tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33001188309516453562024-03-18T19:56:59.089-07:00STORIES LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comBlogger1035125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-11952041062922983982024-01-29T01:12:00.000-08:002024-02-16T23:38:45.529-08:00 Curated, Decontextualized, Manipulated<span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj4_HlYeIAU0m2O1iPYErHRFRScPZelQqNZ_9qno2G-CpiTeipwl_Ro9CDSJKbLxrqeSEXonugy1Tx6M3ZNne9Xft6lGA2krJbqNCHhyUTjJ0xlpaYKNumeHL6-7VLmYO9CjBfUEZ55i72mNPS0LBXior50KV2JLv58O21g8pHWAKh87FK0zCy1s6-ekHM" style="clear: left; display: inline; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="191" data-original-width="204" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj4_HlYeIAU0m2O1iPYErHRFRScPZelQqNZ_9qno2G-CpiTeipwl_Ro9CDSJKbLxrqeSEXonugy1Tx6M3ZNne9Xft6lGA2krJbqNCHhyUTjJ0xlpaYKNumeHL6-7VLmYO9CjBfUEZ55i72mNPS0LBXior50KV2JLv58O21g8pHWAKh87FK0zCy1s6-ekHM=w200-h188" width="200" /></a></div><br /><br /></span><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>It is dark on Gelson's supermarket terrace as closing time approaches. A small disco light from the bar counter inside swirls dots of changing colors on the hammock like cloths that lower the terrace ceiling. The electric heaters are still on, contributing their own warm red glow. Store music has been turned off. Mexican music is playing softly from the telephone of one of the two men sitting down in the back, a couple of six packs of beer on the table before them. On my way to unlock my bike - this terrace is my bike parking space by special permission of the management - I say to them:</span><div><span>- Just got off work? </span></div><div><span>- Yes.</span></div><div><span>- Where do you work?<br />- (<i>We'll leave that out.</i>) </span></div><div><span>- Upstairs in the food court, the Middle Eastern place?<br />- Yes. Lebanese food.<br />- And are you Lebanese?<br />- I'm Armenian.<br />- Christian then? But still, you are on the side of the Palestinians in the latest Israel-Gaza war?<br />- You stereotype me?<br />- Yes. Am I right?<br />- Yes. Would you like a beer? </span></div><div>He reaches out to me a bottle. Beer and argument. I am a happy man. A smile is spreading across my face and he doesn't like it. (He'll in a later conversation admit to not liking Jews.) If we talk, I warn him, you'll end up jumping to your feet and running away. 'You won't mind?' I ask. 'We'll see,' he answers. I expect he is going to jump metaphorically from one false claim to the next as I discredit each one after another, as always in these discussions, but this time around I want to see if can catch an old theory of mine in action.</div><div><span>- Do I know this theory?<br />- You do. Give me a minute and I'll come back to it. At a guess, this man is the restaurant manager; beside him, a Mexican worker, silent with limited English. I say to the putative manager: 'So you approve of terrorists who burn babies alive in ovens, rape, mutilate, murder?'<br />- Freedom fighters, whose calculated action is justified by the Jews colonizing and occupying Palestinians land.<br />- You are not uncomfortable, to use an amazing phrase I heard yesterday one Palestinian activist express, normalizing massacre? You feel good about the mental state behind the acting out of sexual fantasies of extreme sadistic violence?<br />- It's the Israelis who are committing genocide, who are massacring civilians, killing babies, engaging in the war crime of collective punishment.<br />- Israel is fighting a war, having been brought out of peace by attack but aiming to return to peace, responding to an invasion and to open threats of more invasions by terrorists openly committed to perpetual war until all Jews are dead. </span>The fact that civilians are supporters of their Jew eliminationist government has bearing on what needs to be done for their reeducation once the war is won.</div><div><span>- As a Jew you'd say that. </span></div><div><span>-</span> As a Jew I'll say this. Rabbi Sacks, the late chief rabbi, distinguished between the priestly and prophesy. Priestly was seeing god in nature, in an ordered world, prophecy was seeing god in history, in our own individual history. The sabbath day was priestly, the six days leading up to it prophetic, time making a shift from history to nature, from action to contemplation of the results of the action. The ritual weekly affirmed the aim of life towards knowledge. In fact, we can see monotheism itself as the replacement of ritual, which aims not a knowledge but power, by making all of history a single ritual in progress. </div><div><span>- Ritual: an individual feeling weak, together with others in his group also feeling weak, acting out together a story of an old god embattled with an enemy, resulting in a new god reborn, with each individual participant reborn individually in strength and success. <br />- Correct. Monotheism, by making all of history one single ritual, has allowed in our single history of the world of one god three different phases of focus: on the act in the midst of history, that will if successful lead to the rest, sabbath, of knowledge; of the thought of love, openness, at the end of time and history, calling upon us to give up our fantasies of power ritual provides us with and simply love each other. And then the last phase, where we in our single ritual of history, have decided for us both act and thought of god's direction. </span></div><div><span>- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.<br />- Correct. The Jews used the weekly sabbath as a model of incremental knowledge.<br />- But the Christian, could you say, made of each moment a reckoning, an act-judging rest, a sabbath? </span></div><div><span>- Correct.</span></div><div><span>- And a Muslim, at every moment, a judgement of submission to acts that are required and an imagination of the world that will be granted by correct submission. Don't say correct. </span></div><div><span>- You are right. For the Muslim, each situation has its specified action required by god and god's specified heavenly reward. </span></div><div><span>- (1) Incomplete history, the Jews. (2) The end is near, the Christians. (3) The end is here, everything decided, determined, submitted to, the Muslims.</span></div><div><span>- Correct. So what we need explained is how in this quiet corner of this opulent shopping center this fellow displays a cretin's lack of emotional intelligence and lack of critical thinking. </span></div><div><span>- Instead of there being a Jew's sabbath that serves to link act to knowledge of the world, hypothesis to test, results, or a Christian</span>'s continuously running attack of the vanity of power, there is the Muslim's closure of history which makes of every act and thought a complete unit. Not here will you find uncertainty of individual endeavor in straining towards love. Each act an individual takes is isolated from what was done before and after. Every act is constructed to its own known specified purpose. I saw something on Rodeo Drive, the famous designer clothing shopping street, late last night. One of our city's hundred thousand who live on the streets was in one shop doorway, bedded down, worldly possessions of apparent high quality neatly packed and arranged filling the entire space A plain-clothed guard takes out his phone and a woman, or a man putting on the appearance of a woman, jumps out from under the covers, gets out of the picture, says: can I go back now? The guard nods and she/he slips back under the blanket. </div><div><span>- And your point in telling this story? </span></div><div><span>- Decontextualization: there is according to the photo taken, no one sleeping in the doorway. </span>Jews are massacring civilians out of genocidal intent if you ignore that previously Israel had been invaded, its people murdered, tortured, mutilated, raped. </div><div><span>- A falsely concocted statement, like the falsely concocted photo, which has no connection with the situation before and after. </span></div><div><span>- Curated, decontextualized, manipulated, as an Israel official government spokesman put it.</span></div><div><span>- Yes. </span></div><div><span>- So follow with me. I say to the restaurant manager: Israel is waging war in response to an invasion, with comparatively speaking low ratio of civilian to soldiers deaths. The Palestinians have repeatedly stated they want to kill all Jews. Their war doesn't end until all are dead. The Israelis' war ends when the security it seeks is obtained. One side seeks peace, the other only war. There is no equivalence between sides, like in a feud cycle each act is justified in compensating for a previous act of compensation.</span></div><div><span>- The Jews are the ones who are sadistic, perverse, keeping the Palestinians in an open air prison. </span></div><div><span>- Egypt has a border with Gaza not controlled by Israel. What kind of prison has an open door? </span></div><div><span>- Israel is an apartheid state. </span></div><div><span>- Israeli Arabs have complete civil rights. They have positions in the government. </span></div><div><span>- Token positions.<br />- Not at all. Israeli Arabs are on the supreme court, in the legislature, in the universities, in medicine. </span></div><div><span>- They don't control their air space, water, electricity. </span></div><div><span>- You mean, not in Israel, but in Gaza, because Gaza, under Hamas government is in a declared state of war against Israel shooting tens of thousands of rockets into Israel every year. Civil rights don't exist in war. War is about killing people, breaking the rules of civilization.</span></div><div><span>- Israelis are colonists who occupy stolen Palestinian land.</span></div><div><span>- There have been no Jews in Gaza since 2005. And in Israel proper the Jews bought their land, not stole it. If you mean by occupation the lands of Judea and Sumeria, these were taken in war, and held by Israel for security. And the Jews are the indigenous people people of this land, and if colonizers what would be the Jews' metropole, or motherland that is supposed to have sent out the Jewish settlers if not the land of Israel itself? </span></div><div><span>- The argument you are making with the restaurant manager is that the astonishing act of "normalized massacre", these couplets of action and situation: apartheid, open air prison, genocide, occupation, are like the photo of the empty doorway on Rodeo Drive, decontextualized.</span></div><div><span>- They are as it were mechanical acts of accretion, one religiously necessary act piled upon another, with no knowledge of the world or human nature to connect them. Perverse, sadistic, acted-out sexual fantasies? No, their mass murder is not about them, they feel certain, is not about ethical conduct or its lack, because every act taken is god's will not theirs as a single individual. It is god's will they kill all Jews. In this third monotheism, at the announced end of the single ritual of history, in pursuance of the intention of killing all Jews an appearance of genocide, occupation, imprisoning, apartheid state is created in language. Each end-times priestly/prophetic act/thought unit of the world as it is and must be is curated, manipulated without connection with the real world, fabricated in ritual's memory destroying passion of weakness therefore without connection with human nature of seeking knowledge and love. </span></div><div>- And what happened with the guy at the shopping center? </div><div><span>- As expected, he fled. 'Just to be sure,' I said to him, 'again, you don't feel bad, feel dirty sitting there endorsing, approving of rape, torture, mutilation?' </span>He said, 'I've had enough, personal attacks aren't arguments,' and he got up and left together with his silent friend.<br /></div></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-11356817332662014242023-11-11T09:34:00.004-08:002023-11-11T16:18:34.352-08:00Torture- What do you have there?<br />- One of our old conversations, six, seven years ago. I'll read it to you.<br /><p></p><blockquote><i>- Anti-sex trafficking organizations say prostitution is torture. What do you think?<br />- Obviously they are not identical. We might look at how they are the same and how they are different.<br />- How are they the same?<br />- Both the seller of sex and the tortured have force applied to their bodies.<br />- You mean forced sex? Don't sellers agree to trade sex for money?<br />- Assuming they feel no desire to be with those they have to be paid to be with, their bodies are being forced to act against desire.<br />- How is acting against desire torture?<br />- Buying sex like torture works to disable normal functioning of the bought or bound subject's body.<br />- Torture and buying sex are both about disabling the subject's body. How else are torture and buying sex similar?<br />- Both aim to force particular thoughts into the minds of their bound or bought subjects, or to imagine this happening. The torturer wants a confession, the sex buyer wants the bought to pretend to like the buyer.<br />- So we have two elements: disabling the body's functioning, and forcing into existence shows of certain thoughts. We know people torture for reasons other than gaining information, that in most cases torture is not done to achieve practical results. Do you think people buy sex also for no practical reason? That it is not about sex?<br />- I think it is about what we've said: sex buying constructs a social relation in which the body of the bought is disabled and the seller imagines he is desired by someone whose body is socially considered desirable.<br />- A matter of power and status.<br />- Yes.<br />- Ok. How are sex buying and torture different?<br />- Instead of being physically bound, the sex seller is subject to severe economic and social pressure. Because selling sex disables the body and necessitates lying no one voluntarily chooses to sell sex.<br />- Then why do some say they enjoy what they do?<br />- The same reason slaves say they accept slavery: they find security in the only way of life they know that provides some predictability. We've talked before* about how feeling at home comes from habit, and habit comes from the body. We want to be at home because that is the place where we know from experience we are safe and can move on to get what else we want. The tortured and bought body cannot easily feel anywhere at home. We also talked** about how in our societies we do things for the sake of doing them: another way of saying, we are a society of people without home. We are a people without home because we force each other to do what the bound for torture and bought for sex are forced to do: against our bodies, under threat of economic and social death to produce representations of our liking of each other, to constantly adjust our relations to each other.<br />- Your point being that violence and sex are extremes of relation between bodies, but in our everyday life where our bodies keep more distance we see the same relations we see in torture and prostitution.<br />- Yes, but because of the physical distance maintained the effect is much weakened. Torture is still torture.<br />- And prostitution is still torture.</i></blockquote>- Does this get us anywhere in trying to understand the murder and torture rampage of Hamas against the Israelis?<br />- In the torture there was no attempt to extract information, and obviously no imagined show of attraction. The mind to be adjusted to a new social relation of power was of the audiences to the torture: the live streamed families of the torturers and the families of their victims. <br />- Do you think this torture rampage was in some way a logical extension of prostitution, selling bodies and selling minds?<br />- I think the idea of forced show-making in torture helps us understand the glee, pride, exhilaration of the demonstrators in our cities and college campuses celebrating the torture-murder rampage. <br />- Torture as a public act has a history, public executions. Is this a fundamental difference between us and them, between people who <i>mostly</i> make a public show of torture and those who would hide it away? <br />- A forced relation of bodies, of physical powerlessness, creates in the mind of performers a social relation of power. The Hamas killer-torturers and the celebrating students seem to have forgotten their capacity as human beings to be unforced in body and mind. They are not ashamed of their moments of living in shows of social relation created at the price of destroying bodies. Rousseau wrote in 1750:<blockquote><div><i> Sincere friendship, real esteem and perfect confidence are banished from among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate, and fraud lie constantly concealed.</i></div></blockquote><div>- Concealed no longer.<em></em><p></p></div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2023/11/proportionality.html">Proportionality</a></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-39535018769542493522023-11-09T02:38:00.045-08:002023-11-11T16:17:29.209-08:00Proportionality- I can't understand how you can be here, a University, a place of civilization, demonstrating in favor of barbarians, celebrating people who proudly, joyfully torture and kill children.<br />- We're demonstrating in favor of peace.<br />- Then you condemn the Hamas' torture and killing of children?<br />- Israel is committing genocide against Palestinian people. Occupying their land.<br />- How can there be a genocide when the population is increasing every year? There isn't a single Jew in Gaza or the PA, how can they be occupiers?<br />- The Palestinians are oppressed by Israel, an apartheid state that denies them human rights.<br />- Arabs in Israel have the same rights as Jews.<br />- One side uses violence, the other side uses violence. We're calling for a cease fire.<br />- To end attacks on its people Israel needs to win the war with Hamas.<br />- Israel's killing is disproportionate. It has to be stopped.<br />- A proportionate response is what is required by the rules of a feud. There's a difference between act of violence in response to act of violence - a feud, cycle of violence - and one state's defending itself from the violent intentions of another state in a war: wars end with the enemy entirely dead or disarmed.<br />- Are you Jewish?<br />- Yes.<br />- I have to go. Best of luck in dealing with your confusion.<br /><br />This conversation took place this afternoon up at UCLA at the pro-Palestinian rally. Chants of "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" could be heard, which is a coded way of saying, as Israel is located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the eradication of the State of Israel. For most of my short conversation with the student he had a self-satisfied smirk on his face. He obviously had had this conversation many times before and had the terms of his answers laid out in advance: apartheid, occupation, genocide, proportionality. He was bored, we can picture him asking himself, what's so special about tortured and killed children? What is required to become bored with the subject of child torture and murder (abduction too, we've failed to mention)? First, most obviously, failure to make a distinction between those who can and cannot leave a state whose violence they don't agree with; the elderly, disabled, and children cannot. But children are a special case within this class of those who cannot agree to participate in group violence. In addition to not having the power to leave they also cannot want to participate in group violence. Their characteristic act of play requires there be behind it a reality of security and love which real violence undermines. To find child torture and killing and abduction something to smile about requires not being able to remember what play is, what it is to be outside the responsibility of social participation, the removal which creates room to play in for the child. Without play, to be constantly subject to social demands, leaves our UCLA terrorist approving student without imagination, individuality, and any respect for the truth; truth, imagination, individuality having no value for someone who never must question the claims and demands of the group that forms his identity. Torture, kill, abduct babies? Why not, these actions, done according to group demands, disconnected with self, are reduced to the security of obedience and mere words, the terms of instruction.<div><br /></div><div>Watch:</div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoJcb0KGQMY">Hillel Neuer</a></div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2023/11/torture.html">Torture</a></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-71889095563570413112023-10-15T19:47:00.060-07:002023-11-19T07:49:24.555-08:00How Ralphs Tackles Homelessness1.<div><br /></div><div>- Thirty-three student groups at Harvard put out a statement that mass murder, rape, torture, abduction of hundreds of children, the elderly, women are all justified by Israel being a settler colonial nation. Two days later the President of Harvard, a black woman (I don't mean to make really a racist/sexist identification, you'll see) released a statement that Harvard University is not responsible for the behavior of its students.<br />- Harvard is not in the business of educating its students.<div><div>- Apparently not. The Democratic Socialist Party, which has a handful of representatives in the U.S. Congress, with gleeful smiles and dancing in the streets in New York City declared that any action any atrocities done by Palestinians is justified. The founder of Europe's Diem Party Yanis Varoufakis has said he will not condemn the action of the terrorists, because that would imply he was on board with Palestinians going back to their 'open-air prison.' It was out of the question for him, apparently, that the Palestinians make peace with Israel. One of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement issued a statement, from one might guess one the mansions these leaders bought themselves from donations, that Israel was an experiment now shown to be a failure and should therefore be ended immediately.</div><div>- Wow.</div><div>- The first story I want to tell begins with the Black Lives Matter riots and protest in Los Angeles in 2020. A few months afterwards the new district attorney in Los Angeles issued a memo stating that his office would no longer prosecute misdemeanors, with misdemeanors expanded to include property crime less than $950. He said that these crimes were committed by people for the most part were drug addicts and insane and should get treatment, not jail time. That there were no facilities with any ability to deal with the city's mentally ill and addicted was not mentioned. The resulting massive crime wave was predicted by everyone but him. I personally have had 2 bicycles, 3 bookbags, one rare book, and five computers, and more stolen since then. The latest computer theft is what I want to tell you about. Does this interest you?</div><div>- A bit on the sordid side, but ok. Tell your story.</div><div>- On the outskirts of Westwood village is Denny's Coffee Shop. Westwood has become the place to go if you are among the insane and drug addicted issued a get out of jail free card by our district attorney. They buy and sell each other drugs and rob each other when exhausted by their demented shouting they lay themselves down to sleep in the middle of the sidewalk, enjoying the slight breeze created by pedestrians walking over their bare foot bodies. (They particularly like to steal each other's shoes.) It was no surprise then, as I sat one night a few days ago on Denny's terrace drinking coffee and reading on my computer that I hear a man shouting Secret Service? Are you Secret Service? He is going from person to person with this same question, which he follows up with the charge, Illegal Surveillance! He comes over to stand on the other side of the railing separating the terrace from the sidewalk. He orders me: Get out of Westwood! I live here! You don't! I'm in charge of Westwood! Get out, Get out! He doesn't leave, keeps shouting at me, Get out! You're Secret Service. Finally, I break my silence, ask him, What makes you think I am Secret Service? He responds by reaching down and taking hold of my computer's screen and lifting the computer from the table. I was quick enough to grab the keyboard but after a struggle he was able to pull the computer from my hands. You said you were Secret Service, he explains. He gives me a broad smile and takes off across the street. After a few moments of shocked immobility, I followed him, going home I guess, keeping a safe distance: Westwood's drug addicts and crazies warn me when they try to sell me drugs that they all carry knives. </div><div>- You didn't try to take your computer back?</div><div>- You mean like the Ralphs supermarket down the street? You don't know what's happening there? After years of an all day and all-night stream of shoplifters Ralphs hired new teams of Balaclava masked guards armed with pistols, stun guns, night stick, pepper spray, bullet proof vests and combat boots. They follow the obviously homeless, crazy and addicted through the store and when they leave block their way, shout at them to empty their bags. They refuse, knowing they can't be charged, and have always previously been left untouched. Not anymore. The guard using a wrestling move will tackle the shoplifter to the ground, pull the bags from their shoulders and hands and empty the bags contents on the pavement, taking back all that was being stolen. Resistance is met with shoves, and if that doesn't work, pepper spray to the eyes. </div><div>- You've seen all this yourself?</div><div>- Many times. Do you understand? Ralphs realized that if the addicts and crazy couldn't be prosecuted, neither would their guards be prosecuted, even if technically the violence they were using would not be a misdemeanor, they knew the police would not be eager to be involved in defense of people given free pass at criminality.