vote to seat.

So your intention is to press this issue?

Yes, it is. Yes, it is."""

Well stated, Mrs President. Contingencies Agrees (that is, the authentic Contingencies agrees).

Nietzsche for Frat-boys (updated with help from Lt. Callley)

Many a college dweeb goes through a Nietzsche phase (for the dweebette, it's probably Ayn Rand's FN-lite). Who can forget the Nietzsche chestnuts--the Will to power, dissing judeo-christian tradition, slave morality, the Uebermensch, attacks on the german proles and Wagner, anti-liberals and contra-feminism, mixed in with his praise of a few classix (including Caesarian classics--Nietzsche much prefers Caesar to Plato--or to "God"). Sooner or later, about any semi-bright consumer tunes into his inner Nietzsche.

Here's the master hisself:

"[The aristocratic men] enjoy their freedom from all social control, they feelthat in the wilderness they can give vent with impunity to that tension which is producedby enclosure and imprisonment in the peace of society, they revert to the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters, who perhaps come from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture, with bravado and moral equanimity, as though merely some wild student’s prank had been played, perfectly convinced that the poets have now anample theme to sing and celebrate. It is impossible not to recognise at the core of all these aristocratic races the beast of prey; the magnificent blonde brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory; this hidden core needed an outlet from time to time, the beast must get loose again, must return into the wilderness — the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are allalike in this need."""(from the Genealogy of Morals,

How cool, and beastly. So no problems with those torturers at Gitmo (or My Lai), or denying the right of Habeas Corpus, etc. (does that passage remind anyone of Donny Sutherlands' rather vile character in Bertolucci's 1900?? it should) The Kossack generally approves of Nietzschean-style RealPolitik, except when it's in his interest not to. Values, if not secular politics as a whole, are for the frat-boy Nietzschean provisional, constructed, and subjective, as Biff, Beau, and Bunny still insist over the kegger. Which is to say, nada (who art in Nada).

Really, the Genealogy of Morals could have been written by Aurelius: Nietzsche is sort of a wannabe-Roman stoic (if not wannabe Caesar), though lacking the virtu, and the dedication to "honor" common to the Romans, raised in the Aristotelian school ( most of the "Nietzschean claptrap" (Ez Pound's assessment of FN) updates Ari's Nico. ethics. It's not "footnotes to Plato," but to Aristotle).
At his worst Nietzsche moves from Ravenna to, er, the Reichstag, and resembles nothing so much as a wannabe-prussian officer, Ludendorff-like, taking issue with the drunken soldiers. He may not care for the German working class, yet he does admire Goethe, Beethoven, etc. Heroes of art and kultur, and the battlefield. Da Classix!! IN spirit he seems more akin to one of Kaiser Wilhelm’s cadre than a brownshirt. Many a german (including soldiers) wanted the Kaiser strung up on a lamppost after WWI.




Applied Nietzsche (Ludendorff)


Nietzsche insists he's not a nihilist, but he is: or rather, his nihilism is not done from despair: we wants to smile as he joins the Blackshirts in his imagination (if not Sturmabteilung). While one can understand the appeal of that gonzo-nihilism--alas, so do frat-boy conservatives the world over. Bertrand Russell considered Nietzsche an eloquent fool, mostly--a prussian one at that: and Frege or David Hilbert he wasn't.


Those humans who, for instance, take issue with Lt. Calley and the bloodsport of My Lai should also take issue with Nietzsche's code (tho' the code is hardly consistent anyways: the frat boy Nietzschean doesn't quite realize what it means to say "truth does not exist"). Gaze at the pics of dead, naked villagers--women, children, old men---and recall the will to power (or, better intone "Der Wille zur Macht"!!!). Nietzsche could not say that is an occasion for sadness or tragedy (and his idea of tragedy itself odd--tragedy affirms, yawped Nietzsche. A german or french WWI vet's hospital after a few years of trench warfare was not so affirming, though FN).

