That old metaphor, which I heard a couple years ago, buzzed, on a bus around xujiahui, and the huangpu river, maybe going down to the meiluo cheng, about the one part of the brain, the cortex, inhibiting the thalamus, or a simlar brain area, as the cause of, our neurological correlate to depression stays with me. Before that, I recall some similar notion, native to my own speculations, about the roots of our depression. I mean me and my brother's depression. And maybe I can say me and my uncle and my brother. And maybe this applies to the satelite of people I know who were abused, violently, and in anger.
The thing is, however, I'm depressed. The self-pityying, unaccountable, vague connotations of that term are such as I wish to avoid. So I'm immobile, in such a way that I think this would be described as low grade chronic depression.
I don't know where to start or which way to go in telling you this. But let me start where I'm at where I am now. I'm sitting in front of the kitchen window, sitting straight up and typing. I have earplugs in and a sleeping mask on. the door is open and the cats are wandering in and out, after being in all day due to the rain.
The reason I need to blind myself and deafen myself is because this is the only way I can feel comfortable to type most of the time. The only way I can block out....
Whatever I'm blocking out. The immanent distractions, the will inside of me that is constatly veering off in any which direction, that cannot put itself into any one thing that I deem productive or necessary.
To do anything, generally speaking, I need a gimmick. This gimmick is unsusually some audio lectures, books, music, or caffeine, anger, or lateness..
The blindfold and earplugs started last year 2009 or so in Shanghai. In the apartment off of zhanghyang lu, with the tiny dining room. I would blindfold myself and try to cover my ears enough, since i didn't have earplugs. Towards the end of our stay in Shanghai, I would do this while Emma's parents were milling around the house, and often I had takien some of the little balls of hash from the small plastic gum containers that I used to store my hash in.
Bakuin and susan, my cats were with me then as now. I often had one of my glass jars that i like to use as cups. I would have a big glasss jar of tea or coffee, or chocolate made by melting eighty percent choclate with some water and creamer.
The blindfold and the earplugs leave me alone, allow me to be in here, free from the outrside. It's the outside that I can't hanle, that leaves me dead. The outside me leaves without any identity, without any being. It leaves me at the mercy whims, the urge to gratification, pleasure , and the urge to consume.
In the middle of that sentence, i reacted to the wine i heard through my earplugs and pulled one out. It was nothing in my immediate zone of interest, something form outside, a neighbor using some machine to cut or weld maybe. But I decided it was an acceptable time to get up and try being in the world. I checked the mail. No mail.
My attention is waning now, got stuck on gimmicks, the idea of gimmicks.
I have alot of gimmicks. The idea of god is a gimmick, sometimes i've felt a presece in my mind that I associate with god, what other people know as god. This was a different prescence than the conversations I'm always having. I have those too. A typical example is the one I had last ight with my therapist. It was in the midst of another conversation I was having in my head. I realized I was doing it, and thought of telling my therapist. Then I was having a conversation with him about it. Then I was telling him that even thinking about telling him would make me have a conversation with him about it.
About the conversations.
Than I thought about how this extraordinary bent in me ought, in some conventional biography of a great man, lead to the production of some skill, some advantage. This would work if I was some trial lawyer, or a politician, or an interviewre on tv. Or if I was a writer, hahaha. [While editing this I notice that what I was thinking at this time, last night, was also that I couldn't utilize the conversations as a skill, and this was a difference between me and the great men in the imagined biographies.]
So is that it now? Am I clear?
What do I want to do? Work on the Beast book. That's the one I want to to work on, but I don't feel it.
I guess now writing this post has become a gimmick
The other gimmicks I can think of right now are other people helping me, and schedules. The schedules are what I have the most trust in now, as escaping the bad parts of other gimmicks. As for other people helping me, sometimes I have sort of a daydream about a motherly figure helping me to write, setting out the implements, like notepaper and a laptop, a special laptop just for writing that I think of getting, and sitting these down on the table just so. And it's on a special writing table, and taking my hadn and guiding me to the table. That's embarrasing, but I think it's a clear reflection of the lack of a motherly figure in my life.
It's embarrasing but even so it's so strong, a motherly figure,a white lady would be nice, and so would a black lady, in her late thirties to fifties, maybe a little plump, and neat in appearance. It's embarrasing, but every time I think of it, the desire is real.
Oh yes, a life of gimmicks. Is that what I've been trying to get around? Whith all the Brcue Lee, Daoist, Buddhist fascination I used to have? Is that what all the self help and psychology is about? No, it's primarliy about understanding, about extravating myself from the unseen influences that abound in my mind. It's about making sese of the lives we lead, of the spectum of minds that make up my social world.
Where do i go from here? I wnat to stop writing now, as if this blog served a purpose and I'm ready to move on.
Where do I go? Stand up. If I stand up, this may be dissapoiting in that it leads nowehre? I don't like the idea of finishing this blog, since I need to edit it, which requires taking off the sleeping mask and letting the light and the objects aroud me in. I dont want anymore auditory visual stimulus going on.
I don't want to hear Phil Hendrie or Christopher Hitchens or any of that stuff I liten to all day and night. The only thing I can think to do is bring the blaket from the couch and put it over my head and the computer, so I can limit the range of intrusion and edit this blog, publish it and.... I don't know what comes next.
I can't really say I want any of those gimmicks, or that the absence of gimmicks is the solution. For any solution is in itself a gimmick, I sense.
I have to go the bathroom.
I will get up, and them i will come back witht he blanket and edit this blog ad publish it. I want somethig to listen to while I'm up and about. I will lisen to soemthing. I will take off my sleeping mask and use the other cpomputer to listen to something. I'm using Emmas computer, and my computer is at the other end of the aprrtment, buy the door, on a chair.
I'm back, but I'm not using the blanket. Maybe I'll go get it in a minute or so. I'm eating strawberries. This is a gimmick, as it gives me a sense of doing something healthy. Eating potatoes is a gimmick, as food impulse keep me going. I'm going to cut up a potato and fry up the pieces. I wish I had ketchup or eggs to go with it. This is my second potato of the day.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
NON-FICTION: SCIENCE, OTHER KNOWLEDGE, FAMILY THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND PERSONALITY TYPES
1. I just heard Ricard Dawkins on the "Late Late Show" in Ireland. A priest mentioned that Science is not the only way to know things. The tacit implication is that this makes believing in god without proof okay.
It makes sense that people would want to regard Science as a monolith in order to regard it as isolated and incomplete, and thus allowing for baseless belief in god.
It also makes sense to say that since all the bible or all the main doctrines of someone's Christianity have to be right in order of Christianity to be true, all claims of science have to be right or science is wrong.
What is interesting is that this discussion between Atheist Scientists and theists implies an odd spectrum of epistemology. From Religion to science?
This has nothing to do with actual existence as we experience it, nothing to do with our lives. The scientific method is a set of procedures for empirical discovery and verification.
Religion's special knowledge acquisition is done through faith, which is a feeling most often backed up by the threat of force, often directly.
But why have I not heard anyone mentioning the fact there are entire works dedicated to epistemology? Why is the question of how we know limited to Science versus faith? Am I the only one who is disgusted by the implications?
The reason that we have this incomplete, false dichotomy is because of the ignorance or inexperience of scientists and the petty stratagems of theists.
Experience and logical processes are what we all use to decide most questions. The scientific method is no more universal or fundamental to human experience than a recipe for hummus.
The main reason why we have questions like "Does science answer everything?" or "Is science the only way to know the universe?" is because religious types fear the implications of plain old logic. It is better to have something outside of their everyday experience and those of potential converts. It is better to argue against a presumed monolith than the everyday logic that causes to trust somethings and not others.
Our own experience might eventually lead us to a germ theory of disease, but never to the resurrection. It might tell us that people seem to be gone after death, but not that the people have souls inside them that fly out of them at death.
I want to write something more extensive on this subject, perhaps a review of epistemic theories and experiential perspectives of knowledge for atheists.
2. George Lakoff believes that political affiliation has more to do with our sense of familial affiliation than doctrinal procession. That is, when you see people who believe in gun control our also much more likely to be pro-choice, this is not because one belief suggests the other, or because both arise from a common principle, but because experience a sense of community and identify with a community of believers (this is my own interpretation of Lakoff.)
I have noticed for a long time that much communication among more orthodox believers, be they anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, liberals, or Limbaugh-types, has to do with in-group morality.
There is much less rational assessment of goals and consequences in general. Anarchists, despite their inspirational emphasis on consensus decision making, which entails a focus on mutually determined goals whether than enforcement of dogman, still can be seen denouncing others as not being real anarchists, being statists, being leftists, etc.
So it makes sense that once we come to identify with a certain perceived community of belief, we then project the doctrines, premises, and tendencies of that community onto the rest of our world.
Fear of losing authentic group identity can be seen, usually, in some sort of slippery slope arguments, such as, if you accept such and such premise, you are on your way to become a leftist. It is also seen in absurd definitional arguments, such as what constitutes a real anarchist, or real conservative. It is all too common to hear someone say. All those guys calling themselves X are not really X.
Whereas, ideologies (including the mythological embrace AKA Religion) generally have efficacious aims, such as the betterment of society, liberation, the end to capitalist oppression, it is hard not to stray to tribal business. Thus, we have factions, splits, heretics, and dogma.
Solutions to problems. Putting forth a common goal that transcends doctrinal differences is liberating. It frees us from the problem of loyalty to a community of ideas and puts back in the control seat. It also breaks down walls that keep us apart from other people.
As to personality. Given that our ideologies have much, perhaps mostly, to do with our sense of family, our neurological structures that correspond to our social reality, it is further likely that some people are more inclined to have stronger or weaker tendencies to adhere strictly to a particular community of belief.
This is what is called the True Believer phenomena.
It seems that some people are definitely more focused on the psychology of other people and some are less focused. This function may or may not intersect with a greater tendency to ideology. When it does, it then may coincide with a loyalty to ones immediate social ties, a rejection of those ties in favor of the ideology, or a rejection of the ideology in favor of ones social ties.
It makes sense that people would want to regard Science as a monolith in order to regard it as isolated and incomplete, and thus allowing for baseless belief in god.
It also makes sense to say that since all the bible or all the main doctrines of someone's Christianity have to be right in order of Christianity to be true, all claims of science have to be right or science is wrong.
What is interesting is that this discussion between Atheist Scientists and theists implies an odd spectrum of epistemology. From Religion to science?
This has nothing to do with actual existence as we experience it, nothing to do with our lives. The scientific method is a set of procedures for empirical discovery and verification.
Religion's special knowledge acquisition is done through faith, which is a feeling most often backed up by the threat of force, often directly.
But why have I not heard anyone mentioning the fact there are entire works dedicated to epistemology? Why is the question of how we know limited to Science versus faith? Am I the only one who is disgusted by the implications?
The reason that we have this incomplete, false dichotomy is because of the ignorance or inexperience of scientists and the petty stratagems of theists.
Experience and logical processes are what we all use to decide most questions. The scientific method is no more universal or fundamental to human experience than a recipe for hummus.
The main reason why we have questions like "Does science answer everything?" or "Is science the only way to know the universe?" is because religious types fear the implications of plain old logic. It is better to have something outside of their everyday experience and those of potential converts. It is better to argue against a presumed monolith than the everyday logic that causes to trust somethings and not others.
Our own experience might eventually lead us to a germ theory of disease, but never to the resurrection. It might tell us that people seem to be gone after death, but not that the people have souls inside them that fly out of them at death.
I want to write something more extensive on this subject, perhaps a review of epistemic theories and experiential perspectives of knowledge for atheists.
2. George Lakoff believes that political affiliation has more to do with our sense of familial affiliation than doctrinal procession. That is, when you see people who believe in gun control our also much more likely to be pro-choice, this is not because one belief suggests the other, or because both arise from a common principle, but because experience a sense of community and identify with a community of believers (this is my own interpretation of Lakoff.)
I have noticed for a long time that much communication among more orthodox believers, be they anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, liberals, or Limbaugh-types, has to do with in-group morality.
There is much less rational assessment of goals and consequences in general. Anarchists, despite their inspirational emphasis on consensus decision making, which entails a focus on mutually determined goals whether than enforcement of dogman, still can be seen denouncing others as not being real anarchists, being statists, being leftists, etc.
So it makes sense that once we come to identify with a certain perceived community of belief, we then project the doctrines, premises, and tendencies of that community onto the rest of our world.
Fear of losing authentic group identity can be seen, usually, in some sort of slippery slope arguments, such as, if you accept such and such premise, you are on your way to become a leftist. It is also seen in absurd definitional arguments, such as what constitutes a real anarchist, or real conservative. It is all too common to hear someone say. All those guys calling themselves X are not really X.
Whereas, ideologies (including the mythological embrace AKA Religion) generally have efficacious aims, such as the betterment of society, liberation, the end to capitalist oppression, it is hard not to stray to tribal business. Thus, we have factions, splits, heretics, and dogma.
Solutions to problems. Putting forth a common goal that transcends doctrinal differences is liberating. It frees us from the problem of loyalty to a community of ideas and puts back in the control seat. It also breaks down walls that keep us apart from other people.
As to personality. Given that our ideologies have much, perhaps mostly, to do with our sense of family, our neurological structures that correspond to our social reality, it is further likely that some people are more inclined to have stronger or weaker tendencies to adhere strictly to a particular community of belief.
This is what is called the True Believer phenomena.
It seems that some people are definitely more focused on the psychology of other people and some are less focused. This function may or may not intersect with a greater tendency to ideology. When it does, it then may coincide with a loyalty to ones immediate social ties, a rejection of those ties in favor of the ideology, or a rejection of the ideology in favor of ones social ties.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
BOOK CLUB: Book Club Spits Out Four Books
Book Club: I got a question: Why they Hatin' on me?
Book Club: The collective has consumed three novels since it's inception earlier this year. You may have missed it.
You may have lingered, over there, in your fear of Book Club. In your incomprehension at the intangible but binding web of lust that is Book Club.
But Book Club loves and wants you to understand what Book Club has done. You do not know of Nethereland, by Joseph O'neill. You have not tasted of Bandits, by Elmore Leonard. You have not yet sullied yourself with the pretense of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. You have dreamed of but never read the words of The Road by Cormac Mccarthy
But you want Book Club. This, Book Club knows, before you even think it, before the thought makes its way up from the bottom depths of your psyche.
So, Book Club will give you these Books as they have become inside of Book Club.