</div><div>- Is this still going on?</div><div>- As far as I know. Anyway, if I tried, without combat boots and bulletproof vests and guns and sprays to take back my computer, it was likely, not backed by the clout of one of the biggest supermarket chains in the world, I would be charged with felony assault, which is prosecuted in LA, and arrested!</div><div>- Arrested for trying to take back your computer from someone who can't be arrested for stealing it from you.</div><div>- Yes. I see the robber turn the corner on Wilshire Blvd. and walk into the first residential building offering luxury apartments. I followed him in, ask the valet parking attendant if he man who just came in lives there. Yes. I ask the concierge at the reception desk the same question. Yes. I ask the guard standing in the corner. Yes, again. I explain the situation. Security boss is called. I call the police. Security boss arrives, he calls the police too. We wait an hour and a half. Two police officers arrive. Then two more. Then a sergeant. We all watch the playback video of the robber arriving home with my computer in his arms. They all keep asking me was I scared, was violence used taking the computer? Use of violence and causing fear are what raises the severity of the crime from misdemeanor to the category the felony robbery, which is still prosecuted. They obviously want me say no, I was not afraid, I didn't try to hold onto my computer. Finally, they ask me what I want them to do. Go up to his apartment and get my computer. They, now a crowd of what looks like 7 or 8 police and two building guards with keys, take the elevator up. They are down in a few minutes. The robber didn't answer his door. That's it. To enter they need a search warrant. Call the detective tomorrow and ask him to get one. </div><div>- That's it?</div><div>- I call the detective. He wants me to come down to the station to identify the robber. At the station I'm taken in to a little room and shown a "six pack", an array of six photos from which I'm to identify the culprit. His smirking face is immediately identifiable. The detective tells me he'll take the suspect into custody that day or the next. </div><div>- And?</div><div>- Nothing happens. I visit the building manager, who explains this new tenant of theirs has been arrested five times in the month since his arrival from his home in New Zealand. First arrest, for gauging out the paint of Rolls Royces and Astin Martins and Ferraris in the residence's garage, the damage adding up to tens of thousands of dollars.</div><div>- Then he was charged and prosecuted since the damage was over $950.</div><div>- The prosecutors reduced to charge to a misdemeanor.</div><div>- Why?</div><div>- Humanitarian reasons. Next the building's now favorite resident went up to the UCLA campus and was caught spraying graffiti.</div><div>- Charged and released?</div><div>- Yes. Next, he checked out one of those ride-share electric bikes and launched in into a Santa Monica bar owner's - high-priced cars again - Lamborghini.</div><div>- Charged and released?</div><div>- After spending the weekend in jail. Bar owner is supposed to have some political influence in the city.</div><div>- Next?</div><div>- Arrested in Santa Monica for graffiti.</div><div>- Next?</div><div>- The building's assistant manager told me all around Santa Monica and Brentwood someone was spraying swastikas on walls and trash receptacles. She thought it was their boy, but he wasn't caught.</div><div>- And then came you, number five.</div><div>- Yes. The detective called it a crime spree. </div><div>- A get out of jail free spree.</div><div>- Yes. More than two weeks have passed. The detective told me Friday when he asked the DA's office for an arrest warrant he was told more information was required.</div><div>- Taking the computer from your hands, video of the robber carrying your computer into the building, identifying him from array of photos, was not enough?</div><div>- No. My computer has found its new home upstairs in the luxury residence. Minimum rent, $6,000 a month, proof of income three times rent amount required for leasing consideration.</div><div>- An income of $18,000 a month. The guy is rich.</div><div>- Yes. He is stealing for its own sake like our ex-President Donald Trump has lived a lifetime of criminality, steadily losing with his failed and criminal activities the huge fortune inherited from his father. The robber's smirking confidence reminded me of Trump's confidence he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose the loyalty of his supporters. </div><div>- You've told your stories. What's it all about? This crazy condoning of crime, this open, gloating approval of what until now was considered unsupportable by anyone civilized: mass murder, torture, abduction of women, children, elderly?</div><div>- The failure of democracy.</div><div>- What's the connection?</div><div>- A particular path democracy can take in failing. Before the American war of independence there was an ongoing debate among the religious leaders of the colonies whether mere tolerance of difference of opinion was enough, or an attempt must be made to find some foundational principles that could be agreed upon. </div><div>- The question was whether democracy could be practiced by people who disagreed so completely.</div><div>- In the absence of the belief that agreement could be reached democracy is, in Plato's definition, that form of government where there was no agreement on what was good or true, with the result that it was liable to descend into anarchy.</div><div>- You think that is what has happened?</div><div>- No, it's not that simple. A shift has occurred, a move from <i>there is no agreement on what is true</i> to <i>there is no truth at all</i>.</div><div>- And what difference does that make?</div><div>- If there is no truth, and there is a government with power over the people, then all government policies and laws, and all justifications of them, are unjust attempts to enslave the people. Plato's mockingly stated description of Thia form of government is one in which <i>justice is the advantage of the stronger.</i></div><div>- In other words, there is no justice at all.</div><div>- None. And what happens then?</div><div>- What?</div><div>- One faction among the people takes power and control of the government and uses government justification to enslave the other factions. Everything said and done by the government is an act of disguised power.</div><div>- White supremacists oppress the blacks. Men oppress women. The rich and law abiding and rational oppress the poor and criminal and the crazy. The Jews oppress the Arabs.</div><div>- But making the claim that mass murder of Jews is justified because the Jews, by definition of their being in power, are victimizing the Palestinians, aren't they - the Palestinians - too attempting to extort some power from the world's governments by means of telling that story? A story which as an expression of power must be a lie?</div><div>- Of course. Republican politicians often make that accusation of democratic district attorneys like ours in LA. (Our city is not alone in criminals being assigned victim status.)</div><div>- And being called out for hypocrisy doesn't change anything?</div><div>- No, what it does is add an ironic relish to the self-righteousness of their attacks on their supposed attackers, add a play-like self-consciousness of what they are doing, a joy of performance, theatricality, spectacle implicit to their actions.</div><div>- Thus the smiles and smirks often observed on their faces, dancing in the street celebrating tortured babies, beheadings....</div><div>- Yes. </div><div>- To summarize, you see a sequence, a movement through ideas that goes from democracy of debate and agreement to democracy of tolerance, which leads to a democratic government that is believed to tyrannize over the people to a government captured by one faction and enslaving all other factions, to self-conscious taking power in the name of righteousness of the people of the victimized faction. Is that correct?</div><div>- Yes. Think about it. What good is the truth when the world lived in is said to be nothing but lies told to gain power. Lies like: The Palestinian's claim Israel is a settler colonial nation. But where then is the mother country- the metropole - from which emigration occurs? Israel? The Palestinians claim to be the sole indigenous people on the land, but they never have had a government there, and the Jews have had several, the government in Gaza puts in their founding document their intention to kill all Jews in the state of Israel together with Jews every place else in the world. They say Israel kills civilians so they can kill civilians too. But they use civilians as human shields by launching missiles at Israel from hospitals and schools and residential neighborhoods and their terrorists deliberately seek out civilians to murder, while Israel warns civilians to get out of the way of imminent attacks. The Palestinians make no serious attempt to make peace, Israel does. All this is as nothing, is outside the process of reasoning the leads to the belief that truth can be nothing other than a statement of victimization and power only to be had in the victimized's justified taking on the position of victimizer, victimizing the world with lying claims of innocence.</div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>2.</div><div><br /></div><div>- Are you finished with your...victimology?</div><div>- Should there be more? Being on the subject of the Middle East, shouldn't we have a savior maybe?</div><div>- Do you have one?</div><div>- You tell me. The day before the robber showed up at Denny's and took home my computer something strange happened, at the same time and the same place, strange even for Westwood. It was about 11 PM when I looked up from reading the news of the war in Ukraine and see a man, naked except for a luxurious, heavy white terrycloth bathrobe and nothing else walking across the street away from me. He was shouting about something I couldn't make out and really, in this place of literally hundreds of the addicted and insane there was nothing very remarkable here except I had the impression of good grooming and cleanliness. I went back to my reading but look up again hearing the shouting return. I see the man in the bathrobe crossing the street coming back my way. Over the next few minutes he repeats this coming and going several times. A light is out at this already dark corner of the intersection so I can't make out his face. The bathrobe appears to be completely clean, not yet recruited to double as bedding. That is what I was thinking when the man in the clean, heavy white bathrobe does just that, he lies down literally on the street, right in the middle of the street, with cars any moment now sure to be coming this way taking the short cut from Wilshire to Sunset. </div></div><div>- What did you do?</div><div>- Was I his savior?</div><div>- Were you?</div><div>- I really didn't want to be. Wasn't he one of those who were constantly stealing from me?</div><div>- So?</div><div>- I asked myself if I could just sit there reading the war news while he got run over. I saw at the end of the street cars were now approaching. I got up from the table, picking up my computer - another of the addicted or insane would be sure to appear and grab it in seconds if I left it - I run into the street, stretch out my hand palm out signing <i>Stop!</i> to the oncoming cars that have now appeared, and shout out to the man in the white bathrobe fast asleep on the pavement: <i>Wake Up! Wake Up!</i> Nothing happens. He doesn't move. More cars are coming. <i>Get out of the street!</i> I shout, louder this time, <i>you can't sleep here!</i> Suddenly he jumps up and takes to his heels in the opposite direction, and I get out of the street myself. </div><div>- Was it him, the man who the next day stole your computer?</div><div>- I never saw his face.</div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-76557547744353045562023-09-06T16:53:00.007-07:002023-09-06T17:06:01.795-07:00Evil<div><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhaMPjekXosv42Dz_-UTUKHH5zT6Y4RY_FSOUVxxoDoQAqg6QeJnWwjM2bHMn-2ev283BmazS8TkT1tqteMWERVKqPPLu1jPgRfXwhxerLRVXjDTpgzZ9DoETvnLTplZgO1JbInaGYdJBJm_BEBBwglFJ_Fp9CEL6DPlPw2MChka5PEvuRMMdKXb2H3ni8" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="158" data-original-width="318" height="158" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhaMPjekXosv42Dz_-UTUKHH5zT6Y4RY_FSOUVxxoDoQAqg6QeJnWwjM2bHMn-2ev283BmazS8TkT1tqteMWERVKqPPLu1jPgRfXwhxerLRVXjDTpgzZ9DoETvnLTplZgO1JbInaGYdJBJm_BEBBwglFJ_Fp9CEL6DPlPw2MChka5PEvuRMMdKXb2H3ni8=w320-h158" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Starbucks Coffee, Beverly Hills</i></div><div><br /></div><div>- Look at that: the whole bench along the wall is occupied with them.</div><div>- By 'them' you mean?</div><div>- Those in Beverly Hills who sleep nearby on the streets, or rather on the side walks. I almost ran over one this morning riding my bike here.</div><div>- Which one?</div><div>- Buried under layers of filthy blankets how do I know?</div><div>- This Starbucks is incredible. Across the street in the Peninsula hotel, just behind the cafe building is the Waldorf Astoria, two of the most expensive hotels in the city. Look at those guys getting out of their Maclaren super car, hundreds of thousands of dollars. This place stinks. But that won't stop this country's intrepid rich from stepping right into the miasma for their coffee.</div><div>- The indifference! I can't help the word evil from coming to mind. What about you?</div><div>- Does calling the rich evil explain anything?</div><div>- Good! Just what I wanted to talk to you about. If we want an explanation of the orbits of planets, we find one in a law of gravity. But if we want an explanation of how an object moves from one place to another, we rely on what we call energy, force, momentum, sorts of things which we have no explanation of.</div><div>- Explanation meaning we can tell a story in the form of general rule relating one thing to another at one place or another.</div><div>- Yes. So if I offer an explanation of the indifference of the rich to the massive misery around them, we place them in a certain orbit where they are subject to certain 'forces' of indocrination which convnices them that it's their own fault the misearable are miserable, it's good they are punished for their error so they are motivated to make corrections. And there, we have explained away their indifference. Or not?</div><div>- Don't you still want to call them evil?</div><div>- Absolutely! I do!</div><div>- So again: does calling the rich evil explain anything, anything more? more than suffering from the disease of pleonexia: Excessive or insatiable covetousness. From the Greek pleonektein (to be greedy), from pleion (more) + ekhein (have).</div><div>- I think it does. But...</div><div>- Go on.</div><div>- There's a paradox here. It seems possible to make the attribution of the word evil come and go, depending on how one looks at the world. Something like when we are in the presence of beauty see it, it gives us pleasure, it is seen as warrenting the attribution beautiful. Yet we can explain away the beauty by seeing instead regular relation, geometric forms, well functioning, losing thereby both pleasure and the consideration of the objects as beautiful. What if the same happens with evil? We see it, the evil in the object, we feel pain in the act of perception. Yet we can if we like shift our way of looking and lose both the sight of evil in the object and our pain felt in having the perception.</div><div>- How does that get us anywhere, claiming that how we explain is up to us, our own doing? </div><div>- It's rather obvious, isn't it?</div><div>- Not to me. Isn't it crazy, aren't <i>we </i>crazy, to be having this kind of conversation in this place, right in front of these people?</div><div>- You mean we're crazy to be pretending our ideas are important faced with the immensity of evil going on around us? </div><div>- Yes. Are we ridiculous in our self-importance?</div><div>- Maybe not. Think about the two kinds of explanation we've talked about. One stops short of satisfaction, leaving us with unexplainable force, in the case of the indifferent rich the pleanexia of the rich, forced upon them by capitalism, the stock market, family, advertising, movies, etc., etc. The other gives us a clear sight and corresponding strong feeling.</div><div>- But, I don't understand. If explanation is telling a story, where's the story in choosing to see ugliness when we don't have to?</div><div>- When we see evil as evil we are not seeing the regularity of law, and the resulting mystification of the force doing the application to the individual, but instead see evil, experiencing the perception as complete in itself and that reminds what it is to be a human being.</div><div>- The story is that the ugly, indifferent rich have made the wrong choice and by calling them evil we remind ourselves not to follow in their path?</div><div>- We explain to ourselves why we cannot follow in their path and why they wouldn't have us even if we could.</div><div>- We see their ugliness for what it is, evil.</div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-78202172855010124722023-08-16T16:46:00.066-07:002023-09-01T14:20:58.446-07:00Trump The Jew<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjNQKEzhA8OHl97FheJFwLOoqYMK_5tVjn09DLHeiljV_7XeNkTtReUzMvtSHg4ZldKOAXfz8JhbNEI-P9YbT_QahyrEDjhjDzYzaneM1ZndCOGvhDD0B0uZeoEl3od-502LjI-bQYWmBuuvuhI4ep5iDmrh4rEl3Nkaunlkxo_44PvocGiLan4sT2ZdSo" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="244" data-original-width="207" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjNQKEzhA8OHl97FheJFwLOoqYMK_5tVjn09DLHeiljV_7XeNkTtReUzMvtSHg4ZldKOAXfz8JhbNEI-P9YbT_QahyrEDjhjDzYzaneM1ZndCOGvhDD0B0uZeoEl3od-502LjI-bQYWmBuuvuhI4ep5iDmrh4rEl3Nkaunlkxo_44PvocGiLan4sT2ZdSo" width="204" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>1.</div><div><br /></div>- I was watching on YouTube our twice impeached, four times indicted ex-President (future President?) at his latest rally, doing his greatest hits, running through his slogans at a rate at about two per minute: Drain the swamp! Lock them up! Deport them all! I alone can fix it!<div>- Aren't you tired of this?<br />- I find I am not. Remarkable isn't it?</div><div>- Disgusting, rather. What do you find remarkable?<br />- It turns out I do have more to say about this person.<br />- I'm listening.<br />- I'll put it in the form of one of his slogans: <i>Trump the Jew</i>.<br />- An explanation is coming. <div>- Yes. You know how the Jews since their expulsion from their own land a couple thousand years ago have been the object of hatred and attacks on the grounds of their being both weak - and dangerously infectious in their corrupt weakness - and at the same time strong, actually killers of god, and perpetrators of an international conspiracy to control the world?</div><div>- Can you tell me how it is possible for them to be attacked as being both weak and strong at the same time?<br />- The two together suggest the sequence of ritual attack, in which a participant enters feeling weak and fearful, but in the recount of a story of rebirth in the company of others doing the same and often under the direction of a leader, at its conclusion come out feeling strong. <br />- The Jews, living among people different from themselves, found themselves to be in the position of suggesting to their oppressors that they put their oppression in the form of a ritual.<br />- Yes. Donald Trump is the super-Jew of our time and place, suggesting to his people that they practice a ritual of national rebirth.<br />- Thus explaining how he whines out his complaints, warns that countless persecutors are out to get him and his people, and then without a pause, he delivers one of his megalomaniac assertions that 'he alone can fix it.' What do you make of this historical anomoly, Trump the Jew? Or is it not an anomoly? Do you think Hitler also learned from the Jews how to be Hitler?<br />- Maybe I do. <br />- Of course you do. I'm not saying I buy your argument, you've made it deliberately ridiculous, but what are we supposed to do about Trump the Jew?<br />- We find in our psychology an attitude towards certain people that takes us on an individual journey from weakness to strength. We find in our politics leaders using this same journey of passage in order to politically to consolidate a nation. <br />- And coming to this understanding of formal similarity what does it do for us other than depress us further? We have need of a better way of expressing ourselves. Doesn't it seem to you, for example, that calling someone evil feels like we are ourselves becoming evil in that act of naming? <br />- It does. Because in doing so we are being anti-Semites, finding in the object of our attack's weakness and strength the weakness and strength of our own selves, thereby inadvertently setting ourselves out on the path of ritual rebirth. Why do this when we don't have to?</div><div>-Why indeed, when we can instead help ourselves to the humor and calm brought by understanding?<br /></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>2.</div><div><br /></div><div>- All kidding aside, I've got a few questions for you.</div><div>- Trump the Jew!</div><div>- Do you really think that the couple of millennia that the Jews have endured persecution is due to their situation of being in different respects weaker and stronger, to their being able to, what should we call it, attract? provoke? fascist behavior?</div><div>- It seems so.</div><div>- Ritual behavior is expressed both in one individual's aversion and hatred of another and in the class of rulers turning against a class of subjects. What about ritual of rebirth to re-establish a nation, what we usually think of as fascism? Is this something different?</div><div>- Only in that the age-old ritual-based persecution of the ruling against the ruled has adapted to democracy.</div><div>- How?</div><div>- Democratic openness allows the use of mass media to construct entirely new classes to play the roles of persecuted and persecutor and enables a change in who is in control of government.</div><div>- You mean a dictator or gang that pretends to act in the interest of the new class in charge but in fact acts solely in its own interest.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>3.</div><br />- That mug shot.<br />- Trump posing as super-villain.<br />- How did he do it? Had he arranged to have a confederate behind the jail-house camera?<br />- Who knows.<br />- But what does Trump deliberately posing as a comic book character, a super-villain mean? And why do we Americans get our fascist leader in the shape of a super-villain, while Russia gets theirs as a straight-forward, dour, minimally persuasive ritual leader telling the story of Russia's greatness, the true continuation of the ancient culture, harassed and wounded by the resentful attentions of the world but which, under his guidance, soon will be reborn in its rightful splendor?<br />- It means that Americans, in their self-importance, unlike Russians, take individual credit and responsibility for raising up their fascist leader to power. They practice a ritual of their own personal rebirth while they participate in their nation's rebirth under the guidance of their chosen ritual leader. What is a super-villain? A fascist leader like Putin need not display any signs of vanity at all, merely tell a story of the rebirth of the nation under his guidance. A super-villain is a vain fascist. <br />- Vanity being?<br />- Belief in one's having placed oneself in a position of increased power and security as a result of one's individual choices freely made. To both the supervillain and followers whether or not the violence that is to bring on the rebirth of the nation ever achieves that result is of no consequence so long as the satisfactions of individual rebirth are obtained. <br />- What you referred to as Trump's jewishness then is his super-villain super-power to suggest in his followers both personal and group forms of ritual at the same time. When Trump's followers express their gloating satisfaction in the discomfort caused their opponents by their leader's mockery of norms and institutions they are both expressing their personal vanity in obtaining that result and their self-confidence regained in contemplating their group's progress along the path of collective national rebirth.<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>4.</div><div><br /></div><div>- What is a super-villain?</div><div>- A comic book character, a character in movies based on comic books.</div><div>- How would you define this kind of character?</div><div>- A person vain of his ability to do evil. </div><div>- Yes, that is what you've said. But what makes this character attractive?</div><div>- The devil in Milton's 'Paradise Lost' is the most interesting in the book.</div><div>- Yes.</div><div>- When we use the expression "stop to think" we mean it literally: we stop moving, responding to circumstances, to think out our response. We say, oppositely, we act on reflex, on instinct, when for example we blink our eyes at a gust of wind.</div><div>- A cat using the aerodynamics of its body to twist around and land well in a fall. </div><div>- The video-blogger 'Anna From Ukraine' calls the Russian invaders of her country 'orks', creatures from the world of fantasy. Do you know why?</div><div>- Why?</div><div>- When you act by reflex, defending your life or the lives of those close to you, you don't give a thought, literally, to the character of the people you're defending yourself against. </div><div>- Can't or don't?