Nietzsche's own writing in TGOM (as quote above indicates) would seem to bless Lt. Calleys and bloodsport; he might find it distasteful, but he could not say it was wrong--a fortiori he could not term even the Nazi's "evil" . No value realm holds for Nietzsche, no normativity, no consensus either, even in a secular sense. Lt. Calley and his platoon (really Capn. Medina the CO), or Ludendorffs and Goerings--the Reichmarshall does not seem so distant from FN's ideas of the blond beast--lay waste to chandala: wolves attacking caribou. (Hobbes addresses a Nietzsche-like rebel knight in a few paragraphs in Leviathan. What to do with the Baron von Nietzsche's? You force him to accept the covenants, or order him to be out of town by sunset).

It should bother us when legal-professionals pick up Nietzsche, and call it "naturalism": does that imply then whenever a judge or DA can get away with lying, mis-repping evidence, f-ing over the defendant,etc. that's acceptable? So much for Jefferson and Madison, not to say traditional philosophy ala Hobbes and Kant (and however jargon-ridden Kant is, he believed in Justice with a capital J, and was a bit of peacenik. The Categorical Imperative should not be just tossed aside as if it were some baptist tract).

Moreover given Nietzsche’s own amoral, hedonistic principles–the Will to Power, and nothing else–-in a sense he has no business making evaluative statements about anything. Nietzschean ideals in a political context would mean, for instance, that if Bush/Cheney lied about the WMDs, mis-rep’ed the dangers of terrorism, etc. that’s acceptable, since the end result was a furthering of US power. Lie, when it’s in your best interest: that’s Nietzsche applied to RealPolitik (for that matter, Nietzsche denies the possibility of Truth itself–one reason he criticizes traditional philosophy, modern science, etc). We might appreciate Nietzsche's praise of strength in terms of psychology, even a type of self-help: to thine own self be true, etc. (yet it's not true that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger--it might maim you). On a political level, however, Nietzsche has for years provided live ammo to countless Calleys- and Himmlers-in-potentia (and Zhukovs-in-potentia).

Science: Real (EO Wilson), and Bogus (Al Gore) (Cont. retrofit)

"With sociobiology prospering, Wilson has carried his research into the full arena of human knowledge, publishing the hugely ambitious Consilience in 1998, in which he developed his ideas about gene-culture co-evolution further and resurrected CP Snow's efforts to conjoin the "two cultures". In fact, Wilson's arguments are more fundamental and persuasive than Snow's; works on evolution, like Sociobiology and Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, have been absorbed into western cultural life as neatly as any neo-Darwinist could have predicted.

"He is," says Ian McEwan, "a scientific materialist who warmly embraces the diversity of human achievement - including religion and art, which he sees in evolutionary terms. One of his tasks has been to further the Enlightenment project of absorbing the social sciences into science proper; another has been to find a sound ethical basis for ecological thinking. He is fundamentally a rational optimist who shows us the beauty of the narrative of life on earth. He is living proof that materialism need not be a bleak world view.""

EOWilson



I read Wilson’s "Consilience" a few years ago and was quite impressed. While Wilson may over-simplify a few issues (in regards to the biological evidence for species-altruism, for one), he offers quite a bit of support for his socio-biological ideas; Wilson, like his colleague Dawkins (tho' Doc Dawkins a bit more strident in tone than EO), tends to a sort of reductionism which might irritate some political or ethically-oriented writers--(and few liberal hacks shrieking 24/7 about what they take to be "ethics" have troubled with Hume on the fact-value distinction, or the cliffsnotes to Plato's Republic for that matter). Most philosophical types who I am acquainted with who bothered to read Consilience objected to it, but they are rarely able to formulate their objections. Many philosophers tend to be sort of Kantian idealists (not to be confused with Henry-Fonda idealists), if not theists, more often than they are materialists; thus, Darwin, if not biology as a whole, is taken to be wrong-- or at least questionable--owing to its determinist-naturalist grounds. The idealists rarely offer any convincing arguments showing the real problems with strict determinism.

