[main comment posting doesn't seem to be working btw]
Gandhi and the Dalai Lama? Certainly it's clear that anger is not the most productive political affect (nor productive anything - and aren't we back to Nietzsche's ressentiment/affirmation divide with added neuro-biological sheen?), but what about certain capitalist affects that don't seem to fall on either side of the 'if I involuntarily mimic you I'll feel better/worse' divide? Competition, enterprise, invention, the profit motive for example. Or are these 'happy', 'productive' affects? I'd have thought an element of negativity must drive at least some of these, regardless of one's subsequent political stance towards them.
Infinite Thought - as a congenital infernophile (if no longer quite a miserabilist) I'm not really on the plane with this, although - as with the 'positive thinking' meme more generally - it seems conceptually and hyperstitionally persuasive.
Not really sure about your specific questions - my provisional response: there seems to be a relatively impersonal capitalist euphoria (more readily attributable to cities than persons) which aligns with positive techonomic feedbacks but may not easily square with 'anthropological' cheerfulness. The response to D&G might be indicative - I always got a buzz from their "accelerate the process" which I suspect is far from universally shared.
The impersonal joy of cities is something to be celebrated, absolutely! Agree that this is not necessarily or even desirably indexed to anthropological 'happiness'. We are both modernists in some sense then...
But cities often seem miserable in-themselves - architecturally, commercially - perhaps I would say this living in crumbling shop-worn old Europe, ha. Amusingly enough, I am a rather upbeat kind of person myself, although I do think (probably not widely shared) that intellectual conflict = happiness (and that Kant was right about man's 'unsocial sociability' - the grit that irritates reason to perpetuate invention).
Anyway - 'accelerate the process' - sure - but wouldn't the biggest anthropological illusion be that we somehow help things on their merry way...when they didn't need us all along?
"but wouldn't the biggest anthropological illusion be that we somehow help things on their merry way...when they didn't need us all along?" - over-egging the antihumanist pudding a little here, surely? People are at least machine-parts, and politics makes a difference (can't imagine you'd want to deny that).
It's not my antihumanist meringue, certainly...but I wonder, rather teleologically, if we 'accelerate the process' (unfurl turbo-capitalism hither and thither, let competition and markets dictate who crumbles and who growls, etc. I presume) then who or what will it be for, ultimately? It or us? or an us that will be inseparable from It...?
Realise this is a bit fast - but isn't a lot of the 'capitalism is a natural expression of humanity' stuff precisely a denial of politics? It'd make more sense to me if capitalist economic policies were explicitly acknowledged to be a decision or even an experiment...
Think your "if capitalist economic policies were explicitly acknowledged" line either rhetorical or contradictory - Capitalism is consistently characterized by the absence of deliberation attendant upon its spontaneous character, so no one is refusing to 'acknowledge' anything. The particles of an evolutionary experiment are not attempting an experiment, they are being experimented with. Since Smith (and the retrospective intellectual apprehension of socio-economic spontaneous emergence AKA "the invisible hand") there has been a - typically quite marginal - politics of laissez faire, but generally political programming has not been capitalism's thing. Even with the strongest examples (the holy trinity of Deng Xiaoping, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher) the overt politics have been more about piecemeal undoings of socialist damage (retardations), while preparing for unimaginable storms of creative destruction, rather than pushing the sort of programmes that conform to 'acknowledging' a positive philosophy. If there's a 'decision' it's merely to stop trying to control stuff on the basis of ignorance, wishful thinking and lies.
... of course, I'd love the 'unacknowledged' capitalist agenda to be an utterly irresponsible cosmic experimentalism, but it isn't. It's a bunch of confused conservatives overwhelmed by complexity and trying to get the economy to work.
But do the particles always vibrate to a capitalist tune? I thought it was undecidable which way they went...
Seriously tho, whether the 'acknowledgement' point is badly put (it certainly is, making gvts sound like Habermasians, apologies), you can't really be saying that Thatcher (to take one of your examples) was merely limiting socialist damage - 'unimaginable storms of creative destruction' on the other hand - Well that sounds kind of groovy - shame all we got was mass unemployment, a botched poll tax and the Falklands...
Economic libertarianism in general seems to me to underestimate its reliance on states and state activities - it seems like a way of keeping one's hands clean: 'Oh I'm all for global markets - but that war and dirty stuff...is a state-thing'.
missed your second comment in the crossover...
'It's a bunch of confused conservatives overwhelmed by complexity and trying to get the economy to work.'
Better off without them, then? Isn't the economy precisely the sort of thing they should be leaving alone? I certainly appreciate the necessity of 'minimal governments' argument (from the other side I suspect), but frankly what do governments do these days apart from 'creative destruction'? There are certainly very few social concerns left for them to worry about (transport, education, health)...
'what do governments do these days apart from 'creative destruction'?'
By which I mean nothing exciting.
In all seriousness I wonder why gvts don't spend their time/money sending probes out in order to potentially colonise more planets - would solve a lot of problems...the horizon of political thinking shouldn't restrict itself to Earth...
figures a ccru man would idolizes the sleigh of hand stuff. It's the good old pull one over the wowable public; ask 'm to sacrifice cause we sure can use them ashes (primitive and prechemistry times aren't over yet it seems)
"..overt politics have been more about piecemeal undoings of socialist damage .."
no, coercing consensual local, regional and inter-, trans-, etcetera monies into territorial ammo after robbing them of their voluntary openhand invitatial qualities
"...(retardations), while preparing for unimaginable storms of creative destruction,.."
no, stealing the ultimate and primary creative (cause intimate/small scale) destruction act (rock grinding compost sprinkling by sheer force, turning de 'handeling' (=act) into handel (=trade).
vissen (beings) into vissen (verb/trade), diversity into deviancy and scar tissue .. .
enjoy the chip on your shoulder . . or is that a chinese dragon?
Infinite Thought - all your points fair enough (except for absurd summation of the Thatcher legacy), but my argument isn't pro-conservative, it's that capitalism is a parasite of antipolitics, of lacunae in the political order, so that while dependent on 'conservatives' to keep the socialists under control and waste foreign romantic revolutionaries, it doesn't 'resonate' to a specific political agenda - unless you reject the concept of spontaneous emergence entirely - which really would be ridiculous - it's hard to see what the key point of objection is, beyond inessential debating points
Piet - no idea what the hell you're on about (so what's new?)
... the "It's emerging spontanteously and it's an eviiiil monster" position (roughly k-punk's?) seems coherent enough and also lots of fun in a 'fighting the Thing' kind of way, but there's no point mixing it with empirically ludicrous 'free-markets increase unemployment' -type 70s leftist nonsense
my god I've been up too long - you've already been to bed and woken up again! this thesis is destroying my neurons, mirror and otherwise...
I think we're getting somewhere tho - the phrase 'capitalism is a parasite of antipolitics' definitely intrigues...I don't reject what I think you mean by spontaneous emergence, tho is hard not to wonder where capitalism 'came from' in a possibly sad human-historical way (outer space?). I think this just comes back to the same questions I've asked before - is capitalism natural? If so, why can't everybody see it is? Does capitalism need war? Why not have just markets and no gvt? Ok, all these questions are simultaneously massive and naive, but I'm fried and I can't be more dialectical...
without wishing to state what k-punk thinks, I think a lot of it is to do with the grinding bureaucratic Blairite bore-capitalism that permeates every institution going (including education etc.)