Book Club helps. Book Club Reveals Below a story for those of you outside of Book Club.
Read it, and Read on. Book Club Presents: The Underground Society of Darker Types Who Do the Crime in a Postmodern Nightmare, by Book Club.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Jack Skillet laughed at the empty concrete streets in front of the corporation. The streets were manufactured by technology, but they were desolate of life.
The boy said "Those streets?"
"Yeah, I reckon."
He took the dusty old Iphone out from his frayed pocket to check the google maps app. It made him think of Juanita, who had showed him the wild side of life, with wondrous fragrances of mate, pisco sour, and Ma Po Doufu. Juanita, who took away the point of his existence, and replaced it with another.
The door to the corporation's office was about several yards in the distance. The clouds overhead had nothing to say to them, in this dark world.
The boy shuffled his feet nervously. "They gonna rape us up somethin' awful, I 'spect."
"They ain't gon' do nothin'"
"They ain't?"
"They ain't."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay."
He went on up the path. The tangles of vines along the walls of the corporation's office twisted all over the place, unable to work out a choerent message,in a world devoid of meaning.
Next to him, he moved the bicycle along the path. His strong hands gripped the handlebars as his long, model-like body moved sinuously towards the door.
Juanita had left him and the boy, left them to keep going down the path. It had been on a cold night, when the camp fire sent smoke up into the godless sky, that answered no prayers.
She had come to him, in a womanly way, with her mocha brown skin fraying his nordic restraint. And after, as they lay in a barren land, listening to the drinking songs of cannibals, as they drank the blood of their children, she had whispered to him.
"Me voy."
"Why?"
"Jewelry heist."
"Who?"
"The guy at the computer company."
"Which one?"
"The one that symolizes the dislocation of modernity."
"How?"
"Loose cannon help. Web of contravening plots."
"Motivation?"
"For who?"
"For you, loose cannon,me."
"Hard to tell."
And that was the way it was. Things were hard to tell, when you got down to it. Things were just hard to tell nowadays.
They proceded along the path. He could make out more detail of the corporation's office now.
There was a click behind him and he froze.
The boy froze too. "That a gun?"
"Uh hunh."
"Somebody hurt me?"
"Nobody hurt you."
The man with the gun asked them to to turn around. Jack Skillet could tell by the sound of the man with the gun's voice that he was crazy and unstable.
As he turned, he thought of his life before the fall, he thought of the big city, all the crazy characters. He was just a futures analyst back them, prioritizing amortization tables for international financiers who dabbled in the funds derivatives assets.
He had been just another tall, stiff, blond, European type. With eyes of blue that expressed no emotion or unpleasant social truth.
Then he had met Juanita. At the top of the empire state building, she had been so excited at her arrival in the land of dreams, as all immigrants were, that she had danced a native, festive dance. He had seen her as she swirled her dress, hoop earrings dangling wildly, with spicy passion.
And she had shown him the other side of the city. A world of hustlers and cheats, dreamers and womanizers. Free of the chains of morality and decency that trapped Jack.
He finished turning and faced the wild eyed man with the gun. There was a look of desperation in his eyes. He was drunk, and his clothes were brown with dirt, and hung in tatters over his skinny shoulders.
"Ain't gon' do it." He told them.
"Ain't gon' what?"
"Ain't gon' steal jewelries first, 'fore Juanita does it."
"Why?"
"'Cause i 'gon' get it."
"How?"
"Point gun, not let you go."
"Who are you?"
"Erasmus Deleterius, part of secret society."
"What it do, sercret society?"
"Can't tell. Read book: Plays of Aeschylus. Go civc center, see performance."
"You gonna shoot me, mister?"
"No."
He motioned for them to move behind him. They did. As they moved behind him, Jack could see the grass clippings on the side of the lawn. Juanita had been a gardener. The clippings lay dead on the dead concrete, cut off from their life, killed for encroaching on the man-made world.
Erasmus Deleterius ran to the door and went inside.
The boy too thought of Juanita. "She my momma?"
"Mm."
"Momma come home?"
"Mm nnh."
Jack knew he had to get to the door and open it up. he would do anything to keep the boy safe, and get back the mother the boy had lost.
He went on up the path and arrived at the door.
From inside there were loud yells and gunshots. He shoved the boy to the side, yanked open the door, and rushed in.
Erasmus Deleterius lay dead. Juanita was on the desk, shot, jibbering in her native tongue, praying to pagan gods.
He looked around the office, a bunch of desks laid out, where people spent most of their lives.
He saw the man with the jewelry. He saw the pirate who had tried to get the jewelry, dead and hung on the wall with his own hooked hand. He felt nothing. He looked atJuanita.
"Get the nekclace."
"No. Help you."
Then the man with the jewelry shot him. The boy came in. The man with the jewelry said "I take care of you?"
The boy said to Jack "You die now?"
"Unh."
"I go with other man?"
"Unh."
Jack skillet a man made by secular philosophy, technology and Sartre, looked up at the ceiling as the dark red pool of blood spread over his chest. The boy had a new dad, but would he do a better job? Was there any progress? Or was it all just decadence.
"Hope good." he said.
"Yeah." Juanita said.
They both died. The man with the jewelry put the necklace over the boy's head and they headed back outside, back down the path.
Book Club: The collective has consumed three novels since it's inception earlier this year. You may have missed it.
You may have lingered, over there, in your fear of Book Club. In your incomprehension at the intangible but binding web of lust that is Book Club.
But Book Club loves and wants you to understand what Book Club has done. You do not know of Nethereland, by Joseph O'neill. You have not tasted of Bandits, by Elmore Leonard. You have not yet sullied yourself with the pretense of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. You have dreamed of but never read the words of The Road by Cormac Mccarthy
But you want Book Club. This, Book Club knows, before you even think it, before the thought makes its way up from the bottom depths of your psyche.
So, Book Club will give you these Books as they have become inside of Book Club.
Book Club helps. Book Club Reveals Below a story for those of you outside of Book Club.
Read it, and Read on. Book Club Presents: The Underground Society of Darker Types Who Do the Crime in a Postmodern Nightmare, by Book Club.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Jack Skillet laughed at the empty concrete streets in front of the corporation. The streets were manufactured by technology, but they were desolate of life.
The boy said "Those streets?"
"Yeah, I reckon."
He took the dusty old Iphone out from his frayed pocket to check the google maps app. It made him think of Juanita, who had showed him the wild side of life, with wondrous fragrances of mate, pisco sour, and Ma Po Doufu. Juanita, who took away the point of his existence, and replaced it with another.
The door to the corporation's office was about several yards in the distance. The clouds overhead had nothing to say to them, in this dark world.
The boy shuffled his feet nervously. "They gonna rape us up somethin' awful, I 'spect."
"They ain't gon' do nothin'"
"They ain't?"
"They ain't."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay."
He went on up the path. The tangles of vines along the walls of the corporation's office twisted all over the place, unable to work out a choerent message,in a world devoid of meaning.
Next to him, he moved the bicycle along the path. His strong hands gripped the handlebars as his long, model-like body moved sinuously towards the door.
Juanita had left him and the boy, left them to keep going down the path. It had been on a cold night, when the camp fire sent smoke up into the godless sky, that answered no prayers.
She had come to him, in a womanly way, with her mocha brown skin fraying his nordic restraint. And after, as they lay in a barren land, listening to the drinking songs of cannibals, as they drank the blood of their children, she had whispered to him.
"Me voy."
"Why?"
"Jewelry heist."
"Who?"
"The guy at the computer company."
"Which one?"
"The one that symolizes the dislocation of modernity."
"How?"
"Loose cannon help. Web of contravening plots."
"Motivation?"
"For who?"
"For you, loose cannon,me."
"Hard to tell."
And that was the way it was. Things were hard to tell, when you got down to it. Things were just hard to tell nowadays.
They proceded along the path. He could make out more detail of the corporation's office now.
There was a click behind him and he froze.
The boy froze too. "That a gun?"
"Uh hunh."
"Somebody hurt me?"
"Nobody hurt you."
The man with the gun asked them to to turn around. Jack Skillet could tell by the sound of the man with the gun's voice that he was crazy and unstable.
As he turned, he thought of his life before the fall, he thought of the big city, all the crazy characters. He was just a futures analyst back them, prioritizing amortization tables for international financiers who dabbled in the funds derivatives assets.
He had been just another tall, stiff, blond, European type. With eyes of blue that expressed no emotion or unpleasant social truth.
Then he had met Juanita. At the top of the empire state building, she had been so excited at her arrival in the land of dreams, as all immigrants were, that she had danced a native, festive dance. He had seen her as she swirled her dress, hoop earrings dangling wildly, with spicy passion.
And she had shown him the other side of the city. A world of hustlers and cheats, dreamers and womanizers. Free of the chains of morality and decency that trapped Jack.
He finished turning and faced the wild eyed man with the gun. There was a look of desperation in his eyes. He was drunk, and his clothes were brown with dirt, and hung in tatters over his skinny shoulders.
"Ain't gon' do it." He told them.
"Ain't gon' what?"
"Ain't gon' steal jewelries first, 'fore Juanita does it."
"Why?"
"'Cause i 'gon' get it."
"How?"
"Point gun, not let you go."
"Who are you?"
"Erasmus Deleterius, part of secret society."
"What it do, sercret society?"
"Can't tell. Read book: Plays of Aeschylus. Go civc center, see performance."
"You gonna shoot me, mister?"
"No."
He motioned for them to move behind him. They did. As they moved behind him, Jack could see the grass clippings on the side of the lawn. Juanita had been a gardener. The clippings lay dead on the dead concrete, cut off from their life, killed for encroaching on the man-made world.
Erasmus Deleterius ran to the door and went inside.
The boy too thought of Juanita. "She my momma?"
"Mm."
"Momma come home?"
"Mm nnh."
Jack knew he had to get to the door and open it up. he would do anything to keep the boy safe, and get back the mother the boy had lost.
He went on up the path and arrived at the door.
From inside there were loud yells and gunshots. He shoved the boy to the side, yanked open the door, and rushed in.
Erasmus Deleterius lay dead. Juanita was on the desk, shot, jibbering in her native tongue, praying to pagan gods.
He looked around the office, a bunch of desks laid out, where people spent most of their lives.
He saw the man with the jewelry. He saw the pirate who had tried to get the jewelry, dead and hung on the wall with his own hooked hand. He felt nothing. He looked atJuanita.
"Get the nekclace."
"No. Help you."
Then the man with the jewelry shot him. The boy came in. The man with the jewelry said "I take care of you?"
The boy said to Jack "You die now?"
"Unh."
"I go with other man?"
"Unh."
Jack skillet a man made by secular philosophy, technology and Sartre, looked up at the ceiling as the dark red pool of blood spread over his chest. The boy had a new dad, but would he do a better job? Was there any progress? Or was it all just decadence.
"Hope good." he said.
"Yeah." Juanita said.
They both died. The man with the jewelry put the necklace over the boy's head and they headed back outside, back down the path.
NON-FICTION: Steven Pinker and the Over Reach of the SocioBio Paradigm
I'm listening to Steven Pinker lay out his arguments from The Blank Slate on a TVO podcast, Big Ideas.
I've been thinking for awhile about the annoying but inevitable overreach of this genetics-makes-society paradigm that started with E.O. Wilson, and Chomsky, and the rest.
I think Pinker is an example of a preacher for this paradigm. I read The Blank Slate when it first came out eight or so years ago. I was interested due to it's rejection of the anti-human nature character that I understood to be a phenomena of the outdated academic left, as well as a flaw of socialism, and a key to the evil of twentieth century dictators.
Of course, the idea now is that since before the social sciences got to the point where many said that culture makes everything, we are now getting back to the point where human nature, now genetics, makes everything.
Pinker ties an argument by Steven Jay Gould and Lowentin that claimed that attribution of behavior/culture to genetics was used to maintain existing, and that Social Biology was a continuation of this, with the doctrine of the Blank Slate.
A little later on, he ties in racial prejudice and pogroms against successful racial minorities, whose cultures led them to greater success, with the doctrine of the Blank Slate. The idea that everybody is the same is the idea that allowed this persecution, since it indicates that, among equally Blank Slates, those who get more are greedy.
This is odd. Persecution against Hindu minorities, Chinese minorities, and the Igbo had to do with religion and in-group morality, not social science trends.
As to in-group morality, Pinker paraphrases Singer, who says that this is the default switch of human nature. Pinker goes on to explain that we have had centuries of culture to teach against this. This is odd as well, as we can more simply say that children are taught to regard other people as either acceptable or unacceptable. There is much ambiguity in the way that children, and the adults they become, view their groupings. There is also a whole lot of subtlety. As with modern Chinese, who like us, have distinct, intersecting rings of social networks, including family, in-laws, region-group, coworkers, bosses, classmates (very big for them), and friends.
Little children in these primitive tribes may or may not hate reflexively dehumanize other tribes. And here, we get a taste of the commonality that the new Genotypic Social Sciences have with the previous excesses of culture and system: The avoidance of psychology and avoidance of the complexity of personal experience.
But when we look at those savages, regarded as our recent cultural ancestors, perhaps the way 'we' were before the Holocene, we are supposed to see a simpler version of ourselves, which reflects our true human nature (universal genetic tendency.)
I just had a Physical Anthropology professor who's thesis showed that men's pickiness in female selection evolved because it promoted status and greater access to sexual resources.
It might also be that we just feel attracted to the most sexually viable woman in the set available to our perception, or the woman who has exaggerated examples of features that connote fertility among woman. But this answer is not suitable to the trend now, and so seems facile, and unfruitful.
For Pinker, growing up around all that culture makes everything excess, like rape is all about cultural patriarchy, or crime comes from racism and poverty, it is natural that his swing to the other side would be excessive.
For my Phys Anth professor, though, the situation is different. Now that this perspective dominates, it is heading into it's phase of over application. And, for a young academic, there is need to produce work that understands the truth of human nature as the leading minds understand it. Respecting your professors, wanting to get their approval, wanting to succeed in that academic endeavor that you are unlikely to contemplate at a structural level, and wanting to smash the false idols of the receding generation all lead to reproducing the latest big idea that the mainstream of academia is grasped by.
Into the big idea, the universe must be crammed. The renaissance saw a lot of new machines and tecnhology, and gave us the start of Mechanism, around the time of the disovery of electricity and modern chemistry, we got vitalism. Then, Hegel, Marx, and Bentham started thinking about how the big thing determines the small thing, and that led, eventually, to the Blank Slate.