We here at Contingencies, however, contend there are no good grounds for upholding Kantian idealism (or theology for that matter)--though the First Critique, however jargon-ridden, should at least be kept on the intellectual jukebox (Kant's synthetic a priori rather "proto-cognitivist" anyway)--nor for the more extreme forms of Humean skepticism--tho' in many situations, doubts about causality or any absolute inductive knowledge ARE more than warranted, as in the "social sciences". (Those few new-agey narcissists who mistake Niels Bohr and quantum mechanics for evidence of mystic idealism may be safely ignored). The Chomskyan sorts of "Cartesian rationalists" have raised a few interesting issues regarding innateness (and a prioricity in trad. terms), yet those issues and the supposed "Universal Grammar" do not disprove naturalism, though the relation of cognition to the brain's hard-wiring--to neurology-- has not been conclusively established (especially in regards to intention and higher order thinking)--most mortals will have little or nothing to say on that topic anyway.

Darwinian accounts of evolution and natural selection as well as Mendelian genetics and many other modern biological concepts have been established. Thus the burden rests on idealists to disprove Darwin, if not materialism, which they have failed to do; the Intelligent Design argument, however subtle and complex, being the latest theological fiasco--tho' the IDT people (who are NOT the same as the fundies or biblethumpers who have made use of IDT) raised one valid point-- Darwinism still has not provided a complete account of evolution: Father Darwin was no biochemist, for one. The IDT people often commit the ad ignorantium sort of fallacy: the theory of Darwinian evo. still has gaps; therefore, "God" must exist to explain the gaps. NICHT. There are, however, sort of naive leftists, nearly as pernicious as the fundamentalist or dogmatic xtian (or muslim, jew etc.), who quote Darwin and then some marxist-multiculturalist PC BS --or, Osiris forbid, Al Gore--as if they were equivalent. Hah. Darwinism does not offer any comforting assurances or utopian ideology for the liberal--or conservative--do-gooder.


and now for something completely different from Big Al:

"The climate crisis offers us the chance to experience what few generations in history have had the privilege of experiencing: a generational mission; a compelling moral purpose; a shared cause; and the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict of politics and to embrace a genuine moral and spiritual challenge."

SO much for unbiased research, data-gathering, and the sound biological science that Wilson practices. By what means were the problems associated with global warming (and the big issue of proving "anthropic" cause---some evidence suggests global warming and ozone depletion are natural phenomena) converted into a "generational mission," a "moral purpose" or "spiritual challenge"? Maybe they became so in Gore's mystical vision of the protestant-buddhist Verde. Big Al unlikely knows C02 from karma, but that doesn't stop the Gore-Bot liberal nurseys from worshipping him.

ah care to compare notes on that, bubba-belch

Leviathan, Inc. (wtih DiDi Feinstone's mensch Richie Blum at the controls)

"""People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.""
(Kierkegaard)


Man flies with jet-powered wings

There you go, Nurse Starcraft

News from the Weird

Mormon salesmen for Obama?

Hey Brighamius: your little zionist-barf poems have gone out even to your pals at LDS! What a shame. Maybe you'll have to leave COLDS, and like take up with some Scientologists.



fly, pretties, phly

Oprahocracy

Interesting list on defining an Oprahcrat from one Charles Rouse:

"""1. Make all sorts of baseless accusations and insinuations (accuse people of racism, misogyny, homophobia, fascism, etc), without ever referring to facts or evidence.

2. Reduce arguments to childish ad hominems, ad populus, generalizations, other logical fallacies and character defamations. Mock people's religions, political viewpoints and heritage like a drunken fratboy might. Do your best to eliminate dissent: that's the apparatchik tradition ( KGB, maoist, gestapo, etc.).

3. Avoid logic or fact-based writing, or specific points at all costs (tho,' yes, this strategy might be used by rightists as well). Rely on slang and crass, colloquial language instead of rational prose. Construct simple-minded dichotomies–an Us vs. Them situation–even where there isn't one. Villify (Bush (Pelosi, McCain etc.) is Satan!).............""""""

Global Warming Gospel
Howard Hayden, physics professor (emeritus) at U. of Conn, offers his thoughts on AGW "hypothesis" and the Gore church:


"The hype surrounding the issue of global warming is a bunch of hot air, a retired physics professor told members of Rotary Club 43 on Monday.
"Global warming is not a problem," Howard C. Hayden said. "Go find something useful to do." Hayden is an emeritus professor of physics from the University of Connecticut and now resides in Pueblo West.
Hayden, who spoke at the Rotary Club's weekly meeting, offered a skeptical view of global warming.

