cheese it, the cops!

It hurts my head when Fox News is in the right on a matter of principle

In which Crusader AXE mutters into his amontrillado about Harry Frankfurt, bullshit, talking points, the relationship between Roland Hedley and Winston Churchill and whether or not Jay Kearny now showers after or before or during each press conference....hands and soul never get clean. Oh, and involves Montaigne, Rolling Stone b-sides and Bob Dylan...with Popeye. 

Battle of what, exactly?

Certainly not of ideas, unless we're focusing on really bad ideas...in which Crusader AXE ponders the nature of treason implied by Republican antics in the House over the credit limits and uses Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter to foretell the future.

 

With discipline, tire valve stem caps are possible...

In which Crusader AXE says nice things about a General he knows in order to provide advice for living to youth who should ignore it and post some irrelevant or maynot so irrelevnat music from Allison Krausw channeling Blind Faith and Stevie Winwood being himself.

Neither Crusader AXE, nor Crispy, nor Allison Krause nor Stevie Winwood

ethics and evolution

one thing that is typical of our scientistic moment, as in the late nineteenth century, is the idea that we can derive morality or moral values from evolution. now, i am afraid not, and i will briefly state the overwhelming problems.

(1) the classical is/ought problem: evolution cannot account for normative force or moral claims. so let's say it was counter-evolutionary to take your stuff. is that a reason not to take your stuff? you might have many good arguments that it's wrong to take your stuff, but the idea that i am swimming against the tide of evolution might be met with a mere shrug. what if it turned out that some forms of violence or crime were adaptive? would that show that they were right? also evolution makes use of counter-adaptive behavior as much as adaptive behavior. acting counter-adaptationally is necessary to the progress of the species, and i and my offspring will pay the price if in fact i am so acting. 

(2) the basic inference has to be from actuality to etiology: arguments from evolution start by presuming that we are what evolution made us. so look: staring squarely at the data, we ought to speculate that both what we would think of as good behavior and bad have been selected for, insofar as we so stubbornly display both. insofar as evolution has selected us, it has, obvioously, selected both cooperation and competition, good and evil, happiness and pain, and so on. it appears, like the rest of nature, to be morally indifferent. if it was really selecting against theft or individualist philosophy or something it should have done better than it has so far in weeding out thieves and individualists.

in short if you want ethics without god you are going to have to find it elsewhere.

Faded love and National Security?

 

In which Crusader AXE muses about the CIA, Roman Triumphs, the Afghan conflict, hubris, schadenfreude, adultery, marriage, hypocrisy and teen age crushes by middle aged men viewed at least tangentally through classic honky tonk music because, that's what I do...

Like Dublin on his tower, watching his world collapse...or not

In which Crusader AXE responds to Crispins' couer de crie aboout factions, confounds Louis MacNeice with theology and Ana Marie Cox with a homeless guy in Dublin, and addresses what the hell it's all about Alfie anyway, revealing that Crispin Sartwell is really Mitt Romney's illegitimate teenage lovechild due to Mormon baptism of some shit....

Unscrupled and unlearned and Rubes

In which Crusader AXE corrals Moses, Mohammed, Newt Gingrich and Jeff Imelt's predecessor and drags them over to Crispin's place for a game of Texas Hold'Em dealt by William of Occam.

what if everyone did that?

one thing i'm puzzled about: the ethical stance, associated with the left at the moment, where the question is 'what if everyone did that?' what if no one recycled? what if everyone had five kids or drove a car that got 20 mpg? sometimes i share the intuition. sometimes i doubt the effects would be as described. you can get some pretty draconian stuff out of this, like it makes an argument that everyone should live urban, for example, which reduces your carbon footprint but might tend to delete in important respects everyone's relations to non-human nature, with incalculable long-range effects. in some ways it's a sort of an extension of the golden rule or the categorical imperative: live as you could want everyone to live. it sounds sensible.

on the other hand it sounds crazy. what if everyone was a philosophy professor? imagine the social costs! what if no one read novels? the publishing industry would collapse! what if everyone raised tomatoes? too many tomatoes! what if, at 3pm, everyone in the whole world stopped what they were doing and watched general hospital? it would be incumbent on someone who was trying to tease this into an ethical theory to distinguish cases where one ought to from cases where one needn't or ought not calculate the effects of everyone doing 'that'; possibly some thinkers have had a go.