Now we are back to human nature again, and this time the argument is leaning towards a positive view of human nature.
I don't think we will see everyone adopting the obvious implication of evolution by natural selection: what we call good is just what was once adaptive. The choice is only to inhibit or encourage tendencies brought about by our evolution. There is no final morality, no safety in human nature. Sometimes dolphins might rescue humans, but it is more common for us humans to slaughter dolphins. That is our nature. Charity is also human nature. We can choose life affirming values, but we are nowhere compelled to do so.
Biological and genetic data is useful. Constructing our evolutionary heritage is a noble endeavor, and the results fill me with awe. But, Pinker and the rest will not get away with merely fighting for a respect of the actual evolved tendencies of humans. They will not escape the expanding canvas of the big idea.
Our evolved society and social intelligence will not allow this. The tendency in human nature to go too far with an idea, never realizing that it is just one way that we grasp existence, and the tendency to get caught by metaphors, rather than spreading out the data before us, and letting their implications branch out from them in all directions, is a bit hard for us. Especially when we cannot distinguish between research, revelation of causal processes, and the paradigm we imagine to be inherent in them.
Just as the early phrenologists left behind good neurological insights, so too will the present academic fashion queens continue to produce mountains of brilliant explanations and data.
Let's hope they can get to a point where the prevalence of metaphor, it's evolution, and it's non-binding, limited character can be found in the workings of Social Biological brains. Let us get to the point where we can grab the big idea by the root and pin it down in our neurological processes, rather then just letting it morph and carry us away elsewhere.
Further, I hope we can get to the day when we replace Sociobiology with Biological Socialism.
Sociobiology will inevitably lead to prescriptive forces, both among academics and the intermediary levels of society, ending in popular culture. It has already done so. But I hope that they are able to grasp the ultimately structurally prescriptive character of their endeavor.
Likely, they will just continue to teach the naturalistic fallacy and miss it's application to their metaphor hijacked minds.
But back to my recent Physical Anthropology class, we learned of a theory that says rape is among us because it allowed some people to impregnate woman. This coincides with the idea that behaviors are adaptations, and thus must have contributed to our survival, since we exhibit them.
It cannot be only me that automatically senses the proximity to tautology that this line of reasoning indicates.
Can you see the flaws in this?
Well, lets break down it a little:
Behaviors that are persistent among humans have persisted, therefore they must have helped in our evolution. If they hadn't helped us reproduce, those humans that had them would have failed to pass on their genes and would have died out. Every behavior? What does each behavior correspond to? A set of genetic expressions of proteins that comprise muscle, neural, glandular tissue?
Well, since we haven't quite worked all that out, we must instead rely on statistical correlation. And statistical correlation in regards to human behavior, and it's underlying psychological manifestation, is hard to be anything other than over simplification. There are so many factors to correlate with so many other factors, that you are better off delving into the messy, hard to access human mind.
Rape, of course, might be caused by any number of factors, but when you spend all your time discussing behavior in terms of natural selection, neglecting to account for any behavior through natural selection is likely to make you uncomfortable.
It is perfectly reasonable to assume that some behaviors were not adaptive and just results of other adaptations, or what Richard Dawkins calls 'misfires', where one tendency results in another tendency that is not adaptive.
According to the rape as adaptive idea, we want to rape people because our ancestors evolved this trait, which then made them more successive at reproducing.
But what I noticed about the authors of the rape book, and my professor, is that they seemed utterly ignorant and unaware of the issue of psycology in regards to rapists. If you are dealing with a rapist and want to know why he did it, you have to imagine what it's like to be him. And that's an imperfect endeavor, and it's accuracy is hard to guage.
But we can at least see that to violate someone's will in such a blatant manner requires a lack of empathy and, likely, a process of dehumanization of the victim.
When you are hurting someone, particularly when they are physically and verbally imploring you to stop, you have to justify continuing. Moreover, in rape, you see patterns of going after victims who are perceived as weak. The rapist, who is said in that book to be genetically predisposed as part of his drive to procreate, is likely to be full of rationalizations.
I doubt you will find anyone familiar with rapists, and rape cases who has come to the conclusion that "These men are basically normal guys with just this one abnormal disposition."
Rape coincides with some pretty messed up psychology. And when you have guys come along, who are experts in genetics, evolution, and biology, who just happen to have come to the conclusion that there own pigeon hole is where the real answer lies, you have to wonder if they've ever really imagined what it would be like to be a rapist, or looked at profiles and case studies that show the minds of rapists.
And, this is somewhat tangential to the rape-is-in-the-genes guys. They are primarily reacting against the rape-is-in-the-society guys. I remember hearing the 'rape is not about sex' line when I was a teenager. For me, it was obvious that this was some sort of rhetorical device, and that what it must really mean is that rape is mostly about violence.
It is disconcerting to find that these old people, full of knowledge and infused with the will to dominate through research, are so flat in their thinking.
Between genes and behavior there is a wide space called the mind, which is full of layers upon layers of meaning.
Between culture and behavior there is a wide space called subjective experience, which is likewise full of myriad messages, signals, leanings, and decisions.
I cannot help but suspect that these Genes/Society determinists have been divided from their own mind's by the needs of public debate, the demands of scientific-type evidence, and academic authority.
Rather than enjoying the indefinite contemplation of their galaxies of internal being, they identify to closely with the exactness of scientific method, and imagine themselves to be simple and determined by evidence.
Nonetheless, I look forward to the future revelations of the current paradigm. I like Pinker's The Language Instinct. I am less satisfied with The Blank Slate and what I have heard from Dennet about Breaking the Spell, but it's important to understand and process his arguments. I love everything by Dawkins. I really want to read The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton.
Hopefully, as neurology advances, we may eventually get to psychology.
I've been thinking for awhile about the annoying but inevitable overreach of this genetics-makes-society paradigm that started with E.O. Wilson, and Chomsky, and the rest.
I think Pinker is an example of a preacher for this paradigm. I read The Blank Slate when it first came out eight or so years ago. I was interested due to it's rejection of the anti-human nature character that I understood to be a phenomena of the outdated academic left, as well as a flaw of socialism, and a key to the evil of twentieth century dictators.
Of course, the idea now is that since before the social sciences got to the point where many said that culture makes everything, we are now getting back to the point where human nature, now genetics, makes everything.
Pinker ties an argument by Steven Jay Gould and Lowentin that claimed that attribution of behavior/culture to genetics was used to maintain existing, and that Social Biology was a continuation of this, with the doctrine of the Blank Slate.
A little later on, he ties in racial prejudice and pogroms against successful racial minorities, whose cultures led them to greater success, with the doctrine of the Blank Slate. The idea that everybody is the same is the idea that allowed this persecution, since it indicates that, among equally Blank Slates, those who get more are greedy.
This is odd. Persecution against Hindu minorities, Chinese minorities, and the Igbo had to do with religion and in-group morality, not social science trends.
As to in-group morality, Pinker paraphrases Singer, who says that this is the default switch of human nature. Pinker goes on to explain that we have had centuries of culture to teach against this. This is odd as well, as we can more simply say that children are taught to regard other people as either acceptable or unacceptable. There is much ambiguity in the way that children, and the adults they become, view their groupings. There is also a whole lot of subtlety. As with modern Chinese, who like us, have distinct, intersecting rings of social networks, including family, in-laws, region-group, coworkers, bosses, classmates (very big for them), and friends.
Little children in these primitive tribes may or may not hate reflexively dehumanize other tribes. And here, we get a taste of the commonality that the new Genotypic Social Sciences have with the previous excesses of culture and system: The avoidance of psychology and avoidance of the complexity of personal experience.
But when we look at those savages, regarded as our recent cultural ancestors, perhaps the way 'we' were before the Holocene, we are supposed to see a simpler version of ourselves, which reflects our true human nature (universal genetic tendency.)
I just had a Physical Anthropology professor who's thesis showed that men's pickiness in female selection evolved because it promoted status and greater access to sexual resources.
It might also be that we just feel attracted to the most sexually viable woman in the set available to our perception, or the woman who has exaggerated examples of features that connote fertility among woman. But this answer is not suitable to the trend now, and so seems facile, and unfruitful.
For Pinker, growing up around all that culture makes everything excess, like rape is all about cultural patriarchy, or crime comes from racism and poverty, it is natural that his swing to the other side would be excessive.
For my Phys Anth professor, though, the situation is different. Now that this perspective dominates, it is heading into it's phase of over application. And, for a young academic, there is need to produce work that understands the truth of human nature as the leading minds understand it. Respecting your professors, wanting to get their approval, wanting to succeed in that academic endeavor that you are unlikely to contemplate at a structural level, and wanting to smash the false idols of the receding generation all lead to reproducing the latest big idea that the mainstream of academia is grasped by.
Into the big idea, the universe must be crammed. The renaissance saw a lot of new machines and tecnhology, and gave us the start of Mechanism, around the time of the disovery of electricity and modern chemistry, we got vitalism. Then, Hegel, Marx, and Bentham started thinking about how the big thing determines the small thing, and that led, eventually, to the Blank Slate.
Now we are back to human nature again, and this time the argument is leaning towards a positive view of human nature.
I don't think we will see everyone adopting the obvious implication of evolution by natural selection: what we call good is just what was once adaptive. The choice is only to inhibit or encourage tendencies brought about by our evolution. There is no final morality, no safety in human nature. Sometimes dolphins might rescue humans, but it is more common for us humans to slaughter dolphins. That is our nature. Charity is also human nature. We can choose life affirming values, but we are nowhere compelled to do so.
Biological and genetic data is useful. Constructing our evolutionary heritage is a noble endeavor, and the results fill me with awe. But, Pinker and the rest will not get away with merely fighting for a respect of the actual evolved tendencies of humans. They will not escape the expanding canvas of the big idea.
Our evolved society and social intelligence will not allow this. The tendency in human nature to go too far with an idea, never realizing that it is just one way that we grasp existence, and the tendency to get caught by metaphors, rather than spreading out the data before us, and letting their implications branch out from them in all directions, is a bit hard for us. Especially when we cannot distinguish between research, revelation of causal processes, and the paradigm we imagine to be inherent in them.
Just as the early phrenologists left behind good neurological insights, so too will the present academic fashion queens continue to produce mountains of brilliant explanations and data.
Let's hope they can get to a point where the prevalence of metaphor, it's evolution, and it's non-binding, limited character can be found in the workings of Social Biological brains. Let us get to the point where we can grab the big idea by the root and pin it down in our neurological processes, rather then just letting it morph and carry us away elsewhere.
Further, I hope we can get to the day when we replace Sociobiology with Biological Socialism.
Sociobiology will inevitably lead to prescriptive forces, both among academics and the intermediary levels of society, ending in popular culture. It has already done so. But I hope that they are able to grasp the ultimately structurally prescriptive character of their endeavor.
Likely, they will just continue to teach the naturalistic fallacy and miss it's application to their metaphor hijacked minds.
But back to my recent Physical Anthropology class, we learned of a theory that says rape is among us because it allowed some people to impregnate woman. This coincides with the idea that behaviors are adaptations, and thus must have contributed to our survival, since we exhibit them.
It cannot be only me that automatically senses the proximity to tautology that this line of reasoning indicates.
Can you see the flaws in this?
Well, lets break down it a little:
Behaviors that are persistent among humans have persisted, therefore they must have helped in our evolution. If they hadn't helped us reproduce, those humans that had them would have failed to pass on their genes and would have died out. Every behavior? What does each behavior correspond to? A set of genetic expressions of proteins that comprise muscle, neural, glandular tissue?
Well, since we haven't quite worked all that out, we must instead rely on statistical correlation. And statistical correlation in regards to human behavior, and it's underlying psychological manifestation, is hard to be anything other than over simplification. There are so many factors to correlate with so many other factors, that you are better off delving into the messy, hard to access human mind.
Rape, of course, might be caused by any number of factors, but when you spend all your time discussing behavior in terms of natural selection, neglecting to account for any behavior through natural selection is likely to make you uncomfortable.
It is perfectly reasonable to assume that some behaviors were not adaptive and just results of other adaptations, or what Richard Dawkins calls 'misfires', where one tendency results in another tendency that is not adaptive.
According to the rape as adaptive idea, we want to rape people because our ancestors evolved this trait, which then made them more successive at reproducing.
But what I noticed about the authors of the rape book, and my professor, is that they seemed utterly ignorant and unaware of the issue of psycology in regards to rapists. If you are dealing with a rapist and want to know why he did it, you have to imagine what it's like to be him. And that's an imperfect endeavor, and it's accuracy is hard to guage.
But we can at least see that to violate someone's will in such a blatant manner requires a lack of empathy and, likely, a process of dehumanization of the victim.
When you are hurting someone, particularly when they are physically and verbally imploring you to stop, you have to justify continuing. Moreover, in rape, you see patterns of going after victims who are perceived as weak. The rapist, who is said in that book to be genetically predisposed as part of his drive to procreate, is likely to be full of rationalizations.
I doubt you will find anyone familiar with rapists, and rape cases who has come to the conclusion that "These men are basically normal guys with just this one abnormal disposition."
Rape coincides with some pretty messed up psychology. And when you have guys come along, who are experts in genetics, evolution, and biology, who just happen to have come to the conclusion that there own pigeon hole is where the real answer lies, you have to wonder if they've ever really imagined what it would be like to be a rapist, or looked at profiles and case studies that show the minds of rapists.
And, this is somewhat tangential to the rape-is-in-the-genes guys. They are primarily reacting against the rape-is-in-the-society guys. I remember hearing the 'rape is not about sex' line when I was a teenager. For me, it was obvious that this was some sort of rhetorical device, and that what it must really mean is that rape is mostly about violence.
It is disconcerting to find that these old people, full of knowledge and infused with the will to dominate through research, are so flat in their thinking.
Between genes and behavior there is a wide space called the mind, which is full of layers upon layers of meaning.
Between culture and behavior there is a wide space called subjective experience, which is likewise full of myriad messages, signals, leanings, and decisions.
I cannot help but suspect that these Genes/Society determinists have been divided from their own mind's by the needs of public debate, the demands of scientific-type evidence, and academic authority.
Rather than enjoying the indefinite contemplation of their galaxies of internal being, they identify to closely with the exactness of scientific method, and imagine themselves to be simple and determined by evidence.