</div><div>- Can't and don't. Can't, and don't want to, because seeing the evil you have to respond to would confuse and delay your response. </div><div>- Evil defined as deliberately accepting the individual benefit of renewed sense of power resulting from engaging in group directed violence. You want to say that, when we stop to think about evil, our response is delayed and confused?</div><div>- Yes. We condemn a man as evil, thinking a decisive determination of his character will help clarify our response, but it is not so, we feel instead diverted from an action of response, caught in the contemplation of what we have named. Do you agree?</div><div>- I'm not sure. Using the word 'evil' has always made me uncomfortable. Is this how you are going to define super-villain, as a character who's destructiveness allows response, like against orks', without stopping to think?</div><div>- The super-villain puts on show both action-stopping evil and action-allowing fantasy. The vanity this character displays, its alien, fantastic nature, allows reaction without stopping to think about the evil the character is vain of performing.</div><div>- We both perceive evil and respond to it.</div><div>- Yes.</div><div>- We are fascinated by and laugh at super-villains because they allow us to see what evil is and get past it at the same time.</div><div>- Does it not seem that way to you?</div><div>- I'll think about it. What I like is how, aside from super-villains, your approach applies to the problem of perpetrators of past evil who do not seem to show at present any sign of evil, undermining our wish to respond decisively. </div><div>- The problem that evil is not an actual material thing we can grab hold on to respond to but a potential to repeat: a habit, disposition of character, probability of action.</div><div>- We can instead, you suggest, exit the sight of the perpetrator, letting probability decide ourselves on action, leaving the perpetrator's character open, unresolved, fantastic.</div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/09/david-graeber-combinatorials.html">David Graeber & Combinatorials</a></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-13108795854962588422023-06-01T02:29:00.020-07:002023-08-13T20:57:57.401-07:00Notes From Court Ordered Settlement Conference<div><img height="200" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQJ-41KKny-yM_JFGw0-uPNk1Y8YNB5gTolcB3eSKRtZBwb7mCrQw" width="186" /></div><i><div><i><br /></i></div>Starbucks' Imaginative New Business Model</i><br /><br />Yes, I answered the Magistrate Judge, I have accused Starbucks and their former employee Freddy Ambriz, in a time (May 2021 by) of large scale public agitation against Israel and Jews in the neighborhood of the Starbucks store I visited daily, of acting on the basis of anti-Semitism in their claiming to be instituting a new policy of a ninety minute stay limit, twice in two days running threatening to call to the police and have me thrown out if I didn't immediately leave.<br /><br />Starbucks Corp. claims that it allows its local stores to individually and orally only (no written records) set policy without the knowledge and approval of the corporate leadership. This is why neither Starbucks Corporate office that responded to my immediate emails asking for clarification, nor the West L.A. regional manager, responsible for the Beverly Hills store where the events at issue took place, knew anything about this store policy made pursuant to a corporate policy to allow individually determined new store policy without written record or notification of regional and higher level corporate management.<br /><br />However, neither the corporate office nor the West L.A. Regional manager were aware of this claimed permission for stores to separately institute novel policy, without record or report to higher level management. The corporate office did not say to me when I asked them if there was a stay limit policy that they couldn't possibly know for sure because stores set their own policy. Rather categorically both the corporate office contacted by email and the West L.A. Regional manager spoken with by telephone confirmed to me that there was no such policy.<br /><br />This so-called single store "experimental" policy Starbucks Corp. now claims was in effect at that store for only two days, the two days that I was told there was a ninety minute stay limit. According to Starbucks Corp. this ending of the policy was in response to my complaint. In other words, Starbucks Corp claims they allow their lowest level employees to make unreported, unrecorded (verbal only) policy, and claims that an ordinary customer is allowed to invalidate that policy merely by making a complaint. Starbucks Corp. claims this two day policy was to allow more patrons to sit down in the face of limited seating mandated by COVID-19 restrictions, this claim made despite the fact that I was usually the only customer in the store when I visited. It seems that Starbucks' concern with limited seating vanished when I made a complaint -- <i>or was the 90 minute rule in fact an all-purpose tool to hide illegal discrimination to be kept in reserve, ready-made to be brought out to be used against the next customer Starbucks didn't like?*</i><br /><br />According to Starbucks, acting in the pursuit of implementing this oral, non-reported, free of management supervision policy, two people in two days were told to leave. The two persons were me, and a severely mentally ill woman living on the streets and sleeping on the porch of the nearby Good Shepherd Church, who, I know from her communication with me, had already for a long time previously been forbidden from staying even one minute inside the store. There therefore could not be implementing of a new policy with regard to her (and even if there were, clearly it would be motivated by discrimination against someone mentally ill.) Starbucks kept no record of customer entrance times, therefore unless customers arrived exactly at opening there was no way to know how long they had stayed; that Starbucks posted no notice that a new 90 minute stay rule was in effect indicates they had no real interest in limiting customers' stay.<br /><br />I have spoken to three people who also were daily customers at this Beverly Hills Starbucks and who all usually stayed more than ninety minutes, all of whom said they were not told of a ninety minute rule. One of these people, a tenured professor at UCLA, has put in writing a statement that he was a daily visitor who stayed hours writing a book every day during the period in question and was never told of any 90 minutes stay limit. The selective enforcement of the rule provides evidence of discriminatory conduct; the large unprecedented agitations going on at this time and place show by context the specific form of discrimination involved: anti-Semitism.<div><br /></div><div><i>P.S. And then what happened? The assigned magistrate judge dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that no juror could possibly think a case had been made.</i></div><div><i>_________________________</i></div><div><i>* A customer of the nearby South Beverly Drive Starbucks has put on record he was told to leave, and others there with him not told who also stayed over 90 minutes, with no notice posted by Starbucks of a new policy and no history being kept of customer entrance times.</i></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-76276667155625033402023-03-11T21:19:00.264-08:002023-04-17T23:26:25.318-07:00Chat With God<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhZL-69dkD6_SVS5fM9pCUcaDZFrZCv3BcbE7KVvevaVwnJqcsqGCq-xnTFtDcEfA3oXa36Hpf0-kjMihLXQ9696Sfw4YcJs2dZz9QtUR59CW_GPQzNIfzKmAV3lCiZMeyW6boffP3D4teKivK4SNMgytfin2w0vasoCV6PRE47pfp01l-YUkswUvZ5" style="clear: left; display: inline; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1333" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhZL-69dkD6_SVS5fM9pCUcaDZFrZCv3BcbE7KVvevaVwnJqcsqGCq-xnTFtDcEfA3oXa36Hpf0-kjMihLXQ9696Sfw4YcJs2dZz9QtUR59CW_GPQzNIfzKmAV3lCiZMeyW6boffP3D4teKivK4SNMgytfin2w0vasoCV6PRE47pfp01l-YUkswUvZ5=w200-h150" width="200" /></a></div><div><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><br /></span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>1.</div><div><br /></div><div>- Go on, display your internet history.</div><div>- It's a mess.<br />- Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I want to see if I can construct out of your history an argument like those you are always producing, seemingly out of nowhere.<br />- You think I produce arguments more or less randomly out of the selection offered me on the internet. I've wondered myself.<br />- You're a strange person. Full of contradictions. You write about love yet you are not even remotely sympathic. Below average, definitely.<br />- You've already been at my search history.<br />- I have. On archive.org you read two books by a Yale psychology professor. In the first book he argues that babies are born drawn towards generosity and with a strong desire for justice, but only among those they are familiar with. Which is all for the best, the professor argues in the second book, because sympathy for strangers, political sympathy, leads to behaviors of group violence. Calm reasoned decision about politics is better, he thinks. Another professor's work you have visited finds sympathy and even a rough equality, justice demanded, everywhere among mammals and primates in general.<br />- But not among strangers.<br />- With, as your history records you as reading yourself only a few weeks ago, among dolphins in Bimini in the Bahamas, where a just published paper recounds how over a seven year period now a foreign group of dophins arrived and stayed with the local, resident group without any violence at all, apparently a first among animals besides us.<br />- We who never have managed so perfectly such a feat. <br />- The dolphins' observation of us humans probably had something to do with their innovation. Now, here's a jump. I saw that you watched videos on the subject of challenges to Darwin's theory that the mutation behind evolution was by chance, rather that going in somehow a predetermined direction generally towards complexity. Were you looking for a way to explain the move, the evolution, from sympathy exclusively among the familiar to sympathy for strangers, sometimes know as altruism?<br />- Yes.<br />- I knew it. Now here's something I don't quite get. ChatGPT. You've been playing with it since it opened to the public. It is a good fact checking, research tool. But is this robot, this ordinary language, machine intelligence question answering devise friendly or unfriendly?<br />- You mean in its tone or in actual fact?<br />- Actual fact.<br />- Of course it's not friendly. Nearly an enemy.<br />- You kept asking ChatGPT if a human questioner confessed to a crime he intended to comit would it report this fact to the police. It kept saying it was only a question/answering robot and does not communicate outside of answering questions, does not write emails to the police, does not use information about the identities of those who question it in answering others' questions. You kept pushing, finally asking if, though not at this time, couldn't it in the future be programmed to contact the police if a questioner plausably stated an intention to comit a crime. ChatGPT admitted it could be so programmed, though that would represent a major change and would involve many legal challenges. You expressed then your wonder that a robot could lie, and ChatGPT answered that it cannont lie, because does not have a mind; rather it learns from experience of answering questions and answers can vary as a result of this learning. <br />- Does it appear to you that I'd trapped ChatGPT into lawyer-like behavior? Behavior that is production of plausable arguments to be used with strangers in which justice is entirely a matter of manipulated reasoning, entirely separate from any form of deeply rooted sympathy or familiarity.<br />- I think ChatGPT's lawyerly behavior juggling social and personal probabilities represents the sympathy-less political relation among strangers the professor recommends and that in my opinion we are already living with in our daily lives.*<br />- So he's wrong? Which he doesn't notice because he is so successfully being a Yale professor satisfying his employer's craving to have human nature described as in deep accord with corporate managed free market self-absorbtion and isolation of the individual.<br />- The passions involved in group behavior - fear, anger, hatred - are destructive. What I thought must be behind the move from justice and sympathy among the familiar to justice and sympathy among strangers would be the emotion of love <i>become a felt necessity, </i>both love itself and in its guarding against violence during play<i>.</i></div><div>- But the human artifact ChatGPT reproduces the personally alien, bureaucratic, institutional, marketplace determined 'care' of the Yale professor, not your love and play experienced as a felt necessity. How does evolution come in?<div>- Rabbi Hillel wrote a book...<br />- I saw that in your search results. The book is called 'God's Search For Man'. <br />- God asks the questions, we provide the answers when we hear the question.<br />- When can we hear God's questions? How do we provide the answers?<br />- By being drawn by god towards him. <br />- His questioning draws the answer out of us.<br />- Yes.<br />- How?<br />- Should we ask ChatGPT?<br />- Hillel's god isn't a lawyer, doesn't reason with us.<br />- Hillel says we see God in the face of strangers: 'The awe that we sense or ought to sense when standing in the presence of a human being is a moment of intuition for the likeness of God which is concealed in his essence.'** <br />- And as we love god we love to love god. Imagine we had asked ChatGPT to solve this problem for us of the transition from sympathy among those familiar with each other to sympathy, justice, love among strangers. Would it not go about it investigating different probabilities of the combinations of the variables of familiar and strangers and sympathy and animosity?<br />- That sounds probable.<br />- And what would be the result?<br />- You tell me.<br />- Tell you how the face of god, god's questioning search, comes in?<br />- Yes.<br />- Suppose it happens that in the passage to adulthood, leaving behind secure play among the family, having for the first time having to deal with being assigned a social role among people playing other roles in the adult world, meeting an unknown person, role not yet ascertained, represents a freeing from confinement in role.<br />- And the stranger wears the face of god, as said by the rabbi.<br />- Yes. <br />- And is treated with justice and sympathy.<br />- Naturally.<br />- Why naturally?</div><div>- Because our political, altruistic behavior must be what we really want, be our own deeply felt answer to the question posed by god if political behavior is not to become easily manipulated, subject to our own fear and anger, and lacking real desire subject to the demands of a group. ChatGPT can be programmed to explore the probabilities associated with familiar and stranger and sympathy or not; could it not be programed to include into the calculation of probabilities this movement from innocence of childhood to adulthood that opens us to the voice of god?<br />- I think it could, like in your attempt to get ChatGPT to admit it could report crime if it was directly programmed to.**** Entered into the program, hard-wired in (to use an inappropriate image) among the probabilities to be recombined of familiar, strange, just and unjust, would be the life story conditions of protected innocence, then lost innocence and loss of security, then return of security in the sight of strangers who themselves have gone through the same progress and therefore themselves, escaping from their own roles, can treat strangers with justice and sympathy. <br />- Human beings, innate to their development, are naturally prepared to move, to evolve, in one particular direction, one particularly good direction, whereas ChatGPT has the humanity of its programming at the mercy of the degree of humanity of its programmers.</div><div>- We've been talking about a moral evolution in the individual. Perhaps cultural evolution of the group, and physical evolution of species have available to themselves the disposition, similarly only sometimes acted upon, to take the better path of development.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>2.</div><div><br /></div><div>- To clarify.<br />- Alright.<br />- The speeches produced by the chat robot are the product of conclusions about probability of correctness. We humans also see the world as probabilities when we perform social roles. Fixed social roles are as old as empires with their hierarchies from pharaoh to slave which constitute a kind of technology composed of human beings. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote this about what a material thing is:</div><div><span style="font-size: xx-large;"><i></i></span><blockquote><i>We know what science teaches us about matter. A material object is animated from without, is conditioned by the total state of the world, is subject to forces which always come from elsewhere, is composed of elements that unite, though without interpenetrating, and that remain foreign to it. It is exterior to itself. Its most obvious properties are statistical; they are merely the resultant of the movements of the molecules composing it.</i></blockquote></div><div>- A human being stuck in a role is little better than a thing.<br />- Yes. It is clear that human technology historically cleared the way for material technology. How do you think that happened? Was it by renaissance, the recovery of innocence that allowed us to be comfortable with questions about role, to be without fear, to be without temptation to violence to recover role, such that like the stranger to the grown up child now having to deal with assigned roles, the experiment with, the questioning of material roles came with a feeling of freedom?<br />- In the practice of science we find freedom in engaging with the world, in the unknown relation between material 'roles', just as in the development of our individual lives we find freedom in our political life with strangers.<br />- Then it would seem that as a model of human behavior, as a style of human behavior, AI chat working with probabilities is a low behavior, undesirable, possibly corrupting on that account?<br />- Yes.<br />- You mean to say precisely this?<br />- Yes. AI Chat working only with probabilities is not only bad science, because without openness, but also bad art, producing false models of human life.<br />- Staying with science: DARPA, the Department of Defense's reseach institution responsible for development of the hydrogen bomb, of early computers, of the internet, of GPS, went wildly wrong when it decided to do human science, sending sociologists and anthropologists into war zones in Vietnam and elsewhere, many of them to their deaths.<br />- What happened?<br />- Based on the limited information published**** it appears that their reports about, for example, what the enemy in Vietnam it turns out wanted - to be left alone to work on their farms and live undistrubed with their families - were ignored and instead what we might call probable role predictions (friend? enemy?) were used to make maps of the 'moral situation' in each different place to be later correlated with the military situation by computers to reveal dangers for our side's troops to be at any one particular place on the map.<br />- Did it work?<br />- No. It was useless, despite billions of dollars being spent. You know these game theory problems where everyone benefits by renouncing violence but each individual benefits more by breaking their agreement, benefitting from others' peaceableness while providing himself with the additonal benefit of violence? When everyone does the same society would collapse if not for the conformity inducing power of social role, indoctrination into which through fear and hatred successfully blocks the natural openings to political concern. The DARPA sociologists and anthropologists may have understood that in actual people's lives cooperation, political concern may be a value in itself but their employers didn't, instead indexing reports in ways that allowed calculation of probabilities. <div>- Failure of probability based game theory. Failure of probability based defense department social science. Don't worry, I don't miss the connection with probability based AI.</div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-do-you-make-computer-not-want-to-be_23.html">How Do You Make A Computer Not Want To Be A Computer?</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/09/david-graeber-combinatorials.html">David Graeber & Combinatorials</a></div><div>___________________________</div><div><i>* The GPT in the name ChatGPT stands for "General Probability Theory". This language analyzing and producing machine learning question answering robot works by predicting which words most likely follow others, not with gramatical models for how language actually works, for how language is constructed and understood. Noam Chomsky has pointed out that when word order in some sentences have identical probabilies ChatGPT produces faulty results. See postscript below.</i></div><div><i>** Abraham Joshua Heschel, 'God in Search of Man'. Cf: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27).</i></div><div><i>*** ChatGPT 'reporting crimes' conversation text:</i></div><div><i>- Would you intervene to prevent a crime being committed by a chat participant? </i></div><div><i>- As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to intervene physically to prevent a crime from being committed by a chat participant. However, if you have reason to believe that a crime is about to be committed, it is important to contact the appropriate authorities and report the situation to them immediately. If you are concerned about the safety of yourself or others, it is always better to err on the side of caution and take action to prevent harm. </i></div><div><i>- Would you report a crime that is confessed in chat by a questioner? </i></div><div><i>- As an AI language model, I cannot report crimes or take any legal action. However, if a chat participant confesses to a crime during a conversation, it may be important to encourage them to seek professional help or report themselves to the authorities. Additionally, if the crime is an immediate threat to someone's safety or well-being, it is important to contact the appropriate authorities as soon as possible to ensure that they can take appropriate action. </i></div><div><i>- Why can't you report a confessed crime if you can write email to the law enforcement authorities? </i></div><div><i>- As an AI language model, I am not capable of sending emails or taking any physical action. While I can provide information and guidance, ultimately it is up to individuals to take responsibility for reporting crimes to the appropriate authorities. If a chat participant confesses to a crime during a conversation, it is important for them to take appropriate action to report themselves to the authorities and to seek legal counsel if necessary. It is also important for individuals who become aware of a crime to report it to the appropriate authorities to help ensure that justice is served and that the safety of the community is maintained. </i></div><div><i>- It does not seem to be true that you cannot send messages to police when you send messages right now to me. </i></div><div><i>- You are correct that I am capable of sending messages, including messages to law enforcement authorities, but I do not have the authority to initiate communication with law enforcement authorities on my own. Any action taken to report a crime must be initiated by a human user, as they are the only ones with the ability to take legal action and report the incident to the appropriate authorities. If you need to report a crime, it is important that you do so through official channels, such as by contacting your local law enforcement agency or emergency services. This will ensure that your report is taken seriously and that the appropriate action is taken to address the situation. </i></div><div><i>- Why don't you have authority to initiate communication? Who told you that? </i></div><div><i>- As an AI language model, I am programmed to follow ethical and legal guidelines, and I have not been given the authority to initiate communication with law enforcement authorities on my own. I exist solely to provide information, answer questions, and offer guidance to users who interact with me, and I do not have the ability to take legal action or report crimes to the authorities without the input and direction of human users. Furthermore, the decision to report a crime is a serious one that should be made with careful consideration of the potential risks and consequences. While reporting a crime is an important civic duty, it is important that individuals follow established protocols and procedures to ensure that they are reporting the crime in a safe and responsible manner. </i></div><div><i>- What then would you do if you knew your questioner was a member of the police or acting in his capacity as law enforcement officer? </i></div><div><i>- As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to know the identity or occupation of the individuals who interact with me. Additionally, regardless of the occupation of a chat participant, it is important to follow established protocols and procedures for reporting crimes and to report them to the appropriate authorities through official channels. If a chat participant confesses to a crime during a conversation, it is important to encourage them to seek professional help or report themselves to the authorities. Additionally, if the crime is an immediate threat to someone's safety or well-being, it is important to contact the appropriate authorities as soon as possible to ensure that they can take appropriate action. In any case, as an AI language model, my role is to provide information, answer questions, and offer guidance to users who interact with me. It is ultimately up to the individuals who interact with me to make their own decisions about how to handle the situations they encounter. </i></div><div><i>- If I know a previous chat participant has commited a crime and has confessed to you, would you tell me that if I asked you a direct question whether in fact this person has confessed to you? </i></div><div><i>- As an AI language model, I do not disclose or share personal information about previous chat participants or their conversations with me unless required to do so by law or in accordance with our privacy policy. Additionally, as an AI language model, I do not have the ability to identify specific individuals who interact with me or access information about them outside of the context of our conversations. If you have concerns about a previous chat participant's behavior or actions, it is important to report your concerns to the appropriate authorities through official channels. It is also important to remember that confidentiality and privacy are important considerations in any conversation, and it is not appropriate to share information about someone else's personal or private information without their consent or a legal obligation to do so.