I don't think it's an anti-markets position - surely its markets against capitalism? The problem is the state capitalism we have is a hideous bloated stalinist machine that churns out nothing but middle-managers, pie-charts and quotas - and is deeply wearisome and inefficient.
"is capitalism natural? If so, why can't everybody see it is?" - this seems to be an important question to you, but I don't really get it. Why should something 'natural' be obvious? Isn't the opposite more usually the case? (Natural phenomena require painstaking scieintific excavation)
As to your brief reconstruction of k-punk, don't get that either. Why would anybody who had anything but hatred for markets be in bed with the fundi SWP socialists at Lenin's Tomb? (A dose of Hong Kong is the best antidote to third-way pie-chart depression btw, but that would require getting out more)
Getting out more definitely key. In lieu of life:
Without pre-empting, would say that k-p has serious problems with SWP: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.o...ves/
007544.html
Re: natural/obvious - sure, I get the counter-intuitive science point, have written about this extensively in past even (Bachelard great on this, better than all the analytics phil sci types put together).
But I suppose the question is whether people are willing to think about capitalism scientifically - surely it's way too tied up with anthropoid concerns like self-image, status, even happiness (on topic even in the tangents, fantastic)...
i.e. it's one thing for folk to be disabused of concepts like unity, atomism, subject, subtance, etc. (simply put - the world is not our representation of it) and it's another to get them to live counter-intuitively.
"it's another to get them to live counter-intuitively" - indeed. Monkeys are sticky little bastards. Still, Cyberspace is just getting to the point of hacking straight into their brains/DNA, so things could smooth out significantly soon ;)
"David Myatt, a founder of the hardline British National Socialist Movement (NSM) who has been jailed for racist attacks, has changed his name to Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
new...2149297,00.html
Wow! An articulate discussion!
Infinite Thought, here's my (no doubt 'monotonous') penny'sworth.
Re: 'capitalism is natural' -
1.One thing to consider here is: what are the measures required for stopping capitalism? Examples of successful repression of capitalism generally feature despotic states, in which labour becomes the property of the state. The ('bourgeois')concepts of citizen, the individual, member of society (which cash out as components with a certain amount of freedom to trade their time and energy, plugging in and unplugging according to what is perceived as their best advantage)are dumped in favour of the proletariat: a homogenous mass of energy and time at the disposal of the state (which will disappear eventually, of course). The proletariat is not a positive concept.
[If you ever have the chance to see communist propaganda films from the 40s and 50s you will see such things as the proletariat being explained the value of their staying at work another 15mins every day. 15 minutes equals 100,000 more shirts, 200,000 more bricks laid etc... for the country, for the state, which is of course you.]
2. K-punk's vision of the proletariat needing their 'false memory chips' removed and replaced is one of the most patronising, chilling examples of blank slate statist thinking I've ever come across.
3.If capitalism is an 'unnatural' brain parasite, why was/is it always resorted to when hard socialism (inevitably) fails to provide the basic necessities?
4.The most baffling and infuriating aspect of the left's current position is the complete lack of a positive agenda, coupled with a lack of a basic knowledge of economics. There is always anti-capitalist criticism, followed by the dangling carrot promise of 'new economic models' which never materialise. Celebrating the constriction of capitalism in France - repression which will eventually only lead to further unemployment and economic crisis - is typical of the f*ck the future short-sightedness and philosophical bankruptcy the left so gleefully espouses.
5. Apart from stopping capitalism working, there is also the strategy of stopping capitalism from working well. The easiest way to do this is have the state interfere with the running of the economy, by choking up the system with bureaucracy, imposing restrictions, protectionism and heavy taxation. The bewildered conservatives Nick refers to are trying to get the economy working by not interfering, by stripping the state to its optimal minimum. (obviously a massive simplification).
6.Communism is no stranger to war, e.g. Lenin went through with the October revolution fully conscious of the fact it would lead to a disastrous civil war. Of course when communists fight wars its all because of the evil capitalists, tho.
blah blah blah.
Re: miserabilism
'I am a rather upbeat kind of person myself'
IT, this is difficult to square with your love of Beckett! I know Beckett can be hilarious
and even sexy in a weird D&G kind of way, but isn't his writing the epitomy of bleak European miserabilsm? I once got heavily into Beckett and Cioran many years ago, and it makes me shudder to think about it now. Grim times.
oh so much here! have to go and look at modernist buildings today (not joking - one of the few reasons to live in London). Back later for more tho. Quickly tho:
Cioran unpleasant I agree, but Beckett - no! Only the most relentless, comic brilliance imho. Here's a pdf of something I wrote about beckett and stoicism which argues those sorts of things:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf1720/...Wk4-
Lecture.pdf
Taking aspects of sd's remarks as a point of departure, it strikes me that a distinctive feature of 'the right' in these matters is an ABSOLUTE confidence that socialist-type policies will lead to economic consequences so ghastly that even their previous supporters will recoil in horror. That's why it seems (from this perspective) even preferable to have countries like France go all out in the direction of headbanging leftism in order to serve as a negative model for everyone else (precisely because, as IT notes, it's not intuitively attractive (to the pleistocene mind) to do the 'right thing' socio-economically). 'Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys' as the Chinese say (I've heard this quoted a lot recently for some reason).
I'm quite interested in what the lefties think of this - do they envisage a set of socialist innovations that would actually work economically (even outperforming capitalism, as Mao - among others - expected)? Or is it that they've moved pomologically beyond such 'crude economism' and are happy to accept generalized poverty and stagnation as a price worth paying for other things - equality of outcomes, social solidarity or whatever?
Agree Beckett is funny btw, Watt especially is fantastic. Cioran, on the other hand, while possessed of a certain dry wit, is rarely a side-splitter.
how can you ever be happy in a world of unhappy people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x...h?
v=xA0pPqXJoAI cheap cheer; after Chomsky's book 'pirates and emperors', quick nutshell history
Piet - even by your standard, that's a new low
ok, so I am not to speak of agression as violence vs agression as forceplain and simply infantile, aggression canalized in order to harvest its energy constructively and alleviate the perceived scarcities with the blows that call sight, sound and life schlechthin on the plan in the first place?
Ok, I won't speak of incensed and spontaneously erupting gang and mob violence, the role of secrecy, encryption and tec-edge nor handson vs industrial cruelty. No sir, too low for me. OK
Tell you what. You talk about violence then and don't let me steal your thunder.
http://blackmailismylife.com/blo...end-themselves/
me? pissed? you bet! The Pentagon has scheduled a test at the Nevada Test Site on June 2, 2006 of a 700-ton ammonium nitrate/fuel oil bomb.
that's to commemorate a certain (same seal, same kin same tone) day back in hiroshima? ---
GOOGLE divine strake (stretch, strak=stout, straks=in a while). Yall help me to thinks of something drastic to stop this madness (testing cheney bunker is the purpose)
how's this for divine ore spasm: 17.13. Having consciously completed the dynamics of time as the mathematical logic of the divine plan, the pilot angel program is attuned to all time as the now-point of synchronic order and, simultaneously, to the final ejection of radiative thermic-luminic properties of the stellar mass whence it had originated.
what's low about capitalism's pimpflavors eh???? She can't live with em (your point) and they sure as hell won't leave her alive without them will they? (My completapointment)
infinite thøught. thanks for "Nietzsche's ressentiment/affirmation divide" (Nietzsche the Nazi).