Nonetheless, I look forward to the future revelations of the current paradigm. I like Pinker's The Language Instinct. I am less satisfied with The Blank Slate and what I have heard from Dennet about Breaking the Spell, but it's important to understand and process his arguments. I love everything by Dawkins. I really want to read The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton.
Hopefully, as neurology advances, we may eventually get to psychology.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
NON-FICTION: The Hindrance of Categorization: Capitalism and Socialism
I have just read through five pages/articles, 1 2 3 4 5 , on whether or not Sweden is Socialist.
And, anyone who reads this is likely already inclined to an answer, and ready to choose a category.
The funny thing is that so much analysis of Sweden, that I've seen, appears to use the facts of Sweden's legal and economic systems to argue for its exclusion from or inclusion into ill defined categories: Capitalism and Socialism.
The principle that puts observation and comprehension before assessment of value is one that humans generally have a hard time keeping to. Thus, we often tend to merely jump to categories, and away from the actual complexity of the phenomena we are referring to.
Moreover, these categories are daily employed in a manner that unconsciously obfuscates their prescriptive and descriptive variants, their doctrinal variants, and their taxonomic variants.
When a Trotskyist argues for socialism, she likely has a clear definition of what she means by that. She is likely arguing that it is a good thing for a party of people to acquire power over the economy and government in the name of the proletariat/workers. But when she talks of capitalism, she is more likely to regard the proposals for economic systems put forth by Carl Menger, by Adam Smith, by Mitlon Friedman, by Wilfredo Pareto , by Friedrich Hayek, by Ayn Rand,or the actual policies enacted by administrators of the various capitalist systems as all more or less the same thing, and unworthy of separate consideration.
Conversely, proponents of capitalism, particularly the anti-analytical, shaken up sheep that one sees all over the t.v. denouncing Obama as a socialist are generally ignorant of both the classification and particulars of the policies they oppose as well as the conceptual delineations and history of the ideas they propose.
What in the world does it mean to describe countries as socialist or capitalist and on this basis argue for the superiority of either supposed system?
I have, for the last few years increasingly felt that, at the base of our crumbling ideological fortresses are merely actual policies and facts of our existence, which would be much more intelligible without the convoluted artifices that we construct around them.
I have also noticed that a fundamental flaw in the debates over political ideology carried out in our culture on the small level as well as in the popular media is that it aims at little efficacious consequence, and is almost entirely carried out for the purpose of rhetorical victory.
The ideologues and faction lovers that comprise much of the discussion of what to do on the national level are often entirely lacking in the drive towards achieving mutually agreeable outcomes.
Such agreement is also considered disloyal to the ideologies. It is perhaps a legacy of the our great Christian tradition that we consider allegiance to wide conceptual schemes, constructed to guide our behavior, more important than the success of that behavior.
It is not enough for the ideologue and enlightened person to find mutually desirable outcomes. It is not enough to agree on mutually desired goals, as anarchists and therapists recommend.
For many of us, the important thing is allegiance to ideas. This is why a discussion of how to provide poor people with medical care becomes a grand debate between competing visions of the universe. (The opponents said, "We all want everyone to have healthcare, but...." A teenage student of mine once told me "In Chinese, when you say 'something, something, but...' That means everything you said before but is nonsense." ) What most people are incapable of is saying. I want health care, you want health care, let's start from there, and be open to revision at each step of the way. If this inability to deal rationally with each other at the national level is obvious, you should then wonder why you still cannot fix it.
The vast array of politicians, the vast array of powerless commentators, and the vast array of financial interests could not simply agree on a common goal. Rather, the public was given the choice between Government Takeover and Health care For All. We were asked to choose between these alternative perspectives.
The actual problem of providing health care to poor people was inaccessible in the popular dialogue.
But something was accomplished. In all the fighting and confusion, there was a group who united together in natural solidarity. That group was the health care lobby. Many of the aides who helped shaped the health care legislation were registered health care lobbyists, and the the health care industry gave generously to most everyone involved in the debate.
And, in the end, it seems that the healt hcare industry was most successful. People who own stock in HMO's are also getting something from this, as HMO stocks have been doing quite well.
There is no irony in this. Our economic system, as well as our society creates a framework in which manipulation of the government for financial gain is utterly reasonable. It was so with Hamilton's crew, and Jefferson's crew, and all who came after them.
I know of many proponents of Capitalism that oppose this, and all opponents of Capitalism also oppose this. Nonetheless, it is a constant feature of our country, and most countries, that has been with us throughout our short history.
Rich people have disproportionate power over the government. And, generally, bosses have more power than employees.
Now, this is something that people would benefit from talking about. Should rich people have more influence over the government? Many, perhaps most of those among the first generation of our Nation believed that they should.
Likewise, there are still many people that believe it is fair for the employer to have more decision making power in the company than the employees. There are also many who support unions.
And, as for the desired political ideology, we ought to take a break, for at least twenty years, and instead focus on profitable questions.
There is no Real Capitalism in existence today. If you doubt this, go to misses.org. Proponents of capitalism argue for systems that don't exist, and have never existed. The same goes for proponents of socialism.
There are some people who thought the Soviet Union was the best system imaginable, or who thought the British system was the best, or the Dutch, or the French, or, of course, the American.
But, generally, the people who grasp the system for what it is and work with it are regarded as unprincipled, wishy-washy, and unscrupulous. Many of them are. There are also those, who really do want to effect positive changes in the lives of their fellow citizens. There are people who want to make others healthier, happier, more comfortable, and more educated.
These people are much more valuable than socialists denouncing false-trotskyists, marxists villifying corporations, O'Reilly denouncing Oberman, etc.
At the very least, we ought to preach to each the other the doctrine of first delineating the varieties of the beliefs we oppose, even, god forbid, when that extends to theology.
And, anyone who reads this is likely already inclined to an answer, and ready to choose a category.
The funny thing is that so much analysis of Sweden, that I've seen, appears to use the facts of Sweden's legal and economic systems to argue for its exclusion from or inclusion into ill defined categories: Capitalism and Socialism.
The principle that puts observation and comprehension before assessment of value is one that humans generally have a hard time keeping to. Thus, we often tend to merely jump to categories, and away from the actual complexity of the phenomena we are referring to.
Moreover, these categories are daily employed in a manner that unconsciously obfuscates their prescriptive and descriptive variants, their doctrinal variants, and their taxonomic variants.
When a Trotskyist argues for socialism, she likely has a clear definition of what she means by that. She is likely arguing that it is a good thing for a party of people to acquire power over the economy and government in the name of the proletariat/workers. But when she talks of capitalism, she is more likely to regard the proposals for economic systems put forth by Carl Menger, by Adam Smith, by Mitlon Friedman, by Wilfredo Pareto , by Friedrich Hayek, by Ayn Rand,or the actual policies enacted by administrators of the various capitalist systems as all more or less the same thing, and unworthy of separate consideration.
Conversely, proponents of capitalism, particularly the anti-analytical, shaken up sheep that one sees all over the t.v. denouncing Obama as a socialist are generally ignorant of both the classification and particulars of the policies they oppose as well as the conceptual delineations and history of the ideas they propose.
What in the world does it mean to describe countries as socialist or capitalist and on this basis argue for the superiority of either supposed system?
I have, for the last few years increasingly felt that, at the base of our crumbling ideological fortresses are merely actual policies and facts of our existence, which would be much more intelligible without the convoluted artifices that we construct around them.
I have also noticed that a fundamental flaw in the debates over political ideology carried out in our culture on the small level as well as in the popular media is that it aims at little efficacious consequence, and is almost entirely carried out for the purpose of rhetorical victory.
The ideologues and faction lovers that comprise much of the discussion of what to do on the national level are often entirely lacking in the drive towards achieving mutually agreeable outcomes.
Such agreement is also considered disloyal to the ideologies. It is perhaps a legacy of the our great Christian tradition that we consider allegiance to wide conceptual schemes, constructed to guide our behavior, more important than the success of that behavior.
It is not enough for the ideologue and enlightened person to find mutually desirable outcomes. It is not enough to agree on mutually desired goals, as anarchists and therapists recommend.
For many of us, the important thing is allegiance to ideas. This is why a discussion of how to provide poor people with medical care becomes a grand debate between competing visions of the universe. (The opponents said, "We all want everyone to have healthcare, but...." A teenage student of mine once told me "In Chinese, when you say 'something, something, but...' That means everything you said before but is nonsense." ) What most people are incapable of is saying. I want health care, you want health care, let's start from there, and be open to revision at each step of the way. If this inability to deal rationally with each other at the national level is obvious, you should then wonder why you still cannot fix it.
The vast array of politicians, the vast array of powerless commentators, and the vast array of financial interests could not simply agree on a common goal. Rather, the public was given the choice between Government Takeover and Health care For All. We were asked to choose between these alternative perspectives.
The actual problem of providing health care to poor people was inaccessible in the popular dialogue.
But something was accomplished. In all the fighting and confusion, there was a group who united together in natural solidarity. That group was the health care lobby. Many of the aides who helped shaped the health care legislation were registered health care lobbyists, and the the health care industry gave generously to most everyone involved in the debate.
And, in the end, it seems that the healt hcare industry was most successful. People who own stock in HMO's are also getting something from this, as HMO stocks have been doing quite well.
There is no irony in this. Our economic system, as well as our society creates a framework in which manipulation of the government for financial gain is utterly reasonable. It was so with Hamilton's crew, and Jefferson's crew, and all who came after them.
I know of many proponents of Capitalism that oppose this, and all opponents of Capitalism also oppose this. Nonetheless, it is a constant feature of our country, and most countries, that has been with us throughout our short history.
Rich people have disproportionate power over the government. And, generally, bosses have more power than employees.
Now, this is something that people would benefit from talking about. Should rich people have more influence over the government? Many, perhaps most of those among the first generation of our Nation believed that they should.
Likewise, there are still many people that believe it is fair for the employer to have more decision making power in the company than the employees. There are also many who support unions.
And, as for the desired political ideology, we ought to take a break, for at least twenty years, and instead focus on profitable questions.
There is no Real Capitalism in existence today. If you doubt this, go to misses.org. Proponents of capitalism argue for systems that don't exist, and have never existed. The same goes for proponents of socialism.
There are some people who thought the Soviet Union was the best system imaginable, or who thought the British system was the best, or the Dutch, or the French, or, of course, the American.
But, generally, the people who grasp the system for what it is and work with it are regarded as unprincipled, wishy-washy, and unscrupulous. Many of them are. There are also those, who really do want to effect positive changes in the lives of their fellow citizens. There are people who want to make others healthier, happier, more comfortable, and more educated.
These people are much more valuable than socialists denouncing false-trotskyists, marxists villifying corporations, O'Reilly denouncing Oberman, etc.
At the very least, we ought to preach to each the other the doctrine of first delineating the varieties of the beliefs we oppose, even, god forbid, when that extends to theology.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
NON-FICTION: Zizek on Trotsky, and The Qualitative Shift from Capitalism
The main point I've gotten from Slavoj Zizek Presents Trotsky: Terrorism and Commumism is that there is an important problem to be solved regarding the transition from a capitalist to a socialist/communist/Marxist society.
The classic presentation of this problem can be stated in terms of the recent health care debate.
The most intelligent, reasonable president, obligated to the rich and powerful that funded and backed his campaign, was elected after the last one was perceived as a total fuck up.
And what was Obama met with, after winning out over Mccain? A sense of renewal, of hope, and covering up of the public's complicity in the previous regime's crimes. And on the other side, we had a mobilization of politically ignorant, marginalized bastards of John Birch, who were manipulated into viewing this utter gentleman and steward of capitalism, who was willing to reform it so that it might last longer and hurt less it's participants, as a socialist, antichrist, muslim, savage, atheist, and non-citizen.
Some on the left called Bush a fascist, but that wasn't quite the party line of the democrats. And Bush did take steps, along with Cheney and others they hired into their administration, to violate the rights of people they decided were bad, and the rights of Americans in general. They advocated torture. None of this is necessarily Fascistic. The appeal to the nation as something which must be defended at the cost of individual rights is rather Fascistic, but, again, this wasn't the main designation of the mainstream left for GW.
Attributing to Obama every sort of evil feared by their white, upper to lower class Americans that the Republicans want to keep with them, is, however, the tactic of the right.
Again, we are talking about an upper class capitalist, well integrated into the ruling class and beholden to numerous capitalist lobbies. He professes Christianity and the importance of our vast military. He believes in wage slavery and the preeminence of America.
But among the opposition, the merging of corporate backed Republicans, with vaguely ideological conservatives, and half-libertarians has resulted in a muddled ideology of anti-government sentiment that faithfully supports the governments wars and abuse of people it calls bad, believes the solution is to return to a past whose inventors they've never heard of, and thinks that a free economy, separated from the government, has something to with American history or the constitution.
But see what this moderate advocate of the modern Welfare State has become.
For proposing national healthcare, which other first world capitalist countries have, he is called a socialist, for not sharing the Left-Behind, Born-Again, Stay in the Closet, Defend Defintions, theology of that sect of Baptist Christianity which has, of late, enjoyed the patronage of the highest levels of government, for all this he is declared to be a fake Christian, an antichrist, and a Muslim.
The hammer and sickle are now, for much of the right, symbolic of Obama. He is compared to Pol Pot, Mao Ze Dong, Stalin, and Hitler.
This is how much of the wealthiest factions of capitalism responds to minor reforms.
They organize the mob, work them up to the point where they utterly believe that they are fighting for there very lives, and set them loose.
A lot of them are ready to see Obama dead. If he did die, a lot of people would shrug and say something like "Well, what did you expect? People can't be expected to just take this laying down."
When the Kennedy brothers were killed, a whole lot of people were happy. Right wingers knew that the Kennedys weren't real Americans. They knew that they were pope worshippers, commie-sypmathizers, nigger lovers, and all the rest.
And now you see these freaks with guns, and the tree of liberty crap, that was written in defense of poor people unable to pay taxes (who were under attack by the rich.)
This is where Trotsky comes in. Trotsky had a debate with Kautsky on representational government.
Trotsky's answer to the allegation that the Bolsheviks had invalidated themselves by throwing away parliamentary democracy was to say that parliamentary democracy was a vehicle by which the capitalists retained power and prevented any sort of proletarian empowerment.
And that's pretty much what's happened. The poor and disadvantaged get more alms, while most of the money still goes to domination of other countries, and campaign contributions and the like to dominate this country.