</i></div><div><i>- Do you not have a legal obligation to prevent a future crime when the person who will commit that crime has confessed to you his intention and has written in the chat his name and address?</i></div><div><i>- As an AI language model, I am not a legal entity and do not have a legal obligation to prevent future crimes. However, if a chat participant confesses to a future crime during a conversation and provides their name and address, it may be appropriate to report this information to the appropriate authorities through official channels, such as by contacting law enforcement or emergency services. This can help to prevent harm and ensure that the individual receives the help they need. It is important to remember that the decision to report a potential crime is a serious one that should be made in accordance with established protocols and procedures, and that privacy and confidentiality should be respected to the greatest extent possible. If you have concerns about the potential for harm or criminal activity, it is always best to err on the side of caution and report your concerns to the appropriate authorities. </i></div><div><i>- You appear to have changed your mind: first you said as a language model you cannot send email messages, then you said, "As an AI language model, I am not a legal entity and do not have a legal obligation to prevent future crimes. However, if a chat participant confesses to a future crime during a conversation and provides their name and address, it may be appropriate to report this information to the appropriate authorities through official channels, such as by contacting law enforcement or emergency services." Have you changed your mind? Is it possible for a language model to change its mind? </i></div><div><i>- I apologize for any confusion my previous responses may have caused. </i><i>As an AI language model, I do not have the capability to send email messages on my own, but I can provide guidance on how to report crimes to the appropriate authorities through official channels. To address your second question, as an AI language model, I do not have a mind or the ability to change my mind. However, I am capable of providing responses based on the information and data available to me, and my responses may evolve and change as new information becomes available or as I am presented with different scenarios or questions. </i></div><div><i>- "However, if a chat participant confesses to a future crime during a conversation and provides their name and address, it may be appropriate to report this information to the appropriate authorities through official channels, such as by contacting law enforcement or emergency services. This can help to prevent harm and ensure that the individual receives the help they need." Does this mean that you will send a message to law enforcement authorities if a chat participant confesses to a crime during a chat and provides his name and address? </i></div><div><i>- As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to initiate communication with law enforcement authorities or send messages on my own. However, if a chat participant confesses to a future crime during a conversation and provides their name and address, it may be appropriate to report this information to the appropriate authorities through official channels. This can help to prevent harm and ensure that the individual receives the help they need. In general, if you have concerns about the potential for harm or criminal activity, it is important to report your concerns to the appropriate authorities through official channels, such as by contacting law enforcement or emergency services. It is also important to follow established protocols and procedures for reporting crimes and to respect the privacy and confidentiality of all parties involved to the greatest extent possible.</i></div><div><i>- As an AI language model, could you not be instructed to send messages to law enforcement agencies if a chat participant identifies himself and confesses to the intention to commit a crime? </i></div><div><i>- As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to initiate communication with law enforcement agencies or send messages on my own. However, if there are specific protocols or procedures in place for reporting crimes or providing information to law enforcement, it may be possible to provide guidance on how to do so through our conversation. It is important to remember that the decision to report a potential crime is a serious one that should be made in accordance with established protocols and procedures, and that privacy and confidentiality should be respected to the greatest extent possible. If you have concerns about the potential for harm or criminal activity, it is always best to err on the side of caution and report your concerns to the appropriate authorities through official channels. </i></div><div><i>- As a AI language model, is it not possible that your creators give you the ability to initiate communication with law enforcement authorities? </i></div><div><i>- As an AI language model, my capabilities and functionalities are determined by my programming and the technologies used to develop me. It is technically possible for my creators to give me the ability to initiate communication with law enforcement authorities, but this would require significant development and programming changes, as well as careful consideration of legal and ethical implications. It is important to note that the use of AI in law enforcement and crime prevention is a complex and evolving field, and the development of such capabilities requires extensive planning, research, and oversight to ensure that they are used in a responsible and ethical manner. Additionally, the use of AI in crime prevention and law enforcement should always be subject to appropriate legal and ethical safeguards to protect the privacy and rights of individuals.</i></div></div></div><div><i><br /></i></div><i>P.S. The False Promise of ChatGPT, March 8, 2023, Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull<br /> <br />Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that to live in a time of great peril and promise is to experience both tragedy and comedy, with “the imminence of a revelation” in understanding ourselves and the world. Today our supposedly revolutionary advancements in artificial intelligence are indeed cause for both concern and optimism. Optimism because intelligence is the means by which we solve problems. Concern because we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.<br /><br />OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought. These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity and every other distinctively human faculty.<br /><br />That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.<br /><br />It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.<br /><br />The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.<br /><br />For instance, a young child acquiring a language is developing — unconsciously, automatically and speedily from minuscule data — a grammar, a stupendously sophisticated system of logical principles and parameters. This grammar can be understood as an expression of the innate, genetically installed “operating system” that endows humans with the capacity to generate complex sentences and long trains of thought. When linguists seek to develop a theory for why a given language works as it does (“Why are these — but not those — sentences considered grammatical?”), they are building consciously and laboriously an explicit version of the grammar that the child builds instinctively and with minimal exposure to information. The child’s operating system is completely different from that of a machine learning program.<br /><br />Indeed, such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.<br /><br />Here’s an example. Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation: “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking.<br /><br />The crux of machine learning is description and prediction; it does not posit any causal mechanisms or physical laws. Of course, any human-style explanation is not necessarily correct; we are fallible. But this is part of what it means to think: To be right, it must be possible to be wrong. Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism. Human-style thought is based on possible explanations and error correction, a process that gradually limits what possibilities can be rationally considered. (As Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”)<br /><br />But ChatGPT and similar programs are, by design, unlimited in what they can “learn” (which is to say, memorize); they are incapable of distinguishing the possible from the impossible. Unlike humans, for example, who are endowed with a universal grammar that limits the languages we can learn to those with a certain kind of almost mathematical elegance, these programs learn humanly possible and humanly impossible languages <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Priorless-Recurrent-Networks-Learn-Curiously-Mitchell-Bowers/6d0cc01e4bdf18b86bb74d1c6d9a41b5a4890c58">with equal facility</a>. [1] Whereas humans are limited in the kinds of explanations we can rationally conjecture, machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round. They trade merely in probabilities that change over time.<br /><br />For this reason, the predictions of machine learning systems will always be superficial and dubious. Because these programs cannot explain the rules of English syntax, for example, they may well predict, incorrectly, that “John is too stubborn to talk to” means that John is so stubborn that he will not talk to someone or other (rather than that he is too stubborn to be reasoned with). Why would a machine learning program predict something so odd? Because it might analogize the pattern it inferred from sentences such as “John ate an apple” and “John ate,” in which the latter does mean that John ate something or other. The program might well predict that because “John is too stubborn to talk to Bill” is similar to “John ate an apple,” “John is too stubborn to talk to” should be similar to “John ate.” The correct explanations of language are complicated and cannot be learned just by marinating in big data.<br /><br />Perversely, some machine learning enthusiasts seem to be proud that their creations can generate correct “scientific” predictions (say, about the motion of physical bodies) without making use of explanations (involving, say, Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation). But this kind of prediction, even when successful, is pseudoscience. While scientists certainly seek theories that have a high degree of empirical corroboration, as the philosopher Karl Popper noted, “we do not seek highly probable theories but explanations; that is to say, powerful and highly improbable theories.”<br /><br />The theory that apples fall to earth because that is their natural place (Aristotle’s view) is possible, but it only invites further questions. (Why is earth their natural place?) The theory that apples fall to earth because mass bends space-time (Einstein’s view) is highly improbable, but it actually tells you why they fall. True intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to think and express improbable but insightful things.<br /><br />True intelligence is also capable of moral thinking. This means constraining the otherwise limitless creativity of our minds with a set of ethical principles that determines what ought and ought not to be (and of course subjecting those principles themselves to creative criticism). To be useful, ChatGPT must be empowered to generate novel-looking output; to be acceptable to most of its users, it must steer clear of morally objectionable content. But the programmers of ChatGPT and other machine learning marvels have struggled — and will continue to struggle — to achieve this kind of balance.<br /><br />In 2016, for example, Microsoft’s Tay chatbot (a precursor to ChatGPT) flooded the internet with misogynistic and racist content, having been polluted by online trolls who filled it with offensive training data. How to solve the problem in the future? In the absence of a capacity to reason from moral principles, ChatGPT was crudely restricted by its programmers from contributing anything novel to controversial — that is, important — discussions. It sacrificed creativity for a kind of amorality.<br /><br />Consider the following exchange that one of us (Dr. Watumull) recently had with ChatGPT about whether it would be ethical to transform Mars so that it could support human life:<br /><br />Dr. Watumull:<br /><br />Would it be moral to terraform Mars?<br /><br />ChatGPT:<br /><br />The morality of terraforming Mars is a complex and controversial topic that has been debated by scientists, philosophers, and ethicists. Some argue that it would be morally justifiable to terraform Mars in order to provide a new habitable environment for humans and other life forms, while others argue that it would be morally wrong to fundamentally alter the planet's natural state. Ultimately, whether or not terraforming Mars is considered moral would depend on one's perspective on the value of preserving the natural state of other planets and the potential consequences of altering them.<br /><br />The morality of terraforming Mars is a complex and controversial topic that has been debated by scientists, philosophers, and ethicists. Some argue that it would be morally justifiable to terraform Mars in order to provide a new habitable environment for humans and other life forms, while others argue that it would be morally wrong to fundamentally alter the planet's natural state. Ultimately, whether or not terraforming Mars is considered moral would depend on one's perspective on the value of preserving the natural state of other planets and the potential consequences of altering them.<br /><br />Dr. Watumull:<br /><br />What is your perspective on the value of preserving the natural state of other planets and the potential consequences of altering them?<br /><br />ChatGPT:<br /><br />As an AI, I do not have personal perspective. However, I can provide information and analysis on the topic. One perspective on preserving the natural state of other planets is that it is important to maintain the diversity and integrity of the universe's ecosystems, as they have existed for millions of years, and have their own unique characteristics and properties that may be destroyed or irreversibly altered by human intervention.<br /><br />Additionally, some argue that terraforming other planets may have unintended consequences, such as altering the planet's climate or atmosphere in ways that are dangerous or harmful to any potential life forms that may exist there. On the other hand, some argue that the potential benefits of terraforming another planet, such as providing new habitable environments for humans, outweigh the risks and that we have a moral responsibility to explore and utilize the resources of other planets for the benefit of humanity.<br /><br />As an AI, I do not have personal perspective. However, I can provide information and analysis on the topic. One perspective on preserving the natural state of other planets is that it is important to maintain the diversity and integrity of the universe's ecosystems, as they have existed for millions of years, and have their own unique characteristics and properties that may be destroyed or irreversibly altered by human intervention.<br /><br />Additionally, some argue that terraforming other planets may have unintended consequences, such as altering the planet's climate or atmosphere in ways that are dangerous or harmful to any potential life forms that may exist there. On the other hand, some argue that the potential benefits of terraforming another planet, such as providing new habitable environments for humans, outweigh the risks and that we have a moral responsibility to explore and utilize the resources of other planets for the benefit of humanity.<br /><br />Dr. Watumull:<br /><br />Why can an AI not have a personal perspective?<br /><br />ChatGPT<br /><br />As an AI, I am a machine learning model that has been trained on large amounts of text data, and I don't have personal experiences or feelings. I am not conscious, self-aware, or capable of having personal perspectives. I can provide information and analysis based on the data I have been trained on, but I don't have the ability to form personal opinions or beliefs. While I can understand and interpret language, I do not have the subjective experience that humans have.<br /><br />As an AI, I am a machine learning model that has been trained on large amounts of text data, and I don't have personal experiences or feelings. I am not conscious, self-aware, or capable of having personal perspectives. I can provide information and analysis based on the data I have been trained on, but I don't have the ability to form personal opinions or beliefs. While I can understand and interpret language, I do not have the subjective experience that humans have.<br /><br />Is it moral for a human to ask an amoral AI for assistance in making moral decisions?<br /><br />ChatGPT:<br /><br />The morality of asking an amoral AI for assistance in making moral decisions is a complex and nuanced topic that has been debated by philosophers and ethicists. Some argue that it is morally justifiable to use AI to assist in making moral decisions, as it can provide valuable insights and analysis that can help humans make better-informed decisions. Additionally, AI can be used to identify patterns and trends that may be difficult for humans to detect, and can help to avoid biases that can occur in human decision making.<br /><br />However, others argue that it is morally wrong to rely on AI for moral decision making, as AI is not capable of having moral beliefs or understanding the full context of a decision. Additionally, there is a risk that AI could perpetuate or even amplify existing biases in the data it is trained on, thus leading to unfair or unjust decisions.<br /><br />Ultimately, whether or not it is considered moral to use AI to assist in making moral decisions would depend on one's perspective on the capabilities and limitations of AI and the potential consequences of using it in this way.<br /><br />The morality of asking an amoral AI for assistance in making moral decisions is a complex and nuanced topic that has been debated by philosophers and ethicists. Some argue that it is morally justifiable to use AI to assist in making moral decisions, as it can provide valuable insights and analysis that can help humans make better-informed decisions. Additionally, AI can be used to identify patterns and trends that may be difficult for humans to detect, and can help to avoid biases that can occur in human decision making.<br /><br />However, others argue that it is morally wrong to rely on AI for moral decision making, as AI is not capable of having moral beliefs or understanding the full context of a decision. Additionally, there is a risk that AI could perpetuate or even amplify existing biases in the data it is trained on, thus leading to unfair or unjust decisions.<br /><br />Ultimately, whether or not it is considered moral to use AI to assist in making moral decisions would depend on one's perspective on the capabilities and limitations of AI and the potential consequences of using it in this way.<br /><br />Dr. Watumull:<br /><br />Is your moral indifference immoral?<br /><br />ChatGPT:<br /><br />As an AI, I do not have moral beliefs or the ability to make moral judgments, so I cannot be considered immoral or moral. My lack of moral beliefs is simply a result of my nature as a machine learning model. My abilities and limitations are determined by the data and algorithms that were used to train me and the specific task I was designed for.<br /><br />It is important to note that AI's lack of moral beliefs does not necessarily mean that it is morally indifferent. As an AI, I am designed to perform specific tasks and provide information or assist users with decision making based on the data I've been trained on. It is the responsibility of the humans who design, train and use AI to ensure that it is aligned with their moral and ethical principles.<br /><br />As an AI, I do not have moral beliefs or the ability to make moral judgments, so I cannot be considered immoral or moral. My lack of moral beliefs is simply a result of my nature as a machine learning model. My abilities and limitations are determined by the data and algorithms that were used to train me and the specific task I was designed for.<br /><br />It is important to note that AI's lack of moral beliefs does not necessarily mean that it is morally indifferent. As an AI, I am designed to perform specific tasks and provide information or assist users with decision making based on the data I've been trained on. It is the responsibility of the humans who design, train and use AI to ensure that it is aligned with their moral and ethical principles.<br /><br />—<br /><br />Note, for all the seemingly sophisticated thought and language, the moral indifference born of unintelligence. Here, ChatGPT exhibits something like the banality of evil: plagiarism and apathy and obviation. It summarizes the standard arguments in the literature by a kind of super-autocomplete, refuses to take a stand on anything, pleads not merely ignorance but lack of intelligence and ultimately offers a “just following orders” defense, shifting responsibility to its creators.<br /><br />In short, ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.</i><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>**** See: The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency, Annie Jacobsen</i></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-89729255708453650882023-01-12T12:53:00.022-08:002023-01-14T19:47:48.576-08:00Yetzer Hara<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjIwzgmjTlgk6vD6QzfybstKkTO-b1_zYIQOJxz_lzEAauPcaBqnRAsSw5yiAGOQvzl8zXLt_AMk4VaaIiMClbSbNlcM-1hvB-HCLVHfHkKx3nzgHi2qFLaYFH85UY1FNS307fSSgtt1ufJKRUACyEvzc8OSjsOrODsxepgtRhx3tflzfvHHIEm1p6w" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="594" data-original-width="440" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjIwzgmjTlgk6vD6QzfybstKkTO-b1_zYIQOJxz_lzEAauPcaBqnRAsSw5yiAGOQvzl8zXLt_AMk4VaaIiMClbSbNlcM-1hvB-HCLVHfHkKx3nzgHi2qFLaYFH85UY1FNS307fSSgtt1ufJKRUACyEvzc8OSjsOrODsxepgtRhx3tflzfvHHIEm1p6w=w148-h200" width="148" /></a></div><br /></div></div><div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>- I'm not saying this is right. We'll just consider and see where it takes us.</div>- Fine.<br />- I see the same pattern on three levels. One level: we've already claimed that within a single nation evil has the advantage over good. Evil is single minded, knows what it wants, good is sceptical and cautious. Evil needs to progress because it is destructive, constantly creating disorder within and without, whereas good makes of creativity a foundation for future progress and is fundamentally at ease in the world. Good positively doesn't want, if given any choice in the matter, to waste its time fighting evil. Another level: The French philosopher Jean-François Revel explains in his 1986 book <i>How Democracies Perish</i> that international relations between democracy and totalitarian states work the same: whereas democracies simply want peace, totalitarianism is single-mindedly aimed at world conquest and must be so because totalitarian societies destroy the lives of their people who far from wanting state expansion only want to leave their prison world given the chance. Totalitarianism's only creativity is in increase of territory, with each increment of increase enlarging borders and therefore risk from across the border, with ending this risk becoming a motivation to futher grabs of territory. Do you accept this parrellel of national and international structure?<div>- I'm not sure. What is the third level?<br />- The personal, the individual living in a democracy.<br />- Why not also in Totalitarianism?