>>but what about certain capitalist affects that don't seem to fall on either side of the 'if I involuntarily mimic you I'll feel better/worse' divide? Competition, enterprise, invention, the profit motive for example. Or are these 'happy', 'productive' affects?
don't know if this answers the question, but i'll throw it in the mix: Burn Rate. organizations morph during each stage of the production life cycle (from startup to enterprise) & burn rate changes accordingly. eg, think Amazon.com operated (think it still does) on a negative cash flow; AOL known for its "creative accounting".
burn rate :: For a company with negative cash flow, the rate of that negative cash flow, usually per month. Often used by venture capitalists to measure how much time a startup has to reach positive cash flow before they run out of money or require additional funding.
for those qabbalistically minded:
AQ 171 = BURN RATE = 144-CURRENT = ACHATH ACHOD = AESTHETIC = ALBA SOLIS = ALCHEMIST = ARGUMENT = AZATHOTH = BERASHITH = BIOETHICS (Logiques des mondes) = BLACK EARTH = BLAST PIT (Half-Life) = CREATORS = DADOUCHOS = DANTALION = DAZZLING = DEMONIST = DNA BACKBONE = DROPPING = DYNASTY = ELEMENTY (Aleksandr Dugin) = FIRST JOB (contrat première embauche) = FOOD FIGHT = FRENCH LAW (contrat première embauche) = GARGANTUA (Half-Life) = GLOBALISM = GO PLAYER = HARD-WIRED = INDONESIA = KAKHURIT = KLIPHOTH = LITURGIC = MAKE A WISH = MALTESE X (Abuldiz) = MATUTINA = MODALITY = MYSTICS = NEGLIGENCE = OMPHALOS = PANORAMIC = PEDOPHILE = PRANAYAMA = REBEL ANGEL = REJOICING = SELF AWARE = SHOGGOTH = SICKNESS = THE EVENT = THE KEY OF 31 (Abuldiz) = THE OTHER = THIRTEEN = TIGHT FIT = TZIKVIK = UNITARY = VIA SANCTA = WORSHIP = XIN=HEART.
AQ 234 (9) = HAPPY PEOPLE = IMMATERIAL LABOR.
AQ 314 (8) = NEGATIVE CASH FLOW (Burn Rate) = MIRROR NEURONS = ACTIVE PROCESSES (Druj Notes) = BADIOU MEDITATION 35 (David Sneek, The Weblog) = BLACK COMMUNITIES (Omowale Adewale) = CENSORED PASSAGES = CLASSICAL GENETICS = CONFIGURE CARRIER = CTHULHU'S RISING (CCRU) = DEEP HOT BIOSPHERE = DUST TECHNOLOGY = EUKARYOTIC CELLS = GEARBOX SOFTWARE (Half-Life) = GERMINAL CARRIERS = HALF-LIFE: BLUE SHIFT (Half-Life) = HORROR STORIES (Wanda Karriker, Ph.D.) = NASA ORBITER FLEET = SEXUAL PROWESS (Piet) = SHOW ME THE MONEY! = SPEED QUESTIONS = THE REALITY OF HGT = TREADER OF THE PATH = VERSTÄNDNISSES (understanding) = VON STRADONITZ = WENT BLITZKROID.
AQ 346 (4) = POSITIVE CASH FLOW (Burn Rate) = A TRUTH IS INFINITE (David Sneek, The Weblog) = æECONOMIC SOLUTION' (D+G; Nick Land, Meltdown) = BUILD CATASTROPHES = CLASS OF MULTIPLES (David Sneek, The Weblog) = EMBRYONIC STEM CELL = GNOSTIC ARITHMETIC (CCRU) = HOROVITZEAN PHASE (CCRU) = RIBOSOMAL GENES: 16S-12S = SECURITY THREATS (see: Human Security System; "human security is lurching into crisis" (meltdown)) = SILENT MUTATIONS = SINGULARITY EPOCH = SOCIAL-ECONOMIC WALL = THE OFFICE OF READINGS = TOTALLY ARTIFICIAL = ULTIMATE NAKEDNESS = UNIVERSAL RNA TREE = UNIVERSITY PHASE = VAULT OF MURMURS = WHIRLING SVASTIKA (Crowley, 6th Aethyr).
AQ 455 (5) = INTENTIONAL ATTUNEMENT (Vittorio Gallese) = CONTRAT PREMIÈRE EMBAUCHE (CPE, France, First Employment Contract) = ALL THAT IS SOLID HAS MELTED = ALLIED INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES = I CHARGE YOU EARNESTLY TO = INTELLECTUALLY WAYWARD = INTUITIVE TEST THEORY = NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER = SENSORIMOTOR ABILITIES = TELEGRAPH AN IMPROVEMENT = THE YEAST OF REVOLUTION = TOKHATTO, ANGEL OF THE CARDS (Amphidemon of Talismania).
AQ 416 (2) = AMPHIDEMON OF TALISMANIA (Tokhatto) = THE BEAR OF WARWICKSHIRE = XENOGENESIS DECADOLOGY.
AQ 381(3) = æACCELERATE THE PROCESS,' (D+G; Nick Land, Meltdown) = CONSTANT RESISTANCE (Coulomb blockade) = CONSTRUCTED LANGUAGE = CONTROL ABSTRACTION = DEOXYRIBONUCLEIC ACID = DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS (Deleuze) = ELECTRICAL RESISTANCE (Spark Gap; measure of the degree to which an object opposes passage of an electric current; SI unit of electrical resistance is the ohm) = HUE, RAINBOW OF COLORS = I SEEM QUITE HELPLESS = INCIDENT TWO OF OT III (L. Ron Hubbard) = LEARNABILITY THEORY = MATERIAL EXPLANATION (Intelligent Design) = NEW FORM OF SOLIDITY (Suck me dry) = PROPAGATING IMPULSE = PSYCHOLINGUISTICS = REMOVE RESTRICTION = SORCERER + NECROMANCER = SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES (Gayatri Spivak) = THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE (Glenn Reynolds) = THE VISION OF THE URN.
AQ 805 (4) = NIETZSCHE'S RESSENTIMENT/AFFIRMATION DIVIDE (Infinite Thøught) = ALL BELIEFS HAVE THEIR ORIGINS IN SOCIAL PRACTICE (Social Naturalism) = DIRECT DESCENDANT OF THE INFAMOUS 'MAD RABBI OF KIEV' (CCRU) = THE AUTHOR-GOD COMMINGLING WITH HER CHARACTERS (k-punk) = THE SMALLEST DIFFERENCE (5::4) HAS THE GREATEST IMPACT (Great Lemurs - No.1: Katak)
ACCELERATE THE PROCESS = DIFFERENTIAL CALCULUS. Neat.
One thing I always notice about these feel-good science stories is the shifting away from realities that are totally obvious without any science, i.e. that happy people are no more likely to be intelligent than anyone else. No reason why you can't get a perfectly servicable type A personality without the brain to back it up, which then makes you one of the 'legitimate causes for anger.' Dunno about you people, but I get a healthy dose of elation and mental sharpening from certain types of 'miserabilism,' clarification, a challenge at least...and what's the contagious effect of happy people who are unendingly smug about that fact, I wonder? Realize I'm just being contrarian -- it's a good start to an actually materialist, actually scientific take on transmittable human behaviors and attitudes, as opposed to all this sketchy meme stuff.