"This is not a view you'll hear from Al Gore," Hayden said, prefacing his slide show presentation. ........

........




Jupiter Kazoo, aka the Butt-Trumpet

"Hayden claimed that much of what is being advertised about global warming issues such as the melting polar ice caps, greenhouse gases and changes in carbon dioxide levels is not factual.

"Yes, the polar ice caps are shrinking . . . on Mars," he said, "On Mars, the ice caps are melting and small hills are disappearing."

Hayden added that there is warming occurring on Jupiter, Saturn and Triton.

He said the increased carbon-dioxide levels that global-warming promoters keep talking about is nothing new. He said the levels of carbon dioxide have been rising and falling for more than 400,000 years.

"We are at the lowest levels in the last 300,000 years," he said. "During the Jurassic period, we had very high levels of carbon dioxide."

Hayden added that the majority of carbon dioxide is the result of natural sources and not to be blamed on humankind.

Worldwide, the burning of coal, oil and gas contributes to only an estimated 3 percent of the carbon-dioxide emissions, he said.

"About 97 percent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from natural sources, not humans," Hayden said."""


Ouchie! Back to those cliffsnotes for "Physics for Dixiecrats 101" courses, Al.

Cactus Ed Abbey on muzak


"Rock" is the music of slaves. Of adolescents pursuing the illusion of freedom and protest while the steel chains of technology bind them ever tighter.




~
Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.
~
Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.
~
How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.
~

"Rock": music to hammer out fenders by. Music for vomiting to after a hard day spreading asphalt. Vietnam music. Imitation-Afro, industrial air-compressor music.
~
Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.
~
Life without music would be an intolerable insult.
~
The best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that music, one can believe anything--while the music lasts.
~
Music is a savage art, a measured madness.


Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.


Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

Verstehen sie das, McSklaven?

Menckenisms



"I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense."


"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."


"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."

"Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon."


Bravo. One bon-mot from Mencken worth a month of blog-belches and ewe-tube spam from the usual moron-o-crat, er, McMoron-o-crat.

"Slang: the grunt of the Human hog." (Bierce)

McGrunt du jour: """So what you’re saying is, [oBama]’s not really a religious nutcase, he just plays one on TV? I think I can agree with that.


What palpable BS--as is the entire justification of Rev. Wright. Overlooking McGuru McGrunt's awkward, colloquial phrasing and usual 1st person blather, note the lack of any allusions to Wright or Obama's stated positions or record. For one, BO has attended the same church for over 20 years, toured on “40 days of faith and phamily,” shakes hands with protestant creationists (including GOP ones), and has even called into question the 1st Amendment (i.e. separation clause--googlestein er!). Obama's received the most donations from religious groups by far (and far more than the GOP biblethumpers like Mitt-bot or Hucklebee) Obama makes Hillary seem about like Madeliene Murray O’Hair. Even McCain has said some words against fundies, unlike BO. BO’s a complete churchie, except when he’s in LA or SF: and as consistently hypocritical as most protestants as well.

Smackdown: TH Huxley vs. Matthew Arnold (with help from Camus)


"Mechanized civilization has just reached the ultimate stage of barbarism. In a near future, we will have to choose between mass suicide and intelligent use of scientific conquests[...] This can no longer be simply a prayer; it must become an order which goes upward from the peoples to the governments, an order to make a definitive choice between hell and reason." (Albert Camus on the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945).


Victoriana tends to irritate most American yahoos. Yahoos (that's yahoo as in Swift, not Silicon Valley extortion) detest all things French, yet they detest most things British as well (and not without some reason). The yahoo doesn't care for British propriety, the civility, the manners: say England, and Americans think Sherlock Holmes, or dreadful PBS Schake-schpearean fairies, or worse, the Beatles. And yes, we here at Contingencies are not down with that sceptre'd isle either, and prefer Descartes to Darwin, and respect Clemenceau more than a Churchill (not only palsies with Il Duce, but praising Hitler and brownshirts until Der Fuhrer's deals with Stalin pissed off the royals, and the tanks rolled into Poland. Winnie--corporate Darwinist way before Rich. Dawkins arrived---most likely sucking scheisse next to the Reichmarshall and gang).