now, when i choose to live rural, should i ask myself what would happen if everyone lived rural? why, exactly, when it's so obvious that not everyone will? many of my own beliefs and even actions are, i admit, taken precisely because in fact most people don't do 'that.' so how would we work in that sort of impulse? now, i guess it's ok until you get the point of using it as a taser: like, requiring people to live as would be best if everyone lived like that (note, with the effects anticipated this week by experts or faddists or scientists or or bureaucrats or whatever).

i do think it's kind of an interesting way to generate ethical intuitions: something you should ask yourself. however, when you get right down to it, i am not going to take responsibility for a kind of sci-fi hypothetical counter-factual scenario. i have enough trouble trying to take responsibility plainly for what i actually do and the effects what i actually do has on what actually happens (including what happens to other people, of course).

the intuition engine turns us into a vague collective cloud, but not even that: it asks you to operate morally in a world that does not or cannot exist, and as a person who cannot exist: a general person. honestly, whatever the truth about climate change, i'm only taking responsibility for my own emissions, which are infinitesimal. but then again, is it even possible for me to take responsibility for my own emissions? like with offsets or something?) probably i am not even paying the costs of my own emissions, and then how could we, or could we, hold individuals responsible in cases like this at all? but what if everyone thought like that?

in some ways the thought-experiement makes everyone responsible for what we do to the world, which sounds good. be the change you want to see etc. but on the other hand, living generally like this might be a way of evading the real effects of what you actually do: what if everyone tried to require everyone else to live as they thought everyone ought to live? possibly a war of each against each.

one thing to note: utilitarianism famously faces the problem that it insists that you judge the moral quality of an action by its effects, but the effects of any given action are very difficult or indeed impossible to foresee. now bloat up this standard to a possible (?) world in which 7 billion people act or believe like you do and try calculating the effects. 

but ask yourself this: what would the world be like if everyone lived the same way, had the same values, anticipated the same effects, and so on? maybe we'd merge ecstatically into a very big single thing. we'd be boring until we went extinct, though, which would not take long. so in application to itself, the principle is wacky, or self-consuming. strange, though, but the question also seems unavoidable and important. obviously, i am hostile a bit, because the thing would mess up my indivisualism etc. i started out tio slam but ended up worried.

Two of Crispin's favorite Renaissance thinkers collide...kinda, sorta, maybe

Highjacking Crispin's site again with JJ Cale and Chuck Prophet, Thomas More and Thomas Hobbes, the Navajo, the Army, Paul Ryan and Tora Bora...it just doesn't get better than this. I think at times there's a better class of reader here than at the other places I babble...certainly the comments I get over at Veteran's Today give me a lot of pause. Anyway, this has been a complex piece to get my teeth into...for a variety of reasons. So, here we go...

Civilized costs more than hard, brutish and short...

The number of broken promises and bad judgments made over the last 30 years is incredible. Each bad judgment ends up causing more broken promises. However, the majority of the problems I see – crumbling infrastructure, lousy schools, increased long-term unemployment, mounting debt, lagging modernization, lack of a coherent energy plan and so on and on and on  as well as what has happened to Native Americans, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsman, Civil Servants, Labor Unions, and on and on comes from the idea that we don’t have the wherewithal to pay for what we need to do. That is bullshit. 

To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life.
Thomas More

 

 

Can you say AN/PDR-27R?  ALPHA-NOVEMBER-PAPA-DELTA-ROMEO-TWO-SEVEN-ROMEO?

Thugs and changing times without change in people

I've been quiet even though there have been a lot of things I've wanted to chime in on. However, the murder of Trayvon Martin has provoked a response. When exactly did behavior by self-appointed guardians of the people as lousy as the B-Specials in Ulster in 1968, the Klan in 1954, or the Security Forces in South Africa become legal in Florida? Self-defense is a universal defense if there actually is a threat...a black teen armed with skittles doesn't cut it as a defense for murder or Manslaughter 1. Florida is now less civilized than South Africa -- hell, the stats would probably bear us out on this. Sad -- we're less a civil society than we were in 1980...but then, why does that surprise me?