LOVE the little pun -- "Science Behind the Angry Left"
I would reverse the construction capitalism = virus / conservatives = hosts. Feel absolutely free to correct me if I'm wrong -- no one here's too shy about that -- but if what you like to refer to as capitalism is some kind of natural force -- the path of least resistance in a perfect world, let's say -- it seems to me both the conservative elites who benefit most from it AND the welfare state recipients are the co-virus, con artists really, who sap its creative strength for monkey comforts like power, status, and food, without putting anything substantial back in. There's reinvestment, which creates jobs, sure, but egotard capitalists being what they are, there's always a limit as to how much of that money stays on the ground (basic self-interest in action, perverted by obscenely asymmetric power dynamic, not much evil required). Get rid of all other limits, you make the few that remain even more powerful -- concentrated drag, rather than thinned and spread out.
Elites 'managing' things until the magical day they are no longer needed - states 'managing' things until the magical day they are no longer needed -- the difference is what, exactly?
'Capitalism' is a religion, like all the others, which is corrupted by its priests, and advanced by its heretics.
hey, I found a way to blame myself again. . . .(don't I always do) .. .I have written, in an attempt to explain fertility rates and feeds and differentials, that it is much like playing volcano but leaving out the neat part too often, adding that less messy dosage would save lots of time and toil, not to mention those of the ice age cycles triggered by screaming feverish pandemically polarized lack of proper and appropriately mobile subcellular mineralmixes, like right about now. The pos. vs neg. cashflow reminds me of such expertly dosed plant- and soillife that no dust is left hanging in the air and blowing in the wind. In a dustfree society you don't see any cause it's all put to work.
Ok, that was a bit melodramatic, but say you've got a group of people who are very, very good at siphoning off the progressive energy of capitalism to strengthen their own molar formations, which they can't do without feeding something back into the system. I would say if there is a way to do this, to maximize returns and minimize output, someone will figure it out, this knowledge will spread, and stagnation will result -- i.e. what if someone 'wins?' You might say the sheer force of capitalism and competition or something will obviate this possibility, and that may be true, but then why side with a team who is clearly trying to gain victory for themselves, aside from macho identification?
I'm pretty sure piet and I are saying exactly the same thing...
Does that make you a Pietist?
This parasite/host business tends to get tangled (in quite interesting) conceptual conundrums, maybe even insoluble ones (although that's not a bid to shut the discussion down).
My problem with some of this is its irrealism - it would be great to see Capitalism ruthless stripped of impedimenta and radically accelerated, but since - short of Skynet-style technoputsch - it lacks an autonomous political identity, it's hard to see how it can make do without a deeply compromised social support system, one that will look pretty much like the messy conservative coalitions we've seen to date. Capitalism's efficiency premium provides the resources to bribe the required constituencies - less than ideal of course, but so's everything.
... but actually agree more than disagree - just being obnoxious to keep you on your toes. "Parasite" meant mostly as a pre-emptive pseudo-concession to leftist moralism - and as you can probably tell, not holding my breath for any kind of "magical day" (persistent suboptimality can always be confidently predicted).
Nick: it lacks an autonomous political identity
just one eh?
i'd like a small set of key words & phrases — a, on the same page kinda thing. not defining what to do, exactly, but a starting point. here's my list:
AQ 66 = æFLU.
AQ 70 = æCOLD'
AQ 70 = æHOT'
AQ 264 = æUNRULY HERDS'
AQ 294 = æSOCIAL DEMOCRATIC'
AQ 327 = æWESTERN MARXISM'
AQ 346 = æECONOMIC SOLUTION'
AQ 381 = æACCELERATE THE PROCESS,'
AQ 496 = æINCREASING THE HUMAN HERITAGE'
AQ 595 = æ[W]HICH IS THE REVOLUTIONARY PATH?'
AQ 928 = æTHE GREATEST TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGH IN HISTORY'
AQ 1157 = æOUR ABILITY TO ARRANGE ATOMS LIES AT THE FOUNDATION OF TECHNOLOGY'
some of this is D+G stuff that i've never read. eg, ACCELERATE THE PROCESS appears in Anti-Oedipus (239-40) — can somebody scan these pages? it refers to something by Nietzsche — where does he say this exactly?
'efficiency'? isn't that a euphemism for (stream)line of command, the social stratification gradient which deals death from a safe distance and via sorry delegates? After all (at a count's closure and life's rupture), your superiorly souped up weapons prove your (su)primo 'premium' -- Links below recounts how a soldier is too cowardly soft to tell the candidates cued for freeing off to their face and would rather stick to (hide behind) his guns; hey, it's easier to be crude than rude .. . www.thewartapes.com via http://louisproyect.wordpress.co.../the-war-tapes/
Repress the fuck out of lefty crap so we can bribe folks with a career in the army all the better.
"Repress the fuck out of lefty crap so we can bribe folks with a career in the army all the better." - that sounds like a programme I could support.
http://www.cafepress.com/laika_space_dog
Traxus4420. come to think on it. Eeyore wouldn't be too happy with this happy stuff. what would the world be like w/o Eeyore? i don't wanna world like that, {sob}.
Not quite Piet's kind of cartoon:
http://www.redstate.com/story/20...4/23/74515/
5357
the cartoon is damn fine, the comments moronic. If Kerry and Murtha are unamerican as mbecker maintains, what does that make people like Churchill? A fish dressed up as the big bad wolf?
by the way, if the right concedes such powers to muslims it follows they doubt the lobby thesis very little.
1 America Meets Bill Blum and Ward Churchill
15 Minutes of Radical Fame
By MICKEY Z.
Greg Elich, author of "Strange Liberators: Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit," wonders why the effect-if there is one-must automatically be deemed positive. "For most viewers/listeners, the (left-of-center) ideas are likely to come across as being from another planet, so markedly different are they from the usual perspective presented in the mass media" says Elich. "In such a context, the presentation of radical ideas requires a long exposition to first challenge a whole set of assumptions underlying the corporate media viewpoint. Without that, the ideas are too easily dismissed by most viewers/listeners. The problem, of course, is that media are notoriously disinclined to allot significant time to the discussion of ideas, preferring the 'sound bite' treatment."
By 'radical ideas' Elich doesn't mean 'left-liberal' but 'marxo-pacifist' - ideas that do come from another planet: bizarroworld (or US academia). The mainstream media is tilted strongly left, but not entirely off the scale of rational opinion. Talk about maximalist demands. As if generalized whoring for a hippy-socialist like Kerry wasn't enough. Geez.