Unions are scattered, disregarded, and seen as a hindrance to progress in the mainstream.
But Trotsky was accused of terrorism, and he acknowledged that terrorism was exactly what he was engaged in.
The major powers of the world united against the Bolsheviks early on, and the White Guard inside Russia was ready to do whatever they could to kill and wipe out the workers uprising.
So Trotsky said terrorism was needed against the the capitalists, and royalists and the rest.
And he was partially right. They got rid of the enemies, and they also got rid of the power of the soviets.
They spoke for the proletariat, then seized power in the name of the workers, and then maintained power in the name of the soviets, and then killed all kinds of people and set up their party as the sole power.
And in all this, the power of the soviets was kicked aside in the name of the power of the bolsheviks, and the party hierarchy. Then Stalin got control of this,closed off the revolution for good, and dedicated Soviet Intelligence to killing it abroad.
Meanwhile, leftists, socialists, and even anarchists tried their best to believe in this image of Socailism, the closest thing they had yet seen to a victory of the proletariat over the domination and oppression of the capitalists.
And what they got for it was the association of party dictatorship and savage cruelty with their ideals.
And when the Spanish Civil War came around, Stalin was their to organize the worlds socialists (by which I mean those that signed up for communism, as well as anarchists) against any part of that uprising that would compete with the Soviet Union for revolutionary status.
And the capitalist enemies of liberation were completely satisfied with Lenin's right wing deviation, and agreed that he and Stalin were in fact, the truest Marxists one could ever imagine.
So, on the one hand, Trotsky's defense of state terrorism is valid in the context of revolution, but when that party has no mechanism of accountability to those it claims to represent,you end up with just the party speaking to itself and accountable only to whoever can seize power.
And the Bolsheviks domination of the socialist movement took away the power of the people and, simultaneously, gave the defenders of capitalist oppression an effortless method of hunting down and completely discrediting socialists: linking them with Russia. Many socialists were in fact linked up with the comintern or Russia.
And down to the present day, the idea that having an impoverished class is caused by the economic/power structure we live in is immediately and conveniently dismissed as Communism, Socialism, and Marxism, all of which were ideas seized by the Soviet Union and ruined for those who seek liberation for the poor.
But, the problem of liberation is that among the rich, as seen with the moderate attempts of Obama, there will always be those who must wipe out anything that grants power to that class which they rely on for their profits.
Terrorism and seizure of the state is not the solution. Terrorism encourages more of the same, as well as bitter enemies who never forgive the regime for its crimes. Seizing state power has lead to preservation of the state at the cost of revolution.
But reform through popular politics is also ineffectual. Millions of dollars went into making Obama president, and millions of dollars went into fighting healthcare reform, and billions of dollars went into keeping up moribund companies who stifle the economy, and billions of dollars are going to Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the thousands of soldiers in military bases our government maintains throughout the world.
To reform the state through it's mechanisms leads both to the villification of a moderate like Obama and too the state tyranny of the Soviet Union.
All this bad mouthing, I hope, serves to illustrate my lack of practical solutions. The most beneficial solutions that I can see in our society, are the consensus model among anarchists, unions, consensus as promoted by therapists in familial relations, and the promotion of atheism against the few sects trying to seize power in this country.
That's enough for this morning.
The classic presentation of this problem can be stated in terms of the recent health care debate.
The most intelligent, reasonable president, obligated to the rich and powerful that funded and backed his campaign, was elected after the last one was perceived as a total fuck up.
And what was Obama met with, after winning out over Mccain? A sense of renewal, of hope, and covering up of the public's complicity in the previous regime's crimes. And on the other side, we had a mobilization of politically ignorant, marginalized bastards of John Birch, who were manipulated into viewing this utter gentleman and steward of capitalism, who was willing to reform it so that it might last longer and hurt less it's participants, as a socialist, antichrist, muslim, savage, atheist, and non-citizen.
Some on the left called Bush a fascist, but that wasn't quite the party line of the democrats. And Bush did take steps, along with Cheney and others they hired into their administration, to violate the rights of people they decided were bad, and the rights of Americans in general. They advocated torture. None of this is necessarily Fascistic. The appeal to the nation as something which must be defended at the cost of individual rights is rather Fascistic, but, again, this wasn't the main designation of the mainstream left for GW.
Attributing to Obama every sort of evil feared by their white, upper to lower class Americans that the Republicans want to keep with them, is, however, the tactic of the right.
Again, we are talking about an upper class capitalist, well integrated into the ruling class and beholden to numerous capitalist lobbies. He professes Christianity and the importance of our vast military. He believes in wage slavery and the preeminence of America.
But among the opposition, the merging of corporate backed Republicans, with vaguely ideological conservatives, and half-libertarians has resulted in a muddled ideology of anti-government sentiment that faithfully supports the governments wars and abuse of people it calls bad, believes the solution is to return to a past whose inventors they've never heard of, and thinks that a free economy, separated from the government, has something to with American history or the constitution.
But see what this moderate advocate of the modern Welfare State has become.
For proposing national healthcare, which other first world capitalist countries have, he is called a socialist, for not sharing the Left-Behind, Born-Again, Stay in the Closet, Defend Defintions, theology of that sect of Baptist Christianity which has, of late, enjoyed the patronage of the highest levels of government, for all this he is declared to be a fake Christian, an antichrist, and a Muslim.
The hammer and sickle are now, for much of the right, symbolic of Obama. He is compared to Pol Pot, Mao Ze Dong, Stalin, and Hitler.
This is how much of the wealthiest factions of capitalism responds to minor reforms.
They organize the mob, work them up to the point where they utterly believe that they are fighting for there very lives, and set them loose.
A lot of them are ready to see Obama dead. If he did die, a lot of people would shrug and say something like "Well, what did you expect? People can't be expected to just take this laying down."
When the Kennedy brothers were killed, a whole lot of people were happy. Right wingers knew that the Kennedys weren't real Americans. They knew that they were pope worshippers, commie-sypmathizers, nigger lovers, and all the rest.
And now you see these freaks with guns, and the tree of liberty crap, that was written in defense of poor people unable to pay taxes (who were under attack by the rich.)
This is where Trotsky comes in. Trotsky had a debate with Kautsky on representational government.
Trotsky's answer to the allegation that the Bolsheviks had invalidated themselves by throwing away parliamentary democracy was to say that parliamentary democracy was a vehicle by which the capitalists retained power and prevented any sort of proletarian empowerment.
And that's pretty much what's happened. The poor and disadvantaged get more alms, while most of the money still goes to domination of other countries, and campaign contributions and the like to dominate this country.
Unions are scattered, disregarded, and seen as a hindrance to progress in the mainstream.
But Trotsky was accused of terrorism, and he acknowledged that terrorism was exactly what he was engaged in.
The major powers of the world united against the Bolsheviks early on, and the White Guard inside Russia was ready to do whatever they could to kill and wipe out the workers uprising.
So Trotsky said terrorism was needed against the the capitalists, and royalists and the rest.
And he was partially right. They got rid of the enemies, and they also got rid of the power of the soviets.
They spoke for the proletariat, then seized power in the name of the workers, and then maintained power in the name of the soviets, and then killed all kinds of people and set up their party as the sole power.
And in all this, the power of the soviets was kicked aside in the name of the power of the bolsheviks, and the party hierarchy. Then Stalin got control of this,closed off the revolution for good, and dedicated Soviet Intelligence to killing it abroad.
Meanwhile, leftists, socialists, and even anarchists tried their best to believe in this image of Socailism, the closest thing they had yet seen to a victory of the proletariat over the domination and oppression of the capitalists.
And what they got for it was the association of party dictatorship and savage cruelty with their ideals.
And when the Spanish Civil War came around, Stalin was their to organize the worlds socialists (by which I mean those that signed up for communism, as well as anarchists) against any part of that uprising that would compete with the Soviet Union for revolutionary status.
And the capitalist enemies of liberation were completely satisfied with Lenin's right wing deviation, and agreed that he and Stalin were in fact, the truest Marxists one could ever imagine.
So, on the one hand, Trotsky's defense of state terrorism is valid in the context of revolution, but when that party has no mechanism of accountability to those it claims to represent,you end up with just the party speaking to itself and accountable only to whoever can seize power.
And the Bolsheviks domination of the socialist movement took away the power of the people and, simultaneously, gave the defenders of capitalist oppression an effortless method of hunting down and completely discrediting socialists: linking them with Russia. Many socialists were in fact linked up with the comintern or Russia.
And down to the present day, the idea that having an impoverished class is caused by the economic/power structure we live in is immediately and conveniently dismissed as Communism, Socialism, and Marxism, all of which were ideas seized by the Soviet Union and ruined for those who seek liberation for the poor.
But, the problem of liberation is that among the rich, as seen with the moderate attempts of Obama, there will always be those who must wipe out anything that grants power to that class which they rely on for their profits.
Terrorism and seizure of the state is not the solution. Terrorism encourages more of the same, as well as bitter enemies who never forgive the regime for its crimes. Seizing state power has lead to preservation of the state at the cost of revolution.
But reform through popular politics is also ineffectual. Millions of dollars went into making Obama president, and millions of dollars went into fighting healthcare reform, and billions of dollars went into keeping up moribund companies who stifle the economy, and billions of dollars are going to Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the thousands of soldiers in military bases our government maintains throughout the world.
To reform the state through it's mechanisms leads both to the villification of a moderate like Obama and too the state tyranny of the Soviet Union.
All this bad mouthing, I hope, serves to illustrate my lack of practical solutions. The most beneficial solutions that I can see in our society, are the consensus model among anarchists, unions, consensus as promoted by therapists in familial relations, and the promotion of atheism against the few sects trying to seize power in this country.
That's enough for this morning.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
NON-Fiction: HIgh Notes. January Fourth
-What is the full range of somatic effects of THC?
-A good way to resolve and expand on "The Marked" plotline in The 4400 would have been to attribute the success of The Marked to someone's or some peoples' 4400 ability. It would turn out that the faction supporting the The Marked were marginal in influence, but bolstered, intentionally or unintentionally strengthening them. Then, this could turn into a hunt for the person/people whose powers are doing this, and various dilemma's, like should they kill to stop the persons powers, or should they restrict promycin lest it encourage more powers like these.
-Becoming aware of a thought develops or inhibits it's progression.
-Areas of the brain inhibited/excited/aggravated by THC as expressed in their exhibition perception and experience, such as:
-Light, Long Term Memory, Short Term Memory, Imagination, Language, Humor
-Differing linguistic tendencies might in some proportion, correspond to genotypic differentiation.
Some people might be better in communication based on their genotype. Some people are better at converstaion and, when this extends to conversations with the self, I wonder what sort of advantages/disadvantagtes in regards to figuiring out things, or controlling oneself there are. Are there people wiht markedly less ability to converse with themselves, and what do they do isntead?
Is this a lot of what prayers are about. What exactly is involved in the statements like "So, I said to myself...." How much talking to oneself is actually going on, and what does talking to oneself indicate about Wernicke's/Broca's area?
-A good way to resolve and expand on "The Marked" plotline in The 4400 would have been to attribute the success of The Marked to someone's or some peoples' 4400 ability. It would turn out that the faction supporting the The Marked were marginal in influence, but bolstered, intentionally or unintentionally strengthening them. Then, this could turn into a hunt for the person/people whose powers are doing this, and various dilemma's, like should they kill to stop the persons powers, or should they restrict promycin lest it encourage more powers like these.
-Becoming aware of a thought develops or inhibits it's progression.
-Areas of the brain inhibited/excited/aggravated by THC as expressed in their exhibition perception and experience, such as:
-Light, Long Term Memory, Short Term Memory, Imagination, Language, Humor
-Differing linguistic tendencies might in some proportion, correspond to genotypic differentiation.
Some people might be better in communication based on their genotype. Some people are better at converstaion and, when this extends to conversations with the self, I wonder what sort of advantages/disadvantagtes in regards to figuiring out things, or controlling oneself there are. Are there people wiht markedly less ability to converse with themselves, and what do they do isntead?
Is this a lot of what prayers are about. What exactly is involved in the statements like "So, I said to myself...." How much talking to oneself is actually going on, and what does talking to oneself indicate about Wernicke's/Broca's area?
Thursday, December 31, 2009
NON-FICTION: High Notes-New Years Eve
1.The reactive emotive response might be capable of inspiring, or creating to some extent the explanation for it, by manipulating our conceptual capacity, which may then only affirm post hoc, and only then, possibly doubt it.
2.Enhanced linguistic/analytic capability, in addition to possibly being solely influenced by increased blood flow to brain, or manipulation of the thalamus, it may also be a sole response to the relaxation caused by THC working outside the CNS.
3.The dreamlike visual experience while high is similar to dream and must involve the same sort of accessing/limiting of the visual experience that is involved in reproducing visual stimuli while dreaming.
4.The moon tonight looks like an expressionist, or Munch painting. It could also be a comic book in the lighting and coloring. The blue of the moon was of a certain softness that seemed to be generally reserved for the appearance of paint or ink.
2.Enhanced linguistic/analytic capability, in addition to possibly being solely influenced by increased blood flow to brain, or manipulation of the thalamus, it may also be a sole response to the relaxation caused by THC working outside the CNS.
3.The dreamlike visual experience while high is similar to dream and must involve the same sort of accessing/limiting of the visual experience that is involved in reproducing visual stimuli while dreaming.
4.The moon tonight looks like an expressionist, or Munch painting. It could also be a comic book in the lighting and coloring. The blue of the moon was of a certain softness that seemed to be generally reserved for the appearance of paint or ink.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
NON-FICTION: Further notes on the Force of Faith
The dominant religions of our world cannot exist apart from continuously reinforced ingorance, fear of the outsiders, condemnation of the world available to us through free enquiry, and pressure to believe, starting at youth.
The majority of people in the world who adhere to Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have been introduced to their faith primarily by the awesome power of their parents.
The parents bring the child it's first role model, hierarchical system, and instructions on how to think. The parents are the witnesses to the validity of faith. They immerse the child in presumptions that need not be independently verified by the child. The child's belief in any nonsense that the parent spouts, such as the tooth fairy or Santa Claus is easily taken for granted by the child. And when the child doubts these presumptions, he or she is inclined to obey the parents admonitions against doubting. And when this doubt is portrayed to the child as fundamentally dangerous, fundamentally bad, and straight up evil, the child will invest great amounts of energy into suppressing this doubt and reworking his or her thinking in order to conform with these doubtful presumptions.