Slante' friends, we need it. 

Because Garage Door Openers are worth dying for...

One of the things that binds Crispin and me and my loose collective of malcontented malevolent dissidents, anarchists and engineers is our general aversion to the impact of the totalitarian mind on life, language and discourse. Particularly when afraid -- when they're afraid, they come unglued with weird explanations of events...Orwell could have had fun with that realization because it is when under pressure from the unknown that the basic spiritual bankruptcy and ontological void that is the totalitarian way becomes most obvious. Case in point, China.

Now, China has the potential to explode at any time. It's fairly obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of Marxist thought that the victory of the Communist Party in 1948 preceded the rise of the industrial proletariat. Pretty much the way that Communism has spread everywhere, by the way, except for the countries in eastern Europe that were conquered by the Soviet Union. So, since the Party still rules the country as a vicious oligarchy, it should not be surprising that the government is terrified of anything that might blow it all up. Tibet, Western China, displaced living lives of misery in Guangzhou and Shanghai...labor unrest, the incredible imbalance between rich and middle class and middle class and poor...disease, famine, water impossible to drink, etc. etc. The place is an economic dynamo sputtering away on top of a volcano. 

Which presents a fair amount of hilarity masquerading as WTF? Not unlike Rush Limbaugh confusing contraception with the adult film industry and Israeli fellow-travellers eagerly sounding the drums for a war with Iran because our last religio-WMD-"Make the world safe"-enterprises have gone so well, the Chinese government is definitely after the root cause of problems at all levels. Jezebel picked up a story from The People's Daily that really makes it obvious that fantastic explanations for things is not just a Republican plutocratic art but one shared by totalitarians univerally. 

Ok, girl one loses a "remote control" to a rolling door for her home. Girl one is obviously fairly rich for China since this looks like a really bad translation of "Garage Door Opener..." although I suppose it could have been a rolling steel shutter door to a patio or perhaps a French Door with a remote to the patio but, WHAT THE HELL?  The silly damn Khardasians don't have remote controlled French doors; Trump doesn't have remote controlled French doors. That makes no sense...even in China, which at some levels, times and places is really like Batman's Gotham City, on meth...So, the kid lost a garage door opener. She decides to kill herself, so she hides in a closet -- another sign that we're dealing with some level of wealth here, there's actually a closet that is not so much in use that hiding in it is possible -- until her little friend comes over. She says she's going to commit suicide, the little friend says, OK, me too and Girl 1 writes down a note saying that she's killing herself over the garage door opener and Girl 2 is doing it because, well, they're friends and it's Tuesday and there's nothing on TV and...they are planning on visiting the Qing dynansty to make a movie of the emperor -- any emperor -- and then going to outer space. Girl 1 tells her sister to "Take Care of the Parents" because it's all about the parents, and they jump in a pool and drown. 

Sister? The Chinese still have their one child rule. Only the very well to do and party elites get to have multiple children. WHAT THE HELL? This passes no reality test...but, the inspiration for the suicide is ...TV shows about people travelling in time and marrying royalty. 

Yeah, and comic books caused juvenile delinquency and rock and roll and teenage pregnancy and communism. Ask your great, great senile grandmother!

Imagine the dialogue in the TV movie...if you've ever listened to the dialogue in a Chinese TV show, as I did by reading subtitles while there -- you'll recognize it. 

Chechette: I lost the garage door remote and have brought dishonor on myself and my family. I must kill myself! 

Chongette: I am your best friend. I will also kill myself. 

Cheechette:Well, if we kill ourselves, we can go back in time and make a movie of the emperor in the Qing dynasty!

Chongette:Oh, good. Then we can travel in space.

 

Cheechette: My parents will be so proud...let's go drown ourselves in the pool!

Both: All hail the Glorious People's Liberation Army and Chairman Mao!"

Yeah. Now, they could have blamed this on Falung Gong because everybody knows that weird calestenics and such make you crazy. They could have blamed this on the influences of capitalism. They could have blamed it on a lot of things. Hell, blame it on Guy Clark ...Time travel on the Chinese equivalent to The Gilmore Girls? Jezebel has an excellent point, by the way.  