Vietnam does the right thing:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006...ews/
vietnam.php
"k-p has serious problems with SWP" - to such an extent he's writing for Socialist Worker now
hey. AQ 155 = GREG ELICH = MICKEY Z = DJYNXX = MINOMMO
AQ 167 = US ACADEMIA = MARXIST
AQ 201 = LEFT-LIBERAL = COMMUNISM
AQ 269 = BIZARROWORLD = UNDERCURRENT
AQ 378 = THE SILENT AFFLICTION (incontinence) = UNACCOUNTABLE QUANGO (Mark Fisher)
northanger - some of your best yet. Much insight gleaned :)
minerama rama rammadammadingdong
madmax midget on a monster's back
happy happy, joy joy
The Zionist Plan for the Middle East Translated and edited by Israel Shahak
AQ 622 = THE ZIONIST PLAN FOR THE MIDDLE EAST (Oded Yinon) = 2{SQUARE X}. THE THREE SCHOOLS OF MAGICK (The Vision and the Voice :: 6th Aethyr, The Vision of the Urn) = GOD, THAT WAS A MAGNIFICENT CONCEPTION Old and New Commentaries to Liber AL, Liber AL I:3 Every man and every woman is a star) = PRODUCER OF DIGITAL HYPERSTITION (A Short Prehistory of Ccru :: Ccru is only important as the producer of Digital Hyperstition, and Digital Hyperstition is significant only as a handbook to the game) = THE ABOMINATION THAT MAKETH DESOLATE (Daniel 12:11 :: From the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the abomination that causes desolation is set up, there will be 1,290 days (NIV)) = THE HUMAN COMPLEMENTATION PROJECT (Neon Genesis Evangelion) = THERE WAS A RELEASE OF THE PSYCHOSIS (Il y a eu un déclenchement de la psychose, Deleuze)
AQ 461 = SUBJECTIVE DESTITUTION = BASIC DECENCY AND COMPASSION (Master and Commander) = CLASSICAL ELECTRODYNAMICS (Coulomb blockade) = CONVENIENT COVER STORY = NAPOLA: ELITE FUR DEN FUHRER.
AQ 582 = AND THEIR POWERS ARE AS THE FIRST 456 (Enochian Third Key; AQ-456=CLA) = IMPULSE TO RETREAT FROM NATURE (Mark Fisher, SF Capital :: In place of Sartre's existentially-tormented man, or Foucault's disciplined subject, we are presented now with what Burroughs and Deleuze identify as the agent/victim of Control. As Miller recognises, Kubrick's Dr Floyd is just such a 'control addict', whose "impulse to retreat from nature, to lead a 'life' of perfect safety, regularity and order in some exalted high-tech cell, and to stay forever on the job, solacing oneself from time to time with mere images of some beloved other, is ... the fundamental psychic cause of advertising") = IRAN'S NUCLEAR-WEAPONS FACILITIES = REGIMEN SANITATIS SALERNITANUM (Wikipedia New Article 28-Apr-2006 :: The Salernitan Rule of Health aka The Flower of Medicine) = UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN (Scott McLemee, Lazy Me).
seemed appropriate with the happy people thingy.
thanks for keeping me on my toes, nick :0
nice to read about vietnam --always good when a country earns the right to decide it's own fate sans foreign military occupation and the resultant violent resentocrats --
the cartoon is sort of imbecilic, but that seems to be the norm with political cartoons, today and yesterday -- i've never completely understood the genre's appeal -- didn't even have the charming animated song & dance of piet's offering (tho it could've stood a bit of editing)
To begin -- a manifesto:
As technology improves at its accelerated rate, the power of the concentrated few to dominate the masses increases (through more precise application of 'soft power' -- infotainment news, politics of unfounded assertion (people trained to only believe in evidence while being only obedient to force), entire political spectrum produced and thus regulated by the spectacle, corporate ownership of the field of debate, branding and commoditization of everything), while potential power of the individual increases at the same time -- upgrades get smaller, cheaper, faster, more deadly, less accountable -- centralized hierarchical power groups (states, corporate heads) slipping into panic mode, resolve to increase control at all costs, launch souped-up 19th century colonization programs in order to force open channels for 21st-century soft power networks, the ultimate goal the creation of necessary conditions in every corner of the globe for an easily hypnotizable and utterly dependent clerk class (aka docile herd animals) to arise, in an attempt to avert the total fragmentation of the state apparatus (fasces), the guarantor of privilege and elite power which has been reduced as far as it can go without evaporating. It is a project both provoked and limited by the separate intensifications (radicalizations) of the left-liberal and theocratic-rightist ideology-matrix whose ongoing and irresolvable dialectic it uses to advertise itself (tolerance). Its solution is to ditch (deconstruct) this always-already illusory dialectic in favor of the hybrid form of neoliberalism. Three-way interdisciplinary warfare commences.
Nick's strategic preference in this situation is to think in terms of capitalism with Chinese characteristics, aka to think like a criminal.
This involves, of course, siding with the ruling class, so that the rules of exploitation remain predictable enough to manipulate to one's personal benefit (keep in mind this is a petty criminal, not a tyrant). However, in classic deal-with-the-devil tradition, this only speeds along the victory of a radicalized theocratic-rightist regime. In the mythical Hegelian Final State scenario of total victory (myths the only way monkey brain can think the world's vast complexity), the world is only reducible to one of two possible outcomes -- tyranny or democracy, thesis or antithesis. Synthesis (and neoliberalism) nothing more than a myth based on myth, or countermyth -- only
only useful as war machine for destroying competitors, becoming superfluous upon Total Victory. Dominant illusion among neoliberals is that a world of pure surplus (synthesis, spectacle, Hegelian Final State as he originally envisioned it, absolute knowledge (absolute commoditization) of the world, technocapitalist utopia) can exist, even in a myth-world of philosophical abstraction. Synthesis not the dissolution of imaginary opposites (flow), but the imagined dissolution (derivative) of imaginary opposites. The Tao which is spoken, etc. etc.
(yes, the spoken Tao is a war machine, which is why you don't ever fucking say it)
Pure individualism demands pure egalitarianism (radical left), pure tyranny denies both (radical right). The exception (which as its sovereign generates the existence of each pure state) is located either in every agent (individualism) or the one god (tyranny). In an impure real world one tends toward one or the other imaginary pole. Postmodernism/neoliberalism falsely asserts that x (the impossibility of wholly committing to either fantasy) is capable of existing separately -- a disavowed 'third way' adherents like to call 'realism' or 'pragmatism' (and in fact constant disavowal of reality is constitutive of this POV). But what it really is is a worship of war -- total, unending, eternal war, the very definition of unsustainability, of logical, ethical, and aesthetic incoherence. War without determinable sides is indistinguishable from total surrender, giving up all time and imagination to synthetic, impersonal, and most important, imaginary forces. This worship of contradiction can only be self-contradictory.
Radical leftism is the ideology of the Future -- atomization, equalization, pure individual liberty -- radical rightism -- repression, massification, total obedience -- is the ideology of the Past. Both are impossible, despite becoming less and less so (in accordance with the technological making-perfect of the world). There is no imaginable alternative, despite the infinitude of unimaginable ones.
Pick your side, then we can talk about how to fight.
hmm. DAILY KOS'S BEST FRIEND = PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH
AQ 388 (1) = INFINITE RESIGNATION = DAILY KOS'S BEST FRIEND = PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH.
AQ 550 (1) = KNIGHT OF INFINITE RESIGNATION (traxus4420) = MASCULINITY IS A RIVER-ING MEAT (Suck me dry) = NARROW BREAD AND BUTTER ISSUES (Piet: Marvin Gandall).
AQ 610 (1) = I AM A KNIGHT OF INFINITE RESIGNATION (traxus4420) = BACTERIA WITH THEIR BACKS TO THE WALL = COUNTERINSURGENCY'S MAINTENANCE (Omowale Adewale) = GLUE NEURONS TOGETHER IN THE BRAIN (NACHIP) = REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL COALITION = WITHOUT EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION.