More than just parents are needed, however, to reinforce the suspicious presumptions. The child of a lone nut or cult member must be kept away from other kids in the neighborhood as much as possible, lest the child be corrupted by other views, and led astray by the desire to fit in to his or her peer group. And the child of a Christian living in a Christian neighborhood, or living in a country where Christianity is prevalent, still must be guarded, against the non-Christian elements of society, which tempt the child all it's life. This defense of the child's inculcation into an indefensible world view is not something the parent can do alone. It takes the whole neighborhood. It takes a group effort.
In addition, then to the force of the parents in inculcating faith, we further need the constant reinforcement of the wider group. Uncles, aunts, neighbors, grandparents, teachers and principals need to scare the child away from doubting doubtful assertions of miracles and magic. When the child of strong faith enters into a world where that faith is not taken for granted, it hardly survives. In an environment where assertions of god, battles between gods, resurrection, original sin, the illusory character of the self, contracts between a god and certain ethnic groups, or the communication between god and certain historical figures are generally tolerated, but often looked down upon for their irrationality or dismissal of the need for evidence, there is little hope for the full retention of the faith of one's childhood.
In such situations, the hope of faith lies in fear and incoherence. The parent and other authorities attach a strict fear of punishment, rejection, and hopelessness to the questionable doctrines they force onto children.
When the time comes that the child's reasoning contradicts the myths of his parents and community, the threats against non-believers come into play. You're life will be meaningless, if you sustain thought processes that invalidate your faith. You will be lost, afloat in the universe in a sea of chaos. You will go to hell, where everything you fear will be inflicted upon you ceaselessly. You will be a savage, a non-human, at the mercy of your base desires.
And, for children who reject this intimidation, a personal use may be fashioned out of the anti-definition, anti-verification doctrines of god that have been forced on them.
For these children, the entry into adolescence and adulthood may bring the realization that a positive internal experience of the other can be a source of comfort and power.
When we are alone in ourselves, there is that sense of otherness, perhaps it really is some independent entity, or perhaps it is just the corresponding brain mechanism that allows us to latch onto our parents at birth, or maybe it is some creation inspired by our sociality, or tendency to reach out to others in times of distress, to beg for help from the people available to us. But it is there in me, and I assume that it is there in many people. I have other presences in me too, some I call myself and some I reject. Some are paranoid, petty and violent, and some allow me to conform to a standard of behavior that I believe in.
When we are alone in ourselves, we are never alone. Our selves are a jumble of tendencies and drives and noise and processes. The anomalous nature of the god that we are forbidden from categorizing, defining, analysing, editing, correcting, or facing with cold logic becomes something ever more capable of survival for it's vagueness. And it is in this form that it survives within a great deal of adults, especially those in communities where no particular relgious dogma is enforced by the state, peer-pressure, or the clergy.
If you arm a child with tools of reasoning, evidence, testing, verification, and indepedendence of thought, you need not fear too much that the child will be turned toward Catholicism, Mormonism, or the Moonie cult.
But to go the other way, to arm the child with fear of disbelief in your own particular dogma, to constantly reinforce this fear with the participation of the greater community, and to erase from the child's mind any possibility of other beliefs is the true calling and goal of the fellowship of belief, be it in Saudi Arabia, 14th century Europe, Hindu Nationalist areas in India, the former theocracy of Tibet, the former theocracy of China, the former theocracy of Japan, or the desired theocracy of fundamentalist Christians in the U.S.A.
In the secular forums they speak for equal time, such as in the attempt to combat evolution by theists in my own country. In societies generated by plurality and a belief in the goodness of equality among different peoples, they demand fairness and respect, such as in the case of moderate Muslims during the Danish cartoon incident.
But in their realms, at Jesus Camp, in the countries where Isalmic clergy holds power superior or comparable to the state, and in other contexts where religion dominates, they let go of the secular appeals to respect, fairness, and tolerance. In their own worlds, they are free to ban, to kill heretics, to burn books, smash cd's, intimidate their children, subjugate woman, subjugate the poor, punish the victim, and generally deny the tenets of toleration, reason, discussion, evidence, and doubt.
After hundreds of years in Western Civilization of certain factions and camps fighting for ever greater inclusiveness, fairness, and better living for an ever greater portion of society, these Faithful, once again, are reacting against freedom and tolerance.
They fight against the system by appealing to the rules they spit upon. Christians who deny evidence, deny even the possibility of testing their central beliefs, argue for open-minded science, and embracing a plurality of beliefs. Their open mindedness extends only to those of their theories that have been rejected by scientists, and their plurality extends to and ends with their singular view of the world and our place in it. They fight against free speech by utilizing their rights to protest and publish. Muslims in Britain protest against the system that refuses to condemn them for their beliefs, and they do so in the hopes that they can spread Islam throughout the world, silencing and eliminating secular government and the reviled embrace of pluralism.
All this they call faith. There is no major, peace loving, fellow-human loving, beuatiful paen to humanity type of Faith around today that was not spread by force, by the threat of death, or some other punishment.
And when idiots promote their religion by appealing to the prevalence of religion, they are also endorsing the continued coercing of children into belief that is the endeavor of many of their co-religionists and a vital issue in their theology.
It is only in the modern times of rejection of religion that they embrace toleration of other religions. It is only because we skeptics, we heretics, we godless killjoys have had so much influence that religious leaders tentatively accept a society where our rights are protected. But, for the most part, those leaders only accept this secular society insofar as it serves the end of spreading their own dogma. For the dominance of the dogma is the general aim of religious leaders. Not a simple recognition of rights and practices, regardless of personal belief, but obedience to their chosen dogmas. Just as they were coerced into belief, so must others be coerced into the true belief, either by attacking evolution, democracy, and rational thought, or by attacking the people that don't agree with them, such as non-Muslisms, non-Christians,communists, abortion doctors, apostates, and, of course, the gays.
There will always be plenty of people ready to accept their own beliefs as something that others need not accept. There will always be people who prefer good social ties and equitable relationships over adherence to unprovable dogma. But these people don't get to be religous leaders very often, and if they do happen to attain influence, like Marting Luther King, they are slandered and reviled as untrue to their faith.
The religous leaders that hold out, espeicially when simply keeping one's religion to oneself is so banal, are the ones who have a fight, who stand out against the general society in their nonsensical intepretations of their religion (usually they claim to need no interpretation, which is impossible.)
These are the people that threaten our freedom, the progress of our civilizations, and the enjoyment of our lives.
Faith, one of the most revered artifacts of humanity, is nothing more than repetition of dogma backed by the towering authority of the parent, the threat of exclusion from one's community, the threat of physical harm, the internal threat of betraying the only truth one feels validated in accepting, and the kings and armies of history.
The reverence for faith is a reverence misunderstood and obfuscated by those who profess it. It is a feeling of obedience and loyalty made into a faculty in it's own right, that no one can find and that no one ought even to look for.
The majority of people in the world who adhere to Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have been introduced to their faith primarily by the awesome power of their parents.
The parents bring the child it's first role model, hierarchical system, and instructions on how to think. The parents are the witnesses to the validity of faith. They immerse the child in presumptions that need not be independently verified by the child. The child's belief in any nonsense that the parent spouts, such as the tooth fairy or Santa Claus is easily taken for granted by the child. And when the child doubts these presumptions, he or she is inclined to obey the parents admonitions against doubting. And when this doubt is portrayed to the child as fundamentally dangerous, fundamentally bad, and straight up evil, the child will invest great amounts of energy into suppressing this doubt and reworking his or her thinking in order to conform with these doubtful presumptions.
More than just parents are needed, however, to reinforce the suspicious presumptions. The child of a lone nut or cult member must be kept away from other kids in the neighborhood as much as possible, lest the child be corrupted by other views, and led astray by the desire to fit in to his or her peer group. And the child of a Christian living in a Christian neighborhood, or living in a country where Christianity is prevalent, still must be guarded, against the non-Christian elements of society, which tempt the child all it's life. This defense of the child's inculcation into an indefensible world view is not something the parent can do alone. It takes the whole neighborhood. It takes a group effort.
In addition, then to the force of the parents in inculcating faith, we further need the constant reinforcement of the wider group. Uncles, aunts, neighbors, grandparents, teachers and principals need to scare the child away from doubting doubtful assertions of miracles and magic. When the child of strong faith enters into a world where that faith is not taken for granted, it hardly survives. In an environment where assertions of god, battles between gods, resurrection, original sin, the illusory character of the self, contracts between a god and certain ethnic groups, or the communication between god and certain historical figures are generally tolerated, but often looked down upon for their irrationality or dismissal of the need for evidence, there is little hope for the full retention of the faith of one's childhood.
In such situations, the hope of faith lies in fear and incoherence. The parent and other authorities attach a strict fear of punishment, rejection, and hopelessness to the questionable doctrines they force onto children.
When the time comes that the child's reasoning contradicts the myths of his parents and community, the threats against non-believers come into play. You're life will be meaningless, if you sustain thought processes that invalidate your faith. You will be lost, afloat in the universe in a sea of chaos. You will go to hell, where everything you fear will be inflicted upon you ceaselessly. You will be a savage, a non-human, at the mercy of your base desires.
And, for children who reject this intimidation, a personal use may be fashioned out of the anti-definition, anti-verification doctrines of god that have been forced on them.
For these children, the entry into adolescence and adulthood may bring the realization that a positive internal experience of the other can be a source of comfort and power.
When we are alone in ourselves, there is that sense of otherness, perhaps it really is some independent entity, or perhaps it is just the corresponding brain mechanism that allows us to latch onto our parents at birth, or maybe it is some creation inspired by our sociality, or tendency to reach out to others in times of distress, to beg for help from the people available to us. But it is there in me, and I assume that it is there in many people. I have other presences in me too, some I call myself and some I reject. Some are paranoid, petty and violent, and some allow me to conform to a standard of behavior that I believe in.
When we are alone in ourselves, we are never alone. Our selves are a jumble of tendencies and drives and noise and processes. The anomalous nature of the god that we are forbidden from categorizing, defining, analysing, editing, correcting, or facing with cold logic becomes something ever more capable of survival for it's vagueness. And it is in this form that it survives within a great deal of adults, especially those in communities where no particular relgious dogma is enforced by the state, peer-pressure, or the clergy.
If you arm a child with tools of reasoning, evidence, testing, verification, and indepedendence of thought, you need not fear too much that the child will be turned toward Catholicism, Mormonism, or the Moonie cult.
But to go the other way, to arm the child with fear of disbelief in your own particular dogma, to constantly reinforce this fear with the participation of the greater community, and to erase from the child's mind any possibility of other beliefs is the true calling and goal of the fellowship of belief, be it in Saudi Arabia, 14th century Europe, Hindu Nationalist areas in India, the former theocracy of Tibet, the former theocracy of China, the former theocracy of Japan, or the desired theocracy of fundamentalist Christians in the U.S.A.
In the secular forums they speak for equal time, such as in the attempt to combat evolution by theists in my own country. In societies generated by plurality and a belief in the goodness of equality among different peoples, they demand fairness and respect, such as in the case of moderate Muslims during the Danish cartoon incident.
But in their realms, at Jesus Camp, in the countries where Isalmic clergy holds power superior or comparable to the state, and in other contexts where religion dominates, they let go of the secular appeals to respect, fairness, and tolerance. In their own worlds, they are free to ban, to kill heretics, to burn books, smash cd's, intimidate their children, subjugate woman, subjugate the poor, punish the victim, and generally deny the tenets of toleration, reason, discussion, evidence, and doubt.
After hundreds of years in Western Civilization of certain factions and camps fighting for ever greater inclusiveness, fairness, and better living for an ever greater portion of society, these Faithful, once again, are reacting against freedom and tolerance.
They fight against the system by appealing to the rules they spit upon. Christians who deny evidence, deny even the possibility of testing their central beliefs, argue for open-minded science, and embracing a plurality of beliefs. Their open mindedness extends only to those of their theories that have been rejected by scientists, and their plurality extends to and ends with their singular view of the world and our place in it. They fight against free speech by utilizing their rights to protest and publish. Muslims in Britain protest against the system that refuses to condemn them for their beliefs, and they do so in the hopes that they can spread Islam throughout the world, silencing and eliminating secular government and the reviled embrace of pluralism.
All this they call faith. There is no major, peace loving, fellow-human loving, beuatiful paen to humanity type of Faith around today that was not spread by force, by the threat of death, or some other punishment.
And when idiots promote their religion by appealing to the prevalence of religion, they are also endorsing the continued coercing of children into belief that is the endeavor of many of their co-religionists and a vital issue in their theology.
It is only in the modern times of rejection of religion that they embrace toleration of other religions. It is only because we skeptics, we heretics, we godless killjoys have had so much influence that religious leaders tentatively accept a society where our rights are protected. But, for the most part, those leaders only accept this secular society insofar as it serves the end of spreading their own dogma. For the dominance of the dogma is the general aim of religious leaders. Not a simple recognition of rights and practices, regardless of personal belief, but obedience to their chosen dogmas. Just as they were coerced into belief, so must others be coerced into the true belief, either by attacking evolution, democracy, and rational thought, or by attacking the people that don't agree with them, such as non-Muslisms, non-Christians,communists, abortion doctors, apostates, and, of course, the gays.
There will always be plenty of people ready to accept their own beliefs as something that others need not accept. There will always be people who prefer good social ties and equitable relationships over adherence to unprovable dogma. But these people don't get to be religous leaders very often, and if they do happen to attain influence, like Marting Luther King, they are slandered and reviled as untrue to their faith.
The religous leaders that hold out, espeicially when simply keeping one's religion to oneself is so banal, are the ones who have a fight, who stand out against the general society in their nonsensical intepretations of their religion (usually they claim to need no interpretation, which is impossible.)
These are the people that threaten our freedom, the progress of our civilizations, and the enjoyment of our lives.
Faith, one of the most revered artifacts of humanity, is nothing more than repetition of dogma backed by the towering authority of the parent, the threat of exclusion from one's community, the threat of physical harm, the internal threat of betraying the only truth one feels validated in accepting, and the kings and armies of history.
The reverence for faith is a reverence misunderstood and obfuscated by those who profess it. It is a feeling of obedience and loyalty made into a faculty in it's own right, that no one can find and that no one ought even to look for.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
NON-FICTION: View of my recent self
美术历史 Art History
I really excelled in this class, in just the way I really want to. In just the way that can validate my sense of myself and my aspirations in writing and learning.
