cheese it, the cops!

a new fascism ? all good fascists must deplore the innovation. i prefer the good old type of fascism: the secret police monitoring your communications; the extreme, irrational nationalism; the secret detention facilities; the military mobilization of society.

actually, it's people who endorse the bush administration's policies who are appeasing the new fascists.

have y'all heard that the marines are forcing saddam to watch the south park movie? extreme excellence. ok, ok, i will start blogging again.

for your edification; what i tell my children, or "young adults."

Writing Philosophy Papers (for CS)

(1) Care. If you care, you'll think about the topic. If you think about the topic you'll have some ideas. Select the topic you care most about. Failing that, select the topic you least care least about. Failing that, simulate passion; various errors of grammar, organization, and attribution can be overlooked if the paper is lively or unlike other papers in my stack. You can assume that I have the job of teaching you this stuff because I care about it and think it's important and fun. If you don't give a damn about it, I am actually offended; if you care I am flattered. (This is the key to the heart of all professors.)

(2) By all means use ‘I’ and state your own opinion in your own voice. There is no reason to pretend that you don’t exist, or that it’s not you who’s writing. Use of the first person is conventional in academic philosophy. This does not mean that sheer assertion is acceptable: you must give the reasons for which you believe what you believe. These can often be specified in careful reflection on the thought process that led to your conclusion.

(3) If a word can be dropped from a sentence, or a sentence from a paragraph, or a paragraph from a paper without changing the meaning, drop it. If you find yourself repeating or padding to reach a certain length etc, either think some more or write short. Otherwise you’re wasting both our time and I become homicidal.

(4) Destroy all cliches and empty, glittering generalities. If you find yourself beginning with “Since the beginning of time, philosophers have pondered…” or any variation, stop and begin again in some other way.

(5) Don’t contradict yourself or try to have it both ways. Be bold. Be clear. Often self-contradiction arises from being overly deferential to a famous philosopher: “Hobbes’s argument is very convincing and logical, but…” If you’re not actually convinced, you don’t regard the argument as convincing; the term 'logical' ought not to be tossed around casually.

(6) Define key terms, or if you are discussing the use of some term (“justice,” say, or “state of nature”) by some philosopher, say what that philosopher means by it, with reference. If you do define a term, think about the definition as giving necessary and sufficient conditions; try to make sure your definition counts all and only the right items.

(7) Make sure you have the basics right. If you give the wrong title for a key book, or misspell the name of the person you’re writing about throughout (‘Mills,’ for example), I assume (perhaps unfairly) that you haven’t actually been listening in class or reading anything.

(8) Say everything as clearly and simply as possible, in words you are certain you understand. Trying to sound sophisticated or academic often backfires.

(9) Factual assertions that could be controversial must be supported by evidence and citation. Claims that a philosopher said, argued, or believed something should be supported by references to the text.

(10) My preference for citations is footnotes using the Chicago Manual of Style. You can see models of this style in Diana Hacker, A Writer's Reference CMS-4c (pp. 428-435). If you are referring to a course text, put the name of the author and page number in parentheses in the body of your paper. Second and subsequent references to the same outside source can be treated similarly.

(11) Any materials apart from our texts that you consult should be listed. If you cut and paste off the internet, and then replace a few words with synonyms, etc, that is plagiarism. If you closely paraphrase a text from someone else without attribution, that is plagiarism. If you get all your ideas from somewhere, that is spiritual plagiarism. For God's sake show some pride: think and write your own words.

(12) If you are not perfectly confident about grammar and punctuation, get help from the writing center or from someone who knows. And go learn grammar and punctuation. It may not strike you that I am a stickler for such things, but I am.

(13) Read the damn thing over once before you turn it in, and after you spell-check it.

(13) A reasonable form is summary and evaluation. A ‘B’ paper will show me that you have a pretty clear grasp on the terms and argument of the text you are considering. An ‘A’ will go on to evaluate the text in your own way in your own voice, giving reasons.

(14) You can consult outside texts, but you needn’t. Papers in my classes are not primarily research papers, but polemical or argumentative essays. Some topics obviously may require or suggest more research than others.

(15) You may think you are a subjectivist; that is, you may think you think that whatever anyone believes about whatever you’re writing about is “valid.” I don't think you really think that.

semester looming, i have been beavering away at the josiah warren project. just finished typing in an important text, the quarterly letter (1867). this is the beginning of a narrative of the community experiments conducted by warren. it is also a very good introduction to warren's anarchism and contains by far the clearest description of the operations of the time store. thanks to the labadie collection, u michigan, and julie herrada.

always sad when a dictator croaks. but they leave such touching stories for those they inadvertently leave behind.

During his long rule, Paraguay was the country with the most uneven distribution of land and wealth.

Under General Stroessner, Paraguay’s security forces became so efficient at intimidating potential opposition figures that eventually fear itself — fear of arrest, torture, exile and murder — became one of his prime levers for staying in power.

The country became a haven for Nazis, with new passports and visas sold for a price. Among those sheltered was Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who selected victims for the gas chambers at Auschwitz and conducted medical experiments on humans. In addition, hundreds of political prisoners and their families were imprisoned at concentration camps like Emboscada, about 20 miles outside the capital city of Asunción, in the 1970’s.

ok: so like, announcing the josiah warren project. if you have the chance, tell me whether this is readable on your browser; my web construction skills are rudimentary.

so what the hell you doin, profcrispy?
i finished my little anarchy book; still identifying a publisher.
i'm working on a book with material by and about josiah warren, freakish genius and the first american anarchist; i'm pulling all sorts of things from archives that have never been published. i'm also editing like mad with the goal of making warren's bizarre prose readable. i'm retyping all his work including handwritten manuscripts in something that will eventually have a web presence as "the josiah warren project."
in connection, i'm immersed in the history of 19th century american utopias (warren was a participant in new harmony and the founder of number of communities of his own), which is truly a fascinating area of research. i'm in the middle of, among others, john humphrey noyes's history of american socialisms and mark holloway's "utopian communities in america." the lattter is the best brief intro to the subject, though closely based on secondary sources. holloway is very droll about the more fantastic belief systems, waxing particularly sarcastic about fourierism.

a column!