Nonetheless, some aspects of English kultur should be attended to, at least for a few nanoseconds: like, say, the celebrated debates between Matt Arnold and TH Huxley: c'est Victoriana. The debate concerned the merits of a scientific education compared to the study of the classics, Latin, Greek, Plato, sophocles, et all. Huxley argued (in effect agreeing with the founder of the University of Birmingham) that Da Classix--even the study of Latin grammar--were no longer needed. Universities would stress natural sciences--biology, chemistry, physics---and engineering. Pure mathematics--itself traditionally regarded as Platonic, and above the grubby work of physicians and lawyers-- would be, according to Huxley, relegated to scientific applications and engineering.

Huxley may win the battle against that eloquent poltroon Arnold, though Arnold may win the war: which is to say (in QuineSpeak) few could doubt the efficaciousness of the natural sciences--Plato's next to nothing compared to gunpowder, or a panzer division. The Huxleyan pedagogy, however, should not be just accepted prima facie as the path to a progressive future, certainly not after the 20th century (that may be obvious to some hepcats, but not to many in ConsumerLand). What Huxley did not foresee was that his beloved Darwin, and the natural sciences could be (and were) very efficacious in terms of advancing totalitarian goals, and murder on a macro-scale. Chas himself seemed to hint at eugenics on occasion. Does Darwin (and the advances of physical chemistry) lead to mustand gas, not to say zyklon B? Es posible. Does Einstein lead to Hiroshima? Es posible.

Until the whores of academic science free themselves from their pimps in industry (not to say the military), the science establishment should be counted as a foe of progressive ideals--and Camus suggests something like that as well. That's not to advocate Luddite-ism; (tho' google Pynchon for an interesting spin on Ludd). Cybernetics--gear itself-- can be a force for the Good; however Tech. is not inherently "Good". One doesn't have to quote Martin Heidegger on "teleos"--or Platonic chestnuts---to understand that science and engineering should relate to some democratic-socialist, and dare we say humanistic goals. Maybe those sections of Plato relating to oligarchy---tyranny of the wealthy, powerful and fortunate---were meaningful, after all.

It's the system, stupid.

Oil and gasoline prices are soaring, and the usual shallowpated cafe-democrat ("every event must have have a cause" as Kant yawped back in the day) starts to point talons fingers. What Dodius the DNCocrat doesn't realize is, one, the petroleum crisis has been building for years. It's not strictly Bush's fault (though he and his cronies in Exxon did not help matters), any more than fluctuations in the stock and futures markets are. Politicians do not control the market (the pseudo-liberal barking "Bush is Hitler"! really helps the right with his moralistic whines). The actions of their economic advisers might have some effect on the market (via slashing interest rates, etc.) but the trading and industry issues ( refinery overheads, etc.) are the driving factors. The trading and pricing depends on the supplies, and reserves are being depleted.

Had she bothered with the cliffsnotes to Adam Smith, Dodius might have known that when supplies dry up, prices go up. Managers mark-up fast-selling items. Similarly, as oil reserves dry, the value of the barrels go up. It's a shame, but not really one person's responsibility--whether politicians, or some middle-eastern petrol-sheiks, or cowboy oil-men, or slimy British Petroleum execs. Yes, oil executives should be held accountable--Lee Raymond, enemy of the People--but the market itself--whether stocks or commodities--was built for capitalism (ie for autos, AND the oil and gas necessary to keep 'em running), and when the petrol dries up a few will become wealthy, and the masses will, more than likely, abandon their SUVs, fall into anarchy, or perhaps blossom into Hugo Chavezes.

Leland $teinford



The shit that begetted the shit

"""‘We sometimes feel, in following the words and behavior of some of the characters of Dostoevsky, that they are living at once on the plane we know and on some other place of reality from which we are shut out.’""""

TS Eliot