AQ 610 (7)
In spite of the rhetoric of bin-Laden supported by millions of Muslims worldwide-- of a Western religious crusade, the new conflict between the post-Christian West and Islam-- is more a clash between secular materialism and a revived religion. Here is the Evidence:
Yesterday Asia Times followed suit by confirming our assessment about “about US covert operations inside Iran” published two weeks ago, and followed an extensive four part research report about Iran. See “The Iran Documents” p.1-4 below.
April 27, 2006: Hu was more successful in Saudi Arabia then in the us, and as a result China’s emergency stockpile will be over and above its daily needs reaching the exact capacity of the American SPR. Plus, something serious is going on in Sino-U.S. relations, the subject of our in depth investigation to go on line as our China P.2 of our China investigation: Introduction.
(Look further down this page for other updates.) http://www.sociologyesoscience.com/
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/
20...monica_ale.html Islam, Judaism and Christianity: Connected at The Orb (this being a recurring icon of a ufo((con))artist), this item also links to a less kitchy one: http://www.ufoartwork.com/ A site that shows art alright but ufos only if you allow common sense be overcome by your hyperstitchloose wish to see them and this guy even had to go to Billy Meier so he is incurable. Incidentally, Erich von Daeniken (another batcrazy Sweatshlander has (or had) a theme park in Interlaken
http://blog.wfmu.org/.shared/
ima...balah_orb_1.jpg this airbrush job shows this escherlike kaballah tree brings out the real attraction to this fucking figure, perspective tricks, an apparantly frozen flow moment illustrative of just how much reality gets lost when relying on symbolizing it. Ghetto sins, wall-builder, taker suck'm dry taxtricks. Fuck Madonna and no I am not (finding very much to get) horny (over these days). I crossed her so she is fucking me down.
AQ 380 = ERIC PIETER WIJNANTS = EXPLICATION INUTILE = MARCUS MOSIAH GARVEY = TROPICAL DEPRESSION = VALIDATE THE EQUATION.
AQ 167 = TRAXUS4420 = DÉCLENCHER.
AQ 454 = DER BEGRIFF DES POLITISCHEN (Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political) = KLOSTERFRIEDHOF IM SCHNEE (Caspar David Friedrich, Monastery Graveyard in the Snow).
T4420 - determined to reply as thoughtfully as possible to your latest, but first: how did you glue this leftism = radical individualism thingummy together? Sounds quite counter-intuitive, to say the least.
AQ 476 = THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL (Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen) = A CONSCIOUSNESS THRILLER = CULT OF THE SPERMATOZOON = EFRAIM KARSH'S MONEY QUOTE = GEMATRIA + EROTICA = GEMÆROTICA = PRIME-ORDINATE ZYGONOMY = REDISCOVERY OF THE SOURCE = RESTORATION WEEKEND PANEL (Nick; On media and the war) = SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT KIT.
AQ 483 = FRIEND-ENEMY OPPOSITIONS (Scott Horton, The Return of Carl Schmitt; see AQ=397 (Jane Meyer)) = HARMONIZED BY THE SWASTIKA.
AQ 600 = SCHMITTEAN FRIEND-FOE DISTINCTION = EIGHT, EIGHTY FOUR HUNDRED & EIGHTEEN (Liber AL I:46) = INTELLIGENIC TECHNOVIRAL TRIGGER = JACQUES DERRIDA'S DE LA GRAMMATOLOGIE (Gayatri Spivak) = JUPITER IS THE KEY TO THE COMPLEX (TAARP) = SF DISINTEGRATES INTO CYBERPUNK (CCRU) = TO MAKE HERSELF PERFECTLY PASSIVE (Abuldiz).
AQ 397 = A DEADLY INTERROGATION (Jane Meyer, The New Yorker; AQ-236 = MANADEL AL-JAMADI = MARK SWANNER) = ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM = DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM = DIGITAL HYPER-SYSTEM = FAILURE OF INTELLIGENCE = PELASTRATION CONCEPT = THE PLACE OF ENCHANTMENT = THE TEMPLETON EPISODE.
AQ 345 = DETAINEE ABUSE SCANDAL = ISLAMIC TERRORISM = TORTURE MEMORANDA = THE FINAL EXPANSION.
[or am I misconstruing your manifesto - as it crescendoes the grammar becomes rather opaque]
nick. you always bust my groove thang.
hey! the numograms's Deleuze's time machine.
oh hey nick, nay, on the contrary .. .as jesus is reported to have commenced several retorts to the Pimperesswhore in a row (King Jesus by Graves which I own in dutch translation even).
turn rock inside out lest you topsellturf other things you have no business right duty nor pleasure to do (such) to (Graves didn't say that cause he was too traumatized by blood to understand and expound upon mud).
piet. will any old rock do?
recent bloggage at rotsstof: .. .see link
http://www.remineralize.org/
fyfe...cksforcrops.php the father of agrogeology in Brazil 2004
http://www.dirtdoctor.com/forum/
...349b7a17935e2e5
http://www.dirtdoctor.com/forum/
...hor=Mineral+Man 5 posts so far by a master gardener from the Rutgers U NJ and ishmael(dotcom) reader strikes up conversation here since last januari
http://www.pitandquarry.com/pita...l.jsp?
id=315665 rock dust is soil building community fuel and keeps you right busy making it too. In this editorial aggregates (dusts) are called soil additive but as I indicated, this stuff of life, if anything deserves such a name, is more . ..errr.. fundamental (in the good sense for a change) than that.
http://tribes.tribe.net/
reminera...mineralizeearth has 34 members now the dynamo there likes dynamotive.com (green fuels)
http://www.uoguelph.ca/rocks/ rocks for crops (phosphates in ((sub-saharan)) africa)
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~geology/...ocks_for_crops/
Peter van Straaten a whole booklenght and thorough survey of all sorts of rocks in africa by country (repeat mention and well worth it)
http://www.remineralize.org/newf...ntry.php?
id=203 dust byproduct in norway goes to waste so far but now some folks are gonna test it
A letter I sent but didn't blog and got no reply to:
You made this rockdust related page right?
http://www.umb.no/?viewID=13561 Seminar av bruk av steinmel i landbruk
I have adopted Julius Hensel (along with and via John Hamaker) as substitute father(s). He wrote his main work while living in Oslo (back when it was still named christiania). I was impressed with Hensel's prediction therein that norway will one day be immensely fertile cause it so rich in suitable granites.
You mentioned large deposits on the remineralize.org forum
I may come have a look and help make your plots/tests grow to a larger, more accurate and more convincing scale (if you don't already have ample opp to do all that anyway. Either way I am very keen and would like to stay informed).