Significant aspects of success were a responsive, enthusiastic teacher who believed in what she was teaching, the emphasis on attribution of theoretical category as the main subject of the class, and my pre-existing familiarity with the history of western painting, western aesthetics, aesthetic theory, and western history in general.
The fact that so much of the motivation was antagonistic and rebellious helped to give me a structure within which to fill out the descriptions.
If only ever class was like this. I didn’t have to worry about learning anything for the most part. I just listened, and read, and thought. Everything was easily absorbed.
人类体格学 Phys. Anthropology
Son of a bitch. Here my creativity and serious treatment of the subject was useless, and perhaps worked slightly against me, either by encouraging a reaction against my arrogance or expecting more based on my writing syle.
That bastard was perfectly reasonable within the confines of his narrow mechanistic approach.
I didn’t study much or really give the time necessary to fully understand every thing he wanted us to memorize.
It brings to mind again the issue of submission as the key to success. My struggle with my fierce independence and the demands of being a student. 恶性死我
My sincere contemplation of the material was insufficient in demonstrating a familiarity and comprehension of the subject matter.
Any son of a bitch that faults for not explaining nature nurture or any other petty distinctions deserves the contempt of the angel as well as the gate keepers of hell.
Any fool that would read my writing and presume ignorance of things I deem insufficient in terms of explanatory power, and ignore the superiority of the explanations offered, or ignore the debate which they imply, or ignore the attempt to replace the check list data which shows an implicit understanding of that same data, grants to that fool the prize of god’s contempt, and the contemptuous smirk of little baby jesus.
My rhetoric was insufficient in dissuading this evil dictatorial banal student!!! from leaving me with at least a C.
Once decided, the grade is worthy only of defense, with the smug indifference of authority, and a single minded devotion to righteousness, lest the typical, unavoidable ambiguity in student assessment be revealed.
This cruel, cruel man required me to jump into a straight jacket, into a check list.
This is check listing, reducing education to list of things to be checked off.
中文Chinese
This was the easiest and most tearing. I didn’t devote enough time, particularly early on. So I felt embarrassed and guilty about the teacher. I felt like I half assed it too much and didn’t give her the courtesy of trying enough.
The class was full of half assers. Bunch of high school kids who thought there limp tongued, broken Mandarin needed no adjustment. Their cultural identity, mostly separate now from China
Again, I feel indebted to the teacher, she was kind and engaging.
人类体格学。lab Phsy Anthropolgy -lab
I forgive you Padua
I learned everything, I got everything. But I still will wind up with a D. It hurts and hurts and hurts.
At least twice in that class I just wanted to put my head down and cry.
All the information would have been great if presented in a series of Sunday visits, free, ungraded lecture/activities, or lessons given for anything other than short term memory retention.
My time issues played a role. I came to class on the day the class project was due with no awareness that it was due, and no awareness that I should have gone to the zoo, at least, in the previous week. That’s when I really wanted to cry.
孩子发展 Child Development, Early Childhood Education
I think that in this class, I missed out on the largest amount of useful information. I’d like to purchase the book, which I might then never look at. The stuff on different types of preschools, elementary schools was the most useful. There was stuff on head start and first five, that I’m working in now.
With this class, I can’t tell how the teacher was grading. I got a’s on all the assignments. I didn’t do the last exam, because of time issues, the opinion that I couldn’t do it anyways without the book, the sense that I already had enough points to get an a or a b, and the sense that maybe since I had already contacted the teacher in a cordial manner about resetting the exam for me (since my browser had closed before I could finish/half ass it), that maybe she would think I made a mistake and take pity on me.
I did make a mistake. I accidentally closed the tab. That’s when I gave up, rather than emaling her again. That’s when I came up with the idea that maybe she would assume I didn’t know that I had done that and give me a second chance after the day it was due.
This class allowed to reflect a lot on my own teaching, and prepare for what it will be like when I go back to teaching.
It made me realize that I’ve been using a lot of modern, progressive methods in teaching, and that, perhaps, learning the terminology and categories of teaching that are used in modern pedagogy, I can categorize and organize my own teaching.
弟弟
I want to finish going over the script and rewrite a portion for him.
This is one of those things where my thinking is that this is a chance to make rogress in my career as a writer, but the perspective that has his thought is a spectator, watching from the future, condemning my hesitance to embrace this opportunity, it tells me that this is what I want, what will help me, which is a lifeline in the monsoon.
哥哥
该咋说? I just want to find a way to interact with him, show him I care, without risking the eruption of his resentment or my defense against that resentment. At this point, he won’t accept concessions, but there might be something short of a full admission that can satisfy him.
I want to bring him some gifts for Christmas and his birthday. Maybe something like a cd, dvd, external memory. gift card, clothing, cologne…
老婆
If I can just keep her from leaving, or keep from leaving her, until I get my writing career (reflexive shame) going, than things will be okay, or what? Things will be stable? No. Things will be sturdy. Or at least I feel she won’t leave me, or she won’t feel so much despair, or at least not so very much, or slightly less.
I just want to be good to her, but there’s some things I don’t want to do, some things I feel like I can’t do. I don’t think I could just go out and get a job at starbucks on the weekend. I don’t know why I can’t resists feeling bad about that, feeling wrong.
海哥
Just emailed me to make sure I could go, and offred to loan me money, said it he hoped was a money issue, and not an emma issue.
我们还有一些矛盾， 他的几句话让我不开心。 有机会我要跟他白白地谈.
读书俱乐部 Book Club
Need to make emma feel both okay that she’s not into it and encourage her in a way that acknowledges her minimal interest.
My next choice, would be nice if it could be my finished Drama of the Christian Science Teachers.
啊根体那 Argentina
Go to the bookstores, buy some Yum Yum booksYum Yum. See the city, have resentful fantasizes about ditching emma and not coming back.
出版书 publish books
Revise beast resigns, and finish Christian scienc teachers (good title) check price of ucla bookfair booth
多写 Write more
Take writing classes (I am) and see every opportunity to write as an opportunity to show your skill.
Try to gain more clarity and acceptance of your situation and feelings. See without thoughts, meditate, pray..
叔叔
Wait till the opportunity comes to email/call, or till he contacts. Think over his possible motivations/disposition, or just stop worrying about them and just pay attention to him when you see him.
下学期的伸河课程 Next semesters rio hondo classes
Buy the textbooks in advance, circle, highlight, study all the key words, categories, chapters, people.
什么书想读 What books do I want to read?
Simple and direct, the spiritual in art, zizek/Trotsky, wenyanduben, mala ondo, years of salt rice-chinese, sciabarras hayek/marx, Chinese history, linguistics, neuroscience text.
Psych-situation
心理情狂
Feel sad, and feel like emma won’t let me feel happy, like I can’t feel happy without her consent that things are okay, or acceptable, or tolerable. Don’t feel in control of my life, like a slightly removed spectator, because, probably, that’s the area of my brain summarizing the day to day to action to action part.
进大学 Getting into university
Guess it will be okay, not be able to go if accepted because of money, might not be able to go unless I get student loans.
大学课程Unversity classes
OBEY!!!!! SUBMIT!!!! Doesn’t sound like anything too hard. I think I can do it with minimal submission.
钱，多上班。。。Money, work more...
I can take more classes in the next few days, before I leave, I can work every day. I can also work continuously until/if I can start classes at whittier
思想／理论的话题 Thinking/Theoretical topics
Origins of the brain,
Revolution as a evolutionary-hominid structure, academia, the revolution-party as dominance hierarchy, the dominant trend in scientific interpretations/humanities: biological mechanism, reintrepting everything as impulse-control again, falling back to reactionary morals sometimes, and, of course, providing powerful new ways of knowing the world and our connectedness too it.
The contstructive political endeavor.
The fight against faith
Being a thinker like zizek (gets to say whatever interesting stuff he thinks about, doesn’t stick to topic.)
The way to see Trotsky.
The problem of inherent class resistance to transcending capitalism.
Monday, December 7, 2009
NON-FICTION: Get to the freaking point: Theism/Atheism, Factual Assertions=True/False
How many pathetic centuries of obfuscation have been wasted avoiding this simple truth. A claim has to be defended, proven, doubted, explained, to be judged either true or false or possible.
The millions of theists, particularly those of the intellectual class, who obfuscate the issue of trust and belief by using a Latinate term, faith, are both unwilling and disinterested in clarifying the issue.
Faith, they say is a higher faculty, or "That's why they call it faith." As if the assertion can avoid any process of logic by it's common acceptance, as if the atheist could be cowed by ad populum (an argument that is said to be true because a lot of people believe it).
And, in fact, that is where faith really comes from, not from the appeal to the authority of the people, but rather to the appeal of some people: Those in Charge.
It use to be the case that there was a group of True Christians who hunted out the many heresies. There was noone to stomp out heresy with a police force or armies, so there were many groups with different Christianities. They listed and condemned the men and woman who deviated from their views.
But, for them, this was a matter of arguments about the state of the world. There was no controversy between science, because they believed the gods were forces that intervened in their world. God was something real, and He kept the world going and punished the people who messed around with him.
But when did Christianity spread? When it became the main authority. The western Roman Empire became the Catholic Church and that's when it became mandatory to believe in god. That's when the repression, the torture, the exploitation, and the wiping out of various cultures took the name of salvation rather than mere conquering.
And it is that same authority that confronts us to today.
Christianity was spread by the impulse to empire, the impulse to conquer. Islam was spread in this way as well. King Ashoka spread buddhism througout the Indian subcontinent and the nearby regions. The Tang emperor adapted it for China, and enforced it on the masses, and the Tibetan rulers adopted it in Tibet.
That is where faith gets it's authority from.
When the Christians, theists, and atheists denounce the strident, arrogant new atheists, like Dawkins and Hitchens, what they really mean is that anyone who could so assuredly and bluntly reject theism, must be arrogant.
But what does that presuppose? That there is something to be humble about. A topic to be humble before.
And just as the ancient Jewish god was akin to the despots of early Egypt or near eastern civilizations, so too is the faith that they refuse to question, and use as a refusal to question anything but why you don't agree with them, so too is this faith a loyalty to belief, a belief that they must believe.
This faith is the faith of the totalitarian state. It says "We shall do whatever it takes to get you to submit, for everyone must submit. And we shall never give up our loyalty to these ideas and lords, for to do so would be do to commit evil."
When you are confronted by the imperative to believe, which has to be reinforced constantly, remember that this is now embedded in our cultures because at one time it was picked up by an army, and made into the state ideology.
The only thing you ever need to do with a factual assertion, like "Jesus was killed and came back to life.", or "David didn't burn in the flames." is discuss whether or not it is true, why it might be true, and what would have to confirm or deny it.
If you say it must be assessed by faith, then you are saying it must be assessed by the second thing that faith refers: inner states of feeling. Assessing a claim by using faith means seeing what you feel about it.
But, between people, feelings must be explained and justified when they contradict.
But Christians don't do that. They say they you've got to have faith, which means they intentionally trust a set of ideas, and commit themselves to changing the mind of everyone, everywhere, while believing that to change their own minds would be a sin, or unholy, and, therefore, unthinkable.
If you say Jesus did something, that is an assertion on your part. If you wan't me to believe, than let's talk about it with the awareness that it might be true, and it might be nonsense, and both of us are completely to change our mights without negative consequences.
If, instead you fall back on faith, and recommend it to me, that what this means, is you are falling back on trust of certain ideas, and you seek to convince me to trust these ideas by telling me to trust.
Look at the following example:
A.Every piece of evidence I have and you have doesn't make the possibility of god very likely.
B. Evidence. Huh huh huh. That's why they call it faith.
And, since faith means a feeling of trust, despite what the apologists and deep thinkers want to maintain, this statement is equal to: I don't have enough evidence to believie in god? That's why they call it belief! Cause you have to blieive it.
And what we end up is with something the person can't understand because they believe it is something that cannot be understood.
And to you the idiot stupid enough to expect things we believe to understandable and subject to confirmation or denial, there is nothing that can be done except to tell you that there is no understanding to be had, only acceptance.
Relgion has been eaten away and replaced to such a great extent in our world, that the modern exponents of religion have no idea that they have inherited a past set of technologies, claims about reality, explanations of weather and illness, and explanations of government.
The millions of theists, particularly those of the intellectual class, who obfuscate the issue of trust and belief by using a Latinate term, faith, are both unwilling and disinterested in clarifying the issue.
Faith, they say is a higher faculty, or "That's why they call it faith." As if the assertion can avoid any process of logic by it's common acceptance, as if the atheist could be cowed by ad populum (an argument that is said to be true because a lot of people believe it).
And, in fact, that is where faith really comes from, not from the appeal to the authority of the people, but rather to the appeal of some people: Those in Charge.
It use to be the case that there was a group of True Christians who hunted out the many heresies. There was noone to stomp out heresy with a police force or armies, so there were many groups with different Christianities. They listed and condemned the men and woman who deviated from their views.
But, for them, this was a matter of arguments about the state of the world. There was no controversy between science, because they believed the gods were forces that intervened in their world. God was something real, and He kept the world going and punished the people who messed around with him.
But when did Christianity spread? When it became the main authority. The western Roman Empire became the Catholic Church and that's when it became mandatory to believe in god. That's when the repression, the torture, the exploitation, and the wiping out of various cultures took the name of salvation rather than mere conquering.
And it is that same authority that confronts us to today.
Christianity was spread by the impulse to empire, the impulse to conquer. Islam was spread in this way as well. King Ashoka spread buddhism througout the Indian subcontinent and the nearby regions. The Tang emperor adapted it for China, and enforced it on the masses, and the Tibetan rulers adopted it in Tibet.
That is where faith gets it's authority from.
When the Christians, theists, and atheists denounce the strident, arrogant new atheists, like Dawkins and Hitchens, what they really mean is that anyone who could so assuredly and bluntly reject theism, must be arrogant.
But what does that presuppose? That there is something to be humble about. A topic to be humble before.
And just as the ancient Jewish god was akin to the despots of early Egypt or near eastern civilizations, so too is the faith that they refuse to question, and use as a refusal to question anything but why you don't agree with them, so too is this faith a loyalty to belief, a belief that they must believe.
This faith is the faith of the totalitarian state. It says "We shall do whatever it takes to get you to submit, for everyone must submit. And we shall never give up our loyalty to these ideas and lords, for to do so would be do to commit evil."