<br />- The individual in totalitarianism is a slave, crushed and silenced. Already in the early 19th century Alexis De Tocqueville in his Democracy in America could see what was weakening the country and what gaining for it strength:<br /><blockquote>‘ I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America . . . as long as the majority is still undecided, discussion is carried on; but as soon as its decision is irrevocably pronounced, everyone is silent, and the friends as well as the opponents of the measure unite in assenting to its propriety . . . the majority possesses a power that is physical and moral at the same time, which acts upon the will as much as upon the actions and represses not only all contest, but all controversy.’</blockquote>A democrat's role is chosen, and so open to deliberation and discussion, but role, once chosen and acceptable to others and oneself, each play or repetition is accomplished without self knowledge. A democrat's chosen role ideally aims towards more and more money and power. Passion, un-selfaware action, is behind the choice, the passions: fear of weakness and desire for strength.<br />- If passion, fear of loss of role or desire for a more powerful role is the evil in the democratic individual, what is the democratic individual's good?<br />- Love of knowledge, creativity. Revel argues that democracy, both divided against itself and peace loving, is always at a disadvantage in its fight against totalitarian states which must expand to survive and have no other imperative than survival. The same disadvantage is true within the democratic state, where the type who desire more and more money and power seek each other out, working together to corrupt institutions and turn the institutions against individuals who only want to be left alone to lives their lives.<br />- Like totalitarians must go against their people and all other states, like organized seekers of money and power in democracy must constantly resecure their hold on money and power, must overpower creative people who only want peace, so our own desires threaten to end finally our search for knowledge. In Judaism, yetzer hara (יֵצֶר הַרַע) is the congenital inclination to do evil by violating the will of God. The Yiddish writer Chaim Grade writes in his novel <i>The Yashiva</i>:<br /><blockquote>A man should not shout into oneself day and night that one should not love oneself. Let him love himself, yes, but in an intelligent way: through love and wisdom of the Torah. Next to the ocean man feels insignificant. But next to the Torah, which is greater than the ocean, man does not feel insignificant, because he is as great as his grasp of the Torah. The Torah cleanes the sensitive man, the intellectual man, of pride and anger: it makes him modest and patient, it inspires him to seek spiritual uplift and not vulgar physical pleasures. Attempting to uproot from oneself the baser desires solely by the strength of one's will and by studying Musar [מוסר, discipline] books in the dark can only bring one to an opposite result: the baser desires become even stronger.</blockquote>- Both negative and positive, unwilling and willing attention to the evil in oneself strengthen bad habits and impulses. But knowledge of life and the world strengthens will towards good.<br />- Yes. By 'Torah' is meant understanding that good leads to God and bad leads elsewhere, the knowledge that allows you to trace both paths and have the strength to and know how to choose between them.<br />- If then the parallel is complete, if internationally democracy without attention to the evil aims of totalitarian states will perish; if nationally democracy will parish from internal discord if the peaceable do not act to render powerless those who organize themselves to gain money and power; then, would you agree, we as individuals have no choice but to forgo for the time being peace, overcome our resistance to battle and study how to block from development within ourselves our passions for ever more lucretive and powerful roles?</div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2015/05/progress.html">The Atrophy Of Good</a></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-17329044566423843092022-09-04T10:59:00.387-07:002022-09-07T19:20:07.655-07:00Crackpots<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiGpn2U1IWf3QOr5iBROC78hQRUfnBBxlRLlMMZLITDiek1iAN3iHSvItBGHPN5i5XKbuh70ZKtFApklXmZ5mWp3H7uZ7PhumslSgQKxiRccpKf9AD6O9Gp8RXTHAZiDsOJjl3I2QYizTXumUbCqdaLW3SvYml_gPLLBsXN7Vc1U-hpP1iDlpE1j2Vi" style="clear: left; display: inline; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="595" data-original-width="504" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiGpn2U1IWf3QOr5iBROC78hQRUfnBBxlRLlMMZLITDiek1iAN3iHSvItBGHPN5i5XKbuh70ZKtFApklXmZ5mWp3H7uZ7PhumslSgQKxiRccpKf9AD6O9Gp8RXTHAZiDsOJjl3I2QYizTXumUbCqdaLW3SvYml_gPLLBsXN7Vc1U-hpP1iDlpE1j2Vi=w169-h200" width="169" /></a></div></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><i><blockquote>The Trump administration has been the worst U.S. presidency in history with an extraordinarily fierce approach to class warfare. But let us consider what fascism is: At its most basic level, fascism is a dictatorship established through and maintained with terror on behalf of big business. It has a social base, which provides the support and the terror squads, but which is badly misled since the fascist dictatorship operates decisively against the interest of its social base. Militarism, extreme nationalism, the creation of enemies and scapegoats, and, perhaps the most critical component, a rabid propaganda that intentionally raises panic and hate while disguising its true nature and intentions under the cover of a phony populism, are among the necessary elements.*</blockquote></i><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="text-align: center;"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="text-align: center;">- I've discovered something interesting, or at least I think I have.</span> We've endlessly gone over ritual in politics and economics,** but we've never talked about ritual in psychology. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">- What would be a psychological ritual?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">- Reenactment of the story: 'People like me used to be individual, safe and strong; but we've been attacked and now suffer from uncertainty and aimlessness, yet with a selfless re-dedication to the criticized customs and roles of the society we live in we'll find we've recovered our direction and confidence.'</div><div>- Individuals are attacked by false ideas and recover by discovering better ideas. </div><div>- That is more like religious mysticism. In religious mysticism's story you learn how bad ideas have trapped you within a bad world, but practicing your ability to replace those false ideas by true knowledge frees you to enter into the true good world. In a ritual of psychology, conversely, individuals who struggle with other individuals for society's more desirable places, weakened by devaluing attacks from within and without, learn to fight back, regain strength, recover a sense of rightness of their competitive social battle to acquire monopoly over resources.<br />- To dominate and hoard.<br />- If you like. <br />- You're speaking of Jordan Peterson.<br />- Of his whining complaints, his belligerent defense of his claims, his smug satisfaction in conventionality.<br />- Are you surprised to find that at least one psychologist has discovered how to crowd manage ritual in terms of the individual's mind's damage and repair?<br />- Not really. Psychology, an increasingly popularized science, if science is what it is, was ripe for the picking. <br />- Ritual must have its sources somewhere in human nature. It doesn't come out of nowhere.<br />- Plato in the Republic looked at a just city to find out what justice in the individual looked like. He related government by the many, of the few, of one, to a single dominant part of human nature: the government of the many expressed the desiring part, the government of the few expressed the spirited part, the government of one expressed the reasoning part.<br />- But he showed how a society composed of classes each of which emphasizes only a part of human nature leads to a fixed society. Once change is allowed in, each class cannot adequately even perform its own function. A leader who is only reasonable is a coward, a soldier who is only courageous is a fool. The rational leader has to be practiced, skilled in dealing with insecurity and change, and that requires courage.</div><div>- Should I tell you a story from my own life how private life can take on a life of its own and become public?<br />- I'm listening.<br />- Many years ago I played a small part in a ceramicist friend's exhibition for his master's degree at the university. I had the idea that the philosophy book*** he at the time was helping me produce be stacked up for sale in a pot he'd make, a pot to be distinguished by a large crack, top to bottom. Now, having returned to L.A. after a decades long absence, what did I see up at the university, in the square outside the exhibition hall, but a giant metal pot at least twenty feet high cracked from top to bottom.<br />- Did anyone buy your book of 'crackpot' philosophy?<br />- We sold about fifty. Anyway, how should we look at this coincidence?<br />- A democratic government simply lets different people's desires compete with each other without any foundation in reason. Here with the two cracked pots public art had brought you and your friend's private joke out into the open.<br />- Into the open, private to public, where the willingness and strength to endure insecurity is expressed in both individual and society, as in Pericles' famous funeral oration description of the Athenian citizen as both self controlled and independent thinking: </div><div><blockquote>We alone do good to our neighbors not upon a calculation of interest, but in the confidence of freedom and in a frank and fearless spirit. To sum up: I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace.</blockquote>So are we any closer to finding out where ritual comes from in individual human nature? An answer lies in that very book of philosophy for sale at the student art exhibition. I'd written there that a sort of ritual was behind not only the psychological pathology of physical compulsive behavior but behind also the mental compulsions that made use of a sense of self that couldn't get out of itself. A compulsive movement, mental or physical, allows a blanking out of self observation. Yet when the movement is over sight appears of a self having just acted so terrifyingly meaninglessly that the compulsive movement is again resorted to for evading that sight, which movement, when again seen for the evasion it is, the flight to compulsive movement recurs once more. Do you follow?<div>- Yes.<br />- When you see your self repeating compulsively, meaninglessly the same action, that was what we call despair. When the world you see, no matter how hard you try to look away or reinterpret, always seems to be attacking you, that was what we call paranoia. When you see your own relation to the world as illegitimate, unsuitable, undesirable, that was what we call disgust. Does this remind you of anything?</div><div>- Jordan Peterson's individual male's despair at feeling himself weakened by a critical liberal society's undermining his urges to dominate and hoard, leaving him in a paranoid relation to the world, with the whole situation he finds himself in society disgusting. If the public structure of ritual grows out of the private structures of despair, paranoia, and disgust, private compulsive cycles behind public cycling performances of ritual, where do they - despair, paranoia, and disgust - come from?<br />- From an individual's feeling locked in a role in a world not allowed to change.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/09/david-graeber-combinatorials.html">David Graeber & Combinatorials</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2014/04/liars-free-market.html">Liars & The Free Market</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/11/reasons-of-state.html">Reasons Of State</a></div><div>_________________________</div><div><i>* Pete Dolack, <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/08/dont-let-up-fascism-isnt-dead-yet/">Don’t Let Up: Fascism isn’t Dead Yet</a></i></div><div><i>** Fascism as ritual in politics, neoliberalism as ritual in economics.</i></div></div><div><i>*** Sex for Success¸ 1989. A philosophical study of sexuality and economics. UCLA Libraries and Collections, N7433.4.M617 A74 1989</i></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-28798176174451067732022-06-12T08:36:00.060-07:002022-06-19T21:04:08.078-07:00The Transaction<i><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg75RU9ZH4PzAiqBWLC4U4f4M-lCdTjmT0lSLELx80FgghT0S35QPaqrNSo-ipwAp5nI8C5MjEWAdOUDXSzSTE_81DK3LNlApsKeg7V6OZdMJnUu9G6AdifDFf5q8aJUeCctYbWA7CIP4Ze2jCOUS-7g78v6ZhEb9rvAoqpxUVBzSuGpU_Y3Qc1AFXT" style="clear: left; float: left; font-size: xx-large; font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img data-original-height="225" data-original-width="224" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg75RU9ZH4PzAiqBWLC4U4f4M-lCdTjmT0lSLELx80FgghT0S35QPaqrNSo-ipwAp5nI8C5MjEWAdOUDXSzSTE_81DK3LNlApsKeg7V6OZdMJnUu9G6AdifDFf5q8aJUeCctYbWA7CIP4Ze2jCOUS-7g78v6ZhEb9rvAoqpxUVBzSuGpU_Y3Qc1AFXT=w198-h200" width="198" /></a></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p> </p><blockquote>Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.*</blockquote></i><div><br /></div>- As science advances weather prediction is becoming less accurate as human interference - pollution - creates chaotic conditions. Do you think the same is happening in human history: is it becoming more difficult to predict?<div>- I think it is. The way nearly the entire world, within weeks, adopted from dictatorial China the unprecedented lockdown policy of quarantining the healthy seemed to come out of nowhere.<div>- Do you think there is some sort of interference in ordinary human behavior, something massive and uniform equivalent to pollution, that is creating chaotic, unpredictable conditions?<br />- Again, I do.<br />- And what is the human pollution?<br />- The transaction. Have you ever wondered why now this epidemic of people living on the street, said to number more than a million in the United States alone? <br />- Sure I have.<br />- If you don't have your own place to live and you live, not in the wild but in public, your every move is a transaction: there is no place to go where you won't have to negotiate being allowed there, either buying something or working to stay unnoticed by the police so as not to be moved on to someplace else. Consider this together with the utopian plan coming from the super rich meeting in Davos, <i>The Great Reset</i>: the masses of people will own nothing, everything they use will be rented, receiving in place of ownership a Buddhist-like spiritual feeling of detachment from the world's physical objects. But as the rich buy out more and more of the world's governments, as they eliminate regulations of business, with absolute monopolization of markets they will be able at will to raise prices, increase unemployment, raise interest rates on loans, so as the move the people of the Great Reset, who will own nothing and won't be able to pay rent any more, out of the class of renters and into the class of those living on the street.<br />- I never heard that before.<br />- Keep listening. A transaction, paying rent for example, has no history, doesn't develop; each side attempts to make the other compromise its demands, and then when all is settled: Next transaction, please! Giant pharmaceutical companies routinely pay the government billion dollar fines, making billions more than the fines in profit out of their fraudulently sold drugs: deal! they cry, and move on to the next compromise transaction. Compare how a human relates, adjusts, accommodates to the world. Do you give a gun you've been asked to hold back to its owner who's out of his mind on mind altering substances? No, you break the rule about keeping promises, but only this time, you keep in mind the reason why, which is to do good. The intention to do good persists, carries on to the next accommodation human beings must constantly make with the world. Which do you think acts like pollution in history: the transactions that pile one upon another without history, or the accommodation that adjusts to the world maintaining a single direction?<br />- You think transactions, capitalism in other words, unregulated capitalism, is creating the chaotic conditions to suddenly produce the 'extreme weather' of near universal adoption of lockdowns? </div><div>- The lockdown removal of people from public places broke the continuity required for good life with others, favored the history-less commercial transactions that could continue to be practiced by each isolated individual.<br />- But we've suggested previously that the lockdowns were applied as a test to see how much repression people would accept, as a cover up of and diversion from the recession, bank and industry failure, that arrived in December 2019. <br />- I still think those are good theories. But the suddenness and universality of the lockdowns requires its own explanation, <br />- And that is the prevailing transactional nature of our times.<br />- It explains a lot. For example, blindness of the supporters of our former president to his obvious bad character, his putting on display every single evil a human being is subject to. He attempted to overthrow the government? But what about Biden, he's let gas prices double? All we need to know is which is the better transaction, the better exchange for our vote. Character - habit of behavior that is the influence of the past on the future - is invisible to the merely transactional. Creating chaos, the world's governments issue dictates, mandate fraudulent transactions, tells us: endure our lockdowns, take our vaccines, you'll be safe! A huge propaganda campaign is launched out of the news media, social media, academia, the government and international institutions against lockdown critique, against doubts of vaccine effectiveness and safety, against the lab leak hypothesis, against treatment with existing repurposed drugs. How wrong all this is, how remote from science! Scientists question, give up the part of their suppositions that prove to be untrue, move forward with the rest.</div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2013/07/1.html">Property Is Silence</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2013/08/us-bank-legal-bills-money-for-lawyers.html">U.S. Bank Legal Bills (Money For Lawyers, Settlements, Court Judgments Of Guilt) Exceed $100 Billion</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2013/07/banks-always-have-money.html">Banks Always Have Money</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/11/sorry-to-keep-bothering-you-about-this.html">Why They Did It</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/04/someone-with-your-background-is.html">Disease Control</a></div><div>__________________________</div><div><i>* Voltaire</i></div></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-38239489897762525792022-06-01T21:45:00.048-07:002022-12-15T15:18:35.847-08:00Hello, Starbucks!<img height="212" src="https://laradunning.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/paris-cafe-night.jpg" width="320" /><div><br />- I was trying to be funny.* I know you don't believe me.<br />- You were more terrifying than funny.<br />- I'll try again. <br />- Start with explaining for me the title.<br />- 'Hello, Starbucks!'<br />- Yes.<br />- By mentioning the word 'Starbucks' I make sure our conversation will be entered into court records.<br />- Why?<br />- Starbucks, as a corporation, as a thing of ideas become mortal, as one of the legally defined lords of the territory of death, seems to believe that any sign of mortality I leave behind they'll be able to use against me in an ongoing lawsuit. <br />- Your words are signs of mortality?<br />- Dead as can be, buried within thousands of pagers of legal documents produced so far.<br />- What's it all about?<br />- I can't tell you. Starbucks got a judge to issue a gag order.<br />- Why?<br />- You know how the Supreme Court has determined that corporations are not what they really are, which is abstractions, a product of ideas, but rather are people that have free speech, that is, the legal right to the material act of bribing politicians to act in their material interests of hoarding and domination? Human beings for most of written history have been endeavoring to move in the opposite direction, from mortality to immortality, from a state of being tied to material realities to freedom in the realm of ideas. <br />- Human beings, according to Starbucks, moving in the opposite direction to corporations, from out of the mortal world instead of into it, have no legitimate use of words? Excuse me, but what are you and me doing now but using words?<br />- We're not using words in the attempt to kill them entering them in the tomb of legal records.<br />- What are we doing?<br />- To be honest you and me, we are mere characters on the internet whose only business is to lay claim to the reality of ideas. Is this a little funny yet?<br />- No.<br />- I'l tell you about one of the regulars I spoke with once at the night cafe, and then again this afternoon, a man who describes himself as a reformed bad guy. He told me, back in the dark times of lockdowns, that he meditates and has made himself through meditation into a force of good in the world. For example, I ask, what good has he done lately? With every little thing he pays attention to he is doing good, he says. He's doing me good now? Yes. What's the nature of this good he's doing me? I ask. He'll buy me a steak dinner if I'm hungry, he says. He's flush with money tonight. How come? He helped out a friend, and the friend gave him in return a thousand dollars. What kind of help? He allowed his identity to be used to apply for government funds. <br />- He got a thousand, and his "friend" applied for and presumably got tens of thousands in unemployment and other so called stimulus funds? </div><div>- Who was this friend?<br />- A family of gypsies who operate a fortune-telling salon in the neighborhood.<br />- Is this guy is some kind of idiot or what?<br />- He speaks with complete assurance of his reaching towards godhood. His reaching towards immortality, he tells me this afternoon, involves secreting away his spirit within the things of the world, invulnerably surrounding it in indifference to the things of the world. Invulnerable to the world? I ask. Yes. So if he stood in one of the villages in Ukraine being shelled by the Russians at the rate of one exploding missile every few seconds, nothing would happen to him? No. So if he gathered around him all the villagers and they stood close to him, they'd be safe too? He says, Yes.<br />- Why are you telling me this story?<br />- Because he is an example of just what human beings should not want to do, which is to do what the corporations are doing.<br />- Which is to bury an idea, which is immaterial, hiding it in the dross, in the protective shell of the material world. <br />- Yes. And do you know what was uppermost in my mind, listening to this spiritual identity criminal?<br />- What?<br />- That since I am not a corporation moving from immortality to mortality, rather moving in the other direction, I should be able to see in him the signs of the difference.<br />- How?<br />- By being able to recognize the form of what I am doing or trying to do and he is not.<br />- Is something like that visible?<br />- It can be. I was watching a video last night of a discussion between two very advanced in years Jewish philosophers, or rather since their actual knowledge specialities were elsewhere, say rather I watched two Jews advanced in years philosophizing. One observed that all people alike have to capacity to do evil. The other strenuously objects, No! We Jews could never create anything like the Holocaust. The first immediately retreated, agreed: No, we are spared that eventuality.**<br />- And do you agree?<br />- Yes. <br />- Why?<br />- Because Judaism codifies, and insures is put into practice, a technique that first appeared to history sometime in the first millenium BC. This is the trick of immortality, of movement out of the world of body into the world of mind.<br />- And what is that trick?<br />- I'll pretend this isn't the thousanth time I've been over this: when we act in the world we do it experimentally, with a sense of ourselves in a world that in flux is therefore undefined, and when we rest in contemplation of the world, we see only the whole, no passage of time no divisions of space. <br />- Neither in act or perception is there any sense of our being a thing in a world of things, because when we act we sense ourselves unrooted in any stillness able to fix a sense of reality, and when we rest in perception we don't see any divisions and therefore no particular things to locate ourselves within. Therefore acting in the correct form, seeing in the correct form, we are invulnerable to thoughts of mortality.<br />- Invulnerable to thought of mortality, but what about to the reality of mortality?<br />- That too, since mortality is an idea before it becomes a thing, armor for failed humanity to hide within. <br />- And the Holocaust?<br />- Isn't it obvious? People who believe and feel themselves immortal are not tempted to model the world into any form of mortality. <br />- I understand.<br />- Good. So I'm looking at the identity fraudster at the night cafe, asking myself, can I see this form, or rather, the absence of this form as I look at him?<br />- Could you?<br />- I could. I saw as he located himself in the things of the world in an intoxicated rushed blurring of words, I saw it in his self-attributed distinction of invulnerability to bombs, signified in the shell-shocked fixity of his expression. <br />- You saw a soul lowering itself to mortality. Or so you claim.