In recent weeks, trying to explain the American position on the conflict in Lebanon or to identify the enemy within the mess, President Bush has adopted with ever more enthusiasm the phrase "Islamo-fascism," long popular with neo-conservative intellectuals. It's hard to express how misleading it is.
   And it is intentionally misleading, an attempt to fix public opinion concerning an extraordinarily complex world around a simplistic - or perhaps actually idiotic - dichotomy.
    To see that, begin by asking this: who are the Islamo-fascists that we're supposedly fighting in Iraq, the "front line on the war on terror"? The "insurgency" of al Qaeda, or of Saddam loyalists? Iranian-connected Shia militias? The armed forces of Iraq and connected death squads? To try to toss Chechen nationalists, Afghan warlords, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and (what the hell) North Korea into the mix, while excluding Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or the government of Lebanon can be expected to yield an entirely incoherent world, and it is at least yielding bad policy.
    We might begin by asking what the term 'fascism' means. It's one of the most elusive terms in political philosophy. Certainly, it implies a totalitarian government. But we might ask ourselves, for example, what people meant when they called Mussolini or Hitler or Franco a fascist.
     First of all, the phrase implies an enthusiasm for interconnected industrialization and militarism. It is distinguished from its perennial enemy communism by leaving capital in private hands and encouraging its rapid expansion. Indeed the dominant corporations of fascist nations have traditionally prospered. Fascism is characterized by a basically secular hyper-nationalism, a la the Ba'ath party.
     At the very heart of fascism, however, was what we might term its aesthetic: its symbol systems and visual languages. Under the aegis of the master designers Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, and Leni Riefenstahl, fascism developed an aesthetic of neo-classical gigantism: of perfect bodies and intimidating marble edifices, of tens of thousands of people marching and singing in unison. The fascist aesthetic was beautiful (at its best), arid, and designed to intimidate.
     At any rate, trying to understand the Islamic world by throwing around "fascism" is worse than useless. Indeed, the economy of the United States - to say nothing of our nationalism and militarism - are more like Nazi Germany than is that of any Islamic country. And of course, even as we condemn our enemies as fascists we are resorting to secret prisons and a vast secret police surveillance operation. Of the aesthetic developed by Karl Rove and of the architecture of Washington, DC, I remain silent.
    Whatever led to the emergence of fascism in early twentieth-century Europe, it is assuredly not much like what has led to the emergence of radical Islam or of terrorism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first. For this, you are obviously much better off looking at the history of Islam itself and at the effect of Western capitalism on the third world than at the disaffection and decadence of Europe in the twenties and thirties.
    Fascism has nothing to do with Islam's history of heresy and fundamentalism, poetry and philosophy, conquest and defeat, violence and transcendence, incorporation and exclusion, life and its annihilation.
     One might just dismiss the phrase "Islamo-fascism," then. as an infelicity or slip of the mind. But it is deeply offensive, first of all, because it is an indication of how stupid the people who run the country think the people they run (us) are. They think we can handle exactly one opposition, exactly two forces: yes and no, good and evil, capitalism and communism, freedom and fascism. Another way the administration tries to achieve this end is by continuously tossing out the phrase "the enemy." If you think you have a good handle on who they mean, I suggest you keep on pondering.

     And second, it is a symptom of the mere dualism of the administration's policies: support Israel and condemn Hezbollah, for instance, incessantly, repeatedly, no matter what happens ever. Insist the democracy is succeeding in Iraq and refuse to make the actual compromises required for peace.
    Paradoxically, this may help manufacture the bipolar world that it fantasizes: we will manage to alienate so much of the world so severely that we succeed in splitting it in two: with us and against us.
    We'd be better off with a larger, truer, and less manipulative set of concepts.

"inevitably," said secretary chertoff, "suspicion falls on tim mcgraw and faith hill, though we haven't ruled out related organizations such as the united states department of justice, the church of scientology, and the loyal order of moose."

"obviously," chernoff pointed out,"it was an alcoholics anonymous-style operation, though whether they were directly operating under orders from the spice girls, or operating independently, is still in question."

11 jumbo jets went down in the atlantic this morning, causing spectacular splashes. "it has the fingerprints of the academy of motion picture arts and sciences all over it," said homeland security secretary michael chertoff.

today ten planes blew up simultaneously over the atlantic, killing 3,000 and entertaining millions more. "the operation had all the earmarks of hadassah," said homeland security secretary michael chertoff.

now, i would gloat over the defeat of lieberman. but one gets the sense that he supported the war cause he thought it was right and he didn't fluctuate with the polls, like hillary or kerry or edwards. his support for the war was honorable; theirs merely craven. of course, that's not to say we couldn't use more anti-war senators.

sadly, bozo the legislator lost yesterday, and america is the poorer for it.

That year [2002], she lost the Democratic primary to a more moderate black candidate, Denise L. Majette. State Rep. Billy McKinney spelled out the reason for his daughter's political troubles that election night: "J-E-W-S."

this time, we might blame I-D-I-O-T-S.

murray bookchin, probably our best known anarchist short of chomsky, is dead. hell of a life, though.

definitely.  no one really gets behind a holocaust like its victims.

another reason to support global warming.