eye of the storm

sometimes, i must say, you hit a little scholarly felicity. off abebooks i ordered a used copy of an extremely obscure book: "The Meaning of Words: Analysed into words and unverbal things, and unverbal things classified into intellections, sensations and emotions." this was a 1948 edition of a work from 1854, by the brilliant and prescient and entirely unknown philosopher/banker alexander bryan johnson. the book, which just arrived, is inscribed on the inside cover "max black," and it struck me that this might be the property of the famous (at least in his time) philosopher of language max black. this rather excellent piece of news was confirmed by the fact that the volume came from a store in ithaca; black spent his career at cornell.

anyway, i've now got a copy of johnson (an important influence on josiah warren) signed and more importantly underlined and annotated by max black.alexander bryan johnson is a freakish philosophical talent developing in the wilderness (utica, to be exact, early-to-mid nineteenth-century). roughly, no one ever read his books. but he more than strikingly, richly and in detail, anticipates twentieth-century analytic philosophy. he more or less just takes the position of the positivists: that a sentence means the conditions under which it could be verified. this is close to peirce, as well, though in some ways, believe it or not, johnson's formulations are superior to either in clarity and plausibility.

believe it or not, there is a full-blown truth-conditional semantics, and this was stated perfectly clearly in the 1820s. "the meaning of words" recapitualtes but clarifies and qualifies the "treatise on language" (1828/1836). it says that metaphysical disputes about soul, spirit, matter, etc, are merely verbal, that the terms are unmeaning and the key to "solving" these "problems" is to see that. and "the meaning of words" is pretty much organized like wittgenstein's tractatus. johnson is a radical and technical empiricist/scottish common sense person (moving the other way into his origins), but i'm going to develop him sideways into a radical particularist and realist.

you know, thoreau, emerson, garrison, warren - the great american individualists from the period of johnson's life - did not have a systematic metaphysics (or anti-metphysics). even coleridge or carlyle - who directly influenced thoreau and emerson's philosophy - are pretty sketchy with the fundamental onology and epistemology. they were poets or polemicists, not system-builders at a fundamental level. but as warren realized, johnson provides a beautiful way to start with a world of incomparable individuals, a world bristling only with particularities. this can connect what emerson was saying, for example, to contemporary science and the history of empiricism. then you can build your poetry or your politics on that.

anyway...

meanwhile i'm working completely through the josiah warren project again, re-writing and correcting everything. fordham has accepted it as a book. there'll be more and more stuff on the warren website, too.

brutality of reality in shrewsbury, pa: lemon volcano.

say you're a producer at cnn or msnbc and it strikes you - as it has many - that the coverage of michael and teddy is similar. and let's say that you think this - the echo of the parallel jackson events last month - tends to devalue kennedy's significance.  well, you shoulda thought of that as you were deciding on a strategy for your myriad michael extravaganzae,know what i mean?

gotta admit i'm glad that they're still fighting back in chechnya.

the last few weeks have left me flummoxed. i don't know who the greatest person is who ever lived, michael jackson or ted kennedy. but imagine a person who combined their talents: a moonwalking, plastic-clad legislative juggernaut with famous brothers. now imagine a person who combined their vices...

here's an interesting approach: moammar gaddafi is obviously insane and dangerous because he condemns the use of alcohol. it's incomprehensible, as if he condemned freedom and puppy dogs. once i heard hoagland decry crack. then i knew that nothing else he said should be taken seriously.

"it would be unfair to prosecute interrogators for actions they had been told were legal." thus fred hiatt. though it's not clear he endorses this as a principle, he lets it pass as obvious or trivial. but i propose to you that it is entirely and obviously absurd: exactly the sort of error that makes persons into the merest idiots and will extinguish our species. i realize that it's a tremendous burden, one which none of us, finally, can entirely bear: but no matter what you are told or by whom, you are responsible for what you actually do. and if you're letting john yoo do your moral deliberation for you, you deserve a lengthy prison sentence no matter what the result.

a moral system - such as all varieties of statism, or any political philosophy other than anarchism - which does not center responsibility in the individual, is fantastical and always the product of cowardice and a premonition of great evil.

of course, i guess it depends on who's telling you what's legal. if the voices in your head are telling you to kill, or some arbitrarily selected mental patient is telling you that torture is legal, that's an understandable reason to throw some chump into a box with scorpions. but if it's a justice-department lawyer, i say you're insane if you listen to him. a schizophrenic has no particular motive to encourage torture; a justice-department lawyer is adminstering a systematic justification for a massive spree of state sadism. if you decide to participate you are at fault, no matter what letterhead is on the memo.

probably even newspaper columnists/opinion editors could eventually be made to understand the inadequacy of 'alberto gonzales told me to' as a global moral excuse.

today michael jackson would have been 51, and would have caught up with me. but he didn't. i kicked that little bitch's ass! thank god for doctors. we can give the poor and uninsured access to propofol. the dream will never die, though it might lapse into unconsciousness and then, like our great nation, indetectibly expire.

watching the kennedy memorial reminds us all again how full of funkiness catholicism really is. the vestments, the eucharist, all those golden goblets, images everywhere. that is some wild shit!

sometimes you can't help but approach science in a posture of wonder:

Did you know that crows recognize human faces? To prove this, she writes, a researcher at the University of Washington conducted an experiment. Volunteers who had captured and banded crows (something crows resent) while wearing caveman masks were cawed at and dive-bombed whenever they re-entered crow precincts.  When the same volunteers walked through the crow zone with their faces hidden by Dick Cheney masks, “the crows left them entirely alone.”