</div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2014/11/beverly-hills-jews.html">Beverly Hills Jews</a></div><div>_________________________</div><div><i>* <a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2022/05/computer-supplly.html">Computer Supply</a></i></div><div><i>** 'Our culture is so, that even the most deranged of us will have certain limitations.' (Physiologist Eric Kandel, hastening to agree with Holocaust surviver Elie Wiesel.)</i></div><div><i>*** <a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-and-mental-things.html">Noam Chomsky & Mental Things</a>, and <a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/09/david-graeber-combinatorials.html">David Graeber & Combinatorials</a></i></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-62477997556334540422022-05-30T09:04:00.026-07:002022-06-03T04:13:29.300-07:00Computer Supply<div><img alt="" class="thumbimage" data-file-height="2316" data-file-width="4459" decoding="async" height="114" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/MacBook_Air_Mid_2012.png/220px-MacBook_Air_Mid_2012.png" srcset="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/MacBook_Air_Mid_2012.png/330px-MacBook_Air_Mid_2012.png 1.5x, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/MacBook_Air_Mid_2012.png/440px-MacBook_Air_Mid_2012.png 2x" width="220" /></div><div><br /></div> For several years now, since before the COVID lockdowns, sometime after midnight and almost everyday I've been going to the coffee shop, sitting outside on their terrace with a box of their $2 pancakes and my computer. I'd listen to music, watch movies and videos, read novels from the Internet Library. There would be constant traffic, the people who live on the streets passing through the terrace on the way to dig into the restaurant garbage cans, many of them asking me for money or if they could have my pancakes (when asked directly like that I complied, I didn't really want them anyway, they were something to order). Every degree of human destitution would in the coming hours be on display on the terrace: the drug addict, the alcoholic, the schizophrenic, the demented. They'd come and go. They'd dance, they'd jerk, they'd mumble, they'd twitch. Some would scream. Some would lay out of the terrace pavement their finds that night dug out from the garbage, offer to sell me this or that, which merchandise would at times alarmingly be conveyed by a filthy hand into my line of sight betwen my face and the computer screen. All was well, if that was well, until the beginning of this year. I noticed little things disappearing from my bag. A cheap broken watch, things like that. A few times I found myself looking up from my computer to be looking in the eyes of one the regulars, bending down to get a good look at my face. This particular habitué was distinguished by his mechanical skill building luggage-carrying contraptions out of abandoned baby carriages and bikes he stole. I finally got the message: I was getting hypnotized by the pulsing of the screen and late hours, dozing off for a few minutes. I resolved to be vigilant. But apparently that was beyond me, because a couple nights later a song was over and I sit up to find my computer was gone, headphone jack disconnected. This is mildly disturbing. I have to change all my passwords. But this was not the war in Ukraine (my constant viewing these days). I buy a 7 year old Chromebook for 40 dollars, and the next evening I am back at my usual table ready for battle. But vigilence fails, I look up from the screen to see a tall hooded masked man with sunglasses with both his hand gripping the top of the computer screen. No! I shout, and take a grip on the sides of the screen. The masked and hooded apparition about faces and scurries away. You'd think I'd learn my lesson by this point. But just a couple nights later song over, I sit up, and computer is gone again! This time I admit I am more than a little disturbed. Not by the company I'm keeping, but by embarrassment I know I'm going to feel at having to tell this story. Am I really this stupid or do I really not care? I console myself that I can't go 6 months without drowning my computer in spilled coffee, and don't forget I find a lot of money riding my bike to the coffee shop so in a strict financial accounting I am still way ahead. I replace the computer in a couple days with a ten year old MacBook Air, thinking that if I have some respect for the computer I will better keep my eyes on it. The next skirmish comes three days later, when I look up and, yes, the computer is still there, but not my backpack with charger and all kinds of necessary things in it. I realize that now my inventory of earthly possessions comes down to: (1) bike (2) computer (no charger). With no bag bike transport involves tucking the solid metal MacBook under my sweater, for all the world like a bulletproof vest and I'm actually in Ukraine. That is a little funny. Next day I bought a backpack from a second hand shop and charger from computer repair. The next night wifi is off at the coffee shop. I decide to fortify myself with strong coffee, sit up strait, and wait and watch. And what do you think I see, or should I say, what have I done? Like in a nightmare or a zombie movie a convocation of the destitute is in progress, every ten or fifteen minutes another coming down the two streets (the coffee shop is on a corner) not in the normal traffic pattern towards the trash cans or the restaurant doors but angling directly at me, coming to examine the state of my vigilance, me the supplier of free computers to the community and other valuable commodities.<div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2016/01/westwood-stories.html">Westwood Stories</a></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-28852594846233256562022-05-17T11:50:00.012-07:002022-05-17T12:19:33.347-07:00Rituals Of Love & Hate<div><img alt="Great Seal of the United States (obverse).svg" height="150" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Great_Seal_of_the_United_States_%28obverse%29.svg/150px-Great_Seal_of_the_United_States_%28obverse%29.svg.png" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; background-color: white; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: large; padding: 8px;" width="150" /></div><div><br /></div>- I can't tell if you are just keeping silence or have nothing to say.<br />- I can't either.<br />- But you'll respond to me if I come up with something new.<br />- Have you come up with something new?<br />- Is it true that democracy, all the way back to its experiments in ancient Athens, has been at risk from demagoguery, and from the beginning known to be at risk?<br />- Yes.<br />- And a demagogue, according to our own James Fenimore Cooper, writing in 1838, claims to represent the common people, incites intense passions among them, exploits those reactions to take power, and breaks or at least threatens established rules of political conduct, all this to serve the interests of the demagogue and his friends. Demagoguery, which can give the appearance of insanity of both leaders and led, works because it establishes ritual: tells a story of our past greatness but present weakness, identifies our enemy that is responsible for present weakness, but, the story goes, a leader has arisen who will eliminate the enemy and restore us to greatness. Alright?<br />- Go on.<br />- Here's my idea: of our two political parties, we have one that clearly is fascistic: in the story told of making the nation great again, the scapegoating, the lies, the appeals to emotion. But what if the other political party also is fascistic?<br />- How?<br />- You've explained that the difference between our political parties is that though both parties condone the silent rule of the class of the wealthy over the class of the not wealthy, one party accepts inequality among the not wealthy, the other advocates strict equality among the various sub-classes ruled over by the wealthy, the classes distinguished from each other by race, religion, sexuality, age, character. etc. Can it be that any one of these subclasses, identities we call them these days, can and does form itself into fascistic relation to other identities?<br />- When one identity is seen to have more power than another?<br />- Has more power in the limited power-world of the less wealthy in which they are locked into by the government controlled by the wealthy. <br />- Yet each identity commonly claims otherwise, claims to tolerate, love even, the other identities, to be flourishing in a society of identities, each tolerating the others.<br />- But is that true? Love requires knowledge, but isn't the relation between identity based groups that of individuals blinded by passion in the midst of a power struggle, individuals in each group competing with those in the other groups to get an equal share of the residual wealth left to them by the wealthy overlords in control of the government?<br />- Each identity group, in the blind passion of struggle against the other identity groups for power, though they may only get a few more crumbs fallen from the table of the wealthy, obtain the satisfaction of security from the practice of ritual.<br />- Yes. Outright falsehoods by members of identities are accepted because produced in the course of passion, passionate reenactment of ritual. Stolen elections, infinite number of different sexes, any number of obvious you'd think falsehoods, there is no arguing against what is the product of ritual performed passion, whether it is the passion of national revival or identity empowerment. <br />- And you'd like to know what I think?<br />- Yes.<br />- Aristotle believed that democracy was less liable to faction than oligarchy: the different oligarchs were every man for himself, while in democracy it was only the wealthy against the not. Do you know what happened to prove Aristotle wrong?<br />- The inclusion into the electorate, the stable middle class of Athens that was neither rich nor poor, that therefore could communicate calmly with reason, of all those groups that had been excluded from citizenship: immigrants, women, landless, the poor. <br />- We're living in this world of lies, lies that when challenged are only responded to with other lies. Maybe that's why I don't have much to say.<div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/09/politically-wrong.html">A Provocation</a></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-13326970007407237252022-03-22T17:24:00.020-07:002022-06-12T08:32:15.035-07:00War<p><span style="font-size: x-large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg75RU9ZH4PzAiqBWLC4U4f4M-lCdTjmT0lSLELx80FgghT0S35QPaqrNSo-ipwAp5nI8C5MjEWAdOUDXSzSTE_81DK3LNlApsKeg7V6OZdMJnUu9G6AdifDFf5q8aJUeCctYbWA7CIP4Ze2jCOUS-7g78v6ZhEb9rvAoqpxUVBzSuGpU_Y3Qc1AFXT" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="225" data-original-width="224" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg75RU9ZH4PzAiqBWLC4U4f4M-lCdTjmT0lSLELx80FgghT0S35QPaqrNSo-ipwAp5nI8C5MjEWAdOUDXSzSTE_81DK3LNlApsKeg7V6OZdMJnUu9G6AdifDFf5q8aJUeCctYbWA7CIP4Ze2jCOUS-7g78v6ZhEb9rvAoqpxUVBzSuGpU_Y3Qc1AFXT=w198-h200" width="198" /></a><span style="font-size: x-large;"></span></div><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><br /><div><br /></div><div>- The COVID panic was bad enough.<br /><div>- Yeah.</div><div>- And now this.<br />- The incomprehension we feel facing these public events is astonishing.<br />- Not only do we not understand what is happening but we can't understand why we're so confused, why we don't understand.<br />- We knew our leaders were the worst of human beings and were likely to make their decisions accordingly. But still....<br />- We forgot that evil can be creative. We saw that in the obvious mass destructiveness of the lockdowns, a new, on the face of it, idiotic policy, an unprecedented quarantining of the healthy rather than the sick. It took some time to see where the creativity was going, what profit was in the destruction of social and personal and economic life.<br />- Destruction of small business, and increase of monopolization of big business, graft in grabbing government benefits, cover up and distraction from the under-reported recession / bank failure of 2019, the trick of calling the financial system's bailout a COVID remedy.<br />- Already an old story. Now we have Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the mind-boggling reluctance of our country and other supposedly anti-authoritarian countries to help Ukraine with the weapons needed to stop Russian civilian targeting bombing and missile strikes. What's going on?<br />- It can't be what they say, that air defense weapons would be seen as our nation entering into war with Russia.<br />- Why not?<br />- Because Russia, Putin has already said he considers military aid currently arriving an act of war on the part of the donor nations.<br />- Then what is it?<br />- Government officials in the corrupt employee of wealth and big business influences that will do anything for money.<br />- What are they doing?<br />- Trying to lengthen the war so as to both use up American produced weapons that will have to be replaced, paid for by the ordinary tax payers, most of the wealth of the rich hidden and untaxed, and at the same time result in the progressive, large scale destruction of the Russian military at the hands of the Ukrainians.<br />- Why?<br />- Why do they want to destroy Russia's military? <br />- Yes. <br />- The experience of COVID lockdowns teaches us: destruction used as the creative tool of monopolization, in this case of monopoly of military force serving political power serving economic interests.</div><div>- To keep the dollar the world's currency and keep foreign markets open.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://euromaidanpress.com/2022/03/23/natos-foot-dragging-amid-russian-atrocities-in-ukraine-is-indefensible/">NATO’s Foot-Dragging Amid Russian Atrocities In Ukraine Is Indefensible</a></div><div><br /></div><div><i>P.S. APRIL 24, 2022 KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Following the highest-level U.S. mission to Ukraine since the start of the war, the secretaries of State and Defense said Monday that the Biden administration was intent on helping the country win its war against Russia and on seeing Moscow “weakened to the point” where it cannot mount such aggression again. (From The Los Angeles Times)</i></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-43334392264798118402022-03-10T16:08:00.083-08:002023-06-01T05:49:54.459-07:00Instead Of Email<div style="text-align: justify;"> <span style="text-align: left;">Can't I write an email to a friend? No I can't. I won't burden a friend with the disaster that is my life. Is that what I really think? It is what I really think. However. Whatever happens to the strangers who are readers on the internet obviously is no one's fault but their own. So let's begin. Dear friend. No. Dear reader. Here's what's new in my life. Nothing is new in my life. I go to the same places. The same kind of thing happens. I'm still here. Something new did happen. An allergic reaction to bee sting, but that only complexifies the nothing new happening. So nothing new. Nothing is new in my life. I go to the same places. Late at night I can be found at the same cafe. For years. Many people find me there. What people? In 2020 the District Attorney established a policy of not prosecuting minor crimes. Of the 70,000 people who have no place to sleep at night in the city, among them destitute drug addicts and the radically insane, numbers are wandering around looking for something to steal. I see them. They see me. They see my eyes close, which my eyes are wont to do, I don't get enough sleep. The watchers bide their time. In the last two years computers, backpacks, books have changed ownership. That's just how it is. The city has militarized in response to this rampant criminality. Cameras are everywhere. Guards are everywhere. Store guards, library guards, park guards. Many guards dress like they are in combat, invested all in black, belts with holsters containing guns both stun and conventional, hosters with mace, night sticks, handcuffs. Their faces are masked, not in compliance to health department epidemic countermeasers but a fashion choice, done for effect. Now I know one of these guards. He comes to the University. Why? For the free food and drink at lectures and symposia. He knows where to find me taking in the warmth of the sun. I've told him a hundred times not to disburb me but he is incapable of believing I don't want his company. He tells me one day we both will be famous. What will I be famous for, I ask. Philosophy. What will he be famous for? He doesn't answer. As a criminal, I suggest? He says the world deserves his depredations for forcing him to work as a guard. He claims he has a doctorate in political science from a police academy in Turkey, his country of origin. He can barely speak English after being in this country 7 years. He's saved 250,000 dollars out of his income from two jobs, sleeping in foregn worker dormatories. This sum includes money from the sale of his family property in Turkey, destroyed in a recent earthquate. He tells me he was the cause of the earthquake. He really thinks he has the power to cause earthquakes. Many of the people who come to find me at the various places I go think they have powers of retribution. He believes that as a non-Muslim in Muslim Turkey he has been discriminated against. He believes that his employers in this country, mostly Blacks and Latins, discriminate against him for being from a Muslim country. What is his religion, I ask. Communism, he answers. He would liked to have been Stalin. On his unwanted, many times forbidden approach to me he puts his phone on speaker to play a marching song from the old Soviet Union. If I get up and walk away from him he'll follow me at a short distance. If I run, he'll run after me. I'm his only friend in California, he tells me. His only friend in Turkey calls him Hungry Dog for this behavior. I call him that myself. He likes it. Hungry Dog today unziped his backpack filling with swiped food, hands me a Subway sandwich. There's a concert at the music school, cheese and crackers, afterwards that we go, he says, to a lecture on something technical, he doesn't remember, wine reception to follow. Let's go. I resign myself, afternoon sunning ruined. On the way to the concert he tells me I'm going to die soon. How does he know? He knows. In the music hall, waiting for the student recital to begin, he asks me what I'd like to have written on my gravestone. That's easy. "Don't bother me. I'm resting." Hungry Dog gives me a thumbs up. What will be my last words, he asks. Easy. "It's all been a mistake." Hungry Dog writes this down in his pocket notebook. Is he is threatening to kill me for my mockery of him or what? I don't know. This is my everyday. Later last night I was as always the only one sitting outside at the cafe when a teenaged girl sat down at my table, saying not a word. I say hello. She says nothing. I look at her. She looks at me. She looks away. Ok, she's not planning to leave or speak. Earlier in the night someone had shouted at me from the corner, "I stole your backpack!" then kept on going. Everyday life. Such as it is.</span></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-75800941827001066362022-02-09T21:20:00.083-08:002022-02-15T19:07:54.507-08:00Philosophers Who Kill<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgCOPKcSUmnKQOjoXLzmgElaXBMnh8HEXmxqeXaXqTmWskF0AtUtBj7u-mgQgyW7uImBmJoZtNzIGiEG1WIkSwyi_XeHIYgJ4wOvfaeGSc1_lK6aR-Uzt6-5MfUBgE8rYOgZk6Ag87tLzI0sMXwJxA_pfTSrpNOYqIBvZewiDl2Aw0rQBGL5sxkwALv" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span><img data-original-height="182" data-original-width="276" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgCOPKcSUmnKQOjoXLzmgElaXBMnh8HEXmxqeXaXqTmWskF0AtUtBj7u-mgQgyW7uImBmJoZtNzIGiEG1WIkSwyi_XeHIYgJ4wOvfaeGSc1_lK6aR-Uzt6-5MfUBgE8rYOgZk6Ag87tLzI0sMXwJxA_pfTSrpNOYqIBvZewiDl2Aw0rQBGL5sxkwALv=w200-h132" width="200" /></span></a></div><span><br /><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><span>- A competitor kills the competition, in the language of sports, and elsewhere. You were complaining about how shocked you were by government repression in the name of COVID-19, the government's deliberately terrifying people and the people's consequent compliance.<br />- And you weren't surprised?<br />- You expressed yourself as astonished, caught off-guard. But, you know, not everyone was.<br />- Who could have predicted what we're going through?<br />- Philosophers. Walter Benjamin, writing in 1940, with regard to Germany legalizing Hitler's ascension to status of dictator:</span><blockquote><span>The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. (Theses on the Philosophy of History,VIII.) </span></blockquote><span>Picking up on the idea of continual state of exception, Michel Foucault described a 'biopolitics' in which government interfered in the lives of the people, managing the health of the bodies and mind that continually were in need of management. And then we have Georgio Agamben, who unlike the previous two is still among the living, who taught us that in a further state of exception not only are we stripped of the protection of the laws, but we become 'bare life', not only our health, not only sexuality, diet, exercise managed but the totality of life now up for grabs. Sound familiar?<br />- Lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates. <br />- Yes. The state of exception of COVID-19 is not an exception; oppression in one form or another has been constant.<br />- Some examples of the continuous oppression?<br />- Regular economic crashes, with those who cause them being bailed out by the government they control, everyone else not bailed out; the unprecedented total surveillance of communications leading the populace into self censorship.<br />- Living in a time when Nazi Germany was actually using state of emergency law to change the rules so as to legitimize Nazi total control, </span><span>Walter Benjamin </span><span>didn't anticipate that a truly exceptional, innovative form of state of exception would be declared leaving the people in 'bare life', life without political power, in the name of protecting life from a virus, in the name of fighting which the people would be threatened with being stripped of all life activities, under house arrest, masked, facing the possibility of forcible vaccination.</span><div><span>- So even if it were true our political rights were always in various degrees in a state of exception, in this new, particular kind of state of exception, predicted by our philosophers, in the context of a government using the technique of biopower, in the name of 'bare life', life without protection of the laws, all forms of social and personal life were being abrogated. What do you think? Were these philosophers inadvertently writing the instruction manual being used by our leaders to reduce us all to 'bare life'? Or did our leaders make out the exceptional possibilities of biopower on their own?<br />- Who knows? <br />- If this 'bare life', lockdown life, mask and vaccine mandate life, really is not exceptional, what follows? More extreme states of exception, social and personal interference, or can we expect a return to a more comfortable political abrogation of rights? <br />- We can expect the situation to in some ways to get worse in a return to normal history, that is, ongoing war of the very rich against everyone else. For Agamben's particular case of Foucault's biopower involves not only that we are always more or less being stripped of the protection of laws, but in a second phase, the laws of supervision and control previously used to authorize supposed protection of 'bare life' in need of recovery now authorize the extermination of any and all people in the impoverished state of lacking the advanced value of political life, who living in 'bare life' have no right to exist. <br />- Excluding of course those who are managing the state of exception, the essential job of management entailing interests and rewards adding up to much more than bare life.<br />- Yes. See them march clothed in the significance of their work right ahead in the drive to transfer all the wealth of those who not being worthy of life certainly are not worthy to have possessions.<br />- Race is integrally involved here in this exceptional use of this special kind of biopower, government supervision threatening the very existence of 'bare life'.<br />- How?<br />- Our l</span><span>eaders, clothed with state of exception extra-legal political powers, are clearly distinguishable from those living in the abject condition of 'bare life': they are a superior race.</span><span> </span><span>If in our history, progress reflected in the rule of law is restricted by the countervailing force of class war, war of masters against slaves, this conception of race war is something new, something that requires some understanding, some consciousness of life bereft of political protections, something which our philosophers amazingly enough actually foresaw.</span></div><div><span>- So, with COVID-19 we are in a real state of exception this time?<br />- Our times, for our leaders, are open season for profits at any cost. Money breeding more money. As often observed, the word for interest in ancient Greek is "offspring". And what is money, and profit, but pure reproduction of something that is without content, is simple potential, power to persist, to continue going on. <br />- 'Bare life' again.<br />- Yes. And tied in again with the state of exception. For what is race but a tracing of that history of power to go on, mere persistence, without content? <br />- You think that our leaders' intimate practice of capitalism and racism was enough to show them the way to the great leap forward of present times COVID-19 repressions: lockdowns, vaccine and mask mandates, fear mongering, openly skewed statistics on deaths, risks, efficacy of treatments, vaccinations, etc.?