When you are confronted by the imperative to believe, which has to be reinforced constantly, remember that this is now embedded in our cultures because at one time it was picked up by an army, and made into the state ideology.
The only thing you ever need to do with a factual assertion, like "Jesus was killed and came back to life.", or "David didn't burn in the flames." is discuss whether or not it is true, why it might be true, and what would have to confirm or deny it.
If you say it must be assessed by faith, then you are saying it must be assessed by the second thing that faith refers: inner states of feeling. Assessing a claim by using faith means seeing what you feel about it.
But, between people, feelings must be explained and justified when they contradict.
But Christians don't do that. They say they you've got to have faith, which means they intentionally trust a set of ideas, and commit themselves to changing the mind of everyone, everywhere, while believing that to change their own minds would be a sin, or unholy, and, therefore, unthinkable.
If you say Jesus did something, that is an assertion on your part. If you wan't me to believe, than let's talk about it with the awareness that it might be true, and it might be nonsense, and both of us are completely to change our mights without negative consequences.
If, instead you fall back on faith, and recommend it to me, that what this means, is you are falling back on trust of certain ideas, and you seek to convince me to trust these ideas by telling me to trust.
Look at the following example:
A.Every piece of evidence I have and you have doesn't make the possibility of god very likely.
B. Evidence. Huh huh huh. That's why they call it faith.
And, since faith means a feeling of trust, despite what the apologists and deep thinkers want to maintain, this statement is equal to: I don't have enough evidence to believie in god? That's why they call it belief! Cause you have to blieive it.
And what we end up is with something the person can't understand because they believe it is something that cannot be understood.
And to you the idiot stupid enough to expect things we believe to understandable and subject to confirmation or denial, there is nothing that can be done except to tell you that there is no understanding to be had, only acceptance.
Relgion has been eaten away and replaced to such a great extent in our world, that the modern exponents of religion have no idea that they have inherited a past set of technologies, claims about reality, explanations of weather and illness, and explanations of government.
Friday, December 4, 2009
中国会不会安排一个避免资本的未来。
伟大的领导都告诉我们他们还没有抛弃社会主义。 这种说法， 在海外没有任何人相信。 各种社会主义者， 共产主义者， 和无政府主义者都认为国际资本已经侵略了中国。 这样的人都认为邓小平已经把中国的共产时代推翻了。
世界上其他马克思主义者和反对资本人也都这样人围。 另外，世界上反对社会主义和支持资本主义者都认为中国政府还是个红色的中国， 还是反对自由。
这么多人觉得中国政府是个邪恶的政府， 那怎么同事也有这么多觉得中国是世界下一个超级大国家， 像以前苏联，八十年代的日本， 或现在的美国。
为什么中国政府不能受到支持分子的赞美呢。 就是因为世界打多数只是分子都没有适合的方式能够说明现实政治体系。
特别是在美国。 对一办政治家和主流只是分子都只有三种经济：社会主义，资本主义， 与混合主义， 与两种政府：民主的政府和专政的政府。
但是最大的问题都是每一国家的政府与大部分的人民都没有想他们的国家会有什么样的未来。
除了发财，挑战和长大， 国家都没有实际的未来计划。
世界各国都往哪儿开？
世界上其他马克思主义者和反对资本人也都这样人围。 另外，世界上反对社会主义和支持资本主义者都认为中国政府还是个红色的中国， 还是反对自由。
这么多人觉得中国政府是个邪恶的政府， 那怎么同事也有这么多觉得中国是世界下一个超级大国家， 像以前苏联，八十年代的日本， 或现在的美国。
为什么中国政府不能受到支持分子的赞美呢。 就是因为世界打多数只是分子都没有适合的方式能够说明现实政治体系。
特别是在美国。 对一办政治家和主流只是分子都只有三种经济：社会主义，资本主义， 与混合主义， 与两种政府：民主的政府和专政的政府。
但是最大的问题都是每一国家的政府与大部分的人民都没有想他们的国家会有什么样的未来。
除了发财，挑战和长大， 国家都没有实际的未来计划。
世界各国都往哪儿开？
Monday, November 23, 2009
NON-FICTION: My Culture Gap with Middle Class Americans
Last night a friend was recounting a few episodes of my offensive behavior in a typical manner.
What has always perplexed me is the certainty his voice when he regards these statements as obviously offenseive.
On the way home, I realized that the problem is that I didn't grow up in a middle class environment, and most of my socialization, outside of school and my peers, took place among Vietnamese people.
The socialization that took place among my peers involved interacting with lower class cutlture that I was able to identify with more, and middle class (to me they were all upper class/wealthy) friends, in whose homes I always felt a little bit guilty or ashamed.
The middle class culture that I am now deemed offensive in is one that regards it as a given that there's certain things you don't say. And I'm included in this 'you'!
The difference between this and my own cultural precedents is that among my Vietnamese relatives, I was the only white guy and they were used to living in a culture where things went differently than their own, so there was no presumption of unspoken, binding codes of social decorum placed on me.
My step-mom would tell me how to behave around her relatives and I would just go along with it.
So, there was an inbuilt tolerance for diversity, my aunts and uncles were immigrants and so accepted the American culture they had to function in from day to day, and I accepted what aspects of their culture I was exposed to by just doing what I was told (sometimes.)
One time I took a girlfriend, a middle class white girl from a very nice, waspish family to Vietnamese New Year at my uncle's house. There were about thirty people there, and we were the only white people.
She ended up crying that night, from being around all those strange people. Everying was laughing and speaking a strange language, and the attempts to bring her into the family involved teasing, joking, and letting her alone.
It must have seemed chaotic and threatening to her. For me, it was like "What are you stupid? These people are going out of their way to be friendly. This is my life, don't be so small-minded."
But when I think of her own family's social functions, I can see that they were all in English, all with 'regular' white people, and much quieter. Introductions were made formally, people were greeted as they arrived, and introductory conversations were boring and informational.
When I was around her family, I felt uncomfortable as well.
But I never thought of anything in terms, of 'people just don't do that', or 'that's just rude!'
Another thing I was told in regards to violations of cultural norms is that I don't put a filter on what I say!
Someone who is hyper-verbal and hyper-analytical, who has worked as a translator and English instructor.... How could I not filter what I say?
I have a million different filters and sculpting tools to polish or refine what I say.
Again, the actual indication is not that I don't think about what I say, but that what I say violates those middle cultural norms that are so foreign to me. Not thinking is equal to not knowing what shouldn't be said. The presumption is that what shouldn't be said is utterly obvious, so transgressions must be due to a carefree, tell it like it is mentality (now I'm the colorful black lady).
And that is another crucial aspect of this middle class culture that I can scarcely refer to with sufficiently comprehensive categorization, this culture presumes that there is an exclusive way to behave around others. There is little awareness of other cultural norms and thus a default presumption of exclusivity.
So, there are three cultural situations I see here. One is the lower class culture, that also has a presumption of exclusivity, but is one I'm both familiar with and one that I rejected easily. Generally speaking, this is the proper thing to do according most people, including those in the lower classes.
Since lower class culture is denigrated, among it's own members there is a sense that it might be better to escape. So for people like me, who educate themselves and form their own identities, their is more likely to be admiration among my lower class peers for abandoning this culture. It's good to violate the norms of lower class culture, smart people like me are expected to.
The two other cultural situations are the middle class culture and the multi-cultural culture.
The middle class culture is the most restricing, and the most foreign to me. It presumes that it is the only right way to be, that it is the norm. It is composed of people who grow up in a mono-culture, where there are likely to be other members of this culture, of various ethnicities or backgrounds, who likewise conform to the same norms.
This is kind of an international bourgois culture. And it's actually not just middle classes, but more upper middle class and just straight upper classes.
The multi-cultural situation is one whose members are used to differences in customs, communication styles, languages, accents, smells, foods, etc.
For people that are used to being foreigners among foreigners, and retaining there own culture among others that do the same, there is a familiarity with and acceptance of culturally abnormal behavior, and a presumption that effort might be necessary to figure out what the other person means by their behavior.
So, what I have concluded is that my cultural background hasn't prepared me well for being around the mono-culture middle class people.
This also means that, in my dealing with these sorts of people, I may have also missed the chance to understand them in their own context.
Sometimes my ethnic or national similarities with these people has made me presume that I should try to have something in common with them, instead of just recognizing the fact that I need to observe them as I would any other new group of foreigners I meet, and try to learn and respect their customs.
I get along okay with my Vietnamese relatives, though I don't see them more than once a year, and I felt comfortable with everyone in China.
Now, I guess, I have the option of learning to sit around with people who seem dull, disingenuous and narrow minded and try to imitate their culture.
I think I have to understand what a niece said to me at my dad's funeral. It was a Buddhist funeral, and pretty normal, for me. We spent a lot time praying to Buddha and praying for Buddha to help my father move on from this life. There was one table that served as an altar for my father, with food and tea for him. And another alter for the Buddha, and food and tea for it as well. This is pretty standard, 'everyone' knows that that's how you do it.
A Buddhist funeral is different from a Catholic funeral, which is also perfectly normal to me.
What my niece asked was "Why don't you have a regular funeral?"
I answered something like "Where do you think you live? You live in a place full of Vietnamese, Guatemalans, Filipino's, various Arabs, Persians, Cambodians, Indians, etc. How can you still think like that?"
I guess that's what's meant by normal.
Yuck!
What has always perplexed me is the certainty his voice when he regards these statements as obviously offenseive.
On the way home, I realized that the problem is that I didn't grow up in a middle class environment, and most of my socialization, outside of school and my peers, took place among Vietnamese people.
The socialization that took place among my peers involved interacting with lower class cutlture that I was able to identify with more, and middle class (to me they were all upper class/wealthy) friends, in whose homes I always felt a little bit guilty or ashamed.
The middle class culture that I am now deemed offensive in is one that regards it as a given that there's certain things you don't say. And I'm included in this 'you'!
The difference between this and my own cultural precedents is that among my Vietnamese relatives, I was the only white guy and they were used to living in a culture where things went differently than their own, so there was no presumption of unspoken, binding codes of social decorum placed on me.
My step-mom would tell me how to behave around her relatives and I would just go along with it.
So, there was an inbuilt tolerance for diversity, my aunts and uncles were immigrants and so accepted the American culture they had to function in from day to day, and I accepted what aspects of their culture I was exposed to by just doing what I was told (sometimes.)
One time I took a girlfriend, a middle class white girl from a very nice, waspish family to Vietnamese New Year at my uncle's house. There were about thirty people there, and we were the only white people.
She ended up crying that night, from being around all those strange people. Everying was laughing and speaking a strange language, and the attempts to bring her into the family involved teasing, joking, and letting her alone.
It must have seemed chaotic and threatening to her. For me, it was like "What are you stupid? These people are going out of their way to be friendly. This is my life, don't be so small-minded."
But when I think of her own family's social functions, I can see that they were all in English, all with 'regular' white people, and much quieter. Introductions were made formally, people were greeted as they arrived, and introductory conversations were boring and informational.
When I was around her family, I felt uncomfortable as well.
But I never thought of anything in terms, of 'people just don't do that', or 'that's just rude!'
Another thing I was told in regards to violations of cultural norms is that I don't put a filter on what I say!
Someone who is hyper-verbal and hyper-analytical, who has worked as a translator and English instructor.... How could I not filter what I say?
I have a million different filters and sculpting tools to polish or refine what I say.
Again, the actual indication is not that I don't think about what I say, but that what I say violates those middle cultural norms that are so foreign to me. Not thinking is equal to not knowing what shouldn't be said. The presumption is that what shouldn't be said is utterly obvious, so transgressions must be due to a carefree, tell it like it is mentality (now I'm the colorful black lady).
And that is another crucial aspect of this middle class culture that I can scarcely refer to with sufficiently comprehensive categorization, this culture presumes that there is an exclusive way to behave around others. There is little awareness of other cultural norms and thus a default presumption of exclusivity.
So, there are three cultural situations I see here. One is the lower class culture, that also has a presumption of exclusivity, but is one I'm both familiar with and one that I rejected easily. Generally speaking, this is the proper thing to do according most people, including those in the lower classes.
Since lower class culture is denigrated, among it's own members there is a sense that it might be better to escape. So for people like me, who educate themselves and form their own identities, their is more likely to be admiration among my lower class peers for abandoning this culture. It's good to violate the norms of lower class culture, smart people like me are expected to.
The two other cultural situations are the middle class culture and the multi-cultural culture.
The middle class culture is the most restricing, and the most foreign to me. It presumes that it is the only right way to be, that it is the norm. It is composed of people who grow up in a mono-culture, where there are likely to be other members of this culture, of various ethnicities or backgrounds, who likewise conform to the same norms.
This is kind of an international bourgois culture. And it's actually not just middle classes, but more upper middle class and just straight upper classes.
The multi-cultural situation is one whose members are used to differences in customs, communication styles, languages, accents, smells, foods, etc.
For people that are used to being foreigners among foreigners, and retaining there own culture among others that do the same, there is a familiarity with and acceptance of culturally abnormal behavior, and a presumption that effort might be necessary to figure out what the other person means by their behavior.
So, what I have concluded is that my cultural background hasn't prepared me well for being around the mono-culture middle class people.
This also means that, in my dealing with these sorts of people, I may have also missed the chance to understand them in their own context.
Sometimes my ethnic or national similarities with these people has made me presume that I should try to have something in common with them, instead of just recognizing the fact that I need to observe them as I would any other new group of foreigners I meet, and try to learn and respect their customs.
I get along okay with my Vietnamese relatives, though I don't see them more than once a year, and I felt comfortable with everyone in China.
Now, I guess, I have the option of learning to sit around with people who seem dull, disingenuous and narrow minded and try to imitate their culture.
I think I have to understand what a niece said to me at my dad's funeral. It was a Buddhist funeral, and pretty normal, for me. We spent a lot time praying to Buddha and praying for Buddha to help my father move on from this life. There was one table that served as an altar for my father, with food and tea for him. And another alter for the Buddha, and food and tea for it as well. This is pretty standard, 'everyone' knows that that's how you do it.
A Buddhist funeral is different from a Catholic funeral, which is also perfectly normal to me.
What my niece asked was "Why don't you have a regular funeral?"
I answered something like "Where do you think you live? You live in a place full of Vietnamese, Guatemalans, Filipino's, various Arabs, Persians, Cambodians, Indians, etc. How can you still think like that?"
I guess that's what's meant by normal.
Yuck!
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