i would like to think that the scientists chose caveman and cheney masks out of a kind of magical-realist whimsy. but no doubt there were rigorous scientific standards that could only be upheld with these particular apparati. the proof does not appear entirely decisive, however: maybe crows don't like fake beards. or lowering brows. maybe crows recognize dick cheney as a carrion feeder like themselves. maybe the crows were in a better mood later on. or maybe masks are not, after all, human faces. other than that and a thousand other little problems, however, the research is rigorous and the results decisive.

i might have been skeptical of obama's healthcare/deficit-increase program. but after seeing the all-star tribute to ted kennedy, all my reservations have been put to rest with the corpus delicti. the performances by brooke shields and usher were shatteringly emotional. only a monster could oppose a healthcare bill now. (of course, only monsters ever opposed it, or even asked any questions about it.)

the blackwater/xe thing is one of the several waronterror nightmares unleashed in the cheney administration. my feeling is that the whole reason for getting them on the case was deniability, and everyone knew they consisted of special-ops nuts etc who were enabled by their connections to the admin to obtain state-of-the-art weaponry and indulge their sadistic fantasies without limitation. no admin people will ever be held responsible for blackwater's actions, though i think the murders and so on were precisely what the admin wanted and expected. you have our heroes serving their country. then you have our nuts shooting and torturing whomever they please in a vague strategy to intimidate the whole country. there is less distinction between these two approaches/armies than the pr machine would like you to believe. the idea was to hire an independent organization to commit the necessary war crimes. that they're being prosecuted is more or less what the admin had in mind when they made the hire. what we need is the shredded/trashed memos in which cheney's office directed blackwater about general comportment or specific actions.

lake champlain, 20 august 2009, by joan brown.

i'm a person or possibly philosopher who doesn't really want to have heroes, and i usually really haven't. you know, i loved nietzsche, kierkegaard, or chuang tzu at different times, but i also saw the drawbacks: like that kierkegaard is interminable and unbelievably repetitive and that nietzsche is...fucking crazy. so it is with some trepidation that i say that henry david thoreau is my hero, especially because for someone soaking in derrida or quine, thoreau cannot but be regarded as a backwater, if a philosopher at all. but i've been reading everything this summer, and i can't help it: he just kills me.

joni and i did concord and walden this week. walden was lovely, actually: sprawled by boston, but the woods are growing back in, and the house-site is not overrun, and i liked the tattooed guy selling stuff in the little gift shop. there's a little public beach filled with moms and kids. there's a walden research center up on the hill, collecting everything written about thoreau. i don't know if that's a good idea or not, but it's a beautiful building (donated by...don henley? what would mojo nixon say?) we got up on the hill at sleepy hollow cemetery and saw the family plots of the emersons, thoreaus, hawthornes, and alcotts. we toured the old manse, where emerson grew up and where nathaniel and sophia hawthorne - the world's worst renters - scratched little notes on the windows with sophia's diamond ring. the first shot of the american revolution was fired in the back yard.

i love emerson, too, but i'm kind of seeing the differences. if i could put it in a nutshell: emerson is still somewhere in the notion that nature is a product of consciousness, which it makes sense to call 'transcendentalism.' thoreau is in no doubt that consciousness is a product of nature; he's the opposite of transcendentalist, an immanentalist if you will permit me. they both write beautifully, of course, but emerson delivers the single ringing sentence; thoreau lets observations accumulate into something. emerson is reticent on the political implications of his individualism; thoreau really is an inyourface religious skeptic and anarchist. and no doubt a very eccentric and prickly - though also beloved - personality.

i've come to see his time at walden as one of the utopian experiments of the time - like fruitlands down the road, or brook farm , etc. only the community that thoreau was building was pointedly not aimed primarily at joining together human beings, but joining a human being with a world: at once a wider and a narrower vision of community.

there's been a rejiggering of thoreau lately, represented for example in the new book the thoreau you don't know by robert sullivan. it is a terrible book, and really remarkably does not actually display a wide acquaintance with thoreau's writings, among many other problems. but the basic idea is right: thoreau is funny, radical, funky, actually fun. and his "environmentalism" is a lot more difficult than it seems, because it starts with the presumption that human life is completely inseparable from nature: that human destruction of nature is nature destroying itself, etc.

if you go to walden, you see how close it is to concord, and real isolation was definitely not hdt's point. he didnt live off the land or resolve on utter solitude. but he was seeking some kind of rite of passage, and an economy that expressed only fundamentals. joni was reading me walden while we drove and it struck me how great a book it is: as good a book as has ever been written: rich in direct or elusive ideas, emerging in a real way from real experience.

you know michael gerson, an ex bush speechwriter who's now a washpost columnist, is really interesting. he's a religious conservative who writes about surprising subjects in surprising ways. the column on obamacare linked above seems really smart and right to me. i guess while i'm at it i might say that one sometimes forgets that bush had good writing at times. the 2005 inaugural, for instance, seemed bizarrely and dangerously hypocritical at that moment, but it was actually a well-written speech that would have been inspiring in another context.  

somehow, i feel that i will be able to continue without ted kennedy. but the nation itself will collapse, thank god.
meanwhile: more insane crime from new freedom. what is the world coming to, if anything?

back from new england, beeches, where i made the thoreau pilgrimage. i'll blog that a bit maybe. meanwhile, this thought: sometimes a witch hunt is appropriate: namely when you have an infestation of witches.

history of hip hop wiki

hey thanks, marriott! ok so i put the list on wikia, and you can have at it. let me know how it's working, if at all. if so, especially direct the attention of hip hop experts/fanatics to it.
history of hip hop wiki

well the first thing i'd do is eliminate the department of education and remove the matter entirely from the purview of the federal government.if god did not intend us to vaporize the department of education, why did He invent high explosives?

i'll also go do a series of deletions from the original 120-or-whatever it is.