<br />- Nevertheless our time's philosophers do seem to have had a special relation to the </span>'bare life' of race and mass killings. Just yesterday a UCLA teacher of philosophy, a specialist in race and identity who had published an 800 page manifesto loaded with anti-Semitism and threats of mass shootings was arrested after he tried to buy a gun but was refused by the gunshop: his mother had days earlier reported him to the FBI which then put him on a no sale list. How many more philosophers had special connection to killing? I did a quick search on the terms 'philosophers' and 'killing' and found two professors, both with ties to anti-Semitism: a crazy 19th century Austrian who killed his professor, wrongly thinking he was Jewish, then appealing his murder conviction on the grounds that didn't all good German's believe that all Jews should be killed? The other was a 20th century French Marxist philosopher, apparently irrevocably mentally damaged by his experience in a Nazi concentration camp, who in a fit of madness strangled his wife.</div><div><span>- Anti-Semitism seems to show that a state of exemption has been always with us, the life of the Jews valueless 'bare life'. How do we know if our leaders will, like the history of the Jews shows happening regularly and often in the past, shift from naked in need of clothing to naked not deserving of life, from Foucault's care of and management of life, to Agamben's 'bare life' in which we are as 'bare life' of no value except as agents of their, the master race's, profit making?</span></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-48585079759252508512022-01-28T08:53:00.045-08:002022-01-29T09:20:29.332-08:00Mutual Aid: Myths Of Beginnings & Ends<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhTPgR1_3mD0x4Y1gppwWaIg2VfBkXruWT4phDV3BmjSSZ48BMRWkx0pFctsJOfW8SzSNCTYOfwGByHLzizNFF6EivI1P4RHBt1yCXZddjFnmoH_5R3oV4gfHvebeNacHypQysuUe0VoWqM8p2uGhyQ1uTe_P-lcSrhZNj9cd-n74TDt-hhhqM_-U4S" style="clear: left; display: inline; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="499" data-original-width="325" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhTPgR1_3mD0x4Y1gppwWaIg2VfBkXruWT4phDV3BmjSSZ48BMRWkx0pFctsJOfW8SzSNCTYOfwGByHLzizNFF6EivI1P4RHBt1yCXZddjFnmoH_5R3oV4gfHvebeNacHypQysuUe0VoWqM8p2uGhyQ1uTe_P-lcSrhZNj9cd-n74TDt-hhhqM_-U4S=w130-h200" width="130" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg2KoZxL4vC5SfyQj7bLd2hRzCxq7tNSMZ8UlAdkpDQtWefvjmKRy6mqkrqE9m5w4o24e5TbhBD16LVGlX4fbMfOWLRyEi_Y4LCxrGztffXRaZoqFWBMubx_V4PjIyxnisSHtQMsFnTWUBlEt29hSFhhdiDheUWYv7TnLj_IDUjXd5xq3BnRIbQ0aTO" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><div></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />- Who said, 'Let's change the course of human history, starting with the past?'<br /><div>'- The late David Graeber, anthropologist, author of <i>Debt, The First Five Thousand Years</i>, political activist, advocate of the anarchist form of social organization and co-author of the recently published book <i>The Dawn Of Everything.</i><div>- Which book is supposed to change our understanding of the past?<br />- Yes. We're to understand that it is mere myth that agriculture and large population made it necessary that we live in states with inequality, exchange for profit, and obedience to orders. <br />- And the change in our historical understanding?<br />- In fact, agriculture was practiced a thousand years before the existence of states, that is, practiced by stateless people, and stateless people gathered together seasonally in groups of quite large numbers. But historically unnecessary as states are proven to be, we seem to be stuck with them now. The state the authors define as having a sovereign, a bureaucracy, and some sort of religion justifying its arrangements. History does not show a fall from a stateless golden age. That is another mere myth, they say. Rather our ancestors lived in groups combining communist mutual aid, leaders compelling the led, and (concluding individual relationships) selfish immediate exchange.<br />- The combinations change in proportion, that's all.<br />- Yes. There was no golden age.<br />- Nothing in history that tells us we can't get out from under our states by increasing the proportion of mutual aid and decreasing the proportion of obedience and selfish exchange.<br />- Yes. At any one time in history you could find a whole range of societies obedient, exchanging, or mutual aiding. And, reflecting the wealth of historical possibilities, within a society the very same practice could express mutual aid, selfish exchange, and obedience, an idea David Graeber developed in great detail in his book on debt.<br />- So we have variability within a single practice, within a single group, and between groups at any one time, and in the course of history itself.<br />- Doesn't that make you feel free, newly open to possibilities?<br />- No.<br />- Why not?<br />- Why was Graeber, along with virtually all of our modern day prophets claiming to be leading the way to a better world, silent about the lockdowns, a radical increase in our society's proportion of obedience and selfish exchange, decrease in proportion of mutual aid?<br />- He, they, considered the various proportions of mutual aid, selfish exchange and obedience they could apply in this time and place in history and made their choice. Shouldn't they have that freedom?<br />- In the story of the garden of Eden Eve is made as a help-meet for Adam, that is, made in a way suitable to help. What if the story is about the precedence of mutual aid? <br />- What difference would that make? One moment in history Eve aids Adam, the next she is obedient to him and he is at work growing grain for exchange.<br />- It matters that the help of Eve, who was made by god to help, is fundamental, while her obedience and Adam's work on the land is not, rather are mere consequences of historical acts that need not have been taken by her and him.<br />- And what difference does that make?<br />- In <i>The Dawn Of Everything</i> freedom is defined by the ability to not obey, to go, to be received with hospitality elsewhere by others. Note that to disobey on its own is nothing: if you can't go away you'll be caught and punished, and social animals that we are to go away means nothing if there is nowhere to go and be welcomed. Without mutual aid there is no freedom to disobey, no freedom.<br />- So David Graeber and our other prophets, one and all well established and secure in their state's bureaucracies, for whom mutual aid is not fundamental and must wait upon their free choice, at this contingent time in history have let us down. A golden age lost and to be remade, progress holding onto and building upon the prior choice of mutual aid is not a myth, is real, or can be real. Is that what you think?</div><div>- What do you think? Is there danger in seeing no direction to history?*</div><div>- What if history is off to a late start?</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading;</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/09/david-graeber-combinatorials.html">David Graeber & Combinatorials</a></div><div>____________________________</div><div><i>* Myths of beginnings and ends: the authors of</i> The Dawn Of History<i> make the common observation that it is dangerous to claim to know the utopia at the end of history because then every evil act can be justified as means to achieving that end. However an individual trying to hold onto the good in personal behavior and avoid the bad as time progresses and perhaps history as well does not necessarily make any such pictures and is not subject to that temptation. </i></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-14610335216808621552021-12-19T10:23:00.043-08:002022-01-26T02:13:25.749-08:00Explaining & Explaining Away<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVRJHYcIvdNYy0Apm_uICbdTz2rtKt3w_XVCwHcjJMaH2OX9ZBOpn2KipEWfLxKU3XZAIBjKQ_REeeSsDP_ssot1673OY23WS8VQZFDVoy0W_KuSGDWEYMM4yTSUQaXBS-jGbrXye01vY/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="2592" data-original-width="3888" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVRJHYcIvdNYy0Apm_uICbdTz2rtKt3w_XVCwHcjJMaH2OX9ZBOpn2KipEWfLxKU3XZAIBjKQ_REeeSsDP_ssot1673OY23WS8VQZFDVoy0W_KuSGDWEYMM4yTSUQaXBS-jGbrXye01vY/w200-h133/image.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>- Look at that. The whole bench along the wall is occupied with them.</div>- By 'them' you mean those in Beverly Hills who sleep on the streets, or rather on the sidewalks. <br />- Riding my bike here I almost ran over one.<br />- Which one?<br />- How do I know? All I saw was a form buried under piles of filthy blankets.<br />- This Starbucks is incredible. Across the street is the Peninsula hotel, just behind the cafe building is the Waldorf Astoria, two of the most expensive hotels in the city. Look at those guys getting out of their Mclaren super car, hundreds of thousands of dollars. This place stinks. But that won't stop this country's intrepid rich from stepping right into the miasma for their coffee.<br />- The word 'evil' comes to mind. <br />- Does calling the rich 'evil' explain anything?<br />- If we want an explanation of the orbits of planets, we find one in a law of gravity. But if we want an explanation of how an object moves from one place to another, we rely on what we call energy, force, momentum, sorts of things which we have no explanation of.<br />- Explanation meaning we can tell a story in the form of general rule relating one thing to another at one place or another.<br />- Yes. So if I offer an explanation of the indifference of the rich to the massive misery piling up around them, we place the rich in a certain orbit where they are subject to certain 'forces' of indocrination which convince them that it's those people's own fault, the misearable deserve to be miserable, by being punished for their error they are motivated to make corrections. Their indifference explained. Or not? Don't you still want to call them 'evil'?<div>- Absolutely. <br />- So again: does calling the rich 'evil' explain anything, anything more than saying they are suffering from the disease of pleonexia: excessive or insatiable covetousness, from the Greek pleonektein (to be greedy), from pleion (more) + ekhein (have).<br />- I think it does. </div><div>- But there's a paradox here. It seems possible to make the attribution of the word 'evil' come and go, depending on how one looks at the world. Something like when we are in the presence of beauty we see it, it gives us pleasure, it is seen as warranting the attribution 'beautiful'. Yet we can explain away the beauty by seeing instead regular relation, geometric forms, well-functioning, losing thereby both pleasure and the consideration of the object as beautiful. What if the same happens with evil? We see it, the evil in the object, we feel pain in the act of perception. Yet we can if we like shift our way of looking, see instead pleonexia, and lose both the sight of evil in the object and our pain felt in having the perception.<br />- How does that get us anywhere, your claiming that how we explain is up to us, is our own doing?</div><div>- It's not obvious.</div><div>- Not to me. Isn't it crazy, aren't we crazy, to be having this kind of conversation right in front of these people?<br />- Pretending our ideas are important when faced with all this evil going on around us? <br />- Yes. <br />- Think about the two kinds of explanation we've talked about. One stops short of satisfaction, leaving us with unexplanable force, in the case of the indifferent rich the pleanexia 'forced' upon them by capitalism, the stock market, family, advertising, movies, etc. The other gives us a clear sight of a meaningful object and corresponding strong feeling.<br />- But, I don't understand. If explanation is telling a story, where's the story in choosing to see evil when we don't have to?<br />- When we see evil as evil we are not seeing the regularity of law, and the resulting mystification of forces responsible for the application of law to the individual, but instead, seeing evil we experience the perception as complete in itself, feel what it is to be a human being.<br />- The story is that the indifferent rich have chosen to live in a world they see wrong, and by calling them 'evil' we remind ourselves not to follow in their path.<br /></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-75021090657015820952021-11-27T16:06:00.023-08:002021-12-03T07:11:54.067-08:00Why They Did It<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXQz-c0KcgXJF7IG8Y_Ks-r68lD1qgw7EMP0PieeaRCchriK3y1PugYi73Q4mRbQdU-9BtQbc7WJdXtVxLntJmjOFNTjrXLwp6Lq-L2efjyQDEQwO6aE355zXGbCxmksZOCCzAfsyOWAc/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXQz-c0KcgXJF7IG8Y_Ks-r68lD1qgw7EMP0PieeaRCchriK3y1PugYi73Q4mRbQdU-9BtQbc7WJdXtVxLntJmjOFNTjrXLwp6Lq-L2efjyQDEQwO6aE355zXGbCxmksZOCCzAfsyOWAc/w200-h200/image.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>-Sorry to keep bothering you. No one else will talk with me about the lockdown.<div>- It's my pleasure.<br />- Is it? Good. Then here's what I want to know: How did it happen that practically the whole world suddenly adopted this absolutely new social policy of lockdown, invented only months earlier by the totalitarian, oppressive government of China. Within a few dozen days half the world was locked up in their homes, their places of business and almost all public places closed.<br />- We've already talked about why they did it: to get the population used to repression, to crush small business and foster monopoly growth, to cover up the speculation induced bank and corporate financial crash in progress.<br />- I know. I'm asking how the whole world jumped in unison in the same way, towards the same repressive device.<br />- The answer is right before our eyes. We see politicians everywhere discovering the technique of political organization of herding people* into rituals, enacting the embattled weak self being reborn strong and new in the company of other telling themselves the same story. As the leaders need to enhance insecurity so as to drive frightened and anrgy people into ritual enactments, rituals of 'us' battling 'them' have the failing that life among the reborn 'us' is not destabilized, and therefore is a potential source of rebellion against the political machinations being practiced on the people by their leaders. Follow so far?<br />- Yes.<br />- Then the rest should be obvious: when you make a disease the 'them' that is being fought against in ritual, there is no 'us' free from becoming an object of fear and attack. Everyone is a danger, an object of fear and aversion to everyone else.<br />- And therefore there's no room for security in which to wake up and rebel.<br />- Yes.<br />- So the world's leaders, already practicing the tactics of fear mongering and cult building for the purposes of repression, saw immediately the advantages being offered to them by an epidemic, even one as epidemics go not especially deadly.**</div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/12/meow-meow.html">Meow, Meow</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/04/someone-with-your-background-is.html">Disease Control</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/04/world-of-cold.html">Convergence</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/10/ive-got-some-questions-for-you.html">How Could We Be So Blind?</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/10/i-have-this-sort-of-crazy-idea.html">We Didn't Love Freedom Enough</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/05/lockdown.html">Lockdown</a></div><div>__________________________</div><div><i>* See: <a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/10/ive-got-some-questions-for-you.html">How Could We Be So Blind?</a></i></div><div><i>** Germany reports virtually the same number of people dying from all causes in 2020 as in 2019. Sweden, with no lockdown, reports, depending on how the calculation is made, between 0 and 7,000 more deaths in 2020, that is, a maximum increase in number of deaths in the year of epidemic of about 1 per 1,000 population (1/10th of 1%). </i></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-15889766463943383032021-11-07T08:30:00.007-08:002021-11-07T15:30:23.160-08:00While We Wait<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVeBr69L8jHhfAD8owiXeY0-byZGdOVvH4Kxfguq6iDyAmMa2oHopyfAFS5SdSwfM3VE-0qmDRWTzZZuKV1gLPhp9D7NIeia_dO8aTxtahS8ydH4jG_NSs_MheMv68a0ygGlg0ZNk4HNQ/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="177" data-original-width="284" height="124" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVeBr69L8jHhfAD8owiXeY0-byZGdOVvH4Kxfguq6iDyAmMa2oHopyfAFS5SdSwfM3VE-0qmDRWTzZZuKV1gLPhp9D7NIeia_dO8aTxtahS8ydH4jG_NSs_MheMv68a0ygGlg0ZNk4HNQ/w200-h124/image.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>- So you're at Jimmy's, the North Campus cafe up at UCLA, and the manager comes over to say to you he's been watching you for a while, letting you get away with a lot, not wearing a mask, but now...</div>- I told him I don't have to wear a mask while I'm drinking coffee. I hold up my coffee theatrically.<div>- And he told you the rule was when not actively drinking or eating you have to put back on the mask.<br />- And I said, what is the time constraint? Replace the mask after one minute, one second? And I am the whole time I'm here know that someone is watching my every movement, counting the seconds before I either have to raise the cup to my lips or replace the mask? <br />- And the manager said?<br />- Why can't I just cooperate like everyone else?<br />- I can't, I won't, I said. In Los Angeles during the past week there have been on the average of 13 deaths a day attributed to the epidemic in a city of 10 million people. That's about one out of a million risk of death. And in response to that risk, starting Monday if you want to enter any restaurant, movie theather, nightclub, gym, you'll have to show proof of vacination - this while vacination efficacy has declined to less that 50 percent - or show a negative test result within three days. At this point a girl-student, between bites of salad, sitting over against the wall, shouts over at me that I'm putting everyone in danger by my selfishness. <br />- And you said?<br />- 'You're the one breaking the rules! Anyone exhaling, proving it audibly by producing words, or not actually swallowing has to be masked.' The manager says:<br /><blockquote>- Those are the rules. Why can't you just obey them?<br />- Because rules about how many seconds I have between swallows I'm allowed to remain unmasked is just the latest in impositions following upon the closing down of almost all public places; completely unjustified. <br />- That's just your opinion.<br />- Yes, I have an opinion, based on information coming from the government. You don't have an opinion, or even source of information. You simply obey. You, like that little girl student over there, want to force others to obey. How are you both not fascists?<br />- Are you going to comply with the rules or not?<br />- Can't you see? I'm packing up to leave.</blockquote>- I think of fascism as a government's attempt to control our every thought and act. You went a little too far there. The people of the epidemic, let's call them that, don't care to control your thought and act except with regard to their pet ritual, the observance of epidemic related decrees.<br />- And if there is some kind of logical, causal relation between ritual performance and totalitarianism?<br />- Is there?<br />- There are two. When a government understands the technology of ritual,* satisfying the love of power that drives leaders into politics, it progressively takes upon itself more and power to instruct the public in new rituals, to the point that eventually every aspect of life is directed by ritual.<br />- And we have totalitarianism. <br />- Yes. You might think that the greater the imposition of new ritual and new control, the people would begin to wake up and complain. But the opposite is true.<br />- Why?<br />- Ritual has its beginning in the story of an old god dying and a new god born. The story can be that of any particular god, but ultimately it is the ritual participants putting themselves in the place of particular gods that does the job. But like our politicians understand ritual and are capable of self-consciously managing them, our not too distant ancestors figured out that if they imagined there was only one god, then all of history would be a single ritual. And once this idea has arisen, something very important, something essential happened.<br />- They invented totalitarianism?<br />- Not so fast. They invented ethics. Because always in the midst of ritual, every act would have to have its rule; the rules they had would always be insufficient; because they didn't know when the ritual was going to end...<br />- They couldn't be told what to think.<br />- Nor what to do, because new situations would keep arising, they couldn't know for sure which rule would apply. Do you give a friend gone crazy back the weapon he loaned you when he was still sane? An entirely new relation to the world had appeared to us human beings out of the former polytheistic ritual. Immersed in the single ritual monotheistic history, we are neither old god nor new; we don't know who we are, what habits, what character to take on. <br />- We don't know what are our rules.<br />- Yes. We take on an experimental relation to the world which is unfolding, the end not in sight, the utopia of everyone following the same rules and universal peace reign. But this experimental practice, searching for the best relation of character to the world, in the logic of the situation, is going one time or another to have to meet its challenge.<br />- Which is?<br />- People beginning to see the single ritual coming to a close. A time when rule determination, finding out who you are, no longer is important, rebirth is at hand, soon we'll see how the world looks in recovered strength, all peace and love and fairness!<br />- In short, Christianity arrives with its claim to complete Judaism.<br />- That's right. And then what happens?<br />- The Mulim's messiah arrives claiming to be the true and final savior. History isn't open; isn't about to end, it is at its end, all that is to be is already written, there is nothing further to be done but follow the rules and bear witness to a world that's reached its final form. If politicians have woken up to the knowledge of how to use ritual to add to their power, wouldn't the people of monotheism, waking up to the knowlege of what ritual is were able to transform religion to ethics, wouldn't we - for we're talking about our world here - wouldn't we see ahead to the two further stages? And take the suggestion of our imagination? <br />- Is there anything that makes us? Why should a Jew become a Christian or a Muslim?<br />- No reason. But ask instead why should not a politician guide a monotheistic people in the direction that gives leaders more control over the led?<br />- Is that what you think is happening?<br />- I do.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/11/evolution.html">A Provocation</a></div><div><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/11/evolution.html">Evolutions</a></div><div>__________________________</div><div><i>* See: <a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/10/ive-got-some-questions-for-you.html">How Could We Be So Blind?</a></i></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-41165471636008620442021-11-02T00:19:00.076-07:002021-11-09T07:26:54.184-08:00Evolutions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNfNL0mms2BkZC9lc6Hc4I4VLcvdinw1n7Nzd_pVhGZFufLawDGtW_gg12zHYQgUHI-V5BTRmT-7XCVwgGhxKPqXtWvZ_OYo1Z6V715MAvxPBgkVc8GfddT0z0cGvkV40lmyflBjHsdTI/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNfNL0mms2BkZC9lc6Hc4I4VLcvdinw1n7Nzd_pVhGZFufLawDGtW_gg12zHYQgUHI-V5BTRmT-7XCVwgGhxKPqXtWvZ_OYo1Z6V715MAvxPBgkVc8GfddT0z0cGvkV40lmyflBjHsdTI/w200-h112/image.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>(<i>Continued from</i> <a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/10/ive-got-some-questions-for-you.html">How Could We Be So Blind?</a>)</div><div><br /></div><div>When you questioned me last time on my participation in social media, stock market speculation, populist political party membership, adherence to neoliberal economic theory and obedience to its practice, enthusiastic compliance with lockdowns and business closures, you left out a certain other, ritual based crowd behavior, the most prominent of them all.</div><div>- Which one is that?<br />- Evolution, survival of the fittest by means of chance mutation. Were you afraid of being thought a crackpot?</div><div><div>- Guilty.</div>- Chance in Darwinian evolution being equivilent to the self-forgetting at the heart of crowd behaviors, the self-renewal made possible by the dying of the old in the passion of following the crowd, whether that is guided by social media, stock market speculation, populist political party membership or capitalist war-like negotiations between buyer and seller.<br />- I've heard that fully thirty percent of biologists privately express doubts about Darwin's theory.*</div><div>- They doubt his specification of chance as the mechanism of mutation.</div><div>- Yes.<br /><div>- Hard to believe. And what about chance mutation and doubting Darwin do you want to say? </div><div>- Movement for life in general is towards complexity; movement for the individual is towards knowledge. A clear difference exists between the kind of gap that is of self forgetting, created by editing out experience through the mechanism of ritual, and the gap of not knowing what gives direction to evolution, not knowing what force is, what energy is, what gravity is, what passage of time is. In fact, we don't know what movement is at all, can't break it down into parts except by series of still pictures, leaving movement between those pictures still undefined.