-----------
http://defense.media-theory.org/....org/
audio.html allerwarmst aanbevolen
this is the stuff Dan Winter takes for godhonest truth but rickels calls Schrebers affl/ddiction a withdrawal psychosis
whoops misheard that, he is just describing a Dick book at that point.
the audio incidentally, at least my present copy stops making sound after about 7 or 8 minutes and the 63Mb large footage can be heard (from) again around the last 6th/5th. Hope yall have better luck
Gum's return to sanity and cross-over to the side of the expansionists on the moon, also referred to as lunatics, closes the novel on the upbeat, it is an observation made in psychoanalysis however, that the return to politics, in a setting of deep regression, no matter how commendable or rational the objective or sentiment, is always a strong sign of and last ditch defense against degeneration of the .. .narcissistic .. . .borderline of the psyche, sane again, or just another lunatic, ..
http://subject-
barred.blogspot.c...tification.html
Correction:
The freudian associations that appear to maintain Gum’s 1959 world to the controll release and recycling of tensions, nevertheless will not stop short of holding Gum’s simulated world under the sway of his internal world
Gum's return to sanity and cross-over to the side of the expansionists on the moon, also referred to as lunatics, closes the novel on the upbeat, it is an observation made in psychoanalysis however, that the turn to politics, in a setting of deep regression, no matter how commendable or rational the objective and sentiment,is always a strong sign of and last ditch defense against degeneration towards or along the narcissistic bottomline or borderline of the psyche. Sane again, or just another lunatic, Gum now recognizes, under the guidance of one of the lunatics who infiltrated his simulated world in order to trigger anamnesis . .. .
today, again, the track has a long mum stretch but I can't quite tell if it actually misses content.
..
To stay back in time the daydreamlike fantasy must be wishfullfilled as always, in or as the future, but this future is also in the past. The present tense or tension is what must be bracketed out for the fantasy to continue to play (GISTEREN WAS VANDAAG MORGEN), thus the double lunacy of the novel’s happy ending, pulls the emergency brake on the degenerative in betweenness of Raggle Gum’s Schreberlike world of intrigue, the ongoing present tension or tense transmitting since G childhood. Dick’s fictions never include recollections of past lives of past lives, his focus always on some memories of somealternate present, Whatever else the present may be, it is where the dead are, which is why is elided in daydreams, the fa g christianity The fantasy genre was not only the first contact but it also engaged him and his delegates throughout his work with a fateful temptation which however even jahweh .. .must reject, In an interview, Dick turned up the contrast with . .fiction, with respect to their spans of retension. In fantasy, you never go back to believing there are trolls, unicorns and so on, but in sf, you read it and it’s not true now but there are things which are not true now but are going to be some day.
It’s like all sf occurs in alternate future universes, so it could actually happen someday. In this life we pass in and out of fantasy. When we die, this is something Tolkien assured me, in his essay on fairy stories; when we die, we enter fantasy, the other word, for keeps. The basis of fantasy’s appeal is christianity, the fantasy that is also true. The happy ending maybe escapist in every day life but in the end, of life, it becomes the great escape, the overcoming of death that christianity advertizes. Although a declared Christian, Dick was also paranoid .. . . . and weary therefore of unambivalence
.. .. ..changeable essense of consumer goods. Although .... ..
traxus4420 you are so far off in your analysis its quite scary. do many people honestly believe the left (whether radical or not) is the future, or worse, the vanguard of individualism? this kind of view is typical of a righteous, idealistic political stance deeply ignorant of how markets and states function, the historical facts, and current trends. any society in which the radical left governs has been doomed to failure. the decline of europe, in terms of faltering economies, dropping bithrates, unassimilated immigrants, increasing jobless, cultural intransigence, and political correctness-affected spinelessness is testament to the effectiveness of left-leaning government, scared of pushing through reforms necessary to change the downward trend. i think what you have to distinguish between are what political activists think they are doing and what real effects their advocated policies actually have. i think you are confusing the latter for the former. the left=egalitarnianism vs right=tyranny is such a naive formulation it is quite scary that educated, intelligent people actually hold these views. i would guess that anyone who takes an alternative view from this ought to open a discussion as to what stategies can be developed to combat such myopic idealism?
T4420 - Still somewhat confused by your position, agree with tachi that the implicit right = tyranny equation is downright weird. The 'right' (in any sense that will be at all usable here) means adherence to the broad social formula of self-interest controlled by competition (markets) - obviously less idealistic than the leftist alternative (altruism, enforced when necessary (i.e. all the time) by coercion). Authoritarianism can spring up on either side, either to force through neoliberal policies (Pinochet) or to substitute for the always-mysteriously-absent general altruistic will (all leftist leaders without exception), so it is fairly dysfunctional as a principle of discrimination. Your refusal to take sides is admirable for the purposes of prolonging discussion, but setting up bogus oppositions doesn't really move stuff forward. Markets are the issue.
Is it all over for small government Republicans:
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006...of-opportunity/
A Roman poet composed this riddle 1700 years ago:
I am a goddess seldom found and known to few. I am ever flying. I am bald behind that none may catch me [by the hair] as I flee. Remorse bears me company. When I have flown away, she is retained by those who did not grasp me as I passed.
The “goddess” was Opportunity—and conservatives and Republicans today can appreciate the poignancy of the poet’s description of her departure.
Wow, I was shown the true meaning of opp. telepathically and came to the conclusion that the most wonderful one, waterpressure high enough to muddy a rock is well west of the fine line that divides opps from exploitation. so, wees een vent en ga de solventor (uit)venten.
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipe...501/
037056.html piety and bloodlust
Sorry I failed to follow up on what is a pretty mystifying post -- planned on it but you know the excuses --
This manifesto is of course a kind of caricature (as all manifestos are to some extent) of some leftist readings I've been ingesting. I do actually agree with something in there or I couldn't have written it, though I can't say absolutely yet what this is.
It's basically Debord mixed with where I'm seeing leftist philosophy/politics currently heading, in Badiou, Deleuze, and others. The 'right' that I refer to there is the old right, the 'religious right' I guess you'd call it nowadays. I don't see neoliberalism or the sort of variation being worked on here as overtly rightist, really. I guess you'd call the right I refer to as 'right idealism.' Take any imaginable (paleo) conservative tradition and amplify it to its logical and necessary conclusion and you arrive at tyranny -- tyranny here defined as 'everything is determined except a one transcendent exceptional sovereign force.' Monotheism is the only form I can think of in this style that makes sense -- what real (physical, breathing) tyrant has ever really lived up to the name?
Now leftism -- imagined, ideal leftism, mind you -- does not lead to tyranny, and can't, or no one would be a leftist. As I said, pure individualism necessitates pure egalitarianism, because to be an individual requires that one have ownership over himself. Therefore no one can own another, etc. etc. sure you've heard this before...anyway, the exception that makes this sort of freedom possible is that every individual be spontaneously free -- souls without a god, essentially. I think you'll agree that this is necessary for something like an anarchist utopia to make sense. This is where leftism has to end up, if taken to its extreme (which is necessary to prove itself).
Needless to say, right idealism (kingdom of God, caliphate) has failed just as surely as left (Greeks, communists).
The whole point of most left analyses of capitalism is that 'market ideology' or neoliberalism or what have you is, in trying to escape the above damaging binary idealism, inconsistent with itself, and in denial of its own tendency towards tyranny. It claims to have located (not precisely, not YET) the abstract systems that generate reality (through science and economics). This makes it profoundly ahistorical, and therefore it can't think about the future either, except in terms of itself. What it calls realism and pragmatism is an ideological adherence to whatever version of reality it happens to have cooked up (its tyrant/god - k-punk's monster capitalism), which of course is an imposition on actual reality and is not at all 'going with the flow.'
I tried to draw a bunch of comparisons to Taoism and Hegelianism that apparently didn't work, but the main idea is that neoliberalism depends on there being an ideological right and left constantly battling one another while it sort of parks
forgot about that word limit -- probably for the best, since I'm mainly just repeating things anyway.