This sounds like a cautionary tale about parenting — if your kid thinks killing herself is a good response to losing the remote control, you might not be sending the right message about the value of everyday objects. But Sun Yunxiao, deputy director of China Youth and Children Research Center, has a different moral in mind:

Schoolchildren are rich in curiosity but poor in judgment, so this kind of tragedy happens in every era. I have heard of children jumping from high buildings after watching an actor flying in a magic show. This kind of imitative behavior is in the nature of young children, but it's very dangerous. So we should give some sort of warning for children on TV programs.

I'm actually not sure that killing yourself so you can travel back in time and film an emperor (where do you get the camera?) is a tragedy that "happens in every era."...

Being not so sure about the impact of TV on suicides -- childish deaths from imitating superheroes, pro- wrestlers and such in the west aside -- and being slightly alert to conspiracies and coverups, I gotta say, this looks more like a cover-up of something else. There are lots of possibilities -- a spree of mass murder of children with or without child rape, a problem with some powerful "Big Bucks" in the local or regional Party-Wealthy Complex, drug-crazed People's Liberation Army veterans of the unpleasantness in Western China which dwarfs what we are seeing in Afghanistan or saw in Iraq -- but TV is a convenient scapegoat. Always has been and always will be...Dr. Who, in Mandarin drag, seducing the young with opium and time travel. 

My money is probably on some sort of Child 44 coverup  but who the hell knows about these things? Totalitarian countries are weirder than weird and China's internal dissension, cultural dissonance, and Commie-Confucian-Oligarchic messiness kind of makes it all seem possible, and that's funny in a weird way...and sad. 

Another possibility is that this is just some Politboro thug having a shit fit at time travel TV. Again, the oddities of totalitarianism...

 

 

Love is a bar band in Boston or Austin

Ok. Crusader AXE here. I guess the incredible, inscrutable, incomparable one either wanted me to occasionally put something here for the erudite masses, or he just forgot he gave me permission many years ago. Regardless, I'm glad he did. He gets a better class of reader here than we do at the Defeatists, most of whom appear to be robots. 

 

Today's topic is love and Valentine's Day. I speak as a bloodied veteran here on several fronts.

So, in the proper spirit of the thing.  Ok. Yesterday was our 36th anniversary. We are very fond of each other and have a reasonably complex financial life that would make disengaging difficult. We don't want to cause the other pain or even inconvenience. I rate this as a successful marriage. We don't hate each other, wish the other grevious harm, and try not to act contrary to our mutual best interests. 

That said, we got married on Friday the 13th. My thought, being a strategic thinker, was that this way I would not forget both Valentine's day or the Anniversary and hopefully, one would key my brain as to the other. Generally has worked...I see the Valentine's bullshit in the stores, and it triggers the response that I need to do something to commemorate the day so as not to violate the "first, do no harm or cause unnecessary pain" part of my ethic. It does not make me happy. This makes me happy... 

I hate Valentine's Day. It is part of the conspiracy of the consumer society that begins in pre-school to make us all ready for a life of disappointment and conspicuous consumption. 

animals as commodities

hmmmm! san francisco is trying ban the sale of all animals, including, like, goldfish. what do y'all make of that?

obviously, an anarchist can't really endorse the legislative approach. but it would be interesting to think about more and more creatures and things as stuff that cannot be bought and sold. if a cultural consensus started moving that way, it would be an immensely dramatic change: you'd get to 'post-capitalism.' we're a long long way from treating animals that way, of course, and people have been buying and selling animals since the hebrew bible, or long before. it more or less seems to go with the concept of domestication, i suppose, or comes soon thereafter. it seems pretty central to the practice of having pets. but it could be and perhaps should be re-thought. 

one would like to think of the national park system, for example, as taking some land out of the possibility of ownership, or moving it into collective ownership. and to some extent these are not mere ideologies, even if in other respects state ownership is anything but collective ownership. but the national park system is actually a reasonably good anti-anti-statist example (something which, in my own head, i've found a little difficult to square with my position), and it comes at least with the notion that some plants (redwoods) or inanimate/animate ecosystems (the grand canyon, say, or the tetons) are beyond ownership. if we could cultivate this attitude, it would change our relation to the world.