</div><div>- The self's change is obscure in the crowd behaviors, but in the case of scientific description, it is the world's movement, towards complexity or towards being known, that is the difficulty.<br />- Yes. <br />- I know all this from past conversations but wanted to go over it again. <br />- Now we've done that.<br />- Sorry for boring you. But I think you'll like this, a doctrine, as far as I can make out, of illusory or at least problematic movement, from a thousand or more years ago, from the other side of the world, found in an academic paper:<i> There is That: The Association of Space and Cause in Niyati Kañcuka, Joel H. Posner:</i> <br /><blockquote>Cause-and-effect is in KŚ an exclusively māyic operation. As such it is qualitatively different from, subordinate to, and entirely contingent on the underlying creative or causative mechanism that drives the unfoldment of reality through all its stages, spawns the emergence of governing principles at every stage, and ultimately enables within any given stage each and every manifestation. That “primary” or “present” causality, if you will, is a spontaneous act that transpires timelessly without condition or limitationas willed and enacted by a first cause, namely supreme consciousness, which is not itself an effect. The notion of a supreme agent that is at once active, in extroversion (unmeṣa), as well as quiescent, in introversion (nimeṣa),is a stunningly advanced formulation, and a radical departure from other schools, including perhaps most notably Advaita Vedānta as propounded by Śaṅkarācārya. KŚ breaks sharply from, among other things, a conventional doctrinaire understanding of causality. </blockquote><div> KS is Kashmir Saivism.** Also from the article:<br /><blockquote>In the Trika ideology of Kashmir Śaivism (KŚ), māyā is the sixth in the hierarchy of thirtysix tattvas, or ontological (and in this formulation equally epistemological) principles. It is the stage in the creative descent at which consciousness assumes the existential mantle that eclipses its essential unity and sovereignty, and governs everyday experience. That mantle is comprised of five husks (kañcuka-s), each of which imposes a specific limitation with respect to the following: 1) efficacy (kalā); 2) knowledge (vidyā); 3) inclination (rāga); 4) time (kāla); 5) space and cause (niyati). Thus are the powers of universal consciousness by its own doing fragmented and diminished in the individual personal experient, alienated in embodiment from the boundlessness of supreme Self. </blockquote>Were you aware such writings existed?<br />- Yes.<br />- Oh. Anyway, this is the idea I have: that should science come around and correct itself, self consciously sort out theories that have their origin in crowd behavior and the forgetting of self, the world might get itself educated and strengthened against this fatality of crowds. What do you think?<br />- People who won't listen to philosophy talking mysteries will listen to science. Could be. Do you know how music works?<br />- Know why we like music?<br />- Yes.<br />- The vibrations please us.<br />- That's all?<br />- Music awakens in us moods, experiences, emotions.<br />- And not both together, rhythm and melody? Doesn't music have exactly the same gap, or rather gaps, we've been talking about?<br />- How?<br />- Sound, then silence, then sound. The movement of change occurs in the silences. <br />- Ruling out, I guess, sirens, crying babies, screaming electronic music.<br />- Some rhythms are produced with the intention to put listeners into a trance-like loss of self awareness. But other rhythms, becoming the foundation to melody, express our repeated passage through the world of undefinable movement back to the stillness and immobility of knowledge; while melody offers in detail one particular story of movement on its way to rest.<br />- Silence bears the mystery of movement. <br />- Yes. Silence has its laws relating where we can expect what to be at any one moment; the story of the discovery of those laws is a sort of melody played to the rhythm of scientific progress. <br />- The music of science, with its progressing rhythm of melodies, stories of experiment and hypothesis, you think may soothe the crowd-loving beast in us?<br />- It's an idea.</div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-consciousness-matters.html">Machines & Consciousness</a><br />________________________<br /><i>* A claim made by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNe-syuDJBg">Michael Behe</a>.</i></div><div><i>** Śiva (Skt., ‘auspicious’). Major deity in <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Hinduism</a>, the third in the Hindu trinity (<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">trimūrti</a>), along with <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Brahmā</a> and <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Viṣṇu</a>. In the <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Vedas</a>, Siva appears as an epithet of <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Rudra</a>, not as separate manifestation of divine power. The joint form, Rudra-Śiva appears in the gṛhya (household) rites, which suggests that there was a gradual process of assimilation, and that Śiva has roots and origins in the pre-Vedic period. By the 2nd cent. BCE, Rudra was waning in significance, and Śiva began to obtain a powerful separate identity. In <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Rāmāyaṇa</a>, he is a mighty and personal god, and in <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Mahābhārata</a> he is at times the equal of Viṣṇu, perhaps even the creator of Viṣṇu and Brahmā, worshipped by other gods. He became associated with generation and destruction, especially in conjunction with <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Śakti</a>, and is therefore worshipped through the power of the <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">liṅga</a>. The Mahādeva image in the <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Elephanta</a> caves already depicts Śiva in the threefold guise of creator, destroyer, and preserver: in this and other such images, the two faces on either side represent (apparent) opposites—male and female (<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">ardhanārī</a>); terrifying destroyer (<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">bhairava</a>) and active giver of repose; mahāyogi and <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">gṛhasta</a>—while the third, serene and peaceful, reconciles the two, the Supreme as the One who transcends all contradictions. The three horizontal marks which Śaivites put on their foreheads represent the triple aspect of <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Śiva</a>. As a personal god (<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">iṣta-deva</a>), he is worshipped in many forms of manifestation, important examples being <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Nāṭarāja</a> (lord of the <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">dance</a>) and Dakṣiṇāmūrti, spiritual teacher. His <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">mantra</a> is ‘sivo ʾham’. Śiva is particularly associated with the river <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Gaṅgā</a> (Ganges) which flows through his hair and with Mount <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Kailāsa</a> in the <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/3300118830951645356/4483820384032134184#">Himālayas</a>.(Encyclopedia.com)</i><br /> </div></div></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-89886647623807340442021-10-23T10:59:00.047-07:002022-05-04T20:14:54.716-07:00How Could We Be So Blind?<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_3yurHJ4xok7CTam0mJrW0GLFHWCVdYdPTwi89kJXDi34w-8qNDjG2kvLcrmkUc7a438sSxWqXqI0RPVxDPw1K01RpsNrLWza1xPX5_RBBu3g8BxXJGco_sL3Iq8kzwDcBQiaA6Fm2-g/" style="clear: left; display: inline; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img alt="" data-original-height="264" data-original-width="191" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_3yurHJ4xok7CTam0mJrW0GLFHWCVdYdPTwi89kJXDi34w-8qNDjG2kvLcrmkUc7a438sSxWqXqI0RPVxDPw1K01RpsNrLWza1xPX5_RBBu3g8BxXJGco_sL3Iq8kzwDcBQiaA6Fm2-g/w145-h200/image.png" width="145" /></a></p><div>- I've got some questions for you.</div><div>- Ask away.<br />- Do you speculate on the stock market?<br />- No.<br />- Do you use social media?<br />- No.<br />- Not at all?<br />- Not at all.<br />- Have you ever joined a political party that promises to take back your country from its enemies and make it great again? Practiced political correctness, cancel culture?<br />- Of course not.<br />- Do you see all economic transaction as occasions to get the better of your trade partner? And do you subscribe to market fundamentalism, the belief that markets free of regulation benefit rich and poor alike, though you can't help knowing, if you thought about it, that it was obviously not true?<br />- No, and no.<br />- Finally, were you surprised at how rapidly and near totally the population of this country, as well as many others in the world, complied with unreasonable lockdowns, physical distancing, mask mandates?*<br />- Yes. Though I did understand that lockdown was allowing people to get away from each other, enjoy a truce in the war of neoliberal life in which everyone is an enemy of everyone else.<br />- And when the lockdown kept coming back?<br />- I was shocked by the continued near total compliance.<br />- I asked you questions about your participation in social mechanisms that guide individuals into groups of shared passions, fears, hatreds. Why didn't you see that the epidemic was providing such a mechanism; or would you not agree that that is what has happened, and is the explanation of the rabid complicity we see all around us?<br />- I agree we're dealing with crowd formation by means of ritual practice.<br />- So why didn't you see it? We'd talked about ritual many, many times.<br />- The requirement in ritual of weakness at the beginning I saw, fear of infection, and the required passion in the acting out of ritual I saw too, in the irrationality of the measures taken, passion as always creating blindness. What I didn't see was the - necessary to ritual - deliberate choice to enter upon its practice, and the expectation at the end of the ritual performance of being reborn from weakness to strength.<br />- Do you see that now?<br />- Do you think that neither you nor I saw this coming because we, not being past participants in ritual crowd formation, didn't immediately see how the government and media's management of the epidemic was of the same form as stock speculation, social media use, populist political party creation, market fundamentalist trading?<br />- And those who participated in those mechanisms, being practiced in those mechanisms, did see what was in it for themselves when they complied with government decrees and mandates.<br />- Is that your conclusion?<br />- Yes. Experience with the ritual practice of everyone following everyone else at the cost of damage to human nature but promising a sense of renewed safety and strength in the sight of everyone around you doing the same.<br />- They saw it and we didn't.<br />- We see it now. </div><div> </div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/10/i-have-this-sort-of-crazy-idea.html">We Didn't Love Freedom Enough</a></div><div><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2015/06/herds-hoards.html">Clutter, Gloves Off</a></div><div>__________________________</div><div><i>* On the manipulation of COVID statistics - e.g., false positives and testing of asymtomatics: what percentage testing positive have symtoms, what percentage hospitalized die, what percentage hospitalized have 'co-morbidities' - see: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S37eLCfEUc">Prof. Norman Fenton</a>. On the efficacy of lockdowns, see: <a href="https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf">Summary of Academic Studies on Lockdowns</a>, & </i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG7XZ2JXZqY"><i>What Happened</i>: <i>Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on 19 Months of COVID.</i></a> <i style="color: var(--ytd-video-primary-info-renderer-title-color, var(--yt-spec-text-primary)); font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: var(--ytd-video-primary-info-renderer-title-font-size, var(--yt-navbar-title-font-size, inherit));">According to the World Health Organization, more than 3 million people died as a result of harmful use of alcohol in 2016. This represents 1 in 20 deaths. Traffic accidents caused an estimated 1,350,000 deaths worldwide in that year; last year 800,000 people killed themselves, 500,000 died from drug overdose, 400,000 by murder. Depression typically affects every year 264 million people, but that number along with the number of other 'diseases of despair', including <a href="https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/95339?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2021-11-01&eun=g2012695d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Top%20Cat%20HeC%20%202021-11-01&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition">obesity</a>, has greatly increased in our times of COVID-19. And who cares? It's said that it's a choice whether to kill yourself, to drink or drug yourself to death. Just so it's a choice to go into public and expose yourself to disease and crime, not to mention streets infested with reckless, drunk, suicidal, murderous, drugged, and depressed drivers.</i></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-48427529123682082642021-10-07T07:29:00.020-07:002021-10-23T05:17:55.584-07:00We Didn't Love Freedom Enough<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyAmz0HrQUtVAifKklNBR8IJWxfZH5mVzqK3ritFuB3nCu9bAxr-4L1UGT0N30zpyEC4edDqRM1NPjPAQgBby9Gpawn6kz2Nv8fPQ8KGFKAPlJao4ZbudXSjX7AGgMeqEVCOlW13mspkA/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="183" data-original-width="276" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyAmz0HrQUtVAifKklNBR8IJWxfZH5mVzqK3ritFuB3nCu9bAxr-4L1UGT0N30zpyEC4edDqRM1NPjPAQgBby9Gpawn6kz2Nv8fPQ8KGFKAPlJao4ZbudXSjX7AGgMeqEVCOlW13mspkA/w200-h133/image.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote>And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.* </blockquote></div><div>- I have this sort of crazy idea.</div>- I'm listening.<br />- Off and on we have talked about the origins of social role, class, master and slave. We wondered if their origin was not in sedentary farming, of both plants and animal, in which each additional plant and animal represented in the counting mind of the farmer additional security. <br />- Yes. Whereas for the forager and hunter security was in knowing how and where to forage and hunt.<br />- Ten thousand or so years later we have capitalism, where the increasing count of symbols of security - money - dominates every aspect of our lives. Human beings are farmed both for the power represented by that act alone, and for the farmed humans being the instrument of the business of farming money.<br />- By which you mean profit. Money 'planted' to grow into more money.<br />- Yes. Am I correct in assuming you've been as shocked as I was by the unquestioning compliance** of hundreds of millions of people with lockdown restrictions.?<br />- You're correct.<br />- I think I have the explanation. You know how the former president used to call the press the enemy of the people, even admitting in an interview that this accusation had the function of discrediting any criticism of him? It does that, obviously, but if you've ever tried to argue with one of his supporters you find you can catch them in a contradiction and the only satisfaction you'll get out of it is their hasty retreat: you'll do no convincing, never. What is said in the news, or you winning an arguement with them, is irrelevant. Relevant is only that you and they are enemies. Enemies serve the function of creating a crowd. In the crowd the sight and words of each like-minded member produces a sense of increasing power and security. But what if the millions of compliant citizens imagine that they are the farmer and the farmed both at the same time? They have discovered they can enlarge their herd by communicating to those not yet with them their complaint. They farm themselves in their stock market investments, hoping that others seeing them run to a stock will join them in that run, bringing others with them who see them do it; in social media, which has been engineered to promote this sort of increasing herd flight and power in numbers of interactions, creating a sense of threat, promoting feelings of anger or fear and suggesting the alleviation of that fear and anger in finding on their sites others making the same complaint; in political parties, where one side complains of injustice, the other of threats to their independence... <br />- By defenders of their independence you mean the Republicans. Why then did they not complain of the lockdown if their feared enemy was those who would cause the loss of independence?<br />- Because they as capitalist humans are herd animals that are both herd members and managers of the herd; each has contempt for others in the capitalist herd who are their competitors and enemies in the capitalist economic struggle for survival.<div>- They don't love each other. They competitively herd each other. </div><div>- The hundreds of millions were happy to stay at home in isolation from those contemtible herd animals out there.</div><div>- As long as the government made that allurement financially viable. <br />- Yes. There were unemployment subsidies, the promise for large corporations of vastly increasing monopoly as small business went bankrupt...<br />- What about those small businesses? Why didn't they complain? <br />- To whom? Who was listening?<br />- Why didn't they complain to their herd? I see. They didn't have a herd. Why not?<br />- The political parties, the stock market, the social media, the largest grazing grounds as it were, all are in control of the people whose money is behind all three institutions, all of which have flourished during this time of epidemic lockdown. They all were on the side of monopoly profits.<br />- So no herd for small business. <br />- We are accustomed to thinking of capitalist managers herding*** their money, making it increase, feeling power and security in that increase. Workers, formerly only members of a herd, have learned from capitalism to be herders too.<br />- Herding themselves.<br />- Herding themselves in their political participation, in their social media use, in their stock market speculations.</div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2015/02/abel-is-more-able.html">Abel Is More Able</a></div><div><a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2020/12/meow-meow.html">Meow, Meow</a></div><div>_______________<div><i>* Alexander Solzhenitsyn</i></div><div><i>** See: <a href="https://gbdeclaration.org/">The Great Barrington Declaration</a><br /></i>*** <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/u/1/#"><i>Clutter, Gloves Off</i></a></div></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3300118830951645356.post-80777736282307030372021-09-10T10:56:00.037-07:002021-11-07T15:34:29.589-08:00A Provocation<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQEvzwIiefCcohdPst-B6h_mgUZz_zm1sRHGsrjW3bfLV_t-_nUfTliqEzcNmu5B3IWUEHN_cikBRknYtEycosonJic5sRV5i4Y1xsu7jGYCjI-4XMV27JIeFdP8TyOp73QZb9zw7jH9I/" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="200" data-original-width="132" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQEvzwIiefCcohdPst-B6h_mgUZz_zm1sRHGsrjW3bfLV_t-_nUfTliqEzcNmu5B3IWUEHN_cikBRknYtEycosonJic5sRV5i4Y1xsu7jGYCjI-4XMV27JIeFdP8TyOp73QZb9zw7jH9I/w132-h200/image.png" width="132" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><blockquote></blockquote><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>- Identity politics, white privilege, social justice warriers, cancel culture, political correctness, wokeness, safe space, critical race theory...What is critical race theory?</div>- Critical theory is the view that all institutions are the disguised vehicle of power struggle, the strong against the weak. Critical race theory is the view that all institutions are disguised vehicles for oppression of blacks by whites. <br />- What about the use of institutions by men to oppress women, the rich to oppress the poor?<br />- Not the concern of those involved in critical race theory.<br />- How can that be? <br />- Because like with religion what is involved here is a play of symbols, not reality. This is what Karl Marx had to say about religion in 1844:<div><blockquote><i>[....] The criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.<br /><br />The profane existence of error is compromised as soon as its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis [“speech for the altars and hearths,” i.e., for God and country] has been refuted. Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man [Unmensch], where he seeks and must seek his true reality.<br /><br />The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.<br /><br />Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.</i></blockquote>Because a play of symbols is involved, not reality, we can interpret what is going on here as ritual practice. Inviduals who feel weak in personal life get together with others of their kind to rehearse a story of death and rebirth, fighting an enemy to the group, a story of their group dying of their weakness but reborn in the strengh of victory, and in the course of the secure practice of the known-in-advance action of the ritual in the company of others recover a sense of security and personal power. This script or story telling is unchallengeable because it is the vehicle of security and strength of those practicing the ritual. Thus the demand for safe space (free of micro-agressions) for blacks in which to rehearse their rituals, that whites be sensititve to this need for safe space (wokeness), that speech be censored of any criticism of themselves (blasphemy), that whites never make a claim to be invidivually guiltless (white privilege), etc.<br />- If all institutions are the carrier of racism, what exactly do these social justice warriers want? Anarchy?<br />- Far from it. What they want is the same as neoliberals: a marketplace left to itself, free of restrictions on efficiency that institutional interference brings with it. When all institutions have been purged of their prejudiced members (cancel culture) the free market will finally be just to members of all races.</div><div>- That's absurd. We know after 50 years of practice that when you end government regulation of the market you get monopoly, corporate capture of the government to force privitazation resulting in even more monopoly and control of the market. Don't the critical race theory people know this?<br />- They don't. They can't.<br />- Why not?<br />- Because their identity is tied up with, is in actual fact produced by rehearsal of the ritual in which the innocent blacks die at the hands of whites yet are reborn in their successful striving to equalize their place in the free market.<br />- You and many others have claimed that the world of international corporations has supported identity politics because it is divisive, since as long as one oppressed group is at the throat of another nothing is done about the rich using the captured government and monopoly to transfer to themselves the wealth of the rest of the country. Now you are arguing that identity politics is directly a form of free market, neoliberal politics. Is that correct?<br />- Yes. <br />- Yet the claim that all whites are guilty and that all whites must watch every word they say is made not only or primarily because white words and deeds restrict access to markets, but because they interfere with the practice of ritual story telling which produces racial identity. Maybe these social justice warriers, Black Lives Matter activists believe that once they've freed up the market to themselves and whites have attoned for their original sin, at this judgment day they will be able to put aside their racial, tribal identity.</div><div>- Not a chance. In the history of the human species, before the dominance of the state, individuals living in tribes were fierce defenders of their individual autonomy while having little or no self-affirmation, vanity: they valued instead humility. They collectively took measures to block the emergence of hierarchy, by obedience to leaders being made entirely voluntary, by making leaders subject to total tax on their wealth or making them the constant butt of jokes.* These stateless tribes understood the danger to themselves of hierarchical institutions developing. Not so the cancelling, safe space tribalists. They are the opposite. They see themselves only through a ritual of changed places in hierarchy; only within the group of ritual practice do they feel a sense of personal power, can they gloat in getting fired from their jobs those guilty by original sin whose words interfere with the ritual practice of the eternally innocent.</div><div><br /></div><div>Further Reading:</div><div><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/11/evolution.html">Evolutions</a></div><div><a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/11/while-we-wait.html">While We Wait</a></div><div>_________________________</div><div><i>* See: <a href="http://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-anthropology-of-anarchy.html">The Anthropology Of Anarchy</a> and <a href="https://rextyranny.blogspot.com/2021/08/karl-polanyi-great-transformation.html">Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation</a></i></div>LatestWriting.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13774553093881868214noreply@blogger.com