Keep in mind that I think science and economics are more compatible with reality than anything yet devised -- but this doesn't turn either into something one can be loyal to or identify with or meekly accept or any of those comforting behaviors one associates with patriotism and religion.
tachi - isn't 'leftist leader' an oxymoron? the radical left has never governed without turning right, and the European left has only resulted in ineffective capitalism, because the left does not have any practical approach. It thinks that using the same strategies as others is sufficient, which doesn't make very much sense.
Capitalism has clearly proved itself to be the most successful system ever to exist -- this isn't the issue -- the issue is what that success means for the actual people living within it. All I'm suggesting is that having a coherent idea of what one would like the world to be is as important as understanding how the world currently operates, however painful the difference.
certainly don't hope to change anyone's mind on such things -- only going on like this because i'm a little surprised this distillation of modern leftism (caricatured though it may be) isn't immediately familiar to most of you --
i do think the hypothesis that idealism is reducible to two flavors is something we can actually discuss?
T4420 - thanks, that's much clearer, except that you're objective in re-phrasing these 'distillate' intellectual formations remains rather obscure to me. Since,as you say, they exist solely in the marxo-academic hothouse, do they have sufficient real world relevance to justify exploring them? What's your 'project' here? (Apologies for all the q's, but can't quite get my teeth into this yet - as a quasi-Hayekian it all seems a little gnostic)
Yet more socialist triumph in North Korea:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006...nion/
edseok.php
Robert Spencer on the timid/dhimmied Moussaoui sentence:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Arti...le.asp?
ID=22331
Heading to Canuckistan for a week, which will probably take intermittence to a whole new level ...
this is a little late, but still very topical:
probably the best response to the Euston Manifesto:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/art...,6-
2151686.html
here are some articles to add to the ongoing totalitarianism/fascism topic:
Oliver Kamm:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/art...72-
2150205.html
Hitchens:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/art...72-
2150205.html
and 'mad mel', as she is so affectionately known at Lenin's Tomb:
http://www.melaniephillips.com/d...ves/
001672.html
And for evidence of moonbat inability refusal to cobble together an argument, see 'The Wrong Side of Capitalism' Houston Manifesto (sic):
http://huh.34sp.com/wrong/catego...egory/politics/
[note that two entires before this there is an entry entitled 'Listening' in which this devout anticapitalist tells us what he has been listening to on his MP3 player. Truly facsinating. And I thought MP3 players and OedIpods were things the high priest/teacher from hell/gripe-meister k-punk had decided were 'bad'.]
another example of leftoid rigour:
OT: Nick Cohen article on the BNP, Respect, "communalism" etc. - you could probably write it yourself:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
commen...en...85,00.html? =rss
Depressingly mindless stuff.
Dominic Fox | Homepage | 7 May, 13:41 | #
________________________________________
I refuse to read it. He's probably pinched it from HP Sauce anyway, so what's the point?
lenin | Homepage | 7 May, 14:27 | #
________________________________________
I propose a new word in honour of Nick's ramblings.
"Cohenherent (adj). Descriptive of a piece of writing or polemic devoid of genuine coherence or logic, yet superficially convincing enough to fool liberal features editors and morons."
Dan C | 7 May, 14:37 | #
________________________________________
Dan C - there's already a word for that.
Casuistry (n): Superficially plausible, yet false argument.
lenin | Homepage | 7 May, 14:38 | #
PRAXIS OF ART = LEFTOID RIGOR
Global baby bust:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20...-baby-
bust.html
[that was me]
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Fro...e/
GH23Aa01.html
Islam has one generation in which to establish a global theocracy before hitting a demographic barrier. Islam has enough young men - the pool of unemployed Arabs is expected to reach 25 million by 2010 - to fight a war during the next 30 years.
Chabert blogster does a Hitler related quote and I comment
The GoP needs to turn right:
http://
article.nationalreview.co...TJlZDg0ODgwNTI=
nick. rephrasing Thoreau, the farthest right is but the farthest left.
my project (post-internet access disaster) -- presenting 'bizarro left' fantasy a la Hegel in an admittedly overelaborate attempt to come up with a decent companion piece to the bizarro right jazz that gets talked up on this page -- and add that at this imaginary conceptual stage (all abstract thought is utopian), left and right are self-consistent (which breaks down when they attempt praxis), but neo-liberal is not. The neoliberal hyperstitional matrix is not very different formally from its adversaries -- it compiles the familiar polemical tools inevitability, establishment of a binary oppositional framework with its numerous (and in reality very distinct) opponents, and inarguability (through mathematizing and scientising itself -- keeping its discourse abstract -- as much as possible to protect itself from arguments in other languages).
The big difference from left and right hyperstitions that posit some future destination as rationale for present action is that neoliberalism's utopic imaginary is already here -- it's just not yet fully developed. Don't see how it's controversial to say that Thatcher, Reagan, both Friedmans, Hayek, etc. ARE utopians in both rhetoric and ideology. They have simply converted interstate violence into police violence, making such conflict a part of that utopia. Where prior left and right movements pointed to the future or the past as an ideal from which behavior must be deduced, the new right begins by positing its world (its society, its theory, its interests) as fact, then deducing subsequent behavior from this (pretty dubious) assertion. All the while calling it induction and encouraging slippage with actual empiricism.
This is an exceedingly powerful strategy, effectively strengthening the already existing divisions in various disciplines and activities, then monopolizing (branding) organization, mediation, and even compromise (you can't resist compromise without being labelled a fanatic). Marketing strategy offers more insight here than either Machiavelli or Schmitt. Especially since the actual actions beneath the ideological overlay are also not so different from older forms.
sd - the difference between leftists and liberals is that liberals have stopped believing that different forms of social organization are possible. The level at which they are willing to support violence is variable and not determined by either category.
That anyone on the left has accepted the right's rhetorical assault to the extent that they equate leftism with supporting Saddam Hussein only goes to show how far the complete failure of imagination (not to mention spinelessness) on the part of the liberal left has come (basically little more tha the right's nagging conscience at this point), not to mention that there actually are some leftists so ideologically bankrupt that they do in fact overextend this 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' type of reasoning. The failure on both sides, even among intelligent people, to recognize that if A does not equal B it does not follow that A therefore equals C -- grade school logic -- is an example of the inability to think outside of pre-established categories that is the most distressing sign of the times.
traxus4420 - firstly I think that neo-liberals do believe in social organisation, but not state-imposed organisation, or that cooked up in prescriptive meme factories. Social movements and formations can and do auto-organise, with differing degrees of positivity.
secondly, I think you could be a bit more specific when talking about leftism, rather than launching off into the abstract. Leftism does have specific (and very absurd, ugly) faces: Chavez, anti-globo foolishness, nostalgic (and anti immigrant) French students, telecommunism...
thirdly, the most infuriating thing about today's left (sorry about the cheap, snarky and pointless dig ak k-opunk above) is the refusal to think about things which are staring them in the face: exponential technological growth, the information economy, the key role of biology in the 21st century, China, microfinance ... Instead they put their fingers in their ears and blather on about Badiou and Zizek. The UK hard left's inability to come up with an articulate, coherent response to the Euston Manifesto, when it is largely addressed to them, really does confirm that there is a self-affirming meme virus in place. I don't know much about the US left - maybe it is a bit more engaged...
Commenting by HaloScan
